The 2019 federal election result confirmed that housing prices, upward mobility, tax cuts, and limited immigration are powerful motivators for Australian voters. Peter Polites’s second novel, The Pillars, with its themes of social and material advancement in Sydney’s western suburbs, captures this spirit of the time perfectly. Pano, the main character, studies people – those better off, more favoured, those who thrive and make it look easy – and wants a better life for himself. Tertiary educated and an avid observer, Pano has studied the habits, codes, dress, and attitudes that will disguise his second-generation Greek migrant status. He knows how to read a room and knows the room is always reading him, right down to his choice of labels, how he grooms himself and his vocabulary.

A struggling writer and poet, Pano has left his Bankstown roots to live in the new, cookie-cut suburb of Pemulwuy in western Sydney. The houses are identical; the gardens are sparse; the roads have no potholes; neighbours rarely meet. Named after an Eora man, the historical Pemulwuy was a warrior in Australia’s bloody but unrecognised frontier wars. Insights into Australia’s complex history abound in the novel and include the dispossession of the owners of the land, ruthless land speculation, bushranger hangings, waves of immigration, interclass struggles, and a constantly shifting palette of faiths, colours, and social conventions.

Pemulwuy is a place of aspiration, a community gated not by walls but by the force of will of its homeowners to keep property values high. It is a suburb where Australians escaping their class and second-generation migrants escaping their families dream of social advancement and erase inconvenient facts from their past. Here, Pano can maintain his mask as an aspirational urban gay, while spying on residents in their houses at night.

The inciting incident in Josephine Rowe’s short story ‘Glisk’ (winner of the 2016 Jolley Prize) unpacks in an instant. A dog emerges from the scrub and a ute veers into oncoming traffic. A sedan carrying a mother and two kids swerves into the safety barrier, corroded by the salt air, and disappears over a sandstone bluff. Three-quarters of a family are erased. And it all happens ‘in a glisk’, Fynn, the driver of the ute, will say years later.

After the hearing, in which he is acquitted, Fynn either ‘ran, slunk, snuck, crawled, choofed off, fucked off, hauled arse or simply went’ – depending on who is doing the telling – to the Northern Isles of Scotland to lose himself in ‘some shit-kicking work’ at a whisky distillery. Back in Perth, the narrator of the story, Fynn’s younger half-brother Raf has married and become a cytologist. One Saturday morning in January six summers later, Fynn resurfaces with his duffel bag and bomber jacket, his blond hair greying at the temples and gone to seed. He’s missed the mining boom, the ice boom, the rehab boom. He missed his father’s bypass. Fynn has come back to confess what really happened that day at the bluff. The truth, like all gifts, conceals within it a burden.

Rowe writes about place and memory with a potency that pitches beauty against its wreckage. By day, an island looks like ‘a rough dog slouching up from the ocean’; after sunset the ‘putrid birds’ and ‘bogans sinking tinnies’ are obscured by nightfall. Perched on a high bluff in a sprawl of blankets, a young Raf witnesses a swarm of bioluminescent phytoplankton ‘on their anxious, brilliant way to who-knows-where’. It is an ‘eerie sort of magic’ he knows he will never see again. But this, Raf tells us, is not the point.

Rowe is an author deeply concerned with the human animal. Bioluminescence is mere ornamentation in her larger purpose, which is to stage the ‘bright migratory-animalness’ of a family wading to island during a neap tide. At the deepest point of the crossing, their makeshift raft breaks apart and Fynn scoops his little sister onto his shoulders. Seawater, stinking of dead things, fills his nose and mouth. He delivers his sister to dry sand and, when his mother turns away, regurgitates seawater onto a patch of salt brush. His legs, Raf sees, are quaking and lashed by stingers. The future hasn’t happened yet and everyone still has a chance to live.

Andrew McGahan’s final book, The Rich Man’s House, opens with an apology. ‘It’s a finished novel – I wouldn’t be letting it out into the world if it wasn’t – but I can’t deny that my abrupt decline in health has forced the publishers and I to hurry the rewriting and editing process extremely, and that this is not quite the book it would have been had cancer not intervened … for once I can fairly plead – I was really going to fix that!’

Exactly how long before his death from pancreatic cancer in February 2019 these words were written isn’t clear, but McGahan’s concern was unfounded. While it’s impossible to say what changes he might have made had he had more time, the novel as it stands feels neither rushed nor unfinished.

At its heart is the brooding physical presence of an imaginary mountain rising from the Southern Ocean between Antarctica and Australia. Christened the Red Wall by Captain Cook, but now known as ‘the Wheel’ due to a typographical error in the first edition of Cook’s Journal, the mountain is of truly astonishing proportions: more than fifteen kilometres taller than Everest, taller even than the vast Olympus Mons on Mars, it rises almost twenty-five kilometres above sea level, stretching far up into the stratosphere, its top so high it can be seen only indistinctly from its base.

A bookseller, Trevor, sits in his shop in Melbourne making conversation with his customers: an exasperating mixture of confessional, hesitant, deranged, and disruptive members of the public. One man stalks him, armed with an outrageous personal demand; another tries to apologise for assaulting him. The apology is almost as unnerving as the attack. The bookshop is a kind of theatre, with a ceiling mirror reflecting the tops of Trevor’s customer’s heads. Trevor has a seat onstage at ground level, and a seat in the gods. Elizabeth, a book editor, steadies herself against his windows as she begins to faint. His book display is not responsible for this partial loss of consciousness; she has a medical problem and Trevor offers her a cup of tea.

This is the dramatic set-up of Philip Salom’s latest novel, The Returns, a tightly plotted story with a knowing and satirical edge. Salom is a Melbourne writer, initially known for his exceptional poetry, which has won notable prizes, including the Commonwealth Poetry Book Prize – twice. He made a seamless transition from poet to novelist in 1991. The Returns is his fourth novel, following the successful publication of Waiting (2016), which was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

With Wolfe Island, Lucy Treloar joins a growing number of novelists whose fiction is marked by anthropogenic catastrophe. Her latest offering confronts two urgent global crises: the climate emergency, and the plight of refugees. Treloar reveals startling connections between the two through the shared thread of displacement in a work that is more than powerful: it’s transformative.

Treloar’s second novel is as impressive and haunting as her award-winning début, Salt Creek (2015), and just as bleak. While Salt Creek looked unflinchingly into the past, Wolfe Island turns its steady gaze towards the future. Common to both works is the notion that, ‘You cannot outrun the past. It will gather itself and find you.’ That Treloar handles dystopian fiction as deftly as historical fiction is proof of her exceptional talents.

The absorbing narrative is structured in three parts – The Island, Journeys, Home. Narrator Kitty Hawke is the last resident of Wolfe, a sinking island turned marshland. She and her wolfdog, Girl, lead an isolated but peaceful life, attuned to the island’s subtlest moods. Kitty fossicks around the shore, ‘mudlarking’, turning debris into sculptures. Her life changes when unexpected visitors arrive, among them her granddaughter, Cat. They are on the run, desperate for sanctuary for reasons that unravel as the novel progresses. What follows is their hair-raising voyage through a land rife with danger. ‘Hell, darlin’, the law don’t even care about the law these days,’ opines one gun-wielding vigilante. But Kitty carries a gun of her own.

The most charismatic of the many monsters in Elizabeth Bryer’s début novel is the conceptual artist Maddison Worthington, who commands attention with her lipstick of ‘Mephistophelian red’ and her perfume of ‘white woods, musk and heliotrope’. From the solitude of a labyrinthine mansion, Worthington devises headline-grabbing installations, and performances that often incorporate hidden-camera footage of her audiences. Her ideas, though provocative, are largely stolen from her assistants or from little-known artists in developing countries. Worst of all, Worthington has accepted a lucrative – some would say Faustian – commission from the Department of Immigration for a project called ‘Excise Our Hearts’.

Far-fetched? Perhaps. Emma Cox’s excellent 2015 study, Performing Noncitizenship, shows that artistic responses to Australia’s post-2001 border regime have, almost by definition, been supportive of asylum seekers and critical of the government. The real question about this corpus of well-intentioned activist art, Cox suggest, is how effectively it advances the interests of asylum seekers. Does a given representation question the conceptual foundation of illegal non-citizenship in Australia, or does it accept the terms of debate and simply consolidate artists, and audiences’ visions of themselves as ethical Australians? To dismiss Worthington’s anti-asylum art project as improbable, then, misses the point. The policy reality in this area long ago passed into territory that exceeds novelistic imagination. For example, the notion that the entire Australian continent could be ‘excised’ from the migration zone for the purpose of boat arrivals might have seemed implausible until it became law in 2013.

One of the few advantages a contemporary writer of historical fiction has derives from working in a context with laxer censorship laws. Representations of sexuality and violence once proscribed can be incorporated to better approach the social conditions of the period. With regard to narratives about Australia’s convict history, Marcus Clarke’s For the Term of His Natural Life was written after transportation had ceased to the eastern Australian colonies, while farther west Fenian convict John Boyle O’Reilly’s Moondyne was published after he had escaped from Western Australia and found sanctuary in the United States.

Reader interest in the convict period has never flagged, however. More recently, Jock Serong’s magnificent Preservation (2018), together with Peter Cochrane’s terrific The Making of Martin Sparrow (2018) and Rohan Wilson’s award-winning double act of The Roving Party (2011) and To Name Those Lost (2017), are nuanced and comprehensive readings of the barbarism visited upon both the convicts themselves but also upon Australia’s First Nations peoples.

