In the novel Demons, Dostoevsky’s narrator describes the character Shatov as ‘one of those ideal Russian beings who can suddenly be so struck by some strong idea that it seems to crush them then and there, sometimes even forever’. This ideal person is one whose ‘whole life afterwards is spent in some last writhings, as it were, under the stone that has fallen on them’. The people who populate Vivian Gornick’s The Romance of American Communism are Americans rather than Russians, but they too are living in the last writhings of the strong idea that dominates their lives: the idea of Stalinist communism.

Gornick’s book, first published in 1977, has been rereleased this year by Verso, with a new introduction by the author. To write the book, Gornick, then a journalist, travelled around America for a year interviewing former members of the Communist Party USA. The product of this labour is a narrative oral history, a series of character portraits that balance the reported speech of the interviewees with Gornick’s own authorial interventions, by turns admiring and judgemental of her subjects but always keenly perceptive.

Kathy Mexted was a teenager when the possibility of becoming a pilot entered her head. The year was 1978, and she was airborne in a plane commanded by her father. The latter turned to his daughter and remarked: ‘If you’d like to learn to fly, I’ll pay for it.’ Nonetheless, it would take twelve years for the author to seriously pursue her piloting ambitions. This delay was due to several factors, not least of which was that flying has long been a ‘male dominated industry’.

Australian Women Pilots is Mexted’s attempt to write women back into Australian aviation history. Ten female pilots are surveyed in the book. They include Nancy Bird Walton and Mardi Gething, who fulfilled their flying dreams during the 1930s and 1940s. There is a chapter on Marion McCall, whose pilot adventures began in the 1990s, when she was approaching fifty.

The reader learns about Deborah Lawrie (née Wardley), who famously took Ansett to court in 1979 in a bid to work as a pilot. Mexted describes the state of affairs in the 1970s: ‘A woman in Ansett’s world was at home, in the office or until they were married serving onboard meals as air hostesses.’ Lawrie was no longer content to simply train future (male) pilots. She fought and won her right to fly for that airline, and was inducted into the Aviation Hall of Fame in November this year.

Australian Women Pilots is impeccably researched and penned with journalistic flair. For example, Mexted writes of Port Moresby’s airport: ‘The place was memorable for its smells of betel nut, sweat and dogs, and for the groups of locals curiously eyeing the machinations of Western society.’

The women profiled in the book are largely unknown, which is disappointing given their achievements in a blokey industry. The text offers a fascinating glimpse into changing (and sometimes difficult to change) attitudes about women in Australian workplaces over the past century.

In the introduction, Mexted writes: ‘I want this book to inspire you to try new things and to know these stories of Australian women stepping up to the plate.’ Australian Women Pilots is a valuable read for historians of this nation, as well as for a general readership.

The concept of ‘trespass’ first entered English law records in the thirteenth century. That this appearance fell between the arrival of William the Conqueror in 1066 and the reformation of the English church by Henry VIII in 1534 is no accident. As Nick Hayes shows in The Book of Trespass, the process by which the English commons were enclosed by the statutes of the wealthy landowning class was slow but resolute; and it had everything to do with, on the one hand, the arrival of Norman delineations of property and, on the other, the disbanding of the monasteries that had worked in a bartering symbiosis with the people of the common landscapes of England.

During those long centuries, and forever since, the once permeable membranes of England’s countryside have been stoppered and barred into an impenetrable grid of privatised demesnes wherein some ninety-two per cent of the land and ninety-seven per cent of the waterways are currently locked away from public use. These estates are off limits whereas once, as James Boyce has revealed in Imperial Mud (2020), his study of the Fens, the indigenous population lived with a concept of ‘property’ that was related not to the material ownership of land but solely to communal rights of use and reciprocal cultural duties.

The cover of this book tells you pretty much what to expect. It shows the dancer Li Cunxin, evidently at rehearsal, facing the camera while over his shoulder peeps his wife, Mary. Add the subtitle, that this is the ‘untold story’ of Li Cunxin’s wife, with a foreword by the man himself, and it’s clear that this book might not have seen the light of day without the phenomenal success of Mao’s Last Dancer, published in 2003 and later made into a well-received film (Bruce Beresford, 2009). Even the title has echoes of its predecessor.

But this book is more than a sequel. Certainly, Mao’s Last Dancer is a great story of overcoming a repressive regime through sheer talent, intelligence, and determination to forge a career in ballet. But the story of Mary, née Mary McKendry of Rockhampton, is equally heroic.

To start with the broadest of generalisations, artists’ biographies can be divided into three types: those that concentrate on the work; those that take the life as their focus; and the ‘life and times’ volumes that attempt to place the artist in her social and political context.

And then there is William Feaver’s massive 1,248-page, two-volume extravaganza on Lucian Freud (1922–2011). It had been Feaver’s original intention to produce ‘a brief account of Freud the artist’, but over time, as the pair became closer, the recorded reminiscences grew and grew and an understanding developed that Feaver would produce what Freud called ‘a novel’ after his death.

This is a strange time to be reading a book about risk, especially one in which the risk of a pandemic is a central concern. Many of us have been worrying about, and attempting to manage, risks every time we have left the house. One of the lessons of this experience has been just how bad we are at thinking about risk. In particular, we struggle to reckon with small risks that may have disastrous outcomes.

This well-known human failing is one of the motivations for Australian philosopher Toby Ord’s book The Precipice, which argues that we are not doing enough to address the risk of extinction of the human species. The ‘precipice’ of the book’s title refers to the idea that we are standing on the edge of great things but also on the edge of disaster. Our new-found power over the natural world, provided by science and technology, holds out the prospect of a near infinite ‘future of value’ in which humanity flourishes and reaches for the stars. At the same time, science has made us conscious of species-level threats such as asteroid strikes that might cut short this future, while technology has produced new threats, including climate change and the risk of rogue artificial intelligences.

‘Half a Jew’s life is consumed by the futile battle with papers,’ wrote Joseph Roth, in The Wandering Jews (1937), his little-known collection of essays written not long before the Holocaust. ‘The struggle for papers, the struggle against papers, is something an Eastern Jew gets free of only if he uses criminal methods to take on society.’ Faced with police demanding to see ‘exotic, improbable papers’, the Eastern Jew who possesses too many troublesome names, inaccurate birthdates, and no proper nationality to speak of is sent packing, ‘again, and again, and again’.

In no other period had papers and passports mattered as much as they did after World War I. As Roth accurately observed in his travels around the ghettos and shtetls of Jewish Europe, ‘a human life nowadays hangs from a passport as it once used to hang by the fabled thread’. Roth was referring to human beings who constituted the Jewish ‘problem’, those without papers or passports, unwelcome in whichever country they had left and to whichever they fled. But the death rattle of the Russian, Habsburg, German, and Ottoman empires in the wake of World War I produced tens of millions more heimatlosen, people without the security of a political home, whose presence gave rise to complex questions about what it meant to live as non-citizens on the margins of new nation states, without the protections granted by citizenship. It also threw into sharp relief the definition and powers of state sovereignty. Was it up to the nation state to determine who was entitled to citizenship within their borders, or could a new international order become the arbiter of a new system of rights and protections?

Anthropology, in my experience, is commonly confused in the popular imagination with archaeology. ‘We study live people, whereas archaeologists study dead people,’ I have sometimes explained half-jokingly to the perplexed. Although public understanding of anthropology’s engagement with living human societies and cultures is at times sketchy, Australian anthropologists have in fact made significant contributions since the 1970s to the recognition of prior Aboriginal land ownership over vast tracts of the Australian continent. The essays in this two-volume Festschrift celebrate the multifaceted life and legacy of anthropologist and linguist Peter Sutton, perhaps the most significant exemplar of this ‘applied’ branch of Australian anthropology.

Sutton’s historian colleague Philip Jones defines ethnography – the systematic description of a socio-cultural group based on long-term ‘participant observation’ – in these terms:

Fieldwork was the anthropologist’s necessary rite of passage. As a participant in the life of the community, and an observer of it, the trained anthropologist of the late 20^th century became skilled at crafting locally specific accounts of a cultural group’s language, cosmology, kinship system, mythology, material culture, secular and ritual life, with the collaboration and support of the communities involved. Mastery of that complex of skills and techniques reached its apogee in Australia in the period from the late 1960s to the 1980s. Peter Sutton’s anthropological career unfolded within that frame, as an exemplar perhaps of Australian anthropology’s ‘golden age’.

Forty years ago, François Furet outraged the French historical establishment by proclaiming that ‘the French Revolution is over’, launching a blistering critique of the Marxist categories and politics of university historians, many of them still members of the Communist Party he had abandoned in 1959. By the time of the bicentenary in 1989, historians were in bitter dispute over the meaning and legacy of the Revolution. In that year, Patrice Gueniffey completed his doctorate under Furet at the prestigious research school the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He remains at that institution today, Furet’s most famous disciple and a celebrated historian in his own right.

There are parallels between Patrice Gueniffey and Geoffrey Blainey. Both are brilliant and erudite men capable of startling insights and loose generalisations. One justification for his book, Gueniffey assures us, is that ‘the younger generations no longer have any taste for democracy’, or even for politics, which are incapable of solving the world’s problems. We are now returning to the world of ‘strongmen’, ‘poisonous’ though that may be. He seems to relish his role as a conservative outsider taking on the left-wingers in France’s universities: his specific targets are the defenders of the French Revolution’s legacy and those who advocate history ‘from below’ and the inclusion of working women, slaves, and minorities in historical accounts. That’s all well and good, he allows, but what of the old-fashioned view that history is often made by great individuals?

Napoleon and Charles de Gaulle, with Louis XIV, are consistently voted in polls as the ‘greatest’ Frenchmen. Gueniffey agrees, but notes that they are also the most controversial: ‘They are admirable, not likeable.’ So Napoleon (1769–1821) was both the destroyer and the saviour of the French Revolution; de Gaulle (1890–1970) both the restorer of national dignity after 1940 and the man who overthrew the Fourth Republic in 1958. The defeat of Napoleon’s dreams of imperial glory in 1815 ended France’s domination of Europe; de Gaulle’s role in reluctantly accepting Europe and decolonisation ended its dreams of a new empire.

General Charles de Gaulle speaking at the African-French Conference in Brazzaville, Congo, 1944 (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy)

It would be difficult to envisage a sharper physical contrast than that between the towering de Gaulle (1.96m or 6’5”) and Bonaparte (1.68m or 5’6”). The passionate, vulgar, cynical Napoleon was the polar opposite of the reserved, devout, and haughty Charle, who entered public life at the age when Napoleon was leaving it. It is therefore odd that Gueniffey deliberately excludes discussing their formative childhood years (though he covered Napoleon’s in the first volume of his biography [2015]). What did the second of eight children of impecunious Corsican nobles have in common with the well-educated son of a wealthy and devout northern upper-bourgeois family? What needs drove them from childhood?

Gueniffey leaves us in no doubt about his admiration for their grandeur, a suitably ancient French term with which de Gaulle began his war memoirs as meaning the opposite of national mediocrity. Both men were great builders at a time of deep national division: Napoleon brought the Revolution to an end, and de Gaulle built the first stable regime since the eighteenth century. They were ‘providential men’ who represented ‘a solution, a way out’ and ‘restored the country’s self-confidence’. Gueniffey explores their capacity for ‘comeback’ in the midst of military crisis: Napoleon’s abandonment of his beleaguered troops in Egypt in order to seize power in 1799; de Gaulle’s manoeuvrings to return to power during the Algerian crisis in 1958 after more than a decade in self-imposed exile.

They could appear above politics, appealing to both left and right. They were capable of prodigious concentration and administrative detail: Napoleon’s durable creation of the Civil Code in 1804 was matched by de Gaulle’s new constitution after 1958. Both were often unscrupulous and pitiless. They were also capable of great cruelty, as in Napoleon’s encouragement of massacres of Muslims in Jaffa in 1799 and de Gaulle’s repression of protests in Algeria in 1945. Gueniffey agrees with Hegel’s judgement on ‘world historical individuals’, written shortly after Napoleon’s death: ‘such men may treat other great, even sacred, interests inconsiderately: conduct which is indeed obnoxious to moral reprehension. But so mighty a form must trample down many an innocent flower – crush to pieces many an object in its path.’

