Essential India!

Our interests and connections extend around the globe, and we know from surveys that 68% of ABR readers travelled overseas last year. In a first for Australian Book Review, we are delighted to be partnering with luxury travel company Abercrombie & Kent to offer one lucky ABR subscriber the chance to win a ten-day adventure for two in India worth up to AU$8,250.

The prize is Abercrombie & Kent’s ‘Essential India’ tour, a seven-day private journey from Delhi to Agra to Jaipur, staying in luxury Taj hotels throughout, plus the winner’s choice of a three-day extension to either Ranthambore, Udaipur, or Varanasi. To be in the running to win this magnificent prize, subscribers need to tell us – in fifty to one hundred words – about a book that has inspired them to travel.

Entry is open now until 20 February 2020, so start browsing your mental bookshelves and don’t be afraid to think creatively, laterally, or locally. Perhaps Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues under the Sea made you want to go diving, or D.H. Lawrence’s Sea and Sardinia took you to Italy. Maybe Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip inspired to you to investigate Melbourne. We’re looking forward to finding out which books have been your travel inspiration.

The winner will be notified in March 2020 and will be announced in the April 2020 issue of ABR. This competition is open to current ABR subscribers (print or online). The prize does not include international flights but does include an internal flight depending on the extension selected. Terms and conditions apply. 

Click here to enter!

ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship

Hessom RavaziHessom Razavi is the recipient of the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellowship. The Fellowship, worth $10,000, honours the artistry and moral leadership of Behrouz Boochani, the award-winning author of No Friend But the Mountains (2018), who has been imprisoned on Manus Island since 2013 and is now in New Zealand on a temporary visa. Dr Razavi will make a significant contribution to the magazine in 2020 with a series of substantial articles on refugees, statelessness, and human rights. He was chosen from an impressive international field.

Hessom Razavi is a writer and doctor based in Perth. He was born in Iran in 1976. In 1983 his family fled Iran to escape political persecution. He completed his studies as an ophthalmologist in 2015 and has visited Manus Island and Nauru in a medical capacity. He also writes essays and poetry. He describes himself as an exile, migrant, professional, and ‘perennial outsider’. His early experience of exile and state violence, and his subsequent qualifications as a writer and clinician, give him an unusual perspective on the plight of the millions of people around the world who are oppressed, anathematised, and endangered.

Hessom Razavi told ABR: ‘It’s an honour and delight to receive this Fellowship. My goal will be to help shift awareness and raise empathy among those Australians who remain uninformed or ambivalent, particularly moderate conservatives, young people, and those who are open to reason. Ultimately, I work to contribute to the collective moment – medical, legal, artistic, political – that advocates for more humane, sustainable outcomes for vulnerable people who seek protection in Australia.’

UWA Publishing

There is much disquiet about the University of Western Australia’s cavalier decision to shut down UWA Publishing, whose proud publishing record goes back to 1935. Thousands of writers, scholars, publishers, and readers have signed a petition deploring this decision and seeking a review by the University.

Writing for ABR, Robert White – Emeritus Professor of English Literature at UWA – reminds us of similarly misguided attempts to close UWAP in the past. He notes UWAP’s contribution to the University’s reputation among the world’s top 100 research universities. Elsewhere, Nathan Hollier, CEO and Publisher of Melbourne University Press, writes an Open Letter to the Chancellor of the University of Western Australia, Robert French. 

Judith Rodriguez

Graduate Women Victoria is offering a scholarship to commemorate Judith Rodriguez (1936–2018) as part of its program to support disadvantaged female students at university. Judith, a GWV member, was a staunch supporter of these scholarships. The award in her name will be open to PhD students in the fields of literature, poetry, and the visual arts.

Applications close on 31 March. Full details will be available by mid-December on the GWV website.

Borderlands

It’s great to hear that the Northern Territory now has its own literary magazine, the first since Northern Perspective. Marie Munkara launched the first online edition of Borderlands in November. A print edition will follow in May 2020. Contributors to the first issue include Mary Anne Butler, Leni Shilton, Adam Doyle, and Lauren Mellor.

The cross-Territory editorial team is comprised of Glenn Morrison, Adelle Sefton-Rowston, and Raelke Grimmer. The editors note that a third of the population in the Northern Territory is Indigenous and a quarter was born overseas. ‘There’s a need for the Territory to have its own voice.’

Where are you happiest?

In my tiny inner-suburban backyard garden, mooching around with compost and growing things. At dinner with my family. Or with my feet up and a good book in my favourite chair in the living room.

What’s your idea of hell?

Childhood sporting humiliations have left me with a dread of being in places where somebody might throw a ball towards me and expect me to do something with it. Other than that, venues where the noise is too loud for good conversation.

A young George Seddon smiles boyishly from the cover of his Selected Writings, a mid-twentieth-century nerd with short back and sides and horn-rimmed glasses. This collection of Seddon’s writings on landscape, place, and the environment is the third in the series on Australian thinkers published by La Trobe University Press in conjunction with Black Inc. The other two, Hugh Stretton and Donald Horne, were also on mid-century men. Born in the 1920s and reaching their intellectual adulthood in the expansive years after World War II, these three were all of wide and eclectic learning. They taught in universities, participated in public debates, and engaged with governments in the making of informed public policy in the areas in which they had special knowledge and interest: Stretton with economics, housing, and urban planning; Horne with citizenship and the arts; and Seddon with environmental policy. Their politics were formed before the rise of neoliberalism, and they shared a social democrat’s faith in the capacity of governments to solve problems. They were also confident in their autonomy as public intellectuals, inhabiting a very different academy from the audit-driven universities of today, where publication in prestigious international journals reaps more points than sustained engagement with one’s fellow citizens on matters of shared concern.

Reading good science writing is not just pleasurable and informative: it’s also necessary if we want to live engaged and examined lives in today’s hyper-technological, climate-changing world. The Best Australian Science Writing 2019 offers readers all these things – the delight in good writing, the satisfaction of learning, and the sobering reckoning with our society’s environmental impact and lack of political engagement with science. Yet it’s not afraid to challenge science itself on occasion – showing ‘its flaws as well as its finer moments’, as editor Bianca Nogrady puts it.

Since 9/11 and all its attendant horrors, the story of the bomb that exploded outside Sydney’s Hilton Hotel early on the morning of 13 February 1978, killing three people and injuring nine others, has largely been cast aside. However, it is considered the worst terrorist act perpetrated on Australian soil. It had wide ramifications at the time, and murky issues still surround it.

The Innocent Reader, Debra Adelaide’s collection of essays reflecting on the value of reading and the writing life, also works as a memoir. Part I, ‘Reading’, moves from childhood memories of her parents’ Reader’s Digest Condensed Books to discovering J.R.R. Tolkien and other books in the local library, and to the variable guidance of teachers at school and university. Its centrepiece is the powerful essay ‘No Endings No Endings No’, which juxtaposes the shock of discovering that her youngest child has cancer with her grief at the death of Thea Astley in 2004. The last words of Astley’s final novel, Drylands (1999) give this essay its title. Adelaide draws out the hope that they suggest as she tells how reading – aloud to her son in hospital, and to herself when he was too ill to listen – enabled her to survive this terrible time.

Paul Giles is a critic for whom it is important where he lives, although not so much in terms of location as of literary and imaginative perspectives. He began as an Americanist literary scholar, in voluntary exile from the United Kingdom, where he was trained, writing about the global remapping of American literature and, more recently, having moved to Australia, about Australasia’s constitution of American literature. He likes redrawing the critical maps of literary study, but also following the reverse and inverted orbits of writers themselves. Part of this impulse includes rethinking the hemispheres. Giles’s book about Australasia and US literature, for example, was titled Antipodean America (ABR, August 2014). If it wasn’t too much of a mouthful, you’d say he was a serial re-territorialiser.

A whistleblower’s child hides from a drug ring in the Blue Mountains. A sixteen-year-old rolls through life like an armadillo. A Melbourne high-school graduate wrestles with her insecurities. The daughter of a Chinese restaurateur juggles her responsibility to care for her siblings as her mother’s health deteriorates.

Four lives, four fragile families, and four exquisite books. Jannali Jones’s My Father’s Shadow, Vikki Wakefield’s This Is How We Change the Ending, Nina Kenwood’s It Sounded Better in My Head, and Wai Chim’s The Surprising Power of a Good Dumpling are recently released Australian coming-of-age novels. Together, they grapple with many of the traditional themes of Young Adult fiction: school, first love, sex, friendship, bullying, violence, drugs, and mental illness. They all also explore the struggle, particularly by parents, to preserve their families.

Serotonin is Michel Houellebecq’s eighth novel and appears four years after the scandalous and critically successful Submission (2015), a dystopian novel that depicts France under sharia law. In Serotonin, we are again presented with the standard Houellebecquian narrator: white, middle-aged, and middle class, seemingly in the throes of some mid-life crisis of a predominantly – but not exclusively – sexual nature.

Through a series of Proustian reminiscences, we discover Florent-Claude Labrouste, forty-six, a middle manager for the French government. He once worked for Monsanto but found the company too cynical even for his tastes. He has a marked preference for Hotel Mercure (was the novel financed by the group?) and an irrational hatred for wheeled suitcases of the Samsonite variety. These are the only two issues which Labrouste, admittedly a heavily medicated depressive, is capable of getting worked up over; these and France’s anti-smoking laws, which he views as both draconian and a serious infringement on individual freedom. In this respect, even his beloved Mercure falls short. After hatching a plan to abandon his previous life and his Japanese lover, Labrouste finds himself in the peculiar space reserved for Houellebecq’s narrators, ‘deprived of reasons to live and of reasons to die’. So live on he must, without reason and without hope. It is basically downhill from here.

In their earliest incarnations, fairy tales are gruesome stories riddled with murder, cannibalism, and mutilation. Written in early seventeenth-century Italy, Giambattista Basile’s Cinderella snaps her stepmother’s neck with the lid of a trunk. This motif reappears in the nineteenth-century German ‘The Juniper Tree’, but this time the stepmother wields the trunk lid, decapitating her husband’s young son. In seventeenth-century France, Charles Perrault’s Bluebeard kills his many wives because of their curiosity, while in his adaptation of ‘Sleeping Beauty’, the Queen’s appetite for eating children drives her to commit suicide out of shame. Jealous, Snow White’s stepmother (and in some versions her biological mother) wants to kill the girl and eat her innards, but is ultimately thwarted; her punishment is to dance herself to death wearing red-hot iron shoes.

Zadie Smith’s commanding collection Grand Union puts our contemporary lives and mores under the microscope. She sets her sights on the insanity (and inanity) of social media, the internet, and ‘call-out culture’, but leaves room to consider the tensions inherent in post-colonial nations, including race, gender, and sexuality.

