No one can doubt the combined impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and Australian policy responses to mitigate its effects, over the past few years. While assessing which groups or sectors suffered more than others will only lead to an invidious victimological contest, we can agree that Australia’s thirty-seven public universities took a number of heavy hits after March 2020. In the year to May 2021, senior managers in Australian universities shed 40,000 jobs, most of them casual teachers, and sixty per cent of them were positions held by women. Unsurprisingly, many inside those universities, along with commentators outside, concluded that the federal government’s decision not to offer JobKeeper payments to public universities reflected a deep animus against and fear of universities. Some reflected on the hostility directed towards the ‘cultural Marxists’ who, it is fantasised in some quarters, still exercise their hegemony in these ‘ivory towers’, notwithstanding the fact that the 2019 report by former High Court Justice Robert French definitively scotched allegations about a rampant ‘woke left’ ruthlessly crushing dissident voices in the academy.

If disinterested observers had doubts about this hostility towards universities on the part of Scott Morrison’s government, those misgivings were dissipated in an ‘unfortunate gift’ delivered on Christmas Eve 2021. It was a more than difficult year for the thousands of academics who endured the extraordinary and unexplained delay in the annual announcement of successful ‘Discovery Projects’ in the much sought-after Australian Research Council grant applications. With a success strike rate of just nineteen per cent, these awards are competitive as well as prestigious. In the context of cutbacks to university research funding, they can make or break the future of university research centres.

This uncertainty about the ARC results ended when the results were announced on 24 December. As in the two preceding years, that message came with a nasty sting in the tail for some of us.

While 587 Australian Research Grants were funded under the Discovery Program, six grants were vetoed by the acting Education Minister, Stuart Robert. The news sent shockwaves through the academic community in Australia and attracted international comment. We were in a team of seven researchers who learned that our application titled ‘New Possibilities: Student Climate Action and Democratic Renewal’ was ‘Recommended to but not funded by the Minister’. (This has since been removed and replaced by the wording ‘Not Funded’.) Five other teams were likewise subjected to the power of ministerial veto provided for in the Australian Research Council Act 2001. This legislation does give wide powers to the minister even though section 33 (c) of the Act says the minister must not direct the CEO ‘to recommend that a particular proposal should, or should not, be approved as deserving financial assistance’. However, section 52 (4) of the Act states that ‘the Minister may (but is not required to) rely solely on recommendations made by’ the Australian Research Council.

This is an example of extreme political interference in research that is greatly out of step with comparable jurisdictions such as Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Aotearoa New Zealand. However, as we all know, this is part of a longer political pattern in Australia under Coalition governments. The Australian federal government’s interference in what is entirely an independent process overseen by the ARC College of Experts has happened before. In 2006, Minister Brendan Nelson vetoed seven ARC grants. Under Scott Morrison’s government, Simon Birmingham vetoed eleven grants in 2018–19 and Dan Tehan vetoed five grants in 2020.

This time, Minister Robert defended his intervention, claiming that the projects were not ‘in the national interest’ or ‘value for taxpayers’ money’, despite the fact that the projects applications had been through a long-established, well-tested, and rigorous independent peer review process before being recommended for funding.

The reaction by senior university leaders such as ANU’s Vice Chancellor, Professor Brian Schmidt, and by the ARC itself, highlights how the acting minister stepped over some lines we might have thought were impregnable in a liberal democracy.

Sixty-three current and past ARC Laureate Fellows wrote to the CEO of the Australian Research Council and to Minister Robert expressing their concern about ‘the way that applications for 2022 ARC Discovery Projects were managed’. They observed that projects covering ‘topics like climate activism and China … are vital for the future well-being of Australia’. The ARC College of Experts also urged the government to ‘adopt standards in line with the Haldane Principle’, which holds that ‘decisions on individual research proposals are best made through independent peer review, and government ministers should not decide which individual projects should be funded’. They called on the government to legislate to ensure future ‘independence of the ARC and prevent political interference in research grants’, and called for changes to protect the ‘rigour and integrity of the ARC’s grant assessment process’ by ‘ending the Minister’s use of the National Interest Test to make unilateral decisions on individual projects outside of the peer review process’. Two members of the ARC College of Experts took the unprecedented step of resigning, stating that they were ‘angry and heartsore’ and had made their decision to resign ‘in protest’.

If we take a broader view of this particular minister’s veto of ARC recommendations, we can see a pattern of arbitrary decision making without reference to, or constraint by, principles of natural justice. As such, ministerial discretion constitutes an assault on the core liberal principle of natural justice. The Morrison government’s reputation for doing this is getting worse. Sometimes there is more than a sign of deep corruption. The ‘sports rorts’ case of 2019 depended on ministerial discretion overriding the due process established and managed by a relevant department dealing with hundreds of applications for community sports funding. A different and more serious kind of corruption associated with the exercise of arbitrary ministerial power has long operated in Australia’s decision not to recognise the right of asylum seekers to have rights. Currently, section 501(3) of the Immigration Act 1958 allows the immigration minister to cancel a visa arbitrarily on grounds of character or security and to set aside a finding made by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, all without appeal. The ‘robodebt’ project initiated by Scott Morrison in 2015 likewise highlights the damage done by untrammelled ministerial power riding roughshod over principles of natural justice, for which the $1.8 billion legal settlement of 2021 only partially recompenses its victims.

Fair procedures in decision making are a fundamental component of the rule of law. Australia’s common law recognises a duty to accord a person procedural fairness before a decision that affects them is made. As High Court justice Robert French, author of the 2019 report on academic freedom, noted:

A failure to give a person affected by a decision the right to be heard and to comment on adverse material creates a risk that not all relevant evidence will be before the decision-maker, who may thereby be led into factual or other error. Apparent or apprehended bias is likely to detract from the legitimacy of a decision and so undermine confidence in the administration of the relevant power (French 2014; 25/47).

Significantly, we have no formal right to appeal the decision by Minister Robert.

Finally, as concerning as the subversion of natural justice is, the Morrison government’s attack on academic autonomy is just as alarming. In our case, it silences researchers working with young people on a crucial policy issue.

Some 1,000 universities in ninety-four countries, including ten from Australia, have signed the Magna Charta Universitatum. The charter restates why universities are important. According to the Charter, a university ‘must serve society as a whole’ and that ‘to meet the needs of the world around it, its research and teaching must be intellectually independent of all political authority and economic power’. A central tenet of the Charter is that ‘freedom in research and training is the fundamental principle of university life’. That freedom is precisely what Minister Stuart Robert’s jackboots have damaged so profoundly.

On a positive note, Green’s Senator Dr Mehreen Faruqi has initiated a Senate Inquiry proposing that a bill first introduced into the Senate in 2018, designed to remove the veto powers from the minister, be reconsidered. It is a long overdue reform that might help mitigate some of the harm this government has done to Australia’s universities.

