Dancing with Stephen Hawking

For Melinda Smith

I was living in England. Punk days, they were.
On my way to the party, I fell and scraped skin
from my knees, tore my stockings. No matter,
they were punk days, and I looked the part –
black-root blonde, make-up slurring my face.
And there she was: He wants to dance with you.
And there he was, seeping into his chair, mind
in the machine. From a distance, I’d thought him
all thought, the body’s ruin savaging desire,
but something simmered there. He rolled across
the wooden floor like a ship leaving harbour,
adrift on a wide sea. I did my best punk moves,
spasmodic thrusts and jumps, while he swayed
left then right in his choreography of wheels.
I tried not to stare. We moved until the music
slammed into silence, left everyone talking
too loud for a moment, like the noise of insects
in the dark. I don’t recall talking at all, only
the time given … Walking to the station,
I stopped, looked up to a moonless sky,
wondering whether that cloud was a cloud
or a galaxy. And I thought of the dance
of asteroids, the merciless pull of black holes,
red giants and white dwarves, breathless
nebulae. I thought of the atoms in my eye,
spinning and spinning, and the torrent of light
surging through me, soaking me to the bone
as I stood looking up, with my bloodied knees.

John Foulcher

John Foulcher has written eleven books of poetry, most recently 101 Poems (Pitt Street Poetry, 2015), a selection from his previous books, and A Casual Penance (Pitt Street Poetry, 2017).

The Mirror Hurlers

for Joyce Lee

1. The Looking-Glass Apprentice

Mistress, I’ve seen the sunlight swim on red brick walls. I’ve watched your mirror fly
from a high window. I remember the crash. It hit backwater bedrooms, distant kitchens.

The frame had shattered but the uncracked mirror flashed, a pool amongst ruins.
I saw my face in it, then your voice flooded the laneway. ‘Try it. Mirror hurling

goes back centuries.’ I grab my full-length mirror, stagger to the bedroom window.
The mirror leans against my shoulder, a cape made of myself. The brick wall opposite

moves in the heat. I turn around and cart the mirror back to its dark corner. And you talk
of leaving. Mistress, I know you want real height, sky streaming in at your front door,

unbroken mirrors scattered across the earth, but show me survival again. Think of me here
climbing the stairs in terror, lanes like canyons around me. All my mirrors unhurled.

2. The Mirror

This is my sworn story of staying whole. My owner knows it backwards.
I dreaded slippery-fingered servants, but when the mirror mistress picked me up
it was like a kept promise. When she threw me, I flew through my cousin
the window, and the air whispered of weightlessness. Falling was a new way
of being held. The crash was a savage cradling. I lay there taking in faces, safe
in the sacrificial wreckage. Now my unbreakable shine waits for you all.
Come to me for the backhanded truth of who you are. See, your left hand
knows only too well what your right hand is doing. Your crooked smile
slants the other way. And notice the fake depth in your eyes, your thin
visiting presence. Stranger, I give you your shallow reversed self.

3. The Mirror Detective

I know them. Their two-faced ways, their almost invisible
shimmers of thought. They are thieves, stealing mirrors
and hurling them into the world. They won’t get away with it.

I am after them, with my dull routine and my non-reflective mind.
I’ll hunt them down. I’ll climb the stairs, knock on the last door
and there it will all be: suspiciously open windows, mirrors in mattresses,
tables littered with wrecked frames. Mirror hurlers at work.

They’ll soon find out their mirror hurling days are over.
I’ll let them know that prison mirrors are made of tin.
They will put on their long coats. I will frisk them for mirrors.

4. The Mirror Lovers

There are those who will never release their mirrors.
They cannot surrender their perfect self-portraits.
They sleep with them. They wake up beside themselves
in dim rooms, and wonder if they have married.

All day there’s a quicksilver gleam in their eyes.
They feel strangely flat. They have to resist
an impulse to mime the movements of others.
Their minds are full of unwanted reflections.

At night, they return to the mimicry of marriage.
The fingertip touching, the two-dimensional tenderness.

5. The Mirror Mistress

I loved the lanes,
the early morning shudder of sun across old brick.

But here on this cliff top
with its mountains of pure space, I know I have come home.

Looking-glass lakes are scattered across the earth,
my run-up takes me

right to the edge.
I let the mirror go and everything seems to slide.

I am wiped from the mirror’s mind.
I am replaced by sky.

Ross Gillett

Ross Gillett lives in Daylesford in the Central Highlands of Victoria. His book The Sea Factory was one of the Five Islands Press New Poets 2006 series. His next book will be published by Puncher & Wattmann later in 2019. 

Searching the Dead

The bone-coloured branches of the rusty fig
twist and rise into a canopy of leaves that shuts
out the beating sun. It’s like standing in a limestone cave
and gazing up at limbs that resemble toned calves
and bulging biceps. As if the tree has been fashioned
out of human body parts miraculously glued together.
From a distance it appears sublime, but standing beneath it,
I can’t shift these images of haunches, thighs and elbows.
The human form, even when you’re not looking for it,
is everywhere. Five days out from Nui Dat, after the firefight
and the ambush, I went back into the rubber plantation
to search the pockets of the dead. They weren’t our dead,
our dead had been dusted off that morning, but here
were men who resembled us, soldiers who had been trained
to follow SOP, move carefully day and night, minimise risk.
Clothes now stretched tightly over bloated arms and legs,
feet cold and green, flies and gnats crowding around
their eyes, their mouths. Bodies washed clean by the rain,
a few with legs completely missing, one or two
without heads. We were searching for intelligence.
I found a gold American watch, sunglasses, a plastic comb,
a bag of uncooked rice, a lock of hair. Occasionally,
what appeared to be a diary, filled with Vietnamese script,
a pressed flower fluttering down to the ground.
A cowrie shell bringing the news from the South China Sea.
In one man’s pockets a pair of lacy black knickers.
And photos wrapped in plastic to preserve them –
a girlfriend leaning against a motorbike, a couple posing
near a lake, a family in front of a shimmering pagoda.
Everything smeared with the same red dust that coated
my skin. There won’t be another photograph of this man
sitting with his children as he tucks into a steaming soup.
The rubber trees had been hit by bullets and dribbled
latex, as if they were crying. Johnno and Boffa
were digging a mass grave. I took my shirt off
so I could feel the sun on my back. I might have been
fielding at square leg, dreaming of the tea break.
When I opened a tin of tiger balm or laid down a pack
of playing cards, this shiver spread from my neck
to my shoulders. I was so aware of my body, how
it was greased and primed, how it wasn’t going to jam.
What I collected I put down by the base of the banyan tree,
the wood darker than this fig, soldiering on through
the hot afternoon, soaked with sweat. I was elated to be alive.
The work had to be done before we could move out.
I made a shrine to lives well lived, then went to find
some cool water to drink, some fresh air to breathe.

Andy Kissane

Andy Kissane has published a novel, a book of short stories, The Swarm (Puncher & Wattmann, 2012), and four books of poetry. His fifth poetry collection, The Tomb of the Unknown Artist, is due in 2019.

63 Temple Street, Mong Kok

Remember 63 Temple Street, Mong Kok?
Remember that cha chaan teng,
Mrs Suen, the owner?

Sorry, that jars your ears.
Remember ‘leave ice’, ‘fly sugar leave milk’, ‘tea go’ –
the waiters’ breaths, like shooting stars?

Sorry for the monosyllabic dictums.
The imperatives chase me back with their voracious tails
to Mrs Suen’s cha chaan teng:
go, leave, fly.

Remember the deep-fried peanut toast –

a square button of butter, egg tassels,
slurry glass eyes of a honey stripe,
and the sweet full-cream condensed milk?

Mrs Suen uses Carnation’s
condensed milk
from the contented cows of Australia
– as she says.

As for the peanut butter,
her preference is USA’s
Planters’ Crunchy, the nuts clutter
but melt like mercy – as she says.

Remember me? Mrs Suen asks.

Remember
the already remembered?
All of us remember –
yet only some grasp the gyration of the remembered.

