A laughing man, according to Flaubert, is stronger than a suffering one. But as Craig Sherborne’s extraordinary new memoir of childhood and youth shows, the distinction isn’t that simple. There is much to laugh at in Hoi Polloi, but this is also a book suffused with pain and suffering. Sherborne is both a powerful satirist and a poet of vulnerability. The poems by Sherborne included in The Best Australian Poems 2003 show something comparable. Those tightly controlled and acidic poems explored similar ground to that covered in Hoi Polloi. But this prose account of childhood is even more attuned to the doubleness of life, to its mix of farce and tragedy.

Hoi Polloi opens with the narrator and his parents living in New Zealand in the late 1960s. The family hotel (not a ‘pub’, according to the narrator’s mother) is the setting for the narrator’s early experiences. The memoir opens: ‘The first time I see drunks beat up my father I’m six and standing at the bend in the stairs.’ What follows sets the tone for the rest of the work: prose that illustrates an unsettling, almost clinical, ability to describe painful events, matched with a capacity to evoke an empathetic pain in the reader.

Melbourne woman Kate Holden’s memoir of being a heroin user and of working as a prostitute to fund her habit opens with a quote from Virgil: ‘To descend into hell is easy. But to return – what work, what a labour it is!’ The quote is at odds with the life story Holden constructs in this brave, explicit, and extremely well-written book. Far from being a kind of hell, Holden represents prostitution – first on the streets of St Kilda, then seven nights a week in brothels – as something she liked doing and was good at. I can’t dispute the second claim, but I did have trouble believing the first one.

Holden describes herself as a princess in her brothel, a glorious, desirable woman decked out in velvet or chiffon, waiting for the ‘rank after rank’ of men who came in to ‘compliment me, worship me, pay for my time, my presence’. Makeup concealed the lumpy scars in the crooks of the princess’s arms. Clients wanted her time, but might not have been so happy to pay for the medication she required afterwards.

Nevertheless, as the author’s sexual skills increase, she feels herself more and more adored. Indeed, the memoir suggests that prostitution was so empowering that it helped Holden to kick a heroin habit of more than half a decade. I say suggest because the book is very much about working as a prostitute rather than about how the author escaped from that grinding life. It is the story of the hard labour required for Holden to fund not only her heroin addiction but that of her boyfriend, a pathetic character who whinges that she spends too much time at the brothel and not enough with him.

The life story constructed by this gifted writer is that of the good girl turned bad, of a privileged young person (a Melbourne University arts graduate no less) who has it all and decides to throw it away. The publicity material from Text plays up the author’s middle-class upbringing in ‘the leafy suburbs of Melbourne’. The writer herself recounts, with relish, the pillow talk about French literature and history that she enjoys with her more educated clients.

Most of a lifetime ago, I read of an exhibit at the Bell Telephone headquarters. It consisted of a box from which, at the turning of a switch, a hand emerged. The hand turned off the switch and returned to its box. If this struck me as sinister, it was because the gambit seemed emblematic of human perversity – of a proneness to self-annulment. The years since have given little reason to change such a view.

The cover illustration of Jacob G. Rosenberg’s East of Time shows bright-eyed children, Talmud students in Czechoslovakia in 1937, and one needs no further reminder of their likely fate: that they were who and what they were was enough to determine, in the eyes of others, that they should not be at all. Probably, what was then done destroyed them: certainly, it destroyed their real or would-be killers morally.

Rosenberg, a survivor of those horrors, offers in this unpretentiously eloquent memoir his sense of what it was to be, first, a child, and then a young man, in Poland in the 1930s and the early 1940s. Readers of his poetry, among others, will know that in his writing lucidity and economy march together, and it is so once more in East of Time. In the preface, Rosenberg says that: ‘The touchstone of these reminiscences – their informing spirit – is the desire and determination of an entire community to remain human, even at the last frontier of life’, and everything in the book keeps faith with that desire, that determination. He says, too, ‘I believe there are times when even the cruellest truth is preferable to the gentlest lie’, and for all its civility and its delicacy of touch, the book manifestly prizes truth above all.

If it is the case that we can no longer avoid the effects of living under conditions of globalisation, then increasingly that spatial dimension governs our lives. Look not, therefore, deep into the history of our individual nations or localities to explain what is going on, but lift your eyes to the horizon, and beyond, where a devastated city may be smouldering. Within minutes, a local politician will be warning us that we may be next.

There has been an innovative thread in Australian writing that has developed this spatial dimension. Paul Carter’s Road to Botany Bay (1987) is perhaps the most famous ‘spatial history’, as he called it, of Australia’s colonial past. Now, with Traumascapes, Maria Tumarkin takes a major step in doing a simultaneous analysis, on a global scale, of six sites of trauma: Berlin, Sarajevo, Port Arthur, Shanksville, Bali, and Moscow. Berlin’s trauma was chronic rather than acute, being a site of two wars, the East–West division and reunification; and the city is notably self-conscious about the ways it should remember. Tumarkin’s site, therefore, is an eccentric museum in the old Stasi headquarters.

The Vogel Prize shares a reputation with the rest of the company’s products: nutritious, worthy, a little dull. But the prize’s earnest image is unfair. Any glance at the roll-call of winners over the last twenty-five years would show that the makers of soggy bread and soya cereals have done more than anyone to introduce fresh literary DNA into Australia’s tiny gene pool of published novelists. But reviewers, mostly, and the public, generally, don’t get excited when the new Vogel is published. This year they should. Julienne van Loon’s desperate joyride, Road Story, is the best Vogel winner to come along since 1990, when Gillian Mears’s The Mint Lawn, equally confident but very different, won first place.

Road Story has a ripper opening: a young woman, Diana Kooper, is running through a Sydney park, late at night, in the rain. Behind her, in a white Suzuki hatchback crumpled around a telephone pole, is the bleeding body of her best friend, wedged halfway through the broken windscreen. Diana runs all the way to Central Station, where she boards the first train. Then she hitchhikes through the out-west townships of her childhood until she stops at a remote roadhouse, where she takes a job warming rissoles and keeping the Cokes lined up at eye level in the fridge.

In the last twenty years, the belief in a transformative left – socialist, communist, whatever – has collapsed more comprehensively than at any time since its beginnings in 1789. The Western working class is overwhelmingly oriented towards individual life, acquisition and consumption; the working class of the developing world has not developed major radical parties in the face of substantial repression of trade union organisation; faith in central planning, market socialism, interconnected cooperatives and the like drained away in the late 1970s, and no alternative plan for running the economy is on the table. Political-economic debate occurs entirely on the right side of the spectrum, and is confined to the degree to which the market’s role as central organising power shall be mitigated or augmented by state power, social capital grants and so on. How this happened, what can be done about it, and the future of a politics based on cooperation and equality – especially in the Australian context – is the subject of this new book from long-time journalist David McKnight.

