One of the hardest challenges for a novelist is to write a story for adults from the point of view of a child. In 1847, Charlotte Brontë set the bar high with Jane Eyre, the first novel to achieve this. The story ends when Jane is a woman but commences with the child Jane’s perspective. So effective for readers was Brontë’s ground-breaking feat that Charles Dickens decided to write Great Expectations in the voice of the child Pip, after just hearing about Jane Eyre, even before reading it.

But the risks are great: creating a child narrator who knows, tells, or understands far too much for their age; dumbing down the story to fit with the character’s youth; striking the wrong notes by making the voice too childish or not childlike enough. It’s a minefield, and any novelist, especially a debutant, who pulls it off deserves praise. Thus Harper Lee, who never had to produce another book to maintain her legendary status.

Scott Morrison has now been prime minister longer than any of his four predecessors: Kevin Rudd, Julia Gillard, Tony Abbott, or Malcolm Turnbull. He has won one election by the skin of his teeth and faces another by May next year. So what sort of man is he and how good a prime minister? These three publications give us slightly different takes on these questions.

The Accidental Prime Minister by Annika Smethurst

Hachette Australia, $39.99 hb, 374 pp

Annika Smethurst’s The Accidental Prime Minister is a journalist’s biography, well researched and able to draw on a rich lode of interviews – with Morrison and his friends, associates, and colleagues – but light on interpretation. Lech Blaine’s Top Blokes: The larrikin myth, class and power is a stylish essay which situates Morrison’s carefully crafted public persona of ‘ScoMo’ in the class dynamics of our blokey political culture. Sean Kelly’s The Game: A portrait of Scott Morrison is a tour de force, the most perceptive and complex account we yet have of our current prime minister with insights into what makes Morrison tick that I am still trying to assimilate.

When the last C-17 cargo plane left the Hamid Karzai International Airport on 30 August with the remaining US soldiers and diplomats, America’s longest war officially came to a close. The swift return of the Taliban was a deeply distressing and tragic end to a war whose close, nevertheless, came partly as a relief. The inevitable question as to what lessons America – more particularly, its military and federal government – has learnt or should learn was followed by substantial criticism of President Joe Biden’s handling of the withdrawal and dire predictions for the future of American power and prestige abroad. The process of confronting uncomfortable realities and debating the meaning of such an event is both natural and necessary, yet the history of previous American conflicts overseas tells us that the period of actual reckoning will be brief and few lessons may be learnt.

Max Dupain, one of Australia’s most accomplished photographers, was filled with self-doubt. He told us so – repeatedly – in public commentary, especially during the 1980s, in the last years of his life. It is striking how candid he was, how personal, verging on the confessional, and how little attention we paid to what he said, either during his lifetime or since (he died in 1992, aged eighty-one).

There were good reasons why we couldn’t hear Dupain properly. In a fervently nationalistic period in Australian life, we needed him to be ‘quintessentially Australian’. We valorised him as a ‘strong individualist’, ‘down-to-earth’, ‘anti-academic’, someone who didn’t tolerate fools, had a ‘no-nonsense manner’, and was physically fit – still rowing on Sydney Harbour in his seventies. We didn’t want or need someone vulnerable, a man with ‘an anxiety complex’, as Dupain’s wife Diana described it. While the framework we constructed for understanding Dupain and his photography now belongs to a different historical and cultural period, its consequences are still with us. As I see it, we’ve locked Dupain’s photography into fixed categories and diminished the nuance and complexity of the contribution he made to Australian cultural life over a six-decades-long career.

On the wall of Yindjibarndi leader Michael Woodley’s modest office in the Pilbara Aboriginal community of Roebourne hangs a large framed portrait of Muhammad Ali and a pair of boxing gloves. It seems a highly appropriate metaphor for the tale of this small Aboriginal group’s thirteen-year resistance to one of Australia’s most powerful companies, now recounted by former Australian journalist Paul Cleary.

Title Fight highlights the unequal relationship between Western Australia’s under-resourced Aboriginal groups and multinational giants like FMG that seek to exploit the state’s vastly profitable mineral resources, often using processes that conflict with the principles of free, prior, and informed consent, protection of Indigenous cultural heritage, and the right to fair and equitable compensation, which are clearly articulated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples signed by the Australian government in 2009.

Rio Tinto’s legalised destruction of the 46,000-year-old Juukan Gorge site in May 2020 highlighted the failure of Western Australia’s Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972 to protect Aboriginal heritage sites of global significance. These include not only Juukan Gorge but also the Burrup Peninsula, the world’s oldest and largest outdoor rock art gallery, where the McGowan state government is continuing to promote large-scale industry such as Woodside’s Scarborough LNG project, despite having nominated the area for UNESCO World Heritage Listing in 2018¹. 'Commonwealth heritage legislation has proved similarly toothless, with one hundred per cent of federally determined protection applications between 2007 and 2013 failing.² In Cleary’s meticulously detailed account of the Yindjibarndi/FMG struggle, native title legislation also seems to fail First Nations peoples in delivering the full promise of the 1992 Mabo judgment.

Andrew Forrest, 2013 (Chatham House via Wikimedia Commons)

After discovering the huge 1.7 billion tonne Solomon iron ore deposit in Yindjibarndi country in 2007, FMG began negotiating with the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation (YAC), as mandated under the Native Title Act 1993. The company proposed an extraordinary ‘whole of land claim access agreement’ for ‘any and all tenure desired by FMG’ for an indefinite time and unspecified project, which would have given the company ‘unfettered access to Yindjibarndi country for as little as $3 million a year and subordinated the group’s native title rights to FMG’s desire to conduct operations “without interference or interruption”’. In line with CEO Andrew Forrest’s well-known rejection of ‘mining welfare’, FMG’s financial offer was also far below established industry rates. In the words of YAC’s mercurial young CEO, Michael Woodley, FMG was demanding a blank cheque to do ‘anything, anywhere, anytime’.

After negotiations with YAC broke down, FMG proceeded with its mining operations without obtaining a land use agreement with the Yindjibarndi, thus exposing the company and its investors to the legal risk of future compensation claims. A former FMG employee was installed as chief strike-breaker in the Roebourne Aboriginal community, undermining YAC’s bargaining position through an FMG-funded breakaway native title group: the Wirlu-murra Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation.

Exploiting weaknesses inherent in Western Australia’s highly privatised Aboriginal heritage consultancy industry,³ FMG was able to ‘shop around’ for heritage reports that suited its own agenda. It threatened to withhold invoice payments unless consultants changed their heritage reports to suit FMG requirements.⁴ My anthropologist colleague Brad Goode was sent packing after he refused to comply. FMG later engaged the services of a more amenable Victorian outfit, Alpha Archaeology, which assisted FMG to under-report previously recorded Solomon Hub heritage sites by thirty per cent, according to state government estimates.

A battalion of FMG lawyers began exploiting loopholes in the native title process and WA’s laughable Aboriginal heritage protection regime⁵ to fast-track the Solomon Hub mine in the face of YAC opposition, and set off a litigation firestorm in an effort to put YAC out of business. In the notorious ‘50 Cent Hall’ native title meeting orchestrated by FMG and attended by Andrew Forrest in 2011, the company attempted to remove opposition to granting FMG tenements by replacing YAC applicants on the Yindjibarndi #1 native title claim with pro-FMG Wirlu-murra applicants. Wirlu-murra supporters were paid $500 sitting fees and bussed in from as far away as Carnarvon. YAC’s video of these unedifying proceedings was posted online as ‘The Great FMG Native Title Swindle’, then removed following FMG legal representations to Vimeo, but later reposted on the website of an Indigenous media outfit operating out of Nunavut, in Canada’s Arctic region._⁶

In what Cleary describes as probably ‘one of the most audacious exercises of orchestration and manipulation ever undertaken by a major listed Australian company’, FMG in 2015 created a second Aboriginal corporation and organised another sham native title meeting in an attempt to stop YAC from proceeding with its native title claim for exclusive possession and compensation over the Solomon Hub mine.

But YAC was to triumph in Federal Court Justice Steven Rares’s 2017 ruling that the Yindjibarndi did indeed have exclusive possession over the Yindjibarndi #1 claim area, including the Solomon Hub mine. FMG’s appeal of this decision was rejected by five judges of the Full Federal Court in 2019. A hard loser, the company made a final appeal to the High Court, which was dismissed in May 2020, with the Yindjibarndi right to exclusive possession again upheld. The intense emotional reactions of Yindjibarndi people gathered back in Roebourne to this historic announcement were memorably captured by the local Ngaarda Media unit.⁷ Lawyers for YAC are now preparing a compensation claim for loss of native title rights against FMG, which is expected to run into hundreds of millions of dollars. But this stunning moral and legal vindication has come at enormous cost to a community still split by FMG’s divide-and-rule tactics.

