The staff and board of Australian Book Review extend their thanks to healthcare workers around the world. We all know what risks confront doctors, nurses, aides, orderlies, and administrative staff in our hospitals and medical clinics, especially here in Victoria. Countless healthcare workers have been infected with Covid-19, and many have died. We’re immensely grateful to the sector for its commitment and self-sacrifice.

Good doctors and good poets
     share a calling
that seems to be the only one 
     in life.
Both see the world as beautifully   
     appalling,
the inhabitants survivors of its   
     strife. 
Each starts off with a discipline   
     so daunting
it seems that no one will survive   
     the test.
Failed fellows will surround them   
     with a haunting
that lasts all life like an   
     unwanted guest.
The lives of a myriad ‘poets’   
     will be saved
while tens of the truly talented   
     expire.
Battalions of banality be   
     braved
before the psyche’s surge begins   
     to tire.
But at the end, whether by pen   
     or knife,
they know the one imperative   
     is Life.

‘Sonnet for Dr Michael Kennedy’ by Bruce Beaver

When William Blake wrote of seeing ‘a World in a Grain of Sand’, he meant the details: their ability to evoke entire universes. So did Aldous Huxley when, experimenting with mescaline, he discovered ‘the miracle … of naked existence’ in a vase of flowers. More recently, Jenny Odell’s bestseller How To Do Nothing: Resisting the attention economy (2019) made a case for rejecting productivity in favour of active attention to the world around us.  

Tegan Bennett Daylight’s The Details: On love, death and reading follows in this tradition, with a focus on reading and how it has enhanced the author’s perceptions and interpretations of life’s events. While The Details is her first essay collection, Daylight is an experienced critic and essayist, as well as the author of several volumes of fiction. Daylight is also a teacher, a role that she confidently inhabits in conjunction with other identities: daughter, mother, friend, writer, and, above all, reader.

Early on, we are introduced to Daylight as reader, learning about her mother’s habit of sharing books as a cure for childhood boredom and as a form of intergenerational communication. Daylight’s mother, Deborah, is a lofty presence throughout The Details. It is Deborah who introduces the author, as a teenager, to the works of Helen Garner (a writer with whom Daylight finds herself in ‘lifelong conversation’). The essay dealing with Deborah’s death, ‘Details II’, is a standout of the collection.

The world evoked by British nature writer and historian Helen Macdonald in her new collection of essays is haunted by no end of unsettling and shrouded presences. The sight of a flock of starlings gives her a shiver of fear. Why? Because in her imagination the flock connects with a mass of refugees. The sight of falcon eggs in an incubator makes her unaccountably upset. Then she remembers that she, too, as a very premature baby, was once kept alive in just such a box. And on it goes.

According to Macdonald, we never see the natural world as it really is. What we see is ravelled up with reflected fragments of our humanity: our personal histories, our politics and prejudices, and the culture we inhabit. Animals are particularly vulnerable to this confusion of meanings. The stories we tell about them always say more about ourselves – our attitudes and assumptions, our habits of thinking – than about the beasts as they really are.

While climbing in British Columbia, Canadian writer and journalist Eva Holland becomes paralysed by fear. She has long been troubled by exposed heights, but this is different. What she experiences is an ‘irrational force’ that prevents her from moving. It is only the dogged encouragement of friends that allows her to make her tentative way back down the mountain.

The terror Holland confronts over those long hours marks a turning point. She resolves to renegotiate her relationship with fear by studying what science has to tell us about its development and treatment. Drawing on her own experience, she identifies three principal manifestations of fear: phobia (her aversion to heights), trauma (her response to a series of car accidents), and existential fear (her dread of her mother’s death).

French journalist Agnès Poirier has a flair for relating the saving of France’s artistic treasures. One of the most gripping chapters of her previous book, Left Bank: Art, passion and the rebirth of Paris, 1940–50 (2018), told the story of Jacques Jaujard, who skilfully evacuated the Louvre’s greatest works mere days before the outbreak of World War II. In Poirier’s brief volume on Paris’s cathedral of Notre-Dame, devastated by fire on 15 April 2019, it is the turn of curator Marie-Hélène Didier and Notre-Dame’s operational director, Laurent Prades. As Poirier tracks the fire from outbreak to containment, we watch them battle Paris’s traffic-locked streets by car, RER, Vélib’, and foot to reach the cathedral and rescue what they can. Prades’s sudden (and entirely understandable) inability to remember the code for the safe in which the Crown of Thorns is kept makes for tense reading.

However you might feel about religious relics, the media attention and the donations that poured in after the fire suggested that, for many, Notre-Dame is part of a shared global heritage. For Poirier, ‘The tragedy revealed that a staunchly secular country had its roots firmly grounded in history, a history that was Christian.’ Some found this a shock, she argues, as ‘Notre-Dame, a place where the sacred met the secular, reminded us all of where we came from in an unexpected and powerful way.’

Adrian Martin’s Mysteries of Cinema is, above all, an impassioned love letter to film, a written record of a life defined and driven by the pleasures, ambiguities, and indeed mysteries inherent in what André Bazin, co-founder of Cahiers du Cinéma, called the ‘seventh art’. In the author’s own words, the book ‘covers 34 years of a writing life’. It charts both his ephemeral and enduring fixations and obsessions, many of which converge on cinema, film form, the role of the critic, pockets of film culture, and the psychological, emotional, and intellectual responses that cinema elicits. Mirroring much of Martin’s oeuvre, Mysteries of Cinema is not easily classifiable; it cuts across different strands of film theory and thought by employing ‘a mode of synthetic film analysis attuned to … the mysteries of cinema’. Martin’s devotees will devour Mysteries of Cinema, savouring its details, imagery, and linguistic flourishes. At more than 430 pages in length, it might prove a formidable undertaking for the more casual reader.

John Kinsella tends to be a polarising figure, but his work has won many admirers both in Australia and across the world, and I find myself among these. The main knocks on Kinsella are that he writes too much, that what he does write is sprawling and ungainly, and that he tends to editorialise and evangelise. One might concede all of these criticisms, but then still be faced with what by any estimation is a remarkable body of work, one that is dazzling both in its extent and its amplitude, in the boldness of its conceptions and in the lyrical complexity of its moments. An element that tends to be overlooked in Kinsella, both as a writer and as a public figure, is his compassion. What it means to be compassionate, rather than simply passionate, is a question that underpins Kinsella’s memoir Displaced: A rural life.

In the early nineteenth century, Sequoyah, a Cherokee man living in Alabama, developed a fundamentally new system of writing Cherokee, which had until then not been a written language. Sequoyah’s system – properly a syllabary rather than an alphabet, in that it represents the eighty-five syllables used in Cherokee – is fascinating, innovative, and remains in use today. But in what order did those fabulous syllables go? Sequoyah provided a chart, but the missionary Samuel Worcester quickly rearranged it to suit English alphabetic order. Language was power, and ‘alphabetic order’ proved not to be neutral.

These thoughts come to mind while reading social historian Judith Flanders’ new book, A Place for Everything, in which she explores the development and dominance of alphabetic order in Western Europe and the United States from the medieval period to the twenty-first century. Flanders organises her book alphabetically (A is for …, B is for …, and so on), but jumps from I (index cards) to Y (Y2K) for a sort of epilogue on the twilight of the alphabet.

When the Abbé Michel Fourmont travelled to Sparta in the 1730s, he thought he was going to make his fortune and academic reputation. The depths of Ottoman Greece were largely unknown territory to European travellers at this time. What fabulous discoveries lay in store for him, wondered the Abbé. What treasures had been left behind by this one of the greatest powers that the Greek world had ever known? One can imagine his anguish when, after braving numerous perils to reach Sparta, he discovered that barely anything remained of this great city-state. Indeed, the paucity of material was such that it seems to have driven Fourmont slightly mad. Rather than admit that nothing existed, he invented in his account of Sparta a series of fabulous, non-existent monuments – altars for human sacrifice, elaborate records of treaties between Sparta and Jerusalem, lists of priestesses and kings that stretched back to antiquity. To disguise his act of forgery, lest any later traveller try to find these monuments, he even pretended to have destroyed them, protesting that as a decent Christian he couldn’t allow such pagan works to survive. It would take scholars decades before they could unravel the extent of Fourmont’s deceit.

In an early episode of the cult Canadian television series Slings & Arrows (2003), the director of the ‘Burbage Festival’ finds himself addressing a corporate audience, forced to teach management strategy through Shakespeare: ‘Do any of you seriously believe that you’re going to sell more plastics products to the construction industry by studying, say, the crisis management techniques of Claudius?’ Fortunately, Scott Newstok wouldn’t be answering that question in the affirmative. His How to Think Like Shakespeare doesn’t strain analogies or instrumentalise Shakespeare’s plays and characters to make Shakespeare seem relevant to patently unrelated contexts; rather, it explores both Shakespeare’s thinking and the ‘educational assumptions that shaped Shakespeare’ (since these frequently differ from our own system of education). At the heart of this book is Newstok’s conviction that ‘education must be about thinking – not training a set of specific skills’. After all, there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

The figure of the child stands at both ends of human experience in Shakespeare’s plays. The span between our ‘mewling and puking’ infancy and our ‘second childishness’ of old age runs to little more than a dozen lines in Jacques’s famous ‘seven ages of man’ speech in As You Like It, before we slip into ‘mere oblivion, / Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.’ In the intervening years, our identity as children might shift as we undergo rites of passage into adulthood, as our relationships with our own parents evolve or as we become parents ourselves. But the child – the archetype of our essential nature – waits patiently for our return. Even Lear, the grand patriarch who disowns the truth-speaking child of his heart, must be racked on the fiery wheel of experience before he can become the ‘child-changed father’ Cordelia recognises in the end.