Smith, born in London to a Jamaican mother and British father, has spent a decade as a professor of fiction at New York University. She is known for her mastery of the novel, including On Beauty (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2005) and Swing Time (longlisted for the same prize in 2017), however Grand Union is her first full-length short story collection. Not that Smith is new to the short form: at least seven of the nineteen pieces in the collection have been published before, many of them in The New Yorker between 2013 (‘Meet the President!’) and 2018 (‘Now More Than Ever’).

Humans cannot imagine avian perspectives, Joshua Lobb admits, but his stories explore what we might learn from the attempt. Some of Lobb’s strategies are familiar from much recent fiction with ecological themes, such as the use of an educated, intellectually curious narrator-protagonist whose wide reading provides a convenient means of introducing diverse facts and anecdotes about birds into lyrical, richly figurative prose. Others are more adventurous, including shifts in grammatical person and tense. Far from being gratuitous, they foreground substantive questions of intergenerational responsibility.

Across twelve interlinked stories, Lobb works through imperfect analogy and nuanced juxtaposition between human and non-human species to derive critical distance on human behaviours and socio-legal systems, and their impact on birds and our shared world. Meanwhile, a troubled family history is progressively (but only partially) revealed.

Readers may disagree as to whether the result amounts to ‘a novel’, and some of Lobb’s experiments deserved to be taken further, such as the projection of one of multiple possible futures for the protagonist’s daughter in ‘Aves Admittant’. Instead, the storytelling is brought up short by extensive ‘Field Notes’ – Lobb’s reflections on the research and writing process, which would be a valuable instructional model for graduate Creative Writing students, but which may test other readers’ patience, given that the stories themselves are already so self-reflexive and fragmented (this self-proclaimed ‘Novel in Twelve Stories’ includes one titled ‘Six Stories About Birds, With Seven Questions’). It is a testament to the depth and subtlety of Lobb’s showing that much of his telling feels expendable.

It does, however, clarify Lobb’s intention in calling Flight a novel: to connect its disparate elements, readers must practise the kind of provisional, pluralistic thinking Lobb proposes is needed to renovate our relations with other species – a challenge urgently topical given recent reports of declining bird populations globally, amid the broader climate crisis.

Australians and New Zealanders know it as the Tasman Sea or more familiarly The Ditch: for Māori, Te Tai o-Rēhua. Significant islands in this stretch of water are Lord Howe and Norfolk. As seen from New Zealand, the island most Australians probably don’t know offhand and, when they are told about it, might feel inclined to reject its name as, well, cheeky: it’s West Island – Australia in short.

Stephanie Johnson’s West Island is breezy, carefully and impressively researched, ambitious, labyrinthine, yet, in the end unobtrusively well organised and, finally, confronting. It might bring to mind two vaguely similar literary enterprises – Howard Jacobson’s marvellous television documentary Brilliant Creatures and Ian Britain’s book Once an Australian, both looking at Germaine Greer, Clive James, Barry Humphries, and Robert Hughes. These might usefully compare with West Island if this sort of narrative were identifiable as belonging to a genre (which it isn’t). They nevertheless all share some interesting common ground: it’s not just the intense interest in expatriates; there is also the task of following a number of individual lives without losing a sense of narrative unity and concentration, without dropping, despite all efforts and ploys to the contrary, into a now-this-one, now-that-one routine. Johnson manages this with élan by immediately treating the reader as a member of a time-travelling tourist group:

Dress warmly now, you visitors from the future, because tonight we’re going out into a Sydney winter of around 70 years ago, pre-climate change, when the world was several degrees colder. The streets are dark because it’s toward the end of World War II and the city is in blackout.

Paul Tilley classes the Treasury, now housed in Canberra, as ‘one of Australia’s great enduring institutions’. It began humbly in 1901, in a smallish stone building that still stands at the corner of Collins and Spring Streets in Melbourne. That handsome structure appears to be just about the correct size for its initial staff of five. Just across the street stands a statue of Sir William Clarke, a rich pastoralist of that era who, had he sold some of his properties and sheep, might easily have paid for all the salary cheques signed by the nation’s Treasury in its first weeks.

George Allen, son of a Geelong bootmaker, was the first secretary or head of the Treasury. Transferred from Victoria’s own Treasury, which stood only a punt kick away, he saw himself primarily as a bookkeeper and accountant. But in an infant federal government with only a few ministers and departments, the federal Treasury was soon assigned other tasks. In the first decade, it opened an Audit Office, conducted by John Israel, and the Bureau of Census and Statistics led by Sir George Handley Knibbs.

What was your favourite book of 2019? Read what our critics and writers have to say about this year's finest literary achievements. Ranging across fiction, non-fiction, and poetry, the selection below has plenty to browse through from a year of exemplary writing. Let us know in the comments what you think of the selection, and which books you think were missed!

✦

Felicity Plunkett

Denise Riley wrote Time Lived, Without Its Flow (Picador) after her son’s death, the lyric slivers of her essay considering atemporality and mourning from the ‘instant enlargement of human sympathy’ she evokes. Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu (Cordite) is a generous work of poetic witness and respect for ancestors, culture, and language inspired by a ‘red journey suitcase’ of letters between the teenage poet and her mother. Michelle de Kretser’s On Shirley Hazzard (Black Inc.) offers a masterclass in reading – Hazzard’s work and beyond. The layers of de Kretser’s exhilarating, writerly rereading collect other people’s observations. It would be difficult to read this wonderful book and not return to (or embark upon) reading Hazzard’s work. I raced through Elliot Perlman’s Maybe the Horse Will Talk (Vintage, 12/19), pausing to admire the meticulous architecture and loping, syncopated pace of its anatomy of corporate greed and human tenacity. Ali Smith’s Spring (Hamish Hamilton, 6/19) continues her urgent, virtuosic, ethical seasonal quartet.

Grace Karskens

Samia Khatun’s Australianama: The South Asian odyssey in Australia (University of Queensland Press), fiercely and beautifully written, signals a breakthrough in Australian history, moving far beyond British colonial frameworks to uncover the powerful histories of the South Asian diaspora in Australia. Khatun’s imaginative narrative moves across time and languages, through places, cultures, and stories. I am enchanted by Favel Parrett’s novel There Was Still Love (Hachette, 11/19), which similarly transports readers into different realms, this time the intimate worlds of children who are loved and cared for by grandparents, no matter the difficult and bewildering world outside, and the sorrows of their lives. Absorbing and moving, it reveals the beauties and comforts of small things. Jasmine Seymour and Leanne Mulgo Watson’s exquisitely illustrated book Cooee Mittigar: A story on Darug Songlines (Magabala Books) introduces children to the Aboriginal stories, images, and language of Darug Country. Children, parents, and grandparents will love this book.

Frank Bongiorno

This year I stuck to my knitting: it was mainly Australian history for me. I was impressed with Marilyn Lake’s Progressive New World: How settler colonialism and transpacific exchange shaped American reform (Harvard University Press, 3/19). Lake covers a period which I thought I knew better than any other, but it was startling to see Australia’s famous legislation of the decades around Federation making its way into United States political debate. Romain Fathi’s Our Corner of the Somme: Australia at Villers-Bretonneux (Cambridge University Press) is a bold account of a long-running case of national narcissism. Dennis Altman’s Unrequited Love: Diary of an accidental activist (Monash University Publishing) seemed to me a beautifully crafted insight into one of the most influential Australians of our times. Michelle Arrow does many intelligent things with a turbulent decade in The Seventies: The personal, the political and the making of modern Australia (NewSouth Publishing, 4/19).

Alice Nelson

‘If the world is torn to pieces,’ writes Terry Tempest Williams, ‘I want to see what story I can find in fragmentation.’ This desire is the animating principle of all my favourite books this year, including Williams’s own hauntingly beautiful Erosion: Essays of undoing (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The fraught necessity of steering a course between despair and hope is also explored by David Carlin and Nicole Walker, who have collaborated in an exquisitely digressive essay collection in epistolary form called The After-Normal: Brief, alphabetical essays on a changing planet (Rose Metal Press). Tessa Hadley’s incisive and powerful Late in the Day (Jonathan Cape) is about the complex and shifting dynamics of long marriages. A particularly impressive Australian début comes from Bindy Pritchard, with her short story collection Fabulous Lives (Margaret River Press), which contains a fascinating tangle of ideas about loss and reconfiguration, rendered in crystalline prose.

Trent Dalton

I’ve been immersed this year in some excellent non-fiction books by some brilliant Australian journalists. Matthew Condon’s The Night Dragon (UQP, 7/19) explores one of Queensland’s most notorious and calculated underworld killers, and why it took forty years to bring him to justice. Every Australian politician – every Australian, to be sure – needs to read Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do: Power, control and domestic abuse (Black Inc., 9/19) if they are serious about addressing our national domestic abuse crisis. Dan Box’s Bowraville (Penguin, 8/19) is a harrowing bookend to the journalist’s relentless investigations into the murders of three Aboriginal children. And I hope Santa’s sack is filled this year with a million copies of David Leser’s Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing (Allen & Unwin, 9/19) and the big guy drops them down from his sleigh over all of us sunburnt blokes at the cricket.

Billy Griffiths

Underland: A deep time journey (Hamish Hamilton, 10/19) is English nature writer Robert Macfarlane’s most ambitious book to date. It is haunting and urgent and beautifully written. Christina Thompson’s Sea People: The puzzle of Polynesia (William Collins, 6/19) is a lively and lucid journey through Polynesian history, written with respect, wonder, and a keen awareness of the politics of knowledge. I was swept away by Yōko Ogawa’s sinister yet poignant novel The Memory Police (Pantheon, published 1994, translated 2019), an allegory of loss, a meditation on the fragility of inner lives, and a reminder of the profound dangers of historical amnesia. And don’t miss Anna Krien’s first novel, Act of Grace (Black Inc., 10/19). Like her non-fiction, it is brave, bracing, and alert to complex truths. 

James Ley

This year I am on the bandwagon for Lucy Ellmann’s retro-modernist behemoth Ducks, Newburyport (Text Publishing, 12/19). Yes, it is sprawling and ungainly and more than a little maddening; and yes, it has its longueurs, but its great torrent of associations and its rich humour come closer than anything else to capturing that weird combination of anxiety and inanity that is the hallmark of our troubled times. I also think Luke Carman’s essay collection Intimate Antipathies (Giramondo) hasn’t received the credit it is due, possibly because a few of its more (ahem) controversial inclusions overshadowed the self-deprecation and pathos of its more reflective pieces. But its intimacy is every bit as good as its antipathy. And for anyone interested in a better class of airport novel, I can recommend Andrew McGahan’s The Rich Man’s House (Allen & Unwin, 9/19), a trashy but thoroughly entertaining disaster story about an impossibly tall mountain. The descriptive passages gave me vertigo.

