Ian Donaldson (1935–2020)

As we were going to press on March 18 we learned that our dear friend and colleague Ian Donaldson had died earlier that morning after a long illness.

Ian, one of Australia’s most distinguished and influential scholars, was educated at Melbourne and Oxford Universities. He returned to Australia in 1969 as Professor of English at ANU. One of his major creations was ANU’s Humanities Research Centre, of which he was Director from 1974 to 1991. That year he returned to the UK as Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. In 1995 he became Grace 1 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge.

ABR’s and my own association with Ian Donaldson really began in 2004 on his welcome return to Australia. He was a member of the ABR Board from 2009 to 2017. In 2011 he delivered the ABR Fiftieth Birthday Lecture at the National Library of Australia. He wrote for us twenty times between 2006 and 2019. Fittingly, his final contribution was a review of his old friend Keith Thomas’s magisterial book In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and civilization in early modern England (January–February 2019).

Ian’s magnum opus was Ben Jonson: A life (2011). It followed a lifetime’s research into his beloved Jonson, and was complemented by the seven-volume Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson in 2012, of which Ian was an indefatigable General Editor.

Anyone who knew Ian was struck by his charm, his modesty, his erudition, and his phenomenal range of friends and associates (though one had to winkle the stories out of him). Time and again he steered ABR towards bright young scholars, for he was a model of intellectual generosity and leadership.

His contribution to this magazine was second to none. We mourn his passing and celebrate an exceptional life.

Peter Rose

A Passage to India

Thank you for your many interesting and thoughtful contributions to the Passage to India competition. In the circumstances, ABR and our partner Abercrombie & Kent think it would be incongruous to announce the winner at this stage, when international travel is moot at best and when such grave issues are uppermost in everyone’s mind. We will name the winner in coming weeks.

Cassandra Pybus is an independent scholar and the author of twelve books of non-fiction, published in Australia, the United States, Canada, and Britain. Her most recent book is Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse (Allen & Unwin).

Where are you happiest?
Walking through the bush behind my house in Lower Snug provides me with self-transcendence that is true joy. Steadily putting one foot in front of the other empties my mind of agitated, ego-driven narrative and fills it with an entirely different sense of purpose. Walking made me a writer.

Australian Galleries opened in Melbourne in June 1956. One year later, Andy Warhol established Andy Warhol Enterprises in New York. Warhol’s art of making money became an art form in itself, with the artist elaborating that ‘good business is the best art’. Gallerists Anne and Tam Purves would have agreed. This husband-and-wife team took selling art seriously and introduced a professionalism unlike anything that had existed in Melbourne. Their new modern enterprise occupied a converted front section of their Derby Street paper-pattern factory in the working-class suburb of Collingwood. While the couple had no experience in art dealership or gallery management, they were confident that the arts were ready for something different. Anne, accomplished in commercial design, had considerable artistic aspirations, while Tam merely transferred his well-established business acumen across the factory threshold into their smart new premises. As with any business venture, timing was important, and they capitalised on the leverage that the 1956 Olympic Games brought to Melbourne.

Amid all the hoopla surrounding the centenary in 2019 of the Bauhaus – naturally more pronounced in Germany – it is gratifying to see such a fine Australian publication dealing with the international influence of this short-lived, revolutionary art and design teaching institute. Bauhaus Diaspora and Beyond – written by Philip Goad, Ann Stephen, Andrew McNamara, Harriet Edquist, and Isabel Wünsche – explores the Bauhaus and its influence in Australia.

Walter Gropius established the Bauhaus in Weimar in 1919. It moved to Dessau in 1925 (Mies van der Rohe became director in 1930), and thence to Berlin in 1932. A year later the Nazis shut it down. It had lasted for just fourteen years, and some of the instantly recognisable designs – notably the Bauhaus building itself, the flat-topped residential architecture by Gropius, and the tubular steel furniture by Marcel Breuer – were designed over an even shorter period (1925–28). In addition to those already mentioned, Josef Albers, Marianne Brandt, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and László Moholy-Nagy are just some of famous artists connected with the Bauhaus.

In Conformity: The power of social influences, the renowned constitutional scholar Cass R. Sunstein acknowledges that social conformity can provide the glue to bind a society together. As he makes clear, there are many particular norms – legal or moral – that we would do well to follow for the sake of the common good. At the same time, he argues, conformity can facilitate atrocities, destroy creativity, drive out nuance, conceal valuable information, and crush free-thinking individuals.

On such an account, conformity often leads to mistakes. Within a process of discussion and deliberation, a propensity to conform to majority thinking is more a vice than a virtue. If we hide our beliefs and preferences when they vary from the mainstream, we keep our critical insights and positive ideas out of consideration. Conformists accrue standing in the group, or at least escape criticism, but they weaken the group’s deliberations. Conversely, honest dissenters may be punished for their trouble, but they offer information that may assist a good outcome. Thus, it is not necessarily conformists who are socially concerned and responsible, and it is not necessarily dissenters who are antisocial and selfish. In many situations, the exact opposite is true.

Below Deck is a stunning literary novel. This is a poetic work that can be read aloud just as easily as it can be read in silence. Sophie Hardcastle wrote Below Deck in 2018 when she was a Provost’s Scholar in English Literature at Worcester College at the University of Oxford. As she reveals in the acknowledgments, she read a draft aloud to her professor, an experience that no doubt consolidated the flow of her prose.

Oli, the protagonist, is a sailor and an artist. Her synaesthesia means that she hears sounds and feels emotions in colour. Hardcastle’s lyrical command of language enables the reader to experience Oli’s world in vivid colour too. Oli is a twenty-something woman whose world is damaged by men – her father, her boyfriend, the all-male crew. The sense of maleness is omnipresent in the novel – how they behave, what they assume, the way they judge others. Their presence leeches the very colour from Oli’s world. But Below Deck is more nuanced than simply pitting maleness against femaleness. There are compassionate men, including the irrepressible Mac and the everyman Hugo.

At its heart – and there is heart to this novel, indeed more than most – Below Deck explores what it is to be female. This is a work for anyone who has felt the sting of misogyny or the consequences of assault. Oli lives those experiences, questions them, crumbles under their weight, and rebuilds herself. All the while, Hardcastle’s lightness of touch means that none of this is didactic. Oli simply is.

The novel is replete with symbolism but can also be brutally frank at times. This is, after all, a work that opens with ‘at sea, no one can hear you scream’. Oli travels to the Southern Ocean, an experience that allows her to begin to recover. This healing is accompanied by a burst of creativity; she begins to see the world in colours she has never experienced before. (Hardcastle was an artist-in-residence in Antarctica in 2017, an experience that doubtless informed the novel.)

This is Hardcastle’s first novel, although she has previously published her memoir of mental illness, Running Like China (2015), and the Young Adult novel Breathing Under Water (2016).

From the Man’s horse ‘blood[ied] from hip to shoulder’ in Banjo Paterson’s ‘The Man from Snowy River’ (1890) to the kangaroos drunkenly slaughtered in Kenneth Cook’s Wake in Fright (1961), non-human animals have not fared well in Australian literature. Even when, as in Ceridwen Dovey’s Only the Animals (2014), the author’s imagination is fully brought to bear on the inner lives of animals, their fate tends towards the Hobbesian – ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ – reflecting back to us our own often unexamined cruelty. The rare exceptions, such as J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello (2003), incorporating a fictionalised series of animal-rights lectures, serve only to point up the rule.

On Boxing Day 1962, The Australian Women’s Weekly opened with a two-page spread on a new publication, Self Help for Your Nerves, by Sydney physician Dr Claire Weekes. Her four precepts for people suffering from ‘nerves’ appeared in huge, bold type: facing, accepting, floating, and letting time pass. Positive reviews followed, including one by Max Harris in ABR’s December 1962 issue. Wary of the ‘help yourself psychiatry’ genre, Harris was quickly persuaded by its ‘particular excellence’. The book went on to become a bestseller in the US and UK markets, and Weekes followed it up with four more.

It is clear from the response to Weekes’s books that anxiety, in its various manifestations, was already a common complaint in the 1960s. The key word was ‘nerves’: people had a nervous disorder, or a nervous breakdown. Most of the terms we use for types of anxiety – post-traumatic stress disorder, agoraphobia, claustrophobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder – were not in common use then, or not yet coined. Treatments offered by psychiatrists ranged from Freudian psychoanalysis to exposure therapy, with an increasing reliance on drugs. Weekes advocated a different, biological approach, which anticipated by decades the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) developed by Professor Steven C. Hayes from the University of Nevada. The patient was encouraged to take charge of her own body, fully experiencing the panic and passing through to the other side.

Westerbork is the name of a transit camp located in the Netherlands. You transitioned from Westerbork to your final destination by means of the Nationale Spoorwegen (the national railways). Eddy de Wind, a Dutch Jewish psychiatrist, met his future wife, Friedel, in Westerbork. Both were sent to Auschwitz in 1943. Eddy was sent to Block 9 as part of the medical staff, Friedel to Block 10 to work as a Pfleger (nurse). Block 10 was administered by the Lagerartz (senior camp doctor), Josef Mengele.