Laurie Duggan (photograph by Angela Gardner)

Laurie Duggan was born in Melbourne and was involved in the poetry worlds of that city and Sydney from the 1970s to the late 1990s. After six years in Brisbane he moved to England, living in Faversham, Kent until 2018 when he returned to Sydney. He has published some twenty books of poems together with Ghost Nation, a work about imagined space. His most recent books are Homer Street (Giramondo, 2020), Selected Poems 1971–2017 (Shearsman, 2018), and No Particular Place To Go (Shearsman, 2017).

Which poets have most influenced you?

Thomas Wyatt, Walter Raleigh, Lord Rochester, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Robert Browning, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Jean Follain, Francis Ponge, George Oppen, Louis MacNeice, Charles Olson, Gwen Harwood, Hilda Morley, Philip Whalen, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Gael Turnbull, Paul Blackburn, Edward Dorn, Jonathan Williams, Joanne Kyger, Lee Harwood, Alan Wearne, John Scott, Pam Brown, Ken Bolton, John Forbes, Gig Ryan. It goes on …

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

Crafted definitely, though how they originate is another matter. Craft is essential. But it can be a subtle thing. I grew up in the shadow of poets who were fixated on forms like the pentameter. Despite their talk about regular forms, I found many of them to be clunky versifiers (there are of course exceptions, like, say, James Merrill). One young Australian poet wrote very ‘formal’ work that rattled and ‘informal’ work that just seemed shapeless. He was tone deaf. Inspiration? See below.

In his description of the verse novel as ‘the awkward child of successful parents, destined to disappoint both of them’, Michael Symmons Roberts emphasises the form’s sometimes disjunctive use of literary techniques commonly associated with poetry and prose fiction. While the verse novel has gained popularity since the 1980s, many of its features may be traced to epic poems such The Epic of Gilgamesh and Homer’s The Iliad, and the long narrative poems of the Romantic and Victorian periods. The form was established by Alexander Pushkin’s nineteenth-century verse novel Eugene Onegin, which was divided into stanzas; however, the definition and key features of the verse novel are still hotly debated.

Linda Weste’s book of interviews, Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on writing, is an important contribution to the growing, but often conflicted, field of studies on the verse novel. Most importantly, it is the first book of interviews to give priority to practitioners’ views of the form and issues associated with the verse novel’s composition and craft. Weste’s aim is to ‘expand knowledge of the diverse ways … authors [of verse novels] combine narrative and poetic techniques to compose their distinctive works’. The book is full of glistering moments that capture what David Mason identifies as the form’s ‘tension and frisson’.

In all of his books, Laurie Duggan has tended to avoid the ‘well-formed poem’. His poems are not of the kind that unroll like carpets: replete with interconnected images, sonic patterning, argument. A large part of his poetic approach emerges from an attempt to not speak over what is already there, or, as he writes in one poem, to ‘not neutralise / the effect of atmosphere’. This might be described as permitting the incidental, letting things in, but it’s also – Duggan being a self-described minimalist – much to do with omission. The model his oeuvre provides is one that prioritises listening (and looking) over speaking, and in that sense it is anti-bardic. ‘The poem’ as a discrete object is often, and almost entirely within this collection, given over to the series, allowing Duggan to retain qualities of the short lyric while building long-form structures whose rhythms become apparent over years or, in the case of ‘Blue Hills’, over decades.

Homer Street is Duggan’s first collection since his return to Australia after twelve years living in England. The book’s three sections reflect this chronology, concerned as they are with England, Australia, and visual art. The first sequence, ‘A Closing Album’, is a series of fragments named for (excluding Dublin) English towns and cities. The title makes its intention clear, to close off that part of his life. Being an album, there is both light and shade. While more than one fragment does not give the impression that Duggan misses a particular place (‘Rotund, pink / and pissed // the English sing / their football songs’ is ‘Gillingham’), others are warmer (‘fresh hops above the bar’ begins ‘East Kent’). The album is followed by another section of ‘Allotments’, the English counterpart to the ‘Blue Hills’ series – the only constraint of the latter being that its poems are written in Australia. The ‘Allotments’ poems would likely have been written when Duggan knew he was leaving England; with that knowledge they read as valedictory, albeit in an understated way. ‘Dogs’, a scrappier, ratbaggy series of puns and fragments, follows. From it, this is (in its entirety) ‘A further misreading’: ‘Philip Larkin / the librarian from Hell.’ Which should give the reader unfamiliar with Duggan’s poetry a sense of his ability to not waste words, as well as his position with regard to the Movement poets. ‘Dogs’ represents the other side to Duggan’s observational mode: that of the satirist, the pricker of pretensions. This tendency runs back to his series of anagrams of poets’ names in his first book, East (1976), and his versions of the poet Martial adapted to the Australian literary scene (1989).

Laurie Duggan (photograph by Angela Gardner)

In the first of the thirty-five ‘Blue Hills’ poems included here, the word ‘perception’ appears (‘a perception of red lakes’) and resonates, leading to the idea that the series will increasingly be about winnowing sense data down to spare registrations of heat, light, and sound. As it proceeds, memory and comment begin to find their way into the poems, and the details observed become, often, smaller and closer: a list of different eucalypt surfaces, a cockatoo cracking a seedpod, ‘its eye a black dot’. In ‘Blue Hills 85’, there appears one of the few notes in the series that touches on that poverty of reference characteristic of non-Aboriginal Australia: ‘what was the name of this place? / (what is the name) / and whom to ask?’

Names of people and places are important for Duggan, and there are plenty of them in his poetry. But rather than simply stating this fact (which has been remarked on enough, as if it were extraordinary), what is of interest is the sensitivity of his attunement to the worlds of reference that are his ambit – primarily visual art, music, and poetry – and by which the poems move.

The title sequence, ‘Homer Street’ (a very Duggan title in its referencing of both high and low), serves as a set of ‘atmospheric attunements’ (to borrow a phrase from Kathleen Stewart) to a place both new and returned to. Place for Duggan is understood as something one is continually ‘reading’, continually re-orienting oneself to, via personal associations as well as cultural signs (which could be an architectural motif as well as a speech style), though as the reference to ‘suburban topographies’ on the back cover note suggests, he evidently also makes use of maps in his writing.

The ‘Afterimages’ sequence closes out the book, and leaves us with something quite different: forty-four poems, each titled with the name of an artist. Arranged alphabetically and presumably not an open-ended series, it is for this reason less vertiginous than ‘Blue Hills’, the poems more self-contained in the sense that the focus of each is trained wholly on the aesthetic of its particular artist. We leave it feeling as if we have spent a few hours in an eclectic (and well-funded) gallery. Many of the poems are built around a question (‘Godfrey Miller’, ‘Gustave Courbet’, ‘Ian Fairweather’) or a speculation (‘Peter Lanyon’, ‘Paul Nash’). Others are more descriptive, capturing, in miniature, details of particular works (‘Mona Hatoum’), or an essential quality of an artist’s oeuvre (‘Georges Seurat’). In the latter mode, ‘Grace Cossington Smith’ evokes for this reader the shimmering effect of that painter’s brush work; it reads in full:

it is best to knit things together
to see part of yourself
in the door of a mirrored robe
as a shadow against bright furniture

These names-as-titles do a lot of work in the series, rousing what is for the reader associated with that name. Even when a name is unfamiliar, it still evokes. Notice what happens when the names above are placed in quotation marks. They become notional, an idea; the strictures of the referential are relaxed. And it’s within that more propositional space that these poems work.

Sometime late morning it begins, a root of something that only as it grows do you recognise as pain. You have had coffee, as you do every morning, and now you feel the kind of heaviness that sends you to lie down. At home, the friend who is staying with you, whom you half invited and who may have misinterpreted your keenness for company, notes your early return and approves of your plan to retreat. For both of you it has been a year frantic with change and learning and emotion, and even if it is likely indulgent – so what, you’ve earned the right to call a morning off the books and instead take a heat pack and wish it were night all over again. She even microwaves the heat pack for you. You take it to bed where you think you will read or watch television or luxuriate in some way.

The feeling continues to grow, though, and turns from an elusive shadow in your abdomen into something more clawing, with a definite shape, even though you’ve never much liked admitting to physical pain, having been told stories of your grandfather walking into the doctor’s office on a broken foot, and having been praised by brothers for not crying when grazes brought blood to the surface. But it’s pain, this time, with a beat all its own, a pulse that echoes your heart. You find some Ibuprofen, take the recommended dose.

Becoming better acquainted with an author may give rise to a surprise, or two. For example, the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft (author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) and William Godwin (author of Political Justice) is the author of Frankenstein. Mary Shelley met her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, through his devotion to her father’s anarchist political philosophy. Gaining an awareness of the surprisingly complex threads that link one thinker to the next in dynamic webs of influence is one of the deep pleasures of scholarship.

The ritual begins by filling a plastic basin with warm water. It is carried from the bathroom to the bedroom. It is placed firstly on a stool, then on to the floor. Soap and a flannel cloud the water. My hands bathe the woman who has removed her nightie. She sits with a sense of calm and pained skin’s need for pleasure. It is like bathing a tired child. I lift her arms, we speak quietly of shared things. This true intimacy is purifying. We have forgotten the things that have strained and estranged us. These mornings our bond is primitive. These days are bordered by routine. I am preparing her for death. I am pleasing her prickling skin. I dry her. I treat her skin with lotions and oils. Liver cancer has swollen her body into a state of pregnancy, distension, emaciation. Life is bursting from the dark soil of March. I have travelled from Autumn to Spring, from Sydney to Northern Scotland to bathe her. The liver was once thought to exude love and courage. The ritual ends with a fresh nightie, accommodating pillows, a flowered quilt. She rests. Other mornings we, a nurse and I, walk her to the bathroom. She removes her nightie and walks naked through the house, we are fully clothed, unholy. Her physical weakness rushes her. We battle to steady her, keep the syringe driver (morphine) untangled, unstrained, and keep up with her, our reaching hands and arms taking her weight. Her swollen legs and feet grip her. I have prepared the bath for her, run warm water beneath her bath seat. We shift her across it until she is centred. We turn her, lift and lower her feet into the pleasure of the warm water. She visibly relaxes. I push my hand between her thigh and the hinge that lifts as the seat is lowered, to spare her a pinch or a bruise. She can stand the sinking until it forces her to sit upright. We stop its descent. She sits, this morphed woman, alabaster grace perched on vinyl with her fingers in her ears, as I reverently wash her hair. I tip water over her head, down her back like a bowed-head statue. She is the praying figure in a fountain; a Gothic ideal, a Medieval Eve. The nurse and I are two of the Danaides, we perpetually pour water over this veiled woman. We are myth personified. We are trying to fill a sieve with water.