Once an angry man dragged his father through his own orchard. ‘Stop!’ cried the groaning old man at last. ‘Stop! I did not drag my father beyond this tree.’

Gertrude Stein

At first, you find the claim that you resemble your parents implausible. Later, you find it unflattering. But there are moments when you glimpse someone in a mirror and only belatedly recognise yourself. These are the moments when you realise – it is in equal parts chastening and reassuring – that if you are moving through time as an image of your parents’ past, their image is waiting for you in mirrors: they are the ghosts that haunt your future, as it were.

All the measures show we are an ageing population. It is an odd term; you might have thought that, outside Gulliver’s Travels, it would be hard to find a population doing anything else. It means that roughly thirteen per cent of us are over sixty-five and that by 2031 this figure will have risen to twenty-one per cent. As a consequence, the federal government is urging us to breed. Like the patriotic women of Renaissance Venice who embroidered on their nightgowns, ‘I do this not for myself but for God and my country’, it seems Australians are rising to the challenge. In the past year, the birth rate has gone up for the first time since 1994: ‘I do this not for myself but for the economy and my baby bonus.’

Perhaps Peter Costello is right to claim some credit for this small baby boom, though you might well regard the average oyster as a more effective aphrodisiac. Perhaps, as these babies move into the phases of production and consumption that some people regard as stages of life, they will carry the economic burden of the elderly on their shoulders. Still it looks as if it will be a heavy burden for their parents, in the meantime. The Australian Bureau of Statistics points out:

Australia’s changing age structure has implications both for the level of social expenditure that might be required in future, and the level of resources that might be available to fund it. For example, as the population aged 65 and over increases in size, associated social expenditures on income support, care and health services can be expected to increase. However, since the potential labour force (roughly represented by the population aged 15–64) is projected to grow at a slower rate after 2011, it may be more difficult to generate the level of resources and public support needed to maintain a large aged population with an acceptable standard of living and quality of life.

What will these demographics mean for the broad human exchange that an economy straitens into the narrow language of money? What will it mean, for instance, for the ordinary, difficult miracle of parents and children?

There is a book that has sold over a million copies in that haven for hard-working statisticians, the US: a book about parents and children called Love You Forever (2000). It starts with a mother holding her new baby in her arms and singing to him, ‘I’ll love you forever’. Every time you turn a page, you cross several years in the family’s life. The boy is destructive, then disobedient, then incomprehensible, then independent. Still, at every stage, his mother goes into his room at night to sing over him, ‘I’ll love you forever’ – until at last she is too old to sing. Then, only then, her son sings to her – but in the end it is his own daughter’s room he goes into at night to sing, ‘I’ll love you forever’.

There is, surely, something terrifying as well as triumphant in the involuntary nature of parental love this book describes. Romantic love affirms our individuality: it finds its frequently irrational rationale in the facts that are peculiar to us. In fact, if you were to make a survey of popular culture, you might conclude that we use the spectacle of romantic love to confirm the value of individualism. Parental love, on the other hand, has a genetic rationale that depends more on what we are made of than who we turn out to be. The mother and son in Love You Forever have no names because they are, supposedly, typical; because they characterise a love that is in essence typical. The son tends to his mother as she is his mother; the mother loves her son as he is her son.

This means, at the very source and perpetuity of our life, we discover ourselves in a role that has nothing to do with how we generally consider ourselves; for we prefer to be loved for the facts that are peculiar to us; it justifies our self-regard. Perhaps that is why we are more accustomed to reflect on the darker aspect of romantic love, its involvement of fantasy and despair. At its worst, romantic love finds us alone, with all the isolation, defiance, glory but at any rate, individuality, such a state implies. But if we consider the darker aspects of parental love, we find ourselves bound to a natural order: a transit route or dead end for selfish genes. This is, perhaps, more annihilating than isolation.

We have used machines to manoeuvre ourselves to the top of the food chain until it looks like ostentation on the part of a crocodile to consider us as prey, so it is not comfortable to consider our role in the mechanics – as the mechanics – of the survival of a species. But parental love brings us up against this mere fact. This natural loss of identity has its domestic corollary, as parents sacrifice themselves for their children who sacrifice themselves for their children who sacrifice themselves for their children. Or, as the New England poet Anne Stevenson puts it with characteristic wryness in her poem, ‘The Mother’:

Of course I love them, they are my children.
This is my daughter and this is my son
And this is my life that I gave them to please them.
It has never been used. Keep it safe. Pass it on.

At least, for the past four hundred years, history has passed on this idea of parents and children. For in the late 1500s, that practical and curious Frenchman Michel de Montaigne wrote an essay (he was, in fact, the father of the genre) on the affection that parents have for their children. The essay is dedicated to Madame d’Estissac because, he claims, ‘we have no example of maternal affection more outstanding – in our time’. In that regard, his essay could be read as a warning. He remarks:

If there is any true law of nature, that is to say any instinct seen to be universally and unchangeably implanted in animals and in men – which is not beyond dispute – I can say that, in my opinion, after the care that all beasts have for their own preservation – the affection which the parent feels for its progeny holds the second place. And because nature seems to have recommended this affection to us, with a view to the spread and advancement of the successive parts of this machine of hers, it is no wonder if the love of children for their parents, since it goes in reverse, is rather less great.

It is the merely natural nature of parental love that disconcerts Montaigne, the idea that it has nothing to do with recognition, with all that recognition implies of merit and reason and all that reason implies, for Montaigne, of the distinction between people and animals. He notes, ‘we are generally more moved by our children’s frolickings, games and infantile nonsense than afterwards by their mature acts. It is as if we had loved them – as monkeys, not as human beings.’

Montaigne’s argument has such currency that it is curious to imagine him writing this essay in his tower on his estate in Montaigne at a time when Copernicus’s theory counts as new philosophy. The rise of the metropolis, Darwin’s theory of evolution, the decline of religion, and the possibilities of in vitro fertilisation – how curious that Montaigne’s idea of parents and children persists, surviving such changes in our ideas of nature, law and the laws of nature.