The greatest contrast, of course, is between Napoleon’s blood-soaked attempt at a creation of a Europe under French imperium, at the cost of at least three million lives, and de Gaulle’s search for a special role for France in a peaceful European Economic Community. This was the contrast between the brilliant general’s sword and the military commander’s pen. De Gaulle himself was horrified by the loss of life under Napoleon.

Gueniffey argues that, unlike Britain, where ruling-class continuity has underpinned institutional stability, France has needed great men for ‘the unity that cannot be found elsewhere’. The contrary point of view was argued by Lionel Jospin, Socialist Party prime minister of France from 1997 to 2002 and twice the Party’s unsuccessful presidential candidate. In Le mal Napoléonien (The Napoleonic Evil, 2014), Jospin regretted that, ever since Napoleon, democratic life in France has been haunted by a gilded myth of the saviour, according to which a great man will restore order, glory, and prosperity. Ever since de Gaulle, France has longed for another saviour but has had to accept mere politicians.

Gueniffey’s polite disdain for his historian contemporaries is mirrored in his sources as much as his perspectives. Not for him the patient labours of archival research or close familiarity with contemporary scholarship. He prefers the company of writers of memoirs. There is no recognition of some of the best biographies of the past twenty years in English (such as Julian Jackson on de Gaulle or our own Philip Dwyer’s superb three-volume work on Napoleon) or even in French.

The book is much more than a reassertion of the importance of ‘great men in history’. It is a polemic against what he mocks as current fashions in historical writing. Gueniffey is scathing about school history curricula, ‘full of holes’ and missing those who have ‘incarnated history’, destroyed by social history and now by global history, post-colonialism, social theory, and political correctness – a history of victims and outrages. For Gueniffey, this is France’s own ‘black armband’ history, ‘a history without heroes’, characterised by ‘relativism, self-hatred, self-denigration, repentance, and a desire for expiation’. His chapter on ‘The Place of Great Men’ is an unforgettable, vituperative attack on every innovation in historical writing of the past fifty years, none more so than ‘currently fashionable global history’ in which ‘mountains give birth to mice’. It would make the perfect set reading for a lively history tutorial on the question ‘What is history?’

The timing was apt. In September, Fake Law: The truth about justice in an age of lies – written by pseudonymous British writer ‘The Secret Barrister’ – was published in Australia. The same month, President Donald Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court of the United States following the untimely death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. From two legal systems that have historically influenced ours came salutary warnings about the ill effects of law’s politicisation.

During the public rancour over Trump’s nomination, a common refrain on Australian Legal Twitter (#auslaw) was how fortunate we are to have an apolitical judiciary. Certainly, the High Court of Australia rarely divides on ideological lines, even in the most politically controversial cases. Some notable former exceptions aside, the political persuasion of our justices is hardly a matter of public knowledge or debate. Historically, Australian judges have cleaved neither left nor right but between centrists (favouring the federal government) and federalists (favouring the states).

On 4 November 1980, Ronald Reagan was elected president of the United States. The former radio announcer, Hollywood actor, and governor of California (1967–75) beat Jimmy Carter by four hundred and forty electoral college votes. No contender had beaten an incumbent by that much since 1932, when in the midst of the Great Depression Franklin D. Roosevelt triumphed over Herbert Hoover. And much like FDR’s victory, Reagan’s win in 1980 permanently altered the course of US politics. The welfare state that had existed under both Democratic and Republican presidents was diminished, if not entirely dismantled. The religious right, previously a nonentity in American politics, gained major clout. And the economic tenets of neo-liberalism, dismissed as fringe ideas in previous decades, took centre stage.

In many ways, Americans are still living in the world Reagan created. After a series of electoral defeats, the Democratic Party shifted to the right. Deregulation and tax cuts marched hand in hand with divisive social issues such as abortion and gay rights. Even the election of Barack Obama in 2008 did little to halt these trends, of which Donald Trump may be the final capstone.

John R. Lewis, who died in July 2020, was an extraordinary man. Born poor, the son of tenant farmers in rural, segregated Alabama, Lewis was one of America’s most prominent civil rights leaders by the age of twenty-three. He spoke at the March on Washington in 1963, when Dr Martin Luther King Jr delivered his famous ‘I have a dream’ speech.

Lewis went on to serve seventeen terms as a US Congressman from Atlanta, but his place in American history was forged on the civil rights battlefields of the American South. Whether organising sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Tennessee, joining the Freedom Rides, or marching in cities around the South, Lewis put his body on the line to secure the rights of African Americans. In His Truth Is Marching On: John Lewis and the power of hope, Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Jon Meacham tells the story of Lewis’s early life and his role in the civil rights movement.

Like much feminist performance art since the 1960s, Casey Jenkins’s latest performance piece, titled IMMACULATE, centres on a female body – Jenkins’s own. IMMACULATE is a performance that documents the legal and commonly practised process of self-insemination in the home.

After initially awarding funding to the work, the Australia Council has rescinded the grant, stating: ‘We cannot be party to any act that could result in bringing a new life into the world.’ While the Council denies ideological reasons or political pressure behind its U-turn decision – despite having sent the artist a transcript of Peta Credlin’s scathing condemnation of the work on her Sky News talk show prior to announcing the funding cut – the response more troublingly points to a long history of political and institutional attempts to control how women use their bodies and assert their reproductive rights.

Disguising the words we dare not print has a long and fascinating history. From the late eighteenth century in particular, it became common in printed works to disguise words such as profanities and curses – from the use of typographical substitutes such as asterisks to the replacement of a swear word with a euphemism. When I was researching my recent book, Rooted, on the history of bad language in Australia, I was struck by the creative ways in which writers, editors, and typesetters, especially through the late nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, sought to evade censors and allude to profanity.

Typographical substitutes, such as the dash, are an old convention. As Keith Houston explains in his fascinating history of typographical characters, Shady Characters (2013), the dash was used to replace letters in curse words as early as the middle of the eighteenth century, such as in Tobias Smollett’s Adventures of Peregrine Pickle (1751). Use of the dash peaked in the late nineteenth century, including in Australia, where many a newspaper article and novel were peppered with b— and d—. The asterisk became an increasingly common substitute for letters in an expurgated word, and these days is more frequently used than the dash.

(‘Idyll II’, Theocritus)

Where are my bay leaves and charms, my bowl with crimson flowers
while he inexorable
has gone from my bed like a dress
Distance: spells of fire wreathe you

Shine on this spin or grave
as sight stunned me

leaves burn
Wheel of brass turning from my door

Now wave is still and wind is still
My heart stopped in its foundry

As horses run, so we to it
Starts love’s knife

whose hair shone like dunes
whose body greased with labour

He had brought apples and his hair sprigged
unasked love into the oak and elm

and words went and came
Now from my lintels

Day drags from me and tells his flowers elsewhere
Farewell, ocean and its team,
whose white arms wrap
Silver flute who sang, and bright-faced moon
who knocks on a door of shadows

A rose for you, to match the wound
but tomorrow’s like now

In 1795, Friedrich Schiller wrote: ‘So long as we were mere children of nature, we were both happy and perfect; we have become free, and have lost both.’ For Schiller, it was the poet’s task to ‘lead mankind … onward’ to a reunification with nature, and thereby with the self. Central to Romantic thought, reimaginings like Schiller’s of Christian allegory, in which (European) humans’ division from a utopian natural world suggests the biblical fall, strike a chord in our own time of unfolding environmental catastrophe. Against such an unfolding, three new Australian books of poetry explore the contemporary relationship of subject to place.

Cadaver Dog by Luke Best

University of Queensland Press, $24.99 pb, 128 pp

‘When a killer strikes and slopes / away, what then does he do?’ So begins Luke Best’s Cadaver Dog, a verse novella inspired by the 2011 Toowoomba floods. Set in the aftermath of ‘the surge’, an ‘inland tsunami’ caused by ‘a weekend of cloud-glut and / bursting’, the book tells the story of an unnamed narrator, marooned on her property by floodwaters and reluctant to accept her children’s fate. Worse, the narrator’s husband has abandoned his family in a show of supreme cowardice. Delirious with hunger, morally wracked, shunning attempts at rescue, the narrator resolves to shield her little ones’ bodies from a German Shepherd trained to detect the odour of death.

What is it about English language poetry that has proved so resistant to the lure of the prose poem? The French, it appears, held no such qualms, finding themselves besotted with the form ever since Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire began dispensing with line breaks and stanzas. Of course, the very existence of English-language works like Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) or William Carlos Williams’s Kora in Hell (1920) could be used to argue otherwise, but such endeavours were considered too eccentric at the time to impart a lasting legacy. Perhaps if T.S. Eliot, whose antipathy towards the prose poem is well known, had given us a major cycle along the lines of Saint-John Perse’s Anabasis (1924), a work he admired and translated, things might have turned out differently.

Yet the tide, it seems, is turning. The recent appearance of The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018), edited by Jeremy Noel-Tod, attests to this renewed interest. While it is not the first such anthology, Penguin’s decision to market it in its Black Classics series will undoubtedly promote a wide readership. In mustering an international selection from Baudelaire to Anne Carson, Noel-Tod unearthed a rich seam of activity, revealing prose poetry as a continuing tradition from the 1840s to the present. Despite casting a wide net, however, he found space for just three Australian poets: Pam Brown, joanne burns, and Laurie Duggan.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Robert Adamson is the fact that he is still alive. One of the ‘Generation of  ’68’ and an instrumental figure in the New Australian Poetry (as announced by John Tranter’s 1979 anthology), Adamson has continued to write and adapt while also bearing witness to the premature deaths of many of that visionary company. As Adamson’s friend and fellow poet Michael Dransfield (1948–73) once put it, ‘to be a poet in Australia / is the ultimate commitment’ and ‘the ultimate commitment / is survival’. The poems in this volume attest to the grace and burden of being one of Australian poetry’s great survivors – of the countercultural mythology of the ‘drug-poet’, alcoholism, and the brutalities of the prison system (recounted firsthand in his 2004 memoir, Inside Out). ‘The show’s to escape / death’, Adamson observes of the Jesus bird (sometimes called a lilytrotter), a lithe performer and canny survivalist that affords this most ornithologically minded of authors a telling self-image.

There has as yet been no comprehensive critical study of the poets associated with the ‘Generation of ’68’, of whom Martin Johnston was perhaps the most naturally gifted and certainly the most intellectually expansive representative. This is because the project of these poets, to fully incorporate the stylistic innovations of modernist poetics and its development in postwar American models within local practice, is still ongoing. If we examine only those poets gathered in the 1979 New Australian Poetry anthology – in which Johnston’s lengthy experiment in parataxis, ‘The Blood Aquarium’, appears as a signature work – we find major authors even today in the process of developing their practice.

Danielle Clode is the author of ten books of environmental history. In 2014 she was the ABR Dahl Trust Fellow and her article ‘Seeing the Wood for the Trees’ appeared in the November 2014 issue of ABR. Her most recent book is In Search of the Woman Who Sailed the World (2020). 

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

The future, so that I’d know what to expect.

Kate Mildenhall’s confronting new novel, The Mother Fault, is set in an alarming near-future Australia. Climate change has left refugees ‘marking trails like new currents on the maps as they swarm to higher, cooler ground’. Sea levels have risen, species have died out, farmlands have been contaminated, and meat is a luxury. Unprecedented bushfires occur regularly; technology and surveillance are ubiquitous, with bulbous cameras hanging ‘like oddly uniform fruit bats from the streetlights’. The media is controlled, and Australian citizens are microchipped and monitored by a totalitarian government known as ‘the Department’. The ‘Dob in Disunity’ app offers ‘gamified’ rewards to informants (‘Even kids could join in the fun!’), while troublemakers can be relocated to ‘BestLife’ housing estates where the reality is far from the Instagram hashtag. Reflecting on the events that led to this, protagonist Mim notes that the world ‘shifted slowly, then so fast, while they watched but didn’t see. They weren’t stupid. Or even oppressed in the beginning.’

The Mother Fault is both a dystopian adventure and a nuanced study of relationships, motherhood, identity, and what it takes to keep children safe. The novel opens in medias res with Mim literally plunging her hands into hot water as she reels from the news that her engineer husband, Ben, has gone missing from a controversial overseas mining project. Desperate and unmoored, Mim soon finds herself on the run with her two children – soccer-loving eleven-year-old Essie and six-year-old Sam – as she tries to find her husband while evading government surveillance.

