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A want of disclosure

Dear Editor,

In his response to my article, ‘At Her Majesty’s Pleasure: Sir John Kerr and the Royal Dismissal Secrets’, the Director-General of the National Archives, David Fricker, acknowledges that there have been ‘unacceptable delays’ in dealing with access requests, accepts that the National Archives has spent close to a million dollars contesting my legal action in the ‘Palace letters’ case, and yet claims the National Archives is a ‘pro-disclosure organisation’.

I address just one part of Mr Fricker’s response to my article, which discusses this legal action seeking access to the secret Palace letters, between the Queen and the Governor-General Sir John Kerr, relating to Kerr’s 1975 dismissal of the Whitlam government. While conceding the historical significance of and the great public interest in the Palace letters, Mr Fricker writes that they are ‘personal’ records and are therefore governed by their own access conditions agreed to by the National Archives with Kerr, which must be adhered to. To do otherwise, Fricker says, would constitute a ‘massive breach of trust’.

In denying public access to these historic letters, the National Archives argues that it is merely upholding the conditions for access specified by the depositor, Sir John Kerr, as it must for all personal records. As David Fricker describes, the Palace letters were deposited after Kerr left office by the Governor-General’s official secretary, Mr David Smith, ‘as Sir John Kerr’s agent with the Australian Archives in August 1978. In accordance with Kerr’s instructions, their release would occur sixty years (later changed to fifty) from the end of Kerr’s appointment, “only after consultation with The Sovereign’s Private Secretary of the day and with the Governor General’s Official Secretary of the day”.’

That parenthetical ‘later changed to fifty’ neatly masks two critical facts about Kerr’s instructions that Mr Fricker fails to mention, and without which it might appear that Kerr himself had changed the conditions of access – not an unreasonable conclusion since, according to Fricker, the letters must be dealt with ‘in accordance with Kerr’s instructions’. In fact, the changes to Kerr’s conditions were made after Kerr’s death, and on the instruction of the Queen. The access conditions currently over the Palace letters are not those set by Kerr.

There were two changes made to Kerr’s conditions, the second of which was the most significant and which Mr Fricker also fails to mention: Kerr’s requirement that the letters only be released after ‘consultation with’  both the Sovereign’s Private Secretary and the Governor General’s Official Secretary was changed to now require the ‘approval of’ both the Sovereign’s Private Secretary and the Governor General’s Official Secretary. It is this change that has given the monarch an effective final veto over their release, potentially indefinitely.

David Fricker’s insistence that ‘[s]tewardship of personal records requires a respect for the depositor’ is impossible to reconcile with these definitive changes to Kerr’s access conditions over the Palace letters, made after his death and on the instruction of the Queen.

Jenny Hocking, Kensington, Vic.

Dear Editor,

I read with interest David Fricker’s ‘Questions of Access’ defence of the National Archives. Unfortunately, this response reads like the usual cover-up and evasion as to what happened when a twice-elected prime minister was dismissed by the monarch’s Australian representative.

In her article ‘At Her Majesty’s Pleasure’, Professor Jenny Hocking questioned the extent of the monarch’s control over disclosure by the National Archives of the dismissal letters. This is the focus – not whether tens of millions of people access services of the National Archives. The Archives’ Director-General’s statement that ‘the facts will speak for themselves’ is an example of evasion. Surely more openness could direct energy towards exposing the unnecessary deceits of everyday politics, which in this case allows the monarch to maintain control over a most significant event in Australian history. In this matter, the criteria as to what is proprietary and lawful is still determined by the monarch. The Australian public’s right to know remains gagged.

No matter how long it takes, the dismissal letters will eventually be revealed. Let’s end this monarchical cover-up now.

Roger Rees, Goolwa, SA

This worried world

Dear Editor,

I commend ABR on the gutsy decision to create the Behrouz Boochani Fellowship. Australia Council, please note! And I offer my heartiest congratulations to the 2020 recipient, Dr Hessom Razavi. His first offering could not be more timely. His modestly titled article, ‘Notes on a Pandemic’, is remarkable. I have rarely read such an insightful work covering so many areas concerning us at this time. There is the history of the outbreak, the painfully slow gathering of evidence as this beast spread itself around the world, firsthand accounts from those on the frontline, epidemiological considerations, informed speculation about the future, and a detailed explanation of how Covid-19 behaves in the body – all presented in an engrossing fashion.

Rereading the essay several times, I was struck by how little there was of Dr Razavi in the essay. No grandstanding here – he shines the spotlight on others. But we do learn that he and his wife (also a doctor) are about to welcome a daughter into this worried world. She will be blessed by having such brave parents.

I look forward to reading more of Hessom Razavi’s work.

Elisabeth Holdsworth, Morwell, Vic.

Dear Editor,

What a sane and moving commentary on the situation engendered by the Covid-19 pandemic. I listen to the ABR Podcast as a US citizen living in Costa Rica, where the response was immediate, very community-minded, and effective. To date there have been only seven deaths. Friends with other conditions that need attention are now crowded out by huge numbers of Covid-19 patients. A small percentage are hospitalised, and a smaller proportion of those are in the ICU.

What the disease has also done is reveal the threadbare responses of so many countries, the United States being by far the worst. Those of us in or from the so-called First World have been living in a world where compassion is deemed less and less necessary and where community bonds are fragile. Now we are paying the price. If only we could change our ways, oust the corrupt, ignorant, cruel politicians and work towards a better world. In the case of the United States, that will be an uphill battle.

As for Hessom Razavi’s comment about US sanctions: do not expect any humanity on the part of the present US government. Its leader does not lead, and his minions are fanatics with no perceptible mercy.

Bronwyn Mills (online comment)

Dear Editor,

Thanks for an absolutely marvellous article. It is the best thing I’ve read on this topic.

Lindy Warrell (online comment)

Dear Editor,

Why is Dr Razavi so critical of the Iranian government while saying nothing about US sanctions against that country? The Iranian government should certainly be blamed, but we should be even-handed. Dr Razavi also doesn’t commnent on why the situation in the United States, as elsewhere, is much worse than in Iran?

Iradj Nabavi (online comment)

Cart before the horse

Dear Editor,

I completely agree with Peter Mares’s assessment of Liz Allen’s book The Future of Us: Demography gets a makeover. While this passionately argued and engaging polemic examines an aspect of Australian political and economic life from an interesting angle, Allen does ‘put the cart before the horse’ in attempting to present demographics as a solution to our woes rather than a the merely analytic tool which it is.

Wayne Eaton (online comment)

Misogyny

Dear Editor,

Wow! Lisa Gorton’s poem ‘On the Characterisation of Male Poets’ Mothers’ is beautifully written, it is also a devastating analysis of the culturally embedded nature of misogyny (ABR, May 2020). How painful to think of all those mothers receiving slap after slap in the face from their anxious, needy, entitled, selfish, infuriatingly talented sons – wanting to support, but flayed for doing so!

Tom Gutteridge (online comment)

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Calibre Essay Prize

When the Calibre Essay Prize, now in its fourteenth year, closed on January 15, there was an oddly shaped, menacing elephant in the room. Few people were aware of the coronavirus, though it had been detected in China the previous month. Not until January 25 was the first case diagnosed in Australia. By the middle of March, of course, the full extent of the catastrophe was apparent, with untold consequences for society, the economy, and the arts.

For Calibre, the theme uppermost in people’s minds was undoubtedly climate change and the recent bushfires that had ravaged large part of Australia – some of them previously unaffected by bushfires. Then there was the customary range of subjects: literary criticism, philosophical speculation, travel writing, personal memoir, childhood memories, and domestic subjects, often poignant, sometimes harrowing.

Next year, we suspect, the balance will be upset by something called the pandemic.

This year we received almost 600 copies from twenty-nine different countries – by far our largest field to date. The judges this year were J.M. Coetzee (Nobel Laureate), Lisa Gorton (poet, novelist, and essayist), and Peter Rose (ABR Editor).

Often, the two winning Calibre Essays are very different, reflecting the multifarious nature of the field. Last year, for instance, Professor Grace Karskens, the overall winner, introduced us to the remarkable Nah Doongh, one of the first Aboriginal children to grow up in conquered land, while the second prize went to Sarah Walker’s highly personal account of an abortion. (Sarah, who went on to become one of the first ABR Rising Stars, has a wonderful essay titled in this issue, 'Contested Breath', on the loss and commemoration of her mother at the start of the pandemic.)

This year it’s very different: both essays deal with aspects of gender, difficulty, health, overcoming, becoming – the endless stages of self-realisation.

Yves Rees (photograph by Sarah Papazian)

The winner of this year’s Calibre Essay Prize is ‘Reading the Mess Backwards’ by Yves Rees, a writer and historian who teaches at La Trobe University. Dr Rees has published widely on Australian gender, economic, and transnational history, and also writes on transgender identity and politics. ‘Reading the Mess Backwards’ is an absorbing account of ‘trans becoming’ in a personal context, addressed without rancour or self pity. It explores how we come to understand and perform our gender in a world of restrictive binaries and male dominance.

Yves Rees told Advances:

I am honoured to be awarded the Calibre Essay Prize. In my essay, I’ve sketched the kind of narrative I hungered to read: a story of trans becoming that digs into the messiness of bodies, gender and identity. My hope is that, as such stories proliferate, we will all – men and women, cisgender and trans – be liberated from the prison of patriarchy, with its suffocating gender binary. The recognition afforded by the Calibre Essay Prize is an important step in that struggle.

