A Letter to Layla is very much a book of our times. Its impetus lies in our rapidly changing climate, and it concludes with the unexpected impact of Covid-19. In between, the book explores both our distant past and our future.

Well known for her past career as an ABC broadcaster, Ramona Koval turns her talent for in-depth interviews and her training in science into an engaging and illuminating book. Combining interviews with her own research, Koval asks what it means to be human and if our origin sheds light on our capacity to navigate a troubling and problematic future.

Thucydides once said, ‘In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.’ Chris Wallace is not inclined to agree with the Greek historian, particularly when dissecting the Labor Party’s shock federal election loss in 2019. In her latest book, How to Win an Election, Wallace nominates the ten things that Labor must get right to succeed at the next federal election, and self-pity is nowhere among them. This approach appears simplistic, even tongue-in-cheek at times, but she has captured the key elements of electoral success and makes a strong case that Australia cannot afford another ALP loss.

Wallace’s previous publications have mostly been biographies, including a life of the former Liberal leader John Hewson (1993). This is no ordinary electoral post-mortem; Wallace brings her historian’s eye for detail and an impressive ability to link the past to the present and the future.

The ‘land of smiles’ was what they called Prague under German occupation during World War II – at least the Germans did. Few locals. Fresh vegetables and meat were available (to Germans) in quantities unknown back in Germany. Until close to the end, there were more than a hundred cinemas operating in the city, as well as theatres, concert halls, and numerous other places of entertainment. After all, Goebbels was not only passionate about culture in general, but keen, he said, to initiate a ‘lively cultural exchange’ with Czechoslovakia in particular.

A posting to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was what Obersturmführer Robert Griesinger, formerly of the Stuttgart Gestapo but now just the SS, had been dreaming of since the war began. When he finally got there in 1943, he found his work at the Ministry of Economics and Labour, organising the transport of Jews to extermination camps and forced labour in Germany, demanding but a promising springboard for a postwar career. Griesinger was a ‘desk perpetrator’: tens of thousands of Czechs, Roma, and Jews died as a result of the orders he signed, but he didn’t shoot anyone himself.

i.
Look, said the sonographer, your sister says hello!
A black photo
where the future rival sucks a thumb-to-be.
Never in all history
was such a portent visible
without a guiding star.

ii.
Algorithms tinker at the corners of my life.
One tells me what I need to know.
One tells me what I want.
No, I say, not furniture, not the nearest death.
I sense that they are holding back.
Turn around, slowly: I want to see your hands.

iii.
Once I slept in a caravan
and heard the breathing ocean.
Dreams were the province of a dandelion curtain.
Now come the frail parasols,
drifting on a screen;
now come the waves,
rolling my hearing into guttural caves.
I have opened
the case for convenient sleep.
The child I was listens,
laughs and weeps.

Judith Bishop’s second collection, Interval (UQP, 2018), won the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize and was shortlisted for the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award. Her poems have inspired many artworks, including music. Most recently, she has contributed a lyric to Andrew Ford’s Red Dirt Hymns project. She has a new poem, 'Portraits of the Future'.

Which poets have most influenced you?

My teachers, direct and indirect: Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, Edwin Muir, Carl Phillips, Rainer Maria Rilke. Quite a number are men; but attunement isn’t a conscious choice.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

All the craft I know won’t bring a poem to life if inspiration is lacking. There has to be a moment of perception buried in it like a seed. Growing that seed, and discovering what kind of organism it will be, requires all the skill (craft, in both senses) I can muster.

Feeling pneumataphoric, I sublate my          I’ve got over 73
long working days into more                 tabs open in my hot
spatially, cognitively                 skull right now, one of which
expansive forms,             on death-cult capitalism says There
i.e. 24/7.                 are more important things than living and

I agree with the whole of my man-o-war                and blue.
heart still beating its stung drum.              Life comes at you
Skeletal, diaphanous, I am               exponentially, so I binge
traversed by grace,                   on predicted and rewatchable
a windowpane,              disasters. I want to die for the world

slated to die this evening. I am its wan               and not just
anchorite at work in iso, one of               thrown by the light
its many tiny shadows               of our turned-out black star,
acting essential              the curve of whose imploding I will
at Central,             never let flatten me into sleep nor dream.

Anh and Lucien by Tony Page

UWAP, $22.99 pb, 104 pp

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Tony Page’s Anh and Lucien is an intricately plotted verse novel set in French Indochina during World War II. It centres on an unlikely same-sex love affair between Lucien, a colonial bureaucrat, and Anh, a young Vietnamese communist who supports Ho Chi Minh’s independence movement.

After being arrested for ‘public indecency’ in Toulon, Lucien is sent to Hanoi to avoid a scandal. While outraged by having been swept aside like ‘dust under the carpet’, he vows to ‘play their game and keep appearances clean’. When we first meet him, Lucien remains an earnest imperialist who believes that the French ‘defend Liberty’. Meanwhile, Anh, whose scholarship in Paris was terminated after he took part in a demonstration, is back in his homeland and immersed in the headiness of revolutionary Marxism.

Though on opposite sides, the two men are united by their pariah status and a growing loneliness. They first meet with some intensity at the opera, where Anh thinks: Lucien’s ‘eyes lock onto mine, as though some kind of secret is shared’.

The prose poetry might initially seem too spare in style, but as the romance progresses such sparsity prevents sentimental drift and allows for vivid emotional clarity. By keeping a strict focus on their love, Page allows humanity to break through in the most abysmal political circumstances. After all, Marshal Pétain has just capitulated to Hitler, and Lucien finds his political allegiances crumbling in the face of French defeat and his love for Anh. That leads to a growing self-awareness: in one drunken and fragmented episode he thinks of himself as a ‘thirty-seven year old like a child / growth arrested / growth suppressed’, ‘mak[ing] up for lost time’.

Anh, for his part, increasingly torn between the Party and his love for one of the oppressors, consoles himself by imagining his life in certain fables. In one flashback he sees himself as ‘Ai Nam Ai Nu’ (meaning ‘half man, half woman’), who cannot join his friends swimming:

because when he gazed at the others throwing off their rags and splashing about, a strange event occurred in his body. He dreaded if they ever discovered what it was, he would not be allowed to join them any more as they huddled in the laneways at night, trying to keep each other safe and warm.

A clandestine love that offers shelter from an intolerant world might sound like a hackneyed theme, but Page renders it with admirable dramatic economy. It is no surprise that he has a background in theatre: this work is begging to be staged.

If the text shies away from anything, it’s sex. It never quite veers into the erotic, even when it might have enhanced its verisimilitude. Even so, this is a passionate, dignified, and quietly daring work, keenly alive to the sufferings and joys of forbidden love.

Scratchland by Noëlle Janaczewska

UWAP, $22.99 pb, 114 pp

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In contrast with Anh and Lucien’s poetic economy, Noëlle Janaczewska’s Scratchland looks decidedly baggy. It is described as ‘poetry with a performative tilt’, and indeed the author had a similarly titled piece of ‘polyphonic environmental theatre’ performed at Yale Drama School in 2014. These poems read more like spoken-word pieces. They present, in fragmented form, a non-linear, anti-poetic urban landscape in which miscellaneous items wash up everywhere: ‘A broken arm / a slur of nail varnish / the sparkle of broken glass.’

In one of the stronger pieces, ‘Styrofoam’, Guantánamo Bay prisoners scratch poems ‘into the Styrofoam cups / they got with their meals’. The poem compares the burgeoning creativity of the inmates to the invention of Styrofoam in the 1940s, even if a contrived motif of Isaac Newton and classical physics (‘you understand / the gravity of the situation’) blunts its emotive force.

One other poem is supposed to be sung in a ‘sentimental key’, while another is composed entirely of a list of songs, hinting at an audio component that might work well in theatre but is less compelling on the page.

It seems odd that the book’s most ambitious section, ‘True Crimers’, comes last. Here, a chorus of voices describes a world in which crime fiction has merged with life: television addicts imagine murder everywhere; bodies are dismembered; there are even paeans to Miss Marple. The idea has been honed by Dorothy Porter in The Monkey’s Mask (1994), which extracts the latent eroticism of the genre with a skilled hand. Janaczewska’s effort contains some mordant lines – these crimes happen ‘in an American nowhere where nothing changes, but when it does, it’s for the worse’, while one potential murderer quips that ‘everybody has a future but some have more than others’ – but overall, the satire consists more of stabs in the dark than decisive blows.

