Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds perform at Open’er Festival on 4 July 2018 in Gdynia, Poland (Ewa Burdynska-Michnam, East News sp. z o.o. Alamy Stock Photo)

It begins with a projected haze of ocean horizon. In this blurry liminal space, silence is misted with anticipation, like the moment before an echo comes back empty, right across the sea. Then a close-up of multi-instrumentalist Warren Ellis’s hands unpicking tranquillity’s fabric, each piano note a loosened stitch.

The machinery of the Bad Seeds emerges: scarred midriffs of violins and guitars, a shimmer of pinstripes and a flourish of the pocket squares favoured by the rock dandy, fingers heavily ringed. The stage is set with percussion, keyboards, flute, a grand piano: jangle and spark itching to launch. Deep concentration: the glance among colleagues who have worked together for decades, in the moment between rehearsal and performance when everything is scripted but anything can happen.

Nick Cave steps onstage, slim, suited, singing: The things we love, we love, we love, we lose, the last word snuffing itself out, almost inaudible. There’s a sob edging the note and sky-raised eyes: there are powers at play more forceful than we. Austere instrumentation drops into silence as he continues: I’m begging you please to come home now, come home now. He is right on the edge, singing convalesce into palpable empathy, mask of twigs and clay, hands reaching towards him: with my voice, I am calling you. Deep within this mood of aftermath, something is stirring. In the echo of witness – the audience, still, holding each syllable – a stretch and wrench of sung words and an eerie swoop of synth and harmonies signal the crossing to a new part of Cave’s creative life.

On 12 April 2018, Distant Sky, a live concert film of Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds screened once in cinemas around the world. Made in October 2017 at the Royal Arena in Copenhagen and directed by David Barnard, it captured Australian-born musician and writer Nick Cave and his band The Bad Seeds playing to an audience of sixteen thousand people.

The concert was part of a tour following the 2016 release of the band’s sixteenth studio album. Skeleton Tree was recorded over eighteen months. During this time, in July 2015, Arthur Cave, the fifteen-year-old son of Cave and his wife, Susie Bick, died after an accidental fall at Ovingdean Gap near their home in Brighton, England. To avoid promotional interviews, Cave commissioned Australian director Andrew Dominik to make a documentary. Dominik describes One More Time With Feeling as ‘a practical solution to a practical problem’. The thought of interviews ‘made [Cave] feel sick, because he was going to have to discuss the context of the record with a whole bunch of journalists. That prospect was very alarming to him. His instinct in making the film was one of self-preservation: it was a way to talk about what happened, but there was a certain safety in doing it with someone he knew.’ Cave found himself caught between the need for silence and the need to speak: the human instinct for privacy and the artist’s sense of a responsibility to say something. ‘The idea of a traditional interview,’ writes Dominik, ‘was simply unfeasible but … he felt a need to let the people who cared about his music understand the basic state of things.’

Dominik describes Cave as ‘trapped’ and needing ‘to do something – anything – to at least give the impression of forward movement’. In the process, an unexpected kernel appeared. The resulting film is more than a holding bay, and more than a way out of a trap. It grows from self-preservation into documenting Cave’s crafting, from elegy and empathy, a new creative mode.

The film explores the final stages of Skeleton Tree’s production, capturing the band’s work that continues through, and comes to embody, Cave’s mourning. Dominik shot the film in 3D and black and white using a specially made camera: a ‘massive, lumbering piece of equipment that’s almost comic lack of mobility added to the eerie drift of the film itself’. Cumbersome, awkward machinery that doesn’t always work seems apt for capturing the impact of trauma and the lurching dynamics of resilience. The angles are often askew, shots out of focus. Cave is split and mirrored – in the sheen of a grand piano or in a bathroom mirror, itself reflecting a line from Skeleton Tree’s ‘Magneto’: And in the bathroom mirror I see me vomit in the sink / And all through the house we hear the hyena’s hymns.

‘Magneto’, the song that gives the film its name, is about intimacy: In love, in love, I love, you love, I laugh, you laugh / I move, you move / And one more time with feeling. It evokes the way pain is necessarily shared to some extent by those in love: I’m sawn in half becomes we saw each other in half.

The plan was that Dominik would shoot the film but that Cave could veto anything. Dominik asked him to record his thoughts on relevant subjects to form a voice-over. As Cave watched the footage and recorded responses on his iPhone, he escaped the restriction of enforced or inspired public words on one side and silence on the other. Poetry and reflection opened the path to a more intuitive approach.  

In a review in the Guardian, Andrew Pulver, who admits to never having been a massive Cave fan, sees the film as a moving collage, but also as a ‘spectacle’. His description of some writing on Cave as ‘hagiographical’ sets the tone for the review. It seems, especially bizarrely under the circumstances, sniffy or sneering, though sniffing and sneering recur in critical work on Cave. But then, so does a hagiographical tone. The trouble is that neither the demonising mode nor the hagiographical captures the paradoxical transparency an artist can find when afforded privacy and spaciousness.

In Rolling Stone, Dominik expresses the fear he felt when, not long after Arthur’s death, Cave contacted him to say he wanted to talk: ‘I was terrified at the thought of receiving that phone call … I just didn’t know whether I would be equipped to deal with somebody who I knew was going to be in state that was unimaginable to me.’ How we might imagine or witness something we have not experienced is a central human question. The film bears witness to mourning. It studies both Susie Bick and Nick Cave, the former reserved and private, the latter used to working in public and with words.

Susie Bick, Nick and Earl Cave, Rick Woollard, and Andrew Dominik in One More Time with Feeling (photograph by Kerry Brown)

Cave’s meta-commentary contains tones familiar from his decades of songwriting. It is allusive, wry, self-deprecating, risky, intelligent, tender, and darkly comedic. New, though, is the ruminative lens through which he tries to convey some of grief’s impact. At one point, he has to overdub a vocal, something he describes as ‘some kind of torture’ because it’s disconnected from the music’s original energy and has to be grafted back on. His commentary does something similar, stitching itself back through the film. This mirrors trauma’s aftermath, when finding ways to reattach the self cut loose from life-as-we-know-it is part of a solitary labour. Cave explores ‘what happens when an event occurs that is so catastrophic … that you just change. You change from the known person to an unknown person. So that when you look at yourself in the mirror, you recognise the person that you were, but the person inside the skin is a different person.’

One More Time With Feeling is about the conjunction of mourning and creativity. In his study of elegy, Poetry of Mourning: The modern elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994), Jahan Ramazani discusses the sublimation of mourning and elegy’s increasing role as ‘refuge from the social denial of grief’. Elegiac, One More Time With Feeling openly places grief in the contexts of work and love. It documents collaboration and friendship, especially between Cave and Warren Ellis, part of The Bad Seeds since 1994 (a decade after its formation in 1983) and Cave’s collaborator on projects including the band Grinderman and numerous film scores. Ellis’s uneasy comment that he won’t discuss other people’s private lives prefaces the film. Extreme close-ups of Ellis watching Cave struggle with his singing or tacking a song to the music’s fabric are just as telling as this protective remark. ‘What would I do without Warren?’ reflects Cave. The sense of Ellis’s vigilance shapes Dominik’s work. It was Ellis who watched the film and assured Cave and Bick it worked.

One More Time With Feeling shows slivers and flashes of how ineptly many people relate to trauma (Cave’s word). Ramazani charts the rise of ‘an increasing neglect of the dead and mourning’ that comes to look ‘more and more like active denial’. He quotes social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer that ‘it would seem to be believed, quite sincerely, that sensible, rational men and women can keep their mourning under complete control by strength of will or character so that it need be given no public expression’. This suppression of mourning has endangered consolation. Sydney writer Mark Mordue describes how people faced with other people’s grief feel ‘shamed by inadequate condolences’. Shame and clumsy gestures on one hand – flowers, cards, casseroles – and shame and evasion on the other.

Early on, Cave gently corrects Dominik’s comment that lives have a similar arc. Of course, broadly, they do. But there are extreme experiences many people don’t have. Cave is quietly emphatic. Sure, our lives have a broad common outline, but ‘the arc can be very different’. Cave describes being in a bakery, and someone approaching ‘with his kind eyes’, saying: ‘We are all with you.’ Now, ‘all the bakery is looking at you with kind eyes’. This is both beautiful and repugnant: ‘When,’ Cave asks himself, ‘did you become an object of pity?’ Part of the artistic and personal triumph of Cave’s work on Skeleton Tree and beyond is about bracing for and embracing the stumbling kindness of other people’s consolation.

Cave has a way of turning the film’s vignettes into something larger. When he struggles vocally, he worries ‘I think I’m losing my voice’, a moment critics have noted for its metaphoric resonance. In the figurative, where Cave is very much at home, he stretches it into an improvised poem about losing things: ‘My voice. My iPhone. My judgement. My memory, maybe.’

This catalogue, with its twist from the arch into the dark, the self-admonishing shove at the end, recalls Elizabeth Bishop’s acute villanelle ‘One Art’, which begins ‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master’. It works through losses – tuning up from ‘lost door keys’, past ‘places and names’ and ‘my mother’s watch’ – until it reaches its final stanza:

– Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Cave doubtless knows Bishop’s famous poem, and his is ghosted by hers. He has articulated poetry’s place in his creative life in a series of online letters The Red Hand Files: ‘I try to read, at the very least, a half-hour of poetry a day, before I begin to do my own writing’, adding: ‘It jimmies open the imagination, making the mind more receptive to metaphor and abstraction and serves as a bridge from the reasoned mind to a stranger state of alertness, in case that precious idea decides to drop by.’

Cave has written about lost love many times. Now, though, when he evokes ‘the lost things that have so much mass and so much weight’, he’s well beyond the terrain that Bishop conjures. Yet a similar jagged barked command to the self – Write it! – runs through the documentary, and this phase of Cave’s career.

The film documents two people – Cave and his wife (Arthur’s twin, Earl, appears at several delicate moments, but is shielded by his parents, even as he shields them) – faced with suffering on a catastrophic scale.

It would be naïve to suggest that trauma’s gifts include creative renewal. Trauma is a stingy benefactor and if pain is the exchange for its benefits, anyone sane would go without. Cave is clear that trauma is ‘extremely damaging to the creative process’. In his interview with Mark Mordue, he speaks of how trauma ‘fills up all the space. It fills up your body. It’s like a physical thing. You can feel it pressing against the insides of your fingers. There’s just no room for the luxury of creation.’ In one of the letters, he describes ‘the uncontainable and merciless dimensions of grief’.