How can I not remember? Mrs Suen! I reply.

For fifteen years at daybreak the lukewarm TV gargles –
‘Welcome to Hong Kong’s Morning.’
Every day I eat deep-fried ghost, drink mandarin ducks, no milk, no sugar.

A diet to keep myself forgotten.

I didn’t forget you, Mrs Suen says.
But all of us forget – yet only some let go of the gyration of the forgotten.  

How not to break the fluid egg yolk on my doll noodles?
Slightly tilt the egg’s fringe up with your chopsticks and pinch –

but the translucent membrane still cracks.
It doesn’t forget the way to brokenness, and neither do I.

Grandma sipped the braised pork belly, her last ritual in the hospital.

The rain breaks its back.
It reaches out its little hands
and cut them off in front of me.
It says, Follow me. And just as I follow, it vanishes,
and multiplies.

Here’s my mobile number, I forgot yours, Mrs Suen says.

Laozi says – ‘She forgets it. That’s why it lasts forever.’
Did she trade her memory for the eternity of my number?

The rain finds its path to remember,
and falls on every person,

 wanting –

I: One tea set, please.
Waiter Kuen: Tea set’s sold out.
I: A fast set, then.
Waiter Kuen: No fast set today.
I: I’d have a constant set, anyways.
Waiter Kuen: Constant set is fast set, fast set is tea set.

a fate of return – the rain and Waiter Kuen’s back.

Now the rain’s a searchlight: a black dog sniffs, a black car follows.
There’s no way to see how the rain enters.

You still have much black hair, Mrs Suen, I say.
The rain, stumbling upon its hands, tries to grip a larger surround.

Thanks to the braised pork belly, Mrs Suen jokes.

O, O, what a slice! Grandma exclaimed.
The fat broke loose on her tongue.
She never woke up again.

A raindrop is very quiet on my lips.
It melts into a shore afar – to where?

A red bean sneaks out of my glass.
I lick it back – to where?

I forget to give Mrs Suen my mobile number.
The rain has no proper path to rise back as rain.

How does hunger enter me?

I forgot the first bite in my life. I forget why I forgot.

Coolness sprawls flat on my tongue.
I can’t even give it a name.

Belle Ling

Belle Ling is a PhD student in Creative Writing at The University of Queensland, Australia. Her first poetry collection, A Seed and a Plant, was shortlisted for The HKU International Poetry Prize 2010.

Raven

Listen, my friend, this road is the heart opening

Mirabai

Out walking Sunday morning, the light wintering
Again inside the start of spring, a raven

Overflies me, and the yaw of its wings,
As it banks a little in the blank verse

Of the Sunday air – for no reason
It knows – the groan of wingbeat is, I think,

The sound my heart makes opening again each day,
Reluctant at first to get about the work

Of bearing my body through all it wants and misses,
And through the weightless freight of waiting out

The gloom that doesn’t want to still. But still
One lets it open, whingeing on its hinges,

A sly hope refusing to call time.
And making slowly through the silver gums,

Their shade a drapery of all the clothes
One’s lovers used to shed, a single feather

Fallen from another bird – nib
End planted in the turf – flares some blue,

Shows some indigo, inside its mourning
Garb. And this, I think, is the nature of things:

The fierce persistence of the wild within
The ordered world; this is a love you felt

You must let fall, which will not let you slip.
This is the work you leave, unmade yourself

By all you’re called to make, the love, the space
For everything you barely understand.

At home, you stand it in a glass, and start
Again. Word by word, beat after beat,

Putting pain to use, feathering forth
The silence out of which the future comes.

Mark Tredinnick

Mark Tredinnick is a poet, essayist, and writing teacher. His books include The Little Red Writing Book (2006) and the landscape memoir, The Blue Plateau (2009). He was co-winner of the 2008 Calibre Prize for his essay ‘A Storm and a Teacup’.

Awake
I am beholding clouds
beholding dreams
and
… beholding the hands of a woman
… she has taken a fragment of me with her
Exactly like the force of a fork
carving out a piece of cake

I muse on those hands
that seem to have bathed within jungles
submerged into oceans
touched herrings

Hands covered with the dirt and sand of deserted plains
Hands soaked with dreams
Your hands
Your arms

If I were you, beholding me
I would fly
I would fly from one cloud to another cloud
from one tree to another tree
from one lake to another lake
from one mountain range to another mountain range
and from one city to another city

Fly over the valleys
fly over the expanse of the oceans
fly over the immensity of the deserts
If I were you, beholding me
I would fly from one river to another river

If I were you, beholding me
I would even send my kisses into flight
… from the lips of a woman
… sweet savour
… to the lips of a man
… sense him like salt

And this is who I am
living in wonderful solitude
and imagining the kiss from those lips
… lips that are overflowing with emotion
… overflowing without cause or reason

If I were you, beholding me
I would fly from one island to another island

Behrouz Boochani
Translation by Omid Tofighian, American University in Cairo/University of Sydney.

The University of Melbourne’s announcement on 30 January 2019 that Melbourne University Publishing would henceforth ‘refocus on being a high-quality scholarly press in support of the University’s mission of excellence in teaching and research’, which led to the resignations of its chief executive, Louise Adler, and five other board members, was just three days old when one of the more absurd responses was floated as a serious option.

On February 2, The Age reported that Senator (and MUP author) Kim Carr had flagged the possibility of a future Labor government providing seed funding to continue MUP’s model of popular publishing elsewhere. Like many politicians and journalists, but few other Australians, Carr was deeply concerned about the prospect of MUP no longer publishing political memoirs and general-interest books, and instead focusing on scholarly works. ‘To ensure we protect political culture and debate’, he stated, government intervention was required. Carr's long-time political foe, Liberal minister (and MUP author) Christopher Pyne, put aside partisanship and expressed support. 

In 1902, Australian feminist and social reformer Vida Goldstein met Theodore Roosevelt in the White House during her North American lecture tour. Marilyn Lake retells the story of their encounter in her important new book. Seizing Goldstein’s hand in a vice-like grip, the president exclaimed: ‘delighted to meet you’. Australasian social and economic reforms attracted Roosevelt and other Americans. Lake’s focus is primarily, though not exclusively, on Australia, yet New Zealand was in some cases more socially ‘progressive’. Other antipodean visitors, including Catherine Spence, who lectured in Chicago on proportional representation, and jurist H.B. Higgins at Harvard, also received warm welcomes. Visits to and fro often produced long friendships, and the chain of letters is important in Lake’s impressive reconstruction of a trans-Pacific sensibility.

In Progressive New World, Lake argues that Australasia and the United States were engaged in a conversation of mutual, if sometimes qualified, admiration. Charles Pearson’s friendship with Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton, Alfred Deakin’s with philosopher Josiah Royce, and New Zealander Edward Tregear’s epistolary debates with the labour economist Victor Selden Clark, are explored, among other affective connections. In this light, US historians will need to reassess the assumption that progressive reform was either an internal product or a result of transatlantic dialogues alone.

Fellowship Twenty

Felicity Plunkett Felicity Plunkett is the 2019 ABR Patrons’ Fellow. This Fellowship is worth $10,000. Felicity will contribute a number of articles and review essays over the course of the next year.

A frequent contributor to the magazine since 2010 and a past Fellow (2015), Felicity Plunkett – poet, critic, teacher, editor – was chosen from a large field, and here we thank everyone who applied in this round. We especially thank the ABR Patrons who make this program – and so much else – possible.

We look forward to advertising the twenty-first Fellowship – the ABR Indigenous Fellowship – shortly.

Read the media release about this announcement here: ABR Media Release

Behrouz Boochani

Behrouz Boochani from Iran, on Manus Island, Papua New Guinea, on Tuesday 11 April, 2017 (photograph by Alex Ellinghausen © Fairfax Media, MEAA)

Though often convivial, not all awards ceremonies are stirring, but the 2019 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards – held at the MPavilion on January 31 – was very different. Behrouz Boochani’s extraordinary book No Friend But the Mountains (published by Picador, translated by Omid Tofighian) was named the Victorian Prize for Literature, having already won the Prize for NonFiction. Boochani, who remains on Manus Island where he has been incarcerated since 2013, recorded a video message and then spoke live to the audience via an iPhone. He spoke with great dignity and feeling.