The Alpaca Cantos by Jenny Blackford

Pitt Street Poetry, $20 pb, 69 pp

Jenny Blackford settles on a somewhat gentler topic in The Alpaca Cantos, which contributes handsomely to that vast, underappreciated genre of pet poems. More than a few poets have found hidden profundities in their cats or dogs, but in this work Blackford builds herself a veritable Noah’s Ark.

In the first ‘canto’, ‘Stranger Homes and Gardens’, the human speaker offers several sweet but not cloying observations of animal life. She is alert to the differences between herself and these animals, while sometimes playfully anthropomorphising them. One speaker senses a frogmouth looking at her while she puts out the bins. That might recall Gwen Harwood’s famous ‘Barn Owl’, in which a child shoots an owl and loses her innocence, but Blackford’s poem is neither as dark nor as symbolically resonant. In fact, this bird is described as ‘neither metaphor nor portent’, which sounds almost like Lorine Niedecker’s ‘A monster owl’ (‘What / is it the sign / of? The sign of / an owl’). When Blackford’s frogmouth disappears without warning, a cat ‘at my ankles … stood silent / sniffing at the path / beetles and slugs’.

There is something enchanting about this affectionate and wry attention to the animal world, with all its predatory ambiguity. In another more amusing poem, the speaker’s sister adopts a dingo pup, ‘company for the cavoodle’, its ‘eyes / shining with intelligence, huge ears / like radar dishes positioned / to listen to the universe unfolding’.

Despite leaning on clichés (including, at a low point, ‘Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt’), Blackford maintains technical control and touches on a surprisingly wide range of fauna: cats, llamas, marauding rats, and – in what might be the only sustained lyrical piece on the subject – a slug. With its joyful affirmation of animals as friends, the first sequence could even make a memorable children’s picture book. True, there are poems later on that bring to mind Oscar Wilde’s witticism about all bad poetry being sincere, but the animal pieces create a charming paper menagerie that rises far above the usual, err, doggerel.

If the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is that there has never been a better time to respond to the climate crisis than now.

The global nature of Covid-19 has made it clear that global issues need a coordinated response and can easily affect the welfare of every human being on earth. The virus has shown us that it is absolutely crucial to listen to the science. Governments, in responding to epidemiological forecasts, have rapidly spent hundreds of billions of dollars on welfare subsidies, enforcing social distancing, protective equipment, mental health services, and vaccine research.

The political will to protect populations based on medical advice has been enormous. But many of the same politicians who have displayed such determination have all but ignored the climate crisis, though its causes and solutions are obvious. This dangerous chasm between knowledge and action is at the centre of a grave contradiction between these two crises. For a fraction of the budget that has been thrown at solving the coronavirus, based on meagre understanding of it, the climate crisis could be substantially mitigated, especially if measures are put in place quickly.

Whereas the duration of viruses like the coronavirus in human populations has historically been only one or two years, the atmospheric residence time of CO₂ is hundreds of years. With the current remaining ‘carbon budget’, we only have ten years to prevent warming of 1.5°C, or twenty-six years for two degrees. Covid-19 is but a fire drill for what we can expect from climate change by 2050. With attribution studies showing that an increase of just 1.2°C above pre-industrial global average temperature made possible the Australian pyrocene of last summer, the third and most widespread mass bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef in February 2020, and the highest recorded temperature in the Arctic Circle of 38°C in June, the scale of the problem becomes apparent.

Warnings about an increase of two degrees in global average temperature are often dismissed; some people see it in terms of day-to-day variability in the weather they experience. But two degrees in global climate terms means there is so much more energy in the system available for extreme weather: heatwaves, superstorms, floods, dry forests, and extended and intense fire weather. The additional heat going into the oceans today compared to 1750 is enough to boil Sydney Harbour dry every four hours.

For humans, and indeed all species, adapting to a 1.5°C or 2°C world will require far more spending and regulation by governments than we are seeing around Covid-19. This could be avoided by listening to the climate science just as earnestly as politicians are saying we must listen to medical science.

Paradoxically, many of the concepts medical scientists have used to explain the virus, usually in a briefing accompanied by a nodding politician, relate directly to public education on climate change. At the beginning of the pandemic, we heard how every hour and minute were important in preventing a runaway pandemic, just as each year is vital in avoiding the committed warming that future generations will have to cope with. ‘Flattening the curve’ of the virus or bending the CO₂ or temperature curve downwards follows the same principle. James Hansen and Makiko Sato have pointed out that the concept of a ‘delayed response’ regarding how actions today relate to dire consequences later is central to both crises. They also point to ‘amplifying feedbacks’ that overwhelm human control of these crises. An overrun health system will result in active cases not being treated as well as increased medical staff infections, just as a loss of the ocean’s ability to act as a carbon sink, or the melting ice sheets’ ability to re-radiate heat, will accelerate the rate at which humans will lose control of temperature increases.

Clearly, what is needed is a proven vaccine – for both the virus and climate change. This is where the incongruity between the response to Covid-19 and to climate change has become most absurd. Globally, every nation is trying to be the first with a vaccine. Meanwhile, with regard to climate change, there has been insufficient political will to act until other nations step up first. In Australia, we have a vaccine for climate change – renewable energy supported by energy storage – which has been all but ignored by the Australian Government Technology Investment Roadmap, released in September 2020.

The roadmap, which may as well have been written by Australia’s fossil-fuel companies, ignores the proven power of solar and wind that already provide twenty-five per cent of the nation’s energy. The delaying tactic of suggesting that more research and development on new technologies are needed, rather than simply accelerating what Australia is already doing with solar and wind, is a concession to Big Coal interests. Since 2003, more than $1.3 billion in government funding has been squandered on ‘carbon capture and storage’, an elaborate ‘coal can be clean’ PR campaign, which has not resulted in a single commercially operating plant capable of sequestering CO_2. In 2020, per megawatt, wind and solar are cheaper than the coal and gas for electricity generation even if you don’t price in health.

Australia is blessed with so much wind and sun that it could rapidly transition to one hundred per cent carbon neutrality and could be a net exporter of energy to Southeast Asia and create tens of thousands of jobs in the process. Economists can explain this, but they don’t have the expertise to tell you of the societal and environmental risks of not making this transition. Ultimately, it is the physics of climate change that must be respected, long before it becomes irreversible and long before human agency has lost control at personal, national, and global scales.

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

The vision was of a brown-skinned child standing by her side. She sensed it so keenly that she could even feel the child’s warmth. It was so striking she wondered about her sanity … but as time went by, she became more comfortable with her vision, accepted it as something precious, a visitation of some sort that only she knew about.’

Saroo Brierley related this life-changing vision from his adoptive mother Sue’s childhood in his memoir A Long Way Home (2013). That book told of how, aged five, he became separated from his brother at a railway station in Burhanpur, in the state of Madhya Pradesh. By accident he was locked in a train compartment, and ended up 1,400 kilometres away in what is now known as Kolkata. He lived on the streets, friendless and unable to make himself understood – his name was even changed through mispronunciation from ‘Sheru’ (Lion). He was taken into an orphanage. Sue and John Brierley later adopted him and gave him a new life in Hobart.

Virginia Woolf wrote that when trying to communicate about pain as a sick woman ‘language at once runs dry’. How does one talk about wounds without fetishising their workings, and how in a society where pain is taboo does one speak of it authentically? In Show Me Where it Hurts, writer and journalist Kylie Maslen balances the difficulty of this equation: telling the story of her disability and having that story remain fundamentally unspeakable. The act of telling remains for Maslen ‘a rejection of language’, and yet the thing on the table for those suffering is ‘the desire to make ourselves known’.

This is well-trodden terrain in the echelons of theory. There are shades here of Elaine Scarry’s contention that pain breaks language, but Maslen’s approach is visceral, practical. It has to be. Theory would be a privilege. She navigates the urgent, sublimated world of pain’s inexpressibility in ways that are fresh and inventive. More importantly, they are the authenticities of the life she lives.

People ask, ‘How are you?’

What I want to say:

I’m running out of words.