The massive profits from FMG’s dramatic break into the Pilbara iron ore market have not only made Andrew Forrest the richest man in Australia (and second richest person after Gina Rinehart), but have also supercharged a veritable philanthropic bonanza; about half of the Forrest family’s income of $4.52 billion has been channelled through its Minderoo Foundation into a wide range of philanthropic initiatives. Cleary acknowledges FMG’s Indigenous employment initiatives, but highlights the contradiction between Forrest’s high-profile advocacy of human rights issues like anti-slavery and his company’s clear disregard, in its dealings with the Yindjibarndi and other Pilbara Aboriginal groups,⁸ for human rights principles enunciated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

Forrest’s 2020 ABC Boyer lecture series perhaps represents an apotheosis in terms of his influence in the Australian public sphere, and contrasts with the significant reputational damage suffered by a number of key facilitators of FMG’s aggressive but failed strategy to smash Yindjibarndi resistance. Solicitor Ron Bower had acted for Wirlu-murra in the notorious 50 Cent Hall meeting, but in 2017 was found by the Legal Profession Complaints Committee ‘to have engaged in consistent and substantial misleading conduct’, and was suspended from practising. He lost his appeal against the ruling in 2018. Alpha Archaeology had facilitated FMG’s Solomon Hub development by recommending that no further archaeological work be done on 14 of 24 previously recorded sites, ‘contrary to the recommendations of earlier surveys, which indicated that such work was warranted because of the sites’ significance’.⁹ A list of accreditations from numerous professional heritage bodies was subsequently removed from the company’s website, while FMG’s point man in Roebourne (a former hero of WA’s Aboriginal land rights movement) is now widely regarded as a pariah by his former associates.

The publication of Cleary’s extraordinary tale of First Nations resistance to Australian corporate bastardry coincides with widespread opposition by Western Australian Aboriginal groups and professional associations to the McGowan government’s current Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Bill. Recently retired Aboriginal Affairs minister (and recently appointed Rio Tinto and Woodside board member) Ben Wyatt intended this legislation to supersede WA’s Aboriginal Heritage Act 1972.¹⁰ Yet in September 2021, a group of senior Aboriginal leaders submitted an urgent request to the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to review the Bill, arguing that it falls far short of the principles of protection for indigenous cultural heritage enunciated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples endorsed by the Australian government.¹¹ The fight for Aboriginal people’s cultural rights in Western Australia continues.¹²

Endnotes

1. https://www.fara.com.au/

2. McGrath, P & Lee, E 2016, ‘The fate of Indigenous place-based heritage in the era of native title’, in Pamela McGrath (ed.), The Right to Protect Sites: Indigenous heritage management in the era of native title, AIATSIS Research Publications, Canberra, Australia, pp. 1-25 at p. 8. Available at: https://apo.org.au/sites/default/files/resource-files/2016-06/apo-nid64601.pdf

3. Philip Moore (1999), ‘Anthropological practice and Aboriginal Heritage: A case study from Western Australia’, in Applied Anthropology in Australasia, edited by Sandy Toussaint and Jim Taylor (Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press), pp. 229-254.

4. https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/11894610/letter-from-sue-singleton-to-registrar-yindjibarndi-aboriginal-

5. https://www.themonthly.com.au/blog/stephen-bennetts/2015/17/2015/1424128413/wa-s-new-look-aboriginal-heritage-policy-and

6. http://www.isuma.tv/yindjibarndi/fmgs-great-native-title-swindle

7. https://fb.watch/8fNZtoE6ND/

8. https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/twiggy

9. Cleary, 2021, p 106; 232f.

10. Although approval for the site’s destruction under section 18 of the Aboriginal Heritage Act was granted by Wyatt’s ministerial predecessor in the Barnett Liberal Government, Peter Collier.

11. https://www.edo.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/210830-Final-UN-communication-.pdf

12. https://protectaboriginalheritagewa.good.do/protectaboriginalheritagewa/Email-WA-Premier/ 

Correction

An earlier version of this review stated that 'Commonwealth heritage legislation has proved similarly toothless, with one hundred per cent of applications for federal protection unsuccessful or not in 2013 yet resolved.^2'. This has been corrected to read 'Commonwealth heritage legislation has proved similarly toothless, with one hundred per cent of federally determined protection applications between 2007 and 2013 failing.²' 

It is now well accepted that the invasion and colonisation of the Indigenous territories we call ‘Australia’ are emblematic of a particular type of colonialism. A settler colony, unlike, say, an extractive colony (where Indigenous peoples may be exploited in pursuit of resources but where permanent settlement does not necessarily follow), seeks to establish a new society on an acquired territory (regardless of the means by which that territory was acquired), intentionally displacing and eliminating the Indigenous inhabitants. In settler colonial societies, the settler came to stay.

The Taiping Rebellion was the most disastrous civil war in history. Over fourteen years from 1850, the upheaval claimed the lives of more than thirty million Chinese people – many to violence, more to famine, plague, and displacement as hundreds of cities across the Qing empire were destroyed.

Leading the rebellion was Hong Xiuquan, a poor man trying to break into the ranks of the scholar–official class, a familiar path to moderate prosperity in China. Three times Hong sat the civil service exams, and three times he failed – again, a familiar story in an exam with a success rate often little more than one per cent. Outraged by his inability to make the winning list, Hong led a revolt which tapped into widespread discontent. When the rebels captured the imperial capital of Nanjing, Hong introduced his own exams for the new civil service. Aspiring candidates were examined on Hong’s translations of Christian holy books instead of set texts from Chinese classical literature.

Travel itineraries are significant in the world of diplomacy, as Ian Hoskins illustrates in this panoramic survey of Australia’s interactions with the Pacific. Gareth Evans, freshly installed as Australia’s foreign minister in 1988, made a point of visiting the South Pacific neighbourhood before paying his country’s traditional obeisance to Washington and the European capitals. Within a month he had visited Papua New Guinea, Nauru, the Solomons, New Caledonia, Vanuatu, Western Samoa, Tonga, Fiji, and New Zealand. Evans was sending a message, visibly prioritising ‘our Asia-Pacific geography over our Euro-Atlantic history’.

On 19 November 2020, the Chief of the Australian Defence Force (ADF), Lieutenant General Angus Campbell, released the findings of the Brereton Report, so named for the New South Wales Supreme Court Judge and Reserve Major General Paul Brereton, who led the investigation into war crimes allegations against members of the Australian SAS. The report had been a long time coming – with good reason. Over four years, Brereton and his team scrutinised more than 20,000 documents, examined 25,000 images, and interviewed 423 individuals – Afghan victims and their families, eyewitnesses, whistleblowers, and the alleged perpetrators. The final eight-volume, three-part report came in at 3,251 pages. Everybody knew it would be bad, but few had anticipated quite how confronting its findings would be.

There were divas before Nellie Melba and, given that nowadays any young woman who can hold her career together for a few years while screeching into a microphone has the title bestowed on her, there have been many genuine and ersatz ones since. But Dame Nellie (1861–1931) remains the ne plus ultra, the gold standard of opera divas. Essential attributes include an instantly recognisable voice, an unshakeable faith in one’s ability, and position in the world, and an equally unshakeable determination that no rival will intrude upon one’s limelight. Nellie Mitchell showed these traits from an early age.

When the leukaemia with which he had been diagnosed in 1991 claimed his life twelve years later, Edward W. Said left behind more than the usual testaments to a successful academic career: landmark studies, bountiful citations, bereft colleagues, and the cadres of pupils whose intellectual maturation he had overseen. More importantly, he embodied a many-sided ideal of intellectual and civic engagement that combined the vita contemplativa with the vita activa. A professor in Columbia University’s Department of English and Comparative Literature for forty years, Said was a member of the exiled Palestinian National Council and arguably the most visible advocate for the Palestinian cause throughout his later life.

Deborah Levy published the first volume in her ‘living autobiography’ trilogy, Things I Don’t Want to Know, in 2013. Five years later came The Cost of Living. Now we have the finale, Real Estate. Each book is an autobiographical interrogation of women’s middle age in which Levy ambivalently considers the place of the woman writer in the contemporary world.

Things I Don’t Want to Know is a novella-length response to George Orwell’s essay ‘Why I Write’ (1946), and its purpose is reasonably clear. Levy takes Orwell’s premise that good writing must be politically motivated and suggests that her own writerly motivations cannot be so distilled, because the presumption is that while a man writes about life in general, a woman writes about herself in particular. The condescension the woman writer experiences in life will, of course, filter into her literary concerns. Levy recalls Virginia Woolf, who hypothesised, in A Room of One’s Own (1929), that due to material limitations women’s writing might necessarily have to be different from men’s: ‘At a venture one would say that women’s books should be shorter, more concentrated, than those of men, and framed so that they do not need long hours of steady and uninterrupted work. For interruptions there will always be.’

When did the rationale for the Iraq War – which began in 2003 and still rumbles today – go from being a mistake, to a self-deception, to an outright lie? When did it dawn on the Bush Jr administration and its key allies in London and Canberra that the ostensible reason for the invasion of Iraq had disappeared, probably literally, under the sands of Mesopotamia? By the time of the invasion, Saddam Hussein’s regime possessed no weapons of mass destruction that could threaten another country. The Iraqi dictator may have desired such weapons, but a combination of international sanctions and the mere fear of retribution thwarted his plans.