Susan Wyndham

Two novels about American families wowed me. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury), made perfect by her narrative skills, follows a brother and sister who spend a lifetime trying to understand their parents. Lucy Treloar creates a disturbing but beautiful sense of place in Wolfe Island (Picador, 9/19) as lapping water and social anarchy force a sculptor out of seclusion. Helen Ennis puts flesh on a fine artist in her biography Olive Cotton: A life in photography (Fourth Estate). Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume 1, 1978–1987 (Text, 12/19) proves she can’t write a bad sentence, even in private.

Brenda Walker

Susan Sontag once described herself as ‘gleaming with survivorship’. Anne Boyer’s The Undying: A meditation on modern illness (Allen Lane) looks at what cancer survival can mean. Her book is not a celebration of personal gleaming; it is a ferocious account of the cost of survival and the use of cancer patients as sentimental emblems of fortitude, or ‘another person’s epiphanies’. On Shirley Hazzard, Michelle de Kretser’s joyous work of appreciation, marks a high point in Black Inc.’s Writers on Writers series. Confident and discriminating, Hazzard is the forebear of many Australian novelists who write with literary poise and a great command of character, including de Kretser and Charlotte Wood. I can’t think of a finer account of Hazzard’s stylistic and political distinctiveness. Tara June Winch’s The Yield (Hamish Hamilton, 8/19) gathers up family, Country, and spirituality, blanketing one part of rural Australia in Indigenous history and language in an impressive rebuking of loss and colonialism.

Beejay Silcox

Cities under cities, Paleolithic art galleries, bronze-age tombs, warehouses of toxic doom, and a forest internet powered by empathetic mushrooms: Robert Macfarlane’s Underland is an awestruck and awestriking catalogue of the world underneath us. ‘To understand light,’ Macfarlane writes, ‘you need first to have been buried in the deep-down dark.’ Here is nature writing at its most exigent and magnificent: equal parts elegy, map, metaphysical disquisition, and exultant sensory surrender. When I finished Underland, it felt like surfacing. I felt the same breathlessness reading Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend (Allen & Unwin, 11/19) a blisteringly intelligent novel about rifts of another sort: the ‘strange caverns of distance’ that are wrenched open in grief. Wood’s new novel of precarious friendships is an elegantly self-contained fury – a thunderstorm in a bottle.

Paul Giles

Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me (Jonathan Cape, 5/19) weaves his familiar preoccupations – technology, war, politics – into a darkly comic alternative history of Britain and is perhaps the most successful novel he has written. Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard: Selected essays, speeches, and meditations (Knopf) is an indispensable collection of non-fiction by perhaps the most important writer of our age, addressing topics as varied as opera, time, and memory, as well as issues relating to race. James Simpson’s Permanent Revolution: The Reformation and the illiberal roots of liberalism (Harvard, 7/19) is a revisionist account of the seventeenth-century emergence of liberalism from an Australian scholar in exile, which sheds new light on how evangelical religion continues to shape contemporary politics. And the exhibition catalogue Janet Laurence: After nature, edited by Rachel Kent (Museum of Contemporary Art), offers a handsomely illustrated and informative account of this important Australian visual artist.

Gregory Day

As the various tropes of crisis heighten, I return to strangeness, the strangeness of pre-commodified voices. So this year it was back, or perhaps forward, to Emily Dickinson, and how! Cristanne Miller’s Emily Dickinson’s Poems: As she preserved them (Harvard University Press) is a suitably immense way to experience Dickinson’s ‘pierless bridge’. The product of various championings of the poet’s distinctive methods and voicings down through the years, it reinforces the fact that Dickinson is the nature writer for our histrionic and overmediated times. As someone working the seams of a new novel dealing in realms of early bush media, I also enjoyed Wendy Haslem’s From Melies To New Media: Spectral projections (Intellect Books), which offers a delicate survey of the way the tactilities and textures of analogue days determine so much in our digital present. The chapter on the Tate’s Eadweard Muybridge app, Muybridgizer, is worth the price of admission on its own.

Ali Alizadeh

This was a good year for philosophy, and for horror. My philosophy picks are from the same publisher (Bloomsbury): Marx: An introduction by Michel Henry (trans. Kristin Justaert); and Happiness by Alain Badiou, translated from French by Australia’s own A. J. Bartlett and Justin Clemens. Plenty in both books to prove that Marxism isn’t, and never was, a cold, anti-humanist economistic doctrine. Badiou even has things to say about affect and pleasure! My fiction picks: Paul Tremblay’s Growing Things and Other Stories (Titan Books) shows that he’s a ridiculously talented – and genuinely terrifying – storyteller. C.J. Tudor’s The Taking of Annie Thorne (Michael Joseph) is an addictive fusion of supernatural horror and crime, and indicates that she’s no one-hit wonder. 

Fiona Wright

My favourite novels this year were Carrie Tiffany’s taut and haunting Exploded View (Text, 3/19) and Elizabeth Bryer’s wonderfully strange and often enigmatic From Here On, Monsters (Picador, 9/19). I loved two collections of short stories: Josephine Rowe’s masterful Here Until August (Black Inc, 9/19) and Alice Bishop’s A Constant Hum (Text, 11/19), both of which handle their separate griefs with great delicacy and luminosity. In non-fiction, I loved Luke Carman’s Intimate Antipathies for its alternating cheeky wit and devastating heartbreak, and Chris Fleming’s On Drugs (Giramondo, 11/19) for its clear-eyed incisiveness and intellectual curiosity.

John Kinsella

Again, for me, it’s a poetry year. Charmaine Papertalk Green’s Nganajungu Yagu is a living poem-text of affirmation and intense confrontation with injustice (‘Society slavery here’); Omar Sakr’s The Lost Arabs (UQP), of which I wrote in a blog review: ‘This is not an easy journey on which to accompany this remarkable poet, but join him and see how anger can bring compassion, and how compassion can show why there is anger. The Lost Arabs offers ways not only into Sakr’s personal poetics and psyche, but into a polyphonous sense of community and communities’; Lisa Gorton’s conceptual-textual activism in Empirical (Giramondo, 10/19), with its layered questions of agency, legacy, historical residues, and invasiveness. Like nothing else, not even his previous works, is J.H. Prynne’s large-format, red-ink print Of Better Scrap (Face Press). With conversations happening between poetry books on my desk, a revered Samuel Taylor Coleridge speaks from Gorton to Prynne and back again. Prynne’s poem ‘Familiar Left Hand’ begins: ‘Frost at noon, singular and fragile assign rapier point / aftermath as well indent’, and its lyric-political intensity lifts only as lightning can ‘lift’ nature. Of Better Scrap has poems of insect-close intensity.

Jacqueline Kent

Bill Goldstein’s The World Broke in Two (Bloomsbury Circus) is a brilliantly constructed, imaginative collective biography of Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, and E.M. Forster in 1922, when they were writing their most celebrated novels. Robert A. Caro’s Working: Researching, interviewing, writing (Bodley Head) balances the importance of research, intuition, and knowledge of human nature in essays that form a masterclass in the art of life writing. Andrea Goldmith’s Invented Lives (Scribe, 4/19) is a novel of exemplary clarity and insight examining questions of exile, belonging, and history.

Lisa Gorton

Written in the voice of Alan Turing, Will Eaves’s novel Murmur (Canongate) is simultaneously trance-like and analytical, and brilliantly free in its exploration of consciousness and artificial intelligence. I loved Evelyn Araluen’s piece in the Sydney Review of Books, ‘Snugglepot and Cuddlepie in the Ghost Gum’ (11 February 2019), so wildly clever that it reminded me of Italo Calvino’s way of turning the mind inside-out and back again. I found Xia Jia’s short works of science fiction strange and memorable, dream-like satires on technology’s new empire (in translation online at Clarkesworld Magazine). And I’m already rereading Jessica L. Wilkinson’s Music Made Visible (Vagabond), a poetic biography of George Balanchine. Closely researched, the work of years, its poems are all in movement, sudden, and vital.

Andrea Goldsmith

Miriam Sved’s second novel, A Universe of Sufficient Size (Picador, 4/19), is a superbly structured novel of family, history, secrets, trauma, and mathematics, stretching from 1930s Budapest to Sydney in the 2000s. Very impressive. Deborah Lipstadt is a fearless and free-ranging intellectual. Her latest, Antisemitism: Here and now (Scribe, 8/19), is an accessible, punchy account of anti-Semitism, filled with relevant historical perspectives. It is also a practical book, supplying numerous strategies and techniques to use with a wide range of bigots. My highlight of the year is All the Lives We Ever Lived: Seeking solace in Virginia Woolf (Atlantic Books, 11/19) by Katharine Smyth. This book combines childhood memoir with grief over a beloved and deeply flawed father, difficulties with a very much alive and misunderstood mother, and the power and intimacy of reading. It’s a personal book with a far reach, and I loved it. Imagine a young Susan Sontag, with the welcome addition of humour. Millennial essayist Jia Tolentino, in Trick Mirror: Reflections on self-delusion (Fourth Estate, 8/19), writes like a hand-crafted speedboat, drawing on the likes of Erving Goffman, C.S. Lewis, and DJ Screw as she guides you through the contemporary cultural swamp.

Astrid Edwards

This was a banner year for Australian women writers. Anna Krien’s Act of Grace is a masterpiece. Rarely does a writer’s first move from non-fiction to fiction display such heart and literary craft. Claire G. Coleman continues to entertain (and educate) us with The Old Lie (Hachette, 9/19), reinvigorating Australian speculative fiction in the process. Her reinterpretation of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ is haunting. Alice Bishop may be the début writer of the year with A Constant Hum, a collection of short fiction about the 2009 Black Saturday fires. No list would be complete without non-fiction. Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do should be compulsory reading for all.

Chris Flynn

My number one pick for 2019 goes to City of Girls (Bloomsbury), Elizabeth Gilbert’s ode to joy. Set in the 1940s New York theatre scene, costumier Vivian Morris indulges in sex, booze, and dancing without the usual boring patriarchal consequences. It is a refreshing literary gin fizz, and an antidote to the seemingly endless cavalcade of misery fiction. The Aussie poke in the eye this year comes from Tony Birch. The White Girl (UQP, 8/19) deals with the Stolen Generation and white Australia’s messed-up attitude towards its Indigenous people, with Birch’s trademark humour and grace. Is it tempting fate to call this one next year’s Miles Franklin winner?