Professor Judith Bessant, School of Global, Urban and Social Sciences, RMIT University.
Associate Professor Faith Gordon, ANU College of Law, Australian National University.
Professor Rob Watts, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, RMIT University.

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

A new column for illiberal times

These are critical, alarming – even alarmist times. In the March issue, 2021 Calibre Prize winner Theodore Ell writes about a recent outrage in Canberra that ‘exposes a violent, expansionist nihilism within our culture’: the descent by thousands of anti-vaccination demonstrators on the national capital and the subsequent closure of a popular charity event. Mindful of these illiberal developments, ABR is pleased to announce the creation of a new monthly column focused on politics. With generous support from the Judith Neilson Institute, we will publish extended long-form political commentaries intended as intellectual provocations across a range of contentious issues such as native title, climate change, lowering the voting age, and state and federal politics.

The column builds on the success of the magazine’s recent turn towards a higher proportion of commentary pieces, and will draw on its existing pool of expert commentators while broadening the net to include new contributors, whose original and incisive approaches to these issues capture the temper of these activist times. We hope the column will influence political discourse in Australia, shifting it beyond the confines of the daily news-cycle into the wider context of informed intellectual and cultural debate.

The column kicks off this issue with ABR Rising Star Mindy Gill’s critique of the increasingly dogmatic assumptions of identity politics and the resulting ossification of our reviewing culture. But there will be plenty more to come this year, and we welcome enquiries on potential topics of interest.

Prizes galore

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize is now open, with a closing date of 2 May. Once again, because of the generosity of ABR Patron Ian Dickson, we are able to offer total prize money of $12,500, of which the winner will receive $6,000 (there are two other cash prizes). The judges on this occasion are Amy Baillieu, Melinda Harvey, and John Kinsella.

On 19 January, Anthony Lawrence was named the winner of the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize at a Zoom ceremony. All five contestants read the poems shortlisted and published in our January–February issue, then Morag Fraser – past Chair of ABR and Peter Porter’s biographer – announced the overall winner, who receives $6,000. (Morag supports the Porter Prize with fellow Patron Andrew Taylor). Of the winning poem, ‘In the Shadows of Our Heads’, the judges – Jaya Savige, Sarah Holland-Batt, and Anders Villani – had this to say: ‘Brimming with surprise, supple, pitch-perfect imagery, linguistic energy and wit, “In the Shadows of Our Heads” is a stunningly vibrant poem by a masterful technician at the top of his game. This unusual love poem revels in the unpredictability of those connections, intellectual and physical, forged between simpatico minds and damaged bodies across space and time. A vivid, potent reminder of love’s dance of proximity and distance – at a time when these fundamental bases of human intimacy have been thrown into fraught relief – it is a work deftly attuned to our present moment.’

This is the second time Anthony Lawrence has won our poetry prize; he did so first in 2010, the year before it was renamed the Porter Prize. After the official announcement, he told Advances: ‘To win the Porter Prize is not only a wonderful surprise, given the quality of the other poems on the shortlist, but it’s an important personal pleasure, given my respect and admiration for Peter Porter and his enduring influence in Australia and the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile, when the Calibre Essay Prize closed on 17 January, we had received 566 entries from seventeen countries. Judging is now underway (the panel consists of Declan Fry, Peter Rose, and Beejay Silcox). We look forward to naming the winner – and publishing his or her essay – in the May issue.

Adelaide Writers’ Week

This year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week, the fourth and last under director Jo Dyer (soon to stand for federal parliament as an independent), will run from 5 to 10 March, bringing a host of international luminaries to our recently unrestricted shores. On the final day, ABR Editor Peter Rose will chair a session with critic and former ABR Editor Kerryn Goldsworthy, historian Julia Horne, and editor Nick Horne to celebrate the publication of The Education of Young Donald (NewSouth, 2021), which collects the trilogy of memoirs penned by one of Australia’s great public intellectuals, Donald Horne. Horne, best known for coining that oft-misunderstood phrase ‘the lucky country’, continues to exercise an influence on our national self-understanding, the style and insight of his writing setting a high watermark for cultural criticism, then as now. This session, which features two members of Horne’s immediate family, will examine the course of Horne’s career from the army to The Bulletin to chancellery and reflect intimately on his public and private legacies. The session is free and will be held at 1:15pm on the West Stage in the Pioneer Women’s Memorial Garden. Meanwhile, the Editor and Christopher Menz will lead the latest ABR tour, with a full contingent.

The poor cousin

Fund the Arts represents a needed and refreshing intensification of the campaign (passionate but hitherto pretty informal) to focus attention on the woeful neglect of the arts in this country and to influence the election to parliament of sympathetic independents. David Latham, one of the organisers of the campaign, writes about it here. There will be a related public event at Readings Hawthorn at 6.30 pm on 4 April. Speakers include Emily Bitto, Peter Rose, Clare Forster, and Ben Eltham.

John Bryson (1935–2022)

John Bryson – author and former barrister – has died, aged eighty-six. Bryson was best known as the author of 1985’s Evil Angels, which examined the trial of Lindy and Michael Chamberlain. The book was lauded as a forensic study of one of the most egregious miscarriages of justice in Australian history. Spiros Zavos, reviewing the book for ABR in December 1985, noted that it is ‘much more than a reworking of the arguments for and against Lindy Chamberlain’s innocence. Bryson has consciously tried to create a work of art ... Like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, a work he has been clearly influenced by, Evil Angels is concerned about the context of the tragedy and its impact on the leading players.’

Bryson had a long association with ABR, both as writer and Patron. He first appeared in the magazine in November 1980: a short story titled ‘Blowing It’. (You can read the story, and Spiros Zavos’s review, in our digital archive.) Bryson went on to appear in ten other issues, most recently in 2013.

Changes at ABR

In early February, ABR farewelled its digital editor (and all-round technological troubleshooter), Jack Callil. Jack was an editorial intern in 2018 and soon joined the staff. During his three and a half years with us, he made many notable contributions, from the ‘Book of the Week’ feature (which he proposed within a week of his arrival) to a major overhaul of the magazine’s website in 2019 of which we are all the beneficiaries. Many of our contributors will have benefited from Jack’s editorial nous and scrupulous proofreading.

Jack now takes up a position as deputy production editor at Crikey. While he will continue his association with ABR as a freelance contributor, we would like to thank him for the stylish digital stamp he has left on the magazine. Ave atque vale!

Editor’s Diary

While he has doubtless gone on recording our foibles in his journal, not for some years has the Editor given us some excerpts for publication. But over the summer – when not watching an inordinate amount of cricket and tennis, we suspect – he compiled a selection from his 2021 journal. This one is rather different in tone from past offerings, as he admitted to Advances: ‘Living through a pandemic has changed all of us. Covid has also coincided with a marked deterioration in the health of my aged mother, who moved into aged care last March. Like so many Australians, and like so many of my friends and colleagues, I have experienced the feelings of anguish and impotence that go with caring for a loved relative during lockdown. For better or worse, the parents of writers must indulge their recording progeny. In making my selection, I felt obliged to relate something of my mother’s story. To have done otherwise – left out the dark stuff and retained only the editorial cakes and ale – would have been blithe, even disingenuous.’