Yves Rees’s memoir All About Yves charts their experience of coming out as trans. The book documents the challenges of the transition in a colonial society built for and around the gender binary. Rees invites the reader into their everyday life. The point is to make their ‘gender legible in a world that refuses to see it’, and the author sets out from this premise.

On the back of mounting tension during their adolescence, a realisation arrives on holiday in Canada after taking the psychoactive THC. Waking to the dawn light, Rees hears a voice in their head: ‘You’re not really a woman.’ By afternoon, Rees has a tattoo of a Rilke quote in German on their wrist: Lebe die Fragen (‘Live the questions’). Social media is used as a scrapbook and tool through which to be seen and acknowledged, as well as to find and create communities. The relief and joy of connecting with transgender models, bakers, writers, and students on Instagram are palpable for Rees; the feeling of finding their people.

The chapter ‘Reading the Mess Backwards’ (which won the 2020 Calibre Essay Prize) delves into those teen years and upbringing in the author’s family of origin and speaks of the ‘pallid feminism dished up in the Howard era’. Here are Rees’s first recognitions of not fitting in.

The book contains repeated descriptions of self-starvation, ‘revelling’ in the feeling of hipbones on concrete. In a later chapter, Rees fantasises about ‘slicing’ off their breasts. These images evoke hagiographies. All About Yves will offer solace for those experiencing ambiguity about their gender, and readers are left asking how societal systems could be restructured for the gender diverse. The essay ‘Trapped in a Body’ is a useful starting point for anyone unfamiliar with the history of gender diversity and its lineage in indigenous cultures. Rees, a historian and academic by trade, notes that some 168 indigenous languages in the United States have terms to describe a person who is neither woman nor man. One of these words, nádleehí, of the Navajo Nation, includes masculine women, feminine men, and intersex people, and means ‘constant state of change’.

The idea of living the questions, of becoming as a principle, is seen through different lenses. The goal is not a quest but rather one of experiencing, living, and being comfortable with the in-between. Despite the author having changed names from Anne to Yves, the former stays around, having done much of the legwork for the latter’s research career. For all the difficulties of having two names, Rees says ‘a part of me revels in the contortions of two selves. There’s a glorious theatre, a strange kind of liberty, in having multiple identities at my disposal.’

Within a medical model that views deviation as illness, the gender binary is enforced in both theory and practice. The idea here is: if you’re not one, you must be trying to reach the other. But neither side is where the author belongs. ‘I can no longer live as a woman, but nor do I desire to enter the parallel universe of men.’ Rees describes having to perform a certain role to gain the diagnosis they need to live the way they feel. This role follows an outdated script: ‘I mention the skateboard; omit the pink T-shirts and fairy wings. The full truth is so messy, too messy.’

Rees receives a diagnosis of severe gender dysphoria. This opens the option of medical transition, the framework structured around the binary. This is not the path for Rees: ‘I am not a man. Gender is fluid, and some days I’m more masculine than others, but never do I belong in the world of men.’ They concede: ‘There’s no point escaping one ill-fitting costume just to adorn myself in another.’ Here Rees tacitly raises questions about the medical model and its ability or otherwise to recognise and accommodate a fuller range of lived realities. In this world, it seems even relatively basic sexual fantasies are pathologised. Imagining oneself with a penis penetrating a woman is termed autoandrophilia, a ‘condition’ associated with transsexualism (wait until mainstream medicine discovers strap-ons).

The chapter ‘Screen Time’ is compelling for its insistence on positive representation and the repercussions for the trans community if the depictions are negative. Visibility alone won’t change power dynamics. (Rees quotes Anne Boyer on this.) Changes of perception and attitude are needed whereby trans experiences are presented as part of the human experience. ‘There is a danger in ignoring the body. It knows things, deep in the guts.’

The chapter ‘They’ is a lesson on not using the wrong pronouns and on the emotional pain produced from mis-gendering. Rees’s mother is one of the stars of the book, having introduced them to feminism. ‘My mother was a Libber, I am a trans person, but beneath those labels we’re fighting the same fight.’ Inspired by her child, Rees’s mother asks them to call her Grace rather than ‘Mum’, a name used solely inside the child–parent relationship. Rees notes that their mother is still becoming – ‘she reminds me it’s never too late, not for anyone’.

In the final chapter, ‘Destination Trans’, Rees returns to the root of it all. The Latin term trans means both ‘across’ and ‘beyond’. Trans stands alone, beyond gender or sex: ‘beyond the binary, beyond the categories, beyond the rules and prescriptions. Always becoming, forever unresolved.’ There is a sense that the imaginative possibilities in the defeat of patriarchal systems are only just beginning to unfold.

The closest I have ever come to expiring from heat exhaustion was not during one of Melbourne’s oppressive summers. It was not in north-east Victoria as bushfire smoke choked the air and even the kangaroos abandoned the grasslands. The closest I have ever come was not even on the continent of Australia. It was on the number 26 bus as it crawled up the Rue des Pyrénées on a sweltering June day in Paris. 

Whether on a wet autumn afternoon or a fiery day in summer, no matter the season, the bus in Paris is always too hot. It is also too loud, too cramped, and usually nausea-inducing. There’s a reason it was Zazie dans le Métro, not Zazie takes the 47 to Châtelet. Yet for many of us who inhabit Paris the metropolis, rather than parachuting down into Paris the playground, the bus is an inevitability and thus a unique window onto a city and its denizens.

Our Home in Myanmar: Four years in Yangon is an Australian woman’s account of her four years living and working in Yangon, the commercial capital of Myanmar. In 2012, Jessica Mudditt arrived there with her Bangladeshi husband; they were looking for adventure and a way to pay for the experience. This is Jessica’s story: how she found work with an English language newspaper, her experiences as a foreigner, her fractious relationships with expat colleagues, the struggle to find suitable accommodation, the shock of her summary dismissal, her money and visa problems, and her subsequent work with the British Embassy, before freelancing and working as foreign editor at the much-derided state-run newspaper, the Global New Light of Myanmar.

In 2016, New York Times correspondent Damien Cave moved his young family to Sydney to establish a foreign bureau for the newspaper. As he writes in his new book, Into the Rip, the experience has been transformational, teaching him among other things that ‘None of us is trapped within the nation we come from or the values we picked up along the way’. Despite political and economic alliances, Australia and the United States are not clones of each other, and in many ways Australia proves ‘the healthier model’ for a society. Cave learned these life lessons, he reports, through ‘the combination of fear, nature and community spirit’.

This collection of short pieces by fifty writers is about long players in more than one sense. Not only are they discussing LPs, but also albums that have been long played.

‘I became a student, then a PhD student, then a husband,’ writes Ian Rankin. ‘Kids arrived. I moved houses and countries. Each time, when we moved, the first record on the turntable was [John Martyn’s] Solid Air.’ And they stay fresh. For Lavinia Greenlaw, The Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat ‘sounds no less original every time I hear it’; for Marlon James, Björk’s Post ‘is so relentlessly present tense, that every time sounds like the first time you’re hearing it’.

If you have even a passing interest in the state of the Australian media, you may have come across the estimate that between four and five thousand journalism jobs were lost nationally in the past decade. This estimate suggests the scale of an industry-wide crisis in which successive rounds of redundancies became a feature of life in many newsrooms as media organisations turned to cost-cutting in their struggle to adapt to a rapidly changing landscape. The figure, which originated from the journalists’ union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, also points, albeit more obliquely, to the human impact of such cultural changes and the thousands of distinctive individual experiences that such numbers can elide.

How will the year 2020 be remembered? No doubt the headline event was the coronavirus pandemic, which shuttered schools, factories, and hospitality services, leading to a contraction of per capita income for ninety-five percent of the world’s economies. For Europe, the acrimonious exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union would serve as a stark reminder of how fragile supranational institutions are in the face of popular fury. Following the murder of George Floyd, similar rage at police brutality marked a turning point in the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States, which preceded a combative presidential election that denied Donald Trump a second term. And the world endured one of its hottest years on record, with surface temperatures reaching nearly one degree above the 141-year average as fires burned through Australia and the United States.

Imagine how the light
fell on their desks.
Clerks in rotation
elbowed into the ’30s
with their heated office
coffee unimpeded.

Telephones still rang.
10,000 tons of progress
swung in a month, still
toilets flushed. Lunch
revolved on static gossip
panning Indiana backdrop.

The future comes at you
at fifteen inches to the hour.
The future marks you
for demolition. But
sometimes you’re spun
off-axis, feeling nothing.