Catherine Jinks’s Shepherd, which was shortlisted for the 2018 Text Prize for Young Adult and Children’s Writing, similarly evokes the terrible conditions of the frontier for both convict and Aboriginal subject alike, in the cloth of a highly readable, richly characterised, beautifully written novel. Much like Wilson’s To Name Those Lost, which draws suspense from a central chase plotline, Shepherd too is structured around a pivotal incident, which sets off a chain of violent events and maintains its narrative intrigue from a sustained pursuit.

Playwright and author Lucy Caldwell raises the issue of national identity early in her introduction to this long-running anthology series. She grew up in Belfast but lives in London. Her children sing Bengali nursery rhymes and celebrate Eid. She holds two passports, neither of which adequately captures who she is.

‘I feel apologetic and fraudulent to varying degrees, depending on who I’m with, or where I’m going.’ ‘Who is more Irish?’ she asks. Is it the writer born in Ireland who consciously chooses not to live there, or the writer born elsewhere who moves to the island? What about the writer born outside of Ireland whose parents maintain their link to the country through songs, St Patrick’s Day, and a romanticised sense of patriotism for a place they may have never visited? Or, in a scenario that will be recognisable to many contemporary Australian authors: ‘A writer born in Ireland to parents from elsewhere, who constantly has to answer the deathly question, No, but where are you really from?’

The right to identity in a world of porous borders is arguably the greatest philosophical issue of our times. Caldwell chooses an all-encompassing approach in her author selection, commissioning stories from born-and-bred residents like Kevin Barry and Sally Rooney alongside expats Adrian McKinty, Eimear McBride, and Kit De Waal. We are also treated to work from new arrivals, notably Arja Kajermo (Finland), Melatu Uche Okorie (Nigeria), and Chinese sensation Yan Ge.

In The Old Lie, Claire G. Coleman has given herself a right of reply to her award-winning début novel, Terra Nullius (2017). Here, she strips away some of the racial ambiguity of the human–alien invasion allegory of that novel and leaves in its place a meaty analysis of colonisation and imperialism.

The Old Lie is also a hoot, a rollick through both sci-fi and speculative fiction. While some early action sequences may leave the reader scurrying for purchase in a vacuum not unlike the great yawn of space, they reflect the confusion of war and displacement. Although it strands us, as bodies boil or suffocate and planets succumb, it has the merit of making her readers work hard – encoding revelation after revelation about contemporary realities into a knotted, visceral plot.

Democracy won the Cold War. As East Germans breached the Berlin Wall in November 1989 to screams of joy, a young KGB officer watched the concrete crash to the ground. Systematically, he destroyed sensitive Soviet diplomatic papers in the East Berlin embassy. Ten years later, that KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, would launch his own quiet counter-revolution and re-establish dictatorship in Russia.

‘Illiberal democracy’ has become reality. From Washington to Budapest, political leaders seek to abrogate constitutionalism. In some cases, they do so with voters’ implicit or explicit consent. Boris Johnson, the new British Prime Minister, has intimated that he might prorogue Parliament in order to implement Brexit in the absence of the Commons’ approval. Like their twentieth-century predecessors, some contemporary European democracies have deconsolidated into illiberalism; Viktor Orbán in Hungary eulogises ‘Christian values’; in France, the twice-divorced presidential hopeful, Marine Le Pen, preaches Catholic conservatism precisely because it differentiates ‘French’ Christians from ‘non-French’ Muslims.

Liberal democracy is a hybrid form of governance, with a rule-of-law system and separate executive, legislative, and judicial institutions. The legal system forms a nexus with a human-rights framework, governed by a constitutionally limited executive government. Liberal thought preceded true democracy by more than two centuries in Britain; universal suffrage for women was only achieved in 1918, somewhat later than Australia.

Sheri Berman traces the history of democratisation and dictatorship in Europe from the ancien régime to the postwar period. Her thesis explains how individual liberties and human rights are constantly under challenge from both the extreme left and the far right. From the seventeenth-century English Revolution to National Socialist Germany, reform movements and unstable democracies are exceedingly vulnerable to a coup d’état by a well-organised dictator. The dictators have many faces, but the mechanics of oppression remain constant: the republican military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell; Napoleon’s First Empire; and the scientific war machines created by Fascism, Nazism, and Soviet socialism. Rhetorically, both Stalinism and Nazism were stridently anti-Semitic, anti-intellectual, and anti-capitalist; in practice, they were united in their totalitarian vison of the complete suppression of individual rights.

Everyone knows about the final days of Adolf Hitler – his abject suicide in a clammy Berlin bunker. Many prominent Nazis followed suit, including the master propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who broadcast messages to the public espousing the virtue of death over defeat. His wife, Magdalena, wrote: ‘Our glorious idea is ruined, and with it everything beautiful, admirable, noble and good that I have known in my life. The world that will come after the Führer and National Socialism won’t be worth living in, so I have taken the children with me.’ There were six of them, all killed with cyanide.

But what of the everyday people? This is the subject of Florian Huber’s Promise Me You’ll Shoot Yourself: The mass suicides of ordinary Germans in 1945, a 2015 bestseller in Germany now translated into English by Imogen Taylor. Huber, an author and documentary filmmaker, examines the tens of thousands of Germans who took their own lives in 1945 – mostly in eastern states, where the much-feared Red Army was brutally advancing (some two million German women were raped during this time).

The first part of the book, Huber’s strongest, focuses on the small north-eastern town of Demmin. From April 30 to May 3, some 700 to 1,000 people took their own lives there – men and women, young and old, Nazi Party members and non-members. Abandoned by the German army, which burned the bridges behind them, Demmin’s civilians were stranded. Corpses filled the rivers and woods; many of those who committed suicide killed their children as well.

Unlike an autobiography, which tends to be time-bound and inclusive, the memoir can wander at will in the writer’s past, searching out and shaping an idea of self. Although Geoffrey Blainey’s memoir, Before I Forget, is restricted to the first forty years of his life, its skilfully chosen episodes suggest much more. The memoir shows how Blainey set his own course as a historian and forecasts the brilliant but sometimes unexpected career that he achieved.

As a maker of memorable phrases, Blainey has few equals. As well as ‘the tyranny of distance’, which comes from one of his book titles, he has given us the ‘black armband’ view of Australia’s past and its ‘three cheers’ antithesis. His account of childhood is one of difficulties overcome without fuss. No black armbands in his private story, no regrets or complaints. He is too polite to give himself more than two cheers.

Blainey’s narrative celebrates the pleasures and challenges of growing up in rural and provincial Victoria in the 1930s and early 1940s. The second in a family of five, he was the son of a Methodist minister who earned a meagre stipend in several small towns before being moved to Geelong and Ballarat. Nurtured by loving parents, the young Geoffrey was favoured by a lucky chance that brought him to the city, and to early and dazzling success.

Always an avid reader of newspapers, Blainey discovered a scholarship that seemed made to measure for him. The winner had to be a thirteen-year-old son of a Methodist minister, living more than forty-eight kilometres from Melbourne. As well as a free place as a boarder at Wesley College, Melbourne, it offered an allowance for textbooks, weekly pocket money, and train fares home. Geoffrey’s parents were doubtful about sending their son into a less religious environment among boys from affluent homes, but they allowed him to travel to Melbourne to sit for the exam. ‘I went by myself,’ Blainey writes, as if to assert some agency in this magical windfall.

Hearing Maud begins and ends with the notion that the narrator’s life has been defined by a pharmakon, an ancient Greek term denoting something that is both poison and cure. This subtle and more complex version of the ‘gift or loss’ dilemma common in disability memoirs avoids oppositional thinking and embraces instead paradox and nuance. This is typical of Jessica White’s remarkable work of creative non-fiction, which is a sophisticated hybrid of memoir, biography, and critical disability studies.

White’s initial pharmakon is the dose of antibiotics used to treat her meningitis at age four, which leaves her with almost no hearing. Over time, White realises that deafness, too, can be both poison and cure. It takes many years, and an exploration of the history of deaf education and the life of Maud Praed, before she can understand and accept the true significance of the pharmakon motif in her life.

Maud Praed (1874–1941) was the daughter of Australian novelist Rosa Campbell Praed (1851–1935). It was during her doctoral research in London after reading Rosa Praed’s novels that White discovered in the archives that Rosa’s daughter, Maud, was born deaf. This fascinated White, who undertook more detailed research in the United Kingdom and Australia to discover all she could about the lives of both mother and daughter. White’s unfolding of their unusual lives is wonderfully done. The historical details she conveys are never boring, and she is scrupulous about indicating when she is using imaginative reconstruction. Here, for example, she imagines the scene for a séance: ‘I imagine Rosa in Dowden’s drawing room in 15 Cheyne Gardens in Chelsea. The London light, extraordinarily strong for a May afternoon, pours through the French windows.’ In such instances, White provides endnotes indicating her sources, as she does for all the factual information in the book.

In an era of dogmatism, polarisation, and intolerance, visible on both the right and left wings of politics, liberalism needs more love. Part of its image problem is a widespread perplexity about what values and principles it really stands for. In different times and places, liberalism has meant many different, even contradictory, things. There are, among others, British and American traditions of liberalism (dating back to the 1830s and the 1930s, respectively), varied liberal traditions in continental Europe, and still others in Latin America, while in Australia our so-called Liberal Party is firmly perched on the centre-right of the political spectrum (where it has nothing obvious to do with the ideas of, say, Benjamin Constant or John Stuart Mill).

