‘Haskell was the epitome of the word he coined – “balletomane” ... When he sat front of house, Haskell could revel in the aesthetics. Slipping behind the curtain, he could investigate the tensions, byzantine feuds and gossip.’

Valerie Lawson is a balletomane, journalist and dance critic whose writing on dance encompasses newspaper articles and also articles and editorials for numerous dance companies. Lawson’s lavishly illustrated Dancing Under the Southern Skies, like Arnold Haskell’s mid-twentieth-century popular histories of ballet, substitutes stories about ballet and ballet dancers for a cohesive historical narrative about ballet in Australia. Portraits, images of ballet dancers posing in photographers’ studios, and ephemera are reproduced in the book; but the total sum of stage photos – of dancing – can be counted on one hand.

Where are you happiest?
Hiking the bush track around Berry Island in Wollstonecraft and listening to pop hits.

What’s your idea of hell?
Being trapped in a state of permanent distraction.

Ceridwen Dovey (photograph by Shannon Smith)

What do you consider the most specious virtue?
Moderation – in anything in life. I like excess!

What is your favourite film?
Dirty Dancing (1987), directed by Emile Ardolino.

And your favourite book?
At the moment, one of my favourites is All Joy and No Fun: The paradox of modern parenthood, by Jennifer Senior.

Sing This at My Funeral is not your conventional ghost story. Invoking Franz Kafka’s words, ‘Writing letters is actually an intercourse with ghosts, and by no means just the ghost of the addressee but also with one’s own ghost, which secretly evolves inside the letter one is writing or even in a whole series of letters’, this moving memoir by David Slucki gives shape to the ghost of Zaida Jakub, the grandfather he never knew. Following his beloved father Sluggo’s death in 2015, the author, a Melbourne-born professor of Jewish Studies at the College of Charleston, discovered a series of letters written by Zaida Jakub to his brother Mendel in Los Angeles over three decades. Weaving together excerpts of these letters and incorporating family photographs, the memoir reconstructs the story of Zaida Jakub’s profound personal loss during the Holocaust and examines its effects on subsequent generations. In Slucki’s own words, this book is about ‘how the difficult memories of the past shaped the relationships between fathers and their sons, how the ghosts kept multiplying, never far from the surface’.

In his long poem The Bridge (1930), Hart Crane balances the breadth of his epic vision against a compressive energy, a ballistic sort of expression: ‘So the 20th Century – so / whizzed the Limited – roared by and left.’ Since Crane worked in an American tradition of poet–prophets that includes Walt Whitman and the undersung H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), it is tempting to grant him that. The twentieth century did roar by and go. And the 20th Century Limited, the luxurious passenger train connecting New York to Chicago, furnished it (and him) with an expression of the century’s quarrelsome momentum, its loud, emblematic modernity. That iconic, bullet-shaped train also provides the title and setting for one of Ben Hecht’s most successful comedies, Twentieth Century (1934). A buzzing farce directed by Howard Hawks, it was adapted from a Broadway show of the same name, which Hecht wrote alongside his utmost scrivener-in-arms, Charles MacArthur. For those interested in the screwy art of the insult, get aboard. A delirious tour de force awaits, in which John Barrymore, playing the pompous theatre director Oscar Jaffe, gets to call his stage manager an amoeba!

Heide is the final instalment of an epic trilogy that began with 24 Hours (1996) and was followed by Fitzroy: A biography (2015). It also marks a departure for Π.O. In this third volume (the only one in the trilogy not to be self-published), the unofficial poet laureate of Fitzroy turns his attention away from the migrant and working-class characters of his beloved suburb toward the names that line the bookshelves and gallery walls of the nation’s most august institutions. In more than 500 pages of verse, Heide plots the history, and colonial prehistory, of the artistic milieu that gathered at Sunday and John Reed’s property in Heidelberg. The book’s concern with institutional memory aligns it with Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), a film famous for its unblinking gaze down the corridors of the Winter Palace in the Hermitage Museum. Both works share an architecture of historical imagination in which the museum becomes a memory palace where the artist’s acts of listening and recording conserve without being conservative.

To complement our ‘Books of the Year’ feature, which appeared in the December 2019 issue, we invited some senior publishers to nominate their favourite recent releases – all published by other companies.

Robert Watkins
Head of Literary and Head of Illustrated, Hachette

When I look back at the quality of Australian publishing for 2019, I found this task particularly difficult. But when I consider the books my mind returns to often, two stand out. First, Damascus by Christos Tsiolkas (Allen & Unwin), a masterpiece by an author I admire greatly, set in a time and place I am not unfamiliar with (having spent my formative years in a deeply Christian household). It was quite the religious experience (pardon the pun). Tsiolkas interrogates masculinity and class in a way few writers do, in such an assured manner. I believe this work might be his best yet. My other highlight is Tara June Winch’s extraordinary novel The Yield (Hamish Hamilton). Winch has generously gifted the reading public a work rich in language and country. I often found myself returning to passages just to soak in their beauty.

Aviva Tuffield
Publisher, University of Queensland Press

The increasing success of Aboriginal authors has been much commented on in 2019, which was also the UN International Year of Indigenous Languages. One book that stood out for me was Nganajungu Yagu (Cordite). Charmaine Papertalk Green’s unforgettable collection is a dialogue with her mother, inspired by letters the latter wrote in the 1970s: it’s both an indictment of cultural genocide and a reminder that the written word can be used for good, by conveying love and connection. I also admired Favel Parrett’s novel There Was Still Love (Hachette), about the intergenerational experiences of a family separated by war. It’s a polyphonic work, but the children’s voices sing out the loudest.

Catherine Milne
Publisher, Head of Fiction, HarperCollinsPublishers Australia

The Glad Shout by Alice Robinson (Affirm Press) was difficult to read – so real, so confronting, so visceral in its immediacy and intensity, but the novel has stayed with me more than any other this year. As our country burns and we know the bitter taste of smoke in our mouths, I can’t get the rising sense of disbelief and bewilderment that Isobel experiences in the refugee camp out of my head – nor her courage. This is writing as an act of radical empathy, imagination, and – in those terrifying, deeply moving final scenes – true beauty.

Nathan Hollier
Publisher and Chief Executive Officer, Melbourne University Publishing

Samia Khatun’s Australianama: The South Asian odyssey in Australia (UQP) stands out for me. Khatun focuses on people and experiences within Australia that have received little attention before. She brings to this task impressive, multilingual learning from different cultural traditions, an inspired yet thorough approach to research, an intriguing narrative, an admirable capacity for skilled navigation of complex philosophical areas, and an affecting willingness to share aspects of her personal story and her journey in researching and writing this book. This is certainly a stimulating work for readers and may well be so for Australian history as a whole.

Phillipa McGuinness
Publisher, NewSouth Publishing/UNSW Press

Too Much Lip (UQP) rode into my reading life the way its protagonist Kerry Salter rides into Durrongo on her stolen Harley: loud, fast, and super-smart. I caught author Melissa Lucashenko in conversation during the year; she talked about pre-colonial Indigenous civilisations and dispossession. But this brilliant writer always reminded her audience that Too Much Lip is funny too. She’s right. The hoop pine on Granny Ava’s island stands alongside other literary trees of 2019, including those that star in Sophie Cunningham’s wonderful collection of essays City of Trees (Text), which I read with a mix of admiration and sadness, the latter prompted by Cunningham’s own losses and the planet’s.  

Meredith Curnow
Publisher, Knopf, Vintage, Hamish Hamilton, Viking

Narratively straightforward, Tony Birch’s The White Girl (UQP) had me ever alert for the violence underlaying this remote, dry, and dying settlement. You know it is going to hit, but the beautiful, nuanced storytelling and the dignity of the strong, wonderful, and vulnerable Odette and Sissy carry you forward. As Edmund Burke warned us, when good men do nothing, evil can triumph. The constabulary of Deane allowed this, but the simple goodness of people like Henry Lamb and Odette are there to inspire us all to be better people. This is a vivid and emotional exploration of the scars colonisation has left on this country.

Barry Scott
Publisher, Transit Lounge

Nick Gadd’s Death of a Typographer (Arcadia) is the story of a revered Dutch-Jewish typographer called Pieter van Floogstraten whose childhood is spent hiding in cellar. Out of darkness and grief – the Nazis capture his mother – blossom strange fonts. Tiring of adult success and rivalry, he disappears to remote monasteries and towns, all the while creating a secret font that pays tribute to the small people of this world. But his movements are followed by a trail of murders. An intriguing, imaginative mystery story that it is impossible to pigeonhole. I was also moved by The Palace of Angels (Wild Dingo). Perth-based author Mohammed Massoud Morsi encourages you to engage with characters at a deep emotional level and to put a face to the rawness of life in Gaza.

Sophy Williams
Publisher, International Director, Black Inc.

Two very different books linked by a common thread stood out for me this year. Both tackle hate – online and in the broader culture. Stan Grant’s slender but powerful essay On Identity (MUP) eloquently explores the divisive power of labels and how they can fuel anger and stifle conversation. This is a personal and emotional account from a famous Australian who identifies as Wiradjuri, Kamilaroi, Dharrawal, and Irish, but wonders why he must choose. Ginger Gorman was trolled online, her life threatened. This lead her on a Jon Ronson-style investigative journey into the terrifying world of cyberhate. Troll Hunting: Inside the world of online hate and its human fallout (Hardie Grant Books) is utterly compelling.

Martin Hughes
Publishing Director, Affirm Press

In Favel Parrett’s There Was Still Love, a short, tenderly crafted novel to savour, the small and quiet scenes are the most memorable. It’s about the power of love to endure over distance, disappointment, and dislocation, with an impact that is magnified over time. Rick Morton’s One Hundred Years of Dirt (MUP) is also about love. While Morton shows that the denial of love can choke the spirit, guaranteed love – such as he received from his mother – can break the downward spiral of poverty and family decay. It’s an extraordinary tale of survival filtered through humour, heart, and controlled anger.

Georgia Richter
Publisher, Fremantle Press

Lisa Gorton’s volume of poems, Empirical (Giramondo) is a masterclass in the genre: a perfect manifestation of content and form sitting in exquisite tension. In particular, her poem series about Melbourne’s Royal Park has the urgency and poignancy of a threatened space, the present freighted with the past of human intersection and interaction. Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend But the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison (Picador) is surely one of the books of the decade – in its inception, its delivery, and its desperate message. It doesn’t get more powerful than this pastiche of life writing, poetry, and acute observation texted in fragments of Farsi from behind Manus’s prison walls.

