People seeking asylum are off trend. As the black and brown people on boats have stopped arriving on Australia’s shores, so has our interest in them waned. In commemoration, a boat-shaped trophy sits in Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s office, inscribed with the words ‘I Stopped These’. Today, Australians seem preoccupied by the vaccine roll-out and allegations of rape in parliament. With a federal election on the horizon, people seeking asylum and refugees seem passé, a case of ‘out of sight, out of mind’.

My ten-month-old daughter knows better than this. ‘Object permanence’ is her developmental recognition that people exist, even if she can’t see them. Celebrating the ‘end’ of the boats, thereby, is analogous to an infantile regression. The passengers have simply been pushed elsewhere; an estimated 14,000 now languish in Indonesian camps, even though many have long been recognised as refugees by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). ‘There’s a growing number of suicides in the shelters,’ journalist Nicole Curby¹ told me. ‘What leads them there is a sense of desperation and hopelessness.’ Far from solving the problem, Australia has shoved it upstream. ‘Suffer or die there, not here,’ we seem to have said to people seeking asylum.

希望本是无所谓有，无所谓无的。这正如地上的路；其实地上本没有路，走的人多了，也便成了路。
Hope is an intangible thing. It cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is like a path. Originally, there is none - but as many people come and go, a path appears.
Lu Xun, ‘My Old Home’

We both unsettled when the boats came.
Briggs, ‘The Children Came Back’

Let’s start with a portrait. The year is 1993. The book is My Kind of People. Its author is Wayne Coolwell, a journalist. Who are Coolwell’s kind of people? Ernie Dingo, for one. Sandra Eades. Noel Pearson. Archie Roach. And there, sandwiched between opera singer Maroochy Barambah and dancer Linda Bonson is Stan Grant, aged thirty. Circa 1993, Grant is a breakthrough television presenter and journalist whose mother remembers him coming home to read the newspaper while the other kids went to play footy. ‘[T]here was a maturity and a sense of order about him,’ Coolwell writes. The order belies his parents’ life of ‘tin humpies, dirt floors, and usually only the one bed for all the kids in the family’. They are unable to afford a football (Grant relies on rolled-up socks). His sister, one of three siblings, sleeps on a fold-out table. In one house, they have to chase away a group of occupying emus before they can move in.

‘Your sense of permanence is perverted,’ said Holstius to Theodora Goodman in The Aunt’s Story (1948). ‘True permanence is a state of multiplication and division.’

The words are prescient, for Patrick White, who wrote them, has done rather well at dissolving into the impermanence of post-mortem obscurity. Perhaps unsurprisingly in view of the pandemic, the thirtieth anniversary of his death in 2020 left little imprint. No literary festival honoured the occasion, and no journal did a special issue. If White is looking down at us from some gumtree in the sky, he will be bathing in the lack of glory. He despised the hacks of the ‘Oz Lit’ industry as much as he loathed the ‘academic turds from Canberra’.

For much of her career, Gwen Harwood (1920–95) was best known for her hoaxes, pseudonyms, and literary tricks. Most notorious was the so-called Bulletin hoax in 1961, but over the years she orchestrated a number of other raids on literary targets, mainly aimed at challenging the power of poetry editors and gatekeepers. For L’Affaire Bulletin (as she sometimes called it), she submitted to that august magazine, under the pseudonym Walter Lehmann, a pair of seemingly unexceptionable sonnets on the theme of Abelard and Eloisa. Only after the poems were published did the Bulletin discover that they were acrostics; read vertically, one spelled out ‘So long Bulletin’, and the other, ‘Fuck all editors’. The first could have passed as a harmless joke, but the second threatened to bring the Vice Squad down on the Bulletin’s hapless editor, Donald Horne. He was not amused, and newspapers around the country echoed his tone of injured outrage. The appearance in print of an obscene word was shocking enough, but the revelation that the author of the sonnets was actually a woman turned shock to horror. To many in Australian society, it was an article of faith that, as an acquaintance of Harwood’s put it, ‘No WOMAN would ever write such a word.’ ‘I had a mental picture, as I heard her pronunciation of “WOMAN”, of little bluebirds with daisies in their beaks,’ Harwood wrote wryly.

Listen to this article as read by the author.

The Middle-East conflict is perhaps the most intractable in the world. Israelis and Palestinians have been fighting for nearly a century over the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean. The world has witnessed a never-ending cycle of tension and conflict, including a number of full-scale wars, with immense suffering on both sides. 

In recent years, particularly in the context of Gaza, every component of the cycle is familiar: Palestinian deaths far outnumber Israeli ones; dismaying images of flattened buildings; the grief of those who have lost loved ones. Outside the Middle East, reporters, politicians, and community leaders present their arguments, often ignoring the losses of those on the other side. 

Many readers will recall reports of the fire in April 2021 that damaged the University of Cape Town’s library, which, among other riches, housed invaluable collections of unique manuscripts and personal papers, and one of the most extensive African film collections in the world. The extent of the damage is still being assessed. Even worse, the fire that destroyed the National Museum of Brazil in July 2018 consumed twenty million objects, including unique documents, the oldest human remains ever found in Brazil, and audio recordings and documents of extinct indigenous languages.

Irreplaceable records may also be lost simply because of an inability or unwillingness to protect fragile items before they deteriorate to the point of loss. This is the situation we currently face in Australia, despite National Archives that are among the finest in the world in terms of completeness and the skills of their staff.

Archives all over the world are confronting similar problems of managing rapidly increasing digital records while preserving vast print, oral, and other records in different, often fragile formats. They all need the government financial support necessary to do this securely and durably. Ours are no exception.

While the ‘National Archives’ conjures up a vision of a repository of print-based official government records steadily made accessible on January 1 every year, it also holds a treasure trove of riches pertaining to the lives of all Australians in forms ranging from film and posters to private letters and personal objects. It is a repository of unique and startling diversity, the property of all Australians.

The painful challenge is that so many of these priceless items are on acetate film or magnetic tapes that deteriorate beyond rescue or are in digital forms about to be obsolete and fall off what archivists call the ‘digital cliff’. In the words of Professor Michelle Arrow from Macquarie University, ‘There’s no back-up copy of these documents sitting in another country’s National Archives. They aren’t on Google, or YouTube.’ 

In April 2019, David Tune, former secretary of the Department of Finance, commenced a ‘functional and efficiency review of the National Archives of Australia, in particular of its ‘capacity and capability to … receive, secure, store and preserve government information in the digital age … preserve and digitise at-risk collections; and perform its functions and deliver services to the Australian Government and the Australian people.’ Tune’s 100-page report is a model of its type and includes twenty key recommendations. He was careful not to call simply for more funding, even though he pointed out that, like all Commonwealth agencies, the Archives have been pared back to the bone by decades of ‘efficiency dividends’. In 2013, the Archives had about 430 staff; today it has about 300. (There are similar tales one could tell about other cultural institutions, from the National Library to the National Film and Sound Archive.) Instead, Tune made fundamental structural proposals about better record-keeping practices for the rapidly increasing digital records of national government and administration. There were also controversial proposals for user-pays income generation.

