Yumna Kassab has utilised the sparse economy of short stories to craft her début collection, grounding universal diasporic themes such as generational disconnect, cultural loss, and the weight of familial expectations in the distinct Lebanese-Australian social milieu of western Sydney, where she was born and raised.

Short story collections often lack a certain cohesiveness, but Kassab’s characters each move in the same fictional yet exceedingly real world where Muslim Australians – straddling the line between being hyper-visible and invisible – are both demonised and studiously avoided. Characters with the same names recur from time to time, not always the same characters; reading Kassab’s stories requires a meticulous attention to detail to deconstruct and decipher how various individuals relate to one another.

The eighty-four-page ‘The House of Youssef’ is heartbreaking in the slow yet deliberate way the family at its centre breaks down, but the preceding stories are striking for the poignant moments of unbelonging and loss they capture in so few pages. ‘Hold True’, ‘Son’, ‘The Rest Of His Life’, and ‘Dead End’ capture the hopeless monotony of being a disenfranchised young Lebanese-Australian man. This discombobulation is elevated in ‘9/11: Before and After’ as an unnamed male narrator closes in on himself after the terrorist attack. Kassab’s stories are quietly devastating; her characters rebel in small ways instead of sweeping gestures, but mostly they go about their lives.

Kassab’s prose is unsparing and frank yet unstinting when examining the push and pull of being a second-generation Lebanese-Australian who carries her invisible audience of family, friends, and cultural expectations wherever she goes. Similarly in the latter half of the book, she expertly inhabits the psyche of first-generation migrants who live in one place yet dream of another. It’s in her ability to bridge the chasm between the two that Kassab shines.

To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.  

Robyn Archer

Zizanie, Meryl Tankard’s new work for Restless Dance Theatre, premièred at the Adelaide Festival: a work of such charm and intelligence it makes you wonder what the word ‘disability’ actually means. The work deserves to be seen Australia-wide.

Back to Back Theatre gave us The Shadow Whose Prey the Hunter Becomes. Typically dangerous, the creator/performers debate the use of the word ‘disability’ and do so in the most minimal theatrical style. Devoid of artifice yet wholly theatrical, this is the most provocative company in the country.

At NGV Australia, Rosslynd Piggott’s survey show I sense you but I cannot see you went from early botanicals, through objects and air of cities, artisan collaborations and vapour paintings. These recent Japan-inspired oils are created with alchemical mastery. There’s an indescribable energy in this ultimate minimalism.

A word on philanthropy. Without Naomi Milgrom’s private collection and assistance we would lack a comprehensive grasp of all that William Kentridge is and does. His Wozzeck was in Sydney, That Which We Do Not Remember graced AGNSW and then AGSA, where we were additionally treated to Adelaide-born, Berlin-resident Jo Dudley’s terrific Guided Tour of the Exhibition: For Soprano with Handbag. Thanks to all inclined to support the arts with such generosity.

Michael Honeyman as Wozzeck in Opera Australia's 2019 production of Wozzeck at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Keith Saunders)

Felicity Chaplin

This year’s Alliance Française French Film Festival featured a strong program, including new films by Jean-Luc Godard and Claire Denis, and the second feature from Louis Garrel. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s exuberant performance in Eric Barbier’s La Promesse de l’aube was a standout for me, but the real highlight was the darkly comic, metaphysical western The Sisters Brothers (sadly not released since), which screened at the Astor accompanied by a Q&A with director Jacques Audiard. The Astor was the perfect setting for Benoît Debie’s majestic cinematography, and Joaquin Phoenix gives a captivating performance as an unpredictable gun for hire. Audiard said that directing Phoenix was like working with ‘a little devil’. Other highlights of 2019 included Richard Lowenstein’s documentary Mystify for its intimate and absorbing portrait of Michael Hutchence, and Jennifer Kent’s harrowing and atmospheric colonial thriller The Nightingale for the revelation of Baykali Ganambarr in a breakout performance as local Aboriginal tracker Billy.

Baykali Ganambarr as Billy in The Nightingale (photograph via Transmission Films) 

Tim Byrne

It is always fascinating to see the wheel of fortune returning a classic work to the forefront of our consciousness; it tells us as much about our present as our past. This year it was Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge. Directed by Iain Sinclair, this breathtaking MTC production rendered Eddie Carbone’s act of betrayal as a catastrophic rift in the social contract, an act of madness against himself, his community, and his future.

In another return, Melbourne Worker’s Theatre produced an extraordinary polyphony of contemporary voices, primal screams, and competing iterations of our national character with Anthem. Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas, and Irine Vela reminded us that agitprop is the beating heart of all theatre, the original call to attention.

Best of all came early in the year. Malthouse brought out Ars Nova’s production of Underground Railroad Game to open their season. It was one of the most accomplished, provocative, and thoughtful works in years. Reaching deep into the history of slavery and oppression in the United States, it threw an uncompromising light on our own racial inadequacies. The past is always present.

Zoe Terakes in A View from the Bridge (photograph by Pia Johnson)

Gabriella Coslovich

Two of the most profoundly moving works I saw this year brought me face to face with a past that, as author Bruce Pascoe has shown, is well documented but that white Australia largely chooses to ignore. Indigenous soprano–composer Deborah Cheetham transformed the requiem – a mass for the dead, traditionally sung in Latin – into a work of bold contemporary relevance, recasting it in the language of the Gunditjmara people to honour the fallen on both sides of the resistance wars on Victoria’s south-west coast. With its passages of terror, grief, and beauty, Eumerella, a War Requiem for Peace unified non-Indigenous and Indigenous choirs with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, and rightly won a prolonged standing ovation at its single performance at Hamer Hall.

Tasmanian Aboriginal artist Julie Gough’s exhibition Tense Past, presented by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery and Dark Mofo, was born of an equally deep enquiry into the impact of colonisation. Gough’s outdoor installation Missing or Dead, at Dark Path in Hobart, was the most perturbing element. In the heaviness of a Hobart mid-winter night, I was confronted by a dimly lit, nightmarish expanse of trees upon which were hung or nailed posters of 180 Tasmanian Aboriginal children lost or stolen during the early years of the colony.

Deborah Cheetham performing in Eumeralla: A war requiem for peace with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra (photograph by Laura Manariti)

Humphrey Bower

My theatre highlight in 2019 was the Belvoir/ Co-Curious co-production of S. Shakthidharan and Eamon Flack’s sprawling Sri Lankan-Australian saga Counting and Cracking at the Adelaide Festival. Two outstanding location- or community-based works in Perth were 5 Short Blasts by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey (in a small boat on the upper reaches of the Swan River and Fremantle Harbour) and The Lion Never Sleeps by Noemie Huttner-Koros (a walking tour of queer Northbridge and its history before, during, and after the AIDS crisis). Joel Bray’s intimate confessional/participatory dance theatre work Biladurang (in a hotel room on the forty-fourth floor of the Sofitel on Collins in Melbourne’s CBD) and Daddy (Arts House, North Melbourne Town Hall) both explored Aboriginality and queerness in a way that was playful, tender, confronting, and inclusive. My favourite piece of new writing was See You Next Tuesday, Perth playwright Samantha Nerida’s delirious monologue in three voices about teenage female sexuality, adventure, and danger, intelligently directed by Alexa Taylor at The Blue Room Theatre. Finally, the most spectacular international show I saw was Dimitris Papaioannou’s darkly humorous work of corporeal theatre, The Great Tamer, at the Perth Festival.

Vaishnavi Suryaprakash and Sukania Venugopal in Counting and Cracking (photograph by Brett Boardman)

Michael Shmith

It takes bravado for an opera company to bring neglected works into the repertoire. The year was bookended by two such productions. In February, Victorian Opera brought to the cavernous Palais Theatre, in St Kilda, the first fully staged Melbourne production of Parsifal (1882). Conducted by the company’s artistic director, Richard Mills, and directed by Roger Hodgman, this was a sterling effort that went to the heart of Wagner’s Bühnenweihfestspiel.

In October, from IOpera, came the Australian première of Ernst Krenek’s jazz-inspired opera, Jonny spielt auf (1927). Conducted by Peter Tregear – a real labour of love and scholarship – this one-off concert performance was a vivid reminder of what was once the most popular opera in the world.

A quick mention of galvanising performances by the MSO and its departing chief conductor, Andrew Davis, of a Stravinsky double bill: Perséphone and Le sacre du printemps.

Andrew Davis conducts The Rite of Spring as part of the MSO's Stravinsky Double Bill (photograph by Laura Manariti)

Des Cowley

The Stonnington Jazz Festival delivered a week of outstanding performances, including the Australian première of Peter Knight’s composition The Plains, based on the Gerald Murnane novel. Elsewhere, jazz and film came together in a memorable concert by the Adam Simmons Creative Music Ensemble devoted to the music of the late Polish jazz composer Krzysztof Komeda, best known for his scores for filmmaker Roman Polanski. Miles Okazaki’s brilliant and unorthodox interpretations of the music of Thelonious Monk, as arranged for solo guitar, was a personal highlight at this year’s Melbourne International Jazz Festival. But nothing could surpass the masterful performance by the Art Ensemble of Chicago as part of Melbourne’s Supersense Festival. Celebrating their fiftieth year, the augmented Ensemble, led by the unflagging seventy-nine-year-old Roscoe Mitchell, one of the AEC’s two remaining original members, unleashed a 100-minute single piece flow of music that ran the gamut from classical to African rhythms, swing and free jazz.

Herbie Hancock at the 2019 Melbourne International Jazz Festival (photography by Anna Madden)

Susan Lever

In July, Meyne Wyatt brought his first play City of Gold to the Griffin Theatre. This witty, confronting performance reminded us how little life has changed for those on the margins while we city dwellers live in comfort. Most of the audience left speechless with awe and shame.

In a complete contrast, Whiteley celebrated that comfortable middle-class life. With its melodic score by Elena Kats-Chernin and massive screens showing some of Whiteleys more colourful and optimistic paintings, it offered art as pure pleasure, with any darkness deftly smoothed over. I left thinking the real genius on display was Kats-Chernin.

The same week, the Sydney Chamber Opera staged another new Australian opera, Pierce Wilcox and Elliott Gyger’s adaptation of Peter Carey’s Oscar and Lucinda. While Gyger’s music became a little monotonous, Wilcox’s libretto turned a prolix novel into a pithily philosophical drama, brilliantly acted and sung by the young cast.

Bradley Cooper as Frank Lloyd and Leigh Melrose as Brett Whiteley in Opera Australia's 2019 production of Whiteley at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Prudence Upton)

Peter Rose

The Adelaide Festival brought many highlights. One performance (sadly not repeated elsewhere) that shook me to the core was the 600-year-old a cappella Sretensky Monastery Choir, with its six virtuosic soloists and its phenomenal sonorities and surges. Monsieur Crescendo himself (Rossini) would have been on his feet at the end, as we all were.

The Sydney Symphony Orchestra’s concert version of Peter Grimes reminded us what remarkable metaphysical angst Britten depicts in his first opera. What is home? Where is home? Stuart Skelton, in the title role, offered an acute study in exhaustion, social estrangement, and defeat. Nicole Car, making her role début, was a radiant Ellen Orford.

Opera Australia and David McVicar’s luminous production of Così fan tutte finally came to Melbourne and convinced some of us that it might just be Mozart’s finest opera. In an exceptional cast, Jane Ede and Anna Dowsley stood out as the equivocating sisters.

Bravo to Red Stitch for giving us Caryl Churchill’s hilarious, unnerving satire Escaped Alone. Julie Forsyth was magnetic, her closing monologue (‘Terrible rage’) quite unforgettable.

