In one of the indelible memories of my life, I take in a room drained of sunlight – late afternoon, early evening – and the blotchy font of a 1990s Picador paperback edition of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient. I feel a slipping sentence: ‘In the kitchen she doesn’t pause but goes through it and climbs the stairs which are in darkness and then continues along the long hall, at the end of which is a wedge of light from an open door.’ The words move and there is movement and ‘a buckle of noise’ and ‘the first drops of rain’.

With the benefit of two decades of reading, I see the way Michael Ondaatje carefully withholds punctuation, and I note the cinematographic effect in both the sequence of clauses and the present tense, and how the cadence of ‘long’ and ‘along’ lies against ‘which’ and ‘wedge’.

I wrote this before opening Suppose a Sentence by Irish-born essayist Brian Dillon. I was delighted to find, in the introduction, that he too ‘went chasing eclipses: those moments of reading when the light changes’. For twenty-five years, Dillon has been copying sentences into the back pages of his notebooks. Suppose a Sentence focuses on twenty-eight of these sentences with an accompanying essay on each.

Soldier. Draftsman. Massacre survivor. Prisoner of war. Veteran. Son. Brother. Uncle. RSL Secretary. Indigenous Man. Activist. Black Scotsman. Celebrity. These are just some of the words used to describe Douglas Grant, an individual who embodied the contradictions of assimilation and the challenges facing Aboriginal people in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Famous during his lifetime, Grant’s reputation has faded since the 1950s but in recent years has attracted the attention of Indigenous Australians and historians of World War I.

In the aftermath of horrendous acts of lethal violence, such as the murder by Brenton Tarrant of fifty-one people in two Christchurch mosques in 2019, and other vicious acts of torture and sadistic cruelty, it is not at all uncommon for public commentators to invoke the language of evil – that there is evil in our midst. Perhaps the most well-known contemporary example of this was George W. Bush’s description of the 9/11 attacks as despicable evil acts that demonstrated the worst of human nature. 

The implication in such commentaries is that these actions go beyond ordinary wrongdoing, being what Hannah Arendt in 1951 referred to as forms of ‘radical evil’ (although Arendt later retreated from this view). On this line of reasoning, acts of radical evil are qualitatively distinct from the merely morally wrong: they are not simply more extreme versions of bad agency. 

On the morning of 6 January 2021, President Donald Trump addressed a crowd of his supporters outside the White House for more than an hour. The president urged protesters who had already begun gathering along the National Mall to go to the Capitol Building where both houses of Congress were about to start the process of certifying the results of the electoral college, formalising Joe Biden’s victory in the November 2020 election. The election had been stolen, Trump told them. It was time for them to take it back and march on Congress: ‘You will never take back our country with weakness,’ said the president.

In the previous days, right-wing Facebook groups and other social media forums were flooded with users announcing their intention to overturn Biden’s victory, pictures of semi-automatic weapons often accompanying their posts. Prior to Trump’s taking the stage, the president’s son Donald Trump Jr had stirred up the crowd by attacking and threatening the Congressional Republicans who refused to break the law and reject the outcome of the election. Included among the various ‘traitors’ to Trump and his dwindling inner circle was Vice President Mike Pence. The previous day, Pence had told Trump directly that he would not use his role in the Senate to appoint new electors and wrote in a formal letter to the president that, ‘as a student of history who loves the constitution’, he simply could not overturn the election. Of course, any such intervention would likely be rejected by the Supreme Court anyway and might wreck Pence’s presidential chances in 2024, should Trump and his wing of the Republican Party disintegrate.

The voice on the telephone, not brusque or curt, came straight to the point. ‘How long are you in London for? And would you be free for dinner this Friday?’

Spoiler and shame-faced name-dropping alert: it was Alfred Brendel, sometime in 1983. I had first met him in Auckland in 1971, after a rehearsal of Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, a work he performed more than fifty times in public before his retirement in 2008. I managed to catch what I think was his final one, in Edinburgh, and I must bashfully confess that I found it as impenetrable as I did when I first heard it.

January 5

We have lost our Hermia, so Sally-Anne Russell comes round to sing for me. She has fished out Benjamin Britten’s Charm of Lullabies and her score of The Rape of Lucretia. We work on both, but particularly on the aria in which poor Lucretia threads together gorgeous lilies into a funeral wreath, her response to what the boastful, ghastly Tarquinius has done to her. Sally-Anne has not sung the opera for twenty-five years, but it sounds as though she’s fresh from recording it, so inside the role is she, so beautiful and rich her voice. I phone Neil Armfield. We have found our Hermia.

January 26

I leave Melbourne, police reportedly having promised to crush peaceful protests against the rather strange day we choose to celebrate in Australia each year. Bastille Day it ain’t. In the foyer of my Adelaide apartment I run into Fiona Campbell (Hippolyta), Rachelle Durkin (Tytania), James Clayton (Demetrius), and Mark Coles Smith (Puck) – the Perth contingent, all insouciantly outdoorsy and sun-kissed, hopelessly out of touch with eastern-state mask etiquette and months-long cabin fever. We’re all delighted to be going into a rehearsal room tomorrow to make some pretty great art.

January 27

Everyone arrives, blinking into the light like cult followers rescued from an underground bunker. In a sense we are, yet this erudite art form we practise could not seem more urgent just now. I commend the American countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen for a) obtaining a flight here; b) quarantining for two weeks (the hotel chef was French, he tells me); c) undergoing multiple Covid tests. But he’s having none of it: ‘This is the only place in the world just now where opera is being performed.’ He melts the room with ‘I know a bank’, the great aria that lets us imagine for only a few minutes that Purcell and Shakespeare were contemporaries and collaborators. If only.

In the evening, Neil gives the children’s chorus a masterclass summary of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (quite different from the one I heard provided by an Oxford student to her friend in preparation for a performance of King Lear in Stratford: ‘It’s all about families’). At the end of this consummate exegesis – many plates spun and caught – one tiny fairy puts up his hand. ‘How are we supposed to remember all that?’

Britten loved his fairies spiky and mischievous, not at all like those mushroom-dancing figures in Richard Dadd’s asylum paintings. He’d be happy with this lot, who have been prepared so beautifully. They interact with Mark Coles Smith’s Puck with a sort of manic joy.

January 28

I suggest cutting half of ‘I know a bank’ to facilitate staging. Aryeh has the grace to laugh – though in a slightly menacing way, it should be said.

January 29

We have lost our Flute. The brilliant Kanen Breen developed an ear infection while doing his mandatory two weeks in isolation, which is just so unfair. We all feel his withdrawal from the production most bitterly, but we swing into action to seek his replacement. Neil rings Louis Hurley, a terrific young tenor whom I conducted in Albert Herring two years ago. After the evening rehearsal, we all Zoom him for an audition, joking about the British producer who, auditioning an American actor, didn’t realise his mic was unmuted when he said, ‘These poor people live in these tiny apartments.’ (The actor had the best response: ‘I know it’s a shitty apartment. That’s why [you should] give me this job so I can get a better one.’) Louis seems to live in a castle. He sings well and looks the part: an innocent yokel who needs to shine in the candlelit play in the third act.

This is how we do our business during Covid.

January 30

Tytania, Oberon, Puck, and all the fairies meet for the first time. Aryeh tells me that a similar encounter when he was a kid gave him the singing and acting bug. They are all gorgeous together, and the fight that opens the opera positively crackles.

The inspiring Denni Sayers (choreographer and associate director), who grew up in Suffolk, is convinced that a fanfare-motif in Act Two was lifted from ITV’s signature tune, which Britten must have known. I let her down gently, telling her that the BBC gifted Britten his first television set in 1971 so that he could watch the broadcast of Owen Wingrave, his much-underrated opera.

We discuss surnames, how kids at the school taught by one of our fabulous répétiteurs, Jamie Cock, are instructed to call him Jamie; how Aryeh, as a Cohen, is a member of the traditional family of priests and therefore must not visit a cemetery since this impurity would bar him from entering the temple in Jerusalem should it reappear; and how Miss Reynolds, who instructed the young Denni in geography and choir, would advise the girls: ‘Open your legs and let the sound out.’

February 2

We have now lost Tytania, Demetrius, Hippolyta, and Puck. Western Australia has shut down, the border closed, and these four had the misfortune to fly out of Perth on January 26, so must remain in isolation in Adelaide. Mary Vallentine and Elaine Chia, the opera’s producer and the Adelaide Festival’s CEO respectively, work the phones, trying to wring exemptions from government officials. I text Mary the names of potential replacements, should it come to that. Stuff like this doesn’t even throw us anymore, the only positive legacy I can think from 2020.

February 3

Tytania, Demetrius, Hippolyta, and Puck are back. Sort of. They have been awarded exemptions, but only for rehearsals. They must spend the rest of their time in hotel isolation for another week.

We work on the fiendishly difficult fight scene with the lovers, full of split-second asides and cat-burglar entries. I discuss our collision policy: if you crash and burn, I will look after other traffic around the highway entries and exits and will say very nice things about you afterwards at the memorial service. But in the moment, I’ll let you crash into the catch fence at quite some speed.

The fight instructor directs the fight choreography, assisted by a series of Russian-doll helpmeets, who are replaced one by one until we are close to the weight and height of Hermia, who does the final routine, singing on her back and side and front.

February 4

We have lost our Lysander. To basketball. A broken toe. My (and his) agent rings early to tell me. Anything that comes at us now looks nothing more than a noisy mosquito: annoying but hardly life-threatening. I tell the rest of the cast we’re on Perth rules: come to rehearsal, go back to your apartment, don’t talk to anyone or play basketball.