Precision Signs
by Lachlan Brown

‘This is officially first / this is the third’

Chance the Rapper

iii. Processing is in

Back to the motorway again, shuffling infinite rows
of line-break auto-excuses in the changed traffic
conditions. Petroleum gifts us the cartographic
illusions of intimacy, reimagining polyphonic prose
as some engine-effective thing that draws us close.
If I did contract-cheat, then why didn’t I get perfect
marks? Tradies deal in air-conditionals, select-
ing authentic essay-writing solutions to expose
our algorithmic spaces that trick and flicker. Out-
er suburbs still feel like home: the gated reverb
of small-crimes, the silent havoc of introduced species.
But each day’s just another investigation report about
the day that came before it. That’s all we deserve,
really, a host of change-agents wielding quality degrees.

ii. Crisis openings

Really? A host of change-agents wielding quality degrees
spawned on the map in a place you hadn’t yet scouted?
What did you do? There’s the evidence you doubted,
planted by a livestream of living water, among trees
that appear aspect-ratioed and 100% !important; please
go on to defeat all the bots once and for real. Controlled
humans are now reminded to breathe by devices sold
in heaven’s equivalents, copied and pasted from Elys-
ian source code. An employer pivots from the cloud,
announcing his no dickheads hiring policy. A second
follows up with an all dickheads hiring policy. Applause
is spontaneous and v/loud. It’s an e.g. of how profound
wisdom can actually be, like yelling fire while on board
a fully-booked cruise (bound for immediate shores).

i. Session pricing

A fully booked cruise bound for immediate shores,
a keystroke logger hidden in your assessment file,
a volta that makes the addiction story worthwhile:
seen in the drone’s viewfinder, all this could be yours.
Bits of the city exist to be driven past, page refresh-
ing backgrounds that blur and sometimes catch fire.
Phone-on-lap means it’s not slab-dark when entire
estates appear on the map’s periphery. Impress-
ive as a key stakeholder feedback-looping the process,
you sense the finely tuned universe cutting across
lanes. The moon’s an allegory for night mode. Those
newly built houses slide silently by. You’re just access-
ing the spreadsheet data, summoning a levelled boss
back to the motorway again, shuffling infinite rows.

Lachlan Brown is a senior lecturer in English at Charles Sturt University, Wagga Wagga. He is the author of Limited Cities (Giramondo, 2012) and Lunar Inheritance (Giramondo, 2017). Lachlan’s poetry has been published in various journals including Antipodes, Cordite, Rabbit, and St Mark’s Review. Lachlan has been shortlisted and commended for various poetry prizes including the Mary Gilmore Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize, the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize, the Judith Wright Poetry Prize, and the Macquarie Fields Poetry Prize. Lachlan is currently the vice-president of Booranga Writers Centre in Wagga Wagga. 

That Wadjela Tongue
by Claire G. Coleman

The urge to tell my truth is resting upon me like a fever; like a weight; like a hot sodden blanket.
I want to tell you …
                How when we step forward, when we tell you who we are; we steer
                With our mouths, with our lips, with our tongues; with
Our breath. We speak ourselves into being.
It pours from our lips shaped by our tongues and that ectoplasm shapes itself; becomes
Who we think we are.
I need to tell you that the surface of a tongue, that shapes words, that tastes the world; is skin.

And my Father’s skin is the wrong colour;

And I am the wrong colour; not as dark as my father. I cannot
                Talk my skin darker.

Words are weapons and those colonisers have disarmed me; they have stolen
The language from my family; killed who still spoke it and
Stilled the Country’s breath – that wants to pour
From my tongue; They banned the speaking of language, made people
Too scared to speak, frightened the breath from them. I cannot
                Speak the sacred words of country, I cannot speak to my love of
My ancestors; the bones in the land, the land
                In my bones; in the language they understand.

My Country does not speak
                That Wadjela tongue.

Words are weapons, they outlawed my tongue, they
Gave me theirs; their tongue that drips water and can only speak
Of a green the wrong colour, has words for the wrong flowers that
Has no words of their own for yongka or waitch; their language that has
A word for ‘orange’. They dragged my language off the land, scraped
My tongue they could not quite bring themselves to cut out.

Words are weapons, they gave me theirs; language is a weapon
And they armed me.

My language, I never spoke, belongs there on my Country, it anchors
My family to home, anchors home on our family. Their language; it’s spoken
By so many, they have tried to control
The world with it; gave it to everybody and now it
Belongs to everybody. Their language is a weapon that is aimed only at them.

My people’s language is
Better for talking to country, wadjela’s language
I learned first, is better to arm myself
For war; as a weapon it’s aimed at their minds. I sharpen it
Their language, I polish it; I make it mine; I want
To outstrip them, want to make them jealous of my tongue; of my words.

When my father was a child he was not allowed to
Visit his grandmother, he told me that, told me
He has been there twice, that he stayed
Outside; he was not allowed in the house. Words on paper
Said, if he didn’t meet his family he would not be black
Enough to take; he would not have a file would
Not appear on that Neville man’s paper.

Words are weapons
I’m fighting back; I’m armed;
                With that Wadjela tongue.

Claire G. Coleman is a Wirlomin Noongar woman whose ancestral country is on the south coast of Western Australia. Her novel Terra Nullius, published by Hachette in Australia and Small Beer Press in the United States, won a black&write! Fellowship and a Norma K. Hemming Award and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the Aurealis Science Fiction Award. She writes poetry, short-fiction, and essays, and has been published in the Saturday Paper, the Guardian, Meanjin, Australian Poetry, Art Collector, The ABC, Griffith Review, Overland, Timothy McSweeny’s Quarterly Concern, and many others. The Old Lie (Hachette 2019) is her second novel.

My Father’s Thesaurus
by A. Frances Johnson

You drove faultlessly until sundown.
As dusk fell, trees lit Magritte
black, discreet ideas of near and far
merged, and your words, sotto voce
then forte, rolled out a new Babel
of vigilant accountancies, cornball song,
plant catalogues, expletives and chess moves.
That the banks could not be trusted
was a saying you’d taken for granted
since the Great Depression. Now the phrase
bloomed in your brain. At dinner
you said, for reasons of efficiency:
the banks were past the mustard.
We lovingly accepted the joke, while
in the wet yard the dog chased its tail,
saw nothing loveless to incriminate.
Later, fear grew: school-tie gerontologists,
nurses, phone calls, bills – lacking tact.
Sheet music’s random dots perplexed,
rainspots bearing no relation to the cruel
beauty of pianos. All could betray,
induce the agitation of sunsets.
You watched the piano and played
the sunset. You insisted: every good boy
deserved flight, all cows ate gravel.
We read your blended agendas uneasily.
Then random hatred arrived with showgirl
fanfare, disfiguring your old kindness.
For peace, we concurred on a mattress bank;
the district nurse was trying to poison you.
Mostly, words aligned, neat as jam jars,
the fruity, sunny order of Fowlers Vacola.
But we played codebreakers as evening fell,
fighting through thickets of translation
until the night you drove the car
into the garage wall, blue shoe on
the accelerator, brown on the brake.
With a bang, words collided around
your head like trams not yet waited for.
The foul sunset was to blame. A week later
suspension came, plotted by a gimlet-eyed medico.
We failed the first test with you,
then the second in the Colac Coles
carpark, lost trolleys whirring and clacking.
You’d driven at snail pace on country roads
then rocketed across a petunia’d town
roundabout, a bollard bent beneath
the wheel. This betrayal, you said, having
never brooked a fine, was the bitter end.
The nuances of fast and slow, slow then fast,
cannot be understood by criminals. We hung
our heads and hid the report in the glovebox,
not accepting a dickey wheel. My mother and I
drove you home from the test among paddocks
and cattle, vast distances suddenly too close,
like a bellicose stranger with bad breath,
strained sun falling like a thief behind the hill.
It, too, had been a shamer, a radiant form
with a signature. None of us spoke or
decoded. There was nothing left but to hack
through the last forests until the axe
quietened, and you were half-calm
in night’s velvety armchair, dog roiling
at your feet like a spinning top.
I had one just like it once, you confided
after furious silence and tea, taking my hand,
turning it round and round, bemused,
as if you wanted to test it, detach it and send it
whirring into the cold, free universe.

A. Frances Johnson is a writer and artist. She has published three collections of poetry. A fourth collection, Save As, is forthcoming (Puncher & Wattmann, 2020). Her recent collection, Rendition for Harp and Kalashnikov (Puncher & Wattmann 2017) was shortlisted in the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature Best New Writing Award and, in 2017, she took up an Australia Council B.R Whiting Fellowship to Rome. A novel, Eugene's Falls (Arcadia 2007), retraced the Victorian journeys of colonial painter Eugene von Guérard. A new novel in progress, The Lost Garden, explores first-contact histories in remote Southern Tasmania, evoking early horticultural attempts to colonise by seed. A monograph, Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage, was published by Brill in 2015.

Constellation of Bees
by Julie Manning

Sixteen and just a touch of down above the lip,
he scrapes honey from each wax hexagon,
explaining the procedure for how to empty combs
and centrifuge remaining gold. Banksia is a flow

dark as coffee grounds, but this is wild-
flower pour from native blossoms, curling red
phalanges and startling yellow tips, on a wasteland
of dunes at the reserve. Just two years in,

the colour is a giveaway – caramel with
opaque crusts, not the cocky’s joy from auntie’s 
beat-up tin with its lion badge and eyes
that followed him around the bush, even where

the sky had pin-hole stars arranged like ziggurats
this silver beast was on its back, one eye toward
the night-sky emu with starry feathers
navigating home. He’s learned to parry natives –

Blue-Bands, Teddy Bears – mostly honey bees,
a deft jouster protected by a smoking urn
to calm them with the trickery of scrubfire. 
He’s studied the vermilion Tulip Tree, its

invasive stealthy seeds, its poisoned chalice
blooms with flagrant, open cups – nightclub porn
for bees who stupefy and die within its lights,
a crypt of littered bodies spilling out.

Why speak of such amazements – who could
not love such industrious devotion to calyx
and to breeze? The day a white van arrived
delivering a payload – odourless and lethal –

for a neighbour’s spider problem,
fumes laid waste to every hive: worker,
drone and high command. Thirty thousand
gone, like rabies through a town. He rebuilt

the hives alone, carefully nurturing the clan
learned that bees’ anger is astonishing –
self-effacing sentries into self-sacrificing
drones, ratcheted with pheromones, death-

fighting like a home-town mob at closing
time. Wiser now, he sees triggers to their rage.
Death of a Queen means colonies ferment
with unacknowledged anguish – body spirited

away, no grief or striped attendants edging past.
An empty cell, now vacant, soon to be a wealth
of light in honeycomb: bees deal with absence
and death in their own way.