And yet, in a poem he recites in the film, Cave says: ‘There is more paradise in hell than we’ve been told.’ In spite of its ironic undertones, this highlights the possibility of renewal through a process of transmutation almost as unimaginable as other people’s trauma. Poetry might jimmy the imagination open. Trauma’s less delicate approach can achieve the same result. Sometimes, together, trauma and poetry can produce a radical openness.

Cave is now undertaking a series of ‘In Conversation’ events, opening up a fearless dialogue with his audiences. The Red Hand Files respond to fans’ questions: ‘You can ask me anything. There will be no moderator. This will be between you and me. Let’s see what happens.’ This is a version of the ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA) sessions hosted in various forums, made close and intimate by the epistolary form and the use of a website rather than social media. Cave writes about creativity, love songs (‘maybe songs are the parlance of love’, maybe they are ‘small unassuming love bombs’), and the letters themselves: ‘When I started the Files I had a small idea that people were in need of a more thoughtful discourse. I felt a similar need. I felt that social media was by its nature undermining both nuance and connectivity. I thought that, for my fans at least, The Red Hand Files could go some way to remedy that.’

The letters return to loss. In response to a question about sensing the presence of his son, he writes that whatever this presence is, its basis is ideas, which might be the bridge to new ways of being in the world: ‘It is their impossible and ghostly hands that draw us back to the world from which we were jettisoned; better now and unimaginably changed.’

The next letter can arrive at any time. When it does, it will have weight and light. This time, the echo comes back full. Skeleton Tree approaches a tentative conclusion – a very quiet one, its final song threaded with the refrain it’s alright now and the image of a candle in a window – maybe you can see? Cave is like Wallace Steven’s ‘scholar of one candle’, effulgence and fear his companions as he works.

Almost prophetically, The Bad Seeds’ previous album, Push the Sky Away, expresses the hope that Cave’s new work limns. The title song quietly urges us to keep on pushing the sky away, while the wild, wired surrealism of ‘Jubilee Street’ has Cave singing: I’m transforming. I’m vibrating. I’m glowing. I’m flying. Look at me now.

Cave’s talent is undimmed and this exhilarating staged ‘I’ is evident in Distant Skies. But in the dark, by the light of that single candle, he has found something else – something urgent, vulnerable, and profoundly kind. He uses the word ‘need’ several times in the letters, writing about audiences and artists’ need for connection, an uncertainty that ‘propels us forward’.

In January 2019, Cave replies to a father raising a small daughter after his wife’s death. A shared understanding of the house haunted by hyena hymns allows Cave to speak in this new way, consoling and empathetic. He has described actively living our lives ‘in the service of others’ and using ‘what power we have to reduce each other’s suffering’ as the ‘remedy to our own suffering’ and ‘the essential antidote for loneliness’. He depicts his wife: ‘defiant and scoured clean by grief; a woman with a mutinous and ferocious grace, now more open, daring and creative than ever; a woman who has simply defied the cosmic odds and bloomed’. Everywhere in these responses, and Cave’s new work, are the currents of his own mutinous and ferocious grace:

We are alone but we are also connected in a personhood of suffering. We have reached out to each other, with nothing to offer, but an acceptance of our mutual despair. We must understand that the depths of our anguish signal the heights we can, in time, attain. This is an extraordinary faith. It makes demands on the vast reserves of inner-strength that you may not even be aware of. But they are there.

I swim at night, carving through water full of chlorine and tasting of mould, turning lap after lap before the pool closes down, while cells inside me hurry into being like bubbles under a running tap. The lifeguard stalks along beside the pool watching me. I know he’s trying to get me out, but I can’t stop swimming. I have to reach sixty laps, because ending on a non-round number is too terrifying tonight, because everything is too terrifying, because I am pregnant. I tumble-turn at both walls. If I don’t surface, I reason, he can’t stop me. I can keep swimming forever, until my heart lies back down and everything goes back to normal, before today, before it all changed. It is a pool noodle that is finally my undoing. The lifeguard prods me with one like a boy testing roadkill for life, and I can’t pretend to ignore him anymore. I surface, blinking up at him, staring at the blue and white flags stretched across the pool and trying not to cry.

Two weeks in, says the internet, the sex of the baby has already been decided.

I wake up gasping, a low, sick moan floating into the morning. I shake the body beside me, frowning. He kisses me softly, says, ‘It’s only the chickens’, but to me it still sounds like screaming. In the bathroom mirror I watch how my aching right breast has already changed shape, kicking out, reaching for the mouth my body hasn’t yet grown.

It was a girl, I thought.

James Dunk is not the first Australian historian to notice that mental breakdown was surprisingly common during the first two European generations in New South Wales. Malcolm Ellis linked the ‘Botany Bay disease’ to rheumatic fever, rife on shipboard, which ‘ruined the lives or unbalanced the minds of … many pioneers’. Manning Clark spoke of sanity collapsing ‘under the weight of the vast indifference of nature, of loneliness and mockery’. More recently, Jonathan Lamb has suggested that it was all a result of endemic scurvy.

Bedlam at Botany Bay offers the most subtle and suggestive explanation so far by linking mental disability with a type of absolute power that, by his account, went from top to bottom of the settler community. We know, certainly, that unaccountable, unfeeling power can cause madness. It is easy to imagine that the most damaging thing about confinement on Manus Island and Nauru, and a likely cause of mental derangement, is the realisation that freedom – when and how – is entirely unpredictable. There must be something especially bitter in the knowledge that our long suffering is the work of other human beings, who could end it when they like.

In early New South Wales, power was usually less arbitrary than this. It was more obviously governed by law, but, as Dunk’s many stories show, it was typically personalised in some way and dramatically unequal. In telling those stories, he conjures up a hopeless pain, uncovering, as he says, a hitherto altogether too obscure dimension of the settlement project. Settlement could be deeply unsettling.

Uncertainty is the new norm. Nationalist rhetoric is rife. Donald Trump is running for the US presidency. It’s June 2016 and the Brexit referendum has dazed the international community, heralding the start of the United Kingdom’s glacial extraction from the European Union. Amid the turmoil, Scottish novelist Ali Smith releases Autumn, the first, she foreshadows, of a seasonal quartet intended to capture the unstable ‘state of the nation’. A playful yet disquieting story set against a backdrop of xenophobia and heightened security, it is promptly hailed as the ‘first great post-Brexit novel’. Smith begins writing voraciously, hurrying to keep step with reality, and releases Winter (2017) soon after. ‘God was dead’ begins the surreal, Dickens-inspired Christmas tale, one featuring a disembodied floating head and a piece of land suspended above the dining table.

And now we have Spring.

Richard Lease, an old television and film director based in Scotland, is abandoning his life. He has quit work on a spurious, sexed-up fictionalisation of the meeting of writers Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke, and is mourning the death of his closest friend, Patricia ‘Paddy’ Heal. First, though, we meet Paddy, a witty, charismatic, preternaturally intelligent woman. She is also a scriptwriter, a rarity who, in her films, could make ‘something real happen’. Following her death, Richard becomes disillusioned and takes a train as far is it will take him.

Next we meet Brittany Hall, a ‘DCO’ at an ‘IRC’ run by the ‘HO’ employed by ‘SA4A’ – or, translated from the Orwellian, a detainee officer at an immigration centre. (The security firm SA4A, i.e. SAFER, is the erector of the mysterious, barbed-wire enclosure in Autumn and the employer of Arthur in Winter.) At the IRC, Brittany monitors the asylum seekers, those interned for ‘years, years and years’ in a place ‘built for 72-hour detention at most’. She is aware that ‘something terrible was happening’, either to herself or to the world at large, but now, as if ‘beyond perspex’, it feels ‘quite far away’. One day a young girl in a school uniform walks into the centre, bypassing security like a ghost. When she leaves, the manager orders all the toilets to be cleaned. No one knows why. Brittany soon meets the girl, a discerning twelve-year-old named Florence Smith, and together they too climb aboard a train.

In Spring, Smith asks us to confront some uncomfortable realities. The novel has a greater political fervency and moral urgency than its predecessors. The writing, while retaining the light, spirited Smithian style, is polemic. The first words, ‘Now what we don’t want is Facts’, build into a deafening list of social media’s pervasive demands. ‘SHUT UP just shut the fUck Up can someone tape her mouth shut’ opens a later chapter, a screed of recognisable hate speech directed at women both online and off. Yet the defining focus of the narrative is the global treatment of refugees. Smith’s indignation at indefinite detention and the use of refugees as political fodder is palpable. ‘My face is all about you,’ one passage reads, ‘My face trodden in mud. My face bloated by sea. What my face means is not your face. By all means. You’re welcome.’ Smith, who has partaken in Refugee Tales, where volunteers befriend and support immigration detainees, has presumably seen and heard some unforgettable things. There is little ambiguity in what she is trying to say in Spring.

Occasionally, this feels didactic. ‘Being British’ is all about ‘keeping people out’. ‘Strangers are more dangerous than ever.’ ‘Young’ and ‘mixed race people’ are treated as invisible by ‘certain white people’. These jugular jabs won’t appeal to everyone, especially those looking for the subtler tones of Autumn and Winter. Yet, it is difficult to shake the feeling that this fourth-wall-breaking frankness is Smith’s intention. Fiction tends to satisfy once its message is absorbed, decoded, and understood. Florence writes stories in a notebook (which appear interspliced throughout Spring). In one of them, a woman is forced to dance to her death, sacrificially. Refusing, she upbraids them: ‘I’m not your symbol. Go and lose yourself or find yourself in some other story.’ Maybe Smith doesn’t want to hide a face bloated by sea in a metaphor.

Portrait of Ali Smith Basso (photograph via CANNARSAOpale Agence Opale, Alamy)

Smith is trying carve out a roadmap for us, a means by which to effect real change. As in much of her work – The Accidental (2005), Girl Meets Boy (2007), How To Be Both (2014) – such changes begin with characters gradually understanding their own capacity to reinvent themselves, to escape their situation. Smith’s radiant, near-angelic figures – her ‘disruptors’, according to Olivia Laing – help facilitate these revelations. In Autumn, the worldly, 101-year-old Daniel Gluck befriends the young and miserable Elisabeth Demand; in Winter, the radiant Lux helps thaw Sophia Cleves’s icy Christmas. In Spring, Paddy is that irreplaceable spirit for Richard, and Florence is a purifying light to Brittany – as well as to anyone else she happens to meet. Smith wants us to know that our identities are fluid, our self-perception malleable and unfixed. Brittany, who half-jokingly refers to herself as ‘the machine’, is told by Florence not to worry: ‘we’ll oil you and adapt you and upgrade you to a new way of working’.