During the break, we talk about Lady Gaga’s version of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ at Joe Biden’s inauguration, which was powerful and appeared in a great arrangement, though it couldn’t reach the heights of Whitney Houston’s version at the Super Bowl in 1991, which remains the SSB benchmark. The anthem is so difficult to sing. (Try it! An American once laughed at my attempt at the opening night of Chicago’s Lyric Opera season.)

‘Whitney lip-synced it,’ Rachelle adds sadly, wiping her nose in grief. That would make sense: the performance is perfect, and Houston almost giggles her way through the incredible highs and lows thrown at her, a metaphor for her life.

February 8

I record a podcast for ABR, talking about Britten, Dream, Musica Viva. Peter Rose tells me the best story ever about Mary Vallentine, who was very close to Stuart Challender and indeed instrumental in his appointment as chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. When he died so tragically and so young, a friend of Mary’s reached out to her and asked if there was anything she could do to help. ‘Can you conduct?’ was Mary’s response.

We have all the Act Three singers with us for the first time, Teddy Tahu Rhodes having emerged from self-isolation in ebullient spirits.

February 10

The cast and pianist Michael surprises me with the most virtuosic and brilliant ‘Happy Birthday’; this one clearly hasn’t stayed under the radar.

Mary tells me South Australia has closed its border with Victoria because of new infections. It’s so strange how easy it would be to find oneself on the wrong side of a border at any time, which is after all a historical condition. Yet musicians have travelled since they could, a wondrous migratory pattern sped up by the railways in the nineteenth century and jet flights in the twentieth. Now we look to our own backyard, which is getting smaller by the month.

We spend the last hour or so on Bottom’s aria, the great moment when he awakens from his slumbers, once again a mere mechanical, no ass, and recounts what he thinks was a merely a fantastical dream, one full of long donkey ears and a large donkey penis, before stumbling off in amazement to tell the rest of his merry gang of the wondrous images that took root in his head over night. Denni says we have now staged every bit of the opera. Now comes the finesse. Oh, and a half-week full of orchestral readings.

February 11

We haven’t quite done the whole opera, it turns out, so we work on the magical moment before Bottom awakens, Tytania having left the lovely nest created from the long trains of her dress, the kids having left the rats’ nests they fall into at the end of the second act. Rachelle sings that great line, ‘Music ho’, and Aryeh wonders out loud who the ho is. Definitely me, at least in this score.

February 12

We rehearse the scene in which Oberon cruelly punishes Puck for his missteps and mistakes and poor Puck ends up whimpering on the floor. With fantastic actor timing, he cracks the room by muttering ‘fucking arsehole’, which Oberon deserves. Neil and I later discuss the Elizabethan usage of the word ‘arsehole’.

Rachelle puts on her crazy-tight rehearsal dress once more, which always reminds me of that great line in that Melissa McCarthy film Spy: ‘You look like a slutty dolphin trainer.’

The changeling boy comes into the room in costume, with rings on his fingers and bells on his toes, and a fantastic bejewelled and befeathered turban. It is our final studio rehearsal with the fairies; the next time I see them is for runs and then the sitz probe at the Adelaide Symphony’s rehearsal studio. Man, we’ve crammed a lot into just over two weeks!

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

Klara is an Artificial Friend (AF), an android companion for spoiled tweens. She’s not the newest model, but what Klara lacks in top-of-the-line joint mobility and showy acrobatics, she makes up for in observational nous; she’s an uncommonly gifted reader of faces and bodies, a finely calibrated empathy machine. Every feeling Klara decodes becomes part of her neural circuitry. The more she sees, the more she’s able to feel.

But to a solar-powered robot, no feeling can compete with pure unadulterated sunlight, that re-energising ultraviolet rush. As Klara poses in a shop window, waiting to be chosen, a mythology is born. The Sun – capital S – becomes holy to her, and she spends her showroom days collecting evidence of His divine and benevolent workings. Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro’s eighth novel, is a parable of idolatry and other lonely human(oid) bargains. When we build a consciousness in our own image, we should not be surprised, Ishiguro argues, when that invented mind invents its own God.

Viet Thanh Nguyen arrived in the United States in 1975 as a four-year-old Vietnamese refugee. He is now a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, a professor of English and of American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, and a contributing writer to The New York Times who has devoted much of his working life to Vietnamese-American history. A related topic that he writes and speaks about is ‘narrative scarcity’, the fact that if you belong to a minority group, none of the stories you read is about you or the importance of those groups being given the opportunity to tell their own stories in their own words. That is just what Nguyen has done in his first novel, The Sympathizer, winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and its sequel, The Committed. Though many American novelists have written about the Vietnam War, he is one of the first Vietnamese-American writers to do so.

The Sympathizer is about an unnamed narrator, a communist and revolutionary who infiltrates the South Vietnamese Army as a spy for the North Vietnamese. In 1975, he is evacuated to the United States with his anti-communist friend Bon. He continues undercover, reporting back to his North Vietnamese handler, Man, on the South Vietnamese Army. When he and Bon return to Vietnam, they are captured and sent to a re-education camp, where they are tortured. When they are released, they escape by boat to Indonesia where they spend two years in a refugee camp.

The Committed opens in 1982, when the narrator and Bon have just arrived as refugees in France. They start working for the Boss, a Vietnamese gangster who operates his drug empire via an Asian restaurant run by a group of thugs. The narrator is introduced to a circle of leftist intellectuals who let slip that Said, their hashish supplier, is missing. He decides to go into business with the Boss selling them hashish – and thus the former communist becomes a capitalist. After he is attacked by Said’s associates, further violence ensues as a vicious turf war erupts between the two groups.

Viet Thanh Nguyen (Matteo Nardone/Pacific Press/Alamy Live News)

The Committed, like The Sympathizer, is part-thriller, part-spy novel, and part novel of (huge) ideas. Its dominant theme is the evils of colonialism – practised in Vietnam first by the French and then the Americans. In the narrator’s words, ‘Colonisation is pedophilia. The paternal country rapes and molests its unfortunate pupils, all in the holy and hypocritical name of the civilizing mission.’ The narrator is the product of such a union, between a French priest (who has never acknowledged him) and a Vietnamese teenager. When he starts selling drugs in Paris, he sees it as revenge – he is polluting France, his father’s home country, just as France polluted Vietnam with Western civilisation.

Nguyen draws on the work of anti-colonial writers such as Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon to flesh out his critique of colonialism. When the narrator studies Césaire’s rewriting of The Tempest, he notes that Caliban is ‘strong enough to say what every colonized person has wanted to say to his colonizer … I HATE YOU.’ Closely allied to colonialism is its ‘dancing partner’, racism. Nguyen draws attention to the racism inherent in the English language – why are Asian people called ‘inscrutable’, but never white people? Why is a comedy ‘black’, not white? He also notes the racism inherent in the condescension shown towards Asian refugees. ‘I would not be the obsequious Asiatic object of pity, the pathetic or polite little refugee,’ the narrator states at one point.

The Committed explores many other political issues as well. Set against a seedy backdrop of drug lords, brothels, and violence, it is a damning indictment of capitalism. Having exposed the cruelties of communism in The Sympathizer, Nguyen forces us to consider whether there is any cause worth believing in and fighting for. He is a realist on the subject of revolutions – ‘Disappointments, abandonments, betrayals – unfortunately all typical of revolutions.’ The narrator (a torture survivor) wryly observes, ‘those who believe in revolution are those who haven’t lived through one yet’.

A recurring theme is duality. The narrator was born in North Vietnam but raised in the south; he is half-French and half-Vietnamese, and he describes himself as a ‘man of two faces’ and ‘a man of two minds’ who is ‘able to see any issue from both sides’. He struggles with this duality, especially when trying to decide if he is a revolutionary or a reactionary, asking himself, ‘to what was I committed?’

While The Committed is an impressive, highly intellectual book, it is not without its faults. The descriptions of violence are at times excessive. There is an issue as to whether it can stand alone, or whether it can only be read as a sequel; although Nguyen does his best to fill in the gaps for those who have not read The Sympathizer, he is only partly successful. Finally, although the writing is glorious, some sections of the book would have benefited from a more judicious edit.

These minor quibbles notwithstanding, The Committed is an outstanding novel, an excoriating take-down of colonialism that is destined to join the ranks of the great anti-colonial literature. And despite the weightiness of its subject matter, it does not take itself too seriously – it can be bitingly funny. Just one example – ‘Whitewashing the blood-soaked profits of colonisation was the only kind of laundering white men did with their own hands.’

There is a celebrated moment in Jonathan Glazer’s 2004 film Birth when Nicole Kidman enters a theatre late and sits down to watch a performance of Wagner’s Die Walküre. The camera remains on her perturbed features for two whole minutes. This image kept recurring as I read Claire Thomas’s new novel, The Performance. In it, three women sit and watch a production of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days (1961), alone in their thoughts, their whirring minds only occasionally distracted by the actions on stage. If for nothing else, Thomas must be congratulated on the boldness of her conceit, on her ability to make dynamic a situation of complete stasis.

At the heart of Trevor Shearston’s latest novel, The Beach Caves, is the act of digging. The protagonist, Annette Cooley, is a young archaeology student, thrilled by the allure of her Honours supervisor’s most recent find: the stone remains of an Aboriginal village on the New South Wales south coast that could rewrite the pre-European history of Australia. Intriguing additional sites are soon discovered, but before long the air of excitement is replaced by one of suspicion, jealousy, and dread when a member of the dig team disappears.