Our runner-up this year is Kate Middleton, the Sydney poet and critic, who began contributing to the magazine while still a student almost twenty years ago. Kate’s essay, entitled ‘The Dolorimeter’, is a riveting meditation on ill health over many years. We look forward to publishing it in the next issue.

In addition, the judges commended five other essays. They are Sue Cochius’s ‘Mrs Mahomet’, Julian Davies’ ‘A Small Boy and Cambodia’, Mireille Juchau’s ‘Only One Refused’, Laura Kolbe’s ‘Human Women, Magic Flutes’, and Meredith Wattison’s ‘Ambivalence: The Afterlife of Patrick White’. We look forward to publishing some of these essays in coming months.

ABR gratefully acknowledges the generous support from Mr Colin Golvan AM QC and Peter and Mary-Ruth McLennan, whose donations make the Calibre Prize possible in this form.

We look forward to presenting the Calibre Prize for a fifteenth time in 2021.

The lurking horrors

Most poets’ centenaries go unnoticed in this country, but Gwen Harwood’s feels different. When she died in Hobart in 1995, aged seventy-five, she was ‘undoubtedly Australia’s most loved poet’, as Peter Porter, not exactly unpopular himself, noted in an illuminating review of her posthumous Collected Poems (University of Queensland Press, 2003).

Most loved? So Harwood perhaps remains twenty-five years after her death, certainly among Australian poets. When ABR invited a number of them to contribute to a special podcast tribute, the response was swift. Readers include old acquaintances of Gwen’s – Stephen Edgar, Andrew Taylor, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Andrew Taylor, Stephanie Trigg, our Editor, whose first collection she launched in verse back in 1990 during a rare visit to Melbourne (her travels were few, and she never left Australia; perhaps, like Emily Dickinson, she felt, ‘To shut our eyes is Travel’); her biographer, Ann-Marie Priest (whose long-awaited book has been pushed back to 2021 because of the pandemic); her editors Alison Hodinott and Gregory Kratzmann; and composer–collaborator Larry Sitsky, who reads ‘Night Music’, Gwen’s 1963 response to his music.

Porter’s review – well worth revisiting (TLS, 9 May 2003) – is illuminating. He notes that Harwood’s poetry is ‘suffused with music’ and rates her as having ‘as natural a feeling for tetrameter as Auden’ – high praise coming from him. Then there is this classic Porterism:

Harwood’s regular metric and rhymes swathe the lurking horrors in suburban reasonableness. She might have found another way to shock her contented nation, but she chooses to outfit her demons with the reassurance of perfected form.

Porter, who regarded Harwood as ‘a great thinker in poetry, very much the Empson “argufier”’, rightly considered her neglect overseas ‘deplorable’. What more did they want in London or New York? At the time, Porter’s closing remarks may have seemed a little surprising, even heretical to some – but not in 2020, when Harwood’s wit, emotional range, and metrical gifts seem ever more treasurable. Porter wrote:

It looks, after all, as if lovers of Australian poetry have been getting their messages crossed. Gwen Harwood turns out to be the most accomplished poet the country produced in the twentieth century.

A coming episode of the ABR Podcast (due to be released on June 4) features some of Harwood’s most celebrated poems, including ‘The Twins’, ‘Dialogue’, and ‘Suburban Sonnet’. The podcast concludes with ABR Laureate Robyn Archer’s sung version of the latter poem.

Advances liked this anecdote about another of the featured poems, ‘Carnal Knowledge I’. When The Australian published it in 1972, an editor asked Harwood to change the title to ‘Love Songs’. She declined. Years later, she remarked to Greg Kratzmann, ‘What other kind of knowledge is there?’

We’re delighted to be able to reprint ‘Carnal Knowledge I’ in the June–July issue.

A nation of thinkers

What authors need most – especially right now – is a sense of security: the freedom to advance a major project with the kind of financial ease that the rest of the community takes for granted. Right now, with a noticeable tightening in the publishing sector and the postponement of many trade titles, this security is in short supply.

Which makes the Copyright Agency’s Fellowships for two creative writers and one visual artist even more significant. As Kim Williams, Chair of Copyright Agency has stated, ‘We’re really pleased to be able to offer even more support for our members who work so hard to make Australia a creative nation as part of a broader aspiration to be a nation of thinkers.’

Past Fellows have included James Bradley, Kathryn Heyman, Melissa Lucashenko, Stephen Orr, and Jeff Sparrow.

Each Fellowship – two of them literary, one artistic – is worth $80,000. Applications for close on 29 June 2020. More information is available on Copyright Agency’s website.

Art and Paris meant everything to Agnes Goodsir. ‘You must forgive my enthusiasm,’ she wrote. ‘Nothing else is of the smallest or faintest importance besides that.’ Goodsir was the Australian artist who painted the iconic portrait Girl with Cigarette, now in the Bendigo Art Gallery. It depicts a cool, sophisticated, free-spirited woman of the Parisian boulevards. When Goodsir created it, in 1925 or thereabouts, she had lived in Paris since the turn of the century. Apart from brief visits back to Australia, she stayed there until her death in 1939.

Goodsir is one of the better known of the twenty-eight artists whose careers are followed in this engaging and often enlightening book: other stars include Margaret Olley, Margaret Preston, and Stella Bowen.

The Stranger Artist is a finely structured and beautifully written account of gallerist Tony Oliver’s immersion into the world of the Kimberley art movement at the end of the twentieth century; the close relationships he developed over the following years with painters such as Paddy Bedford, Freddie Timms, and Rusty Peters; and the creation of Jirrawun Arts as a collective to both promote and protect the artists and their work. How these artists, under Oliver’s practical guidance, came to assume the mantle of the legendary Rover Thomas and took Kimberley art to the world provides a compelling narrative: from fascination to enthralment to disillusion. Dreams are born, bear fruit, and die. Like many a fine work of art, The Stranger Artist attracts with a brilliant surface while fascinating with its deeper layers. Behind the thrill and wisdom of the painting – so new and old, so luminous and dark – lurk the tragedies of history and dysfunctional politics. This book – how could it be otherwise? – is peopled with spectacular characters, art, and landscapes. Appropriate to this remote corner of Australia, it is full of intense colour and eccentricity, while also permeated with great sadness.

You are looking at a book. On its cover is a painting of a person of colour. But you can only see a portion of the piece. The face is obscured. One dark eye takes up the middle third of the page, while one nostril fills the bottom right-hand corner. The painting is covered in a layer of fine cracks – presumably due to its age. These lines show that myriad individual pieces make up the image before you, but this is still only one part of the picture. Frustratingly, you cannot see the face as a whole.

The cover belongs to art historian Alice Procter’s first book, The Whole Picture: The colonial story of the art in our museums and why we need to talk about it. Contrary to the common adage, this is a book that you can judge by its cover. Procter wants us to see the cracks in the narratives we are told by museums about the objects they house. She wants us to see the deep fissures that are papered over when museums claim to be neutral spaces; the histories of violence, genocide, cultural appropriation, and European élitism that are obscured behind museums’ claims to objectivity. This book aims to make us aware not of only institutional power but of our personal biases and that colonial history has a contemporary legacy. It confronts us with the fact that in museums the whole picture is always missing from view.

In 1919 a major outbreak of pneumonic influenza threatened the livelihoods of actors and musicians throughout Australia, and forced a tense confrontation between artists and government officials in Melbourne.

In contrast with the current pandemic, Australians had plenty of time to prepare. Prompted by reports from abroad of a deadly disease that was killing thousands, authorities in November 1918 ratified a plan for responding to the threat. Strict travel restrictions, however, only delayed the arrival of the virus. On 29 January 1919, Victoria joined New South Wales in implementing a federal order that ‘all theatres, picture theatres, music or concert halls, and all public buildings where persons assemble for the purposes of entertainment or instruction, shall be closed forthwith, and not again used until permission is given’.

It is a truth, maybe not universally acknowledged but a truth nonetheless, that epiphanies tend to happen earlier rather than later in one’s life. Soul-shattering, life-changing experiences occur more regularly when the soul is tender enough to be shattered and the life malleable enough to be changed.

I am an excited seven-year-old. Today I am going to what I have been informed is London’s grandest theatre to witness the World’s Greatest Dancer in the ballet Cinderella. I am no theatre-going virgin. I have seen Peter Pan and clapped furiously to bring Tinker Bell back to life and have been to a children’s matinee at Doris Fitton’s Independent Theatre on a return to Australia, but it has been made clear to me that today’s experience will be of a different standard altogether.

Lunch is at the Trocadero in Piccadilly Circus, long since turned into a sort of pinball parlour but then a bastion of rather faded Edwardian grandeur. We walk to the theatre. I am a little surprised that it is right next to a vegetable market, but the building itself lives up to expectations. The uniformed doormen loom majestically over the entrance, the lobby is imposing with its grand staircase, and then there is the auditorium. Rudolf Nureyev, fresh from the grandeur of the Mariinsky and the Paris Opéra was apparently unimpressed by Covent Garden’s décor, but for this seven-year-old, the tiers stretching up into the heavens, the royal box, and the vast red curtain make it the epitome of glamour.