When the Nazis left Auschwitz ahead of the Soviet forces in the autumn of 1944, they took many Jews, Gypsies, political prisoners, and others who might have borne witness against them. This journey became known as the Death March. Friedel was among those on that infamous march. Eddy hid in the camp, treating the sick and abandoned, writing a testimony about his experiences, terrified that his beloved Friedel would not survive.

If our technology-infused world were a great beast, the engorged heart of it would be Silicon Valley. A region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the Valley is the birthplace of the modern start-up, a mecca for tech pilgrims and venture capitalists. A typical start-up has simple ambitions: become a big, rich company – and do it fast. Think Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Airbnb, Uber, Tinder, Snapchat. Like moths to light, budding computer engineers and software programmers are drawn to the Valley, hoping to pioneer the next technological innovation, the next viral app. If they’re lucky, they become some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs of their generation.

Enter Anna Wiener’s memoir, Uncanny Valley: a chronicle of five years working in Silicon Valley in the early 2010s. Before moving to San Francisco, Wiener lives a ‘fragile but agreeable life’ in New York, subsisting on a meagre salary as an assistant at a Manhattan literary agency. Disillusionment gnaws: upward mobility is near impossible, and ‘nobody [her] age was excited about what came next’. One morning Weiner reads an article about an e-reader start-up endowed with $3 million in venture capital – chump change, she later learns – and is lured by the ‘optimism of no hurdles, no limits, no bad ideas’. She applies for a customer-support role at the company; to her surprise she is hired.

Twenty years ago, Robert Tickner tried his hand at the nuanced art of political memoir. Taking a Stand (2001) was, he said, ‘an insider’s account of momentous initiatives’ in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs portfolio in the 1990s. A portrait of the politician as a young man, son, father, and husband was not in the offing. Cabinet diarist Neal Blewett, a man not renowned for political flamboyance, described Tickner’s narrative as ‘remorselessly impersonal’. Privately, it seems, Tickner also protested that ‘the public me is not the real me!’

Now, in Ten Doors Down, Tickner peels back the ministerial veil to reveal that his years in public life coincided with a remarkable journey of self-discovery, and that often ‘the personal overlapped with the political’. The authorial dedication testifies to the scale of that journey; it celebrates two adoptive parents, two birth parents, two step-parents, and two children. Of these relations, it is Maida, Tickner’s birth mother, who very nearly monopolises the reader’s attention. This highly personal political memoir tells a heart-wrenching story of genealogical discovery and relationship formation. It is propelled by two powerful questions: ‘What was her story? Was I made in her image?’

Ali Alizadeh’s books include a new collection of poems, Towards the End (Giramondo, 2020), a scholarly monograph on Karl Marx’s philosophy, Marx and Art (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019), and the novel The Last Days of Jeanne d’Arc (Giramondo, 2017). He lives in Melbourne and is a Senior Lecturer at Monash University.

Which poets have most influenced you?
A great many performance poets in Brisbane and the Gold Coast in the 1990s. I liked the more poetic singers too. One band whose lyrics I really loved was the Irish grunge band Therapy? – vulgar, emotive, memorable. Dorothy Porter was probably the first published Australian poet I actually enjoyed reading. That led me in the direction of the long poem, Charles Olson, H.D., etc.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?
What a question! If I have to pick one, I would say inspired, if only because inspiration seems more necessary. Without it – an initiation, a beginning, no matter how clumsy or hesitant – there would be nothing there to craft.

There is probably no book in a poet’s career more important than their first Selected Poems. It is here that poets have the opportunity to display the best of their work in all its variety over several decades. Individual collections are a mere step on the way. Collecteds tend to be posthumous and of interest mainly to scholars, reference libraries, and a cluster of devotees.

Barry Hill’s Eagerly We Burn: Selected poems 1980–2018 is a fine example of the format: not too long at 193 pages, but sufficiently comprehensive and indicative of his changing and developing concerns. Hill has chosen to arrange his samples in reverse chronological order. This reviewer, perversely perhaps, decided to consider them in the order of their first appearance.

‘They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.’

Isaac Watts, ‘O God, Our Help in Ages Past’

We play because we kow-tow and are free;  
a set of guidelines activating choice
or so we hope. The mineral poet wrote,
‘By loss of memory we are reborn’,
but memory’s the root of active power:
we grab the minute and we grasp the hour
hoping that such engagements prove us free.

Let’s fancy a parrot-coloured, balmy world
muralled with insatiable spring
where cluey despots hold the twisted strings of power,
suppose they could breed vice clean out of us
morphing us into a Sunday school,
would we accept that kind of rule?
Can genetic philosophers change the world?

The trouble is, we can’t imagine it;
like centaur, flying saucer, basilisk
it’s made from fancy’s molecules and glue:
purely synthetic thought. And yet it has
a charm, like building cottages from blocks –
the looming castle-wall your children’s toy box.
You’re free to fancy folk to put in it.

Where lies the bridge between pure fate and thinking?
One answer might be found in William James,
a magical stylist, like his portly brother.
(I wonder how those two got on so well.)
But on a looming larger scale, or stricture,
how does our transience occupy that picture
smudged by the Fall – and thinking?

Ah, that’s the canny rub, I see:
keeping the long and short of things elastic,
when set in motion, folk engender fate,

                        hoping that we are free…

                                                    or might be free.

Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness by Peter Boyle

Vagabond Press, $25 pb, 82 pp

Peter Boyle’s Enfolded in the Wings of a Great Darkness is a book-length elegiac poem dedicated to his partner, the anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018). Unlike other works lamenting the illness and loss of a spouse, Boyle’s collection largely avoids representing the day-to-day demands of suffering from (or caring for someone suffering from) an incurable disease. Instead, Boyle’s poetry sequence offers a more metaphysical approach to the uncertainty and grief that he and his partner faced.

There is a decidedly ‘nocturnal poetics’ at work in these stunning poems (which were written before Rose’s death). The poems work as a single sequence partly through their use of imagery and motif. These motifs evoke the traditional dyads of light and dark, selfhood and oblivion, but they do so with extraordinary originality. Sometimes the imagery has a trace of the surreal, as in these lines:

an apocalypse
of stunted proportions
your past comes towards you
as a matchbox of ashes
handed you by a stranger
on a vanishing street corner
one long rainy night.

Felicity Plunkett has being doing good works in the poetry sphere for some time now. She has edited for UQP a recent series of new and established poets; she reviews a wide variety of poetry in newspapers and magazines, as well as writing evocatively, in this journal, about influential figures in popular Australian poetics like Nick Cave and Gurrumul Yunupingu. Valuably, she has also made practical contributions to poetry teaching in the secondary English curriculum. Now she has published a second volume of her own poetry, a varied collection of highly accomplished poems.

Plunkett’s world is a densely lexical one, intricately formed at every turn. Like two of her favourite poets from the sorority she draws strength from, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath, Plunkett is a word lover, in every sense. As those two poets teach you, words just by themselves can be intimate, awesome, weird. Often Plunkett’s poems are generated by arcane or specialist words: the barely contained pain of ‘On Carrying: Seven Cledons’, for example, is a sequence of lyrics in response to chance linguistic encounters that mean very different things to the poet from what they mean to the people around her: ‘In meetings academics say / I’ll take carriage of this’; a page of W.H. Auden’s Letters from Iceland opens randomly at the line about hearts’ desires: ‘Better never to be born.’ A cledon was a form of ancient divination involving ‘chance findings of words overheard or stumbled upon,’ unwitting messages and occasions.

‘Syzygy’ is a conceit, spun out of the double reference of the title, to words and plants: ‘you’re all / verb: pressed to you, wilfully / irresistibly, like ivy’. The poem is full of exotics, linguistic and botanical, introduced from outside the everyday and native, like Hedera rhombea, ‘plamately’, and ‘quixotry’. The poem also consists of two fourteen-line verse paragraphs – so sonnets actually – another syzygy of arithmetic and poetics, but all one sentence. This syzygy of form and theme is also apparent in poems like ‘Blood Days: Monochords’, a poem of numbered single lines (like the string instrument) printed sideways on the page. Plunkett is a poet who likes to give words like ‘xanthic’ (rather than yellowish) a go, or label a poem ‘Anomiidae’ (about saltwater clams). ‘Carpus Diem’, like ‘Syzygy’ one of several conceit love poems in this collection, and subtitled ‘wrist mnemonics’ (wrist the day, get it?), is about remembering one physical attribute of the beloved. Built around the mnemonics used by medical students to learn the bones of the hand, it is full of words like scaphoid, capitate, hamate, perhaps the lexophiliac extreme of these poems. Fo shizzle, some readers of poetry might find this trait off-putting, even superior, but it should be read the other way, as reassuring: every word in these poems has been chosen carefully.

Felicity Plunkett (photograph supplied)

Plunkett is unafraid of talking about love, which she does frequently in these poems. The first poem in the collection, ‘Sound Bridge’, is as unabashed about its high cultural setting – a Mozart performance in Moravia – as it is about the poet’s love for her son, singing in the concert. The poem is a multi-levelled meditation on love and joy, and their antitheses occasioned by Mozart’s ‘Lacrimosa dies illa,’ but with the metaphorics of piano construction at its imaginative core. The bridge links the source of the sound (strings, emotion) and its amplifier (music, singing, poetry). That’s what the poems are – sound bridges – although the poet is also aware of another element in the instrument’s workings, and the need to dampen her anxieties. You might think that Plunkett’s poems sound a bit highly strung then, but they are so well and often densely crafted the reader isn’t short-changed.

