Jordie Albiston (1961–2022)

In early March, the Australian poetry community was shocked by news of the death of Jordie Albiston. Known for both her appetite for formal experimentation and her poetry’s emotional range, Albiston was the author and editor of twenty-two books including the award-winning collections Nervous Arcs (1995) and the sonnet according to ‘m’ (2009), as well as the historical works Botany Bay Document (1996) and The Hanging of Jean Lee (1998). (The latter was adapted for opera by Andrée Greenwell.)

Few contemporary Australian poets thought as deeply about form as Albiston, who drew on areas as far-flung as Euclidean geometry and atomic science for inspiration. As Joan Fleming observed in a review of Albiston’s new volume, Fifteeners (2021), for ABR’s March issue, the latter’s work is animated by a desire for capaciousness, by a world-crafting and world-catching ambition. ‘Albiston’s Everything,’ Fleming wrote, ‘is made with great tenderness’.

Like ‘world’, ‘life’ was also something of a talismanic word for Albiston. When interviewed as ABR’s Poet of the Month in May 2016, she remarked that ‘Life is inspiring. Poetry is (joyful) work.’

Festival round-up 

After a pandemic-induced hiatus, Australian writing festivals – at least those where one can jostle with crowds and be buffeted by the elements – are back with a vengeance. Starting on the westernmost side of the continent: Perth Festival’s Writers Weekend (26–27 February), with headliners including Tim Winton, Hannah Kent, Claire G. Coleman, and Helen Garner, recorded close to 6,700 visitors, despite interstate author sessions being moved online due to border closures. Perhaps the largest demographic who turned out were aspirational authors, with Georgia Richter and Deborah Hunn’s How to be an Author the bestselling book over the weekend at the Freemantle Arts Centre bookshop.

On the other side of the Great Australian Bight, the Adelaide Festival’s Writers’ Week took place from March 5 to 10. Still Australia’s largest free literary festival, the event treated festival goers to one last hurrah from outgoing festival director, Jo Dyer, who is standing as an independent for the federal seat of Boothby. Of the many sessions dedicated to our worsening political predicament, perhaps none was as damning as the panel on the government’s prosecution of whistleblowers. The discussion was chaired by Andrew Fowler and featured Bernard Collaery (whose case Kieran Pender examines in forensic detail in our cover feature), David McBride (the former military lawyer whose allegations led to the Brereton Report on Australian war crimes in Afghanistan), and Jennifer Robinson (Julian Assange’s lawyer). As Pender puts it in his article, these prosecutions are nothing short of ‘a stain on our democracy’ and ‘an insult to our legal system’.

On some brighter notes, Advances was reliably informed that one of the highlights of the festival was the ABR party held on 8 March, attended by local luminaries and friends of the magazine. Congratulations, too, to Helen Ennis, whose book Olive Cotton: A life in photography (reviewed in our January–February 2020 issue) took out the $15,000 prize for non-fiction in the Festival’s Literature Awards. Ennis, a regular contributor to the magazine since 2005, received ABR’s George Hicks Foundation Fellowship in 2013 in support of her work on Cotton. Her essay, ‘Olive Cotton at Spring Forest’ (June–July 2013), focusing on the second phase of Cotton’s life when she married Ross McInerney and moved to Spring Forest in regional New South Wales, can be read online by subscribers.

Continuing our creep eastward, Advances welcomes the return of the Newcastle Writers Festival (1–3 April). Featuring 110 writers from throughout Australia across seventy free and ticketed events, the festival program will match the temper of the times with an opening gala focusing on love’s transformative impact and closing with a discussion of Sarah Wilson’s most recent book, This One Wild and Precious Life, with ABR contributor Beejay Silcox.

And, finally, to bring our own festival tour to a close, Advances has just heard that Michael Williams will be stepping down as artistic director after this year’s Sydney Writers’ Festival. Brought on, in his own words (and with a nod to The Godfather), ‘as a wartime consigliere, to see the festival through the COVID period’, Williams has previously directed another literary institution, Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre. Williams’s swansong program will ‘drop’ (as they say these days) on 24 March and the festival will soon be recruiting a new director.

With at least two vacancies to be filled on the festival circuit this year, Richter and Hunn should get cracking on a sequel to their bestseller.

Amazon closures 

Seven years after opening its first brick-and-mortar bookstore in Seattle, Amazon has announced that it will close all twenty-four of its physical outlets and a further forty-four pop-up and ‘4-star’ stores. When the e-commerce giant opened its first shopfront in 2015, Americans were bemused by this seemingly retrograde move; after all, hadn’t the convenience of Amazon’s ‘1-click checkout’ been responsible for bookshop closures all over the country (and not just independent retailers, but also behemoths such as Barnes & Noble)?

Advances can only surmise that Amazon’s bookshops were intended to provide a more ‘comforting’ veneer to the company’s ruthlessly algorithm-driven business – Bezosism with a human face – but consumers, it seems, failed to be convinced. To understand why, turn to James Ley’s review of Everything and Less, a new study by literary scholar Mark McGurl of what the successes and failures of Amazon’s business model tell us about how and why we read. 

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Another mangled breast

Dear Editor,

I walked out of a screening of Benedetta last night. I simply could not stomach yet another gratuitous scene of degradation – another mangled breast or ruined girl. Basic Instinct by way of Monty Python, Benedetta is phwoar, peephole filmmaking – a tale of snickering cruelty. It is an object lesson in the male gaze – women’s intimacies as a leering punchline. The persecuted Benedetta Carlini has been exhumed from history for the benefit of a dildo gag. There was a tale to tell here about cloistered power and the lure of rapture. It feels mightily telling that my friends and I were the only women in the screening.

Beejay Silcox, Narrabundah, ACT

Mindy Gill

Dear Editor,

What an excellent, subtle essay by Mindy Gill (ABR, March 2022). It feels like a companion piece to Zadie Smith’s NYRB piece, ‘Fascinated to presume’

Paul Morgan (online comment)

Dear Editor,

I appreciate the careful distinctions made in this essay, and hope they can be heard by readers everywhere.

David Mason (online comment)

Dear Editor,

I am old enough to remember the cult of migrant writing, a forerunner of identity politics. Both are sort of playing the man instead of the ball and losing the point of the game altogether. The work suffers, as do the writers. It is time the situation is called out. Well done, Mindy Gill.

Perception, consciousness, and cognition

Dear Editor,

In her review of Antonio Damasio’s Feeling and Knowing: Making minds conscious, Diane Stubbings seems to veer between perception, consciousness, and cognition. They are, of course, cognate but are distinct and need to be kept so if we are ever to understand what they are.