In A Thousand Small Sanities, the New Yorker essayist Adam Gopnik acknowledges this confusion. At one point, he compares liberalism to a rhinoceros: an ungainly, imperfect, and superficially unattractive sort of animal – yet real enough, unlike a pretty unicorn, and effective at what it does. Gopnik explains that liberalism’s values include liberty, equality, and democracy, as well as tolerance, kindness, pluralism, self-realisation, and autonomy. Among its principles are freedom of speech, judicial independence, and, more generally, the rule of law. My own list of liberal values and principles might be slightly different, but Gopnik’s is a pretty good starting point.

Gopnik argues that the essence of liberalism is not centrist but radically reformist. It aims at removing the many sorts of cruelty that mar human societies, and this requires large changes to practices and institutions. However, liberals seek reforms over time, through constant small steps supported at each stage by discussion and debate, rather than through revolutionary upheavals. Furthermore, liberalism is conciliatory rather than triumphalist. As Gopnik points out, it accommodates the interests of as many people as it can, even, where possible, those of its defeated opponents.

One of the strongest markers of identity in my birthplace, Iceland, is the idea of independence. The country takes great pride in how it reacquired full independence from Denmark in 1944; one of the main political parties is called the Independence Party, and the most famous Icelandic novel is Independent People by Halldór Laxness. Being an independent-minded person is seen as a defining quality. But I have often felt that only a small country in which everyone is either related or closely connected could be so strident about being independent. In almost all respects the opposite is true.

It would probably be unfair to compare Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906) with a rocky island in the North Atlantic. But as I was reading Ivo de Figueiredo’s captivating new biography of the playwright, I was struck by how Ibsen was rather like Iceland in some of his insistences. The ‘state of Ibsen’, as de Figueiredo puts it, was convinced of its own isolation, as certain as Ibsen’s character Dr Stockmann (in An Enemy of the People) is that ‘the strongest man in the world is he who stands most alone’. The portrait of Ibsen that emerges in this book is of a man who saw himself and his artistic practice in this way. He preferred to examine from the outside rather than from within, and felt that he was writing for eternity rather than as a reflection of his times. He was often unpleasant with his friends and colleagues, and harsh towards his critics and competitors. When living in Italy, Ibsen even kept a scorpion under a beer glass on his desk, seemingly a reminder of his role as a writer: to strike poison where society needed it.

Philip Johnson – lagging well behind the founding fathers – may not be the most profound architect of the twentieth century. Nor does he have the resonance of Louis Kahn or the form-changing genius of Frank Gehry, among his contemporaries. Yet the pattern of twentieth-century architecture cannot be fully understood without him. Mark Lamster’s biography lodges him vividly in that pattern. A critical biographer in every sense, Lamster appears overly concerned not to let the charming, wise, and witty Johnson pull the wool over his eyes. A disparaging undertone accompanies much of his commentary. ‘Johnson was moved by aesthetics, not the travails of working men and women – especially if they were Catholic or Jewish – a condition foreign to his experience.’

At eighteen, Johnson’s life was fundamentally changed. His father settled his fortune on his three children. Philip received a large parcel of stock in the Aluminum Company of America, now Alcoa. By the time he left Harvard in 1927, he was a millionaire when the word still meant something. Alfred North Whitehead had dissuaded him from pursuing a life in philosophy. Johnson, a rich young man in search of a life, found it in the architecture of Europe, most notably the discovery of modernism in the work of J.J.P. Oud, the Dutch architect who deserves relief from his obscurity.

Back in America, Johnson made two important friendships: with the young Alfred H. Barr Jr, poised to become the founding Director of the Museum of Modern Art, and with Henry-Russell Hitchcock, the architectural historian. Why not include a department of architecture in the new museum, Johnson boldly proposed? The Bauhaus had been an inspiration to Barr as he framed MoMA, and he readily assented, especially as Johnson would fund the department himself.

In the foundation Jean Blackburn Memorial Lecture in 2014, David Gonski observed that Australian schooling was unfairly funded – that the money wasn’t going where it was needed. To our national shame, this is not a new phenomenon. Successive governments in Australia have adopted school-funding policies for which there has been little educational justification and which have contributed to the profound inequality of our schools.

But it could have been different. What if our governments had believed that no children or young people should be held back from a good education because of the circumstances of their parents or the under-resourcing of their schools? What if our governments had decided to fund the public education system to make it among the best in the world? Some parents would still have chosen private schools, but most would have stayed with the public ones, making sure their taxes were used for a schooling system that provided a fair go for all.

When reiterating the arguments that Jean Blackburn had made forty years earlier, Gonski referred to the continuing relevance of her contribution to an ambition still not yet achieved – a schooling system that offers all children and youth access to the finest liberal education possible.

Craig Campbell and Debra Hayes have done education in Australia a service by undertaking a biography of Jean Blackburn. Readers who have not heard of Blackburn and who care about education in Australia, as well as readers who know of her leadership in educational reform, will learn much from this book. Readers interested in a social and cultural history of Australia, through the lens of education, from the Depression through World War II, postwar reconstruction, the Cold War, the Whitlam era, and the rise of neo-liberalism in the late 1980s will also not be disappointed.

It can be revelatory to read the original words of a famous writer and thus meet them on the page. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) has been so much quoted and written about that it might be rare even for his admirers to be exposed to his original prose at length and in context. It is a rewarding experience, especially when the writer cared so much for the ‘melody’ of his sentences. Humboldt was a scientist unembarrassed by lyricism and remarkable for his confluence of empiricism and emotion, science and poetry. Therefore, it is welcome to have this almost 800-page anthology of his six most popular and influential writings, published to mark the 250th anniversary of his birth, and edited and introduced by his biographer, Andrea Wulf.

Humboldt was described by contemporaries as the most famous man in the world after Napoleon. He was a spellbinding lecturer and an electric dinner companion; he so fizzed with ideas that he was ‘steaming like a pot full of boiling water’. Some said he was like a meteor that whizzed through the room. Humboldt became a guiding influence on Charles Darwin, a stimulus to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a hero of George Perkins Marsh, an inspiration to Henry David Thoreau, a foundation for Rachel Carson’s ecological vision, and a precursor of James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia’ (Humboldt’s book Cosmos was initially titled Gäia). He remains essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the unity of nature and the integration of science and the humanities. Instead of dividing animals and plants into taxonomic units, Humboldt studied nature as a global force and as ‘a living whole, not a dead aggregate’. His global perspective alerted him to the destructive power of humans on the environment, even on the climate.

The formative experience of Humboldt’s life was his five-year expedition to Latin America from 1799 to 1804. With his travel companion, French botanist Aimé Bonpland, Humboldt set out to experience the ‘grand, wild nature’ of ‘the torrid zone’. It was a daring and dangerous adventure: when exploring the Orinoco River, he was flung from his capsized boat into a stream full of crocodiles (but still managed to rescue his diary). When he happened upon a jaguar in the jungle, he recalled, ‘There are moments in life when it is useless to call upon reason. I was very scared.’ Thankfully for the future of world science, he did not run from the big cat but walked steadily to safety. They travelled 10,000 kilometres through rainforests and volcanic ranges, bringing home forty-five cases of specimens, including 60,000 plants. But Humboldt’s central purpose was to collect ideas rather than things. He carried an array of instruments from Europe with which he recorded and measured everything.

Domestic violence and rape are not easy topics to write or read about. It’s not just because of the subject matter itself, as grim and distressing as the details can be. The writer must grapple with centuries of cultural baggage, competing theorisations and research paradigms, and the politicisation of these issues, for better or worse. They have responsibilities to those affected, including among their readership, and there may be legalities to navigate. There’s the question of what language to use; some terms – like ‘domestic violence’ – may no longer be fit for purpose, if they ever were, while others – like ‘rape’ – retain a rhetorical power that can flatten out the complexities. Statistics, inevitably, must be presented but also qualified and carefully deployed. Persistent myths and assumptions should, at the least, be dutifully considered. Gender, of course, has to be reckoned with, including in relation to class, race, and religion. Looming over all of these concerns are overarching questions – what’s the intervention here, is it useful, and who will pay attention?

Walkley Award-winning investigative journalist Jess Hill spent four consuming years researching domestic violence, or ‘domestic abuse’, a term she convincingly prefers because in ‘some of the worst abusive relationships, physical violence is rare, minor or barely present’. To elucidate both the range of behaviours that encompass domestic abuse and their astonishing uniformity across different families and relationships (as though plucked from what she calls ‘the perpetrator’s handbook’), Hill spoke to survivors and perpetrators, experts and activists. She sifted through decades of research to distil the main approaches to comprehending domestic abuse. This included canvassing explanations for the higher rates of family violence in Aboriginal communities where, as she notes, Indigenous women are thirty-five times more likely to be hospitalised and eleven times more likely to die from their injuries. Children, oft-neglected in or peripheral to previous studies, are given a dedicated chapter, but they are present throughout. Current legal options for dealing with domestic abuse, namely the police and the courts, are scrutinised and revealed as mostly failing. The Family Court system, in particular, is nightmarishly depicted. With cautious optimism, Hill offers examples of positive initiatives from within Australia and across the world. See What You Made Me Do is a thorough, thoughtful, solutions-oriented examination that demands to be taken seriously.