What I actually say:

‘About the same.’

Doctors: ‘Give that to me as a number from one to ten.’

Susan Ryan was a formidable storyteller. Her stories communicated her values and her world view, her commitment to the pursuit of a more egalitarian society. Hers was a powerful form of communication, capable of questioning and challenging the inadequacies of the masculinist, class-exclusive ‘fair go’ of postwar Australian society.

Two weeks before her death on September 27, I spoke to Ryan via videoconference in what must have been one of her final interviews. As ever, her stories were uplifting and thought-provoking, full of humour but laden with didactic intent. She talked about her childhood and her upbringing, her education and her values, and the political ascent that culminated in her becoming the first female member of a federal Labor Cabinet, in 1983.

Ryan’s predisposition towards offering compelling stories led her to write her autobiography, Catching the Waves: My life in and out of politics, which was published in 1999. In it she wrote not just about her own life but about the social and political contexts in which it occurred. She reflected on her working-class upbringing in Maroubra, Sydney, and her Catholic education, which, for all its strictness and rigidity, instilled a deep sense of social justice and the imperative to do good for those less fortunate than herself.

Susan Ryan speaking at the 2015 Human Rights Awards (Australian Human Rights Commission/Wikimedia Commons)

Interestingly, Ryan did not consider her work to be an autobiography in the strictest sense. ‘I didn’t want to write a complete account of everything that had happened in my life,’ she recalled. ‘I wanted to focus on what I saw as the determining events in my own childhood and so on and so forth, and the important events from my perspective as a feminist, social democrat.’ Ultimately, the power of her stories mattered more to her than their generic labels, and she encouraged me to make my own judgement about her book’s classification. She found the book ‘demanding emotionally’ to write, and this in itself reflects the extent to which the essence of her selfhood was etched into the pages.

Catching the Waves explored two of the more significant socio-political tides that shaped and defined her political life. The first, of course, was the rise of second-wave feminism in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. Through that lens, her autobiography was just another highlight in a career full of firsts: ‘I had the sense that I was doing something for the first time.’ The book told the story of her involvement in the Women’s Electoral Lobby, her ascendancy in the newly formed ACT Branch of the ALP, her enthusiastic chasing of the women’s vote under Bill Hayden, and her battles over education policy and women’s reform in the Hawke government. Her message to younger readers, she said, was clear: ‘The gains were so hard to make, and if you don’t watch out, they’re going to disappear.’

In our conversation, Ryan was measured in her stories about life as a female Labor parliamentarian. She was conscious that she had experienced mild sexism. For much of her tenure, her departmental secretary was Helen Williams, the first woman to lead a government department. When Ryan took Williams to Expenditure Review Committee meetings to advocate for higher spending, they were occasionally greeted with: ‘Oh, here come the women.’ Her unwavering commitment to the women’s policy agenda caused some friction with colleagues. Her famous Sex Discrimination Act (1984), which prohibited workplace discrimination on the basis of sex, marital status, or pregnancy, was a case in point: ‘It was a hassle to handle,’ she recalled. ‘It took up a lot of time.’ This frustrated some male ministerial colleagues. Including Finance Minister Peter Walsh, who complained that ‘this bloody women’s stuff’ was slowing the passage of other reforms through the Senate.

Ryan did not perceive herself – or indeed represent herself in her book – as the victim of sexism. She said that ‘day-to-day sexism’ was not something she suffered often. Some of her male colleagues had a ‘crude style about them’, but they were courteous and collegiate with her. ‘I didn’t get any of that personal, insulting behaviour that Julia Gillard and other female members of parliament had,’ she said.

Ryan’s fellow feminists urged her on in her political career. They also encouraged her to write the story of that career. Senior feminists implored her to write an autobiography, the rationale being that it was their story as much as it was hers. Having avoided the autobiographical project for some time, Ryan decided to commit to it when Edna Ryan, a fierce champion of equal pay for equal work, said emphatically, ‘I want you to do this book.’ For Susan Ryan, it was the ‘breakthrough of feminism into parliamentary politics’ that mattered. ‘I was conscious that it was an important story, without saying I’m a particularly important person.’

The second major ‘tidal wave’ was the rise of economic rationalism in the 1980s. Notwithstanding its commitment to social reform, the ALP under Hawke became the party of deregulation, free markets, and restricted government spending.

Ryan’s repudiation of this philosophy was at the heart of many of the stories she told about her life in politics, particularly in Catching the Waves. ‘I was a big spending minister,’ she said, ‘which meant more in education, TAFE courses for migrant women who had lost their jobs when the factories closed. I wasn’t an economic rationalist, and I couldn’t be in my program.’ Politically, Ryan made her last stand on the issue of university tuition fees. ‘I certainly created a lot of problems for myself by not agreeing to university fees,’ she recalled later. ‘That was the real breakdown between me and Bob and Walsh.’ Having lost that war and been demoted from the Education portfolio, Ryan left politics in 1988.

Ultimately, Ryan remained committed to the core values of the Labor Party. Despite the ‘high tide’ of economic rationalism, she felt that Labor’s core values had survived the 1980s. Asked about her portrayal of Labor in government in Catching the Waves, Ryan said: ‘Despite all these brawls, all the mistakes … the core belief, which is that every Australian should have equal opportunity, was the core belief of the Labor Party.’

Values of social justice and egalitarianism drove her post-parliamentary life as well. After a brief and ‘unhappy’ stint as the Australian publishing director at Penguin, Ryan served as the head of the Association of Superannuation Funds of Australia. In 2011, Prime Minister Julia Gillard appointed her as Australia’s first Age Discrimination Commissioner. Ryan used the opportunity to promote ‘good research about age stereotyping’ and to facilitate training programs for employers to prevent age discrimination in the workforce. In this role, she noticed patterns of discrimination that were highly familiar: ‘All of the reasons employers – particularly big employers – would give me for not wanting to have older workers were the same that in the 1970s they gave me about women.’

In our conversation, Ryan revealed that she was considering writing another book. While she had no interest in reissuing Catching the Waves, she had contemplated writing a sequel to discuss issues such as sexual harassment in the workplace and domestic violence. She was undecided about whether to commit to that project. With an inscrutable smile, she said, ‘I’ll let you know if I do.’

Had it been written, Ryan’s second book would have been another profound story about the changing place of women in Australian society. Nonetheless, Australians can be grateful for her life, her work, and the stories that she did put down on the record for posterity. Susan Ryan was modest. She didn’t simply catch and ride waves: she helped to shape them.

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

Who was John Maynard Keynes? Was he the bookish Cambridge don who penned ambitious theories to overturn the tenets of economics and political liberalism? Or was he Baron Keynes of Tilton, the ardent imperialist who viewed British rule as a benevolent force bringing justice, liberty, and prosperity to the societies it administered? Was he a meticulous Lothario who kept lists of his hookups with anonymous men on notecards? Was he also a political statesman who lambasted the intransigency of his colleagues during fraught negotiations in two world wars?

In Zachary D. Carter’s highly sympathetic biography, Keynes (1883–1946) was all of these and more. Besides treading familiar territory on Keynes’s contribution to the discipline of economics, Carter also shows an intimate portrait of Keynes (better known as Maynard to his friends) and how Keynesian ideas transformed the landscape of modern American power. With its seventeen chapters and ample references to both Keynes’s published works and his personal correspondence, this book is ambitious in revising the image of Keynes as a man and thinker. Its inconsistent and hyperbolic writing, however, tends to diminish Keynes’s achievements rather than clarify them.

Michael Gawenda’s engaging biography of Melbourne lawyer Mark Leibler traverses matters of Australia’s migration history, Jewish identity, and political influence. What has it meant to live a Jewish life in an Australian city? What have been the intergenerational impacts of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, and the establishment of the State of Israel? How, if at all, might the balance depicted between commitment to minority cultural distinctiveness and broad societal participation exhibit a way forward for multicultural futures?

Mark Leibler’s life, as a successful Australian lawyer and a publicly committed leader of Jewish organisations, has emerged from the remarkable history of refugees who lost their families in the Holocaust. From small business beginnings, a significant number became upwardly mobile and in Melbourne some achieved great success. Leibler’s parents were young middle-class members of the Jewish community in Antwerp, Belgium, who moved to Australia months before the start of the Nazi horror in September 1939.