Peter Rose’s diary can be found here. A longer selection appears on the website, and it’s this version that he has recorded for the ABR Podcast.

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Castrating their own cause

Dear Editor,

ABR readers should be alerted to an outrage that has taken place in Canberra, one that exposes a violent, expansionist nihilism within our culture.

On 11 February, having been removed from the vicinity of the National Library, thousands of anti-vaccination demonstrators began squatting at the Canberra Showgrounds. There the Lifeline Bookfair, a popular annual charity event in support of people in suicidal crisis, was just opening. Crowds of demonstrators harassed Bookfair volunteers, shouted foul insults through loudhailers at attendees, blocked parking areas with trucks, and finally tore down a security fence, mobbing the venue. With public safety at risk, the Bookfair closed down.

The demonstrators went on to commit offences which were more serious – in their thousands, they threatened assault against a dress-up vaccination event for children, and guns were found by police at the squat – but it is the attack on the Bookfair that underlines the contempt that is driving the anti-vaccination movement and that signals grave societal trouble.

This was more than a case of feral, wrong-headed, self-defeating hooliganism, a national version of school muck-up day, although in shutting down a charity event the demonstrators did castrate their own cause. They abused the tolerance of Canberra residents, who had been inconvenienced for days by marches through the Parliamentary Triangle – an abstract and uninhabited place where protest has a rightful stage – and who now found themselves slighted and assaulted in their own community. The Bookfair is part of the life we make in the margins of Canberra’s capital status. These people besieged that life to make a political statement.

That statement was an incitement to violence against art and knowledge. The demonstrators trespassed, malevolently, to stop an event that promotes reading, thoughtfulness, curiosity, and conscience, in support of lonely and vulnerable people. The Bookfair usually takes place in an atmosphere of friendly treasure-hunting. Standing at its closed doors, the demonstrators promoted a bullying ignorance, an aggressive mindlessness, a lifestyle of passionate unreason.

The message is the opposite of freedom. Trampling over the local, it made itself national. Invasive though the demonstrators have been, they are not an alien species. They are our own people. Their homes, to which they will eventually disperse, are in cities, towns, and rural areas all over eastern Australia. Buoyant with self-belief at having got away with harming someone else’s community, they will wield corrosive influence in their own. Those who showed themselves in Canberra number more than fifteen thousand. Their sympathisers back home may number many more. To nurture the nihilist mindset on such a scale, some humane reinforcement we once offered one another must be rotting. The culture is not happy. It is not well.

The significance of memory

Dear Editor,

Oral History Australia joins oral historians around the world in condemning the closure of Russia’s Memorial organisation, one of Europe’s most important oral history projects. A Russian court ordered the closure on 28 December 2021. This appalling act represents an assault on human rights and an attempt to suppress the Memorial’s significant contribution to the history of the Soviet Union.

Memorial was set up in the late 1980s to document and record the crimes of the Soviet regime and the history of political repression in the Soviet Union. In a statement following the closure decision, Memorial wrote, ‘Memorial is not an organisation, it is not even a social movement … Memorial is the need of the citizens of Russia to know the truth about its tragic past, about the fate of many millions of people.’

As oral historians we understand the significance of memory and how an authoritarian state like Vladimir Putin’s Russia might wish to suppress memory to sustain a mythical version of the past which legitimises the regime. We urge Australian colleagues to protest about the Russian decision to close an oral history project that spoke truth to power.

For further details, see this article by British oral historian Graham Smith, at https://www.ohs.org.uk/general-interest/ohs-condemns-closure-of-memorial-international/

Alistair Thomson, President, Oral History Australia

Damen O’Brien’s first collection is an exceptional accomplishment. His individual poems have won several competitions (including the 2017 Peter Porter Poetry Prize). O’Brien signals the emphases of Animals with Human Voices in his afterword, stating that the world has become a ‘meaner’ place during the ten years of its completion: ‘a place of harsh politics, that values outrage over kindness, tribalism over empathy’. He concludes: ‘Like the animals of the title, the poems are voices for human problems and troubles, for the little moments and cares of the human condition.’

There are many ways one might write a history of Australian history, but from any angle it is a heroic project. In Making Australian History, Anna Clark is open about the difficulties, the possibilities, and her choices. How do you make sense of Australian history, she asks, amid a ‘swirl of changing sensibilities, methods, culture, politics and place’? How do you trace the story of a discipline across time, when each generation has defined the contours and boundaries of that discipline differently? How do you write a genuinely inclusive history of Australian History – one that gives due place to the full range of historical forms, not just those approved in academic circles?

The life of Charles Lamb reads like a tale by Charles Dickens. In 1775, a sweet-natured boy is born in the Inns of Court, the ancient legal district in the City of London. The boy’s father, John Lamb, works as clerk, scribe, and all-round dogsbody for an imbecilic barrister called Samuel Salt – the names themselves are Dickensian – who does nothing without first consulting his servant. Charles, the youngest child by eleven years, grows up amid the great halls, libraries, chapels, staircases, sundials, fountains, and hidden orchards of the Inner Temple; his early youth is an Eden, but there is a serpent in the garden, because madness runs in the Lamb family.

We can learn much about a culture by listening to how it talks about its art. The way non-white writers, for want of a better phrase, tend to be reviewed in Australia tells us a lot about how we determine cultural value. Some reviewers place a premium on the author’s biography – her identity – rather than on her work itself. The reviewer avoids critical engagement with the text in favour of a kind of reverential praise of its political messaging. This messaging isn’t necessarily determined by the content of the work, but rather by a mistaken conflation of the work with the author’s cultural identity. It’s a kind of habit, a reflexive way of reading literature, especially literature by non-white authors, as if the mere act of writing a book were fundamentally and inevitably political – or, as they say, an ‘act of resistance’.