Note: In 1930, engineers rotated an eight-storey Indiana Bell office building by 90°, without disrupting 600 employees’ workdays.

for Gabriella Smart

There’s no getting away from things.
There is driving, then walking miles
along a quiet coast on a rising tide –
with the back-of-the-mind consciousness
that in an hour or so the sea
will have reached the cliffs of shale
with their pebble threads to denote other epochs
of Earth events and that you will be wading in water
on return. There is walking the distance to see
the Monarch butterflies mating, their wings
like stained glass windowpanes, and you wonder
who is upside down, the male or the female,
and do they notice, and you think of the fine detail
of pleasure that such creatures achieve in coitus,
assuming there is allure and pleasure
for them to come together at all,
the western light of the sun going down
over the ocean lighting up the orange mosaic
inside the black craze and you have to draw
attention into that feral beauty and not notice
it is sea spurge and invasive weeds that are
their lover’s beds in the cove in the cliff
and that the cliffs themselves
are being eaten by ocean and wind and rain,
by runnels and rivers that have not soaked into earth
because the land for miles has been razed of its trees
and scrub and native grasses, and overgrazed
so that topsoil has followed rainwater down to the sea.
Again, you give your attention to the mating Monarchs,
and when the light evaporates them, you look instead
at the colours and pattern and texture of the shingle
beneath your feet, a sacred ground it might be,
with its volcanic stones suffused with golden hieroglyphs,
or wrapped with white silk on black or pink or navy blue,
the embossed, the smooth, the Japanese, the expressionist,
the Fred Williams and Clarice Becketts, meanwhile
the sun sliding close to the horizon like a Beckett sky itself,
and you try to avoid or appreciate the way it lights up plastics:
drinking straws and bottle tops, nylon strings and frayed ropes,
hairbands and bits of bags.    At all times
there is this living with what some of us have done,
there is this under-the-skin knowing
and a constant trying to say that it will all work out,
trying not to let hope crack like ancient stones,
like the lead lines in the stained-glass pattern
of the Monarch wings –

Build Your House Around My Body, Violet Kupersmith’s début novel, is an expansive Vietnamese saga that stretches over seven decades. Ambitious in scope, it takes in the French colonial period around Da Lat in the 1940s right through to hedonistic modern-day Saigon. The large cast is drawn together through circumstance as well as irresistible supernatural forces – Vietnamese and foreigners, spirits and ghost hunters.

The Vietnam War and its aftermath continue to be profound influences on diasporic Vietnamese writing. In recent years, there has been a perceptible shift in how younger Việt Kiều – overseas Vietnamese – writers are attempting to confront this history. Build Your House Around My Body is a bold testament to this shift. Whereas Kupersmith’s first story collection, The Frangipani Hotel (2014), explored the war’s legacies in Vietnam and the United States, this novel is set entirely in Vietnam and ostensibly skips over the war, focusing on the periods before and after. 

The novel opens in the near present with Winnie, a twenty-two-year-old Vietnamese American, who turns up late one night at Saigon’s Tan Son Nhat International Airport. Months later, she vanishes. The mystery of her disappearance – the spine of the novel – is intertwined with another young woman’s disappearance in Da Lat decades earlier. Through the use of non-linear narrative and multiple perspectives, we are taken back and forth in time as the initially unconnected stories slowly converge. 

Far from representing the desirable return of a prodigal daughter, Winnie’s arrival in Vietnam recalls the protagonist in Alex Garland’s The Beach (1996), a young foreigner in Southeast Asia in search of … well, what exactly? A simple yearning for freedom, perhaps, though from what and to what end are never articulated. Winnie is not a foreigner, however, but Việt Kiều. Being mixed race, she even embodies her hyphenated identity, described as being neither ‘Eastern’ nor ‘Western’ in terms of her physical appearance but ‘the muddy ambiguity of the middle’. We later learn that Winnie’s name itself is a confluence of the Vietnamese and English languages. Her last name, Nguyen, the most common of Vietnamese surnames, was ‘nonsoluble to the American tongue’. Nguyen became ‘Win’, eventually becoming ‘Winnie’. She is a compromised being, a woman who seems to mostly exist rather than live.

Violet Kupersmith (photograph by Adriana De Cervantes)

Kupersmith’s exploration of the complex relationship the Vietnamese diaspora have with the homeland is both welcome and intriguing. This fertile narrative terrain remains largely under-explored in Anglophone literature, yet is a vital and compelling way to reckon with the consequences of civil war. In Build Your House Around My Body, the Việt Kiều characters represent a range of possible pasts and futures. Self-effacing Winnie fails at teaching English and derives little enjoyment from the abundant pleasures on offer to foreigners and Việt Kiều in Saigon, unlike her fellow Vietnamese-American colleague, Dao ‘The Devourer’ Huynh. At the end of her stint teaching English, Dao – ethnically full-blooded, with ‘true’ black hair rather than Winnie’s ‘swampy brown’ black – makes a somewhat triumphant return home to attend law school. In contrast to both, Dr Sang is a Việt Kiều who has fully repatriated. He is now well-to-do; another character notices him moving his lips in a way that indicates a ‘quintessentially capitalist manner’. For decades, Vietnam has been flush with capital brought in by Việt Kiều, but this continues to be a source of friction, reflected in the novel by the uneasy relationships that the native Vietnamese have with their overseas counterparts.

There is a recurring preoccupation with bodies and, as the title of the book indicates, with bodies as foundational to ideas of home. How women’s bodies are routinely used and abused in order for men to create homes for themselves. Regardless, Vietnamese women remain remarkable agents of strength, resilience, even magic. The almost cartoonishly fearless Binh, another protagonist, is adept at catching cobras. ‘She caught it behind its head, wrapping four fingers tightly around the top of its throat.’ Tan, her childhood friend, cowers nearby and watches awestruck, even though he is a salaried police officer in Saigon while homeless Binh camps out in an abandoned rubber plantation in Da Lat.

Throughout the novel, Kupersmith underscores Vietnam’s history of relationships between the Kinh ethnic majority, colonisers, and its ethnic minorities. The otherworldly Jean-François, for example, the bastard son of a Khmer father and French mother, represents another by-product of colonial occupation. In the earlier period, we also meet two French men in the Central Highlands who are seemingly benign, but there is no mistaking their exploitative intent as they seize land for large rubber plantations from the original inhabitants they refer to as ‘the Montagnard’.

At times, Build Your House Around My Body is weighed down by overwrought and cumbersome description. The many individual storylines are difficult to follow at times; some of the stories feel under-developed. There is also a lack of bilingual dexterity, the kind demonstrated in a novel such as Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai’s The Mountains Sing (2020). However, Kupersmith overcomes linguistic limitations to invent a rich, imaginative world with characters who would otherwise speak Vietnamese, French, and the many languages of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities.

The direct consequences of colonialism and violence are brutal, and the after-effects haunt the future in both literal and figurative ways. Build Your House Around My Body suggests how restitution for the crimes of the past can be achieved by women learning how to wield the power that resides in our bodies, that this is how we can transmute and harness the fury that continues to accrue over the generations, in Vietnam as elsewhere.

On page 20 of my advance copy of 7½, I insert a line in the margin: ‘Starting to sound like Sōseki’s Kusamakura here’. I had met the author of the passage – a man named Christos Tsiolkas – at the Sydney Writers’ Festival in May, sidling up to the Clare Hotel breakfast bar at an enviably early hour each morning to enjoy fruit and festival conversation. As my pen hovers, I wonder how that gregarious and personable figure squares with the bittersweet register of this novel.

September 25. I skip ahead to the book’s finale and there, at page 339, is an explicit reference to Kusamakura. A short while later, Natsume Sōseki rears his head again: ‘Isn’t it from such questioning and interpretation that stories begin? If I am not going to begin with Morality or Politics or Race or Class or Gender or Sexuality, if I am going to resist the authority of Purpose, then how should I begin?’ Those three ‘begins’ might alert the reader: the conundrum of how to start (‘the number three is auspicious [...] Three is also possibility and risk’) is something 7½ never entirely resolves.

Joe Exotic. Carole Baskin. Tiger King. There was a moment in early 2020 when these were names to conjure with; when a plague-ridden world became fascinated with the outlandish behaviour of these larger-than-life Americans and their unbelievably legal menageries of ‘exotic’ animals. Now, as we inch closer to ‘Covid-normal’, revisiting this surreal world through Emily Bitto’s exuberantly baroque second novel, Wild Abandon, is an unsettling experience.

Bitto’s Stella Prize-winning first novel, The Strays (2014), explored a fictionalised version of 1930s Melbourne’s bohemian art world through the eyes of a curious young girl who was briefly adopted into her friend’s eccentric family. While there are some thematic overlaps between the two novels, they are very different in style and setting.

In Wild Abandon, we follow self-absorbed, twenty-two-year-old wannabe music journalist Will Free as, ‘ego-bruised by heartbreak’, he flees his Melbourne sharehouse for an impulsive journey of discovery in America. His time in New York is a whirl of hedonism and insecurity; he dines at fancy restaurants, drinks too many negronis, and does lines of ‘party parmesan’ from an Altoids tin while trying, and failing, not to think about Laura, his ex. Amid the seedy glamour and excess, Will vows to ‘journey from innocence to experience … to open himself to whatever came his way … in a dashing new habit of wild and indiscriminate “yes!”’.

Following an act of betrayal, Will, now almost penniless, bolts again from New York to the small town of Littleproud, Ohio, where he meets up with a girl he knew from school and her American husband. Soon Will finds himself living with and working for the mercurial Wayne Gage, a Vietnam veteran with his own private zoo. The two lovelorn, emotionally immature men develop a bond while looking after the majestic creatures housed on the property, but it becomes increasingly clear that Wayne’s troubles run deeper than Will realises.