In her new book, Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo, an English-language translation and revision of the 2016 German first edition, writer and cultural commentator Mithu Sanyal takes a radically different approach to her subject than Hill. Both writers are obviously feminists, but Hill’s exemplary reportage stands in contrast to Sanyal’s more freewheeling and self-consciously provocative style. The title ambitiously suggests a sweeping history that takes us from a foundational ‘rape myth’ through to the contemporary moment. But Sanyal is no historian, though she does draw substantially on Joanna Bourke’s Rape: A history from 1860 to the present (2008), a deeply researched and thought-provoking work I would recommend to any reader seeking out the historical approach Sanyal’s title references, but only intermittently provides. Rape is instead an emphatically contemporary book, primarily concerned with joining in on and extending current conversations about rape and ‘rape culture’, a loaded term she dissects with some skill. Rape may be a depressing subject, Sanyal writes in her introduction, but ‘this doesn’t have to a be a depressing book’. On this front, Sanyal delivers. Hers is a rather jaunty book, in the mode of Laura Kipnis or Laurie Penny, two feminist commentators she quotes liberally throughout.

Jess Hill (photograph via Black Inc.)Given the heightened visibility of both domestic violence and sexual assault in recent years, both books are obviously timely publications. This is a point each author makes more than once, Hill somewhat hyperbolically in her introduction. ‘For the first time in history,’ she declares, ‘we have summoned the courage to confront domestic abuse.’ In Australia, the horrific murder in 2014 of eleven-year-old Luke Batty in broad daylight was the ‘decisive turning point’, eventually leading to the Royal Commission into Family Violence in Victoria, the most comprehensive political response to the problem thus far. But as Hill also recognises, the current moment is not unique insofar as, for decades now, violence in the home has circled in and out of public consciousness as a serious issue in need of attention. In some ways, we’ve gone backwards. The system of emergency refuge for women and children fleeing violence is ‘practically broken’, and governments have stopped properly investing in affordable housing. New technologies have produced new forms of coercive control. While maintaining a firm grip of essential details and a carefully calibrated narrative, Hill does not hold back from sharing her own despair at the lack of options available or her fury at failures in policing and social services that have sometimes led to death. Hers is a book to shake readers out of their complacency, not through sensationalising the issue but by doing the necessary work of giving every essential facet of the problem due consideration.

As feminists, Hill and Sanyal are necessarily invested in the larger project of cultural change, which they both recognise takes time and must include men. In various ways, they each extend, complicate, and occasionally refute feminist analyses from the 1970s. For Sanyal, the obvious touchstone is US author Susan Brownmiller’s landmark text on rape, Against Our Will (1975), so influential that its legacy endures in contemporary discourses and activism around rape, including in racist stereotypes about alleged perpetrators. In contemplating Brownmiller’s influence from her European vantage point, Sanyal’s book offers a refreshing perspective on how and what feminists should prioritise. For Sanyal, the project of sexual self-determination is not served particularly well by feminist constructions of rape that reproduce retrograde notions of female sexual passivity and vulnerability on the one side, and male sexual aggression on the other.

In addressing men who have been raped, Sanyal achieves her goal of opening up alternative narratives, though at times she overstates her case. Not unlike Germaine Greer’s short, shambolic essay On Rape (2018), Sanyal’s is a somewhat messy book, perhaps inevitably so considering the myriad themes that attach themselves to the topic of rape. But it’s also a more engaging and sustained provocation, including her analysis of the racialised dynamics of the alleged ‘mass sexual harassment’ in the streets of Cologne on New Year’s Eve 2015; the evident Islamophobia of which is transferable to the Australian context.

Mindful of how some men’s rights activists have succeeded in bringing a misleading counter-narrative about male victims of domestic violence to public consciousness, Hill is more careful than Sanyal in contemplating feminist interpretations of the problem. She notes the benefits and limitations of both feminist and psychological explanations and advocates for an approach that incorporates the best elements of both. A chapter is devoted to women who commit violence against men. She takes seriously the ways hegemonic notions of masculinity harm women and men. The notion that gender equality can eradicate or reduce rates of domestic abuse is scrutinised and mostly dismissed. Having done all of this, Hill’s ultimate framing of the problem as rooted in patriarchy – a term which, she notes, was still a ‘dirty word’ before #MeToo came along – is both persuasive and reductive.

Mithu Sanyal

There is no question that See What You Made Me Do is a feminist book. Occasionally, I did wish for more direct engagement with feminists who have struggled with similar dilemmas to those posed by Hill – such as how to attend to the macro and micro dimensions of the problem. A notable exception is her illuminating and powerful chapter on violence in Indigenous communities. Here, Hill prioritises the work and activism of Aboriginal women such as Judy and Caroline Atkinson, Marcia Langton, Josephine Cashman, Melissa Lucashenko, Hannah McGlade, Amy McQuire, and Celeste Liddle, as well as community-based initiatives.

To return to my opening questions, See What You Made Me Do and Rape: From Lucretia to #MeToo are both useful books, especially the first. Hill has given the topic of domestic abuse the gravitas and attention it demands, but she is also right to be concerned with its reception and possible impact. As she notes, increased visibility of the problem can have mixed effects – incidents of domestic violence have spiked after documentaries focused on the issue have aired in prime time, but it may be that the coverage has made it easier or more possible for victims to speak out. At the policy level, governments have set national targets without concrete goals, and have funded expensive awareness campaigns but not refuges. I hope her hefty tome lands with a thud on the desk of every politician in Australia and that each one reads it. I predict it will be the most important work of Australian non-fiction this year.

Barely a decade ago, Australia was in the middle of much excitement about the Asian Century. Today, those heady days seem a distant memory. A growing number of pundits see the north as troubled by dangerous flashpoints and great power rivalries. On top of that is an America apparently in strategic retreat from the region, further aggravating Canberra’s long-held fear of abandonment by its great and powerful friends.

No wonder debating Australia’s defence has lately become a booming cottage industry. The 2018 issue of Australian Foreign Affairs on ‘Defending Australia’ warns of the ‘collapse of Australia’s defences in a contested Asia’. At home, we are told that China, the fast-expanding Asian power, is busy engaging in a ‘silent invasion’.

Australian journalist and author David Leser’s 2018 Good Weekend article, ‘Women, men and the whole damn thing’, sparked a wildfire of commentary, confession, and praise. Written in the early white heat of the #MeToo movement, the Harvey Weinstein exposé, and Oprah Winfrey’s 2018 Golden Globes speech in which she spoke out on behalf of the Time’s Up campaign, it crackled with questions that were age-old yet suddenly pressing: ‘Why is it that men have killed, enslaved, scarred, diminished and silenced women of every age, race and class, on every continent, for so long?’; ‘What is it we have so deeply normalised that we are blind to?’ And most pertinently, or practically, in the midst of this cultural reckoning: what happens next?

Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing expands on those themes and features well-crafted interviews with activists, intellectuals, campaigners, authors, and family members, and also selected correspondence the author has received from victims of abuse.

As a ‘straight, white, middle-class male who has breathed the untroubled air of privilege’ all his life, Leser is at pains to point out that he isn’t a spokesperson for women and can’t ever know their lived experience. Rather, as a father of two daughters, he wants to show ‘there were men prepared to listen and learn’ – men who might ‘become part of the change that is so urgently required’.

Much talk around the abuse of children centres on the desire (or demand) for justice. Unfortunately, justice is not easy to attain. To begin with, it tends to require a justice system. This introduces all manner of creaking bureaucracy and complicated, sometimes outmoded laws. Justice outcomes are also hugely influenced by race, gender, and inequality. Nor does it help when our political leaders ladle out injustices upon young people, whether by perpetuating outrages against child refugees or by disparaging those who dare to take a stand against the ruinous environmental practices of their elders.

The Age of Consent is an edited collection that provides a powerful commentary on many contemporary issues in youth justice, agency, and sexuality. As society has surged into the information age with little chance to stop and wonder about its impact on young people, so this book attempts to address some of the paradoxes, loopholes, and – most significantly – fictions that abound. In a country where conservative mythmaker Andrew Bolt can rail about the ‘weaponising’ of sexual abuse allegations in the Family Court, and ‘sex therapist’ Bettina Arndt operates a ‘fake rape crisis campus tour’, clearly there are no shortage of figments to debunk.

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.

Nick Cave

Dear Editor,

Felicity Plunkett’s essay on Nick Cave and trauma’s aftermath (ABR, June–July 2019) exhibits qualities worthy of its subject. Many of us were wondering how it was all going – the film allows insight without intrusion. I was shocked and delighted to see that it existed. And what a graceful and exquisite artist the boy from The Birthday Party grew into. I walked out on them in a garage in Alexandria once. They were making a raucous noise, unbearable even by punk’s low bar. Normally, I would have danced to the sound of a dripping tap, but I had to leave. It might have been 1987. Nick Cave feels like a brother to many of us now. Let’s appreciate this reminder that he’s here, doing the work, creating and sharing the gold he spins from straw and shit.

Janelle Trees (online comment)

Much ado about Much Ado

Dear Editor,

After reading Tim Byrne’s online review of Bell Shakespeare’s new production of Much Ado About Nothing (ABR Arts, July 2019), I am left wondering if I’d seen the same production. While not totally perfect, there was so much more to admire about the play than your reviewer indicated. The whole slant on locker-room ‘bro culture’ contrasted perfectly with Beatrice’s beautifully acted frustration about being a woman – still so pertinent. This contrasted with the relationship of Claudio and Hero, which made way more sense to me than it did in the Kenneth Branagh film version. I, too, was a little nonplussed by the opening scene, but when that scene returned at the end it made total sense, rounding this production nicely. There is such flexibility in the dramaturgy of Shakespeare plays. There is always a new angle to be explored, and Bell Shakespeare has often used this to great advantage.