I too have nodded along to the old dictum ‘all art is political’. Its satisfying consonance lends it the heft of any halfway-decent party line. And yet I have always suspected that its meaning is opaque. I’m not suggesting that art can’t be political, nor am I underestimating its power. But, to me, political impact has never been a useful measure of art’s worth or success. As a reader, I measure a novel or a poem by its capacity to move me. This is the first imperative: all else follows. I’m thinking of the first novels I read that made me feel this way, and how, as a child, I celebrated the idea that these marks on a page had the power to change how I thought and felt. I recognised elements of my own consciousness in that of another’s – in Scout’s open-heartedness as much as in Mayella Ewell’s cowardice – and saw how, within the privacy of a book, this wasn’t a shameful thing to experience. The point of fiction and poetry to me is empathy. I feel it most strongly when I’m writing an essay of this kind. No matter how much I’d like to believe I’m embarking upon some exercise of personal discovery, I know that the truth isn’t nearly as noble. I don’t want people to see things the way I do – I want to convince them. Contemporary fiction and poetry, on the other hand, encourage you to think, and feel, more deeply. You don’t fail it – nor it you – if you leave a book with your perspective unchanged, unable to identify with its premise, its language, its characters. This is not a diagnosis but an instinct, and I don’t expect each reader to feel the same way. And here is another gift that literature brings us – myriad avenues of escape and response. You don’t need to subscribe to a writer’s ideology, nor share any element of her biography, to feel a personal connection to her work. The possibilities for ‘identifying’ with someone are more than skin-deep. How reductive life and art would be if we were stirred only by those who thought and looked like us.

‘Theory of what?’ is the obvious lay response to Philipp Felsch’s title. But for those in the know, it goes without saying that he is talking about Theory with a capital T. That strange hybrid of philosophy, ethnology, and literary criticism cast its spell over participants in the student movement in Germany from the mid-1960s and in Paris after 1968. In the 1980s and 1990s, it reached the humanities departments of Anglophone academia, making a PhD dissertation without a Theory component a risky undertaking. This applied even in history, traditionally the most empirical of disciplines; and in 1994, Keith Windschuttle, soon to be prominent in the Australian ‘history wars’ about the interpretation of European colonisation, was provoked to write a whole book entitled The Killing of History: How a discipline is being murdered by literary critics and social theorists.

Most people, and certainly most politicians, don’t spend much time or emotional energy thinking about whether human life on this planet will still exist in one hundred years’ time, or what efforts might need to be made right now if we and our descendants are to avoid extinction.

More Covid-scale pandemics, and the increasingly obvious reality of global warming, are both now being seen – though still not universally – as serious risks demanding serious policy response. They may prove to be game changers. But, here as with other potentially huge man-made risks, complacency generally prevails. Since the end of the Cold War, it has been hard to animate policymakers and publics anywhere in the world about the risk of annihilation by nuclear weapons – and even harder to alarm anyone but a handful of aficionados about developments in artificial intelligence amounting to a measurable threat to our very existence.

In late March 1941, more than six months into the relentless German aerial campaign that was then destroying great swaths of London’s fabric and spirit, Virginia Woolf filled the pockets of her heavy overcoat with stones and waded into the River Ouse. Her suicide occurs halfway through Will Loxley’s scattergun study of English writers and writing during the war, though its inevitability haunts the first half of the book, as claustrophobic as the pea-soupers that had defined London’s self-image in the centuries before the Blitz took on that singular responsibility.

There really isn’t another biographer like Joseph Frank – nor a biography to place beside his 2,400-page, five-volume life (1976–2002) of Fyodor Dostoevsky, the wildest and most contradictory of the great nineteenth-century Russian novelists. Frank set out in the late 1970s – a time when historically grounded literary scholarship was losing favour in the academy – to fix Dostoevsky (1821–81) in the complex matrices of Russian history, politics, religion, and culture. An author who had been read in the English-speaking world as a hallucinatory thinker, somewhat detached from reality, could now be seen as one fully imbricated in his era and milieu.

‘There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about’

Oscar Wilde

When the Morrison government decided in December 2019 to axe the federal arts department and to fold it into the department of infrastructure, transport, regional development, and communications, it was a strong signal – if another was needed – of the low esteem and influence the arts wields in Canberra. But it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The decision was made just months after the 2019 election campaign, when the Liberal Party offered no arts policy, and Labor only a nominal one. The depressing news came on the back of a decade of crisis and neglect for the sector, well before the spectre of Covid wreaked havoc for many artists and performers.

Creativity in Crisis, a report released in July 2021 by media academic and arts journalist Ben Eltham, and Senior Economist at the Australia Institute, Alison Pennington, detailed how the Australian arts sector has been eviscerated over a long period of time. Among other things, the report showed that since 2014 the ABC has had $783 million stripped from its annual budgets. Music and arts funding in schools has been gutted. Streaming video on demand services (SVOD) such as Netflix and Stan carry only two per cent Australian content. Children’s television budgets are half what they were a decade ago. After last year’s May budget, the National Archives was forced to crowdfund to help save Australia’s cultural legacy from crumbling to dust.

Similarly, the Throsby Report points out that in the past decade federal government arts and cultural expenditure decreased by 18.9 per cent per capita. During that period artists’ income fell by nineteen per cent.

Given the slow burn, the question for the arts sector is what is being done to respond to this long-term decline in arts investment and infrastructure?

Part of the problem for the arts community has been its sheer breadth. The nature of the political lobbying is another factor. Spending a day in Canberra or organising a special meeting or delegation with the relevant minister – where you deliver research and anecdotes from case studies, and the minister exits the engagement with a stock of social media images – is not a strategy that works if you have no political leverage and are effectively on ‘the outside’. And that’s where the arts undoubtedly are right now.

In recognition of this reality, Fund the Arts was formed in 2021 by a coalition of concerned media, advertising, lobbying, and arts professionals to address the problems besetting the sector. Fund the Arts is running a media and ground campaign in marginal seats aimed at making neglect of the arts a political liability. We want to ask these politicians – before their constituents – what are you doing for the 400,000 people working in the creative sector? What are you doing to nurture the next wave of Australian voices?

Fund the Arts has developed its own policy response as a touchstone for political contenders. Some of that is about funding, such as adding $300 million to the ABC budget or $70 million for regional and community arts, and some of it is policy driven, such as twenty-five per cent Australian content quotas for SVOD services.

Fortuitously, the Voices movement has helped break the policy logjam. In 2019, Labor merely had to move a half step from the government’s non-policy to outpoint the coalition. Today, Fund the Arts has meetings organised with Voices of Candidates looking to broaden their policy positions and appeal to constituent concerns. Many of these will be using their media platforms to deliver FTA campaign messages in whole or in part.

Through targeted advertising, social, and traditional media, we will be pressuring political candidates in twenty marginal seats to support the arts. We will also distribute scorecards for each party/candidate based on their arts policy.

Fund the Arts has identified three key demographics that will receive tailored messages making the arts relevant to their concerns and interests.

Writers and publishers have serious concerns about current funding. The 2020 Australian Society of Authors survey showed that eighty-one per cent of respondents earned less than $15,000 per annum – fifty-eight per cent of those less than $2,000. Literature received just six per cent of Australia Council grants and initiatives. But fighting for literature without supporting broader investment in arts infrastructure is futile. In so many arts disciplines, organisations that received funding in the past are failing today due to the diminished size of the overall arts funding pool.

Of relevance to the world of literature and writing, Fund the Arts is fighting for 300 Creative Fellowships ($85,000 per annum over three years) so that artists can refine their craft. We’re pushing for $133 million of Australia Council funding for individual artists and for small to medium organisations. We’re pushing for a change in policy settings so that Australia is not only an importer, but also an exporter of art and culture.