The trajectory of the second part of the novel was ‘initially inspired’ by the tragedy that took place in Zanesville, Ohio, in 2011, involving Vietnam veteran Terry Thompson and the animals in his private zoo. The incident led to incredible headlines (such as that of Chris Heath’s fascinating 2012 GQ article, one of the sources Bitto cites in her acknowledgments) and a wider, shocked awareness of Ohio’s laws regarding the ownership of exotic animals. There are strong connections between Wayne’s and Terry’s stories, but Bitto is careful to emphasise that Wild Abandon is a work of fiction.

And what a work of fiction it is. Wild Abandon is an extravagant, harrowing novel of ideas filled with granular details, an abundance of surprising similes, and freewheeling philosophical and factual digressions on everything from modern art and the American military industrial complex to the ethics of keeping animals in zoos and the callow insecurity of youth. Alongside ruminations on identity and self-discovery, Bitto weaves in details about the diets of lions, the impact of the Vietnam War, and the unexpected revelation that the Amish are the main dealers of exotic animals in Ohio. ‘Something about their faith endorses it,’ Wayne informs Will. ‘The dominion of humans over all the creatures of the earth or some other religious mumbo jumbo.’ Bitto shifts registers easily throughout, with references to Hyperborea and suovetaurilia sitting comfortably alongside reminiscences about conversations on message boards for the television show Supernatural.

Wild Abandon is an eminently quotable, sometimes funny, sometimes heart-breaking book, one that will make cocktail drinkers crave negronis (perhaps even from Heartattack and Vine, the bar Bitto co-owns in Melbourne) almost as much as it will put them off eating chicken nuggets (‘whole minced baby roosters’) and burgers (‘bone and hide and eyeball’).

Bitto’s simile-rich descriptions are evocative and startling. A pickle is ‘as big as a dildo’, hungry lions and tigers mass around food ‘like giant pigeons’, office workers emerge from buildings ‘like vampires in reverse’, an artwork is ‘savage as a catheter to Will’s abraded brain cells’, while the arms of Wayne’s hoarded leather jackets ‘lay strewn about like some tentacled creature from the depths of sea or mind’. Bitto also has a knack for characterisation and telling detail; she imbues the varied players in this insightful novel with depth and individuality.

Reading such lavish writing at a time when the fashion inclines more towards the minimal can be a heady experience. Wild Abandon is peppered with long, opulent, thought-provoking sentences. The elaborate, almost Dickensian, omniscient narration provides an entertaining contrast with Will’s gauche conversations with the people he encounters, although sometimes the cumulative effect of sentences like this one can be overwhelming:

Will didn’t know what to do; he found himself inhabiting such a moment as those in which we look around ourselves and see not one object that is friendly or familiar, in circumstances that as little as a week ago we would have been incapable of imagining, let alone believing would be our own in so brief a span of lithe and thwart and mocking implacable time, and in the taut-stretched and overdue silence, with the pressure of the wordless night against the window, his dark burdened soul at last could run no more, and down it crumpled on the blue leather sofa.

Throughout this intelligent novel, Bitto meditates on human nature and our complicated, multifaceted relationship with animals and the natural world. The creatures of Wayne’s Wild Kingdom are portrayed with compassion and a touch of Blakean awe that is infused with rage and wider concern at what may turn out to be ‘the sure and terrible ruin of all things at the hands of man’.

One of the hardest challenges for a novelist is to write a story for adults from the point of view of a child. In 1847, Charlotte Brontë set the bar high with Jane Eyre, the first novel to achieve this. The story ends when Jane is a woman but commences with the child Jane’s perspective. So effective for readers was Brontë’s ground-breaking feat that Charles Dickens decided to write Great Expectations in the voice of the child Pip, after just hearing about Jane Eyre, even before reading it.

But the risks are great: creating a child narrator who knows, tells, or understands far too much for their age; dumbing down the story to fit with the character’s youth; striking the wrong notes by making the voice too childish or not childlike enough. It’s a minefield, and any novelist, especially a debutant, who pulls it off deserves praise. Thus Harper Lee, who never had to produce another book to maintain her legendary status.

Ambiguity, done well, has a bifurcating momentum that can floor you. The late Argentinian writer Julio Cortázar, a master of unsettling short stories shot through with ambiguity, knew this and used it to pugilistic advantage, declaring that ‘the novel wins by points, the short story by knockout’. Ambiguity is likewise central to S.J. Norman’s début collection, Permafrost, seven eerily affecting stories that traverse and update gothic and romantic literary traditions, incorporating horror, queer, and folk elements to hair-raising effect. No matter how often you read these spectral tales, they simply refuse to resolve themselves definitively. It could be that things have gone spectacularly wrong and that, simultaneously, everything is okay – a see-saw in constant motion, made all the creepier by the fact nobody is sitting on either side.

Great art provokes by taking great risks. It goads, teases. When we recognise we’re in the hands of a master, the banal becomes profound, the sacred profane, and the grandest of truths reveal themselves in the most innocent of questions. Take Pauly Shore’s scathing 1994 cinematic rebuke of the complicity of heteronormativity in the military industrial complex, In the Army Now. In it, two gay soldiers signal their intent to defy the US Army’s ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy and serve their country in a neo-colonial war by asking, simply, ‘Is it hot in Chad?’

What distinguishes graphic novels (aka ‘big fat comic books’) from other books is how completely the page registers movements of the maker’s hand. Before we begin the business of reading, we look, and what we see is not margin-to-margin Helvetica or Times New Roman: it’s the mark of the makers, be it Alison Bechdel or Kristen Radtke or Mandy Ord. We might even think of the making of comic books as being closer to letter writing than novel writing. Accustoming ourselves to the style of a particular graphic novelist (‘Aha! That’s how Bechdel depicts euphoria!’) is a large part of the pleasure of reading comics – the business of aligning one’s own visual point of view with the maker’s. Perhaps this is why autobiographical works have been such a vital force behind the rebirth of comic books as ‘graphic novels’.

Alison Bechdel (‘rhymes with rectal’, as she informed us at a 2014 Wheeler Centre event) is the global superstar of autobiographical graphic novels, and her star has only taken on more sparkle with the improbable adaptation of her 2006 book Fun Home (closeted gay father suicides! literary references abound!) into a musical that took Broadway by storm, was staged in Sydney (ABR reviewed it in June 2021), and, Covid fingers crossed, will come to Melbourne in 2022.

The Secret to Superhuman Strength by Alison Bechdel

Jonathan Cape, $35 hb, 240 pp

Fun Home, the graphic novel, presented the torrid world of Alison’s childhood home, crafted and honed into ‘a family tragicomic’, as the calling card on the cover proclaims. Fun Home joined Art Spiegelman’s The Complete Maus (1991) and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000) at the centre of the graphic novel canon. All three use autobiography to dissect trauma: familial, social, historical. Bechdel’s follow-up, Are You My Mother? (2012), explored her relationship with her mother and referenced psychoanalytic theory, in particular the work of child psychologist Donald Winnicott. It was a dense, exhausting slog of a comic book. But in this year’s The Secret to Superhuman Strength, Bechdel deploys her delicately droll lines, written and drawn, to construct a gentler, funnier self-portrait amid her usual storm of self-criticism and sardonic wit. She asks a question at the beginning of the book: just what is it that we are seeking in the agonistic rage for ‘fitness’? She spends the book running, stretching, cycling, telling, and showing us that it’s not the body beautiful, but the mind set free.

Bechdel’s art features her trademark crisp nib and ink work. Here, though, her fine lines are not highlighted by a sombre ‘spot’ colour, as per her previous two books, but are illuminated in full watercolour by her wife, Holly Rae Taylor. There is an excellent panel late in the piece that jokingly depicts the pair of them as medieval tonsured monks sitting opposite one another in their twenty-first-century scriptorium, in pandemic-imposed, drawing-board solitude, working away at the pages of this book. Excitingly, art-wise, with each chapter break Bechdel’s usually finely controlled nib work loosens into wide Zen brush lines. She’s discovering something new, and she’s taking us with her.

Seek You by Kristen Radtke

Pantheon Books, US$30 hb, 352 pp

Kristen Radtke’s Seek You: A journey through American loneliness seizes on the idea that we are in the depths of a loneliness epidemic and expands this into a book-length visual essay. Because a comics page takes much less time to read than a page of text, a graphic novel running to this length will take you the same time to read as a magazine-length essay. Radtke, art director and deputy publisher of The Believer magazine, was brought up in the buttoned-down Midwest, then as a young adult lived in the fever-dream cities of New York and Las Vegas, and she examines how these social experiences shaped her image of loneliness. She discusses the research on socialisation and the effects of social isolation, including Robert D. Putnam’s Bowling Alone (2000) and, more scathingly, psychologist Harry Harlow’s cruel experiments on rhesus monkeys.