Robyn St George (online comment)

Having seen this production, I agree with every word of Tim Byrne’s review. I was so appalled by most elements of this production that I went online hunting for reviews. As a teacher of English and Drama, I was glad I hadn’t taken my students to see this as an example of contemporary Shakespeare or as an example of acting and direction. It’s always a relief to read a review that more succinctly articulates what I’m feeling.

Edwina Tribe (online comment)

The scourge of anti-Semitism

Dear Editor,

What an outstanding review by Ilana Snyder of Deborah Lipstadt’s extraordinary book Antisemitism: Here and now (ABR, August 2019). The reviewer’s deft understanding of the issues covered by Lipstadt is apparent. That there are varied facets of anti-Semitism is not new, but that the facets are increasing in complexity as well as in intensity is new.

Snyder’s review highlights the important issues unpacked in Lipstadt’s book, many of which will resonate with diaspora Jews and with Israelis – and, it is to be hoped, with others. The importance of our own individual, proactive, educative, and responsive actions is also highlighted. As the reviewer comments, ‘[Lipstadt] criticises Jewish organisations that respond to the BDS by seeking to “boycott the boycotters” or to intimidate pro-Palestinian professors and activists by compiling dossiers on them.’ This sort of ‘reverse vilification’ is often counterproductive. By way of example – in 2003 Hanan Ashrawi was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize, which offended some critics. Much of the public criticism from sections of the Australian Jewish community was not fact-based and verged on the hysterical – to what end?

As Lipstadt concludes in her Note to the Reader: ‘[This book] is written with the conviction that action starts with understanding, which will be applied differently by different people in different circumstances. My attempt to explore a perplexing and disturbing set of circumstances is written in the hope that it will provoke action. What precisely the action remains in the hands of the reader.’ One hopes that Lipstadt’s book will lead to a better understanding of the scourge of anti-Semitism in all its guises, and that it will be a catalyst for understanding and change.

George Greenberg (online comment)

Bruce Pascoe’s Open Page

Dear Editor,

What a man! We could all learn something from Bruce Pascoe.

Paul Menman (online 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.

In retrospect, the Morrison government’s win in May 2019 is not surprising. After the shift to the right in a number of liberal democracies since the election of Donald Trump, why did we assume that Australia would be immune? The assumption that Labor was certain to win resembled the attitude of most commentators towards Hillary Clinton in the United States in 2016. This is not to suggest that Scott Morrison is another Trump, but rather that the deep suspicion of government and the anger at the rapidity of social change that undermined Clinton were also factors in the Australian elections.

The vicious polarisation of views now evident in the United States was clearly apparent in some areas of Australia. This was reflected in the blatant racism of some senators and in the bitter divisions between pro- and anti-Adani supporters. The willingness of right-wing commentators to abandon any pretence at civility, already clear in the attacks on Julia Gillard as prime minister, is poisoning political debate and undermining confidence in government.

Over the past several decades, Labor’s base has steadily declined, with union membership now one million fewer than in 1976, despite a much larger population. Elsewhere, most notably in Germany and France, social democratic parties no longer seem viable for government. Australia is exceptional in that the choice for government remains essentially the same as it has been since Robert Menzies created the modern Liberal Party in 1944.

In 2016, Malcolm Turnbull almost lost his majority and was regarded as a failure. Morrison narrowly increased the government’s standing three years later in what is widely regarded as an extraordinary victory. Yet outside Queensland and Tasmania, little changed: in New South Wales, the parties each lost a seat; in Victoria, Labor won two, aided by a favourable redistribution.

In the end, a few thousand votes in key seats could have returned a hung parliament rather than the status quo. The 2019 election was undoubtedly a triumph for Morrison, but it was not a total disaster for Labor. Labor’s greatest decline came in the coastal cities of central Queensland, where, presumably, support for the Adani mines lost the party thousands of votes. At the same time, the Liberals were forced to put resources into defending some of the richest areas in the country: Wentworth (which includes Point Piper and Vaucluse), Higgins (Toorak and Malvern), and Warringah (Mosman).

The difference between 2019 and 2016 was largely one of expectations. Internal turmoil within the Coalition and polls showing a swing to Labor made us expect a government defeat. Just why the polls were so inaccurate is unclear, but possibly the expectation of a Labor victory caused some voters to panic on the day and change their vote.

Both major parties lost votes, but in Queensland the government benefited from a flow of preferences from Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation. The government parties polled more than forty-one per cent of the vote; Labor’s share fell to a third, slightly better than in 2016, which was the lowest recorded first-preference result since 1934. Our preferential voting system supports the two major parties – more accurately two and a half, as the Nationals can win substantial number of seats with less overall support than the Greens.

The Greens polled surprisingly well and maintained all six of their outgoing Senate places, but they face the dilemma that to increase their vote, now around ten per cent of the electorate, they would need to radically discard the policies that make them unique. In the medium term, at least, they will remain an irritant and a necessity for Labor, a relationship of codependency that neither party relishes.

The government campaigned on a policy of the status quo and sought to build their campaign around the personality of the recently anointed prime minister. Labor offered a swag of policies that amounted to a redistribution of wealth in order to support greater government funding of health and education.

The government’s campaign against higher taxes seemed to persuade former Labor voters to switch. It has been claimed that Labor did particularly badly among older Australians, unhappy at Labor’s plans to limit the benefits of franking credits and negative gearing. National Seniors Australia, a lobby group as ferocious in defending self-interest as any militant union, has claimed that it delivered a two per cent swing to the government, aided by unscrupulous claims that Labor favoured a ‘death tax’. Labor’s policies of minor-income redistribution seemed least popular in the poorer parts of the country; the two seats that swung heavily in northern Tasmania are hardly centres of major dividend imputation.

Against expectations, the Liberals outsmarted Labor on almost every front. By focusing heavily on Morrison, they made the election seem presidential, gambling on the apparent unpopularity of Bill Shorten. I have long felt that Shorten’s unpopularity was largely a media creation: constant attacks on him as untrustworthy led to people responding negatively to him, which in turn fed media attacks.

The government had near hysterical support from the Murdoch press, which turned on Labor with greater vituperation than usual. (A former Murdoch journalist, Rick Morton, has written of the press’s stoking of ‘culture wars’ [‘Murdoch media fuels far-right recruitment’, The Saturday Paper, 10–16 August 2019].) It is likely that the government also used social media more effectively than Labor, although it’s hard to get reliable evidence. From what evidence we have, the right was far more successful in running a scare campaign, drawing on tropes already rehearsed in the United States and United Kingdom.

We don’t yet have reliable demographic analysis of the elections, but it seems that the government was more successful than Labor in winning support among certain ethnic communities. The clearest example of this comes from the Melbourne electorate of Chisholm, which both sides expected Labor to win. Chisholm has a large recently arrived Chinese community and both major party candidates were Chinese-Australian women. The Liberal, Gladys Liu, used Chinese-language social media very successfully, building on her role in the campaign opposing marriage equality. (There was a swing to Labor in Chisholm, and we don’t know how far Liu’s campaign may have moderated that.)

The steady drip of right-wing paranoia over the past few years has created an audience for crude attacks on anyone threatening the political and cultural status quo. Labor’s attempts to neutralise these attacks have resulted in pusillanimous policies on asylum seekers and constant temporising on coal mining, which has bled off votes to both Greens and Liberals.

In an unsympathetic article after the election, Parnell Palme McGuinness argued that ‘Labor must change or die’ (AFR, 10 July 2019). This is pure hyperbole; similar articles appeared about the Liberal Party after their defeat in 2007. Neither party can rely on the automatic loyalty of earlier generations, and both Labor and Liberal remain vulnerable to attacks from their flanks as they seek to balance the competing demands of an increasingly complex electorate.

Labor’s problems were not that they promised too much; in the case of Newstart, they should have promised more. Rather, they failed to construct a meaningful alternative to the dominant neo-liberal scripts that have hollowed out belief in government and extolled individual affluence. The Liberal slogan ‘The Bill You Can’t Afford’ rested on forty years of relentless propaganda painting taxation as robbery, rather than the way in which we collectively pay for services from which we all benefit.

One of the abiding myths of Australian politics is that Labor are bad managers of money. Morrison consistently played on fears that a Labor government would mean higher taxes and power bills. Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen answered these criticisms repeatedly, but their rational economic arguments were swamped by a distrust of politicians. What Labor described as fairness was attacked as the politics of envy and class warfare, even though the changes in taxation proposed were aimed at removing extraordinary perks that disproportionately favour the best off.

The most disappointing contradiction of our politics is that, while most Australians are aware of the threat of climate change, the government is aligned with Trump’s United States in denying the urgency of the issue, and this appears to have cost them little support. Climate change remains a boutique issue, one that swept away Tony Abbott and produced swings to Labor in the richest areas of our cities, but one that is ignored in current debates about Australia’s future in an unstable global environment.