But Tune was particularly bothered by two urgent matters of wider public interest. First, in his words, ‘an issue of immediate importance is the deterioration of many records held in the Archives. Limited capacity in the Archives means that many records (in a variety of forms) will be lost if action is not taken. As such, the National Archives could potentially be in breach of [the Archives Act] due to unauthorised loss of records.’ A specific recommendation was that $67.7 million must be allocated for urgent preservation across seven years.

Second, Tune highlighted the Archives’ current inability to respond to requests for records within reasonable time, a bugbear of many historians. Delays of more than five years before researchers hear the results of their requests for access are now commonplace, as the Archives are excruciatingly cautious about processing new material. There is even a reluctance for thesis supervisors to recommend research topics that might draw on archival records, for fear that it would not be possible for students to complete a thesis in a timely manner.

Tune submitted his review to Attorney-General Christian Porter in January 2020. It was not until March 2021, however, that Amanda Stoker, Assistant Minister to the new Attorney-General Michaelia Cash, released the findings of the review. She has undertaken to respond to the review this year.

Studying our past and telling our stories is critical to our sense of belonging, to recovering hidden and awkward histories, and to creating our shared future. Our National Archives are a core resource for these stories as well as the indispensable repository of official records. We cannot afford to compromise on which records are kept or on the quality of their maintenance. The Tune review deserves thorough consideration; its urgent matters require prompt remediation.

Update

A specific recommendation of the Tune report was that the Commonwealth Government make an emergency allocation of $67.7 million across seven years to preserve the most at-risk items in the National Archives. The budget allocation announced on 11 May was $700,000, about one per cent of the total recommended. The Archives have now turned to crowd funding and other appeals for donations. See https://www.naa.gov.au/about-us/support-us

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

Where is home for a feminist? ‘I carry “home” on my back,’ wrote poet and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa in Borderlands/La Frontera (1987), a protective response to the many layers of discrimination she experienced as a queer Chicana woman. ‘Home’, for Palestinian poet Fadwa Tuqan, writing in the 1970s, was a place of confinement, where women’s movements ‘strongly resembled those of domestic poultry’. The home has rarely been a safe place for women (never mind feminists), who have for millennia dared to ask for better accommodation. But in the Penguin Book of Feminist Writing, academic Hannah Dawson, who teaches the history of political thought at King’s College London, has built a vast home for six centuries’ worth of feminist writers – the ‘city of ladies’ that medieval author Christine de Pizan envisions in the anthology’s first extract. It is a glorious history of women’s struggle for liberation from 1405 to 2020, featuring rebellious feminists of all stripes, from the French revolutionary Olympe de Gouges to Kenyan Nobel Prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai to the Russian punk rockers Pussy Riot.

It is wonderful to immerse oneself for days in the precise, elegant, passionate words of historian Inga Clendinnen (1934–2016), as this welcome collection of her writings enables one to do. Clendinnen’s distinctive voice comes through: warm, confidential, witty, and driven by a fierce intelligence. All her major writings are here – essays, articles, lectures, memoirs, and extracts from her books – deftly selected by James Boyce, a historian thirty years younger than Clendinnen and himself a highly original thinker and writer. As Boyce observes in his perceptive introduction, ‘Clendinnen’s subject was nothing less than human consciousness.’

In the process of British colonisation, Aboriginal people lost their country, kin, culture, and languages. They also lost their freedom. Governed after 1901 by different state and territory laws, Aboriginal peoples were subject to the direction of Chief Protectors and Protection Boards, and were told where they could live, travel, and seek employment, and whom they might marry. They were also subject to the forced removal of their children by state authorities. Exemption certificates promised family safety, dignity, a choice of work, a passport to travel, and freedom. Too often, in practice, exemption also meant enhanced surveillance, family breakup, and new forms of racial discrimination and social segregation.

Among historians of sexuality, it is customary to stress that there was never just one sexual revolution, but many. There were the pop-culture versions, the countercultural expressions and perhaps most momentously, but least discussed, the everyday or ‘ordinary’ sexual revolution. Or conversely, as French philosopher Michel Foucault so influentially argued in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1: The will to knowledge – first published in French in 1976 and in English in 1978, in the very thick of the so-called sexual revolution – there was no liberating sex from the disciplinary and regulatory effects of modern sexuality, already by then at least three centuries old. One of the delusions of the age was that, as we put sexual repression behind us (by saying yes to sex, for instance), ‘tomorrow sex will be good again’.

Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous by Mark Anthony Cayanan

Giramondo Publishing, $24 pb, 102 pp

Few books blur the line between beauty and ugliness more than Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (1912). The novella follows the ageing writer Aschenbach, whose absurd over-refinement – born in part of repressed homosexuality – is dismantled by Tadzio, a beautiful boy he encounters on holiday in Venice. His obsession with Tadzio represents the displacement of mortality (Aschenbach will soon succumb to cholera) through a wilful surrender to decadence and decay.

Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous, a polyphonic suite of verse from Filipino poet Mark Anthony Cayanan, claims to ‘loosely [channel] the dynamic of desire and inhibition’ in Mann’s novella. In fact, it does something quite different. It is written in the ‘fourth person’, an ill-defined chorus of voices marked by tenuous fluidity of self. Protean identities – unfixed and ‘unfinishable’ – respond to and resist Aschenbach’s repression and rigidity, against a drastically different moral and political backdrop. The interior monologues alternate between two modes: prose poems written ‘as Aschenbach’ that border on literary criticism, and others adapting the book’s theme through a contemporary queer lens and with oblique reference to the current political situation in the Philippines.

Familiarity with Mann isn’t essential but will help readers to appreciate Cayanan’s insights. They are particularly astute on Aschenbach’s self-dramatising tendencies: ‘scenarios of unsanctioned passion are swaths of an inner life repurposed from bourgeois melodrama’. ‘There’s no knowing now,’ begins another poem; ‘knowing dignity’s no longer a reason to keep alive a life that precludes abandon’.

Cayanan’s lexicon is unabashedly rococo, the syntax syncopated. The voices that emerge are uncanny, breathless, enfolded in an ironised, swirling grandeur characteristic of Mann, as in this almost parodic homage:

Tadzio, you’re the tired gold of sunset, of ardour and unused heat, of horses drowning in the sea. There’s tulle over the lampshade, tulle of the landscape, Tadzio. Mine, mine, the white word admonishes the world.