As with Bechdel’s and Ord’s most recent books, the maker’s life partner features in the narrative. In Radtke’s case, her husband’s long-ago purchase of a gun continues to gnaw at her. Radtke creates her illustrations from photo reference and her artwork bears an unfortunate consequence of this approach. The images are accurate but stilted, and in a book about loneliness, their curiously affectless, detached nature certainly makes this a lonelier text. ‘Loneliness lives in the gap,’ says Radkte, ‘between the relationships you have and the relationships you want.’ What we want is more emotional connection with the images in a visual text, in order for that text to have greater resonance.

When One Person Dies the Whole World Is Over by Mandy Ord

Brow Books, $24.99 pb, 376 pp

The autobiographical push is also important in Australian comics, and Mandy Ord is one of the great local exponents. Her one-eyed ‘Mandy’ avatar moves through a world of two-eyed humans, and this anatomical abnormality is an elegant analogue for our experience of sight: it doesn’t feel like we have two eyes, even though we can see that everyone else does. It’s also an instant identifier of her main character, as iconic as Charlie Brown’s zigzag shirt. Ord has been using this avatar-figure to tell autobiographical stories for decades, but even within such a long practice, this book is a staggering high point. When One Person Dies the Whole World Is Over, longlisted for the Stella Prize in 2020, features on every page a four-panel account of Mandy’s day, one for each day of a year. We accompany Mandy at her two jobs, walking the dog, making dinner, gardening, watching The Walking Dead with her partner. The book is intimate: we accompany Mandy on her daily commutes, we see the bird on the fence. It’s epic: we are invited into the vast emotions that lurk within everyday life. It’s also microscopic in its recording of those corner-of-the-eye moments that otherwise get lost in the swirl of events.

Ord’s facility with the ink brush – even the lettering is made with the brush – is such that, as in Bechdel, we feel deeply, bodily, and boldly connected to the tidal flow of the life on show. The fluid, monochrome world that Ord conjures, even when the life she is documenting – her own – is overwhelming, is an eloquent argument against loneliness. Autobiography is where the energy is in comics at the moment. By the strength of their hand-drawn work, Bechdel and Ord sweep us into their worlds, inviting insight about how to live with others, and with ourselves.

Reading Richard Flanagan’s searing allegory The Living Sea of Waking Dreams (2020) and Delia Falconer’s new non-fiction book, Signs and Wonders: Dispatches from a time of beauty and loss, in rapid succession was a surreal, slightly unmooring experience. Both authors lucidly capture the dreamlike state of disbelief and horrified fury with which we’ve watched the world slide terribly into the 2020s. Both are part of an outpouring of new language, new stories, new ways of expressing our reactions to the barely imaginable scale of realities we can no longer ignore: fire columns that remind NASA of dragons; a pandemic that conjures news scenes we had thought the province of cinema. As our poor human cognition struggles to catch up, scientists become poets, novelists become scientists.

At the height of the Millennium Drought (2001–9), I took the late Deborah Bird Rose to my favourite childhood swimming hole near Dubbo, on the Wambool (Macquarie River). The banks had eroded and a flood had washed the sandy beach a hundred metres upstream, burying trees halfway up to their crowns. Weeds flourished in the churned ground, and scum floated on the shallows. Nothing seemed safe from degradation. Farther west, on the Barka (Darling River) near Bourke, we passed private water storages lining the banks of the river for kilometres. The scalded land was strewn with rubbish and discarded machinery. Wind blew dust into our eyes. At our feet, a dead sheep lay in an irrigation channel. ‘This is it,’ I said. ‘This is broken country.’ Rose thought for a moment, then turned and said, ‘No, it’s wounded.’ It was a reminder to afford nature its potential to heal.

One consequence of the pandemic is that it has led many people to imagine themselves as someone else. Those whose work has dried up – actors, musicians, curators, librarians, flight attendants, and so on – have suddenly had to adapt to a world that has no place for the things they do and thus no place for people like them. What if this new world is not just a temporary blip, but the shape of things to come? Who will I be in this future world?

It is not just those who consciously identify themselves with their work that might ask such questions. If I am a tradie or a hairdresser whose business is on the brink, I face an upheaval in my life no matter how important being a tradie or a hairdresser is to my identity. If I need to find a new means of income, my life story is going to change. I can then imagine different stories panning out, different versions of my future self.

About as eminent an academic philosopher as they come these days, Robert B. Pippin made his reputation with a sequence of brilliant studies rehabilitating the great names of German Idealism – Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel – for a (mainly) baby boomer American audience. In the wake of the path-breaking interventions of Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Rorty, Pippin, alongside such colleagues as Terry Pinkard, Robert Brandom, and John McDowell, has argued for a version of the essentially dialogic nature of all philosophy, which seeks to bring together metalogical ratiocinations and nitty-gritty semantic theories with reflections on the diversity of social interactions.

Bravura technical disquisitions on high-end philosophy aren’t Pippin’s sole forte, however. From William James through John Dewey to Arthur Danto and Stanley Cavell, a strong line of American pragmatism has insisted – somewhat against a dominant trend of analytic philosophy to diminish the truth-claims of art and aesthetics in the name of logic, mathematics, and science – on the unique world-revealing qualities of an aesthetic education for thinking what we are and what it is we do in an extra-philosophical way. Pippin is an inheritor of this lineage in his contributions to a contemporary philosophy of art, above all the art of cinema. And if Hollywood westerns, Hitchcock’s oeuvre, and film noir have all been tapped by his tuning fork to sound the relations between vengeance and law, individual and government, he has also extensively examined prose fiction, notably that of Henry James and J.M. Coetzee, as proffering quasi-metaphysical explorations of fundamental moral dilemmas.

The present book’s title invokes a famous boutade by Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian general and philosopher of war, for whom ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’. Pippin’s work everywhere hints at such contexts of violent contestation, which he seeks to mollify without entirely erasing. Plato might have thought that the warring discourse of philosophy should expel the poets from the ideal republic, but that’s exactly the sort of extremity that we can’t countenance today. Part of the (Hegelian) point, as Pippin himself carefully phrases it in this collection of essays, is not that ‘the arts’ are ‘philosophy’, ‘but that they have the same content as philosophy’, and, moreover, that the very different ways in which the arts present such content can only be ignored by philosophy at the cost of its own self-mutilation.

Philosophy by Other Means is accordingly broadly divided between how art registers for philosophy, as well as how metaphysical and moral conundrums emerge from artworks themselves. The individual chapters focus on a range of philosophical and aesthetic questions, some technical, others more everyday. Why is Kant unable to deal with the implications of dramatic tragedy? What is a mutilated extract of a poem doing at the end of one of Hegel’s major works? Why is there no aesthetics stricto sensu in Hegel’s Aesthetics? How does painting function for Hegel? What is Theodor Adorno’s position on aesthetic negativity? What does Maisie actually know in Henry James’s novel What Maisie Knew? There are two chapters on the art-history and photographic studies of Michael Fried, two chapters on subjectivity, love, and jealousy in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, and two chapters on the paradoxes of power and philosophy in J.M. Coetzee’s fictions. Every chapter contains something of interest, from little factoids regarding editorial cruxes to critical philosophical deadlocks.

Pippin’s tastes are emblematic of élite North American liberalism generally: not experimental poetry but prose fictions; not anti-aesthetic disruptions but the subtleties of expensive art; not experimental but popular cinema (for a touch of the folky demotic). Flicking through the index gives us such painters as Caillebotte, Correggio, Boucher, Cézanne, Caravaggio, Courbet, David, Géricault, and Greuze; and such writers as Aeschylus, Beckett, Coetzee, and Proust. Pippin’s presentations – sensitive, sometimes stunning, always erudite and illuminating – seek to resist propaganda, kitsch, commercial, or illustrative modes in the name of subjective freedom, the self as process and outcome of a self-reflexion that is not objective but infinite.

Still, it’s all pretty canonical. Although there’s nothing wrong with this, it does in our own deleterious dog days release a certain scent of eschatological denialism. So the limitations remain noteworthy: John Keats appears only as a citation from Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, and the sole essay that tackles poetry in a more extended fashion (brilliantly) investigates why Hegel concludes the notoriously rebarbative prose of his Phenomenology of Spirit with a severely amended citation of a couple of lines of a poem on friendship by Schiller. Regarding more radical avant-gardes, Pippin clearly doesn’t care for them. One might further ask if Pippin’s elegant clarity is not also covertly concerned with curbing potentially dangerous enthusiasms (in the eighteenth-century sense of that word at least).

Whatever the case, Pippin’s secular puritan vitalism undeniably packs a punch. For him, hard aesthetic labour can make works of art gleam with an admirable subjective achievement that puts philosophy itself into question. Kant cannot bear the irreparable pathos and self-contradictions of dramatic tragedy: the fall of the protagonist and their world runs counter to every classical philosophical determination, which desires to expel contradiction and contingency as unreal, confused, ultimately false and unnecessary. Oedipus, after all, even calls himself ‘the son of chance’. Hegel’s rebinding of history and contradiction, of history as contradiction, by contrast returns to the conditions and experience of life the impossibility of deciding any dilemma without self-betrayal. It is not our intentions that establish the value of our actions; the latter rather take on their import through the unexpected consequences of others’ reactions, teaching us, belatedly, about the true nature of our own alienating deeds. Pragmatically, life is always presenting us with new contradictions we cannot master with existing tools, which we never fully comprehend, and which cannot be resolved except at inadmissible cost. Yet, as Pippin underscores, even Hegel can’t quite think tragedy outside a moral framework, still seeking to handle conflicts in a rationally satisfying way. Hence tragedy threatens philosophy with the terror of absolute unintelligibility.