Ben’s story, that of a male geologist who vanishes while working on a shadowy project, is one that would take centre stage in another kind of narrative. Here, while the shock waves of his disappearance ripple out to his family, jolting Mim into frantic action, he remains almost a MacGuffin with the focus squarely on Mim, Essie, and Sam. In this way, The Mother Fault explores the angles that are often sidelined in more traditional, blockbuster-style apocalypse narratives. Women are at the heart of this story, and Mildenhall’s narrative is less preoccupied with showy heroics than it is with grim, marvellous reality.

Mim is a vivid creation, full of ‘prickle and bluster’. A hydrogeologist who finds it ‘calmed her anxiety to speak in epochs’, Mim crackles with rage, fear, and a deep-rooted sense of guilt, providing a nuanced and uncomfortable vision of motherhood. Spiky and determined, Mim makes impulsive decisions without allowing herself to think through the consequences. It seems she must always be moving forward, even if she doesn’t know where she’s going.

Unlike the deep time of geology, the action unfurls at hyperspeed and pauses only in the liminal moments between decision and potential disaster. As Mim drives along a backroad at dawn, she muses: ‘This is a nowhere space. Left but not yet arrived, where she does not have to make plans, or think, or try to make sense. Just drive. Watch those kilometres click, each one, a tiny space to breathe.’ Later, aboard a boat, she wonders ‘how long they could stay, suspended between places, out of time’. The ending, when it comes, feels both surprising and inevitable; the suggestion from novelist Toni Jordan that Mildenhall alludes to in the author note was clearly a good one.

The Mother Fault is reminiscent of works by Margaret Atwood, James Bradley, John Lanchester, and Meg Mundell with echoes of Charlotte Wood, Aldous Huxley, and even of convict Mary Bryant’s courageous escape attempt. As in her accomplished début novel, Skylarking (2016), which told a fictionalised version of a historical event, author and podcaster Mildenhall offers complicated, believable characters against an atmosphere of rising tension and menace. Both novels are imbued with a sense of awe and wonder at the natural world, though in The Mother Fault this is tempered with rage and solastalgia. In a coastal town where her family used to spend the summer, Mim recalls ‘an uncomplicated love of the sea. Now, it is tinged with melancholy.’

Mildenhall has an excellent ear for dialogue. Fraught conversations between Mim and her mother and combative older brother are particularly resonant, as are the unnerving ones she has with people from the Department. A tense encounter with police in what was Queensland is also handled deftly. As Mim reflects, ‘At least their methods still seem old school, their standover tactics more Keystone cop and less Stasi.’

From exhaustion to anxious constipation and a particularly nasty foot injury, Mildenhall’s narrative is grounded in the physical. She also demonstrates some striking turns of phrase. At one point, Mim wants to ‘push her thanks into [her friend] Heidi’s bones, have her feel Mim’s relief’. Later, driving along in the ‘slumbering darkness’, she imagines the car as ‘a tiny cocoon of light, barrelling along in the dark’. When her children take a moment to play when she wants them to help her with something, she finds herself ‘all froth and indignation’.

As she demonstrated in Skylarking, a novel that explored the bond between two girls growing up in an isolated lighthouse community, Mildenhall depicts children and teenagers particularly well: Mim’s delicate interactions with Essie are a highlight. Essie’s blunt moral absolutism also allows her to chastise Mim for her generation’s inaction on major climate issues. The questions Mildenhall’s characters raise around the ethics of choosing to have children in an era of climate change are also particularly resonant now.

Reading intelligent dystopian fiction is an unsettling experience in 2020. In an article about the genesis of The Mother Fault, Mildenhall describes how she tried to imagine scenarios that could lead to the Australia she depicts, ‘and then this year along came a pandemic. So neat, I wish I’d thought of it earlier.’

In 1976, Sigrid Nunez moved into an apartment on Riverside Drive in New York with her then boyfriend, David Reiff, and his mother, Susan Sontag. Nunez is a person who cherishes solitude. In Sempre Susan, her tribute to Sontag, she describes the strain of living with extroverts when her dream, from her teenage years, had been: ‘A single room. A chair, a table, a bed. Windows on a garden. Music. Books. A cat to teach me how to be alone with dignity.’ Sontag never wanted to be alone. Nunez was drawn into constant dinners, movies, and mountainous correspondence interrupted by telephone calls and visits, often from Joseph Brodsky, the Russian poet, who sometimes meowed like a cat instead of saying hello. (Although Nunez liked him, Brodsky was clearly not the cat of her dreams.) Sontag, objecting to a routine interview, grumbled that ‘Beckett wouldn’t do it’, which became a private refrain for Nunez, oppressed by the relentless activity of the household and the pressure for her to join in.

What Are You Going Through, Nunez’s most recent novel, follows The Friend, which won the National Book Award in 2018. It resembles The Friend more closely than any of her previous books: in each novel a solitary intellectual woman is put in a difficult position by the request of a friend. In The Friend, an immense dog is given into her care. In What Are You Going Through, a dying woman asks for assistance. The narrator thinks intensively about her circumstances, using an armory of reading and personal experience.

To read a novel by Marilynne Robinson is to step into a god-haunted world. Hers is a universe both recognisable and brilliant with strangeness, where glory and mystery abound, where revelation is never finished and souls are argued over with the greatest of gravity. At once mythic in scale and deeply attentive to the textures of this world, Robinson’s novels are full of people for whom notions of grace, redemption, and salvation are not abstractions but aspirations – people who, as Robinson once wrote of herself, look to Galilee for meaning.

A devout Calvinist, Robinson has argued unashamedly for the necessity of faith and rued mournfully what she sees as the aridity of secular thinking, with its profound ontological demotion of the human being. A purely materialist cosmos degrades and diminishes each one of us, Robinson believes, and deprives us of the ‘liberation of amazement’ that comes with viewing the world as the work of God and the human being as an emanation of the divine. Positivism has not only emptied the heavens, but made sere and barren the human heart.

What is presented as impassioned and articulate argument in her essays is distilled into something much gentler in the world of her novels. Religion is never merely a subject or stage prop: it is part of the very fabric of her character’s lives. To enter the famed fictional terrain of her Gilead novels is to inhabit a metaphysical space foreign to most secular readers. Her new novel, Jack, is no exception; it may be more preoccupied with the fall from grace and the thorny theological notion of predestination than her prior works, but in Robinson’s world even the damned are steeped in scripture. No one can escape the gaze of a God who numbers every hair on our heads.

Portrait of Marilynne Robinson (Agence Opale/Alamy)

The eponymous Jack Boughton is threaded through all three of the earlier Gilead novels, a troubling shadow cast over the serene world of the small Iowa town. Jack – a thief, a liar, and a drunk – is an enigmatic and wayward presence, cursed by an ineradicable loneliness and trailing damage in his wake. The transgressions of this failed prodigal son break the hearts of his bewildered family members again and again. He tests their love, and their faith, in every way possible.

In the previous novels, we see Jack through the eyes of those around him; now readers have been given the chance to inhabit his own complicated consciousness. One of the triumphs of Robinson’s literary skill is that, while her characters share her theological lexicon, they never sound like mere mouthpieces for her beliefs. They are as densely real as Tolstoy’s characters, as flawed and as forgiven as Chekhov’s. Jack is no exception. There is something deeply unsettling about this preacher’s son who believes that God’s grace was never intended for him and who cites a Robert Frost poem to explicate his melancholy soul: ‘I have been one acquainted with the night / I have walked out in rain – and back in rain.’ Jack conceives of himself as an irredeemable miscreant, spreading contagion and cursed by ‘an old compulsion to do damage as chance offered’. And yet he yearns to be good, or at the very least to ‘aspire to harmlessness’.

This aspiration is tested when he falls improbably and hopelessly in love with Della Miles, the pious daughter of a black Methodist minister. Despite the rapturous nature of their communion, Jack is aware of the endless varieties of damage he is capable of wreaking upon Della and of ‘how grave and final the harm would be to her’. There is his constitutional bent for inflicting pain on those he loves, but there are also larger forces that conspire against the lovers. In a time of anti-miscegenation laws, it is illegal for them to marry. Even to be seen walking on the street together could cause Della to lose her teaching job. Della’s family are followers of Marcus Garvey and believe in racial separation; they will never accept her connection to this sullied white sinner. Everything is at stake for Della, but the matters of this world do not concern her when it comes to Jack.

‘Love is holy,’ the Reverend Ames tells his young son in Gilead (2004), ‘because it is like grace – the worthiness of its object is never really what matters.’ Della echoes this belief, claiming that it is Jack’s very soul that she is in love with: ‘And a soul has no earthly qualities, no history among the things of this world, no guilt or injury or failure. No more than a flame would have. There is nothing to be said about it except that it is a holy human soul. And it is a miracle when you recognise it.’ The soul may be a fragment of the divine and romantic love a benediction, but Della and Jack live in a fallen world, one which has trapped them in ‘a great web that made every choice impossible’. Readers familiar with the other Gilead novels will know a little more about the consequences of this impossibility, but Jack leaves the lovers in a blessed space of transcendence.

Anatole Broyard wrote ecstatically of Robinson’s first novel, Housekeeping (1980), that it had achieved a kind of transfiguration. The miracle that she has wrought in the Gilead novels is to make the secular reader consider deeply what it must be like to live in the presence of the divine, to long for a moment for the ‘ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds’ that Wallace Stevens called for in his poetry. ‘Everything always bears looking into,’ Robinson believes, ‘astonishing as that fact is.’ Reading a book like Jack, one cannot help but agree.

‘Literary talent,’ writes Martin Amis in his new ‘novel’, Inside Story, ‘has perhaps four or five ways of dying. Most writers simply become watery and subtly stale.’ Not so the eighty-three-year-old Don DeLillo, who has published seventeen novels over the last fifty years, all of them muscular, intelligent, prescient. In 1988, he told an interviewer from Rolling Stone, ‘I think fiction rescues history from its confusions.’

This is true of his mammoth 827-page Underworld (1997); it is no less so of this year’s brief but brilliant The Silence, which clocks in at a slender 116 pages. Truly it might be said of late-phase DeLillo as Australian poet Laurie Duggan has of himself: ‘I’m a minimalist with a lot of content.’ Or as a character in a Donald Barthelme ‘novel’ says: ‘Fragments are the only forms I trust.’

For a protagonist that is self-professedly unlikeable, Martha commands attention – and is likeable. In Meg Mason’s tragicomedy Sorrow and Bliss, Martha navigates living with an undiagnosed mental illness. The novel solidifies Mason’s thematic preoccupations by revisiting those of her previous works: as in her memoir Say It Again in a Nice Voice (2012) and her first novel, You Be Mother (2017), the power of female relationships, loneliness, and the bleak humour of motherhood are apparent.

At seventeen, ‘a little bomb went off’ in Martha’s brain, and for two decades no one has been quite being able to tell her what is wrong. Moving between London and Oxford, Martha – in first-person and with genuine hilarity – narrates a combination of well-paced scenes and vignettes that have led to the present events in her early forties. At the centre of this bricolage is a difficult relationship with her ‘minorly important’ sculptor mother, Celia, a fierce closeness with her sister, Ingrid, and a tested bond with her husband, Patrick.

Martha’s voice is direct, intimate. Her intelligence is vividly rendered in her observations. Mason is at her sharpest when the writing hesitates between confessional sentimentality and deadpan humour. The tone reflects Martha’s interiority and is foreshadowed in the title. In this novel, sorrow and bliss, both present in the sublime moments of connection within a family, are what make a life. Martha’s reflections on these episodes are among the novel’s joys.

Granted, some ponderings feel engineered and forced: when discussing whether it is sadder if a newspaper specifies that a woman killed by a car is a mother, Ingrid, speaking of her own husband, says: ‘But apparently I just exist in terms of my relationship to other people now and Hamish still gets to be a person. Thanks. Amazing.’

The choice to leave Martha’s mental illness unnamed is intriguing. Though it might read as if amplifying the ‘unspeakableness’ of mental illness, the novel’s engagement with discourse surrounding mental health stigma enables the choice to be read as reflecting, even critiquing, the history of women’s health being misdiagnosed or dismissed.