Told in two parts – the first set in the early 1970s, the second in the mid-2000s – The Beach Caves examines the impact that young relationships and instinctive reactions can have on the course of a life.

Set in colonial Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, Karen Wyld’s new novel Where the Fruit Falls examines the depths of Black matriarchal fortitude over four generations. Across the continent, Black resistance simmers. First Nations people navigate continued genocide and displacement, with families torn apart by the state. Where the Fruit Falls focuses on the residual effects and implications of such realities, though it presents a quieter narrative: one of apple trees, wise Aunties, guiding grandmothers, and settlers both malicious and kind-hearted.

Where the Fruit Falls joins contemporary works such as Tony Birch’s The White Girl (2019), where intricacies of the author’s historical focus shine through. Like Birch, Wyld focuses on a time where constitutional recognition was said to have drastically changed First Nations people’s lives. These authors tell a different story though, offering narratives that are arguably more truthful regarding the extent of varying forms of oppression experienced by First Nations people – influenced by where you landed and how safe it was to put roots down and exist.

Determining connections between books sent as a review bundle is not mandatory, but there is an irresistible tendency to find some common theme. In the case of these three novels, the theme of women’s pain, and hidden pain at that, does not need to be teased out – it leaps out. Since it is unlikely that three different authors would have colluded, the prevalence of this is worth deeper reflection, especially considering recent titles such as Kylie Maslen’s essays on illness, Show Me Where It Hurts, or Kate Middleton’s extraordinary memoir essay ‘The Dolorimeter’, placed second in the 2020 Calibre Prize.

Other hitherto silenced female narratives, such as those of domestic or sexual abuse, are now being heard. But while authors like Hilary Mantel have already provided insight into the hidden suffering of the female body – and in particular that most insidious and invisible condition, endometriosis – the narratives of female health and physical and mental suffering are still only emerging. Even ordinary health: when the recent Young Australian of the Year Award was given to a menstrual health advocate, Isobel Marshall, public discussions were a reminder that this normal bodily function of fifty per cent of the world population is still largely taboo.

A series of beautifully controlled fictional voices and an exquisite sense of literary craft contribute to the dark magnificence of Chloe Wilson’s début collection of short stories, Hold Your Fire. This volume explores the strange and sometimes surprising abject horror that characterises the quotidian and the ordinary. The stories both examine and revel in the classically Kristevan abject realities of the body’s expulsions and the disgust that is often characteristic of social marginality. For example, the ‘poo phantom’ writes a ‘message in shit on the walls’; tampons wrapped in toilet paper are described as ‘bodies that needed to be shrouded for burial’; a character feels a ‘quiver down to the bowels, the rush that is equal parts excitement and dread’; another tries ‘to pass a kidney stone’; and two sisters try an ‘Expulsion Cure’, where the doctor asks how much they expel: ‘And how often? And what is the colour? The texture? … When you eat something – poppy seeds, say, or the skin on a plum – how long does it take to reappear?’

The book also encompasses a sense that to live well is to move beyond the monotony of much twenty-first century urban existence. For example, the extraordinary piece of flash fiction that opens the book, ‘The Leopard Next Door’, has a style reminiscent of James Tate or Russell Edson and follows the narrator’s neighbour who buys a ‘juvenile leopard’ before seemingly disappearing. Similarly, in ‘Arm’s Length’, when the narrator is told to, ‘Keep that boy at arm’s length ... she took a saw and severed her arm at the shoulder.’ One of the most engaging characteristics of the collection is the feisty, sometimes ferocious sense of humour. The points of view of these works tend to critique and ironise what they present while simultaneously maintaining a strangely beguiling affection for their subject matter. This is evident from the witty opening hook of each story, including: ‘the first part of Maya to wash up on shore was a foot’; ‘It always seemed tragic to me that Ian was so much shorter than his daughters’ and the magnificent line: ‘While waiting for his faecal transplant, my husband wasn’t as fun as he used to be.’

Wilson is known to many readers as an award-winning poet. Here, she brings her well-honed understanding of poetic metaphor and dramatic monologue to bear on her prose writing. The title story was originally published in Granta, and touches on, or introduces, many of the preoccupations and themes in the collection. In this narrative, while the protagonist ‘designs weapons that could cause massive, instant carnage’, her boss tells her never to be ashamed. He expresses a haunting conviction: ‘Everyone holds their fire. It might come down to the last minute, the last second even. But no-one really wants to press the button.’ The narrator contemplates this observation as she attends meetings at her son’s school and gives her husband a ‘DIY faecal transplant’.

These stories present many windows onto the grotesque with an emphasis on olfactory disgust. This is most evident when a character in ‘The One You’ve Been Waiting For’ vomits in minute and technicolour detail, and when the narrator ‘takes a deep breath right in the place where the smell was the worst. A private thing, like a prayer or a confession.’ The reader is often confronted by elements of repulsiveness in the stories, only to find their unsettling nature is powerfully connected to the bodily connections everyone has with the world. In this sense, we may understand Wilson’s grotesquerie to be a way of examining and critiquing the commonplace, while simultaneously revealing it to be connected to ways of thinking and apprehending the realities we know. In being so grounded in the everyday, the abject realities presented in these stories ask the reader to explore whether there is a certain abiding toxicity and surrealism in the daily lives and rituals that people use to shore up their existences. In this light, Hold Your Fire may be seen as a sustained series of nimble explorations in re-presenting and critiquing many twenty-first-century assumptions. Wilson casts reality into sometimes whimsical, sometimes parodic new light, while probing at the underbelly of the daily rounds, conversations, and self-projections that characterise accepted social norms. She questions what people strive to be; how this may be judged and delves into the basis of the assumptions by which many people live. Many of Wilson’s characters are transgressive and eccentric, prioritising ambiguity and liminality. They often choose to embrace their instincts and urges, liberating them from the constrictions of societal order and creating a sense of exhilarating uncanniness.

Wilson’s characters are often unreliable and unlikeable, but it is a testament to her writerly skill that all are nevertheless somehow appealing and compelling. The reader finds herself wanting these characters to succeed in their ambitions, however weird or perverse. There is a sense that even the strangest of Wilson’s fictional people are not so unlike the people we all know, even in confronting moments when, for example, the narrator in ‘Powerful Owl’ wheels a baby onto the road and leaves it there for a minute before announcing, ‘Please understand that everyone left alone with a small child has wondered what they might get away with.’

Chloe Wilson’s Hold Your Fire combines dazzling storytelling with impeccable prose. In this remarkable collection, Wilson reveals herself to be a postmodern fabulist, fascinated by the weirdness one may encounter day to day and by the extraordinariness of apparently ordinary situations. With razor-sharp wit, she demonstrates that ‘People do all sorts of strange things’.

In July 1894, a year after New Zealand women had gained the national right to vote (the first in the world to do so), their spokesperson Kate Sheppard prepared to address a suffrage rally in London, alongside Sir John Hall, the parliamentary sponsor of the New Zealand suffrage campaign. They took the stage in the vast Queen’s Hall at Westminster to report on their historic fourteen-year struggle. In an age when oratorical skill defined public authority, Sheppard was, unfortunately, not a forceful speaker. She was evidently ill at ease on the platform and her voice ‘scarcely audible’, as historian James Keating reports in Distant Sisters, his meticulous account of Australasian women’s international activism in support of women’s suffrage between 1880 and 1914.

Sheppard’s début on the metropolitan stage was not the success her compatriots had hoped for. Somewhat embarrassed, she retreated to the English provinces. The following year, she tried public speaking in London again, but, as Keating writes, ‘her second appearance before a large audience was more disastrous than her first’. On this second occasion, she actually ‘broke down from nervousness’ and only regained her composure with the help of a male assistant. Shortly afterwards, Sheppard opted to return to work quietly for the related causes of women’s rights and temperance in New Zealand.

In August 1823, Quamina Gladstone and his son Jack led an uprising in the British sugar colony of Demerara where they were held as slaves. The men believed that the British parliament had voted to abolish slavery and that this was being concealed from them. The colonists quashed the rebellion with firepower, torture, and execution. Something had happened in Britain’s parliament: the Anti-Slavery Society’s Thomas Buxton had given a speech, proposing gradual reform. Yet it would take another decade, and much political upheaval, for the British parliament to abolish slavery. Michael Taylor’s book is set during these ten long years.

‘Gladstone’ was a recognisable name in British politics at the time. John Gladstone, father of William Gladstone (prime minister four times between 1868 and 1894), was a parliamentary member from 1818 and managed four election campaigns for Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister George Canning. John Gladstone was also one of Britain’s largest slaveowners and chairman of the Liverpool West Indian Association. It was from within his plantation, Success, that Quamina and Jack launched their uprising, and it was his surname that they carried. Today it is common throughout the Caribbean.

In 2019, the Spanish government exhumed the remains of General Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen memorial to relocate them, bringing the controversial dictator alive in national debate in a way he hadn’t been for decades. Franco’s wasn’t the only body to resurface in Spain. Of the 170,000 non-combatants – innocent people – murdered during the Spanish Civil War of 1936–38, 115,000 were killed behind nationalist lines, then buried under decades of silence. In recent years, however, the people of Spain have begun unearthing mass graves, ordering DNA tests in search of lost relatives, and hotly arguing the historical and cultural narratives of Franco’s dictatorship.