Cayanan counterbalances Aschenbach’s ‘queer tragedy’ with vignettes of modern travel and life on the Filipino streets. These prevent the book’s exploration of selfhood from becoming too insular or claustrophobic, and add a postcolonial layer to the commentary. Once Aschenbach’s demise has been charted, though, Cayanan breaks decisively into a confessional, autobiographical mode that risks working too far against Aschenbach’s agonised dissimulation. ‘I enable my self-absorption,’ the speaker writes. ‘I’m silly enough to think it makes me interesting.’

Some of the commentary can feel too glib: ‘Mann offloads his gay shame onto his characters’, for one. Even so, the final shift towards candour helps to resolve some tensions in Unanimal, Counterfeit, Scurrilous – not so much a ‘queer tragedy’ as a complex reworking of Death in Venice that leaves readers to ponder the new challenges and anxieties of modern queer life.

Errant Night by Jerzy Beaumont

Recent Work Press, $19.95 pb, 78 pp

Science fiction tropes have found their way into much poetry over the last ten years – from Tracy K. Smith’s Life on Mars (2011) to J.O. Morgan’s The Martian’s Regress (2020) – but none is quite as left field as Jerzy Beaumont’s Errant Night, a verse story that uses interstellar travel as a semi-allegory for grief.

In the midst of a Canberra winter, the speaker begins by declaring that ‘depression is [his] heart’s armour. Rusted shut,’ and follows this with the metaphor of constellations disappearing in the night sky. The speaker then takes off in his spaceship (‘built from schematics found on Reddit’) to find the missing stars. Flying over the capital, he collects ‘neon halos from street lights, fast food signs’, but these artificial stars are no substitute for the real thing. ‘I won’t be back,’ he writes, ‘until the night sky is flooded with light.’

It is a simple – almost pat – metaphor, but it is elaborated with the intricate world-building of a fantasy novel. With a sound dramatic hand, Beaumont describes his travails on Narcissau, a port city or ‘Cubist favela’ he finds after being made ‘homeless in space’.

The work’s reliance on sci-fi tropes can seem to obfuscate the realities of grief as much as illuminate them. Certainly, you are left with the feeling that Beaumont might have a lot more to say about his own experiences, but there are also moments when the truth breaks through the grand metaphor. ‘It has been fifty-four days since you died. I think about you a lot. Wonder how many stars count your absence at night. Some things can’t be fixed.’

At the end, the speaker admits: ‘I never did find the stars, but I don’t mind.’

Errant Night presents readers with narrative poetry that is both epic and fugue. Some of the set pieces are as muddled as the processes of grief itself, but Jerzy Beaumont does in fact find a few stars. ‘It is not the avoidance of pain that will save me,’ he writes, ‘but the dedication to repair.’ This is a poet recuperating and slowly emerging. We owe him our attention and patience.

I Said the Sea Was Folded: Love poems by Erik Jensen

Black Inc., $22.90 pb, 81 pp)

Meanwhile, I Said the Sea was Folded: Love poems – the début collection of Erik Jensen, co-founder of The Saturday Paper and editor-in-chief of Schwartz Media – is presented, like Cayanan’s work, as an exploration of queer experience.

It is easy to imagine how someone in love could write the sort of guileless sweet nothings in this book (the poems are addressed to Jensen’s partner Evelyn Ida Morris), but much harder to imagine how they could ever have been published.

Jensen’s verse is woefully slight. It aims for gnomic profundity but tumbles into the mundane or mawkish every time. To say these snippets are like refined Instagram poems would insult the Rupi Kaurs of the world, who look like the height of emotional sophistication alongside Jensen. Here is ‘Second time’ in its entirety:

My favourite line
Is when you said
You were dreading
More chicken soup.
Later you asked
If it was Wednesday
When you made it
And whether it was still
Okay to eat.

That is about as exciting as a shopping list. The poet seems to suffer from a journalist’s addiction to reportage. Such seismic personal events as making meatballs or ordering ‘milled beetroot / with a brick of cabbage’ at a restaurant are relayed with a plodding, dutiful accuracy. The result is dullness of the kind the poet himself tries to justify as a poetics of inarticulacy: ‘I don’t know if you read poetry,’ begins ‘Last Tuesday’; ‘I don’t know if I write it.’

Readers will know instantly. What is most striking is how few of these poems communicate anything meaningful about Ida Morris. The poem ‘Waiting’, which includes a lone note of poignancy (‘You say your childhood was purple feet / Made cold by the river’), is one of the few. Most of the others lose focus quickly, veering into ramblings such as that in ‘Glasses’:

This morning
You were smiling
And I wondered what
You could see
Without your glasses.
I just remembered
That last night
In my dreams
I wrestled an alligator.

No doubt this has some private significance, but the whole book is like this. It does not translate into anything of artistic value for the general reader.

Smoke softens the trees, a swift omen scented before seen.
It warps what it brings, from the sun to grief.

I stir on the stoop I rent. All around me wasps shimmy,
Orange alphabet of knives. I call them father and son

Until my tongue blisters. I chew the queen into bits
And for a moment, we understand each other

Her children and I, the way a believer understands God:
As a largeness capable of being

Stung. Out of stillness I come to marvel
At my survival, the stupendous absurdity of breath.

I tremble so violent I vibrate off the ground, a man
Dripping between earth and sky with only a mother

Left in life – what luck – and men I will never call
Baba. Soon I am high enough to see the limits of burning

The pall dispersing over waves, the end arriving
As always, on the edge of an unfathomable wing –

In the long vanishing blue I smile a migrant smile
Knowing we look our best as we leave.

In the garden, my father sits in his wheelchair
garlanded by summer hibiscus
like a saint in a seventeenth-century cartouche.
A flowering wreath buzzes around his head –
passionate red. He holds the gift of death
in his lap: small, oblong, wrapped in black.
He has been waiting seventeen years to open it
and is impatient. When I ask how he is
my father cries. His crying comes as a visitation,
the body squeezing tears from his ducts tenderly
as a nurse measuring drops of calamine
from an amber bottle, as a teen at the car wash
wringing a chamois of suds. It is a kind of miracle
to see my father weeping this freely, weeping
for what is owed him. How are you? I ask again
because his answer depends on an instant’s microclimate,
his moods bloom and retreat like an anemone
as the cold currents whirl around him –
crying one minute, sedate the next.
But today my father is disconsolate.
I’m having a bad day, he says, and tries again.
I’m having a bad year. I’m having a bad decade.
I hate myself for noticing his poetry – the triplet
that should not be beautiful to my ear
but is. Day, year, decade – scale of awful economy.
I want to give him his present but it is not mine
to give. We sit as if mother and son on Christmas Eve
waiting for midnight to tick over, anticipating
the moment we can open his present together –
first my father holding it up to his ear and shaking it,
then me helping him peel back the paper,
the weight of his death knocking,
and once the box is unwrapped it will be mine,
I will carry the gift of his death endlessly,
every day I will know it opening in me.