After My Brilliant Career appeared in 1901, Miles Franklin spent a few years living in Sydney, where she enjoyed being fêted as a new literary sensation. Her attempt to earn a living by writing fiction and journalism about women’s issues was less than successful; even the timely and witty suffrage novel, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909), was knocked back at first. In 1906, at the age of twenty-six, she left Australia for the United States. She spent the next nine years living in Chicago and working for the Women’s Trade Union League, secretary to its wealthy patron, Margaret Dreier Robins, and editing its journal, Life and Labour, with her compatriot Alice Henry. The two Australians enjoyed recognition as enfranchised women, a status that American women were still fighting for.

Gail Jones’s beautifully crafted narratives invite and reward careful reading. All her work bears the mark of her formidable intellect. Yet her texts don’t show off: they assert the primacy of embodied experience and interpersonal relationships as much as the inner life of the mind. They provoke you to attend to their many layers of meaning, often requiring at least two readings (and some research) to fully grasp their complexity. But the reader’s reward is in the ‘ah’ moments when, for example, an image takes on particular resonance or an idea emerges from the text’s depths. It is to these intricacies that Tanya Dalziell’s monograph, Gail Jones: Word, image, ethics, turns its attention.

Jones’s importance to the field of Australian literature – justifying her inclusion in the Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series of which this book is a part – is validated not just by the quality of her work and its translation into numerous languages but also by her many literary accolades, including being shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Literary Award four times, winning the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2019 for The Death of Noah Glass (2018), and being longlisted for the Man Booker and Orange prizes. Dalziell’s academic study brings together other critics’ writing on Jones, Jones’s own non-fiction writing, interview material, theoretical sources, and intertextual references in conversation with detailed readings of her fictional texts, thereby providing an especially useful resource for researchers or students seeking in-depth analysis of her work and its influences.

It is now taken for granted that nothing which concerns art can be taken for granted any more: neither art itself, nor art in its relationship to the whole, nor even the right of art to exist.

Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory

Those of us who work in classical music will be familiar with the accusation that our chosen art form lacks contemporary social relevance. It is one with a long pedigree. ‘Sonata, what do you want of me?’ asked an exasperated Fontenelle in 1751, according to Rousseau. But you will find no widespread or heightened disdain for worldly affairs among classical musicians on the whole. Rather, any apparent reticence they may have describing how their art connects with the world at large stems from the fact that it is notoriously difficult to do. As the well-known quip goes, ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.’ This is not a love that dare not speak its name so much as one that struggles to be put into words at all.

When the music stops, however, finding the right words becomes urgent. Our concert halls and theatres were some of the first public spaces to be closed when Covid-19 reached Australia, and they are likely to be some of the last to reopen. Many of the musicians who work in these spaces also found themselves ineligible for government financial assistance schemes like JobKeeper. Those fortunate enough to hold salaried positions in state-funded ensembles and venues must now watch nervously from the sidelines as their employers’ operational deficits grow. The $250 million arts rescue package that the Morrison government announced in June, small by comparison with those enacted elsewhere, is also still many months away from coming into effect. The cumulative effect may not prove terminal, but it seems increasingly clear that the performing culture we abandoned in March is not one to which we will easily, if ever, return.

Amanda Lohrey lives in Tasmania and writes fiction and non-fiction. She has taught politics at the University of Tasmania and writing and textual studies at the University of Technology Sydney and the University of Queensland. In November 2012 she received the Patrick White Literary Award. Her latest novel is The Labyrinth (2020).

Where are you happiest?

At my laptop, writing.

Financial crises, recessions, and times of high unemployment have periodically affected Australia. They have also shaped our vocabulary. The first recording of the iconic Australian word battler, in the sense of a person who struggles for a livelihood, was in 1896 by Henry Lawson in While the Billy Boils. The ‘swagman, itinerant worker’ sense of battler was first recorded in 1898. The verb to battle in the sense of ‘to struggle for a livelihood’ was first recorded in the 1880s, and in the sense of ‘to seek to subsist while seeking employment’ from the 1890s.

A variety of words for itinerant workers and those in search of employment date to the second half of the nineteenth century: sundowner, swaggie, bagman, and swag carrier are just a few of them. If the swagman travelling on the wallaby track (or the hungry track or the tucker track) was imbued with some romance of life on the road, there were also words that spoke of contempt for the unemployed vagrant: toe-ragger was recorded as a term of abuse for a tramp in 1878, and suburban swagman is recorded in 1899, perhaps reflecting the impact of the 1890s depression on the city worker. The first decade of the twentieth century saw a handful of terms enter Australian English that continued this late nineteenth-century language around itinerancy. The most notable of these perhaps is knight of the road, first recorded in 1904.

Criminal lawyer turned crime/thriller writer Jock Serong has produced five highly successful novels in as many years. His latest, The Burning Island, is probably his most ambitious to date. Set in 1830, it is part revenge tale, part mystery, part historical snapshot of the Furneaux Islands in Bass Strait, in particular the relationship between European settlers and Indigenous women, who became their ‘island wives’, or tyereelore. It is also the moving story of a daughter’s devotion to her father, with a cracking denouement reminiscent of an Hercule Poirot mystery.

Like Serong’s last novel, Preservation (2018), The Burning Island is historical fiction, based on the true story of the disappearance in 1839 of the Britomart, a ship that departed Melbourne for Hobart carrying thirty passengers and cargo, but never arrived. She was presumed lost in Bass Strait, somewhere around the Furneaux Islands. There were rumours that she had been carrying a large amount of gold coins, to establish the first Tasmanian bank, and that lawless sealers had lured her to her ruin with false lights so that they could plunder her.

Near the beginning of Bruno Lloret’s stark, unvarnished first novel, Nancy, the cancer-riddled protagonist discovers that her husband has died in a workplace accident, sucked into the tuna processor while drunk. With no body to bury, she imagines having ‘a moment alone with the 2,500 tins containing [him]’.

That unsentimental account issues from a woman habituated to abandonment and plays out in the north of Chile, where the Atacama Desert meets the ocean. In the world of the novel, it is a place where the love of family is circumscribed by the vicissitudes of industry, and where the forces of capitalism, even on its fringes, are as merciless as any Old Testament god. When swine flu breaks out at a pork-processing plant and the townspeople refuse to send representatives to meet with a visiting minister, she ‘laid down her curse: Never again will we remember you in the capital, she said, according to my tío x Then the slow exodus towards the horizon, the sea.’

The bolded x’s that typographically scar the novel accrue a multiplicity of meanings. As well as defamiliarising the text, they guide the reading much as does the blank space around, and line breaks in, a poem – they impel where you place your focus, how many beats a sentence is given to resonate in your mind. This is especially the case for the exquisite opening and closing sections, where time is compressed and the enjambment of the spare prose builds a hypnotic rhythm.

If there is a flaw in Nancy, it is that for the most part the reminiscences of childhood and adolescence are neatly chronological, and footnoted; sometimes the fact that the scenes are being evoked by a remembering mind is lost. While a vastly different book, Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream (2014), likewise narrated by a dying woman, carries out the complex dance between memories and the present with greater finesse.

Yet Ellen Jones’s translation is attuned to the asperous beauty of everyday language, and Lloret’s evocations of place, the intensity of his narrative, and his experimentation with form are resplendent. This is a beguiling addition to Southern Latitudes, a series that in a few short years has become the most invigorating across the Australian publishing landscape.

You wouldn’t envy any writer releasing a novel at the moment, due to the difficulties getting books in front of readers, yet recent UK statistics indicate a surge in crime fiction sales following the relaxing of lockdown restrictions and the reopening of bookshops. It’s hard to say whether the same optimistic reading of the crime fiction market in Australia holds true, though two new crime novels by début authors – Kyle Perry’s The Bluffs (Michael Joseph, $32.99 pb, 432 pp) and Katherine Firkin’s Sticks and Stones (Bantam, $32.99 pb, 392 pp) – appear to have well and truly jumped out of the blocks. And it’s fair to assume that, given the international commercial and critical success of Megan Goldin’s terrific début novel, The Escape Room, her new book, The Night Swim (Michael Joseph, $32.99 pb, 352 pp), will appeal to antipodean readers this winter.

Margaret Bearman’s We Were Never Friends is a novel that places the myth of the artistic male genius against the critical eye of history. Lotti, the eldest daughter of renowned Australian painter George Coates, narrates from two perspectives: her younger, twelve-year-old self and her present-day one, a trainee surgeon.

In 1999 the Coates family abandons Sydney, assured that ‘Canberra would be different’. There, Lotti meets an inscrutable waif, Kyla, widely considered a liar. Kyla comes to embody the novel’s undercurrents of violence, pretence, and deceit. Although Bearman began writing this book long before the #MeToo era, its ethical concerns about whose voices are believed, and whether – as Lotti’s mother wonders, ‘you can profit from something without it being wrong’ – are as germane today as ever.

