James Shapiro, in his brilliant book 1606: William Shakespeare and the year of Lear (2015), notes the general reluctance of the Elizabethan theatre to deal directly with the subject of plague, despite its pressing relevance to audiences of the day. He asks if this is ‘because it was bad for business to remind playgoers packed into theatres of the risks of transmitting disease or because a traumatised culture simply couldn’t deal with it?’ As our own theatre begins to emerge from pandemic, those twin concerns of risk and trauma loom large over the collective consciousness. Outbreaks that explode like spot fires around the country have sapped our confidence, and the gap between our desire to participate in live performance and our fear of community transmission still seems insurmountable.

It is an issue that national programmers of the performing arts have been wrestling with for an entire year. How can they make people safe – and make them feel safe – cheek by jowl in the enclosed spaces that are central to the theatregoing experience? Beyond this, what kind of works do they believe audiences will want to see? Is a post-Covid theatre one of distraction and sleight of hand, of shiny sets and marquee names, or are audiences hungry for challenging art that pushes their boundaries – something they’ve never experienced before? This is an environment where the normal parameters of risk have been utterly upended. The theatre has always been a grappling in the dark, but suddenly it feels like a great litmus test – a way out, a way forward.

President Joe Biden has given cause to hope that the position of Science Advisor to the President of the United States might be returned to a position of influence after years of neglect under Donald Trump’s presidency. Biden nominated Eric Lander of MIT and, for the first time, elevated the advisor’s role to a Cabinet-level position. Lander will also sit on the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), which coordinates science and technology policy across the various federal research and development agencies, and which is chaired by the president.

Trump took more than nineteen months to appoint a presidential science advisor (twice as long as any other president), and left the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) – an advisory group of private sector experts that has provided reports on scientific and technological developments to the president since 1990 – unappointed and unstaffed until 2019. He then stacked it with representatives of private industry, appointing only one academic scientist.

The hopes attached to the science advisor’s return to centrality in devising policy may be based on the unrealistic expectations of a position whose function as ‘house intellectual’ is more mythical than real. Lander assumes a role that has long been demoted, and heads a council that has become isolated and largely silenced on policy matters through successive presidencies.

The office, first occupied by James Killian, was established by President Dwight Eisenhower at the height of the Cold War. Despite the fact that the United States emerged from World War II as the only global military power, the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the Sputnik satellite forced it to question its relative technological advantage. Sputnik handed Killian the keys to the castle, involving him in matters of national importance and providing the technical guidance for significant policy decisions.

Oath of Office for Dr. James Killian, scientific and technical advisor to President Eisenhower, 15 November 1957 (MIT Museum)

But the glow of that dawn has faded. Donald Hornig, science advisor to Lyndon Johnson, was of the opinion that science is ‘not a thing’ in government. Like economics, it was pervasive but neither an object nor an instrument of policy. And most scientific advisors have been kept resolutely outside the circle of close presidential advisors. It is arguable that federal science policy is nothing more than the management of the science budget. Certainly, the office as re-established by Congress during Gerald Ford’s presidency (President Richard Nixon had terminated it in 1973) had that mandate, and management of the budget has been a key indicator of its success.

The contradiction in the science advisor’s role is that as science permeates every function of government, the advisor is rarely involved in wider White House decision-making. Science issues with technical content are dealt with by agencies – each one with its own science office and advisor, with their own specialisation – and only filter through to the higher levels of government through the budget process, where the science advisor discusses them with other senior White House staff. The nature of modern government, which has become increasingly reliant on an army of experts rather than on the polymath capabilities of any individual, suggests that the science advisor may no longer have a scientific role.

The science advisor’s role is shaped by political priorities, and science advice cannot step out of the political framework. John Marburger, advisor to George W. Bush, recalled that he began every day of his tenure in meetings with senior White House staff discussing current salient matters, and that science was never one of them. What is salient to the president and to senior White House staff is the success of the presidency and securing re-election. Nixon wanted (but did not succeed in getting) the Apollo 16 and 17 missions rescheduled, concerned that an accident would harm his chances of re-election in 1972. In a different vein, President Jimmy Carter ignored his science advisor’s opinion that a national target of twenty per cent of energy from renewable sources was unachievable, concluding that there were good political reasons for adopting the target, despite the technical evaluation.

In the ice bath of Washington politics, what some consider a war on science others accept as a continuation of politics by other means. The Clinton administration fired a Department of Energy official whose views on climate change differed inconveniently from those of Vice President Al Gore. Administrations on both sides have imposed strict controls over agency scientists’ relationships with the media and Congress. The Obama administration in particular aggressively pursued government employees responsible for leaking classified or confidential information.

The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) criticised the George W. Bush administration for, among other things, publishing false information alleging a connection between breast cancer and abortion, and for altering an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) report on climate change, linking each of these actions to the influence of conservative interest groups seeking industry deregulation. President Clinton’s science advisor John Gibbons dismissed accusations that the Bush administration conducted a systematic ‘war on science’, saying that its actions were more a matter of ‘good government’ than an abuse of science. That is, they fell arguably within the boundaries of legitimate political self-interest.

What sets the Trump administration apart from even the most extreme prior examples is the systematic rejection of scientific method, scientific findings, and the scientific framing of problems. In 2018, the EPA proposed the ‘Strengthening Transparency in Regulatory Science’ rule, requiring it to use only studies whose underlying data was publicly available. The rule mistook transparency for the basis of scientific rigour, and excluded data sets – including clinical trials providing confidentiality to participants by law – that formed the basis of existing and effective environmental regulations. The UCS called the rule ‘a trojan horse … that serve[d] no purpose other than to prevent the EPA from carrying out its mission of protecting public health and the environment’. Another eminent scientist described it as ‘a direct assault on epidemiology’. The rule was finalised on 6 January 2021, as an angry mob stormed the Capitol Building.

While other administrations have been selective in their use of scientific authority, the Trump administration sidelined expertise altogether. The Science Advisory Board, the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, and the Board of Scientific Counselors, on which the EPA relies for scientific advice, have not had their membership renewed, have removed researchers, or have terminated advisory panels undertaking reviews of standards for air pollutants. At the same time, the EPA’s Office of the Science Advisor was terminated by merger into the Office of Research and Development, a move that the UCS has likened to its burial.