All morning, I read about Christian mystics. After a long bath, I wear a caftan and silver ring.
Intolerable hours of waiting for you. I plunge my hands in ice water.

The sun is red and low when I meet you by the fountain. Houses on steep hills light up. You speak
to me with your deep voice like a man hammering in a forge. I thrill at the sound like a dog.

We watch a miracle play performed by homosexuals. The homosexuals play saints or abstractions.
One man wears antlers braided with holly. Chastened in the last act, a lascivious friar loses his wig.

Longing is simple. However, you are a man with a skeleton, a will, a past. We argue on our way to
your place for dinner. My arm around your waist, drawing you near, is a gesture of peace.

We eat salt-baked branzino stuffed with chilies. We slowly pour cold water into our liquor until it
clouds in the glass. Wind buffets the screen door constantly. I sob in the bathroom.

Feathergrass shifts in the moon’s lean light. It is now so late the exact hour does not matter. Passing
the blunt, you exhale smoke like a sun god. When we kiss I kiss your skull.

It’s difficult to describe what it’s like to be raised in a Chinese family, especially when you are surrounded by markers of Western society. There is no such thing as talking back to your parents or refusing to do what they say. As a child, I never went to sleepovers. During my teenage and young adult years, I felt increasingly trapped in my own home. Everything I did was scrutinised; my parents never seemed to take into account my wants or needs. I found myself grasping for any scrap of independence, usually through lying or stealing or a combination of the two. As children, we are continually told that adults do things to protect us, especially when they are things we don’t particularly like. But when does protection morph into something uglier? When does it smother us, as if our agency has been stripped from us?

There are two famous statues in the Gundagai area. One is the Dog on the Tuckerbox. The other is of two heroes, Yarri and Jacky Jacky, who, with other Wiradjuri men, went out in their bark canoes on many exhausting and dangerous forays to rescue an estimated sixty-nine people from the Great Flood of 1852.

That statue wasn’t erected until 2017, but the white settlers did show their gratitude soon after the flood. They presented Yarri and Jacky Jacky with bronze medallions, which they wore on their chests with great dignity. Looking on at this ceremony, in Anita Heiss’s fictionalised version of the story, is Yarri’s young daughter Wagadhaany. She is bursting with pride, but at the same time she has deep misgivings. Why didn’t the town give her people blankets and food instead of medals? Why didn’t the white folk follow her people’s advice to build their houses on higher ground?

This scene sets the tone for Heiss’s account of Wagadhaany’s life on the cusp of white settlement, torn between the Bradley family, where she works as a servant, and her own family on the banks of the mighty Murrumbidya (Murrumbidgee), a river that brings both life and death to its human neighbours.

We meet Wagadhaany as a happy little girl in 1838, watching the new settlers build their houses, at a time when black and white people lived alongside one another in an uneasy truce. By the time she is a woman with children of her own, the balance has shifted to a point where the white man and his laws are in total control of every aspect of Wiradjuri life.

Heiss is speaking from both her research and her experience. She is a member of the Wiradjuri Nation of New South Wales, and that background has informed her work as an academic and author of historical fiction, commercial women’s fiction, non-fiction, play adaptations, children’s novels, and blogs. With its strong emotional pull and its accessible female hero, this novel deserves wide appeal.

There are moments of high drama and tragedy, not least the Great Flood, which leaves a distraught Wagadhaany clinging to the roof of the Bradley house with brothers James and David, the family’s only survivors. But this is not a tale of the worst of white settlement. Wagadhaany’s people know about massacres and rape and poisoning, but those horrors take place elsewhere. Instead, Heiss gives us a somewhat more nuanced portrait of a range of black–white relationships, always insidious because the white side of the equation has the power and dominion. As a servant, Wagadhaany lives what seems a relatively privileged life; but in reality she has no choices. She is in effect a slave.

The Bradley brothers force her to move away from her beloved family to a new homestead at Wagga Wagga. Grief has not improved them. James is an irascible drunkard who barely treats Wagadhaany as a human being and refuses to say her name: she is always ‘Wilma’. David, a somewhat underdeveloped character, seems kinder, but he turns out to be rather different.

The most interesting relationship is between Wagadhaany and Louisa, James’s new wife, one of the few ‘good’ white people. Louisa, from a Quaker background, is what we today would call a progressive: despite her husband’s scorn, she is passionate about improving the lot of the Wiradjuri people and educating their children, and she rails against the injustice of the white man’s law. Part of her project is to befriend Wagadhaany; another driver is her loneliness.

Heiss’s portrayal of this difficult friendship is one of the chief joys of her novel. The women reach out to each other in awkward ways, Wagadhaany always hanging back a little. We feel sympathy for both of them; it’s their mutual burden that they can never be entirely close because of their fundamental inequality. Eager and slightly patronising, Louisa never understands this. Wagadhaany understands it all too well.

Away from the cups of tea and scones at the Bradley homestead, Heiss shows us a different world at the Wiradjuri camps along the Murrumbidya, at Gundagai and Wagga Wagga, places teeming with children, grumpy old aunties, affection, and belonging. But here again, Wagadhaany is torn – between the family of her sweetheart Yindyamarra, father of her children, and the family she has been obliged to leave behind.

I could quibble about some of the detail in the English dialogue, which sometimes strikes a jarring, twenty-first-century note: would someone like James really say ‘too little, too late’? In other ways, the language is fascinating. Like other Indigenous novelists, Heiss makes frequent use of words in her ancestral tongue, in this case the Wiradjuri language, with a glossary to help unfamiliar readers.

It was a bold decision by the publishers to go with a Wiradjuri title (it means ‘River of Dreams’), but I think it will pay off. The names of the characters are also important. Yindyamarra means ‘respect, gentleness, politeness, honour, careful’ – a name he lives up to. Wagadhaany (pronounced Wagadine) means ‘dancer’.

Wagadhaany is frequently too weighed down with sorrow and fear to dance. But there is optimism in her step and a quiet, determined dignity in her character, and she is extraordinarily brave. Her friendship with Louisa gives her an occasional chance to speak her truth to the white woman with a freedom that must have been extremely rare at the time. Her deepest passion is reserved for her family, and that yearning fills Heiss’s story with poignancy and heart.

Like Louisa, I still have lessons to learn from Wagadhaany and her descendants. Heiss and other Indigenous writers are helping me, and keeping me entertained into the bargain.

In his monograph The Great Derangement (2016), Indian writer Amitav Ghosh pointedly asks why society, and more specifically literature, has almost entirely ignored climate change: ‘ours was a time when most forms of … literature were drawn into the modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight’. This was, Ghosh concludes, because ‘serious prose fiction’ had become overwhelmingly committed to versions of literary realism that rely on notions of quotidian probability. The irony of the realist novel, then, is that ‘the very gestures with which it conjures up reality are actually a concealment of the real’.