The last poem in the collection, ‘Inclined’, is also about love, this time in the shape of a conceit about climbing a mountain. This extended metaphor of the experience of love might sound naff, but as the title implies it’s the angle the poet takes that makes it work, plus the linguistic energy, sometimes shifting into wit: ‘you can’t / wait, think of love as losing wait, court waitlessness’. Once again, the self-conscious diversion into poetics and the real: on the climb up the mountain, ‘keep in mind the rhyme / (rain on face) (warm embrace) the rhyme / of it, the pulse, climbing in iambics’, steadily. Somehow Plunkett manages to keep it light and fun, ‘the climb takes heart / and breath from you’, a climb that ends in the puzzle of not-knowing and knowing at the same time.

Another poem in this collection deserves special mention for the arrestingly original thinking it represents about rhythm. ‘Bridge Physics’, yet another love conceit, ends with the revisionary statement that it is ‘a song’. The set-up of the title is glossed in the epigraph from a University of Colorado engineering textbook. It’s about the two major forces of compression and tension, like the ones that act on a bridge. Plunkett translates this discourse of mechanical engineering, which of course is about how to avoid breakage or failure, into the scene of the lovers. The poem alternates between the assertions of love by the poet – ‘you do me / good’ – to the idea that poetry, like the relationship, also exists by opposing forces (song and silence). There’s much more to this poem, but it is the tensions that the lines (and their spaces) enact, moving one way then another, that are so deftly crafted.

For all its energy and brilliance, this is poetry that relies on some fairly traditional foundations, and this is part of its appeal. The metaphors and conceits, the intricate exploration of poetic form, even the exuberance of printing a verse upside down, or a whole poem, sideways, doesn’t disturb the always straightforward and careful syntax, even when it is fragmentary. Which is an interesting and distinctive signature for a contemporary poet. Plunkett is not tempted by the varieties of contemporary derangement in poetic language, she is absolutely certain about that, something she has learnt, I suspect, especially from Plath. She knows exactly what she’s doing.

The publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring (1962) is widely regarded as one of the key moments in the development of the global environment movement. In the wake of Silent Spring, science fiction writer Frank Herbert published the first of the Dune series in 1965. Herbert presented complex descriptions of alternate planetary ecologies, with influential characters known as ‘planetologists’ (a new film version is due out this year). In 1972, the image of the ‘Blue Marble’ was released, a photo of Earth taken by the Apollo 17 crew on their way to the moon, also widely considered to be critical in influencing public understandings of our finite planet. Each of these developments extended a long history of exploratory research, experimentation and imagination about the deep and complex connections of Earth systems. Sarah Dry’s Waters of the World investigates six critical figures in this history.

The Hypermarket, an enigmatic and deeply uncanny novel, explores ‘mistranslation’ against the backdrop of Nietzsche’s philosophy of Eternal Return. Gabriel García Ochoa’s début novel transforms the Houghton Library at Harvard University into a Borgesian space. As the narrator is undertaking his research, he comes across an excerpt from a letter copied into an old diary. It details the lives of people living in a supernatural Hypermarket, ‘where the linoleum floor gives way to moss and a young, tender turf’. In a highly significant moment, the narrator rips out the pages and stores them in volume six of The Arabian Nights.

García Ochoa’s The Hypermarket revels in its matryoshka structure of stories inside stories, demonstrating that ‘stories are infinite ... they contain everything and nothing’. In this way, the book is both fragmentary and cohesive, simultaneously a series of short stories and a novel.

The use of self-reflexive moments and repetition expertly problematises the relationship between fiction and reality, while obsessive questioning of the narrators’ reliability foregrounds an appeal to the plurality of truth. These fascinating narrators are wonderfully eccentric and include Gasparian Nebula, who lives only in the present; Eddie W, a three-quarters bull; and an unnamed narrator who relates the stories of characters such as painter, Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen; Ganeshiya, an elephant; and Dr Edith Crossman, ‘Head of Khrono-Translation, Specialisation: Future into Present’.

The most memorable narrative is a brilliant reworking of the ‘Apollo and Daphne’ myth. As the bull charges, Laurel transforms into a tree, her Nikes ‘burst[ing] open like ripe pomegranates’ and ‘roots burrow[ing] into the ground out of toes and fingers’. Less effective is ‘Da Train’, with its awkward use of language: ‘U only get 1 chance 2 c ur loved 1s again.’ Also, the use of double spacing throughout the book is uninviting. It reads more like a thesis or draft rather than a published novel. It also makes the book appear double its length.

The Hypermarket explores the story of circular time and its relationship to ‘Meaning, as ... an elusive bird that not only nests in words but is made from them too.’ In its best moments, García Ochoa’s use of magical realism is part-Murakami, part-García Márquez.

The Coconut Children is an assured début from nineteen-year-old novelist Vivian Pham, who has drawn upon the richness of Sydney’s south-western suburbs to construct a deeply affecting coming-of-age story revolving around teenager Sonny.

Pham’s language is melodramatic at times. With bold flourishes she expertly captures the internal monologue of a teenage girl navigating the everyday travails of being a young woman – schoolyard crushes and the ‘violent ammunition of her love thoughts’, an ever-changing body, and a burgeoning sexual awakening – alongside the darker undercurrents present within Sonny’s family and her wider community: sexual abuse, domestic violence, intergenerational trauma, addiction, and poverty.

Pham adroitly evokes the emblems of suburban living, specifically Cabramatta, through the smell of day-old frying oil, the sprinklings of charcoal chicken shops, and bus-stop graffiti. There is a meticulous level of detail in every sentence, elevating the ordinary into the sublime and imbuing the narrative with a magical quality: Pham has a gift for sketching the minutiae of her characters’ lives, from the faded purple of Sonny’s mother’s tattooed eyeliner to the sulphuric sweetness of the durian cake that Sonny’s love interest, Vince, abhors.

In a book signposted by the shifting seasons, Pham uses the language of deciduous trees and dwindling sunlight to describe the temperament of abuse in Sonny’s household and the households around her to foreboding effect: ‘Unable to escape fate’s clutches, the siblings dressed to swelter.’

The story is a universal migrant Bildungsroman in many ways, yet it has a specificity directly linked to Pham’s own experience of growing up as a child of Vietnamese refugees. Vietnamese terms of endearment, salutations, and food are peppered throughout the text in italics, as Sonny straddles two languages in an attempt to straddle two different worlds. Pham expertly captures the weight of trauma, present in Sonny’s father who ‘had taught his sufferings to chisel him free’ and the inextricable burden of descending from people who have made such enormous sacrifices, so much so that Sonny wonders at one point if ‘she loved her mother for who she was, or what she had done for her’.

The Coconut Children is a book about what it’s like to navigate a world that’s not made for you, but it retains levity and a crucial sense of hope throughout. It refuses to be defined by trauma, even as it delves into it with a fine-tooth comb.

Dervla McTiernan’s third novel consolidates her standing as a star of Irish detective fiction, following her breakout début, The Rúin (2018), and its follow-up, The Scholar (2019), all featuring Detective Sergeant Cormac Reilly.

Dublin dominates the imagination of Irish crime writing, but McTiernan’s stories centre around the western city of Galway and the small towns that surround it, places with pretty, smiling exteriors that mask darker moral and economic realities. For every cheerful local pub and beautiful seaside terrace there is a building lot abandoned in the wake of economic crisis and a cheaply constructed block of units with no heating and a rent-gouging landlord.

Hilde Hinton’s début novel is character-driven storytelling at its best. Its narrator, Susie, is a perpetual outsider whose world comprises ‘her dad, her crazy sometimes-there mum and a house that didn’t look like the others’. Susie faces life’s brutal realities earlier than most: by Year Seven she has moved from the country to the city, taken up selling newspapers in Melbourne’s streets, where adventure lurks but so do ill-motivated men, and seen her mother drifting ‘in and out of the mind hospitals’.

Hinton’s style is direct, conversational, and often funny, despite the subject matter: ‘Admitting defeat is like being able to laugh at yourself. A must.’ Susie’s sensitive intelligence, her fall-down-seven-times-get-up-eight determination, and her vulnerability make the reader protective of this young girl, who can be impulsive and obsessive but also generous and imaginative. Her friendship with other outsiders (‘Two differents make a same; two outcasts makes no outcasts’) is a lifeline in her teens as she seeks belonging in Sydney’s counterculture of the 1980s.

Interspersed through this narrative are chapters about Miss Kaye (though to a lesser extent than the marketing blurb suggests). Miss Kaye works at The Institute, where employees have different strategies to deal with ‘the damaged, the dangerous, the not-quite-rights’. For Miss Kaye, ‘simply being herself was mostly effective’. These chapters, though few, establish Miss Kaye’s quick wits and hard-won wisdom.

With much of Hinton’s family story shared publicly through the charity Love Your Sister – Hinton is the sister of Connie Johnson, who died from cancer in 2017 after raising millions for cancer research, and of actor Samuel Johnson – it’s hard not to draw parallels between narrator and author. Like Susie, Hinton, who works as a prison officer, grew up in Daylesford with a mother battling mental illness. With Hinton cheekily inserting real-life references – like ‘that nice man riding a unicycle around the country for cancer research’ – it seems an unstated premise that the novel contains some autobiographical content.