Lotti is oppressed by family life, by the ‘acolytes, friends and strangers’ who appear most evenings in their home, and the concessions her otherwise fiercely resolute mother makes because of her father’s talent. His seminal work, a portrait of his wife as a Madonna, is Lotti’s first source of ambivalence. To Lotti, it represents how he thinks about her, ‘a saintly but flawed icon of a woman’. She notes how father views others as potential subjects only made real – valuable – in his representations of them, not least when Kyla becomes an unshakeable presence in her home life. Kyla’s vulnerability positions her as a mythic, muse-like figure through which Bearman examines, without didacticism, why the genius artist is so often separated from ethical duty. She also questions the responsibility of audiences who believe great art, by nature, cannot be exploitative.

Bearman leans heavily on the language of adolescent melodrama, invoking the vicious, fickle nature of pre-teen female friendships. While Lotti desires popularity at any cost, she recognises the gulf between her inner values and outward actions. Like most characters in this novel, she lacks the courage to resolve her two selves. In many ways, this work is about courage, why it is difficult to be morally brave, especially when much is at stake. Margaret Bearman interrogates how history contextualises life and art but refrains from moralising. We Were Never Friends is a work of ambiguity and nuance.

With its cast of freaks and hustlers, damaged souls, and self-proclaimed geniuses, the music world seems custom-made for novelists. Yet while some excellent novels catch more than a whiff of that sweaty, drug-fuelled space where the shared exultance of music becomes something transcendent – Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments (1987), Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad (2010), Dana Spiotta’s dazzling and heartbreaking Stone Arabia (2011), and more recent entries like Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones and the Six (2019) and Australian author Kirsten Krauth’s excellent Almost a Mirror (2020) – the list of novels that take music seriously is surprisingly short.

In a 1954 letter to his niece Pippa, artist-nomad Ian Fairweather lamented that he could not write with sufficient analytic detachment to look back at his life and ‘see a pattern in it’. (Ian Fairweather: A life in letters, Text Publishing, 2019). The irony – that one of Australian art’s most profound, intuitive pattern-makers should be ruefully unable to ‘see’ the formative structures and repetitions of his fraught life – would not be lost on Amanda Lohrey. Labyrinth, her haunting new novel, is a meditation on fundamental patterns in nature and in familial relations, and our experience of them in time. But this is a novel, not a treatise, its narrative so bracing – like salt spray stinging your face – that one is borne forward inexorably, as if caught in the coastal rip that is one of the novel’s darker motifs. It is a work to read slowly, and reread, so that its metaphorical patterns can come into focus, and the intricate knots of structure loosen and unwind.

(If you don’t know about labyrinths, my earnest advice is do five minutes’ research and then draw a simple seed-pattern model for yourself. Like the prefatory list of names and patronymics in a Russian novel, this will be an essential tool. Just don’t, like a Lohrey character, become obsessive.)

The book’s epigraph is both prophetic and hortatory: ‘The cure for many ills, noted Jung, is to build something.’ Lohrey underscores the point by giving it to us twice, the second time in the maxims of Kenneth Marsden, father of the novel’s narrator, Erica. Marsden, chief medical officer and psychiatrist at Melton Park asylum (‘a manicured madhouse’ where Erica and her brother Axel grew up), held strongly to the therapeutic efficacy of making, of building: ‘A man who does not use his hands is a mind untethered, he would say: when you make something you become a rivet in the fabric of the real.’ Marsden repeats the Jung of the epigraph. And narrator Erica adds a parenthesis: ‘(though he otherwise thought him a charlatan.)’ It is characteristic of this novel that no received ideas slide through. Erica is a sceptic, an interrogator. She is also an avid learner, open and vulnerable in a world where things go awry, or ‘the gods thought otherwise’. Her father coaches her in Latin and encourages her undergraduate Greek: ‘Soon it became clear that I had an aptitude, a gift for entering wholly into another world, whether Melton Park or the gods on Olympus it made no difference.’

I was struck by that sentence (as with many in this taut, deftly edited work): Erica shares with her author a mordant intelligence and an ‘aptitude’ for empathy. I remember a striking essay of Lohrey’s (Voting for Jesus: Christianity and politics in Australia (Quarterly Essay 22), 2006) in which she interviews a group of young evangelical Christians. The temptation to satire was considerable but resisted, without intellectual compromise. The result was revelatory.

In The Labyrinth, a related capacity for reserving judgement allows Lohrey to create characters who are vivid, open-ended, never mere types. They surprise, disarm, disappoint, intrigue. And ideas, like a juggler’s orbs, dance in the novel’s air. Dangerous ideas, ideas that must be scrutinised, sieved for worth.

The novel’s story is stark, unflinching – gothic without contrivance. Erica Marsden, spurred by a labyrinthine dream, leaves her life of urban fracture – father dead, mother bolted, artist–lover departed and artist–son Daniel in jail – and retreats to the New South Wales coast, a littoral in every sense.

In The Labyrinth, a related capacity for reserving judgement allows Lohrey to create characters who are vivid, open-ended, never mere types.

There, in between wrenching visits to Daniel in his rural incarceration, Erica tries to piece together a rationale, a way of living. From her undergraduate Greek she retrieves the word kairos, ‘meaning not time, but timeliness … the right or opportune moment for doing’, kairos as distinct from chronos, ‘which is mere arithmetic’. And on the wind and sea-swept fallow ground next to the gemütlich fibro shack she buys, Erica sketches out a labyrinth, and finds another loner, called Jerko, a displaced European stonemason who ‘has the eye’ to help her build it. If you have ever watched a skilled dry-stone waller at work, you’ll know there is nothing magical about having ‘the eye’, rather a focused skill at making – with stone, with paint, with the oil pastels Erica buys for Daniel-in-prison – or with words. And all making carries the potential for destruction as well as creation.

But summary does scant justice to the subtlety and power of Lohrey’s writing, just as ‘the main ideas’ (yes, you can find them on the web) of Oedipus Rex read like farce. Every page of this densely populated novel, with its incised landscape, shimmers. A minatory Pacific gull scavenging for chips, ‘its beak pointed with loaded intent’, becomes an event; an old maple tree a welcome lecture in grounded form. Erica’s labyrinthine musings share some of the mad wonder of Melville’s cetalogical chapters in Moby-Dick, and her etymological diggings go deep:

The word labyrinth comes from the Greek word labrys, a double headed stone axe said to have been a weapon of the Amazons and to symbolize the early forms of matriarchal society. Said also to have been an early symbol of the act of creation, of techne, and making by hand …

In the form of the classical labyrinth, or seed pattern, its opening is said by some to resemble a woman’s labia, its outer rim the cervix, its coils the inner walls of the womb.

And Erica’s note: ‘The womb and the labrys axe. Female and male: mother and father. Except there is no reason why a woman should not wield an axe.’

Or a pen, indeed. The Scots called their poets the Makars. Amanda Lohrey sits well in their dark, wit-laced company.

Wonderful is not a critical word, but that is where I begin. Now that I have made my peace with foxes, I am full of wonder for them. Doubly receptive to these stories, I am quickly seduced after the first few, in which foxes appear either substantially or marginally. There is much wonderment in these stories, though only one of them is what might strictly be called speculative. Throughout the collection, little hints and details loiter in plain sight but are also hidden from the characters, sometimes from us – a bit like foxes themselves. For example, in ‘Animal Behaviour’ there is a small bomb ticking quietly from the start in the form of just one word – ‘offenders’ – linking the protagonist to her rescue dog; its detonation as the story unfolds is a triumph of structural control.

The range of these stunning stories is global, universal: they are set in Tokyo, the Spanish coastline, Oxford, Hong Kong, London, Wollongong. The characters are also diverse: filmmakers, scientists, and students; actors, surfers, and escapees from cults. A journalist on Mars in ‘Day Zero’ takes the reader into unexpected territory in every way. The story is a sobering reminder of the fragility of life and relationships no matter what apparent conquests humans make in their universe. Similarly, in ‘Catch and Release’ a criminal lawyer experiences a frightening violation but is ultimately obliged to confront what he has in common with his drug-crazed assailant, rather than their differences.

That story, a tightly paced crime thriller, is also punctuated with a fox, one that pauses, observes, then moves away, choosing not to attack. ‘A world away in London, foxes carried out fox business.’ This is from the quietly compelling title story about cross-generational ties and family responsibilities, one I returned to several times; it is another reminder of our species’ vulnerability and our misguided assumption that we can control nature. Like the protagonist, Nina, I know I should not cheer the fox that survives in her suburban garden, but I do.

Raymond Carver famously said of writing stories, ‘No tricks’. Introducing a fox element could have been a trick, a mere gimmick, but the anticipation of the role of that subtle, liminal creature only gives the reader another layer to mine in these rich, clever, accomplished stories.

Kate Grenville’s new novel, her first in almost a decade, is dedicated to ‘all those whose stories have been silenced’, for which, as its ‘memoirist’–narrator heroine is Elizabeth Macarthur, we might read ‘women’. Did she – wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in early Sydney – write what Grenville’s publishers call ‘a shockingly frank secret memoir’? In her ‘Editor’s Note’, Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of there being discovered in the ceiling of a historic Parramatta house under renovation a long-hidden box containing that memoir. In an ‘Author’s Note’ at the book’s end, we are assured that ‘No, there was no box of secrets found in the roof of Elizabeth Farm. I didn’t [as she claimed at the beginning, in her Editor’s Note] transcribe and edit what you’ve just read. I wrote it.’ Perhaps those who thought otherwise failed to observe the book’s epigraph from Elizabeth Macarthur – ‘Do not believe too quickly’ – though whether those words were inscribed by the historic Elizabeth or by Grenville’s fictional one may be a matter for discussion. Apropos of previous books, Grenville the novelist has had disputes with historians about matters of fiction and fact.

The dual crises of the recent bushfires and the Covid-19 pandemic have exposed structural weakness in Australia’s economy. Our export income is dominated by a few commodities, with coal and gas near the top, the production of which employs relatively few people (only around 1.9 per cent of the workforce is employed in mining). The unprecedented fires, exacerbated by a warming climate, were a visceral demonstration that fossil fuels have no role in an environmentally and socially secure future. Global investors are abandoning coal and, in some cases, Australia. Meanwhile, industries that generate many jobs – education, tourism, hospitality, arts, and entertainment – have been hit hard by efforts to reduce the spread of the virus.