The EPA also barred recipients of EPA grants from serving on its advisory committees, purportedly to avoid any appearance of compromise to its independence and objectivity. The effect of this ban was to prevent academic representation and to increase industry’s presence on committees that consequently received advice from representatives of industries with a financial interest in deregulation.

The Lancet has characterised the Trump administration’s actions and policies as demonstrating a ‘disdain for science’ and a promotion of corporate interests over public health and safety. Leaving the EPA in the hands of climate change deniers such as Administrator Scott Pruitt, whose career as attorney general for Oklahoma was funded by the fossil fuel industry, and withdrawing the United States from the Paris Agreement, have increased the likelihood of climate change-induced mortality. Covid-related deaths would have been avoided had Trump consulted and implemented evidence-based public health measures instead of taking a stubbornly and dangerously anti-scientific position, rejecting Covid-19 as a ‘hoax’, saying it would disappear on its own ‘like a miracle’, and promoting the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine for ‘use immediately’ as a treatment, despite there being no evidence of its effectiveness.

While marginalising science does not observe party-political lines, efforts to dismantle the regulatory state underpinned by good science are now a peculiarly conservative objective. The historical politicisation of science is reflected in changes to the relationship between conservative and scientific institutions. In the United States, science has been transformed from a vehicle for the pursuit of national interests – such as Eisenhower’s awakening to the launch of Sputnik and John Kennedy’s single-minded pursuit of the space program – to an ideological fault line, enlisted to support political alternatives. Political identity has become a matter of choosing between a scientific and a competing authority.

What complicates the picture is that while the decline in trust in the scientific community among political conservatives is well established, the attitude towards scientific research itself remains almost universally positive and stable. Pew Research shows that seventy-three per cent of liberal, conservative, and moderate Americans view science and technology as having a positive effect on society, while eighty-two per cent expect greater future benefits. This inconsistency is explained by a conservative ideology that preserves the value of science while dismissing scientific authority perceived as politically biased.

Science remains a crucial battlefield for waging and winning ideological contests. Conservatives have not so much abandoned the scientific field as raised standards against scientific authority. In fact, the federal budget for research and development under the Trump administration represented some of the highest historical spending on scientific enterprise, even after accounting for inflation. Scientifically literate conservatives are selective in their rejection of science, or scientists, that upset religious credos (e.g. creationism) and political positions (climate change), or that seek to explain morality on scientific grounds. The Trump administration did not conduct a war on science as such but on regulatory science – the synthesis and application of science to social problems by regulatory agencies.

Science advisor Lander comes to the role favoured by the potent combination of presidential collegiality and historical crisis. Killian had Sputnik and a superpower’s ideological slumber. Lander has a global pandemic and its disproportionate effect on the United States. Biden has signed executive orders to reverse many of the Trump and earlier administrations’ worst actions, directing agencies to base decisions on science and data and protecting agency scientists from political interference, and he has prioritised the pandemic and climate change as targets for scientific responses. Long-term structural change will require legislation, the reorientation of political settings, and a reinvention of the public meaning of science. History, however, shows that the affection of government for science is at its pleasure: Killian’s swearing-in ceremony was ‘unusually brief’ – the president (like others before and after him) had a golf game to attend.

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

The distinguished historian Mark McKenna has written an elegant and hungry book about the pull of Uluru, that place of mysterious significance to Australians, black and white. Of course, in recent times, the Uluru Statement from the Heart – the heart that had a stake driven through it the moment it was entrusted to the most powerful whites in Canberra – is a complicated domain of passion and polemic. McKenna’s work, pro-Aboriginal and postcolonial in spirit, is itself an addition to the long history of romancing Uluru, albeit with a focus on a hero who seems like an anti-hero by the time this book is done.

Into the Loneliness is the story of two Australian women, opposites in temperament, who eschewed the conventional roles expected of women of their eras, lived unconventional lives, and produced books that influenced the culture and imagination of twentieth-century Australia. The book focuses on their complicated friendship, and on Ernestine Hill’s role in assisting Daisy Bates to produce the manuscript that was published in 1938 as The Passing of the Aborigines, which became a bestseller in Australia and Britain. Hill, a successful and popular journalist, organised the anthropological material and ghost-wrote much of the book, for which Bates privately expressed her gratitude, while not acknowledging it publicly.

What kinds of stories are possible now about a mission community at the height of the assimilation era? How might scholars narrate the lives of religious women who ran an institution for Indigenous children?

‘If you want peace, prepare for war,’ Vegetius wrote in a fourth-century CE Roman military manual. From the classical world to the twenty-first-century Sino-American cold war, Margaret MacMillan’s book is broad in its sweep. Judging by the content, one might gain the impression that war is a purely European invention, but that would be erroneous; it is only because Europeans spent 2,400 years carefully archiving their literary, artistic, and technological endeavours in ‘the art of war’ that so much survives – except the victims. The soldiers and civilians are long gone, their names largely forgotten; what lives on is the representation of war in text, the visual arts, cinema, and oral history.

Every country has fought wars. Even the Swiss, traditionally neutral, ‘were the terror of Europe’ – for those who could afford them. Hitler wondered aloud about invading Switzerland, its vaults laden with gold, but thought better of an assault on a country surrounded by mountain peaks, where the national sport was sharp-shooting.

Is there a profession on Earth more mythologised than journalism? It’s hard to think of one. All that talk about the principles of the Fourth Estate, of keeping the powerful in check and guarding the public interest. In the days of well-funded journalism, university graduates were ushered into weekly shorthand training and could not advance further until their hand flew across the page at an unlikely 140 words per minute. Distinct from other forms of employment, the newspaper ‘profession’ (or is it a trade?) developed a weird and delightful lexicon around its daily production: page layouts were ‘furniture’, sub-editors were taught to avoid ungainly paragraph breaks known as ‘widows’ and ‘orphans’, while copy that was spaced out too sparsely was deemed to be ‘windy’. Meanwhile, many journalists, myself included, were seduced by the clubbish and contrarian quality of the profession, with offices resembling pool halls after 10 pm, rather than formal workspaces. There were certainly no key performance indicators to abide by, let alone an annual performance review.