Hinton has an ear for dialogue and an eye for detail, but her work’s greatest asset is its heart. Her moving, well-realised début introduces a promising Australian writer.

The American writer Jack Matthews had no time for what he called ‘a discontent’ with the brevity of the short story. ‘Ask a coral snake,’ he declared, ‘which is as deadly as it is small.’ The claim for ‘deadliness’ certainly applies to four recent début collections; in the tight spaces of the short story, each one presents confronting ideas about contemporary Australia.

Wild Fearless Chests by Mandy Beaumont

Hachette, $28.99 pb, 212 pp

Mandy Beaumont’s Wild Fearless Chests, shortlisted for the 2019 UWAP Dorothy Hewett Award and the 2018 Hachette Richell Prize, is the most harrowing of the four collections. Its stories of gritty realism reveal the horror of rape, domestic violence, paedophilia, and repulsively squalid surroundings. The typically matter-of-fact tone of the narration paradoxically intensifies the darkness of the content and enacts the helpless passivity of the predominantly female victims. There are also examples of the gothic and the parable, including the grim ‘Kafka’s Apple Sitting in Between Her Shoulder Blades as Infection’, in which the desire for gender transformation descends into a nightmare of familial cruelty and condemnation.

Much political mileage has been made in Australia from the turning back of ‘boat people’. Travel by boat is the cheapest means of getting to this island continent, and the most dangerous. Boat travellers are the poorest and the most likely to be caught and deported or sent to an offshore camp. But their number is less than half of those who arrive by air as tourists and apply for refugee protection: some 100,000 have done so during the seven years of this Coalition government.

In January 2020 alone, 1,931 air travellers sought asylum; more than twenty of them were deported. The rest wait for their cases to be decided. Among those who applied, 255 came from India, 309 from China, and 546 from Malaysia. The work of assessing these claims is tedious and slow, and Australians at the Refugee Review Tribunal say privately that most of them are false. Some ninety per cent of applications for protection visas are rejected, the highest rate being for Chinese, of whose claims only 3.3 per cent succeed.

‘When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished.’ That gunshot of a quotation comes from the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. I suspect he means writers are traitors to biology – they have higher allegiances than blood ties. Art is their true spouse; their works are the favoured first-born.

Catherine Dickens had ten children by her husband, Charles. Each was named after a famous author or a literary creation of the author – a heavy nominal burden assumed at birth – and was given the best education money could buy. Aside from a daughter, Dora, who died at eight months of age, eternally immunising herself against parental disappointment, and Henry Fielding Dickens, who had a solid if not stellar legal career, the rest represent a generational catalogue of failure and mediocrity.

The poet Anne Michaels once wrote that when love finds us, our pasts suddenly become obsolete science. All the secret places left fallow by loneliness are flooded with light and the immanence of the longed-for one draws us into the clearing, stains us with radiance. Yeats’s wing-footed wanderer arrives at last and the miraculous restorations of love and the imperatives of desire render our separate pasts ‘old maps, disproved theories, a diorama’.

Felicity Volk, sublime prose-poet and sage student of the human heart, knows this not to be true. Our histories mark us indelibly, coursing through us like underground rivers, every wound part of the invisible arterial system of our souls. We cannot slip past some damage done to us; it coalesces and echoes though the lives that we carve out for ourselves, disfigures our future outline in the world.

Kate Lister (historian and curator of the website Whores of Yore) writes in her foreword to Sounds and Furies that language ‘is a powerful agent of social control, and dictates the acceptable, the feminine, and the well behaved’. Slang lexicons have long served to objectify women in all sorts of ways. It is not surprising, she argues, that Green’s Online Dictionary of Slang records only twenty-seven slang terms for the clitoris but 1,122 for the vulva. Female sexual pleasure does not find much expression in the slang lexicon.

Women and their relationship to and with slang has been a neglected topic in the otherwise copious literature on slang. Jonathon Green, today’s foremost slang lexicographer, has finally tackled this topic in his fascinating and hefty new book. He takes us on a journey through some seven hundred years of the slang lexicon in an effort to show how women have always had a stake in slang.

‘The tourist travels in his own atmosphere like a snail and stands, as it were, on his own perambulating doorstep to look at the continents of the world. But if you discard all this, and sally forth with a leisurely and blank mind, there is no knowing what may not happen to you.’ Thus, in 1928, British writer Freya Stark, an intrepid traveller, described the distinction between a traveller and a tourist. British historian Peter Furtado’s new anthology, Great Cities Through Travellers’ Eyes, is squarely aimed at the former. In it he collects the writings of a diverse group of writers about thirty-eight different cities, over a period dating from ancient times to the 1980s (more on that later). Some writers, such as Marco Polo, Hans Christian Anderson, and Simone de Beauvoir, are well known, others less so.

Some like what they see, others do not. As Furtado observes, ‘the reactions of the writers … reveal as much about their own characters and interests as about the cities themselves’. For example, Anthony Trollope, who visited Sydney in 1871, reveals, perhaps unwittingly, his snobbery in his praise of Sydney’s Botanic Gardens: ‘For loveliness, and that beauty which can be appreciated by the ignorant as well as by the learned, the Sydney Gardens are unrivalled.’

The writerly ‘I’ is notoriously fraught and political in non-fiction writing. What are the implications of writing from a biased and limited perspective (as all of us inevitably do)? How to get around – or work within – the constraints of the personal? These questions are ethical ones but also ones of craft. Many memoirists and essayists have grappled explicitly with them on the page.

In 2017, Ellena Savage wrote an essay titled ‘Antimemoir, as in Fuck You (as in Fuck Me)’. It was published as part of her books column in The Lifted Brow. Savage has lost her writerly ‘I’, she claims in this essay, following three events: an anti-memoir workshop run by writer Bhanu Kapil; reading James Alan McPherson’s Crabcakes (1998) and Yiyun Li’s Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life (2017); and uprooting her life (‘again’). ‘When in the past I wrote,’ Savage writes, ‘there was a point from which “I” could pivot. A time and a place and a self, located at the centre of those dimensions.’ But now? ‘Can’t write memoir now. How ’bout antimemoir?’

Essays One is the first of two volumes of collected non-fiction drawn from all periods of Lydia Davis’s long career. While the second collection will, according to the author, ‘concentrate more single-mindedly on translation and the experience of reading foreign languages’, this volume has an alternating focus on writing and reading practices, translation, commentary, reviews, and personal essays. It is loosely structured, non-chronological, and doesn’t shy away from repetition or reiteration – particularly throughout the several pieces that share the subtitle ‘Forms and Influences’.

The collection of these essays into a single volume serves readerly convenience more than a desire for purposeful proximity. It makes it easier to read Davis’s non-fiction side by side, to identify any shifts in thought or sensibility, and to locate those repetitions. A few pieces appear to be without obvious purpose – except, perhaps, for what they reveal about Davis’s interests – but most are more than worthy of republication.

Listen to this essay read by the author.

During my first month as a trainee journalist at The Sun-Herald newspaper in Sydney, I went on strike. It was the year 2000, and the newspaper enjoyed a full roster of reporters and photographers dedicated solely to one edition each Sunday, yet even during this well-resourced period there were inklings of the headwinds to come.

The Fairfax (now Nine Entertainment) chief executive officer at the time, Fred Hilmer, had alienated many reporters with plans to modernise the old mastheads in a manner that staff worried would put profits before quality. Word spread quickly that Hilmer had called reporters ‘content providers’ and referred to the newspapers as ‘advertising platforms’. Aggrieved journalists downed tools and my fellow trainees and I dutifully joined the striking workers on the picket line. Afterwards, we bought some cheap bottles of wine and drank them in the Royal Botanic Gardens, privately hoping that the strike would end soon so that our meagre trainee wages would be reinstated, thereby sparing us the indignity of moving into the gardens more permanently.

Two decades on, the protestations of my journalism colleagues appear like the minor gripes of an industry that has lost a much larger fight. The terminology hardly matters anymore, nor would the phrase ‘content provider’ be viewed nowadays as a slight against the media’s overarching mission to challenge and inform. After all, it matters little what the chief executive calls the profession if there is no one left to perform the work, or worse, if the media outlet ceases to exist.

At the beginning of March, it was announced that Australian Associated Press (AAP) will close, abruptly ending the eighty-five-year history of the respected newswire and further narrowing an already concentrated media landscape, dominated, in print at least, by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Veteran reporters who thought they were inured to the upheavals of their industry – who have witnessed decades of cutbacks, sacked co-workers, closed international bureaux, and a revolving door of executives – were shocked by the dissolution of this largely invisible but vital service. I was among the crestfallen, having spent four instructive years as a court reporter for AAP a decade ago, but my shock no doubt paled in comparison to the grief felt by the 200 or so current reporters whose jobs are threatened.