I am given the aisle seat so that I can lean out and not have a view impeded by the adult in front of me. The lights dim, the music starts, the curtain rises, the ballet begins – but the earth does not move. I am not bored or disappointed. The scene changes are magic. I enjoy the Ugly Sisters, they’re funny and I’m pleased that one of them is an Australian like me. I like the World’s Greatest Dancer. She has a nice smile and makes it clear that she is sad to be bullied by her family, excited to be going to the ball and, finally, happy to be with her prince. But she is so old. I do find it rather annoying that just as the story is heating up everything stops and somebody I’ve never seen before and who has no connection to what has been happening dances and then disappears, never to be seen again.

The ballet finishes, the curtain descends, there is a pause, and then it rises to reveal the corps de ballet in formation advancing to the front. The applause begins. This is when I realise that there is a difference between clapping for Tinker Bell and really clapping. This is exciting. The curtain descends again and I’m outraged. Aren’t we going to see the soloists? But a gap in the curtain opens and out they come, some solo, some in pairs. Here come the Ugly Sisters. The audience really like them. The prince arrives, regally acknowledging his reception. Now there is another pause and I am getting worried. Has the World’s Greatest Dancer had an accident? Has she gone home already? At last she appears and now I really hear applause. The house explodes. Adults are standing and shouting. Through the commotion she smiles and curtsies, coolly accepting the adulation. So this is what performers can reduce their audience to. I am vaguely beginning to understand the power of live performance.

As we leave, I am wondering if perhaps next time we could have less ballet and more applause.

I am twelve and going to my second opera. The first was not a success. If you are trying to encourage an eleven-year-old to appreciate opera, perhaps a static, poorly acted, if well-sung, performance of The Flying Dutchman is not the best choice. The second will be Rigoletto, and my dauntless mother is determined not to make the same mistake. For my birthday I am given a recording, the Callas, Gobbi, di Stefano version with the La Scala façade on the cover. My older brother has the score and cajoles me into singing one of the heroine Gilda’s arias, ‘Tutte le Feste’, to his accompaniment. Many years later he tells me it was chosen because the piano reduction was easy, but at the time it didn’t occur to us or our parents that an aria in which the heroine describes her abduction and rape to her father was not perhaps the most suitable vehicle for my boy soprano voice.

This performance is at the much less grand Sadler’s Wells theatre, but the cast is first grade. Rigoletto and his daughter, Gilda, are sung by two young performers who will go on to distinguished international careers: Peter Glossop and Elizabeth Harwood. Because I know the opera, I enjoy the first two acts, but something special happens in the third.

Rigoletto has come to the duke’s palace in search of his daughter. The courtiers try to fob him off, but suddenly the distraught Gilda appears from the duke’s chambers. Rounding on them in fury, Rigoletto drives them off and turns to comfort his daughter. Harwood begins ‘Tutte le Feste’ and I realise the oceans of distance between my amateur warblings and the emotional anguish this wonderful singer can put into the aria without breaking the line. The two singers launch into the passionate ‘vendetta’ duet that ends the act, and I am beginning to understand the combination of technical control and emotional abandon that makes the best opera so powerful. I have become an opera addict for life.

I must admit to being intrigued by any self-proclaimed ‘Histories of Everything’, so I leapt at the prospect of a dense history of my favourite creative art and how it flourished in our past centuries, right down to a couple of writers who died in 2019. And occidental only: that is, apart from a sidelong glance at Hafez, Tagore, and Li Po’s fellow poets. Unless you regard the Russians, that is – bridging East and West.

Yes, John Carey’s A Little History of Poetry runs from Sappho’s ‘first description of the symptoms of passionate love’ in Western literature, down through great, intransigent Catullus and the classics, all the way to tumultuous Ted Hughes and self-doomed Sylvia Plath: into the former’s sense that ‘what feeds the universe is the death of anything in it. / Even a gnat’s death feeds the stars.’ Even a short life nourishes those heavenly bodies, then, like those of Wyatt, Keats, and Lorca, among so many practitioners of the language art over centuries, especially in earlier, armoured ages; not that we know much about the Gawain Poet’s life.

For Mark Tredinnick, best known so far as a nature poet employing distinctive and often ingenious imagery, A Gathered Distance is a brave book – even a risky one. It’s essentially the diary of a family breakup or, more accurately, its immediate aftermath. As with most poetry in the confessional genre, the poet is explicit about some people and reticent about others.

From the poetry itself, it would seem that the breakup was occasioned by the poet’s leaving his family (a wife and three children) for a new love. We are not told much about the two women involved, and it is clear that the poet was estranged from his children for some time and felt the pain intensely, a pain articulated in almost every poem in the book. Even the nature poems are part of it.

If I were to make gauche generalisations about the poetics of MTC Cronin, Jordie Albiston, and Michael Farrell, I might respectively write conceptual, technical, and experimental. But these established poets – each in their fifties, highly regarded – display fluency with all these descriptors, especially in their latest books.

God Is Waiting in the Worlds Yard by MTC Cronin

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 210 pp

In God is Waiting in the World’s Yard, Cronin’s twentieth collection, contemporary gothic imagery is gruesomely and artfully tossed against the edges of its prose poems. Let’s talk about these edges. Other than the free-verse poem ‘Sitting Worldside’ on the first page (where we find a sleeping kitten), all of the poems on the left-hand side of this collection’s spine have a rusty right-ragged margin. These poems have different titles: ‘The Brunt of God’ or ‘God Has a Stroke’, etc. They are sometimes blackly comedic and present a ‘sociopathic god’, a flippant, lazy god, a ‘philanthropic eponym’, a reflection.

Written by a prominent economist with a long career in emissions reduction and policy modelling, this engaging book attempts to debunk eleven myths that undermine effective climate action. Jaccard also offers a ‘simple’ path to climate success, built around strong regulatory action, carbon pricing, a system of carbon tariffs, and supporting poorer countries in energy transitions. Jaccard focuses on emissions reduction in the transport and energy sectors, in line with his areas of expertise.

The myths Jaccard interrogates are not those of climate denialists but, rather more interestingly, ones believed by those who support action on climate change. He scrutinises claims like ‘energy efficiency is profitable’ and ‘we can be carbon neutral’, drawing on a career’s worth of experience and research to question or debunk them partly or in full. This myth-busting would be of particular interest to those working in emissions reduction or policy development, as well as to more casual observers of climate politics and policy.

All authors who are releasing new books during the global pandemic are at a disadvantage, but some less so than others. It helps to have a title that speaks to the moment, which The Better Half, with its central thesis that women are ‘genetically privileged’, certainly does. The coronavirus, we have learnt, tends to affect men more severely than women. Some have attributed the discrepancy to men being more likely to engage in risk-taking or health-compromising behaviours, while other experts have advanced a genetic explanation.

Clinical trials have begun in which male patients with Covid-19 have been injected with oestrogen to test the hypothesis that women are advantaged by their greater production of sex hormones. In The Better Half, physician and genetics researcher Sharon Moalem proposes a related theory: the female’s XX chromosomes are why ‘women are simply stronger than men at every stage of life’. No surprise then that his captivating thesis has animated a number of think pieces on men and the coronavirus, even though his book was written well before it.

Grandmothers are not what they used to be, as Elizabeth Jolley once said of custard tarts. It’s a point made by several contributors to Helen Elliott’s lively and thoughtfully curated collection of essays on the subject, Grandmothers, and it partly explains why these two books are not as similar as you might expect.

A Lasting Conversation: Stories on ageing – edited by Dr Susan Ogle and Melanie Joosten – is an anthology of previously published short stories, some of them decades old, from a grab-bag of Australian writers; it focuses on the personal experience of ageing, particularly as it affects bodies and brains. Grandmothers, on the other hand, is a collection of new essays that focus on the grandmother role itself and the ways in which the contributors have experienced it.

‘“I must remember accurately,” I told myself, “remember everything accurately so that when he is gone I can re-create the father who created me.”’ This is Philip Roth exhorting himself while witnessing his declining father bathe in Patrimony: A true story (1991), a memoir that opens when Herman Roth is diagnosed with a brain tumour. The book, tender but also brutal, slips between the present and the past. Philip Roth, after all, is the writer. The matter of accuracy feels particularly perilous when the subject is the writer’s parent, if the intention is not to write a hagiography. It takes a particular kind of courage to countenance a parent’s failings when not motivated by revenge.

Whatever you think of Woody Allen, you will probably find his memoir, Apropos of Nothing, compelling. It’s likely to convince you that he didn’t molest his adoptive daughter Dylan all those years ago. The resurgence of this accusation, first aired in 1992, has caused such widespread concern that Hachette pulled this book because of vehement objections by Ronan Farrow, Allen’s biological son with Mia Farrow, sometime partner of Allen and the woman who accused him of molesting Dylan. This was in the wake of her discovery that Allen had begun a romance with Farrow’s twenty-one-year-old adoptive daughter Soon-Yi Previn, to whom he has been married since 1997. The immediate context was a widespread office rebellion at Hachette.

In 2018, Dylan had gone on television attesting, Allen believes sincerely, to what he asserts is a false memory. The question of what Allen did to his seven-year-old daughter was exhaustively examined at the time. In 1993, two investigative teams concluded that the accusation was false and that there was a distinct possibility that Mia Farrow had coached Dylan. Nonetheless, in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Allen (director of umpteen films since What’s Up, Tiger Lily? in 1966) has struggled to have a new film distributed in America.