David Kemp, formerly professor of politics at Monash University and minister in the Howard government, has a fairly simple thesis about Australian politics in the years between the mid-1920s and the mid-1960s. Put crudely, Australians were offered a choice between socialism and liberalism.

The Australian Labor Party offered them socialism. Kemp doesn’t much like it. It is one of the remarkable features of A Liberal State, that in more than five hundred pages of packed type, the author struggles to find a single idea or policy pursued by the Labor Party worthy of praise. The gymnastics involved in this effort are sometimes remarkable. To take just one example, the casual reader might imagine that it was a Liberal government that initiated Australia’s massive postwar immigration program. John Curtin and Ben Chifley, Kemp concedes, weren’t bad blokes, but they were surrounded by deluded ideologues and class warriors who wanted to nationalise everything.

Facing the ‘global refugee crisis’, politicians in Europe and Australia claim they are protecting their countries from the arrival of untold multitudes. Yet the ‘crisis’ is not global but highly specific. In 2019, seventy-six per cent of refugees came from just three countries (Congo, Myanmar, and Ukraine), while eighty-six per cent of refugees are hosted in a handful of countries in what is known as the Global South (especially Turkey, Jordan, Columbia, and Lebanon). Despite the significant contribution of Germany to hosting refugees, only ten per cent of the global refugee population live in Europe, comprising 0.6 per cent of the continent’s total population. There are 2,600,000 refugees in Europe today, compared with 11,000,000 at the end of World War II. The European Union’s challenges can scarcely be said to be at ‘crisis’ levels.

Subtitled ‘Encounters with love, death and faith’, Sarah Krasnostein’s The Believer takes on big themes. In this work of creative non-fiction that combines memoir, journalism, and philosophical inquiry, Krasnostein details her meetings with people whose beliefs she finds unfathomable but whom she is driven to understand. Her own guiding faith on this journey is that ‘we are united in the emotions that drive us into the beliefs that separate us’.

Across the Anglosphere, academic freedom is in crisis. That, at least, is the conclusion one draws from reading conservative newspapers and listening to right-wing politicians. Boris Johnson’s government, concerned about ‘unacceptable silencing and censoring on campuses’, recently announced plans to appoint a ‘free speech champion’ for British universities. In 2019, Donald Trump signed an executive order to protect free speech on campus, describing it as a ‘historic action to defend American students and American values that have been under siege’. In February 2021, the Australian government amended higher education legislation to redefine academic freedom, amid shrill calls from the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) about the ‘free speech crisis at Australia’s universities’.

Lucy Delap, Reader in Modern British and Gender History at the University of Cambridge, is a consummate historian and not one to privilege her own experience. Indeed, one of her chief aims in her innovative new global history of ‘feminisms’ – the plural is important, no matter how inelegant – is to bring to the fore feminists and other activists for women’s rights who are less well known, but hardly less significant, than the usual suspects. In this aim, and from the very first page, Delap succeeds admirably. Feminisms: A global history opens with an ‘incendiary letter’ published in 1886 in a local newspaper in the British-ruled Gold Coast (now Ghana), written by an anonymous author on behalf of ‘We Ladies of Africa’. At once a protest against the sexual violence of colonial incursion, and an assertion of cultural power and defiance, the letter also flags to a present-day audience that this history will not be the standard White Feminist narrative – and hooray for that.

The most difficult thing for white, straight, able-bodied, middle-class, cis women to accept seems to be that feminism was designed for them. But the reality is that from a suffrage movement that forced Black marchers to walk at the rear to the ‘girlboss’ CEOs who bully their poorly paid underlings, the cause known as ‘feminism’ has long been dominated by the aspirations of an élite group of women. 

I have been made by what was done, by what gets done, what I have made, and I can’t redeem one part of this.

No Document begins with a description of the opening sequence of Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts, 1949) in which a horse is led to slaughter – a significant misremembering that Anwen Crawford rectifies later. Franju’s black-and-white documentary actually begins with a collage of scenes shot on the outskirts of Paris; surreal juxtapositions of objects abandoned in a landscape devastated by war and reconstruction.

Cinematic structure informs the narrative composition of No Document and permits Crawford to draw seemingly arbitrary connections through time: parallels between impressionistic memories of the friend to whom No Document is dedicated, their collaborative art practice, their shared activism, and historical snippets. She identifies with artists whose lives were abruptly curtailed, in particular Franz Marc and August Macke of Der Blaue Reiter school, whose work was declared ‘degenerate’ by the Nazi regime. Crawford links Marc’s Blue Horse (1911) and The Tower of Blue Horses (1913) to freedom of expression; his death in World War I to the slaughter of animals; the Nazis’ removal of Marc’s paintings to absence, detention, and Australia’s reprehensible treatment of asylum seekers.

Crawford graduated in photography from Sydney College of the Arts, has a Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Columbia University, and is best known for her critical writing on music and film. Her diverse interests inform a text that defies easy categorisation. It is an inventive combination of poetic devices and documentary fragments in a paean to friendship and creativity, and an elegy for a lost friend. Crawford positions her life in a historical and political context, intertwining personal grief with a meditation on the suffering caused by inhumane, self-interested actions. The combination is not without precedent. Like French memoirist Annie Ernaux, she writes to guard against ‘future absence’ (The Years, 2018), against forgetting; to salvage the past and make sense of the pain of absence. For Crawford, the present is a repetition of battles fought in the name of a better future. She finds herself ‘afflicted by the sadness of thinking that it is too late to remember the futures they were dreaming of’, and pictures herself

hand-in-hand inside a loop of

evenings/ the carlight/ the sense there isn’t time enough/ to stumble
the cash machine/ the glow in other people’s/ houses/ the threshold

moving again
us moving
against moving
against

the violence of the state. I gather
I am gathered in the ghosts round.