Julie Manning is a late-career poet. Her work has previously been published in Australian Book Review, Cordite, and the Grieve Anthology (Hunter Writers Centre), and it is forthcoming in Overland. She was longlisted for the University of Canberra Vice Chancellors International Poetry Prize in 2019 and selected at the Queensland Poetry Festival as an Emerging Poet for 2019. She lives on Moreton Bay in Queensland.

South Coast Sonnets
by Ross Gillett

We drove across the estuary,
a field of wind-stained calm, its rippled sheen
reflecting a dull acreage of sky.
Where had the mirrored clouds been
that they lived for a moment in that flattened
version of the sea, that roughed up
version of a river? We saw a battened
sail, its ribbed skin taut with a slooped
urgency. The river-imaged
sky was a helpless backdrop, a flecked plain
of tidal doubt. Would the future be staged
upstream or downstream? The sailor was again
tacking into the world’s wind. The threadbare
bridge we crossed had always been there.

We were instant coastal addicts.
Our first wonder was a suppressed surf,
a withering offshore wind. We practised
not being blown into the sea. Just enough
leaning inland did it for us.
Next day we leaned towards the ocean
arm in arm, wind-resistant visitors
embraced by what was now an onshore
gale. Was this a marriage rite? Gestures
of spray rose from the rocks and drifted
over us. We knew the wind that blessed us
was a turncoat. We took on trust the gift
we couldn’t avoid, a getaway
ocean wedding. We wore the veils of spray.

Call it the eternal southerly.
Breakers bloomed and faded,
ghost cliffs retreating into the sea.
An endless coastal uproar betrayed
our inland certainties. A dusk walk
took us down a slipshod path
skirting the maelstrom. We stood back
from the edge of an ocean truth,
immensity ending in collapse,
the earth-shaking landfall. Above us
clouds were turning into high-speed scraps
of themselves. We were lovers
in a gale-force world. The long gusts
wailed as they came at us.

We saw the surfer calling it a day,
riding in towards the undermined
bluff we stood on. No beach lay
in wait, but he casually half-planed
into shore, or what there was of it. We worried
when he disappeared from sight. Then the yellow
tip of his board came up through a hole in the scarred
platform of rock behind us. What runs below
the sea-wrecked surface of a place like this,
what do the locals know that they can rise
like bearded seals out of the ground? There’s always
safe passage somewhere, but it lies
hidden. We are cave believers. Lord
we have seen the risen man with his finned board.

The dedicated ocean spent
years laying down the small laws
of sand. Edges of the continent
disintegrated into loose shores,
gold beneath our feet. The beaches
harboured us. Even with bad weather
beating at their doors, they were stretches
of close comfort. Our footprints receded together,
a stitched wake trailing behind us.
Weightless strands of foam crawled
after each other. In the end, the wind turned us
home through the dunes, but we were a told
story by then, our staggering narrative written
step by step across the sea’s terrain.

Ross Gillett is a Melbourne-born poet who now lives in Daylesford in the Central Highlands of Victoria. His poems have appeared in The Age, The Australian, and The Canberra Times, in journals in Australia and the United States, and in three editions of Black Inc.’s former series The Best Australian Poems. His book The Sea Factory was one of the Five Islands Press New Poets 2006 series. In 2010 he published a chapbook of old and new poems – Wundawax and other poems – with Mark Time Books. His new book The Mirror Hurlers has just been published by Puncher & Wattmann. He has been twice shortlisted for the Blake Poetry Prize, and his poem ‘The Mirror Hurlers’ was shortlisted for the 2019 Peter Porter Poetry Prize.

Mary Ann Evans arrived in London from country Warwickshire in 1851 into an environment of intellectuals who believed in the progress of the human spirit through criticism of superstition and the application of science. Working first as a translator and critic, she became for a time the editor of the Westminster Review, a journal that had been turned by John Stuart Mill into a forum for philosophical radicals. Evans had plans to write a critique of the doctrine of immorality but her partner, George Lewes, who was famous for a work on the lives of philosophers, encouraged her to write fiction. She began with sketches of rural life using the name George Eliot.

For two and a half decades, Samantha Power has been an advocate for US intervention to prevent genocide around the world – as a war correspondent, as an author, and as a member of the Obama administration (2009–17). The Education of an Idealist is a deeply personal memoir of that experience.

The book is divided into two parts, reflecting the distinct stages of Power’s career before and after joining the Obama administration. The tensions and conflicts between the two stages echo throughout The Education of an Idealist, as Power’s early commitments clash with the limitations of being one part of the broader administration.

My local shopping centre has seven nail bars, two waxing salons, and a brow bar. A cosmetic surgery clinic touts ‘facial line softening’ and ‘hydra facials’. A laser skin clinic offers cosmetic injections. Three other beauty temples offer ‘cool sculpting’, ‘eyelash perms’, and ‘light therapy’ for skin. I live in a gentrified, working-class suburb in Melbourne’s inner west. I’ve never set foot in these beauty shops, but they’re replicating like cells.

It’s almost thirty years since Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth was published. Wolf’s 1990 analysis of the economic power structures underpinning our seemingly ‘natural’ beauty ideals was ground-breaking. Reading this book at the time, I fumed. Yet I was hopeful, too. Women might reject the industrial-scale body policing (cellulite, facial hair, breast shape) and create different definitions of beauty.

Lexicographers, especially historical ones, are always interested in the way words fall in and out of fashion. But while we spend a lot of time tracing the first usage of a word and trying to figure out its origins, we pay much less attention to when or why a word falls out of common usage.

Why do words cease to be used? For some words, the reason is clear. We no longer listen to gramophones or refer to unmarried women as spinsters. Technologies shift, as do our attitudes. But there are also words that fall out of fashion for no apparent reason. We simply seem to stop using them. For example, it is unlikely you would hear anyone still using the word bonzer these days, although in the early twentieth century it was ubiquitous. While we might still understand what it means, we would be unlikely to use it unselfconsciously, if at all.

The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse has revealed systemic mistreatment of vulnerable children over decades. Though these crimes have not been the exclusive province of the Catholic Church, its education system has brought more children into intimate care by religious orders, and even those never abused have observed the tics of brutality in some of their teachers and mentors. In a note at the end of his new novel, In Whom We Trust, John Clanchy mentions James Joyce’s hell-fire sermon in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and the recurrence of these ‘tropes of terror’ in the rhetoric he heard as a Catholic schoolboy in 1960s Melbourne. The system has long-standing practices of psychological control.

Two of the greatest Australian crime writers died within six months of each other in 2018. Peter Temple authored nine novels, four of which featured roustabout Melbourne private detective Jack Irish, and one of which, Truth, won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2010. Temple died on 8 March 2018, aged seventy-one. Peter Corris was more prolific, writing a staggering eighty-eight books across his career, including historical fiction, biography, sport, and Pacific history. Forty-two of those highlighted the travails of punchy Sydney P.I. Cliff Hardy. Corris died on 30 August 2018, seventy-six and virtually blind.

That their respective publishers have issued nearly simultaneous compendiums that contain previously unpublished fiction, reviews, essays, and columns seems a fitting tribute to the contributions both men made to their houses. It is also a boon for readers. Fans will lap up Corris’s ‘An ABC of Crime Writing’ manual and Temple’s 100-page unfinished Jack Irish novel. Those unfamiliar with the work of either author are provided with enjoyable springboards into their messy, hardboiled, accomplished worlds.

Let’s start with Corris. What a writer he was. In the introduction, his widow, Jean Bedford, claims that Corris rarely plotted his stories: they simply flowed. Dip into any of the twelve Cliff Hardy short stories that follow and you will find this hard to believe. The first, ‘Man’s Best Friend’ was written in 1984, while the last, ‘Break Point’ appeared in 2007. The consistency of tone is remarkable, as is the sense of a man ageing yet keeping up with the changing times. Mobile phones and the internet appear as the detective’s craft evolves, while Hardy learns to employ his experienced brain rather than resort to fisticuffs in problem solving.

His late-in-life columns for the Newtown Review of Books, some of which are collected here, candidly reveal the author’s disappointments. Lee Child’s later work and the fact none of Corris’s stories ever made it to the screen are notable bugbears.Collections of short stories can often be jarring, as the reader reinvests in new scenarios and characters every twenty pages, but this pitfall is avoided here. The effect is akin to following a detective over the course of a few months’ worth of cases, even though decades have passed. Corris never flagged in his enthusiasm for Hardy’s melancholic life of small-time corruption and local hoodlums, of Glebe’s descent into gentrification. Ironically, the early stories are reminiscent of Mickey Spillane’s violent Mike Hammer series, which Corris later professes to dislike, saying they have a, ‘mindless, fascist character’. Once the guns and knockout punches are set aside, Corris moves more towards Dashiell Hammett, a register he satisfyingly settled on throughout the Hardy novels.

  Peter Corris (photograph via Penguin)

Corris mentions our other featured author in passing, under ‘G is for gambling’ in his A-Z. ‘Gambling has not featured much … in crime fiction, though it crops up in Dick Francis’s racing novels (see H for horses), and Peter Temple’s character Jack Irish (Bad Debts, 1996, and following) is a punter and variously involved in the world of racing.’

Indeed, he is. The cover photograph of The Red Hand shows Temple scrutinising the form guide. Inside, we are presented with a number of also-rans, including Temple’s screenplay for Valentine’s Day, a football comedy that was screened on the ABC in 2008. That, and many of his ‘reflections, reviews and essays’, are arguably of limited interest and only for completists, although he does deliver a refreshing brand of dismissive sarcasm in excoriations of John le Carré and Kathy Reichs. ‘Absolute Friends joins the list of recent le Carré novels that resemble Zeppelins: huge things that take forever to inflate, float around for a bit, then expire in flames.’ Then, on Reichs’s Grave Secrets: ‘And it is a fact that many writers peak early and then trundle downhill with the sound this book makes: the hollow noise of empty garbage bins being dragged back to base.’