And to the other men from Afghanistan,
and Iran and Iraq, who prepared a feast for me
one midday, years ago on my way to work,
laid the clean sheet smooth
on the worn carpet of the furnitureless house,
placed dishes of spiced rice and chickpeas,
and slid a plate towards me –
there were not enough plates
to go around – and with upturned palms
urged me to eat first,
I want to thank you and say
I’ll always remember that meal,
your hospitality and kindness,
the cool of the empty room
as I stepped off the busy street
and out of the sun to join you
for what I thought would be
a glass of black tea.
I want to say sorry though
that I left too soon,
that I let my job call me away.
I’m sorry, Hassan,
that by the time I returned with the paper
and pencils and tubes of paint you needed,
the house was boarded up,
you’d been moved on; I’m sorry to say
I’ve forgotten your friends’ names;
I’m sorry that my imagination
could barely grasp that deep water
and fearful waves could look like hope,
most of all I’m sorry for my ignorance
that statelessness in this country
might also look like the view
from a small boat on a hostile ocean,
except with no coast to train the eye to.

On 14 November 2019, Behrouz Boochani arrived in New Zealand, to feature in the WORD Christchurch literary festival. In so doing, Boochani, the Kurdish-Iranian writer, detained – or, in his words, exiled – by the Australian government for six years, finally escaped his ‘Manus Prison’. The details of his resettlement remained unclear, but it didn’t matter; he simply wanted to be ‘free for a while’. Around the world, on broadcast and social media, thousands celebrated Boochani’s ‘long flight to freedom’. This followed his award-winning book No Friend But the Mountains (2018), an autobiographical novel typed on his mobile phone using WhatsApp, one passage at a time. Smuggled from Manus in thousands of PDF files, it was translated from Farsi into English by his Iranian-Australian collaborator, Dr Omid Tofighian. For Boochani and those concerned with the plight of asylum seekers and refugees, his escape offered a rare moment of exultation.

Three days later, the SARS-CoV-2 virus emerged. Some investigations have traced the first confirmed case to 17 November 2019 in Hubei Province, China. At particular risk were those in captive quarters: nursing homes, prisons, detention facilities. In March 2020, with more than 500,000 Covid-19 cases worldwide, Michelle Bachelet, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, called for detainees held ‘without sufficient legal basis’ to be released. In Australia, the advice was echoed by some 1,200 medical professionals in an open letter to federal ministers Peter Dutton and Alan Tudge; the clinicians called for the release of refugees and asylum seekers into community-supported accommodation. The plea merely elicited a statement from the Department of Home Affairs about cleaning measures in detention centres.

In repurposed Australian hotels, hundreds of men formerly detained on Manus Island and Nauru were at heightened risk from the virus. In Brisbane’s Kangaroo Point Central Hotel, which accommodates more than 100 detainees, a security guard tested positive in March. In July, at the Mantra Hotel in Melbourne, which houses around sixty men, another guard tested positive. ‘Everyone is panicking … they don’t want to die,’ said Farhad Bandesh, a detainee at the Melbourne Immigration Transit Accommodation. Meanwhile, the Department of Home Affairs reiterated that protective measures, including the provision of gloves and masks, were in place.

Craig Silvey is an author and screenwriter from Fremantle in Western Australia. He is the author of Rhubarb (2004) and Jasper Jones (2009). His new novel is Honeybee.

Craig Silvey (Llihsemaj/Wikimedia Commons)

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

Buckle up. I’m starting the day at Augusta National Golf Course and playing eighteen holes. Post round, I’ll take a dip in a Mauritian lagoon, after which I’ll stroll around the Natural History Museum in London, and finish up in a Spanish taberna surrounded by tapas and cerveza and amigos.

The cover of All Our Shimmering Skies is crammed with surprises. Look closely among the Australian wildflowers and you’ll find black hearts, butterflies, lightning bolts, a shovel, a crocodile, a dingo, a fruit bat, a Japanese fighter plane, and a red rising sun.

Trent Dalton has adopted a similar method in writing his second novel, which samples almost every genre you can think of, from war story to magic realism and Gothic horror to comedy. There are references to Romeo and Juliet and a nod to The Pilgrim’s Progress. There is the heightened excitement of a Hollywood spectacular, the earthy mysticism of Aboriginal Dreaming, and a brushstroke of Japanese mythology, all sprinkled with the gold dust of Dalton’s originality.

Honeybee, Craig Silvey’s highly anticipated new novel, his first since Jasper Jones (2009), chronicles the coming of age of fourteen-year-old transgender narrator Sam Watson, who was assigned male at birth. This is a story of desperate loneliness and fear, of neglect, family violence, betrayal, and self-disgust. But it is also one of love and solidarity, a celebration of the kindness of strangers who become family and friends.

Honeybee takes its place among other recent writing (from Charlotte Wood’s novel The Natural Way of the Things [2015] to Jess Hill’s investigation of family violence in See What You Made Me Do [2019]) that confronts deep-seated and deeply problematic aspects of Australian masculinity. Silvey adds to these representations a consideration of the link between the strict policing of a male/female binary and the physical brutality that – according to Sam’s stepfather, Steve – defines what it means to ‘be a fuckin’ man’.

A short story collection can have much in common with a collection of poetry, where each story pivots on attention to something particular and arresting – an image, a memory, the encounters with strangeness or beauty that can occur in a life. Individual stories build delicately towards such a moment, then fall away quickly, willing a reader to engage with feeling and suggestion rather than the comprehensiveness of narrative.

Emma Ashmere’s short story collection Dreams They Forgot is subtle and evocative in this way; her stories move both on internal trajectories of revelation and in relation to each other, incrementally building a richly nuanced fabric of story, character, and pinpoints of life experience.

Sofie Laguna does not shy away from confronting subject matter. Her first adult novel, One Foot Wrong (2009), is about a young girl forced by her troubled parents into a reclusive existence. Her second, The Eye of the Sheep (2014), which won the Miles Franklin Literary Award in 2015, tells the story of a young boy on the autism spectrum born into a family riven by poverty and violence. Her third, The Choke (2017), concerns a motherless child in danger because of her father’s criminal connections. Infinite Splendours is also about the betrayal of a child by the adults in his life, but here Laguna ventures into new territory, exploring the lasting impact of trauma on a child as he becomes a man, and whether the abused may become the abuser.

Infinite Splendours, set in a small town near the Southern Grampians in Victoria, concerns a ten-year-old boy called Lawrence Loman who lives with his mother, Louise, and his younger brother Paul. The boys’ father, Charlie, an air force pilot, was killed during the war, when Louise was pregnant with Paul. All that the boys know of their father is his ghostly presence in the spare room, where a photo of him sits next to his posthumous Atlantic Star Medal. ‘It was as if father was a medal,’ thinks Lawrence.

In Andrew Pippos’s immersive and multi-layered début novel, Lucky’s, a tragic shooting that occurs in the last bastion of a Greek-Australian restaurant franchise becomes the fulcrum around which mental health, heartbreak, displacement, and toxic masculinity are explored.

Spanning the years between 1913 and 2002 and taking place across multiple continents (though Sydney is its primary backdrop) Lucky’s oscillates between the perspectives of Vasilis ‘Lucky’ Mallios, Achilles Asproyerakas, Emily Main, and Ian Asquith – each of them bound to one another through happenstance, family ties, and, in perhaps the main theme of the book, deception.

Through a cavalcade of coincidences, the vast world these characters inhabit shrinks into a finely interwoven web, where each character’s actions reverberate to affect the others in unforeseen and pernicious ways. Pippos’s characters dance around the fine line between fate and self-determination, often grappling with the weight of intergenerational trauma and structural barriers. Emily wonders ‘if all she could ever be was the person she’d already become’, while Lucky ponders if failure and success ‘aren’t always determined by other people’.

The intermittent absurdity of the book – particularly in the highly visceral nature of Ian’s troubles and a dreamlike scene where a malnourished horse walks into Achilles’s café to disastrous consequences – coupled with the narrative’s serendipitous quality, only serves to underline its fantastical nature. Pippos writes towards myth while grounding his book in deeply human themes.

