Serious observers of American presidential politics will not have missed the rapid rise to national prominence of Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-eight-year-old former mayor of the small Midwestern city of South Bend, Indiana. Within a year of announcing his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination, Buttigieg had made history as, in his words, ‘the first openly gay candidate to win a state in a presidential nominating contest – doing so as the first out elected official to even make the attempt’.

In addition to accomplishing this remarkable feat, Buttigieg offers arguably the most thoughtful and perceptive analysis of the current American political terrain of any leading political figure. Having arrived on the presidential scene as a trailblazer, Buttigieg moved to become a forceful advocate for the Biden/Harris election campaign, often venturing into the hostile media territory of Fox News to argue the case against re-electing President Donald Trump.

Undertaking fieldwork in Iceland, anthropologist Hugh Raffles was combing a beach when he noticed, and became transfixed by, a ‘large rectangular black stone’. So transfixed, in fact, that he decided to take it back to New York. On his return to his car, everything was in chaos. The alarm went off, piercing the tranquil landscape; the ‘door open’ icon flashed, despite all the doors being closed. Raffles began to drive, but the alarm and blinking light were unceasing. So he pulled over, gently placed the stone by the side of the road and drove on in relieved silence. Upon hearing this story, his Icelandic friends laughed knowingly. ‘Everything is alive,’ they said. Later, poring over archival material, Raffles discovered that the coastline on which his brush with the supernatural had occurred was known for causing chaos with ships’ navigational instruments, ‘perhaps because of high levels of magnetite grains in the basalt’.

Hugh Stretton knew he was a lucky man – someone born well in the lottery of life. Born in 1924, he came into a thoughtful family with a strong record of public service. He was educated at fine private schools and excelled in his arts and legal studies at the University of Melbourne. When war intervened, Stretton served in the navy for three years without suffering injury and then won a Rhodes scholarship before completing his undergraduate qualifications.

The golden thread continued at Oxford. He was a student so clever he was awarded a college fellowship before taking his final exams, a scholar so magnetic he was offered the Chair of History at the University of Adelaide before he turned thirty, though he had neither a doctorate nor a book to his name.

Stretton returned to Australia the youngest professor in the nation, took on a role in which he excelled, developed new interests in city planning, and became a valued adviser to governments and oppositions. Within two decades, Stretton was presenting the Boyer Lectures (Housing and Government, 1974) and had become, in Peter Beilharz’s words, ‘widely recognised as Australia’s leading democratic thinker’.

When in 1968 the administrative burden of being Chair of the Department of History became too much, Stretton simply demoted himself to Reader so that he could focus on teaching and writing. He donated all the royalties from his most successful book, Ideas for Australian Cities (1970), to the Brotherhood of St Laurence to support its charitable work. At the Brotherhood, he began a friendship with Barry Jones, a future science minister in the Hawke government, that would endure for decades. A collection of their correspondence is now held by the National Library of Australia. Yet, says Graeme Davison in his perceptive introduction to Stretton’s Selected Writings (2018), throughout a long and active public life Stretton remained modest, self-deprecating, and generous ‘almost to a fault’.

We each respond to luck in ways that reveal our underlying character. Good fortune invited Stretton to reflect on his values. Since education opened up opportunities for him, Stretton wanted others to enjoy the same privilege. He advocated urban planning that avoided sharp class barriers, and public spaces which encouraged people to mix, as he mixed with men from very different backgrounds during his time below decks in the navy.

A tenured academic, Stretton wanted more jobs with security so that Australians could build lives not blighted by capricious economic disruption. A practical man, he did not seek to remake cities – or societies – with a wave of the hand, but rather to build on what already worked well. Stretton preferred pragmatism over ideology, experiment over economic orthodoxy. He valued culture with emphasised solidarity in a political system that ‘encourages individual difference and non-conformity’. This eminent public thinker refused to be typecast, variously describing himself as a ‘moderate socialist’ or a ‘radical conservative’.

The University of Adelaide was far-sighted in recruiting young Hugh Stretton in 1954, as it is wise now to establish a policy shop in his name. In interests and range, the Stretton Institute will no doubt reflect on the question which always shadows good fortune: when life is generous to me, what is my responsibility toward those for whom fate has not been so kind? For birth is the great gamble. We take a ticket and are born into bodies, families, health, and societies we do not choose. A random roll of the dice can shape an entire life – into love and security, as Stretton experienced, or into hardship and poverty. Life can be non-linear and our fates arbitrary.

This inescapable lottery imposes a moral challenge. Our starting points are inherently unequal. Some enjoy privilege while others struggle. Birth is always a lottery – must life be one also?

It is hardly an original question. Making sense of chance in life has been a preoccupation of religion and philosophy for millennia. For a democratic thinker, poverty poses a dilemma. What do we owe our fellow citizens who suffer deprivation? We expect government to address economic distress, but we, the voters, also put firm boundaries around our generosity. Much is left to charity, or seen as essentially a private concern, outside political discussion.

Millions of Australians accept a responsibility to help those facing difficulty. Some eighty per cent of adult Australians make charitable donations each year, and many invest time helping charities and voluntary organisations. Yet charity will always struggle on its own. It can never command the resources required to deal with entrenched disadvantage.

We have a fond image of Australia as the land of the fair go, the place where hard work, determination, and talent allow people to find their way in the world. And so it proves for many. Yet the scale of disadvantage in our community remains confronting. The most recent available data reveals that 3.24 million Australians live below the poverty line. This represents more than thirteen per cent of the population, including 750,000 children. Australian levels of poverty are slightly above OECD averages, and have changed little over the past decade. The cost of housing, declining incomes, and modest benefit payments are key drivers.

Particularly at risk are single parents, recent migrants and refugees, Australians living alone or outside a major urban area, people emerging from the criminal justice system, those with minimal education qualifications, and people on social security benefits, such as the elderly. Disability has been a persistent marker of disadvantage, linked to limited employment, housing, and transport options.

Above all, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians face poverty levels almost double that experienced by other Australians. It is more than two centuries since European settlement, yet across this nation the descendants of the First Australians remain those most likely to experience economic hardship – a compelling reminder that poverty is often intergenerational, a cycle that proves difficult to escape.

To express disadvantage through numbers conveys nothing of the lived reality. A static picture provides little feel for patterns. So let’s start from a different point: if you are born into one of the poorest households in Australia, what are your chances of breaking out, of achieving a more prosperous life as an adult? Can we predict likely outcomes for young children born into poverty?

Sadly we can. A detailed 2020 study by the Melbourne Institute confirms that most children born into extreme economic disadvantage struggle to prosper in adulthood. On average, the more years a child spends in poverty, the worse their likely socio-economic outcomes. A child from an impoverished background is five times more likely to suffer adult poverty. In this meritocratic society, entrenched poverty is handed down from parent to child, and social mobility highly constrained. For more than one in ten Australians, a lifetime of economic struggle beckons.

It is easy to look away, to accept the world as we find it. Yet how we respond to misfortune in our midst says everything about us. Ethicist Peter Singer speaks of an obligation to assist. If we encounter a child drowning in a pond, says Singer, we should put aside concern for our clothes and swim to the rescue, because the harm we can avert is so much more important than the cost to ourselves. Singer expresses this as a simple principle: ‘If it is in our power to prevent something very bad happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.’

The caveat about ‘comparable moral importance’ is important. Our obligation to others is not an absolute moral imperative but a judgement about consequences. If responding requires us to be unjust to others, or to accept an unreasonable burden, then the calculation shifts. But if the cost is small in comparison to the difference we can make, our responsibility is clear. Singer believes the requirement to assist applies ‘not just to rare situations in which one can save a child’ but also to helping those who live in extreme poverty. If an affluent society can help, it should.

This turns a philosophical point into an issue of public policy. The Australian settlement never pursued a radical redistribution of wealth. Social benefit payments remain modest. The Henderson poverty line, first published in August 1975, made clear that even with child endowment and other benefits, some Australian families could not achieve a reasonable standard of living.