Only six short stories are offered, with length seeming to equate to strength. ‘Missing Cuffney’ (2003) and ‘Cedric Abroad’ (2010), at twenty-two and forty pages respectively, permit Temple to flesh out scenarios and characters. It may sound counterintuitive given his preponderance for quickfire banter, but I always found his long-form work less indulgent. The world of his novels seems vast and densely populated. Every character is armed with a loaded retort. If at first he felt like an Australian Elmore Leonard, as his career progressed, he broke free of convention and became something all his own.

Lovers of Jack Irish will be thrilled and devastated to read 20,000 words of what publisher Michael Heyward dubs High Art. If the title is meant to be a nod to the crime writer who conquered the literary world, its significance is apt. The book, or what there is of it, is dazzling. Irish’s plethora of new simultaneous cases is instantly engaging, short-circuiting the brain as we scrabble to work out how they are all connected – a hobbled racehorse, the disappearance of an art assessor, a restaurant shake-down, and, through it all, the enigmatic Jack Irish, barely holding it together. It ends just when you’re completely hooked and the realisation hits: Peter Temple is gone; we will never know the answers.

Catherine de Saint Phalle already had an impressive publication history – five novels written in French and one in English – when her elegantly written, often heart-breaking memoir Poum and Alexandre was shortlisted for the 2017 Stella Prize. Her new novel, The Sea and Us, is her third book written in English since she came to Australia in 2003. Its title works both literally and symbolically. The Sea and Us is the name of the Melbourne fish and chip shop above which the middle-aged narrator, Harold, rents a room, having returned to his childhood city after eighteen years of living and working in South Korea.

The man traditionally held to have written about half of the New Testament is variously known as Saul of Tarsus, Paul the Apostle, and St Paul. Initially an enthusiastic persecutor of the earliest Christians, he underwent a dramatic conversion shortly after the Crucifixion, and it is on this moment that his life, and Christos Tsiolkas’s new novel, both turn. Damascus covers the period 35–87 CE, from shortly before Paul’s conversion until twenty or more years after his death. This chronology is not straightforwardly linear, with an assortment of narrators recounting their personal experiences, at various times and from various points of view, of Christianity’s birth and spread amid the brutal realities of the Roman Empire.

These are exciting times when the new normal for Australian crime fiction is strong domestic interest and sales, but also international attention in the form of Australian-only panels at overseas writers’ festivals, plus regular nominations and awards in Germany, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Whether this is a literary fad or sustainable in the long term – with Australian crime fiction becoming a recognisable ‘brand’ in the manner of Scandi-noir or Tartan-noir – will depend largely upon the sustained quality of the novels produced here.

Modern US culture has a peculiar love of the extracurricular world of teenagers, valorising the spelling bees, debating competitions, and varsity-level football games of its youth. In Ben Lerner’s new novel, The Topeka School, the interscholastic debating trophy is so sought after that tournaments resemble verbal combat, in which high-school competitors rely on sly technique rather than substance. Witness the use of what our teenage protagonist, Adam Gordon, aptly refers to as ‘the spread’: a rapid-fire, near-hysterical diatribe designed to deliver so many arguments in such a short amount of time that the opposing team will be unable to address each point. These verbal sprinters may be sweating under the strain of 340 words per minute, but they will take home the trophy regardless because of the opposing team’s inability to counter their gasping gibberish. As Lerner notes, a ghost wandering the high-school halls would perceive interscholastic debate as ‘less competitive speech than glossolalic ritual’.

On the evening of 6 August 1926, Alice Anderson donned her driving goggles and gloves, waved to the cheering crowds outside Melbourne’s Lyceum Club, and got into her tiny two-seater Austin 7. With her former teacher Jessie Webb beside her, the boot packed with two guns, sleeping bags, a compass, four gallons of water, a supply of biscuits, and, strangely, two potatoes with red curly wigs, she tooted the horn and set off. Her mission? A three-week pioneering trip to the never-never. ‘There is only one main route from Adelaide to Darwin, and that is only a camel track,’ the tiny young woman behind the wheel said breezily of the 2,607-kilometre journey ahead of her. ‘We are not going to stick to the beaten track.’

It was what Lawrence Durrell described as ‘the flickering of steel rails over the arterial systems of Europe’s body’ that steadily transformed nineteenth-century Europe into a cultural and social unity that would last until the outbreak of World War I. Not everyone was happy about this. Rossini, who was terrified of trains, stuck to coach travel, while others, including the German poet Heinrich Heine, took a sort of reverse-Brexit view, writing: ‘I feel as if the mountains and forests of all countries are advancing on Paris. Even now, I can smell the German linden trees; the North Sea breakers are rolling against my door.’

On 3 October 1962, Hugh Gaitskell rose to address the annual Labour Party Conference in Brighton. He had been Labour leader for nearly a decade and was widely tipped to win the next general election, due within two years. Gaitskell’s message was clear and vivid: Britain must never join the European Economic Community. To do so, he told delegates, would ‘mean the end of a thousand years of history’.

While Gaitskell campaigned hard against a place in Europe, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan – ‘Supermac’ in political circles – was slowly melding a coalition of Conservative colleagues in favour of applying for EEC membership. As Macmillan saw it, the Conservative Party was split between romantics and realists. The romantics yearned for empire, quoting Churchill on an island standing alone. The realists, with Old Etonian Macmillan at their head, believed in some stark truths: Britain’s influence in the world was in sharp decline, its economy sluggish, its famed innovations in military hardware and pharmaceuticals long lost to the Americans. Without a European agreement, reasoned Macmillan, the slide would accelerate. While Britain languished, France and Germany were thriving amid unbroken growth and prosperity. Conservative pieties aside, Macmillan saw no viable alternative to a European alliance.

Australians have admired distinguished actor David Gulpilil in films like Walkabout (1971), Storm Boy (1976), The Tracker (2002), and Rabbit-Proof Fence (2002). Not so many will be familiar with the details of his recent life, as related by journalist Derek Rielly. We find Gulpilil dying of lung cancer in Murray Bridge, an unprepossessing town on the lower Murray River in South Australia. He is surrounded by friends and cared for by the heroic Mary Hood, a retired nurse who has dedicated much of her life to caring for Aboriginal people in the Top End. This follows several bleak years living as a ‘long grasser’ on the fringes of Darwin and doing time in Berrimah Prison on charges of serious assault during a drunken fight.

A key philosophical question posed in Rielly’s narrative is whether, as Gulpilil’s artist friend George Gittoes maintains, Gulpilil should return to die among his own people in Arnhem Land, or whether, as his more pragmatic friend, actor Jack Thompson suggests, he is better off staying where he is ‘because in his homeland there is nothing but humbug … And there’s not much doubt he would wind up with nothing to his name and he’d die in the long grass. Whereas here, he’s looked after, respected and has some mates, he goes down to the pub for lunch and he and the cook are good mates.’

Gulpilil (photograph taken from Gulpilil by Derek Rielly)

Gulpilil has touched many hearts during his long and celebrated career, but the most moving passage of this book was Rabbit-Proof Fence co-star Natasha Wanganeen’s account of her first glimpse of him on a television set at South Australia’s Point Pearce Aboriginal Mission, where she grew up. Wanganeen describes Gulpilil playing Fingerbone Bill in Storm Boy: ‘I looked at him and said, he’s like me, I’m like him. And it made me feel good. It made me feel happy and proud. When I looked at him, he let me know I had a place here. That it’s a part of us, we’re here! It’s such a beautiful thing to an Aboriginal child when you grow up on a Christian Mission. Watching him be so happy and free and such a larrikin. That’s exactly us!’

This passage represents one of the few Indigenous voices in the book. Gulpilil’s life and Indigenous experience generally are mainly filtered through accounts from his many white associates. These include filmmakers Phillip Noyce (director of Rabbit-Proof Fence), Philippe Mora (Mad Dog Morgan), and Rolf de Heer (Charlie’s Country, The Tracker, and Ten Canoes); co-stars Jack Thompson, Damon Gameau, Gary Sweet, and Paul Hogan; artists George Gittoes and Craig Ruddy (whose portrait of Gulpilil won the 2004 Archibald Prize); and Richard Trudgen, a forty-year veteran of the Arnhem Land outstation movement and fluent speaker of Yolŋu Matha, whose 2000 book Why Warriors Lie Down and Die offers Rielly an important key to understanding the cultural challenges faced by Gulpilil in negotiating two radically divergent worlds.

Fêted by European society, like Bennelong and Namatjira before him, Gulpilil represents for white Australians the embodiment of traditional Aboriginal culture. Yet Trudgen claims that after being discovered as a young man by British filmmaker Nicolas Roeg for the 1971 film Walkabout, Gulpilil lost connection with his traditional culture ‘because it just wasn’t part of his practice when he was out with Europeans talking with them all the time. The great disappointment of Gulpilil’s parents was his lack of traditional knowledge.’

Charlie’s Country (2014) offers a more cogent biography than Rielly’s book and is perhaps the most powerful film about Aboriginal Australia I have seen. De Heer probably saved Gulpilil’s life by visiting him in Berrimah jail and persuading him to make this semi-autobiographical film, which won him Best Actor in the Cannes Film Festival’s Un Certain Regard section.

Gulpilil is rich in hilarious anecdote, but in terms of engagement with blackfellas, Rielly is by his own admission a complete neophyte. The author was also precluded from visiting Gulpilil’s homeland because of Gulpilil’s declining health. He faced the additional challenge of interviewing a highly laconic biographical subject for whom English is a third or fourth language.

There is a kind of ocker naïveté to Rielly’s surf-magazine writing style; we are unnecessarily regaled, for instance, with accounts of certain figures smoking bucket bongs, while in another passage, when the author is sent to recover a painting from Gulpilil’s bedroom, the reader becomes an uncomfortable participant in Rielly’s voyeuristic invasion of the actor’s privacy, as he gives a detailed inventory of every item in his bedroom. Glossing over Paul Hogan’s inane dismissal of the Aboriginal land rights movement in the film Crocodile Dundee (1986), the author comments wistfully that ‘watching Paul Hogan smoke Winnie Blues and reminisce as he sat on a bench in his daughter’s suburban front yard was a reminder of an Australia long gone’. Rielly’s previous book, Wednesdays with Bob (2017), showcased another Australian good old boy, the late Bob Hawke.

Rielly’s memoir is a modest yet honest attempt to capture something of the significance of this great Australian artist in his final days. The book’s real strength is perhaps its depiction of the powerful emotional impact that Gulpilil has had on ordinary white Australians with no direct experience of Aboriginal culture, and of how his performative genius has helped to reshape their understanding of Australia’s First Peoples.