To make this campaign succeed, we need your support. Join writers like Tim Winton, Charlotte Wood, and Joanna Murray-Smith – and ABR’s own Sarah Holland-Batt and Peter Rose (both FTA Ambassadors) – to put arts back on the political agenda.

Mary Beard is one of the world’s leading classicists and cultural commentators. She is professor of classics at the University of Cambridge. Her most recent book is Twelve Caesars (2021).

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

That has a very particular resonance as we approach what we all hope might be the beginning of the end of Covid. I can’t wait to get back to Rome. I’m currently writing a very different book on Roman emperors from Twelve Caesars, looking back to the ancient world itself and trying to think harder about what life was really like for them: what they did all day, etc. So, I really want to get to Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli again soon.

What’s your idea of hell?

A walking holiday! 

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

It has to be ‘sincerity’. It’s not that I want to advocate ‘insincerity’ as such, but I dislike the way we let bad arguments off the hook on the grounds that that they are sincerely held!

What’s your favourite film?

Usually it’s the last one I enjoyed. But if I was choosing one for my ‘desert island’, and allowing myself a bit of sentimentality, I think I would go for Casablanca.

And your favourite book?

That really is impossible!

In 2015, Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel A Little Life was published to a critical response so effusive as to seem almost hyperbolic. Jon Michaud of the New Yorker described the novel’s depiction of the Promethean repetitiveness of trauma as ‘elemental, irreducible’; Garth Greenwell declared in The Atlantic that ‘the great gay novel’ had finally been written. Even critics who viewed the novel less favourably acknowledged its extraordinary affective force. In one of the few unflattering reviews, Daniel Mendelsohn of The New York Review of Books savagely describes the novel as ‘little more than a machine designed to produce negative emotions for the reader to wallow in’.

There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,’ Vladimir Lenin has been credited with saying, with reference to the Bolshevik Revolution. It’s a sentiment that immediately springs to mind when reading Jessica Stanley’s A Great Hope, a début that, while not billed as historical fiction, is deeply concerned with history and its making. 

Home and Other Hiding Places by Jack Ellis

Ultimo Press, $32.99 pb, 311 pp

I have said this already in a recent review, but it is a special kind of novelist who can write about young characters yet still engage the adult reader. It’s also a special book that can handle the burden of what cover quotes are fond of labelling ‘warm-hearted’ or ‘big-hearted’ fiction. To me, such descriptions usually mean the kiss of death for credibility, but warm-heartedness is exactly what Jack Ellis’s Home and Other Hiding Places delivers, without lapsing into sentimentality.

After being published to acclaim in Aotearoa by Victoria University Press in 2021, Sue Orr’s Loop Tracks was picked up by Terri-ann White, formerly of UWA Publishing, now at Upswell Publishing. A second-time novelist, Orr is represented by agent Martin Shaw, who has also supported authors such as Pip Adam and Ingrid Horrocks to be published across the Tasman.

Australiana opens with a break-in. Lifting away a flyscreen, strangers climb into a man’s house, help themselves to his biscuits. The crime doesn’t feel important – it’s the fourth in a month, we’re told – but the intrusion does. It evokes the entanglements of small towns, the way in which lives intersect, physical proximity breaking down the barriers of class and culture and personal choice that can divide urban populations into subcultures. As a declaration of intent, the image of trespass is pretty clear: there is no real privacy in this town, and as readers we’re about to gain access.

In the first two sections of the book, short, interlinked stories ripple out, often connected by an object: a stolen silver spoon, a child’s jumper, a stone. The short story writer’s knack for the telling gesture is everywhere, a craft refined through microfictional practice. Kassab draws on real-world observation and careful listening. There is a lightness of touch to her direct and lively prose.

In his extraordinary journey through Iceland’s history, Saga Land (2017, with Richard Fidler), Kári Gíslason described Icelanders as ‘being reserved’ and ‘a bit severe’ at first glance, likening them to the Hallgrímskirkja church that looms over Reykjavik with its enormous basalt column wings and stony façade. The first three days I spent alone in that city gave me a wholly different impression of its people. On my first day there in 2013, I was greeted by what appeared to be most of the city’s population lined up on the Lækjargata strip waving flags, smiling from ear to ear, and dancing as the annual Gay Pride parade rolled by in all its garish joy. The following night, as I chomped on one of Iceland’s famous hot dogs from a van by the waterfront, a young woman, soused to high heaven, threw her arms around my neck and yelled ‘I luff you!’ in my ear until her friends, doubled over with laughter, dragged her away. The morning after, in a souvenir store, the young man behind the counter asked me where I was from. When I answered ‘Australia’, a dark cloud crossed his face and he mumbled, ‘Oh, my girlfriend left me for an Australian’, as he daintily popped my little model fishing boat in a paper bag.

It was, inevitably, in a Zoom meeting that I first noticed the phrase. A colleague, excusing some minor oversight, explained it away with the words: ‘Sorry, Covid brain fog.’ Although I hadn’t consciously registered the expression before, I knew exactly what she meant.

All my life I’ve kept a daily journal. I’m not quite sure why I do it, but I can’t imagine not doing it – if that makes sense. Some writers’ diaries are highly literary, analytical, indeed philosophical. Mine is different – much more social – a kind of record of my work at ABR, my friendships, and the literary scene. In a way it’s a kind of group biography. Early on it was certainly a useful literary exercise – good practice at how to record events and conversations succinctly and with a certain irony.

A while ago I began publishing extracts from the diaries in the print edition of the magazine – highlights of ABR’s year laced with a bit of gossip and the odd joke.

This year’s diary is rather different in tone. Living through a pandemic has changed all of us, I think. Publishing a magazine during repeated lockdowns has not been without its challenges. Covid has also coincided with a marked deterioration in my aged mother’s health. In March last year she moved into aged care. Like so many Australians, and so many friends of mind, I have experienced the feelings of anguish and impotence that go with caring for a loved parent during lockdown.

In choosing the following extracts, I felt obliged to tell something of my mother’s story. To do otherwise would be have seemed blithe, even disingenuous.

January 1 Hindmarsh Island. Rose early and sped across the water to inspect the wetlands where hundreds of ibis were roosting – a marvellous sight. But we won’t be going to New South Wales in the middle of the month, following a Covid outbreak in Sydney. Victoria has closed the border, causing much predictable lamentation.

January 5 Three am: there’s no point not starting the day, as my mother is much on my mind after another severe illness. I begin to fear that this woman will be left with few happy memories of life. I think of Darl’s awful words in As I Lay Dying: ‘It takes two people to make you, one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.’