Few books immediately suspend time; few need no warm-up and almost demand to be read, reread, underlined. Stephanie Smee’s rendition of Joseph Ponthus’s multi-award-winning first solo book, On the Line: Notes from a factory, is one such read. It is the autobiographical story of an intellectual with a career in social work in the suburbs of Paris, who, having moved to Brittany for love, can’t find a job in his field and is forced to sell his labour as a casual worker in the local food-processing industry. Here we couldn’t be further from postcard Brittany, whose wild nature, hazy skies, mysterious language, and inhabitants inspired a Romantic generation of poets in search of an exotic fix without the hassle of leaving the Hexagon.

Sometimes termed an experimental novel, On the Line defies categorisation. The sixty-six free-verse entries without punctuation composing this diary of social demotion surface from a charged blank page. Words are distilled, sentences stripped to the bone. Ponthus’s descent to hell comes with a whole new jarring soundscape: the implacable cadence of twenty-first-century food-processing plants. His writing conveys the liberating pace of one’s fragmented wanderings when fighting against time. ‘The factory is / Above all else / A relationship with time / Time that passes / That doesn’t pass.’ Such human(ising) rhythm pushes against the dehumanising tempo of the machines. And this is what Ponthus endeavours to transcribe faithfully, day or night, after his unpredictable shifts:

I write like I think when I’m on my production line
Mind wandering alone determined
I write like I work
On the production line
Return
New line

From the grinding monotony of shellfish and tofu processing to the gut-wrenching everyday horrors of the abattoir, the unrelenting rhythm of each episode is dictated by working ‘on the line’. The double entendre here is more evident in the original French title, À la ligne, which, as recalled fittingly by translator Stephanie Smee (whose name surely deserves a place on the front rather than back cover) refers to the production line, but also means ‘to start a new line of text’, or ‘to press “return” on a keyboard’.

Given its spellbinding beat, it comes as no surprise that experimental rock musicians Michel Cloup, Pascal Bouaziz, and Julien Rufié leapt at the opportunity to adapt Ponthus’s text into a hypnotic half-sung, half-read litany with Sonic Youth undertones, À la ligne – Chansons d’usine.

On the Line is about factory work, but it fits uncomfortably under the label of proletarian literature. Writing for Ponthus is not an intentionally empowering gesture, nor, in itself, an act of condemnation against capitalism. It is first and foremost a need, his way of holding out. The resulting expression of shared humanity and camaraderie arises from this will to resist. Despite it all, On the Line is not a universe without hope. It is witty, full of irony, even vaguely optimistic. It’s a book where true love exists and where art can save lives: ‘We sing at the factory / Goddamn how we sing / We hum in our heads.’

What saves Ponthus are the songs of iconic singer-songwriter Charles Trenet and all the great writers of the French literary tradition – Hugo and Dumas, but, above all, Apollinaire, Cendrars, Aragon – authors whose work was transformed by the experience of war; their style becoming drier, more condensed, punctuation often disappearing. The factory is Ponthus’s war. On the Line is at home within the French avant-garde and wartime writing, such as René Char’s fragmented journal Feuillets d’Hypnos (1946), to which Ponthus’s original subtitle, Feuillets d’usine, pays homage.

In his previous life as a social worker, Ponthus had published a number of articles on life in the Parisian banlieue, the underprivileged suburbs on the outskirts of the capital. Some of the troubled youth he was helping even co-authored with him Nous ... la cité (The Suburbs Are Ours, 2012), an everyday journal of their joint writing journey. Like war for so many before him, Ponthus is forced by the factory to discover his own truth, find his style, become a poet. He learns to ‘remove all fat’ from the text, just like with the cows in the abattoir.

While there is, for Ponthus, a before and after the factory, a common thread runs through all his work, both literary and not. It is a form of compassion and solidarity towards the underprivileged, the sans-dents, as former French President François Hollande had infamously called them, ‘the so-called toothless of our society’, to whom On the Line is dedicated. This is evident in his preface to a hot-off-the-press edition of the works by neglected author Henri Calet (1904–56). Ponthus here declares: ‘Like him, I come from the people and have never been anything else: an unemployed, a social worker, a factory worker in food-processing plants. Like him, I think I have never been able to write anything else than myself and the modest lives that surround me.’

No one could have expected that Ponthus would not see this preface nor this English translation in print. Baptiste Cornet, better known by his pen name Joseph Ponthus (1978–2021), died of cancer at forty-two in Lorient, Brittany, in late February, in the same week that saw the disappearance of major poets Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919–2021) and Philippe Jaccottet (1925–2021). The French newspaper Le Monde devoted a double page to these disparitions, their three photographs side by side. There they were, the faces of the Francophone-philosophical-poetic heritage, the down-to-earth Anglo-poetics of the everyday, and, as I like to think, Ponthus, in his own unique way, tracing a line between the two. 

Is it tautological to describe a work of fiction as ‘family Gothic’? After all, there’s nothing more inherently Gothic than the family politic: a hierarchical structure ruled by a patriarch, as intolerant of transgression as it is fascinated by it, sustaining itself through a clear us/them divide, all the while proclaiming, ‘The blood is the life.’ Yet three new Australian novels Gothicise the family politic by exaggerating, each to the point of melodrama, just how dangerous a family can become when its constituents turn against one another.

The quiet had left me. That’s how I put it, but I meant Maree. Most of her cosmetics abandoned in a swollen-stuck bathroom drawer. Hydrators, anti-aging, complexion correction. Potions, I called them, like an old man describing a woman’s things. A few days after she left I tried them on myself, mostly for the smell of her. Of course they did not correct anything, did not make me beautiful, only streaked me to an unlikely shade – Maree’s – darker and more lustrous than my own. I accepted why she’d gone. She’d made a choice, and it was not the wrong choice – her folks old and susceptible, too proud to see it and too stubborn to budge. Bad reception where they are. Have to climb a hill to make a call. But she never climbs the bloody hill. And her emails, when they come, arrive in business hours.

Listen to this article read by its author.

Before reading Richard Flanagan’s new book, Toxic: The rotting underbelly of the Tasmanian salmon industry, it is useful to remember that Australia’s southern isle was once the penal colony of Van Diemen’s Land. During the first fifty years of the colony’s existence, a small ruling élite achieved a near monopoly over the island’s most lucrative natural resources, the subservience of the majority convict population, and considerable profit from the public licences and patronage associated with political power. Far from these privileges ending with the cessation of transportation, self-government allowed the establishment to so entrench their interests that no substantial separation existed between the promotion of them and the functions of the state. The enduring cost of a historically corrupted polity was well highlighted (including by Flanagan) during the environmental conflicts of recent decades, but despite the saving of the Franklin River and the demise of forestry giant Gunns, a fully functioning democracy seems as distant as ever. Even the most basic task of government – returning a public profit from highly valuable public licences, be they poker machines or public waters – is still not being achieved in a state that is the poorest, sickest, and most disadvantaged in the nation.