It may be there is something intrinsic to the relationship between parents and children that makes it resist evolution. Our relationship with a parent is so absolutely personal it tends to stand for the general: we understand that a parent is as our parent was. So it passes on, generation after generation, bringing a history of other times and places into the present, like a crocodile: at once archaic and brilliantly adapted to survival. There is a striking portrait of Elizabeth I – queen of England as Montaigne was writing his essays – with her breasts on show to suggest that she is the mother of her country. In such ways, in the course of history, the state lays claim to what you might call the emotional value of parents and children and, conversely, invests the concept of parents and children with a social logic. For, as Costello’s encouragement to procreate suggests, nature and society share an interest in parents and children. This means even the words we use for parents and children are never simply private – they resonate in a larger area; they keep what you might call the idea of history, even when history has changed its ideas. (It is difficult and not obviously rewarding, for instance, to imagine Elizabeth II on a stamp in the fashion of her predecessor.)

That is to say, even in this most private sphere we encounter something so largely and persistently social it may well be – it might as well be – natural; and the love a parent feels for a child takes its force from a logic at once impersonal and possessive. Montaigne likens such love to the love a benefactor feels for the proof of his generosity and a craftsman for the proof of his skill; ‘and every workman loves his work better than his work would love him in return, if it had feeling’. Mutuality is an ideal of romantic love, but it is impossible for parents and children. For a parent’s love, wherever it may end, characteristically starts with pride in creation – an easier emotion than gratitude, as a rule, for gratitude marks our limits.

If it starts here, a parent’s love may not, for instance, end in regard for a child’s mature independence. Montaigne remarks:

Many a parent is very liberal in supplying his children with toys, but becomes close-fisted – once they are of age. It really looks as if our jealousy at seeing them come out and enjoy the world when we are on the point of leaving it, makes us more sparing and niggardly towards them … But if this were something to be feared, the order of things decreeing that they cannot, in fact, be nor live except at the expense of our being and our life, we should never have allowed ourselves to be fathers.

If this idea that children consume ‘our being and our life’ is discomfiting, it is perhaps worth remarking that Montaigne is working with a sense of time we can scarcely imagine. For, Einstein and the remoter physics notwithstanding, our timetabled age of clocks and watches allows us to consider time as that abstract force that drives the hand around a watchface. Montaigne is working with a more intimate sense of time as that force of creation and destruction that the order of things makes explicit when children become parents and parents become grandparents. It is a sense of time that dates all the way back to Greek myths of the beginning of the world, of Cronos (aka Time) consuming his children till one of them rises against him, even as Cronos had risen against his own father; a sense of time that sees generations turning on each other and turning into each other in that simple and radical way that Heraclitus describes: ‘In thirty years a man may become a grandfather.’ (Working on today’s averages, we might say that in sixty-six years a woman may become a grandmother.)

Perhaps Montaigne’s warning to Madame d’Estissac may serve as a gentle caveat to the government’s confidence in generation. Certainly, in a broad economic sense, children are the necessary counterbalance to an ageing population: economists say young people create wealth whereas old people deplete it. Yet this is almost exactly contrary to how inheritance tends to work in a family. Society’s broad economic balance depends, therefore, on all the intimate, difficult arrangements parents and children make.

Imagine 2050: a country of old people and children, and between them, a taxed generation. Imagine the natural succession of generations turning into a competition for what we like to call resources: for aged care and child care, nursing homes and schools; obligations to parents and commitments to offspring. In Japan, where in 2020 a quarter of the population is likely to be over sixty-five, they are planning a robot companion for the elderly. The prospect wins support for the argument in Robert Frost’s poem ‘Provide, Provide’:

Too many fall from great and good
For you to doubt the likelihood.

Die early and avoid the fate.
Or if predestined to die late,
Make up your mind to die in state.

Make the whole stock exchange your own!
If need be occupy a throne,
Where nobody can call you crone.

Some have relied on what they knew;
Others on being simply true.
What worked for them might work for you.

No memory of having starred
Atones for later disregard,
Or keeps the end from being hard.

Better to go down dignified
With boughten friendship at your side
Than none at all. Provide, provide.

Provide! And already, in Japan, a quarter of the men over seventy-five are still working. In the main, these older men are prepared to renounce their senior positions to make way for younger generations. But if there is only a companionable robot at home, when – and why – should the older generation step aside?

`This is a question that Montaigne addresses in his essay, though his answer offers but small consolation, for he imagines the next generation waiting, pitiless and impatient: ‘If we wish to be loved by our children, if we wish to take from them all reason to desire our death – let us reasonably supply their lives with everything that is within our power.’ If this describes the danger of giving up power too late, Montaigne also suggests the danger of giving it up too early: ‘This does not mean that a man should transfer his property to his children by a bond that he can never revoke.’ Or, as it says in that great saga of a father and son, the Bible: ‘As long as thou livest and hast breath in thee, give not thyself over to any. For better it is that thy children should seek to thee, than that thou shouldst stand to their courtesy’ [Sir:33].

So here it is, the dilemma of old age: renounce authority in time or breed resentment; provide for yourself or add dependence to the humiliations that attend your last years. Montaigne remarks: ‘There are so many kinds of failings in old age, and such feebleness, and it is so open to contempt, that the best thing a man can win is the love and affection of his family; authority and fear are no longer his weapons.’ But a sudden need for love and affection does not of necessity provide the means to win love and affection. There is no reason to suppose the body’s failings will teach humility or its feebleness, patience. And so in Montaigne’s time a peasant passing over his holding to his son when his own powers failed usually took care to stipulate, in legal deed, the obligation to care for him: the number of candles to be supplied, and free access to the kitchen fire.

Shakespeare read Montaigne’s essay; it served as a prompt for his massy tragedy of parents and children, King Lear. Critics of the play most commonly criticise King Lear for giving up his authority, for sharing out his kingdom between his daughters. Certainly, as the play moves forward like a natural machine of suffering, it seems natural to long to go back to the beginning. Yet Montaigne’s essay suggests that the problem in this play is not so simply a question of policy. For a start, the policy has its admirers. Montaigne argues:

The Emperor Charles V never performed a finer action than in recognising  that reason quite clearly commands us to undress when our robes grow too heavy and encumber us, and to go to bed when our legs fail us. He resigned his possessions, his greatness, and his power to his son, when he found himself failing in strength and vigour …

There is something more subtly wrong in what Lear does, some problem more intrinsic to the relationship between parents and children.