Julie Forsyth in Escaped Alone (photograph by Jodie Hutchinson)

Alison Stieven-Taylor

My first review for ABR was David Goldblatt: Photographs 1948–2018, an expansive collection of works by one of South Africa’s most insightful photographers. This exemplary expression of the documentary form was followed by Ballenesque, Roger Ballen: A Retrospective. Bizarre, thrilling, and at times repellent, Ballen’s work is at the other end of the photographic spectrum to Goldblatt, but both artists challenge conceptions of humanity, politics, and power. Hoda Afshar’s breathtaking Remain features portraits of asylum seekers on Manus Island. Shot in secret in a makeshift studio, Afshar’s work is unequivocally political, portraying the beauty in suffering. Dina Goldstein’s satirical series Gods of Suburbia brilliantly questions religious faith in the era of technology. Oded Wagenstein’s Like Last Year’s Snow, a lyrical dissertation on ageing, moved me to tears. Both featured in Head On Photo Festival (Sydney). And my final highlight: Civilization: The Way We Live Now. Exhilarating and apocalyptic, this is the show of the summer.

Eyesight testing at the Vosloosrus Eye Clinic of the Boksburg Lions Club. 1980 silver gelatin photograph on fibre-based paper. Image courtesy Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg and Cape Town © The David Goldblatt Legacy Trust

Will Yeoman

Recorded music aside, I’ve spent a lot of time this year listening to WASO, especially when principal conductor Asher Fisch was in town. His ability to galvanise the orchestra in performance, while continuing to shape and refine its technical and artistic qualities, is a constant source of wonder, especially when orchestra and conductor share the platform with superb international artists. Three of this year’s WASO concerts stand out for me. An Evening with Gun-Brit Barkmin – Beethoven, Wagner, Richard Strauss – showcased not only the interpretative range of this fine German soprano but Fisch’s considerable fluency in German operatic repertoire. To hear Fisch conducting Danish violinist and conductor Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider in a superlative performance of Elgar’s Violin Concerto, followed by Szeps-Znaider conducting Fisch in Schumann’s Piano Concerto – well, that took things to a whole new level.

Gun-Brit Barkmin (photograph via West Australian Symphony Orchestra)

Gillian Wells

Spartacus is a Bolshoi Ballet specialty. Aram Khachaturian’s romantic score is lyrical and lush, and Yuri Grigorovich’s ambitious choreography captures the plight of the gladiatorial slaves and the phalanxes and testudos of Roman military tactics. In the recent Bolshoi production presented by The Queensland Performing Arts Centre, the superbly synchronised military sequences made an ideal foil for the breathtaking airborne artistry of Igor Tsvirko in the leading role.

In Concert Seven of this year’s Bangalow Music Festival, the Orava Quartet’s performance of Wojciech Kilar’s rarely heard Orawa thrilled the crowd. The Quartet’s crystal-clear, lovingly precise vibrancy was like a portal through which the sights, sounds, and colours of a Polish rural scene were indelibly revealed.

The Tyalgum Music Festival presented a stunning performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs by soprano Greta Bradman and the Tinalley String Quartet in the festival’s Friday Gala. Another highlight was an airing of Schubert’s Fantasie in F minor. This work for four hands is a treasure, though in the hands of the unimaginative it can be witheringly repetitive. The Viney-Grinberg Piano Duo’s superb interpretation breathed with such fresh insight, drama, and edge-of-the-seat silences that every repetition was a joy.

Kevin Jackson and Robyn Hendricks in Spartacus (photograph by Jeff Busby)

Ben Brooker

Sometimes there is so much bad theatre around you’re left wondering what you ever saw in the medium in the first place. And yet, when the reminders come, as they always do, the effect can be incendiary. Three performance works qualified in the past twelve months: Counting and Cracking, S. Shakthidharan’s astonishing epic (and début play!) about four generations of one Sri Lankan family; SHIT/LOVE, fortyfivedownstairs’s double bill of equally brilliant one-act plays by Patricia Cornelius, high poetess of Australia’s underclass; and The Second Woman, Nat Randall and Anna Breckon’s marathon work for stage and video. Across a single scene repeated one hundred times over twenty-four hours, it excavated contemporary gender roles in an utterly compelling fashion.

Nat Randall and collaborators, The Second Woman (2017), at Carriageworks (photograph by Heidrun Löhr)

Barney Zwartz

Melburnians, as always, had a rich choice of operas from several companies. Opera Australia, unsurprisingly, led the way with a brilliant co-production of Rossini’s Il Viaggio a Reims, composed for the 1824 coronation of Charles X, lost for 150 years and given here in its Australian première. The other OA highlight was a concert performance of Andrea Chénier, with superstar soloists in Jonas Kaufmann and Eva-Maria Westbroek. Baritone Ludovic Tézier almost stole the show.

Victorian Opera’s best was an outstanding Parsifal, again with a fine cast led by Burkhard Fritz, Peter Rose, and Katarina Dalayman, with the luxury of Teddy Tahu Rhodes as Titurel. Perhaps the most interesting was tiny IOpera’s witty and inventive concert performance in the Australian première of Ernst Krenek’s 1927 sensation Jonny spielt auf. Twice before planned and dropped by bigger companies, the opera made it thanks to the passion of Krenek specialist Peter Tregear, who conducted masterfully.

Sian Sharp as Marchesa Melibea and Shanul Sharma as Conte di Libenskof in Il Viaggio a Reims (photograph by Prudence Upton)

Richard Leathem

ACMI may have closed its doors for much of 2019, for redevelopment, but not before it screened the ultimate movie montage. Christian Marclay’s twenty-four-hour opus The Clock (2010) delivered a masterclass in film editing. The Clock features clips from thousands of films made since the creation of cinema; each scene contains a time corresponding with the actual time. Suspense builds without ever being released. Cinema has been described as the art of time; Marclay’s addictive installation took the practice of time manipulation to the ultimate degree.  

Cinema of a more traditional length reached its acme, as ever, at the Melbourne International Film Festival. This year the Georgian-set And Then We Danced showed how beautiful art can come from harsh reality. Levan Akin’s response to seeing members of the LGBTIQ community in his home country being violently attacked was a rapturous celebration of self-expression in defiance of oppressive traditions. 

Giorgi Tsereteli as David and Levan Gelbakhiani as Merab in And Then We Danced (photograph via Cannes Film Festival)

Sophie Knezic

The year featured three outstanding exhibitions by established artists in full command of their medium. The Garden of Forking Paths: Mira Gojak and Takehito Koganezawa, curated by Shihoko Iida and Melissa Keys at Buxton Contemporary, offered a rare opportunity to see a cluster of Gojak’s materially poetic and literally incisive works surprisingly well-paired with Koganezawa’s exuberant drawings and animations.

Composite Acts by David Rosetzky – a one-night-only exhibition as part of the Channels Festival – showed him excelling in the role of artistic director. Featuring a video of dancers Shelley Lasica, Arabella Frahn-Starkie, and Harrison Ritchie-Jones choreographed by Jo Lloyd (two of them performed on the night), with ludic sculptures by Sean Meilak and a poignant score by composer Duane Morrison, this seamless work deftly balanced the live and the recorded, whose overlappings became an affective metaphor for the probing of memory and reflection.

A survey exhibition of one of our most interesting artists working with digital animation, Arlo Mountford: Deep Revolt (Shepparton Art Museum) highlighted the tautness of Mountford’s work, its mash-up of art history, manga, and genre film exposing our entanglements in the mediatised world.

Arlo Mountford, The Triumph, 2010 video still single channel video installation, 16:9 HD, stereo. Duration 9:11 min. Image courtesy the artist and Sutton Gallery Melbourne

Patrick McCaughey

Richard Serra has taken over Gagosian’s prime spaces in NYC this fall. The huge, multi-piece Forged Rounds at West 24th St sets the key: ‘Weight is a value for me … I have more to say about the balancing of weight, the diminishing of weight … the disorientation of weight, the disequilibrium of weight …’ The drawings, Diptychs and Triptychs, at the mother house on Madison Avenue exemplified the theme, and the 99’ length of Reverse Curve added dynamism.

I admired Kristin Headlam’s illuminations of Chris Wallace-Crabbe’s long poem The Universe Looks Down at the Baillieu Library in Melbourne. Although the poem has brilliance and liveliness on the page, it is not an easy work. Headlam’s spirited responses – a bestiary of the poem – drew my attention to overlooked passages. I returned to The Universe Looks Down imaginatively refreshed with a new awareness and admiration.

Richard Serra, Nine, 2019 (photograph via Gagosian)

Francesca Sasnaitis

The musicians’ joyous engagement with one another and with the audience was the highlight of Silkroad Ensemble’s performance in Perth. Opening with an impassioned dialogue between Cristina Pato’s gaita (Galician bagpipes) and Wu Tong’s suona (Chinese horn), and travelling through Brazilian, Vietnamese, Indian, and Sephardic traditions, and the compositions of György Ligeti, Antonín Dvořák, and John Zorn, the exhilarating program was truly representative of founder Yo-Yo Ma’s ideal of cultural exchange and collaboration.

The survey exhibition Tom Nicholson: Public Meeting at ACCA, in Melbourne, proffered a spectacular argument in favour of socially driven arts practice that combines arresting visuals, profound thought, and an ongoing conversation with community. Nicholson’s deployment of text as both graphic element and narrative vehicle in projects, such as Towards a monument to Batman’s Treaty (2013–19) and After action for another library (1999–2001/2019), multiplied and challenged readings of contested colonial histories with surprising emotional intensity.

Cristina Pato and Wu Tong from the Silkroad Ensemble (photograph via the Perth Festival)

Ian Dickson

It is fitting that in a year in which the concept of masculinity has been put firmly in the spotlight and populist movements have sought to demonise ‘the other’, three undoubted highlights concerned themselves with flawed men, outsiders who are brought down by their otherness. In his searing production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck for Opera Australia, William Kentridge’s familiar charcoal drawings summoned up a hellish World War I nightmare. As the increasingly isolated and paranoid Wozzeck, Michael Honeyman gave a career-defining performance.

Isolated, paranoid, pitiful, and brutal are all adjectives that could also apply to Peter Grimes, the eponymous protagonist of Benjamin Britten’s opera, which was given a magnificent semi-staged performance at the Sydney Opera House. David Robertson led a superbly in-form SSO, and the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs rose to the occasion brilliantly. Their stentorian cries of ‘Peter Grimes’ nearly blew Utzon’s sails into the Harbour. But it was the superlative cast that set the seal on this incomparable evening. Can there be any doubt that Stuart Skelton is the reigning Grimes of the moment? He has all the power of Jon Vickers but also a tenderness that the great Canadian lacked in this role. It says much for the rest of the cast, especially Nicole Car and the American baritone Alan Held, that they were all performing at his level.

The story of the third outsider, John Grant, the schoolteacher in Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright, was given a brilliantly radical retelling at the Malthouse. Director Declan Greene worked seamlessly with the extraordinary Zahra Newman, who played all the characters and provided a devastating introduction. The staging of the two-up game and the roo shoot were bravura moments of theatre.

Zahra Newman in Wake in Fright (photograph by Pia Johnson)

Kim Williams

Three things standout in particular for me in the 2019 year – all epic in vision and realisation.

Counting and Cracking from Belvoir St Theatre (Sydney Festival and Adelaide Festival). A huge, valiant production written by S. Shakthidharan in a collaboration with director Eamon Flack, who realised an indelibly memorable production about four generations of Sri Lankans moving between Sydney and Sri Lanka in a beautiful and tragic epic. It was cast with a large, entirely non-Anglo Celtic troupe that delivered gripping storytelling.

The new film from Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Never Look Away, is even better than his last (The Lives of Others, 2006). Loosely based on the German artist Gerhard Richter, this sweeping piece of cinematic storytelling is almost perfect in terms of realisation, and devastating in impact. It addresses the artistic sensibility, mid-twentieth-century politics, humanity, and, above all, love.