As with the Civil War, the colonial invasion of Australia was an attempt to forge a new society. Cultural historian and hispanist Luke Stegemann frames this likewise as a civil war: a prolonged, murderous battle for control over the land and its resources. As in Spain, this long under-acknowledged violence is at the centre of intense public debate, with the controversy over the ABC’s recent use of the term Invasion Day just one of the latest developments.

Because the United States was born in a revolution against Great Britain, the relationship between them, as the child decisively supplanted the parent, has remained key to world history for more than two centuries. Indeed, the ‘unspecialing’ of this relationship in recent decades, argues Ian Buruma, represents a psychological condition that British officials refuse to self-diagnose. He calls this the ‘Churchill complex’ – the persistent delusion, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, that US power requires British facilitation and approval. Winston Churchill began it; his successors have yet to escape it.

Buruma opens the book with his childhood encounter with Churchill in 1958, at the Scala Theatre in London, where Peter Pan was being performed. ‘The memory is a kind of audiovisual blur: a pale face in the spotlight, a pudgy hand emerging from a fur muff to make the V sign, and everyone around me, including my very patriotic British grandparents, breaking into wild applause.’ Like the prime ministers he describes, Buruma has been in thrall to him ever since. A young Dutch boy, Buruma saw that the ‘language of freedom was English’. Unfortunately, as his book documents, this attitude led recurrent British statesmen to believe the English were instrumental in what the author now describes as the ‘Anglo-American myth that I grew up with’. Even prime ministers not yet born were subject to its delusions.

Lerone Bennett Jr, bestselling author of Black history, ruffled feathers with a 1968 article in the glossy monthly magazine Ebony. ‘Was Abe Lincoln a White Supremacist?’ the piece’s title asked provocatively. The title of Bennett’s later book on the topic proclaimed that Lincoln was Forced into Glory. Mainstream media either ignored or denigrated Bennett’s work, but his insights about Lincoln’s racism paved the way for a host of historical works that have revised our understanding of who should be credited with ending slavery in the United States.

That credit lies, beyond a doubt, with enslaved people and, secondarily, with their free Black and white allies. The latter included the estimable John Brown (1800–59) and, eventually, Abraham Lincoln (1809–65) – the ‘zealot’ and ‘emancipator’, respectively, of H.W. Brands’s title. Enslaved Africans and their descendants refused to believe they were inferior to white people. They knew there was nothing natural in their being enslaved, no matter what contemporary science and theology claimed. Their resistance to ideas about racial difference, which sought to justify enslaving a cheap labour force, was fundamental to ending Atlantic slavery.

Comparison, when it comes to historical study, is rarely devoid of ambition. The aim is to identify patterns that are global in their significance and to overcome the tendency to see a unique trajectory for particular places or nations. Yet such work frequently founders when it becomes apparent that the author’s knowledge of alternative cases is thin or that the claim to comparison is made to hide a focus that is in fact quite narrow. Not so in this co-authored book, which builds upon its three authors’ areas of expertise – the Anglosphere (Martin Crotty), Asia (Neil J. Diamant), and Europe (Mark Edele) – to deliver a compelling argument about veteran benefits in the twentieth century.

The authors faced an extraordinary challenge. Their mission was to account for why states awarded, or denied, benefits to veterans who participated in the twentieth century’s major conflicts, with a focus on the two world wars. The task was one of scale and discipline: Crotty and Edele are historians, Diamant is a political scientist. The major case studies concentrate on Australia, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, with reference throughout to developments in the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan.

Edward Gibbon’s great narrative of the fall of Rome still troubles the imagination. We see parallels between Rome’s decline and the eclipse of Western powers today, our fears intensified by a global pandemic, a failure of internationalism, and an increasingly fragmented public sphere. Our values and territories, we are told, are under threat, principally from China and the Islamic world, agents of disruption in our Western order. For Gibbon, the fall of Rome heralded a ‘tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery’ without even the intrigue of ‘memorable crimes’. Our future, then, is to be both bleak and boring.

International education, we are told, is Australia’s third-largest export industry; in 2019 it was valued at more than $32 billion annually. But it is now also one of the hardest hit by the pandemic. The publication of Gwilym Croucher and James Waghorne’s history of Australia’s universities, one of the principal institutional drivers and beneficiaries of that industry, is thus timely, even if it went to press before Covid-19 was detected. Government policymakers and higher-education institutions alike will need to respond to the present crisis not only with fresh thinking but also with a clear understanding of how the university sector got itself into such a vulnerable position in the first place.

This book addresses one fundamental question: is nationalism a transformative force in politics? Nationalism is usually seen as an offshoot of ‘identity politics’, which in turn is the product of long-term social change, notably access to higher education. Such an analysis can be found in David Goodhart’s The Road to Somewhere: The new tribes shaping British politics (2017) and Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford’s Brexitland: Identity, diversity and the reshaping of British politics (2020). There is of course merit to such positions, but it is unusual for any research-based analysis to see nationalism as the driver of political change: it is the symptom rather than the cause.

Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones’s monograph takes a different tack: their research convinces them that it is a politicised Englishness that is transforming British politics. Brexit was the most profound result of this transformation. Whatever caused Brexit and whatever its consequences may be, one thing is for certain: Brexit was a misnomer. Henderson and Wyn Jones mapped voting intentions onto survey respondents’ self-described identities and found that, in England, the more British you saw yourself, the more likely you were to vote to remain in the European Union. In other words, Brexit was not a moment of British nationalism.

In 2005, Murray Bail published Notebooks: 1970–2003. ‘With some corrections’, the contents were transcriptions of entries Bail made in notebooks during that period. Now, in 2021, dozens of these entries – observations, quotations, reflections, scenes – recur in his new book, He. It’s to be assumed that this book, too, is a series of carefully selected transcriptions from the same, and later, notebooks.

Notebooks was a book to be dipped into. One-liners, wise saws, brief vignettes – however diverting each one might be – can’t be gorged on, particularly when there’s no obvious pattern or sequence to them. He., for all its use of exactly the same notebook material, and in spite of even less of a chronological order, is different. Bail’s first book was Contemporary Portraits (1975). He. is another portrait. The full stop in the title is important, even if the book didn’t come with publicity material announcing it as Bail’s ‘last’ and ‘final’ work. Notebooks was redolent of ongoing, forward life, full of possible titles and plot-starters for books. He. has none of these; it’s a backwards look.

He. is a record of observing. We’re treated to an extensive view from 11 Galway Grove, Adelaide, in the 1940s to Elizabeth Bay, Sydney, in the year of Covid. Observation, rather than interaction, is His approach to the world. Yet what He is actually after is ‘experiences’, ones that might give him precision and wisdom. This might suggest involvement and interaction, but the experiences recorded are self-chosen and uninvolving, though often worthy. He inspects a leper colony in India and becomes a regular visitor to AIDS patients in the Sacred Heart hospice in Darlinghurst. ‘He looked for experiences away from what was common, if not actual experiences then from reading.’ Which sounds a bit tame. The ideal experience seems to be that of one of his literary heroes. ‘Stendhal behaved well during the retreat in winter from Moscow, which left him as a man of experience.’ Understandably, ‘extreme experiences, usually violent’ are best for producing recurring images.

Murray Bail (Text Publishing)

The point of experiences seems to be to provide precise, rich memories to inform the life of both man and artist. Such a concern, however, engenders its own worry. ‘This particular life: was he allowing it to shape itself entirely, or should he provide experiences to bolster an imagined shape?’ Doubts about the shape of life or art recur. He commends a quartet of three writers and one painter because ‘over many years they had worked hard at their lives. To give shape to their thoughts and express them into what would remain theirs alone.’ The logical sequence in this summary sounds artificial and unclear, but then the whole ‘experience’ program seems, well, programmatic and naïve.

Observation is all, not least observation of He himself. Miniature memories, the offspring of observation, tumble out, frequently in the same paragraph, with no connection discernible to the reader. Three consecutive sentences, for example, run, ‘The instinct for a man is to discuss his wife as little as possible. Bougainvillea on the ochre walls in Mexico. Three pigeons kept shifting in formation above his street in Adelaide.’ Sometimes acute, sometimes banal, the images and memories break out in a disorderly jostle. But they are the memories He keeps. In a way He. is a riff on Robert Browning’s ‘Memorabilia’ – ‘Well, I forget the rest.’ And even what is remembered will soon be gone; the book regularly annotates characters once met or seen, as no more.

One remark about observation is a clue to the major tenor of the book. ‘For him views presented by nature were more clearly remembered than the behaviour between people, the one being stationary and having an apparent simplicity.’ ‘Don’t move’ is the call. He observes but doesn’t interact. This is most spectacularly the case in his notes on women. Here are some single, complete paragraph entries.

She who kept talking throughout in a perfunctory sort of way.

Facing him while removing her clothes.

How women lying in the bath called him in, where he could not help but appreciate their bodies.

The slight tufts of hair from her armpits, residue from the Seventies, for him the promise of unconventionality.

When He writes ‘as he grew older women became more interesting’, the trouble is that we never see one being interesting. Not that He is unkind. Overt references to his two former wives, for example, are not bitchy.

His first wife took secateurs and twisted and cut the ring off her finger, the second tugged and dug at her gold ring and threw it into the bin. The startling effect of the symbolism broken.

But He just watches and then deconstructs the drama of the moment. The book has no conversations, only limited reflections on his marriages, nothing but sexual fragments of other women, no mention of any male friendships. He is detached. The book’s last two sentences sum up the style and the final effect of the portrait. ‘In whitish light, blurry when figures appear, virtually no colour. At least this is how he can remember the years, a more or less motionless series of times.’