The characters in Spring, as in its predecessors, happen upon different artists and their work. This in turn assists their reconstitution. Smith’s frequent ekphrastic renderings of art throughout the series exemplify her belief in its value amid a climate of uncertainty. Daniel Gluck collects the ‘arty art’ of British pop-art painter Pauline Boty; Sophia Cleves adores the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth. In a gallery, Richard happens upon the vast chalk works of Tacita Dean. He stands before The Montafon Letter, a depiction of an avalanche crashing down a mountain so immense ‘the wall became mountain and the mountain became a kind of wall’. Richard sums up its gravity, stammering ‘Fuck me’.

The Montafon Letter, Tacita Dean (photograph courtesy the artist, Frith Street Gallery, London and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York and Paris)

Spring is a luminous tale, one striving to be the axe with which to crack the frozen, post-Brexit, post-truth sea around us. It comes at a pivotal time, when nations, and their peoples, are folding in on themselves. We live in the world of Spring. This is no wild fiction for Australians, who are all too familiar with the internment of asylum seekers. The direction in which we are steering ourselves is the crux of this narrative: our choices determine whether we will bring ourselves together or further inure ourselves to division and indifference.

In one passage, Richard watches as a train’s wheels come into contact with mud. ‘Even the machine has to encounter nature, not even it can escape the earth,’ he reflects. ‘There’s something reassuring in that.’ Perhaps this is Smith’s lasting question: are we nature, or have we become the machine?

How do we get the measure of the phenomenon that is #MeToo? Both deeply personal and profoundly structural, #MeToo has been described as a movement, a moment, and a reckoning. Some critics have dismissed it as man-hating or anti-sex; sceptics as a misguided millennial distraction from more serious feminist concerns. Others distinguish between a ‘good’ #MeToo (focused on eradicating sexual harassment from the workplace) versus a more capacious #MeToo (aimed at destroying the patriarchy). That #MeToo originated from the activism of African-American civil rights campaigner Tarana Burke in 2006 has not negated representations of #MeToo as White Feminism, but nor have the privileged white women who have been its most high-profile faces been delivered justice either.

#MeToo is perhaps best described as a work in progress, as the new edited collection #MeToo: Stories from the Australian movement vividly illustrates. Consisting of thirty-four contributions, including from the editors – Natalie Kon-yu, Christie Nieman, Maggie Scott, and Miriam Sved – #MeToo productively resists an overarching thesis or message about the hashtag that inspired its title. In this sense, the subtitle that identifies ‘an Australian movement’ is somewhat misleading. There are no mission statements, manifestos, or self-proclaimed movement leaders within. Instead, readers are treated to a rich assortment of perspectives and genres, including personal essays, fiction, poetry, interviews, and an endearingly didactic graphic essay by comic artist Sarah Firth titled ‘Start Where You Are’.

I didn’t write this review. I stole it. Or so a review that echoes the framing conceit of Alex Landragin’s elegant and unusual début might begin. This richly allusive, speculative historical novel opens with a preface from the book’s self-described ‘adopted parent’, the fictionalised ‘Alex Landragin’. Following the sudden death of the ‘Baroness’, an ardent and obsessive bibliophile with a keen interest in Charles Baudelaire, this ‘second-generation Parisian bookbinder’ finds himself in possession of a mysterious loose-leaf manuscript. Despite the Baroness’s strict injunction not to read it, he finally succumbs to curiosity and devours it in ‘one fevered sitting, on a winter’s night so cold ice was forming on the Seine’.

He discovers three separate stories: ‘The Education of a Monster’, a short work that appears to be by Baudelaire; ‘City of Ghosts’, a noir romance/thriller set in Paris on the eve of the German occupation; and ‘Tales of the Albatross’, the ‘strangest of the three’, an ‘autobiography of a kind of deathless enchantress’. Despite its unlikely contents, the document purports to be the lost manuscript that Walter Benjamin had with him while trying to escape occupied France in 1940. The bookbinder advises that there are ‘at least seven’ ways to interpret the text. It is at this point that the reader must decide how she wishes to proceed: with the book as bound, or, by turning to page 150, for the start of the ‘Baroness sequence’, an alternate reading order that follows the ‘jumble of figures scrawled on the first page’ of the manuscript.

What distinguishes man from machines? What is artificial life, death, progress? These are just some of the questions Jeanette Winterson explores in her brilliant new novel, Frankissstein, a modern take on Mary Shelley’s masterpiece, Frankenstein. Two warnings: first, the structure is complex, as the narrative segues (at times, unclearly) between the early 1800s and the present; second, readers unfamiliar with Frankenstein will find parts of the novel difficult to follow, especially when Winterson quotes from Frankenstein without explaining that she is doing so. Those riders aside, Frankissstein is a rich, multilayered book that is at once a transgender ‘love story’ (the subtitle), a warning about the perils of unchecked scientific progress, and a frightening look at the potential of artificial intelligence.

First, a brief recap of Frankenstein and its context. In 1814 seventeen-year-old Mary Godwin scandalised English society by running away with the married poet Percy Shelley. In 1816 they spent a summer at Lake Geneva, with Lord Byron. There, Mary wrote Frankenstein, about Victor Frankenstein, a doctor who creates an animate creature, only to be filled with remorse when his creation turns into a murdering monster. When the monster argues that he was born good and only became evil after being abandoned by Victor and spurned by other humans, Victor is forced to acknowledge his responsibility as a creator. ‘Learn from me’, he warns, ‘how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge.’

‘I’m a rich man, and wanted to give something back. Not the money, but something.’

The Simpsons Movie (2007)

From McKinsey analyst to honoured author, New York Times correspondent, familiar face on MSNBC. Awarded a prestigious Henry Crown Fellowship at Aspen, invited onto private planes amid discussion of drinking-water projects in Kenya and improved farm supply chains in India. Not one but two TED talks. Yet all the time, a gnawing sense of something profoundly wrong.

Anand Giridharadas, in Winners Take All: The elite charade of changing the world, turns on those who fêted him. At Aspen, he was drawn into a place he calls ‘marketworld’, a distinctive domain of business, philanthropy, and consulting, with celebrity motivational speakers and promises to use market mechanisms for social change. It felt good at first but in time became a ‘giant, sweet-lipped lie’. In 2015 Giridharadas took to the stage at Aspen, not to say thanks but to go on the attack. Some cheered. A private equity guy swore at him. Winners Take All, an extended version of that speech, denounces a world Giridharadas briefly inhabited.

A spectre is haunting Australia, that of neo-liberalism. For the last thirty years, both major parties have subscribed to its tenets in order to propitiate big business. It is an ideology (and language) that dare not speak its name. Instead, from London, from Berlin, from Washington, DC, politicians beat the gongs of ‘efficiency’, ‘productivity’, ‘competitiveness’, and ‘incentive’. These are duly echoed in Canberra, causing banks to be deregulated and public assets to be privatised.

All this is contended in Richard Denniss’s Dead Right: How neoliberalism ate itself and what comes next, which is an updated and expanded version of his 2018 Quarterly Essay. Denniss, chief economist at the Australia Institute (a public policy institute in Canberra), makes a powerful argument for state intervention in the economy. Denniss is in favour of free markets but argues that even free markets need rules. In his view, the rich and powerful end up controlling markets, without regulation, denying equality and freedom of access for everyone else.

The economic pendulum has swung over the last four hundred or so years between state intervention and laissez-faire capitalism, but Denniss focuses on events in the twenty-first century, with occasional forays into the twentieth. He defines neo-liberalism as ‘the catch-all term for all things small government’ and describes it as the antithesis of democracy. However, its intellectual origins were more egalitarian. In the seventeenth century, European monarchs dominated economic policies; mercantilism was the norm. Classical liberalism emerged, alongside the Enlightenment, as a response when philosophers such as John Locke argued that certain individual rights could not be abrogated by anyone; furthermore, the state should serve the people and protect their rights. Economists such as Adam Smith advocated unfettered commercial transactions; supply and demand would control prices of goods and services. By the eighteenth century, classical liberal ideas led to democratic stirrings, culminating in the American and French Revolutions and the separation of church and state.

‘History repeats itself,’ Karl Marx wrote presciently in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. ‘The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ The central themes of Hal Brands and Charles Edel’s The Lessons of Tragedy are clear. In the developed world, we are complacent about world order, democracy, and civil society. But the ancient Greeks knew, from endless wars with Sparta to the Hellenic Republic’s annexation by Rome, that empires have feet of clay. It is telling, too, in a work about world order and engagement, that seminal figures such as Bismarck and Kissinger are quoted approvingly. Both men were Machiavellian in their use of power, but they were also sufficiently prudent to know its limits and to exercise restraint.

Appeals to classicism have both their vices and virtues. Machiavelli’s The Prince, the first modern work of political science, was influenced profoundly by Virgil, Plutarch, and Cicero. Enoch Powell’s inflammatory ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech in 1968 also drew inspiration from Virgil, as he excoriated Britain’s mass immigration policy.

It is no surprise that the first widely accepted international relations text, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, tells a tale of tragedy. The Athenians defeated the Melians, slaughtered the men and sold the women and children into slavery. From the Battle of Vienna (1683), to the establishment of the Concert of Europe following Napoleon’s defeat, to the darkness of Auschwitz, the response to tragedy has been the same: nations coalescing to defeat the oppressor and cooperating to reduce the persistence of conflict and to regulate the conduct of warfare. By the mid-nineteenth century, the grim battlefields of the Austro-Sardinian War led to the formation of the Red Cross.

Australia’s energy transition has been hotly debated for a decade, and it doesn’t look set to cool anytime soon. Blackout: How is energy-rich Australia running out of electricity? offers readers the chance to be an informed participant in the debate. For more than a century, decisions about our electricity system have been left to the experts – the electrical engineers and policy wonks who knew the grid best. Today the electricity system is a matter of public debate. If decisions about the grid are going to be made by a popularity contest, then energy experts need to engage with the public and help inform the debate. Matthew Warren steps up to this challenge with Blackout.

Warren explains why electricity prices have been rising, why heatwaves increase the risk of blackouts, how places like King Island are leading the way in renewables integration, and why rooftop solar requires a rethink of the grid. Part history, part science, and part economics, Blackout explores the early experiments that enabled electricity to be harnessed and the events that shaped the development of Australia’s electricity ‘archipelago’.