Meryl Tankard’s restaging of her remarkable work Two Feet for the Adelaide Festival, with the twenty-first century’s greatest ballerina, Natalia Osipova, in a solo role that portrayed the tragic, tempestuous life of the twentieth-century heroine Olga Spessivtseva, provided a wondrous chamber work with devastating impact. 

Natalia Osipov in Meryl Tankard's Two Feet (photograph by Regis Lansac)

Tali Lavi

Watching The Australian Dream on opening night in a near-vacant suburban cinema rendered the devastation twofold. The documentary examines the state of this country’s heart, made rotten by racism and the disavowal of Indigenous Australia’s centrality to the national narrative. Adam Goodes and Stan Grant stand as beacons of dignity.

Sometimes artists are so ingenious that their works induce a heightened state of wonder. Bryony Kimmings’s I’m a Phoenix, Bitch (Arts Centre Melbourne) was a melange of puppetry, subversive song, encounter with the woods of Grimm, and multimedia, as Kimmings revealed her experiences of post-natal depression and having a sick child.

Honourable mentions: THE RABBLE’s feverish production of Alison Croggon’s poetry-infused My Dearworthy Darling and Nakkiah Lui’s Black Is The New White (STC/Melbourne Festival), where racial and sexual politics were subversively and outrageously skewered amid audience dancing and joyfulness.

Jennifer Vuletic in My Dearworthy Darling (photograph by David Paterson)

Michael Halliwell

This has been a good year for offerings from Opera Australia, but two stand out, for different reasons. Wozzeck (a co-production with the Salzburg Festival), directed by artist William Kentridge, dazzled as a visual feast with a kaleidoscopic array of images punctuating Berg’s bleak look at struggling humanity. Of similar impact, Strauss’s Salome was distinguished by the outstanding performance of the title role by American soprano Lise Lindstrom. Salome is an almost impossible role, visually and vocally, but Lindstrom’s lithe and alluring physical presence and steely tone were as close to perfection as is possible.

Revisiting a well-loved play for the first time in nearly forty years has its perils. Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Tom Stoppard’s quasi-autobiographical, meta-theatrical meditation on love and betrayal, The Real Thing, paid homage to the play’s 1980s social, and particularly musical, context, but made it a searingly contemporary experience.

Lise Lindstrom as Salome in Opera Australia's 2019 production of Salome at the Sydney Opera House (photograph by Prudence Upton)

What was your pathway to publishing?

An Arts degree and a youthfully optimistic view that I could land a job in publishing when I was living in London in my twenties. Working at Penguin Books in the wake of Penguin’s publishing Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was an exciting and dramatic time. I was sold on the courage, the passion, and the literary life around me.

How many titles do you publish each year?

Up to fifteen titles. This has traditionally been across fiction, poetry, and non-fiction at UQP, but I’m focusing more now on non-fiction.

The recent death of Les Murray can be likened in its significance to the passing of Victor Hugo, after which, as Stéphane Mallarmé famously wrote, poetry ‘could fly off, freely scattering its numberless and irreducible elements’. Murray’s subsumption of the Australian nationalist tradition in poetry, including The Bulletin schools of both the 1890s (A.G. Stephens) and 1940s (Douglas Stewart), has delineated an influential pathway in our literature for more than fifty years. Yet the death in 2017 of the American poet John Ashbery might be viewed as equivalent in its effect, given the impact of his work on several generations of local poets, which has in many respects constituted a counter-stream to Murray’s often narrowly defined nationalism. Ashbery’s voice has been infectiously dominant in English-language poetries over several decades, in a manner similar to T.S. Eliot’s impression on poets of the earlier twentieth century. Critic Susan Schultz, the publisher of this volume, has charted the dynamics of its transcultural influence in her aptly titled collection, The Tribe of John (1995).

At first glance, the premise of this book seems dubious. Katharine Smyth, an American woman in her mid-twenties, turns to the life and work of Virginia Woolf for solace after the death of her father. There is no doubt that Woolf writes brilliantly about death, particularly in the novel Smyth focuses on, To the Lighthouse (1927), which fictionalises the death of Woolf’s mother, Julia Stephen. But what comfort could Smyth hope to find in the work of a writer who herself refuses any of the usual consolations? After losing her mother and her elder half-sister, Stella, in her early teens, and then her father, Leslie, and her elder brother, Thoby, in her twenties, Woolf knew that there was no solace to be found. Her only comfort was that at least ‘the gods (as I used to phrase it) were taking one seriously’.

Lucky Ticket is a brave and haunting début collection of short stories by Vietnamese-Australian writer Joey Bui. In erudite stories of the displaced and dislocated, Bui’s characters are glistering survivors. Many of their voices ring out against the bleak political backdrop of Saigon, making the reader aware of the tyrannical government control and the lack of basic civil and political rights. Bui’s memorable characters are a testament to the deft way she crafts dialogue and to the interviews she undertook with a range of Vietnamese people from refugee backgrounds to better understand the intricacies of their existence.

In the stirring titular story, the disabled protagonist is a war veteran who sells lottery tickets. This serves as a brilliant metaphor for the entire collection, where ‘fortunes rise and fall’. The narrator has lost his legs to a ‘Chinese bomb’: ‘One hundred Vietnamese soldiers run through a field and umph, umph, umph, umph! ... Two hundred legs fly off! You are ruined, you cannot fight them anymore, but you have to keep living.’ Far from being a war hero, he is ‘a burden to Vietnam, one more cripple to look after’. There are similar tropes in ‘Hey Brother’, where the narrator recounts his experience on a refugee boat, pushing overboard a soldier with a gangrenous leg. These gritty, abject moments enhance the determination of the characters. Incredible resolve is also evident in ‘Mekong Love’, a mesmerising parable where characters Comma and Slip must survive a series of threats to the consummation of their marriage, and in ‘The Honourable Man’, dedicated to Nam Le, where a father considers his obligation to his unwanted son.

Lucky Ticket explores resilience in times of political unrest and the unfailing tenacity at the heart of dispossession. Bui’s narratives are profound and unforgettable.

ABC journalist Steven Schubert’s first book, Mandatory Murder, could have been a definitive account of the bizarre sentencing of Zak Grieve for the murder of fellow Katherine resident Ray Niceforo in October 2011. To achieve this, it had to dig deeper and cover greater territory than existing accounts, including Dan Box’s mediocre documentary, The Queen & Zak Grieve, presented in six ‘webisodes’ on The Australian’s website.

Unfortunately, Mandatory Murder’s first 273 pages are given over to a fairly standard true-crime account – complete with shocksploitative details and police-style sardonic humour – of the investigation into Niceforo’s murder and the subsequent trials of Grieve, his mate Chris Malyschko, and Chris’s mother, Bronwyn Buttery (Niceforo’s partner). A third young man, Darren Halfpenny, separately pleaded guilty to murder. Although he doesn’t need to, Schubert seems to want to amplify the shock value; we even get gruesome colour photos supplied by police. True crime is a genre that often precludes illumination of the narratives of class and trauma that propel criminality in general, and this criminality in particular.

Fred Watson’s inspiration as a lad was the legendary telly astronomer Patrick Moore, who presented the BBC’s show The Sky At Night for more than fifty years. At the end, when others such as Chris Lintott began taking over, Moore was simply wheeled in at the start of the show in his wheelchair, to mumble a couple of sentences, then wheeled off again, out of the way, looking on wistfully.

Watson and Moore have a lot in common: both British, both immensely informed, both musical performers. And they both showed not just deep knowledge of deep space but also the essential emotional commitment to the vast tapestry they were investigating. I well remember the night when the first pictures of the far side of the moon came to Moore, live on air. As he showed them to the television audience, he simply cried, talking in choked tones as tears streamed down his face.

During cold southern winters, the islands and atolls of the Pacific seem to offer an idyllic escape. Advertisements for cheap flights to Fiji or New Caledonia present smiling ukulele players and al fresco massages. More bleakly, despairing islanders, by virtue of their place of birth, experience the devastation wrought by urbanisation and the climate crisis.

For Melbourne writer Tom Bamforth, the Pacific is much more complex than either of these extremes. Over ten years, he has pursued and discovered a collection of layered and interesting places, learning much about the unique delights and challenges of life in our neighbouring Pacific nations.

Sidney (Sid) J. Baker (1912–76) is undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in the history of Australian slang lexicography. Born in New Zealand, Baker worked in Australia as a journalist, writing for publications such as ABC Weekly, The Daily Telegraph, and The Sydney Morning Herald. He was also the author of a number of books about Australian slang, one of which is A Popular Dictionary of Australian Slang (1941).

I recently added a copy of the third edition (1943) to my collection of dictionaries and lexicons. This slim volume is particularly special: it is signed by Baker, but is also inscribed ‘Gift from Constance Robertson’. Constance (Connie) Robertson was an editor, writer, and war correspondent. She was also the daughter of The Bulletin’s ‘Red Page’ editor A.G. Stephens, himself a collector and champion of Australian slang. Baker acknowledged his debt to the work of Stephens in his preface to A Popular Dictionary. While it is unclear just why Constance Robertson signed this copy, it might be because of this connection.

A year after her death, Mirka Mora is still regarded as a ‘phenomenon’ in the Melbourne art world, not least for her vibrant personality and provocative behaviour. Now Sabine Cotte, a French-Australian painting conservator, in this modest account of her research into the artist’s methods and materials, offers a new perspective on Mora’s creative process and the significance of her work.

Mora – a creative innovator until her death at the age of ninety – was a dedicated, self-taught artist who studied the Old Masters and refined her painting techniques. She is widely known for her dolls (soft sculptures), her tapestries, and her murals. People who took part in her textile workshops often report that she changed their lives. Her public art is still visible in cafés, bookshops, railway stations, and on St Kilda Pier, guaranteeing her a continuing presence in Melbourne’s cultural and social life.

Galileo and Kepler went down in history for prising European science from the jaws of medieval mysticism and religion. But where was England’s equivalent? Newton would not make his mark for another century. Surely the free-thinking Elizabethans also had a scientific star?

They did: Thomas Harriot (c.1560–1621). Most of us have never heard of him, for Harriot did not publish his findings. His day job was teaching navigation to Sir Walter Raleigh’s ship captains. Queen Elizabeth’s favourite was intent on colonising North America for the Crown. But it was also down to Harriot’s personality: retiring, cautious, and meticulous.

Australian classical music. Not quite an oxymoron, but certainly an unfamiliar phrase. Yet Australian literature has been promoted by a battery of university courses overseas, following the beachhead established by Patrick White’s Nobel Prize. Similarly, Australian art has twice had great moments of impact: the Whitechapel exhibition of 1961 for the Nolan–Boyd generation, and now the continuing worldwide interest in Aboriginal art. Our rock stars have repeatedly made worldwide reputations; in classical music, Australian singers have regularly risen to the top. But classical composition has been something else. Apart from the quirky Percy Grainger – deftly working in small forms, sometimes with large resources – no Australian composer has had a significant influence overseas (though Brett Dean is shaping up as a contender). Grainger had to abandon Australia to do so, eventually taking out American citizenship.

In 1942, Elio Vittorini managed to circumvent the Fascist censors and publish Americana, a landmark anthology of thirty-three American authors. The aim of this massive project – over a thousand pages with translations into Italian carried out by ten significant literary figures of the time, including Alberto Moravia, Cesare Pavese, and Nobel Laureate poet Eugenio Montale – was to introduce iconic American voices to Italian readers. In assembling her substantial collection of forty Italian short stories, Jhumpa Lahiri set herself the same objective but in reverse: to introduce Italian authors to American readers. Lahiri declares Vittorini was her ‘guiding light’, not only for the general design of the work but also ‘in writing the brief author biographies – intended as partial sketches and not definitive renderings – that preface each story’.