Congratulations to the organisers and the Victorian government for not excluding Behrouz Boochani from these prizes, which – on this occasion – transcended the merely festive and monetary. (Boochani had earlier been excluded from the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards because he is neither an Australian citizen nor a permanent resident.)

At the ceremony, Omid Tofighian read a new poem by Behrouz Boochani (again, translated by Tofighian), which we are thrilled to publish in the March issue.

Felicity Plunkett reviewed No Friend But the Mountains in the October 2018 issue.

Peter Porter Poetry Prize Shortlist

Peter Porter

This year’s judges – Judith Bishop, John Hawke, Paul Kane – have shortlisted five poems in the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which is worth a total of $8,500. The poets are John Foulcher (ACT), Ross Gillett (Victoria), Andy Kissane (NSW), Belle Ling (Queensland/Hong Kong), and Mark Tredinnick (NSW). The poems commence on page 39.

This year’s Porter Prize ceremony will be held at fortyfivedownstairs, 45 Flinders Lane, Melbourne, on Monday, March 18 (6 pm). Reservations are essential for this free event: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. After readings from the work of Peter Porter, the shortlisted poets will introduce and read their poems. Then a special guest will name the overall winner, who will receive $5,000.

MWF on the move

The Melbourne Writers’ Festival (first presented in 1986) was based at the Malthouse Theatre from 1990 to 2008. Many people with fond memories of those congenial auditoria and the main foyer – always packed with authors and publishers and readers – have been hoping that MWF would find a more gemütlich home than Federation Square.

Happily, this year MWF will move to the State Library of Victoria (SLV), that dynamic cultural complex in the heart of town. The creation of new public spaces as part of SLV’s $88 million Vision 2020 redevelopment will make it possible for the Library and adjacent venues to accommodate a festival with this popular writers’ festival.

SLV CEO Kate Torney commented: ‘The Library is thrilled to be partnering with MWF to become the new home of Australia’s favourite literary festival. The partnership will bring new audiences to our magnificent Library, which is being transformed to meet the changing needs of our visitors.’

The Festival will run from August 30 to September 9.

Calibres galore

When the Calibre Essay Prize closed in mid-January, there were more than 450 entries – far more than in previous years. That’s almost two million words of essayism. Judging is underway but will take longer than expected. Hence, the winning essay will appear in the May issue – not April.

Hearty thanks to everyone who entered the Calibre Prize.

2019 Stella Prize Longlist

The 2019 Stella Prize longlist features books by twelve women, from a variety of publishers. Allen & Unwin figures prominently, with Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee, Little Gods by Jenny Ackland, and Bluebottle by Belinda Castles. Three-year-old publisher Brow Books is favoured too, with Pink Mountain on Locust Island by Jamie Marina Lau and Axiomatic by Maria Tumarkin. Axiomatic has already won the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature Best Writing Award and was shortlisted for the 2019 Victorian Premiers’ Literary Award.

The other longlisted titles are Stephanie Bishop’s Man Out of Time (Hachette), Enza Gandolfo’s The Bridge (Scribe), Chloe Hooper’s The Arsonist (Penguin Random House), Gail Jones’s The Death of Noah Glass (Text Publishing), Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip (University of Queensland Press), and The Erratics by Vicki Laveau-Harvie (Finch Publishing).

The winner will be named at a ceremony in Melbourne on April 9.

Melbourne University Publishing

Melbourne University Press – under the leadership of Louise Adler – has an unrivalled capacity to generate publicity. The University of Melbourne’s decision to (in the words of new Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell) ‘refocus MUP and a high-quality scholarly press’ and to reduce its commercial publishing led to a lot of lively debate. In response to the changes, Ms Adler (CEO since 2003) resigned, as did five board members, including Bob Carr and Gillian Triggs. There has been much commentary, some of it indignant and partisan.

Writing for Australian Book Review, Dominic Kelly – political historian and commentator – approaches the controversy from a different angle. His article aims to fill in some of the gaps in the recent coverage and to provoke a broader discussion of the role and purpose of university presses within the Australian publishing industry. Dr Kelly voices the frustrations of many academics about the direction of MUP and the quality of its titles over the past decade. He also seeks to correct the view propagated by a number of journalists and commentators that criticism of MUP from within academia is motivated by snobbery.

To read Dominic Kelly's commentary, click here. 

Vale Andrew McGahan

Andrew McGahan (photograph via Allen & Unwin)ABR was saddened by the recent death of author Andrew McGahan from pancreatic cancer in February aged fifty-two. McGahan was the author of six novels including the Vogel-winning Praise (1992), Wonders of a Godless World (2009), and The White Earth (2004) which won the 2005 Miles Franklin Award. McGahan was also the author of four young adult novels in the Ship Kings series including Ship Kings (2013) and The Coming of the Whirlpool (2011)

James Bradley reviewed The White Earth for ABR, describing it as ‘possessed of a resonance and symbolic complexity that exceeds anything he has done before’. His review was republished in the January-February 2019 issue as our From the Archive feature. In a statement on the Allen and Unwin website, publisher Annette Barlow said ‘I know that Australia’s literary community and readers will join me in mourning the loss of Andrew. I will remember him for his fierce and intense intelligence, his kindness and generosity, his fascination with the natural world and his bravery in facing his diagnosis. He truly was the best of men.’  

Allen and Unwin will publish McGahan’s final, posthumous novel The Rich Man’s House in September 2019.

Newcastle Writers Festival

The 2019 Newcastle Writers Festival runs from 5–7 April, and the full program is now available. Guests include Heather Morris, author of the bestselling The Tattooist of Auschwitz; acclaimed journalist and author Clementine Ford, who will discuss her recent work Boys Will Be Boys; and the award-winning Australian artist Ben Quilty. The festival will also feature a series of writing workshops and masterclasses, book launches, literary trivia, and much more.

For more information on the Newcastle Writers Festival, visit their website.

Daisy Utemorrah Award

In this prize-happy country, some of the worthiest (if not most lucrative) literary awards are for unpublished manuscripts. There is a new one from Magabala Books: the Daisy Utemorrah Award for an outstanding fiction manuscript in the junior and Young Adult categories (including graphic novels). It honours the late Ngarinyin Wunambal elder and author Daisy Utemorrah. Entrants must be Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander persons. The winner will receive $15,000 and, better still, a publishing contract with Magabala Books. Applications close on April 30.

ABR welcomes succinct letters and website comments. Time and space permitting, we will print any reply from the reviewer with the original letter or comment. If you're interested in writing to ABR, contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Correspondents must provide a telephone number or email address for verification.

Asbestos

Dear Editor,

In an otherwise excellent review of David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948-2018, I was shocked by one sentence by Alison Stieven-Taylor (ABR, January–February 2019). In commenting on David Goldblatt’s primary focus on South Africa, Stieven-Taylor wrote: ‘One notable exception was a trip to Australia in the late 1990s to photograph the ghost town of Wittenoom, infamous as the site of Australia’s asbestos mining industry.’ Wittenoom was indeed infamous, and its blue asbestos is a particularly infamous form. But Wittenoom was not Australia’s only asbestos mining site. There is an abandoned (and largely unremediated) white asbestos mine near Barraba in northern New South Wales. Less than 400 km away, in the Clarence Valley on the New South Wales coast, is a former asbestos mine at Baryulgil, then a largely Aboriginal town, where mine tailings were used for roadwork and in the school’s playground and sandpit.

It appears that asbestos was mined at many sites in Western Australia other than Wittenoom: also at three sites in New South Wales other than those noted above; two in Tasmania; and four in South Australia.

It is important that this part of Australia’s history not be airbrushed by implying that there was only one mine.

David Godden, Tamworth, NSW

Gallery directors

Dear Editor,

We would like to thank Ron Radford for his generous review of our book Australian Art Exhibitions: Opening our eyes. We’re impressed that it appeared so soon after publication.