Of course, Australians have never demanded their governments solve the challenge of disadvantage. Almost every election is a referendum on how much tax we are willing to pay, and the answer is usually the same. We seek a trade-off between helping others and limiting demands on ourselves. Our electoral decisions limit the scope open to any government. This means we expect much from charity in mitigating life’s lottery.

Individual Australians donate more than $12.5 billion annually to support everything from child protection and emergency relief to programs for refugees. Business contributes a further $17.5 billion annually in charitable donations. We support some 56,000 registered not-for-profit organisations across the nation, employing more than 1.3 million Australians part- and full-time. Yet, apparently impressive figures can mislead. Overall, charitable income remains small compared to government. Combined state and federal spending on education, health, and welfare dwarfs the resources available to charities. Government remains the most significant player in addressing disadvantage, leaving the charitable sector perched around the edges of public investment. Which leaves something of a dilemma: if charity is too small, and government too limited, can anything change the equation for those who draw a blank in the lottery of life? How do we meet an obligation to assist if charities lack the money and governments lack the appropriate design, local engagement, and commitment to provide viable pathways from disadvantage?

Yet there are some reasons for quiet optimism. Promising projects can redraw the separation between government and charity. What happens if communities and government agencies, charities, and foundations combine their intelligence and resources around an agreed goal? There are encouraging examples of collaboration in practice, such as helping children prepare for and succeed in school. This addresses a trap that leaves people otherwise unable to escape the cumulative effects of poverty. Collaborations between community, government, and charity can provide an ‘off-ramp’: a way to help people step outside the endless repetition and setback of a cycle of disadvantage.

For government, collaboration can be daunting. Public agencies must deploy standardised approaches and treat everyone equally, though every disadvantaged person lives with different personal circumstances. Charities know more about possible off-ramps, but they rarely command enough money or people to tailor programs appropriate for each individual or family.

Put the two approaches together and new possibilities open. In an ideal setting, pre-school and education support, health services, and transition-to-work programs, whether provided by government or charity, would be linked so that a child at risk has consistent encouragement and support all the way through to adult life. Such an integrated service would be based locally so that individual needs and aspirations are heard. It would ensure continuity of friendly faces and understanding through the journey.

This is the approach adopted by Our Place, a Victorian initiative which began at Doveton College in 2012 and which now extends to ten sites across the state. Using a local primary school as the hub, Our Place coordinates service delivery for children and their families in disadvantaged communities. It has inspired relevant government departments to pool their expertise, and foundations to make long-term funding commitments.

One Our Place facility involves a partnership between the Carlton Primary School, the City of Melbourne, and the Carlton housing estate. The school sits adjacent to public housing, a pocket of disadvantage in an otherwise affluent suburb. Only two per cent of students at the school come from English-speaking backgrounds. This is a linguistically and culturally diverse gathering of migrants and refugees in one community, sharing ageing buildings which were locked down – with the residents inside – in July 2020 because of Covid-19.

Investment by the state government includes a former school building refurbished to provide education facilities and funding for an early learning service, community spaces, health consulting rooms, and a mother and childcare service. Gowrie Victoria operates the early learning centre, while the YMCA offers after-school activities, all linked by a dedicated community facilitator.

The Our Place model argues that programs should focus not just on children but also on their families. Attention is paid to adult education, recognising that getting unemployed parents into work brings broader benefits for their children. Our Place calls this ‘reshaping the service system’ to provide wrap-around support.

Well-led partnerships transform lives. This collaborative approach has a name: collective impact. It suggests the best chance of social change is when communities, government, and for-purpose organisations work towards a shared goal. Collective impact requires a common agenda, a shared measurement system, mutually reinforcing activities, continuous dialogue, and a backbone organisation.

Collective work imposes uncomfortable demands on everyone. Communities are asked to acknowledge and take ownership of local problems. Government agencies are expected to collaborate, pool funding, and work to someone else’s priorities. Local business must accept a role in securing outcomes for the neighbourhood. Collective impact demands charities and foundations be patient, while community leaders and their public agency partners experiment, fail, and then fail better.

The collective impact model has an established history across Australia with programs such as the Cape York Partnerships and the empowered communities movement. The approach has inspired place-based initiatives, including Logan Together in south-east Queensland and the Hive at Mt Druitt in Sydney. It guides Adelaide Zero, a project to end homelessness in the inner city.

Policy innovation should not end with collective impact – not every problem is based in a community, or amenable to collaborative responses. There are other significant responses worth considering, including social impact investing. This raises and deploys private capital for ventures which combine some profit with social outcomes. The Aspire Social Impact Bond is Australia’s first social impact program with homelessness as its primary focus. It aims to generate a competitive financial return while ‘making a lasting difference to the lives of people experiencing homelessness in Adelaide’.

We need all these innovations, and so many more. In the tradition of Hugh Stretton, we should welcome policy experiments which build on what works. Policy is never final, but a series of continuous tests and occasional improvements guided by experience and evidence.

That poverty endures despite much public and private investment, despite people and agencies committed to its eradication, despite generations of social science research and policy proposals, points to the implausibility of swift solutions. We know what failure looks like – think, sadly, of our national inability to ‘Close the Gap’. Yet we can hope that a process which begins with community voice and goes on to ask individuals and communities, charities, businesses, and foundations to work as partners might provide new off-ramps to address disadvantage.

Australians are inventive and independent. Those living with disadvantage want change, not charity. Give people a viable off-ramp and they can take control of their lives. Cycles of disadvantage are dogged and entrenched but not impervious. And when existing policy does not solve the problem of intergenerational poverty, new thinking is essential. Thinking from public intellectuals such as Stretton, from everyone committed to better outcomes. A nation that saves its people from calamitous health outcomes and deploys vast reserves to soften economic distress can also address poverty. Community, charity, and governments, working together, can succeed where each alone will falter. Our responsibility for others remains compelling. The lottery of life means some people will be born and die, whatever their merit or talent, without sufficient opportunity for dignity and fulfilment. The measure of justice is whether our society empowers individuals – you, me, everyone – to find the life we want.

So the challenge is entirely our own. One of the richest societies on the planet once stared down a global financial crisis and now protects its population from a pandemic. Such a nation can end poverty among its own citizens – if it chooses. The effort needs a grand coalition of community, charity, and government. It requires a tolerance for failure, an ability to recognise and celebrate success. Waiting in a myriad of experiments, of small local victories, are the models that can work.

We start as helpless participants in a blind lottery. Let our beginning not also prove to be our end.

This is an edited version of the Inaugural Hugh Stretton Oration, delivered at the University of Adelaide on 18 February 2021. It draws from Glyn Davis’s On Life’s Lottery (Hachette, 2021).

‘Shall I scrub your back for you?” the monkey asked ... He had the clear, alluring voice of a doo-wop baritone. Not at all what you would expect.’ The eight short stories in First Person Singular are exactly what a reader has come to expect from Haruki Murakami, a writer with a penchant for neo-surrealism. The parabolic tales in this collection explore the familiar tropes and motifs of his oeuvre, including loneliness, outsiderness, chance encounters, music (classical, jazz and the Beatles), and memories. While Murakami might not be breaking new ground here, it is still a magical experience to return to his whimsical, eccentric, and enigmatic reimagining of Japan.

Go to any suburban shopping centre and you will find a metropolis of consumption. ‘Buy, buy, buy’, it screeches, whether you are contemplating fast-fashion T-shirts, new-age solutions to age-old problems, or services and pampering you don’t really need, all in the harsh glare of white lights and a controlled climate, temperature just right. The shopping centre, uniform and tidy, is where you can get everything you’ve ever wanted while also getting nothing at all.

This is the setting of Jamie Marina Lau’s second novel, Gunk Baby. It follows Leen, a twenty-four-year-old woman who opens an ear-cleaning business in the Topic Heights shopping complex, nestled between display homes in the fictional US suburb of Par Mars. The traditional Chinese practice has been adopted from her mother; Leen aims to introduce it to a Western audience hungry for cultural exchange.

Pip Adam’s third novel, Nothing to See, is a multifaceted and complex work. The complications begin immediately, as we meet the protagonist, Peggy and Greta, who are a recovering alcoholic. The odd combination of the singular and plural here is intentional. As far as appearances go, Peggy and Greta are different individuals with separate bodies and separate minds. Nonetheless, they share one life in an arrangement made difficult by the discomfort and lack of understanding they face at every step. They became two at the lowest moment in their history, when the crushing weight of trauma and alcohol addiction became too much for a single person to bear. One individual whose choices were limited to recovery or death thus became two.