Thanks to the internet, the 24/7 news cycle, and social media, certain books are preceded by their reputations. They arrive freighted with so much publicity hype that reading them with fresh eyes is almost impossible. A Constant Hum is one such book, very much the product of a reputation established well before publication, due to the airing of individual stories in places like Seizure and Meanjin, along with several prizes and shortlistings.

Despite my resistance to googling this book and its author, plus bypassing the considerable prelim pages of glowing comments by famous authors and from other literary reviews, I still came to my reading of A Constant Hum armed with too much knowledge. A sense of anxiety prevailed: would it live up to its reputation, would I be disappointed, would I feel intimidated if I had to disagree with the likes of Tony Birch and Fiona Wright?

As the ship carrying nine-year-old Cleary Sullivan and his mother, Cate, sets sail from Liverpool, there is a ‘flurry’ among the passengers. A ‘violent slash of red; tall as a house and shining wet’ has appeared on the dock, visible only to those onboard. Cleary’s mind fills with images of ‘some diabolical creature of the deep, blood erupting from its mouth’. The reality is more prosaic – some spilt paint – but it is an ominous beginning.

Like Meg Mundell’s début, Black Glass (2011), The Trespassers takes place in an unforgiving near-future. Cleary is one of more than three hundred masked passengers escaping a pandemic-riven United Kingdom. Their passage to Australia has been arranged through the ‘Balanced Industries Migration’ scheme, indentured servitude in all but name. The old-fashioned mode of transport and technological restrictions imposed on the passengers, combined with sailors casually shooting down drones, and terms like ‘shippers’, ‘sanning’, and ‘the stream’, give the novel an almost timeless quality, though its concerns are very much of the moment.

When Claude Monet lived in Argenteuil in the 1870s, he famously worked in a studio-boat on the Seine. He painted the river, he painted bridges over the river, he painted snow, the sky, his children and his wife, and, famously, a field of red poppies with a large country house in the background. Argenteuil is to Paris roughly what Heidelberg and Templestowe are to Melbourne. Once a riparian haven for plein air painters interested in capturing the transient optics of natural phenomena, it is now a suburban interface with a diminishing habitat for anything but humans.

Actually, Heidelberg and Templestowe are in good shape when compared to Monet’s old river haunt. When he was living in Argenteuil, the population was fewer than 10,000 people, most of whom were asparagus farmers, vintners, fishermen, and craftspeople. Now the suburb is home to more than 100,000, many of whom are commuters making the train trip into Paris every day to work. The only shimmering light of interest would probably come from their phones.

‘What kind of game is the sea?’ asks the speaker of Tracy K. Smith’s poem ‘Minister of Saudade’. ‘Lap and drag’, comes the response, ‘Crag and gleam / That continual work of wave / And tide’. It is not until the end of The Weekend that the sea’s majestic game is brought into focus, and then the natural world rises, a riposte, to eclipse human trivia.

Before this, Charlotte Wood’s novel is emphatically domestic, the sea a backdrop to the tight dynamics of decades-long friendship, its presence only occasionally noticed as it ‘[slaps] against the seawall in lazy, rhythmic sloshes’. This, too, is a kind of riposte, since ‘domestic’ fiction, especially by women writers, has long been disparaged.

Bruce Pascoe’s Salt is a wonderfully eclectic collection of new works and earlier short fiction, literary non-fiction, and essays written over twenty years. Structured thematically across six themes – Country, Lament, Seawolves, Embrasure, Tracks, and Culture Lines – Salt moves between the past and the present with Pascoe’s distinctively poetic voice. Readers of Dark Emu (2014) and Convincing Ground (2007) will be familiar with the style and subject matter but will discover newly released or reworked gems.

The title speaks to memories and ghosts triggered by the smell of salt; its ability to clean, to render flesh and skin from bone, to preserve evidence, to signal cumulative impacts on Country. The prevalence of salt speaks to the power and closeness of sea Country and our dwindling salty river systems, increasingly threatened by human intervention. Pascoe’s characters are richly drawn from this salted earth and exposed to the light and the elements. Whether presented as fiction or the voices of shared histories, his characters are grounded within the seasons and Country. So, too, in Pascoe’s view, are their possibilities of reviving this salted earth through heeding Indigenous knowledge and experience.

Bank bashing is an old sport in Australia, older than Federation. In 1910, when Labor became the first party to form a majority government in the new Commonwealth Parliament, they took the Money Power – banks, insurers, financiers – as their arch nemesis. With memories of the 1890s crisis of banking collapses, great strikes, and class conflict still raw, the following year the Fisher government established the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, ‘The People’s Bank’, as a state-owned trading bank offering cheap loans and government-guaranteed deposits to provide stiff competition to the greedy commercial banks gouging its customers.

A century on and Labor’s hostility towards the banks may have significantly eased but public animosity has not. Australia’s big banks enjoyed a moment of glory navigating the most recent financial crisis of 2008–09, celebrated as Australia’s ‘first line of defence’ against the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). A decade later and that reputation, despite the AA ratings and the soppy television commercials, has been trashed. For good reason, too. At least seventy-six good reasons, according to Royal Commissioner Kenneth Hayne.

In Israel’s recent election, Benjamin Netanyahu desperately defended his position as Israel’s prime minister, but perhaps also as a free man, because he may soon face trial for corruption charges. As Israelis learn more about his lavish life style, many yearn for the days of David Ben-Gurion (1886–1973), whom they recall as an ascetic statesman of vision and integrity. Netanyahu is seen as the opposite of Ben-Gurion.

So mused Israeli historian and journalist Tom Segev, author of this important biography of Israel’s first prime minister, in Haaretz newspaper. But, he added, Netanyahu has in many ways followed in Ben-Gurion’s footsteps, especially in his view that Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians can at best be managed, not solved.

In 2016 John Kaye was dying. Once leader of the Greens in New South Wales, he had a final message for his party. ‘This isn’t and never has been about changing government … This is about changing what people expect from government.’ In our era, dogged by chronic distrust of parties and government, it might have served as a rallying cry for people to transform politics by demanding more of their representatives. But Kaye was a man of the left, and in the context of an impending election, as the Greens descended into vicious factional brawls over preselection for his seat, his words unleashed a storm of controversy over the direction of the party.

This is just one among many eruptions of internecine warfare over the purpose of the Greens chronicled in Paddy Manning’s comprehensive history. The survival of the party since 1992, despite the elaboration of a program, and despite its professed commitment to consensual democratic processes, has depended on its leaders: the iconic Bob Brown, then Christine Milne, and lately Richard Di Natale.

The recent speech by young Swedish climate-change activist Greta Thunberg has provoked much comment and controversy. It also caused me to ponder the future of our planet and how our cultural lives will be affected by the environmental changes that will inevitably take place by the middle of the twenty-first century. 

In 2006, when I was Artistic Director and CEO of the Brisbane Festival, I invited Mikhail Gorbachev, former president of the USSR, and a number of international scientists and thinkers to a World Forum in Brisbane. Called Earth Dialogues, it was directed towards sustainable development, climate change, and resource management. We conducted the Forum in association with Green Cross International, of which Gorbachev was president. And I must say Anna Bligh, who was treasurer of Queensland at the time, ensured there was enough money to support the project, and without this it would never have happened.

Earth Dialogues, held long before these issues became fashionable, was an extraordinary event. The Brisbane City Hall was packed, and the Forum generated tremendous enthusiasm and goodwill. The state government and the Brisbane City Council contributed to setting up a branch of Green Cross International in Brisbane, and there were great expectations for change. Unfortunately, this momentum dissipated over time and little was done.

Thirteen years later, there seems to be a genuine wish for change to be accelerated. Thunberg’s speech leads me to contemplate a future scenario for our cultural life in Sydney and Australia as a result of the changes to our lives that will inevitably take place because of the effects of resource management, sustainable development, and the climate crisis.

The recent changes to our public transport system, with the reintroduction of trams, point to the inevitability of inner Sydney becoming a car and bus-free zone. That could only be a good thing. The centres of most major cities in the world are free of cars and buses and are consequently healthier, cleaner, more efficient, and far more attractive. 

With the current work in Sydney on the reintroduction of a tram or light rail system, I find it odd that, unlike most other major opera houses around the world, no underground railway station is being planned for the Sydney Opera House (SOH).

Ultimately, there will be no cars or buses in the Circular Quay and Opera House areas. Car parks will thus become redundant. The most obvious redundancy will be the one beneath the forecourt of the SOH. Needless to say, that car park was not part of Jørn Utzon’s original design, so the heritage argument for its preservation is not valid. 

So let’s consider this. If the car park were to be removed and replaced with a state-of-the-art lyric theatre, Sydney and Australia would have not only one of the great opera houses of the world on the outside, but also on the inside. This new lyric theatre could be built without disturbing the exterior of the SOH, for the existing car park is large enough to accommodate a 2,000-seat theatre. The public would enter the main entrance of the SOH and then take an escalator or an elevator down to the new theatre. A subway stop at the Sydney Opera House would be the obvious solution to transport audiences to and from another train station or to a car park outside the CBD. 

It is clear that Sydney urgently needs at least one other major theatre. The Joan Sutherland Theatre, despite the ongoing renovations, is not a twenty-first-century opera theatre. The orchestra pit is too small and the wing space facilities make it virtually impossible to present works of scale. As we all know, according to Utzon’s original design, this theatre was never intended to be an opera theatre. 

Globally, there is now a genuine desire to protect the health of our planet. Creating a genuine opera theatre as part of the SOH by removing the car parking station would be a responsible action towards preserving our future culturally and environmentally.

In recent days, one of the world’s leading directors refused Opera Australia’s offer of a new production in Sydney because the Joan Sutherland Theatre is not equipped to stage a large production. As a consequence, we will now stage this production in another Australian city before it transfers to the Metropolitan Opera in New York. 

Opera Australia has tripled its turnover since 2011 to $145 million in 2020. During that time OA has also tripled the size of its audience. The world’s greatest singers and conductors regularly perform with OA, which has become one of the world’s major opera companies. But the extraordinary opera houses recently built in China, for example, are far superior to the Joan Sutherland Theatre and are capable of staging the largest opera and theatre presentations in the world. 

The Sydney Opera House is a magnificent work in progress, but for it to fulfil its potential it is essential that a 2,000-seat lyric theatre replaces the car park beneath the forecourt. Only then will the greatest opera house in the world be in Sydney.

In the spring of 2003, a person from Hilary McPhee’s past got in touch with her. McPhee did not remember the woman’s name but recognised her immediately when they met for coffee. At high school they had played hockey together for a team called the Colac Battlers. The woman had been working for years as a personal assistant at a palace in Jordan, and her purpose in contacting McPhee wasn’t merely to reminisce. At one point in their conversation, she lowered her voice, glanced around the busy inner-Melbourne café and said that McPhee might hear from someone in Amman, the Jordanian capital, about a writing project.

This thrillerish scene is the starting point of the second volume of McPhee’s memoirs. In the first, Other People’s Words (2001), McPhee told the story of her early life and her career in publishing, culminating in her co-founding and running the independent publishing house McPhee Gribble. The firm’s financial struggles and eventual buy-out meant the book ended on a rueful note, but McPhee subsequently went on to do other big things, including chairing – and reorganising – the Australia Council for the Arts. By the time of the odd little reunion in the cafe, she had long been a highly respected and influential figure in literary and cultural circles. But she was restless.

Sam Leith, literary editor of Spectator magazine, recently put author Benjamin Moser on the spot. ‘Do you think her work will last?’ he asked, referring to the writings of Susan Sontag, whose biography Moser had not long finished. ‘And if so, which of it?’ Moser dissembled bravely. ‘Well, I hope so ...’

Yet was it dissembling? Or even brave, for that matter? Sontag’s oeuvre need not survive for Moser’s book – seven years in the making – to be a success, which it undoubtedly is. But, as one instance of monstrous behaviour gives way to another, we are left hoping that the work does survive, that it is forever recognised as a milestone in twentieth-century intellectual history, that the words exculpate the person. Otherwise, what’s the point?