There is so much that is pleasurable in He. – the aperçus, the aphorisms, the vignettes of time and place – but I find it unsettling and problematic. It’s the old issue of the distinction between the author and the apparent version of himself he might create in his work. But is there any such distinction here? He. is a selection from the notebooks and journals of Murray Bail. And on record is a remark Bail made to a lover in 1989: ‘These notebooks I’m publishing. This dreadful person who wrote them: severe, pompous, humourless.’ What is Bail doing? Is He. really intended as A Portrait of the Artist as a Cold Cad, albeit an intelligent, cultivated one, moving in intellectual and artistic circles, with power over women, and sometimes critically self-reflective? Is this ‘final’ book intended as a debasing self-exposure? After all, he also said in 1989 that reading the notebooks made him want to change – ‘be kinder, more open, less selfish, less severe’. Is He. a cautionary tale? Or has the author somehow forgotten what he thought thirty-two years ago of the writer of the notebooks? Does he realise just how much of himself he is betraying? His casting a cool eye on women undressing or in the bath or post-coital, no fuller scene or personalities given, is even more squirm-territory now than it was in 1989. I miss the conversations, the interludes, with the ‘interesting’ women. Maybe I’m missing more?

Jacqueline Kent is a Sydney-based writer of biography and other non-fiction. Her memoir Beyond Words: A year with Kenneth Cook (UQP, 2019) was shortlisted for the 2020 National Biography Award. Her most recent book is Vida: A woman for our time (Penguin, 2020). She first wrote for ABR in 1995.

What makes a fine critic?

Somebody who understands and explains clearly and concisely what is in the book being reviewed, what the author is attempting to do and how successfully, giving praise and criticism where due – not the book the critic thinks the author should have written, and didn’t. Someone whose evaluation is fair and dispassionate, possibly illuminated by the critic’s own knowledge. Someone who can do all this without scoring points, showing off, making jokes at the writer’s expense, or defending his or her own academic or other territory. Amazing there are so many, really.

Late January 2021 brought a moment of anger and anguish for many liberal Australians. Margaret Court, the erstwhile tennis champion turned Pentecostal Christian preacher, had just received Australia’s top honour. Court may have won more grand slam tournaments than any other player, but her record cannot erase a history of derogatory comments about gay and transgender Australians. And yet, I wonder if most Australians didn’t just mentally check out of this latest chapter in a thirty-year kulturkampf over sexual identity. This is a country increasingly willing to live and let live – but not obsess – over such matters.

Less than two years earlier, another top athlete had brought the debate over faith and free speech to its apogee. Most of us seemed to accept that we should agree to disagree.

Poor old Sydney. If it isn’t being described as crass and culturally superficial, it’s being condemned for allowing developers to obliterate whatever natural beauty it ever had. Is it doomed, will it survive, and if so, what kind of city is it likely to be?

Elizabeth Farrelly is here to provide answers to these and other questions. An architect, former City of Sydney Councillor, and tertiary teacher, she is probably most widely known as the Sydney Morning Herald ’s writer on civic architecture. Her new book echoes much of her recent journalism: Sydney is being murdered. Its fabric, she asserts, is being destroyed by self-interested and inadequate governance, corruption, haste, and lack of proper planning.

The Climate Cure should have been on every Australian federal politician’s Christmas list. As Tim Flannery explains, our federal politicians, stymied by Coalition climate change denialists and the fossil fuel lobby, have failed the climate challenge of the past two decades, so that we have ‘sleepwalked deep into the world that exists just seconds before the climate clock strikes a catastrophic midnight’. But ‘at the last moment, between megafires and Covid-19, governments are at last getting serious about the business of governance’.

Perhaps no other Australian is better equipped than Tim Flannery to define the immense challenges of the climate crisis or to propose a cure that might work. Flannery combines scientific understanding with political nous forged over many years of engagement in national and international climate politics. Just as important, his prose is crystal clear about the nature and extent of both catastrophe and cure. I have not read a better explanation of the difference between ‘clean’ and ‘dirty’ hydrogen energy (dirty hydrogen is generated using fossil fuels and thus contributes to the problem it is meant to solve) or of the different options for ‘drawdown’ (atmospheric CO₂ removal).

When fourteen-year-old Dara McAnulty penned a diary entry on 7 August 2018, his grief poured out in stanzas. He felt an acute need for ‘birdsong, abundant fluttering / humming, no more poison, destruction. / Growing for growth, it has to end.’ One month later, he took these words to the People’s Walk for Wildlife in London: ‘I call it a poem but I am not sure it is. I feel it would be good to say aloud, to a crowd … the words spilled out.’ For the event, McAnulty added a title: Anthropocene.

The Anthropocene was conceived in 2000 as a geological epoch, an age of humans, a new time period acknowledging the ‘rupture’ that humanity has unleashed on the planet. It is a key concept for environmental sciences, for climate science, for Earth Systems Science, for economics and societies. It affects all humanity and all life on which we depend. In The Anthropocene, Julia Adeney Thomas, Mark Williams, and Jan Zalasiewicz introduce the concept, relating many of the key stories that define it in geological deep time and as an urgent, contemporary concern. The three authors work with one voice: they recognise the importance of multidisciplinary thinking.

It’s an achievement to write about the climate crisis – and the resulting increase in Australian firestorms – without having people turn away to avoid their mounting ecological unease. Despite experiencing the Black Saturday bushfires of 2009 directly, I too am guilty of looking away. It’s easier that way. Danielle Celermajer, however, excels at both holding our attention and holding us to account, balancing the horror and hope of not-so-natural disasters, specifically extreme Australian bushfires, in her new book of narrative non-fiction, Summertime.

Summertime’s understated prose documents Celermajer’s own account of the 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires (the most extensive in Australian history) and the colourless aftermath. Many will remember the thick Betadine-coloured smoke; the viral footage of a single koala, charred and wailing; the burnt feathers washed up on Mallacoota’s ashy beaches.

Judith Butler is acutely aware of the extent to which violence is an accepted part of human affairs. ‘The case for nonviolence encounters skeptical responses from across the political spectrum,’ Butler writes in the opening sentence of their latest book, The Force of Nonviolence. It is not so much that most people unconditionally advocate violence. Rather, it is considered an inexorable feature of life, a necessary measure to resist evils and prevent atrocities against populations and the marginalised. Nevertheless, Butler pushes back against that orthodoxy, declaring that we must ‘think beyond what are treated as the realistic limits of the possible’. It is a bold yet hardly indefensible claim. Indeed, the bleak alternative would be to doom the future of humanity to the internecine violence recently demonstrated in Washington, Ethiopia’s war in the Tigray region, and Australia’s inhumane asylum-seeker detention policy. It is, perhaps, a duty of writers and philosophers to free themselves from the mire of the status quo and to pave a way forward that ushers in a better, more equal world.

Margaret Atwood began as a poet and transformed herself into a factory, producing work of great energy and range. Since her first collection, Double Persephone, appeared in 1961, she has published more than sixty books of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. She is a librettist, a maker of eBooks, graphic novels, and television scripts, and, with the serialisations of The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace, a beloved global phenomenon. Much of this work builds on genre fiction bones: the gothic romance, the dystopian novel, and speculative fiction. But now it has become difficult to see her poetry as anything more than an adjunct to her prose, attracting attention less because of its merits as poetry than because it is an Atwood production.

Her subjects have ranged from Canadian identity to revisionist mythologies and a laudable feminism (though she has sometimes resisted such labels). From the start, she has written in a spirit of scientific enquiry, pursuing ideas as much as emotions. But what of the other qualities poetry offers – form, music, or that uncanny attempt to express the inexpressible? Too often, Atwood’s poetry seems unmemorable and relatively shallow.

Yet unlike other poets, Atwood has millions of readers due to the success of her prose and its various adaptations. Her new collection of poems, Dearly, leads with a letter to said readers, then a poem clearly aimed at posterity: ‘These are the late poems.’ The definite article assumes she will be discussed in the afterlife – and she will be, though not primarily for her poetry, which has become a sort of repository for her restless productivity.

Margret Atwood at New Scientist Live, 2017 (John Gaffen/Alamy)

Her early work included such incisive minimalism as the following:

you fit into me
like a hook into an eye

a fish hook
an open eye

There are poems with subjects that seem hers alone, like ‘Half-Hanged Mary’, and arch retakes on the psychology of myth like ‘Siren Song,’ but across more than sixty years her verse has hardly evolved beyond the serviceable technique we could see at the start. A younger Canadian poet, Jason Guriel, has objected to the prominence of Atwood’s poetry (in the Autumn/Winter 2020 issue of the Scottish magazine The Dark Horse), calling some of her lines ‘so flat they’re basically roadkill’. More than a generational squabble, Guriel’s essay critiques a poetry thinned to its concepts. It hasn’t risked much in its subjects or offered particularly memorable lines. The plain style of Atwood’s new book resembles that of a thousand other poets writing now. Her most eloquent passages don’t really go anywhere and too often close with mild self-approval. The politics of her ‘Princess Clothing’ is as facile as the fashions it critiques:

Fur is an issue too:

her own and some animal’s.
Once the world was nearly stripped of feathers,
all in the cause of headgear.