At the core of Love Objects, Emily Maguire’s sixth novel, is a delicate exploration of the responsibility that comes with love and what it means to care for others in both the emotional and practical senses of the word. The book’s protagonist, Nic, is a caustic but kind-hearted woman, positioned, in many ways, so as to be overlooked by the world. Middle-aged, childless, and living alone in her childhood home, she works as a cashier in a low-end department store. She is the kind of woman who often becomes invisible in our society, so it seems fitting that she has an affinity for the forgotten and the overlooked.

From Where I Fell by Susan Johnson

Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 338 pp

A new Susan Johnson novel is always a treat, partly because you get the sense that with each one she has set herself a specific creative challenge, and partly because she is such a fine writer. In From Where I Fell, the epistolary novel, popular in the nineteenth century, has been updated, with the entire work in the form of emails. Nothing new in that, but what makes this different is that the contemporary problem of emailing someone unintentionally is followed through with that intellectually teasing ‘what if’ thread: what if the person you accidentally contacted was someone with whom you wanted to keep communicating? What if this person was someone to whom you could confess your most private thoughts? And what if this person never responded in a conventional manner?

This is what happens when Pamela, a Sydney-based librarian and mother of three sons (including a seriously disaffected teenager), sends a heartfelt email to a woman called Chris in the United States instead of to her ex-husband Chris in France. The former replies, and while her first email is reticent, Pamela responds by oversharing her very middle-class woes: being a single mother in suburban Ashfield, how hard it is to juggle work and motherhood, how she regrets leaving her husband. She spills her guts in long, impassioned emails that always end in protestations of love for the correspondent she has never met and, we imagine, never will.

Chris’s emails, on the other hand, reveal a feisty, unpredictable, and inscrutable personality. They are terse and private, ending with the sign-off ‘take care’, something Pamela should perhaps heed more than she does. Chris, though something of a battler, has time to help others without advertising the fact. And as she bluntly tells Pamela, ‘I don’t want to be rude, but you do enough reflection for the whole of Australia. There is a fine line between reflection and self-indulgence.’

This novel relies on voice and character more than on storyline or plot. But while Pamela is an annoying character, the cleverness of Johnson’s art is that she is also familiar. Not only might she be that person whingeing over the coffee machine at work, trying to juggle too much, overcompensating for her children’s lack of a father, not content to have a home and a job and three gorgeous children when so many do not – she might even be us.

New Animal by Ella Baxter

Allen & Unwin, $29.99 pb, 234 pp

Plot is a minor consideration in Ella Baxter’s novel New Animal, which is more a series of arbitrary events propelling things towards an end point. It works by premise, though it is a good one: Amelia is a cosmetic mortician, working in the funeral home run by her stepfather, who, years ago, had seduced Amelia’s mother with offers of work in the family business. We get that: death can be surprisingly sexy. But when her beloved mother dies in an accident, this seems more like a device to kickstart Amelia into action, rather than being integral to the story. This one event is a hook on which to hang all that follows, starting with Amelia’s inexplicable and sudden decision to avoid the funeral, travel interstate, and reconnect with her biological father. She spends little time with him, instead adopting a BDSM lifestyle overnight, which initiates a series of incidents that are chaotic, implausible, gross, and sometimes hilarious.

New Animal is messy, unfocused, and laced with surprises. Despite having handled death with professional detachment, Amelia realises that she knows nothing about grief, and that bodies, whether live or dead, cannot always be controlled. The final chapter about the last body she prepares for burial knocks us sideways with unexpected tenderness.

Unsheltered by Clare Moleta

Scribner, $29.99 pb, 320 pp)

With Clare Moleta’s Unsheltered we move into different territory altogether. As a novel this is impressive enough; as a début it is outstanding. One of those novels that takes you by the scruff of your neck and drops you straight in, Unsheltered is set in a future version of a place like Australia. Its main theme is degradation on a vast scale: environmental, of course, as well as social, political, and economic.

The story focuses on Li, whose young daughter Matti has gone missing while Li was out hunting food to sustain them in a temporary refugee camp. Having been victims of climate disasters, and having sought asylum in another state, they have already lost their husband and father, Frank, and are now illegal, or officially ‘unsheltered’, in their own country.

Everything in this harsh world is transactional – people don’t get so much as a glass of water unless they offer something in return – and so while Li is cautious and resourceful, her journey to find Matti becomes a series of fights against dangers that are both anticipated and unexpected. She only just survives a fire, then sprains her ankle escaping attackers in the night, camps in a broken-down vehicle after ejecting the desiccated corpse of its driver. She is double-crossed when out stealing water, and incarcerated in a massive prison camp where a deadly flu is raging.

It is fascinating how much currency this novel has: anxiety about water supply, dispossession, border security, and other contemporary issues, such as public health, affect every individual in a world where merely existing is a daily battle. It is extraordinarily relevant, in a profound and sometimes touching way, without the constant disasters seeming gratuitous or overdone. The unsheltered of the title – dispossessed only because of bad luck and brutal policies – have no status and are subject to constant surveillance. In fighting for her basic human rights, not to mention what she holds dear, Li could be anyone from our society: a worker ejected from JobKeeper, a victim of domestic violence, or someone exhausting their phone credit while on hold to Centrelink.

While it may be hard to get a handle on the geographic and political complexities of this world, it is impossible not to feel it, to understand it. Checkpoints, ‘makecamps’, regions called the No Go, the Sacrifice zone, all suggest landscapes long destroyed by mismanagement, vast penal states, and implacable authoritarianism. An entity called the Company controls everything and provides nothing. A service called Homegrown offers relief or aid that is only provisional. The ubiquitous XB Force polices everyone.

Other ironies abound: communications are intricate yet mobile phones are rare; shipping containers are both shelters and incubators of disease; water is a scarce commodity and ‘howlers’ or dust storms prevail, yet a massive deluge only brings destruction. Having embarked on a perilous journey to find Matti, Li is soon part of an epic endeavour, along with other desperate people, few of who can risk true friendship.

I won’t spoil the suspense of this remarkable novel, but all throughout we wonder what has happened to Frank, who the mysterious Chris is that Li keeps phoning whenever she can, and why she was a reluctant parent. Moleta reveals the answers to these questions at perfectly timed dramatic moments, but leaves enough unsaid for our imaginations to keep sparking for a long time afterwards.

The world of this novel is only disorienting at first glance. The degradation of the environment, surveillance by the state or communications companies – not to mention the commodification of our most precious natural resource – are all too familiar. Unsheltered sounds grim and depressing, but Li’s ferocious devotion to finding her daughter provides a strangely optimistic thread that relieves the shocking violence. You will grip this thread until your palms bleed.

For this reviewer, the sign of a healthy crime-fiction ecosystem isn’t merely the success of the ‘big names’ but also the emergence of writers whose voices are so distinctive as to be singular. Sometimes these writers become commercially successful in their own right, and sometimes they remain literary outliers, drawing their readership from a smaller but avid following. When I think of the health of American crime fiction in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I recall not only the success of Mario Puzo, but also the kind of writing culture that sustained the dark vision of an author such as George V. Higgins. The same goes for Britain in the 1980s, where Dick Francis was still publishing prolifically when Derek Raymond emerged. Turning to twenty-first-century America and the success of writers like Michael Connelly and Karin Slaughter, it’s the rise of Megan Abbott and Richard Price that illustrates the full potential of that culture’s capacity for crime storytelling.

The term ‘autotheory’, despite having been around since the 1990s, gained prominence after the release of Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts in 2015. Predictably, the emergent term elicited a flurry of academic interest, amid which Lauren Fournier – curator, video artist, filmmaker, and academic – established herself as a leading voice. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, Fournier’s first monograph, builds on her previous work, offering a condensed history of the genre and a number of case studies drawn from literature and the arts.