But there are worse ways to start a daunting day than reading Jacqueline Rose on Freud and the pandemic (LRB). Here’s a quote from Freud: ‘We lay a stronger emphasis on what is evil in men only because other people disavow it, and therefore make the human mind, not better, but incomprehensible.’ Then I turned to Wallace Stevens’s The Auroras of Autumn, whose third stanza is full of magnificent valedictions about his mother:

… It is the mother they possess,
Who gives transparence to their present peace.
She makes that gentler that can gentle be.

And yet she too is dissolved, she is destroyed.
She gives transparence. But she has grown old. 
The necklace is a carving not a kiss. 

The soft hands are a motion not a touch.
The house will crumble and the books will burn.
They are at ease in a shelter of the mind

And the house is of the mind and they and time,
Together, all together … 

But cool the early breeze through the narrow window.

January 7 A day that will surely live in infamy, as they are already saying in the United States, though it was January 6 there when it happened. I was listening to breakfast radio when they announced that the joint sitting of both houses of Congress, intended to ratify Biden’s election as president, had been overrun by a huge mob of Trump supporters, incited by the president and his goons, Giuliani among them. Soon anarchy prevailed at the Capitol, whose security was exposed as unbelievably lax. The representatives and senators, and Trump’s veep, were escorted to a safe room. It took hours for them to begin to clear the steps of the Capitol, while the fascists roamed around the Capitol with their smug signs and Confederate flags. I watched all day, numb, disbelieving. The sessions resumed and by 3 am Biden had been ratified. But what does this mean for the US? Will the scales fall away from people’s eyes, or will it inspire them, and Trump, said to be deranged, with a fortnight to go before the inauguration?

Alex Ross and I exchanged emails about his new book on Wagnerism, which I am meant to review for The Age. Alex is keen to appear on our podcast. I sympathised with him, and with Patrick McCaughey in New Haven.

January 9 To cheer ourselves up after our mothers’ woes, we went to Gimlet on Russell Street, Andrew McConnell’s new restaurant. Outside I saw Adam Gilchrist and Michael Hussey, in jeans and T-shirts, still trying to look in their twenties, quite passably. (C. had no idea who they were.)

January 10 On Friday Sam Watts, who is doing a PhD on race in America, proposed an article on the assault on the Capitol, citing historical precedents. It arrived this morning, and it’s good. 

January 12 Up Toorak Road comes a Japanese woman, masked, bandy-legged, carrying an enormous cardboard box almost bigger than herself. She must be replacing the oven.

Wrote my review of Helen Garner’s new diaries for the Literary Review.

January 13 Read, no luxuriated in, the criticism of Alfred Kazin: his essay on T.S. Eliot and the even more remarkable and perverse Henry Adams. Is Kazin becoming my favourite critic, eclipsing Virginia Woolf? His amplitude, his elegance, his fearlessness.

January 14 Well, if Kazin is my favourite critic, Gore Vidal is the saltiest and most malicious. I have been reading some of his essays from the 1980s, when he was obsessed by tenure-seeking, theory-riddled academics. I love his riffs about Americans’ vacuity and Orson Welles’s dog – ‘a totally unprincipled small black poodle called Kiki’. No one else would/could describe a canine as unprincipled – except Henry James. Even Vidal’s brief introductions are malign. In both of them he declares that he will never write his memoirs (‘I have never been my own subject, a sign of truly sickening narcissism’). Within a decade or so Vidal had written two memoirs.

David Gelber in London likes my Garner review (‘a zestful piece’), but I was mortified, on rereading it, to discover that I had used ‘finest’ thrice. Now David is resolved to read Harry Kessler’s inimitable journals, which I extol in my review. I first met David at the Literary Review’s cramped little office in Soho. David told me about an LR event at his grandfather’s house in the country. Curious, I asked him where his grandfather lived. ‘Blenheim,’ he said quietly.

January 16 Just back from the South Melbourne Market where I visited Rod Cameron’s excellent bookshop, near the doughnuts. I found some treasures, including Martin Boyd’s memoirs. Rod, who addressed me as ‘Bobby’s son’ (which doesn’t happen often now), told me about his long career as a book valuer on 3UZ. 

Martin Boyd, in Day of My Delight, is plummy, even priggish, but his self-possession at the front during the Great War was remarkable, and it’s hard to disagree with him when he writes (in 1965): ‘I do not think it unfair to say that the worst Australian characteristic is a reverence for money, and for the artificial social distinctions created by its possession in any quantity.’

January 17 Our first jazz concert in a year or more – at fortyfivedownstairs. Mary Lou Jelbart, introducing Alexander Nettelbeck and his Impromptu Quartet, seemed anxious. This was their first concert in a year. God knows what will happen to arts venues like this.

January 26 Much enjoying Mark McKenna’s new book Return to Uluru, about a police killing at Uluru in 1934. The culprit, Bill McKinnon, somehow survived the subsequent inquiry ordered by the Lyons government. Then he took himself and his bride on a 4,000-mile journey across Australia, stopping for afternoon tea with my friend Sonja Chalmer’s grandparents family at Macdonald Downs before lobbing on the Kidmans.

January 28 Nice responses to the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which has been won by Sara M. Saleh. Sara’s family wants to frame the media release. She told us there is no letter P in Arabic, so they are having trouble processing it. When Danielle Blau, another shortlisted poet, joined us in the virtual green room the gent sitting beside her turned out to be Steven Pinker, her stepfather. At least he knows about ABR now.

Helen Garner and I exchanged emails about old photos and my volatile dream life. Helen said it seems to carry ‘a lot of psychic freight’.

January 29 Margaret Court has been made an AC in the national honours, so I fulminated in an e-newsletter. I congratulated Kerry O’Brien on declining his AO in the Australia Day honours following Court’s elevation. (Others have since followed suit.) I hope Kerry has been inundated with letters of solidarity.

My husband has returned. A traveller whose flight was cancelled has found his way home. He slowly unpacks while I make space for the unexpected.

The house is full of him. I find him everywhere. He hovers in the kitchen and takes over the knives. He lifts paper to the window’s light and slices it with the sharpest blade.

I keep saying wash your hands, this virus is deadly. We wait from a distance for the world to return.

He cuts the tender loins and offers a slowly cooked dinner. I look for a tablecloth. We talk and take time to hear how each other’s sentences end.

The sky is empty of temptation. In the corner, the suitcase still lurks with a broken zip and an old address. An invitation. If we had a choice where would we rather be?

Every poet has his or her addictions: words they use over and over again, ones they own ‘by right of obsessive musical deed’ (to quote Richard Hugo). For Emily Dickinson, it was thee, thou, and Death. For Sylvia Plath, it was him, nothing, go, and gone. For Gabriel García Lorca, it was sangre, lagrimas, negro, and corazón. For Jordie Albiston, it just might be world, the word that aims to contain everything.