When invited by Morry Schwartz, Anna’s husband and proprietor of Schwartz Publishing, which owns Black Inc., to write an account of the Anna Schwartz Gallery (ASG), Doug Hall initially declined but changed his mind after realising that it would enable him to write with a fresh perspective, having returned to Melbourne after twenty years as director of Queensland Art Gallery. The result, Present Tense: Anna Schwartz Gallery and thirty-five years of contemporary Australian art – which takes its title from the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007), Think with the Senses – Feel with the Mind: Art in the Present Tense, curated by Robert Storr – is a periphrastic straddling of art history, social history, and biography, inclined to reminiscence over analysis.

Featuring eighty-nine chapters of varying length, the text mostly provides overviews of the artists represented by ASG, set within a chronicle of Anna Schwartz’s evolution as a gallerist. This broad narration is interspersed with chapters on a few key late-twentieth-century art dealers – sometimes to narrate artist defections to ASG – as well as state museum redesigns, biennales, and even a chapter on Anna’s wardrobe.

Artist, hermit, instinctive communicator, a nomad who built studio nests for himself all over the globe, Ian Fairweather is a consistent paradox – and an enduring one. In an art world of fragile and fluctuating reputations, his work retains the esteem with which it was received – by his peers – when he landed in Australia in 1934 and, with their help, exhibited almost immediately. His way of life – eccentric, solitary, obsessive – was extraordinary then, and continued so until his death in 1974. Success never sanded off his diffident, abrasive edges. When presented with the International Cooperation Art Award in 1973, he mused, in a letter to his niece, Helga (‘Pippa’) Macnamara:

And what am I to do–with the beautiful bronze medallion–I have no one to leave it to–you wouldn’t want it … I suppose the Butcher Birds who have been my friends for many years–and driven away all the other birds–whom I should so much prefer–like the Kookaburras– the Laughing Jackass The Spirit of Australia’

All Fairweather’s letters, intimately intertwined with his physical world, read with a stream-of-consciousness fluidity (abrupt dashes for punctuation) that parallels the spontaneity of his art. ‘A master of fluent design full of springing energy and fine colour,’ wrote Bernard Smith in 1962 in Australian Painting, 1788–2000. Small wonder, then, that he continues to intrigue writers and cultural historians as well as art critics, museum directors, and auction houses (his 1963 painting, Barbeque, sold recently at auction for $1.4 million).

The editors of Ian Fairweather, Claire Roberts and John Thompson, credit writer Murray Bail with providing ‘the foundation upon which this volume of letters is based’. Bail’s Ian Fairweather, enlivened by the inclusion of Fairweather’s letters, was published in 1981 and revised, with more letters, as Fairweather in 2009. Roberts and Thompson have cast their research nets very wide, the consequence being that their volume now includes 354 of the known 700 letters written by Fairweather between 1915 and 1974 from multiple locations – a German POW camp, Canada, Shanghai, Melbourne, Mindanao, Peking, Brisbane, Manila, London, and many other ports – until he settled (if that is ever the word with Fairweather) on Bribie Island, off the Queensland coast.

In keeping with the contradictions of Fairweather’s life, particularly his apparent alienation from family, the letters project was endorsed by his nephew, Geoffrey Fairweather (the volume’s dedicatee), and had ongoing support from other members of his family. Fairweather himself exemplified throughout his life the strange tribal-domestic familiarity that far-flung members of the Scottish diaspora exhibit:

I wrote home on the strength of that Bali picture getting into the Tate–I thought this was something perhaps they’d like–so I wrote–and they’ve been really very nice about–so thank God for the moment I am not at war with my ain folk–that is a rotten state of affairs–

(Letter 28, to William ‘Jock’ Frater, from Peking, 1936.)

Fairweather’s ‘ain folk’, as the editors’ perceptive notes indicate (and Fairweather’s letters confirm), had much to do with the formation of this complex, driven man. Born the last of nine children to parents who were prosperous servants of the British Raj, Fairweather was brought up by maiden aunts in Scotland. Forty-plus years later, he writes to Pippa:

How I wish I could write like Arthur Koestler–his Autobiography ‘Arrow in the Blue’–the right attitude I think–detached analytic–he looks back over his life and tries to see a pattern in it … How much I would like to try that–the things that shaped ones life … the old aunts and sickness that gave me–an unnatural aversion to old age and physical contacts.

(Letter 82, to Helga Macnamara, from Bribie Island, 1954.)

The editors’ chronology note is pertinent: ‘Census records him residing in Lewisham with Jane Fairweather, then aged sixty-four …’

When his parents returned from India and settled on Jersey, the island was the first of many Fairweather gravitated towards during his life. And the enclosed, impacted life he first experienced with his aunt was replicated again and again, not least in the POW camp in Friedberg, Germany, where he was frequently held in solitary confinement after failed attempts at escape.

The editors point, with admirable discretion – no cod psychology – to the formative experiences of Fairweather’s life. However, they truly have let him ‘speak for himself in print’ in his letters. They have also published (in a hauntingly beautiful book, designed by W.H. Chong) enough of Fairweather’s drawings and paintings and various locales (all well documented) to show just how fully his longing for ‘a pattern in it’ found expression in his work, in that ‘fluent design and springing energy’ that Bernard Smith noted with such approbation. Roberts’s particular interest in Chinese art makes her an appropriate if implicit judge of the way Fairweather incorporated his considerable understanding of Chinese calligraphy.

A further fascinating aspect of the book’s structure – letters, deft editorial commentary, photographs, illustrations – lies in its crosshatching way of presenting Fairweather as an avid, inveterate sponge, soaking up the visual and social stimuli of towns, island ports, people, weather, and every culture (including Australian Indigenous culture) he encountered throughout his peripatetic life. The counterbalance comes in the way the letters and notes also record his uninhibited critique of his surrounds. He can be an unreconstructed son of Empire – querulous, arrogant, and impatient. He castigates the Chinese for the flat backs of their heads. They have ‘sinister sub-human eyes’. He hates ‘their’ music. Australia in 1934 is a place of ‘colossal monotony’:

oh, the Sundays–the Salvation armies prowl the empty streets–If I stay I will have to work in abstractions–it would be too irreverent to represent such wholiness. What is it in Australia that stimulates these multiplications–the sheep–the prickly pears the rabbits … and yet in six long years of wandering it is here for the first time I feel I am not a criminal–trying to make a living by painting. They have been very kind …

(Letter 6, to Jim Ede, from Colombo, 1934.)

While profoundly illuminating, the volume is neither a hagiography nor a paean to artistic genius. Prickly, unexpurgated (thank heavens) Fairweather was sometimes paranoid, perpetually anxious, and uncertain, if relentless, about his art. The editors express it this way, offering an insightful connection between state of mind and state of living/working conditions:

One disturbing manifestation of Fairweather’s suspicious disposition is his repeated disavowal of authorship of works irrefutably painted by him, and his distrust of the art world generally. Fairweather painted at night in a studio lit only by the soft irregular light of kerosene lamps, making it difficult for him to recognise his own works in photographic and printed form, or on the walls of the Queensland Art Gallery, where in 1965 he saw for the first and only time a large number of paintings from different phases of his life hung, framed and lit in a white cube environment.

Ian Fairweather: A life in letters is not a book to read through at one sitting. The man will drive you mad with his desperate scrabbling for money, his intemperate swivels of mood, his harassing of friends, his sudden shifts of sympathy. But you might also treasure, as I did, his persistent bursts of self-awareness, his minute observations of nature, his honesty – no looking over his shoulder to wonder how posterity will regard him. The book can leave you heartsick at the human tragedy of a life, and exultant at its fulfilment in Fairweather’s works. So read it as a series of door-opening invitations: to explore, for example, Fairweather’s long epistolary friendships, with Jock Frater, with Margaret Olley (‘Miss Olley’), and with Harold Stanley (Jim) Ede, one-time curator at the Tate, who went on to create Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge, one of the most perfect and moving small museums in the world. Read it as a reminder to revisit Robert Hughes’s criticism (always stimulating) or as a prompt to delve into Donald Friend’s diaries, where Fairweather is reported as being both ‘extremely dirty and smelly’ and ‘a genius’ for his ‘absolute refusal to make any concession at all to the outside world’.

The book is a vivid and subtle guide to Australian art in the twentieth century. It is also a profound, idiosyncratic meditation on the nature of art, its exhilarations, the pursuit of its ‘patterns’, and its devastating exactions – in any age.

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Three voices

Dear Editor,

It’s nice to be alive still in September 2019, a month that saw three pivotal public statements (none of them by men), moments of remarkable drama directed to high principle and the future: by Brenda Hale in the UK Supreme Court, re the Westminster system of government; by Nancy Pelosi in Washington, re the impeachment of Donald Trump and the foundations of power in the United States; and by Greta Thunberg at the United Nations, re the future of the planet. Altogether a moment to be unpicked in any number of books.

Alan Atkinson, Dawesville, WA

Paedophilia and climate change

Dear Editor,

I would like to comment on the last sentence of the first paragraph of Tim Flannery’s review.

It may well be that polluters and those who pander to them are threatening our future and that of our children, but to compare this to being as repulsive for his children’ future as paedophiles is a comparison that will be painful to many readers and suggests a level of innocence and ignorance about the impact of a paedophile on a child. Yes, climate is a serious and threatening issue, but Flannery’s comparison is a dreadful one, likely to cause pain and alienation for many readers.

Joanne McDonald, Frankston South, Vic.

E minus for the UN

Dear Editor,

I am grateful for the review of my book Global Planet Authority: How we’re about to save the biosphere. However, contrary to Tim Flannery’s review, I give the nation states, their multilateral efforts, and the United Nations an E minus for their protection of the biosphere since the Stockholm Declaration of 1972. I ridicule the Paris Agreement and hold up Montreal as a broken model.

In the book, I advocate that humanity must practise global governance for the first time through the tried and tested method of mass allocation of personal sovereignty. Going past the nation state is absolutely necessary. Unlike Greta Thunberg and supporters of Extinction Rebellion, who are shouting at a system that, due to its fractured nature, cannot guarantee global biophysical security now or in the long term, Global Planet Authority advocates a revolution at least equal to the greatest seen since the Westphalian agreement of 1648.

Tim Flannery may deem that quaint, but I don’t think he has accurately reported the central tenet of my book.

Angus Forbes (online comment)

Greta Thunberg

Dear Editor,

Congratulations to everyone at ABR and to the contributors to the Environment issue. The cover portrait of a furious and unforgiving Greta Thunberg could not be more timely.

I read Tim Flannery’s review of books by Thunberg, Angus Forbes, and the group of young writers who contributed to This Is Not a Drill with much interest. In 2005 I reviewed Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers for The Monthly. The book has stayed with me as I mark off each of the predictions Flannery made then: ever-increasing cycles of drought; greater extremes of weather; and the collapse of species, among other depressing prophesies.

I live in north-east Victoria, where we have been in drought on and off for the past five years. From December 2018, it did not rain for five months. Our village had to truck in water from Seymour, eighty kilometres away. We were fortunate, for we can access bore water on our property, but we do so at the expense of compromising the aquifer that lies beneath this region and that is a major contributor to Melbourne’s water supply. We have also witnessed the collapse of the local koala population. Small birds, bees, and butterflies have disappeared.

Recently, I celebrated Rosh Hashana (Jewish New Year) with some three hundred or so others. For three hours we celebrated the creation of this wonderful planet. At the end, the rabbi gave an unexpected sermon about the bravery of Greta Thunberg, who so eloquently has held world leaders to account.

I applaud this articulate young generation. I am ashamed that I have not done more. I applaud Tim Flannery for his tireless work in writing and lecturing on the effects of climate change. Thank you, ABR, for your own contribution.