‘The real coming of age for Australian electricity was in 1879, when half-a-dozen arc lamps were used to light the Melbourne Cricket Ground for two night games of Australian Rules football,’ Warren writes. Australians immediately saw the potential, and Melbourne, flush with cash from the gold rush, became one of the first cities in the world to build an electricity grid.

Stories are at the heart of Peg Fraser’s compassionate and thoughtful book about Strathewen and the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires. The initial impression gained by the subtitle, Not the end of the story, could be one of defiance, a familiar narrative of a community stoically recovering and rebuilding. Yet this book is anything but hackneyed, and the title proves provocative. How could the story of Black Saturday ever end? Is there just one Black Saturday story? Who is making this story, and why? The great American fire historian Stephen J. Pyne has observed that there are three paradigms of academic research on fire – physical, biological, cultural – and that it is the cultural paradigm that is the most neglected. Black Saturday is a ‘story about stories’ and thus represents an important step in the understanding of how Australians live with fire. Fraser challenges the clichés that influence so much public discussion about bushfire tragedies.

The legacy of Judge Leonard Stretton’s Royal Commission Report into the 1939 Black Friday bushfires looms over any bushfire writing in Australia, but Fraser respectfully moves away from Stretton’s shadow. Despite his sympathetic tone, Judge Stretton did not place witness testimony at the heart of his Commission. Fraser chooses to begin Black Saturday with a loose narrative of selected quotes from her oral interviews with survivors of Black Saturday. Analysis and insights are left for later chapters as readers are encouraged to ‘feel, in some very small degree, what the narrators felt’. This merging of individual stories into a single loose overall narrative is powerful without feeling drawn out.

Tom Doig’s Hazelwood begins with Scott Morrison proclaiming to Parliament, ‘This is coal. Don’t be afraid … It won’t hurt you’, and concludes, 284 riveting pages later, that ‘the Australian coal industry doesn’t just cause disasters – it is a disaster’.

In February 2014, during ‘the worst drought and heatwave south-eastern Australia had experienced in over a century’, embers from two bushfires ignited the worked-out northern coalface of the Hazelwood mine. Seven kilometres long, four kilometres wide and forty storeys deep, the steep ‘northern batters’ of the mine were seamed with clay and coal and tangled with unruly undergrowth. There was nothing to stop the fire spreading deep into the coal seams. The fire was out of control for forty-five days, and was not finally extinguished for another seventy-two, on June 6.

A few weeks into the fire, David Briggs was employed by a contractor to drive an earth-working bulldozer and help extinguish the fire. He took a compulsory health examination and his lung function was rated at 144 per cent of normal function; his lung capacity was ‘not far off that of a professional cyclist’. He worked long night shifts (they could only see the deep seams of fire at night), with no special protective clothing or gas mask. The money was good but the work was hard, filthy, and terrifying, with his machine often bogged at the perilous edge of a burning, molten drop. ‘The deeper David dug into a burning coal fault with his 35-tonne excavator, the hotter and smokier it got. He sometimes had to dig the equivalent of six storeys deep, scooping out mounds of pulsing red-orange coal from the darkness.’ When his wife, Penny, said he should complain about the conditions, David responded ‘If I say something, I won’t be working next week.’

If you’ve somehow avoided listening to podcasts, you will have missed out on the recent explosion of long-form audio storytelling – and I mean it, you’ve really missed out. The show which pioneered the form, This American Life (TAL), pulls a cool four to five million listeners each week, and you don’t get those numbers for nothing. TAL takes ordinary people, tells their stories, and then – this is their secret sauce – makes a whimsical pivot to the larger idea the story gives us about the world. It’s a simple formula that’s had a subtle but widespread ripple effect on journalism. Narrative is being used to explain, to explore, to interrogate – as an invitation to thought.

I’ll return to the notion of storytelling as an invitation to thought. Before that, there’s a more specific reason why I mention TAL here. If you were around Kings Cross in late 2016, you would have seen Eleanor Gordon-Smith, microphone in hand, walking along Darlinghurst Road and recording for the program. The idea for her piece was: woman on street, woman gets catcalled, woman confronts catcallers, convinces them to stop. It’s a great pitch, made more compelling by the fact that Gordon-Smith was (and I assume still is) a weapons-grade arguer – she was a philosophy tutor at the University of Sydney at the time and had previously been a world-class debater. Convincing the men would be easy, no?

In a hallway with the door open, a Honeywell T87 will attempt to
equalise the temperature of the continuous (available) world. It sits
between the mirror-dresser and the coat-hook which resembles two
of four talons of a lived-in bird, like a Fiji or an Imitator goshawk.
The Honeywell has the brain of a bird but no mouth or Nest.
In this arrangement and when you’re cold you might catch sight
of the consternation of yourself in the mirror-dresser when you
run around the corner of the living room to adjust the temperature.
At least. Or the top of your head or your apparently open mouth.
What you can’t see is the outcasting belly of the change in the air
as it flushes through a white flyscreen: the plastic or enamel white
an extruded quatrefoil egg which flauntingly comes off in drying
and which the Honeywell is doomed to face. If you could see
the change in the air, it’d spill like the extra-amniotic puff of
the wind in 1362. The thermostat is a lens perplexing the evidence
of environmental warmth upside-down and inside-out and dreaming
and as percussive as the feet of the continuous (available) world.

Rowan McNaught

Who doesn’t love the portmanteau
for tangerine and pomelo, or more like angel,
tango, words for wilderness,

how I like planting you (reader)
in the thick of it. Also known
as honeybell, the peel lifting off

like a capelet, the poem a long path
for getting at the flesh: its obdurate slickness.
A tangelo’s not a metaphor

for anything, which is why I love
its simple divisions. The pith a lacework
or dragnet. Where I’m from, a photo

of a bleeding vice president –
Guillermo Ford in his guayabera,
bludgeoned by gangs of the opposition –

went viral months before the invasion
of Panama. In 1989, savagery seeps
through what we know.

The tangelo’s no ritual, but it’s as good
as anything when it comes to hooking the past
through the eye of the present. I can let lightning

stitch my lip or forget a country with dead dictators.
It’s not the shape of a world that counts.             
It’s the weight in my closed palm.

Karen Rigby

Where are you happiest?

Probably swimming in an ocean pool on the New South Wales coast. I love doing a few laps in these amazing spots. For me it’s almost the ultimate pleasure.

What is your favourite film?

Two-Lane Blacktop.

Click here to enter the ABR FAN poll

In 2009, ABR invited readers to nominate their Favourite Australian Novel (FAN) of any era (view the 2009 poll here). We received thousands of votes for nearly 300 novels. Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet was the overwhelming favourite – by a margin of three to one to its nearest rival, Henry Handel Richardson’s The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, which was closely followed by Patrick White’s Voss and Winton’s novel Breath.

Now we’re keen to find out your Favourite Australian Novel of the twenty-first century (published since 2000). There’s been some outstanding fiction published over those two decades – novels by writers such as Alexis Wright, Michelle de Kretser, Shirley Hazzard, Peter Carey, J.M. Coetzee, Tim Winton himself – and on the list goes.

Vote now to be in the running for one of three terrific prizes:

1. A Readings gift voucher ($500)

2. The complete recordings of Herbert von Karajan on Deutsche Grammophon and Decca ($1,281), courtesy of our friends at Classics Direct. 

3. A five-year digital subscription to ABR

In the May 2019 issue of Quadrant, its literary editor, Barry Spurr, inveighed against the ‘inane expansion of creative writing courses’. Professor Spurr’s scholarly accomplishments in the study of poetry and Australian fiction do not include creative writing. (His resignation from the University of Sydney was accepted in December 2014.) While many Australian authors have spectacularly succeeded without degrees in creative writing, such courses have certainly helped others – including Nam Le, Ceridwen Dovey, and Matthew Hooton – to write prize-winning fiction. Before studying creative writing in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia, where he now teaches in the course at Adelaide University, Hooton worked for four years as an editor and teacher in South Korea. Typhoon Kingdom is his second novel about Korea, following Deloume Road, which won the Guardian’s ‘Not the Booker Prize’ in 2010.

The US forces who arrived in Korea in 1945 and fought there in 1951–53 called it ‘the hermit kingdom’, and the label stuck. God created war, Mark Twain proposed, so that Americans would learn geography. History too, perhaps. But Korea was never hermetically sealed. Centuries earlier, Koreans returned from China with foreign knowledge; the Manchu brought more outside influences; Scots, Australians, and Americans were there from the late nineteenth century as missionaries; and Japanese invaded and colonised the peninsula.

Mainstream science fiction is a genre that thrives on quantity as much as quality. Such narratives pose the deepest questions; as Douglas Adams once famously put it, these are stories about Life, the Universe, and Everything. Why publish stand-alone space operas when storylines, character arcs, worlds, and revenues can be elaborated across trilogies? Why stop at one time-travel trilogy when fans are willing to buy prequels and sequels and sanctioned spin-offs? Why limit yourself to one mind-bending book every few years when annual titles will boost author profiles and sales? The motto upheld by much of the publishing industry nowadays seems to be more is more.

Except when it comes to Ted Chiang. Since 1990, Chiang’s entire body of work has consisted of seventeen stories. ‘Tower of Babylon’, his first published novelette, won the Nebula Award and was nominated for a Hugo Award in 1991 – two of the most prestigious prizes in the field – and set an extraordinary trend for his fiction that continues unabated. Over the past twenty-nine years, Chiang’s writing has won four Hugos, four Nebulas, four Locus Awards, and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Eight of these pieces were reprinted in his début collection, Stories of Your Life and Others (2002), which was translated into twenty-one languages, an astounding achievement for a small book released into a market that is generally allergic to sole-author short story collections. Fourteen years later, its titular novella was adapted into the Academy Award-nominated film Arrival . The advanced reading copy of his long-awaited second book, Exhalation, proclaims: ‘No living writer is quite like Ted Chiang.’ This smacks of marketing hyperbole, but can also be read as plain truth. Chiang is remarkable not just for the many accolades mentioned above but because in an age of social media and self-promotion, his work speaks for itself. There is no Ted Chiang author site; no Facebook or Twitter or Instagram accounts. He earns a living as a technical writer in the software industry, which allows him the freedom to be, in his own words, ‘an occasional writer’ of fiction. Unlike those whose livelihoods, identities, reputations, and longevity in the business rely on mass production, Chiang clearly isn’t motivated by excess.