This is the first book dedicated to autotheory; it takes on the onus of circumscribing what ‘autotheory’ is and setting the parameters of future discourse. As such, it is disappointing that while Fournier acknowledges the influence of women of colour in the nascence of the genre, she does not meaningfully contextualise it using their work. Instead, Fournier gives a quick overview of autotheoretical-ish work produced since the 1960s, traces the roots of the genre to European thinkers like Montaigne and St Augustine, and dates the term ‘autotheory’ to white women theorists Stacey Young (in 1997) and Mieke Bal (2015).

Listen to this article read by its author.

Harold Bloom died in 2019 at the age of eighty-nine. Always prolific, he continued working until the very end. Throughout his final book, he digresses at regular intervals to record the date, note his advanced age, and allude to his failing health. At one point, he reveals that he is dictating from a hospital chair.

Could a book composed under such circumstances be about anything other than death? Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The power of the reader’s mind over a universe of death, the prolix title of which combines an instantly recognisable line from Shakespeare with a less obvious reference to Milton, can certainly be read as Bloom’s attempt to bring his career full circle. In its pages, the venerable literary critic presents us with his final reflections on a select group of canonical poets (Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Lawrence, Frost, Stevens, Crane). He also, pointedly, returns to the subjects of his earliest critical studies (Shelley, Blake, Yeats) and includes a lone chapter on Freud, whose ideas he adapted into his idiosyncratic theories of literary influence and canon formation.

‘What is so good about Dickens’s novels?’ It is a question ‘oddly evaded by many who have written about him’, in John Mullan’s reckoning. ‘Gosh he is good – though so careless,’ Iris Murdoch wrote to Brigid Brophy in 1962. Many writers before and since have found Dickens not only improvisatory and self-indulgently digressive but also sentimental, melodramatic, and sermonising – a great entertainer rather than a good writer. Mullan undertakes to demonstrate that what appears to be carelessness is as often as not ‘technical boldness and experimental verve’. Composing ‘on the wings of inspiration’, in response to the exigencies of serial publication, Dickens essentially revised as he wrote. Yet, consulting the manuscripts of the novels, Mullan notes how meticulously he adjusted his diction and phrasing. Like Oliver Twist’s companion in crime, the Artful Dodger, who comes alive through his sleights of hand and language, the Artful Dickens is a magician in prose and a talented conjurer: ‘his feats of legerdemain might equally apply to his writing’.

‘When I first began reading Nam Le’s Love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice, I was sceptical: a story about a writer writing a story? A writer at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, no less? Isn’t this a little self-indulgent? Hasn’t this been done before?’

So begins Fiona McFarlane in her essay for Reading Like an Australian Writer, a new collection of writings on writing, edited by award-winning novelist Belinda Castles. I shared a little of this sentiment when Castles’ book arrived for review. Yet another book of writers talking about the books that inspire them? Isn’t this familiar territory?

‘Land isn’t always meant to be grasped any more than art is, or dust,’ writes Michael Farrell in the arresting opening sentence of the first essay of Kate Leah Rendell’s Randolph Stow: Critical essays. Stow’s writing shows just how provisional meaning and territoriality can be, and the statement is a fitting beginning to a new book about his work.

Randolph Stow (1935–2010) is a particularly interesting writer, especially for his time and place: historically aware, generically expansive and predictive of much later Australian writing. His work has become more accessible, too, with the publication of Suzanne Falkiner’s biography Mick: A life of Randolph Stow (2016), with the Text Classics reissues of some of his novels with astute contemporary critical introductions, and with The Land’s Meaning (2012), John Kinsella’s expertly introduced selection of Stow’s poetry. Randolph Stow: Critical essays provides thirteen responses to Stow’s life, poetry, and fiction.

‘Experimental writing’ can sometimes seem like a wastebasket diagnosis for any text that defies categorisation. Even when used precisely, it begs certain questions. Isn’t all creative writing ‘experimental’ to some degree? Isn’t the trick to conceal the experimentation? And what relationship does it bear to the ‘avant-garde’? If avant-gardism implies a radical philosophy of art, where does ‘experimentalism’ fit today? Is it not part of the valorisation of novelty, of innovation for innovation’s sake, which has gripped the literary establishment in recent decades? (When books like Milkman [2018] and Ducks, Newburyport [2019] fall victim to the cosiest of literary prizes, where have the real radicals gone?)

Bain Attwood’s Empire and the Making of Native Title is a welcome contribution to the field. Like many good historians of sovereignty and native title in Australia and New Zealand, Attwood stresses the importance of contingency and complexity in the first decades of British settlement on both sides of the Tasman Sea. His early chapters focus on the local and imperial contexts that shaped Crown approaches to Indigenous title in New South Wales, Port Phillip, and South Australia. The rest of the book provides a forensic account of the lead-up to and aftermath of the British assumption of sovereignty in New Zealand, and its shifting ramifications for legal arguments about Māori land title.

In 1969, an Anzac veteran visiting Gallipoli fell into conversation with a retired Turkish school teacher. The teacher had with him a guidebook featuring a quote from Şükrü Kaya, the former head of the Ottoman Directorate for the Settlement of Tribes and Immigrants. The quote came from a 1953 interview Kaya gave, in which he recalled a 1934 speech he made on behalf of Mustafa Kemal, a sentimental entreaty to Anzac mothers to ‘wipe away’ their tears. The teacher shared Kemal’s supposed words with the Australian visitor, who returned to Brisbane and passed them on to Alan J. Campbell, a Gallipoli veteran. Campbell, who was involved in the creation of a Gallipoli memorial in Brisbane, contacted the Turkish Historical Society to verify the quote. They could only confirm Kaya’s 1953 interview, but this was considered good enough. In this convoluted way, ‘the most iconic refrain of Anzac Day’ ended up on the memorial’s plaque, attributed to Kemal, with one addition. Campbell invented the now well-worn line about ‘the Johnnies and the Mehmets [lying] side by side’.

As readers of her two volumes of memoirs will know, Sheila Fitzpatrick trained at the University of Melbourne until departing for Oxford in 1964 to pursue doctoral research on the history of the Soviet Union. That took her to Moscow, where she gained access to Soviet archives. Fitzpatrick would make her name as an archival historian, in contrast to earlier Western scholars who relied, both of necessity and by inclination, on other sources; she showed remarkable ingenuity in using the officially sanctioned records.

To kidnap one pope might be regarded as unfortunate; to kidnap two looks like a pattern of abusive behaviour. Ambrogio A. Caiani tells the story of Napoleon’s second papal hostage-taking: an audacious 1809 plot to whisk Pius VII (1742–1823) from Rome in the dead of night and to break his stubborn resolve through physical isolation and intrusive surveillance.

The French have a term for weighty tomes of scholarship: gros pavés or paving stones. Alexander Mikaberidze has landed his own gros pavé, an extraordinary account of the Napoleonic Wars of 1799–1815 in almost one thousand pages, based on an awe-inspiring knowledge of military and political history and a facility in at least half a dozen languages. The scale of his knowledge is breathtaking.

Mikaberidze grew up in the Republic of Georgia as it transitioned from the collapsing Soviet regime to independence. After a short career at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Georgia (1996–2000), he moved to the United States in 2000 to pursue his passion – studying the Napoleonic era. Now a historian at Louisiana State University and still in his early forties, he is a prodigiously productive author, with more than a score of books on the military history of Europe and the Middle East during those years.