Lucky’s central conceits lie in how we respond to failure, how we live in the shadow of other people’s decisions, and how we elevate ourselves while staying true to our own ideas about who we are. Each character grapples with a sense of impostor syndrome – Lucky and Ian dabble with being fraudsters, while Emily grapples with a persistent sense of inferiority in her line of work, her marriage, and her life.

Reminiscent of works such as Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings (2013) that interrogate the pursuit of specialness, Lucky’s is concerned with the stories we tell ourselves and the chasm between fact and fiction, the space where happiness may lie. One lasting preoccupation of the book, and its characters, is how extraordinariness may reside in ‘the glory of a lie that was as meaningful as the truth’.

During a 1995 television interview on Charlie Rose soon after the publication of Martin Amis’s The Information, another long novel, there is a moment when, as Rose begins to read the opening passage, Amis’s mouth visibly slackens. Silently he intones the first lines. His hand (often tentatively raised toward his chin in interviews) searches out his forehead. There is a spectral waver in his gaze, a registering (as if accommodating, or incorporating, new information). He looks adrift, unmoored. Free-floating. One has the sense of a man assimilating his own self as it is spoken back to him. For a moment, he seems precarious.

Amis once wrote that a writer’s life ‘is all in the novels, at one remove or another, for the not-so-idly curious’. The viewer feels as though here, in close-up, the truth of that sentiment was being comprehensively proven.

The cover of Inside Story dubs the 500-page work ‘a novel’. Amis calls the enterprise a ‘novelised autobiography’. Of Philip Larkin’s ‘Letter to a Friend About Girls’, he notes: ‘The “friend” of the title is only approximately Kingsley [Amis], just as the narrator of the poem is only approximately Philip; but approximation can come very close.’

Here, approximation comes very close, very often.

At the heart of every fairy tale, there is violence: Snow White’s stepmother calling for her heart on a platter, Cinderella’s sisters mutilating their feet to fit the silver shoe. ‘All the better to eat you with, my dear,’ says the wolf, his belly already stuffed with grandmother’s flesh. From this bloodletting, the fairy tale tries to spin something wondrous, turning straw into gold and men into beasts.

In Flyaway, Kathleen Jennings has woven the conventions of a fairy tale into something new, transforming the Australian bush into a haunted forest. The novel begins in the dwindling town of Runagate, where nineteen-year-old Bettina Scott is living a half-life since the disappearance of her father and brothers. She spends her days minding the house and tending the garden, trapped under the gaze of her reclusive, fey mother – until a cryptic accusation is splashed across their front fence, startling Bettina into both action and remembrance.

The search for her brothers takes Bettina across the borders of Runagate and into the silent outback beyond. Here, a complex web of stories unfolds. A strange woman recalls what happened in the neighbouring town of Woodwild, where children were spirited away in the night. A farmer looks through a window to see himself sitting there with his wife, this other-self grinning ‘with sharp, gleaming teeth’. Bit by bit, the real monsters are unveiled: familial abuse and intergenerational rivalry, laced with the residual violence of colonialism (‘not stained by massacres, no, nor cursed, whatever people whispered about how the Spicer family first established Runagate Station’).

Jennings has a real gift for prose, her sentences pleasurably thickened with images of glitter and decay: ‘Trees bled resin like rubies, sprouted goitrous nests, suspended cat’s cradles of spiderwebs, spinning disks of silk.’ Here and there, we encounter aphorisms of startling beauty: ‘A civilised, bone-china soul knows, as a bird does, that a heavy-footed, shouting man is a thing to be fled.’ And yet, as with all fairy tales, the novel hints that something savage and depressingly familiar lurks beneath its magical trappings. Flyaway is a novel that knows any story is only as truthful as the person who tells it; that the tale itself survives as a parasite does, jumping from person to person and host to host.

Opening a review with a book’s first line allows a critic to thieve the author’s momentum for themselves. I am in a thieving mood. For the first line of Elena Ferrante’s new novel, The Lying Life of Adults, carries an enviable wallop: ‘Two years before leaving home my father said to my mother that I was very ugly.’ It’s the kind of line – charged, discomforting, and vicious – that makes Ferrante so electrifying to read. Ferrante’s novels are whetstones; her narrators are knives. When we meet twelve-year-old Giovanna Trada in this novel, she is a meek and dutiful creature – clever but incurious; a dewy-eyed admirer of her affluent parents and their hermetic life. Four years later, when Ferrante is finished with her, Giovanna’s heart is a shiv. Here is womanhood, Ferrante shows us once again: a relentless abrasion, a sharpening.

It is difficult to write about Ferrante’s work without becoming distracted by its glittering literary mythology: the tantalising mystery of the pseudonymous Italian writer’s identity and the invasive cruelty of the quest to unmask her; the genre-detonating splendour of her Neapolitan novels (the four-part series that began with My Brilliant Friend in 2012); and the debate this quartet has sparked about how we (de)value the fiction of women’s lives. And – of course – the ever-ratcheting hyperbole. As Ferrante has been consecrated into the modern literary canon, she has been compared to everyone from Marcel Proust, Edith Wharton, and Charles Dickens, to Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, and Mario Puzo.

The Living Sea of Waking Dreams begins, self-consciously, at the limits of language. Its opening pages are rendered in a prose style that is fragmented and contorted. Sentences break down, run into each other. Syntax is twisted into odd shapes that call into question the very possibility of meaning. Words seem to arrive pre-estranged by semantic satiation in a way that evokes Gertrude Stein or Samuel Beckett at their most opaque: ‘As if they too were already then falling apart, so much ash and soot soon to fall, so much smoke to suck down. As if all that can be said is we say you and if that then. Them us were we you?’

Richard Flanagan’s eighth novel is a rough beast. It has clearly been written to the moment, in anger and sorrow. Its prose radiates the heat of its composition. It is what one character calls a ‘growing scream’, prompted by the wilful ignorance and general imbecility of the present. The novel buzzes with anxiety that the centre will not hold, that language may prove inadequate to the task of addressing all the chaos and fragmentation, that maybe the false determinations of words themselves are part of the problem. The narrative is shrouded in toxic smoke from the unprecedented bushfires that reduced much of the country to ashes earlier this year. More broadly, The Living Sea of Waking Dreams expresses horror and frustration at the ongoing destruction of the natural world and at the maddening tendency of people to carry on as normal while ecosystems are collapsing and mass extinctions are taking place all around them.

Who would have guessed that a rejuvenation of regional difference might be triggered by a plague? Cosmopolitan Melbourne became the epicentre of what Prime Minister Scott Morrison has called the ‘Victorian wave’. Borders, the leitmotif of Australian politics since Tampa, suddenly became internal. My own state of Western Australia was sued for breach of the Australian Constitution for maintaining its ‘hard’ internal borders. Wonted barbs flowing between states now felt just a little personal. Interstate rivalry in Australia is not uncommon, with familiar stoushes over GST share, the Murray– Darling Basin, the location of naval shipbuilding, and the hosting of sporting events. But the idea that Australia has internal borders, not just to check fruit but to stop the movement of people, Australian people, is something that has only emerged with Covid-19.

I have been thinking about such things since I was appointed Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia in July of this year. With the decision not to renew the Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney following Robert Dixon’s retirement in 2019, the position at UWA took on an additional significance within the AustLit community.

Within the national conversations in which I participate, I have always been conscious of my position as a Western Australian, but also quite unconscious of it as well. Like all unconscious things, we can only see them in certain deviations and hesitations, or in the bees in our bonnets. For me, when I speak about Australian literature I find myself wanting, in one way or another, to preface my remarks by noting the fact that I am speaking as a Western Australian. Look, I’ve just done it again.

It reminds me of those occasions when I become conscious of my accent. Like most people, I tend to imagine I have no accent. But my wife, who is Malaysian, sometimes teases me by repeating words I say, like ‘DVD’, which apparently I say as ‘doy-voy-doy’ à la Kath & Kim.

One of the notable features of Australian English is that it is not strongly marked by regional accents. Still, people do, as it were, think in regional accents. I say this even though it remains an open question whether settler Australia should be properly understood as being inflected by regional vectors. Yes, we are divided into states and territories, but are these anything other than lines on a map, drawn with a ruler and a set square, and the occasional river? The contrast between the political map of Australia and the now iconic AIATSIS map of Indigenous Australia graphically exposes the poverty of the Australian regional imagination and the essential irreality of our territorial demarcations. More particularly, for someone like me, is it right to conceive of Australia in terms of literary regions?