Eight Lives is a meticulously crafted first novel by Susan Hurley, a 2017 Peter Carey Short Story Award nominee and a medical researcher with more than thirty years’ experience in the pharmaceutical industry. It’s an intricate thriller told in a multiple first-person style by friends, family, and associates of the late Dr David Tran, all of whom feel some responsibility for his horrific death.

Tran was the ‘golden boy’: tall, handsome, hailed as a boat person who made good by becoming a brilliant surgeon, then a brilliant immunologist. Having created ‘SuperMab’, a monoclonal antibody wonder-drug he prefers to modestly call ‘Eight’, Tran teams up with wannabe venture capitalist Charlie Cunningham, heir to a business empire, who is trying to redeem himself in the eyes of his family after being conned out of millions by a dodgy software engineer. Seven months after Charlie overhypes SuperMab in a video media release, Tran is dead.

Though inspired by a disastrous medical trial in the United Kingdom in 2006, this is an original character-driven thriller. Hurley’s narrators don’t just tell their own stories and Tran’s, they describe the arcane worlds of Melbourne’s social hierarchies from very different perspectives. Tran’s sister, Natalie, his research assistant Rosa, and his vegan activist girlfriend, Abigail, come from working-class suburbs, while ‘Foxy’ Renard is a publicist for the uber-rich Cunninghams and Tran’s sponsors, the Southcotts. The narrators’ varied educational backgrounds (Miles Southcott is an MD, Rosa a PhD candidate) also allow Hurley to convey the science necessary to the plot with a minimum of jargon, and there are no lectures slowing down the pace – which really takes off about halfway through the novel, as the increasingly suspicious circumstances of Eight’s trial and Tran’s death are revealed.

In 1961 the great Australian poet Judith Wright published an influential essay called ‘The Upside-down Hut’ that would puzzle contemporary readers. The basis of its argument was that Australia felt shame about its convict origins, and that we needed to move on. And we have: since 1961 the representation of the convict era in fiction and on screen has undergone a shift. Having convict ancestry used to be regarded as a cause for shame; now amateur genealogists hunt down convicts among their ancestors and celebrate when they find them.

Two 1960s novels in particular, Hal Porter’s The Tilted Cross (1961) and Thomas Keneally’s Bring Larks and Heroes (1967), winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award, showed the convicts of the earliest Australian colonies in a newly sympathetic light, and were followed in the 1970s by such onscreen treatments as the television series Against the Wind (1978), and in the 1980s by Robert Hughes’s unexpectedly best-selling and highly coloured history The Fatal Shore (1986).

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.

Nil by half

Dear Editor,

In your review of Nam Le’s recent publication on David Malouf, you rightly point out that Nam Le writes mainly about himself rather than David Malouf (ABR, May 2019). But has he really understood Malouf’s background? The description that Malouf is ‘half-Lebanese’ (although he might equally be described as ‘half’ English, Jewish or Catholic) and the suggestion that he might be suppressing ‘half his identity’ seems to offer a skewed angle on his upbringing. Unlike Nam Le, Malouf never heard his parents speak a language other than English; he heard no ‘old country’ stories from his father who grew up in Brisbane and was determined to identify as Australian. Malouf’s grandfather never learned English, although Malouf’s poem ‘Early Discoveries’ has him guessing about his grandfather’s view of the world and the older man’s sense of dislocation in coming to Australia. 

Malouf’s father was born and grew up in Australia, no doubt experiencing the kind of cultural tensions of a first generation migrant child. But by the time of David Malouf’s birth in 1934, his father was a successful businessman in his late thirties. Apart from his Lebanese surname, the young Malouf had good reason to avoid categories of identity based on race and religion: they had caused conflict for his parents, preventing their marriage for fourteen years.  His father was Melkite Catholic and his mother was Jewish, born in England and coming to Australia as a girl aged thirteen. Her father forbade members of the family from attending the wedding. 

The cultural stories that most moved the young Malouf were told to him by his mother. He heard all about her family’s former life in England, making it sound exotic in a way his Lebanese grandparents never seemed to him. She read English fiction constantly and shared her love of reading with the young Malouf, naming him after David Copperfield when his baptised first names ‘George Joseph’ and the nickname ‘Junior’ no longer suited when he went to a local public school for the first time. His father, despite his own limited education and having to leave school young to join the family business, recognised his son’s love of reading and purchased fine second-hand editions of writers like Charles Dickens, Walter Scott, and Alexander Dumas for him to start his own library, a collection that Malouf has treasured. 

Given his parents’ example and the experience of a wartime childhood, it is not surprising that Malouf came to have a deep sense of the dangers of perceived differences, as he portrays in the story ‘The Kyogle Line’, which may be read as a young person’s first realisation of problems caused by labelling people as different to yourself. If Nam Le aspires to have in the future a body of work of the quality of David Malouf’s, he should follow what he recognises in Malouf: that a great writer must be fully and frankly himself and not worry about being ‘half’ anything.

Yvonne Smith

J.M Coetzee

Dear Editor,

I was very surprised by the statement here that J.M. Coetzee would never be described as ‘South African-Australian’. Like most readers, I am guessing, I associate him primarily with South Africa, where most of his finest work is set. Also, given that he only moved to Australia in his early 60s, I would have thought that describing him in that way would simply be an act of courtesy. A quick look on google also brought up – in a short space of time – 'Irish-Australian crime author', 'Irish-Australian cellist', 'a German-Australian author', etc. etc.

Andrew Sheilds (comment)

Curate's egg

Dear Editor,

The reviewer [Peter Tregear in his review of West Side Story] has adopted the common misuse of the curate’s egg cliche. Presumably he intended to convey that only some parts of the show were not good. However, the origin of the term is a nineteenth-century Punch cartoon. A nervous young curate is having tea with a bishop. The curate is obviously finding something distasteful with his boiled egg. The bishop enquires whether there is anything wrong with the egg. 'Oh no, my Lord,' says the curate obsequiously, 'I assure you it is good in parts.' The point being that an egg can only be wholly good or wholly bad.

Peter Heerey (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.

Winner of the Calibre Essay Prize!

Grace Karskens (photograph by Joy Lai)The Calibre Essay Prize, now in its thirteenth year, has played a major role in the revitalisation and appreciation of the essay form. This year we received a record number of entries – 450 new essays from twenty-two countries. ABR Editor Peter Rose judged the Prize with J.M. Coetzee, author of several volumes of critical essays as well as the novels that won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2003, and Anna Funder, author of the international bestseller Stasiland and the Miles Franklin Award-winning novel All That I Am.

This year, our two winning essays could hardly be more different: a remarkable contribution to Aboriginal and colonial history from one of our finest historians; and a highly personal account of an abortion – the body out of control and at sea.

Grace Karskens – Professor of History at the University of New South Wales and author of the award-winning The Colony: A history of early Sydney – is the overall winner of the Calibre Prize; she receives $5,000. Her essay, titled ‘Nah Doongh’s Song’, examines the unusually long life of one of the first Aboriginal children who grew up in conquered land. Born around 1800, Nah Doongh lived until 1898. Her losses, her peregrinations, her strong, dignified character are the subjects of this questing essay, in which the author states: ‘Biography is not a finite business; it’s a process, a journey. I have been researching, writing, and thinking about Nah Doongh … for over a decade now.’ The discoveries she makes along the way – the portrait she finally tracks down – are very stirring.

‘Nah Doongh’s Song’ will appear in our Indigenous issue, to be published in August.

Placed second in the Calibre Prize is ‘Floundering’ by Melbourne-based artist, photographer, and fine artist Sarah Walker. Sarah Walker told ABR: ‘The Calibre Essay Prize is an essential avenue for new writing to be published with profound care and respect. I am proud to be joining a lineage of extraordinary writing.’

In addition, the judges commended five essays, which will appear online in coming months. They are John Bigelow’s ‘The Song of the Grasshopper’, Andrew Broertjes’s ‘Death and Sandwiches’, Martin Edmond’s ‘The Land of Three Rivers’, Michael McGirr’s ‘Thicker Than Water’, and Melanie Saward’s ‘From Your Own Culture’.

ABR gratefully acknowledges generous support from Mr Colin Golvan AM QC and the ABR Patrons. 

Tell us your Favourite Australian Novel and win!

Ten years ago, we invited readers to nominate their Favourite Australian Novel of all time, and what an informative list it was. Placed first, to no one’s surprise, was Cloudstreet by Tim Winton, followed by The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson and Voss by Patrick White.

Now we’re keen to find out your Favourite Australian Novel published since 2000. Is it True History of the Kelly Gang by Peter Carey, Breath by Tim Winton (placed fourth in the 2009 FAN poll), Questions of Travel by Michelle de Krester, Carpentaria by Alexis Wright, Truth by Peter Temple, Benang by Kim Scott, The True Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan, The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard, The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas – or one of the myriad novels published here in the past two decades?

To vote, all you have to do is complete the FAN poll survey. You’ll then be in the running to win one of three great prizes:

• A $500 voucher from Readings
• Herbert von Karajan’s Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon and Decca (valued at $1,281)
• A five-year digital subscription to ABR.

Good luck!

Introducing ABR's new column: Ephiphany

While on the subject of seminal works, we’re also curious to learn what some of the country’s finest writers and arts professionals consider the pivotal cultural encounters in their own artistic formation. Was it a poem, an oil, a pas de deux, a film, a novel, a temple, an aria or riff?

We invited ABR Laureate Robyn Archer – one of Australia’s most culturally sophisticated and distinguished artists – to inaugurate our new column, Epiphany. Robyn recalls a day in 1996 when she ventured to Glyndebourne, which she had previously resisted, only to be entranced by Peter Sellars’s production of Handel’s Theodora – ‘some kind of aural miracle’.

Monash sells film rights to Half the Perfect World

The story of Australian writers George Johnston and Charmian Clift life on the Greek isle of Hydra is unfailingly captivating. The most recent book on the subject was Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s Half the Perfect World: Writers, Dreamers and Drifters, 1955–1964 (Monash University Publishing, 2018). Reviewing it in the November 2018 issue of ABR, Brian Matthews recalled writing to Clift when he himself was contemplating becoming a schoolteacher on another Greek island in the mid-1960s. Our reviewer described Half the Perfect World as ‘a fascinating, impressively researched, well-told story about a place and its moment that time and tourism have since overrun’.

Now Cascade Films has purchased the film rights for Half the Perfect World, to be directed by Nadia Tass with a screenplay by Andrew Knight. Commenting on the sale, Nathan Hollier, Director of Monash University Publishing, said” ‘We are thrilled to have now partnered with such a well-credentialled and talented group of filmmakers.’