Australian nature writing has come a long way in recent years. Not only do we have an abundance of contemporary nature writers, but we are also rediscovering the ones we have forgotten. The neglect of Australia’s nature writing history, with its contributions to science, literature, and conservation, is happily being redressed with recent biographies of Jean Galbraith, Rica Erickson, Edith Coleman, and now a new biography of Alec Chisholm.

Chisholm is one of the best-known Australian nature writers. His first and most famous book, Mateship with Birds, was republished by Scribe in 2013. Born in 1890 in rural Victoria, and spending his working life in Brisbane, Sydney, and Melbourne, Chisholm lived through much of the twentieth century and was a leading figure in the golden age of Australian nature writing and the birth of the modern conservation movement. Russell McGregor’s biography documents Chisholm’s long life in scrupulous detail, aided by a significant body of archives and Chisholm’s own autobiographical work.

The biography has long been reserved for human subjects. It is a genre largely predicated on the idea that only humans live lives sufficiently rich and complex to be worthy of sustained examination. Countless books have centred on different kinds of animals, yet few have fallen within the biographical category. Most are found in the children’s, zoology, or fiction shelves at bookstores.

Alfred Fidjestøl has shaken, though perhaps not toppled, these assumptions with Almost Human, the tale of a likeable but hapless Norwegian chimpanzee named Julius. It spans over forty years of Julius’s life, dedicating much space to his turbulent childhood. Fidjestøl recounts, in distressing detail, how Julius’s mother, Sanne, neglected him. ‘Julius appeared starved; he grew silent and seemed nearly dead’, he writes. Two senior staff members at the Kristiansand Zoo, Billy Glad and Edvard Moseid, were forced to intervene and brought Julius home to live with their families. For Julius, those were wonderful times, as he indulged in the pleasures of cake, painting, and companionship. However, his bonds with the human world meant that his reintegration into the chimpanzee community would prove difficult.

In following years, Julius’s existence was marred by dysfunction and alienation. He was victimised by the community’s alpha male leader, Champis, fathered babies who died as infants, and made repeated attempts to escape from the chimpanzee enclosure. Simultaneously, Norwegian media spun false, romanticised narratives about him.

Even apart from its subject, Almost Human is not a conventional biography. Fidjestøl takes some liberties with the form, drawing on a wealth of information concerning chimpanzees and other animals, including Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal’s work, enhancing readers’ appreciation of non-human life. Almost Human is an unashamed act of animal advocacy, at a time of mass endangerment and extinction.

Julius, almost 45 pounds overweight (photograph by Nicolai Prebensen/VG/NTB Scanpix)

A lover of photography since childhood, by the time Olive Cotton, who was born in Sydney in 1911, was in her twenties she was already creating the pictures that were to define her as one of Australia’s foremost women photographers, although this would not be acknowledged until the 1980s. Apart from the photographs she made, Cotton left little material trace of a life that spanned nine decades (she died in 2003). This lack of physical evidence presented a challenge for biographer Helen Ennis, a former curator of photography at the National Gallery of Australia and an art historian, who has nonetheless managed to weave a compelling, if at times diaphanous, narrative.

The book is divided into six parts: Cotton’s personal journey, her evolution as an artist, the progress of the medium, and shifts in Australian society. This juxtaposition creates a fascinating historical account that is captivating and illuminating. Importantly, it also serves to ground a tale that is at times stitched together by supposition and possibility, Ennis acknowledging that, ‘as a biographical subject … Olive has surprisingly little weight’.

In piecing together Cotton’s story, Ennis has drawn on various sources: anecdotes from those who knew Cotton; Ennis’s own recollections of her friendship with the artist; Cotton’s children, Sally and Peter; the private papers of Cotton’s first husband, photographer Max Dupain; and the few personal items that Cotton kept in an old trunk on the property near Cowra, NSW, where she lived for more than half a century. The trunk’s contents, or lack thereof, are a metaphor for Cotton’s acceptance of the impermanence of life and of photography as an act of remembering.

The first half of the book is largely concerned with Cotton’s childhood and her burgeoning friendship, and later love affair, with Dupain. As the story unfolds, Cotton emerges as a woman of substance, a pioneer who was unafraid to challenge conventions but was also a romantic soul who wanted to live life with passion. As an eighteen-year-old, Cotton saw herself as a thoroughly modern woman who wanted to carve her own path, a view coloured by a life of privilege. Growing up in an affluent family, Cotton lived in a sprawling mansion in Hornsby with a live-in maid. Holidays were spent at the family’s beach house at Newport, where she first met Dupain when she was thirteen. Hers was not an idle life. Cotton studied for a Bachelor of Arts, attending university when it was rare for women to do so. Instead of going straight into teaching, as was expected, she chose to work with Dupain in his studio, where she attracted her own commercial clients. The studio was also a social hub, providing the pair with what Cotton labelled her ‘happy family’.

Cotton and Dupain married in April 1939, but their union was short-lived. Citing abandonment, Dupain was granted a divorce two years later; Cotton had moved from Sydney to Mittagong and taken a job as a teacher. Her refusal to return to her husband, as the judge ordered, was cause to ratify the decree absolute. There is a suggestion that Cotton felt her marriage was one of familiarity rather than passion, but there is little known of her feelings at this time. Rather, the narrative unfolds through Dupain’s private letters and anecdotes from those who knew the couple. This leaves the reader to imagine what might have compelled her to make such a dramatic life change. Divorce in those days was difficult, uncommon, and socially frowned upon.

Despite their personal problems, Cotton returned to Sydney to run the studio while Dupain was in the military. During this time, she was introduced to Ross McInerney, then a soldier. As Ennis notes, the portrait that Cotton took of McInerney in 1942, which features in the book, conveys an intimacy between the sitter and photographer that is undeniable. The glint in McInerney’s eye, his shy smile, and the close composition indicate that love most definitely was in the air, but it would be more than two years before the pair married. It wasn’t just romance Cotton craved, it was also dependability and sexual fidelity, desires she revealed in the few letters that remain of her correspondence to McInerney during the war.

When McInerney and Cotton married, the newlyweds set up home in a tent, where they lived without running water or electricity for several years before buying Spring Forest, the property near Cowra where she would spend the rest of her days. (Readers will recall Ennis’s ABR Fellowship essay ‘Olive Cotton at Spring Forest’, published in the July–August 2013 issue.) Here they lived in a two-room cottage and raised their two children before moving into the property’s old barracks in 1974. By all counts it was a remote and minimalist existence, but Cotton did not forsake the privilege of her lineage, taking her children for summer holidays to Newport while McInerney stayed behind. During these separations, Cotton and McInerney wrote to each other frequently. These letters were kept, offering a rare bounty to Ennis.

There are long hiatuses in Cotton’s career: twenty years between working in Dupain’s studio and opening her own in 1964 in Cowra, and another twenty before her work was widely recognised. Ennis connects Cotton’s intermittent photographic output to the overall narrative by interspersing chapters throughout the book that are dedicated to specific images.

Tea cup ballet, Olive Cotton (photograph via the Art Gallery of New South Wales)

The chapters that delve into the nuances of Cotton’s photographic practice deliver some of the most satisfying moments in the book. In a chapter on Tea cup ballet, one of Cotton’s best-known photographs, Ennis discusses the artist’s capacity for ‘drawing with light’, Cotton’s description of photography. Cotton’s creativity and photographic skill come to the fore in this ‘ballet-like composition’ fashioned from inanimate objects. With Tea cup ballet, Cotton made her international début; the picture was exhibited in the London Salon of Photography in 1935. It wasn’t until fifty years later that Tea cup ballet became recognised as an exemplar of Australian modernist photography.

These short chapters deliver important insights into Cotton’s artistic practice, but the images also reveal aspects of her personality. Her resourcefulness is found in the intricate still-life compositions made from everyday items; her romantic heart is reflected in her capacity to find the exotic in the ordinary; her willingness to experiment can be seen in the play of light and shadow; and her love of nature is indicated in her intimate depictions of the natural world.

While Ennis has proven her skill in crafting an engaging story about a woman she describes as ‘a background figure’, the weakness of the book lies in the poor reproduction of Cotton’s photographs. This is incredibly disappointing: the pictures are crucial to introducing a new audience to Cotton’s work and to demonstrating why she is so important to the history of photography in this country.

How many of us would really want to be prime minister? The road to The Lodge is littered with depressing tales of ambitious politicians abandoning their friends, principles, and even their own authentic voice in order to secure the Top Job. Then, once you’ve fulfilled your life’s ambitions, voters and your own supporters are liable to tire of you and seek a new political hero. Nevertheless, prime ministers become accustomed to the power, public attention, and perks of office; they find it difficult to choose the ‘right time’ to leave office.

Clinging to office is one of the major themes explored in Norman Abjorensen’s The Manner of Their Going, a study of the political and personal factors that have led to each and every prime ministerial exit since 1901. Originally published in 2015, the text has been updated to include Malcolm Turnbull’s defeat in 2018. As a distinguished political scientist, historian, and journalist, Norman Abjorensen brings a wealth of experience and knowledge to the project. The book is well researched and displays a strong awareness of the major works of scholarship on the federal political scene over several decades. However, more intense study of official and private papers at national institutions, such as the National Library of Australia, would have assisted in creating a more original contribution to Australian political history.

You didn’t have to be Antony Green to know that by seven o’clock on election night things were looking very bad for Bill Shorten. The problem itself wasn’t complicated. While all the available polling suggested that Labor would gain support, the majority of booth results said that Labor was going backwards. Numbers were breaking for Scott Morrison, with the Liberal National Party driving a bulldozer through Queensland, while expected Labor gains in Melbourne remaining stubbornly out of reach. Echoes of Don’s Party were hard to ignore.

For Shorten, the whiplash must have been immense. While the Labor leader knew from internal research that the election was closer than publicly recognised, few people seriously believed he could lose. Why would they? A term of unbroken polling supremacy, three recycled prime ministers, a dysfunctional Coalition teetering on the edge of splitting – this was a government destined for punishment, according to all conventional wisdom. And yet, despite this very public mess, Scott Morrison somehow managed to win. This improbable victory, still shocking six months on, is the subject of Aaron Patrick’s new book, The Surprise Party: How the Coalition went from chaos to comeback. Part history, part insider journalism, it’s one of the first book-length autopsies of the election. It’s unlikely to be the last.

Patrick begins this story a year out from the vote, with Turnbull hanging on to power and Morrison his ostensibly loyal treasurer. This allows a full view of twelve strange months in Australian history: from the ‘Super Saturday’ by-elections that convinced Queensland conservatives that Turnbull could never win their state; to the slow, brutal stalking of Turnbull, which ended in Morrison’s surprise ascension; to the state elections in Victoria and New South Wales, which respectively suggested doom and possible hope for the federal Liberal Party.