This memoir shifts between telling the story of Allen’s life and leading his own defence against the ancient and none-too-credible charges that continue to jeopardise his professional life at a bizarrely late age. He claims that when he invites people to work with him some of them say, ‘I waited all my life for this phone call, and now I can’t take the job’ for fear they will be blacklisted. Apparently, Timothée Chalamet told Allen’s sister that his agent said it would be better to denounce Allen if he wanted to have a chance of winning an Oscar for his role in Call Me By Your Name.

Allen says, ‘God forbid anyone should say, “This accusation has been thoroughly investigated and found to be untrue.” Although I’m told Joy Behar did make that point on TV. I should mention others who I’ve been made aware have come out publicly in my defense: Ray Liotta, Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Rampling, Jude Law, Pedro Almodóvar, Alan Alda.’

It’s that kind of book: intensely repetitive, an old man’s book, perhaps born of a tape recorder, and seemingly different from the one Hachette was set to publish. The upshot is a rough, sometimes oddly affectless autobiography, though this in no way diminishes the authority of the work, the sense of conviction it carries, even though the overall effect is raw and garrulous. It has the unusual quality of sounding rambling and obsessive. Every so often, Allen indicates – despite a modesty that can seem pathological at times – just how much greatness he has had thrust upon him.

Here he is, on his hero, Ingmar Bergman:

I dined with Bergman and had a number of long phone conversations where we just gabbed … He was, I felt, the best filmmaker of my lifetime and he had the same fear I had. If he doesn’t know where to put the camera to make the most effective shot, how would I ever know? … Bergman invited me to his island a few times. But I always ducked it. I worshipped the guy as an artist, but … I’m not that dedicated.

There’s a lot of this stuff where he seems not to have got the tone quite right.

What comes across overwhelmingly – if inadvertently, for he seems to derive little pleasure from it – is that Allen has been phenomenally successful for something like seventy years. When he was still at high school, he was earning as much writing jokes for New York newspapers as his mother was as a house cleaner. He rapidly graduated to writing scripts for the greatest television comedians in America, including Sid Caesar. Jack Rollins (whose name is to be seen among the producers in the closing credits of Allen’s movies) persuaded him to do stand-up despite his reservation about his abilities as a live performer. By 1965, at the age of thirty, he’d written What’s New Pussycat? for Peter O’Toole, Romy Schneider, and Peter Sellers. He was underwhelmed by the greatest comedian of his day and says absurdly of O’Toole – the man Alan J. Lerner wanted for the film of My Fair Lady – that he hadn’t learned how to do comedy.

After Pussycat, he had total control over every film he directed. There are the early farces like Love and Death (1975), which are expert and pretty enchanting. He went through a couple of marriages – first to Harlene Rosen, a seventeen-year-old college girl with psychological problems, and then to the actress, Louise Lasser, who looked like Brigitte Bardot. In 1977 Allen made Annie Hall with his favourite actress, Diane Keaton. He emphasises that their romance was over by the time he made the picture, which won every Oscar in sight.

This is the period of the mellow humane romantic comedies of which Manhattan (1979) is a poignant example, brilliantly shot by Gordon Willis, the Prince of Darkness (so called for his love of chiaroscuro), the cinematographer of The Godfather. Stardust Memories (1980), in which Allen takes a shower with Charlotte Rampling, is a kind of homage to Fellini’s 8 1/2. Broadway Danny Rose (1984) has Mia Farrow in a brilliant incarnation of a mafia moll.

After this, the films become quite variable. He says that September (1987), with the great Elaine Stritch as Farrow’s mother, had all the qualities of Chekhov except his genius. It had in fact been anticipated in emulative impulse by Interiors (1978), with Geraldine Page, which is imitation Bergman, but Allen was gratified to hear that both John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson liked it. He says he was appalled to have to replace Gielgud as the narrator of the mock-doco Zelig (1983) because of his grandeur, and that he must be the only director on earth to have removed Vanessa Redgrave from a film because what he shot with her did not tally with the rest of the film.

The account of Mia Farrow’s systematic attack on Allen and the alleged curdling of her daughter’s memories is convincing and makes you think that Alan Dershowitz is right when he says that we live in an age of trial by accusation.

This is a likeable, ramshackle, almost amateur book by a genius who has almost successfully convinced the world that he’s a schlemiel. He comes across as an honest man, without vanity about his talent or much else. The jokes are hit and miss, but I liked the stories about how Judy Davis was such a great actress that he never dared say more than hello and goodbye to her.

And this book has the irresistible charm of its cold-eyed ironies. ‘How would I sum my life?’ he says. ‘Lucky. Many stupid mistakes bailed out by luck. My biggest regret? Only that I’ve been given millions to make movies and I’ve never made a great film.’

After such knowledge, every kind of forgiveness. He even jokes about his misfortunes and the last American election. ‘Hillary Clinton wouldn’t even accept Soon-Yi’s and my donation to her campaign for President and we couldn’t help wondering if another $5,400 to spend would have enabled her to carry Pennsylvania, Michigan or Ohio.’

What tethers you to your life? For most people it is the filaments of connection – family, place, friends, work. Hayley Katzen becomes untethered in multiple ways in this engaging and highly readable book. Many will identify with that period of life when you are technically a functioning adult, but there remains a long, long journey ahead to real adulthood. Katzen has a sevenfold whammy: a broken family life; the trauma of immigration; losing her Jewish heritage; discovering herself as a lesbian; dropping out of a career; moving to the country; and falling in love with an ‘unsuitable’ woman.

This memoir could be classified under a burgeoning genre: ‘How the hell did my life turn out this way?’ But there is another deeper strand that Katzen taps into: the eternal Ulysses quest to find meaning in the daily round of chores, commitments, contrary feelings, and pressures of a life.

At first glance, this biography does not look especially compelling. Why should we want to know about Australia’s first woman radio pioneer? But David Dufty calmly and quietly shows why Violet McKenzie is well worth celebrating.

From her earliest days, Violet, born in 1890, showed great flair for practical science. She became a high school maths teacher but was determined to study electrical engineering. She qualified, but her gender meant that she was refused admission to the university course and also to a technical college diploma. Meanwhile, her elder brother Walter had become an electrical engineer and was running his own business in Sydney. This was 1912: seduced by the new moving-picture craze, Walter had ploughed all his profits into a ‘flickergraph training school’, teaching people to operate cinema projectors.

For some of us, love for a work of literature brings with it a desire to learn about the work’s gestation. All the literary theory in the world can insist that a piece of writing is not a question to which the author holds the answer, but whenever a book or poem or essay catches our interest, we want to know more about the person behind it. 

For Subhash Jaireth, this desire to comprehend the authors he loves, to imagine their inner lives and motivations, functions as an organising principle. Spinoza’s Overcoat gathers together Jaireth’s rigorously researched essays on writers and their work, all obvious products of passionate curiosity. These are Montaignesque essays, with a persuasive authorial presence, self-reflexivity, equivocations, and charming self-criticisms. Each essay nominally focuses on a particular author – Franz Kafka, Mikhail Bulgakov, Anne Carson, and Boris Pasternak, among others – but they usually open with some story of Jaireth’s past, before making excursions through biography and literary history and analysis. 

Queensland MP Charles Porter’s book, The ‘Gut Feeling’ (1981), relates the story of former prime minister Billy Hughes being pressed in the 1940s to pass judgement on a Liberal Federal Council statement on an industrial issue. ‘No bloody good,’ he pronounced. ‘Not sufficiently ambiguous!’ If, as Hughes implied, ambiguity is a key virtue needed for political survival, then by 2001 the Howard Liberal–National Party Government appeared to have embraced it. Indeed, any objective analysis of the Howard era is fraught with difficulties because of these two factors: the verbal, unrecorded nature of some political incidents, and the emotive left-versus-right culture war that marked John Howard’s prime ministership (1996–2007).

Trials and Transformations is the third in a projected series of four books on the Howard years edited by historian Tom Frame. Like its predecessors, it is the product of a conference in which academics, public servants, commentators, and former politicians were invited to discuss a specific time period in Howard’s term in office. Contributors have provided essays that cover the thirty-seven months between August 2001 and September 2004.

Spare a thought for the other existential crises. Remember climate change? Wealth inequality? The rising tide of fascism?

Then there’s our newest apocalypse: bad technology. When we look back, the three years from late 2016 to early 2020 will go down as the time the scales fell from our eyes. Maybe the devices we have insinuated into nearly every moment of our lives had their own aims for us all along – our time, our attention, our outrage. In 2018, the runner-up for the Oxford Dictionary’s word of the year was ‘techlash’: ‘A strong and widespread negative reaction to the growing power and influence of large technology companies, particularly those based in Silicon Valley.’

A number of recent political events in Australia will have enduring and wide-ranging impacts on freedom of expression in this country. They include the denial of access to archival papers concerning the Whitlam dismissal, which Professor Jenny Hocking detailed in the April 2020 issue of ABR.

There are also mounting concerns about raids on and threats to journalists, especially the mixed decision in the High Court in April 2020 concerning Annika Smethurst and the possibility of charges against her. More recently, Peter Dutton has proposed changes that would give home affairs agencies more power to influence the circulation of information and the privacy of individual citizens. No less concerning are the closures of media outlets, including regional newspapers, BuzzFeed, Ten Daily, and AAP. Coupled with the non-funding of literary journals by the Australia Council, this points to a systematic attack on freedom of expression.

Listen to this essay read by the author.