Brenda Niall

Don’t mistake Helen Garner’s Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume 1, 1978–1987 for ‘something sensational to read in the train’, as an Oscar Wilde heroine characterised her own diaries. Garner’s are spare, quiet, reflective: a portrait of the artist and her world, observed with scrupulous honesty. The identities of others are so carefully protected that only insiders will try guessing who is who. Another distinctive voice comes from the reclusive artist Ian Fairweather. Letters from his Bribie Island retreat, with their total concentration on the essential act of painting, are quirky, opinionated, dedicated. Ian Fairweather: A life in letters (Text, 11/19) is superbly edited by Claire Roberts and John Thompson, and generously produced. Kathy O’Shaughnessy’s In Love with George Eliot (Scribe) is a riveting novel underpinned by impressive scholarly work. And welcome back Kate Atkinson and her grumpy sleuth Jackson Brodie in Big Sky (Doubleday).

John Hawke

Australian poetry titles are represented only fleetingly (if at all) in bookshops, so it is necessary to check the websites of leading independent publishers, such as Giramondo, Vagabond, Cordite, and Puncher & Wattmann, for the range of current practice. The outstanding book this year was funded through the goodwill of subscribers, and the generous work of its publisher, Alan Wearne, and its editor, Judith Beveridge. Robert Harris’s The Gang of One (Grand Parade Poets, 8/19) is an authoritative selection of work from one of the most important poets of his generation, and appears a quarter of a century after his death. Melbourne poet π.O. has produced another major collection: Heide (Giramondo), 600-page documentary poem, is a critical survey of Australian cultural history, focusing on the local reception of modernism in art and poetry. This documentary approach is also evident in recent volumes by Lisa Gorton, Natalie Harkin, and Jessica L. Wilkinson, though in each case with distinctive results.

Kieran Pender

Since The New York Times published allegations of sexual harassment against Harvey Weinstein, the #MeToo movement has reverberated across the globe. The impact continues to be felt in 2019, and has given rise to several compelling books. In She Said: Breaking the sexual harassment story that helped ignite a movement (Bloomsbury Circus, 12/19), Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey – among the reporters who earned a Pulitzer for the Weinstein reporting – provide a gripping consideration of the past, present, and future of #MeToo. Australian David Leser in Women, Men and the Whole Damn Thing offers a male perspective on the persistence of misogyny, discrimination and harassment in society. This was risky – his own daughter told him ‘it’s time for men to shut up and listen’ – but Leser’s honest reflections resonate. Both books remind us of the long road ahead for those seeking a gender-equal world.

Ellen van Neerven

My books of the year include the stunning Nganajungu Yagu by Charmaine Papertalk Green. Charmaine is from the Wajarri, Badimaya, and Southern Yamaji peoples of Western Australia, and the bilingual Nganajungu Yagu springboards from the letters Charmaine and her mother exchanged in 1978–79 when she was living away in Perth for school. This collection reminds me of the close relationship I have with my mother and other older women in my family, as does The White Girl by Tony Birch, which introduces us to one of my favourite characters in recent Australian writing: Odette, proud grandmother to Sissy. Odette is a protector, creator, and nurturer against the rough backdrop of a rural town in the assimilation era. Birch’s touching narrative had me bawling. 

Glyn Davis

The Breeding Season by Amanda Niehaus (Allen & Unwin, 10/19) is an assured first novel, testing human relationships against biological fieldwork. The story of Elise and Dan is both a ballet of ideas and carefully signalled drama. Science makes us look at the world anew in Donald D. Hoffman’s The Case Against Reality: Why evolution hid the truth from our eyes (W.W. Norton & Company), which offers a startling thesis that consciousness does not map reality but invents it. He turns the hard problem on its head: how does consciousness create a physical reality? A troubled mind, and delusions that can run through our actions and memories, is the theme of The Hilton Bombing: Evan Pederick and the Ananda Marga (Melbourne University Press, 12/19). Imre Salusinszky interviewed the Hilton bomber over seven years, and presents his story with sympathy, but also a sense of gaps and confusions. The work recalls passions and controversy from an earlier generation in well-crafted prose that moves across decades.

Marilyn Lake

More than thirty years have passed since feminist historians first insisted on the gendered nature of political power. This year a new crop of political histories illuminates this insight from new angles. In The Blackburns: Private lives, public ambitions (Melbourne University Press, 4/19), Carolyn Rasmussen shows how a joint study of the intertwining romantic and political passions of Maurice and Doris Blackburn gives us a fresh perspective on Victoria’s distinctively progressive political culture in the early twentieth century. Michelle Arrow’s The Seventies has at its heart an investigation into the Royal Commission on Human Relationships, created by the Whitlam government, whose radical initiatives led to long-term social (if not political) transformation. In her splendid biography of the path-breaking South Australian premier, Don Dunstan: The visionary politician who changed Australia (Allen & Unwin, 10/19), Angela Woollacott confirms that even as politics remained a masculine pursuit, gender relations were changing.

Ceridwen Dovey

Alice Gorman’s Dr Space Junk vs the Universe (NewSouth) passionately describes the material culture of outer space, and reclaims space as a cultural landscape, not as a blank canvas onto which we can project whatever techno-utopian fantasies we like. Gorman, a founder of space archaeology, has a gift for making space feel accessible to ordinary outsiders – showing it’s not just the realm of sci-fi geeks and rocket fanatics. Nicola Redhouse’s Unlike the Heart: A memoir of brain and mind (UQP) is a wise, elegant book about so much more than mothering. Redhouse is unafraid to dive right into psychoanalytic theory and the complexities of neuroscience, weaving these bodies of knowledge into more personal reflections on the post-natal body, mind, and brain. And finally, I greedily read and loved both Nam Le’s On David Malouf (Black Inc., 5/19) and Michelle de Kretser’s On Shirley Hazzard.

Bronwyn Lea

I was surprised that so many books I loved this year were actually published in 2018 and therefore ineligible. But three 2019 titles leap out: Carrie Tiffany’s Exploded View is a dark coal of a novel compressed into a diamond; Josephine Rowe’s Here Until August marks her as one of the best short story writers going; and Emma Lew’s potent Crow College: New and selected poems (Giramondo, 5/19) continues to disturb my waking dreams.

Zora Simic

This year I decided to track my reading on Instagram. My one rule was to post an image and write a short review as soon as I finished, keeping it fresh. Looking back, I’d revise at least half of my hot takes. The ones that have stayed with me, in the order in which I read them, are The Bridge (Scribe, 6/18) by Enza Gandolfo (sad and beautiful), Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend from Little, Brown (wise), Luke Carman’s Intimate Antipathies (for the essay set in the waiting room of a medical centre), The White Girl by Tony Birch (his best yet), Fleishman Is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner from Wildfire (funny and worthy of the hype), and (for sheer audacity) Peter Polites’s The Pillars (Hachette, 9/19). Most of those are novels, but if I had to pick one book of the year it would be non-fiction – Jess Hill’s powerful See What You Made Me Do. She has such respect for the stories of women and children who have endured domestic abuse. Is it too much to hope that Pauline Hanson and Kevin Andrews read it before the forthcoming federal government inquiry into the family law system they will be running?

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Angela Woollacott’s Don Dunstan: The visionary politician who changed Australia is the first full biography of Dunstan, himself such a complex and brightly coloured figure that Woollacott’s scholarly, detailed, emotionally neutral approach nicely balances her material. She steers a steady course between hagiography and its opposite, giving a warts-and-all yet unsensationalised and affectionate account of Dunstan’s style, his personal life, his true political and social vision of an ideal state, and his unique achievements in government. The Weekend is Charlotte Wood’s intensely engaging novel about friendship and grief, exploring the harsh terrain of old age in women’s lives. It doesn’t flinch from the humiliations of the ageing body, from the sadness of inevitable loss, or from the revelations that can shed unwelcome light on the past. Wood’s frank but generous view embraces the full range of this experience, all the way from scenes of utter devastation to moments of laugh-out-loud comedy.

Geraldine Doogue

Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe (Fourth Estate) is a triumph. Its crackling energy and sheer heart consumed me. Can it really be a first novel, with that level of proficiency and galloping pace? Yes, the plot becomes somewhat fantastical towards the end, but I was transfixed, especially by the Brisbane newsroom scenes, surely some of the best-ever depictions of the vulgar, idealistic, aspirational mix that characterises a good news hub. I would almost read Howard Jacobson’s letter to his dog, such is my devotion to his humour, his generosity to characters. Live a Little (Jonathan Cape) may not be a vital read, but it is replete with Jacobson’s conviction that no one is beyond redemption. L’chaim! Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Fleishman Is in Trouble – a tale of the moment – relentlessly mines modern Manhattanites’ search for meaning and the elusive life of good values. Exhausting, neurotically sexy, and somehow cautionary.

Paul Kildea

I’m currently halfway through Orlando Figes’s intriguing account of the phenomenal soprano Pauline Viardot, her husband, Louis, and her lover, Ivan Turgenev. The Europeans: Three lives and the making of a cosmopolitan culture (Allen Lane) is far more than a biography, however: Figes places these three smack-bang in the centre of the huge shifts in European culture brought about by railways, industrialisation, and national unification. Some years back Willem de Vries wrote a vitally important book about the Nazi looting of Jewish music collections. It has now been translated into French – Commando Musik: Comment les nazis ont spolié l’Europe musicale (Buchet Chastel) – and launched in France, the country that suffered so grievously in this regard. He’s a friend, which is why I’m thrilled Dennis Altman has written such a good book. Unrequited Love: Diary of an accidental activist is part memoir, part explanation for Altman’s failed love affair with the United States, with some fabulous cameos.

Gideon Haigh

Best non-fiction: Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing: A true story of murder and memory in Northern Ireland (Doubleday), a melancholy retelling of the Troubles and their remembering. Best fiction: the Vintage reprint of Butcher’s Crossing, John Williams’s 1960 novel of the American frontier, big, bold, and bloody, like a prose Deadwood, and a less baroque Cormac McCarthy. 

When it comes to serial muses, Alma Maria Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel was in a class of her own. Lou Andreas-Salomé may have included Friedrich Nietzsche, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Sigmund Freud among her conquests, and Caroline Blackwood scored Lucian Freud, Robert Silvers, and Robert Lowell, but Alma’s conquests were more and varied. Antonia Fraser is supposed to have claimed that she ‘only slept with the first eleven’; although Alma would not have understood the reference, she would have agreed wholeheartedly with the concept. Gustav Klimt, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Gustav Mahler, Oskar Kokoschka, and Walter Gropius were major notches on her belt, and if the reputations of the author Franz Werfel and the political theologian Johannes Hollnsteiner have faded, they were big in their time.