Defend
                 Indefensible
                                  Defendant
Deafen
                 Defang
                                  Deferment
Deform
                 Deforest
                                  Defect
Defile
                 Deflower
                                  Defrock
Deface
                 Defame
                                  Deflect
Deflate
                 Defecate
                                  Befoul
Differ
                 Defunct
                                  Defund
Affray
                 Redefine
                                  District
Defy
                 Decry
                                  Decline
Diffract
                 Defray
                                  Defraud
Default
                 Deceit
                                  Deficit
Federal           
                 Afraid
                                  Duffer
Defeat
                 Defenestrate
                                  Degenerate
Disgrace
                 Dégueulasse
                                  Deglaze

The cultural critic, poet, and musician Wayne Koestenbaum is pooped. He is ready for his writing to assume its ‘corpse pose’, to expire and become obsolete. Over the course of a thirty-year writing career marked by a lively enthusiasm for culture and celebrity, the author has often shown his attraction to acts of disappearance – his admiration, for example, of artists who retire relatively young (e.g. Audrey Hepburn and Brigitte Bardot, or poets Arthur Rimbaud and pre-comeback George Oppen). Perhaps more compelling to Koestenbaum, though, are those cultural figures who retire into careers; those who make work of indolence. In this group, there are Henry Thoreau at Walden Pond and Walt Whitman loafing in New York. There are Jackie Onassis and Andy Warhol, whose iconic yet ephemeral life-as-art sensibilities are the subjects of his star-hagiographies Jackie Under My Skin (1995) and Andy Warhol (2001). And, probably the author’s nearest literary precursors, there are the poet–art critics Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery – all various Bartlebys in Manhattan whose prodigious output and cultural appetites evince a cruisy idleness. In these figures, Koestenbaum savours the coupling of productivity and lethargy, writing and not-writing, being and nothingness.

What we read at difficult times in our lives – plague, insurrection, divorce, major root canal work, etc. – is always telling. Carlyle, miserable and unwell at Kirkcaldy, read the whole of Gibbon straight through – twelve volumes in twelve days – with a kind of horrified fascination. I recall one friend who, at a time of ineffable tension, calmly read Les Misérables, one thousand pages long, in a single week. (I would have been incapable of reading a tabloid.) Another time, lovelorn in Siena, I stayed in my ghastly hotel room and read The Aunt’s Story right through while the handsome Sienese sunned themselves in the companionable Campo.

We’ve all been interested in what people are reading at this [fill in the space] time. Are we seeking consolation, insight, succour, or comic distraction? Kirsten Tranter, writing from highly covidic California, notes in a review to be published in ABR’s October issue: ‘There is something about lockdown and its strange effects on the mind that makes every text seem like a code for the situation of quarantine.’

After my autumn of existentialism – essential after the jolts of March – I have begun to look elsewhere, though my habit of starting the day with a new poem by Wallace Stevens, in chronological order, continues – a necessary fillip. As I write this, I am up to The Auroras of Autumn, only eight years to go (remarkable ones though). Much though I want 2020 to end, I don’t think I want to reach ‘Not Ideas About the Thing But the Thing Itself’ – the final poem in The Rock. Will it coincide with the Last Lockdown or with confirmation that there will be no vaccine, no relaxation, no midnight unmasking?

Stevens aside, after a volley of books about the egregious Trump – several of which will be reviewed next month – I turned to Frank Kermode’s 1995 memoir, Not Entitled – merely dipped into before, I’m not sure why, for I have read most of Kermode’s other books, in some cases more than once, for the phrasing, the perspicacity, the poise.

Frank Kermode, 2000 (photograph by Basso Cannarsa/Agence Opale/Alamy)

I met Kermode once. This was in 1988. He was in Australia for a sojourn at the legendary Humanities Research Centre in Canberra, presided over by his great friend Ian Donaldson. Afterwards he came to Melbourne. I recall the day well. A fire at the Footscray Tyre Works had clouded the city in toxic smoke. The Melbourne General Cemetery looked even more gothic than usual.

That evening, Peter Craven and Michael Heyward hosted a reception for Kermode at Scripsi ’s home, Ormond College. I was working for Oxford University Press at the time – a minnow in marketing. OUP had just published History and Value, a collection of Kermode’s Clarendon Lectures and Northcliffe Lectures. At Ormond, Kermode lectured on Horace, Marvell, and Auden. I met him briefly at the reception afterwards (memorable for its Scripsian prodigality of wine). I had a keen sense of how much he’d read and how much I hadn’t. Kermode was genial, interested, unpompous – a surprise after some of the Oxonians who dropped in at Normanby Road, some of whom fell asleep at meetings, whether from jetlag or boredom. (Kermode, a Manxman, went to Liverpool, not Oxbridge.) He enjoined me to read the London Review of Books, which he had instigated in 1979.

Not everyone relished Not Entitled. I remember that Ian Donaldson was troubled by his old colleague’s almost reflexive pessimism and self-disgust – the endless sense of doom running through this short memoir of his childhood on the Isle of Man (forever setting him part), his bizarre experiences in the British Navy during the war, and his subsequent departmental reversals in the academy.

Kermode is always lucid and clear-eyed about life, war included. Here he is towards the end of the riveting chapter on his naval service, the follies of war, his randy colleagues, and all his mad captains. He is conscious of

the petrifaction of sensibility war imposes: an observation that may not be fully intelligible to anybody who did not experience the war, even if it could be claimed that peace as we have subsequently known it has its own petrifying power. In wartime people are actively prevented from thinking except in headlines, many of them lies. Simple personal freedoms are sacrificed, and the mind volunteers for, or is conscripted into, banality.

Inevitably, I thought of the pandemic (ceaseless subject): how it makes us think in headlines, some of them lies. (Kermode again: ‘So there is in journalism an unavoidable tendency to error, as there is in navigational dead reckoning.’) Worse still are the platitudes, the repetitions, the nightly jeremiads on the news. (How many times can we speculate about what Covid clings to without going mad?) At times, as in a farce, we all seem to dart through the same door, think the same way. How convenient for government if this proves true. Those of us who worry about the new zeal of authority – in an already concessive and conformist age – wonder what will emerge from this era of threat, fiat, compulsion. Is satire possible at such a time? What personal freedoms are being sacrificed along the way? Will we miss them? What banalities must the mind endure? Will we go on thinking in headlines, muttering into our metaphorical masks?

Or will a new kind of thinking emerge to disrupt our glum orthodoxies – a movement, a visionary, dare I say it a resistance, impatient with prohibition, submission, and petrifying power?

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.

The voice on the car radio was not immediately recognisable, nor was the song familiar to me. There was just a smoky laid-back piano and someone singing a song that sounded as though it was from the 1940s: ‘Young lovers, young lovers …’ I thought the voice, whomever it belonged to, had a real musicality in it, a precision of pitch and phrasing in tandem with a kind of liquid sweetness.

I had not attended closely enough to every phase of Paul Kelly’s forty-year musical career to recognise the song, but suddenly, five or six bars in, there was the plangent, nasal, almost metallic, and immediately recognisable sound that has always distinguished his voice. I remembered having noticed that musicality the next day when I read in Stuart Coupe’s extensively researched and frequently entertaining account of Paul Kelly’s life to date that Michael Gudinski, overlord of Australian popular music in the 1980s, had been reluctant back then to sign Kelly to Mushroom Records. ‘I knew he had the potential of being a great songwriter,’ Gudinski recalls. ‘But I thought he couldn’t sing.’

With the possible exception of Jean Baudrillard or Anthony Giddens, it is difficult to think of a contemporary sociologist who has rivalled the international intellectual standing, as well as global fame, of the late Zygmunt Bauman. In his subtle, worldly intelligence, his interdisciplinary engagement, and his poetic cast of mind, Bauman stands out as one of the most influential social thinkers of our time. A distinguished heir to the tradition of radical Marxist criticism, his writings tracked the political contradictions, cultural pressures, and emotional torments of modernity with a uniquely agile understanding. With his scathing critical pen and brilliant socio logical investigations, Bauman unearthed major institutional transformations in capitalism, culture, and communication in a language that disdained all academic boundaries, crossing effortlessly from Marx to mobile phones, from Gramsci to globalisation, and from postmodernism to the privatisation of prisons.

On the July afternoon when I first read Intimations, novelist and prolific essayist Zadie Smith’s new book of essays, Melbourne registered its highest number of Covid-19 cases – 484 positives, with two deaths. Since then the daily tolls have risen alarmingly. Midway through the city’s second week of Lockdown 2.0, there is a nebulous feeling of dispiritedness. We mark time as belonging to a pre-Covid era or the present reality. Within the present there exist further subdivisions of pasts and presents marked by social distancing, mandatory mask-wearing, hopefulness.

Even in Melbourne, we are more likely than not to be thankful that we are not living in the United States or the United Kingdom or India or Brazil. In ‘The American Exception’, the collection’s sole formerly published essay (in which Smith succeeds in writing of the current US president without naming him – a quiet act of thumbing her nose), she laments, ‘we are great with death – we are mighty with it’. The collision of this ‘global humbling’ with another global watershed moment, the proliferation of the Black Lives Matter protest movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, is not coincidental. The world is ruptured and porous. Natalia Ginzburg’s Vincenzino seems to be talking directly to us as he pronounces happiness to be ‘like water; one only realises it when it has run away’ (Voices in the Evening, 1961).