The opinions are valid, but such prosaic language would be boring in any circumstances. Another poem improvises ‘On a First Line by Yeats’, so I looked up the original, a poem called ‘Hound Voice’, in which Yeats evokes a mysterious, violent, and primordial world in strong stanzas. Atwood’s poem, torn between environmental concern and a lament for lost meaning – ‘Everything once had a soul’ – never touches emotions deeper than a newspaper column’s. What if everything does still have a soul and she’s too unwilling to search for it?

Atwood’s short novel The Penelopiad (2005) offered a feminist revision of Homer’s Odyssey, but once one has made such a critique, where does that leave all the other resonances of myth? In Dearly, she tries again with poems like ‘Cassandra Considers Declining the Gift’: ‘What if I didn’t want all that – / what he prophesied I could do / while coming to no good / and making my name forever?’ Notice how bland and functional the lines are. A more compelling use of mythology can be found in The Scattered Papers of Penelope (2009) by the late Katerina Anghelaki-Rooke, who writes from inside the artist’s wound, probing its psychic origins. Atwood comes closer to such intimations in ‘Cicadas’, a poem about music and being:

This is it, time is short, death is near, but first,
first, first, first
in the hot sun, searing all day long,
in a month that has no name:
this annoying noise of love. This maddening racket.
This – admit it – song.

Nothing in Dearly is unintelligent, nothing objectionable politically or otherwise, but too little is vulnerable to experience or open to articulate emotion. Too little of it produces anything deeper than a nod of recognition and mild approval. Only when she turns to actual loss in elegies for Graham Gibson, her partner of many years, does Atwood touch a nerve:

The red light changes. Darkness clots:

it’s him all right,
not even late, his cane foot
hayfoot, straw,
slow march. It’s once
it’s once upon
a time, it’s cane
as tic, as tock.

Here, emotion resists speech, creating a tension she too rarely achieves in other poems. We can also find a touching understatement in her ‘Invisible Man’: ‘You’ll be here but not here, / a muscle memory, like hanging a hat / on a hook that’s not there any longer.’

Other good poems include ‘One Day’ and ‘Dearly’, which finds its grief in a word. The collection will be approved because it contains the work of an important writer, but readers who really care about poetry, who want charged language moving into another dimension, lines they cannot forget or durations of sound and sense that shiver their timbers, will find too little in this book that really compels attention. These are symptoms of conformity more than poems, unchallenging additions to the so-called poetry of our time.

Stephen Edgar, over the past two decades or so, has earned himself an assured place in contemporary Australian poetry (even in English-language poetry more generally) as its pre-eminent and most consistent formalist. His seemingly effortless poems appear in substantial overseas journals, reminding readers that rhyme and traditional metre have definitely not outlived their usefulness.

Edgar’s The Strangest Place: New and selected poems is an ideal opportunity to examine what this reputation is founded on. Its poems were written across some forty-four years, though it is only in the past twenty or so that we recognise clearly the poet we know today. In the earlier collections (Queueing for the Mudd Club in 1985, and Ancient Music in 1988), the poems already show Edgar’s formal command but are perhaps less ambitious technically than his more recent ones. The use of blank verse is never less than assured, and the rhymes, while less complex and original than the ones Edgar uses currently, are still more than fit for purpose. His long poem ‘Dr Rogers’ Report’, for instance, is a highly engaging exercise in a nine-line variant of Byron’s ottava rima.

Dislocations is a product of the Irish diaspora. Its editor is a Western Australian who claims his Irish heritage from Carlow and Wicklow; its subject was brought up on the border between counties Armagh and Tyrone in Northern Ireland, and emigrated to the United States in 1987. There is, then, a biographical precedent for John Kinsella’s sharp characterisation of Paul Muldoon’s work as ‘a liminal poetry that lives both sides of any given border … in an ongoing state of visitation with its roots in linguistic and cultural reassurance’.

While Dislocations is advanced tentatively as a ‘selected innovative poems’ (a dicey editorial enterprise for an oeuvre like Muldoon’s, which, in Kinsella’s words, is ‘always experimental, even when the work is more readily accessible’), the book’s rationale becomes clearest when considered in light of Kinsella’s critical writings on international regionalism and ‘polysituatedness’. These writings think of our relation to place as not just a function of ‘where we are, but [also] where we have been and where we can perceive ourselves as having been, or imagine ourselves being’. The idea of ‘home’ thus becomes a palimpsest of past and present habitations, real and ideal modes of belonging. For Kinsella, it is Muldoon’s verse vagabondage through the thorny linguistic, historical, and mythological borderlands of his two homes that best captures this ‘multi-layered and cumulative picture of place’. Not just ‘the prince of the quotidian’, Kinsella’s Muldoon is the laureate of polysituatedness.

Commissioning deities:                      Aphrodite, Adonis, Gaia, Venus

Topic:                                                  Beauty

Scope:                                                 Internal audit

Auditor name:                                   Φαιδρα (Phaedra)

Auditor registration number:         ͵δφξζ

Audit site:                                          Addison St, Elwood, Victoria, Australia

                                                           Avenue measures είκοσι δύο schoinions

Date:                                                 ζʹ moon waning,͵βκ

Notes:                                                Local numbering and sacred references

Key findings:

School sing-song wisps, plane trees frame powerline peril,
ribs smeared salmon and taupe to the apse. Driveways
bloom yards – uncombed jasmine at 93, roses clipped to fists,
fringed birch, spots of cumquat. Leonine sentries kiss camellias
pink, snow, arterial red; flocks of magnolia plead mercy and chant
novenas for poplar bones. Cruciform canal, swollen with sticks
and storms; hunched sentries tear bread, toddlers lob offerings –
spoonbill, heron, teal. Crossed by Shelley Street, freesias waft
to the uncoupled. Waterside, a baker dances in her driveway,
paints palings – I still love you, comical fish. Pickets woo
violets, homes claim names … Santa Fe, the tulip fretwork
of Ashfel, Rappelle’s sasanqua. A handful of banana palms
play, tawny eyes spy tabernacled pigeons; trouser legs watch
first-act baths, tea steams a bolted bench. Rainbow gates
at 13, swings on the verge – tyre and rope, plank and nylon –
Hebe’s brood insided. Baskets freckled purple at 7, terracotta
warms silver-eye and bird-of-paradise agree with soft winds.
Lorikeets hide in velvet-gloved gum, father-of-the-bride magpies
strut and ivy pretends to flee, one tendril at a time. Blossom
clots branches, a southerly tickles pregnant jacaranda,
nasturtiums unperturbed. At 58, a citrus circus teases would-be
thieves and cooks; eternally bogged, a wheelbarrow brims parsley
and rosemary twists for Priapos. Limbs buttress nests, tail feathers
pause … a lyre unsheathed, choristers perch on Addison’s bridge.

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This is one of the times you won’t remember.
You are lying side by side with your father

as the radio murmurs, a ghost wind shifting
from magnet to magnet that does not

announce its presence. You know you will
never equal the weight of disappointments

that make up his experience of this world
he has gifted you, who are as empty

as radio patter engraving the details
of every current moment, relieved now

the gravity has drained from his hands
for this pause of remission. Early spring

brings bindweed to the untrimmed lawn,
the witnessed suffering of a child’s finger

suddenly dislocated against a misread ball,
the shock of its wrenched angle portending

howling. Seared together within that instant,
you share the endurance race to Emergency

and the hospital report: ‘Father very anxious’.
How callow he is since he stopped learning,

wincing from this memory of his present self.
Opportunity narrows with each anniversary:

the books not opened, pages scarred with
unaccountable marks of temper – astray

in serpentine corridors searching for an exit
that does not exist, always circling back to

the one room you cannot bear to enter.
A gate you have come to know too well

opens, then you leave. This is one
of the times you will not remember.

In a recent interview, Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli confessed that the book he would most like to be remembered for is The Order of Time (2018), a work in which time, as it is commonly understood, ‘melts [like a snowflake] between your fingers and vanishes’. The Order of Time, Rovelli admits, only pretends to be about physics. Ultimately, it’s a book about the meaning of life and the complexity of being human.

Rovelli has never shied away from acknowledging, even revelling in, the philosophical questions and unanswered mysteries that continue to emerge at the cutting edge of science. As he writes in There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness, ‘a science that closes its ears to philosophy fades into superficiality; a philosophy that pays no attention to the scientific knowledge of its time is obtuse and sterile’.

Celestial Tapestry is a gem, indeed, a trove of gems: lavishly illustrated cameos from the science and history of art and mathematics, woven into a narrative about pattern and symmetry. We humans have an innate appreciation of symmetry, judging from 5,000 years of art, architecture, mathematics, and mythical and religious symbolism. After all, symmetry is all around us – in the shapes of our bodies, snowflakes, and seashells, and in the fractal-like branching of twigs and blood vessels. In its abstract, mathematical form, symmetry even underlies our modern theories of fundamental physics.

Nicholas Mee is the perfect guide for a journey into this patterned realm. A physicist and popular science writer with his own educational software company, he is interested in the links between science and art. These latter skills are well displayed in many of the illustrations in Celestial Tapestry, but Mee offers an additional treat: an insight into the secret of computer-generated imagery (CGI). For these gorgeous pictures are just arrays of numbers to a computer – and numbers, along with the strange geometries of curves and shapes, are central to this story.

Andrew West

Dear Editor,

I agree with Andrew West that Nick Bryant has written a very interesting book (ABR, January–February 2020), but I am puzzled by West’s dichotomy between Joe Biden and Kamala Harris along the lines of social democratic versus social media left. Indeed, I wonder whether there isn’t some lazy assumptions at work in his claiming that Harris as vice president ‘will demand attention to group rights based on ethnicity, sex, sexuality and gender’. When she was running for the Democratic nomination, Harris clashed with Biden around her support for Medicare for all, i.e. exactly the sort of social democratic program that West favours. There is little evidence that they differ in supporting moves for greater equality around the issues that West seems to believe are confined to social media activists.