Day flicks its cards, laconic.
Even in April, a flamboyance of colour:
stray perfume for the pent. Burnt leaves
drift away one by one, like concert-goers
after interval. High and handsome
loom the houses, forlorn, dogless even.
No one frolics on a lawn.
Merriment is shadowplay, happenstance.
Yet we build new ones, colonies of selves.
Czars of concrete lay their riddling floors
listening to songs of the eighties.
Loud they ring through the torpid suburb.
A flag is draped over a balcony –
rebuke, provocation, an airing?
Even the kookaburras exhort us now.
Two doors down, in a bedroom window
(boy or girl we wonder as we go),
Dennis Hopper broods for us, ageless cowboy.
Plague in a park vivifies the dogs.
They snap at each other, foreigners.
Pigeons peck among the futile seed.
Though no storm comes, a great bough
topples from the golden gum.
It lies there cordoned and criminal.
Triathletes excel at their several sports,
haughty in their charismatic tans.
Undeceived and wan, we trudge and trudge:
the circuiteers of inconsequence.

after Eavan Boland’s ‘New Territory’

The world closed in, but it was fortunate
there was her own interior to explore:
the prayer books a captain might have read
on long voyages, now small with gossamer pages
of tiny print, so interesting, myths really,
of rise and fall, pride, hedonism and fate,
the farmer who could not turn water into wine
no matter how hard he tried. And then there were
emotion’s continents, the hesitation of awkward
words, entire cities falling into wrath’s fire
and reddened sunsets flaming shame
over unknown deserts. And the territory of air
how weightless the soul becomes in solitude –
a puff and there it spins across the inner globe
like a stellate summer husk. Each landscape
morphs in shadow and more shadowless sun,
death hidden in a map marked with disparate
arrows, as if no symbol leads the way home.
Other scratchings indicate a waterhole, some
place to rest. And here, in the centre of a circle
scrawled by a child, the child glimpsed,
the monster conquered by the colour of the sea.

Having mastered the art of using magnets
in discretionary acts
                like making a pencil
                                float above a table
or a throwdown of iron filings in stasis
becoming a shiver of black rain
                in the air between
                                points of contact & repulsion
I began to harvest my own
absence of weight
                as when appearance & illusion
                                are indeterminate
as one with luminaries such as
moonlight on ice so thin
                the face of a risen fish
                                can be seen or a vision
of skin through translations
of heat lamp steam running
                beads on glass
                                & other manifestations
of desire that turn to harm
when intimate is confused
                with intimidation
                                so careful not to wake
what was left of my own dubiety
I swore allegiance to charms
                & spells & went
                                about my work indoors
in the dark until a thin horizontal
line above the window sill
                & the heavy hem of the curtain
                                grew dim & I neared
the plaster rose on the ceiling
like some vast albino spider
                & if the story of how I came
                                to leave the earth turns
to something like heresy of hearsay
instead of myth it will be
                because I summoned as witness
                                to the capitulation of gravity
a trapped bird in the blacked-out
flyway of the living room
                that battered my face
                                with its wings & made
a sound you’re more likely to hear
in a clearing than a room
                & also a rainforest moth
                                with its avuncular disposition
& feathers for feelers
that testified to my rising
                by shaking amber dust
                                into my eyes & I know
that what has occurred within
the small parish of giving your word
               is a poor substitute for proof
                                in the form of audience
involvement like passing a hoop
as portable portal
                over the body to eliminate
                                the use of wires & yet
what of the bird that refused to leave
when the doors were thrown open
                or the moth that had taken on
                                the texture of the basal
cell carcinoma on my hand
that developed
                as in a dark room
                                of the mind.

Krissy Kneen is the award-winning author of fiction, poetry, and memoir, including An Uncertain Grace, Steeplechase, Triptych, The Adventures of Holly White and the Incredible Sex Machine, Wintering, Eating My Grandmother, and Affection. Her latest book is the memoir The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen. She has written and directed broadcast documentaries for SBS and ABC Television.

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

Slovenia. Finding my grandmother’s homeland has been the most strengthening experience of my life. The homeland of my ancestors has given me a sense of self in the present. I need to go back at least once more to firm up that (waning) sense of self.

Young writers may turn to the page for catharsis – for writing-as-therapy – but that’s not why we read them. The ageist view, that a writer mustn’t pen their memoirs until they are older and learned, neglects the breadth of excellent work by precocious writers who have a story to tell. Naïveté and inexperience can enchant, sometimes more so than brilliant craftsmanship or intellectual maturity.

Lech Blaine’s memoir, Car Crash, introduces another young author to a corpus of young Australian essayists and memoirists, which includes Oliver Mol (Lion Attack! [2015]), Bri Lee’s (Eggshell Skull [2018]), and the collected works of Luke Carman and Fiona Wright. To different degrees, these writers attempt to document a turning point in their personal lives. For Fiona Wright, the trigger was coming to terms with, and learning to talk openly about, her eating disorder; Luke Carman had a psychotic breakdown after his marriage failed; Bri Lee, as a former lawyer, wrote from a personal perspective about the ways in which the Australian legal system handles sexual abuse cases; and Oliver Mol, the Aussie hipster Everyman, related how migraines prevented him from reading, writing or – the horror! – using his smartphone.

Blaine’s turning point was a devastating accident that killed three of his friends. Overnight, his carefree youth was obliterated, and the young man soon discovered how poorly a masculine society full of slogans such as ‘harden up’ and ‘she’ll be right’ had prepared him for dealing with tragedy.

The book opens on 2 May 2009, when Blaine was involved in a car crash near Toowoomba. In a scene that feels highly metaphorical, Blaine escapes the car crash and watches amid the tragedy gawkers as his six friends remain trapped beneath the wreckage. ‘The car crash hadn’t occurred to me,’ Blaine later reminisces. ‘Not in the same way as to the others. I was a bystander to the end.’ By establishing himself as an onlooker to his own tragedy, Blaine cleverly frames the dramatic arc of his survivor’s guilt.

During the course of the following days, he receives the news in a state of deep shock. Three friends are dead. Tim, his best mate, is comatose. Dom, the driver of the car, must endure a trial for his role in the death of his passengers (he was ultimately acquitted of dangerous driving and of dangerous driving causing death and grievous bodily harm). The rumour mill is already corrupting the tragedy with fanciful retellings. Although it’s later confirmed that the P-plate driver was sober and driving under the speed limit, hostility toward young male ‘hoons’ runs deep in Australian society. As Blaine writes: ‘The driver was drunk and speeding, clearly. At some point he’d been blindfolded from behind. The front passenger – me – yanked on the steering wheel. We were committed to a suicide pact. Witnesses saw ziplock bags of weed on the back seat.’

Lech Blaine (photograph by James Brickwood)

Afterwards, the crash casts a long shadow over Blaine’s sense of self. The book flicks between episodes before and after the crash, filling the reader in about his literary ambitions, his torrid journey from adolescence to adulthood, and the beginnings of a Martin Edenesque romance with the cultivated Frida.

Blaine adopts the good old tortured artist archetype, with an outback spin. Since reading Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Blaine has considered his larrikin lifestyle and literary ambitions as being diametrically opposed. He lived a double life. He describes himself as ‘poet moonlighting as a hoon’, a stranger lost in a land of beer-drinking philistines. His father, Thomas, demonstrates a well-meaning inarticulacy when trying to console Blaine after the crash. ‘That’s a fuckin’ cunt of a thing,’ Thomas says. But ironically Blaine’s native tongue, an ocker irreverence, gives his writing an amiable charm and reflects the styles of artists such as Tim Winton, Miles Franklin, and Helen Garner.

As Car Crash progresses, Blaine begins to inhabit a darker territory of life. He spirals into self-renewing misfortune, involving trouble with the law, intemperate drinking habits, a failure to acculturate in Brisbane, disillusionment with his father’s ‘she’ll be right’ attitude, and alienation from his family and friends. The book’s epigraph, which presents a definition of a car crash as ‘a chaotic or disastrous situation that holds a ghoulish fascination for observers’, suggests the book is arranged as a series of smaller ‘crashes’ or aftershocks, all stemming from the original accident.

The words ‘ghoulish fascination’ lingered in my mind while I reread the opening pages of Blaine’s book. It clearly referred to the rubberneckers who huddled voyeuristically around the scene of the crash. But then I found a shadow meaning: was I, the reader, any better than a gratuitous rubbernecker? Was I drawn to Blaine’s memoir for the same trauma porn, the ghoulish fascination, of observing disaster?

The note of tragedy was not what stayed with me after reading Car Crash. Blaine’s navel-gazing keeps the stories of the other survivors remote; we never get to see their tragedies. For the most part, Blaine seems to have resented his status as ‘bystander’ – a witness, not a victim.