The final passage of The Years begins with the words ‘to save’, followed by a list of evanescent moments. It ends: ‘To save something from the time where we will never be again.’ Crawford addresses the friend whose ghost is ever present (and whose name we only learn towards the end): ‘seriously what about our plan to take over the world, don’t think I’ve forgotten about it ’.

Crawford’s conjunctions – visual, linguistic, technical – between the processes of photography, filmmaking, and art production are pathways to understanding the enormity of loss, destruction, and sorrow; the calamitous scars wrought on body and mind by resisting injustice. Meanings multiply with repetition, seemingly innocuous terms assuming the significance of politically expedient euphemisms, like ‘rendition’ to refer to the forced repatriation of asylum seekers.

‘Latent within the word asylum is the notion of something inviolable, without right of seizure,’ she says of a word that has been used to denote a place of incarceration, the antithesis of sanctuary. Crawford is candid about her week in a psychiatric ward on suicide watch and about the self-inflicted scars that crosshatched her torso. She draws a comparison between her own body and the carcass of the slaughtered horse. She was ‘teenage in the 90s and it felt like the answer was to die, but what was the question?’ Though Crawford and I are a generation apart, I remember this feeling from my art school years, when despair and suicide attempts pervaded my peer group, as if we were ‘going crazy’ together, as if suicide were infectious. Psychology’s remedy was to advise Crawford to distinguish her own moods from ‘the state of the world’. Her response was characteristic: ‘But what if the problem, I said, is capitalism? ’

The accuracy of memories and the veracity of photographs that purport to document reality are brought into question. As Crawford says, ‘the photograph will frame a truth only the photograph contains’. She remembers scenes and places (Indigenous names meticulously cited), but conversations escape her: ‘There must have been many days and evenings when we sat in the shed where you lived / on Gadigal country […] and yet what we might have said has left me.’ African-American poet Claudia Rankine says that ‘a share of all remembering, a measure of all memory, is breath and to breathe you have to create a truce—/ a truce with the patience of a stethoscope’ (Citizen: An American lyric, 2014). Breath and the cessation of breath have, of course, taken on horrifying significance for the Black Lives Matter movement. But breath also informs poetic syntax and rhythm. In No Document it is represented by the space between thoughts and the pauses in lines of text. Ruled lines inserted in the text serve as fences, borders, redacted sentences, spaces that signify the unspeakable: the anomaly between some Australians’ belief that ‘we don’t behave barbarically’ and the shocking reality. The black-bordered rectangle that reappears periodically on a white page is an enclosure, a corral, but also an absence made visible; ‘the failure to remake a world where there is no place now that contains you’; the ‘no document’ of the title.

Perhaps Crawford feels guilty about her absence overseas when her friend died. She never saw his body, and ever since she has wondered if it would have ‘helped to have the fact of this |: body in my mind | to not be saying this |: goodbye.’

I don’t know if she found the redemption she sought by writing No Document, but what she has achieved is a stunningly crafted testament to the enduring power of art and literature. For a world often bereft of empathy and compassion, she quotes Franz Marc: ‘New ideas kill better than steel and destroy what was thought to be indestructible.’

Comprising more than thirty works of poetry, fiction, memoir, and criticism, John Kinsella’s prolific output is impressive, and this figure doesn’t include his collaborations with other artists. Here is a writer who swims between boundaries, experiments with form and content, and eludes easy categorisation. His most recent novel, Hollow Earth (2019), was a foray into science fiction and fantasy, and his most recent poetry volume The Weave (2020), was co-written with Thurston Moore, founder of NYC rock group Sonic Youth.

When as a boy I listened to football on the radio, I would often hear mention of David Harris, a skilful midfielder who played for Geelong and Geelong West respectively in what were then the VFL and VFA. Harris was mostly known as ‘Darky’, not ‘David’. Recently, thanks to a YouTube interview, I learnt that Harris’s parents were Lebanese Australians. While in the interview Harris did not express offence, one can only wonder about the effect on him of this nickname – one he’d had since his own boyhood – based on the colour of his skin.

Smokehouse is an engagingly constructed collection of interlinked stories set in small-town, yet globally connected, settler Tasmania. The volume, which is focused on personal crises and family breakdown, is bookended by the two parts of the novella that lends the collection its name. This splicing is an inspired decision: the end of Part One keeps us turning the pages through the subsequent, fully realised short stories; with Part Two we feel rewarded whenever we spot a character first encountered in a story that seemed discrete.

S.L. Lim’s second novel, Revenge, begins with an ‘all persons fictitious’ disclaimer. The paragraph concludes: ‘Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. LOL!’

On the back cover of O, we learn that the protagonist of the novel, Dominique, lived through the German occupation of France, participated in the Resistance, relished its ‘clandestine life’, and later wrote an ‘erotic novel about surrender, submission and shame’, which became the real-life international bestseller and French national scandal, Histoire d’O (1954). ‘But what is the story really about,’ the blurb asks, ‘Dominique, her lover, or the country and the wartime past it would rather forget?’

To survey concurrent works of art is to take the temperature of a particular time, in a particular place. And the temperature of the time and place in these four début Australian novels? It is searching for a sense of belonging, and, at least in part, it’s coming out of western Sydney in the wake of the 2005 Cronulla riots. All four novels are set in New South Wales, three of them in suburban Sydney. Each is concerned with who is entitled to land and the stories we tell while making ourselves at home in the world, sometimes at the expense of others.

The Price of Two Sparrows by Christy Collins

Affirm Press, $29.99 pb, 288 pp

The Price of Two Sparrows, by Viva La Novella Prize-winning author Christy Collins, considers who is permitted access to land and to what end. In this book, the disputed site borders a conservation area and becomes hotly contested when the local Islamic community purchases it with the intention of building a mosque. But Collins’s novel, set in an unnamed coastal Sydney suburb between 2004 and 2007, is not a simple story of far-right opposition. Instead, she has cleverly complicated that well-worn narrative and sought to represent multiple sides of the debate. As Julian, a journalist who covers the dispute, says: ‘You can tell a story in many different ways.’