Of the three, perception is probably fundamental. It seems to be a property of most (if not all) animal life, but, pace Thomas Nagel (of ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ renown), we have no real idea of how it arises, and though we assume that sensations are comparable, we also know (e.g.in colour blindness) that they are not necessarily the same for different individuals. Why is this a ‘problem’? It is essentially because, though the nerve impulses which convey information from (for example) the olfactory epithelium, the retina, the auditory system or the skin operate with, basically, the same biophysical mechanisms, the perceptions which they evoke are quite distinct and seem to depend upon transformative processes which depend, critically, on where in the brain they arise.

Yet it is a reasonable assumption that when, say, my dog is given a general anaesthetic drug, the effects are analogous with what happens to me with that same drug. Thus noci-sensitive pathways probably possess common features. But we cannot know what a conscious canine ‘feels’ or perceives. Furthermore, every dog owner knows that their pets experience what looks like joy and guilt, but that, by no means, indicates that it experiences a comparable ‘consciousness’ to ours, nor that it can think and reflect as we do.

We are also aware that animals (including invertebrates) have memory and we know that these must involve biochemical mechanisms, including the synthesis of new molecules. Yet, we have absolutely no idea (apart from theories, some of them fanciful) of how those chemicals (including new proteins) generate the vivid memories – of people, sounds, words, odours and tastes – which are so familiar to us.

Furthermore, assertions such as ‘the emergent properties of neural networks’ do no more (in my judgement) than state the obvious in different words. I might just as validly theorise that the picture on the screen of my television is an ‘emergent property’ of its circuitry. It does not take us a single step from our starting point.

John Carmody, Roseville, NSW

Something of a stretch

Dear Editor,

There is no doubt the interruption to the book fair was unpleasant and unfortunate, but to draw from that the conclusion that we are all doomed seems something of a stretch. There exists a grey area in which the rights of individuals have had to be set aside for the greater good, but most of those folk are law-abiding citizens who, once the pandemic is over, will return to their normal patterns of behaviour despite the reinforcement of their fears about the imagined connections between big business and big pharma (never mind that you would have been better off investing in Tesla or Bitcoin in the last couple of years rather than Pfizer or Moderna).

Patrick Hockey (online comment)

The Grainger Museum

Dear Editor,

What an insightful commentary from Peter Tregear (‘The Grainger Trap’ ABR April 2022). I have seen the latest installation at the Grainger Museum. Fresh responses to museums and collections should always be welcome, particularly from groups and individuals traditionally excluded. At a university museum, however, surely such efforts should also be informed by awareness of the history of the collection, the institution, the founder(s), and their historical context. These factors can (and probably should) be challenged and critiqued. But to challenge and critique you must first understand: read the existing literature, do your research.

Fred Wilson’s brilliantly subversive interventions revealed a solid understanding of the collections and institutions that he was critiquing, gained presumably through reading, research and discussion, and complementing his own lived experience and sharp insights. The Grainger Museum’s latest project is the work of its first ‘Creative Researcher in Residence’. In other typical university/academic forums, such as seminars, conferences and peer-reviewed journals, research and a knowledge of prior scholarship are essential. They should also be essential in university museums.

Belinda Nemec (online comment)

On the first day of March this year, Scott Morrison declared his commitment to democratic principles. ‘My government will never be backward when it comes to standing up for Australia’s national interests and standing up for liberal democracy in today’s world,’ the prime minister told reporters. ‘We can’t be absent when it comes to standing up for those important principles.’ It was a deeply hypocritical statement from a leader who has overseen raids on journalists, the prosecution of whistleblowers, and the degradation of transparency mechanisms at the heart of our democracy. Standing up for important democratic principles is just about the opposite of what the Morrison government has done, domestically at least, in recent years. The secrecy-shrouded prosecution of Bernard Collaery makes that abundantly clear.

Much has already been written about the Collaery case, an insidious misuse of government resources that is contrary to the public interest and will only serve to silence whistleblowers. In this article, I want to look to the future. How does this end? And how do we prevent it from happening again?

First, though, a recap. Bernard Collaery is a Canberra lawyer. He is an elder statesman of the profession, having acted in many significant cases (including lawsuits arising from the Canberra Hospital explosion and the Thredbo landslide) and served briefly as ACT attorney-general and deputy chief minister. Collaery was also deeply involved in the independence movement of our neighbour Timor-Leste, acting as an adviser to the likes of Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta.

In 2018, Collaery was charged with five counts under the Intelligence Services Act 2001. It is alleged that Collaery breached a secrecy provision in that statute, through his communications with various ABC journalists. It was also alleged that he had conspired with his former client Witness K to contravene the secrecy provision. K, an ex-intelligence operative, had received approval from the Inspector-General for Intelligence and Security to seek legal advice from Collaery. It is alleged that Collaery and K conspired to pass information to the government of Timor-Leste.

And what information it is alleged to have been. The central issue underlying this entire prosecution is Australia’s alleged spying on Timor-Leste for commercial gain. Just a couple of years after Timor had gained independence from Indonesia, and had been left in impoverished ruins, Australia allegedly bugged Timor’s cabinet offices to gain the upper hand in oil and gas negotiations. It was a despicable act of espionage, morally bankrupt, aimed at enriching Australia and a few energy majors at the expense of a war-ravaged, newly born nation. Our neighbours, our friends – victims of the rapacious greed of our government.

Rather than prosecuting those who authorised this shocking intelligence operation, the government wants to shoot the messenger. Three years after being charged, Witness K pleaded guilty to a lesser charge; in June 2021, he was given a suspended sentence. But Collaery maintains his innocence. Since being charged, he has withstood a veritable procedural battering – over fifty court hearings and a dozen judgments over the extent of secrecy to be applied to his jury trial, and related issues.

The Morrison government, via Attorney-General Michaelia Cash, wants the trial to be mainly heard behind closed doors. One motivation for this secrecy is so that Collaery can be successfully prosecuted without the government having to publicly admit that it spied on Timor. It is not a crime to make something up, so Collaery will only be found guilty if the underlying matter, the espionage, is true. But the government has never admitted its wrongdoing, has never apologised, and it doesn’t want to start now.

This is not hyperbole. As much was stated, matter-of-factly, in a decision from Justice David Mossop of the ACT Supreme Court in 2020: ‘By this mechanism the Attorney‑General hopes to maintain a position of “neither confirm nor deny” (NCND) in relation to the subject matter of the [redacted].’ In other words, the Morrison government wants to tell a jury one thing, to convict a whistleblower, but refuses to admit the same thing to the Australian public.