Patrick recalls some significant, if occasionally tangential, chapters of our recent past. Some of these already feel forgotten, like the scuffle between Turnbull’s office and the ABC, or Michael Daley taking on Alan Jones over the Sydney Cricket Ground Trust. Other editorial decisions are more perplexing. Patrick spends an inexplicable amount of time psychoanalysing Alex Turnbull, the former prime minister’s son, including his place within the playground hierarchy at Sydney Grammar. For anyone living outside a select few postcodes, this is likely to feel gratuitous.   

On the book’s central question, Patrick is more focused. The Surprise Party is ruthlessly and consistently critical of Bill Shorten. He depicts the Labor leader as a man overburdened by self-confidence, with ‘an unwavering certainty that he would vanquish the Coalition government’. Patrick argues that this arrogance led to unnecessary risks, particularly the party’s ambitious tax policies, aimed at wealthy retirees and investment property owners. Shorten himself, coveting the prime ministership since youth, could sell neither the vision nor his own story; his ambition was too naked.

While these arguments can be overly personalised – Patrick seems to enjoy rubbing salt into Shorten’s considerable wounds – no honest examination of the election can avoid the question of leadership. But arrogance doesn’t explain everything. As Labor’s official election review found, the party’s large and unwieldy policy platform followed its own political logic. The foundation of this was a conviction that, after the Rudd and Gillard years, the party needed to present a balanced budget to voters. As time went on, shadow ministers developed spending proposals for their prospective portfolios. To balance these two things, Labor needed to find itself new revenue. Hence the franking credits.

When Morrison came to power in late 2018, he inherited a broken and demoralised party, as well as Labor’s political vulnerabilities. Paradoxically, the brutal changeover gave him more space than Turnbull ever enjoyed; people were exhausted by all the fighting. Free from conservative suspicion, Morrison had a short window to reorient the Coalition’s campaign more aggressively against Labor.

Morrison’s plan wasn’t complex; it also received important support by sympathetic parts of the media. In many ways, it reflected Turnbull’s own unfolding strategy: demonising Labor’s tax reforms, claiming a budget surplus, and then attacking Bill Shorten with every available weapon. But Morrison implemented it with relentless efficiency. Its success meant that, after two terms of conservative rule, the election was largely a referendum on Labor’s platform, by then six years in the making, built in pieces to combat three different Liberal leaders.

There is no escaping Morrison’s credit for this electoral pirouette. Beyond the strategic discipline, he managed to connect with regional and suburban voters in a way Turnbull never could. Part of this was his carefully cultivated image, marked by unpretentious clothing, fatherhood, and a performative love of rugby league. Part of it was his deliberate wedging of Labor over Adani and the future of coal mining in central Queensland. The book does a good job of mapping this project, both publicly and behind the scenes.

Still, for all Morrison’s unexpected success, certain temptations should be resisted. One is to assume that, just because Morrison won, everything he did showed tactical genius or that everything Shorten did contributed to his eventual loss. As Barack Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, put it, ‘You’re never as smart as you look when you win, and you’re never as dumb as you look when you lose.’ Shorten managed to hold a traumatised party together for six years, taking down two prime ministers in the process. It clearly wasn’t all bad.

The other temptation is to make grandiose claims about the deeper significance of May 18. Every election is important; as another prime minister once said, they all change the country. But it’s not yet clear that this one will ‘redefine Australia’, as Patrick suggests, or that people chose ‘capitalism over paternalism’ in some definitive way. It is certainly true that people chose caution over uncertainty – Scott Morrison over the Labor alternative. It remains to be seen whether they will do the same next time.

While Patrick indulges in both tendencies on occasion, he can be forgiven these flourishes. This is a book about Scott Morrison’s remarkable triumph, which even his enemies cannot deny. The question is whether a political campaign built around opposition and critique, which excelled in destroying a more ambitious agenda, will also work as a project of government.

In Future Proof, Jon Coaffee, professor in urban geography at the University of Warwick, asks readers to imagine ‘a typical day’: radio reports of an impending cyclone; public-transport posters encouraging the reporting of ‘suspicious activity’; the path to an office (especially in a CBD) protected by hostile-vehicle-mitigation bollards. At work, computer systems will be tested for security from cyber attacks. The train home will be delayed due to a network complication, and the evening’s television will show the cyclone’s impact, discussing the relative ineffectiveness of hazard mitigation.

Cass Sunstein, a noted American constitutional scholar, once lamented: ‘The notion that the government may control information at its source is at odds with the idea that the purpose of a system of free expression is to control the conduct of representatives.’ In a liberal democracy – supposedly of the people, by the people, for the people – political opacity is inconsistent with the central premise of government.

Yet in Australia, and elsewhere, this overriding presumption of governmental transparency has been steadily eroded. As veteran journalist Brian Toohey reveals in his sweeping new book, Secret: The making of Australia’s security state, which begins with words from Australia’s defence minister of 1938 and concludes in the Scott Morrison era, the catchcry of national security has time and again distorted our political system. From a default position of openness, with limited exceptions only where justified by compelling interests, secrecy has become the norm.

One of the pleasures of reviewing a book is reading it slowly, paying attention to the rhythms and its author’s intentions, impulses, and indulgences. Reading is always a conversation between writer and reader. A major collection like Life: Selected writings takes this experience to a new level. This is not just a conversation between a writer now and a reader now, but a writer then, his choices now, the sum of those choices as arrayed in a substantial blue volume, and the reader with a ‘long now’ to luxuriate in the exchange.

This is a wonderful summer book: it can be tasted in short, self-contained moments or read as a large, luminous whole exposing the historical concerns of a polymath over nearly thirty years. More than a memoir, it captures snapshots of the intellectual musings of a feisty, funny writer – sometimes angry, sometimes lost in wonder. Almost like a diary, the essays have a subtext revealing what else is happening in Flannery’s life and times: ‘Ground Zero’, for example, an essay that describes the geological and biological genesis of North America sixty-five million years ago, carries the date 2001.

Tom Carment the artist, writer, and man makes a perfectly integrated whole. Carment is a compact, casually neat figure who looks through round-lensed glasses and has a calm stillness even when he’s on the move, as he often is. His art and writing are also on a small scale, intimately observant, informal, and warmly appealing. He has exhibited his paintings and drawings for more than four decades and has written for almost as long, occasionally for publication and often in private. As he said at his book launch, he used to pour most of his thoughts into letters, including one he found recently that ran to thirty-eight pages.

The ‘Uluru Statement from the Heart’ emerged in May 2017 from a convention held in Arrernte country in Central Australia attended by 250 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people from around the nation. The Statement called for a ‘First Nations Voice’ to be enshrined in the Constitution enabling, in general terms, a process of influence on future legislation and policy affecting Indigenous communities. The Statement also seeks a commitment to agreement-making between government and Indigenous groups and ‘truth-telling’ about the history of colonisation.

First encounters between Indigenous Australians and European voyagers, sealers, and missionaries often unfolded on the beach, a contact zone where meaning and misunderstanding sparked from colliding worldviews. This sandy theatre also serves as one of the enduring metaphors of ethnographic history, a discipline that reads through the accounts of European explorers, diarists, and administrators to reconsider historical accounts of the gestures of Indigenous people from within their own cultural frameworks. Europeans blinded by racial preconceptions scribbled reports about the peoples they met, often misinterpreting actions as foolish, threatening, or pointless. Yet from the late twentieth century, historians such as Greg Dening (whose extensive theoretical work positioned the beach as the great physical and mental horizon of contact history) began combing through accounts of these tense meetings to reach for the other side of the story.

Meredith McKinney, our pre-eminent translator of Japanese classics – among them Sei Shōnagon’s The Pillow Book, the poetry of Saigyō Hōshi, the memoirs Essays in Idleness by Yoshida Kenkō, and Kamo no Chōmei’s Hōjōki (Record of the Ten Foot Square Hut) – has delivered another marvel of absorbing, elegant scholarship. Travels with a Writing Brush crosses the country of old Japan, from north to south and from east to west, and is a quintessential travel book. It goes to places, and shows them – except that the latter is not quite true; you would not go to this book to see things objectively so much as to cue to them imaginatively.

Better say that McKinney’s book names the places of highest Japanese worth, this because they have over time become poetic places, utamakura, to which travellers made pilgrimage, and from which they departed with gratitude and sorrow, treasuring the memory traces of the sacred sites. If you think of a culture map of the first thousand years of Japanese literary history, the land would glow with hundreds of little lamps lit by the poetic imaginations of travellers, each in touch with the others over time, each defined by memories from poetry, legend, and mythology.

ABR welcomes succinct letters and comments. If you're interested in writing to ABR, contact us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. Correspondents must provide a telephone number or email address for verification.

Penny Wong

Dear Editor,

I would like to correct an error in Angela Woollacott’s generally favourable review of my book Penny Wong: Passion and principle. Woollacott writes of Wong: ‘She loved her grandmother, and did not want one particular family story included in the book – but Simons tells us that, and includes it regardless.’

This is not an accurate account of what happened. As declared in the book, Senator Wong granted me interviews on the condition that anything I drew from them was cleared with her before publication. This delicate and detailed process was conducted with honour and integrity on both sides. Had Wong maintained her objection to this anecdote appearing, it would have been a serious ethical breach for me to have published it. In fact, Wong asked for a small clarifying addition and cleared it for publication. I recorded both the anecdote, and Wong’s initial reluctance and the reason for it – a fear that her grandmother would be harshly judged by readers, when such judgement was not justified.

Margaret Simons, Flemington, Vic.

Angela Woollacott replies:

I do not question that Margaret Simons drew from her interviews with Senator Wong with the integrity and process she describes in her letter. Yet I stand by what I said in my review. Here are the relevant sentences in her book: ‘Penny Wong is reluctant to have this fact printed. “People will judge. And you can’t judge what happens in that kind of deprivation.”’

A fierce little book

Dear Editor,

This ‘rather fierce little book’ (and I couldn’t agree more with this comment in your review) hit me really hard when I read Nam Le’s essay on David Malouf recently. For old white Australians like myself, I think it is meant to. Although I once foolishly volunteered and wore the uniform of the Australian Army and served in Vietnam (Nam Le’s country of birth) for a year (1967–68), I feel more and more alienated from the country in which I was born and which I now somewhat reluctantly have to call home. I always fondly believed, incorrectly as it has turned out, that Australia was a welcoming country for those from other lands seeking its help and refuge, and that after a few years living here, such people would feel, as David Malouf presumably does, but Nam Le does not, that they had become truly Australian; that they no longer felt ‘other’.