The Covid-19 pandemic has affected all our lives, and little else has featured in the media for weeks. Unsurprisingly, this has led those of us who work with words to track the language of the pandemic (coronaspeak) closely. Here at the Australian National Dictionary Centre (temporarily WFH, of course), we have been compiling a database of the words emerging from the pandemic; from anti-lockdown protest to zumping (being dumped via Zoom), the Covid-19 isolation lockdown has generated its own vocabulary.

The Oxford English Dictionary team recently undertook corpus analysis to look at how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected the language, drawing on English-language sources from across the globe. This analysis, as might be expected, shows the enormous increase in the frequency of mentions of coronavirus and Covid in the past few months. It also reveals that in March 2020 the top twenty keywords were all coronavirus-related, the top five being Covid-19, pandemic, distancing, coronavirus, and self-isolate.

Listen to this essay read by the author.

When I’m ten or so, my brother appears shirtless at the dinner table. Ever the eager disciple, I follow his example without a second thought. It is a sweltering January day, and our bodies are salt-crusted from the beach. Clothing seems cruel in these conditions.

As my brother tucks into his schnitzel, tanned chest gleaming, I grow conscious that the mood has become strained. Across the table, my parents exchange glances. The midsummer cheer of recent evenings is on hold.

I look down. Two small nubs peak from my ribcage, barely the beginnings of breasts. My torso is white and soft, a reptile’s underbelly to my brother’s hard brown exoskeleton. I realise: this chest of mine does not belong in public. It is somehow obscene, something to be hidden rather than flaunted. My brother and I differ in this crucial respect.

Excusing myself, I flee upstairs and don a T-shirt. Back at the table, there is a palpable sense of relief. Chatter resumes. All is well with the world.

In this absorbing first novel – which won the 2017 Richell Prize for Emerging Writers – Sam Coley tells the story of Alex, a young Aucklander who returns home from abroad after the sudden death of his parents. Alex and his estranged twin sister, Amy, set off on a reluctant road trip through New Zealand to reconnect with each other and their home country.

Moving backwards and forwards in time, the novel shifts between the present-day road trip and Alex’s memories of his early life. Through these shifts, we discover a childhood filled with privilege but rife with emotional neglect. Left by their famous film-director parents to largely to raise themselves, the twins develop an uneasy relationship, one full of jealousy and tension. As the pair journeys together, their deeply flawed characters are revealed and longstanding wounds start to fester.

Amy, bossy and self-assured, has always been the dominant twin; she thrives on ordering others around. In contrast, Alex is deeply unsettled and easily bruised by his sister’s actions. Alex’s deep loathing for his family is clear from the beginning when, three years prior to his parents’ deaths, he hurriedly leaves New Zealand for an internship in Dubai, bitterly cutting off all contact with his parents and sister in the process. It is not until the end of the novel that the catalyst for this act becomes apparent, but Coley peppers the narrative with just enough hints to make State Highway One a suspenseful page-turner.

With each step in the long journey, Alex’s emotional and mental states start to unravel, and Amy begins to show a long-hidden tenderness towards her brother. Coley masterfully crafts Alex’s distress and reveals just enough history to make the narrative both believable and utterly compelling. The book is, at its heart, about repressed grief, trauma, and the ties that bind us.

Humorous, insightful, and ultimately affecting, State Highway One unpicks the uneasy nature of family and the difficulty of escaping your past.

While having a child is an act of hope and joy for many, it is also risky. One can heed expert advice, prepare, even throw money at the endeavour, but there is no guarantee that the creation or nurturing of a child will go as planned.

In Donna Mazza’s Fauna, motherhood is riskier than ever. Set in the near future, the novel explores the impact of experimental genome-editing technologies on individuals, families, and the question of what it means to be human. The protagonist, Stacey, desperate for another child, is recruited by genetics company LifeBLOOD® to carry, birth, and raise a child who is biologically hers and her husband’s, but whose cells have also been blended with Neanderthal DNA. The story follows Stacey as she nurtures a child who is ‘human enough for her’ but never human enough for society.

Unlike Mazza’s first novel, The Albanian (2007) – a work of historical realism – Fauna is speculative fiction. Mazza has clearly researched Neanderthals and de-extinction technologies in writing this novel; her weaving of science into the story is compelling.

Fauna is striking for how it humanises ethical issues present in technological advancements. The novel is above all about family, and about the human cost of granting life within morally opaque parameters – and motherhood is still an underexplored lens through which to write speculative fiction. In this sense, Fauna is reminiscent of recent acclaimed Australian fiction such as Alice Robinson’s The Glad Shout (2019), a cli-fi novel noteworthy for its focus on mothers and children.

Fauna is also topical for its exploration of power and control, especially in the context of women’s bodies. Privacy invasion becomes a strong theme as Stacey and her family grow increasingly aware of LifeBLOOD®’s invasive presence. Vital information is strategically, unethically withheld, and rights are unwittingly signed away.

Fauna is a gripping novel that raises thought-provoking questions. Granted, it falls short on characterisation, with Stacey’s husband and her two ‘normal’ children slotting into the familiar moulds of well-meaning blokey husband, smart daughter, and outdoorsy son. Perhaps this is partly indicative of the protagonist’s limited perspective: Stacey’s relationship with her youngest daughter is all-consuming, as is her desire to protect her. This desire is instinctive; even animalistic. In love, we are all fauna.

In thrall to thresholds, drawn to every brink,
            at three weeks old
an infant’s eye adores the frames of things,
            the joinery that holds
each smudge in place, and individuates.

It feasts on edges, architraves and jambs,
            the skirting boards
of portals, vistas, stairs – the sinews of
            a monochrome Matisse
above the couch – a rim of tortoiseshell

that clasps a lens – jawlines, bevels, hems.
            Collecting motley
verges, most of all, it relishes the glinting
            blade of gold
that flashes in the gaps between the blinds

(a second birth, a scimitar aflame, that fattens
            on each careless
ghost of wind) – as if it knew the brilliant
            strip contained
some future proof technology for life.

The leavings of a star have cast this spell,
            summoning blood
and chlorophyll – and so, the summer
            of his birth, I find myself
orbiting the block, hammering our bond

in the forge of an inhuman heatwave.
            I emphasise the hip-
jolt of each step, to simulate the rocking
            of the womb, as if
I knew. My crude technique appears to do

the trick – that glassy stare, as though he hailed
            from a pond of jellied
frogspawn, his visa from the commonwealth
            of zonk. I am a roving
gum, and this koala is my son. His pupils rowing

back toward the main, weary of their cargo,
            shove off their oars
and drift onto a eucalyptus reef, as curbside
            fuchsias, wilting in a kiln
of scorching bitumen, collapse in heaps

of silk and taffeta upon the street like lurid
            ballerinas on the nod,
the victims of a batch of iffy pills. Back home,
            some Bach to help us
both relax, Partita No. 2 but on the lute – and as

the plucked notes run, I learn to count the cost
            my gaze extracts – how
every glance beseeches him to concentrate
            on me, the toll it takes to hew
a face from scratch and animate the world.

This month’s survey features three bewitching novels from authors intent on transporting younger readers to other worlds.

The Threads of Magic by Alison Croggon

Walker Books, $19.95 pb, 380 pp

In Alison Croggon’s latest fantasy novel, The Threads of Magic, Pip and his sister El are living in a poor but snug apartment in the city of Clarel, bequeathed to them by Missus Pledge. Pip, always on the lookout for opportunities, scoops up a silver box from the sidelines during a street brawl. The opening of this box burdens Pip with an ancient and grisly relic: the shrivelled black heart of a child.

Pip carries the child’s desiccated heart with him, even as it becomes apparent that assassins and other powerful enemies will kill, kidnap, and alter the known universe to repossess it. The heart belonged to a child named Clovis. Throughout the novel, his voice and power combine with Georgette’s to help the young people face their demons and win a kingdom for themselves.

King Axel II’s daughter Georgette can’t wait to be a queen, to exercise power in her own right, but she is also troubled by dreams of a child sobbing uncontrollably. Her betrothal to the evil and enigmatic King Oswald is forced upon her; there will be a wedding in an indecently short time. Georgette flees to the comfort of her old nurse and friend, Amina, and there meets Amina’s daughter Oni, who, with El and Pip, is fleeing her pursuers. Amina’s identity as a witch places her in particular danger in a country that has an Office for the Extermination of Witches, but a greater horror is waiting – spectres who seemingly cannot be killed, created by the misuse of magic.

Croggon is assured in building a fantastical world. Readers are soon immersed in the forbidding alleys, velvety darkness, and dark dealings reminiscent of Leon Garfield’s writing, complete with cliffhanger chapter endings. Pip is an arrogant upstart kept in check by his responsibilities towards Clovis, who veers between the personas of petulant toddler and a supernatural force. Georgette and Oni, strong young women, are united in their protection of the innocent El. The brutality of some scenes – in particular, torture – put this at the upper end for middle-grade readers.

Euphoria Kids by Alison Evans

Echo, $19.95 pb, 252 pp

Saltkin is fifteen-year-old Iris’s faery friend in the garden where Iris grew up. They are happy in their own company and counsel in Euphoria Kids by author Alison Evans. Non-binary Iris is contented living with Clover and Moss, close to the bush realm where they can commune with dryads. A rose quartz worn around their neck invites friendship with Babs, and fire flashes between the two. The only trouble is that Babs flickers in and out of invisibility, an advantage when she wants to escape the attention of teachers at school, but not great when Iris wants to get to know her better. A witch’s curse is behind it all, and they work with a new arrival at the school to undo it. The malevolence of the fae in the bush realm, and a blank book from an op shop, complicate their plans.