This wrong is set in play in the first scene, the scene that critics typically describe as a love-test, a contest. The Melbourne Theatre Company, for instance, paraphrased the story of King Lear in advertisements for its recent season: ‘In order to “shake all cares and business from his age”, Lear sets out to divide his estate between his three daughters, but first there is to be a contest …’ Certainly, in this first scene, King Lear claims to be running a contest, announcing he will allocate his kingdom to his daughters according to the measure of love they state for him. But this is not, in fact, what he does; and in this discrepancy, Shakespeare finds a dramatic form for that blind force in the love between parents and children. For, as Barbara Everett remarks in her essay, ‘King Lear: Loving’, Lear has already apportioned his kingdom. In the first lines of the play two courtiers, Kent and Gloucester, reveal that the king has allocated equal shares to his two sons-in-law:

Kent. I thought the King had more affected the Duke of Albany than Cornwall. 
Gloucester. It did always seem so to us; but now in the division of the kingdom, it appears not which of the Dukes he values most …

That means the contest that follows is mere show, a public play that Lear stages; and the only role he gives Cordelia is to speak according to the measure of land – the quantity of love – that is left over for her. It is a role that unmakes her, that makes her nothing but his most loved daughter.

In Leir, the old play that Shakespeare uses as a source, the king in this first scene seeks his daughters’ promise that they will marry a suitor of his choosing. Shakespeare changes this so that the two eldest daughters are married already. Lear is not controlling their preferences, he is demanding their recognition, their love for him as a person, not as a father. With this change, Shakespeare sets at the heart of the play a conflict between the merely natural love ‘the parent feels for its progeny’ (as Montaigne puts it) and the kind of love that depends upon preference, the kind of love you can believe you earn. When his eldest daughters, his married daughters, state their love for him, they could be quoting from Shakespeare’s sonnets: ‘I love you more than words can wield the matter’; ‘I am alone felicitate / In your dear Highness’ love.’ Against this, Cordelia asserts the merely natural bond between parents and children: ‘You have begot me, bred me, lov’d me: I / Return those duties back as are right fit.’ This is the reasonable duty that Montaigne makes out for children; and it unmakes Lear.

It is orthodox to claim that over the course of this play Lear goes ‘from power to powerlessness, from reason to madness, and, ultimately, from blindness to insight’, as the MTC puts it. Yet ‘insight’ may suggest a way of seeing that is out of time for these characters, for the world of King Lear is the world of mere nature, of bare fact and power. It seems likely that Montaigne’s account of the natural bond between a parent and child – with its blindness and terrors – came together in Shakespeare’s mind with the story of a father and his daughters in the natural world – as Shakespeare and his audience would have seen it: the world before Christ, before history becomes allegory and things become symbols. The phrase that Lear uses when he refutes Cordelia is emphatically pre-Christian; it is the phrase that Aristotle uses to deny creation: ‘Nothing can come of nothing.’ In such a world, it is not insight that matters, so much as seeing.

The play has a weightiness, an effect of sheer mass, because the curses and metaphors that characters use tend to come true: ‘See better, Lear, and let me still remain / The true blank of thine eye,’ cries Lear’s faithful servant, Kent. ‘The true blank’ is a phrase that takes its meaning from archery, where the blank is the centre of the target. But Kent’s cry brings together those aspects of the natural that make for terror: its centrality and its blindness; so Cordelia is most loved, and least known. And though faithful Kent follows Lear, in disguise, after Lear banishes him, Lear never recognises his service. Even at the end, Lear cannot see whether Cordelia is alive or dead, though he is, at last, looking: ‘Do you see this? Look on her! Look her lips, / Look there, look there!’

These days, the state serves as a last resort for old people. Perhaps that explains why it is encouraging family values. We have the Family First party with its slogan of fake simplicity: ‘If it’s good for families, we’ll vote for it’ – as if all happy families were alike and all unhappy ones, too. Such a celebration of family values implies a certain nostalgia for those times when old people depended upon their families for refuge. But the literature from those times suggests such nostalgia is misplaced.

In Renaissance England, for instance, there was a kind of vogue for writing about parents and children. To read it is to realise how far we sentimentalise the relationship. If what happened to King Lear strikes us as implausible, it may be useful to remember the story of Sir William Allen, a mayor of London who ‘shared his estate between his three married daughters, and arranged to stay with each in turn. They resented the charge of his upkeep and said he was rude to their servants; he cursed them and died in misery.’

In plays such as King Lear, such conflict between generations serves as a testing ground for questions about nature and reason, in accordance with Montaigne’s argument that nature urges parents to care for their children but only reason urges children to return the favour. You could say this idea culminates in the play by Thomas Middleton, William Rowley and Philip Massinger, The Old Law (1616–19); a play that imagines a world where the state follows nature’s law: it kills everyone over sixty and gives power to the younger generations. In this play, children delight in getting rid of their parents, and one husband determines to falsify his wife’s birth date to get her killed off more quickly.

At the least, this might imply that it is scarcely wise – for parents, at least – to invoke the natural as a basis for family values. At the most, it might prompt you to consider other forms of perpetuity. Montaigne ends his essay with praise for creative production:

Now if we consider this simple reason for loving our children, that we have begotten them, and therefore call them our other selves, there seems to me to be a very different kind of production coming from us which is no less worthy of consideration. For what we engender from the soul, the offspring of our mind, our heart, and our talents, springs from parts nobler than the corporeal, and more truly our own  And I do not know whether I would not much rather have produced a perfectly formed child by intercourse with the Muses than by intercourse with my wife.

And Francis Bacon takes up this point in his essay, ‘Parents and Children’. He argues:

The perpetuity by generation is common to beasts; but memory, merit, and noble works are proper to men: and surely a man shall see the noblest works and foundations have proceeded from childless men; which have sought to express the images of their minds, where those of their bodies have failed.

In his essay ‘Of Marriage and Single Life’, too, Bacon complains: ‘He that hath wife and children, hath given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises.’

And Bacon was, after all, a practical man: when his enemies accused him of taking bribes as Lord Chancellor, he explained that he took them from both sides, and never allowed them to influence his decisions.

In the park outside my hotel in downtown Cincinnati, Ohio, there is a splendid statue in bronze of President James Garfield, modelled in 1885 by one Charles H. Niehaus and cast in Rome. The pose is oratorical and forms a convenient hub for several witty panhandlers. Somebody has lodged a Panasonic logo high up inside the twentieth president’s lapel. The Cincinnati Club is down the block, a huge post-Albertian palazzo that would have made the Gonzagas blush. For a wedding, floor-to-ceiling arrangements of white and pink roses and several truckloads of lily of the valley effervesce upstairs amid chandeliers, while jungly orchids creep down the front hall banisters – all clearly visible from the other side of the street. Obviously, they have invited only the immediate country. Around the corner is a hat shop from another era, with the elevated thrones of a separate shoe-shine department running down one side, and a fully operational hat-steamer snorting among stacks of boxes behind the wide counter opposite. I find myself being fitted for a beautiful pork-pie hat by Biltmore of Canada.