Dennis Altman, Clifton Hill, Vic.

Sara M. Saleh

Dear Editor,

Sara M. Saleh’s poem ‘A Poetics of Fo(u)rgetting’ is evocative and powerfully political. Hers is an important voice in Australian and international dialogue.

Karen Robinson (online comment)

Blind to shortcomings

Dear Editor,

On reading the online version of Samuel Watt’s article ‘This Is America’, it occurs to me that perhaps the strangest aspect of human intelligence is that people are blind to their intellectual shortcomings and indeed quite satisfied with their quota. What has changed is that people who have little comprehension of the tenuous nature of democracy have been mobilised by social media and that most inimitable capacity for caprice of the human being, so accurately captured in Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from the Underground.

Patrick Hockey (online comment)

Blatant erasure

Dear Editor,

Lara Stevens’s article blatantly erases the real issue that people had with Casey Jenkins (ABR, December 2020): specifically that donor-conceived people (DCP) don’t want our conception used as entertainment when our circumstances have caused many of us real and lasting trauma. They can do what they want with their body, but DCP trauma should not be on display like that.

Cassandra (online comment)

Advance Australia Now

Dear Editor,

During the pandemic, many of us have watches a deluge of television as we isolate and lockdown. Several things have become apparent, the main one being the dearth of Australian content on the many streaming services. These are somehow exempt from the Australian quota. This needs to change.

Due to the global pandemic, Australia is now in the box seat in terms of film and television production. Our services and country can excel like never before. We’re all aware of the success of the local film The Dry, starring Eric Bana, plus plenty of local television in 2021, apart from the welter of sport, which is a given. It is a case of Advance Australia now.

Thanks to everyone who is contributing to arts commentary at a time when the arts have been crippled by Covid-19.

Jenny Esots, Willunga, SA

Viva Verdi!

Dear Editor,

Thank you for publishing Michael Halliwell’s terrific and informative review of Opera Australia’s new production of Ernani in Sydney. I can but hope that we will eventually see this production in Melbourne. Early Verdi is a rare treat.

Barney Zwartz (online comment)

Cadetship position

Australian Book Review (ABR) is seeking an energetic and committed Editorial Cadet. The Cadetship (supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas) is a full-time twelve-month position, starting in April 2021. The total package is worth $45k to $50K pro rata (plus superannuation).

The Cadet will report to the Editor, Peter Rose, and will work in the ABR office in Southbank, Melbourne. Key responsibilities will be editing and proofreading, digital publishing, and writing for the magazine. There is much scope for making a diverse contribution to the magazine. Applicants must have proficiency in digital technology. Some experience in the publishing/magazine sector will be an advantage. Applicants must demonstrate familiarity with ABR (its content, style, and ethos). We also look for candidates with a broad general knowledge of literature and the arts. The successful candidate must have completed a university degree or diploma in at least one of these disciplines: Arts, Journalism, Creative Writing, Publishing & Editing.

Applications close at 5pm on Monday, March 22. 

For information on how to apply, click here.

Porter Prize

Sara M. Saleh was named the overall winner of the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize for 'separate episode' at an online ceremony on January 27. As reported, the four other shortlisted poets were Danielle Blau (USA), Y.S. Lee (Canada), Jazz Money (NSW), and Raisa Tolchinsky (USA). The shortlisted poems were selected from 1,329 entries from thirty-three countries, and they appeared in the January–February issue.

In their report, the judges – Lachlan Brown, John Hawke, A. Frances Johnson, and John Kinsella – had this to say about Sara’s winning poem: ‘“The Poetics of Fo(u)rgetting” tells the story of a resettled Lebanese refugee family from a daughter’s point of view. The double shellshock of a family displaced by war is evoked with quiet pathos. But cultural observances mean one thing to the older generation and another to the next. These ruptures were sensitively observed across this lush, cinematic poem.’ The full judges’ report appears here.

On learning of her win, Sara M. Saleh commented: ‘I come from a community and history rich with art and culture; I am indebted to family and to teachers, to the artists and poets, to those who make space and elevate others. I may be the first Muslim and Arab Australian to win the Porter Prize, but this win is not mine alone. Thank you to everyone who sees us, really sees our poems – the 2021 shortlist is a testament to this. I hope we can keep building a movement where we are free to bring our whole selves.’

All five shortlisted poets read and introduce their poems on a recent episode of the ABR Podcast. In a separate episode you can listen to all the past winners of the Porter Prize, first awarded in 2005.

Writers’ Week

Right now, no one would envy festival programmers or impresarios, but Jo Dyer (director of Adelaide Writers’ Week) has put together a full and fascinating program for this great celebration of literature, which begins on February 27. Highlights include a series of panels and solos that can be streamed at home. Guests include Katharine Murphy, Laura Tingle, Sigrid Nunez, and Anne Applebaum.

There will be abundant sessions in the two tents at the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Gardens. Among the presenters are Don Watson, Durkhanai Ayubi, James Bradley, Jenny Hocking, Randa Abdel-Fattah – and two former PMs: Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull. Jacqueline Kent – our Critic of the Month – will deliver the Hazel Rowley Fellowship Address. Peter Rose will be in conversation with Robert Dessaix about his new book, The Time of Our Lives.

ABR Arts

ABR Arts is back in earnest! After such a difficult time for the arts sector, it’s heartening to be able to bring you so many reviews of theatre, opera, film, the visual arts and more. We publish all our arts reviews promptly online, and they remain open-access for about ten days. Then we bundle them up in the ABR Arts e-newsletter, which goes out every other Saturday.

We have much in store for arts lovers in March. Here are just a few highlights.

Michael Morley will review Neil Armfield’s production of Benjamin Britten’s opera A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a highlight of the Adelaide Festival. (Paul Kildea, the conductor, writes about the pandemically tense preparations for the opera in his ‘Letter from Adelaide’.)

Elsewhere in Adelaide, Ben Brooker will review several productions, including Christopher Hampton’s A German Life, a ninety-minute solo starring Robyn Nevin, and the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam’s production of Medea, directed by the prodigiously gifted Australian director Simon Stone, whose earlier production of Seneca’s Thyestes, from the 2018 Adelaide Festival, lives in the memory. (Brian McFarlane recently reviewed Stone’s new film, the subtle Edwardian The Dig.) In a first, Medea will be screened live from Europe at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Adelaide.)

In early February, just before the new lockdown, Melbourne Opera launched its new Ring Cycle with a superb production of Das Rheingold. Now we can look forward to Wagner’s great tetralogy in coming years. Meanwhile, there’s more opera in Sydney. Malcolm Gillies, the eminent Bartókian now returned to Australia, will review Opera Australia’s new production of Béla Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which opens in Sydney on March 1.

There are two strikingly different offerings at the National Gallery of Australia. Botticelli to Van Gogh: Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London spans 450 years and includes sixty paintings by artists such as Titian, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Velázquez, Goya, and Turner. Delayed last year because of Covid, this promises to be one of the richest assemblages of art ever brought to Australia. It comprises the largest group of works to travel outside the United Kingdom in the history of the National Gallery. Keren Hammerschlag is our reviewer. Then we have the celebrated Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell. Worlds of Colour (to be reviewed by Julie Ewington) will examine the final stage of Mitchell’s career with a selection of works on paper.

At the cinema, Felicity Chaplin will review several new releases at the 32nd Alliance Française French Film Festival.

Be sure to sign up for the arts newsletter here.

Jolley Prize

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize, which opened on January 20, is already attracting much interest. Once again it is worth a total of $12,500, of which the overall winner will receive $6,000.

The judges on this occasion are Melinda Harvey, Elizabeth Tan, and Gregory Day, winner of the first Jolley Prize. Entries are open to writers all around the world, writing in English, until midnight 3 May 2021.

Calibre galore

When the Calibre Essay Prize closed in January we had received 638 entries – 45 more than last year’s record field. Thanks to everyone who entered the Prize.

Judging is underway, and we look forward to publishing the two winning essays in coming months.

Liz Byrski’s introduction to Women of a Certain Rage is, among other things, a homage to second-wave feminism and a lament that feminism, ‘originally a radical countercultural movement’, has been ‘distorted into a tool of neoliberalism’. While there is no doubt that strains of feminism have been co-opted by neoliberalism to debilitating effect, this narrative – that feminism has become ineffectual since the 1970s – is one that erases many contemporary feminisms, as well as broader feminism-informed political movements and the work that they have done and continue to do.

Byrski’s sentiment here is echoed in Eva Cox’s essay, which ends the collection: ‘Feminists are no longer setting a change agenda, nor are they offering alternatives to the failing macho market paradigm that is undermining the citizenry’s trust in social democracy.’ This comment comes amid Cox’s insightful analysis of the fraught relationship between feminism and neoliberalism, but as a blanket statement it erases so much current work by feminists that it ends up being patently false. What about the tireless work of First Nations activists such as Goenpul academic, feminist, and author Aileen Moreton-Robinson, whose seminal Talkin’ Up To The White Woman (UQP, 2000) emphatically ‘sets a change agenda’ and offers alternatives not only to the ‘failing macho market paradigm’ but to white-centred feminism as well? What about the work of feminist disability activists such as Mali Hermans or Carly Findlay, or local grassroots activist groups such as FCAC’s Disabled QBIPOC Collective? What about the women whose writing is collected in Women of a Certain Rage?