Thankfully, the justice system disagreed. Despite Mossop’s initially granting the secrecy orders sought by Cash (the deck is stacked in the attorney-general’s favour, with the court required by law to give greatest weight to their views), on appeal Mossop’s colleagues upheld the importance of open justice and ordered a largely open trial. In a public summary of its judgment, released in October 2021, the ACT Court of Appeal indicated that a secret trial would pose ‘a very real risk of damage to public confidence in the administration of justice’. The summary added that ‘the open hearing of criminal trials was important because it deterred political prosecutions’.

It is at this point that the pre-trial proceedings took a turn that would be outlandish even in Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The attorney-general appealed to the High Court – not to challenge the underlying decision of the Court of Appeal, but to contest the Court’s refusal to redact parts of their written reasons. The government wants to keep a judgment that said no to secrecy itself secret. The case remains before the High Court, awaiting a decision on whether the attorney-general will be granted special leave to appeal (a hearing is expected in mid-April). If special leave is granted, the High Court will weigh in on the redactions later this year. If not, we might finally see a judgment, handed down six months ago, that said no to a secret trial. It is perversity heaped on perversity.

It does not end there. Notwithstanding its robust defence of open justice, the Court of Appeal sent the ultimate secrecy question back to Justice Mossop, because when it was first argued before him, the government wanted to put evidence that it said was so secret only the judge could see it. Contrary to foundational principles of procedural fairness, the attorney-general’s lawyers submitted that they would only provide the evidence if Collaery and his lawyers could not see it. Mossop decided that he did not need to see the evidence to make his decision – now that the Court of Appeal has decided against the attorney-general, the government is back for another bite of the cherry, this time with secret evidence in hand. In mid-March, Mossop agreed to receive and consider the secret evidence, shrugging off constitutional concerns that had been argued by Collaery’s barristers. Collaery will therefore have to relitigate the fight over whether his trial should be in secret, effectively blindfolded, unable to see the evidence on which the attorney-general is relying.

And so, almost four years after Collaery was charged, a trial remains beyond the horizon. The current parallel litigation might be concluded by the end of this year. Even that is uncertain, particularly if Mossop, having agreed to receive secret evidence, insists on a secret trial, which may then be appealed – to the Court of Appeal and even the High Court. More pre-trial fighting is likely; no aspect of this case has been uncontested. (In one judgment, in 2020, Mossop complained that the relevant issue, over parliamentary privilege, might have been resolved by consensus; instead, ‘the parties allowed it to become another front in their greater war’.) The punishment by process inflicted on Bernard Collaery by the government rolls on.

So how does it end? The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (CDPP) or the attorney-general could drop this prosecution today. The Morrison government could apologise to Timor-Leste and Collaery, pardon Witness K, and commit to comprehensive law reform directed towards protecting whistleblowers and promoting transparency. That would be the preferable outcome, even if it is alarming that it has taken them four years to reach the obvious conclusion that there is no public interest in prosecuting whistleblowers.

The CDPP has the authority to drop a prosecution at any time prior to a trial. They should exercise that authority. The Prosecution Policy of the Commonwealth provides that the guiding question is at all times whether ‘the public interest requires a prosecution to be pursued’. Prosecuting whistleblowers is not in the public interest. It punishes courageous Australians who have spoken up and revealed wrongdoing.

No one really disputes that what Collaery is alleged to have said is true – that Australia spied on Timor-Leste. Prosecuting someone for telling the truth, when that truth reveals government wrongdoing, is profoundly undemocratic. Prosecuting whistleblowers also has a chilling effect on other Australians who might speak up. Discouraging people from calling out wrongdoing is antithetical to the public interest.

If the CDPP will not exercise their discretion to discontinue the prosecution, then the attorney-general must. At common law, the government has the prerogative power to discontinue the prosecution – in technical terms to direct a nolle prosequi (‘no bill’) in relation to a criminal charge. Section 71 of the Judiciary Act 1903 also provides express statutory authority for this power. The attorney-general can, at any time, end this madness.

Cash has so far refused to drop the case. At every Senate estimates hearing, upon being grilled about the Collaery case by the likes of Senator Rex Patrick, Cash offers the same excuse. In the most recent exchange, in February 2022, the attorney-general insisted that it was ‘not appropriate for me to intervene to discontinue this matter … it would be extraordinary and, given its nature, represent political intervention in a process that … conventionally, has been independent’.

This is wrong for two reasons. First, the nature of the charges against Collaery required the attorney-general’s consent for the CDPP to proceed. The brief reportedly lay dormant on former Attorney-General George Brandis’s desk, for good reason. It was not until Christian Porter became the nation’s first law officer that the case was given the green light. It has therefore been political from the start; there is nothing apolitical about refusing to intervene now. Second, this is an extraordinary case, and extraordinary cases deserve the exercise of extraordinary powers. Those powers exist for a reason.

Hopefully, the CDPP or the attorney-general acts. If they continue to refuse to drop the prosecution, it is incumbent on the next government – whether Coalition or Labor – to intervene. Labor has been making the right noises, thanks to agitation by Canberra MPs and senators. If Labor is elected, Mark Dreyfus, the current shadow attorney-general, who was responsible, back in 2013, for the enactment of federal public sector whistleblowing laws in the first place, will have the power to end the case. If he fails to do so, it would represent a great betrayal.

The alternatives are grim. Without the government or CDPP dropping the prosecution, the case will, eventually, go to trial. At the earliest, it would be heard by a jury, in open or closed court, in mid-2023. The following year is more likely. Whatever the outcome, an appeal seems inevitable – further prolonging the prosecution. It is not impossible that the case could still be on foot in 2028, a full decade after Collaery was charged (at which point he will be in his eighties). Even a not-guilty verdict would be a pyrrhic victory, in a case that should never have commenced. The alternative, that Collaery is found guilty and imprisoned, for allegedly speaking up about Australia’s wrongdoing against Timor-Leste, is intolerable.

Collaery is not the only whistleblower currently on trial. David McBride spoke up about alleged war crimes in Afghanistan, while serving as a defence force lawyer. Richard Boyle, while working at the Australian Taxation Office, blew the whistle on unethical debt recovery practices. Both thought they were doing the right thing – speaking up internally, and then to an oversight body, and only going public, to the ABC, as a last resort, as is expressly permitted by whistleblowing law. Both have been vindicated: the Brereton Report alleged horrendous conduct by Australian forces in Afghanistan; an investigation by the Senate confirmed Boyle’s allegation. And yet both are on trial, later this year.