Hands up if you subscribe to an Australian journal. Keep them up if you subscribe to more than one. More than two? If you read them? Cover to cover? Half? More than two articles an issue? Hands up if you look forward to them. Maybe it’s just me, but there’s something that makes me terribly tired when faced with the prospect of Australia’s literary and political journals. I stand in front of the (small) shelf made available for them in my local bookshop and try to muster up the enthusiasm I might feel when faced with a shelf of new books; try to feel excited at the prospect of reading them. I have a couple of subscriptions, and when they arrive, I make a point of tearing the envelope open immediately to have a look. And yet I still have to push past a barrier of resistance to sit and actually read them.

Part of the problem with these journals is that they all seem so familiar. Approaching them, we feel that we know what to expect: the same names, on the same topics, at the same pitch. Attempts are clearly being made to keep these periodicals fresh and vital, but outwardly, at the very least, it seems to be an uphill battle. And it’s a battle that we’ve seen before, many times. Familiarity breeds fatigue.

But push on through weary expectations and there is first-class reportage writing, and, more importantly, some beautiful writing within. Heat includes a couple of pieces of fiction that are surprising, refreshing, unfamiliar. Griffith Review offers a crisp vision of contemporary Australia through a series of very strong essays and articles. Island has a very nice red cover.

Henry Pollack, the founder of Mirvac, one of Australia’s largest and most successful property development companies, started life in Lodz, a booming Polish textile town. Born in 1932, he belonged to a well-to-do family and became a bookish boy. He writes about his youth with vivid openness, describing not only events but his feelings, thoughts and youthful ideals. With this memoir, written towards the end of his life, Pollack comes close to being the writer he dreamt of becoming as a boy. Memories of his childhood have a fidelity and clarity that may well be the result of a life lopped and restarted at the age of sixteen; those early years are preserved as if in a time capsule.

The Germans invade in September 1939 and, as the first bombs fall on Lodz, Henry is sent off by his family on a pushbike, on what turns out to be a most extraordinary flight to the other side of the globe. He tells this harrowing and epic story with a considered coolness. He doesn’t impose on us his experience of the horror or his near misses; rather, he invites us to experience it ourselves.

A friend called me from Beijing recently to ask advice about her novel. She had played a prominent part in the avant-garde art movement associated with the protests at Tiananmen in 1989, and had achieved notoriety in both art and life. Fifteen years on, she wanted to give her own account of events, choosing the form of a roman-à-clef that would be published first in English. But now the Hong Kong agent helping to prepare her text wanted changes to enhance its appeal to foreign publishers. The agent wanted to tart it up, and my friend was unhappy.

Few books from China reach the international market unmediated. The patient curiosity required for writing that does not match existing tastes or confirm prejudices is hard to come by in an English-speaking world that has too much to read already. As a result, what passes for Chinese writing outside the country is rather thin, and Chinese authors who deal seriously with their culture are known only to specialists.

The parameters of the twentieth century have, in the hands of historians, proved rather malleable. The need to contextualise the ‘End of History’, and a belief that eras are less arbitrarily and more accurately defined by events than by calendars, justified Eric Hobsbawm’s chosen bookends to his acclaimed Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (1994). Harvard historian Stephen Graubard, in his magisterial exploration of the transformation of the American presidency during the twentieth century, extends the reach of the century into the twenty-first – a continuity justified by the redolence of the strategies pursued by George W. Bush to those of Ronald Reagan. For all the present incumbent’s protestations of paradigm shifts necessitating new approaches and responses, Graubard convincingly posits him among the twentieth-century presidents.

Indeed, the Bush administration provides the exclamation mark to Graubard’s thesis that the last century has borne witness to both an unparalleled accretion of power to the presidency and an equally pronounced decline in the quality of men elected to the Oval Office: ‘The perils of exaggerated executive power were never more conspicuous than in the first years of the 21^st century, when the king, courtiers and warriors domiciled in Washington DC so little resembled those of more perilous times.’ It is a dissimilarity accentuated in Graubard’s telling by the exclusion of William McKinley (slain in office in 1901), a president to whom none other than Dick Cheney has likened George W. Bush. The first of the eighteen chiefly biographical essays that comprise the bulk of the book’s 928 pages is an adulatory sketch of Theodore Roosevelt, an ‘elemental force’ to whom Graubard attributes the origins of the modern presidency. The imperious Teddy, ‘a king without courtiers’, arrived in office brimming with an ambition enlivened by his conception of the role of the presidency. It was a conception shared by Woodrow Wilson (‘a king in all but name’), and one that presaged an unprecedented presidential arrogation of power.

Australians have been experiencing ‘intensified globalisation’ in the last twenty years. That is, our political leaders, ‘under the sway of neo-liberal ideology’, have made decisions that have ‘intensified’ the ‘widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide inter- connectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life’ (David Held). They have curbed the influence of arbitration and promoted enterprise bargaining and individual contracts. They have deregulated banking and capital flows, and reduced tariff protection. They have made the tax system less progressive. They have reduced spending on social welfare. And they have privatised and corporatised many government services and utilities. Moran, preoccupied with political economy, tends to take as given the technological features of ‘intensified globalisation’ (the indexer saw no reason to include ‘computer’, ‘telephone’ or ‘Internet’). His sense of globalisation resembles Paul Kelly’s account of the dissolution of the Australian Settlement. With Australians becoming more ethnically diverse and less economically secure, there are ‘feelings of vulnerability and disorientation among the populace’.

After rain at cooler times of the year, the bush is full of fungi. Fruit-bodies of mushrooms, truffles, puffballs, morels, slime moulds and other larger fungi spring forth in a great variety of shapes and colours. For select Australian fauna and flora, such as birds, reptiles or orchids, there are comprehensive and richly illustrated field guides, which have sufficient text to assist the user in putting names to species encountered. However, existing guides to Australian fungi cover a rather limited number of species, or lack text. Putting names to the multitude of fungi is therefore rather difficult.

A Field Guide to Australian Fungi, in its display of 548 splendid images, offers much promise for naming fungi. Bruce Fuhrer has a well-deserved reputation as a leading fungus photographer, through works such as A FieldCompaniontoAustralianFungi (1985). Indeed, more than fifty images are repeated from his earlier works. Fuhrer has photographed some truly magnificent specimens, of the like that might be seen but once in a lifetime. Many of the fungi have not previously been illustrated in colour, and some interesting tropical fungi are included (such as Boedijnopeziza, with its fringed wineglass fruit-body). Images can be enjoyed solely for their beauty of form and colour: as in the cascading spines of Hericiumcoralloides or in the riot of cap tints among fruit-bodies of Hygrocybearcohastata. Some images depict the truly bizarre, and anyone wanting ideas for aliens need look no further than Aseroe rubra.