As the pandemic wars devastate society and global warming nature, as every human value whimpers melodramatically towards its ignominious self-destruction, perhaps there remains some consolation, however brief and impotent, in such sensitive, intelligent inquisitions of the varied truth-contents of the manifold apparitions of modern high art. I for one sucked up Pippin’s insights as a weasel sucks eggs, feasting happily on its little bursts of spirit in our waste of shame.

Not many people create an archive. For almost thirty years, Phillip Maisel led the testimonies project at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre (JHC). Maisel’s memoir is his story of surviving the Holocaust and becoming ‘the keeper of miracles’.

Maisel’s Holocaust story is crafted in simple yet eloquent prose, ‘in a language I am still perfecting’ (a native speaker of Lithuanian, Polish, and Yiddish, Maisel began to learn English on the ship to Australia in 1949). He relates appalling details of racism and ideology that are familiar yet shocking. With his Jewish classmates in Vilna, he must sit on the left of the classroom so the teacher knows to mark them down; though the Soviets who annexed Lithuania in 1940 were not anti-Semitic, Maisel is ruled ineligible for higher education because his is a wealthy family. Once the Germans invade, Maisel lives the everyday trauma of the Jewish ghetto and Nazi labour camps. He describes the ‘senseless orderly cruelty’ of camp guards who force prisoners to stand for hours in snow and rain as they count the roll, and then count again, ‘while all around you your friends are collapsing’ and dying. He recalls the terrible moment when, after the joy of reuniting with his brother and twin sister after the war, he learns that their beloved father was one of 2,000 Jews massacred by the Nazis the day before their camp was liberated. This ‘greatest tragedy of my life’ is also ‘one of my biggest regrets’: the last conversation he had with his father was a bitter disagreement about the merits of communism.

Good poetry uncovers the secret in the manifest, and the manifest in the secret. Three new collections throw this paradox into vibrant, unsettling relief. Each book deserves a broad readership. Each beats back the lethargic thinking that has invaded society under the cover of the pandemic.

How to Make A Basket by Jazz Money

University of Queensland Press, $24.99 pb, 136 pp

Two poems in Jazz Money’s David Unaipon Award-winning How to Make a Basket crystallise the poet’s mission, and challenge. ‘If I write a poem’ begins: ‘if I write a poem / it’s for the pen / banned from my grandmother’s hands’. More than a book, How to Make a Basket is a reclamation. Numerous poems trace an arc from pre-colonial idyll to ‘sickness’, and on to resilience, growth. Yet for an Indigenous person ‘raised off Country’, the culture to be reclaimed proves innate and distant, ‘a song that boils in my chest / in my soul / that no one has taught me the words to / yet’. Occasionally, that song grows audible: ‘when i break through the confines of english / i’m free / all the best things i write / are straining at the edges / of the coloniser’s language’ (‘ngargan’). Like too many, Money must pass through the tainted language she knows to reach the ideal language of which she knows only fragments. In a tragic way, this resembles the double bind of the poet.

These days, poetry is primarily a visual experience. So claims the American poet and theorist Cole Swensen, whose essay ‘To Writewithize’ argues for a new definition of ekphrasis. Traditionally understood to be writing about visual art, ekphrasis typically has a poet stand across from a painting or sculpture, in a kind of face-off, and write about it. To ‘writewithize’, however, is to take a different approach: this is not writing made about art but made with it. This is writing that, in Swensen’s words, ‘lives with the work and its disturbances’. Two new Vagabond releases by Bella Li and LK Holt are doing ekphrastic and intertextual work that is exquisitely disturbing. These are moody books of allusion and visual play by two of Melbourne’s most brilliant poets.

Capacity by LK Holt collects referential poems that respond to myths, works of art, and a sequence of sonnets by French Renaissance poet Louise Labé. A pair of block-shaped ekphrastic poems, named after paintings by Mark Rothko, hangs in the book like a verso–recto diptych. ‘Light Red Over Black’ reclaims Rothko’s morbid blocks of black paint, as the speaker takes the colour back into her live body against a pulsing of red progesterone. The poem performs – even collaborates with – the painting’s bodily affect, its disturbance. Holt’s ekphrastic response to an Ainu (East Asian) epic song is similarly dynamic: ‘Woman of the House (Spider Goddess)’ gleefully narrates the Goddess’s violent spurning of the advances of Big Demon. In tone and plot, the poem is a faithful version of the source text. However, Holt’s writewithism then gives rise to the perverse spinoff poem ‘Woman of the House (Millennial)’ where the Goddess’s superpower is nothing more than the choice not to look away from a bukkake scene glimpsed between the backs of aeroplane seats. The pornstarlet on the laptop screen is also imbued with a divine scrap of agency, in the equanimity with which she takes the treatment. It’s a wry, weird indictment of the contradictions of feminist power, and a fine example of the way that Holt uses mockery to weaponise perversion.

The great accomplishment of Capacity is the ‘Modern Women Sonnets’, which respond to the poems of Louise Labé, a sixteenth-century daughter of ropemakers. Labé had the luck of exceptional education and literary exposure and her sonnets stage an argument with the self about love’s vicissitudes. Tonally, they alternate between modes of elation and degradation, a trick that Holt does well: ‘I live, I die: I burn & I drown, I’m having issues …’ While faithful to Labé’s oscillation between rapture and ironic distance, Holt’s versions often overturn Petrarchan cliché (‘like a flayed moon’) and upend the logic of the original’s argument. Where Labé begs the beloved not to quench her longing, without which she would die, Holt flatly tells the nurse holding love’s ‘black needle’ that she will have to die for desire to disappear. Holt’s sonnets are darker and more despairing of love’s exhausting violence. Frankly, they are suffused with disdain: ‘So I’ve cried my days down the days-drain.’ The heart is meat, love is twisted, and it’s not always the lover’s fault. As readers, we can trust the self-excoriation of these poems, and the brilliance at work behind them, even if we’re not always invited in.

Holt is a tart and tartly serious poet in the mould of the most demanding of the Anglo-Modernists (Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore). She has an erudite sensibility that is loath to give anything away too easily, and reviews of her work contain a thread of anxiety about ‘feeling comfortable’ with the poems, or ‘being able to deal with’ her work confidently. Her wit and referentiality draw on an idiosyncratic personal library of artworks, writing, and ideas, and the legend provided by the book’s notes is a mere gesture towards decipherment, partial at best. Some of her poems read like private, coded jokes. There is a density to LK Holt’s poetry that will keep a reader at arm’s length.

Bella Li’s new book of poetry and collage is, by contrast, a series of opening doors. With Theory of Colours, Li has levelled up the uncanny. Unnerving collages with gothic overtones give way to prose poems that are a tissue of references. The empty spaces of abandoned hotels and national parks, devoid of human life, create a sense of dislocation, and haunting. While nearly two years of lockdowns may or may not have shaped the artistic choices here, it is impossible not to associate these collages with the eerie, blank streets of our empty cities.

The difficulty of the experience of reading this book is one of its strengths. The collages in Li’s award-winning Argosy (2017) were transparent in their influences. Max Ernst’s surrealist cut-outs provided the blueprint. In Theory of Colours, however, reproductions of black-and-white architectural and geological photographs are undermined by subtle interventions. Everything is just a bit off, like the cursed manor in Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (one of Li’s textual sources). Hill House is a culmination of tiny architectural aberrations that add up to a profound distortion. As Dr Montague tells his guests, ‘every angle is slightly wrong’. The effect of Li’s surrealist détournements is a subtle discomfiture, and the images are masterfully set into conversation with the perturbing linguistic performances of the texts. One visual sequence references Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (a different pandemic) with a progression of coloured open doors. This sense of an endless corridor is bookended by writing that slams the door suddenly shut, through sentences forced prematurely to fragment: ‘In the west wing, veined with precious lodes of chrysoprase, onyx and opaline, the visitor will find.’

Li is preoccupied with the holes in language, the holes in perception. The poems are not lyrical or personal in any traditional sense. They are tonally complex about history, culture, perspective, colour, absence, and language itself. Occasionally, gleeful gothic pronouncements (‘the garden, as I have said, was blessed with a plentiful supply of sharp objects’) and a mode of soft menace are part of the verbal spectrum, which is dominated by an unnerving formality. Scientific language is used sparingly, in a subtle critique of imperialism’s trust in the systems of Western knowledge. And while some of the sequences in Theory of Colours are narratives, there is never the relief of a resolution. Each piece of text ‘[floats] not into clearness, but into a darker obscure’. Theory of Colours and Capacity are both densely referential books. But rather than LK Holt’s cool, acid distance, encoding meanings that a reader might not be shrewd enough to decipher, Bella Li offers the reader a fully open text.