My book Like Nothing on this Earth: A literary history of the wheatbelt (UWAP, 2017) wagered that there was a value in conceptualising Australian literature regionally. As much as possible I tried to emphasise the material factors at work in the agricultural colonisation of the south-western corner of the Australian continent, rather than invoking some genius loci that magically flowed into the veins of the writers that lived there. I remained sceptical about confected regional identities serving as euphemisms for white belonging. But still, something did happen to writers who lived their lives, often not their whole lives but some crucial part, in the wheatbelt. Apprehending what that was proved to be a major task in the book, but in the end I believe it does make sense and there is a value to speaking of these people – Dorothy Hewett, Jack Davis, Barbara York Main, John Kinsella, and the others I studied – as ‘wheatbelt writers’. They became, one might say, part of the wheatbelt complex.

Wheatbelt of Western Australia (Jana Schoenknecht/Alamy)

But what is regional difference? Certainly, one feels that regional difference is at most a weak factor when compared to the forms of difference that most occupy us today: race, gender, class, ethnicity, and, increasingly, sectarian political affiliations. The existence of regional difference as a literary concept was explored some decades ago in a remarkable conference that took place in Fremantle in 1978. The Fremantle Arts Centre, founded just two years earlier in 1976, hosted a roundtable discussion on ‘Regionalism in Contemporary Australian Literature’. The topic was the subject of lively debate, with presentations from Frank Moorhouse, Elizabeth Jolley, Jim Davidson, Thomas Shapcott, and others. The two main issues that emerged were whether regionalism could even be said to be present in Australian literature; and then, if it could, how regionalism was anything other than a glorified parochialism. I was only six years old when this conference took place, and living with my family in Munich at the time, so I am grateful that the presentations were later published.

Shapcott confessed in his postscript to the conference that he had initially thought the conference was ‘aimed at reassuring Westralians that they were OF US’, but came round to the applicability of the regionalist approach in more general terms. Davidson, as ever, was especially acute. He grasped something that has stuck with me since I first encountered it, because it provides a kind of litmus test for literary regionalism, at least as it was conventionally conceived: ‘The one ingredient most apparent in regionalism as a world-wide phenomenon is essentially lacking in Australia: grievance.’ Davidson gave the examples of Wales, Scotland, and the American South – vanquished peoples forced to live next to and among their wealthier conquerors. In the most direct terms, what Davidson was suggesting was that to be regional was to be a loser. That was not his judgement but rather him giving voice to a judgement hidden inside the fabric of regionalism. In that sense, more positive expressions of regionalism, including those I subscribe to, are also, at bottom, a means of compensation.

The great Marxist critic Raymond Williams drew a similar conclusion in relation to regions, although following a different line of reasoning from Davidson. For Williams, what emerged under the name of ‘regions’ in nineteenth-century Britain was essentially a geographical spatialisation of class. Regions were economically subservient peripheries of production. This meant that, for Williams, regional consciousness was a form of class consciousness. With this in mind, it is interesting to go back to how accents work in Australia, where they follow class rather than regional lines.

No doubt, contemporary Australia is well seeded with the politics of grievance. But Davidson is largely correct to suggest that this has not typically found its expression in regional particularity, at least not in such a way that it then gave expression to what might be called an imaginary. Davidson did proffer one possible exception: the case of Tasmania. Indeed, his later, highly influential 1989 Meanjin essay ‘Tasmanian Gothic’ was a seminal attempt to delineate a regional Tasmanian literary sensibility, one that was indeed founded in grievance.

The papers at the Fremantle Arts Centre were published in Westerly’s December 1978 issue. The magazine was at that time edited by Bruce Bennett and Peter Cowan, who were strong advocates of literary regionalism. I only have faint memories of Cowan, but I was taught by Bennett at UWA as an undergraduate and remember his particular interest in regionalism in Australia and America, but also, presciently, in the Southeast Asian ‘region’ and the Indian Ocean rim. Cowan was one of my case studies for Like Nothing on this Earth. Going through boxes of his papers and personal effects held by the Peter Cowan Writers’ Centre, I came across a letter he had written to his wife, Edith Howard. The letter was undated but probably written in 1941. In it he defended his desire to write a ‘regional novel’ based on his experience of working as a rural labourer in the wheatbelt through the Depression years:

I can see what you don’t want me to do. You don’t like the idea of a regional novel, and I am quite determined to write only regional novels until I have a quite different type of experience. I will probably never have this, but that will also probably not stop me trying regional novels. Look at the American regionalists – definitely successful. I think that regionalism is something the Australian novel needs.

In the history of Australian literary regionalism, this letter will be an important document, for it is one of the earliest explicit announcements of this literary goal. There was clearly regional writing before 1941, but I haven’t come across it being described as such. Cowan’s main influences at this point were Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, and John Steinbeck, but what one notices when reading Cowan’s often exquisite short stories is something quite different from these writers. Instead of the swirl of broken histories that eddy through his American and British exemplars, in Cowan’s writing there is a poetics of isolation that is coupled with a profound historical amnesia.

Why? For the simple reason that Cowan’s sketches take place in the midst of colonisation – the agricultural colonisation of the south-west of the Australian continent – rather than in its wake. In his later writing life, Cowan would become an important historian of the Swan River colony, but at that point in his career he was trying to capture something different, some particularity of sensibility that was already ingrained in the raw wheatbelt farms he had laboured on, and which had so recently been carved out of their ancient human and ecological systems. These farms proceeded in violent disregard of what went before, and when Cowan came to express this he found himself, I can’t put it more precisely, at a loss. All his characters are like this – they are at the end of things.

Arguing for a relationship of literature to place in Australia is not in itself new. The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia (1987), edited by the late Peter Pierce, was a pioneering work of literary place-making. Philip Mead, my predecessor in the UWA Chair, has written eloquently on literary regionalism. Cheryl Taylor, with her work on North Queensland, was one of the first academic literary scholars (along with Bruce Bennett) to take literary regionalism seriously. In the 1990s, the rise of ecocriticism gave particular attention to the concept of a bioregion, opening up the possibility that literary regionalism might be reimagined as literary bioregionalism. One can see this emerging in some of the fine literary scholarship on the Mallee districts of Victoria by Paul Carter, Brigid Magner, and Emily Potter. Like Carter, Stephen Muecke has also been adept at utilising the post-structuralist resources of European literary theory (de Certeau, Latour) to unstitch the people and places of the Australian continent from the weave of colonial predeterminations.

Cutting back across the emergence of bio-regionalist sensibilities in literature and criticism has been the advent of second-wave Indigenous authors like Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, and Tony Birch and of the powerful insinuation of the concept of ‘Country’ into wider Australian discourse. The fact that Country does not coincide exactly with bioregion – though they often speak to each other – opens up deeper epistemological differences that remain to be negotiated. No one is necessarily clamouring for a rebooted Jindyworobak syncretism, but there might yet be some value in a genuine dialogue about the spiritual (or in the current parlance, more-than-human) value of environment.

For me, literary regionalism is a critical stance that I find myself adopting, whether I want to or not. I think it is just something that happens when I read, and I would feel uncomfortable advocating for reified regional schools of expression. It does produce interesting results. In my book, I found that major writers like Dorothy Hewett, Jack Davis, and Elizabeth Jolley took on different complexions when they were viewed through the prism of region.

In similar ways, I find myself relating to Alexis Wright, Kim Scott, Judith Wright, Richard Flanagan, Thea Astley, Colin Thiele, Charmaine Papertalk Green, and Trent Dalton as regional writers. It is not a label they would necessarily accept or welcome, and they would have different reasons for being wary of such designations. If this group are all regional writers, we must wonder if they are not then somehow differently regional. In my neck of the woods, it has been inspiring to watch the Wirlomin Noongar grouping (Kim Scott, Clint Bracknell, Claire G. Coleman, and others), who trace their belonging to the south coast of Western Australia, become a nodal point of Noongar cultural and language renaissance, and seriously influence the national imaginary. I realise that this might be of a different order to a regionalism we might ascribe to Judith Wright or Thea Astley, but I think just entering into the world of regional difference opens us to the possibility not just of different regions, but of being differently regional.