Nam Le’s essay is challenging, instructive, and deeply thought-provoking. Some have suggested that it is more about Nam Le than it is about Malouf and that he has not done his subject justice. I profoundly disagree. His work in this essay has sent me back to rereading Malouf’s writings, much of which I had half forgotten. That to me is proof enough that the essay is a success. And it has not only made me reread The Boat but to long for more writing from Nam Le’s pen. I hope he won’t disappoint us by another long interval before he publishes again.

David Bradford (online comment)

Chernobyl

Dear Editor,

In her book Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl guide to the future, Kate Brown has written a conspiracy theory of the first water, masquerading as a travelogue, masquerading as cultural anthropology, masquerading as first-person history. As historical research it is a failure, and Professor Sheila Fitzpatrick should have been able to recognise this. Brown cites a laundry list of known anti-nuclear advocates (opponents of both nuclear weapons and nuclear power), including Karl Morgan, Joseph J. Mangano, John Gofman, and Rosalie Bertell, among many others. She ignores several thousand peer-reviewed epidemiological studies published in recognised international journals, and misquotes or misuses recognised scholars such as historian David R. Marples and world-renowned epidemiologists Fred A. Mettler and the late Elaine Ron. Brown is so anti-nuclear that she even opposes nuclear medicine as part of a vast conspiracy among the US, USSR, UN agencies such as the IAEA and WHO, and private-sector nuclear utility executives.

This is truly a tour de force that should be thrown in the trash.

Michael K. Launer, Florida, USA

Sheila Fitzpatrick replies:

I’m not sure about the source of Michael K. Launer’s claimed expertise on Chernobyl, but he seems to have an axe to grind. Kate Brown, Professor of Science, Technology and Society at MIT, is a respected historian with twenty-five years of research on the Ukraine, particularly the Pripyat region, behind her. Her Manual for Survival on Chernobyl is described by Philip Ball in The New Statesman as ‘an extraordinary and important – if controversial – book’, and by Noah Sneider in The Economist as ‘magisterial’. Serhii Plokhy, Professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University and himself a Chernobyl expert, writes that ‘Brown knows her landscape exceptionally well’, while in The New York Review of Books, Sophie Pinkham praises Brown’s ‘scrupulous efforts to double-check facts’. I see no reason to change my assessment of the book.

Clive James in ABR

Clive JamesMuch has been written about Clive James since his death from leukaemia on November 24. He was, of course, one of the last polymaths, with a range of skills and accomplishments that made him famous in Australia (where he was born in 1939) and the United Kingdom, where he lived from 1961 to his death. Novelist, satirist, memoirist, poet, broadcaster, lyricist, reviewer, paradoxer, essayist par excellence: what didn’t he do in print, on air, on stage?

When I, Peter Rose, became editor back in 2001, one of the first things I did was to add poetry to the magazine’s repertoire – not just because I happen to be a poet but because I felt any national review worth its salt should feature new poetry. Clive was one of the first poets I contacted. His eventual response was positive, and typically witty:

My desk is in chaos here, and I’m afraid the magazine and the note were victims of two separate geological shifts to the bottom of the pile … A few poems are getting through, and I’d like to try placing one or two of them in your excellent pages. If I can get my printer working I’ll fax you one soonest; it’s about Pound and Eliot as a double-act.

That poem, ‘Simple Stanzas about Modern Masters’, duly appeared in our August 2001 edition – the first of twenty contributions from Clive James. He gave us many poems over the next decade, and a few reviews. In 2003 he attended the Mildura Writers’ Festival, where he received the Philip Hodgins Memorial Medial and delivered the La Trobe University/Australian Book Review Annual Lecture. Entitled ‘The Meaning of Recognition’, it celebrated the poetry of Philip Hodgins (‘one of the glories of late twentieth-century Australian poetry’). Hodgins, one of the creators of the Mildura Festival, had died of leukaemia in 1995, aged thirty-six.

Towards the end of this memorable lecture, Clive said:

As a poet, I spent two thirds of my career without even a reputation. Receiving this award, I feel like someone who has run the whole race invisible and popped into sight at the finishing line. Well, that fits. To be recognised means to be reassured that you were right to pursue a course that had no immediate rewards, and got in the road of activities that had. Poetry is something I gave at least part of my life to: a fact on which I often preened myself, at least in private. Now, to remind me that I had things easy, I have been honoured in the name of a man who gave his whole life to it, and his death as well. So the honour seems disproportionate; but I suppose an honour ought to.

Afterwards, there was a splendiferous Italian lunch at the Grand Hotel. Stefano de Pieri and Donata Carrazza fed us royally. There was a gigantic Murray Cod for Clive and Les Murray. Then they wheeled out Don Carrazza’s Rolls Royce to take Clive to the local airport. I caught a lift. While we waited for our flight to Melbourne, Clive went over to a vending machine and removed the saddest, limpest, least Italian tomato sandwich I have ever seen, and ate it with gusto. I thought to myself, You can take the boy out of Kogarah, but you can never take Kogarah out of the boy.

Porter Prize

When the Peter Porter Poetry Prize closed in October, we’d received 1,046 entries from thirty different countries. It was our largest field to date, by a considerable margin. Our three judges – John Hawke (Chair and ABR’s Poetry Editor), Bronwyn Lea, and Philip Mead – have now completed the judging, after a marathon effort (we thank them warmly).

The five shortlisted poets are Lachlan Brown, Claire G. Coleman, A. Frances Johnson, Julie Manning, and Ross Gillett (who was shortlisted for the 2019 Porter Prize). Click here to read their featured poems.

Here is the judges’ interim report:

This year’s record field demonstrates both the depth and stylistic range evident in this vital area of our literature. The poems were notable for the currency of their engagement with social issues. ‘My Father’s Thesaurus’ by A. Frances Johnson is an unsentimental yet emotive portrayal of the situation of the elderly and their carers. A concern with Indigenous themes was evident in many entries: the forceful argument of Claire G. Coleman’s ‘That Wadjela Tongue’ was outstanding among these. Lachlan Brown’s unsettling ‘Precision Signs’ interrogates the hollowness of contemporary jargon from within. There is also a commitment to conventional form: like Brown’s poem, Ross Gillett’s ‘South Coast Sonnets’ impressively adapts and modernises a traditional end-rhyming verse structure. Julie Manning’s ‘Constellation of Bees’ is a finely observed poem of the natural world, presented with necessary ecological awareness.

This year’s Porter Prize ceremony will be held at 6 pm on 16 January at the Boyd Community Hub (Southbank, Melbourne), where ABR is based. This is a free event but bookings are essential. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. All five poets will attend. After readings – the five shortlisted poems and classics by Peter Porter – a special guest will name the overall winner.

ABR Podcast

The rapid extension of our digital archive going back to 1978 (when ABR was revived) will be a major priority in 2020, but we’re also looking forward to reviving our podcast, which has been dormant for a couple of years. From January 8 we will offer a fortnightly podcast: reviews, conversations, poetry and short fiction, and recordings of Calibre essays. Michael Hofmann inaugurates the new podcast with a reading of his inspired poem ‘The Resident’ about Donal Dump (aka Donald Trump). Look out for the podcast every second Wednesday.

India bound

Thanks to everyone who has already entered our current travel competition. In a first for ABR, 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 until 20 February 2020. All current subscribers (print or online) are eligible, and, as you know, you can subscribe online for as little as $10 per month.

The winner will be notified in March 2020 and will be announced in our Travel issue in April 2020. Terms and conditions apply. Click here to enter for your chance to win!

Jolley Prize

The tenth ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize will open on January 20, with a closing date of May 1. Terms and Conditions, Frequently Asked Questions, and the judges’ names will be available online from January 20. We welcome unpublished short stories ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words – on any subject and in any style.

Due to the continuing generosity of Ian Dickson, the Jolley Prize is worth $12,500. The division of the prize money differs from last year. There are three prizes: $6,000, $4,000, and $2,500.

In a recent survey of past entrants in our three literary prizes (approximately 5,000 in all!), we asked if they preferred a hefty first prize or a more even division of prize moneys. Eighty per cent of respondents preferred the latter: hence this review of the Jolley Prize and our other prizes.

Fellowships worth $240,000

It’s a time of considerable largesse from Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, which has just awarded three ‘life-changing fellowships’, each worth $80,000. The recipients are writers Stephen Orr and James Bradley, and the artist Danielle Freakley.

Stephen Orr, a past ABR Fellow, will use his Fellowship to write ‘a fictionalised reimagining of past Carl Strehlow and his fourteen-year-old son, Theodor, as they travel through the South Australian desert’. James Bradley, who has written for ABR since 1997, intends to write ‘a series of interconnected essays that will offer an engaging portrait of the catastrophe taking place in our oceans’.

The fortieth anniversary of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras might have been an occasion for unbridled elation. Held in March of 2018, the celebration came soon after the bitterly fought battle to legalise same-sex marriage in Australia. Dennis Altman, a pre-eminent figure in Gay Liberation, paints a different picture of the Mardi Gras. His new book, Unrequited Love: Diary of an accidental activist, conveys a sense of unease despite the frolicsome charms of such festivities.

According to Altman, the veterans in attendance are left with the ‘odd sensation of having been turned into talismans, simultaneously memorialised and passed by, as successive generations reinvent themselves in ways we couldn’t imagine’. Fatigued, Altman soon leaves the carnival, taking a long detour through the dirty backstreets to his hotel. This quiet moment acquires a powerful resonance, for the peripheries are indeed where this memoir is prone to wander. Its exploration of contemporary queer culture lingers over the problems that remain unresolved: the blind spots in its politics, the missing pieces in its history, the open wounds of its past.  

The diaries excerpted here cover the years following the election of Donald Trump as president, but their account of the period inevitably draws on earlier memories. A visit to the Robert Mapplethorpe exhibition in Sydney prompts a winding meditation on time spent in the United States during the heady days of the 1970s. The layered structure of these recollections underscores the complicated ways in which the past and present intertwine. Altman marvels at the presence of old continuities, as when he suggests that a drag queen popping into a bar in San Francisco might bear a close resemblance to someone he saw on the same strip forty years ago. More often, his perceptions evoke a sense of loss. He laments the devastating toll of AIDS, which claimed the lives of many of his friends and associates. Some of the most affecting passages in the book express grief for his partner, Anthony Smith, who died from lung cancer. Peering through the window as he drives around Melbourne, he realises that the city has already changed in ways Anthony would no longer recognise, and that ‘each day the dead are further lost to us’.