Hope is the marrow of Sorrow and Bliss. In this way, Mason’s latest novel is a genuine artistic continuation from her memoir.

In Western culture’s calendar year, is there some hidden fifth season, and if there is, what is it? The main character of Philip Salom’s fifth novel, a writer called Jack, asks himself near the end of the book whether the fifth season might be ‘Time, which holds the seasons together’, or perhaps the fifth season is simply ‘the Unknown’. Jack is preoccupied with the lost: with those people whose bodies are found but never identified, or those who, suffering amnesia, can’t be identified, but who need ‘to find their proper location in the story. In the seasons. A lost person must be allowed other dimensions.’

The beginning of the novel finds Jack arriving at an Airbnb in a small Australian coastal town called Blue Bay, where he intends, over a planned period of three months, to work on a book about what he thinks of as found bodies: ‘Found dead, on the beach, in a car. In a hotel room. Anonymous. Their end shape charged with the object of their body, not the subject of their lives.’ His research involves more than one person whose anonymous dead body was discovered on a beach, and the figure to whom his mind returns most often is the unknown man whose newly dead body was found leaning against the sea wall on Adelaide’s Somerton Beach in 1948, a mystery with assorted features sufficiently strange to reinforce Adelaide’s reputation as the home of the weird.

In 1819, sixty thousand people gathered in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, to protest for parliamentary reform. Industrialisation had transformed a city of skilled tradespeople into factory workers, tariffs on imported grain kept food prices high, and few were eligible to vote. Although the protest was peaceful, local magistrates sent in the Yeomen and the Hussars who killed approximately eleven people and injured more than four hundred.

It is this bloody scene from the Peterloo Massacre that opens The Wreck, the second solo work of historical fiction by Meg Keneally. We encounter the protest through the eyes of Sarah McCaffrey, the daughter of impoverished weavers, who is attending arm in arm with her mother. While the Yeomen may have put an end to the protest, Sarah is radicalised. She moves to London to participate in a plot to assassinate the Cabinet and set up a provisional government.

Later, in Sydney, a town that ‘hadn’t quite made up its mind on what it wanted to be’, Sarah meets Mrs Thistle, a former convict and now one of the wealthiest women in the colony. Sarah’s, and the novel’s, politics begin to shift to a proto-neoliberal feminism: girls can rule the world if they are rich enough to bribe police and buy the favour of magistrates.

The author bio invites us to read this transformation through Keneally’s own experience working in corporate affairs for listed financial services companies. Sarah McCaffrey’s transformation may be an argument for emancipation via wealth creation, or it might be an analogy for Sydney’s future: a town ruled by Murdoch-like élites.

Keneally provides her readers with all the thrills and spills promised by historical romance and moves Sarah through her plot like a pawn dodging rooks. Some obstacles are overcome so easily that it’s hard to remember this is only a game. The horrors of the Peterloo Massacre, the Cato Street Conspiracy, and the Luddite uprisings of the early 1800s furnish our heroine with an energising backstory, and then politely leave the room. As the plot bounds on, the focus of The Wreck reveals itself: the deftness with which our heroine negotiates drama, not the social and political intricacies of her situation.

When Shirley Hazzard was invited to give the 1984 Boyer Lectures, it was an astonishing break in tradition. Her twenty-three predecessors included only one woman, Dame Roma Mitchell, a supreme court justice who was later governor of South Australia. Except for architect and writer Robin Boyd, and poet and Bulletin editor Douglas Stewart, Hazzard was the only creative artist on the list. All her predecessors were well known for their public contributions to Australian life.

Hazzard, born in Sydney in 1931, left this country when she was sixteen; and although she returned more than once for a visit, she spent most of her life in New York and Italy. Her 1984 perspective on Australia was detached, with an edge of asperity that hinted at resentment. Her memories of childhood and adolescence were those of wartime austerity, cultural poverty, and the unhappiness of her own family life.

Paul Giles is Challis Professor of English at the University of Sydney. His most recent book is Backgazing: Reverse time in modernist culture (Oxford University Press, 2019). A sequel, The Planetary Clock: Antipodean time and spherical postmodern fictions, will be published by OUP in February 2021. He first wrote for ABR in 2015.

What makes a fine critic?

Besides a capacity to write well, critics need to be well-informed. I sometimes get exasperated by reviewers without sufficient expertise in the topics they are considering. On the other hand, academic pedantry can also be off-putting, particularly when couched in a clunky style. In general, I’ve found the most memorable pieces to be those which say something about the reviewer as well as the author under review, like portraits which work through a kind of double vision, offering insights into the painter as well as the sitter. There was a very good essay on Les Murray by J.M. Coetzee in the New York Review of Books a few years ago which had this double-edged quality.

André Gide, when asked who was the greatest French poet, is said to have replied ‘Victor Hugo, alas’, and many readers have responded in similar fashion to William Faulkner’s place in the history of the American novel. Werner Sollors, the eminent Harvard scholar of American Literature, unambiguously described Faulkner in 2003 as ‘ultimately the most significant American novelist of the [twentieth] century’, a judgement echoed in this book by Michael Gorra, who calls him ‘the most important American novelist of the twentieth century’. But Faulkner’s marked proclivity for both stylistic excess and thematic incoherence has always made him a difficult author to appreciate and study. Hence Gorra’s The Saddest Words, a judicious and measured blend of biography, contextual history, and travelogue, performs a signal service in making this complicated author more accessible to a wider reading public.

Glyn Davis

How to Win an Election by Chris Wallace

With theatres closed by plague, many intriguing productions were lost to us in 2020. Tom Stoppard’s late rumination Leopoldstadt (Grove Press, BUY), about generations of a Jewish family in Austria, lasted only a few weeks on the stage before Covid-19 intervened. Fortunately, the text is now published and repays close reading. Daniel Mendelsohn, too, continues to ponder how we make sense of history. His Three Rings: A tale of exile, narrative, and fate (University of Virginia Press, BUY) is a masterful demonstration of narration through digression, echoing the exile and grieving expressed by Stoppard. Thanks to Chris Wallace for How To Win An Election (NewSouth, BUY), a reminder that passionate writing matched with tough-minded analysis is still possible when arguing about Australian politics. Finally, a shout-out to editors Glenn Morrison, Raelke Grimmer, and Adelle Sefton-Rowston for the first issue of Borderlands, a journal of ideas and identity from the Northern Territory. These welcome voices from Alice Springs and Darwin bring insight and energy to an essential conversation about identity.

Sarah Holland-Batt

Change Machine by Jaya Savige

After years of anticipation, I was thrilled to finally read Jaya Savige’s dazzling third volume, Change Machine (UQP, BUY): an intoxicatingly inventive and erudite collection rife with anagrams, puns, and mondegreens that ricochets from Westminster to Los Angeles to Marrakesh, remixing multicultural linguistic detritus into forms of the poet’s own invention. Yet for all the book’s global sweep, it’s the quiet poems about fatherhood that stay with me, especially Savige’s immensely moving elegy for a premature son, ‘Tristan’s Ascension’, with its devastating simplicity: ‘Oh, son. You stepped off one stop too soon. / Your mother has flown // all the way to Titan / to look for you.’ I also loved Prithvi Varatharajan’s Entries (Cordite, BUY), an introspective and deeply intelligent collection of mostly prose poems whose overriding note is one of ambivalence: a welcome antidote to the sea of certitude we seem to swim in these days.

Frank Bongiorno

The Mirror and the Light by Hilary Mantel

My ‘iso’ read was Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy, ending with The Mirror and the Light (Fourth Estate, BUY). Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell is a study in embodied power that will surely influence my understanding of the practice of politics ever after. For similar reasons, I admired Sean Scalmer’s Democratic Adventurer: Graham Berry and the making of Australian politics (Monash University Publishing, BUY). In the absence of the plentiful private papers enjoyed by biographers of Henry Parkes and Alfred Deakin, Scalmer presents a memorable portrait of a man who arguably did more than any other to define the character of antipodean democracy. Amanda Laugesen’s Rooted: An Australian history of bad language (NewSouth, BUY) picks up where classic accounts of our identity, such as Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend, left off. As the global experience of Covid-19 prompts renewed soul-searching about what makes us different from others, Rooted has arrived just in time.

Beejay Silcox

Hollowpox: The hunt for Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend

When you’re lucky enough to meet a twelve-year-old girl who loves books as ferociously as you do, and she raves about her new ‘best-most-favourite-ever novel’, go buy a copy! That’s how I learned about Jessica Townsend’s glorious Nevermoor series, the third of which, Hollowpox: The hunt for Morrigan Crow (Hachette, BUY), has just been released (nine books are planned). Townsend’s books balance sophisticated menace, gleeful morbidity, and guileless wonder. Wonder has been the watchword of my reading year: I found it lurking in the endless halls of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi (Bloomsbury, BUY) – imagine a joyful Robinson Crusoe trapped in an Escher sketch – and in Catherine Lacey’s Pew (Granta, BUY), a novel that reads like Flannery O’Connor penned an episode of The Twilight Zone. In non-fiction, fellow Western Australian Rebecca Giggs’s Fathoms: The world in the whale (Scribe, BUY) left me feeling like I’d surfaced from some uncharted deep – breathless, awestruck, and brimming with questions.

Judith Brett

Consolation by Garry Disher

For the past two springs, I have driven from Victoria to the Flinders Ranges. Not this year, of course. Instead, locked down in the city, I read Garry Disher’s three novels set in South Australia’s dry farming country, where Constable Paul Hirschman drives up and down the Barrier Highway to solve crimes small and large: Bitter Wash Road, Peace, and the most recent, Consolation (Text, BUY). Disher’s plots are masterful, and Hirschman is warmer and less troubled than the average fictional copper, but for me the richest pleasure is Disher’s superb evocation of place. Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth (Text, BUY) is a novel about suffering and redemption, set in a small coastal community to which the main character moves to be near her imprisoned son and to find a way through the nightmare of his madness. Lohrey’s social observation is acute and the writing is superb, spare, and filled with light and wisdom. 

Paul Giles

Collected Stories by Lorrie Moore

The handsome and weighty Everyman’s Library edition of Lorrie Moore’s Collected Stories (BUY), with an introduction by Lauren Groff, confirms Moore’s reputation as one of the most innovative fiction writers of her era. From nearer to home, Kate Fullagar’s The Warrior, the Voyager, and the Artist: Three lives in an age of empire (Yale University Press, BUY), winner of the General History Prize at the NSW Premier’s Awards, is an engaging example of what the author calls ‘New Biography’. It uses the interwoven life stories of Sir Joshua Reynolds, Cherokee warrior Ostenaco, and Pacific Islander Mai to challenge drier historical clichés about the British Empire in the eighteenth century. In a more hardcore academic vein, Jack Halberstam’s Wild Things: The disorder of desire (Duke University Press, BUY) traces theoretically the evolution of the ‘wild’ as an epistemological formation in modern times, ranging across cultural icons from Thoreau and Stravinsky to Monty Python and the Muppets.

Declan Fry

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado

I loved Carmen Maria Machado’s In the Dream House (Serpent’s Tail, BUY). The vertiginous flair of the writing, the multi-angular excavations of love and hurt in same-sex relationships (forget ‘Never Say I Didn’t Bring You Flowers’: Machado’s lover barely proffers a rose). In one of the book’s memorable set-pieces, Machado invites readers to choose their own adventure; anyone reading this may realise they already have. Ellena Savage’s Blueberries (Text, BUY) stole my heart. Not surprising, either, given all the larceny it contains: the theft of land that birthed settler-colonial Australia; the theft of time as one’s twenties make way for their thirties; the cruel coercion and theft of self that marks sexual violence. I liked Elizabeth Tan’s Smart Ovens for Lonely People (Brio, BUY) even more than Robbie liked Cecilia in Atonement. Congratulations are due to Tan: it is we, the reader, who may have already won (and not once, now, but twice). Finally, I can happily testify that Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings (Profile, BUY) caused nothing of the sort.