Some generals in Australia’s ‘culture wars’ have appointed themselves defenders of a mythical identity against the incursions of multiculturalists and ‘black armbanders’. Literary skirmishes over national identity have been more mundane, concerning mainly eligibility for awards. Certainly, three recent crime novels suggest that Australian writing benefits from adoption of a broad definition. That these three novels vary widely in plot, setting, characterisation and style is understandable given the authors’ disparate backgrounds.

Leigh Redhead grew up in an alternative community. Rubdown is her second novel featuring narrator Simone Kirsch, ‘full time PI and part-time stripper’. Her brash first-person voice is metropolitan and cosmopolitan, but distinctly Australian. The shameless Simone solves cases with courage, luck and help from patient friends.

Broken/Open, Jill Jones’s fifth book of poems, explores the meanings of breaking and opening partly through an exploration of memories where the past is more accessible than the unexpected shocks of the present. Jones’s previous book, Screens Jets Heaven: New and Selected Poems (winner of the 2003 Kenneth Slessor Poetry Prize), contained many poems that hinted at abstraction. Broken/Open, divided into eight sections, furthers that abstraction. Journeying through sites of childhood and memory, the book’s forays into the past open out the present, particularly in the last epiphanic section. Unlike in some earlier work, where social and political comment were overt, opinions are often relegated to phrases to make context for the main drama, although one poem mirrors the plight of asylum seekers with its rudimentary finish: ‘Because I don’t belong here – being from the State of Flux – my / papers do not rhyme … // Because I don’t belong here, I know it is better and I know it is / worse’ (‘Refrains on Sand’).

It would be difficult to write an uninteresting life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94). There is the progression from the young Stevenson, so often sick and confined to bed, to the intrepid traveller full of life and vigour as he sailed the South Seas. There is the move from cold and chilly Edinburgh to the ‘warm south’ of France and to the even warmer south of the Pacific. There is the dash across the Atlantic and America to claim Fanny Osbourne as his wife. There is the spectacular popular success of works such as The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886). There is Stevenson’s death at the age of forty-four and his burial on the top of a Samoan mountain. There is even, for us in Australia, the interest of Stevenson’s visits to Sydney. On top of this wealth of incidents, biographers can draw on eight packed volumes of hugely quotable letters and a treasure trove of photographs from the earliest ones with his parents in Edinburgh to some iconic images in the South Pacific.

There is a trick to the trite title of Death by Water, the fifteenth volume in Kerry Greenwood’s series about the hedonistic 1920s private detective Phryne Fisher. Contrary to expectations, no murder occurs for more than two hundred pages. In the meantime, the nominal plot involves the hunt for a jewel thief aboard a cruise ship bound for New Zealand, but far more attention is devoted to meals, cocktails, cigarettes, clothes, dance music, maritime scenery, anthropological chit-chat and recreational sex. Literary quotes of approximate relevance head each chapter, while ratiocination occurs as an accompaniment to life’s more sensual pleasures: ‘Phryne ate a thoughtful croissant.’

As all this suggests, Greenwood’s allegiance is firmly to the ‘cosy’ school of mystery writing. Phryne may be ‘fast’, but her adventures have little connection with the hard-boiled side of Jazz Age mythology or with bright young things dancing on the edge of the abyss. One major set piece in Death by Water involves a costume ball, and the entire novel has a slapdash fancy-dress flavour: it seems unlikely that even the most advanced of flappers would describe herself as ‘blatantly heterosexual’. The real basis for the series is its mixture of contemporary political correctness and high-camp superwoman fantasy: Phryne is somewhere between a female Bond and a youthful Auntie Mame, a democratic-minded toff who never fails to maintain a fabulously soignée appearance while solving mysteries, disarming bullies, seducing one or two men per volume and dispensing advice with the aplomb of a no-nonsense schoolteacher.

In his Structure of Complex Words (1951), William Empson counted fifty-two uses of the words ‘honest’ and ‘honesty’ in Othello. Nikki Gemmell, the publicity-shy cover star of the latest edition of Meanjin, manages to cram ten references to honesty (her own) into five lachrymose pages of her essay ‘The Identity Trap’, in which she explains that she refused to publish The Bride Stripped Bare (2003) under an assumed name because ‘a pseudonym is a lie’. How comforting it is to know that a writer of fiction should be possessed of such integrity, even if she does say so herself. Gemmell’s revelation does, however, constitute a severe blow to the reputations of George Orwell, Henry Handel Richardson and those lying Brontë sisters.

Portraits of the Artist, a double issue, revisits a successful theme from two years ago. Its emphasis is on questions of identity – specifically the creation and representation of identity – both on an artistic and a personal level. The edition is split fifty-fifty between contributions dealing with the visual arts and, in its second half, essays on literary subjects. It is a terrifically diverse collection, taking in everything from cinema and cartooning to the recent Christo installation in New York’s Central Park. On the literary side of the ledger, it boasts articles on Helen Garner and Patrick (‘Uncheery Soul’) White, as well as an interview with Hannie Rayson and new fiction from Peter Goldsworthy.

The publisher’s puff to actor Michael Craig’s autobiography, a ‘fascinating, wittily wicked memoir of his life in film, theatre and television’, is unfortunate: not only is its conventional hyperbole on this occasion a cruel overstatement, but it misleadingly suggests a meaningful structuring of the events of Craig’s long career – in three media on two continents – that is nowhere apparent. Craig himself calls it more modestly a ‘rambling discourse’.

As Graeme Blundell observed recently of the autobiographer’s task, ‘Simply telling what happened rarely makes for compelling narrative. The job is to find the shape in unruly life.’ He is right: it is to massage the chronological sequence of events of a personal narrative into some sort of meaningful statement, argument or lesson perhaps. If only his editor had passed similar advice on to Craig, a ‘jobbing actor’ who has enjoyed an undeniably colourful career. He has credits in dozens of largely British films of the 1950s and 1960s, from Doctor in Love to The Cruel Sea. His extensive theatre work includes roles in provincial English weekly rep, with the Royal Shakespeare Company at one of the high points in its history, opposite Barbra Streisand in the West End production of Funny Girl and on tour with Australia’s Bell Shakespeare Company. He also played in television series as varied and well received as Doctor Who (for the BBC), The Danedyke Mystery (for Granada) and GP (for Australia’s ABC). Moreover, many episodes of these he scripted himself, among them the intensely moving The Fourth Wish and the hugely popular GP, both for the ABC.