Another question especially pertinent to this review: what about the activism of trans and non-binary feminists? One of the most notable shifts in mainstream feminist discourse since its second wave has been towards an interrogation and deconstruction of the gender binary and a focus on the socially constructed and performative nature of gender itself. One of the defining tensions of contemporary feminism is that between trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) – who subscribe to a transphobic strain of feminism rooted in the biological essentialism prominent in much second-wave feminist thought – and trans women, nonbinary folk, and their allies.

I am providing this context because I have been trying to work out how an essay collection about women and their rage can be released without any trans-related perspectives. In Burn It Down: Women writing about anger (Seal Press, 2019), another anthology about women’s rage – which includes, among many other brilliant essays, a piece on gendered ideas about knowledge and expertise by trans journalist Meredith Talusan and an essay on ‘transfeminine anger’ by Samantha Riedel – Lilly Dancyger, the book’s editor, asks: ‘If there is now space for cis white women’s anger, what about Black women? Trans women?’ While there are essays in Women of a Certain Rage that address ways in which race can intersect with gender, the very pertinent question of how rage might be relevant to the experiences of trans women is simply not asked. This exclusion is a missed opportunity, at best.

Nonetheless, the essays in this collection are frequently incisive, nuanced, and courageous. Claire G. Coleman’s ‘Write-ful Fury’ buzzes with energy, and offers a thoughtful reflection on the distinction between anger and hate. Rafeif Ismail’s ‘The Body Remembers: The Architecture of Pain’ is a lyrical and wide-ranging essay exploring mental health, misogynoir, and trauma. Nadine Browne unpacks the complex gender dynamics at play in the Born Again church in which she grew up, a childhood populated almost exclusively by women but marked and driven by absent men (absent fathers, absent husbands, absent male gods). Jay Martin reflects with anger and compassion on her difficult relationship with her deceased father. Anne Aly writes of the ‘placebo effect of patience’, and identifies rage as a mobilising force that ‘made me desire more than a life defined by others … by structures that were never meant for me’. Olivia Muscat rages against patronising responses to her blindness in ‘To Scream or Not To Scream’, and Carly Findlay writes of her anger on behalf of young children who share her disability, and the invasion of their privacy that she witnesses occurring on social media.

Many of these essays explore rage’s power, as well as its sources. A recurring theme is anger’s potential as a catalyst for action. ‘Most women,’ writes Victoria Midwinter Pitt, ‘are taught to contain our anger. Contain it. Not resolve it, or assuage it – contain it. Well, that which I contain is stored. We are walking fuel stocks.’ Reneé Pettitt-Schipp describes anger and sorrow as necessary guests: ‘These difficult friends are my barometer and my guide when all around me acts of violence and hate become normalised and mundane.’

But there is also room made for ambivalence about rage; several of the essays acknowledge its destructive capacity, its potential for misdirection and harm. ‘When first invited to contribute to this wonderful anthology,’ writes Carrie Cox, ‘I declined. The “rage” in the title made me flinch.’ And in a particularly confronting essay, ‘Regardless of Decorum: A Response to Seneca’s “Of Anger”’, Julienne van Loon describes moments when her rage sees her acting violently in front of her young son: ‘the demonstration of the anger was for his benefit. That’s an uncomfortable fact.’

The contributors to Women of a Certain Rage ask themselves and their readers challenging questions about their anger, where it comes from, and what it might have the power to achieve. The anthology would be stronger had the brief included a more rigorous and inclusive approach to gender, but its essays invite readers to engage with exciting thinking about rage’s place in politics, relationships, and throughout a life.

In the wake of the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, truth-telling has gained new currency in Australia. The Statement called for a ‘Makarrata Commission to supervise a process of agreement-making between governments and First Nations and truth-telling about our history’.  Although yet to be fleshed out in any detail, the renewed call for truth-telling has been greeted with enthusiasm by many First Nations peoples and their allies around the continent, who endorse the view that shining the bright light of truth into the darkest recesses of Australian history will contribute to a transformation in Indigenous–settler relations.

In his new book, Truth-telling, historian Henry Reynolds launches an early salvo in this renewed battle to lay bare the truth of Australia’s history. The book tells a disturbing tale of colonial excess and violence, of conduct that wilfully ignored imperial direction from Britain and even the law itself. Reynolds contends that the British ‘messed up the colonisation of Australia’ and provides an abundance of evidence to confirm that the sovereignty of the First Nations of this continent was recognised in international law at the time of invasion and early colonisation, and that the Colonial Office in London was deeply worried about the overreach of the colonists, both in their claims of sovereignty over the entire continent and in their murderous treatment of Indigenous peoples.

That this is an important work of revisionist historiography cannot be in doubt. Reynolds details the wilful desecration of First Nations’ sovereignty as the British turned their backs on a tradition of treaty-making with First Nations in North America and instead advanced a regime of brutality that can only be understood today as widespread warfare or wholesale murder. As you would expect of a historian of his standing, Reynolds is at his best when engaged in the forensic historical accounting of the legal and moral failings (to put it mildly) of the colonial project.

Uluru Statement from the Heart at the Yabun Festival Victoria Park, Camperdown in 2018 (Alamy/Richard Milnes)

Nevertheless, there is the occasional misstep or puzzling overreach. For example, in making the argument that there were numerous agreements between First Nations and settlers, Reynolds slides into euphemisms that diminish the violence such agreements involved. He suggests, for example, that ‘successful negotiations’ often included ‘the provision of young men’ as ‘valuable additions to any station’s workforce’, and that young women were included in such arrangements to ‘provide sexual comfort’. Such provisions would seem, in fact, to amount to slavery and rape, hardly likely to be willing contributions to a negotiated agreement among equals.

Yet the overarching concern I hold for this new focus on truth-telling is not on such points of interpretation, important as they may be, but on the efficacy of truth as a means of achieving longed-for change. As a nation, we are not without experience in this regard. The Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families, which produced the famous Bringing Them Home report in 1997, is widely regarded as an Australian form of truth commission. Rather than leading to any transformation in Indigenous–settler relations, however, the publication of the report unleashed the History Wars, a wholly unedifying period of public debate that, if nothing else, revealed the deep attachment many Australians, and almost all conservative Australians, retain for a more sanitised version of Australia as a peaceful settlement.

Reynolds was of course in the trenches of the History Wars, and this book revisits what he describes as the ‘great forgetting’ of Australia’s colonial history, which saw generations of Australians ‘nurtured with a national story that left out much of the most significant aspects of their colonial heritage’. He also details the deep resistance to accepting the truth of Australian history that much of his work has met. Yet he seems undeterred, and as he reports on the careful work undertaken by fellow historians, which significantly revises upwards the estimates of the total numbers of First Nations people killed (to a total of 61,000 to 62,000 overall), Reynolds remains convinced that this new truth will make an impact. Indeed, Reynolds argues that these new estimates should be ‘taken very seriously indeed’, and that: ‘Once they are as widely accepted as they should be, Australian history will never be the same again. It will no longer be possible to hide the bodies or skirt around the violence that was required to quell the resistance of the First Nations during the conquest of northern Australia.’

Certainly, the appeal of truth-telling is seductive. Since the Hawke government reneged on the commitment to a national treaty and gave us a decade of reconciliation in its place, Australia has been told that non-Indigenous people were ‘not ready’ to renegotiate the terms of the Indigenous–settler relationship. Education, and the telling of truths, were meant to be key to making non-Indigenous Australians ‘ready’ for more just and lawful relations. We seem reluctant to accept the profound failure of that project.

Perhaps it is too much to ask a historian to outline a vision for the future, and Reynolds seems to balk at such an imagining. The final lines of the book are telling in this regard. In place of a galvanising call for truth-telling that might reshape and restructure Indigenous–settler relations, we are left with the vague suggestion that First Nations may ‘increasingly look overseas in their search for both justice and respect’. Precisely what this means is not made clear – one assumes some form or recourse to the United Nations. What this displaces is the immediacy of the task at hand, as First Nations in Victoria, and likely soon also in the Northern Territory and Queensland, prepare themselves for treaty negotiations and continue to insist on truth-telling as a building block in the process.

I worry now that we are not worthy of whatever form of truth-telling lies ahead. The goals are, one suspects, quite different for Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Non-Indigenous people want the telling of truths to be an end in itself, a moment of engagement that can be moved past with the relief of knowing we have faced some ugly truth about ourselves. For First Nations, however, truth-telling will only be meaningful if it is tied to autonomy and self-determination, a voice in decisions that affect them, treaty negotiations, the return of land, and reparations for other historical losses. It will no doubt be traumatic and demanding emotional labour for First Nations to document their battles and losses, the massacres and horrors they have endured over the past 230-odd years. Tearing down statues and deleting the honours bestowed on those who perpetrated and condoned historical violence are certainly important, but if these are the only consequences of truth-telling, many will wonder what it was all for.

This is most definitely a book that Australians should read, and in the reading should be discomfited and called to reflect. Truth-telling is, as Reynolds suggests, ‘the ultimate gesture of respect’. But surely this gesture is only meaningful if it is accompanied by structural change. In an ideal world, this kind of truth-telling would be genuinely transformative; it would, as the back cover promises, ‘shake the foundations of the Australian legal system’. That I am sceptical of such an outcome should not be a deterrent to reading Truth-telling. Rather, it is a call to action, made in the hope that I will be proved wrong.