Kerryn Goldsworthy

Smart Ovens for Lonely People by Elizabeth Tan

My picks feature a couple of youngish, newish Australian writers: Elizabeth Tan and Daniel Davis Wood. Tan’s short story collection Smart Ovens for Lonely People (BUY) won the 2020 Readings Prize for New Australian Fiction. The witty stories are set in a futuristic yet easily recognisable world where the human relationship with technology becomes ever closer and more anxiety-inducing while creating some laugh-out-loud scenarios and lines. The book is utterly original, as is Davis Wood’s At the Edge of the Solid World (Brio, BUY), a detailed study in grief and empathy. This beautifully written novel places individual and personal human grief in the context of various massive-scale real-life tragedies, tacitly making the argument that the former is not diminished by the latter, and explores the implications of a claim made by the narrator in its final pages: ‘the body is holy and there’s no accounting for all that is lost when the body is gone’.

Kim Williams

Caste: The lies that divide us by Isabel Wilkerson

Some books this year took my breath away – first was Caste: The lies that divide us (Allen Lane, BUY) by Pulitzer Prize-winner Isabel Wilkerson. This is one of the best books I have read this century. It addresses embedded hierarchy and its corrosive impact on thought, behaviour, and society in a wholly original way, drawing always on real-world examples from the United States, while drawing profound references elsewhere, quite brilliantly. I admired Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Public Affairs, BUY), which provides a searing analysis of society and its disruption from mighty, often cynical, seemingly unstoppable big tech companies. Finally, I am an ardent advocate for Jenny Hocking’s continuing authoritative study of Gough Whitlam, generally as his biographer and specifically over his dismissal in several studies culminating in The Palace Letters (Scribe, BUY). This is an authoritative account of the settings, subterfuge, and genuine intrigue attached to the behaviour of the governor-general and the queen’s private secretary, arising from Hocking’s dogged pursuit of the National Archives of Australia to release John Kerr’s ‘private correspondence’. A must read for anyone interested in modern Australian history, one that provides definitional purpose for an Australian republic.

Morag Fraser

I Wonder: The Life and Work of Ken Inglis edited by Peter Browne and Seumas Sparke

When the forests were sprouting their green fuzz in February, I read essays on the scholarly, wit-leavened life and work of historian Ken Inglis. Aptly titled, and edited by Peter Browne and Seumas Spark, I Wonder (Monash University Publishing, BUY) was testimony to the profound contribution Australian historians make to our collective life and intellectual integrity. What price a history degree these days? As Victoria ground its way out of lockdown, I read What Happens Next? Reconstructing Australia after Covid-19 (Melbourne University Press, BUY), edited by yet another Australian historian, Janet McCalman, and public policy academic–activist Emma Dawson. Frankly Labor in its bent, but nonetheless abuzz with scrutable and arguable ideas for a more equitable future, it was refreshing, challenging – and hopeful. In between, I read Marilynne Robinson’s new novel, Jack (Virago, BUY), and reread everything else Robinson has written to remind myself of what remains wonderful about America.

Tony Birch

Throat by Ellen van Neerven

Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (UQP, BUY) highlighted, yet again, that van Neerven is an important and gifted poet. The poem ‘Country’ ends with the sparse but resonant image, ‘my country and I / numb until fed’. Two of my favourite books this year were works of non-fiction. James Boyce’s Imperial Mud: The fight for the Fens (Icon Books, BUY) is a wonderful example of history writing embedded in the narratives of place, in this instance the Fenlands of England and its people, both dramatically altered in the name of dubious progress. Similarly, Andri Snaer Magnason’s On Time and Water (Serpent’s Tail, BUY) is a story of Iceland and the growing impact of climate change told through family stories, mythology, and deep time. I loved Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighbourhood (Granta, BUY), a slim volume of perfectly weighted short fiction in the Japanese tradition of ‘palm of the hand stories’.

Don Anderson

Reaching Light: Selected poems by Robert Adamson

In this Year of the Plague, we could do worse than celebrate our poets, particularly the lyric and the witty, and have them sing us through Prince Prospero’s Palace to alleviate, in particular, Melbourne’s own Masque of the Red Death. Robert Adamson is the Bard of the Hawkesbury River, poet of tides, oysters, and Spinoza the satin bowerbird, all celebrated in his Reaching Light: Selected poems (Flood Editions, BUY). Laurie Duggan’s Homer Street (Giramondo, BUY) shows him to be, to appropriate his own words, ‘a minimalist with a lot of content’. Always witty and intellectually acrobatic, he validates the Horatian assertion ut pictura poesis. If Ezra Pound was correct in asserting that ‘an Epic is a poem containing History’ (and he was), then π.O.’s Heide (Giramondo, BUY) is truly epic, while but one part of a greater three, preceded by 24 Hours and Fitzroy: The biography. Art as history; history as art.

Alice Nelson

Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz

‘Why not now go toward the things I love?’ asks Mojave-Latinx poet Natalie Diaz in the final poem of her electric, intimate collection Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, BUY), which is both a celebration of the body ecstatic and a condemnation of the violence wrought on Native American bodies. Both the rapturous renewals and the darker edges of love are limned beautifully in Mags Webster’s new poetry collection Nothing to Declare (Puncher & Wattman, BUY) and also in Garth Greenwell’s novel-in-stories Cleanness (Picador, BUY), which is preoccupied with our porousness to each other and the sometimes vertiginous excavations of the self that love and desire demand of us. Mark Doty’s What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in my life (Jonathan Cape, BUY) is an enchanting conversation across time and space; at once a devoted paean to a spiritual ancestor, an eloquent close analysis of Whitman’s poetry, and a moving account of a life lived in its reflected light.

James Ley

Mayflies by Andrew O'Hagan

The novel that stood out for me this year was Andrew O’Hagan’s Mayflies (Faber, BUY). In the past, I have been more admiring of O’Hagan’s journalism than his fiction, but his bittersweet story about the formative experiences of youth and the pain of losing a lifelong friend to cancer is notable for its quiet sensitivity and pathos. The two non-fiction books I most admired were Lydia Davis’s Essays (Hamish Hamilton, BUY) a career-spanning collection of insightful musings on literature and the craft of writing, and Patrick Mullins’s The Trials of Portnoy (Scribe, BUY), an entertaining history of a successful campaign to reform Australia’s antiquated censorship laws. Let it also not pass without notice that this year the canonical Library of America imprint republished Richard Hofstadter’s classic works of the early 1960s, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life and The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which have dated in certain respects, but nowhere near as much as one might hope. 

Yves Rees

The Yield by Tara June Winch

This year, as Black Lives Matter protests fuelled an overdue reckoning with race, I decentred whiteness in my reading diet, prioritising Indigenous writers and writers of colour. It was an embarrassment of riches. As a historian, I thought I knew the history of frontier violence in Tara June Winch’s The Yield (Hamish Hamilton, BUY). I knew it, yes, but Winch’s masterpiece made me feel it like never before – a reminder that stories trump facts when truth-telling about Australia’s past. Mirandi Riwoe’s Stone Sky Gold Mountain (UQP, BUY) tells a refreshing counter-narrative of the goldfields, one focused on the Chinese miners typically painted as mere victims of white protagonists. Smart Ovens for Lonely People (BUY), Elizabeth Tan’s short story collection, is a romp of dazzling imagination that injected whimsy into my lockdown. Poetry has never been my tipple, but Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (BUY) converted me. Each line lands like a punch, the whole book an assault on settler complacency.

John Hawke

Shorter Lives by John A. Scott

Peter Weiss’s 1975 text The Aesthetics of Resistance (Duke University Press), which chronicles the anti-fascist underground in 1930s Nazi Germany, is perhaps the most significant political novel of the late twentieth century, and seems strikingly relevant to contemporary concerns. The Duke University Press edition of Volume II (the first appeared in 2005) is astutely translated by Australian poet Joel Scott; it is to be hoped that a translation of the final volume is forthcoming shortly. John A. Scott’s Shorter Lives (Puncher & Wattmann, BUY) signals a return to poetry by this major author. Innovative in form and masterly in its construction, Scott’s book interrogates the major figures of literary Modernism to raise unsettling questions about the nature of modernity itself. Readers who enjoyed Meredith Wattison’s exquisite prose poem ‘Votive’ in the September edition of ABR will be interested in her new collection, The Munchian O (Puncher & Wattmann, BUY).

Felicity Plunkett

Summer by Ali Smith

Ali Smith’s Summer (Hamish Hamilton, BUY) completes her seasonal quartet, written swiftly in response to unfolding events, including the pandemic. Summer collects strands from the first three novels around ideas of fracture and repair. Allusive, expansive, and exhilarating, its motifs of migratory birds and fragments of remembered wisdom evoke acts of kindness and consolation emphasising the idea that there is a ‘chance to make the world bigger for someone else. Or smaller.’ Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s poetry collection Living Weapon (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, BUY) is a paean to imagination’s ‘gloriously winged / Angel’. It swoops through Homer, Orpheus, Elizabeth Bishop, the United States, and Madrid to limn ways a person – especially a poet – might vote against ‘the awful silence of rage’. Rage, angels, and alchemy are part of the meticulous design of Amanda Lohrey’s The Labyrinth (BUY), which examines the trace and wrack of violence and the counterbalancing creativity that might transmute it.

Gregory Day

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

My standout books this year were all, in their own way, about the slow processes of the earth and its creatures. Merlin Sheldrake’s Entangled Life (Bodley Head, BUY) is the most readable and good-humoured book ever written on the mind-opening, ever-connecting life forms of fungi. An important publishing event was the long-awaited appearance of A Shelter for Bells (Epidote Press), an exquisitely produced binding of the vivid walking notebooks of German aphorist, composer, and mystagogue Hans Jürgen von der Wense. And James Boyce’s longitudinal study of the Fens, Imperial Mud (BUY), is a surprising and wonderfully slushy next layer in the ecological oeuvre of my favourite Australian historian.

Ali Alizadeh

No Room at the Morgue by Jean-Patrick Manchette, translated by Alyson Waters

Thrilled that the great French novelist Jean-Patrick Manchette’s work is becoming more readily available in English, I’ll choose Alyson Water’s translation of No Room at the Morgue (NYRB, BUY) as my favourite work of international fiction for the year. It may be one of Manchette’s more formulaic hard-boiled novels, but it’s still utterly riveting, darkly humorous, and joyfully violent. On a more topical note, Swedish scholar Andreas Malm’s Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War communism in the twenty-first century (Verso, BUY) leaves no doubt that bourgeois individualism, no matter how ‘ethical’, will do nothing to save us from the calamities of our world. We must unite and act collectively, decisively. My favourite work by an Australian author this year was the novelist Elizabeth Bryer’s eloquent translation of José Luis de Juan’s Napoleon’s Beekeeper (Giramondo, BUY), a terrific historical novella about the emperor’s brief exile on the Italian island of Elba. 

Jacqueline Kent

Friends and Rivals by Brenda Niall

Friends and Rivals (Text, BUY), Brenda Niall’s study of four Australian women writers working against the grain of their literary times, accomplishes a great deal. Niall provides sharply individual portraits of Barbara Baynton, Ethel Turner, Nettie Palmer, and Henry Handel Richardson, and gives an overview of the writing life for women in the early twentieth century. Her sometimes mordant commentary is particularly enjoyable. In the reviews and journalistic commentary that make up Mantel Pieces (Fourth Estate, BUY), Hilary Mantel demonstrates elegant writing, coruscating wit, and breadth of knowledge about a huge variety of subjects. And Philippe Sands’s The Ratline (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, BUY), the biography of Otto Freiherr von Wächter, a devoted family man who was also a vicious Nazi war criminal, is mesmerising. This is largely because of the author’s adroit negotiation of contradictory strands. Wächter’s son, convinced his father was a good man, helped Sands in his research.

Billy Griffiths

Meeting the Waylo: Aboriginal Encounters in the Archipelago by Tiffany Shellam

Two Australian histories deeply impressed and inspired me this year: Tiffany Shellam’s richly evocative Meeting the Waylo: Aboriginal encounters in the archipelago (UWA Publishing, BUY), which searches the silences of colonial archives, and Grace Karskens’s masterfully crafted People of the River: Lost worlds of early Australia (Allen & Unwin, BUY), which explores the confluence of lives, cultures, and histories along the ancient waterway of Dyarubbin. James Boyce’s Imperial Mud (BUY) offers a lively and refreshingly antipodean history of the Fens in eastern England, while Hank Lentfer’s biography Raven’s Witness: The Alaska life of Richard K. Nelson (Mountaineers Books, BUY) brims with the curiosity, wisdom, and exuberance of his subject, ‘Nels’. Robbie Arnott conjures the magic of a Studio Ghibli production in his beautiful novel The Rain Heron (Text, BUY). And it was a thrill to return to Elena Ferrante’s Naples in The Lying Lives of Adults (Europa, BUY).