We should note that Dr Radford’s curatorial career, which was marked by innovative exhibitions in a number of art museums, was one reason for the addition of the Career Paths appendix at the end of the book. As this is only concerned with those involved in key exhibitions of Australian art, it does not include either Edmund Capon or Betty Churcher, whose interests lay elsewhere.

The impact of Edmund Capon on the Art Gallery of New South Wales probably deserves a study on its own. His skill at managing both staff and trustees brought coherence to policies on all fronts, and his scholarship in Chinese art led to the establishment of a large and flourishing curatorial department of Asian art. 

Joanna Mendelssohn, Catherine De Lorenzo, Alison Inglis, and Catherine Speck

The Eighth Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1791, prohibits the use of ‘cruel and unusual punishments’. General Order No. 100 (the Lieber Code of 1863) declares that ‘military necessity does not admit of cruelty’ and explicitly bars American soldiers from torture. The UN Convention Against Torture, which the United States signed in 1988, stipulates an absolute ban on torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading punishments. Yet, as W. Fitzhugh Brundage amply demonstrates in Civilizing Torture: An American tradition, the United States has used torture at home and abroad for centuries.

Physical and psychological torment helped subjugate indigenous and enslaved populations, underpinned the formation of the carceral state, and has long been an instrument in America’s military adventures, particularly in the developing world. Yet notions of national exceptionalism have led many Americans to insist that the United States is a ‘unique nation with uniquely humane laws and principles’. Thus, despite international revulsion at the horrors inflicted by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, President George W. Bush still maintained that ‘any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture.’

Recently I was speaking with a friend about the impact of the #MeToo movement on gender politics and the implications for male academics. He suggested that there are only two speaking positions for men. The first is as a cheerleader from the sidelines. The second is as a critic, offering challenges or raising questions. But, he said, for those who would like to be viewed as politically left, the first is the only real option, because the second entails too many risks. Chief among these is the likelihood of being labelled a dinosaur with a vested interest in defending the patriarchy. Men on the conservative side of politics may be willing to wear such charges, but those who are more liberal understandably are cautious about risking the damage to their reputations that raising questions about feminist orthodoxies may imply.

The dilemma inherent in this example – namely the risk of exploring views that deviate from current, accepted norms – lies at the heart of Russell Blackford’s The Tyranny of Opinion: Conformity and the future of liberalism. Though not focused specifically on contemporary discussions about gender equity, the book explores arguments of relevance for debates on this hot topic, as well as those relating to the politics of religion and identity, including racial identity. Accessibly written and well-structured, it offers an excellent overview of the complex issues at stake when we talk about freedom of speech and the ways in which civility, privacy, and personal stability are undermined by call-out culture and social media.

Kenneth Cook (1929-87) was a prolific author best known for his first novel, Wake in Fright (1961), which was based on his experience as a young journalist in Broken Hill in the 1950s. In January 1972, as I sat in a London cinema watching the film made from this novel by director Ted Kotcheff, its nightmare vision of outback life seared itself into my brain. I was about to return home to Australia after two and a half years away, and I wondered why on earth I had made the fateful decision to go back to a place as violent and cruel as this.

Wake in Fright exemplifies the tradition of Australian bush Gothic, with its themes of entrapment, madness, sexual violence, and massacre (in this case, of kangaroos). Its small-town setting links it with Thea Astley’s novels dealing with the rituals of male violence and the humiliation of schoolteachers and other purveyors of culture beyond city limits. The restoration and rerelease of the film in 2009 again drew shocked and fascinated responses; since then, both book and film are frequently taught in Australian literature courses.

Future generations of readers will invariably look back in awe at the second decade of twenty-first-century Australian politics for its ridiculous revolving door of prime ministers. Personal and journalistic accounts of this rare instability – Australia had six prime ministers between 2010 and 2018 – have certainly proved a publishing bonanza. Defeated prime ministers publish memoirs as rapidly as journalists and commentators write their chronicles.

Journalist Paddy Manning’s first edition of Born to Rule – written during Tony Abbott’s failing prime ministership and released just weeks after Malcolm Turnbull’s accession in late 2015 – is clearly one of the better accounts. Given that no one from outside the parliament (except perhaps Bob Hawke) had been (for years) more frequently labelled a prime minister-in-waiting than Malcolm Turnbull, the release of a balanced portrait of the brilliant but seemingly irascible Turnbull was perfectly timed with Abbott’s exit.

How do you visually portray a concept like human rights? Much of the scholarship around this question focuses on the idea that to understand what human rights might look like, we have to visualise life without them. Historically, photography has played a significant role in exposing violations of human rights to a mass audience. Images of King Leopold of Belgium’s vicious rule of the Congo in the mid-1800s, and pictures from the Holocaust, confirmed the import of the picture as a document of evidence. This is an idea that historian Jane Lydon, editor of Visualising Human Rights, affirms in the book’s introduction, where she states that photography is a universal language, one crucial to constructing ‘a shared humanity’.

While discussion on photography dominates Visualising Human Rights (as one would expect), the book also illuminates other approaches to thinking about the role of the visual in shaping collective thought. Featuring seven essays by scholars and artists, Visualising Human Rights explores ideas of the self-image, memory, selfrepresentation, spectacle, protest, personal narrative, and media censorship.

There is much to admire about this detailed and painstaking book. The authors have entered a field that is replete with stereotypes and even gags. They will have none of it. The result is an account of the Irish in Australia subtly modulated and insistent on evidence. It is suspicious of the lore and yarns that have sometimes been made to take their place.

Elizabeth Malcolm and Dianne Hall make countless references to this book’s spiritual godfather, Patrick O’Farrell, whose The Irish in Australia, published in 1986, is still a delicious reading experience. Indeed, a number of the chapters in this new book begin with references to O’Farrell as a starting point. The authors are a little in awe of him, which is easy to understand. They treat him like an elderly ancestor whose stories may need to be toned down a bit.

According to the online resource Climate Action Tracker, Australia’s emissions from fossil fuels and industry continue to rise and are heading for an increase of nine per cent above 2005 levels by 2030, rather than the fifteen to seventeen per cent decrease in emissions required to meet Australia’s Paris Agreement target. What this means for our environment and how the changes will manifest is a matter for speculation.

Lucida Intervalla is set in that not-so-distant future: the atmosphere is ‘smudged’; Centralia is the barren heart; posting, tweeting, and messaging are out of control; surgical and genetic modification has brought humanity a step closer to immortality. The joke is that Perth hasn’t changed that much. But this is not a typical ‘pisstake’ (the title of one of its many short chapters) in the style of Ben Elton’s Stark (1989), though the themes are similar. Acclaimed eco-poet and self-confessed anarchist John Kinsella lampoons big business, ignorant government, and ineffectual activism almost as an aside, a habitual response to a culture and society he finds inexplicable at best and reprehensible as a whole.

The term ‘exploded view’ refers to an image in a technical manual that shows all the individual parts of a machine, separates them out, but arranges them on the page so that you can see how they fit together. As the title of Carrie Tiffany’s new novel, it can be interpreted as a definitive metaphor and perhaps, in a somewhat looser sense, an analogy for her evocative technique. Various things happen over the course of Exploded View, some of them dramatic, but the novel has little in the way of a conventional plot. Its characters exist in relation to one another, but they barely interact. There is almost no dialogue. It is the kind of novel in which the psychological and emotional unease is displaced or buried beneath the matter-of-fact narration.

What makes it distinctive is that much of this unease is not conveyed via insinuating moments of dramatic tension; it is approached figuratively and analytically, disassembled using the the novel’s central metaphor as a mechanism. Exploded View draws out the multiple implications of the idea that a nuclear family can be understood as kind of machine, consisting of separate but interlocking parts. It develops this simple analogy into the kind of extended conceit one associates with the metaphysical poets. It reflects on how the individual components fit together, how they function as a single entity, and, more to the point, what might cause such a finely attuned piece of machinery to break down.