Foreign policy played no part in the election debates; our new foreign minister, Marise Payne, is both highly competent and largely ignored by the media. Rapidly growing tensions between China and the United States demand more than platitudes about bipartisanship from both parties. A government that was genuinely concerned about the fate of Pacific Islands nations would worry less about increasing military expenditure and more about the realities of global warming.

Reconciling the needs for greater sustainability and a more equitable society is the challenge facing any party that challenges the Morrison government. If Labor follows the advice of those who wish to jettison its policies, there will be less, not more, reason to support it. It is strange to define refunds to people who pay no tax as somehow rewarding ‘aspirationals’.

To convince people living in those marginal areas of our suburbs and regional towns where elections are decided, Labor needs to portray a better world, which means restoring the belief in politics as a means of solving problems that individual aspiration cannot. The challenge for the mainstream left is to capture the public’s imagination by demonstrating how change benefits both the individual and the broader society.

In his campaign, Morrison appealed to self-interest, Shorten to altruism for the common good. That the former won out, even if narrowly, is grounds for regret but not necessarily for pessimism. Recent actions by state governments – allowing abortion and the right to die; the development of treaties with Indigenous Australians – remind us that this is not the United States.

Too often Labor seems to be intent on scoring debating points rather than creating a positive story that counters the deep distrust of government that is now prevalent. It is always harder for those who want change than for those who wish to preserve existing structures. Both Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating challenged Australians to think beyond immediate self-interest and were loved and hated as a result. As Robert Kennedy said: ‘Some men see things as they are and ask why. I dream of things that never were and ask why not.’

In his infamous 1955 review of Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, A.D. Hope’s dismissal of the book as ‘illiterate verbal sludge’ focuses on a perceived confusion between the categories of poetry and prose. White ‘tries to write a novel as if he were writing poetry, and lyric poetry at that’, writes Hope; however, ‘the imagery, the devices of poetry are effective because they are wedded to metre. Practised in prose they look absurd and pretentious.’ Hope’s rigid alignment of poetry with metrical verse typifies the view of many Anglo-American critics in the middle of the twentieth century, a time when, in critic David Antin’s words, ‘the blight of Auden lay heavy on the land’.

This was especially the case in English poetry circles, where the anti-Modernist trajectory of Hardy–Yeats–Auden dominated poetry anthologies until only recently. Yet this conservative interregnum now seems anomalous within the history of twentieth-century poetry, subsumed by two great waves of experimentation: the first emerging from Paris and spreading through European languages from the pre-World War II period; the second extending through US and other English-language poetries from the 1950s onwards. Jeremy Noel-Tod’s important collection of international prose poetry acknowledges this history in relation to currents within contemporary English poetry in an unprecedented manner: as he states in his introduction, the anthology foregrounds ‘an alternative history of modern poetry and an experimental tradition that is shaping its future’.

As my plane drops down in turbulence

I think of you and of Salt Lake City,

I think of ice stealing over the Great Lakes

and of Omaha and of adamant plains.

I think of all the places

I have never been: Caracas,

La Paz, Kingston. I think of the way

our bodies puzzled together in that room

over pine woods where night deer

passed in the snow, their lonesome

inscrutable tracks sluicing

in the morning’s melt, I think of

your eyes that are almost the colour

of mercury, of their unbearable weight,

I think of the plateau of your chest

rising, rising, and of your hand

resting on my right thigh,

of the slim glint of your wedding

band in the dove predawn light.

I think of how everything is defined

by distance: how close we were,

how far from steel mills in Pittsburgh

and those killing Chicago winds

and union towns near Detroit, Michigan

where loyalty is the only religion.

I think of the sound of your breathing,

which is the sound of fields

of blond Illinois wheat bent down,

I think of those silver silos

of harvest corn we saw in Schuylerville,

barns blazing in all that silence

as we drove through what we could

not think or say. There is no grace

in this kind of longing, there is only pain,

pain which I have always preferred

anyway – it is where I live,

and called love by any other name.

Sarah Holland-Batt

Writing a line, as if from bed, on a lovely, handmade
organ based on Gerald Murnane, the Goroke novelist
last seen pouring a glass of amber silk and swaying
imperceptibly enough to be called coincidental to Hot
Chocolate. I would not be the writer I am if I forebore to
mention the snowy peaks outside, being an analogy of
actual peaks. You see me out there gesturing at their
anti-poetic line, my hand perhaps making a mosquitoey
movement in the air, a veritable range-splainer or
Attenborough in Asia  Sentences erode like

ripped earth, as if an editor or technological malfunction
(how can a malfunction be bad when it sounds so good?
you can’t spell a-b-c-d without b-a-d) were large yellow
machinery with the name Cat, or Komatsu. Do you
believe like me, in a different way, in Spinoza, in deco-
nstruction? It is not, to return to the trope of the hand-
made musical instrument, as if wood is dead, I mean
wood as word or key. Call science (but how? where?)
romantic then, I may add there are rows of yellowing as-
pen in clear view like I might – going blonde in midlife

  It started with a kiss and if a lengthy
trial must be undergone, it is not too shabby a thing to
wake in a room like this. What, I’ve been asked is the
tension between a sentence and a stanza? (Or you might
say: between a block of flats and a plaza.) This is a
question for the infinite forest to ignore, but I must give
it some thought, in order not to begin to sound like a
mechanical monkey, however cute, based on Broken Hill
essayist Evan de K – not their real name, last seen drop-
ping a dingleberry into someone’s coffee, perhaps at the

height of their humour, and irony  So I begin to chop
in earnest as if I earn money from making salad, or it’s
my passion: lettuce under the knife, just needing freshly
roasted advice to bring its yellowing heart back to life
  Should prose rhyme? Another question I’ve never been
asked, but on a night when you know that sleep will make
you ill, and road fatality statistics arise like clapped-in
topiary at an impatient neocon convention – I’d marry
Time, but I just turned seventeen and by the next day
the voice on the radio says it doesn’t remember me

The shortlist for the 2019 Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize

The shortlisted authors for the 2019 Jolley Prize: Sonja Dechian, Morgan Nunan, and Raaza Jamshed

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is now in its ninth year. On this occasion we received about 1,350 entries from thirty-eight countries. The judges – Maxine Beneba Clarke, John Kinsella, and Beejay Silcox (chair) – have shortlisted three stories: ‘The Point-Blank Murder’ by Sonja Dechian (Vic.), ‘Miracle Windows’ by Raaza Jamshed (NSW), and ‘Rubble Boy’ by Morgan Nunan (Vic.). They all appear in this issue.

The judges also commended three other stories: ‘Supermarket Love’ by Elleke Boehmer (United Kingdom), ‘Hero Manifest’ by Bill Collopy (Vic.), and ‘Lizard Boy’ by Brendan Sargeant (ACT). These stories will be published online in coming months. The other four longlisted stories are listed here. Congratulations to the authors and thank you to our judges and to all those who entered this year’s Jolley Prize.

If you are in Melbourne on Wednesday, September 11, join us at Readings Hawthorn for the Jolley Prize ceremony – always enjoyable, if tense-making for the authors (only the judges know the winner until he or she is named on the night). The overall winner, to be named by Maxine Beneba Clarke – a stalwart of the Jolley Prize – will receive $5,000. All six authors share in the total prize money of $12,500.

On this occasion, for the first time, all six shortlisted and commended authors will be present. This is a free event and everyone is welcome, but bookings are essential: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

As always, we warmly acknowledge the generous support of Ian Dickson, who makes the Jolley Prize possible in this munificent form.

ABR and Monash University

(L-R) Christine Lambrianidis, J.R. Burgmann, Luke Forbes, and Merav Fima (photograph by Julia Lamb, Monash University)

Since its inception in 2016, ABR’s agreement with Monash University has led to a regular ABR presence on campus and a marked increase in Monash contributions to our pages.

A major facet of our agreement with the Faculty of Arts is a series of publishing masterclasses. Over the course of three weeks, the ABR editors introduce groups of twenty graduate students to the rudiments of magazine culture with a view to encouraging them to write for ABR or like publications. Topics include writing for general readers, pitching, working with editors, online publishing, and the art of criticism.

The most recent masterclass concluded on August 20, just as we were going to press. All the participants are encouraged to submit a review or Op-Ed piece for consideration by the editorial team, so that we can award two paid commissions. As happened last time, the quality was so high we ended up tapping four PhD students: Merav Fima (Literary and Cultural Studies), Luke Forbes (Theatre Performance and Music), Christine Lambrianidis (Theatre Performance and Music), and J.R. Burgmann (Literature and Cultural Studies) – photographed together opposite. Merav Fima submitted a review of Elizabeth Bryer’s novel From Here On, Monsters (reviewed by James Halford in the September issue). Last year, coincidentally, Bryer was offered one of these paid commissions at ABR. Doubtless, someone attending the next masterclass will elect to review a new book from Brill – Gal Ventura’s Maternal Breast-Feeding and Its Substitutes in Nineteenth-Century French Art – which Merav Fima, deploying her French and Hebrew, has translated in her spare time. (She has just received the Monash University Literary and Cultural Studies Best Publication Prize for this monograph.)

We look forward to publishing this talented quartet in coming months.

Grace Karskens in conversation at Gleebooks

Grace Karskens (photograph by Joy Lai)

Join us on September 9 at Gleebooks to hear Grace Karskens – winner of the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize – in conversation with author and historian Mark McKenna about her essay ‘Nah Doongh’s Song’. The event starts at 6 for 6.30pm at Gleebooks in Glebe, NSW. Booking details can be found on our website.