Blaine is the antithesis of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus: our ‘pessimistic poet’ never reaches the epiphanic moment of heightened perception in everyday life. Instead, the book ends without closure or cure or ‘clean endings’. For Joyce, epiphanies were profound, spiritualised moments arising from banality. Blaine’s realisation is more humble: the banality of extraordinary trauma. We see glimpses of ‘subterranean pain’, of profundity, but often Blaine’s powers of self-analysis are blunted by a penchant for bravado.

The Three Burials of Lotty Kneen begins like a fable, the story of a poor family that wins the lotto and moves to a remote Queensland location to make fairy-tale characters for a tourist attraction called Dragonhall. There should be a happy ending, but there isn’t.

The family’s undisputed matriarch is Lotty Kneen, or Dragica, as she was once known. She says the name means ‘dragon’, but Dragica, in Slovenian, actually means ‘precious’. Nothing Lotty says can be trusted. Lotty is the persona she fashioned for a life in Australia. Hers is a familiar story of ‘displacement, migration and struggle’, from Slovenia via Alexandria to Australia. What makes it unique is the extent to which Lotty hides the details of her background, and the hold she exerts over her family. Her granddaughter Krissy Kneen’s memoir is more than a search for lost family; it is a remarkably honest disclosure of the effects of living with a confabulator, a self-styled healer and tyrant. Kneen likens the grandmother she always called ‘Mum’ to the witch Baba Yaga of Slavic folklore and to the krivopete: supernatural Slovenian wild women with backward-facing feet, fickle creatures who dispense help and harm in equal measure.

In Creating a Character (1990), acting coach Moni Yakim urges students to explore their vulnerability, arguing that, while we admire Superman for lifting buildings, we become emotionally invested only when he’s faced with Kryptonite. It’s ironic, Yakim writes, that vulnerability is simultaneously ‘the one quality a person is most likely to conceal’ and the one that ‘most allows an audience to identify’. This is the terrain Rick Morton traverses in My Year of Living Vulnerably, a mix of memoir, cultural history, reportage, and witness testament. How can we be at peace with our vulnerabilities when, like the dinosaurs Morton used to obsess over, they could eat us alive?

There is no definitive answer, of course, but that’s never stopped the luminaries of science, pop culture, philosophy, psychiatry, media, literature, religion, or social media from having a crack, as Morton judiciously highlights. Maybe not knowing is fine. ‘Doubt,’ as he writes, ‘is the engine of this project.’

The tension between competing Mortons – ‘I’m an optimist by birth and a cynic in my work’ – lends the book a taut through-line on which Morton hangs an investigation into the restorative properties of love and kindness, and regular reminders that he’s no Deepak Chopra: ‘[A]lthough kindness can make you happier, this is not a manifesto to live happily. Fuck that noise.’ In chapters on topics such as forgiveness, touch, masculinity, beauty, and the self, Morton revisits themes from his début memoir, One Hundred Years of Dirt (2018). His early years on a remote, 1,000-square-kilometre cattle station in Queensland still preoccupy him – and how could they not?

Rick Morton (photograph by Perry Duffin)

A diagnosis in early 2019 of complex post-traumatic stress disorder sees Morton looking back – often tentatively – towards a serious childhood accident involving his brother, who had to be flown to a distant hospital, and the sudden, concurrent awareness that his father was having an affair with the family’s nineteen-year-old governess. Morton’s traumatised seven-year-old self is a ‘ghost in the machine’, one that, of its own accord, pulls various stress-response levers that have beleaguered his life. Loving that little boy anew, while attempting to leave him behind, becomes a delicate act of disentanglement. Morton writes: ‘I must unwrap his little fists from the cords of my amygdala and cut him loose.’

It is interesting to speculate how the book may have been knocked sideways by Covid, that great reminder of shared vulnerability. The overseas research trips Morton takes in early 2020 with his ‘newly minted book advance’ yield rich material. In New York, he invites a homeless man, Cardell, for a meal at a recently opened diner and orders takeaway for Cardell’s precariously sheltered family. In Japan, he speaks with Yoshizawa, a farmer who, though just fourteen kilometres from the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant, returned to his farm to tend his cows after the 2011 nuclear disaster. One imagines that, had 2020 unfolded differently, there would have been more of these incidental encounters.

Instead, within days of returning to Australia, Morton finds himself in lockdown with his flatmate Séamus, whose job as an intensive care nurse renders impossible the hugs on which Morton had become dependent after half a lifetime of avoiding touch. Maybe as a result, his writing on ‘the complex intersection of pain and loneliness’ is among the most poignant in the book, from a rendezvous with Paro the robotic seal, designed to alleviate loneliness in aged-care homes, to profound reflections on the nature of loneliness itself:

Imagine a bridge that you have chosen not to cross because you are happy on your riverbank. That’s solitude. Loneliness is a washed-away bridge in front of the woman who can no longer remember what the other side of the river looks like.

At times, Morton’s reveals are only half-reveals, a glance into his internal work-in-progress before the curtains are re-drawn. He refers to ‘espionage humour’, used to ‘disguise the many secrets of feeling’, and to the jokes he still makes about being raped, which constituted his first sexual encounter. Told the first time in stark matter-of-factness, the incident resurfaces later as a quip about the night he ‘lost’ his virginity – ‘I told you I could joke about it.’ But then, as he argues, humour in adversity is the opposite of ‘laying down arms’.

Morton is as warm as any blanket, an intelligent, funny, endearing writer. His penchant for self-deprecation, though honed and humorous, might be the only thing readers would want less of – not for their own sake, but his. Nobody is likely to reach the end of a Rick Morton paragraph and think ‘Jeez, that was twaddle’ – the opposite, in fact – so the author’s suggestions that points he makes are ‘anodyne’ (they’re not) or inconsequential (‘Who the hell is going to read this book and change their mind?’) can feel superfluous. Or maybe not. What could be more relatable and human than this type of pre-emptive self-owning? We’re back with Superman, buckled by that glowing Kryptonite, and feeling even more invested in Morton.

We can’t help concluding that things are rarely settled, or rarely settled for long. Curiosity trumps certitude in nearly every situation. Feelings are facts and memories malleable. Traumas – and the dark power they hold over us – are stubborn, mutable, and transferable. We remain both the decorative tablecloth and the stain underneath.

From that renewed sense of inherent motion comes one of the most powerful messages in this quite beautiful book, that life’s fair winds, however scarce, are still significant. ‘What I’ve tried to convey over the course of this book is not a sense of finality,’ Morton writes, ‘but of progress.’

On 8 November 2015, a year after his death, a celebration was held for Mike Nichols in the IAC building in New York. The audience included the likes of Anna Wintour, Stephen Sondheim, Tom Stoppard, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, and Meryl Streep. Seventy-six years earlier, less than a mile away, seven-year-old Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky walked down the SS Bremen’s gangplank into America and a new life. The transformation of the angry, bewildered immigrant Peschkowski into the outwardly charming, debonair, outrageously talented Nichols is at the heart of Mark Harris’s comprehensive, compulsively entertaining biography.

Nichols was born into an artistic, intellectual Russian-Jewish family in Berlin. His maternal grandmother, Hedwig Lachman, translated Oscar Wilde’s Salome; Richard Strauss used it as the basis for his libretto. Einstein was a distant cousin, a fact on which Elaine May riffed to hilarious effect at Nichol’s AFI Lifetime Achievement celebrations in 2010 (not to be missed on YouTube).

Sylvia Pankhurst was unquestionably the most interesting of the Pankhurst women and the only one who continues to be thought of with admiration and respect. Her life certainly deserves to be known. A talented painter, she gave up the possibility of an artist’s life for one as an activist, not only as a suffragette, but also in the labour movement and for a time as a communist, an anti-fascist, and an anti-imperialist fighting for independence for Ethiopia, where she lived for her last five years (she died in 1960 aged seventy-eight).

Vera Deakin was Alfred and Pattie Deakin’s third and youngest daughter. Born on Christmas Day 1891 as Melbourne slid into depression, she grew up in a political household, well aware of her father’s dedication to the service of the Australian nation, not only in the Federation movement but later as attorney-general and three times as prime minister.