To an older generation of Australian poetry readers, David Campbell (1915–79) was perhaps the best-loved poet of Douglas Stewart’s post-World War II ‘Red Page’, appearing there with what would become iconic poems of the new Bulletin school like ‘Windy Gap’, ‘Who Points the Swallow’, and ‘Men in Green’. Despite his frequent publication in that heritage venue, Campbell published his first collection, Speak with the Sun (1949), in England with Chatto & Windus, through the good offices of his Cambridge mentor E.M.W. Tillyard. After that, he joined the ancien A&R régime of poets like Rosemary Dobson, R.D. FitzGerald, Francis Webb, James McAuley, and Judith Wright, who took up much of the middle ground of Australian poetry in the 1950s and 1960s. A lifelong friend and supporter of Campbell, Stewart was also influential in this group’s prominence, along with Beatrice Davis, his editorial co-adviser at Angus & Robertson.

In 2016, Hillary Clinton received nearly three million more votes for president of the United States than Donald Trump. Despite this sizeable margin, Clinton was not elected. The reason was the electoral college, a method for picking presidents that emerged as an ‘eleventh-hour compromise’ at the Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia in 1787 and that has never been abolished.

Perhaps contrary to general perception, Americans do not vote directly for presidential candidates. Instead, the votes go towards selecting members of an electoral college (known as electors). Legislation in each of the states determines precisely how that selection occurs, and it is the members of the electoral college who choose the president.

It is a damning – if not altogether surprising – indictment on our public discourse that the average Australian knows far more about political and social developments on the other side of the world than about those occurring in our ‘near abroad’. It takes just fifteen minutes to travel in a dinghy from the northern most island in the Torres Strait to Papua New Guinea. The flight from Darwin to Timor-Leste lasts barely an hour. If visitors were permitted in Indonesian-controlled West Papua, the trip from Australia to Merauke, by plane from Darwin or boat from the Torres Strait, would not take much longer. Yet judging by the sparse coverage these regions receive in our press and by their minimal prominence in our politics, they might as well be on Mars.

For some time now, several journalists and scholars have sought to remedy that knowledge gap. Professor Clinton Fernandes has written extensively on Australia’s relations with the region, including Reluctant Saviour on Timor (Scribe, 2004) and Reluctant Indonesians on West Papua (Scribe, 2006). More recently, ex-diplomat Bruce Hunt published Australia’s Northern Shield? (Monash, 2017), drawing on declassified cabinet documents.

In 2011, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton proclaimed that ‘gay rights are human rights’. This statement, which would seem uncontroversial to most readers of ABR, was widely attacked as a symbol of Western neo-colonialism. Combined with the 2015 US Supreme Court recognition of same-sex marriage, gay rights were seen by many religious and political leaders as a threat to tradition, culture, and religion, even when, as in many parts of Africa and the Pacific, laws proscribing homosexual behaviour are the legacy of nineteenth-century colonialism.

Debates over sexuality and gender have become central to global culture wars. For Mark Gevisser this has created ‘a pink line’, a more vivid term than the concept of polarisation which Jon Symons and I used in our book Queer Wars (2016). As sexual and gender diversity seems to blossom in some parts of the world so too do stigma and repression, usually fostered by religious and political authority. From Putin to Bolsonaro, many of today’s despots have used queers as a convenient scapegoat.

No Australian feminist is likely to forget the moment when Germaine Greer appeared on Q&A and declared that our first female prime minister should wear different jackets to hide her ‘big arse’. Greer, of course, has blotted her copybook many times before and since, but if we needed proof that a woman leader could not catch a break in this country, here was Australia’s most celebrated feminist joining in the new national pastime of hurling sexist invective at the prime minister.

Sometime in 2017, one of the world’s largest academic publishers started quietly removing thousands of articles from its websites in China because they covered topics deemed politically sensitive by the Chinse Communist Party (CCP). Much of the offending material related to the three Ts: Taiwan, Tibet, and the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. At the time I was a China correspondent for the Financial Times, and an academic who was horrified by this censorship tipped me off. I contacted the publisher, Springer Nature, which admitted that it had begun censoring to comply with ‘local distribution laws’. I naïvely thought that the exposure of such craven behaviour by the owner of Nature, Scientific American, and the Palgrave Macmillan imprint would prompt a huge backlash from academics, universities, and governments.

Jolley Prize

In this year of constant barrages and unravelling, nothing is certain. ‘All changed, changed utterly: / A terrible beauty is born’ – as W.B. Yeats said of modern Ireland in his great poem ‘Easter, 1916’. In a commentary piece, 'Thinking in Headlines', our Editor ponders the implications of the many changes and concessions that have already been rung during the pandemic – all those ‘polite meaningless words’ that Yeats heard after the Easter Rising in 1916.

Yet some good arises, even during the ‘casual comedy’ that is 2020: new voices and resistances; new ways of ensuring that literature, in all its guises, will go on reaching people, despite lockdowns and closures. On August 14, for instance, ABR hosted its first public webinar, to celebrate the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Usually these ceremonies happen in Melbourne or Sydney. This year, of necessity, we retreated to the internet. Hundreds of people from around the world joined us for readings by the three shortlisted authors: C.J. Garrow, Simone Hollander, and Mykaela Saunders. Future prize ceremonies are likely to occur online, befitting the international nature of our three prizes.

Following the readings, Mykaela Saunders was named the overall winner of the Jolley Prize for ‘River Story’, a work that ‘illustrates the strong matriarchal bonds between three generations of women and the grief, birth, and death that they share’, to quote the judges. Mykaela Saunders receives $6,000. C.J. Garrow, author of ‘Egg Timer’, was placed second ($4,000); Simone Hollander (‘Hieroglyph’) third ($2,500).

After thanking ‘the original storytellers, our old people and ancestors, whose stories nourished our countries and communities since time began’, Mykaela Saunders went on to say:

This story is for all mob who are recovering from the long hangover of colonial destruction of our people and our lands, who are healing and strengthening themselves and their families, and who are embodying sovereignty in any which way they can. Yours are the stories that matter to me more than anything. This story is for everyone fighting for the future and for the benefit of all people: all blackfellas who are fighting for land and water and culture and family everywhere, and to everyone else fighting alongside us. And to all of our beautiful rivers and lands that are victims of colonial-capital-corporate desecration: I promise that we will return you to fullness and glory, or we will die trying. Didgerigura – thank you.

Mykaela Saunders’s evocative and lyrical story appeared in our August issue, along with the other shortlisted works. The author reads ‘River Story’ in its entirety on a recent ABR Podcast – not to be missed.

Stay deadly!

We are delighted to name our third Rising Star: Declan Fry. Declan, who was born on Wongatha country in Kalgoorlie, is an essayist, critic, and proud descendant of the Yorta Yorta. In 2009 he received the Tom Collins Prize in Australian Literature; the Todhunter Literary Award, which he shared, followed in 2013. He currently lives on unceded Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung land and is a board member of Books ‘n’ Boots, an organisation which distributes football boots and books to remote and regional Aboriginal communities. Declan began publishing with ABR in June 2020. He reviews After Australia in this issue.

The Rising Stars program is intended to encourage younger writers and critics whose early contributions to ABR have made an impression. We work closely with the Rising Stars: a major investment for writers and the magazine alike. This particular grant is supported by Creative Victoria and the ABR Patrons.

On becoming our latest Rising Star, Declan Fry told Advances:

One of my earliest memories of local writing publications was seeing ABR nestled in my local public library. In a difficult environment for the arts, ABR’s energetic support for new and emerging talent is vital. ABR’s willingness to build a relationship with a new contributor has been a joy. Having an opportunity like the Rising Stars initiative is a great privilege. It provides a place to hone your writing practice and to develop a long-term investment in the work. It gives me a real sense of confidence, knowing that there is a space for considered, thoughtful analysis. 

Much love and stay deadly, ABR.

Prizes galore

Thanks to all those poetic early birds who have already entered the Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Worth a total of $10,000 (with a first prize of $6,000), the Prize will close on October 1.

The Calibre Essay Prize will then open in mid-October. In this issue, we publish Kate Middleton’s essay ‘The Dolorimeter’, which was placed second in this year’s Calibre Prize.

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.

Hooray for Hollywood

Dear Editor,

Jean Baudrillard locates excess, which James Ley stresses is a product of neo-conservative political and economic ‘theory’, in excrement. Baudrillard does this metaphorically, but also literally. We cannot escape from it. What matters is how we deal with it and how we conduct the rest of our lives. The government’s response to the ‘problem’ of artistic performance in the Covid era is to grab a stash of money and offer it to a foreign entity (Hollywood studios basically) – to shoot offshore here – in the same way as it has, though to a lesser extent than its Labor rivals, been happy to sit by and let foreign money (mainly Chinese) prop up cash-starved universities. The mess, the government pretends, can be cleaned up in film, as the medium itself does always with its editing. Not so in unmanageable, excessive, live, gut-churning, look-me-in-the-eyes theatre, which the government dare not approach with any conviction.

My hope is that as La Mama, in Melbourne, now embarks on its ‘job-ready’ theatre rebuild, it will leave undisturbed the outside toilet in the courtyard as a reminder that, in the spirit of lockdown, ‘we are all in the shit together’, always.

James Oliver Daly (online comment)

Dear Editor

James Ley’s polemic is eloquent and somewhat depressing, but the very fact that he is able to articulate what is happening so that others can notice too gives me hope for change.

Rosalind Burns (online comment)

The White Australia policy

Dear Editor,

Chris Wallace’s review of British India, White Australia: Overseas Indians, intercolonial relations and the Empire speaks of ‘the official racism perpetuated by Australian governments of both persuasions until the Whitlam government ended “White Australia”’ in 1973’. In fact, the White Australia policy disappeared without much fuss under the Coalition government in the late 1960s. Corroboration will be found in A Certain Grandeur: Gough Whitlam in politics, written by Graham Freudenberg, who became Whitlam’s press secretary in 1967 and was special adviser to the prime minister from 1972 to 1975. In a work which, as its title suggests, verges on hagiography, the terms ‘White Australia’, let alone ‘abolition thereof’, do not appear on the index.

Peter Heerey AM QC, Melbourne, Vic.