Labor MPs hold up signs in support of Australian Associated Press (AAP) during House of Representatives Question Time at Parliament House in Canberra, Tuesday, 3 March 2020. (AAP Image/Lukas Coch)

Predictably, a public brouhaha has commenced over who is to blame, with AAP’s major shareholders, News Corp and Nine, pointing the finger at the proliferation of free news on social media and digital-content aggregators, while the journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (MEAA), has suggested that the reported closure was designed to thwart Nine and News Corp’s rivals, who also subscribe to AAP. Most recently, a potential lifeline was thrown to reporters when multiple parties expressed an interest in buying AAP. It’s a heartening development, but somewhat tempered by chief executive, Bruce Davidson’s, warning to staff not to get their hopes up: ‘I must stress that at this stage we have no understanding on the viability or otherwise of these approaches,’ he said.

There is talk of trying to patch together some weak substitute – News Corp and Nine are considering developing in-house breaking news services – while discussions were reportedly held to establish a cooperative among the remaining small subscribers to pool news and photography resources. If AAP fails to find a respectable buyer or some limp iteration takes its place, it is abundantly clear that the loss will have widespread ramifications for the media’s ability to fulfil its charter to inform the citizenry and to keep a vital check on power. The major mastheads all subscribe to AAP, as do smaller and newer players, including Verizon Media, regional papers, radio, and, to some extent, The Guardian. Newsrooms across the country have shrunk at an alarming rate over the past two decades, with data showing the number of journalists in traditional print businesses fell by twenty per cent from 2014 to 2018 alone, as outlined in the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) ‘Digital Platforms Inquiry’ report.

Yet AAP journalists, burdened by their own staff cutbacks, have continued to turn up to court cases, royal commissions, council meetings, and coronial inquests, informing Australians on what is happening in their communities, judicial system, and tiers of government. It is the kind of methodical, serious, deeply important work that buttresses a free press. Wire journalists do not need to fill blank pages like their colleagues on a news masthead, which means that there is very little pressure to cook up a specific angle. AAP is owned by four media outlets, with rivals Nine and News Corp holding the largest stake, and the wire service’s need to cater to a range of subscribers ensures that it has never taken a distinct editorial line. News wires, furthermore, are immune from the commercial need to attract advertisers. This liberates journalists from the weak will of nervous editors who cannot hold the line against commercial pressure to kill or limit a damaging story.

AAP also plays a fundamental role in its indirect support of long-form investigative work. A number of fine wire reporters have broken exclusives, but it’s been AAP’s broader role in helping to free up subscribers’ newsrooms for deeper fact-finding that has made it such an asset. This deep investigative work is invaluable, especially in light of the federal government’s hostility towards media probing and accountability, which has only increased in recent years. In the past year alone, Australian Federal Police (AFP) officers have raided the home of a News Corp journalist and the ABC Sydney office in relation to exclusive and damaging stories, while the Australian Signals Directorate Director-General, Rachel Noble, recently admitted to a Senate estimates committee that the ASD had spied on Australians, claiming they were ‘rare circumstances’. In 2016, journalist Paul Farrell, formerly of Guardian Australia, discovered the AFP had attempted to identify and prosecute his confidential sources by seeking to access his metadata without a warrant. Meanwhile, journalists are continually frustrated in their efforts to access information through the obstructive and clunky Freedom of Information (FOI) apparatus, the prime minister, Scott Morrison, refuses to answer questions over the sport grants affair, and we still lack a robust federal anti-corruption body, with the government proposing a toothless Commonwealth integrity commission instead. These are but a handful of worrying examples of creeping government intrusion, obfuscation, and overreach, and it is not difficult to imagine how an impoverished reporting climate and the loss of a major news player will further hobble the media’s ability to hold the powerful to account.

The crisis becomes even more acute when you consider that many Australians receive their news through a limited range of sources, including uncredentialed stories on social media. According to the findings of the 2019 ‘Digital News Report’, coordinated by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at the University of Oxford, Australians are less engaged with news than citizens of other countries. The report found that, compared to the citizens of thirty-seven other countries, we are less likely to check the accuracy of a story and we use fewer sources to access news. This trend was visible during the recent Black Summer bushfires, when an analysis by BuzzFeed found that some social media accounts were spreading information and images of the fire that were false, misleading, or unverified, including the widely circulated lie that Greens MPs oppose hazard-reduction burns.

While many commentators agree on the need for reliable news sources, few can agree on how to fund it, with the social-justice principles of journalism seemingly out of step with the commercial imperative of modern business. MEAA Chief Executive Officer Paul Murphy has argued that the government must intervene to protect public-interest journalism through a levy on a percentage of the digital revenue that the likes of Google and Facebook make from their use of news content. Chair of the Public Interest Journalism Initiative (PIJI) Allan Fels has similarly called on the government to step in with potential tax rebates that he says could inject up to $380 million into public-interest journalism. The editor-in-chief of AAP, Tony Gillies, told ABR that he doesn’t believe it is the role of the government to support news, but thinks more needs to be done to rein in Google and Facebook. ‘I can see the case for a short-term [government] funding boost to a new entrant, but long-term I think it’s the government’s role to act primarily to ensure a level playing field,’ said Gillies, referring to the advertising revenue Google and Facebook make from mainstream media content. ‘To be honest, this problem began when we in the media started giving our content away for free online, and now it is like trying to get the toothpaste back into the tube.’

On the day AAP’s closure was announced, Morrison and Federal Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese stood up in Parliament to express their sympathies for sacked staff. Albanese listed the names of the AAP Canberra bureau staff one by one, solemnly paying his respects to journalism’s most recent casualties. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the sentiment, but there is no clearer sign of the Fourth Estate’s growing impotence than the sight of MPs offering their pity and condolences up to its charges.

Our democracy will be weakened if AAP closes its doors, creating news deserts in our communities and entrenching social media’s panicky echochamber of likes, shares, and viral outrage in its place. Meanwhile, the nation’s most pressing stories will be left untold.

Rising to the lectern amid a tightly packed crowd in the Cambridge Union’s debating hall, James Baldwin began quietly and slowly to speak. ‘I find myself, not for the first time, in the position of a kind of Jeremiah.’ It was February 1965, and Baldwin was in the United Kingdom to promote his third novel, Another Country (1962). Baldwin’s British publicist had asked the Union if they would host the author. Peter Fullerton, the Union’s president, was quick to seize this opportunity, on one condition: that Baldwin participate in a debate.

Speaking for the motion that the ‘American dream is at the expense of the American Negro’, Baldwin offered his jeremiad not just on the state of American race relations but, as he saw it, the tortured state of the American soul. According to Baldwin, the United States needed saving from itself and only a complete moral reckoning would prevent the country from being engulfed in the hatred and violence so recently on display in Birmingham.

Sometime in the early 1970s – his health poor, his country’s no better – the English composer Benjamin Britten asked his good friend and publisher Donald Mitchell to write his biography, imploring him to tell the truth about his long-term relationship with the tenor Peter Pears. In the ten years that followed Britten’s death in 1976, Mitchell amassed thoughts and notes, all the while deflecting the common query among friends and those outside the hallowed circle, ‘How’s the biography going?’

Ultimately, Mitchell shied away from writing the book. Perhaps he found the task daunting, though it was more likely that this prolific writer did not feel he could deal honestly with the less savoury aspects of his friend’s life and character – the dark moods, the thin skin, the lifelong interest in pre-pubescent boys – certainly while Pears still lived. In the years following Pears’s death in 1986, Mitchell turned toward the more neutral territory of a collection of letters, which, in the twenty-odd years separating the first volume from the sixth, encompassed thousands of pages of notes and explanations, newspaper crits and photos, diary entries, and foreign visas. You could quibble with the selection of letters and documents but never the scholarly apparatus supporting them. This was a serious intellectual endeavour, though a disguise as well.

‘Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.’

Donald Justice, ‘On the Death of Friends in Childhood’

I think of you now for the first time
in about five times as many years
as you actually lived, so uncomplainingly,
they always said, as they do of the dead.
Your name shadows me
as we shadowed your small coffin,
toggle-straight in our uniforms –
why, I have no idea, for my memories
are all school ones, not Scouting:
playing at tents or precipitous pranks,
crossing perilous roped bridges
in front of elders and getting stuck halfway,
intimations of later strandings.
Not so much your face (smooth though it was,
olive, Scandinavian?) as your manner
comes back to me, masculine
as your forthright name (‘Ahoy for Murray Hoy’
we chanted). Yes, manly somehow,
though you were nine or ten when you
eventually died, shunning the ‘bald of hell’,
the titans of accomplishment.
Short though you were,
shorter than I and most of the boys
(though not Beverley Wattle, who shot up
like the skyscrapers we traced in exercise books) –
what made you so precocious,
gifted you with such gravitas? Was it Death
they told you about in private classes,
the notion spared us as we pecked
each other behind saplings
and practised lethal samurai attitudes?

It seems hard to imagine that we need more books on World War I after the tsunami of publications released during the recent centenary. Yet, here we have a blockbuster, a 926-page tome, Staring at God, by Simon Heffer, a British journalist turned historian in the tradition of Alistair Horne and Max Hastings.

Heffer opens by stating that Staring at God is neither a military history of the war nor an international history of the war. It is a social, cultural, and political history that tells the story of ‘how the government and people of a great naval and mercantile power, shaped by the tenets of laissez-faire, broke with the traditions of their culture, liberties, doctrines and customs, and adapted to total war’. It considers how Britain managed to adapt its economy and society to the demands of industrialised war, and how the British state ballooned and gained unprecedented control over the lives of its people. Heffer also focuses on a ‘second conflict’: that between the British state and Ireland. Denied Home Rule by the outbreak of war in 1914, Ireland would erupt in violence in 1916 and progressively descend into partition and civil war.