Hilary Mantel's new novel

Hilary Mantel (photograph supplied)

Devotees of Hilary Mantel’s novels about Thomas Cromwell don’t have much longer to wait for the publication of the third and last volume in the trilogy. HarperCollins has announced that The Mirror and the Light (which will escort Cromwell to the block just as he manoeuvred his arch-enemy Anne Boleyn there at the end of Bring Up the Bodies [2012]) will be published, after many delays, in March 2020 – surely the publishing event of the year.

Both of the first two novels in the series – Wolf Hall (2009) and Bring Up the Bodies – won the Booker Prize. Will the finale earn Mantel another Booker, making her the first person to win three Booker Prizes?

Peter Rose, reviewing Bring Up the Bodies for ABR in June 2012, wrote:

Mantel humanises tyrants and psychopaths. Unlike most writers, who have so little experience of it, she understand power … The language throughout is fluent and zesty. Adverbs are at a premium, and most of the sentences are brief. This tautness, the seeming simplicity of the prose, generate real drama and spring … Hilary Mantel’s second novel about this doomed statesman and most improbable of heroes proves even more relishable than the first.

Out of paradise

Mary-Kay Wilmers (photograph a screengrab from London Review Bookshop interview)

Few people escape from publishing. Most people, once they get a foot in the door, stay put. Mary-Kay Wilmers has been working in the industry for more than fifty years. She began at Faber & Faber when the company was still dominated by ‘GLP’ (the ‘Greatest Living Poet’ himself, T.S. Eliot, much mentioned in Toby Faber’s epistolary history of Faber). Wilmers, co-founder of the London Review of Books in 1979 and sole editor since 1992, occasionally writes ‘pieces’ for ‘the paper’ (LRB-speak). Now, two admiring colleagues of hers, John Lanchester and Andrew O’Hagan, have collected some of her occasional writings in a volume called Human Relations and Other Difficulties (Profile Books, $27.99 pb).

We meet the warring Connollys: literary critic Cyril Connolly, who ‘famously marked his place in a book he had borrowed with a rasher of bacon’, and his second wife, Barbara Skelton, who bedded many but doesn’t seem to have liked anyone (‘What a terrible waste of time people are,’ she wrote in her diary). Coolly, Wilmers is often deadly: in her essay on Patty Hearst she mentions a pre-kidnap beau called Steven Weed – ‘not a name that would necessarily wish fame upon itself’.

Wilmers is generally suspicious of aphorisms, but ABR liked this one in her article on seduction: ‘One way or another, a plot had to be devised to get Adam and Eve out of paradise.’ This piece, in true LRB fashion, occasioned a lethal exchange of letters. Christopher Ricks, in acidulous form, rebuked Wilmers for misremembering one of his pronouncements: ‘I hope that Ms Wilmers the editor of the LRB is more scrupulous than Ms Wilmers the insufficiently edited contributor to her pages.’ (Wilmers, adverbially deft, was sorry that Ricks had ‘taken the lapse so darkly to heart’.)

Hacks shouldn’t miss Wilmers’s article ‘The Language of Novel Reviewing’ – that toughest of assignments. Wilmers notes some of the pitfalls, the minor misprisions. Here, on her own turf, she is decidedly epigrammatic: ‘Every liberal and illiberal orthodoxy has its champions’; ‘Sometimes it seems as if novel reviewing were a branch of the welfare state’; and ‘Just as some novels supply their own reviews, so many reviews supply their own novels.’

Wilmers is funny about the triads of adjectives flung at novels: ‘exact, piquant and comical’, ‘rich, mysterious and energetic’, etc. etc.. She might have been thinking of those triadic puffs beloved of trade publishers – usually written, at any one time, by a cohort of six reliable encomiasts.

Monash University launches the Ian Potter Centre for Performing Arts

The Ian Potter Centre for Performing Arts (photograph supplied by Monash University)

On May 13, Monash University formally opened Melbourne’s newest cultural hub, the Ian Potter Centre for Performing Arts. The $54.3 million venue includes the refurbished 586-seat Alexander Theatre, the 130-seat Sound Gallery for acoustically optimal music performances, and the 200-seat Jazz Club, which operates as a café by day and restaurant and bar by night. Professor Paul Grabowsky, Executive Director of the Monash Academy of Performing Arts, hosted the launch. The night featured a performance by Australian soprano Emma Matthews with the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra, Uncle Jack Charles reciting a poem from the late Les Murray, a circus display by the group One Fell Swoop, Auro Go on the piano, and a performance by Grabowsky with Vince Jones and band

There’s a very active program, and arts lovers are encouraged to sign up to receive regular updates from the Centre.

For more information about the Ian Potter Centre, visit the Monash website.

The Wheeler Centre's $150,000 Next Chapter project 

Applications are now open for The Next Chapter, a $150,000 development project for writers run by The Wheeler Centre. Ten writers are chosen as part of the annual program to develop their work. As well as receiving $15,000, each recipient will be assigned a personal mentor. Selected recipients will be expected to complete a manuscript within the twelve months of the program, as well as actively participate in the mentoring relationship. This year, the judges are authors Benjamin Law, Christos Tsiolkas, Sophie Cunningham, and Ameblin Kwaymullina. 

Application are open until July 12. For more information, visit The Next Chapter website.

The year of Anchuli Felicia King

Playwright Anchuli Felicia King (photograph via Melbourne Theatre Company)

What a year Anchuli Felicia King is having. The twenty-five-year-old, New York-based Australian playwright has new productions of her work at the Royal Court, London, the Melbourne Theatre Company, and the Sydney Theatre Company.

First up is White Pearl, at the famed Royal Court. Running until June 15 and directed by Nana Dakin, it opened last week to much acclaim from new ABR arts reviewer Alexander Douglas Thom, who described it as a ‘meticulously constructed black comedy’ and ‘unabashedly political theatre, an accounting of some of the sunk costs of modern society’.

Sydney audiences will have a chance to see White Pearl in October 2019, when the STC mounts a new production directed by Priscilla Jackman. Meanwhile, in August, MTC will present the world première of Golden Shield, directed by Sarah Goodes, described as ‘an urgent legal drama that explores the personal and political ramifications of corporate greed in the political economy’.

ETA, a terrorist group formed in the late 1950s, was predominantly active in the Basque Country. Its name is an acronym in Basque for ‘Euskadi Ta Askatasuna’, which means ‘Basque Country and Freedom’. Fernando Aramburu’s Homeland is not the first novel to deal with the decades of ETA’s terror. Other works, like Martutene (2012) by Ramón Saizarbitoria, also delved into the car bombs and sporadic gunfire on sunny afternoons, ETA’s separatist aim to create a socialist state independent from Spain, and the psychological carnage that was left behind. Previous novels by Aramburu himself have touched on the subject: Fires with Lemon (1996) and Slow Years (2012). But Homeland is the first Basque novel to garner international attention and to sell hundreds of thousands of copies.

Part of this has to do with timing. ETA came to a ceasefire in 2011, and the group was finally disbanded in 2018. Aramburu’s novel was published in Spanish in 2016, striking a topical chord in its readers. Homeland unfolds close to San Sebastián, in an unnamed small town that represents everyday life in the Basque Country. Txato, a successful businessman, receives letters from ETA demanding money. At first Txato complies, but when he is no longer able to pay, the demands are followed by threats. Graffiti appears, denouncing Txato as a traitor. Everyone loves Txato, but everyone is petrified to say so publicly for fear of what ETA might do. His closest friend, Joxian, stops talking to him because Joxian’s son, Joxe Mari, has joined ETA. The novel begins with Txato’s assassination, and much of its plot hinges on whether it was Joxe Mari who killed him.

On 20 August 2018 the ABC aired a ‘special literary edition’ of Q&A during the Melbourne Writers Festival. It had a stellar line-up: John Marsden, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Sofie Laguna, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and Trent Dalton. Viewers must have been optimistic. Were Q&A’s producers indulging in a long hour of lively literary debate? Unfortunately, they were not. But even though politics overshadowed much of the discussion that evening, the panellists made a considerable effort to draw on their expertise as writers rather than as political commentators when answering questions from the audience.

One of the most thought-provoking questions of the night came from Laguna, who wondered about the role of fiction given the issues we are facing as a society. Can fiction help us ‘inch a little closer to the truth’, as Marsden suggested? Can it help us interrogate the politics of fear and racism, or even inject new idealism into politics? Later in the episode, Tony Jones followed up with a question of his own, asking Laguna if it is the role of the writer to be a ‘provocateur’. Nodding thoughtfully, Laguna agreed that it was.

While not all novelists have readily embraced the role of provocateur, many have been drawn to the novel’s power to provoke. Four new-release Young Adult novels – Alison Evans’s Highway Bodies, Astrid Scholte’s Four Dead Queens, Neil Grant’s The Honeyman and the Hunter, and Helena Fox’s How It Feels to Float – showcase the continued ingenuity of Australian fiction writers in confronting the social and political issues facing today’s youth. Together these novels dismantle caricatures of queerness, mental illness, and racism, and explore questions of belonging, power, grief, family, and love.

Of the four, Highway Bodies (Echo Publishing, $22.99 pb, 376 pp, 9781760685027) is most likely to surprise. This is the fourth book from Alison Evans, an emerging non-binary author. Set in contemporary Melbourne, it features several queer and gender-non-conforming teenagers in the midst of a zombie apocalypse. In a post-The Walking Dead era, zombies will give some readers cold feet, but these mindless flesh-eating creatures have long held immense symbolic power in popular culture. They have represented all kinds of social anxieties, from fears of voodooism, communism, and nuclear war to the all-consuming force of capitalism. In Highway Bodies, Evans reveals the enduring elasticity of the genre by using it to isolate and represent the queer community. Not just another post-apocalyptic thriller, Highway Bodies reads like an allegory of growing up queer in an often hostile world. Even as zombies ravage Melbourne, darker, more dangerous enemies lurk among the survivors: cars ‘full of white [bogans]’ that will ‘fuckin kill ya jus for lookin at em wrong’ and a hyper-masculine, queerphobic cult working to establish a ‘civilised’ safe haven.

A well-written novel, Highway Bodies eloquently balances absurdity, obscenity, violence, humour, and emotion. While the plot is sometimes underdeveloped – characters wandering aimlessly in the bush or suburban Melbourne – the three teen narrators are compelling. They have had the internet to figure out who they are; unlike many teen coming-of-age novels, they are not on a journey of self-discovery, but of survival.