Carole Woods recreates the life of this Melbourne middle-class family with its home entertainments, annual beach holidays, and careful education of its daughters. Because of Alfred Deakin’s central role in the achievement of Federation and the first decade of the new Commonwealth, the Deakins’ family papers have been well preserved, including family letters that have little to do with politics but are invaluable for the insights they provide into the Deakins’ social and family life. Alfred and Pattie instilled a sense of service in their three daughters, as well as a love of Britain, her literature, and her imagined landscape. In 1900, when Vera was eight, Deakin took his family with him when he went to London in the delegation to shepherd the constitution through the British parliament.

The first statue commemorating Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), a swirling tower of forms coalescing into a single naked figure at its apex by British artist Maggi Hambling, was unveiled in London last year. Responding to accusations that the statue was ‘mad’ and ‘insulting’, Hambling defended it as ‘not a conventional heroic or heroinic likeness’ but ‘a sculpture about it now’. Against such dehistoricisation, Sylvana Tomaselli’s intellectual biography of the late eighteenth-century philosopher seeks to recover the historical Wollstonecraft. Tomaselli, the Sir Harry Hinsley Lecturer in History at St John’s College, Cambridge, has been writing on women in the late eighteenth century since the mid-1980s.

Members of the general public are likely to recognise the names of some of the pioneering female aviators. There is of course Amelia Earhart, the American who became the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. Here in Australia, many would recognise the name Nancy Bird Walton, who is known for gaining her pilot’s licence at the age of nineteen, as well as for helping to establish a flying medical service in regional New South Wales. But what of the Australian female aviator who is the subject of James Vicars’s début, Beyond the Sky: The passions of Millicent Bryant, aviator? Millicent Bryant (1878–1927) has largely passed into obscurity, but in her day she was a sensation. Vicars would like his great-grandmother to become once again a household name, celebrated for her achievement as the first woman in Australia – indeed, the first in the Commonwealth outside Britain – to gain a pilot’s licence.

A little over a year ago, I was writing about the effects of the Black Summer of bushfires on our language. When Covid-19 hit, suddenly we were collecting the words of the pandemic. Despite the overwhelming focus on the pandemic (and its language) over the past year, the language of climate change has continued to evolve. My column on the Black Summer bushfires touched on the broader vocabulary of climate change and talked about both the language of climate crisis, such as tipping point, mass extinction, and eco-anxiety, and that of climate activism, such as school strikes, climate justice, and climate protests. More recently, however, it has struck me that the language around climate change is also increasingly that of climate grief.

It speaks volumes that almost a century and a half after Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen announced the modern prose poem, James Longenbach influentially defined poetry as ‘the sound of language organized in lines’. An otherness, bordering on illegitimacy, pervades what Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington argue is ‘the most important new poetic form to emerge in English-language poetry since the advent of free verse’. The book vindicates this claim. No less compelling, however, is the way the prose poem, long defined in negative terms, here becomes the whetstone over which old assumptions – about the prosaic, the poetic, and the daylight between the two – are run to a fresh sharpness.

Four Oceans by Toby Davidson

Puncher & Wattmann, $25 pb, 93 pp

Toby Davidson’s first collection, Beast Language, was published nine years ago. That feels surprising: its freshness then makes it feel more recent now. Much of the movement in that book is present in his new collection, Four Oceans, literally so, as we begin with a long sequence aboard the Indian Pacific from Perth to Sydney. It’s his younger self again, leaving home for the ‘eastern states’, but with an esprit de l’escalier twist, as that younger self gets to see and describe everything with the eye and language of the older, freer, more assured Davidson.

It is a compelling journey. The rhythms of the writing conjure up the compressed, swaying, jolting drag of a long train journey: ‘Two-seaters unlatch and swing into cradles – / my flickering doona, Canadian Monica, star-crossed and rocking platonic. Orange sparks of outer mines sprint like children for a vintage loco.’

The Library of America has published massive anthologies of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American poetry that include work from multiple racial and ethnic backgrounds, so why now another large book devoted exclusively to African Americans? Because it needs to be said and said again just how profoundly American this poetry is, how it enriches culture and should not be ignored among the more conventionally canonised. The fact that this book appeared in 2020, the year when Black Lives Matter protests went global, only underlines its importance as a historical marker. Poetry by Black Americans is not only unignorable but central to American literary life. Reading African American Poetry: 250 years of struggle and song may change your way of reading poetry, particularly modern poetry. It is that rare thing among anthologies, a moving book, enlivened by fire and soul.

In 1985, following the publication of their collaborative works Gularabulu: Stories from the West Kimberley and Reading the Country: Introduction to nomadology (with artist Krim Benterrak as co-author), Paddy Roe, possibly sensing that the young researcher would be of critical importance to his life’s project, suggested to Stephen Muecke that there needed to be a third book, The Children’s Country, about the rayi – the spirit children – and for human children to come. Muecke writes that he was unable to deliver the book at the time. Roe went on to establish the Lurujarri Heritage Trail following a songline along a ninety-kilometre stretch of coastline from Minyirr (Broome) to Minarriny (Coulomb Point).

In July 2020, Indigenous residents of the remote central Australian community of Laramba lost their case in the Northern Territory Civil and Administrative Tribunal. For decades, the water that flowed through the taps into Laramba homes had been contaminated with high levels of uranium – about three times the safe limit. The case was a desperate attempt to force the government to assume legal responsibility and to fix the problem. They didn’t succeed: the Tribunal found that the Department of Housing (as the landlord) wasn’t required under Northern Territory law to provide safe drinking water to its tenants.

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Lazy repetitions

Dear Editor,

In her review of Fires Flood Plague: Australian writers respond to 2020, Adele Dumont referred to ‘the impact of the 1789 smallpox epidemic’ in the nascent colony at Port Jackson. While there is no doubting that this disease was a terrible experience for the Indigenous people (with a major effect on the local population), and while it must have contributed seriously to the level of anxiety among the colonists and convicts, it is in fact highly unlikely to have been smallpox. I wish reviewers (and others) would read more widely and not lazily repeat outdated notions.

Even the early and astute chronicler, Watkin Tench, reported that it was ‘like’ smallpox (he did not and could not identify it more specifically). Tench wondered impressively about its origins, since no smallpox had been introduced into the colony for a very long time. The reality was that not one of the British settlers succumbed to the disease (especially no children, who are especially vulnerable to smallpox), despite the fact that some of them had exceedingly close contact with the victims. That outcome would have been impossible if the illness really had been smallpox. The far more likely diagnosis would have been chickenpox, which virtually every colonist would have carried in their nervous system as a residue of childhood infection. When some of them, in the stress of quotidian colonial life, developed ‘shingles’, the children would have developed chickenpox and then passed it into the Aboriginal community, which, in all probability, had no previous experience of that disease. We need to recall that as chickenpox (varicella) and smallpox (variola) had been distinguished only as recently as 1767, an insight about which the colonial surgeons would have been unaware, the early confusion is understandable. But this is no reason for modern historians to perpetuate it.

This has been published, in corroborative detail, previously (see Hunter & Carmody’s ‘Estimating the Aboriginal Population in Early Colonial Australia: The Role of Chickenpox Reconsidered’ in The Australian Economic History Review (2015); and a number of ABC Ockham’s Razor broadcasts including 19 September 2010).

John Carmody, Roseville, NSW

Adele Dumont replies:

As historian Billy Griffiths notes in his essay in Fires Flood Plague (which I quote in my review), controversy over what is routinely referred to as Australia’s ‘1789 smallpox epidemic’ centres on its origins. It is unclear whether the disease was transmitted to Indigenous populations by the British – either inadvertently or in a deliberate act of biological warfare – or, alternatively, by Macassan seafarers. That this disease was indeed smallpox, I confess I did not realise was also a contested matter. I have therefore taken this opportunity to update myself on this chapter of our history.

It seems to me quite a stretch to label the smallpox theory an ‘outdated notion’. Richard Hingston floated the chickenpox theory in 1985, but this was rebutted by virologist Frank Fenner. John Carmody’s own more recent attempt to reintroduce the chickenpox theory has been rebuffed by Chris Warren (the two sources Carmody provides in his letter refer back to himself). As recently as 2020, historian Henry Reynolds describes the question of the 1789 epidemic’s causes as ‘a real mystery’, but makes no reference whatsoever to the possibility of the disease being chickenpox.