The centenary of World War I offered a significant opportunity to reflect on the experience and legacy of one of the world’s most devastating conflicts. In Australia such reflection was, on the whole, disappointingly one-dimensional: a four-year nationalistic and sanitised ‘memory orgy’ (to use Joan Beaumont’s wonderful phrase). It did, however, galvanise historians to produce important new studies of the war and to tackle long-standing questions about Australians’ attachment to Anzac. Many of those historians, established and early career, feature in The Great War: Aftermath and commemoration.

Editors Carolyn Holbrook and Keir Reeves take the reader on an almost chronological journey through the aftermath of the war and into the centenary period. The challenges faced by military officials charged with bringing home thousands of potentially unruly soldiers are explained, as are the ways in which Australians responded to the news of the long-wished-for armistice. Australia’s role in the postwar imperial project and its attempts to shore up its strategic position in the Pacific are placed in the context of the fear of another world conflict.

It was only seventy years ago that Aboriginal workers in the north-west of Western Australia emerged from virtual slavery on the pastoral stations in the Pilbara region. Through their own efforts, and with encouragement from some white supporters, they radically changed the industry and undermined a colonising process of government control over them. Their protest is known as the 1946–1949 pastoral workers’ strike, which Anne Scrimgeour declares ‘has the quality of a legend’. In On Red Earth Walking she verifies the story. Her meticulous archival research and evidence, from those whose planning and actions were mostly not recorded, lead her to new understandings. It is her relationship with the strikers and their descendants that makes her book unique, for she conveys their response to colonisation through their eyes.

Colonisation in Western Australia resulted in legislation ‘to make provision for the better protection and care of the Native inhabitants’ (Native Administration Act, 1936). An interpretation of protection as control underpinned government policy in the Pilbara’s pastoral industry, which depended on ‘native’ labour. This industry contributed enormous wealth to the state, and so ‘protection’ meant safeguarding industrial relations favourable to the employers, and the state.

Listen to this review read by the author.

Truganini: Journey through the apocalypse follows the life of the strong Nuenonne woman who lived through the dramatic upheavals of invasion and dispossession and became known around the world as the so-called ‘last Tasmanian’. But the figure at the heart of this book is George Augustus Robinson, the self-styled missionary and chronicler who was charged with ‘conciliating’ with the Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples. It is primarily through his journals that historians are able to glimpse and piece together the world fractured by European arrival.

In this book and in earlier works, writer and historian Cassandra Pybus provides one of the most complex and compelling portraits of this vain, ‘problematic fellow’, with his class aspirations and ‘cramped puritan spirit’. He oversaw and led the decimation of the Tasmanian Aboriginal population, and yet was often fighting back against even more indifferent authorities. He also ‘fancied himself an ethnographer’ and took detailed notes of the life of his companions, which confers on him an outsized role in Aboriginal histories of Tasmania. As Pybus laments, ‘Truganini and her companions are only available to us through the gaze of pompous, partisan, acquisitive, self-aggrandising men who controlled and directed the context of what they described.’

Listen to this essay read by the author.

The dismissal of the Whitlam government by the governor-general, Sir John Kerr, on 11 November 1975 was one of the most tumultuous and controversial episodes in Australian political history. The government had been elected on 2 December 1972 and returned at the May 1974 double dissolution, with Whitlam becoming the first Labor leader to achieve successive electoral victories.

The prime minister was at Yarralumla at 1 pm on 11 November to sign the final paperwork for the half-Senate election that he was to call that day. Kerr had agreed just that morning on the wording of the announcement that Whitlam was to make that afternoon in the House of Representatives. That Kerr dismissed Whitlam at that moment and without warning only added to the legal and political furore at the time and ensured its continuing contestation ever since.

With such extraordinary provenance, at once fascinating and disturbing, it is hardly surprising that the rancour, division, and fierce debate that greeted Kerr’s actions have never ended. The dismissal raised fundamental legal and political questions about the relationships, responsibilities, and conventions of parliamentary democracy in a constitutional monarchy, and personal questions of propriety and ethics in high office. It is as irresistible, operatic, and compelling today as it was forty-five years ago.

In terms of the historiography, the last decade has been a sharp corrective to history, propelled by a series of archival revelations that have gradually and collectively recast our understanding of the dismissal and challenged even its most established historical facts. It is remarkable that even today, more than four decades later, critical documents about the dismissal remain secret, hidden from public view and from history. The ‘Palace letters’, correspondence between Queen Elizabeth, Sir Martin Charteris (her private secretary from 1972 to 1977), and Kerr relating to the dismissal are among Kerr’s papers held in the National Archives of Australia. They are embargoed ‘on the instruction of the Queen’ until at least 2027, after which their release requires the approval of both the governor-general’s official secretary and the monarch’s private secretary, giving the monarch an effectively indefinite veto over their release. We cannot see the letters until the queen or her successor, King Charles, says we can.

Queen Elizabeth II departing Australia at the Sydney airport farewelled by Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, 1973 (National Archives of Australia NAA A6180 2510733)

The importance of the Palace letters lies in the evolving history of the dismissal of which they are the last of the ‘unattainable archives’, without which the history will remain flawed and incomplete. In the continuing process of revelation and historical (re)construction that has reframed the history of the dismissal in recent years, Kerr’s papers in the National Archives have been of unparalleled significance. It was there that I discovered Kerr’s notes revealing the role of the then High Court Justice Sir Anthony Mason, who was Kerr’s secret confidant and ‘guide’ over several months before the dismissal, ‘fortifying me for the action I was to take’, as Kerr described it. Mason’s role extended to drafting a letter of dismissal for Kerr. As Paul Kelly has said, the only possible conclusion is that Mason ‘was implicated in the dismissal’. In its fracturing of what had become the central dismissal orthodoxy – that Kerr had acted alone, reaching ‘a lonely and agonising decision’, as the veteran journalist Alan Reid flamboyantly described it – this was the most significant of the dramatic revelations to come from Kerr’s papers in recent years.

A more profound breach of the separation of powers, not to mention personal probity, would be difficult to find, and yet Mason’s role had been kept secret for thirty-seven years, at his own insistence. In this Mason was not alone in seeking to hide his role in this troubling moment in history. The construction of a flawed, at times even false, history by those involved is one of the more disturbing aspects shown by the tumble of revelations in recent years.

One of the more dramatic, and frankly shocking, instances of calculated distortion was revealed in correspondence released by the Archives in 2019, eight years after I first requested it. These letters, between the queen’s private secretary and Kerr in 1978, after Kerr had left office, show the Palace overseeing the final version of Kerr’s autobiography, Matters for Judgment (1978), to ensure that there would be no mention of Kerr’s secret discussions with Charteris at the time of the dismissal. Kerr assured the Palace, ‘I did my very best of course to omit any reference to the exchanges between Martin Charteris and myself.’ This is history by carefully structured omission, a royally sanctioned whitewash of history. It shows Kerr to be as unreliable in print as he was in office.

Kerr’s ‘exchanges’ with Charteris at the time of the dismissal are documented elsewhere in his archives: in his 1980 journal in which he details discussions with Prince Charles and Charteris and cites some of his letters to and from the queen; and in a handwritten list of fourteen key ‘points on dismissal’, which includes ‘Charteris’ advice to me on dismissal’. The clear connection between the Palace and Kerr’s planning for the dismissal of the government is impossible to avoid since, according to Kerr, the queen’s private secretary had advised him on it.

That the ‘Palace letters’ are tremendously important historical documents is beyond dispute. They are a contemporaneous record of Kerr’s version of the circumstances of the dismissal, including the dismissal itself, and at the same time they constitute part of that history as it unfolded. Their release would fill one of the last remaining gaps in the historical record of the dismissal. The National Archives has denied access to the letters on the grounds that they are ‘personal’ communications and not ‘Commonwealth records’, and that, as a consequence, the open-access provisions of the Archives Act (1983), under which they would have been available for public release after thirty years, do not apply.

That correspondence between the monarch and the governor-general, two positions at the apex of a constitutional monarchy, could be seen as ‘personal’ is, on a common-sense reading, manifestly unsupportable. Kerr himself described them as ‘despatches’, as part of his ‘duty’ as governor-general, and they were deposited in the archives in 1978 by David Smith in his capacity as official secretary to the governor-general, after Kerr had left office, and not by Kerr himself. The Archives contends that as ‘personal’ records the letters are strictly governed by what it terms ‘Kerr’s instrument of deposit’ setting out the conditions of access to them: ‘When the Archives accepts such a [personal] collection, we undertake to adhere to arrangements agreed to with the depositor.’

The quandary here is that Kerr did not agree with and sought to change his ‘personal’ terms of access. It was no secret that he wanted his correspondence with the queen to be released, believing that it would vindicate his version of events surrounding the dismissal. Adding to the confusion is that the original Instrument of Deposit attached to the Palace letters by Smith was later changed ‘on the Queen’s instructions’ after Kerr’s death. (I’m not sure how that works for Kerr’s apparently ‘personal’ conditions of access.) It was this change that gave the monarch’s private secretary a lasting final veto. All of which is extremely difficult to reconcile with the concept of the letters as Kerr’s ‘personal’ property.