How can we ensure that these types of cases never happen again? Whistleblower protection reform is essential and long overdue. An independent review told the federal government to improve the Public Interest Disclosure Act, which protects public servant whistleblowers, in 2016. Despite promising to do so, six years later the law remains unchanged. Whistleblowers are suffering as a result. Whoever wins government should prioritise whistleblowing reform as part of a wider suite of integrity measures, including a federal anti-corruption commission.

The three prosecutions underscore the failure of existing whistleblower protections. The PID Act provides no avenue for external disclosure by an intelligence officer, no matter how egregious the wrongdoing. McBride and Boyle, meanwhile, both thought they were abiding by the law – only to find themselves on trial. Each is defending the case on the basis of the PID Act; hopefully they succeed. But the very fact of the prosecutions shows that the protections for whistleblowing to the media are too narrow and technical. Reforming prosecutorial guidelines, to underscore the lack of public interest in prosecuting whistleblowers, is important. A general public interest defence to secrecy offences, as exists in other jurisdictions, would provide an additional safeguard.

Finally, we can prevent future prosecution of whistleblowers, and more raids on journalists, by making it clear that this is unacceptable. By attending rallies – the Alliance Against Political Prosecutions convenes outside the Supreme Court in Canberra at almost every Collaery court date. By contacting our elected representatives and expressing our displeasure at these prosecutions. And by doing all we can, as individuals, to support and empower those around us to speak up about wrongdoing, of whatever nature. Collaery, McBride, and Boyle might be the faces of whistleblowing in our popular imagination, but each week there would be thousands of people across Austra-lia who speak up about wrongdoing at work. Some are protected and empowered, too many others are punished. Research shows that eight in ten Australian whistleblowers suffer some form of backlash. Changing that culture is the ultimate challenge.

I try to attend every court date in the prosecution of Bernard Collaery. I feel it is the least I can do, to show solidarity and keep the public informed about this unjust case. Sometimes I am expelled from the courtroom after a few minutes, together with the handful of journalists who keep an eye on the proceedings, when the court goes into closed session. Other times I watch from the back of the courtroom as the attorney-general’s barristers – eminent members of the Sydney bar – make their submissions, before Collaery’s counsel, all acting for free, in the public interest, have their turn.

What I find most infuriating, and why the prime minister’s recent homily about defending democracy drew my ire, is how the law is used to wrap this prosecution in respectability. Smartly dressed silks orate as if this were any other case – the application of the law to the facts, nothing out of the ordinary. An uninformed spectator, on stumbling into courtroom six at the ACT courts building, could easily conclude that there was nothing to see here, just the wheels of justice in motion.

They would be wrong. There is no public interest in prosecuting whistleblowers. Doing so in secret is the sort of thing more commonly associated with authoritarian regimes than with liberal democracies. Whistleblowers should be protected, not punished, and certainly not prosecuted behind closed doors for speaking up about abhorrent government wrongdoing. The Collaery prosecution is a stain on our democracy, an insult to our legal system.

Scott Morrison: if you really care about democracy, drop this case now and fix our broken whistleblower protection laws.

This is one of series of politics columns generously supported by the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

Curators at old Parliament House – now known as the Museum for Australian Democracy – have for many years maintained the prime minister’s suite much as it was when Bob Hawke vacated it in 1988. Visitors can gaze at a reproduction of the Arthur Boyd painting that hung opposite Hawke’s desk, gawk at the enormous, faux-timber panelled telephone Hawke used, and cast a wry eye over the prime ministerial bathroom, where curators have laid on the vanity toiletries and accoutrements belonging to the office’s last occupant: a box of contact lenses, a pair of black shoelaces, and a tube of hair dye.

Stuart Macintyre was in a league of his own as a historian of communism. That’s not just a comment on his status as a historian of the Communist Party of Australia, whose first volume, The Reds (1999), took the party from its origins in 1920 to brief illegality at the beginning of World War II, and whose second, The Party, covering the period from the 1940s to the end of the 1960s, now appears posthumously. It applies equally to his stature in the international field of the history of communism. There are plenty of Cold War histories of the communist movement, written from outside in severely judgemental mode. There are also laudatory histories, written from within. But when The Reds appeared, it was, to my knowledge, the first history of a communist party anywhere that succeeded in normalising it as a historical topic, that is, writing neither in a spirit of accusation or exculpation but with critical detachment and scrupulous regard for evidence and its contradictions.

The books we read and collect can provide telling insight into our lives. Indeed, bookshelves often draw the immediate attention of our guests, who seek to discern clues about us from the titles that we have accumulated. With Stalin’s Library: A dictator and his books, Geoffrey Roberts takes on the role of a curious visitor perusing the impressive library of Joseph Stalin (1878–1953), who, as head of the Soviet Union, amassed a collection of some 25,000 items. Conceptualised as a biography and intellectual portrait, Stalin’s Library joins a crowded field of works aimed at cracking the Stalin enigma. Setting this latest biography apart is its focus on Stalin’s personal library as a basis for constructing a ‘picture of the reading life of the twentieth century’s most self-consciously intellectual dictator’.

Australia’s Vietnam War has passed through several phases in the last six decades. In the mid-1960s the commitment of combat forces by the Menzies and Holt governments was strongly supported. The war and the associated conscription scheme became the focus of enormous controversy in the late 1960s and early 1970s, contributing to Labor’s electoral success in 1972. Gough Whitlam did not pull out the troops – that had already been done by his predecessor, William McMahon – but he did recognise the communist government in the north, even before the war was over. In the 1980s and 1990s, debate over the wisdom and morality of the war was superseded by emotive controversies over the reception given to returning veterans and the effects of service on their postwar physical and mental health. It remained possible for many Australian veterans to retain the geopolitical views that had shaped their commitment, as well as believing that they had fought their war more honourably and successfully than their American counterparts.

At last we have it – the much-anticipated first volume of the definitive biography of President Soeharto (1921–2008). It is the culminating work in the distinguished career of Australian journalist David Jenkins. This startling volume, covering the years 1921–45, will appeal to the general reader and the Indonesia specialist. It has been described as ‘truly extraordinary’ by the late Benedict Anderson, the prominent Indonesia scholar.