Elisabeth Holdsworth, Strathbogie, Vic.

Tim Flannery responds

I appreciate Angus Forbes’s letter further elucidating his book. I believe that I was correct in describing his approach as ‘supranational’ (meaning that it transcends national boundaries and governments), though I remain unsure just how ‘the tried and tested method of personal mass allocation of personal sovereignty’ will be enacted.

I apologise to Joanne McDonald for any pain and alienation brought about by comparing the damage done to our children by climate change to that done by paedophiles. Let us hope that we can avoid the horrendous future scenarios, which some believe will involve the deaths of billions of people, that our current climate path appears to be leading our children into. And thank you Elisabeth Holdsworth for celebrating Greta Thunberg. She is a hero fit for our age.

Media censorship

ABC lawyers and AFP officers hover over a computer as they work out what comes within the terms of the warrant. At the end of the table, on the right, are the AFP digital forensics people. (photograph by John Lyons)

It’s not often that Australia’s media organisations come together in a display of solidarity, but so they did on October 21, when virtually every newspaper in the country led with a redacted front cover above the stark message: ‘When government keeps the truth from you, what are they covering up?’

The Right to Know coalition (‘an unprecedented show of unity between competitors’, to quote Fergus Hunter, a Fairfax reporter) could hardly be more timely. By stealth and attrition, successive federal governments have eroded press freedoms, intimidated whistleblowers and journalists, and defended a culture of secrecy. The June AFP raids on the Sydney headquarters of the ABC and the home of News Corp’s Annika Smethurst represent a new threat to press freedom.

Like the Right to Know coalition, ABR deplores these repressive measures. In our cover story, Australian lawyer Kieran Pender examines some of the present risks. As he states, ‘The only winners are those who wish to cloak government operations in a shroud of secrecy.’

Clearly, it’s up to writers and journalists and citizens to reject these punitive, censorious tendencies of government.

The University of Sydney

The Main Quadrangle of the University of Sydney (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

Umbrage greeted the announcement in mid-October that the University of Sydney will not be replacing the outgoing Chair of Australian Literature, Professor Robert Dixon. It beggars belief that such a wealthy university can abandon the professorship. We don’t have enough chairs in Australian literature to allow them to lapse in such a cavalier fashion.

We’re pleased to have recently published an official statement from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

Rising Stars

Sarah Walker (top) and Alex Tighe (bottom)On a brighter note, we are pleased to name our first two ABR Rising Stars: Sarah Walker (Victoria) and Alex Tighe (New South Wales). Rising Stars – a new initiative supported by Creative Victoria and Create NSW – is intended to encourage outstanding young ABR writers and critics around the country. Sarah and Alex, who have made such an impression since first publishing with us, will receive a number of paid commissions over the next twelve months.

Sarah Walker, who was placed second in the 2019 Calibre Essay Prize, told Advances:

In a cultural climate where intelligent, long-form writing is becoming increasingly rare, and where opportunities to establish a sustainable writing practice are dwindling, ABR’s commitment to supporting new writers is quite remarkable. As a young and emerging writer, I was surprised and gratified that the publication of my Calibre essay was only the beginning of a rich relationship with the magazine. To have been treated with such respect and care by ABR has been most validating. As a fledgling writer, being supported with well-paid publication opportunities and careful editing has been hugely important. As a freelance artist, the opportunity for a year of close editorial association through the Rising Stars program means the ability to create a sustainable writing practice, to find my feet in the industry, and to learn and grow as a writer. I am completely chuffed. 

With support from state governments, we hope to extend the Rising Stars program to other states.

Gumtrees and emus

With this issue we revive our language column, which has been mute for a while. Amanda Laugesen’s column on Sidney J. Baker and Australian slang is the first in a bimonthly series of articles on the etymology, politics, and sheer quirkiness of Australian English. The column emanates from the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC), of which Dr Laugesen is the current director, and with which ABR has a long connection.

It’s little wonder that H.L. Mencken – author of The American Language (1919) – described Baker’s Dictionary of Popular Slang (1941) as ‘extremely pungent and original’. Baker, to paraphrase Bill Ramson, first director of the ANDC, was an unremitting fossicker, with a keen ear for the exceptional idiom.

Let’s all hope to ‘kick the arse off an emu’ (enjoy good health) and to avoid for some time ‘seeing our last gumtree’ (being near death).

Prizes galore

When the Peter Porter Poetry Prize closed on October 1, we had received 1,050 entries – our largest field to date. Judging has begun, and we look forward to publishing the five shortlisted poems in the January–February issue.

Meanwhile, the Calibre Essay Prize remains open until 15 January 2020. The judges on this occasion are J.M. Coetzee, Lisa Gorton, and Peter Rose.

Free gift subscription

We’re feeling generous again! New and renewing subscribers can now direct a free six-month digital subscription to ABR to a friend or colleague. Qualify for this special offer by renewing your current ABR subscription – even before it is due to lapse. Renew for two years and give away two free subs, etc.

To arrange your gift, contact us on (03) 9699 8822 or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We will then contact the nominated recipient.

Terms and conditions apply. See our website for more information.

'It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once.’   

David Hume, 1742

It is a famous parable. If a frog is dropped in boiling water, it will immediately leap out. But if placed in tepid water that is gradually heated, the frog will not notice the increasing temperature until it is boiled alive. The parable may be biologically inaccurate, but it remains instructive in the context of civil liberties. As far back as the Ancient Greeks, Aristotle warned that ‘transgression creeps in unperceived and at last ruins the state’. Societies, the classical philosopher cautions, must ‘guard against the beginning of change’.

When the Australian Federal Police (AFP) arrived at the home of News Corp journalist Annika Smethurst on a crisp Canberra morning in June 2019, the water was warming. The AFP raids, in relation to a story Smethurst had published about intelligence matters, were swiftly condemned; her employer decried them as a ‘dangerous act of intimidation’. A day later, the AFP executed a search warrant at the ABC’s Sydney headquarters, in response to whistleblower-sourced reporting on the conduct of Australian defence personnel in Afghanistan. More public outrage followed. ABC News executive editor John Lyons asked: ‘Is this the new normal?’ Yet the frog was not jumping.

The erosion of government transparency as a result of political action and inaction in distinct but related spheres has led Australian society into hot water. As the federal government has overhauled official secrecy laws, failed to provide robust protection for whistleblowers, cracked down on public servant free speech, and frustrated Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, democratic accountability has suffered.

Because these wounds have been inflicted by a thousand cuts, abetted by weak constitutional protections and courts unwilling or unable to intervene, the impact has not been fully appreciated. Australians neglected to heed the advice offered by American Founding Father James Madison: ‘It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.’ Having failed to do that, we must now ask: is it too late?

ABC lawyers and AFP officers hover over a computer as they work out what comes within the terms of the warrant. At the end of the table, on the right, are the AFP digital forensics people. (photograph by John Lyons)

At 6.04 pm on 7 December 2017, Malcolm Turnbull introduced a new bill into the House of Representatives in Canberra. The attention of onlookers was elsewhere – marriage equality had become law minutes before. Journalists wrote frantically about the momentous development; there was an exodus in the public gallery as activists rejoiced. But while the nation celebrated, Turnbull proposed legislation ‘to counter the threat of foreign states exerting improper influence over our system of government’. Hidden within this bill, and barely mentioned in Turnbull’s subsequent remarks, were the most significant revisions to Australia’s official secrecy laws in a century.

Reform was needed. The relevant provisions of the federal Crimes Act (1914) had been hurriedly legislated following the outbreak of World War I; they were draconian and outdated. In 2009 the apolitical Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC) published Secrecy Laws and Open Government, an exhaustive 642-page report proposing sensible change. The ALRC sought to reconcile the tension between the necessary role of official secrecy in a Whitehall/Westminster system of government and the centrality of transparency and public accountability in a representative democracy. Its proposals, the ALRC argued, struck ‘a fair balance’ between such competing, and compelling, public interests.

Rather than adopt these considered suggestions, the bill introduced by Turnbull doubled down on the protection of government information. The proposed changes increased tenfold the maximum term of imprisonment for unauthorised disclosures, adopted expansive definitions, and imperilled whistleblowers and journalists.

Civil society pleaded with parliament to amend the draft law. The Human Rights Law Centre condemned the bill as having ‘no place in a healthy democracy’, while Human Rights Watch compared the proposal to measures in ‘repressive countries such as Cambodia and Turkey’. One expert simply described it as ‘creeping Stalinism’. The bill passed in mid-2018, with only minor revision.

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Such laws do not operate in a vacuum. Their full impact on government transparency can only be assessed against a broader context. The ALRC recognised this in its 2009 report, highlighting the role of whistleblower protections as an ‘essential element in an effective system of open government and a necessary complement to secrecy laws’. By their nature, secrecy laws prohibit unauthorised disclosure of information – if robust channels are implemented for authorised disclosure, the risk to public accountability by penalising unauthorised leaks is diminished. Here, too, the government has failed to accept informed, apolitical advice.

The concept of whistleblowing has deep roots. The Ancient Greeks celebrated the notion of parrhesia, or fearless speech. The idea that societies should encourage individuals to speak out against wrongdoing has persisted. A seventh-century British king financially incentivised whistleblowing; more than a millennium later, the Civil War-era False Claims Act did much the same in the United States.

Despite these origins, the traumas of the twentieth century saw whistleblowers feared rather than lauded. ‘Snitch’, ‘traitor’, and ‘spy’ remain common synonyms. When South Australia enacted the Whistleblower Protections Act in 1993, it became a world leader, one of the first jurisdictions globally to adopt a stand-alone statute to protect and empower public sector whistleblowers.

Every other Australian state and territory followed suit, but it was not until 2013 that the federal parliament passed the Public Interest Disclosure Act (PID Act) in a rare display of bipartisanship. Notwithstanding the two-decade delay, the PID Act was hailed as a major advance for integrity and transparency in public life. The new law established proper channels for public servants who wished to blow the whistle on fraud, corruption, maladministration, and misconduct within government. It also gave whistleblowers a strong shield against reprisals. The authorised channels for disclosure even included the press, in certain circumstances.

Jubilation at this legislative progress was short-lived. An independent statutory review in mid-2016 was scathing; Philip Moss, in his review, stated that ‘the experience of whistleblowers [under the PID Act] is not a happy one’. In September 2017, a joint parliamentary committee observed that ‘whistleblower protections remain largely theoretical with little practical effect’. Moss articulated thirty-three recommendations for improving the PID Act. Three years later, not a single one has been implemented.

Australia’s ineffective protections for prospective whistleblowers matter because they expose the dissonance at the heart of harsh new official secrecy laws. In a democratic society where public transparency is valued, robust restrictions on unauthorised disclosure of official information could only ever be justifiable if authorised channels alleviate the adverse effect of these limitations.

Official secrecy is not, in itself, a legitimate end. Secrecy is a justifiable pursuit when it serves a compelling public purpose in a proportionate manner. Otherwise, the scales should always be weighted towards openness. As Justice Paul Finn of the Federal Court observed in 2003: ‘The vices of excessive secrecy in the conduct of government, its effect on the quality of public debate and, ultimately, on the practice of democracy itself, have more recently been both exposed and addressed in this country.’

Perhaps no longer. The federal government has instead put the cart before the horse. By on the one hand threatening whistleblowers (and journalists who report their disclosures) with heavy jail sentences, and on the other failing to provide official channels for the same whistleblowers, the executive has created a chilling catch-22. The only winners are those who wish to cloak government operations in a shroud of secrecy.

21 October 2019: Redacted covers of The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian, two newspapers of many participating in the Your Right To Know campaign fighting for government transparency.