The Archives Act (1983) makes no such explicit exclusion of the governor-general’s records in general or the vice-regal correspondence with the monarch in particular from its provisions. The designation of the letters as ‘personal’ means that not only are they not subject to the open-access provisions of the Act, but there is also no means of administrative review of the decision to deny access to them. The label ‘personal’ has set an impenetrable legal catch-22, denying both access and review through that single powerful word ‘personal’.

The only avenue to challenge the denial of access to personal records is through a Federal Court action. In September 2016, I launched legal action against the National Archives of Australia in the Federal Court, seeking the release of the ‘Palace letters’. The case centres on the critical question of whether the letters are ‘personal’ or Commonwealth records, which is defined in the Archives Act in terms of property. The core question is: are these letters between the queen and the governor-general the property of the Commonwealth or the property of Sir John Kerr and his family?

The case has been supported by a crowdfunding campaign, Release the Palace Letters, with a legal team working on a pro bono basis led by Antony Whitlam QC at trial, Bret Walker SC at the Appeal and the High Court, with Tom Brennan throughout and instructing solicitors Corrs Chambers Westgarth. After nearly four years, the case has been through the Federal Court and the full Federal Court on appeal. In February 2020 all seven judges of the High Court of Australia heard the case on appeal.

In March 2018 the Federal Court acknowledged the ‘clear public interest’ in the Palace letters, which address ‘topics relating to the official duties and responsibilities of the Governor-General’, relating ‘to one of the most controversial and tumultuous events in the modern history of the nation’. Nevertheless, the Court found that the letters are ‘personal’ and not Commonwealth records, effectively continuing the queen’s embargo over them. In our appeal against that decision, the majority of the full Federal Court in a split 2:1 decision again ruled that the Palace letters are ‘personal’ records. In his strong dissenting judgment, Justice Flick found that it would be ‘difficult to conceive of documents which are more clearly “Commonwealth records” and documents which are not “personal ” property’. The Palace letters, Justice Flick stated, concern ‘“political happenings” going to the very core of the democratic processes of this country’.

Questions on notice in parliament in 2019 from Julian Hill, the Labor member for Bruce, have revealed that prior to the High Court appeal the National Archives had spent close to $700,000 contesting the case. This expenditure comes at a time when the Archives has faced resource pressures, diminishing budgets, and the loss of twenty-five per cent of its staff in the last decade, economies that the director-general of the Archives, David Fricker, has acknowledged have impacted severely on service delivery. The federal attorney-general, Christian Porter, intervened on behalf of the Archives, and the attorney-general’s department has contributed twenty-five per cent of Archives’ costs at the High Court appeal. These federal government bodies have now spent more than $800,000 fighting this crowdfunded case, reinforcing the formidable institutional imbalance faced in taking this action.

The Tune Review into the Archives was completed last year with the common theme recurring in submissions from historians and researchers being the inordinate and unacceptable delays in dealing with requests for access to its records. I am by no means alone in having twenty requests for access, requests that the Archives is statutorily required to deal with within ninety days, still pending after nine years. The Archives appears a broken institution, paralysed by delay, hamstrung by resource pressures, and indifferent to its core function ‘to connect Australians to the nation’s memory, their identity and history’.

The case has already revealed important details about the nature of the letters, and about the curiously arcane relationship between the Palace and the governor-general. Kerr wrote frequently, at times writing several letters in a single day. Central to their correspondence was the prospect of Kerr’s possible removal of the Whitlam government, which Kerr states in his papers he had first raised with Prince Charles in September 1975. Kerr’s letters included other material, commentaries about the political situation and about the governor-general’s powers, and copies of other people’s letters to Kerr.

These enclosures are particularly important in understanding the influences and authorities Kerr was relying on as he considered the dismissal of the government. They would also tell us just what version of the highly polarised political situation Kerr was conveying to the queen. Did he reveal to her, for instance, his negotiations with Sir Anthony Mason, his discussions with Sir Garfield Barwick, or his secret communications with the leader of the opposition, Malcolm Fraser? Most importantly, did Kerr inform the queen of Whitlam’s decision to call the half-Senate election? What is not in the letters will be as important as what is in them.

The Palace letters case has provided a rare opportunity to challenge in open court an entrenched presumption (even in our own National Archives) of royal secrecy, a residual ‘colonial relic’, as Whitlam described such lingering imperial pretensions. The ‘personal’ status of the letters reflects the easy means by which royal communications have been kept from the public both here and in Britain in order to protect the vaunted ‘political neutrality’ of the Crown. This simply confuses secrecy with neutrality and keeps hidden examples of royal political intervention under the guise of ‘personal’ communications.

The powerful archival descriptor ‘personal’ appears at best a misnomer and at worst a sophistry which maintains a veil of secrecy over the queen’s communications with the governor-general at a time of great political controversy, in which the question of the prior knowledge of the queen is singularly important. As Professor Anne Twomey has said, ‘If neutrality can only be maintained by secrecy, this implies that it does not, in fact, exist.’

It is entirely fitting that these fundamental questions of access and control over our archival records, of the functions and powers of the governor-general, and of our national autonomy – questions that go, as Justice Flick said, ‘to the very core of the democratic processes of this country’ – will now be determined by Australia’s highest court, and not the queen.

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.

Ethics of the self

Dear Editor,

I agree with Yves Rees that transgender stories are a valuable addition to the memoir genre. I want to learn more about transgender experiences and how they represent an ethics of the self, especially in their relations with the medical-industrial complex and those they love and relate to. However, I reject both her accusations that gender critical views such as mine are transphobic and her disrespectful use of the label TERF. To question is not a hate crime, just as it is not belittling to raise concerns about the consequences of the current trans fashion on natal women as a class.

Vivian Morrigan (online comment).

Yves Rees replies:

I am glad that Vivian Morrigan is keen to learn more about transgender experience. We all have much to gain from the stories of people unlike ourselves. Empathy, compassion, and the celebration of difference are desperately needed in the world right now.

In regard to her critique, I stand by my argument that the TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) position is transphobic. The TERF insistence that transwomen are not legitimate women and represent a threat to cisgender women is a hateful stance that causes real, measurable harm to the trans and gender diverse (TGD) community, transwomen in particular. TERF campaigns to exclude transwomen from ‘women-only’ spaces such as female bathrooms give rise to the idea that transwomen are predatory imposters whose presence poses a risk to others. This demonstrably false position only further stigmatises and discriminates against an already vulnerable community. Transwomen, along with all TGD peoples, experience shocking rates of mental and physical illness, suicidality, homelessness, unemployment, and violence. This is not because being trans is itself pathological but rather because TGD peoples live in a hostile and transphobic world.

Given this context, what kind of feminism would further attack and question the trans community? In my view, any feminism worth its name should prioritise solidarity between all women – whether cisgender or trans – and advocate for our most vulnerable communities, including TGD peoples. During 2019, when the Victorian parliament considered legislation (now passed) to give trans people the right to amend the sex on their birth certificate with medical intervention, local TERFs launched an extraordinary campaign in opposition to this legislation. This campaign was harnessed to legitimise The Australian’s concurrent transphobic publishing spree, and threatened the safety and well-being of TGD peoples. After transphobic stickers were installed (by an unknown person) in University of Melbourne bathrooms, trans students were given cause to question their safety on campus. My mental health suffered greatly during this TERF campaign, an experience widely shared within the Victorian TGD community.

To describe such efforts as merely ‘gender critical’ is a disingenuous euphemism, one that misrepresents hostile and harmful actions towards an already oppressed minority as reasonable and necessary critique. Furthermore, to suggest that the rising profile and incidence of TGD peoples is a mere ‘fashion’ is an extremely poor choice of words, implying that being trans is a choice or phase rather than a real and legitimate expression of human diversity. The recent vogue for adult colouring books is a fashion; being transgender is not.

Finally, I note that Morrigan misgendered me in her comment. I am not a woman, and all public information about me clearly indicates this fact. Instead I am a nonbinary trans person who uses they/them pronouns. However, Morrigan twice referred to me as ‘her’ – a disrespectful mischaracterisation, typical of the micro-aggressions and erasures that all trans people experience daily.

Australia’s dangerous global role

Dear Editor,

David Holmes’s article ‘Suddenly last summer’ is superbly written, and quite terrifying (ABR, March 2020). I live in both Melbourne and Ontario, and this story must get to Canada: Australia’s dangerous global role in the climate crisis needs to be told in, and to, the global north. The ‘Labour leadership in the climate crisis’ Canadian-funded research project, now twelve years old, has begun exchanging tactics and strategies with some Australian unions. Let there be more action, more information, more exchanges.

Carla Lipsig-Mumme, York University, Canada (online comment)

David Holmes replies:

It is indeed instructive to compare the cases of Australia and Canada, since both countries are impacted by political division around climate change, both are experiencing more extreme weather (including fire in places where it has never previously occurred), and both countries have enormous opportunities to take action.

In the weeks before Black Saturday, Canadian firefighters came to assist in the Victorian Alps. While the Spruce and Fir forests in Canada are much denser, they could not believe how much more heat was radiating from eucalypts, much of that energy released from the canopy. ‘Fuel-load reduction’ does not happen at the canopy, so preventing the severity of such fires in the future is about addressing climate change, as attribution studies have already found.