A will to capture world, to thoroughly catalogue internal experience, is the engine of Albiston’s latest collection, Fifteeners. One substantive sequence titled ‘Omegabet’ orders twenty-six poems from ‘Apple’ to ‘Zed’ – a constraint that gathers meditations ranging from the mite to the matriarch; that gathers angels, Tuesdays, Father Time, and the chaos of the self under the primary rubric of the building blocks of English. Another sequence titled ‘The Five Wits’ invokes the Elizabethan tabulation of all human psychology according to just five faculties of the soul: ‘Reason’, ‘Instinct’, ‘Imagination’, ‘Fantasy’, and ‘Memory’.  Another longish poem composed of multiple conjoined ‘fifteeners’ – Albiston’s invented form, the fifteen-line sonnet – is titled ‘Poem on Life’. What could be a more fitting title for a poem on the totality of living and being? ‘You summon the sea’.

The trouble with the cataloguing impulse, of course, is that it is impossible to appease. How can a collection of poetry – even a poet’s entire oeuvre, thirteen books in Albiston’s case – capture and contain world ? Worlds, perhaps, is more doable. (Albiston has said that she knows when a poem is done: it clicks physically into place like the door of a Porsche.) The plural worlds grants a multiplicity of perspectives and a multiplicity of containers for experience, releasing a poem, or a book, from the task of unrealisable totality. Totality, to my mind, is connected to perfection: another impossibility.

Ben Lerner supposes that this tension between the actual (a finished poem in the world) and the virtual or the dreamed-of (an ideal song in a realm of pure possibility) underlies the suspicion and awkwardness non-poets often express upon first encountering those of us imprudent enough to identify ourselves as poets. In The Hatred of Poetry (2016), Lerner writes, ‘We were taught at an early age that we are all poets simply by virtue of being human … Most of us carry at least a weak sense of a correlation between poetry and human possibility that cannot be realized by poems. The poet, by his very claim to be a maker of poems, is therefore both an embarrassment and an accusation.’ It follows that The Ideal Poem – personal enough to be true to life, universal enough to connect with everyone – is a dream, a value (‘Poetry’) that real poems can never achieve.

Albiston, in an interview from 2017 in Cordite Poetry Review, cheerfully disagrees with this sentiment. If anything, upon finishing a poem, and hearing the ‘click’, she experiences ‘an upward fall’ – a glimpse of transcendence? Transcendence is present throughout this collection. The first poem in Fifteeners versions the anonymous Christian mystic text ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, with the word ‘God’ replaced by ‘Poem’ or ‘Poetry’. The speaker here affirms that the poem is not for ‘fleshly janglers’, ‘open praisers’, or ‘tellers of trifles’, but is, rather, intended for

                   those readers who
stir after the secret spirit of all
Poetry  its specials and dooms  & they
full gracious disposed to be called by the
Poem   to be one with Poetry   

Here, Albiston invokes the Poem as reverent container, encompasser of Life, transcendent song. The tension between the virtual and actual, the realm of the ideal song and the compromised crash-to-earth, is an unmistakeable preoccupation of ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’, ‘Boy’, and ‘Poem on Life’:

We opened our beaks and we sang –        it was
A song no one heard         not even the stone

Later in the collection, playful irreverence comes to the fore, to undercut the idea of the Poem’s perfect music: the fall, the apple, the song that’s impossible to hear, the fact of the poet impossibly ‘fastened to / words by a leash of longing’. (I have my own ‘leash of longing’ for a better cover design, something at least as carefully made as the music of the superb poems inside.) In fact, by their very form Albiston’s ‘fifteeners’ insist on imperfection. The fifteeners are decasyllabic quintains with strange sonic textures and vertiginous, funny line breaks. These anomalous ‘sonnets’ are mapped imperfectly over the ‘perfect’ (which is to say, Shakespearean) form, like a picture copied on tracing paper then knocked askew of its source. Instead of meter, the lines are mapped by syllables, creating a live throb of idiosyncratic rhythms. The rhymes a reader would expect to encounter at the end of a line are kicked forward, and drop to the line below. The chime of the couplet is often found in a single line, or at the centre of a stanza. The last stanza of ‘Elephant’ is typical:

Fifth limb & sailcloth ears & this summit
Of puckers this mosque of tusk this final
Freight of largesse & love declines unto
Dust  & the tiniest grasses pitch &
Sigh  & the sun switches off with her eyes

Joy and zest, paeans to family, motherhood, and love, and the delight of offbeat rhythms are constants in these poems. Sober meditations on disaster, of which there are of course several – look at the times we are living in – are upended with a weird sonic jollity, an injection of fizz that bubbles the worlds’ shadows and makes them dance. Albiston’s Everything in Fifteeners is made with great tenderness. It puts me in mind of a poem called ‘Hills’ by Aotearoa poet Dinah Hawken, where she asks, ‘Who put the el / in the word world, / changing things forever?’ It’s an old woman, of course, ‘in the days before writing / when words dwelt in the body’, resting her tongue, ‘by chance and lovingly, on the roof / of her mouth before sounding the d / that is always ending the word word’. The roof of the world appears, and with it, hills, ‘lovely / and potentially touchable’.

Charles Bernstein, born in 1950, is a prolific poet and theorist of Language poetry, which arose in the 1970s in the wake of the anti-Vietnam War movement (or the American War, as the Vietnamese call it). As with similar movements in many countries, including Australia, this now semi-institutionalised poetry began as radical revolt against an established verse culture that preferred its poetry to be an easily palatable, Inauguration-worthy commodity. Instead, Bernstein and his colleagues variously practised a ‘multi-discourse text’ that chipped away at the boundary between poetry and critical theory. ‘Poetry is the aversion of conformity,’ Bernstein writes in an early essay, rephrasing Ralph Waldo Emerson. It is a site of perpetual enquiry rather than the expedient repose of fixed meaning.

The poetry community in Australia, as in the United Kingdom, has been slow to accept prose poetry as a legitimate poetic form. Yet there have been celebrated exponents of prose poetry over nearly two centuries – and even longer if the prose component of the Japanese Haibun, developed by Matsuo Bashō (1644–94), is understood as prose poetry.

Because of its gloomy appearance the building is like a defeated army, and
the gloom is so heavy it makes handling difficult and postage quite out of the
question. Still, if you wish to transfer its impression to someone don’t despair
at the apparent impossibility of it; there are some things you can do, and it’s
always better to feel like a winner than be dragged down by your enemies.
I say this to you because these enemies of yours are hiding behind the stinking
and spider-infested bushes which grow at the building’s corners. See, there is
one over there. There’s a pen-knife clutched in his hand and a concentrated
look of intense hatred standing, apparently at attention, in each of his eyes.
And this is the building you have been waiting to enter! Move closer and
you will see a single word rudely carved above its padlocked door: fame. 

Family histories are always complicated. Delia (‘Mickie’) Akeley and her monkey, JT Jr, are the titular family in this intriguing book, but its story includes the grand global family of colonial museums, and the personal families of Theodore Roosevelt and the author, Iain McCalman.