These are two pieces of a broader puzzle. Yet the interrelation between official secrecy, whistleblower protections, and other puzzle pieces has too often been neglected in assessing political developments. Considering these actions and inactions in isolation has been a collective cognitive failure. While each is individually concerning, the severe cumulative impact on public transparency and government accountability has not been appreciated. As Professor Eugene Volokh writes in the Harvard Law Review: ‘We underestimate the importance of gradual changes because our experience teaches us that we needn’t worry much about small changes – but unfortunately this trait sometimes leads us to unwisely ignore a sequence of small changes that aggregate to a large one.’

Another puzzle piece gained attention earlier this year when the High Court ruled against a public servant who had been terminated for tweeting criticisms of government policy via a pseudonym. Michaela Banerji was fired for her political comments in 2013, and subsequently commenced what would become a protracted court battle against her employer, the Department of Immigration. When she won in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) in 2018, the Tribunal observed that the termination, in circumstances where there was no visible connection between Banerji’s anonymous tweets and her employment, bore ‘a discomforting resemblance to George Orwell’s thoughtcrime’.

Silencing sixteen per cent of the Australian workforce – approximately the number employed by federal, state, and local government – should have caused the High Court to pause for thought. Instead, in March 2019 the seven judges unanimously gave the government sweeping authorisation to continue its crackdown on employees who dare to speak out, overturning the AAT’s ruling. ‘There can be no doubt,’ the Court held, ‘that the maintenance and protection of an apolitical and professional public service’ is consistent with Australia’s constitution.

Several years ago, the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet urged public servants to ‘dob in’ their tweeting colleagues, while current guidance from the Australian Public Service Commission warns against even ‘liking’ an anti-government post. Emboldened by the outcome in Banerji, these efforts will no doubt continue.

Combined with harsh secrecy laws and ineffective whistleblowing channels, the High Court’s decision in Banerji erodes transparency and openness in Australian political life. As Justice Finn said in the only Australian case to invalidate Banerji-style limitations, ‘it is not possible to divorce official secrecy from public comment by a public servant, as if the two were in unrelated fields of discourse.’ Otherwise, our society would risk institutionalising a ‘“dialogue of the deaf” between those who do not know and those who will not or cannot tell’.

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Lastly, Australia’s FOI regime, an underlying guarantee of transparent government, is being routinely treated with contempt by those it is intended to hold accountable. The relationship between the people and the state in Australia changed profoundly in 1982 with the passage of the Freedom of Information Act at federal level. As Gough Whitlam had argued when first proposing such a law a decade earlier, the aim was ‘a less secret society, a more open society, a more co-operative society, a better informed and involved society’.

In recent years, the law’s noble intentions have been patently ignored. An investigation in January 2019 by The Guardian found that FOI refusals are at record levels, thousands of requests are not being processed within the prescribed timeframe, FOI teams with government departments have shrunk, and the regulator is ‘chronically understaffed’.

The Department of Home Affairs, which receives the most FOI requests, has been accused in the Senate of ‘simply ignoring its obligations in law’. A whistleblower indicated that departments are deliberately delaying the release of documents to minimise embarrassment: ‘In the current age it’s all about managing the message, and FOI is just inconvenient.’ Calls for law reform have been ignored, as has the advice of an independent 2013 review by Allan Hawke, which recommended a comprehensive overhaul.

All the while, there seems little concern on either side of politics about the impact that wilful hostility to open government has on the quality of Australian democracy. The words of a Senate standing committee, opining on draft FOI legislation in 1979, have long been forgotten. ‘Secrecy in government, where excessive or unnecessary, is in fact destructive of the very foundations of a democratic society,’ the committee warned.

This article has highlighted four developments that together represent a grave threat to transparency, and more broadly to press freedom and free speech, in Australia. This list is not exhaustive. A recent parliamentary submission by the Human Rights Law Centre also identified the impact of metadata retention laws, the absence of sufficient safeguards for journalists when warrants are sought, and the ‘maze’ of laws that ‘criminalise some acts of journalism’. A holistic approach to these distinct but related developments is urgently needed. Only then will the true impact be perceptible.

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Following the raids, News Corp and the ABC commenced proceedings challenging the respective AFP warrants. The Federal Court heard the ABC’s case in October; News Corp will argue its position before the High Court in November 2019. Somewhat ironically, News Corp’s challenge to the constitutional validity of secrecy laws relates to the pre-reform provisions, as the warrant was granted in early 2018, before the amendments passed.

Even if the media organisations are successful – and recent free-speech litigation offers little optimism – the degradation of public transparency will not be reversed overnight. Limited judicial victories would neither halt the prosecution of Witness K and his lawyer in the East Timor spying case, nor aid Australian Taxation Office whistleblower Richard Boyle, who faces a 161-year prison sentence.

There is no panacea. In response to recent developments, some have demanded a bill of rights. Australia’s lack of explicit constitutional protections for civil liberties makes us an outlier among liberal democracies. Attorney-General Christian Porter recently instructed the Director of Public Prosecutions not to prosecute journalists for official secrecy offences without his (discretionary) approval; Senator Rex Patrick responded by tweeting: ‘Constitutional change is what’s required to properly protect Australian journalists.’

Enshrined human rights might be a helpful step, although the US experience – with its Bill of Rights – suggests this is only a partial remedy. The US treatment of public sector whistleblowers is patchy, and the First Amendment has been missing in action for several decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence on the speech rights of government employees. Only limited progress has been made since 1892, when Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes quipped: ‘The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a policeman.’

While we await constitutional change (it may be a long wait), Australians should collectively be alert to these creeping, multifaceted threats to our political system. We must all appreciate the bigger picture and resist small intrusions that hinder public accountability. The ongoing parliamentary inquiry into press freedom, due to report in late November 2019, is an important contribution, even if not everyone is so concerned. ‘Is there a crisis around press freedom? No, I don’t think so,’ Home Affairs tsar Mike Pezzullo told the inquiry.

Sure, the frog is still alive. Australia remains a robust liberal democracy, receiving ninety-eight points out of one hundred in the latest Freedom House rankings. But that is no reason for complacency in the face of these gradual encroachments. The AFP raids set off alarm bells around the world; a Pakistani television anchor told The Sydney Morning Herald: ‘It freaked me out. It tells you that no one is safe.’ We should never take our rights and freedoms for granted.

Justice Finn, while on the Federal Court, observed that: ‘Official secrecy has a necessary and proper province in our system of government. A surfeit of secrecy does not.’ By unquestioningly accepting the former explanation as the government pursues its agenda, we have failed to heed his latter warning. Finn’s words are quoted by News Corp as part of its challenge to the AFP raid. We can only hope the High Court is listening.

In Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. ‘Two ways,’ he quips. ‘Gradually and then suddenly.’ If the current trends continue, Australia will succumb to a surfeit of governmental secrecy, with its corresponding consequences for our civil liberties, slowly and then all at once. And the frog won’t jump.

There was never any question that The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s coda to The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), would be a gargantuan blockbuster, a publishing Godzilla, giddily hyped and fiercely embargoed. Bookshops across the world counted down the minutes until midnight on September 10 (GMT), when the envy-green volume – already the odds-on favourite for the Booker Prize – could be unboxed. One hundred and forty-five journalists travelled from fourteen countries to cover the London launch; in the United Kingdom alone, a hardback copy was sold every four seconds in the book’s first manic week.

The Handmaid’s Tale was an ‘anti-prediction’ or literary inoculation, Atwood explained in a 2017 essay: ‘If this future can be described in detail, maybe it won’t happen.’ Penned in 1984, that Orwell-haunted year, early reviews praised Atwood’s artistry but declared the dystopian horror of her post-American patriarchal theocracy, where fertile women are kept as captive breeders while environmental catastrophe looms, to be outlandish. Now, a boastful sex-pest is in the White House, the world’s schoolchildren are striking for action on the climate crisis, and women dressed as handmaids, at rallies in defence of their reproductive rights, carry signs that read ‘Make Margaret Atwood Fiction Again’.

Atwood’s reluctant prophecy has furnished us with an iconography of female resistance: crimson capes and snow-white bonnets. It has also provided the source material for a lauded, grisly television series (2017–). You could buy handmaid costumes this Halloween and add a surveillance ear tag or scar to mimic the televisual torment. As Jia Tolentino writes so incisively in The New Yorker: ‘The Handmaid’s Tale has long been canonical, but was once a novel. It is now an idea that is asked to support and transubstantiate the weight of our time.’ The frenzy around the release of Atwood’s new book is a defiantly joyful celebration of this idea, equal parts pop-cultural cool and revolutionary zeal. Nolite te bastardes carborundorum, bitches.

The Testaments could never live up to its predecessor; what an impossible yardstick. No book could compete with thirty-four years of readerly devotion, let alone this mighty collision of Zeitgeist. To measure it against The Handmaid’s Tale is to focus on the wrong literary legacy. What matters is how this new work – in so many ways the obverse of its forebear, its mirror twin – unwittingly damages what came before.

Margaret Atwood (photograph by Liam Sharp)

For three decades, Atwood resisted calls to extend The Handmaid’s Tale. She could not imagine reinhabiting the novel’s quietly mutinous heroine, Offred. ‘You can climb the Empire State Building barehanded once,’ the author explained in a recent interview with The New York Times. ‘When you try again, you’ll fall off.’ Impelled by Donald Trump’s election in 2016, she found her way back into the Republic of Gilead’s autocratic universe by considering the fate of its second generation.

Fifteen years ago, Offred stepped resolutely into an unmarked van: ‘whether this is my end or a new beginning, I have no way of knowing’. The former handmaid has survived, smuggled across the border into Canada with her baby, who has become a ‘poster child for Gilead’. The republic is intent on reclaiming ‘Baby Nicole’ as a matter of increasingly urgent national pride: ‘for God’s kingdom on earth, [Gilead] had an embarrassingly high emigration rate’. Gileadean ‘missionaries’ roam suburban Canada, hunting for leads and for vulnerable young women – ripe-wombed and wretched – to entice over the border.

In Toronto, sullen teenager Daisy is sick of hearing about the missing child, who would now be her age: ‘I’d basically disliked Baby Nicole since I’d had to do a paper on her ... I’d got a C because I’d said she was being used as a football by both sides, and it would be the greatest happiness of the greatest number just to give her back.’ Daisy’s textbook angst masks a deeper unease: the couple she knows as her parents are twitchy and aloof, too careful with her: ‘It was like I was a prize cat they were cat sitting.’ Meanwhile in Gilead, Agnes Jemima is being prepared for marriage: ‘Wedlock: it had a dull metallic sound, like an iron door clicking shut.’ Suitors circle, including the odious Commander Judd, whose too-young wives have a convenient habit of perishing once the sexagenarian letch gets bored with them. Agnes’s only alternative to marriage is to pledge herself to the Aunts, Gilead’s puritanical coterie of taser-wielding uber-nuns.

It is the notorious Aunt Lydia, architect of Gilead’s handmaid system of socially sanctioned rape, and an assiduous keeper of its leaders’ most incendiary secrets, who is the dark heart of The Testaments – J. Edgar Hoover in an itchy brown habit. A high-ranking Gileadean is collaborating with the activists who liberated Offred and Baby Nicole. Aunt Lydia knows the identity of the mole, but she also knows that the republic is politically shaky; there is a possibility here, not for power (she is already ‘swollen’ with it) but for vengeance. A regime-toppling revolution would just be a gratifying side effect.

Simultaneously a sequel and prequel, The Testaments alternates between Daisy’s and Agnes’s witness statements to an unknown authority, and Aunt Lydia’s furtive journal, tracing her ascendancy from prisoner to power broker: ‘Over the years I’ve buried a lot of bones; now I’m inclined to dig them up again – if only for your edification, my unknown reader.’

The girls’ intersecting stories are forgettable fun – an exuberant, escapist romp. When covert geopolitical machinations conspire to bring them together, their odd-couple dynamics – arse-kicking, streetwise, smartarsed Daisy versus pious, wide-eyed, bookworm Agnes – are the stuff of buddy-cop action movies (‘You want to have this conversation right now? I am fucking sorry, but we are in a hot mess emergency here!’). We always know who the good guys are; the bad guys get walloped in the windpipe.