John Kinsella

A Kinder Sea by Felicity Plunkett

Two standout poetry volumes whose concerns revolve around the workings of language have been years in the making, yet no two works could be more different. Jaya Savige’s Change Machine (BUY) is a work of razor-sharp verbal plays and passion for detail shimmering on international wavelengths. It disputes colonial usurpings of language by breaking them down and playing them back in confronting, ironic, and liberated ways. It’s a book of social critique and family, and an incisive investigation of the estrangement and bewilderment many of us feel. Felicity Plunkett’s A Kinder Sea (UQP, BUY), with its searching for ways to ‘love’ and be loved, for deliverance from harm and damage, towards a ‘kindness’, is a book that traverses love, textuality, family, bodies, ‘art’/‘music’, stories, loss, lament, and the sea. In ‘conversation’ with Emily Dickinson and other writers, it’s a sinewy book of survival with a deceptive tautness beneath its flows. Another work written and revised over many years is Gabrielle Everall’s unique, ironic, confronting, frequently traumatic, and dissecting verse novel of sexuality and desire, passion but also abusive invasiveness, Dona Juanita and the Love of Boys (Buon-Cattivi Press, BUY). And for a book that confronts colonial injustice and decisively shows why Australians should understand and address the history of dispossession, the fact of Aboriginal sovereignty, and continuing connection to country, Living on Stolen Land by Ambelin Kwaymullina (Magabala Books, BUY) is an essential and clear statement.

Patrick McCaughey

The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979, edited by Saskia Hamilton

Robert Lowell’s penultimate slim volume was The Dolphin (1973). Its sensational subject – his abandonment of his wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, and his impassioned affair with and marriage to the perilous Caroline Blackwood – guaranteed its notoriety. Lowell quoted Hardwick without consulting her. Their Dolphin Letters 1970–79 (Faber, BUY) and letters from friends such as Elizabeth Bishop and Mary McCarthy, all edited by Saskia Hamilton, are grimly illuminating. Hardwick comes out nobly, Lowell badly, and Blackwood ignobly. Mary Hoban’s An Unconventional Life: The life of Julia Sorell Arnold (Scribe, BUY) is a brilliant portrait of a calamitous Victorian marriage. Brought up in colonial Hobart, Julia had the misfortune to fall in love with and marry Tom Arnold, son of Dr Arnold, brother of Matthew and Inspector of Schools in Tasmania. Back in Britain, under J.H. Newman’s spell, he converted to Catholicism and created a lasting breach with Julia. She raised eight children on little money. A favourite of Jowett’s at Oxford and the grandmother of Aldous and Julian Huxley, she was worn down by Tom.

Susan Wyndham

Funny Weather: Art in an emergency by Olivia Laing

Visual art in many forms has been my salve this year, including these books about the dance between tension and beauty. British art critic Olivia Laing writes about ‘reparative art’ (and literature) in her essay collection Funny Weather: Art in an emergency (Picador, BUY). In elegant, vivid prose, she writes about artists who have responded creatively to personal and political crisis, from painters Georgia O’Keeffe and Jean-Michel Basquiat to filmmaker–gardener Derek Jarman. Australian novelist Amanda Lohrey shows how art can both destroy and heal in The Labyrinth (BUY), which follows in philosophical depth a woman’s retreat from Sydney to the rural coast, where her artist son is in prison and she must rebuild peace of mind. Sofie Laguna goes inside the imagination of an artistically talented boy in Infinite Splendours (Allen & Unwin, BUY), a brilliant, heartbreaking portrait of a damaged but resilient soul.

James Walter

People of the River: Lost worlds of early Australia by Grace Karskens

How has our core culture come to be what it is? Grace Karskens’s magnificent People of the River (BUY) immerses us in the realities of early settler/Indigenous cultural collision, impelling the realisation that these tangled histories must be jointly understood to render justice and reconciliation possible. Sean Scalmer’s engaging Democratic Adventurer (BUY), tracking Graham Berry’s rise in nineteenth-century Victorian politics through rhetoric and charisma to become the leading advocate of protection, illuminates the origins of our persisting expectation that the state should act to curtail adversity. The strictures of Australian liberalism are cruelly exposed in Terry Irving’s acute The Fatal Lure of Politics: The life and thought of Vere Gordon Childe (Monash University Publishing, BUY), on the Australian archaeologist. Childe’s fascination with the deep history of cultures and the improvement of current conditions led him to Marx, a hatred of colonialism and imperialism, exile from Australia to win renown abroad, and an unremitting pursuit by British and Australian security services.

A. Frances Johnson

Weather by Jenny Offill

Jenny Offill’s novel Weather (Granta, BUY) melds Holocene end-time themes with refreshing deadpan wit. Her gloom-struck heroine lands an uncredentialled academic job answering mail from doomsday preppers. She cares for the letter writers as she does for her god-haunted mother and recovering addict brother. Perfect paragraphs fashion Offill’s gut-wrenching ‘weather report’. Judith Brett’s Quarterly Essay, ‘The Coal Curse’ (Black Inc., BUY), is a devastating, clarifying history of the ‘resource curse’ and long-term Australian failures to foster manufacturing. Brett, not Barnaby Joyce, deftly catches the coal footy that a future PM saw fit to bring into parliament in 2017 – an essay so good I wanted a plane to do a leaflet drop. Fire Front: First Nations poetry and power today (UQP, BUY) dynamically situates seminal poets alongside ascendant talents (e.g. Oodgeroo Noonuccal, Lionel Fogarty, Raelee Lancaster, Baker Boy). Bruce Pascoe, Chelsea Bond, and other Indigenous public intellectuals provide searing commentaries on myriad poetic ways of ‘doing power’.

Philip Mead

Essex Clay by Andrew Motion

What a year of catastrophe for the arts, especially the performing arts, and one of dispiriting disregard for education and its vital role in our lives. The literary arts are used to their marginal habitats, those unresolved times and spaces of reading and writing – the fall-backs of our deepest selves. In a year, for me, of many poetry volumes, the recourse of poetry seemed all the more compelling: Hölderlin’s fateless gods gazing at humans in silent clarity; Andrew Motion’s Essex Clay (Faber, BUY), with its parallax of human misfortune. Michael Farrell’s Family Trees (Giramondo, BUY) has been a highlight of this year’s poetry. There are many aspects to Farrell’s formal skill and playfulness in this collection, but one of the things that’s most evident is the way he writes about the continuum between dream and waking life. Imagine if we felt and thought all day the way we did when we first wake; Farrell’s poems seem like vivid capturings of this thought experiment.

Brenda Niall

Square Haunting: Five Lives in London between the wars by Francesca Wade

Francesca Wade’s Square Haunting: Five women, freedom and London between the wars (Faber, BUY) is an absorbing, elegantly written group biography. Modernist poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), classical scholar Jane Harrison, detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, historian Eileen Power, and writer Virginia Woolf all lived at different crucial periods in Mecklenburgh Square, near the British Museum. Here, these women thrived on financial independence and intellectual and emotional freedom. Half a century of women’s history is unobtrusively told in these brief, shrewd, and sympathetic biographies, in which the shaping forces of time and place are subtly rendered. From Mecklenburgh Square to Wenceslas Square: Richard Fidler’s engaging history The Golden Maze: A biography of Prague (ABC Books, BUY) is especially moving in its final pages, in which the author, no longer just a chronicler, joins a crowd in the Square to honour past freedom fighters and share present-day hopes and fears.

Kieran Pender

Law in War: Freedom and restriction in Australia during the Great War by Catherine Bond

In a year of turbulence, reference to history can be instructive. In the early stages of the pandemic, Law in War: Freedom and restriction in Australia during the Great War by Catherine Bond (NewSouth, BUY) provided insightful lessons from another period of upheaval in Australia history. If we don’t learn from the past, we are bound to repeat it. Unfortunately, history often repeats for whistleblowers, those courageous individuals who speak up about wrongdoing. Whistleblowers have played a vital role during Covid-19. Yet they often suffer negative personal and professional consequences. Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an age of fraud by Tom Mueller (Atlantic, BUY) is a tour de force of book-length reporting on our collective failure to protect and empower whistleblowers. Finally, on a more uplifting note, Sarah G. Phillips’s When There Was No Aid: War and peace in Somaliland (Cornell, BUY) sheds light on an unlikely success story in the Horn of Africa.

Brenda Walker

Intimations: Six essays by Zadie Smith

In the foreword to her personal essays Intimations (Penguin, BUY), Zadie Smith defines her form as a kind of ‘Talking to yourself … And writing means being overheard.’ My choices for 2020 are the works of writers we seem to overhear with all the powerful attentiveness of a secret listener. Smith writes with the immediate focus of a New York resident during the Covid-19 pandemic. Sufferings and divisions are gradually revealed by the ordinary events of her life. Rebecca Solnit’s Recollections of My Non-Existence (Granta, BUY) is an extended memoir of her writing life, in which she consciously constructs herself in much the same way as she writes, recommending: ‘making a self who can make the work you are meant to make’. Alex Miller’s Max (Allen & Unwin, BUY) is a magnificent reprise of the life of Miller’s friend the European refugee Max Blatt, silenced by experiences of loss and totalitarianism, but articulate in his intellectual guidance.

Peter Rose

The New Despotism by John Keane

John Keane’s short book The New Despotism (Harvard, BUY) – drily filleting the new threats to liberal democracy – is essential, worrying reading. Patrice Gueniffey, not long after his magisterial biography of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, gives us an illuminating study of Napoleon and de Gaulle (Harvard, BUY), showing why the French are drawn time and again to ‘great men’ (and the odd slip of a saint). The heady, lordly prose reminds me of Carlyle – or superior fiction. Apropos of which, during lockdown I went back to Marcel Proust, in the Kilmartin– Enright edition from the Everyman Library (Random House). The boundless efflorescence of Proust’s sensibility and intelligence – not to mention his humour, sometimes overlooked – induce the usual awe. Finally, I recommend Clive James’s posthumous gift of a book, The Fire of Joy: Roughly eighty poems to get by heart and say aloud (Picador, BUY): some of the sweetest poems in the language accompanied by James’s lucid, loving notes – the ideal gift for adolescents who savour language.

David McCooey

The Song Remains the Same: 800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies by Andrew Ford and Anni Heino

As the world rushes to catastrophe, the federal government chose this pandemic year to abandon (or attack) the arts and universities. Despite the times, resilient local poetry publishers gave us superb collections by Jordie Albiston, Aidan Coleman, Jill Jones, and many others. Felicity Plunkett’s A Kinder Sea (BUY) was a necessary rejoinder in a year of unkindness, illustrating Plunkett’s ability to write poetry that is both deeply intelligent and profoundly moving. Andrew Ford and Anni Heino gave us The Song Remains the Same: 800 years of love songs, laments and lullabies (La Trobe University Press, BUY), one of the best books on song I’ve ever read. The White Dress (Natasha Lehrer’s translation of La robe blanche, published by Les Fugitives, BUY) brought Nathalie Léger’s triptych of works about women, art, and power to an astonishing close. Lastly, Jenny Offill’s Weather (BUY) was the perfect novel for these end times.

Sarah Walker

Cherry Beach by Laura McPhee-Browne

In a year when time has felt unusually heavy, I have loved books that made me stop noticing page numbers, books into which I fell face-first and emerged dripping with sticky emotional residue. Carmen Maria Machado’s blistering In the Dream House (BUY), an account of an abusive lesbian relationship, swept me away on a flood of crepuscular dread. Its formal play and bite-sized chapters form a rich flotsam: memoir, theory, queer bravery. When I finished it, I exhaled hard. It felt as though I hadn’t breathed for hundreds of pages. Laura McPhee-Browne’s Cherry Beach (Text, BUY) similarly pulled me into a house vibrating with the rumblings of things going wrong. I floated along with its worried, lonely narrator, in whom I recognised the thick longing that characterised my early twenties. The dreamy, slightly dissociative quality of the writing felt right for this year: hovering above a life that is slipping between our fingers.