The suffering of prisoners of the Japanese dominates many Australians’ memories of World War II. More than 22,000 men and almost forty women were captured in Southeast Asia between 1942 and 1945. About 8,000 of them died. Traditionally this high death rate has been attributed to a mix of Japanese cruelty and their refusal to observe international humanitarian law. The military code of bushidō, it is argued, meant that Japanese soldiers had no respect for enemies who had surrendered. They did not recognise that prisoners had rights under international law, since the Japanese authorities promised to observe the Geneva Convention of 1929 only mutatis mutandis – that is, as Japanese laws and local circumstances allowed. From mid-1942 on, Allied prisoners of war, like Asian labourers from occupied territories, were seen as a useful but utterly disposable labour force. Moreover, the liberal use of corporal punishment within the Imperial Japanese Army’s disciplinary system meant that prisoners were slapped and beaten, even for minor infringements. Their guards – often Korean and thus on the lowest rung of the IJA’s military hierarchy – were themselves treated violently.

Another book about a mother by a daughter, I thought when I saw this one, summoning to mind Biff Ward’s In My Mother’s Hands (2014), Kate Grenville’s One Life (2015), and Nadia Wheatley’s Her Mother’s Daughter (2018). But while each of those books presents an impressive woman cramped – sometimes tragically so – by her postwar circumstances, in this case we have a subject who was nothing short of a national treasure.

Drew Rooke begins A Witness of Fact in the viewing gallery of Adelaide’s Forensic Science Centre, his eyes scanning the stainless steel benchtops, scissors, ladles, a pair of ‘large, heavy-duty shears used for cutting through ribs’, and an arsenal of knives of different styles and sizes – ‘what you would see in a commercial kitchen’. The atmosphere is cool, sterile, and menacing. This is where disgraced forensic pathologist Colin Manock worked for thirty years. Given that this book is about Manock, the opening could be confused with scene-setting. But there is a deeper significance to the author’s choice of words, one that goes to the heart of his book: what transforms knives in a commercial kitchen into specialist tools of medical forensics? How is our trust in the criminal justice system dependent upon our thinking of the ladles and scissors not as ordinary objects but, when placed in the right hands, as the instruments of experts? Who has the authority to speak for the dead or to interpret the mute language of deceased flesh? And in Colin Manock’s case, what do we do about the four hundred criminal convictions secured by someone juries believed to be an expert witness but who had few formal qualifications beyond that of a general practitioner?

In Feeling and Knowing: Making minds conscious, neuroscientist, psychologist, and philosopher Antonio Damasio asks us to imagine life without consciousness. We would, he argues, still have patterns of neurochemical, sense-derived information ‘flowing in our minds, but [that information] would be unconnected to us as singular individuals’.

The Bible is a collection of books with a long history. Not surprisingly, there is little agreement as to precisely which books it contains and what their collective importance might be. In The Making of the Bible, a distinguished Old Testament scholar, Konrad Schmid, and an equally prominent New Testament specialist, Jens Schröter, have combined forces to produce a volume (elegantly translated from the German by Peter Lewis) that outlines how different forms of the Bible came into being. Their focus is historical and philological rather than theological or literary. Yet the story they tell is engrossing: that of an unstable world needing to attend to the values of God’s kingdom. They help a non-specialist reader appreciate the fascinating diversity of ways in which the Bible’s message was regularly reinterpreted in a changing political situation.

The 2021 centenary of Raymond Williams’s birth was a moment of acknowledgment but also involved some assessment and testing of his ongoing relevance. Williams seemed to live many lives: son of a railway worker in rural Wales, Communist Party member, wartime tank commander, tutor in the Workers’ Educational Association, novelist, author of key texts within cultural and media studies, professor of drama at Cambridge University, founding figure of the British New Left, television reviewer and commentator, socialist activist and Welsh nationalist, cultural and Marxist theorist.

For M.F.

What is the use of a full moon
now we do not harvest by its light?

There is no one else standing here,
lifting their face to the star-studded sky.

Do you see the moon’s craters, its dark side?
It simply hangs there, brilliant white –

*

In the living room the children
and I mime spinning on an axis.

We tread an elliptical path around
the sun of the dying woman. Later,

she gifts me six pieces of gold.
Weight of a blessing from the living:

a Möbius bangle, blue sapphires in bezels.
Her name in Arabic, hanging from a chain.

*

Almásy said, Every night I cut out my heart,
but in the morning it was full again.

Black consumes the luminous orb
even as the girl learns how to spell

gibbous, waxing, waning. Do not swallow
the bright coin we place under your tongue.

*

A bolus of bread. It rises,
it fills with air, it is eaten.

Dust to flesh to dust to dust.
The frozen smiles of family

framed in silver. I draw the curtains.
Moonlight falls across the bedlinen.

Behind your lids, all will fade, and turn to ink.
Outside, a curlew cries. We see the glitter of a scythe.

The Almásy in my poem refers to Count Ladislaus de Almásy, the titular character in Michael Ondaatje’s novel, The English Patient (Bloomsbury, 1992), where the quote is also drawn from.

Paul Davies, the British physicist who brightened up the Australian science scene when he was a professor at the University of Adelaide in the 1990s, is currently director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science at Arizona State University. Beyond describes itself as ‘a pioneering center devoted to confronting the really big questions of science and philosophy’. It also aims to present science publicly ‘as a key component of our culture and of significance to all humanity’, something Davies has been doing for thirty years, in popular talks, articles, and books such as About Time (1995).

Among the most celebrated of nineteenth-century British decoration firms, but one that is almost completely forgotten today, was Cottier & Co., founded by the Glaswegian decorator and stained glass artist Daniel Cottier in 1869. The volume Daniel Cottier: Designer, decorator, dealer is the first comprehensive scholarly treatment of this decorator and his eponymous firm. With branches in London, New York, and Sydney, this was a remarkable international enterprise disseminating the principles of Aesthetic interior design, the movement that construed the role of art to be the provision of uplifting delight through visual beauty. A series of essays by a group of eminent art historians, including leading historian of nineteenth-century art Petra ten-Doesschate Chu, considers Cottier’s initial training as a stained glass artist in Scotland, the founding of his London decorating firm, the establishment of the New York and Sydney branches of the business, and the influence Cottier’s activities as a dealer had on the art markets in London and New York.

The Western, colonial, patriarchal hegemony having eroded somewhat in recent years, the purposes and methods of art and of museum management and curatorship are undergoing fundamental change. Formerly unchallenged Anglophone-transatlantic canons and practices have been undermined by broader international perspectives, by the impact of digital technologies, and by the politics of identity – in ethnicity and nation, gender and sexuality. The art museum is being transformed from a locus of the national, the classificatory, the educational and the aesthetic to a platform or vehicle for personal and political positioning. More recently, conventional programming has been overturned by the impact of Covid closures and restructuring, while the climate crisis looms threateningly over everything.