‘I consider myself more a vaudevillean than a scholar,’ George Saunders writes cheekily in his introduction to this collection. Yes, he is indeed a professor of creative writing at Syracuse University in upstate New York, a Booker Prize-winning novelist, and a regular in the pages of the New Yorker, but in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain he is first and foremost a vaudevillean: in seven short acts he sings, dances, and acts the comedian. According to Martin Amis, ‘all writers who are any good are funny’, even Kafka and Tolstoy, and he has a point. Saunders may not be quite vicious enough to qualify as ‘any good’ in Amis’s terms, but he is at least unfailingly sharp and good-humoured.

Craig Munro’s latest book shines a spotlight on the work of some very different Australian book editors. It begins in the 1890s, when A.G. Stephens came into prominence as literary editor of The Bulletin’s famous Red Page. It continues through the trials and tribulations of P.R. (‘Inky’) Stephensen in publishing and radical politics in the interwar period and his internment during the war for his association with the Australia First Movement. Literary Lion Tamers then moves on to Beatrice Davis’s long career as a professional book editor with Angus & Robertson after World War II. It concludes with Rosanne Fitzgibbon, with whom Munro developed fiction and poetry lists at the University of Queensland Press.

Kent MacCarter is publisher of Cordite Books and managing editor of Cordite Poetry Review. He is author of three poetry collections: In the Hungry Middle of Here (Transit Lounge, 2009), Sputnik’s Cousin (Transit Lounge, 2014) and California Sweet (Five Islands Press, 2018).

Kent MacCarter (photograph by Tim Grey)

What was your pathway to publishing?

In the waning days of the Italian lira, I accidentally left a new velvet jacket – pockets stuffed with an early mobile and gobs of cash – in a café in Florence, en route to pay school tuition. 1999. Gone. That forced me to return to Santa Fe, then to Chicago where a friend shoehorned me into a role at the University of Chicago Press. There I dabbled in poetry with Thom Gunn and Mark Strand, and in abstractions with Robert von Hallberg and Julia Kristeva. Initial glimmers. I headed to Melbourne to hopscotch my finance degrees with an English gong with Tony Birch and Chris Wallace-Crabbe. I worked for Thomson Learning and Curriculum Press and was treasurer of Small Press Network. In 2010, I became managing editor of Cordite Poetry Review. I started Cordite Books in 2015.

Mark McKenna’s most recent book is Return to Uluru (Black Inc., 2021).

Mark McKenna

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

Suakin, the former Ottoman trading port on the Red Sea coast of Sudan. I spent time there in the early 1980s and I’m planning to write about it in the near future.

I Don’t Know How That Happened by Oliver Driscoll

Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 74 pp

Oliver Driscoll’s note on his first book I Don’t Know How That Happened praises the inclusive flatness of David Hockney’s still life paintings, and it is to this inclusiveness that his poems and prose pieces aspire. Droll reported speech creates a comic atmosphere but also moves into Kafkaesque alienation where nothing seems to follow any pattern. Sometimes these casual observations feel undercooked, but at times the flatness works as cool satire:

I read an extract about a piece I wrote about Sarajevo and Bosnian literature at a small university panel event. At the end of the event, an audience member asked if I was of Bosnian heritage. No, I said. The man beside me on the panel said, ha, yeah, we used to be able to do that, right, claim other people’s suffering. The piece is kind of about that, I said, how we see and think about other people’s trauma.

Right, he said, as though he’d won something fair and square.

These three new poetry collections are works by established poets at the top of their game in terms of poetic craft and the honing of insights into both life and art. These are voices developed across a significant number of previous collections, allowing for an emergence of innovation, confidence, and ease of style and mood.

A boy appears at school early
to lick the flagpole and speak different.
Scratch the ‘g’ from ‘listening’

like the girl he watches
hang her beaded bag
from the hook with all the grace he doesn’t know

he heaps upon her.
At recess, the boy eats a golden delicious,
seed and stem. Each instant a northswept

southerner in Nonna’s stories, losing dialect.
Kids jigsaw around him; he stays still
faster than they do. The sun sinks

into its resin.
Seven bells. The girl he watches untense
her hand, as if she almost

imitates a marlin, but stops herself –
how does she stop herself? Why

does he see her at her bag
rubbing lanolin cream from a white jar
on the webbing between fingers that understand him now?

This shared language must be rung in.
At lunch, the boy scrapes a beetle off a wattle bush

and fills his ear. Screeches
down the canal, barbed
legs pricking towards the drum.

On Clare’s Skype the beach mixed every coral colour: the sheen,
saw George, transforming their soft bedroom in her mother’s
Mt Druitt house to a Micronesian dusk. But this South Tarawa
Beach was much too empty. They had waited for the Afghani man,
Farjaad, now for hours, but the boat that Clare had hired
for her old friend Aunty to smuggle him from Nauru was off air.
She said, ‘Maybe the Americans stepped in and snaffled him
already, before Australia traded him to them. If that’s so, he may
have actually known something he suggested about what did
happen to Ayatollah Mike in Afghanistan.’ George said ‘My best
information from a Langley bloke in his cups is that Mike’s
plane crash was a straight retaliation by Iran for the Soleimani
assassination, but that no one knows if Mike still runs the anti-
Iranian section, is in hiding, retired, plucked off home, or dead.’
She said, ‘Well, Farjaad said he knew. He is a nice boy, anyway,
and it would be a shame if they Guantanamo him. Aunty said
she liked him right away.’ ‘At this stage,’ said George, ‘they might
Guantanamo Aunty.’ The beach, built on coral with a crisp palm clump
and clinging rusty garbage, remained empty. He was just as anxious as Clare.
He said, ‘By now, could the Chinese be involved? Their pact with Kiribati
to dredge the land up against global warning, finance local welfare
there in the archipelago not extract cheap labour, like Australia,
was the reason Australia stopped Micronesia heading the Pacific
Forum, so the five countries left it.’ ‘Including Guam,’ said Clare: ‘really
odd, but the Americans must have gone along with the betrayal, even
though it was the American Ambassador from Guam who lost his job.
I’d hate to be an American Ambassador. They get shivved as much
as the spies.’ ‘It’s a type of operant conditioning,’ suggested George:
‘They think the uncertainty makes them loyal.’ But where was Farjaad?
The fragile beach was empty. George said, ‘Also the new Kiribati leader
won’t recognise Taiwan.’ She was juggling three sources on her phone.
‘They don’t know where he is,’ she sounded afraid. But George said,
‘That interference might be Aunty’s boat.’ Indeed, the Skype shook
and splintered in archipelagos of stars. When it was steady,
The beach contained the Afghani youth and Aunty. Clare was angry
with relief: ‘I was too worried. Where were you?’ ‘We had to explain,’
explained Farjaad, ‘but it’s okay now. I’m going to China.’ And Aunty
said, ‘You can pay me in Bitcoin. Anyway, I’m going home.’ Even when
the Skype was off and Clare and George relaxed slowly together
the whole room still dusked with Kiribati’s coral sky.