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth

Piranesi by Susanna Clarke

I found myself totally absorbed by Susanna Clarke’s novel Piranesi (BUY). Brilliantly conceived and executed, it is a masterclass in contemporary unreliable narration. Another slow-burning, eerie tour de force was Richard Flanagan’s The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (Knopf, BUY). The ecological catastrophes of this moment are folded through the banal origami of a family dealing with their dying mother. In short fiction, my favourite work was Elizabeth Tan’s Smart Ovens for Lonely People (BUY), which I think is already destined to be a classic. Its blend of Vonnegut surrealism and Carveresque suburbia gives each story a tiny wobble of ontological anxiety. The poetry book that spoke most directly to me in 2020 was Ellen van Neerven’s Throat (BUY). Wickedly sharp, the quiet poems draw you closer and deliver their sting at intimate quarters, and the louder ones grab you by … the throat.

from Suddhodana’s Poems

We bent the camels’ legs back at the knees
and bound them with rope, then we tethered them
to a tree and left them in the scorching heat.
The whole camp aromatic with onion, cardamom,
tamarind, cumin – even the dusk seemed spread
with the crimson marinade we’d mixed for the basting.
We could almost taste the slender straps we’d soon
lift from the bones, camel meat sweetened by the fat
drawn from their humps. When, finally, we slaughtered
the beasts, those humps lay slack across their backs.
The meat filled twenty-nine platters and the grease
dripped from our fingers, the wine filled our mouths
and the sharp grains of salt where our vows
spoken again to the future. We licked our hands
and laughed because we were foolish young men
whose hearts were as hard as kilned clay,
as ugly as the faces we saw in the snarled hair
of the sky, as strident as the shrieks of the brain-fever bird
telling us death will come out of the hills,
the deserts, the skies. We were drunk on wine,
arrack, on the blood spilled after we slaughtered
not just the animals, but their drivers too,
thick-browed, slope-eyed interlopers from the north
who wore the faces of demons, ones that turn
our crops to dust, our milk sour, our sheep, goats
and horses barren, our elephants rogue, our altars cold.

Single-name status is granted to very few. In Australian art, ‘Daniel’ has always been Daniel Thomas: curator, museum director, walking memory, standard-setter (and inveterate corrector of errors), passionate lover of art, friend of Australian artists. His life’s work has been establishing the understanding of Australian art in our art museums, and his influence is incalculable. The late Andrew Sayers rightly described Thomas as ‘the single most influential curator in creating a shape for the history of Australian art’, but as editors Hannah Fink and Steven Miller observe, ‘Daniel is everywhere and nowhere: the greatest authority, hiding in the detail of someone’s else’s footnote, and in the judgements that have made the canon of Australian art.’

Now, with this splendid, absorbing, rewarding book, the importance of Daniel Thomas’s writing in Australian cultural life is revealed. It is nothing less than an insider’s history of the last six decades. The anthology is chronological, rather than thematic, gathering together a rich selection of reviews, art-historical notes written for museums including the Art Gallery of New South Wales (Thomas’s first museum from 1958 to 1978), journal articles, and occasional pieces including a brace of wonderful obituaries – for designer Marion Hall Best, curator Ruth McNicoll, and artist Bea Maddock, for instance – that illuminate the tenor of the art community; nearly all are illustrated.

Geoff Goodfellow is best known as a poet. Out of Copley Street, his first non-verse publication, chronicles his working-class coming of age in Adelaide’s inner-northern suburbs during the 1950s and 1960s.

The book is structured as a series of vignettes from Goodfellow’s childhood and young manhood. Many of the stories are about the author as a prepubescent lad with a fondness for cigarettes and storytelling. The reader learns about Goodfellow’s family life, the warmth of which is overshadowed by his father’s alcoholism and frequent visits to a ‘madhouse ward’.

The author describes his early job selling pies and pasties in local hotels, and his later stints in a number of butcher’s shops. Out of Copley Street concludes with a tribute to the author’s decades-long passion for boxing. Goodfellow’s father was a boxer, though the author explains that his own passion is just as linked to the preternatural power of the equipment. As he wryly notes: ‘Funny thing about boxing gloves once people see them, they invariably want to pick them up and pull them on. Then they want to start punching.’

The book’s key strength is its emotional restraint. Goodfellow relays grim and possibly painful memories with nary a skerrick of judgement, self-pity, or melodrama. He demonstrates a devastating knack for bringing to life the minutiae of a bygone era: the social mores and conventions, the sights, the conversations. Consider dialogue such as: ‘Listen Bluey, you’ll want portholes in ya coffin.’ These passages crackle with the sound of retro Australiana.

At 158 pages, Out of Copley Street is compact, perhaps too much so. Goodfellow’s life in the period between the 1960s and now is quickly surveyed via a reference to the author’s passion for boxing. What happened during those decades? How did Goodfellow become the writer he is today? This reader wanted to learn more about Goodfellow’s relatives, especially his father. These characters spring to life, vivid and believable, only to vanish just as quickly.

It’s to be hoped that Goodfellow will gift us with further prose explorations of his past and present. He is a fine wordsmith, one whose talents lie within and outside the realm of the poetic.

A tantalising ‘what if?’ emerges from the opening chapters of Hermione Lee’s immense, intricately researched life of Tom Stoppard. On the day in 1939 when the Germans invaded Czechoslovakia, the future playwright’s assimilated Jewish parents were obliged to flee the Moravian town where they lived. They made it to Singapore, only to endure Japanese invasion soon afterward. Stoppard’s mother, Martha, had to move again, and swiftly, with her two sons while her beloved husband, Eugen, a doctor, remained behind to aid with civilian defence. His evacuation ship was destroyed, and he was lost, presumably drowned, a little later. But when Stoppard’s mother boarded her own ship, earlier in 1941, she thought it was headed for Australia. Only later did she learn that India was their destination.

So it was that Australia’s greatest future playwright, one Tomas Straussler, found himself at the age of five in Darjeeling instead – a hill station town straight out of Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills – where his attractive young widowed mother met an English major named Ken Stoppard and that alternative history was definitively foreclosed.

One of the frustrating things about being a historian is the number of times you are told by others that surely everything in your specialty must already have been ‘done’. After so many decades or centuries, what more could there possibly be to discover? One of the answers is that what interests scholars, and what topics are considered worthy of examination, changes over time. This explains how ‘new’ material – often sitting in the archives for centuries – comes to light. It also explains why women have not always made the cut, a problem compounded, as recent Twitter discussions have highlighted, by how often research about women by female scholars still goes unpublished.

All of which takes us some way towards understanding why the name of Jeanne Baret is not better known. Barret (the spelling settled on by Danielle Clode) was the first woman known to have sailed around the world. She did so disguised as a man, acting as valet and assistant to French naturalist Philibert Commerson, for whom she had worked as a housekeeper and with whom she was in a relationship. She accompanied Commerson on the famed voyage of Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (charged with France’s first circumnavigation of the globe), helping him to gather as many specimens as possible at each port of call. The voyage departed France in 1766, sailing via South America, the Pacific, Australia (albeit without seeing land), Papua New Guinea, and Mauritius, where Barret and Commerson disembarked. Adept at quashing rumours, they seem to have successfully hidden Barret’s identity from most on board until they reached Tahiti, when it was revealed in rather dramatic circumstances.

Save the Children in Stockholm wanted to highlight the unfair distribution of global wealth, so it invented an online game called The Lottery of Life. This invited Swedes to a website to spin the wheel of chance. If you were born again tomorrow, where would you appear?

Not in Sweden, it turns out. The chances of being born into this safe, healthy nation, where most children grow to be healthy adults with comfortable circumstances, prove vanishingly small – about 0.08 percent, to be precise. Instead, most babies emerge in poor, populous nations and confront medical and economic challenges that are rare in the West. Seventy per cent of newborns around the world face significant risk of poverty or violence. If you are fortunate enough to be born in Sweden, suggested Save the Children, you should support those who are less fortunate.

It is not surprising that a book on the politicisation of intelligence in Australia should begin and end by referring to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. For many Australians, that episode will long remain the classic example of the misuse of intelligence for partisan political purposes, in sharp contrast to the ideal that intelligence analysts should speak truth to power, giving policymakers their unvarnished assessments, rather than telling them what they want to hear.

This book is not about that episode but about its prehistory. Written by an academic who, we are told, ‘teaches across the social and political sciences’ at RMIT University, the book uses several episodes in Australian history as case studies in the politicisation of intelligence. Justin T. McPhee places these episodes into analytical frameworks developed by scholars of intelligence in Europe and North America. His aim is to identify what he calls the means by which intelligence has been politicised in Australia, the forms of that politicisation, and the conditions under which intelligence has been politicised. These categories might be better defined as the purposes of politicisation, such as to promote a policy, to persuade a sceptical audience, or to discredit one’s opponents; the means of politicisation, including direct intervention and more discreet manipulation; and the social and political context.

In the frantic days after the recent US presidential election, Donald Trump’s team – led by his attorney Rudy Giuliani – held a media conference in a suburban Philadelphia carpark. The establishment that formed the backdrop to this unusual performance is called Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Neighbouring businesses included a crematorium and an adult entertainment store (soon translated on social media into a ‘dildo shop’). At the time of writing, the explanation for how this had happened is still not forthcoming, but most commentators assumed a mix-up with one of the city’s major hotels, also called Four Seasons.

It is just the kind of scene that would delight Don Watson, bringing together several of his favourite themes: political theatre, grifting, ‘down home’ life, gardening, the absurd, and the Americans. I take it that Watson has no special interest in crematoria or porn, but the rest are well represented in this large and entertaining volume of his writing. It took Watson twenty years, he told the Australian Society of Authors in 2013, ‘to find the gall to say, “I’m a writer”, when people ask me what I do’. And it is not least among this book’s virtues that it draws the contours of what an Australian writing life might look like.

What is to be done? The question is asked whenever humankind confronts a new crisis. And the answers, whether from biblical sources, Tolstoy, or Lenin (or indeed Barry Jones in his imminent book, What Is To Be Done?), must confront universal moral quandaries at the same time as they address local needs, hopes, and aspirations.

Hence these two volumes of essays, compiled after Australia’s bushfires and before the lifting of lockdowns and the reopening of borders: a total of fifty-eight essays, each mercifully brief and focused, by sixty-three contributors. The writers are historians, scientists, Indigenous thinkers and activists, farmers, politicians (former and current), epidemiologists, journalists, economists, educators, business experts, environmentalists, unionists, apprentices, social researchers, entrepreneurs, and innovators.

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Pivotal questions

Dear Editor,

In his essay ‘Failures of Imagination’, Hessom Razavi asks Australia the pivotal question, ‘Why are we among the few countries in the world that practise mandatory, indefinite detention of all undocumented – yet not illegal – non-citizens?’ Why, indeed! Every time I hear about mandatory detention, my heart misses a beat and my chest tightens. It passes, because nobody can sustain breathlessness for long. But thoughts linger. How do we live with the way we torment people in such a manner? How did Australia become even more cruel than it was in the colonial era? It is time that mandatory detention ceased. It is long past time that we signed up to the Uluru Statement from the Heart. We have nothing to lose and so much to gain.

Lindy Warrell (online comment)

Inhumane and ineffective

Dear Editor,

Hessom Razavi’s essay is an important and nuanced insight into the human story behind cold statistics and sensationalist newspaper headlines. The appalling lack of empathy and imagination that has led to inhumane and ineffective detention policies in Australia needs to be called to account. Sharing such stories is possibly the most powerful way to do so.

Liana Joy Christensen (online comment)

Hessom Razavi replies:

There are deep wells of empathy available to Australians, if only we are given the opportunity to access them. Stories, as Liana Joy Christensen says, are among the pathways to these wells.

Journalists in denial

Dear Editor,

I have read with interest Johanna Leggatt’s article ‘The Problem of Belonging’ and her reply to Peter McPhee, and indeed many other pieces written by journalists appalled, like all reasonable persons, by the poor treatment of some of their number on social media platforms. As Leggatt states in her reply, all of us should have the ‘right to do [our] work without death threats or trolling’. I just wish that this sentiment was stretched to include the Victorian premier, the chief health officer, and the much-discussed contact tracers. The media must take some responsibility for the attacks on these people. Throughout the successful second lockdown, the Herald Sun headlines (for example) have been designed to inflame.