Far from the post-apocalyptic nightmare of Evans’s novel, Neil Grant’s The Honeyman and the Hunter (Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 288 pp, 9781760631871) tells the story of sixteen-year-old Rudra Solace as he struggles to negotiate his Indian and Australian heritage. Born in the small beach town of Patonga on the central coast of New South Wales, Rudra is shaken out of the rhythm of everyday life by the unexpected arrival of his Indian grandmother, Didima. Filling her grandson’s head with Sundarbans folklore about the Dokkhin Rai and the mawalis (honeymen), Didima eventually persuades Rudra to flee from his home in Patonga to India on a quest of self-discovery.

The Honeyman and the Hunter is Grant’s fourth Young Adult novel with Allen & Unwin. Chiefly a coming-of-age story, it also explores questions of belonging, dispossession, climate change, domestic violence, and racism. Many Australian readers, especially those who grew up on the New South Wales coast, will be familiar with stock characters like surfer boy Maggs and his rival bully Judge Dredd. With dreadlocks and the Southern Cross tattooed on his shoulder in memory of the 2005 Cronulla riots, Judge eggs Maggs and Rudra on with racist insults.

When moving away from predictable characters like Maggs and Judge, the third-person narration risks distancing some readers from the main characters. This is especially the case for Rudra’s mother, Nayna. Once an ambitious young scientist who fled her homeland to escape an arranged marriage, she has sacrificed her career only to marry a racist and abusive fisherman. Why is Nayna still married to this man? Although Grant occasionally journeys into Nayna’s past, many questions about her marriage are left unanswered. Most troubling of all, after accompanying Rudra to India, Nayna returns dutifully to married life, giving readers a bleak picture of women’s ability to subvert traditional power roles.

We get a very different representation of women in Astrid Scholte’s first fantasy novel, Four Dead Queens (Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 432 pp, 9781760685027). Not unlike Veronica Roth’s factions in Divergent, Quadara is comprised of four distinct cultural districts. Each quadrant has its own queen, but they all rule from the same court. The novel alternates between the perspective of these four powerful women and seventeen-year-old ‘dipper thief’ Keralie Corrington, who, after stealing a secret message from the palace, becomes embroiled in a mission to solve the queens’ brutal murders.

With its thieving, mystery, and romance, Four Dead Queens is ideally placed to explore the complex and often contradictory nature of human morality. Somewhat surprisingly, Scholte is reluctant to consider the moral ambiguity of her characters and exaggerates the virtue of her heroine, Kera. Even though the young thief is responsible for innumerable crimes, she is generally portrayed as a victim who would do ‘anything to keep’ people ‘in the light’. She even finds love with an honest man. As Judith Plant noted in her review, ‘the book has a very Disney-esque feel’ to it, embracing many of the familiar tropes of the fantasy genre. No doubt this is exactly what appealed to Scholte’s publishers: fantasy is not every reader’s kettle of fish, but plenty of avid young fantasy readers will find themselves at home in the mystery and romance of Four Dead Queens.

Last of all, Helena Fox’s début novel, How It Feels to Float (Pan Macmillan, $17.99 pb, 384 pp, 9781760783303), heralds the arrival of a talented new voice on the Australian literary scene. The story is told from the perspective of sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Martin Grey (also known as Biz) who is floating through life following the death of her father. After a near-death experience at a Wollongong beach and the departure of her lifelong friend Grace, Biz’s world slowly begins to unravel around her. Feeling herself ‘floating’ away, she clings to the whispers of the ocean and her polaroid photographs. ‘The photos are talking to me, whispering in my bag’. No one else can hear them ‘[s]o I guess the stories are just mine?’ Eventually, as Biz admits in unspoken words to her mum, the stories become suffocating: ‘I couldn’t breathe, Mum. I couldn’t breathe because my skin was crawling with stories. Just imagine you had bugs under your skin, Mum, just picture that, actually crawling with words I couldn’t get out.’

Fox, in passages like these, finds words and phrases that give feeling to the frightening loneliness that often accompanies mental illness. Elsewhere, she grapples with the anguish of Biz’s mum as she struggles to support her daughter. It’s hard, she admits, ‘to love someone who lives outside your body, and whose life you can’t control. You can’t hold anything still. You can’t be sure anything will be okay.’ A gut-wrenchingly beautiful portrait of grief and mental illness, How It Feels to Float is a tribute to the unconditional love between mother and daughter, as well as the power of new rather than old friendships.

While there is no denying that these four new books are very different works of Young Adult fiction, they all acquaint readers with marginalised voices and cultures. As the authors suggest in their stories, a ‘normal’ teen experience is the stuff of fairy tales. Life is complicated and full of contradictions on the east coast as much as anywhere else.

From the ill-fated explorations of Leichhardt and Burke and Wills through to the Beaumont children, Azaria Chamberlain, and the backpacker murders in New South Wales, the history of Australia is peppered with tales and images of people going missing. And, as the First Peoples might well have been able to warn us, few of those stories turn out well.

Felicity McLean’s first novel situates this familiar trope in an outer-Sydney suburb circa 1992. The publisher calls it ‘Picnic at Hanging Rock for a new generation’, without explaining why Joan Lindsay’s original – or, for that matter, Peter Weir’s definitive film adaptation – shouldn’t suffice for all generations. But the ill-advised television remake of Picnic is already among us, and now McLean attempts to step out of the considerable shadow of Lindsay’s precursor. (Any doubts as to whether she was concerned about the comparison evaporate when the Miranda-like character Cordelia is described as ‘no Botticelli angel’.)

And she does: The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone is a highly efficient and, at times, exceptional piece of storytelling. The clinging summer heat and looming sense of disaster are expertly rendered through the eyes of eleven-year-old narrator Tikka. Her observations are childlike but never childish. There is little cloying precociousness, always a risk when a youthful protagonist is employed.

Things get off to an inauspicious start with a two-page prologue in which clumsy images (‘the death rattle of cornflakes in their box’) blunder across the page like a rhinoceros on a jumping castle. The ending is also slightly awkward: as in many mystery novels, the desperation to reach a satisfactory conclusion results in one less than satisfactory. But on this evidence, McLean’s craft is only going to improve. She is most assuredly a writer worth following.

What was your pathway to publishing?

I completed a writing degree, then was published in Voiceworks magazine, then joined its editorial committee, there discovering that editing is a wonderfully creative and fulfilling act, then commissioned and published some folios of new work in other literary publications, then joined The Lifted Brow magazine as fiction editor, then took over from the founder (Ronnie Scott), then edited and published the magazine for a few years, then handed over editorial reins to others, then launched the Brow Books imprint, and a few years later here we are.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Rather than publish to a quota, we’ve instead put a cap on how many titles we’ll do a year in order to make sure we are fully behind each and every title we do, which allows us to focus on making sure we do the best possible job of publishing those titles/authors. I’m not a fan of the trade publishing model that is ‘let’s throw a bunch of titles at the wall/market each month and see what sticks – and then divert more resources to the titles that stick’. I think it’s unfair to the titles that might not have that immediate ‘sticky’ factor.

Nowadays every second young person seems to want to be a stand-up comic, an occupation that perfectly represents the ‘gig’ economy in its precariousness and occasional nature. Anne Pender gives us mini-biographies of seven Australians who succeeded, often spectacularly, in the risky business of being a comic long before the idea of a ‘gig’ economy entered the collective mind. Beginning with Carol Raye, Pender relates, in forty or so pages each, the life stories of Barry Humphries, Noeline Brown, Max Gillies, John Clarke, Tony Sheldon, and Denise Scott – in other words, members of the two cohorts who rode the national theatre and television wave from the 1960s to the recent past.

Pender, a professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of New England, is the author of One Man Show (2010), a biography of Barry Humphries. The essays in Seven Big Australians, based on in-depth interviews with her subjects and careful research, demonstrate an empathy that makes them quite engrossing. A good part of their charm comes from the details that Pender elicits from her subjects about the upbringing. The men especially suffered. Their lack of interest in sport and ‘manly’ occupations made them outsiders (Humphries’ headmaster farewelled him with the words, ‘I hope you’re not turning pansy’); in some cases their parents regarded them as ‘no-hopers’ (Clarke). Here, the pathos is underlined by photos showing them looking hapless, usually in fancy dress.

When asked to review Sea People: The puzzle of Polynesia, I thought it might be hard work – improving, but not necessarily fun. I could not have been more wrong. The book is a triumph. Exploring the remarkable history of Polynesian migration to the ‘vast triangle stretching from Hawaii to New Zealand to Easter Island’, it is magnificently researched, assured, and elegant in both structure and style. Marrying careful, probing scholarship with masterful storytelling, Sea People deserves a wide audience, one well beyond those who are from, or conduct research, in the region.

Christina Thompson, born and raised in the United States, is best known in Australia as a former editor of Meanjin (1994–98). After fifteen years in Australia, Thompson holds dual citizenship here and in the United States, where she lives outside Boston with her family. Now editing Harvard Review, Thompson is an award-winning writer, including a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship and a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award.

In her youth, Thompson was fascinated by Australia, the region, and southern colonial encounters. Crossing the seas in her twenties to complete a PhD in English at the University of Melbourne turned out to be a boundary-breaking experience in more ways than one. To write her doctorate, Thompson drew on anthropology and history as much as literature, thus bringing together insights from the diverse disciplines she continues to interweave in her writing.

People spent a lot of time looking for the pioneering aviator Charles Kingsford Smith. When he disappeared for the final time in 1935 just south of Myanmar, then known as Burma, he was just thirty-eight but felt ancient. Hopeful rescuers came from far and wide, but their efforts were not rewarded. Ann Blainey remarks wryly that one day the Andaman Sea may ‘give up its secret’, but, until then, Smithy’s final resting place is as mysterious as that of MH 370.

This was far from being the first occasion on which he had vanished. He had piloted many aircraft whose positions became unknown for a time. On one awkward occasion in 1929, he was accused of faking his disappearance in a remote part of Australia. Two of his friends, Keith Anderson and Bob Hitchcock, died in the search and Smith was blamed for recklessly creating this catastrophe. Smithy was often immature, but a deception of this magnitude was unlikely.