ABR is getting a new website!

ABR is getting a makeover! While our website has served us well over the years, it’s time for a major structural and aesthetic renovation. The website, due to be launched in early September, features a new design specially optimised for reading on phones and tablets. Enjoy reading the Jolley stories and all the other September features – plus our fast-growing digital archive – on our new website. Let us know what you think.

ABR Fellowships

We’ve been heartened by the response to our Indigenous issue in August and to the creation of the ABR Indigenous Fellowship, which is worth $10,000. We encourage interested writers and commentators to contact the Editor, Peter Rose, before formally applying. (Applications close on October 1.) Email him at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

The ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship has now closed and the judges – J.M. Coetzee, Michelle Foster, and Peter Rose – are considering the applications. We look forward to naming the Fellow in coming weeks.

Behrouz Boochani himself, meanwhile, continues to garner plaudits for his memoir, No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador, 2018), while still languishing on Manus Island because of the obduracy of the Australian government. The most recent of his prizes is the 2019 National Biography Award, which is worth $25,000. Accepting the Award from afar, Behrouz thanked his many supporters but ‘didn’t want to talk about literature’. He described the resistance to his incarceration and that of his fellow prisoners as part of the opposition. He concluded: ‘I think history will judge this generation and will judge all of us for this hard and dark period in Australian history.’

ABR Favourite Australian Novel Poll (Since 2000)

Have you voted in our Favourite Australian Novel since 2000 poll yet? Do so before entries close on September 16 and be in the running to win one of our three special prizes: a $500 gift voucher from Readings, Herbert von Karajan’s Complete Recordings on Deutsche Grammophon and Decca, courtesy of our friends at Classics Direct, or a five-year digital subscription to ABR.

The October issue will include a feature on the Top Twenty novels nominated by readers.

Still open: $9000 Peter Porter Poetry Prize

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize doesn’t close until October 1. We’ve been impressed by the prolificacy of the poets. In the first few weeks there was a marked increase in the number of entries compared with recent years. A record field seems likely. Perhaps the new first prize of $7,000 is a factor.

Just a heads-up, as they say, on our other international prizes. To help administratively and promotionally, we’ve separated all three prizes. The Calibre Essay Prize will open a week after the closure of the Porter (October 8), and the next Jolley Prize will open on January 20, soon after Calibre’s closure.

National edeposit

A major new digital resource is now available for writers, publishers, and readers. NED (the National edeposit), as it is affectionately called, is a nationwide digital collection of Australian publications. We’re talking books, journals, magazines, music, pamphlets, newsletters, novels, children’s stories, self-published poetry anthologies, maps – even government reports, if you are so inclined.

NED was made possible by the national, state, and territory libraries coming together to combine their digital archives. Kate Tormey, CEO of State Library Victoria, writes for our new online column Book Talk about ‘the herculean task’ behind the NED and its profound implications for consumers of Australian literature.

In the 1970s, before Malcolm Fraser (ahead of his time) tightened security and made most of the place a no-go zone, Australia House – a regular embassy – also functioned as an informal social amenity for visiting Australians. There was a howling disjunction between their friendliness to compatriots, and the sombre, almost processional formality of the central hall. Newspapers were spread on long tables: manna from Oz. The fustian nature of the place was a constant reminder of how removed Australia then was from the rest of the world. In four years of living in England, I heard ‘God Save the Queen’ at public functions only twice: once at Covent Garden for Princess Margaret, and then at a concert in Australia House.

Eileen Chanin’s exhaustive study of the building makes it plain that such convergence was its prime purpose. Australia (contrary to the common view that it became a nation in 1901) was still largely seen as ‘an imperial unit’ – albeit one with its own distinctive character. Chanin draws attention to the way that George V personalised the link. Twice he had been to Australia, once to open the first Federal parliament in Melbourne’s Exhibition Buildings. So it was entirely appropriate that he should both lay the foundation stone and return to open the building in 1918. On that occasion shouts of ‘Cooee!’ echoed down the Strand. Australians felt they had a home in the imperial capital.

Where are you happiest?

At the desk, in the moment between putting a full-stop and rereading the sentence.

What’s your idea of hell?

Not being able to read for ten days after cataract surgery.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Listen to this story read by the author.

Irene and I are on the verandah at her grandparents’ house, in the two chairs we’ve managed to clear of spiderwebs. The baby is awake in her arms.

‘Did you sleep?’ I say.

‘Yeah, a few hours.’

‘That’s good.’

She offers no sign of agreement.

The sunset is orange, the sky scattered with clouds. We’re eating pumpkin and lentil soup out of bowls from home. I didn’t think it was necessary to bring them, the cupboards here are well stocked, but Irene insisted. She says they’re the perfect size. Also, she read in her online mother’s group that the glaze on old crockery often contains lead, so our modern bowls are safer. That’s one of the things about having a baby, you have to think things through. You’re no longer just eating from this bowl or that, you need to consider it all, how the bowl was made, how the food will affect Irene’s milk, then the baby’s digestion, her growth, etc. From production to final consequences. It’s an unsettling development.

Irene’s food is untouched. ‘Eat something,’ I say, and I put my bowl down and take the baby, who stares, seeing me or not, I’m never sure.

‘Do you think we made the right decision, coming here?’ I say.

Irene shrugs. She can’t answer, because how would she know what a right decision would look like? She shrugs again. ‘We’re here now.’

It’s just like her to say that.

We moved out here with a three-week-old baby so we could have time alone together, get to know one another, in our new formation of three. Now we have never been more alone, together.

Irene picks up her bowl, rests it on her lap, but still doesn’t eat.

‘I remembered something,’ she says. ‘My grandpa was missing two fingers. I’d forgotten. Isn’t that weird?’

The call of a bansuri rising to her window from the street below awakens Mehr. It is a crooked call; the initial notes, delicate and malleable, make all the right turns inside the hollow of a bamboo reed, but soon miss the swivel that all sounds must make to morph into melodies. The magic that happens between a human mouth and a hollow reed reaches her when she’s still half asleep. A raag paws at the cobwebs of her mind, dyes it in bursts of ochre and green, before a breath at one end of the bansuri attempts a pitch too high; too soon the notes crash against one another, the sound screeches out through the other end of the reed. Mehr jolts awake. Some amateur is fiddling with an instrument down the road. Mehr begins the day with a premonition of missing a turn, an inexplicable sense of possibilities leading to dead walls.

Half a year has taken its turn since the time Mehr first saw Meer. It was a cold morning; fog leaked from the asphalt on the road, rolling onto the tyres of Meer’s motorbike as he tailed Mehr’s college bus. Seasons have changed, it is almost summer now; she sees it in the slow-moving blades of the fan hung from a hook on the ceiling above her single bed, feels it in the sweat beads forming on her forehead. But when her hand runs across her bedsheet, her fingers, in an attempt to stall the day, find pockets of coolness in its creases. She wants to lay her body still, to drink in the coolness her hands have discovered, but the staccato of ladles and pots from the kitchen remind her that she has little say.

Mehr drags herself out of bed, leaving an impression of her body on the limp mattress. She puts on her college uniform, a white Patiala shalwar with a hundred pleats that billow around her knees, inadvertently drawing attention to what it must conceal, a brief kameez barely reaching down to her knees, tapering around her thin waist. Over one shoulder she drapes a blue dupatta, a long, rectangular piece of cloth dried stiff by the starch her mother prepares from boiling rice until it dissolves into a sticky liquid. She looks in the mirror of her vanity, its oval, wrought-iron frame rusty at the edges, and dabs talcum powder on her face before walking away.

She attends a home economics college, one that prides itself on producing the best housewives in the city. All day she will surround herself with the hum of sewing machines working with cotton and silk for her clothes and textiles class, she will pore over textbooks on caring for children and elderly at home, she will handle hot bread with bare hands in her food and nutrition practicals, while her mind turns to snippets of conversations she has had with Meer over the phone. Hushed conversations, midnight dialogues, carried out only when the others at home are deep in their slumber, only when Meer’s mates in the hostel have turned deaf to the world. Meer studies at the only veterinary university in Lahore, its campus large and sprawling on the borders of the inner city. The campus houses animals ranging from cows to horses to rare cranes procured from tribes on the outskirts of the Himalayan Mountains. Mehr thinks about the crane Meer is caring for, wonders if it will survive the day. She has never seen the crane, or his university campus; she hasn’t seen his face in a few days, but at college she types in the name of his university, looks at the still lives archived there as the screen blinks at her to make it her home page. She has memorised the address of Meer’s university.

Mehr crosses her living room where her fourteen-year-old brother lounges in front of the television screen – another day off from school. He is watching a Bollywood actress twerk across the screen, but flips to the news channel when he sees her. The kitchen is without a door; a floral-print curtain is draped across its threshold. From a split in the curtain, she sees her mother’s back hunched over her stove; white fumes rise above her head. Despite being a decade old, the stove smoulders throughout the day. Smoke tendrils have lacquered the wall it rests against, have made the design of a singed lotus whose blackened petals reach up to the ceiling. Her mother’s rotund figure stands in the centre of this burnt logo; rolls of flesh under her cotton shirt jiggle with the movement of hands working between steaming pots. As Mehr parts the polyester curtain, she realises the stove has two additional cauldrons next to the usual chai pots and curry pans. The cauldrons, large and spherical, are steaming away.