In endeavouring not to make gender the central ‘issue’ in the novel, Evans has instead created a mystic mash-up. The line between realms is blurry: texting and video watching and homework assessments co-exist alongside talking trees and faeries preening their gossamer wings.

The strength of the characters’ convictions, and the seductive quality of the enchanted bushland, are captivating. The complete lack of other students in the narrative makes the school experiences of Iris, Babs, and the boy much harder to read. This skilful writer could have provided a little more context here. The importance of finding your people is never more important than at this age and stage of life, but there should be some minor characters to bounce off first.

The three protagonists, despite their differences, are blessed with sympathetic adults in their lives. Their mothers, the owner of the café where they hang out after school, their art teacher, and even the witch who cursed Babs are all sensitive listeners who treat the teens as equals. All of them are ready with the comfort of candles, herbs, and tea, and this is the bubble of encouraging empowerment that the reader is invited into. (There’s only one incidence of gender ignorance by an adult, and it is resolved through respectful enquiry and listening.) The dryads and Saltkin are the most parental figures, whose warnings and advice are appropriately disregarded by the three.

The Vanishing Deep by Astrid Scholte

Allen & Unwin, $19.99 pb, 423 pp

Tempest, called Tempe, is diving into the depths of the sea from her home on The Equinox in Astrid Scholte’s The Vanishing Deep. Since the Old World drowned, new societies have formed to eke out a living on the rocks that remain. The nearby island of Palindromena, where Tempest’s mother and father worked as head warden and head botanist, respectively, has sustained itself with a terrible industry directed by Nessandra. Dead bodies are kept in suspended animation in the macabre Aquarium until loved ones can raise the Notes (their currency) to revive them for a final goodbye. The catch is that the dead can only be reanimated for twenty-four hours, and during that time they mustn’t suspect that they’re dead.

It’s not her parents that Tempe wants to resurrect – they disappeared after a boating accident – but her sister Elysea, who drowned two years before. Nessandra’s son Lor is working in the depths of the Aquarium that day, assuaging his guilt for the accidental death of his best friend. He reluctantly agrees to act as warden for Tempe’s reunion with Elysea, who reveals that she knows that their parents are still alive, and proposes that she and Tempe go and find them together. As Lor is covering for his friend Raylan, and wearing the echolink monitoring Elysea’s revival, he must follow them.

Scholte has created a completely believable watery world, where most characters are doing more than floating just above the waves. The Equinox reads like a floating Brunswick Street, in contrast with the sepulchral civic bastion Palindromena. This reader’s favourite supporting characters were the Remorans, pirates of this world, who make two attempts at profiting from the sisters.

The separate angers of Lor and Tempest are fully realised and propel them through the novel, taking the reader with them. The story’s chapters are told in their alternating voices, as they inevitably draw closer together. The denouement, back on Palindromena, is both shocking and satisfying, like a plunge into a cool ocean.

Though its origins are unknown, the earliest sense of the word ‘quirk’ was as a subtle verbal twist or a quibble. Over time, its definition has become more nuanced: a quirk now also refers to a person’s peculiar or idiosyncratic traits, chance occurrences, and sudden, surprise curves appearing on paths or in facial expressions. Quirks can also be accidents, vagaries, witty turns of phrase.

Elizabeth Tan’s first collection of short stories, Smart Ovens for Lonely People, encapsulates quirkiness in complex and compelling ways (without the sneer of saccharine cuteness this adjective often evokes). Its opening move, for instance, is a bold one. The lead piece is a work of flash fiction, so there’s little space for it to act as the spokes-story for the rest of the collection, and its tone is deceptively soft. In well under two pages, ‘Night of the Fish’ offers a glimpse of development in an ordinary Australian suburb – a slide removed, a playground paved over – that is at once both beautiful and wholly unnerving.

In an unnamed land under the thrall of a mysterious coup, mountain-dweller Ren wants only to live off the grid, undisturbed by human contact. Ren’s familiarity with the natural world becomes a liability when a band of soldiers comes seeking information that only she can provide: the whereabouts of a fabled bird with the ability to make it rain.

Despite a decided ambiguity about exactly where and when The Rain Heron takes place, Robbie Arnott conjures locations with a richness that belies their generic signifiers (‘the valley’, ‘the mountain’, ‘the port’, etc.). This results in a world that, while less idiosyncratic than the Tasmania of Arnott’s critically acclaimed début, Flames (2018), feels equally true to the author’s imagination and is expressive of his trademark flair for imbuing landscapes with symbolic resonance.

Although shifts in setting and perspective are handled gracefully, a level of trust in the author is a prerequisite, as the thrust of the narrative is not always clear. Such trust pays off generously. One of the starkest transitions – which takes the reader from the action in the mountains to a cold seaport where a girl learns the ancient art of harvesting squid ink – is also revelatory, its significance rippling outward to inform the wider narrative.

Arnott has a knack for sketching frontier communities. Often, his characters are extensions of their environments, less notable for the words they speak than the way they hold themselves and the scars they bear. It is easy to believe in the power the land has over its inhabitants, as Arnott writes it: a land where humans and squid symbiotically exchange fluids, crops flourish on the favour of ancient birds, and animal wrath determines the course of history.

The Rain Heron’s environmental concerns, paired with its allegorical quality, could be didactic in less assured hands. By privileging the laws of his fictional universe without reference to contemporary debates, Arnott weaves a narrative that feels both timely and timelessly engaging. A powerful meditation on human greed and frailty, The Rain Heron also leaves room for redemption. This bracing follow-up to Flames will reinforce Arnott’s reputation for unusual, risk-taking literary fiction.

Perhaps reflecting the long gestation period of Bem Le Hunte’s third novel, the term ‘Asian Century’ occurs early on in Elephants with Headlights. The sobriquet is certainly apt. Induction into this vaunted space does not befall a country haphazardly: its temporal aspect serves to remind us that the fate is written in centuries-old geopolitical legacies. Before there was an ‘Asia’ to eponymise in this fashion, a wealth of cultures simply went about their business. But the determinations of capital and colonisation were made long ago, and now we live with the press.

The century is a source of both anxiety and excitement for the middle-class Indian family at the centre of the novel. Mae, Byron Bay child of sun-and-surf Australia, has fallen in love with Neel during a trip to Goa. His parents, Siddharth and Tota, having all but given up hope of finding a suitable match for their daughter, the headstrong Savitri, are in no mood to welcome the newcomer. Determined to see the relationship undone, Tota sets in motion a chain of events that will test both cultural and familial bonds.

Le Hunte writes with undeniable tenderness and humour. Her facility for crafting tangible human relationships is one of the book’s joys. Several crucial turning points in the novel feel a little engineered, however. During one typically happy coincidence, Neel marvels at the serendipity of events; how ‘perfectly beyond comprehension’ are the circumstances in which he finds himself. It is a sentiment some readers may be inclined to agree with.

The novel also indulges in an uncomfortably wide spectrum of cross-cultural vampirism. At one point, Mae enlists a bazaar trader to help her stitch ‘Australian Indigenous designs’ on to pillows to sell back in Byron. Perhaps the manoeuvre is intended to punctuate Le Hunte’s thesis that the meeting of cultures contains liberating potential. More often than not, the only thing that feels liberated is a strong desire to ask – is this necessary?

Elephants with Headlights highlights the generative forces: of class, family, maternity, and, perhaps most powerful of all, change. It is about seeking a break from tradition even as tradition’s afterlives provide succour to those who inherit them.

Tasmanian writer K.M. Kruimink’s first novel, A Treacherous Country, a witty, cracking tale set in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s, has more than a hint of Dickens and Moby-Dick about it. It won The Australian/Vogel’s Literary award, established in 1980 for an unpublished manuscript by an author under thirty-five, which has launched the career of Kate Grenville and Tim Winton, among others. The award sets high standards – it was not awarded in 2019 due to a ‘lack of quality’. Kruimink, who described it as an ‘absolute life-changer’, is a worthy recipient.

The narrator is Gabriel Fox, aged twenty-five, from Norfolk, who is the third son (‘he who does not matter’) of a baronet and gentleman farmer, Sir Alfred Fox and his wife, Apphia Fox. Gabriel has made the long, arduous journey by sea from England to the colonies on a mission, which he describes variously as ‘an Odyssey’, ‘a Grave Mission’, and ‘my great Purpose’. The said mission is to find Maryanne Maginn, who was transported from England as a convict more than thirty years ago, when she was fifteen. He has been set that task by Maryanne’s great-aunt, the formidable Mrs Prendergast, with whose great-grand-daughter, Susannah, Gabriel is love. He believes that if he returns to England with Maryanne, Mrs Prendergast will consent to the marriage.

‘What is the use of saying, “Peace, Peace” when there is no peace below the diaphragm?’ asks Chinese writer Lin Yutang in The Importance of Living (1937). The subject of food and its manifestations – sustenance, communion, gluttony, longing – has claimed a place in the books of every era and genre, from heavenly manna in the Book of Exodus to starving gladiators in Suzanne Collins’s multi-billion-dollar The Hunger Games franchise. Writers as varied as Marcel Proust and Margaret Atwood have prioritised this theme in their work.