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

Modern mega-farms are like nothing on earth. Imagine a vast black field stretching from horizon to horizon. A driverless tractor glides across the skyline spreading synthetic fertiliser. A cluster of grain towers looms over an empty asphalt parking lot. A row of pig sheds gleams in the distance. The square blot of the manure lagoon simmers in the hot sun. There are no trees. No birds. No mess. Everything is orderly, unpeopled, and entirely alien.

Such a venture has little in common with the kind of farm that English writer James Rebanks grew up on. By comparison, his grandfather’s ‘fell farm’ in Matterdale, in the English Lake District, ‘was crooked and patched and narrow. It wasn’t falling apart, but it was a bit scruffy at the edges. And it supported a rich diversity of plant and animal life. Even though the land had been farmed for many centuries, there was still some wildness in it.’

In her paean to walking, Rebecca Solnit notes that any history of walking is by nature provisional. As a subject it trespasses almost infinite fields: ‘anatomy, anthropology, architecture, gardening, geography, political and cultural history, literature, sexuality, religious studies’. Despite such ungainly dimensions, her book Wanderlust (2000) maps rich connections between walking, thinking, and creativity. These stretch from the peripatetic philosophers of ancient Greece to the Romantic poets; from Walter Benjamin on Parisian streets to political protesters crossing no-go zones.

John Blay’s Wild Nature belongs to a long if amorphous tradition of walking with intent. It completes his trekking trilogy, following Back Country (1987) and On Track (2015). ‘Suddenly it comes clear,’ he writes. ‘We can map whatever we find and tell the story of the great escarpment forests.’  Walking is meshed with narrative production, used to report back on intimate encounters with place. Others have deployed this strategy: Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney (2017), Robert Macfarlane’s The Old Ways (2012), and Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital (2002) are a few. What is intriguing about Wild Nature is its encounter with an under-celebrated landscape stretching from Bermagui in New South Wales to Lakes Entrance in Victoria.

Scanning my bookshelves, I see a dozen or more of the distinctive green spines of Virago Press. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the Virago imprint was a guarantee of good reading by women writers whose works were rediscovered and sent out to find a new public. I had read Margaret Atwood, Rosamond Lehmann, and Elizabeth Taylor for the first time in hardcovers; Virago made them new. Kate O’ Brien’s The Land of Spices, banned in Ireland, had been hard to get. Here it was in Virago green, with a perceptive introduction to put it in context.

The Virago imprint dates from 1972. Its founder, Carmen Callil, is one of Australia’s most influential expatriates. Born in Melbourne in 1938, she is almost the same age as Germaine Greer. Like Greer, she started her education at Star of the Sea convent in one of Melbourne’s bayside suburbs. Later she was taught by the Loreto nuns at Mandeville Hall in Toorak. She has described her education as intellectually good but the nuns as ‘cold, hard creatures’. Like Greer, she went on to the University of Melbourne.

When the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding (SACU) invited Hugh Trevor-Roper, Regius Professor of History at the University of Oxford, to visit China in 1965, he jumped at the chance. It was a decision that all parties concerned came to regret. The eminent historian had a terrible time in China, ‘that land of bigots and parrots’. He didn’t meet the right people. He found no intellectual equals. The interpreters and guides assigned to the group weren’t up to the job. He nicknamed them Cement-head, Duckbottom, Smooth-face, and the Presbyterian.

For too much of the time, Trevor-Roper was stuck with his fellow travellers. He bonded with playwright Robert Bolt, author of A Man for All Seasons, who had joined at the last minute when Vanessa Redgrave cancelled. The delegation leader, Mary Adams, BBC broadcaster and feminist, he found insufferable: ‘She has absolutely no function, no purpose here: she might just as well be in Surbiton.’ Her deputy, union activist Ernie Roberts (later a Labour MP), was worse: ‘a narrow, complacent know-all … invulnerable in the solid armour of hypocrisy, philistinism and double-think’. The pair annoyed Trevor-Roper by their compliance with what their Chinese hosts wanted of the group. His journals were his secret weapon and would provide material for the article he wrote for the Sunday Times on his return, headlined (not by him) ‘The Sick Mind of China’. So much for enhanced Anglo-Chinese understanding.

Scott Morrison does not like to explain the decisions he makes on our behalf. Sometimes he just refuses to discuss them, as he did when, as immigration minister, he simply rejected any questions about how his boat-turnback policy was being implemented at sea. At other times he is a little subtler, as he has been this year while presiding over what will probably prove to be the most consequential shift in Australia’s foreign relations in decades. The collapse in relations with our most powerful Asian neighbour and most important trading partner is not just Canberra’s doing, of course; it has resulted from decisions made in Beijing too. But Australia’s recent and current choices have certainly contributed to the chill, and our future choices will do much to determine where things go from here.

Our prime minister evades any serious discussion of these choices with a simple but powerful rhetorical manoeuvre. He denies that he is making any choices, because the issues at stake mean that he, and we, have no real alternatives to the policy he is adopting. He justifies this by claiming that those issues engage our interests, our values, and our sovereignty, and as such are non-negotiable. Any course of action other than the one he has chosen would fatally compromise this inviolable trinity, and would be an unthinkable betrayal of our country. Thus, he implies, there really is no choice for any decent patriotic Australian but to accept what he has done.

The realisation that our parents are not exactly who we understood them to be can be a profound rite of passage. For some it comes with no forewarning: a random event leads to an accidental disclosure, or substantiates an old rumour. For others this realisation takes shape in a less acute though no less transformative manner. With The Other Side of Absence: Discovering my father’s secrets, Betty O’Neill pieces together her family history in an effort to learn more about her father, a stranger she briefly encountered when she was nineteen. What began as an innocuous exercise at a writers’ retreat would evolve into a three-year research project through which the author uncovers the riveting story of Antoni Jagielski – resistance fighter, Holocaust survivor, unsettled postwar migrant, and absent father.

Recently a large cockroach appeared on the reputation and memory of my late father, Hirsch Munz (HM), suggesting that he was the mastermind of a second Soviet spy ring, not exposed in the Petrov Affair, from the time he was placed in Australia by Soviet military intelligence in the late 1920s to the 1950s. Despite this slur, he was a good man: his Australian Dictionary of Biography entry outlines his contributions to Australian agricultural science and to English and Yiddish letters. My father having died in 1978, there is no legal recourse to counter this untrue, gratuitous, and defamatory speculation about him. Fortunately, a historian friend alerted me to these allegations in John Fahey’s book Traitors and Spies: Espionage and corruption in high places in Australia, 1901–50 (Allen & Unwin, 2020) before they were publicised in an illustrated article in the Melbourne Herald Sun, its companion podcast, and an interview on ABC Radio. I was therefore able to promptly deny the allegations in the next day’s edition of that paper.

Grace Karskens’s previous book, The Colony (2009), which dealt with Sydney and the Cumberland Plain during the first years of invasion, was one of the great books about the early colonial period in Australia. People of the River is just as important but more profound and risky. In both, Karskens has found ways, brilliantly original ways, of taking in entire populations, and she is particularly good with webs of human connection and patterns of movement. Her focus on multi-centred relationship belongs to the twenty-first century, an age which is beginning to rethink the human individual as an interlinked being, a creature shaped by circumstance and by connection.

The river of the title is the Hawkesbury and its tributary, the Nepean, which together cut a crescent around Sydney on a roughly sixty-kilometre radius. The people of this new book are those who lived within easy reach of that noble watercourse from the 1790s into the first half of the nineteenth century. To quote the subtitle, these people, black and white, represent for us lost worlds. So many generations stand between us and them. We cannot escape the ebb and flow of generational time. As generations multiply between the present and some significant point in the past, its people become almost figments of imagination. We can hardly believe in any palpable connection with our grandparents’ grandparents as agents in their own right. They are figures in a dream.

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Gotcha moments

Dear Editor,

Yes, much of the twittering is the unpleasant expression of rage from all sides, especially when emotions are running as high as during the ‘lockdown’ in Melbourne. The shortcoming of Johanna Leggatt’s excellent but needlessly defensive article is that she assumes ‘journalists’ to be equally responsible and diligent professionals (‘The Problem of Belonging: The Twitter mob is a threat to writers and journalists’). They aren’t. Much of the reporting on the lockdown has been lopsided opinion (rather than reporting) and self-indulgent searching for ‘gotcha’ moments. If the Andrews government had followed the advice of most journalists, rather than that of epidemiologists, we would now be in a UK-style situation, with soaring rates of infection.