On 21 July 2021, one of the world’s richest men, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, staged a press conference in the small town of Van Horn, Texas, the purpose of which was to boast about his recent ten-minute joy ride into space atop a rocket so comically penis-shaped that one could be forgiven for thinking that the whole exercise was intended as an outrageously expensive joke, albeit one that Mel Brooks would likely have rejected for its lack of subtlety. Dressed in matching blue jumpsuits and looking thoroughly pleased with themselves, Bezos and his three fellow space cadets sat in a row on their wooden highchairs, framed by an enormous set of thrusters, while a lickspittle with the unnaturally thick hair, glittering dental work, and unctuous demeanour of a game-show host lauded them as great heroes and benefactors to humankind.

The reverberations from 6 January 2021 continue. On that day, two thousand or more protesters stormed the Capitol Building in Washington, DC, intending to overturn the formal ballot electing Joe Biden as president of the United States. Waving phones, livestreaming their moves, some called for the execution of politicians, notably Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi. For the first time, a Confederate flag was waved on the floor of the Congress, while a man wearing horns and waving a ‘Q sent me’ sign became the global image of the invasion. The mob was eventually pushed out of the building, but five people died during or after the assault, and four police officers caught in the mêlée later suicided.

Dominique Wilson’s new novel is another foray into the field of historical fiction. Her two previous novels deal with the pain of living through periods of civil strife and migration, and cover long periods of time and several cultures: The Yellow Papers (2014) is set in China and Australia from the 1870s to the 1970s, while That Devil’s Madness (2016) moves from Paris to Algiers to Australia and back from the 1890s to 1970s.

Allegories can be divisive. They are inherently deceptive, forever speaking with forked tongues. Animal Farm both is and isn’t a fairy story about talking pigs. Spenser’s Faerie Queene isn’t just an epic poem about the Redcrosse Knight’s chivalric virtues. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe isn’t merely a fantasy about plucky children conquering a malicious ice queen. Some readers enjoy being literary archaeologists fossicking beneath a narrative’s surface for deeper meaning. There is a thrill in peering through a story’s topsoil, discovering the many-layered substrata beneath it, seeing the author’s politics supporting the words. Others prefer texts without overt messages. To them, as Barthes puts it, the writer should be ‘dead’. Let readers engage with the work on their own terms. Let the book speak for itself.

Early in Steven Carroll’s novel Goodnight, Vivienne, Goodnight, a middle-aged woman contemplates her own existence: ‘Vivienne, Vivie. Viv. Now distant, now near. Who was she? The Vivienne now sitting in the gardens of Northumberland House, Finsbury Park, is contemplating the question.’ This Viv is Vivienne Haigh-Wood, the first wife of T.S. Eliot – or Carroll’s fictional rendition of her. Northumberland House is an asylum where, by 1940, Viv has lived for several years. Her previous actions include not accepting the end of her relationship with Eliot, dabbling in fascism (‘Did you tell him I just liked the uniform?’), and asking a police officer at five one morning if it’s true her husband has been beheaded. Institutionalised, she now lives in quiet defiance of other people’s perceptions and diagnoses of her. And with the help of her friend Louise and a group called the Lunacy Law Reform Society, she is about to do a runner.

What a performance this novel is! And not just in the virtuoso sense. What an exhausting mishmash of contradictions: snobbery, self-abasement, campery, stock masculinity. The whole pastiche is laced with vivid images of what it means to be finally old and ugly.

Fish Out of Water by Kate Hendrick

Text Publishing, $19.99 pb, 288 pp

Few traits typify the mythology of the Aussie bloke quite as strongly as a love of water and a laid-back attitude. Increasingly acknowledged is the role violence plays in shaping our laconic beach-lovers. Three Young Adult novels tackle this sinister undercurrent of male identity, but in different ways and to different effects. In Kate Hendrick’s Fish Out of Water, swimmer Finn aspires to be a ‘top bloke’ like his father, but does he really? Philip Gwynne’s Taj just wants to surf, but he must deal with a foreign government intent on executing his father in The Break. In If Not Us, by Mark Smith, surfer Hesse is trying to save the environment but soon discovers that taking a public stand on a controversial issue can have dangerous consequences.

In How Fiction Works (2008), James Wood examines how novelists write characters and allow us to sympathise with them. He refers to the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s now famous question, ‘What is it like to be a bat?’ Nagel reckoned we cannot know, can only imagine what it would be like to behave like a bat. We can’t know ‘what it is like for a bat to be a bat’.

This is pertinent to Craig Sherborne’s main character in The Grass Hotel, a woman whose dementia has robbed her of sensible and comprehensible language, but who, to put it far too simply, relates the story. 

This is a remarkable feat of wordsmithing by the real author, and it is probably churlish to ask if we can really know what it is like to have dementia, to have ‘flicker-faint wiring’ and ‘drivel words’, until ‘Each week worse. Blank. Blink. Think. Blank. Goes.’; to know what is really going on in her brain. It’s a version of a black and terrible joke that the person who has lost correct and coherent language is written by someone who is something of a word magician.

If you have read Hoi Polloi (2005) and Muck (2007) – Raimond Gaita called the latter a masterpiece, and this reviewer deemed it pitch-perfect – both described as memoirs, then it is a feat of imagination on the reader’s part to read The Grass Hotel as a novel, but the definition of novels in general has transmogrified into whatever it wants to be these days. The Grass Hotel stands alone as a virtuosic deferral of self-examination by delivering an often cruel version of a woman who has lost her mind. The only names in the book (apart from Twinkle, the father, who had a ‘salesman’s glint’ and dies before the mother, and whose ashes are central to a comedic scene of dispersal at a public beach), are those of the horses, Sock and Boy.

And the ‘grass hotel’? According to the narrator, her son called his farm his ‘grass hotel’. The parents had owned hotels, made money, bought a farm (she had been a fine rider) to please the son who, though he is also a reader with a fantastic memory, ‘only has eyes for animals’. ‘I’d complain to Twinkle … If he ever has offspring their legacy will be those piles of paper. Those encyclobloodypaedias.’  This is an obsessive trope in Sherborne’s writing. Early in the book, after her complaintive but still sensible reminiscences of son and husband, she says, ‘Off you went, the father of horses, to become the father of us.’

Some way into the book, the horse, Sock, is put down. Should a person be put down?

Where did the mother’s mind go, this woman who cared so furiously and comically for social status (piano, not bongos), had wanted her son to be a daughter (thoughts of Rilke who was dressed as a girl until he was two), and whose furies are now garbled verbal losses but at the same time Sherborne’s readers’ gain.