Legacies of British slavery

Dear Editor,

Congratulations to Georgina Arnott on a brilliant article that provides a further ‘disturbance’ to the self-satisfied narrative of Australian colonial history (‘Links in the Chain: Legacies of British slavery’). I am looking forward to the outcome of the larger research project.

In the geographically proximate colony of the Dutch East Indies, the anti-slavery movement, which impacted on extensive Dutch involvement in slavery, particularly in relation to its South American colonies, was also creating a diversity of outcomes in colonial Java. This included a recourse to ‘unfree labour’ and justifying the expansion of the ‘civilising influence’ of Western colonisation.

Joost Coté (online comment)

Dear Editor,

Georgina Arnott’s excellent article brings into focus a topic ignored for far too long. It is fascinating to trace the origin of some of the capital that built Australia. While I was aware of the story of black birding, I was quite ignorant of the effect of slave money in the history of our country. I could not believe the amount of money paid to slave owners, and the fact that the British taxpayers only paid off the loan in 2015. I look forward to reading Dr Arnott’s future research on this topic.

David Thummler (online comment)

Laura Elvery’s second short story collection, Ordinary Matter, shows the same talent for precise observation, pathos, and humour as her accomplished début collection, Trick of the Light (2018). It differs in its creation of a greater range of narrators and voices, and in its use of a specific ideological framework through which to unify the collection: each of its twenty stories is prefaced by the name of a Nobel Prize-winning female scientist and the ‘prize motivation’ for her award. This device might be read as subverting the sexist stereotype that, denying women the capacity for rational thought, consigns them to the ‘softer’ realms of emotion and artistic endeavour. It also encourages an interesting way of thinking about female desire as it pertains to a range of experiences, including creativity, ambition, motherhood, sexuality, and political activism.

A number of stories feature versions of the Nobel Laureates themselves. ‘Growth’ concerns the Italian neurobiologist Rita Levi Montalcini, who, in contrast to the young girls immersed in needle point and the composition of affected nature poetry, turns her bedroom into a laboratory and her life into a career that ultimately triumphs over rampant misogyny and anti-Semitism. The story ‘Frost’ reveals both the intellectual strength and creaturely vulnerability of the chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin, renowned for her discovery of insulin. The medical physicist Rosalyn Yalow in ‘Stockholm’ refrains from dwelling on past injustices – her treatment by ‘the faceless men … who failed to have faith in [her]’ – as she prepares to receive her prize.

More often the links between the work of the female scientists and the stories are indirect; cleverly oblique. The politically charged story ‘You Run Towards Love’, set in Paris in 2003 during ‘the hottest summer for five decades’, is prefaced by Marie Curie’s award for her work on radiation. The story requires readers to make a connection between then and now: one hundred years after Curie’s award for the medical benefits of radiation, France is confronted by the legacy of dangerous carbon emissions from nuclear reactors. Deftly avoiding the didacticism or self-righteousness that can mar overtly political fiction, the story also captures the voice of laconic indifference to rivers full of dead fish and indeed to the fate of the entire planet: ‘Who cared, really, about fish anymore? Who cared about one or two or even three degrees?’ The quirky story ‘Corn Queen’, prefaced by Barbara McClintock’s work on genetics, raises questions about genetically modified corn crops and celebrates gender modification in the form of cross-dressing. The work on odorant receptors by the biologist Linda B. Buck is used to frame an emotionally powerful story about a foul-smelling plant; ‘Titan Arum’ uses smell to symbolise the toxicity of parental abandonment and a grandfather’s murderous impulses towards his treacherous son-in-law. The intriguing allegory ‘Something Close to Gold’, in which an infertile couple adopts a baby washed up on the beach, can be read as a criticism of Australia’s ethically impoverished refugee policies and/or as undermining Western maternal entitlement. The unsettling story ‘The Fix’, prefaced by Donna Strickland’s work on optical pulses, plays on the concept of vision: while a woman’s laser surgery results in brilliantly clear eyesight, her dream of carnage on the road suggests a disturbing pre-vision of the fate of her marriage.

Complementing this refusal to place the complexities of human experience in tidy hermeneutic boxes is the collection’s tonal variety. ‘Garden Bridge’ is a grim representation of contemporary London, in which ‘unlit lanes and whiffy air, the grimy pavements’ mirror the despair of the city’s inhabitants. By contrast, ‘The Town Turns Over’ is a witty account of a defiant group of elderly people escaping from the ironically named Freedom Villas. The poignant story ‘Wing Span’, set in conservative, postwar Hobart, uses a series of artfully designed meanderings and the motif of flight to explore female creativity, sibling love, and repressed homoerotic desire. Like the best work of Alice Munro, it’s a heartbreaking expression of ‘the unsaid’.

Ordinary Matter also takes risks within the boundaries of fictional realism. The story ‘Little Fly’, for example, endows a tiny baby with conscious motivation and intent; it’s both conceptually audacious and utterly charming. Other stories use a paratactic structure to encompass the passing of decades, although with varying degrees of aesthetic success. Both ‘The Bodies Are Buried’ and ‘A Brief History of Petroleum’ are inclined to the summation of a character’s life, and as a consequence feel rushed or truncated. A much more satisfying example is the story ‘Hyperobject’, in which ten discrete sections of retrospective narration detail a woman’s work as a secretary on what she will much later come to learn was a deadly scientific project. Early sections reveal the narrator’s youthful naïveté; her description of being ‘pleased’ with her unknown work ‘down to her bones’ is a subtly ironic allusion to the bone marrow radiation sickness caused by one of history’s most egregious acts. The final section comes as a shock to both narrator and reader. The stories are also skilled in the art of imagism. ‘Fruit Flies’, for example, projects a young woman’s sense of dissociation and guilt onto the urban landscape, where she notices ‘orange peel in the gutter and a baby’s nappy, wrapped up tight, pale like a ball of dough’. But here, as elsewhere in the collection, there is hope to be salvaged from the anxieties and degradations of everyday life.

Ordinary Matter is, in the best sense, a surprising collection: intellectually ambitious; offering unexpected digressions and deliberately odd conjunctions; its ‘wing span’ traversing the world from Hobart to the Grand Canyon. This engaging and unusual collection will consolidate Elvery’s reputation as a writer of fine short stories, and will surely garner admiration for her willingness to try something new. 

Acknowledging the limits of Acknowledgments of Country, the Wiradjuri artist Jazz Money once wrote:

whitefellas try to acknowledge things
but they do it wrong
they say
           before we begin I’d like to pay my respects
not understanding
that there isn’t a time before it begins
it has all already begun

The sentiment is salutary for an anthology like After Australia, in which several writers – through ecopoetics, speculative fiction, memoir, and other modes – imagine what has begun, or is yet to begin, amid the cruelties and joys of our history.

Recalling Kim Scott’s haunted approach to questions of conciliation in Taboo (2017), Karen Wyld traces the lines of a family tree backward through time, uncovering blood on the leaves and blood at the root. As one character remarks: ‘Where had all the Aboriginal people gone?’ It’s a question that has nagged at some of our most acclaimed authors. Think of David Malouf’s novel Remembering Babylon (1993): the evidence afforded by its 200 pages might suggest that, on occasion, even Malouf’s memory failed him (not a single Aboriginal voice punctuates its pages). Similar critiques have been made of books like Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet, in which the biggest guest at the house of the Lambs and Pickles is the absence of any living Aboriginal voice from the narrative. As academic and poet Jeanine Leane has written, this issue afflicts much of Australian literature. Similar to her other work, Wyld draws our attention here to the way Aboriginal lives are written out of history, erased from our collective memory.

Recalling Benedict Anderson, that seminal cartographer of empire and the role of communication technologies in manufacturing ‘imagined communities’, Roanna Gonsalves writes poignantly about the force with which concepts take on material life, impacting the world like a weapon:

With charcoal, gum, and shark oil, as the printer worked the inkballs to distribute ink evenly across worn metal type, a colony was carved from a continent. The Sydney Gazette spread the stories of this colony across the world, through sail and through whisper, through a process of accretion and embellishment, through a process of shaping and sculpting according to the needs of those who controlled the purse. Shammy understood the power of this alchemy. She gripped the frame of the press tightly, felt the strength of the tree from which it had been cut.

It is impossible to read something like this without acknowledging that to read and write history – even speculative or alternative history – is to engage with first principles; that history’s importance lies not only in who writes it, who tells it, but how it is listened to and understood.

A similar sense of alchemy pervades Michelle Law’s ‘Bu Liao Qing’ (the title recalls Eileen Chang’s 1947 screenplay as well as Hong Kong director Doe Ching’s 1961 film and its eponymous song). Law’s narrative reads less like dystopian speculation than as a weary mapping of real possibilities, alive with spooked unease. As in Lin Dai’s song, the raw aftertaste of loss and yearning is palpable (at one point a mouldy ceiling collapses on a student’s head, evoking the trauma of school building collapses in Sichuan in 2008). Law’s narrative reminds us how traumas often do not manifest until, with perilous precision, they interrupt our waking lives, like Georges Perec’s train in L’Infra-ordinaire:

What speaks to us, seemingly, is always the big event, the untoward, the extra-ordinary: the front-page splash, the banner headlines. Railway trains only begin to exist when they are derailed, and the more passengers that are killed, the more the trains exist.

Ultimately, Law seems to suggest, some departures never end: the finality of departure yields only to the haunting of memory, the constant slow-motion replay of loss.

Harnessing the mad energy that characterises his best work, Omar Sakr’s ‘White Flu’ is an eerily, furiously talented pastiche, and a prescient one (Virus falls upon the country! Waves of panic contort the town! No one is safe!). With satirical élan, Sakr interrogates the intersections of xenophobia and pandemic fear, reminding us that the anonymity afforded to whiteness, its furtive, blank neutrality, can be a curse as much as a blessing:

It quickly became apparent that [the virus] was devastating the West in particular, and people of European or Anglo descent seemed to be the only ones dying. Ancestry dot com crashed and kept crashing from the demand: everyone suddenly wanted to know where they came from.