Ann Blainey is the latest in a significant list of writers who have joined another type of search for Kingsford Smith, a man whose epic flights brought thousands of enthusiasts to aerodromes to wish him well. He was fêted with ticker-tape parades and a knighthood. Along with Bradman, he was one of those who supported a myth that people clung to in the Depression years: that the most unlikely things were possible. He flew across the Pacific, the Atlantic, and broke countless speed records. In an understated and careful way, Blainey wants to find more than the myth. She is a calm and measured historian who, unlike her subject, is not given to flights of fancy. Her search is absorbing. Yet what she charts is often uncomfortable.

Tired of Winning: A chronicle of American decline by journalist and essayist Richard Cooke begins with the shock of Donald Trump’s election on 8 November 2016. In New York’s Lincoln Square, thousands of Clinton supporters were ‘stunned into silence’ while ‘a posse of drunk frat boys in MAGA caps announced themselves loudly’. Yet, as the author soon realised: ‘This was not the moment “everything changed” at all. It was a culmination, rather than a beginning, and the change had started months – maybe even years – before. It was the product of other people, and other places.’

That realisation led Cooke to return to the United States in the lead-up to the 2018 midterm Congressional elections, ‘determined to experience as much of the present state of the United States as [he] could, and to capture that experience on behalf of those similarly perplexed’. The result is a series of sketches, ranging across present-day America and observing life under President Trump.

One of the threads that runs through Cooke’s account is the social consequences of economic decay and inequality. In Appalachia, Cooke visits communities trapped in cycles of opioid addiction. He writes movingly, ‘opioids have hit hardest in the parts of the United States that are spare and wooded, and the country does not speak to itself in the voices of these places’. As a pastor in West Virginia tells the author: ‘The coal and steel was taken away and, to some extent, the ease to sell dope was introduced around the same time.’ Cooke also reveals a heartbreaking correlation: a psychological test called the Adverse Childhood Experiences Study ‘predicts addiction and chronic disease with a subtlety and precision that seems almost cruel’. One of its questions: ‘Did you often or very often feel that … you didn’t have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, and had no one to protect you?’

Marilyn Lake is without doubt one of the most influential historians in and of Australia in the last thirty years. ‘SIGN. US. UP’ writes Clare Corbould, one of the contributors to this festschrift, when describing the reaction of her postgraduate self and friends to seeing Lake sweep through the crowd at a history conference in the late 1990s. Backing up astute critique of others with innovative and field-shaping work of her own, Lake’s scholarship demonstrated the power of feminist analysis in the study of war, culture, and politics, then broke its early national boundaries to explore how the settler colonial world, especially Australia and North America, responded to the challenges of increasingly mobile and articulate people of Asian, Pacific, and African origin. The historian who began with Tasmania ended up taking on the world.

A festschrift works on a number of levels. Designed to honour the significance of an eminent scholar upon retirement, the essays therein also identify their authors as esteemed peers and anoint the coming generation. So it is with this collection. The senior men in the field of history in Australia are well represented. True to their disciplinary training, several of them look to Lake’s place and family of origin, and her undergraduate milieu, to locate the wellsprings of her early intellectual interests. The essays by Graeme Davison and Stephen Garton sketch Lake’s biography and the formative influences on her work, while also identifying both her points of departure and their lingering traces.

Requiem with Yellow Butterflies begins, aptly, with a death. Sitting at his office in Brisbane, the author receives news that Gabriel García Márquez has died at his home in Mexico. Across the world, there is a mushrooming of obituaries. Garlands of yellow butterflies are draped from trees and buildings; outside Mexico City’s Palacio de Bellas Artes, paper butterflies rain down like confetti. From Madrid, Elena Poniatowska eulogises: Gabo ‘gave wings to Latin America. And it is this great flight that surrounds us today and makes flowers grow in our heads.’

Gabo’s death is a catalyst for James Halford, in many ways. ‘As I read the memorials from around the world,’ he writes, ‘a spark of curiosity kindled.’ Halford, a diligent reader of García Márquez, begins to unpick the tightly wound threads of ‘mythomania’ that envelop the writer and his magnum opus, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), ‘the great twentieth-century Latin American novel’. The result is the first of fifteen deft chapters that drift seamlessly across the genres of literary essay, travelogue, and personal memoir, opening up new dialogues between Latin America (haunted Mexico; abandoned Paraguay; the humid midriff of Venezuela and Brazil; umbilical Cuzco; ‘eternal’ Buenos Aires), the coastlines and ‘unknown towns’ of Queensland, and the red desert of Australia’s interior.

Andy Kissane, who (with Belle Ling) shared the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, is one of Australia’s most moving poets. He is unfailingly empathetic, a master of poetic narrative – and of the ‘middle style’ where language is not an end in itself but an unobtrusive vehicle for poignancy (or, occasionally, humour or irony). The Tomb of the Unknown Artist, Kissane’s fifth collection, is divided into four thematic sections, all of which contain powerful and memorable poems. Of these, Part Three, a series of monologues from the Vietnam War, is the most disturbing.

Part One comprises mainly personal and family poems, some autobiographical. Others (such as ‘Marriage Material’, a monologue by an Edwardian bride on her wedding day) are examples of extreme empathy – ‘metempsychosis’, as Kenneth Slessor would have said. (‘When I imagined walking down the aisle / I did not know that it would feel like this: / as if I’d been blessed with much more // than I deserved, more than I could grasp: as if / the scent of gardenias and orchids would cling / to my skin for the rest of my days ...’) Other poems in this section also embody this feeling of unapologetic joy, a hard thing to achieve without sentimentality. They include the book’s opening poem, ‘Alone Again’, and several others such as ‘Domestic Dreaming’ and ‘A Personal History of Joy’. The latter ends with how the ‘two-thumbed salute’ of a childhood VFL boundary umpire on a muddy pitch can be ‘a perfect accompaniment to the endorphin light that swamps / your mind as you rise again in the shining world’. It’s not hard to hear an echo of the early Bruce Dawe here.

Giotto’s frescoes invite us to ponder the nature of what we instinctively, conveniently, but not very satisfactorily call realism. Compared to the work of his predecessors, these images have a new kind of material presence. Bodies become solid, take on mass and volume, and occupy space. Those in front overlap with and partly occlude our view of those behind, for Giotto wants to set them in the same kind of space that we ourselves dwell in, rather than the immaterial space in which Duccio’s rows of angels can hover one above the other.

There is nothing literally illusionistic in this, nothing that tries to trick us into believing that we are seeing the real world instead of a picture. There is instead an artifice of illusion, a play of conscious reference to natural experience; indeed even in the most overtly naturalistic images, like those of Caravaggio, the effect and the intention are entirely different from the beguiling but superficial conceits of trompe-l’œil.

The purpose of this ‘realism’ is inherently double, or even ambivalent. On the one hand, it is an attempt to give new substance and cogency to the sacred stories. Giotto brings images of faith down from what Yeats called ‘God’s holy fire’ and into the world of human experience. But this is also to accord a new importance to physical and sensorial apprehension; to give the sacred stories new reality by setting them in our world is, implicitly, to modify the standard of reality itself.

I am a girl who knows how to hold a gun. On weekends, Dad drives me out to the pistol club, while Mum pulls white-sapped weeds from the garden. She plants natives that can handle the salt in the air; angular, bristling plants with angular, bristling names: banksia, grevillea, bottlebrush. A line of Geraldton Wax along the verge to replace some mean and blighted rose bushes. She knows we won’t stay long enough to see them tall. We never stay. She plants them anyway.

There is always a pistol club, and so I pack my gun box and Dad and I drive out, away from the wind-churned coast and deep into the canola. In a converted dairy shed we stand next to each other and shoot at paper targets alongside sharp-eyed farmers and retired cops. They are men with enormous hands and wide, sun-ruddy faces, and they are always watching me. There’s never been a girl in the shed. Wives, sometimes; sons, often. But the men never bring their daughters. A girl is alchemy. I change something, curdle it.

‘First time for everything,’ they say.

And there is.

‘Show us what you can do, sweetheart,’ they say.

And I do.

It was during the still relatively tentative explorations I was making into the world of international arts festival direction that I swallowed hard and made my first visit to Glyndebourne. I had lived in London throughout the 1980s, had performed there many times in various venues from the National to the Drill Hall to Wyndham’s in the West End, and had sung in Paris, Vienna, and Amsterdam. I’d been to the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, but never to Glyndebourne.

The cost had probably kept me away initially, but its apparent veneer of privilege made me feel uneasy even on that first visit. It was 26 May 1996. As Artistic Director Elect, I’d just experienced Barrie Kosky’s Adelaide Festival and was now on the hunt for performances that would populate my 1998 edition.

The ‘untold history’ of Faber & Faber should be a cause for celebration. For so many of us, possessing the unadorned, severe paperbacks with the lower-case ‘ff’ on the spine meant graduation to serious reading: coming of literary age by absorbing the words and thoughts of Beckett, Eliot, Larkin, Stoppard, Hughes, Plath, Miłosz, Golding, Ishiguro, Heaney, Carey, Golding, Barnes – Djuna, not Julian – and dozens of others. (Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet, too, even for those of us who didn’t get past the middle of Justine.)

Toby Faber, grandson of the founder, Geoffrey Faber, tells the story of his family firm from its beginnings in the 1920s to 1990, encompassing what he evidently considers Faber’s glory years. He has put together his history more or less chronologically from correspondence, memos, and diary entries, interleaved with shortish paragraphs of commentary and background. At first glance this seems promising, especially for readers who – like me – enjoy reading other people’s mail in print. But it doesn’t take long to realise that this approach has significant and rather puzzling problems. The most obvious of these is the lack of a strong narrative line; there is no clear indication of the company’s development, no tracing of the means by which Faber became the multifaceted publisher it now is. Who, for instance, decided that Faber should publish musical texts as well as words? How well did that work? Toby Faber’s commentaries are neither pungent nor particularly informative. And the lack of an index doesn’t help either.

There have been at least half a dozen previous biographies of Robert Menzies, but Troy Bramston’s new life of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister is arguably the most attractive combination of research and readability.

Menzies was born in 1894 in the Victorian country town of Jeparit. Its population was then only two hundred, but Menzies did not have a deprived childhood. His father ran the general store and was later a member of the Victorian parliament. Menzies finished his school years at one of Melbourne’s élite institutions and then attended law school at Melbourne University where he won many academic prizes and headed a wide range of student bodies.

His university years largely coincided with those of the Great War. His two elder brothers enlisted but, under family pressure, Menzies did not. This was a far-reaching decision, given the fact that in the 1920s and 1930s there was a real gulf in Australian society between those males who had fought in the war and those who had not.