Diamond Beach        

Heads down and shoulders hunched, we set off, trampling
The footstep-gripping sands of Diamond Beach,
Into the flat refusal of the gale,
Squinting into a distance we would fail,
Surely, ever to reach,

However far we trudged, like Charlotte Rampling
In that French film – what was it? – Sous le sable,
Running, and yet not getting anywhere,
Towards the yearned-for phantom of her dead lover.
Massed clouds that seemed too ponderous to hover,
Depending on thin air,
Loomed over us, like sculptures made of marble.

The wind, as though inhabited, howled past,
Like history re-enacted in blown scraps
And moments, formless figures and events,
With the grand claims they make in the future tense
Even as they elapse.
And fictions too, with their invisible cast.

Francesca, clasping Paolo, came to mind,
Whom Dante looked with pity on, and wept,
In turmoil, whirlwind-driven round the second
Infernal circle. And she told when beckoned
The story that had swept
Their souls away. A tern zoomed from behind

And past our thwarted progress with a flair
And effortless finesse, as to rescind
Without a sideways glance all trace of those
Phantasmal settings and scenarios.
The wind was just the wind,
The air the wordless and inhuman air.

Founded in 1831, the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) sought to redress impediments to scientific progress that arose in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, determining that the BAAS would ‘give a stronger impulse and more systematic direction to scientific inquiry … [and] promote the intercourse of cultivators of science’.

If you have ever wondered about the imaginative, wondrous side of science – for instance, how Einstein used maths to predict the existence of gravitational waves, or how a metaphor led to the astonishing discovery that the spinning earth drags space-time around it like molasses around a spoon, this is not the book for you. But if you want to know why scientists had the patience to keep refining their experiments until they detected this barely perceptible rippling of space-time, or why they have the kind of grit made legendary by Marie and Pierre Curie, sifting through tonnes of pitchblende for a speck of radium, you will find an intriguing, bold, and controversial answer in The Knowledge Machine.

Australia’s nearest neighbour, the fabulous New Guinea, is one of the least developed and least known islands on earth. The largest and highest tropical island, it boasts extensive tracts of old-growth tropical forest (second only to the Amazon following massive destruction in Borneo and Sumatra), equatorial alpine environments, extensive lowland swamp forests, and huge abundances and diversities of orchids, rhododendrons, forest tree species, frogs, freshwater fish, and leeches. The fauna, exotic as well as diverse, include the richest radiations of tree kangaroos, echidnas, birds of paradise, and bowerbirds.

‘Exile is a profound stimulus to the human anxiety for literary representation,’ writes Harold Bloom. Whether voluntary or involuntary, this impetus is the driving force behind the works in The Penguin Book of Migration Literature.

Here’s a story about a spy with a wooden leg, another spy who liked to sit around with his penis exposed, and a spy’s daughter who spent decades refusing to believe her father was dead. If this tale of an everyday family of secret agents were a novel or a Netflix drama, we’d laugh, frown, and admire it as a surreal fantasy. But it is real, the children are still alive, and their recollections are proof that truth is nuttier than fiction.

Have you ever noticed how boxing matches invariably deflate into two breathless people hugging each other? In pugilistic parlance, this is called a clinch. It is a defensive tactic, a way for fighters besieged by their opponent’s assault to create a pause and regain their equilibrium. And while it is beyond cliché for books to be hailed as knockouts or haymakers or other emptied expressions of victory, Michael Winkler’s Grimmish is the best literary clinch you’ll ever read. It is the honest account of a writer overmatched by his subject matter and left clinging on for dear life.

Alison Croggon has written poetry, fantasy novels, and whip-smart arts criticism for decades, but Monsters is her first book-length work of non-fiction. In this deeply wounded book, Croggon unpacks her shattered relationship with her younger sister (not named in the book), a dynamic that bristles with accusations and resentments. In attempting to understand the wreckage of this relationship, Croggon finds herself going back to the roots of Western patriarchy and colonialism, seeking to frame this fractured relationship as the inexorable consequence of empire.

More than twenty-five years ago, I wrote an essay on the work of Oliver Sacks (Island Magazine, Autumn 1993). Entitled ‘Anthropologist of Mind’, it ranged across several of Sacks’s books; but it was Seeing Voices, published in 1989, that was the main impetus for the essay. In Seeing Voices, Sacks explored American deaf communities, past and present. He exposed the stringent and often punishing attempts to ‘normalise’ deaf people by forcing them to communicate orally, and he simultaneously deplored the denigration and widespread outlawing of sign language. Drawing on the work of Erving Goffman, Sacks showed how deaf people were stigmatised and marginalised from mainstream culture, and he revealed, contrary to prevailing opinion in the hearing world, the richness and complexities of American Sign Language.

I was first diagnosed with a hearing loss at the age of twenty-eight. At the time, I was working as a speech pathologist. Any degree of deafness is somewhat of a liability for a speech pathologist, so it was fortunate that my primary passion was fiction. Owing to my strenuous attempts to hide it, no one knew about my hearing problems, and that remained the case for several decades. All those years ago I welcomed Sacks’s book, as I now welcome Fiona Murphy’s The Shape of Sound.

Hearing loss is perceived differently from short-sightedness, and hearing aids carry a stigma not applied to spectacles. If you can’t hear properly, it is often assumed you cannot communicate. Until recently, deaf people who did not communicate orally, and even some who did, were described as deaf and dumb. I always wanted to avoid that stigma.