The literary presentation of the text itself takes on an almost elegiac quality. Altman points out that many gay men of his generation came to terms with their sexual desires through the narratives of writers such as Christopher Isherwood, James Baldwin, and Gore Vidal. (In an early passage, he explicitly refers to Isherwood’s diaries as the precedent for the records of daily life collected in this volume.) Altman discloses a desire to preserve the literary tradition as it becomes endangered by the ascendancy of visual and new media. The most striking aspect of this gesture is the diffidence with which it is made. Reflecting upon his remarks at a public speaking event, he writes: ‘I define queer history as being ultimately about the desire to know that there are other people out there like us, and regret the decline of reading, particularly of imaginative literature, among so many queer activists. If someone had the presence of mind to challenge me I’d have to acknowledge I have no proof for that assertion.’

Ironically, the recognition of this ambivalence points towards the literary virtues the book seeks to champion. After all, this is a memoir that takes great relish in its ability to accommodate speculation. The sentiments it expresses are seldom presented as unquestioned facts. Instead, the jottings in the diaries are pitched as a series of provisional and fragmentary impressions.

This approach enables Altman to cast doubt over a wide range of assumptions, including his own. For instance, he brings a critical eye to Australia’s enduring but increasingly tainted romance with the United States, which comes to mirror his own mixed feelings for the country. (His formative experiences there set the stage for his vocation as a writer and activist; now he grows more and more disillusioned by its violence and injustice.) It is worth stressing that the scepticism he applies to received wisdoms is filtered through the cautious declaration of his own dissent. A case in point: he repeatedly takes issue with the widespread use of the LGBTI acronym, but he also acknowledges that the term ‘queer’, his preferred alternative, runs the risk of offending older members of the community who recall its pejorative uses in the past. On another occasion, he tempers his complaint about the depletion of radical potential in queer activism with the concession that he himself only ever dabbled in the counter-culture of his heyday.

If Altman means to pass on a message to the next generation, it cannot be reduced to a crude slogan. Perhaps the careful nature of his deliberations is itself instructive. The memoir’s most powerful legacy is its insistence that we resist the dangers of presuming too much. Instead, it provokes us to grapple with the strange ambiguities and contradictions inherent in our time. Dennis Altman invites us to step outside the parade for a moment and wander through the shadows.

In November 2001, the United States – along with Australia and its other allies – prepared to embark on the now notorious military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the time, some effort was made to justify these actions to the American public. It fell to Laura Bush, the First Lady, to deliver the apparently feminist case for the so-called War on Terror. Speaking on national radio, Bush focused on Afghanistan and the plight of its women. Military intervention, she said, would save women from ‘brutal degradation … by the Taliban regime’. Detailing various ways in which women of Afghanistan suffered privations not shared by its men, Bush assured the American public that ‘the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women’.

We can put aside the familiar objections to the Bush administration’s warmongering, along with doubts about whether it was motivated at all by concern about the oppression of Afghan women. Another question concerns what sort of reasoning sat behind the claims of Laura Bush. More generally, we might query what goes on whenever Westerners try to identify injustices suffered by women in the Global South, and how such thinking infects subsequent attempts to intervene ‘on the ground’.

Serene J. Khader’s remarkable book bravely and effectively confronts such questions. Many of us would not consciously accept that we only try to help women in the Global South by finding ways to make their culture more like our own, as if Western liberal society is a sort of ‘endpoint of moral and human progress’. Indeed, Bush’s speech made conspicuous efforts to endorse what Khader calls ‘universalism’ – the view that oppression can be tackled through moral values shared across cultural or group differences: One doesn’t need to be a wealthy, white, American Christian like Bush to be troubled by how the Taliban treats women – our ‘common humanity’ is enough.

Yet Bush still wanted to draw attention to Afghan women being punished for wearing nail polish. The freedom of Western women to wear cosmetic products and high heels, not to mention other ways of making their bodies compliant with aesthetic norms, is held within our own Western system of rewards and punishments, one in which women have it tougher than men. The response that it is still worse to be an average Afghan woman than an average Western woman is often offered as a way of ending this conversation, and sometimes by scholars Khader criticises. But it changes the subject. Emphasising who is most oppressed evades the question of whether saving from oppression drifts into with ‘saving to’ [nonsensical] – a kind of ‘missionary feminism’, where saving approximates conversion into another way of life.

If we can’t be universalists, the worry arises that we must instead be relativists: burqas, even genital mutilation, are just ‘their culture’. Khader’s more constructive approach is to ‘decolonize universalism’, with an emphasis on the harm done when gender injustice is exacerbated by Western efforts that are not as universalist as they suppose themselves to be. A key point is that ‘feminism [as] opposition to sexist oppression is compatible with different judgments about the presence and causes of oppression in different cases, as well as with the employment of different practical strategies and different moral vernaculars in different cases’. In other words, we can and should continue to be troubled by the severe oppression of women in the Global South. But we need greater awareness of the social structures within which such women find themselves. Such structures will differ for women in Afghanistan, India, Sudan, and Aboriginal Australian communities (Khader discusses each). Attention to these differences will help us to identify and prioritise possible changes. Unbounded pursuit of Western liberal ideals will not.

Khader develops this approach over the book’s length. It is commendably concise but dense in argument. The power of Khader’s analysis is perhaps best conveyed here by repeating examples she uses. The case of microcredit (small loans) to women in the Global South has been touted as a means of empowerment through financial independence. But by overlooking established local norms, microcredit schemes have often subsidised men’s withdrawal from traditional responsibilities. The loans actually increase women’s burden as they are now expected to do something with the money while continuing to perform traditional unpaid labour, like cooking and cleaning. Attempts to promote the educational opportunities for young girls have been offered as another device for securing emancipation. Yet the provision of education can overlook the fact that early marriage (and associated entry into a kinship structure), despite its associated harms, may yet offer a more reliable route to security and economic well-being. In short, reducing women’s oppression is not as simple as finding ways to bring about ‘the right to exit and refuse marriage’.

I came to Khader’s book without anything like her expertise in feminist theory or in injustices (contemporary or historical) outside the Western countries in which I’ve lived. I read the book as an optimist about Western liberalism wary about the hazards of evaluating other societies from a Western liberal perspective. Having learned a great deal from Khader’s book, it is from this perspective that I would suggest that the idea of ‘Western liberal values’ does not, after all, refer to just one thing. Western liberalism is open to interpretation, internal disagreement, and has evolved over time. Khader does not deny this, but her focus is often on a strand of liberalism she calls ‘independence individualism’. This involves a preoccupation with economic-oriented values, such as the promotion of markets, entrepreneurship, and the enhancement of women’s autonomy with respect to financial affairs.

Khader’s criticism of independence individualism is well made, particularly on the case of microcredit. But enlightenment liberal values don’t start or end with market individualism. Ideas about rule of law, a free press, and universal suffrage can be endorsed alongside scepticism about the promise of markets or capitalism to deliver social progress. In their institutionalised form, they also tend to be more present in the West than in the Global South. Changing whole institutions is, of course, harder than the sort of piecemeal ‘missionary’ interventions discussed in the book. But such efforts might avoid assuming that women are helped most by gaining a means of getting away from their husband.

Khader demonstrates that if Western liberals are to have something to offer the women of the Global South, they must acknowledge a higher burden of justification than is typically supposed. Khader’s book also illuminates an important general lesson about injustice, namely that piecemeal attempts to fix some part of an oppressive structure will fail unless attention is paid to the rest of that structure, the explanations for its existence, and which of its parts might need to be preserved even if other cultures find them hard to swallow. As Khader notes, ‘the tragedy … is that feminist change is typically going to require changes to relationships women are genuinely self-interestedly invested in’. In bringing these complexities to light and showing how they might change our approach, Khader has produced a pioneering work.

On 7 December 1941, Japan bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. The following day, President Franklin D. Roosevelt declared that it was a date that would ‘live in infamy’. Those who heard his radio broadcast knew that the United States would be drawn into the war that had engulfed Europe and the Middle East. But for some, the content of FDR’s address was baffling. People in the US-held Philippines, who had also been subjected to attack, wondered why the focus was primarily on Hawai’i, and not the devastation that had been wreaked on them too:

A reporter described the scene in Manila as the crowds listened to Roosevelt’s speech over the radio. The president spoke of Hawai’i and the many lives lost there. Yet he only mentioned the Philippines, the reporter noted, ‘very much in passing’. Roosevelt made the war ‘seem to be something close to Washington and far from Manila.’ This was not how it looked from the Philippines, where air-raid sirens continued to wail. ‘To Manilans the war was here, now, happening to us,’ the reporter wrote. ‘And we have no air raid shelters.’

It is this strange reality, of territory held but barely acknowledged by the United States, that opens Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A short history of the greater United States. Immerwahr has constructed a fast-moving page-turner that examines the strange duality of a nation that has engaged in imperial and colonial expansion, and yet has consistently shied away from the term ‘empire’. The book is dedicated to ‘the uncounted’, reflecting those people who live in territories controlled by the United States, but who have no voice and no vote. On the eve of World War II, this figure numbered just more than eighteen million people. For a nation whose revolutionary break from imperial control was defined in part by the statement ‘no taxation without representation’, this is a particularly cruel irony.

In its interrogation and negotiation of contemporary theoretical frameworks and practices at the core of the Italian–Australian migration complex, Francesco Ricatti’s comprehensive study offers a fresh and lucid understanding of the interrelation of core issues and processes affecting settlement and governance of immigration strategies for Italian arrivals in Australia during the past one hundred and fifty years.

A relatively short volume, considering its broad subject, Ricatti’s analysis is nevertheless amply illuminated by the key foci of historical narrative, identity, and memory viewed through a transcultural frame. The author captures the resilience and inventiveness of migrant protagonists operating in the dioramas of preand postwar enterprise; a cultural context replete with strategies that go beyond the well-versed catalogue of the crystallisation of cultural mores, the calcification of traditional values and customs, as well as the familiar socio-economic stories of financial success and endeavour. In reconfiguring the migration narrative’s staple coordinates, Ricatti’s approach represents a fundamental shift in our thinking and a significant revision of the theoretical underpinnings of past decades of scholarship on Italy’s mass-migration history.