A book we have all been waiting for, a history we have all needed, should be assured success. In the Australian museum world, such a publication should garner acclaim, yet this review will fail to deliver the praise it anticipates. My lack of enthusiasm is not because the editors have failed to do a good job. In fact, they have brought together a wide-ranging series of essays that fascinate and illuminate just as one might wish. Telling the story of the Museum’s complex history, from its foundation in 1880 as the Industrial, Technological and Sanitary Museum, which became the Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences in 1950 and, in 1988, the Powerhouse Museum, Yesterday’s Tomorrows captures the changing times and purpose of the institution.

Divided into three sections – Visions, Stories from the Collection, and Tomorrows – the essays show how the Museum began as a typical late-nineteenth-century educational institution with displays aimed at workers bettering themselves – ‘salutary instruction and technical education’ – and has changed into a supreme example of the late twentieth century’s fascination with museums as the source of the best ‘infotainment’. There is just enough history in Yesterday’s Tomorrows to document the other activities of the museum throughout its history, including branch offices sadly no longer in existence at Albury, Bathurst, Goulburn, West Maitland, Newcastle and Broken Hill, and, since 1982, the Sydney Observatory. Curiously, the several years that the Powerhouse occupied the Macquarie Street Mint in Sydney are not mentioned.

If we adopt a charitable view about political memoirs, it is generally preferable that serving or newly departed politicians should pen their reminiscences. If they are any good, it is a bonus. To have their particular ‘take’ on events and personalities is a valuable addition to the historical record, even if such products err on the side of self-indulgence and egocentricity. Most politicians, unfortunately, take their secrets with them when they go. Moreover, to write, or collaborate in, one’s memoirs while still in public office is a remarkable achievement – undertaken only by Peter Beattie and Bob Carr in recent times.

Margaret, Margarethe, Grete, Gretl, Gretele are all the same person: the biographer Helen Ennis prefaces her book and arouses our curiosity with the note that she has used the names depending on the context. Margaret Michaelis was born Margarethe Gross in 1902, in Dzieditz (Austria, later Poland); when she died in 1985, in Melbourne, she was known as Margaret Sachs. She studied photography at the Institute of Graphic Arts and Research in Vienna. In the late 1920s she worked in studios in Prague, and then Berlin. There she met and married Rudolf Michaelis, an archaeological restorer and an anarchist. After the Nazi takeover, the couple fled to Spain in 1933; they separated soon after their arrival. In Barcelona, and after 1939 in Sydney, Michaelis managed her own photographic studios. In 1960 she married Albert Sachs, a Viennese-born émigré and moved to Melbourne.

J.M. Coetzee at the National Library

‘Advances’ is often amused by prognostications about the demise or disengagement of fiction. 2005 has already proved to be an auspicious year for new Australian fiction. And there’s more to come! This month, J.M. Coetzee, the remarkable South African writer will publish his new novel, Slow Man. UK publication will follow the book’s local release by a week, though the novel has already been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. There are so many surprises in Mr Coetzee’s new novel that it would be wrong to discuss them here, except to say that the book is set in Adelaide, where he has lived for some time, and that Elizabeth Costello, the eponymous character in his previous novel, makes another appearance, bossy as ever. James Ley, who discussed J.M. Coetzee’s oeuvre in his essay ‘The Tyranny of the Literal’ in our April issue, will review the novel next month.

Last year, we had an opportunity to hear J.M. Coetzee when ABR hosted a memorable event at the Melbourne Town Hall. We are delighted to be able to do so again at the National Library of Australia on Sunday, October 23 (at 2 p.m.). ‘An Afternoon with J.M. Coetzee’ will undoubtedly sell out quickly, so you are well advised to book early. Ring the National Library on (02) 6262 1271.

The cost of this event is $15. ABR always discounts or waives charges for its subscribers. On this occasion, current subscribers are entitled to a single gratis ticket (don’t forget to cite your subscriber number). Lapsed subscribers or those who have mysteriously resisted to date should subscribe now (via ABR’s office, not the National Library). As well as receiving the Review with a considerable saving off the cover price, you also get to hear some of the world’s finest authors, including J.M. Coetzee. Go to it!

Aspects of Australian Life

Working-class settlements north of Sydney are the common setting for these two family sagas. Between them, they take us from the 1880s to 1951. Jack Wallis, who labours in a quarry in the sandstone country that gives Stephen Lacey’s book its title, is born in the early twentieth century; Edmund Shearer, a Newcastle miner of the coal or black diamonds of Greg Bogaerts’s title, nears his death by that time. Both novels might have been designed to answer recent calls for Australian writers to turn their attention to the lives of ordinary people. How many other recent novels explain to working-class readers how their own parents and grandparents, not those of the social élite, thought and acted? Where else, for instance, could today’s renovators read about how their progenitors built their own homes?

Anne Manne’s book Motherhood: How Should We Care for Our Children? arguably makes the greatest contribution to the work–family debate in Australia in years. Manne has drawn on a huge range of resources – philosophical, psychological, sociological, economic and political – to create a thesis that shows a way out of the current quagmire of work–family relations.

These novels fulfil the brief of ANU’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, where Pandanus Press was founded in 2001, by viewing Australia and Australians from the perspectives of China and a distant island. In The Tao of Shepherding, set in the 1850s, two young Chinese men are kidnapped and sold as labourers to a Riverina sheep property, where they lose all hope of returning to civilisation. The Lost Tribe is mellower, in that the Pacific is crossed in both directions in its counter-pointed narratives, one set in the present and the other in the 1860s. These second novels, by promising Australian authors with direct knowledge of the countries depicted in them, offer insights into cross-cultural interactions, myths and religion.

Jack Lang was born to a poor watchmaker’s family in Sydney in 1876. He was twice premier of NSW and founder of two breakaway Labor parties. Lang lives on in the popular imagination as that hapless figure at the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1932, upstaged when the sword-wielding Captain de Groot of the right-wing New Guard rode in and slashed Lang’s official opening ribbon. De Groot’s ribbon-slashing wins passing notice in Frank Cain’s story of Jack Lang. Very little else in Lang’s life does. His youthful encounters with socialism during the 1890s Depression, his marriage to Hilda Bredt – daughter of feminist–socialist Bertha Bredt – or his success as a real estate agent in Auburn are not important in this story, for Cain places Lang firmly within a framework of economic and constitutional history.