Mallees contradict the green pompom-on-a-stick notion of treeness. The word ‘mallee’ stems from the Wemba Wemba word ‘mali’ for a form of eucalyptus tree; one with a shrubby habit with a multi-stemmed trunk branching out from a lignotuber (a woody life-support system at or below the ground). Highly adapted to challenging environments, more than 400 species of the genus Eucalyptus are considered mallee. The diverse and unique ecosystems that they define evolved within the bewildering contexts of aridity, salinity, heat and wind exposure, and soils devoid of nutrients.

The import of this book is best summed up by pinching one of its section headings: ‘another Europe is possible’. In this other Europe, this better one, the ‘democratic deficit’ that has bedevilled the European project from the outset has finally found a satisfactory resolution. A dream? Not at all. For the authors of this book, it is a ‘realistic utopia’, fully achievable if the right measures are taken. All that is needed is an agreement on a treaty and the dismantling of a Trojan Horse. The proposed Treaty on the Democratization of the Governance of the Euro Area (‘T-Dem’ for short) is the centrepiece of this book and provides the common reference point for its various contributors. In Parts One and Two, the four editors – Stéphanie Hennette, Thomas Piketty, Guillaume Sacriste, and Antoine Vauchez – make their case for the treaty proposal and outline its particulars; in Part Three, a range of responses is given; in Part Four, the editors offer their rejoinders. This turns the book into a deliberative forum whose points of agreement and disagreement on the possibility of democratising Europe repay attention. But first a word about that Trojan Horse.

Andrew Johnson’s first day in the White House was less than promising. Whether, as his supporters claimed, he was suffering from illness and had attempted to self-medicate or had simply been celebrating his new position as vice president, Johnson was devastatingly drunk. It was 3 March 1865, the Civil War was rapidly drawing to a close, and the recently re-elected President Lincoln was to deliver his second inaugural address. In prose that would eventually be inscribed across the walls of his marble memorial, Lincoln reflected on God, war, and the emerging challenge of how to rehabilitate a divided Union. The vice president’s words that day were barely decipherable and after prostrating himself before a Bible and subjecting it to a long wet kiss, he was quickly ushered away.

Within weeks, Lincoln would be dead and the same Republican congressmen who would later play a leading role in Johnson’s impeachment looked hopefully to the former tailor from Tennessee to guide a nation in mourning through the challenges of peace and Reconstruction. For many, he was the ideal candidate for this task. A Southern Democrat who had owned slaves, yet who had also fought hard and risked everything to stand up against secession and for the preservation of the Union and the Constitution – who else could hope to unite and heal such a fractured, wounded nation?

To hell with what you think of me.
I’ve started drinking martinis at three.
I wake, I walk, I write, I sleep.
I snooze the alarm. I doze. I read.
Sometimes I listen to Carmen McRae
and pity you an inch. Not often.
Mostly I think about who’ll be next
now you’re gone. I stay out extravagantly late.
I buy myself a new coat, oysters, peonies.
I take long baths with a flute of champagne.
In bars, I sip whiskey straight. I pet
stray cats on stoops. When it’s hot
I laze around in French lingerie. Why not?
You’ve gone; the world hasn’t stopped.

I am from a very large island, a continent in fact. Yet smaller islands have meant more to me – trips to Bribie Island with my grandmother to drink shandies and eat crab sandwiches; two years living in an expatriate Australian community on the Malaysian island of Penang; an object lesson in the power of oceans while visiting American Samoa, when my then boyfriend and I were carried by the tide beyond the coral reef we were exploring with snorkels. In my part of the world, small islands often connote tourism, but they also serve other objects. There is a vanishing point where paradise becomes isolation, where utility meets strategy and where purpose matters more than people.

My island continent is surrounded by a string of small islands that have always loomed large in Australia’s national imaginary. This is perhaps more the case now than at any time since World War II. Then, Australians were acutely aware that their troops were fighting Japan on the nation’s doorstep in the external territory of Papua and in New Guinea, which Australia administered under the ‘sacred trust’ conferred by a League of Nations mandate. Manus Island formed part of that mandate. There were other islands that Australia held under similar terms. One of them was Nauru. Australia and its Allies managed to hold out in New Guinea, but Manus Island and Nauru were occupied by Japan, which also recognised their value for its Pacific campaigns.

We have the White Louse. His name is Donal Dump. He is the Resident, and he heads the Dump maladministration, squillionaires and a sprain-surgeon, a Cabinet of all the talons. They call him a racial spigot. He sees it as he calls it, which makes him spigot. He squitters Twitter on the shitter, and we titter after. He only squeaks for us. He is our mouth-squeeze. He has a background in constriction. Bill the Wall! Bill the Wall! He owes the Dump Hotel, wright here in DeCease. He is a self-dealing man who once in his youth wore out the uniform. Then bone spurts struck, and he invalidated to the venereal front. A ployboy and a much-married man and father to the fair Larissa-without-portfolio who he’d love to give one to. Or even several. A stately plump buck who takes the time to vent before the chopper with his luxury hair and tie blowing bravely in all erections. Fake nudes! Fake nudes! To me he is a crevice to the orifice. The economy is re-relegated like you wouldn’t believe. Unvironment too. Offense Dept. going bangbusters. Eye ran. Blat! Mixed Tans. Blat! Gerry mans. Blat! He achoos new tariff-farts every day, whining easy-peasy dread wars, slapping stanchions on Shiner and our other alloys. (All except Rusher, on account of Poo-in.) He is surely flushing in the dawn of a brand-new Yellow Rage. Grate again! Grate again! GAGA! GAGA! We are a Nation of Lawns. (He flogs golf off a tetchy handiclap.) We have the suppuration of pars. There is the Supreme Bought, also the Senilate and the House of Unrepresentatives (tho cuntly in Demographic hands). We stand by the corruptibility of our unstitutions, and the wisdom of the Foundering Fathers.

Michael Hofmann’s most recent collection is One Lark, One Horse (Faber & Faber, 2018). ‘The Resident’ appeared first in the New York Review of Books (10 October 2019). We thank NYRB for allowing us to reproduce it here.

Just over one hundred years ago, Sydney readers were speaking in hushed tones about a shocking new book by a young woman, Zora Cross. A collection of love poems by an unknown would not normally have roused much interest, but because they came from a woman, and were frankly and emphatically erotic, the book was a sensation. It wasn’t, as a Bulletin reviewer said demurely, a set of sonnets to the beloved’s eyebrows. It was ‘well, all of him’. It broke the literary convention that restricted the expression of sexual pleasure to a male lover. Cross took Shakespeare’s sonnets as her inspiration. Her Songs of Love and Life (1917) was a long way from being Shakespearean, but it roused huge admiration. Cross was hailed as a genius, ‘an Australian Sappho’.

Queensland-born Zora Cross began her literary career as an unstoppable contributor to the ‘Children’s Corner’ in the Sydney-based Australian Town and Country Journal. Cross was only nine when she wrote from home on Pie Creek Road, Gympie, to the Corner’s editor, ‘Dame Durden’, who, as everyone knew, was the bestselling author Ethel Turner.

Every biographer has a relationship with their subject, even if they have passed away. A real advantage for biographers of the dead is that the subject cannot say what they think about the book. The relationship between Margaret Simons and Penny Wong was fraught. That this mattered is evident from the opening sentence: ‘Penny Wong did not want this book to be written.’ Simons, a journalist, biographer, and associate professor at Monash University, uses her preface to complain about how difficult it was researching the book without Wong’s assistance and against her will. Finally, well into Simons’s writing, she was invited to Senator Wong’s office, where Wong gave her ‘a hard time’. The relationship thawed and Simons was able to conduct six interviews. Readers will be glad that Wong overcame her resistance to this intrusion into her life: the stories in Wong’s voice and her personal memories are rich elements of the book. Yet there are recurrent reminders of Simons’s tense relationship with her subject.

Penelope Ying-Yen Wong was born in 1968 in Kota Kinabalu, the capital of Sabah in the North Borneo part of Malaysia. This was her father’s home region, where his Chinese ancestors had moved in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Francis Yit Shing Wong was a Colombo Plan student of architecture at the University of Adelaide in the 1960s; he had married Jane Chapman and returned to Sabah with her. People in Borneo suffered severely under Japanese occupation in World War II, including Penny Wong’s paternal grandmother, father, and his siblings.

When Penny was eight, her parents separated. Jane, Penny, and her younger brother, Toby, immediately moved to Adelaide, where her mother bought a house in Coromandel Valley in the hills, not far from where her own English ancestors – who went back to the founding of South Australia in 1836 – had farmed. At Coromandel Valley Primary, Penny and Toby had a terrible time because of the racist bullying they suffered. Racism became part of the children’s everyday experience. Life improved greatly when Penny won a scholarship to the élite Scotch College. She thrived and excelled academically, as well as shining in drama and sport. Toby joined her at Scotch, where he did less brilliantly. Toby’s story is a tragic part of Wong’s life. He dropped out of school, took up music (and drugs), and became a chef. In 1988 John Howard, leader of the opposition, announced the Coalition’s new immigration policy of One Australia to reduce Asian immigration. In Wong’s view, this legitimated the kind of racist abuse she and Toby had received. Ten days after the 2001 election, which first took Penny into the Senate, Toby killed himself. In a powerful maiden speech in August 2002, Wong paid special tribute to Toby, called for Australia to unite as a compassionate country, and condemned the racist division of Australian society exacerbated by Pauline Hanson and John Howard.

At the University of Adelaide, Wong studied law and political science. In her second year, she became active in student politics and was elected to the students’ association and the board of the university union. Wong describes herself as a social democrat. She started to the left of the Labor Party, but in 1988 in the heat of debate and student protest over the introduction of the HECS scheme, she became convinced that it was more important to ‘be in the room’ to influence policy. She joined the ALP and has been on its left ever since. In 1989 Wong was elected general secretary of the university Labor Club; others viewed her as the one in charge.

Wong quickly transitioned from student politics to being active in the Labor Party at state level, and then nationally – with the help of powerful supporters such as Nick Bolkus. Before she finished her degree she began work as a paralegal with the Federated Furnishing Trade union. After graduating, she took a full-time organiser position there just as they were amalgamating with the CFMEU. At the end of 1994 she moved to Sydney to work for the CFMEU. Following the 1995 NSW election, she became a policy adviser to a minister in the new Labor government. In late 1996, Wong, at the invitation of the SA ALP’s left, returned to Adelaide to seek preselection for the Senate. She took a job in industrial law with a firm that represented unions on the left, then moved to the Miscellaneous Workers’ Union to work with Mark Butler, president of the SA Labor party. In 1998 she was selected as the left faction’s candidate for the Senate ticket. In 2000 Wong applied to have her Malaysian citizenship revoked, which it was in 2001. Later that year, at the ‘Tampa’ election won by John Howard, Wong was elected to the Australian Senate.