Boy ‘whinnied because Sock had disappeared from this two-horse herd’. And the mother is losing herself and her (wonderfully) garbled words: ‘They’ll have to pill me harder … me pilled into drivel words.’ Her bed needs railings, her keys and money have no meaning. And in her voice, which voices the writer’s version of her version of the son’s feelings (are you still with me here?), there’s a realistic and piteous scene of his caring for her:

You see a smile on me, my lips at least. Top one beaked to milky tea. You lift tea. I suck. You are repulsed but pitying. You get up and leave. You return. You sit and want to leave. Leave now means to shun. You stay. The long hour to sit through. Stand and leave for a breather. Return … You do speak sweet. But this not-me repels you. The me me was grit to your teeth. Against me. This new me is not me even enough to touch. But you do touch because you expect I expect it. You don’t know what I expect.

And now, only now, are we treated to a transcendent scene in which the son brings Boy to the sea and his depleted mother with them. In her voice, he writes, ‘You thought for me’. The reader senses a version of theft.  ‘She had you, her mammal child. Made sure you were punished and neat.’ It’s an act of barbed ventriloquism, perhaps a kind of love, a putting down. In his novel Off the Record (2018), Sherborne has his central character say, ‘The more you get to know yourself, even the bits you hate you like.’

There is a touch of something like exorcism in The Grass Hotel: the mother spitting out, in her dementia, in her furious loss of word-use, her inability to lipstick her lips, to control her evacuations, and all that is festering in her. Sherborne as exorcist, emptying himself as well. I thought of Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.  

In His Master’s Voice (1968), Stanisław Lem wrote:

‘What would happen to us if we could truly sympathise with others, feel with them, suffer for them? The fact that human anguish, fear and suffering melt away with the death of the individual, that nothing remains of the ascents, the declines, the orgasms and the agonies, is a praiseworthy gift of evolution, which made us like the animals.’

Is this Sherborne’s concern, too? Early in the book, the mother says, ‘I am dead; you can have me speculate anything.’ And so the author does.

The latest in a new crop of outback gothic fiction, Josh Kemp’s début has everything readers have come to expect from the genre. There’s a messed-up bloke with a past. There’s a lost girl, ten years old and traumatised. There’s plenty of guilt and shame, damaged landscapes, haunted houses, injecting drug use, altered states, brutal acts of violence, and of course, there is the road.

In David Whish-Wilson’s new historical novel, The Sawdust House, it’s 1856 San Francisco, where the citizen-led Committee of Vigilance has convened to purge foreign undesirables from a city populace swollen beyond control by the gold rush. Of course, armed nativists ‘enthralled by their own performance’ are a common feature of U.S. history, from the Virginian lynch mobs of the late 1700s to that guy in the fuzzy Viking hat parading around the Capitol Building just last year. In an intriguing twist, however, the pitchforks are aimed this time at those ‘vermin from some hellish southern continent’, aka Australians, particularly a criminal element who congregate in a lawless quarter nicknamed Sydney-town.

The Australian summer was once again a story of Covid. Just as things were slowly reaching a state of ‘Covid-normal’, Omicron came along to present us with new, decidedly unwelcome, challenges. Despite Omicron, our summer did not pass by without one of its most defining features: sport. Many events went ahead as planned, not least the Australian Open tennis tournament.

In the time before festivals, writers used to attend congresses to perform their role as ‘the unacknowledged legislators of the world’ in Shelley’s fine phrase. A who’s who of literary leftists and liberals gathered in Paris for the First International Congress of  Writers for the Defense of Culture in 1935, in solidarity against the rise of fascism across Europe. Nettie Palmer was a member of the Australian delegation. She was pleased to spend time there with her younger compatriot Christina Stead, who was living in London. Both writers were internationalists, but at different points on a spectrum. Stead showed her communist credentials by urging fellow writers to ‘enter the political arena’. Palmer had trouble squaring this with Stead’s interest in fashion. Stead was a ‘lightly-elegant young woman’ who spoke in ‘a voice without an accent … slightly coloured by her … pan-European years’, Palmer wrote. Hazel Rowley wonderfully evokes the Paris Congress in her 1993 biography of Stead, touching on what was happening behind the scenes as the dashing Soviet-aligned British communist Ralph Fox set the novelist’s imagination on fire.

In Skin Deep: The inside story of our outer selves, Australian writer Phillipa McGuinness gathers some impressive facts about skin. A square centimetre contains, among other things, six million cells, two hundred pain sensors, and one hundred sweat glands. The skin of an individual weighing seventy kilograms ‘covers two square metres and weighs five kilograms’. A YouTube channel where you can watch a dermatologist popping pimples has amassed more than three billion views. The beauty and personal care industry accrues half a trillion dollars in annual sales, while one major cosmetics company now spends seventy-five per cent of its billion-dollar advertising budget on influencers.

As McGuinness explains in an occasionally nebulous overview of its biology, skin comprises three primary layers: the exterior layer of the epidermis, the dermis beneath it, and beneath that the subcutaneous tissue of the hypodermis. Further, skin undergoes a continual process of death and renewal, the cellular structure of the skin recreating itself every month as the dead cells of the outer layer shed themselves and the layer beneath moves to the surface to form the new epidermis, ‘the circle of life playing out on your skin’.

Noting that skin is the largest organ of the human body (although some argue that the lining of the intestines is the larger organ by virtue of its surface area), McGuinness emphasises the dynamic nature of skin and its fundamental role in our sense of touch, our immune system, and our evolution. For example, the relative lack of hair on human skin fostered both the development of our ‘acute cutaneous sensory system’ and our ability to sweat, thus allowing human beings to ‘regulate our internal temperatures’ and spread across the globe, ‘[honing] skills of cognition and coordination’ along the way.

There are chapters examining dermatology, cosmetic/plastic surgery, sunbathing, skin cancer, skin disorders (for example, psoriasis, eczema, and acne), tattoos, and the urge to touch and be touched (‘Skin as comfort. Skin as friendship’). McGuinness blends anecdotes, interviews, and personal observations with secondary scientific sources, and her personable style results in a book that often reads like a lively conversation between friends.

Phillipa McGuinness (photograph via Penguin Australia)

Notwithstanding, what quickly becomes apparent is that McGuinness’s understanding of skin – its biology as well as its historical, cultural, and metaphorical implications – is often only one step ahead of the reader’s. Skin Deep is more a chronicle of McGuinness’s peripatetic research than an analysis of her findings. As such, any reader wanting a deeper exploration of the biology, dermatological history, or politics of skin may find it more profitable to go directly to one of several books on which McGuinness regularly draws: for example, Nina Jablonski’s Skin: A natural history (2006), Monty Lyman’s The Remarkable Life of Skin: An intimate journey across our surface (2018), or Adam Rutherford’s How to Argue With a Racist: History, science, race and reality (2020).