Paradoxically, many of the same politicians who are now listening closely to medical science on the coronavirus (about which little is known) ignore climate scientists on climate change (about which we know a great deal).

Rapacious gangs

Dear Editor,

Jordan Prosser’s review of the film True History of the Kelly Gang led me to watch the film on Stan and to regret that the film spent so little time in cinemas. The landscape and cinematography were excellent, by far the best aspects of the film, but their impact was mitigated by the screen size. A home screen, no matter how large, cannot do such a film justice.

I wonder how many other quality films will be rushed straight on to Netflix or Stan or Disney+, and their best features thus diminished. I hope we are not about to experience the contraction of the visual scope of new films, to essentially suit only a home television screen. I hope that the rapacious competition between streaming services will not tilt new films away from grand vistas and stunning natural landscapes. And I hope that ABR will continue to review important films, whatever their source and outlet.

Michael Henry, Melbourne, Vic.

Taking issue

Dear Editor,

I must take issue with Michael Morley’s appraisals of perhaps the two marquee shows at this year’s Adelaide Festival, Requiem and The Doctor, both of which he reviewed for ABR Arts. I went to the latter with low expectations; it sounded exactly like fifty talking-head British plays on ‘topical’ themes I’d seen before. On the other hand, I couldn’t wait to see Requiem by renowned Italian director Romeo Castellucci, whose Go Down, Moses was, for me, the high point of the 2016 Festival.

Morley praises Requiem for its memorably ‘evocative, poetic, and, yes, musical images’ and finds The Doctor fatally misjudged and, well, hard to hear. To the contrary, I thought Requiem a shadow of Moses – a banally conceived and grindingly staged funeral service for the planet (and one that, as anyone familiar with Castellucci’s previous works will know, replayed many of the director’s greatest hits, including the distracting gimmick of a live baby).

Where Requiem was boring, making me wish I could just hear Mozart’s glorious music with my eyes shut, The Doctor was riveting from the moment it began. I was seated on the balcony and had no trouble at all hearing (and seeing – it seems the import of writer–director Robert Icke’s gender- and colour-blind casting was lost on Morley) this whip-smart contemporary drama unfold one devastating, unforeseen twist at a time.

Ben Brooker, Brompton, SA

Michael Morley replies:

While there may be differing, subjective views about the colour- and gender-blind casting in The Doctor, the question of audibility and poor diction is, dare I suggest, more objective. Last time I had my hearing checked, it was okay. Last time I sat in The Playhouse, I heard every word. And although one might hesitate to offer Bertolt Brecht’s advice to the audience in the interlude to Man Equals Man (‘If you can’t follow the plot, don’t worry: it’s incomprehensible. If you want something full of meaning, I suggest you pay a visit to the Gents’) as something to follow on every occasion. The conversations overheard in this environment at the performance I attended ranged from ‘Can’t hear or understand what they’re saying’ to ‘Me neither: we’re leaving.’

I acknowledged in my review that there would be a range of responses to the theatrical imagery Romeo Castellucci conjured up to accompany Mozart’s music. On balance, it seemed to me that his approach was of a piece with Igor Stravinsky’s (only slightly ironic) disclaimer from decades ago: ‘I haven’t understood a bar of music in my life, but I have felt it.’

I was unaware that Castellucci had deployed the image of a real baby in a previous production, but given that creative artists are regular plagiarists (the Greeks, Shakespeare, Joyce et al.), I don’t quite see how borrowing a baby can be seen as child- (or theatrical) abuse.

After a summer of bushfires across the nation and phenomenal loss and destruction, Australia – like the rest of world – now faces a health crisis of fearsome scope. As we go to press (earlier than planned because of present uncertainties), the scale of the threat, unprecedented in our times, is becoming stark.

Australian Book Review is mindful of the enormous challenges posed by the coronavirus and by the real threat to people’s health, movement, livelihood, and recreation. We have readers, contributors, and partners around the world, and we are thinking of them. The most important thing is to stay healthy. I and my colleagues wish our friends and associates well.

Literature, art, music, ideas matter more than ever at times like this. Never has reasoned argument or cogent journalism been more important than it is now. ABR is committed to providing such, notwithstanding any changes to our present situation.

It is impossible to predict what will happen in coming weeks and months. ABR is doing its best to prepare for closures, stringencies, or contractions. We anticipate delays in the delivery of the print edition in coming months. We apologise in advance for any disruption.

Our friends in the performing arts are gravely affected by the coronavirus. Festivals, concerts, whole seasons in fact are being cancelled or negatively impacted. We feel for these professionals immensely. ABR Arts will of course maintain its weekly coverage of music, theatre, and the visual arts.

Literature and journalism have a unique dispensation – and responsibility – in the digital age. The online edition of ABR will be unaffected by any interruptions to printing or postal services. We’re taking steps to ensure quality, diversity, and regularity. Our website – with its growing archive stretching back to 1978 – may assume even greater importance in coming months as a platform for reviews, essays, commentary, and creative writing. The new ABR Podcast will also enable us to communicate freely with readers. In late March, for instance, a dozen noted poets and close associates of the magazine will read poems that seem to speak to these anxious-making times.

All current individual print subscribers are entitled to complimentary access to the online edition. If you have not signed up for the latter, we encourage you to do so by emailing Grace Chang at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. or by ringing (03) 9699 8822 to request log-in details for the digital edition. This way you will have constant access to our digital resources.

Since 1961 Australian Book Review has provided readers with thoughtful reviews, incisive commentary, and fine new writing. Ours is a small team – just five of us, which sometimes surprises people – but it’s full of purpose, camaraderie, and resolve.

Enjoy this issue of ABR – and all the ones that will follow. Meanwhile, let’s hope this new pestilence is quickly eradicated. 

Peter Rose, 17 March 2020

On 15 March 2019, the worst mass shooting in New Zealand’s history took place at the Al-Noor Mosque and the Linwood Islamic Centre in Christchurch. Fifty-one people were killed and forty-nine injured as they gathered for Friday prayers. Sickeningly, the gunman, Brenton Tarrant, live-streamed the event on Facebook. A manifesto written by Tarrant quickly surfaced, full of coded language and references best understood by the alt-right community on online platforms such as Reddit, 4Chan, and 8Chan. In court, as he waited for charges to be read out, Tarrant flashed the ‘okay’ signal, once an innocuous hand gesture, now transformed by the culture of the alt-right into a symbol of white supremacy.

Both the Christchurch mosque shooting and the 2017 protests at Charlottesville in the United States have become the most public face of far-right extremism. In Going Dark: The secret social lives of extremists by Julia Ebner and Antisocial: How online extremists broke America by Andrew Marantz, the origins, motives, and methods of online extremist groups are examined. Ebner is a research fellow at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank based in the United Kingdom. For Going Dark, she went undercover, using a range of aliases and, in some cases, physical disguises to penetrate extremist groups. With Marantz, who writes for The New Yorker, his methodology hews to that of an embedded journalist in a war zone: he attends various rallies and far-right meetings, and interviews members of the global far right.

When the German social commentator Oscar A.H. Schmitz described England as ‘Das Land ohne Musik’ [The Country without Music], the insult stuck. Its veracity arose not because the English lacked a vibrant musical culture, or a lively intellectual class prepared to engage with what they were hearing. Rather, it was because Schmitz believed the English simply did not consider music to be an art form that could, or should, play a significant role in the nation’s cultural consciousness.

This generous and engaging volume of scholarly essays examines the work of music critics that stands to counter Schmitz’s censure. Its focus, the title notwithstanding, is on English journalists, authors, and, more latterly, broadcasters, and it covers a period of time almost exactly parallel with the lifespan of George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950). Not surprisingly Shaw’s music criticism features prominently alongside studies of other well-known critics; we are also introduced to many others unlikely to be known today.

Their combined legacy is worth reconsidering, for, as Julian Horton’s especially fine chapter on Donald Tovey’s reception of Schumann and Bruckner reminds us, one risk we run of ignoring their views is that we may be unaware of how we might still be beholden to them. When our own capacity to think critically is also threatened by the decline in rigorous music education in school and a loss of faith in expert opinion more broadly in social media, it becomes all too easy ‘to mobilise received opinion’ than to consider more deeply ‘music’s processual, affective and cultural-historical complexities’. Good criticism should always be grounded in the latter.

Fear has always been a dominant element of human existence, across all human societies, but has our attitude to it changed? It might be argued that our concern with threats has become more pronounced. Is the twenty-first century an especially fearful period in human history?

At the heart of Frank Furedi’s book is the striking assertion that the concept of ‘fear’ is key to understanding our current socio-historical condition: his claim is that we are caught in a ‘culture of fear’. According to Furedi, the idea of a culture of fear provides genuine insight into our current predicament, that is, what is to be regretted about the present.

In recent times, allegations that the general population is being deliberately manipulated by misplaced fears have become commonplace in political life. Such allegations are typically raised with the aim of debunking the arguments of one’s opponents, casting them as forms of ‘moral panic’. An obvious case in point here would be the debates held in the United Kingdom in 2016 over whether Britain should leave the European Union, in which both sides attacked their respective opponents for engaging in scare campaigns. Such debunking is a major theme of the book.