And so did Fiona Murphy.

Murphy was born in 1988. She was, from birth, profoundly deaf in her left ear, although this was not discovered until she was five years old; her hearing in her right ear was within normal range until her thirties when she was struck by the double unfairness of tinnitus (a constant noise in her ear) and otosclerosis in her right ear, a relatively rare condition that leads to loss of hearing.

Murphy’s hearing loss infused her identity from the time she started school. Was she deaf? Half deaf? Half hearing? Although given her attempts to pass as not deaf, the specific description is probably immaterial. Murphy, like me, and like so many deaf people, had absorbed the negative associations that prevail about hearing loss.

Fiona Murphy (photograph via Text Publishing)

Murphy was an intelligent, curious child, with a strong desire to communicate. She hid her deafness at school, and believed she was passing successfully; so when someone asked about her accent, she was shocked to learn she had one. It was only when Murphy recalled that she learned to read and sound out words with her Irish mother that the accent became explicable. She was a teenager when her brother, in exasperation, told her to stop talking in fragments. Murphy talked the way she heard, and she heard in fragments: because of her hearing loss, she was picking up only scattered words in an utterance and filling in the gaps herself.

She relied on lip reading, but was unaware of this until she was twenty-seven and set herself a test in a noisy bar. It was impossible to ‘hear’ if she could not see the person’s face (and, I might add, impossible in these days of Covid-19 and masks).

In her late twenties, Murphy was fitted with a specialist CROS hearing aid, which would re-route the sound and give her the sense of hearing in her left ear. But the world was so noisy, intolerably so, that she returned the aid after two weeks. I wonder why the audiologist set the loudness level so high. When I was fitted with hearing aids, it took almost two years for the sound to be turned up to the level of normal hearing. Even now, on those rare occasions when I go into the world wearing my aids, I can’t abide the howling wind, the roaring cars, people shouting into their phones.

Few people are totally deaf, many are partially hearing. Murphy shows what it is to live with hearing loss. She trained as a physiotherapist, she worked in a variety of settings, and she managed. She lived in share houses, she had friends: she managed. She had a loving supportive family: she managed. But life for her had a different dynamic and carried vastly different stresses than for a fully hearing person. For most people, their main energies in conversation go into the engagement, the to and fro of talk, into understanding what is said and responding in a way that moves the conversation forward. For people with hearing loss, the main energies go into actually hearing what is said, and it is exhausting. And you have to be so adept: you hear maybe thirty per cent of the words, you fill in the gaps, you absorb the meaning, you rummage around for an appropriate response, then you speak – all done without pause. It’s hard work and it’s no wonder that Fiona Murphy, and other hearing-impaired people, embrace solitude and silence.

Murphy’s personal story is one that reaches out to deaf and hearing people alike. It reveals the toils of stigma, the effects on one’s identity, the toll it exacts on social life. However, several times through the book her story is interrupted by far less interesting theorising – about secrets, about the body’s involvement in communication, about stigma itself. The book is at times repetitive, and more attention from an editor would have eliminated the heart pantings and sweaty armpits and other physical twitches that Murphy has substituted for complex actions and emotional states. Similarly, there are some clumsy expressions and the occasional typo.

These issues aside, Murphy shines when she’s writing her own experience. Her decades-long struggle to pass as not deaf is vividly portrayed, and late in the book she refers to ‘the vast and shocking amount of mental space I devoted to trying to be nondisabled’. She shows through her own personal history what it is to carry a secret that impinges on every single interaction, every single day of one’s life. Also illuminating is her account of the ‘intimacy’ of Auslan (Australian Sign Language), and her pleasure in learning to sign.

These days, deaf children are absorbed into mainstream schools. Auslan is taught to both hearing and deaf people. One of the few positive features of the pandemic is the presence of someone signing alongside the politicians and medicos during their daily updates. Deafness is being brought out of the shadows and into the public realm. With these changes, and with personal stories like Fiona Murphy’s, deaf children of the future should enjoy lives free of burdensome attempts to pass.

‘The first forty years of life furnish the text, while the remaining thirty supply the commentary,’ Arthur Schopenhauer remarked in The Wisdom of Life and Counsels and Maxims. While the timespan is different, the proportions are similar. Brendan Ryan’s Walk Like a Cow, which focuses predominantly on the poet’s first twenty-five years, has been written over roughly two decades. The memoir features twenty-seven largely self-contained chapters and nine previously published poems, in a roughly chronological narrative.

If you were fortunate enough to take Franz Philipp’s course in Medieval and Renaissance Art at the University of Melbourne in the 1960s – the old Fine Arts B – you would have quickly encountered Erwin Panofsky’s masterpiece, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (1960). It set forth authoritatively the argument that from the Carolingian revival in the eighth century through the Ottonian and Romanesque survivals, culminating in the Italian Renaissance of the quattrocento and cinquecento, Western art was haunted by the spectre of antiquity. Admiration for its mighty surviving works throughout western Europe turned steadily towards emulating them.

The history of art history in the West over the past five hundred years is rich and complex and yet rests on clear historiographical foundations, themselves grounded in inescapable historical realities. Authors and artists in the Renaissance looked back to the civilisation of Greco-Roman antiquity, all but lost in the catastrophe of the fall of the Roman Empire and succeeded by centuries of dramatic cultural regression. They sought to regain the greatness of antiquity, and the bolder even hoped to surpass it.

This is the basis of Vasari’s three-stage account of the rise of Renaissance art (1550), the first beginning with Giotto, the second with Masaccio, and the third with Leonardo. Vasari considered the greatest of his contemporaries, Michelangelo, to have equalled the ancients, but a later generation came to believe that the sixteenth-century Mannerists had lost their way. From the early seventeenth century, therefore, the model was extended to include an interval of decline before the new impetus beginning with the Carracci, and this process continued in academic debates about line, colour, and what we now call the Baroque.