The girl goes forward tentatively and kisses the side of her mother’s head, catches a drop of sweat from her mother’s brow on her lips. ‘Come home early from college,’ the mother declares. ‘We are receiving visitors today.’ There is finality in her words. Mehr knows who the visitors are. Any other guests would come unannounced, not needing to send a notice in advance for her mother to prepare the house and a suitable feast.

1.

Growing up, my brother and I lived with Dad in a Housing Commission flat among a row of identical flats. Back in those days, we played Greatest Hits of the 70s through a subwoofer on the back deck. During the guitar solo in ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ we howled over the music and the neighbourhood dogs followed our lead, continuing their cries long after the song was finished. This was after Mum had passed away. Dad couldn’t find any work so he spent each day drinking Bundaberg Rum mixed with Coke and creating sculptures out of junk that he collected in a trolley he found dumped by the creek behind Safeway.

Dad called himself an artist (he was a cabinetmaker by trade), but he never sold a work. Instead, he would ‘donate’ his finished products to the public – he left them on nature strips, playgrounds, the carpark behind the fish-and-chip shop. Dad always said he was ‘not-for-profit’.

2.

On the nature strip opposite my high school Dad built a piece he called Perspective. It was basically twelve copper pipes bound together in the middle then twisted at the ends like open palms, or a flower in bloom, but really it just looked like a bunch of copper pipes. Dad said he came up with it after he passed out in our driveway: he woke up to water splashing over his face from a down pipe affixed to the side of the house. I was in year seven.

‘Your dad is a retard,’ said Holly, a girl in the year above, whose own dad was a bikie with the Hells Angels. ‘Only a retard could make a sculpture that shit.’

Holly followed me home that day. She threw rocks at me until we reached the flat and when she saw where I lived she burst into feverish laughter. Dad kept the junk he collected for his art in the front yard. The odds and ends resembled a garbage tip and included stacks of discarded couches and a collection of traffic cones.

‘Look at Rubble Boy go into his rubble home,’ Holly said.

In 2013, Matthew Condon published Three Crooked Kings, the first in his true crime series delving into the murky, sordid, and often brutal world of police corruption in Queensland.  That year, he wrote in Australian Book Review that, after finishing his trilogy,  he planned to ‘swan dive into the infinitely more comfortable genre of fiction’. 

The story of disgraced ex-commissioner Terence Murray Lewis concluded with All Fall Down (2015), but there was no swan dive. The book was quickly followed by Little Fish Are Sweet (2016). Condon evidently had more to ask of that era of bagmen, crooked cops, and unsolved crimes. He returns to Brisbane’s underworld with The Night Dragon, part character study of psychopathic criminal Vincent O’Dempsey,  and part investigation into his role in Brisbane’s Whiskey Au Go Go massacre and its links to a decades-old cold case: the 1974 murders of Barbara McCulkin  and her two young daughters.

Just after 2 am on 8 March 1973, the Whiskey Au Go Go nightclub in Fortitude Valley went up in flames. Fifteen people died, making it Australia’s worst mass murder since the frontier wars. Two men were arrested: John Andrew Stuart and James Richard Finch. Both protested their innocence, and doubts about the nature of their involvement continue. Less than a year later, McCulkin and her daughters vanished from their home in Highgate Hill. McCulkin knew too much about what happened that night.

Ben Jonson famously derided Shakespeare’s grasp of ‘small Latin and less Greek’, and vocal sceptics in our own time refuse to believe that a grammar-school education was sufficient to enable the man from Stratford to write the plays attributed to ‘Shakespeare’ (of course it was). Rather than create another study documenting Shakespeare’s narrative and dramatic debts to the classics, Jonathan Bate attempts to cover ‘the diversity of Shakespeare’s direct and indirect encounters with the classics’ (his emphasis) in this new book. To address the question, ‘What kind of a thinker was Shakespeare?’, one needs to appreciate the extent to which classical culture – its literature, philosophy, and politics – pervaded Elizabethan England. To better understand the shaping of Shakespeare’s mind by the classics, Bate suggests we need to look beyond ‘his school-room education and his direct reading’. This study thus builds on, but extends in interesting ways, Bate’s earlier account of Shakespeare and Ovid (1993) and his recuperation of the much maligned but classically inflected Titus Andronicus (which Bate edited for the Arden Third Series).

Much of the book originates from the Gombrich Lectures and the Gresham Lectures delivered by Bate in London, and he has purposefully avoided altering the form of writing when presenting this material in book form. Readers have the pleasure of a lucid, engaging style, but one that does not compromise in its erudite coverage of sophisticated rhetorical devices and classical conceits. The flipside, and my one minor criticism, is that the origin of the book in oral delivery sometimes means that transitions between paragraphs and ideas aren’t as readily apparent in print: the storytelling that captivates an audience isn’t always what the reader expects in print form.

Of all the tributary footage screened in the days following the death of Bob Hawke, one short sequence jarred. In it, Hawke conducts the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs and orchestra in the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’ from Handel’s Messiah, jerking and twitching in response to the well-drilled ensemble, showing admirable bravura in the face of such a magnificent disconnect between cause and effect.

‘Confidence gets you a long way in conducting,’ Mark Wigglesworth writes in this new manual on the art form he has spent his life practising and perfecting. ‘Even some prime ministers have thought they could have a go.’ Wigglesworth is here disparaging Edward Heath, a former British prime minister, who at least had some form as a pianist and organist. Yet his point remains: why do people think conducting is something almost anyone can do?

The dust jacket is more circumspect. The book is ‘for all who wonder what conductors actually do, and why they matter’. And so Wigglesworth sets off on his picaresque journey through this most singular practice, his own career hovering over the narrative, drawn on whenever a point needs making or a plane needs landing. He is far more than an amiable guide, for Wigglesworth is a smart, serious musician who brings curiosity and courtesy to everything he does, which has included some turbulent tenures, boards, and management sabotaging the role he carefully delineates in this book.

As a teenager, I was a Greek tragedy tragic. While my friends had crushes on George Michael and Boy George (in retrospect, not the most promis­ing objects of desire), I was crushing on Sophocles. It was 1983: shaggy perms, rolled-down leg warmers, cheap syn­thetic leggings, winklepickers, and a school Portakabin that reeked of fumes from the paraffin heater. It was a miserable Tuesday in January, with nothing but three more months of winter and a new set text to look forward to. The text was Sophocles’ Electra.

We began without much enthusiasm. Our hennaed, green eye shadow-wearing, CND-lapelled teacher allo­cated parts and we started to read. Frankly, it was dull: two blokes talking about a shrine to some god and one of them being like an old racehorse, all conveyed in the toneless nasal drone of adolescent girls with runny noses. But then, something extraordinary happened. At line eighty-two, a cry from inside the palace – a woman’s cry, one of total pain that the men ignore as they turn their backs and walk away. For the next 800 lines we live with the echo of that cry, entering the world of women and words, of pas­sion and hatred and desire and agony and humiliation and defiance and despair and yet more unending pain.

And that was it; I was smitten. I had fallen for Sopho­cles’ Electra, the twisted, degraded, haggard remnant of the most dysfunctional of all families in Greek mythology – a character with such an extraordinary ability to seize the whole expanse of being that she stole my passions whole.

I was in love, I was obsessed, and I had to do everything in my power to make that love requited. So I learnt Greek every Saturday morning with our retired vicar, devoured books on acting, and wrote letters to the artistic directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company and National Theatre begging them to program the play. Three years later, I found myself studying Classics at Cambridge, still trying to make a go of a relationship with my beloved.

In January 1989, my wishes, I thought, came true. The RSC was to do Electra, with Deborah Warner directing and Fiona Shaw playing the role. I was already a fan of both: I’d regularly binged on RSC productions at Stratford, staying at the youth hostel and hanging around the stage door to talk to my acting idols (Fiona included). I had been turned into a gibbering mess by Warner’s extraordinary Titus Andronicus (1987) that had left me feeling more sick and more exhilarated that any production I’d ever seen.

The production was agony, not because it wasn’t good, but rather because it was so good. Or at least Fiona’s perfor­mance was. She was my Electra – the raw, endlessly picked scab I had imagined and had longed to act. She had stolen my beloved and made her her own. But the revelation that came from watching that performance, in its naked, brutal honesty, was a sudden understanding of what acting could be. Not the attitudinising I had thought of as great acting, but the ripped-open vulnerability of a performer who lays herself bare, who delves into the abject so deeply that she becomes sublime and the ugliness makes of her pain a thing of beauty.

Three years later, my relationship with Fiona Shaw and Electra entered a whole new chapter. The production was to be remounted and so, of course, I bombarded Warner with letters until she agreed to meet me and then cast me as company understudy. ‘This will be the most painful job of your career,’ she warned me, and she was right. I held eight separate roles in my head with only the faintest of chances of ‘going on’, I made tea for everyone, gave Fiona shoulder massages, nightly screamed the death cry of Clytemnestra (who didn’t want to strain her voice), and sat in my under­study’s perch watching each nuance of Fiona’s performance. I admired her tricks, I watched her technique, I noted the waxing and waning of energy, and I learned more from that experience than from any drama school training.

Ten years later I did end up playing Electra on a six-month national tour that was more gruelling yet more exquisite than anything I could have imagined in my teen­age fantasies. This was now a new Electra, my Electra, but I remembered what Fiona had taught me. I remembered to search for the beauty in the ugliness and the sublime in the abject. I remembered the epiphany that she engendered, and for that I’ll always be grateful.