For a more detailed discussion of the various debates surrounding the epidemic, including arguments in favour of the smallpox theory: https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/sundayextra/smallpox-outbreak-of-sydney27s-past/5383312

For a discussion of the 1789 epidemic’s possible causes: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-03-29/coronavirus-and-australias-first-pandemic-caused-by-smallpox/12099430

Prizes galore

Yes, you still have time to enter the 2021 ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. It closes at midnight on May 3 (AEDT). The Jolley Prize, worth a total of $12,500, is being judged by Gregory Day, Melinda Harvey, and Elizabeth Tan.

Meanwhile, judging continues in the Calibre Essay Prize. In early May, we will inform all entrants of the status of their essays. We look forward to publishing the winning essay in the July issue.

And looking ahead, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize will open in July. This will be the eighteenth year for ABR’s poetry prize.

Changes at ABR

ABR and the Judith Neilson Institute are delighted to welcome James Jiang as the ABR Editorial Cadet in 2021–22. This is a full-time, twelve-month position intended to advance the career of a young editor–journalist. It builds on ABR’s internship program, which dates back to 2009. James was chosen from an impressive field of 120 applicants. We thank them all for their interest in this innovative program.

‘Opportunities like this are sadly rare in the sector,’ commented Peter Rose, Editor and CEO of ABR. ‘This is a great opportunity for James Jiang, and a terrific outcome for ABR. We have big plans for 2021. James will be an integral part of the creative team.’

Andrea Ho, Director of Education at JNI, commented: ‘JNI is delighted to partner with ABR to help strengthen its cadetship program and to develop the career of James Jiang. Journalism has a proud craft tradition, and cadetships have been the foundation of industry-based learning for many years. As the media undergoes a profound and rapid transformation, now is an excellent time to reimagine how cadetships work. ABR has set an impressive standard that should inspire others to follow.’

James Jiang joins ABR after working for several years as an academic. Born in Shanghai and raised in Sydney, he has degrees in English from Yale (BA) and Cambridge (PhD). He has written for many publications, including ABR.

The ABR Editorial Cadetship is supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas and by the ABR Patrons.

An almost faultless début

Congratulations to Ella Jeffery, whose collection Dead Bolt (Puncher & Wattmann) has received the Anne Elder Award. Established in 1977, the prize is awarded annually to the best sole-authored first book of poetry published in Australia. The panel of judges – Marcella Polain, Rae White, and Toby Fitch – praised ‘Jeffery’s clarity and control of language and form’ in an ‘almost faultless’ début.

Reviewing Dead Bolt in the January–February 2021 issue of ABR, Luke Beesley commended Jeffery’s art of ekphrasis and subtlety of expression. We look forward to featuring more of Jeffery’s work, poetical and critical.

Empathy and compassion

Arnold Zable, the award-winning writer, novelist, playwright, and human rights advocate, has been named the 2021 recipient of the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature. Zable received the award at an online ceremony. The Melbourne-based author’s books include the memoir Jewels and Ashes, the novels Café Scheherazade, Scraps of Heaven, and Sea of Many Returns, and several short story collections.

Zable served for many years as president of the Melbourne Centre of PEN International, and in 2013 was the recipient of the Voltaire Award, recognising his promotion of free speech and human rights.

In a streamed conversation with Michael Heyward, his long-time publisher, Zable remarked: ‘When I received the news, I was in one of my favourite writing spots down by the river. I felt a great sense of lightness, a kind of weight, a burden, lift off my shoulders. It is a privileged vocation, but it is also one that doesn’t come without struggle. I feel very moved by it. At the heart of literature is empathy and compassion and putting yourself in other people’s shoes and seeing it through their eyes. And it becomes a great pleasure to do this.’

A bonus ABR

Next month, as foreshadowed in April, subscribers will receive an extra issue of ABR – at no extra cost. The June issue is coming along nicely, with more commentary, review essays, and creative writing than usual.

The middle class has always been the target audience for the ever-optimistic, benign phrasing of Australia’s economic prospects. It is for them that there runs a vein of exceptionalism that believes no matter what the numbers say, the nation is immune to the dangerous excesses of the American brand of capitalism. This extends to debt. Despite the widely touted fact that we have among the highest levels of household debt in the developed world, we assume that any downturn will be temporary – the next mining or housing boom is just around the corner.

Here to skewer this fallacy is Royce Kurmelovs’s Just Money: Misadventures in the great Australian debt trap. We quickly learn that debt as not an isolated problem. Rather, it is an indicator of an economy structured so that ordinary people are saddled with the costs of speculation, mismanagement, and rank profiteering. Kurmelovs quotes headlines hinting at an Australia far less prosperous than we supposed. Stories like the proliferation of the gig economy, robodebt, the banking royal commission, and predatory lending develop the argument our society is primarily divided between those with the wealth to shake off debt and those it cripples.

This latter category is explored through a series of personal histories in which fortunes, businesses and, in some cases, the debtors’ entire life, can be consumed by their debt. Wendy Waszkinel’s brother commits suicide after a child support accounting error lumps him with incorrect payments the tax office refuses to rectify. Jenny Low’s story is the sole victim’s account heard at the Banking Royal Commission. Hers began with the discovery that her deceased husband’s business owed vast sums to SunCorp; it ended with the elderly widow being ejected from her home, still in debt. Even relatively minor sums can devour the host with shame, extinguishing any long-term plans. One conclusion we draw is an old one: caveat emptor. The more slick the corporate lender’s logo and web presence, the more ruthless the predator it disguises.

Kurmelovs’s own tale is less dramatic: he finds himself uninsured after a car accident and is lumped with a $23,000 bill he will struggle to repay. This gives him the excuse to ‘go gonzo’ and experience firsthand the underworld of debt collectors. No longer the cauliflower-eared standover men of a bad detective novel, even they have been lacquered with a corporate gloss, embossed business cards, and a toolkit of manipulation techniques.

Just Money is not simply a catalogue of tales of woe. In its primary register, it explores the roots of how we ended up with an economy that does not create human misery as a by-product but devours it as an active ingredient. The villain here should be known to everyone. Neoliberalism (or ‘economic rationalism’ at birth) is the doctrine that continues to haunt Australians, in spite of regular denunciations. One senses it has become a load-bearing pillar of economics in this country – discredited but not to be demolished lest it bring down the house.

Kurmelovs is lucky not to have to trace the flow of neoliberal ideals across the Pacific one-by-one, though apt comparisons between financialisation here and in the United States are sufficient to rebut any dreams that we are all still young and free, girt by sea though we are. Instead, Kurmelovs is able to point to Milton Friedman’s tour of Australia in 1975 as planting the domestic neoliberal seed. From it sprouted a redesigned financial system, a project vigorously pursued through the 1980s by both major parties. Of the many reforms initiated by Bob Hawke and Paul Keating in the 1980s, it was floating the dollar in 1983 that changed national economics forever. The financial sector experienced explosive growth that led to speculation infiltrating those newly privatised segments of the once public service, as well as the broader economy. These reforms and their drive towards efficiency did not stop at streamlining bloated aspects of the once sheltered public sector. Instead, they continued to demand profits with a free-market zealotry beyond what could be expected of any entity designed to serve the public.

Kurmelovs is persuasive when he explains how neoliberalism’s severance of restraints and regulations ends not in liberation but in fresh bondage. Institutions and businesses allowed to pursue a pure profit motive will inevitably result in perverse interactions without empathy and humanity. Anyone who has remained on hold over a crackling line to a distant call centre in an attempt to contact their local bank will understand the real-world absurdity of so-called economic rationalism. But instead of resetting your PIN, imagine you are holding to relieve a debt payment that would mean the difference between food on the family dinner table or going hungry.

Relating human scale to a broader economic arc has become the author’s trademark. This goes beyond trade-craft and runs to the core of Kurmelovs’s moral code: economic abstraction without considering the human implications is what produces a system that thrives on exploitation and hardship.

It is unclear whether Australian economic exceptionalism will survive Covid. There are still so many debts to be tallied. Either way, Just Money should be kept on hand to temper the conversation.