In his 2017 essay ‘Notes for a Novel’, illuminatingly added as a kind of afterword at the end of this book, Steven Carroll recalls a dream that he had twenty years ago. It was this dream, he says, that grew into a series of novels centred on the Melbourne suburb of Glenroy, a series of which this novel is the sixth and last. It was

a vivid dream about my old street in Glenroy where I grew up. In the dream my father (who is now dead), my mother and I were standing on the street … it was a Saturday night in 1957 … We all had our best clothes on … The vividness and the urgency of the dream prompted a novel that, over three drafts, eventually became The Art of the Engine Driver [2001].

With four more novels in between, set at various times over the twentieth century but always featuring the same three main characters – Vic, Rita, and Michael, a father, a mother, and a son – Carroll has chosen with this final novel in the series to return to the beginning of the story, to the conception and birth of Vic the engine driver in the terrible year of 1917.

‘If you think you know what this collection will be like, you’re wrong,’ Carmen Maria Machado (author of the brilliant Her Body and Other Parties, 2017) states on the back cover of Kristen Roupenian’s provocatively titled début, You Know You Want This. It is an unusual description of a short story collection from an emerging author, but Roupenian is not your average débutante. She is the author of ‘Cat Person’, the short story that launched a thousand hot takes after the New Yorker published it in December 2017.

Published during the rise of the #MeToo movement, ‘Cat Person’ – a finely written, conversation-starter of a story – relates the prelude to, and aftermath of, a bad date between twenty-year-old Margo and thirty-four-year-old Robert in confronting, nuanced detail. ‘Cat Person’ captured the public imagination to an extraordinary degree. Roupenian, then an MFA student at the University of Michigan, became the author of the ‘first short story to go viral’. A subsequent bidding war by publishers resulted in a seven-figure book deal.

As the United States tears itself to pieces over a proposed wall, which has in recent months transmogrified into a steel fence, here in Australia we have no right to be smug or to rubberneck. After all, Australia loves its fences. Since it was first occupied as a penal colony, this land has been bisected by a seemingly endless series of enclosures, barricades, frontiers, and fences, including some of the longest in the world: the rabbit-proof fence in Western Australia; and the dingo fence in the Eastern states. Fences, both physical and symbolic, have long been used by our leaders to banish undesirables or to constrain their movement within acceptable boundaries. Various Australian governments have forcibly removed Indigenous Australians to reserves and missions, interned so-called ‘enemy aliens’ within camps during wartime, and detained those fleeing danger or tyranny abroad within remote and offshore prisons.

Debra Adelaide’s masterful new story collection, Zebra, draws upon this history of fences to examine what it means, in Australia in 2019, to be a good neighbour. Zebra is full of fences, backyards, and divided spaces, and full of people making choices about the extent of their kindness and compassion for those on the other side. The first story, ‘Dismembering’, is narrated by a woman who dreams of a body that she and her ex-husband may or may not have buried next to her back fence. In the story ‘Welcome to Country’, the fence is much bigger: armed conflict has made the Northern Territory an ‘autonomous state now just called Country’, surrounded by a massive wire fence. Adelaide is explicit about some of the history this fence is drawn from: ‘There had been dingo fences and rabbit-proof fences before – now we had the ultimate fence.’  The story is narrated by a man who travels across the continent to perform an act of kindness in honour of someone that he has lost.

Where are you happiest?

Generally where I am right now, in my study writing, but also in the garden. It is very uncomplicated. 

Are you a vivid dreamer?

Some dreams are extremely vivid, but unless I consciously process them they vanish like water down a drain. Doesn’t everyone dream like this?

Last year in New York, I visited the Mysterious Bookshop, Manhattan’s only bookstore specialising in crime fiction. The otherwise knowledgeable bookseller had heard of three Australian crime novelists: Peter Temple, Garry Disher, and Jane Harper.

If I were to visit this year, however, I’m pretty sure the bookseller would be able to add more Australian novelists to his list – the multi-award-winning author Emma Viskic for one, along with Dervla McTiernan and Candice Fox. Fox has become an internationally bestselling author, a success amplified by her four parallel collaborations with James Patterson, one of which hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list. McTiernan’s 2018 début, The Ruin, was both a critical and commercial success in Australia and overseas, garnering praise from fellow writers, critics, and fans alike for the Ireland-set novel’s clear-eyed style and deep characterisation.

In 2018, Garry Disher was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award by the Australian Crime Writer’s Association Ned Kelly Awards in recognition of a career spanning several decades. Twice awarded Germany’s most prestigious crime-writing award, the German Crime Prize, and twice winner of the Australian equivalent for best crime novel, the Ned Kelly Award, Disher is one of Australia’s great writers and the author of more than fifty books.

Fusion is the fiction début from the author of the acclaimed Madness: A memoir (2013). It draws on Australian gothic and older gothic traditions. With the meditative possibilities of walking alpine ranges, it also portrays claustrophobia and compulsion. Its drama centres on a small and wounded cast, a reclusive household that suddenly encounters the outside world.

Conjoined twins Sea and Serene share a life that, although secluded, is vibrant with sensory information and memory. The past, a childhood of barbaric treatment at the hands of nuns and classmates at Hope Home, lingers in their minds. Cruelty has driven the twins to their quiet home on Blindeye Creek. One of the few intimate relationships they experience lies in the connection to their environment, which, in turn, links the twins to those who have walked these mountains before:

This land is a sentient being with an enormous elemental power, fierce spirit – holy and unholy both – above and below, all round and beyond us. The Jaithmathang people, Bidawal people, the Dhudhuroa people knew this well. Thousands and thousands and thousands of years before us. Their songlines still criss-cross the earth where the Lightning folk walked before they all became stars.

Gilian Best’s début novel, The Last Wave, is a thoughtful narrative that charts the intricacies of one family’s experiences and relationships across three generations, from the postwar period to the present. It makes use of the iconography of the coast and the unpredictability of the sea almost as a dramatis personae that motivates, consoles, and potentially threatens the characters in their proximate lives. Set on the coast of southern England, Best’s imagery is beautiful and evocative: windswept, shingle beaches, the White Cliffs of Dover, Vera Lynn’s haunting song.

Martha and John Roberts live by this grey and unruly sea; for Martha, a swimmer, it has always been an immersive experience of challenge, providing her with a sense of purpose beyond the roles of wife and mother. Her desire to swim the Channel, to feel salt on her skin, is life-defining, offering both independence and emotional connections.

The story is told in multiple voices within the family. This shifting of perspective does allow us to see into the various cross-currents of family life – its rifts as well its opportunities. However, it is also a rather wooden strategy, as it somewhat heavy-handedly stitches together its themes and symbolisms, providing no real rationale as to why we might be privy to each character’s point of view. In narrative terms, these varying currents are brought to a head in the novel’s present in which John descends into a fog of dementia, Martha is dying from cancer, and unspoken things surge and press.

Best nevertheless conveys a powerful sense of the emotional tides sweeping her characters. Her poignant portrayal of the enduring bonds between John and Martha, even in the face of such unravelment, gives insight into how we might all face that last wave when it inevitably comes.

Rose Lucas

Hare’s Fur is about what follows grief. Russell Bass, a seventy-two-year-old potter, lives alone in Katoomba. Adele and Michael, his wife and child, have both died. Time still passes. He wakes early, drinks coffee, visits friends, throws clay.

One morning, seeking basalt for glazes at a nearby creek, Russell discovers three siblings living in a cave: two young children, Todd and Emma, and their teenage sister, Jade. Moved to act, he brings them food, offers them help. At first hesitant, they come to trust him, and a tentative relationship begins.

Hare’s Fur is a tale of convalescence, a restrained, moving story about how we discover new meaning in the wake of anguish. While Trevor Shearston’s prior fiction has largely explored the fictionalisation of historical figures – Jack Emanuel’s assassination in A Straight Young Back (2000), Italian explorer Luigi D’Albertis in Dead Birds (2007), the bushranger Ben Hall in Game (2013) – Hare’s Fur proves the writer’s talent beyond historical saga. Katoomba, nestled in the heart of the Blue Mountains, also provides a vivid backdrop. Privy to its ‘tea-trees, acacias, and hakeas’, its ‘grevillea laurifolia, dillwynia, and hibbertia’, Shearston is clearly at home; it’s no surprise that he lives there.