So it is with Patrick Allington’s second novel, Rise & Shine, set thirty-four years after a global catastrophe that demarcates the Old Time from the New Time. In a world where plant and animal life are distant memories and rain is toxic, humanity’s tumour-ridden survivors feed on war footage, screened daily from ubiquitous autoscreens. Their leaders, Walker and Barton, have found a means to feed the people that relies on their being moved by human suffering.

Roll back, you fabulous animal
be human, sleep. I’ll call you up
from water’s dazzle, wheat-blond hills,
clear light and open-hearted roses,
this day’s extravagance of blue
stored like a pulsebeat in the skull.

Content to be your love, your fool,
your creature tender and obscene
I’ll bite sleep’s innocence away
and wake the flesh my fingers cup
to build a world from what’s to hand,
new energies of light and space

wings for blue distance, fins to sweep
the obscure caverns of your heart,
a tongue to lift your sweetness close
leaf-speech against the window-glass
a memory of chaos weeping
mute forces hammering for shape

sea-strip and sky-strip held apart
for earth to form its hills and roses
its landscape from our blind caresses,
blue air, horizon, water-flow,
bone to my bone I grasp the world.
But what you are I do not know

Hunting Nazis is an almost guaranteed reading pleasure – the joy of the chase, plus the moral uplift of being on the side of virtue. I started Philippe Sands’s book with a sense both of anticipation and déjà vu. A respected British international human rights lawyer with the proven ability to tell a story, Sands should be giving us a superior version of a familiar product. Many readers will remember his book East West Street (2016), which wove together the Nuremberg trial, some family history, and the pre-war intellectual life of Lemberg/Lviv. The latter produced not only Raphael Lemkin, theorist of genocide, but also the lesser known Hersch Lauterpacht, theorist of crimes against humanity, as well as Sands’s maternal grandfather, Leon Buchholz.

In 2018, Sands came to Australia spruiking the book, of which he had made a musical version (East West Street: A Song of Good and Evil) with two narrators, including himself, a singer, and a pianist. I did not attend his performances (which in retrospect I regret), but I did participate in one of Jenny Brockie’s Insight programs a few years back in which a friend and collaborator of Sands who appears in East West Street – Niklas Frank, son of the Nazi governor-general of wartime occupied Poland – gave a star turn, denouncing his father and showing clips of himself visiting the Jewish Museum with tears in his eyes. This made me feel a bit squeamish.

July 1970. A graduate student in English at Columbia University was feeling bogged down in her PhD topic. She was only a year or so in and reckoned that there was still time for her to make a switch from medieval sermons to a modern author. She wrote on index cards the names of numerous writers she liked, including James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, and Virginia Woolf. She then arranged them alphabetically. Beckett came out on top (presumably Auden didn’t make the cut). ‘That was how my life in biography began,’ explains Deirdre Bair, who died in April 2020, in time, fortuitously, to see this book published late last year.

Bair, the mother of two young children, had returned to college after working for a decade as a journalist and reporter. The skills she had developed in hunting for stories and sources inclined her towards life writing, against the temper of the times in which ‘literary theory’ was surging. Her thesis dwelt on Beckett’s life as well as his work. Nearing the conclusion, she began contemplating a biography of the famously reclusive writer. She wrote to him: to her amazement, he wrote back, offering to see her. ‘So you are the one who is going to reveal me for the charlatan that I am,’ was his opening gambit when they met in Paris in 1971.

Listen to this essay read by the author.

There’s a script for everything. Someone, voice wavering, says, ‘She’s dead’, and you say, ‘What?’ They say it again, and you say, ‘Oh, my god.’ You ask the usual questions, and then hang up and everything is incredibly quiet. You tell your boyfriend, and you both walk around the house trying to pack useful things: a sleeve of Valium, warm socks. You call your brother in London. He texts to say it’s five am there, can it wait? You call back. Before he even answers the phone, he knows.

Over the Westgate Bridge, the light sits flat and brooding over the city. Mike, my boyfriend, drives. We stop at an Exeloo public toilet five minutes from her house, because neither of us wants to interrupt a police conversation by needing to pee. The stainless-steel cubicles reek of piss. Mine is out of toilet paper. I wonder if someone heard the latest news and sat here pressing the button that dispenses six sheets at a time, until they had enough to assuage their fear of shortages. Overhead, the toilet plays a piano cover of ‘What the World Needs Now is Love, Sweet Love’.

I round the corner to find her draped in a white blanket, a mess of triangles. She looks like a house packed up for a season, furniture shrouded in sheets, waiting. I reach for what I think is an elbow and feel fingers instead. The world whitens, the exposure ratcheting up. I try to pull up the blanket to reveal her face. I get as far as her hair, the soft grey of it blending perfectly with the shag carpet. The fact of that hair, the corporeality of it, shatters me. I have to ask the young cop, eight months on the job, to do it for me. She pulls the blanket back like a game-show prize. And there is my mum.

The women that Robyn Davidson had a powerful effect on, Richard Cooke tells us, include author Anna Krien, adventurer Esther Nunn, and his wife. ‘I watched as the power of this book and its author, their energy and weight, worked an entrainment across cultures and generations,’ writes Cooke. In some ways his essay charts his struggle with that power. How not to fall into the trap that others who have tackled Davidson have fallen into? ‘I lagged decades of writers and pilgrims, interlopers and fans. Reading interviews to try to chicane through the questions already asked was pointless. They most often sought answers about the same thing – her first book, now published forty years ago.’

That book, of course, was Tracks. Everyone wanted a piece of Davidson before, during, and after its publication, but the more she insisted on her desire to be alone the more people wanted to get close to her. There was a deep, slightly pervy fascination with a twenty-six-year-old woman undergoing a 2,500-kilometre journey from Alice Springs to the coast of Western Australia, with three camels and a dog, in the late 1970s. The people who made versions of that journey not irregularly, Indigenous Australians, were treated with contempt. A white bloke would not have garnered the same attention. In Tracks, Davidson talks at length about the racism and sexism that fuelled social relations in central Australia, and Cooke draws on this to make interesting observations on the ways in which Davidson’s book changed the way we understood our First Peoples and their lands (though even as recently as 1996 the difference between Davidson’s first book, Tracks, and her fifth, Desert Places, was reviewed thus by Rosalind Sharpe in the Independent: ‘Australia, with its empty, hygienic spaces, sprinkled with people who understand English, was unimaginably different from India.’)

Cooke also does a good job of conveying Davidson’s extraordinary charisma – informed, to be sure, by a real intelligence, grit, determination, and all-consuming rage – a charisma that catapulted her across a continent, into the public’s consciousness. I appreciated his insight into one of the sources of that charisma: the desert itself. ‘By venturing into the desert, Robyn Davidson was also entering a literary landscape.’

As I read Cooke on Davidson, however, I was aware of a distance between the critic and his subject, one that was not in the other Writers On Writers books I have read. In On Patrick White, Christos Tsiolkas discusses the impact of Manoly Lascaris, Greece, and spirituality on White’s work in ways that convey intense excitement. In On Kate Jennings, Erik Jensen takes us behind the scenes of a life to create a portrait that changed how I read Jenning’s work. In On Shirley Hazard, Michelle de Kretser homes in on Hazard’s craft and art. These books are enlivened, even electrified, by the unexpectedness of these writers’ responses. That passion is missing in On Robyn Davidson. Perhaps that is a good thing. Other writing on Davidson has been heavy on the passion and light on perspective and analysis.

Cooke, an intelligent and forceful writer, lays out the problem he’s up against. Not only is Davidson too much written about: she does not, in fact, consider herself a writer.

We should start with something she is not: Robyn Davidson does not like to call herself a writer, or at least not a Writer.This was self-deprecation, I thought at first, but her hesitancy was so pronounced and recurrent when we spoke that it had to be something more. A writer is ‘the thing that I mostly am’, she would admit, while a ‘real writer’ is someone ‘who knows that’s what they want to do’ ... A writer was someone else, in other words. After forty years and five books – one of which has sold more than a million copies – Davidson is still not sure that writing is what she is good at, or what she wants to do.

I would have loved to see Cooke interrogate Davidson’s self-representation more, see him pick the fight Davidson is always spoiling for. If not a writer, what is she? Is Davidson’s assertion that a real writer is someone who knows what they want to do in any way a meaningful one? Not by my reckoning.

Cooke does, however, acknowledge that Davidson equates the written word with constraint and with loss of freedom. He nudges us towards what is interesting about Davidson’s position: the way she interrogates the meaning, or erasure of meaning, in the creation of narrative. In Tracks she writes, ‘I did not perceive at the time that I was allowing myself to get more involved with writing about the trip than the trip itself. It did not dawn on me that already I was beginning to see it as a story for other people, with a beginning and an ending.’ This is similar to her rage about being looked at. Feeling as if some essential part of herself is being stolen, commodified, she is angry – with herself as much as anyone – for allowing this to happen.

Is Davidson contrary just for the sake of it, or is her position a more profound interrogation of narrative and the self? Or both? Cooke at times seems defeated by Davidson’s refusal not just of easy answers but of any answers at all. By the end of the book, he decides to take her at her word. She may never finish her final trek – the hard slog of writing her memoir, a project that has hung over her for twenty-five years – and if she does finish it, it might take many years yet.

Correction

An earlier version of this review contained an inaccurate reference to one of Robyn Davidson’s books. The reference to ‘... Davidson’s first book, Tracks, and her second, Nomads...’ should have read ‘...Davidson’s first book, Tracks, and her fifth, Desert Places...’. The error has now been corrected.

Listen to this review read by the author.