Peter McPhee (online comment)

Johanna Leggatt replies:

Thanks for your comment. I certainly agree that not all journalists are of the same calibre, but, of course, we could say that of any profession. Let me be absolutely clear that my central argument was about the impact of the specific nature of Twitter on working writers and journalists. For the purposes of the argument, it was important to assume a certain level of professionalism in the broader industry sense. The questions of whether the lockdown has resulted in a positive outcome for Victoria (few would argue it hasn’t) or whether journalism has become routinely shoddy are, indeed, interesting ideas, but they belong in separate comment pieces. Surely, it is possible to disagree with what some reporters extract from press conferences and churn into commentary, but believe more broadly in the journalist’s right to do her work without death threats or trolling on Twitter.

Parsing Donald Trump

Dear Editor,

I have been searching for some incisive analysis of the contemporary moment in the age of Donald Trump and I have finally happened upon it in Gideon Haigh’s review of Bob Woodward’s book Rage. Haigh nails phenomena that I have been unable to parse. Woodward, he states, ‘keeps straining to interpret Trump by the light of previous presidents’. That’s what it is, and it’s not limited to commentary on the Trump ‘administration’. The same could be said about the UK Tories and Brexit.

This is why so much analysis seems to function as obfuscation. ‘[F]inding that facts here have no purchase’, says Haigh, ‘Woodward is reduced to pointless imprecations.’ This practice is what I have repeatedly witnessed in political commentary and it is very helpful to have it named and explained so well. We haven’t been here before, certainly not in my lifetime. We need to name and explain things in order to develop a fitting response.

Kate Hegarty (online comment)

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Calibre Essay Prize

For the fifteenth time, we seek entries in the Calibre Essay Prize – the country’s premier prize for an unpublished nonfiction essay. The Prize is worth a total of $7,500, of which the winner will receive $5,000 and the runner-up $2,500. Calibre is open to anyone writing in English around the world. We welcome all kinds of essays – from the literary and the political to the experimental and the highly personal.

Guidelines and the entry form are available on our website. Entries close on 15 January 2021. The two winning essays will appear in successive issues of the magazine in the first half of 2020.

The judges on this occasion are Sheila Fitzpatrick, Billy Griffiths, and Peter Rose.

We thank Colin Golvan AM QC, Peter McLennan, and Mary-Ruth Sindrey for enabling us to present Calibre in this lucrative form.

Porter profusions

When the Peter Porter Poetry Prize closed on October 1, we had received a total of 1,330 entries, twenty per cent more than last year, and the biggest field in the competition’s seventeen-year history.

Judging is now underway. We look forward to publishing the five shortlisted poems in the January–February 2021 issue.

Covid and the light

The seemingly endless lockdown has been good for one thing at least: literacy, with the odd libation. What else has there been to do – especially in cloistered Victoria – but to read and write (and replenish one’s cellar)?

Book dedications can be wonderfully saccharine (Advances boggles at authors’ mawkish effusions), but Geoff Raby, ambassador to China from 2007 to 2011 and author of the new book China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order (Melbourne University Press), is admirably direct. He dedicates his book to Covid-19, ‘without which it would not have been finished’. Raby does, however, remember to thank his mother, who, we learn, has reached her centenary, and ‘little Alana, who is the light’.

Sydney bounty

The University of Sydney got seriously lucky last month with two remarkable donations from philanthropists. The first was a copy of Ben Jonson’s Folio, donated by Charles Littrell and Kimberley Cartwright and described as ‘one of the most important books published in English’ by Dr Huw Griffiths, Chair of the Department of English.

Dr Harry Melkonian, from the University’s United States Studies Centre, has gifted several novels and collections of short stories by William Faulkner, along with seventy volumes of literary criticism relating to the American writer. What a trove for future scholars and students.

As it happens, Paul Giles (our Critic of the Month in the December issue) is reviewing Michael Gorra’s new book, The Saddest Words: William Faulkner’s Civil War (Liveright), for the same issue. Gorra, an English professor at Smith College, considers Faulkner to be the most important novelist of the twentieth century, and he’s not alone. In The Saddest Words – part biography, part literary history – he re-evaluates Faulkner’s life and legacy and re-examines the junctures of race and literature in works such as The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!

Jamesians will recall Professor Gorra’s previous book, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the making of an American masterpiece, a masterly study (so to speak) of James’s great novel The Portrait of a Lady.

ABR Arts returns

Warily, distantly, with masks and perspex aplenty, theatre is beginning to emerge again after these plague times. How good it is to be able to run Ian Dickson’s review of the new production of Angus Cerini’s play Wonnangatta (Sydney Theatre Company). While nothing is possible as yet in Melbourne, elsewhere we hear of tentative plans for stagings with restricted capacities. We’ll get used to the new protocols, the distancing – anything for some live theatre and music.

Opera returns to Adelaide this month with a welcome revival of Richard Mills’s opera Summer of the Seventeenth Doll, with a libretto by Peter Goldsworthy and a new production by Joseph Mitchell. Advances fondly remembers the Victoria State Opera production back in 1996. The cast includes Dimity Shepherd, Antoinette Halloran, and Elizabeth Campbell. Richard Mills will conduct the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra. Half the seats in the brand-spanking-new Her Majesty’s Theatre will be filled – an audience of five hundred.

Ben Brooker will review Summer of the Seventeenth Doll for ABR.

Meanwhile, the plethora of television drama is unchecked. In our back pages, Dennis Altman reviews the tense-making new Netflix adaptation of Mart Crowley’s lacerating play The Boys in the Band, while Tim Byrne revisits Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and appraises the gory new miniseries Ratched.

Ania Walwicz (1951–2020)

Vale to the highly individual poet, writer, and teacher Ania Walwicz, who died recently on 29 September, aged sixty-nine. Walwicz published seven books, including Boat, which won the 1990 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award. Born in Poland, she emigrated to Australia in 1963, where she would go on to inspire a generation of writers through her writing, performances, and the thirty years she spent teaching students at RMIT.

Ben Bland, a Financial Times correspondent in Indonesia in 2012–15 and currently director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute, had a ringside seat to watch the rise of Indonesia’s President Joko Widodo (also known as Jokowi). By his own account, Bland has met him more than a dozen times. Jokowi was a furniture-maker and -exporter, mayor of Solo, and governor of Jakarta before being elected president in 2014. Bland has written a good introduction to the Jokowi era that will appeal to the general reader but may leave the serious student of Indonesia unsatisfied.

One of Bland’s strengths is his gift for capturing Jokowi’s stance at various stages. It would be hard to better Bland’s pithy depiction of the recent disillusioning years of Jokowi’s rule: ‘Jokowi has lurched back towards Indonesia’s authoritarian roots, eroding free speech and the rights of minorities [and] undermining the all-important fight against corruption’; or, even more succinctly, ‘he proved a poor custodian of democratic principles and practice’. Bland also gives the reader a good feel for the election campaigns Jokowi has waged, and he has useful sections or chapters on foreign policy, Islamic politics, the response to Covid-19, the economy, and infrastructure.

Tom Lehrer famously believed that Henry Kissinger’s Nobel Prize for Peace rendered satire impossible. Has Donald Trump’s presidency made the same true of political journalism?

This may sound counterintuitive. After all, Trump has been a boon for news outlets and book publishing, as well as for social media. Bob Woodward’s Rage sold 600,000 copies in its first week. And that the dean of White House scribes herein abandons his trademark disinterest and pronounces authoritatively that ‘Trump is the wrong man for the job’ has been treated as news in itself. Yet so what? In the four years that Trump has acted as America’s id, journalists have repeatedly demonstrated that he is cruel, mendacious, vain, venal, and colossally ignorant – confirming more or less what anyone could tell after listening to Trump for five minutes. Yet for all that stupendous effort, they have hardly shifted the dial by a degree, any more than seven million cases of Covid-19 and 200,000 deaths have. Rage, sadly, hints why.