In the Senate from 2002, Wong would find her feet as a politician and gradually rose within the ALP. With the ‘Kevin 07’ ALP victory, she became minister for climate change and water, a frontbench heavyweight. It was the climate-change portfolio that enabled her to shine on the international stage. In 2013 she became Leader of the Government in the Senate, the first woman to do so, and later the upper house’s Leader of the Opposition. In 2016 she was made shadow minister for foreign affairs.

The biography covers Wong’s personal life, albeit very briefly compared to the politics, by far its main focus. Simons notes Wong’s long-term partners, firstly her five-year relationship with Jay Weatherill, future premier of South Australia, which began while she was at university and he was an industrial officer for the Australian Workers’ Union. After Weatherill, her relationships were with women. Her first long-term woman partner, Dascia Bennett, whom she met in 1995, had two children, so Wong became a stepmother. In 2006 Wong met her current partner, Sophie Allouache; together they have two daughters, Alexandra, born in 2011, and Hannah, in 2015. Along the way, we learn about Wong’s beliefs (she believes in God and was baptised in the Uniting Church as an adult, but accepts all religions as equal) and values – her absorption of her father’s emphasis on education and ambition, and her mother’s feminism and sense of social justice. And we see, over and over, how racism was so pervasive in her life that inevitably it became the paramount issue for her.

Perhaps because of the tension in her working relationship with Wong, Simons is repeatedly critical, describing Wong as being occasionally bad-tempered to staff and others, aggressive, and as having learnt ‘unappealing political skills’ at Adelaide University while engaged in ‘student politics at its worst’. On the other hand, she is ‘principled, intellectual, private, restrained and sane’, generous to her staff – which is loyal to her. Simons notes that Wong’s Liberal opponents have only good things to say about her (as does the cleaner in charge of ministerial offices at Parliament House), and that she is commonly regarded with a mixture of fear and respect.

We should all be grateful that Simons has given us this clear, well-researched, and comprehensive biography, and that Wong eventually contributed the personal memories and views that round it out. As the ALP digests its recent report on how it lost the 2019 election, some commentators are calling for a change of leadership. If Labor does find a seat in the House of Representatives for Wong, she would immediately be a highly qualified candidate for the top job, due to her intellect, political and policy acumen, as well as her speaking skills, compassion, and determination. Whether as prime minister or foreign minister, there is a good chance that she will yet be one of our top leaders, which is a compelling reason for us to know more about the making of Penny Wong.

Two years before Rachel Cusk published the first novel in her acclaimed Outline Trilogy (2014–18), she wrote a searing account of her divorce, entitled ‘Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation’, which ignited a brouhaha in her homeland, the United Kingdom. The dramatic excoriation of marital life aroused apoplexy among critics and readers; they bristled at Cusk’s subjective and one-sided storytelling, as if any other account of divorce were possible. It wasn’t the first time Cusk’s work had raised eyebrows: her memoir, A Life’s Work: On becoming a mother (2001), offended many a book-club member with its frank and unflattering descriptions of motherhood.

If the invisible narrator of the subsequent Outline novels was an attempt to move away from story and subjectivity, Cusk remains no less obsessed with these ideas. In Coventry, a new collection of memoir, literary criticism, and essays, which includes ‘Aftermath’, Cusk explores the way story – who controls it and its relationship to the truth – shapes our reality. The most compelling contribution is the titular essay, in which the word ‘Coventry’ refers to the English idiom of ‘being sent to Coventry’, meaning to be ignored and isolated. We learn that Cusk’s parents periodically suspend contact with her over some slight that Cusk has failed to detect or to mitigate. Doubtless, her parents stop communicating in an attempt to revive waning parental power. She is brilliant at elucidating the reasons for their behaviour: ‘It is in fact failure, their failure to control the story, their failure to control me. It is a failure so profound that all they have left to throw at it is the value of their own selves, like desperate people taking the last of their possessions to the pawnshop.’

When teenage girls send one another to Coventry it becomes a form of ‘elemental bullying’, an immolation of another’s identity. ‘If other people pretend you’re not there,’ Cusk asks, ‘how long can you go on believing you exist?’ Long-married couples stop talking to one another too; Cusk eyes them at her local pub, picking at their food and staring past each other. She wonders if their silence is caused by the problem of reconnecting to reality once the family story is over. Indeed, a friend with adult children tells Cusk that she would like to see all of the family accoutrements she has bought, the mountains of Barbie dolls and Nintendo games, piled in front of her to assess their objective worth. It is as if the real story of her friend’s family life has eluded her and that the mountain of stuff would symbolise the loss of another life, one she could have experienced had she believed in something else entirely.

Rachel Cusk (photograph via Allen & Unwin)

In ‘Making Home’, Cusk examines our modern tendency to create temples of style from our houses so that visitors become messy impositions, potential vandals of our artfully curated spaces. She speaks enviously of her friend’s ability to let crap accumulate across the kitchen bench and up the stairs, and not in a self-conscious, bourgeois way either, but in a freeing fashion that strips the surrounding objects of any authority. As Cusk writes: ‘in overthrowing the power of objects she was simultaneously removing them as a last line of defence. Anyone could access her; there was no governed terrain to keep a person out.’

Not every essay contains Cusk’s trademark tautness and perception, and sometimes her postulations seem rather weak. In ‘On Rudeness’, Cusk wonders whether displays of hostility are the blunt instruments of those who have been outplayed their whole lives by more sophisticated thinkers and articulators, but it’s far too simplistic a conclusion to be satisfying. Even stranger is when Cusk rhetorically asks at one point ‘what Jesus would do’, not so much as a religious invocation but as part of a ponderous tangent that is insufficiently unpacked. Similarly, the second section, ‘A Tragic Pastime’, examines the role of creative-writing courses and what constitutes women’s writing, among other topics. Despite Cusk’s enthusiasm for the subject matter and her considerable intelligence, the writing lacks her usual brilliance.

The final section, entitled rather prosaically ‘Classics and Bestsellers’, is also underwhelming until Cusk tackles Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love (2006) fame and the rather questionable brand of self-discovery literature that is Gilbert’s milieu. As Cusk notes, selling pleasure to ‘overcommitted women’ is lucrative work, and Cusk is refreshingly hostile to the performative nature of these ‘girlish giant-slayers’ and their demand for an audience to inspire their Damascene life changes. These paragraphs are razor sharp, beautifully written, and among the best in the book.

Cusk’s prose is most effective when she is combining social commentary with confession, uniting her personal story with her meticulous, almost scientific, appraisal of the world. While she once feared the ejection from the story that Coventry represents, these days she no longer cares. Stories can enslave, and being ejected from one narrative allows immersion in an entirely different reality. Cusk has been ejected twice: first from her parents’ reality and then from her marriage. From the vantage point of Coventry, alongside her two daughters, she can see that without the old, predictable narrative governing their new-look family unit, they belong more fully to the world. They are more open and capable of receiving. As Cusk suggests, ‘should the world prove to be a generous and wondrous place, we will perceive its wonders’.

‘Several new perceptions of the unfortunate creature that I am have dawned upon me consolingly.’

Franz Kafka, 7 January 1911

Anyone who keeps a diary day in, day out for decades knows why Helen Garner, a few years ago, destroyed her early ones, deeming them boring and self-obsessed. Incineration has a long, proud history: think of Henry James, late in life, at his incinerator in Rye, burning all his letters and private papers – that lamentable blaze. The sheer misery and tedium of our early journals can be dejecting. ‘What is the point of this diary?’ Garner asks herself in 1981. ‘There is always something deeper, that I don’t write, even when I think I’m saying everything.’

Few of us know why we keep diaries, and few of us actually consult them, but nor can we imagine how people (especially writers) manage to get through life without them. What do they do with their mornings, their midnights? According to Cynthia Ozick, ‘Journal entries, those vessels of discontent, are notoriously fickle.’ But they can also be antidotes for boredom, panic, heartbreak, slights – those esprits de l’escalier. Harry Kessler, one of the greatest of diarists, wrote on 18 September 1888: ‘When I am alone like this evening it often strikes me what an infinitely small proportion my outer life … bears to my inner life, the life I live with myself; hardly the spray that is thrown off the ocean by the wind.’

Helen Garner, 2004, by Julian Kingma. Collection National Portrait Gallery.

Of the life ‘lived with herself’, Garner has been diarising ‘for almost all of her life’, we are told on the jacket of this new compilation of diary entries from 1978 to 1987 – her first, but assuredly not her last (Volume I, the jacket proclaims). While retaining the years, Garner has excised the dismal dates that can give journals such a leaden quality, the chronicling of the quotidian being such a ‘poor method of self-preservation’ (Nabokov).

While a few acquaintances are named (Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Jolley, Raymond Carver), most of the players, especially the intimates, are reduced to initials. At the beginning, Garner is in Paris. Monkey Grip behind her, she is trying to write screenplays and fiction. She has met F, the Frenchman who will become her second husband and then leave her for one of her sisters. Already there is a certain fractiousness: they quarrel when Garner won’t show F a fan letter she has written to Woody Allen. By 1986 she writes, ‘No wonder he can’t stand me. I can hardly stand myself.’

Much later, there is L, ‘an unfairly handsome man who was at the festival’. (The adverb is as choice as a good-looking man.) By 1987 she must choose between L and V, the writer who will become her third husband. When V tells her in a letter that he wants to see her, ‘a gong of terror’ sounds in the bottom of her stomach. ‘Something chilling in him. His intellect.’ He praises her handwriting (‘nicely childlike, and yet not’), and her response is characteristic: ‘Why would anyone so brilliant … want to have anything to do with me?’

The men in this book (some famous, some not) are vivid yet somehow extraneous. They seem like Garner’s straight men, or bent men (incidental, malleable as a draft) as she works out how much she needs them, how much they need her. Trust doesn’t seem to come into it. In 1986 she writes, ‘I see that what I am doing, in this diary, is conducting an argument with myself, about these two men, and myself, and men in general.’

Nathaniel Hawthorne once described his wife as the ‘Queen of Journalisers’ on being shown her Cuban diary. What sobriquets will Garner’s ex-husbands and lovers deploy on reading this volume?