 Okay, I’ll tell you what’s wrong with this country. For a start, we have this profoundly stupid and deeply irritating myth that we’re all irreverent freedom-loving larrikins and easygoing egalitarians, when it is painfully obvious that we have long been a nation of prudes and wowsers, that our collective psyche has been warped by what Patrick Mullins describes, with his characteristic lucidity, as ‘a fear of contaminating international influences’, and that we are not just an insular, conservative, and deeply conformist society, but for some unaccountable reason we take pride in our ignorance and parochialism. And let’s not neglect the fact that we are cringingly deferential and enamoured of hierarchy. Oh yes, it’s all master–slave dialectics and daddy issues around here. Why the hell else would we keep electing entitled, smirking, condescending autocrats? In fact, there are few things your average patriotic Australian likes better than the authoritative clamour of some dead-eyed, bull-necked crypto-fascist bashing on the bathroom door and demanding to know what we’re reading in there. Which, for most of the twentieth century, was not much. We banned Balzac, for fuck’s sake. We banned Lawrence and Huxley and Nabokov. We banned Hemingway, Baldwin, Vidal, Salinger, Donleavy, Burroughs, Miller, and McCarthy. We banned Ulysses, then unbanned it, then realised our mistake and banned it again. We prosecuted Max Harris for publishing a poet who didn’t even exist. For a while there, the list of banned books was banned. But then what happens if I read one of them by accident, Dr Spielvogel? Mullins has all the receipts. For years it was ‘assumed incontrovertibly by common law that obscene writings do deprave and corrupt morals, by causing dirty-mindedness, by creating or pandering to a taste for the obscene’. Who stands a chance against such impeccable circular reasoning? No wonder the country is a neurotic mess. No wonder we can’t even get philistinism right. When the attitude of our guardians of public morality for most of the last century was ‘I have no idea what this is or what it might mean, and I have no intention of finding out, but I don’t like it’, declaring ‘I know what I like’ represented a significant advance. Saying ‘I know it when I see it’ qualified you as an intellectual. Of course, the whole wacky censorship regime was justified on the grounds that it was upholding ‘community standards’, disregarding the obvious point that if the community had any standards there would be no need to uphold them. What standards? Artie Fadden’s trade minister, Eric Harrison, thought he knew what they were, but only because he copied out all the rude bits of Ulysses and mailed them to some church groups. Apparently, they weren’t impressed. He should have referred himself to the vice squad – I mean, what kind of creep sends unsolicited smut to little old ladies? This is all in Mullins’s book, if you’re interested, which you should be, because believe me the same clueless creeps are still in charge. Mullins wrote a biography of Billy McMahon, so he understands better than most that the dominant genre of Australian political life is farce. The Trials of Portnoy is about a rare instance of sanity prevailing, though of course a regime of unrelieved idiocy doesn’t just collapse of its own accord. It needs to be brought down. A few cheeky student publications were never going to achieve anything. No, it took a novel of perverted genius, a novel backed by a major publisher, a novel about a compulsive onanist that’s so funny that anything it touches instantly becomes ridiculous. Fight farce with farce was the basic idea. And hoo-boy did it work. It was like that Monty Python sketch about a joke that’s so funny it kills people. The book immediately sells 100,000 copies and they’re debating whether or not it meets ‘community standards’. A communist bookstore over in Western Australia sold so many copies they were able to renovate with the profits! It’s brilliant when you think about it. I don’t know, Dr Spielvogel. For some reason, I find debates about ‘literary merit’ incredibly funny. And I find the thought of lawyers debating literary merit before bewigged judges even funnier. Imagine writing a book that’s basically an extended psychiatrist-couch gag about a guy who can’t stop pulling his putz and it leads to a string of court cases trying to establish if it’s ‘obscene’. If! Imagine them all in their robes, scratching their beards, trying to work out if a novel about a neurotic jerkoff has ‘depraving’ effect. Well, they all read it. They should know! Picture a procession of the nation’s finest literary minds summoned as expert witnesses. Such experts! James McAuley, Vincent Buckley, Patrick White, Fay Zwicky, Dorothy Hewett – all taking the stand to attest to the literary merits of a novel about a guy who whacks off into his sister’s brassiere. But what about the bit where he sticks his schlong in the raw liver? Oh, that bit’s especially meritorious, m’lud. Some academic called the book enriching. I mean, this is Alexander Portnoy we’re talking about here. If he’s enriching, where’s a guy supposed to go for a little depravity? A qualified psychologist testified that the novel had ‘the truth of a tone poem or landscape’. When that happens, you know you’ve won. It’s a funny thing, Dr Spielvogel, I can’t quite explain it, but reading Mullins’s book actually made me feel a little better.

First light beside the Murray in Mildura,
Which like a drift of mist pervades
The eucalypt arcades,
A pale caesura

Dividing night and day. Two, three clear notes
To usher in the dawn are heard
From a pied butcherbird,
A phrase that floats

So slowly through the silence-thickened air,
Those notes, like globules labouring
Through honey, almost cling
And linger there.

Or is it that the notes themselves prolong
The time time takes, to make it stand,
Morning both summoned and
Called back by song.

As with many authors, Covid-19 forced Catherine Bond to cancel the launch event for her new book. But unlike most authors’ work, the contemporary relevance of Bond’s latest book has been considerably heightened by the ongoing pandemic. Indeed, in the midst of this crisis it is hard to imagine a historical text timelier than Law in War: Freedom and restriction in Australia during the Great War. A century later, lessons from that era are still instructive today.

Covid-19 has had a dramatic impact on people’s lives. At the time of writing, Australians cannot leave their homes except in narrowly defined circumstances. Domestic and international borders have been sealed. The government is effectively underwriting the economy. In a society governed by law, these changes have been brought about by hastily drafted legislation and regulation. The extent of the power now lawfully wielded by Australia’s federal and state executives is unparalleled in living memory.

Australians have a healthy appetite for political memoirs and biographies at a federal level. It is not only the scandal-ridden set of recent prime ministers with juicy details of political assassinations that sparks interest. The popularity of David Headon’s First Eight Project has demonstrated that the lives of Australia’s first national leaders are still a source of deep fascination. Even Earle Page, who only held the top job for nineteen days, is being rediscovered, thanks to Stephen Wilks’s 2017 PhD thesis from ANU. That Barnaby Joyce, one of Page’s distant successors as party leader, could secure a book contract speaks more to popular interest in federal leaders than to the quality of his prose.

The ongoing public fascination with federal actors on the political stage sits in stark contrast to the relative indifference to their colonial predecessors. This is surprising, as the scandals and drama that filled the columns of colonial newspapers were every bit as sensational as the revelations that excite our modern Twitterati. The subject of Sean Scalmer’s rich biography is a case in point.

John Curtin and James Scullin occupy very different places in whatever collective memory Australians have of their prime ministers. On the occasions that rankings of prime ministers have been published, Curtin invariably appears at or near the top. When researchers at Monash University in 2010 produced such a ranking based on a survey of historians and political scientists, Curtin led the pack, with Scullin rated above only Joseph Cook, Arthur Fadden, and Billy McMahon. Admittedly, this ranking was produced before anyone had ever thought of awarding an Australian knighthood to Prince Philip, but the point is clear enough: Curtin rates and Scullin does not.

Liam Byrne’s pairing of the two men in this book is therefore in some ways a peculiar one. Scullin and Curtin are not usually considered in the same frame. The touching Peter Corlett statue in Canberra is of Curtin and Ben Chifley, a truly famous wartime partnership, rivalled in Australian politics only by the more fractious one of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating four decades later. But Byrne reminds us that in Parliament House during the war, Scullin occupied the office between those of Curtin and Chifley.

Malcolm Turnbull looks us straight in the eye from the cover of this handsome book, with just a hint of a smile. He looks calm, healthy, and confident; if there are scars from his loss of the prime ministership in August 2018, they don’t show. The book’s voice is the engaging one we heard when Turnbull challenged Tony Abbott in July 2015 and promised a style of leadership that respected people’s intelligence. He takes us from his childhood in a very unhappy marriage, through school and university, his astonishing successes in media, business, and the law, his entry into politics as the member for Wentworth, and ends with his exit from parliament.

It is a Sydney story, full of the Sydney identities Turnbull worked with as he made his name and fortune: Kerry Packer, of course, but a host of others, and the politicians, like Neville Wran and Bob Carr, who were his friends. Like the young Paul Keating, Turnbull sat at the feet of Jack Lang. The stories of his successes, friendships, and enmities before he entered politics are lively and well told, but they have a rehearsed feel, the jagged edges worn away. The book’s energy is in his three years as prime minister (2015–18) which occupy more than half the book.

John Keane is Australia’s leading scholar of democracy, with work that demonstrates an impressive command of global sources. Keane’s most widely cited book, The Life and Death of Democracy (2009), included new research on the origins of public assemblies in India many centuries before the familiar democracy of Greek city-states. Keane located the origins of democracy in non-European traditions, in part by tracing the linguistic origins of the concept.

This engagement with language and evidence is deployed once more in The New Despotism, an ambitious study of the non-democratic world. Despotism as a term fell out of use in the twentieth century, replaced by concern about totalitarian states. Keane seeks to revitalise the concept, not as a mirror image of democracy but, worryingly, as something that can grow out of democracy. As his many examples show, this century has seen the closing down of accountability and free elections until states retain the formal institutions of democracy but not the reality of popular sovereignty.