This serenity is occasionally disrupted by superfluous touches – Russell’s internal, italicised musings, for one, tend to get in the way. We are also rationed only fragments of the lives of Adele and Michael – in one beautiful passage, Russell watches Todd approach a wallaby, recalling Michael once doing the same – and we are left wanting more.

Overall, Hare’s Fur is about the inevitable reconfiguring of a life. It shows us that, like Kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with seams of gold, we too can mend ourselves, we too can reconnect our pieces.

Old friendships and close collaborations between author and subject can be either a blessing or a curse in biography – a tightrope between discretionary tact and open fire. Both call for intimate but balanced subjectivity, especially where virile egos are concerned. The Boy from Brunswick, a massive tome with sixty chapters and 540 pages, offers a bit of everything.

Jan Senbergs, who knew and admired Leonard French from the 1950s, gives a frank account of his fellow artist in the foreword, which makes for valuable commentary. We are informed by the author, Reg MacDonald, that the biography is based substantially on extensive interviews with the artist over a three-year period. Hence, French’s raconteur-like voice resonates throughout the text, in excellent quotations from correspondence between the artist and his family that reveal a perceptive, articulate man and confirm the importance of primary material. MacDonald, who knew French for more than forty years, wisely relies on this valuable resource, but he is also remarkably attuned to the artist’s punchy vernacular. Herein lies one of the more disquieting aspects of this biography, a persistent recourse to blokey banter, reflecting French’s ‘long[ing] for male company’ to record and ruminate over his life. The artist’s quest for ‘enduring monumentality’ in his art is one thing, but MacDonald’s homage is tarred by macho slang and unnecessary repetitions. Further, his pressuring for curatorial ‘critical reassessment’ of this late artist’s work also tends to pushiness.

The author and critic Richard Ellmann died in May 1987, a handful of months before the publication of his biography of Oscar Wilde. Twenty years in the making, the book instantly established a benchmark in literary biography. Psychologically astute and critically nuanced, Oscar Wilde invites the reader into a world of bourgeois values – moral and artistic – that leads so tragically to the grim poverty and degradation of Wilde’s final years.

Ellmann had cut his teeth over three decades earlier with a biography of James Joyce (1959), written when many of those who had known him were still alive. Yet it took his study of Joyce’s fellow countryman to demonstrate the virtuosity and sheer nerve necessary to recreate a life in print so many years after the subject’s death. He takes the reader by the hand and never lets go, no matter how rough the terrain.

There is a scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail outside a castle, brimming with French men-at-arms, who taunt King Arthur and his knights remorselessly, while the Britons are convinced that the Holy Grail lies behind the drawbridge. The Grail was, of course, membership of the Common Market, to which President Charles de Gaulle had denied Britain entry for a decade. It was the Gallic ‘Non’ of 1963 that merely continued the thousand-year war between France and England. But it was not the first time de Gaulle had had ‘trouble with Anglo-Saxons’.

De Gaulle dominated French politics for almost thirty years, from the fall of France in 1940 to (barely) surviving the post-1945 political wilderness, multiple assassination attempts, and the 1968 student revolution. He is inseparable from France’s modern political history. But was he a liberator, an imperialist, or a fascist? Perhaps all three. Historian Réne Rémond regarded Gaullism as forms of Bonapartism and Boulangisme. Franklin Roosevelt detested de Gaulle’s ‘fascism’. De Gaulle himself was influenced by Charles Maurras’s Catholic integralism, while Maurras, an ardent monarchist, praised de Gaulle early in the war. The best-known contemporary admirer of Maurras’s philosophy is Steve Bannon, the architect of Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.

The word indicible appears frequently in the work of French author Annie Ernaux. In English, it means ‘inexpressible’ or ‘unspeakable’. Yet saying the unsayable – or rather, exploring the crevice between what is discussed openly and the inexpressible within – is where Ernaux excels. As the opening anecdotes of The Years (Les années) display, this may not always be pleasant: shit, urination, and sex are described in matter-of-fact detail, while in other works the basic mechanics of abortion and adultery, domestic violence, and death are registered calmly and head-on. Ernaux’s quiet determination to document the unspeakable, however, forms a vital record of what it means to have been a child, a woman, a human being in the twentieth century.

Born in 1940, Ernaux published her first book in 1974. Some twenty books have followed, many centred around a particular incident or period in her life. La place (winner of France’s 1984 Prix Renaudot), for example, begins with the death of her father, while the unflinching ‘Je ne suis pas sortie de ma nuit’ (1997) charts her mother’s decline from Alzheimer’s. Ernaux’s books are mostly short but, with the repetition of certain stories, images, and dialogue, together resemble a serial novel. Ernaux was initially inspired, she tells us in The Years, to write something like Guy de Maupassant’s Une vie (1883), something that would ‘convey the passage of time inside and outside of herself, in History, a “total novel” that would end with her dispossession of people and things’. This is classic autofiction territory, but her decision to replace the ‘I’ of earlier works with ‘she’, ‘one’, and ‘we’ – what her translator refers to as a collective ‘I’ – indicates that here we are being taken on a different journey altogether.

The much-lauded Les années was published in France in 2008, appearing in English with Seven Stories Press only in 2017. While not the first of Ernaux’s books to be translated, it is perhaps the one with widest appeal, recounting the cultural and social shifts she has experienced against a backdrop of current affairs ranging from World War II and the revolutions of 1968 to 9/11. Her aim, she declares, was to tell the story of her existence but to dissolve this existence into that of her generation.

Ernaux eschews traditional narrative, which, she notes in her earlier work La honte (1997), ‘would produce a reality instead of the search for it’. Instead, she builds impressions of the past decade by decade. A single photograph or a few minutes of home video serve as her Proustian madeleine, as do memories of family meals and dinner parties with their changing food, method of setting of the table, and topics of conversation. A 1950s family gathering might, for example, revive such recollections as:

– living in a house with a dirt floor

– wearing galoshes

– playing with a rag doll

– washing clothes in wood ash

– sewing a little pouch of garlic inside children’s nightshirts near the navel to rid them of worms

Inventories of song titles and films, items of clothing, even the changing contents of a supermarket trolley help her quest. While Ernaux has toyed previously with the idea of being an ethnologist of herself, here she is more like a historian, anxious to record for future generations memories, objects, habits, and language that the internet might distort or neglect.

Like all good writers, Ernaux identifies the transformations we sense but cannot always immediately articulate. She tracks, for example, the connected growth of advertising, consumerism, leisure time, and self-obsession. She depicts a society that, satiated, looks steadfastly inward rather than taking on the much harder task of being curious about the past (other than an ostentatious form of civic duty) or the outside world. She worries about the reversal of various twentieth-century achievements, seen in increased hostility towards immigrants or the worsening place of women, who are told they have it all but are still judged for their bodies, clothing, and sexuality. Ernaux has a way with aphorisms (‘Anomie was catching’), but the book forms, too, an extraordinary document of language and its changing use over the twentieth century, from the patois or dialect of her childhood Normandy to the days when a party was still a ‘surboum’.

Annie Ernaux (photograph by Olivier Roller)

Replete with cultural references, The Years cannot have been easy to translate. Canadian translator Alison L. Strayer acknowledges having had to look up many details, but seems to have struggled with deciding what to translate and when: certain names and terms are translated or receive an explanatory footnote, but others do not. Strayer also confesses to the challenges posed by Ernaux’s minimalist but occasionally ‘breathless’ writing, with the result that the author’s laconic, yet lyrical style is sometimes lost. She does, though, preserve Ernaux’s unusual spacing.