Flash back to that election night in May 2019, when Australians, depending on their party affiliation, were either overjoyed or appalled at the Coalition’s return despite the opinion polls. That evening, Scott Morrison – a man little known to Australians until assuming the prime ministership just nine months before after an ugly leadership coup – summed up Coalition sentiment and his own Christian faith: ‘I have always believed in miracles,’ Morrison said, before asking, rhetorically, ‘How good is Australia?’

With his founding of the Bauhaus in 1919, the German architect Walter Gropius proposed a radical reimagining of the arts and crafts. His manifesto outlined the principles for an institution that would unify architecture, art, and design, creating ‘a new guild of craftsmen, free of the divisive class pretensions that endeavoured to raise a prideful barrier between craftsmen and artists!’ At the heart of this stirring vision was a world in which creativity was directed to practical ends, where function was a fundamental element of creative endeavour. Gropius’s call was both inspiring and timely, and it found ready devotees. In a continent savaged by four years of war, there was urgent need for a new way. Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Schlemmer were a few of the many who made their way to the German city of Weimar to work with Gropius and to help realise his vision.

Far too few Australian artists have been the subject of comprehensive biographies. Gary Werskey mentions Humphrey McQueen’s 784-page Tom Roberts (1996) as an inspiration. Of course, there are art monographs and retrospective exhibition catalogues, but those are not life stories. With seventy-six colour plates and another fifty-one images in the text, Werskey’s thoroughly researched Picturing a Nation, set in rich historical and social context, is most welcome. As he observes, A.H. Fullwood’s life was ‘as full of pathos and plot turns as a three-volume Victorian novel’.

Four kangaroos recently moved into the paddock that adjoins the house on Peramangk Country in the Adelaide Hills where I live. For weeks I had been conscious of distant gunfire, not the usual firing of the gas guns that wineries use to keep birds off their vines. I concluded that the kangaroos had been driven here by a cull. The goats, Charles and Hamlet, and the sheep, Lauren and Ingrid, who call the paddock home, seemed unperturbed by the roos’ presence. But what, I wondered, did all these animals think about one another? What, indeed, did they think about me?

These are the sorts of questions that poet, novelist, short fiction writer, and essayist David Brooks, one of Australia’s pre-eminent thinkers on the subject of human–animal relations, asks in his new collection, Animal Dreams, which anthologises seventeen essays written between 2007 and 2019. Following Derrida’s Breakfast (2016) and The Grass Library (2019), it is the third volume in what Brook says will be a sestet or septet of works on the lives of animals.

The higher education sector currently faces a confluence of challenges that are imperilling the future of universities as they have traditionally been understood and the sort of intellectual life they have long sustained. The most immediately pressing concern is the impact of the pandemic that has eroded the financial stability of Australian universities, resulting in widespread job losses and the closure of entire departments. Overall state funding for higher education has in fact grown slightly over the past decade, but this increase has coincided with ever more complex and invasive attempts by governments to ensure that tax dollars are ‘well spent’, such as the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) exercise that began in 2010, the Engagement and Impact Assessment (EI) implemented in 2018, and the National Interest Test (NIT) introduced in 2019 for all applications for funding to the Australian Research Council. The impact of these efforts is felt across all academic disciplines, but some are hit harder than others, often by design, such as last year’s Job-ready Graduates Package, which has made most humanities degrees vastly more expensive than other subjects thought to lead to better employment outcomes.

These realities are well known and often lamented. Corresponding attempts to justify the existence and mission of universities are not uncommon, typically falling into two categories: one that is economic, and one that is moral or political. First, defenders of the university will highlight the economic benefits they bring to society, such as the way a given subject instils skills (e.g. ‘critical thinking’) deemed necessary for employment. A second response often heard from humanities scholars claims that these disciplines play an indispensable role in diagnosing society’s ills thanks to their ability to identify past injustices and ongoing systems of power and oppression (frequently in the academy itself) that must be uncovered to make the world a better place.

Two recent books suggest alternative ways of justifying the existence of the university in the modern world, offering stimulating and fresh accounts whose disagreements are as noteworthy as their continuities. Zena Hitz’s Lost in Thought is a cri de cœur from an Ivy-league trained scholar of ancient philosophy whose disillusionment at the lack of moral relevance of academia led her to abandon her comfortable post in the ivory tower to join a Catholic religious order in the remote Canadian wilderness. Through spending several years pursuing an ordinary, simple life amid a close-knit community, she unexpectedly regained her sense of vocation and returned to teaching undergraduates. Lost in Thought has the primary aim of similarly reigniting the spark within academics whose joy in their profession has been snuffed out by the demands of their career. Aware of the problematic élitism her project might encourage, she broadens the appeal of her book by taking care to present academics as the mere stewards of a kind of intellectual activity to which all humans have access.

Hitz believes that people are moved more by images and stories than by deductive argument, and thus presents her case through a well-chosen assemblage of evocative source material. Her vision of the life of the mind focuses not on specific content but instead takes in intellectual investigation of any topic, so long as it is pursued in a certain manner. Consequently, she introduces her readers not only to Augustine’s Confessions and Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, but also to Einstein’s patent office and John Baker’s 1967 The Peregrine, along with activists like Malcolm X and Dorothy Day. From this rich collection she draws the argument that certain goods are intrinsic to human flourishing, and that one such good is unhindered intellectual enquiry, which nourishes the inner life, provides a refuge from suffering, and sustains human dignity. Such rich benefits do not come easy but instead require the ascetic practice of setting aside preconceived ideas, ignoring the allure of comfort, wealth, and social superiority, and cultivating a heightened sense of perception that enables one to confront reality as it is and to press on for ever deeper insights. Hitz insists that the intellectual life is inevitably distorted when one attempts to make it useful for some more important goal, even laudable moral or political agendas, since doing so restricts the free exercise of the intellect in its dogged pursuit of reality. On the contrary, the life of the mind certainly is useful, but only when it is allowed to abide in its uselessness, for it is this freedom of the inner life that grounds a variety of possibilities for acting in the world.