At its heart, ‘White Flu’ is about repression: sexual, political, cultural, and psychological. Like Martin Amis or Philip Roth (or, locally, Michael Mohammed Ahmad or Ouyang Yu), Sakr displays a Rabelaisian fondness for the elaborate, carnal grotesqueries of bigotry and the taboo: newsreaders uncritically recite the grievances of white supremacists; the narrator’s anti-Semitic brother plays both devil’s advocate and accomplice; and the deep-sweat insecurities of masculinity and sexual longing are related with anxious, propulsive candour.

Familial and cultural angst are also at the heart of Sarah Ross’s contribution, where the author, seeing herself reflected for the first time on the cover of a book, realises that there exists ‘another place or another world where people looked like me’. Yet insights can carry pain: on Father’s Day and at parent–teacher meetings, she experiences the cold lateral exclusion of being caught between wanting to fit in and not wanting to upset her mothers. Hearing the strictures of Pope John Paul II against same-sex unions, she remarks: ‘We listened to it in the same way you hear white noise in the background, it wasn’t turned down or censored, it was just a backdrop to the world we lived in.’ This is white noise as backdrop, as necessary conditioning: the dull awakening to an environment that does not provide an equal measure of safety and comfort to all. In this world, life can feel like a hostile force, doling out its comforts as partial and attenuated as any ordinary quantum of prejudice can allow.

A subtly threatening quality characterises Khalid Warsame’s writing. ‘List of Known Remedies’ is a somewhat perambulatory narrative – detached, quietly aloof – but is animated by the author’s sense of being haunted, not so much by memory or human attachment as by the possibility of their loss. The writing is rich with implication (if not incident) and carries an understated, David Byrne-esque flair for the anthropological detail of human anomie and urban disrepair.

Hannah Donnelly intervenes throughout the collection, showing the reader around, guiding you through the exhibits, drawing our attention to both the humour and unflagging violence of our shared histories. Making connections between Pemulwuy and the horrors of government bureaucracy, childhood bike accidents and the eugenics of A.O. Neville, Donnelly’s anecdotes are an accumulating gallery of revelations: impassioned, vibrant, and enlivened by graceful humour.

Like the oral transmission of knowledge, the work of history, even speculative history, is one of constant returning – a gradual uncovering. The veil lifts; the layers of atomisation and confusion that keep us from seeing the connections that were always there disappear. An ear attuned to what is being said – along with the power to listen – is what this anthology offers, allowing us to parse through the white noise, until one day we are ready to acknowledge the frequencies underneath.

On a frosty January morning in 2019, I found myself listening to oral argument at the Supreme Court of the United States. The cases I witnessed were not destined for headlines – no abortion, free speech, or death penalty cases that day – but I was still fortunate to get a seat. Queues snaked around the building, with tightly controlled ticketed entry and heavily armed security. As a scholar of constitutional courts, I was delighted by the public interest (less so by the guns), even if a Trump shut-down of nearby tourist attractions may have augmented the numbers. But none of us attending that day expected to witness something extraordinary: Clarence Thomas speaking.

As Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn College, points out in The Enigma of Clarence Thomas, ‘the only things most Americans know about [Thomas] is that he was once accused of sexual harassment’ – more on that later – ‘and that he almost never speaks from the bench’. While some Supreme Court judges revel in excoriating cross-examinations of the lawyers appearing before them, Thomas has remained largely mute since his narrow confirmation by the US Senate in 1991.

I witnessed Thomas speak in an otherwise non-distinct personal injury matter. Having spent most of the day with his back to the lawyers, the seventy-two-year-old at one point sent his clerk running to retrieve a book of cases. Thomas scoured it for something, rocked precariously on his huge leather chair, and then beckoned neighbouring judge Stephen Breyer for a conversation. The two exchanged words, before Breyer, book in hand, posed a question to the lawyer: ‘It has been drawn to my attention …’ This innocuous phrase belied the fact that it was Thomas who was interested in the case that he had located in the bound tome: that it was the Court’s ‘most extreme’ conservative justice who demanded an answer.

Supreme Court proceedings are not filmed; since Thomas had spoken privately to Breyer, his comment was not officially transcribed. It was only by coincidence that I was in the room when it happened. But I could not help ponder what the interaction revealed about the subtle ways Thomas exerts influence on the court.

Readers hoping for an exposé of scandal from within the Supreme Court (à la Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong’s The Brethren [1979]) will not find it in Robin’s book. Rather, it is a thoughtful exploration of the conservative elements in United States politics and the legal and judicial levers of power available to them. Robin approaches his task through three key themes: race, capitalism, and the American Constitution. As he explains, it is no accident that these are central in Thomas’s decision-making: they are ‘totems of [American] culture, the fetishes of our fixity’. Robin’s concern is to defeat these totems and for the United States to emerge from what he sees as an extreme, disturbing, and ugly conservativism. ‘To get past them,’ he argues, ‘we have to go through [Thomas].’

Robin’s fear of Thomas’s influence is very real; one of legacy through personal connections and philosophical grooming. In Donald Trump’s America, a Thomas clerkship (the equivalent of Australia’s judicial associateships) provides a de facto stamp of approval for lower-level court appointments. These judges directly influence decision-making at the ground level, and gain the essential judicial service necessary to qualify them for higher judicial appointments. Thomas’s influence is therefore transformational and inter-generational in a way that could not be guaranteed by his single vote on the nine-member bench, even as the Court’s longest-serving justice.

Robin is well placed to make these observations, having previously authored a number of award-winning books examining the origins of the conservative movement in America. His narrative is deeply invested in a careful reading of Thomas’s decisions and writings and speeches off the bench, but The Enigma of Clarence Thomas is not legalistic or inaccessible, nor is it polemical in its treatment of Thomas’s vision. Robin ensures that his subject emerges as multifaceted and nuanced. Indeed, it is the nuances of Clarence Thomas that Robin fears. By defying easy labels, Thomas emerges as a more powerful force, with a coherent underpinning philosophy. One wonders whether, had Robin attempted to survey all of Thomas’s decision-making rather than focusing on his three themes, he would have found such coherence. Robin’s choice not to dilute his narrative with a myriad of case references is defensible, however, both for readability and in light of the significance of those themes in contemporary US life.

Robin’s readers gain greater insight into a complex man and his mind: the black nationalist judge who favours mandatory sentencing and imprisonment; who believes that racism is permanent and incurable, and is opposed to affirmative action policies; whose commitment to the Second Amendment stems from his belief in the fundamental need for black men to have guns to protect themselves against white violence, and who believes that violence in schools and the community is the major impediment to black Americans achieving the transformative benefits of education.

Robin’s choice to examine Thomas’s philosophy thematically, rather than to chart a chronological course, also means that this is a rare book about Thomas that does not contain a discrete chapter on the infamous Senate Confirmation proceedings in 1991, and the sexual harassment allegations made against Thomas by Professor Anita Hill. Thomas was ultimately confirmed, as was Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, despite Dr Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations of sexual assault. The conduct of both proceedings continues to excite legal and political debate in America. With Australia now facing its own judicial #MeToo movement, we can look to the controversy over Thomas’s appointment for salutary lessons regarding power, privilege, and patronage in legal systems, and the structural reforms that are needed to effect changes in workplace culture, including complaints mechanisms and diverse and inclusive legal industries.

Robin’s discussion of the pragmatic approach Thomas adopted in the confirmation proceedings (which he summarises thus: ‘say anything to get on the bench’) is also a salutary reminder that all judicial appointment models come with risks and benefits. As the Dyson Heydon scandal excites debate in the legal profession about judicial appointment processes, these calls must be met with rigorous debate about the criteria for judicial appointment – both legal experience and expertise and personal attributes – and how and by whom these are to be assessed. With two (out of seven) new appointments to the High Court of Australia required in the next twelve months, it is a timely moment to reflect upon the attributes Australia needs in its judges, and the influence they exert in our community both on and off the bench. Robin’s engaging dissection of Clarence Thomas’s influence and legacy has much to offer anyone engaged in those debates.

Correction: An earlier version of this review referred once to 'Corey Thomas', this has been corrected to 'Clarence Thomas'.

Borrowing a term coined by the late Jewish Nobel Laureate and vegetarian Isaac Bashevis Singer, Charles Patterson (in)famously likened humanity’s treatment of animals to an ‘eternal Treblinka’. In his 2001 book of the same name, Patterson set the mass murder of Europe’s Jews and industrialised animal slaughter side by side, drawing a line between the production methods of Chicago’s early twentieth-century slaughterhouses, the assembly-line technology pioneered by Henry Ford – an avowed anti-Semite and Hitler supporter – and the death camps of Nazi Germany. Another Jewish writer, the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, is said to have observed that ‘Auschwitz begins whenever someone looks at a slaughterhouse and thinks: they’re only animals’.

In his timely, important, and forensically researched Chicken: A history from farmyard to factory, Paul R. Josephson invokes two similarly grim historical spectres in his discussion of the industrial slaughter of chickens, ones befitting his specialism in Soviet history: the gulags, and the 1986 nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. In the book’s final chapter, titled ‘Broiler Chernobyl’ after the name given to chickens raised for meat, Josephson writes: ‘The chicken you eat is almost certainly not a chicken in the traditional sense. It is a genetically formed meat machine, likely one of three models distributed by a bird genetics company, then produced in massive sheds by a large corporation.’ He goes on to describe the nasty, brutish, and short lives of such ‘technobirds’: raised for six or seven weeks in an area the size of a piece of A4 paper, fattened on specially constituted feeds and growth-promoting additives, and finally shovelled into a processing facility to be ‘hung upside down by the legs, strung to a conveyor, stunned in a variety of ways, their necks slit to bleed out’.