History almost always has a capital ‘H’ for Ernaux, but it is a form of history that historians tend not to broach, not least due to lack of evidence. She fears that this failure to acknowledge the silences in our society condemns those ‘who feel but cannot name these things’. When the silence breaks, she writes, ‘little by little, or suddenly one day, and words burst forth, recognized at last’, other silences begin to form. We have perhaps seen a recent example in the protests of the gilets jaunes for whom Ernaux controversially declared support, comparing Emmanuel Macron’s Élysée to the Versailles of France’s ancien régime in its scorn for workers. Ernaux’s commitment to disturbing these silences has made her one of contemporary France’s most important and intriguing observers.

Judith Rodriguez, who died in November 2018, was a champion of other people’s causes: the right to be heard, the right to freedom from persecution, the right to refuge when such freedom is denied. She was also a champion of poetry and gave generously of her time and energy to fighting its corner. Generations of fledgling poets profited from her mentoring; generations of students were introduced to the pleasures of Parnassus through her intelligent promotion of fellow poets, notably in her time as poetry editor for Penguin Australia (1988–97).

But there’s the rub: those who give much of themselves to other people’s interests may neglect their own – which in this case is a pity, for Judith was a notable poet and for too long we have not seen enough of her poetry. Many of the poems in this new and abundant collection are on show for the first time, even though some were written considerably earlier. 

There has been a long and often troubled history of poets writing novels and novelists writing poetry. The skills needed are very different and equally hard to learn. Few writers have made equal careers in both. If they do, it’s usually the novels that receive most attention. (Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje spring to mind.) Many major novelists, however, had some poetry among their early work. F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner started penning Keats imitations. Some novelists, like David Foster, have put out a book of poetry, had it negatively reviewed, and have then returned, with some chagrin, to prose. Similarly, some poets’ novels are dismissed for their ‘poetic prose’. There is a strong tendency among poets and novelists (even among their reviewers) to ‘protect their own turf’, as it were.

The ‘turf’ image may also be apposite for the novelist Gerald Murnane, given his lifelong obsession with horseracing. Now, in his eightieth year, Murnane has declared that he has written all the fiction he intends to write and has issued Green Shadows and Other Poems as a kind of valediction.

In 2017, Oskar Eustis directed the Public Theater production of Julius Caesar – a play that pivots on the assassination of a political leader – in Central Park with a lead actor who bore an unmistakable likeness to the forty-fifth president of the United States. The conservative backlash was swift and powerful: key sponsors Delta Air Lines and the Bank of America withdrew funding for the production, and Donald Trump Jr took to Twitter to vent, querying ‘how much of this “art” is funded by taxpayers?’ and pondering ‘when does “art” become political speech & does that change things?’ Scholars, including Stephen Greenblatt (New York Times, 12 June 2017), were quick to point out the obvious: that Shakespeare’s play does not endorse the assassination of Caesar, and that the efforts to preserve the Roman Republic do more harm than good. Nevertheless, the damage had been done, and Shakespeare companies across the United States received death threats in the following weeks, despite having no affiliation with the Public Theater. Shakespeare’s political relevance was firmly in the public’s imagination.

Stephen Greenblatt’s new study of political tyranny is a product of such controversial events. From the early question, ‘how is it possible for a whole country to fall into the hands of a tyrant?’, it is obvious that Donald Trump (never named in the book) is the not-so-subtle subtext. Billed repeatedly as ‘relevant’, ‘highly relevant’, and ‘contemporary’ on its cover blurb, Greenblatt’s account of Shakespeare’s tyrants barely attempts to disguise its topicality for modern America. Where Greenblatt’s early works invest faith in the power of anecdotal history and foreground the critical problem of subjectivity in methodology, offering a conceptual account of how texts both affect and respond to the conditions of their production, Tyrant extends the New Historicist methodology, acknowledging the potential for presentist concerns: ‘The playwright remained very much part of his place and time, but he was not their mere creature.’ The political and religious tensions of early modern England are thus refracted through the lens of current anxieties, as when Greenblatt observes of the ‘radicalized’, ‘home-grown’ terrorists trained abroad and ‘smuggled’ back into England (the Jesuit conspirators seeking to remove Elizabeth I from power): ‘[l]ike the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, the beheading of Mary on February 8, 1587, did not end the threat of [Roman Catholic-sponsored] terrorism in England’. (Interestingly, the bin Laden reference has been added to the opening chapter – presumably to reinforce topicality – since it was first published in The New Yorker, 4 May 2018).

Novelist and academic Julienne van Loon does not doubt that the thinking woman is ‘alive and well’, but when she scans the (mostly) male names in bookstore philosophy sections and the (mostly) male staff lists of university philosophy departments, she wonders where they are hiding. Some, van Loon contends, were cast out from ‘capital-p Philosophy’ or were never admitted in the first place. Many, she notes wryly, are simply having a better time elsewhere. The Thinking Woman is van Loon’s attempt to draw attention to the careers and contributions of leading female philosophers, while using their ideas to flesh out what constitutes a good life for women. What are the necessary material and emotional requirements for women to live fulfilling lives? And how are these lives circumscribed by misogyny and gender inequality?

The Thinking Woman is also much more than a thematically organised collection of essays that bring the dense theories of living feminist and female philosophers to a general readership. In many ways the book is also a revelation, as it marks van Loon as an extraordinary memoirist, able to draw convincing parallels between her own life and the academic arguments of her philosopher subjects without descending into cant or mawkishness. Van Loon manages to move confidently and convincingly between discussing her early love of trees and her first job working at a Dagwood Dog truck, to Julia Kristeva’s theory of subjective horror and Rosi Braidotti’s concept of bios/zoe.

A few intellectually superior women exist, conceded nineteenth-century anthropologist Gustav Le Bon, but ‘they are as exceptional as the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads’. Armed with cephalometers, scales, and birdseed for measuring skull volumes, Le Bon and his peers found that women’s heads tended to contain smaller brains than men’s. The five missing ounces must account for women’s cognitive inferiority, they surmised.

The Gendered Brain prosecutes the case that wrong-headed ideas about sexually dimorphic brains and female deficiency are not historical curiosities but endure in modern neuroscience. Gina Rippon, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at Aston University, aims to correct the distorting mirror it holds up to gender. The main target of her critique is gender essentialism, the tenacious idea that women and men are fundamentally different. On the essentialist view, gender differences have deep roots in sex-determining genes, brains, and hormones: anatomy (and physiology) is destiny. Rippon does not offer a radical critique of the notion of gender itself, deny that gender differences exist, or rule out biological contributions to them. Instead, she argues that many differences between men and women are powerfully shaped by culture and socialisation from a surprisingly early age. These differences are also smaller and more malleable than our stereotypes would have us believe.

A marble statue of a crouching Venus disfigured by age and circumstance appears on the cover of Lee Kofman’s Imperfect. The goddess of love and beauty is a ruin, although one capable of radiating an uncertain allure. Through a deft trick of typography, the emblazoned title can be read as either ‘Imperfect’ or ‘I’m Perfect’.

Kofman announces from the outset that she has attempted ‘to tell as truthful a story as I could about how our bodies can shape our lives, and what we can do about this’. She argues for a deep engagement with the word ‘imperfection’, for societal adoption of the principles of wabi sabi, the Japanese aesthetic philosophy, so that the two titular possibilities are not polar opposites. Her embrace of the word ‘imperfect’ feels bold in a cultural climate that would argue that the word should be discarded, laden as it might be with negative judgement. But being brave is a state familiar to Kofman.

Ginger Gorman’s book-length piece of investigative journalism, Troll Hunting: Inside the world of online hate and its human fallout, arose from her experiences as a victim of cyberhate in 2013. Through her own example, and the examples of others, she shows the vulnerability of all internet users to cyberhate, and how quickly and unpredictably it can be triggered. In the remit of trolling – a world deliberately inhabited by Gorman during the writing of this book – all bets are off: intent, rationality, morality, and good judgement suspended in the contest with the provocations and offence meted out by the avatars she encounters. Like an anthropologist, Gorman tracks the evolution of a language that is designed to harm – one running relatively unchecked but with adverse consequences for human life.