Eric Adler’s The Battle of the Classics has a more restricted subject matter and is presented in a more traditionally academic style, recounting an episode in the history of American higher education that should, he argues, inform contemporary apologetic efforts on behalf of the humanities. After providing a cursory overview of the history of the humanities from Cicero to the emergence of the modern research university in the nineteenth century, Adler zooms in on a debate that occurred among élite American universities in the 1880s and 1890s. The idea of ‘mental discipline’, their equivalent to our ‘critical thinking’, figured prominently in defences of the traditional Latin- and Greek-based curriculum as inroads were being made by the natural sciences. The traditionalists lost this battle, as is evident from the fact that by 1886 Harvard no longer required Greek in its admission exam. Moreover, thanks to president Charles W. Eliot’s Darwinian assumption that academic disciplines would be strongest if forced to compete for students in a free market, by 1897 Harvard’s once entirely prescribed curriculum had been thrown open to student choice, with but one compulsory class remaining. Adler contends that such failures resulted from a reliance upon a skills-based apologetic rather than any specific content that distinguishes humanities disciplines.

The hero of Adler’s story is Irving Babbitt, professor at Harvard from 1894 until 1933 and the leading light of the New Humanism movement that proved influential and controversial in the first third of the twentieth century. Babbitt opposed the romantic view that human nature is basically good and simply in need of being freed from the shackles of corrupting traditions and institutions (what he termed ‘sentimental naturalism’). In its place he offered a humanistic program of self-improvement: one should glean from the wisdom of the past by critically analysing cultural masterworks to identify the best accounts of the good life that can benefit contemporary society. It is this kind of apologia for the humanities that Adler argues should replace the skills-oriented approach so common today. This may sound like a reassertion of the now widely rejected ‘western civilisation’ take on the humanities, with its attendant ‘great books’ pedagogy, but Adler insists that, because no culture has a monopoly on greatness, scholars should draw eclectically across traditions to identify both the universality and particularity of the human experience.

What unites these books is their argument that attempts to justify the place of universities in the modern world can only succeed if they are grounded in the common humanity of those who undertake such pursuits. In current political and academic rhetoric, the prevailing emphasis falls upon the distinctive experience and identity of particular groups based upon race, gender, sexual orientation, disability and so on. Consequently, the most radical idea in these books is their insistence that there is a common core to human experience, and that attending to and cultivating it should be the primary aim of the intellectual life fostered by the university. Where the books diverge is in their characterisation of the usefulness of such endeavours. Adler is forthright that we should follow the Renaissance humanists and Babbitt in using the humanities for self-improvement. Thus, though he avoids the instrumentality of the skills-based defense, his own proposal nevertheless makes the humanities instrumental to this more fundamental moral imperative. Hitz, on the contrary, argues that the intellectual life is a basic human good that loses its usefulness as soon as one attempts to make it instrumental to anything, even something so noble as self-improvement or the pursuit of social justice. On this view, exercises like ERA and NIT inevitably debase the intellectual life of universities and unwittingly undermine the very benefit to society they attempt to measure.

Both books offer accounts of the university that helpfully go beyond the current state of the discussion. Adjudicating between the two proposals, or perhaps synthesising them, would push the conversation in a still more fruitful direction.

Stan Grant is the ABC’s international affairs analyst and Vice-Chancellor’s chair of Australian-Indigenous Belonging at Charles Sturt University. He won the 2015 Walkley Award for his coverage of Indigenous affairs and is the author of On Thomas Keneally, The Australian Dream, Australia Day, The Tears of Strangers, and Talking to My Country.

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

I have always been attracted to places with great bookstores. Obviously Paris, London, New York, but I’ve also found great hidden treasures in cities like Jerusalem, Yangon, and Islamabad.

What’s your idea of hell?

Haha. I am with Sartre – hell is other people! Not that he hates other people or that one should lock oneself away, only that we are trapped in the gaze of other people. It is why I bristle at ideas of identity, as if we can be reduced to a singular or simple idea of who we are or who we should be.

Only one manuscript of Beowulf has survived. It was in Sir Robert Cotton’s library. Cotton had been a student of that careful genius William Camden, who, through a lifetime’s work, formulated a different view of history: not the record of victory but the recollection of lost worlds and times. He and his fellow Antiquarians searched out fragments and ruins: Roman urns in the fields, Saxon burials under St Paul’s, a giant’s thigh-bone under a London cellar. They collected ancient manuscripts.

From the age of eighteen, Cotton began to amass his library. When he heard that the astrologer and alchemist John Dee had buried a bundle of manuscripts in a field, Cotton ‘bought the field to digge after it’ (John Aubrey, Brief Lives). He found a copy of the Magna Carta in a tailor’s workshop. He bought the whole room in Fotheringay Castle where Mary Stuart was beheaded and had it rebuilt in his own house.

In recent years, Hollywood has been forced to take a long hard look at itself. Since Alyssa Milano popularised the hashtag #MeToo in 2017, and the Time’s Up movement was launched in 2018, women in the film industry have been sharing their stories of sexism, discrimination, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. Film critic Helen O’Hara’s Women vs Hollywood is not the first attempt at a revisionist history of the Hollywood film industry. Several books have appeared that reread Hollywood through a feminist lens: Laura L.S. Bauer’s Hollywood Heroines: The most influential women in film history (2018), Jill Tietjen and Barbara Bridges’ Hollywood: Her story, an illustrated history of women and the movies (2019), and Naomi McDougall Jones’s The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside our revolution to dismantle the gods of Hollywood (2020). They share the view, as O’Hara’s opening observation puts it, that ‘the Hollywood dream has not been open to everyone and, with a large majority of roles and senior jobs going to men, its scales have often been tilted against women’. Hollywood is – or has been for a long time – a ‘rigged game’.

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In defence of Harold Bloom

Dear Editor,

I wonder how much of Harold Bloom’s output, interminable if not immortal, James Ley actually knows (ABR, May 2021).

Bloom’s earliest books – The Visionary Company, Shelley’s Mythmaking, and The Anxiety of Influence – were ground-breaking as well as rather gutsy for American readers. The Visionary Company included Hart Crane – famously dismissed by R.P. Blackmur – as the only American poet in a book containing readings of the canonical British Romantics. It not only in a sense reintroduced the culture to Romanticism but re-welcomed Crane to a conversation dominated by slavish worship of Modernism, especially T.S. Eliot. I remember reading it when I was twenty, instantly confirmed in my own passion for Crane, the joy of one’s youth (but of nobody else I knew at the time). Bloom’s book on Shelley makes the case, now routinely made by others, that Shelley was among the great religious poets. As for Anxiety, whatever its idiosyncrasies, it changed the vocabulary of literary criticism and extended the range of psychological criticism, and especially of Northrop Fry’s anatomies (Fry was Bloom’s teacher). That book, weird as it is, has always been more important to poets and artists than to critics of literature, especially academicians who are frankly frightened by its central claim, not because it is incontestable but because it eliminates ‘source hunting’ from serious consideration.