So much has been said or written about Indonesia’s political changes since 1998 it might be thought that there was little original that could be added. Then along comes Angus McIntyre with his own particular interpretation of Indonesian politics. McIntyre has long been interested in the psychological make-up of Indonesia’s political leaders and has written some fine papers on the subject, the core of which are in his new book, The Indonesian Presidency: The Shift from Personal toward Constitutional Rule. His approach has been to examine the personalities of dominant individuals as a key explanatory factor in Indonesian politics. As a conceptual counter to Richard Robison and Vedi Hadiz’s recent book, Reorganising Power in Indonesia (2004), McIntyre’s approach similarly begs the question as to whether it is structure or agency that shapes events. In this, McIntyre almost entirely ignores structure, at least beyond the malleable Indonesian constitution.

It is easy to understand two New York naturalists becoming fascinated with a thylacine. Margaret Mittelbach and Michael Crewdson discovered one, stuffed and mounted, in Manhattan’s American Museum of Natural History, and began to visit it with ‘something akin to amorous fervour’. It’s equally easy to understand how this rare specimen, with its ‘glorious Seussian stripes’ and tragically fascinating mythology, inspired the pair to travel to Tasmania to learn more about its origins. What is more difficult to understand is why, once Mittelbach and Crewdson had surveyed the existing literature on the thylacine, they pressed on to write and publish Carnivorous Nights: On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger instead of deciding that the story had been well and truly told. On my bookshelves are Tasmanian Tiger: A Lesson to Be Learnt by Eric Guiler and Philippe Godard (1998), and David Owen’s Thylacine (2003). Close by are two novels, Heather Rose’s White Heart (1999) and Julia Leigh’s The Hunter (1999), that pursue the tiger into fictional territory. Since these are just a fraction of the books already written on the subject, I would have thought that any new tiger book would have something significant to add to the story. Carnivorous Nights, unfortunately, does not.

The title of this biography evokes one element of Tom Hungerford’s rich and complex character, but fails to acknowledge his stature as a writer. Hungerford had long felt that he had not been given due recognition for his substantial contribution to Australian literature. Formal recognition came at last in 2003, when he was given the Patrick White Award, which was established to honour writers whose work has not been recognised sufficiently. This year, a few weeks after his ninetieth birthday, Hungerford became the Western Australian Citizen of the Year; this acknowledged his wider contribution to the community.

The tragedy of Israel is that it wishes, simultaneously, to be a liberal democratic nation, one whose citizenship is defined by universal norms, and at the same time a Jewish state, where even Palestinians born within the borders of the country are denied full equality. I still remember my unease when I visited Israel many years ago at being asked when I, a secular Jew, intended to ‘come home’.

‘There is no pleasure in travelling,’ Albert Camus jotted in his notebook while in the Balearic Isles one summer. ‘It is more an occasion for spiritual testing.’ Pleasure, he argued, leads us away from ourselves; travel, which he considered part of the eternal search for ‘culture’, always brings us back to ourselves.

When Cate Kennedy left rural Victoria for an extended posting in Mexico with Australian Volunteers International, she was motivated by a desire for a challenge. Her gaze was fixed on a new cultural horizon. Sing, and Don’t Cry documents Kennedy’s time working for URAC, a microcredit co-operative providing a secure savings and loans system for campesino peasant communities. Based in the town of Tequisquiapan, Kennedy and her co-workers’ role is not limited to financial administration. They travel large distances to coordinate savings meetings, run nutrition and child health seminars, and deliver livestock – even at one point hosting a public meeting with members of the infamous Zapatista resistance movement.

In ‘Glenlyon’, the opening poem of his most recent collection, Tremors: New and Selected Poems, Andrew Sant provides readers with clues about his approach to poetry. ‘Glenlyon’ speaks of the ‘cool light’ of the page and ‘my shadow’s / hovering vague shape’. Certainly, Sant’s presence is invested in much of his work and his poetry prizes coolness and clarity. While he is sometimes a passionate poet, this passion is rarely overt and it is balanced by a determination to make good argument out of his poetic material and by a characteristically reasonable tone.

The federal government maintains that it has no obligation to monitor the fate of non-citizens removed from Australia’s shores. In fact, it argues that it is better not to monitor returnees, since surveillance by a Western government might put them at greater risk. In certain circumstances this may be true: in a theocracy such as Iran, for example, where the very act of leaving renders a citizen suspect. In the main, however, the government’s argument is self-serving. The fate of Australian citizen Vivian Alvarez Solon, left to decline slowly in a Philippines hospice, shines a more revealing light on policy. It shows that Australian authorities have cultivated a determined indifference to the fate of deportees on the basis that ignorance is bliss. No care, no responsibility.

Judi Farr – one of the fourteen interviewees who appear in Terence Crawford’s Trade Secrets: Australian Actors and Their Craft – reflects on the unpredictable nature of performance, and on the way in which an actor can become so immersed in a role and so apparently truthful to the emotion of the moment that, contrary to what we might expect, the connection with the audience is broken rather than reinforced. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘you can do a play where tears will be pouring down your face, but you haven’t really affected anyone.’ Wendy Hughes makes a similar point: she recalls having to cry for a scene in a Paul Cox film, and how she prepared herself by getting deeply into the mood beforehand. During the first take, the tears flowed, and everything ‘felt so real’. Then she went through the scene again, but this time she ‘didn’t feel it the same and didn’t cry as much’. When the takes were compared afterwards, Hughes was struck by the fact that the one in which it all felt ‘really real’ was not the best. ‘The other one where I was in control was better.’

In the last couple of decades, the disciplines of philosophy, psychology and neuroscience (and perhaps others, such as law) have witnessed intensified interest in the emotions. In cognitive psychology and neuroscience, several developments, especially advances in computational modelling and new brain-imaging techniques, brought early successes in understanding important aspects of perceptual and cognitive processes. Partly because it became clear that these processes were not as independent of the affective, volitional and appetitive faculties as the classical division of mind suggested, it wasn’t long before scientific researchers turned to the emotions (and the other peskier faculties). Most readers will be familiar with some of the recent popular works on emotion by distinguished neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio and J. LeDoux.

The Grave at Thu Le explores a young French woman’s visit to Vietnam to research her ancestry, and to locate the cemetery in which members of her family were interred. Catherine D’anyers’s great-great-grandfather Claude was an engineer who lived in the colonial community in Hanoi at the turn of the last century. Past and present strands of the novel interweave as old, childhood stories of yester-year are overlaid with contemporary realities of Vietnam.

ABR welcomes letters from our readers. Correspondents should note that letters may be edited. Letters and emails must reach us by the middle of the current month, and must include a telephone number for verification.