In The Year Everything Changed: 2001 (2018) – a spirited account of Australian politics and culture in 2001, and a book anchored by both the global convulsions of that year and the death of her son – McGuinness demonstrated her capacity to examine complex events and themes, and to draw perceptive connections. However, in Skin Deep the absence of a central narrative or thesis binding together her disparate observations and facts culminates in writing that seems more haphazard than considered.

McGuinness recognises that skin can be both ‘[c]oncealing and revealing. Our surface and our depths’, and that there are few of us who aren’t conscious of a gap ‘between our exterior and our interior selves’, but she struggles to articulate the significance of the rift between what skin is and how it is read.

Where McGuinness comes close to realising her aim of getting ‘under the skin of skin’ is in her delineation of the relationship between skin colour and racism. Drawing on Rutherford’s reflection that, had genetic science predated anthropology, the opportunity to categorise and colonise people based on their skin colour would have been curtailed, McGuinness stresses the absence of any link between skin colour and race; that race is ‘an idea we ascribe to biology and apply through culture’. Consequently, in many societies skin colour has become a ‘predictor of inequality, of struggle’.

There is intensity also in McGuinness’s scrutiny of ‘skincare’ and ‘wellness’, her fascination, even obsession, with the beauty industry – and her own ambiguous relationship with it – apparent from the first pages of Skin Deep, the prologue given over to an account of an eighteen-minute make-up tutorial posted online by US Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Here, McGuinness pivots between admiring Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Femininity has power’ mantra and questioning whether paying so much attention to her appearance ‘undermine[s] a credible woman’s status and legitimacy’, a tension that defines McGuinness’s attitude to the beauty industry throughout Skin Deep. She rails against the way the beauty industry ‘target[s] our insecurities and manipulate[s] us’, and the rampant body dysmorphia that is – with cosmetic and surgical help – churning out a generation of young women who look uncannily alike, yet ends her investigation of the industry with a ‘measured acceptance of what we do for beauty’, a resignation that, given the disquietude preceding it, is not entirely convincing.

‘I see this obsessive beauty culture for what it is,’ McGuinness writes. ‘It identifies my subjectivities, inadequacies and vulnerabilities, and makes me pay to make them go away, while simultaneously consolidating and augmenting them.’ Had McGuinness interrogated more keenly her own unresolved relationship with the beauty industry – that place where the biology of skin intersects with the ‘forces of commerce, sexuality, desire, art’ – Skin Deep may have found the narrative it is lacking.

In 1976, the Australian government signed an agreement with one of the leading universities in the world, Harvard, to fund a visiting professorial position in Australian Studies. Originally conceived by the government of Gough Whitlam, the gift of US$1 million was a token of Australian goodwill to the United States on the bicentennial celebration of the American Revolution. Its purpose was to promote increased awareness and understanding of Australia by supporting teaching, research, and publication.

There could be someone, there, walking through a forest – upright or
slightly bending – gathering, not berries, or fallen nuts, or mushrooms,
but thoughts; there could be thoughts like whining insects that drill down
through the air to this someone, who is not ‘someone’ to insects, but
at most, might be a chemical, electrical or visual site; there could be someone

over there, making noises in a forest, shaking off the always-fleeing
thought of fleeing from the always-being of their own country; in their
head, packing up the child, the dog, the goat, the –

can you hear it now, the whining, no, not an insect really, but if real can
be a metal thing, airborne, or a steel box, grunting and churning through
the mud, ‘really’ must be how the thing advances calmly through a forest,
seeing – if a thing can see – other objects running off; they call them
‘signals’, as the thing does –

the thing detecting signals seems calm but it is metal – a signal’s walking
by again, restless, through the forest, moving slowly, making sounds to
itself and not – as would be less unusual – to another signal, but as if in
a loop, making sense of itself – in its system, the fleeting-but-recurring
thought of fleeing, in a loop – and there is one, hanging from a tree –

Andrea Brady’s monumental study of poetry and constraint focuses on ‘the ways that poets invoke bondage as metaphor while effacing the actuality of bondage’. Milton’s aspiration to deliver poetry from ‘the modern bondage of rhyming’, and Blake’s injunction that ‘poetry fetter’d, fetters the human race’, associate formal freedoms with political liberation. The modernist discovery of free verse was quickly followed by a formalist reaction in the 1940s, which was in turn displaced by renewed experimentation over the following decades. Yet poetry always and inevitably imposes boundaries on experience, and Oulipian or procedural devices are just another instance of this shaping practice. Brady is not occupied with tired oppositions between neo-formalist and free verse approaches – though a concern with prosody is foregrounded in her analysis. Rather, the focus of her work is a fierce interrogation of the lyric mode itself, and what she identifies as a ‘lyric whiteness’, both in its historical and contemporary formulations.

Brady is herself a significant late modernist practitioner, associated with the field of British writers who have followed the experimental Cambridge poet J.H. Prynne, including Keston Sutherland and John Wilkinson. The political radicalism of the late Sean Bonney – a dedicatee of this book – is also evident in Brady’s firm emphasis on a poetics of commitment. These poets share a suspicion of the lyric mode, with its assumption of a private subject venting emotions in transparent language, secluded from social concerns. Brady positions this conception within John Stuart Mill’s definition of the poem as self-enclosed soliloquy, ‘like the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell … quarantined from sociability’. This can be further traced to Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics, in which the solitary lyric poem is distinguished from, and elevated above, simple and direct collective ‘song’: within the constrained space of the lyric, according to Hegel, ‘the poet’s own subjective freedom … flashes out’. As Brady asserts, there is a racial undertone to this distinction, which underwrites ‘the coupling of whiteness and lyric’.

This raises important questions within the recent history of poetics and its reception. Postmodern poetry critics of the 1990s, such as Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein, were often dismissive of multicultural poetries, arguing that a shared formal reliance on lyric strategies (a stable speaking subject enouncing personal or familial history), led to similitude rather than an assumed ‘diversity’. This is complicated by the enduring model of the Black Arts movement, with its liberationist (via Frantz Fanon) claims for the assertion of identity: this influence can be seen in Aboriginal protest poetry (such as Kevin Gilbert’s 1988 anthology Inside Black Australia) and continues in spoken word practices across a wide diaspora. I would argue that Australian multicultural poetry – from the Steinian writings of Ania Walwicz to the polyglot dialect of Π.O. – has mainly resisted this reductive categorisation. Certainly, local work by writers from the past decade, such as that of Natalie Harkin and Bella Li, has directly contested the assumptions of the lyric mode.