The daily press conferences in Melbourne have become characterised by the aggressive, accusatory nature of the questioning, many journalists seeking ‘gotcha’ moments. By contrast, Premier Daniel Andrews has remained calm and polite, tolerating behaviour that would not be accepted in a primary school classroom.

Hectoring may work well with con artists fleeing down alleyways, but it’s not so impressive, or effective, when the subject decides to stand still for as long as it takes. I am not offended by ‘what some journalists extract from conferences and churn into commentary’ – that is predictable. What I dislike is their behaviour during the press conferences. One journalist asked the premier what he was doing for his birthday, a question that started ‘BirthdayGate’ on Twitter, for which the journalist Alex White later apologised. I don’t see this sort of thing as run-of-the-mill reporting. It’s sensationalism at best, political attack at worst.

Public perception is a tricky beast. Journalists wondering how they morphed from truth-seekers into bullies might well consider some different strategies. As Aristotle noted, we are what we do.

Clare Rhoden, Oakleigh South, Vic.

Quicksand

Dear Editor,

Johanna Leggatt’s excellent piece on social media denunciations and mob tendencies, along with her ABR Podcast conversation covering similar issues, made me wonder how much of our being afraid to stand up to thugs of the left and right – sometimes named, more often anonymous – might stem in part from an Australian provincialism.

For all the much-promoted attempts to ‘decolonise’ our thinking, many an Australian mind, one fears, continues to be colonised by imported modes of thought and practice. (This is perhaps inevitable in a hyper-globalised and hyper-surveilled world: we are all being colonised, at all times.) On an Australian quicksand of identity, permanently unaware of who we are and permanently unable to decide, we are perhaps less willing to make a stand in constructive defence of ideas; too many choose, instead, the default and herd position of (personal) attack and denigration. None of this is healthy in the context of our increasingly and absurdly polarised public debate, and Leggatt is right to express her serious concern.

Speaking of podcasts, goodness knows we have been exposed – many of us far beyond our own level of interest – to wave after wave of Trump analysis over the past four years. The recent ABR Podcast conversation with Timothy Lynch was one of the most incisive and original discussions I have heard on what is an otherwise wearying topic. Refreshingly, at no point did Lynch reach for the lazy clichés or conventional truths about Trump, his supporters, and his impact on the broader world. I’m very much looking forward to hearing from him again.

Luke Stegemann, Palen Creek, QLD

Johanna Leggatt replies:

Luke Stegemann makes an interesting point about provincialism conceivably playing a role in the muck-raking and group-think that Twitter encourages. Perhaps there is a tendency among Australian journalists and writers to look elsewhere for clues as to who we are, what we should believe in, whom we should support. In this respect, one could argue that we can easily become rudderless in our thinking, attaching ourselves to what is modish rather than to what is anchored in a sense of self. I could also imagine there are certain occasions when this Australian ‘quicksand of identity’ might be liberating, as being ‘unaware of who we are’ perhaps gifts the thinking writer with the opportunity for vitality, originality, and a fresh creation, unencumbered by notions of identity. Of course, it might also produce the opposite: a tentativeness and fear that lead to an unwillingness to put one’s head above the parapet and defend freedom of expression.

The aim of reviewing

Dear Editor,

Nicely written though Declan Fry’s review of After Australia, edited by Michael Mohammed Ahmad, is, it is so focused on the political content in each story that it never engages with the bigger questions of literature.

Do these stories in this anthology stack up to good writing? What about questions of form? Do the stories ramble on like fraying threads coming apart, or do the authors find a structural beauty that holds them together? In Fry’s review there is not a single critical word that addresses any of the stories’ shortcomings or weaknesses. I’m left wondering, and not only with this piece, what is the aim of reviewing?

Clint Caward (online comment)

Declan Fry replies:

It is quite an invitation, being asked to comment on not only your own review, but the aims of reviewing itself. I’ll try. Literacy is a political privilege; without it, you or I would not be having this exchange in the first place. So I fail to see how politics is separable from ‘the bigger questions of literature’. But I don’t think that’s what you’re asking. You want to know why I didn’t pounce on perceived stylistic mishaps or pen paeans to ‘good writing’. The reason is simple: awarding stars or admonishments is the most mediocre type of hack work going. This is not Kirkus Reviews, and I am not here to write PR shill (or hatchet jobs telling authors where to get off, as you seem to have wished). My hope is that criticism offers something the reader can’t get from the book itself – a reflection, an overview, a consideration. A commentary of its own.

China’s aspirations

Dear Editor,

Hugh White’s review of Geoff Raby’s book China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order provides an excellent overview of a work that should be read by Australians and Americans.

China has emerged as a great power, but a regional one. China has neighbours on its borders – fourteen of them. Many of them are not fond of the Chinese. China knows this. Raby’s book brings some sanity and much needed honesty to the subject of China’s aspirations. Basically, it wants the United States out of East Asia. China seeks to create what the Japanese failed to do in the late-1930s: the East Asian Prosperity Sphere. It is getting closer to attaining this goal every day.

Australia should act much more independently. Sure, it needs America, but it also needs China. Prime Minister Scott Morrison must stop mimicking the US leadership. It is time for Australia to develop and promote its own national interests, whether America or China likes it or not. If Australia, as in the 1930s, refuses to create and embrace its own agenda and policies for Asia, it may find itself highly vulnerable should the East Asian situation grow ominous. A nation of twenty-six million people may become very isolated in a region comprising four and a half billion Asians.

Geoff Raby’s book basically asks Australians, ‘Are we doing what is right for Australia and its future?’ If the answer is no, the nation’s leadership needs to start creating a new blueprint for the country’s future in a region that is in many respects undergoing a revolution.

Randall Doyle (online comment)

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Magazine capers

Australian Book Review, which enjoys the warmest relations with other Australian literary magazines, rarely comments on the vicissitudes of other publications, but clearly there is no such convention in Britain.

There was a good example in the November 5 issue of the London Review of Books when Stefan Collini, the Cambridge don and regular LRB contributor, offered a potted history of the Times Literary Supplement since its creation in 1902 and wrote about the ‘vigorous spate of new-broomism’ visited on the magazine by Stig Abell, who became editor of TLS in 2016. Abell’s new design and general makeover have resulted in fewer reviews, more articles ‘confessional or narrative in form’, and even a full-page cartoon, which would have looked most incongruous in the decorous TLS of Ferdinand Mount or Peter Stothard.

Now, abruptly, Abell is gone – off to run Times Radio – and Martin Ivens, former editor of The Sunday Times, is the new editor of TLS. Other changes have ensued, Collini reports, with a trace of LRB-ish schadenfreude: ‘Alan Jenkins, the widely respected deputy editor, left a few months ago, and now other long-serving staff are being made redundant, amid rumours of unsustainable losses.’

Even J.C. – author of the indispensable back-page news column ‘NB’ for the past twenty years – has left. Writing in his final column on September 18, Joseph Campbell was his usual forthright self: ‘Did we poke fun at pomposity, hypocrisy and plain stupidity? Yes, but we never suggested that someone should be removed from a post – such as editor of Poetry (Chicago) – for committing a fault that merely goes against current trends.’

Here, J.C. was alluding to the removal of the widely admired Don Share, editor of Poetry since 2013, after yet another example of ‘cancel culture’, all too readily heeded by the ‘immensely wealthy Poetry Foundation’ that runs what has long been considered the world’s pre-eminent poetry journal.

In a closing blast, J.C. reflected on these sour and punitive eliminations:

The most dramatic change in the literary atmosphere during our stewardship [of NB] is this: from the 1920s through to the Lady Chatterley trial and beyond, it was the legal and political authorities who tried to ban books and restrict freedom of expression. Radicals and rebels fought against the very act of banning. Prohibitions on speech and publication now arrive from the identity-conscious children of those same radicals, leaving it to the law to protect the freedom of the imagination.

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Goodbye to all that

And so, a year like no other draws to a close amid constitutional mayhem in the United States, appalling rates of coronavirus infection throughout much of the world (though not in Australia, happily), and promising auguries of liberating vaccines.

Back in March, as the gravity of the pandemic sank in, ABR – like every other arts organisation in the country – had every reason to be anxious about its future viability, especially when we learned that the Australia Council had decided not to continue funding ABR in the 2021–24 round. (We had much to say about the folly of that decision and about the Council’s new pusillanimity towards the magazine sector. So did countless ABR readers, who made their feelings of incredulity and dismay very clear to the Council and to the relevant federal minister.)

Notwithstanding these blows – or perhaps because of them, in a stubborn, resolute way – it has proved to be an exceptional year for the magazine, one that leaves us sanguine about the future. Here are some of the highlights:

• subscriptions rose by 27% (43% digital, 16% print)
• positive responses to new commentary material
• thirty-five new ABR Patrons
• widespread interest in the new ABR Podcast
• record fields for our three literary prizes
• website page views increased by 110%
• Declan Fry became the third ABR Rising Star
• major expansion of the digital archive

This year we have published a total of 306 reviewers, authors, and commentators from around the country. Ninety of them were new to the magazine, a measure of ABR’s continuing openness to new voices and emerging writers of all kinds. We thank them all and we look forward to working with a similarly diverse, protean cohort in 2021.

It’s good to be able to report that a year that seemed likely to shake the organisation to its core has proved bolstering and transformative. Here, I particularly want to thank ABR’s small team – Amy Baillieu (Deputy Editor), Jack Callil (Digital Editor), Grace Chang (Business Manager), and Christopher Menz (Development Consultant) – whose commitment and resilience have been exemplary. I’m also grateful to the ABR Board, especially Sarah Holland-Batt, who became Chair in April.

The ABR team looks forward to bringing you another year of fine literary journalism and creative writing – with some new twists. (We’ll be announcing a major new project in the New Year – a significant add-on for readers and contributors alike.)

Meanwhile, enjoy the summer, thanks for your solidarity, and stay well!

‘Unerring muse that makes the casual perfect’: Robert Lowell’s compliment to his friend Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind as I read Helen Garner. She is another artist who reveres the casual for its power to disrupt and illuminate. Nothing is ever really casual for her, but rather becomes part of a perfection that she resists at the same time. The ordinary in these diaries – the daily, the diurnal, the stumbled-upon, the breathing in and out – is turned into something else through the writer’s extraordinary craft.

‘What I love on my desk is the notebooks I’ve typed up, their freshness, their un-public tone, their glancing quality and high sensuous awareness,’ she confesses. ‘Nothing “serious” I write can ever match these ...’ The title, One Day I’ll Remember This, goes further to indicate the purpose in this private writing. Set down in raw form, it will serve the work of memory in some other future, as experience lived back then is reshaped in retrospect. What we read here as intensely present and in flux is already past and over. It’s a jolt when the diaries record a first fax. What a world away it all was. Time loops back, ties itself in knots, then slips through.

In her essay On Beverley Farmer, Josephine Rowe recounts a 2013 visit to Melbourne’s Heide Museum of Modern Art to see an exhibition of Louise Bourgeois’s Late Works. Among the drawings and sculptures on display was The Waiting Hours, described by Rowe as ‘a series of twelve small oceanscapes’ each of which shifts fluidly, a ‘darkening whorl around the small white axis of a singular source of light shrunk to a pinhole … at once a pivot point and a vanishing point’. The effect on Rowe of this encounter was ‘one of powerful undercurrent. I felt not much and then, abruptly, disconsolate. Swept out of depth. A plunge, a plummet: the inrush towards that oceanic sense of recognition experienced most commonly in dreams, but sometimes spilling over into waking life – encounters in art and music, in nature or, more rarely, in meeting (as though hello, again).’

Skip ahead to 2018. Rowe is in Rome, making a temporary home for herself at the Australia Council’s BR Whiting Studio. Beverley Farmer has been here before her, although Rowe hasn’t yet read her work. In the studio’s library, among ‘the curios and books left by past fellows’, she comes across Farmer’s 2005 collection of essays, The Bone House. ‘I became enthralled by the acuity of her attention,’ Rowe writes. ‘And I went out into the Eternal City each day feeling equipped with some indefinable new apparatus for appreciating the hereto overlooked or undervalued.’ Then, in April 2018, Farmer died, and Rowe – so inured to solitude, so in need of it – experienced a ‘surreal plunge of loneliness, loss’.