The premise of Troll Hunting, in trying to find out who trolls are and seeking to understand their motives, has been canvassed elsewhere: in 2015 American writer Lindy West wrote for The Guardian about ‘What happened when I confronted my cruellest troll’, and Dublin-based Leo Traynor wrote a similar exposé in 2012. In both cases the identity of the troll is surprising, and both stories are articulated with humanity and humility. The conclusions reached by Gorman about trolling and its ties to societal misogyny, and the fact that trolling is a symptom of the isolation and suffering felt by trolls themselves, are not new. However, Troll Hunting is informative because it adds case studies to our arsenal in terms of understanding this behaviour. It analyses the problem in terms of Australian regulation and enforcement against cyberbullying, and looks at the different actors involved and their different levels of responsibility. These are all valuable contributions.

In his 1998 book, Japanese Literature as ‘fluctuation’ (‘Yuragi’ no nihon bungaku), Komori Yōichi deconstructs the concept of ‘modern Japanese literature’ by examining the Encyclopedia of Modern Japanese Literature (『日本近代文学大辞典』), an impressive work that, despite its six volumes, fails to provide an entry for the very thing it proposes to discuss: modern Japanese literature. This, Komori argues, is due to modern Japanese literature’s status as a ‘privileged sign’. Like the modern nation-state of Japan, it can only be defined indirectly, through a tautology of association and exclusion. That is, a work is modern only if it is not premodern. To not be premodern, a text must not only be written after the start of the Meiji period (1868–1912), it must also have been properly baptised at the font of European and American literature.

We know that Akutagawa Ryūnosuke is a modern writer not simply because he was active in the early twentieth century but because scholars have discerned in him traces of Anatole France. Had Akutagawa written gesaku, waka, monogatari, or in any other ‘premodern’ literary mode, he would be invisible to the editors of the encyclopedia, regardless of when he wrote. This logic of exclusion is applied to the other components of the phrase, ‘modern Japanese literature’. A work is Japanese if it is not non-Japanese, if it is written in Japanese by a Japanese person – though the concepts of Japanese l anguage and ‘Japaneseness’ are themselves hardly straightforward. A text is ‘literature’ only if it is not not literature, if it is not art, music, journalism, etc.

On the first page of her book Hope in the Dark (2004), Rebecca Solnit quotes from Virginia Woolf’s diary: ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be, I think.’ Such optimism is, Solnit acknowledges, surprising. But it’s a persistent theme in her work and it finds clear articulation in her most recent essay collection, Call Them by Their True Names.

Solnit is a complex writer and thinker, at once a cultural historian, an avant-garde activist, and a feminist whose work permeates the mainstream – from a Beyoncé hat-tip to the term ‘mansplaining’. Reducing that complexity is difficult and perhaps unhelpful given the rationale of the essays in question. In Men Explain Things to Me (2014), Solnit touches again on Woolf’s diary-statement and suggests that, ‘It’s the job of writers and explorers to see more … to go into the dark with their eyes open.’ This requires a courage that, in Call Them by Their True Names, is embodied in Solnit’s commitment to precision, even as she delights in the indefinite – she sees words as ‘gestures in a ballet’ instead of ‘pieces in a game of checkers’.

In the essay titled ‘In Praise of Indirect Consequences’, Solnit describes what she calls ‘collateral benefit’. A case in point is the indirect transfer of non-violent resistance tactics from anti-slavery campaigners to suffragettes, Gandhi to Martin Luther King Jr, and then to protesters at Occupy, Standing Rock, and for #MeToo. Each action of resistance, she argues – even if it does not succeed in its immediate goal – has repercussions. Through an awareness of the winding paths of historical cause and effect – akin to a metaphysical game of bowling ‘shrouded in mists and unfolding over decades’ – hope can be maintained. She makes a compelling case. And an inspiring one: ‘Hope is a belief that what we do might matter … that the future is not yet written. It’s an informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we might play in it.’ This open-mindedness depends on the above-mentioned duality. Solnit excels in the kind of nuance required to write it.

The book’s title speaks to Solnit’s reverence for clarity and precision. If things are called by their true names, it might be possible to resist some of the ravages of this post-truth era. Accurate language actively eschews ‘the disintegration of meaning’. It’s refreshing, in this context, to see Solnit reverse the charge of relativism onto the right: nuance doesn’t mean avoiding an answer, it means searching for the correct one – even if that search is occasionally unsuccessful. In the essays, Solnit’s insistence on context and depth proves this point; the case studies she describes – death row inmates, police shootings, voter disenfranchisement, and more – are deep explorations of cause and effect. Linking causes also draws attention to the forces behind them, one particular target being Donald Trump and the United States he symbolises. Here, Solnit writes with a glint in her eye, entirely unafraid to call a spade a president, and the frequent takedowns of ‘45’ are glorious.

Her gaze is not a blinkered one. Repeated pleas for nuance cover the gamut, from libertarian right-leaners to the more cynical reaches of the left. These essays demand activism and urge agency on all sides of the political spectrum. Solnit makes the point that complexity can be comprehended only by engaging with allies, and she suggests that, ‘Conversation … is a means of accomplishing many subtle and indirect things.’ This is not a plea for echo-chamber politicking, but a call to give the arguments for progressivism more depth; to thicken the bonds between friends, to solidify foundations, and to open up a way into a clearer kind of discourse. These essays are part of that process, one example being ‘Death by Gentrification’.

The city of San Francisco – Solnit’s home and a place of vast and intricate diversity under siege from the Silicon Valley on its doorstep – is a case study for her argument that gentrification, impelled by neoliberalism and capitalism, tears apart the fabric of cities already under strain. The link between police brutality and this kind of stress shows what happens when the less tangible aspects of a place are removed. This has resonance in the Australian context, perhaps because of the way in which Solnit argues that actions and events work, replete with unintended consequences. This complex concatenation builds resonance for the Australian reader: the book presents parallels to the treatment of Julia Gillard and Julia Banks, to the dismissal of refugees on Manus Island and Nauru, to debates around what should stay in or out of the ground, and to continuing colonisation. ‘The Monument Wars’ demonstrates this last parallelism, arguing that erasure of ‘all signs of the ugliness of [a] country’s past ... would be a landscape lobotomy’. The essay calls for accuracy and honesty in addressing the past; it is a reminder that ‘our emerging perspective is hardly the final realisation of inclusion or equality’.

Call Them by Their True Names doesn’t have the overall consistency of a work designed to be one thing: ideas are repeated and specific thoughts reiterated. But Solnit writes with verve and candour, in lyrical prose that reinforces her claims around interconnectedness and vitality. The book is as difficult to pin down as the rest of her oeuvre. But that, perhaps, is part of her method of emphasising entangled connections – to the visible and invisible past, and to the lines of influence that stretch into a dark and possibility-rich future. 

In his analysis of Australia’s growing urban inequality, Peter Mares recounts a conversation with a homeless man outside a train station while Mares was walking his dog. The dog is well fed and has a warm place to sleep, but Mares can only give the man a few coins. These are implicit priorities we all share. Why, asks Mares, do Australians unhesitatingly spend $750 million annually on a ‘flutter on the neddies’ at the Melbourne Cup rather than on housing our fellow citizens? The policy discussions, political posturing, and expert advice on Australia’s housing crisis are hard to follow and often contradictory. ‘I am surely not alone,’ he writes, ‘in being perplexed by the radically divergent views in this debate.’ No Place Like Home is a compassionate, clear-eyed unpicking of one of contemporary Australia’s ‘wicked problems’.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), 116,000 people were homeless on census night. Yet, of a larger group of people who move in and out of a cycle of homelessness, ‘rough sleepers’ are only the most visible. Others might stay with friends or family, couch surf, or find temporary accommodation in hostels or refuges. Homelessness is compounded by wider social problems, and it is not just about a lack of housing. In 2016–17, forty per cent of people seeking assistance from specialist homelessness services were doing so to escape family violence. In total, two and a half million Australians have experienced homelessness at some time in their lives, according to ABS figures.