There is a moment of reflexivity in Evelyn Araluen’s diary poem ‘Breath’, in which the poet, thousands of kilometres away, follows news reports of bushfires ravaging Australia, including the Dharug Country where she grew up. ‘I’ve started a book which seeks to tease the icons of Australiana that have been so volatile to this country. They, too, are burning,’ she writes. Several reviewers have focused on this dimension of Araluen’s début. Dropbear contains many poems that excoriate the tropes of colonial literary kitsch. This genre takes native vegetation and wildlife, and Aboriginal people, and transforms them into the cute, the twee, or the fearsome. Dropbear responds to May Gibbs’s Snugglepot and Cuddlepie, Dorothy Wall’s Blinky Bill and Nutsy, D.H. Lawrence’s Kangaroo, and Banjo Paterson’s poems and diaries, among other texts and films. In a scholarly essay (2019) that addresses the legacy of Edward Said’s Orientalism, Araluen has argued that we still underestimate ‘literature’s power to operate as a force of imperialism’. For the Bundjalung poet and academic, the personal in poetry is inseparable from the political – as well as from the historical and the literary-historical.

Ivor Indyk is director of Giramondo Publishing, and Whitlam Professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. He was the founding editor of HEAT, and co-founder of the Sydney Review of Books. He has written on many aspects of Australian literature, art, architecture, and literary publishing, including a monograph on David Malouf published by Oxford University Press.

What was your pathway to publishing?

I was a lecturer in Australian literature, and some of the writers I wanted to lecture on couldn’t find publishers for their work. Also I found I preferred to converse with writers who were living rather than with the dead. And then there was the Demidenko affair, which made me angry enough to start HEAT in 1996.

How many titles do you publish each year?

This year we are on track to publish eighteen titles; poetry and prose, Australian and international.

On the road again

ABR readers and supporters seem just as keen to ‘get out of town’. The response to our first cultural tour for two years was prompt and enthusiastic. ABR Editor Peter Rose and Christopher Menz (former director of the Art Gallery of South Australia) will lead a nine-day tour of Adelaide during Writers’ Week and the Adelaide Festival (March 5–13). It filled up on day one, and we now have a waitlist.‘The soul is no traveller; the wise man stays at home,’ opined Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay ‘Self-Reliance’. A few years later, in a letter to Mrs Holland, Emily Dickinson chirruped, ‘To shut our eyes is Travel.’ Clearly, neither New Englander endured a Melbourne lockdown. All we can think about at ABR, looking up from our proofs and surveying the oppressively familiar tenemental skyline of Southbank, is ‘Travel, Travel, Travel’.

This emboldens us to plan more tours in 2022 as the eastern states emerge from successive lockdowns and as the arts community rallies after endless devastating closures. Stay tuned for news of more tours, always with literary programs and destinations as well as art museums, theatres, concert halls – and the odd restaurant. Early next month we will begin advertising an international tour planned for October 2022.

Prizes galore

By the time the Peter Porter Poetry Prize closed in early October, we had received 1,329 entries – the same number as in 2020, rather creepily. Different poems, though. It was a bit of a deluge at the end, with 1,000 entries arriving in the last fortnight. Thirty-four different countries are represented in this year’s field. Judging is underway, and we look forward to publishing the five shortlisted poems in our January–February issue. Meanwhile, the sixteenth Calibre Essay Prize is underway, with total prize money of $7,500. Essayists have until 17 January 2022 to enter.

Book talk

Book Talk, our new open-access online feature is intended as a kind of notice-board for writers, publishers, booksellers, and literary organisations with news to disseminate or something to get off their chest. We welcome suggestions from those interested in spreading the word among ABR readers here and overseas.

Recently, Della Rowley, Lynn Buchanan, and Irene Tomaszewski wrote about the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, which commemorates the life and work of Della’s late sister and supports the writing of quality biography. The Fellowship began in 2011, soon after Hazel Rowley’s death, with modest capital of $20,000. Because of continuing donations and ‘excellent funds management’, the 2022 Fellowship will be worth $20,000 – such a boon for memoirists and biographers.

Applications close on November 16. For more information or to apply, visit the Writers Victoria website.

Hedberg Writer in Residence 

Mainlanders have not been notably welcome in Tasmania for some months, but this must change soon, surely. The end of lockdown coincides with a handsome new three-month residency, to be undertaken in the first half of 2022. Offered by the University of Tasmania, with support from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, the second Hedberg Writer-in-Residence program is worth $30,000. It is open to all established writers, in any field or genre, who are resident in Australia. You have until 8 November to apply.

Free gift subscription 

We’re feeling generous again! New and renewing subscribers can now direct a free six-month digital subscription to a friend or colleague. Why not introduce a young reader or writer to ABR? You can qualify for this special offer by renewing your current ABR subscription – even before it is due to lapse. Renew for two years and give away two free subscriptions, etc.

To arrange your gift, contact us on (03) 9699 8822 or at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.. We will then contact the nominated recipient.

Terms and conditions apply. Visit our website for more information about this special offer.

Books of the Year 

Lockdown is good for at least two things: platitudinising and reading. We’ll spare you the Platitudes of the Year (we know them all by heart: ‘It is what it is’; ‘We’re all in this together’, etc., etc.). Books of the Year is another matter. Find out, in the December issue, what the ABR critics have most enjoyed reading during this cloistered year.

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

Conceptual containers

Dear Editor,

We are grateful to Tony Hughes-d’Aeth for his review (ABR, October 2021) of our co-edited volume The Seasons: Philosophical, literary, and environmental perspectives (SUNY Press, 2021), but would like to indicate some misrepresentations. The first is that the volume is ‘grounded in forms of analytic philosophy’. Among the eleven contributors, five are specialists in Continental philosophy. Paola-Ludovika Coriando is a leading Heidegger scholar. Alphonso Lingis is a pre-eminent Continental philosopher in North America. The contributions by literary scholars also almost exclusively refer to Continental philosophy. This is not a work of ‘analytic philosophy’.

Hughes-d’Aeth seizes upon a passing metaphor of a ‘conceptual container’ and projects that onto an array of diverse chapters. He claims that the seasons are treated as an abstract ‘transcendental category’, when all the essays articulate the importance of embodied approaches to the seasons. One of the primary motivations for this book was the absence of the seasons within philosophical discourse, but Hughes-d’Aeth doesn’t really engage with its philosophical or even environmental aspects.

In Australian literary debates, the term ‘romanticism’ is frequently employed in vague, uninformative ways. Hughes-d’Aeth illustrates this in how he questions the prominence of figures from Goethe and Thoreau to Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Rachel Carson, whom he groups as ‘romantics’ and as remaining ‘within the long shadow of European romanticism’. There is much scholarship on whether even Goethe should be conceived as a romantic or as a classicist, and Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are primarily regarded as phenomenologists and existentialists/ontologists. Hughes-d’Aeth specifies neither how these figures belong to one tradition of ‘romantic imagination’, nor the respects in which this tradition is problematic. His use of ‘romanticism’ thereby amounts to little more than ‘the modern tradition of Western thought’ and insinuates that the volume is too focused on European and North American perspectives. But is this the case?

We were pleased by Hughes-d’Aeth’s appreciation of the three essays that engage with Australian Aboriginal seasons (especially the Noongar seasons of WA). As the volume was published in North America and one of the editors is American, this representation is significant. Moreover, these essays all draw on major figures within the Continental and ‘Romantic’ tradition (Thoreau, Heidegger, and Bachelard) as aids in advancing a decolonised perspective. They thereby undermine the simplistic dichotomy between ‘romantic’ and non-Western perspectives that frames Hughes-d’Aeth’s critique.

Two essays (by Alphonso Lingis and Joseph Ballan) respectively explore Sámi and Inuit conceptions of the Arctic seasons. Given Hughes-d’Aeth’s interest in Indigenous perspectives, it’s surprising that they are unmentioned in his review. Jo Law considers Japanese (as well as Chinese) seasons. In short, while the volume discusses Western conceptions of the seasons, much of it engages with non-Western and Indigenous perspectives.

Hughes-d’Aeth raises the issue of climate change but does not consider the discussions of how attentiveness to the seasons could improve our understanding of the issue. Rod Giblett, for example, makes the thought-provoking proposal that ‘climate change’ would be better construed as ‘seasonal dislocation’ or ‘seasonal disruption’.

Tony Hughes-d’Aeth replies:

It seems the editors of this fascinating volume have now written their own review to complement mine. I am glad I was able to provide them with this opportunity as, to my knowledge, there is currently no magazine which specialises in auto-reviews. In my review I tried to succinctly represent the logic of the book, which is not easy in an eclectic collection such as this, where most contributors have not, in all probability, read each other’s contributions. In reading the book, there was precious little evidence of internal awareness, as several chapters blithely overlapped each other without even a passing nod. I also tried to fairly assess the book’s strengths and weaknesses for the sake of ABR’s readers. It would have been interesting if, in their letter of response, the editors were bound by the same imperative.