Throughout, there is a pedal note of self-loathing. The eleventh entry reads, ‘I have a lot of trouble with self-disgust.’ Later, Garner ‘crashes’ into ‘appalling bouts of self-doubt, revulsion at my past behaviour, loathing for my emotional habits’. She carries around ‘an inventory of my crimes. Everyone else is busy with their own.’ The note of violence throughout is pointed: ‘I need to find out why I so often get myself into situations where people have to symbolically murder me.’ (Kafka: ‘This morning, for the first time in a long time, the joy again of imagining a knife twisted in my heart.’)

Garner has often spoken of her abiding sense of rage. We’ve heard her do so at literary festivals and independent bookshops, those most pacific settings. She reminds us at times of Sylvia Plath – her fury at the world, her indignation at a renegade husband. Elizabeth Hardwick, in her peerless essay on the American poet, writes: ‘The sense of betrayal, even of hatred, did not leave her weak and complaining so much as determined and ambitious. Ambitious rage is all over Ariel.’

It also vivifies these diaries.

What we don’t find here are many literary insights into other writers. Seldom does Garner dwell on technical matters. Jane Austen, we learn, never describes the appearance of her characters; D.H. Lawrence ‘uses the same word over and over again till he makes it mean what he needs it to’; Elizabeth Bowen is ‘very good of course in an infuriating English way’ – but that’s about all.

Garner’s real subject is her own dogged, uncertain progress as a writer. The diary, though often self-flagellatory, is a spur to industry and acclamation. Like an athlete she goads herself, wills herself – full of doubt (‘My mind is full of stories but I lack the nerve to catch one and try to pin it down’) but always ambitious, unswerving. She frets about negative reviews. When she is shortlisted for a premier’s award, she ‘wants that prize’. Upon winning a festival award, she trembles at the knees.

Not for nothing does she choose this epigraph from Primo Levi: ‘We are here for this – to make mistakes and to correct ourselves, to stand the blows and hand them out.’ To an unusual degree, Garner the diarist is vividly and ineluctably present.

Casual eclecticism characterises the best diarists. We think of Thomas Mann: ‘Brief evening walk in a silk suit, downstream among the bats, which I am afraid of’; or this from William Gerhardie: ‘Played tennis in the afternoon; then had a woman; then a bath, and afterwards witnessed a revolution.’ Rarely does Garner skip a minor epiphany. Always she is noticing, practising, flexing her immaculate prose (‘My problems are never syntactic’):

In the shack I get up to take the kettle off the fire and see through the narrow window a pretty sight: a blue wren flirting with his own reflection in the outside mirror of my car. He flips up, whirring his wings like mad, performs a caracole and a pirouette in mid-air before the glass, then perches on the mirror’s rim and looks around in confusion – then back he goes and does it all again.

By now we know many things about Helen Garner, or think we do. We have been reading her novels and stories and journalism for more than forty years, and she has supplemented these with regular self-commentary. Non-fiction works like The First Stone (1995) and Joe Cinque’s Consolation (2004) have reinforced her reputation as a ceaseless judge of others and herself (‘I am very much a moralist,’ she writes in 1986). What these diaries do is restore our sense of what a superb comic writer she is: ‘I called P in Paris, and heard $29.30 worth of information about her vaginal infection.’  Then there is the young male photographer who exhorts her to smile (‘Big smile. Love those big smiles’):

‘Please don’t tell me to smile.’

‘You look starched.’

‘I am starched. I am a starched person.’

Starched or not – severe, unbending, falling about at the absurdity of the world – Helen Garner emerges as a moralist rippling with intent and mirth. The diary, clearly, is her true métier. And now we have successive volumes to anticipate. The titular promise and confidence are typical of this brilliant, defiant book.

The worldwide women’s marches of January 2017 were sparked by the election of Donald Trump, a self-proclaimed ‘pussy-grabber’, to the US presidency in November 2016. Among the millions who marched was movie producer Harvey Weinstein. As with Trump, rumours of inappropriate behaviour with women had long plagued Weinstein, but he also had a history of aligning himself with feminist causes. He had supported Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential bid and, as co-founder of Miramax, had helped launch the successful careers of many women, including Oscar-winner Gwyneth Paltrow.

Over in California, Christine Blasey Ford, a research psychologist, attended her local women’s march. Her politics had become more progressive since moving to the west coast from Maryland, but apart from participating in the occasional protest and making small donations, Ford was not especially political. Her work and family life kept her busy and satisfied, though she occasionally saw a therapist to discuss the ongoing trauma of a rape she had endured while still in high school.

The Trump presidency is an unrelenting saga, a revolving door of controversies and outrages. The women’s marches of early 2017 seem a long time ago, as does the nascent feeling of global solidarity they seemed to herald. But what happened next, first to Weinstein, then to Ford, did mark a historic moment in gender relations: the #MeToo era. On the second anniversary of #MeToo going viral, the publication of two new books – each co-written by journalists at The New York Times – reminds us just how deeply the #MeToo and Trump eras are entangled.

Elliot Perlman’s fourth novel is tentatively billed as a corporate satire and has a striking opening line: ‘I am absolutely terrified of losing a job I absolutely hate.’ The man in this all-too-familiar predicament is Stephen Maserov, a former English teacher turned lawyer. Maserov is a lowly second year in the Terry Gilliam-esque law firm Freely Savage Carter Blanche, which, apart from sounding like a character in a Tennessee Williams play, is home to loathsome dinosaurs in pinstripe suits and an HR department referred to as ‘The Stasi’.

Kicked out of home by his wife and concerned that he is about to become surplus to requirements at work, Maserov seizes a risky opportunity when Malcolm Torrent, CEO of a powerful construction company, visits Maserov’s feared boss, Mike Hamilton. Four women have lodged sexual harassment claims against Torrent Industries. When Hamilton dismisses the cases out of hand, Maserov accosts Torrent, promising to take the cases more seriously and to make them go away. All he needs is one year and secondment to his own office over at Torrent. The book’s title comes from the parable of a jester fallen from the King’s grace who buys himself some time by promising to make the King’s horse talk within a year.

The stage is thus set for the beleaguered, misguided underdog to peel away the layers of sexual harassment in the workplace and confront the #MeToo movement head-on, bringing the bad guys to justice and saving some damsels in distress, while learning a few lessons about women along the way. Tellingly, the cover illustration features a man in corporate attire with the head of a white steed. Never fear, subordinate women, your hero has arrived!

Edward Snowden was a model employee of the National Security Agency. After realising that the vast electronic surveillance organisation often failed to backup its advanced computerised systems properly, Snowden offered a solution. His bosses readily agreed to let him build and run a comprehensive backup system. He subsequently copied huge amounts of highly sensitive information, which he took with him when he left the NSA in 2013, aged twenty-nine, to become the most important whistleblower in intelligence agency history.

Snowden says in his memoir, Permanent Record, that he was motivated by the NSA’s decision to build the most extensive global mass surveillance system ever devised. Called STELLARWIND, its goal was to collect, analyse, and store all digital data from around the world. The bulk interception of Americans’ data broke US law, but the NSA still intercepts foreigners’ data globally.

Snowden said he released documents on a program called PRISM to show the public the extent of the illegality. PRISM enabled the NSA to routinely collect data from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, Skype, and Apple, including email, photos, video and audio chats, web-browsing content, search-engine queries, and all their cloud-storage data. The NSA also routinely captured data directly from the switches and routers that shunt the internet’s traffic worldwide. Signals intelligence agencies in the United Kingdom, Australia, and other partner countries cooperated with the NSA.

Snowden’s 2013 revelations forced the US agencies to adhere more closely to the Constitution’s protection of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Because Australia lacks similar protections, its intelligence agencies are not subject to the same constraints that apply in the United States and many other countries.

To Snowden’s disappointment, no mainstream media journalist was present when the CIA’s Chief Technology Officer Gus Hunt warned at a media conference on technology in March 2013, ‘You should be asking the question of what are your rights and who owns your data.’ This issue underpinned Snowden’s concern about the Australian government’s law forcing communications companies to store all their customers’ phone and internet metadata (digital fingerprints) for two years. Around eighty agencies can access the data without a warrant. Snowden said this was the first time a ‘notionally’ democratic government had established this sort of ‘surveillance time machine’, which allows it to ‘technologically rewind the events of any person’s life going back months and even years’.

Snowden justified his decision to become a whistleblower by arguing that he had sworn an oath of service, not to an agency or government, but to the public in defence of the US Constitution ‘whose guarantee of civil liberties had been flagrantly violated’. He said the same agencies that had manipulated intelligence to create a pretext for a war in Iraq in 2003 – and used kidnapping, torture, and mass surveillance – didn’t hesitate for a moment to call him a Chinese double agent, a Russian triple agent, and worse: ‘a millennial’. Snowden also noted that shortly before he began disclosing key documents, the then NSA head James Clapper lied to Congress by denying that it collected any type of data on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans. Clapper escaped unscathed.

Snowden makes a distinction between governments leaking classified information and whistleblowers exposing wrongdoing. Snowden says unnamed senior government officials often leak classified information to journalists to ‘advance their own agenda and the efforts of their agency or party’. US intelligence officials even leaked a detailed account of a conference call in August 2013 between the Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and his global affiliates. Snowden suggests their motivation was to deflect attention from criticism of the mass surveillance program he had just disclosed. Although the leak alerted Al-Qaeda to change to a more secure communications system, no one was charged.

Likewise, tame journalists in Australia are often briefed by intelligence officials. The journalists simply assume the intelligence is accurate, heedless of the lesson of how the United States used phoney US intelligence about weapons of mass destruction to justify the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq. Despite a media campaign to protect press freedom, many journalists rarely test the boundaries. A low point came when the ABC boasted in January 2018 that it had received hundreds of classified cabinet documents but refused to report any of the contents in case this endangered public safety. Cabinet submissions never contain such material. However, behaving more like an East German state broadcaster than a public broadcaster, the ABC asked ASIO to come and remove all the documents.

Snowden worked directly for the CIA as well as being a contractor to it and the NSA. He rarely set foot in the contractors’ offices. Although this is not uncommon in the United States, Snowden became a systems engineer without even a community college degree. While his memoir is easily understood, no one should doubt that Snowden has complex technical skills. He says he created time to gather his whistleblowing material by writing programs that automated his formal work. He also used tiny storage devices to smuggle huge numbers of documents out of his workplace at the NSA in Hawai‘i. He then selected journalists he trusted to publicise this material, primarily in The Guardian, The Washington Post, Le Monde, and Der Spiegel, and used his own powerful encryption to protect the data he was sending them. He said it would take well over fifty million billion years to decipher: ‘By that time, I might even be paroled.’