It’s hard to see how this ‘thoroughly institutionalised creature’ was that at all. The institution could only contain him by isolating him safely from the rest of the institution (he was not an official member of Yale’s English Department), but could hardly justify ridding itself of this brilliant nuisance, who taught his courses without a book, reciting from Shakespeare, Yeats, etc. As for his ‘assertions’ of the value of literature in a ‘democratic age’, that’s simply not borne out by the range of his work’s interests. Listen to Bloom on Cormac McCarthy and Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison or Emily Dickinson. Poetry has no politics, or if it has, it is not ‘democratic’. Art is not a democracy. In his Autobiographies, and long before the muse of ugliness ruined his prose, Yeats says that ‘intellectual freedom and democracy are incompatible’. Whether it is applicable to the crises of the moment, crises of representation and identity, it is still worth considering.

James Ley replies

I thank Professor Barbarese for taking the time to respond to my article. I am well aware that Bloom’s stance was grounded in his love of Romantic poetry and that his early criticism was forged in opposition to the anti-Romantic Eliotian orthodoxy that was pervasive at the time. I pointed this out in a review of an earlier book by Bloom, in this very publication (ABR, April 2016). There is no denying he was a singular figure; I am, however, inclined to take the fact that his ideas were shaped in opposition to the institutional culture he first encountered in the 1950s as confirmation of my basic point. If the author of The Necessity of Atheism can be reinterpreted as a religious poet, then surely it is not too much of a stretch to describe a critic who spent his entire adult life on the faculty at Yale disagreeing with his fellow academics as ‘institutionalised’.

I am not an ‘academician’, which is perhaps why I am not at all frightened by Bloom’s ideas; I simply find them implausible. The breadth of his reading is not the issue, nor is it in question. My objection is the narrowness of his interpretative focus and the cloistered view of literature he advanced. I trust I am not misunderstanding Professor Barbarese when I take his claim about the undemocratic nature of art to be affirming the notion that all writers are not created equal. I suppose there is something a bit undemocratic about the fact most of us will never be as good at writing poetry as Shelley. But art is democratic in the sense that it is available to everyone and addresses a common reality. One can only imagine that the author of ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ would be astonished at the suggestion that poetry has no politics. As for Yeats’s claim that intellectual freedom and democracy are incompatible, I respectfully submit that it is complete nonsense. 

Bustin’ out all over

Voila! At last we have an extra issue, something we’ve wanted to effect for several years. No longer will readers have to endure winter with a June–July double issue of the magazine. A discrete July issue will follow.

We hope you enjoy the extra issue. It’s slightly different in composition from other ones, with more creative writing, several commentaries, and longer review essays, such as Declan Fry’s questioning reading of two new books by Stan Grant, and Lisa Gorton’s brilliant study of the new translation of Beowulf.

Hessom Razavi – the ABR Behrouz Boochani Fellow – continues his series of essays about Australia’s binary myth about people seeking asylum. In this chapter, Dr Razavi draws on conversations with a dozen journalists, lawyers, psychologists, people working with refugees, and Behrouz Boochani himself, now settled in New Zealand after his own long incarceration on Manus Island.

Ilana Snyder – long-time contributor to and board member of ABR – writes about the recent infernal imbroglio in Gaza (stilled, if only temporarily, as we go to press). Ilana is head of the New Israel Fund Australia.

Martin Thomas – past winner of the Calibre Essay Prize, currently based at King’s College London, where he co-directs the Menzies Australia Institute – revisits Patrick White thirty-one years after his death and asks why White – the only Australian to win the Nobel Prize for literature (J.M. Coetzee moved to Australia after winning his) – is now so little read or heeded. Professor Thomas concludes that White’s supranational outlook and his reluctance to define himself as ‘Australian’ are among the reasons why he has receded from view. He suspects that White, surveying us from ‘some gumtree in the sky’, would be ‘bathing in the lack of glory’ – perverse and utterly individual to the last.

This extra issue is only possible in this form – and without a hike in the subscription cost – because of the generous support of Matthew Sandblom and Wendy Beckett’s Blake Beckett Fund. We thank them warmly.

We hope you enjoy the June issue.

Their stinking crew

Gregory Kratzmann, who has died aged seventy-four after a brief illness, was a frequent contributor to the magazine from 2006 to 2012 (he wrote for us eighteen times). Almost thirty years ago, our Editor commissioned Kratzmann – a medievalist who taught English at La Trobe University – to write the biography of Gwen Harwood, who was to die a couple of years later, in 1995. Gwen loved the idea, and the two became great friends and confidants. Unfortunately, the OUP biography never eventuated. Kratzmann, despite his subject’s enthusiasm, ran into obstacles of a kind familiar to many modern biographers. Kratzmann went on to co-edit (with Alison Hoddinott) Harwood’s Collected Poems 1943–1995 (2003). He also edited A Steady Stream of Correspondence: Selected letters of Gwen Harwood 1943–1955 (2001), surely among the most brilliant letters ever penned in this country.

Happily for us, a biography is now in sight. Ann-Marie Priest is the author, and Black Inc. will publish it next year. In this issue, Priest writes about Gwen Harwood’s succession of brilliant hoaxes, raids on literary targets, and noms de plume. Most famous or notorious of the former was L’Affaire Bulletin (as Harwood dubbed it), when Harwood – frustrated by editorial favouritism and condescension to female poets from Hobart – published two poems in the Bulletin under the guise of ‘Walter Lehmann’. Only later did Donald Horne, ‘hapless’ editor of the Bulletin, realise that the poems were acrostics: they read ‘So long Bulletin’ and ‘Fuck all editors’.

Horne was, shall we say, unimpressed, but Gwen Harwood never resiled. Fifteen years later she wrote Tony Riddell: ‘Fuck all the judges and editors too, fuck all the critics and their stinking crew’. 

Prizes galore

When the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize closed in early May, we had received 1,428 entries – the same number we received in 2020. Encouragingly, more than 500 of these came from overseas – from thirty-six countries in all. International interest in our three prizes, and by extension the magazine itself, is growing all the time, with major benefits for our contributors, for authors and publishers featured in the magazine – and for ABR.

Judging is now underway, and we look forward to publishing the three shortlisted short stories in our August issue.

The Calibre Essay Prize has taken longer than expected because of an illness in the Editor’s family, which has greatly restricted the time available for extracurricular tasks. The judging is being finalised now. We will publish the winning essay in the July issue. We’re grateful to entrants for their forbearance.

Meanwhile the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the oldest of our prizes, will open in mid-July. It’s the eighteenth time we have presented a poetry prize, which now honours the memory of another magnificent Australian poet.

Melbourne Prize for Literature

Entries are open for the triennial 2021 Melbourne Prize for Literature. This time, the categories have changed. Victorian writers can now enter their work for the $60,000 Melbourne Prize for Literature, the $15,000 Writers Prize, and the new $20,000 Professional Development Award. Entries close on 19 July, and the finalists will be announced in September, followed by the winners in November. See www.melbourneprize.org for more information.