Compiling a selection of letters for publication is a vexing task. Inclusions and exclusions tend to satisfy only the editors. Specialist readers will inevitably find their particular interests inadequately represented, while others will find material included to be offensive or inappropriate. The success of this volume has been secured partly because both editors have worked on books of Grainger letters before: Teresa Balough with Comrades in Art: The correspondence of Ronald Stevenson and Percy Grainger, 1957–61, and Kay Dreyfus with her ground-breaking volume The Farthest North of Humanness: Letters of Percy Grainger, 1901–1914. Also, only 181 letters between Cross and Percy and Ella Grainger were available, which minimised the scale of the cull. The editors chose to exclude seventy letters, the quotidian content of which immediately flagged their redundancy.

Want to write a letter to ABR? Send one to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Sharp, dark, humorous

Dear Editor,

I am not here to defend Margaret Atwood’s latest collection of poetry, Dearly, since I have not read it, but I think that David Mason’s review of it (ABR, March 2021) does her poetry a disservice in dismissing it with such statements as ‘across more than sixty years her verse has hardly evolved beyond the serviceable technique we could see at the start’.

There is great variation in Atwood’s collections. For my money, her best are Power Politics (1971) and You Are Happy (1974), but there are notable poems in her other books. At its best, her poetry can be sharp, dark, humorous, surprising, mesmerising – even moving. There is vivid imagery, apt rhythm. Here’s a bit I like from ‘The Woman Who Could Not Live With Her Faulty Heart’ (Two-Headed Poems [1978]): ‘All hearts float in their own / deep oceans of no light, / wetblack and glimmering, / their four mouths gulping like fish.’ Maybe this new collection isn’t one of Atwood’s best – maybe it’s no good at all – and I can appreciate that it may be annoying that her poetry (whether good or not) attracts so much attention because of the success of her prose. Sure, her poetry won’t be to everyone’s taste. But I believe that writing off all the poetry she’s published for any one of these reasons is unnecessary and unwarranted. For the good stuff, I recommend Atwood’s Eating Fire: Selected poetry 1965–1995.

The Proper Beach Caves

Dear Editor,

My sincere thanks for giving serious space to The Beach Caves (ABR, March 2021). It’s not an honour I take lightly. To the review itself. The pedantry is impressive, but you could perhaps mention to Andrew McLeod that the first rule of reviewing is to review the book on the page, in the time and place in which it is set, not the book he believes the author should have written. Alternatively, perhaps I should send him all my notes and waive my copyright so that he can rewrite the novel to his specs and give it a better title, something snappy like The Proper Beach Caves.

Andrew McLeod replies:

I stand fully behind my review of Trevor Shearston’s The Beach Caves. I respectfully disagree with his understanding of the role of the literary critic. For mine, the task of the critic is to engage with a work, consider whether it achieves what it sets out to achieve, and to offer their own thoughts on it. This includes consideration of the work’s place in the cultural discourse in which it is published.

Malcolm Gillies on Bluebeard’s Castle

Thank you for this thoughtful and nuanced commentary, (ABR, April 2021). I’m so glad that you enjoyed it, your knowledgeable misgivings aside, and that the production seems to have hit home with its aims while remaining mostly true to the music. It’s all we have to go on after all.

Johanna Leggatt and Declan Fry, two newly appointed ABR Board members

Changes at ABR

At our recent Annual General Meeting, we farewelled three long-serving members of the Board and introduced two young writers/journalists whose contributions have enriched the magazine in the past couple of years.

Colin Golvan AM QC joined the Board in 2005 and served as Chair from 2015–20. Colin’s contributions to the magazine have been many and invaluable. He has been the principal supporter of the Calibre Essay Prize since 2013, when Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund’s seeding funding of Calibre came to an end.

Ian Dickson, who joined the Board in 2012, is our single most generous donor and the sole sponsor of the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Sarah Holland-Batt, Chair of ABR, commented at the AGM: ‘It is inspirational to consider how many Australian writers have benefited from Ian’s generosity, and the many ways in which he has transformed the magazine’s potential.’

Professor Rae Frances AM – Dean of the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the ANU – joined the Board in 2016 when ABR and Monash University (of which she was then Dean of Arts) became partners, an ongoing creative association that has introduced dozens of Monash academic staff and students to our readers.

Our two new Board members, both well known to ABR readers, bring distinctive expertise and experience. Johanna Leggatt is an accomplished senior journalist with broad expertise in communications, public relations, and media management.

We also warmly welcome Declan Fry, an essayist, critic, and poet of Yorta Yorta descent who is a current Rising Star at ABR, a role in which he has contributed a number of incisive pieces of criticism and commentary. Declan has a background in law as well as literature.

An extra ABR

This year, in June, we will add an eleventh issue to your print subscription – at no extra cost. Henceforth there will only be one double issue per annum (January/February).

To celebrate this milestone, the June issue will be slightly different from other issues, with more commentary, longer review essays, and more creative writing. The focus will be on younger writers and essayists, several of whom will be new to the magazine.

We’ve long wanted to add an eleventh issue. Now it is possible because of a generous donation from Matthew Sandblom’s and Wendy Beckett’s Blake Beckett Fund. Here, once again, support from philanthropists enables us to expand and innovate. Readers, authors, and their publishers will benefit from this added content – not to mention ABR contributors.

The national interest

Monash University Publishing has launched a new publication series called In the National Interest. Covering the major issues of our time, it offers accessible and ambitious thinking on subjects such as government, policy, and governance. Interviewed in The Age, Margaret Gardner – President and Vice-Chancellor of Monash University – spoke of the need to allow academic staff and public intellectuals to ‘reflect in what I call the extended essay about matters that are important to the national interest, where you bring evidence to bear and you have questions about what would be the programs or policies that we should think about’.

There are seven volumes in the first tranche. They include Simone Wilkie on the technological age in The Digital Revolution: A survival guide ; Martin Parkinson on climate change policy in A Decade Adrift; and Don Russell on the disconnect between politics and policy in Leadership.

Visit the Monash University Publishing website for more details.

Three trail-blazing women

Mandy Sayer – the tenth recipient to date – has been awarded the $15,000 Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship. Sayer will write a biography of sisters Paulette, Isabelle, and Phyllis McDonagh, three Australian silent filmmakers who wrote, produced, directed, and even acted in a series of films in the early twentieth century.