Snowden saw a much wider role for encryption. While a person’s bodily presence can only be in one place at a time, he explains that multiple versions of their data wander the globe, where they are open to interception. He hoped that showing people how to encrypt their data would enable them to foil the surveillance state. However, in late 2018 Australia became the first country to introduce laws forcing tech companies to weaken their computer systems to give the government access to the unencrypted version of the data.

Snowden and Lindsay Mills, a blogger, acrobat, and photographer, have been together since 2009. Partly to protect her, he did not tell Mills about his plan to leave the NSA and go to Hong Kong to meet some of the journalists he was supplying with classified documents. His subsequent flight to Moscow had not been planned. Mills joined Snowden there in 2014. They married in 2017 and appear content living in rented apartments in that vibrant city. He earns an income from participating in virtual forums outside Russia. Snowden insists he didn’t take copies of any documents to Russia – its government could read the complete online archive.

Snowden can be proud that he curbed America’s mass surveillance system, which he calls ‘The ear that always hears, the eye that always sees, a memory that is sleepless and permanent’. The Australian government is building its own version, against growing opposition.

Lucy Ellmann’s ambitious seventh novel stages the workings of a mind as it digests – or fails to digest – life-altering experiences. Ducks, Newburyport is, for the most part, the ruminating inner monologue of a bewildered and frightened woman. It spans a thousand mostly artful pages and is an undeniably impressive accomplishment. However, for readers who relished Ellmann’s brilliant comic novels, Ducks may lack the energising charge – absurd, erotic, and darkly funny – that is so satisfyingly prominent in her earlier work.

Its chief narrator is a well-educated American mother of four afflicted by sharp anxiety. Her concerns include: the existence of President Trump; repeated mass shootings; the threat of nuclear war or climate catastrophe; male violence; and precarious health care. Her inner life is expansive but oriented around a handful of personal wounds, many of which are recast in the parallel story of a hunted lioness in search of her babes. Leaving aside a memorable sexual encounter, the latter resembles a children’s fable, a similarity that is knowingly signalled when the narrator recalls ‘some Disney movie about an escaped lion that wonders around some town’.

The experience of reading Ducks, Newburyport will be familiar to those who relish or despise modernist fiction. The oscillation between excited interest and trying boredom over a lengthy spell is an acquired taste. The best way to approach it may be to dip in and out as the mood takes you, wandering slowly, perhaps skipping clumps of pages, traversing its territories in instinctive and idiosyncratic ways – much like the novel’s roaming lioness.

The primary narrative takes the shape of a long and stuttering suspended sentence. The following sample features one of its key obsessions:

... the fact that I think people are just trying not to think about their mothers, the fact that I think that’s all anybody’s doing most of the time, all over the world, Mother Earth, the fact that everybody’s either thinking about their mothers or trying not to think about them ... the fact that the world seems indifferent to mothers, yet when they die it’s so empty, the fact that Mommy’s illness broke me, broke me ...

This rhythmic and repetitive style is perfectly adapted to a mind that thinks ‘in spirals, dizzying spirals’, but it can also be grindingly dull. Ellmann registers this, through her narrator, with dry little doozies like: ‘the fact that Philip Glass can get a little repetitive’; ‘the fact that that Wagner Opera I went to was so long it nearly killed me’; or even, given the fact that ‘the fact that’ appears nearly twenty thousand times and the novel is heavily populated with QI-style facts: ‘the fact that I think there’s maybe too much emphasis on facts these days’.

We can add to these the observation that Ducks, Newburyport features the word ‘Mommy’ or a variant more than eight hundred times. The narrator comes from ‘a long line of mother-worshippers’, and the novel could reasonably be construed as an act of extended mother-worship, or mother-mourning, or mother-need. Approximately halfway through, we read ‘Mommy, ducks, Newburyport’ – which is, perhaps, the novel’s truer title, even if it dilutes the playful association with Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio (1919). If sentiments like ‘my mommy, Mommy, the fact that I want my mommy’ seem infantile at first glance, they make psychological sense by the end.

Ellmann’s narrative technique often produces unsettling and enlivening associations, like:

the fact that somebody said Trump’s raped thirteen-year-old girls, the fact that I wish he’d just quit it, I mean the presidency, but it would also be good if he quit raping little girls, ‘Malignant narcissist,’ the fact that there’s a picture of me sitting on Daddy’s lap when I was about eleven ... the fact that it must be about the last time I ever sat on his lap though, because he shied away from stuff like that once we hit puberty

What does this passage say about the narrator’s father, or her feelings about fathers and fatherhood, or men in general? Nothing obvious, but the sequence of thoughts keeps us alert, even when it sinks into a kind of mental Tourette’s: ‘Pol Pot, pot luck supper, pot au feu’.

Ellmann has fashioned a drenchingly topical contemporary document in a largely out-of-date (if not nostalgic) form. This combination produces a striking effect, not unlike viewing the present through the eyes of a modernist past. From this salvaged vantage point, we’re left with the strong impression that an unlikely president terrorised the psyche of early-twenty-first-century America. Ducks, Newburyport kicks back against that fate as much as it succumbs.

Compelling reminders that the inner world of a single person is immense and rich but largely concealed are always worthwhile. The narrator of Ducks notes that ‘there are seven and a half billion people in the world, so there must be seven and a half billion of these internal monologues going on’. Ellmann wields an important irony in this context, which serves to deepen the novel’s insight: the mind we inhabit for close to a thousand pages has no talent for inhabiting other minds, and she knows it: ‘the fact that maybe nobody understands anybody, if you think about it, the fact that even my own husband and children are complete mysteries to me, not strangers but mysteries, the fact that everybody’s a mystery to me’. Ellmann’s narrator is just one of several billion people whose vast interiors are constrained by the narrow range of their understanding. She is, in that most vital sense, an everywoman.

Two hundred and fifty-four years before the first hour, John Montagu, the fourth earl of Sandwich, was gambling.

Unwilling to break up the game in order to eat properly, Montagu ordered his servants to bring him a meal comprising meat between two slices of bread. This unorthodox culinary innovation inspired his friends in subsequent gambling sessions to order similar. Thus, the sandwich was born. Scholars in the field of sandwich studies, however, have traced earlier incarnations of this type of meal throughout England in the late-medieval and early-modern periods, primarily through the assessment of popular culture. Plays of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries make references to ‘bread and meat’ and ‘bread and cheese’. Corporal Nym in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor utters the line, ‘I love not the humour of bread and cheese.’ While Montagu gave his name to the sandwich, it cannot be claimed with any confidence that he invented it. Montagu would go on to be the First Lord of the Admiralty during the American War of Independence. While Britain lost the war, sandwiches would flourish in the United States, becoming ever more elaborate and cleaving to regional distinctions and names – a culinary delight that was suitable for, and could be adapted to, any occasion, even ceremonies of farewell for deceased loved ones.

The day before the first hour, Emma was tired.

She became more tired as the day progressed, but she had been sick before. In the evening, I took her to hospital.

The title of this book refers to the battle for market dominance between the editors and publishers of two rival dictionaries, the one edited by Noah Webster and the other by Joseph Worcester. This battle took place largely between 1829 and 1864, and it was played out in the newspapers and by means of pamphlet warfare, with such titles as A Gross Literary Fraud Exposed, Relating to the Publication of Worcester’s Dictionary in London.

The title also alerts us to the fact that its wider narrative begins in 1783, the final year of the American War of Independence (1775–83), and ends in 1864 in the midst of the American Civil War (1861–65). 1783 was the year Noah Webster (1758–1843) published his first influential work, the Blue-backed Speller, aimed at teaching schoolchildren to spell. Royalties from this work underwrote many of Webster’s later lexicographical enterprises, and the development of the spelling bee in American schools was a significant offshoot of the Speller. 1864 was the year of publication of An American Dictionary of the English Language by Noah Webster, the edition of Webster’s dictionary that marked its triumph over all competitors.

Webster’s first dictionary war, like the War of Independence, was with Britain. The political revolution began in 1775 during Webster’s first year at Yale. After graduation, law did not provide a satisfactory living, so he turned to teaching and the publication of school textbooks. He became particularly concerned about the influence of British textbooks in American schools, and about the high prestige of Dr Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language in America. Following America’s successful political break from Britain, Webster came to the belief that there needed to be a linguistic break as well. An American national language should be seen as central to an American cultural War of Independence. In 1789 he wrote: ‘As an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.’

One of the risks in writing about the history of Australia in world affairs is the ease with which ideas and visions can be flattened.  If you start from the premise of Australia’s small-to-middle-power standing and diminished agency among other nations, you might conclude that ideas mattered less than adroit lobbying and alliances. Even if you find greater Australian activism by elevating the role of trade, pointing to the hard-headedness in trading with important partners such as Britain, Japan, and, more recently, China, this doesn’t necessarily invite exploration of world views. If the search for security in a rapidly changing region is the metanarrative, then, arguably, what you need are powerful and reliable friends more than innovative thinking about alternatives. But, as Julie Suares demonstrates in her persuasively argued book, this should not apply in the case of  Ben Chifley and Australia in the world.

For Chifley, the middle decades of the twentieth century were meant to reveal the full benefits of arbitration and regulation, both domestically and internationally. Having witnessed the hardships endured during the Depression years of the 1930s, he also saw the period as one that demanded great learning. He read voraciously on the related themes of economics, trade, finance, and international relations, and his appointment to the Royal Commission into Banking in 1935 hastened this learning process. Conscious of the dominant role of trade in Australia’s productivity, he emerged in the 1940s determined to support measures that would increase trading opportunities, and efforts to build an international regulatory framework designed to prevent rogue behavior and maximise trade through such measures as ease of currency exchange. As treasurer in the Curtin government (1941–45) and prime minister from 1945 to 1949, Chifley was able to bring his considerable powers of political persuasion to bear in pursuit of these aims, but his task was far from easy. His bruising encounters with Jack Lang in New South Wales, and his accumulated learning from watching power and procedures at work in the Labor Party, enabled him to bring the party with him (only just) to endorse the main outcomes of the Bretton Woods Conference held in the United States in 1944. This was where the basics of the new monetary system were hammered out, providing for fixed exchange rates, and setting up the International Bank of Reconstruction (later called the World Bank) and the International Monetary Fund. The planned International Trade Organization was scuppered, but in its place the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade set out to eliminate barriers to trade. Chifley stared down the likes of Eddie Ward and Arthur Calwell, who were hostile to what they saw as the new ‘Money Power’ rising in the United States, to argue that these measures provided the best path to greater opportunities for Australian exports. This was an economically driven form of new internationalism, matched by a strong sense that it best served Australian interests, and accompanied by faith in the regulations provided and in the rule of law and arbitration underpinning the new United Nations.