There is more than an echo of The Hunger Games in this teen-saviour subplot, replete with a transformation montage, as Daisy, anointed by destiny, trains for a secret mission to bring down Gilead from within – from sulky teen to warrior queen. It’s a fascinating cultural loop, watching Atwood play in the genre her 1980s novel helped to invent. But it is Aunt Lydia we have come to see, the novel’s slippery, ruthless ringmaster. A family court judge in her pre-Gilead days, she is not interested in apologies or absolution: ‘Regrets are of no practical use. I made choices, and then, having made them, I had fewer choices.’ Her account of those choices – some desperate, some conniving, all ferociously pragmatic – is a potent reminder that complicity is not evil but banal, easy, and often terrifyingly sensible. ‘Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by,’ she explains with characteristic frankness. ‘It was littered with corpses, such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my corpse is not among them.’

Aunt Lydia is a deliciously acerbic companion, a master strategist who is as loathed as she is legendary, as proud as she is disgusted with what she has wrought. Atwood delights in her paradoxes. But there is nothing we learn about Aunt Lydia that we could not have imagined when we first met her in The Handmaid’s Tale. In that novel, her imperious cruelty inspired speculation: zealot, victim, collaborator, psychopath, sadist? All of the above, perhaps, or none at all. Now we know.

In the last pages of The Handmaid’s Tale, having spent the novel immersed in Offred’s insistent mind, we learn from a panel of future historians that her account may not be real. Atwood’s final line is an audacious postmodern wink: ‘Are there any questions?’ Of course we have questions, we burn with them. Her book’s brilliance was always its obdurate, careful silences. Yet now she has returned to Gilead with bountiful answers – comeuppances to administer, loose ends to snip, almost in rebuke to her original premise. ‘The Testaments was written partly in the minds of the readers of its predecessor, who kept asking what happened after the end of that novel,’ Atwood explains in her acknowledgments. It is a particular curse, to get exactly what you ask for. In our culture of entertainment maximalism – of reboots, sequels, reunions, and peak television – we seldom question the notion that every space should be filled. If we love a cultural product, surely we should have – we deserve – more of it. But there’s a fine line between cultural glut and cultural gluttony.

As Agnes Jemima reflects: ‘Where there is an emptiness, the mind will obligingly fill it up.’ Here is the unnecessary tragedy of Atwood’s coda, captivating though it is (this is Margaret Atwood, after all). The dark hollows and crannies of The Handmaid’s Tale are mostly gone, and with them, space for obliging minds. The only space that’s left is a convenient time gap – room for the Hulu/MGM series to brutalise its way onwards.

Where there was doubt, now there is certainty; where there was an imagined future, now there’s a satirised present, replete with fake news, mistrusted experts, and echoes of #MeToo – undeniably timely but forever anchored. And where there was restrained interiority, now there is plot, plot, plot – whizzing and fizzing along. A tale to gobble, not to savour. The human truth beating at the heart of The Handmaid’s Tale was that Offred was ordinary, she could have been anyone. In The Testaments, as in the television show, she has been recast as Gilead’s political keystone, her story no longer a serendipitous insight but the too-convenient beginning of a grand fairy tale of the resistance. Atwood’s Gilead project is no longer about ordinary women and the quiet power of witness, but about extraordinary, fantastical heroism. Farewell Anne Frank, hello Katniss Everdeen.

Fairy tales demand happy endings, and Atwood is inclined to oblige. Perhaps, having unwittingly summoned a monster thirty-five years ago, she is trying to use her literary sorcery to conjure a more hopeful future for us, an injection of cultural optimism and aspiration in a despondent political age where, as Aunt Lydia describes: ‘giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching’. Or perhaps she is just having a boatload of fun. Canada’s most famous novelist doesn’t have to give a rat’s hindquarters about her legacy: ‘Will this ruin my future, my literary reputation? If I were thirty-five, you would be absolutely right to ask that question,’ she told The New York Times. ‘But it’s not a chief concern of mine.’

Fair enough. But having read The Handmaid’s Tale nearly every other year since I was sixteen, I can’t imagine when I’ll return to it again – not as some petulant tantrum, but because there’s no space for me in the novel anymore, I’ve been forced out. I’ve gained a sequel, and lost something far more precious.

Literature inspired by drugs tends to swing between extremes. On the one hand, drugs are the very doors of perception, gateways to Xanadu; on the other they are a source of grim addictions, lotus plants that tempt one into indefinite living sleep. In recent decades there have been the highs of William S. Burroughs, Tom Wolfe, Hunter S. Thompson and Irvine Welsh, but rarer are those memoirists with experiences of addiction and philosophy who can reflect on the subject in the tradition of Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821). Well, cue Chris Fleming’s On Drugs.

Fleming is a philosopher at Western Sydney University who developed a serious and life-threatening addiction to drugs during his twenties. As his options in life narrowed, drug addiction ‘became the last bulwark against nihilism.’ ‘As agonising as unmet needs can feel,’ he writes with a painful clarity, ‘there is still something life-affirming in wanting something, anything at all.’ Drugs could both addle and stimulate his mind; he wrote most of his honours thesis ‘while stoned’ and obtained a score of ninety-five per cent, which led him to the unfortunate surmise that ‘pot might offer an almost unethical advantage in intellectual creation, an analogue to steroids in sport’.

Favel Parrett’s tender new novel, There Was Still Love, explores what it means to make a home and how a person might be free in a world ruptured by political as well as personal upheavals. Moving backwards and forwards in time (from 1981 to 1938) across vast distances – from Prague to Melbourne, via London – between first- and third-person narrators, past and present tense, Parrett beautifully captures one family’s complicated twentieth-century inheritance.

Readers of Parrett’s first two novels, Past the Shallows (2011) and When the Night Comes (2014), will be familiar with certain aspects of this new book: the child’s-eye view of an abstruse and often dangerous world; the sumptuous rendering of place, including the narrow, lived space of a family home. There Was Still Love extends the territory of these earlier books. The family history it narrates is principally imagined through the grandchildren of Máňa and Eva, twin sisters who were cruelly separated by forces beyond their control. The novel alternates between the parallel perspectives of Malá Liška or Little Fox, the granddaughter of Máňa and her husband, Bill, who emigrated from Czechoslovakia to Melbourne; and Luděk, the grandson of Eva, who remained in Prague. It explores the still-unfolding effects on one family of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, the violent suppression of the Prague Spring, and ‘The Curtain’, which, as Eva describes it, will, after 1968, ‘become solid, made of steel and concrete, and it will not bend, it will not open. They were all stuck inside – forgotten.’

There are many references to the forgotten and the invisible throughout this novel, allusions to people and places made ghostly by historical events. In Prague in 1938, Máňa feels that ‘[t]he world has let us down, thrown us away’. In 1980, when she and Bill visit Eva, they attend the Spartakiáda, an immense gymnastic display that Czechs are told will be broadcast across the globe. Ludék asks: ‘Is the world really watching?’ Bill responds: ‘If Poland and Hungary and Russia are the world, then yes.’ And, more obliquely: ‘We are invisible.’ Over the whole narrative, there is a sense that the world has turned its back on Czechoslovakia: from the Munich Agreement of 1938, which permitted the German annexation of Sudetenland and opened the way to further occupation – ‘People wonder how Hitler took my country without one shot being fired,’ Bill tells Malá. ‘Well – it was handed to him on a silver plate!’ – to the Soviet tanks that, in 1968, ‘roll on and on in a thick rumbling line, cracking the old streets’, rendering Eva’s city unsafe, more so because she knows that ‘[n]o one is coming. Just like before. No one is coming to save them.’

Underland is English nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s longest and, by his own admission, deepest and strangest book. It took almost a decade to write. From the remote mountain peaks of his first book, Mountains of the Mind (2003), Macfarlane embarks on an intrepid journey into the subterrain; plunging through chasms and catacombs, mines and sinkholes, secretive spaces, shadow places. He offers ways to navigate these netherworlds but also probes the depths of the human condition, exploring how we are both stirred and disturbed by what lies beneath.

Macfarlane’s escapades are organised into three ‘chambers’: Seeing, Hiding, and Haunting. Within these he examines three recurring themes – Shelter (memories, precious matter, messages, fragile lives); Yield (information, wealth, metaphors, minerals, visions); and Dispose (waste, trauma, poison, secrets) – and the paradox that ‘into the underland we have long placed that which we fear and wish to lose, and that which we love and wish to save’. His stories push limits and teeter on thresholds. Like the dark-matter physicists he meets, they traverse the boundaries of ‘the measurable and the imaginable’. His are ‘descents made in search of knowledge’, burrowing through Parisian passageways, spelunking in Slovenian sinkholes, plummeting through Greenland’s glacial terrains and beyond.

Underland – a narrative non-fiction adventure – is more ‘peopled’ than his earlier books, especially The Wild Places (2007). Macfarlane’s meticulously researched account blends histories, both human and geological, philosophical reflections, and collective imaginings, often through the eclectic voices of those he meets en route. Among them we meet Merlin the mycologist, extreme cavers, and maniacal miners, glaciologists, activists, and other kooky cataphiles (lovers of the below). At times, however, the individual character of their voices merges with Macfarlane’s own, reducing their authenticity.

During a steamy Brisbane summer in the early 1990s, my father planned an outing for his preteen children, an adventure that would punctuate an otherwise predictable cycle of sleepovers, movies, and trips to the swimming pool. At the time, Dad was a board member of the Queensland Abattoir Corporation, and his idea of entertainment was a guided tour of the nearby Cannon Hill abattoir. During our half-day outing to the ‘works’, we visited the cow and pig slaughter chains and the boning and meat-packing operations. In the cow-slaughter room, along a narrow passageway, I was momentarily separated from the group, surrounded by hulking carcasses suspended from a ceiling-mounted track line overhead. Jerked by a post-mortem, parasympathetic muscle spasm, a wayward bovine limb collected me. Perhaps it was at this point that I should have recognised my own inextricability with the Australian beef industry.

Years later, I somewhat unexpectedly found myself recording oral histories with retired meatworkers in the Kimberley region of Western Australia. The famed setting of Mary Durack’s nostalgic stories of pastoral entrepreneurialism, the Kimberley, from 1919 to 1985, was the location of one of Australia’s largest meatworks (also referred to as an ‘abattoir’). The tiny port town of Wyndham is now a shell of its former glory, and the retired meatworkers who remain were keen to retell the stories of its heyday. So, it was with considerable interest that I came to Joshua Specht’s history of the US beef industry: Red Meat Republic: A hoof-to-table history of how beef changed America.

Maryanne Wolf’s excellent book about the reading brain, Proust and the Squid: The story and the science of the reading brain (2007), quotes Marcel himself:

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived as fully as those … we spent with a favourite book … they have engraved in us so sweet a memory (so much more precious to our present judgment than what we read then with such love), that if we will happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and ponds which no longer exist.

Jane Sullivan asserts in Storytime that ‘it’s no exaggeration to say that reading has made me what I am’. Sullivan is a journalist, essayist, and novelist, who currently writes ‘Turning Pages’, a column in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. (She also contributes to ABR.) The young Jane was brought up in London during the 1950s, the daughter of two Australian artist–cartoonists. Here, she re-examines ‘about a dozen’ books that remain fixed in her memory. The writer lays out her framework:

I will first record my memories of them, which might be hazy, or quite wrong. Then I will read them again, and record my new reactions. Because I have a journalist’s curiosity, I will also look around the periphery of the book – at the author, and so on. But I won’t stray too far into the territory of the biographer or the psychologist or the literary critic. This will not be a book about books. It will be a book about my experience of reading those books.