Brady’s central example, and a crucial model within such contemporary practice, is M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong (2008), which recollects in highly fragmented form an infamous 1781 maritime massacre that activated the anti-slavery movement. Philip’s poem, a radical rearrangement of archival documents, works within the ‘constraint’ of limited source material. It is also deliberately anti-lyrical in its refusal of both narrative and subject positioning. As Brady notes, the poem exemplifies the ‘indeterminacy’ and openness of meaning that critics like Perloff identify as central to the postmodern poem. Its structure of relational patterning also links it to late modernist practices of paratactic arrangement, such as in the poetry of Charles Olson. But, as Brady argues, these formal qualities are exceeded by the poem’s political goals: fragmentation and mutilation at the level of the syllable provide a mirror for slave experience. As Philip herself says, ‘I wanted to destroy the lyric voice’, replacing the lyric ‘I’ with a multivocal, communal subject that directly reorients the hierarchy of Hegel’s distinction between lyric and song.

Another key text, Rob Halpern’s Common Place (2015), utilises a similarly limited documentary source – the autopsy report on a Yemeni detainee who suicided in Guantánamo – recalling the use of legal documents by Objectivist poets like Charles Reznikoff. But Halpern’s approach is anything but objective, his eroticised projections on the body of the deceased – which Brady concedes are ‘disturbing’ and ‘deliberately shocking’ – are an excessively pornographic ‘rendition’ of the Petrarchan lyric evocation of the qualities of an absent beloved.

Brady’s critical method resists enclosure in a similar manner: her historicist approach, swerving beyond the poems to engage with sociopolitical backgrounds, draws attention to John Keats’s slave-owning brother and Sir Thomas Wyatt’s experiences of incarceration. It is no digression that one of her turns describes the racist history of the Southern Agrarian movement, and the early support for segregation by New Critics such as Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren; nor is it hyperbole when she likens their conception of the poem as ‘well-wrought urn’, the central critical tenet for the reception of the lyric, to an idealised plantation free from modern industrial influence.

The historicism that Brady opposes to this formalist approach is most evident in her deployment of ‘figural method’ (after Erich Auerbach) to draw synchronic parallels between contemporary examples and canonical figures within the history of the lyric form. Her approach reveals complicities that in each instance undermine Mill’s definition of poetry as solitary self-enclosure. The turn towards private experience in Ovid’s tropes of love as slavery and as a substitute for military service apparently subverts the imperial order but also reproduces its social practices. Wyatt’s English Petrarchism ‘speaks only for himself, performing enslavement as dissent’. Emily Dickinson, the epitome of the bounded and solitary reclusive poet, is positioned in terms of her lack of sympathy for the cause of emancipation.

Against this, Brady provides examples of actual incarceration and genuine suffering. A harrowing chapter on the use of solitary confinement in the US prison system presents contemporary prison poetry as a space in which ‘lyric’s promise’ becomes ‘a form of resistance’. This transcends their value as sociological artefacts, and even the liberationist claims of the Black Arts-inspired prison writings of the 1960s and 1970s. Describing the extreme isolation of ‘control units’, and the symptoms of states of hallucinatory dissociation these produce, Brady gives the example of Bob Kaufman’s ‘Jail Poems’ (1960), which culminates in a visionary and explicitly Rimbaldian erasure of self, in which ‘I am not me’. As the critic George Fragopoulos says of these works, Kaufman ‘is not interested in creating a new kind of identity or subjectivity. He is, instead, attempting to utterly erase the subject position from the lyric itself.’

When life hides behind the mulch
     of what lives, can they expect more
                    than this refusal to hold each other in the open?

Lemongrass floss between molars,
     you wish for foxes. You tell me you don’t wish for them
                    any novel way, no way – no

word – being more or less novel. You wish for
     foxes in the impossible neutral, piss baroquely on
                    the coal heap around the young lime

whose illness we’ve yet to diagnose
     though we yoke answers to the answer.
                    At the rim of the secret’s crater, you balance

on your head and imagine water
     to slant, migrating, because it must. But listen: the Pacific
                    gull that slit childhood, bombing the ocean, never resurfacing?

It did resurface. What hides from us
     leaks what we do not see. Brothers speaking together
                    underwater. Brothers holding each
other’s breath.

I have hidden from you. Keep counting. Keep grinding
     memory’s deer knife through gritty, mulched
                    soil to clean it. When we hold each other, may it not
be the afterlife. Here is a public

garden – a body lighting lemongrass
     the breeze wicks from airy, flax clothes
                    as hunger wicks a fox from another den.

Familiarity may have inured us to Shakespeare’s violence. Poison, suffocation, suicide, rape, and assassination are among the central events of his major plays. But the upper-middle-class respectability of too many Shakespeare performances and the insipid, managerial culture of academic ‘Shakespeare studies’ threaten to reduce the greatest of all dramatists to something antiseptic and safe.

A book about podcasting prompts an immediate question: what is the intended audience? Is it for listeners already devoted to the audio medium? Is it for storytellers who already podcast and want to enhance their craft? Or is it for those interested in podcasting but clueless as to how to go about it? The Power of Podcasting, by Siobhán McHugh, attempts to appeal to all three audiences, with mixed results.

It’s always interesting to see biographers decide to turn the spotlight upon themselves, and to ask why. Will it be another case of ‘now it’s my turn’? The need to confess, even to enter into the Land of Too Much Information?

We all seem to be thinking about grief lately. As Covid keeps many of us away from loved ones and people who are dying or have just expired, how we process death has received a renewed focus. The number of memoirs and guides and stories about grief and loss that have been published in the past two years – over two hundred – is staggering. It is a challenge to write about grief. Every society on earth has its own forms and rituals around grieving, its own texts on what grieving is like. Trying to find something new or original to say is daunting. What we are left with are our own words, our own terrible experiences to put down upon the page.

Troy Bramston has been a senior writer and columnist with The Australian newspaper since 2011. He was previously a columnist with the Sunday Telegraph. He is the author or editor of eleven books, including Robert Menzies: The art of politics (2019) and Paul Keating: The big-picture leader (2016), and he co-authored The Truth of the Palace Letters (2020) and The Dismissal (2015) with Paul Kelly. His most recent book is Bob Hawke: Demons and destiny (2022).

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

Florence, Italy. The city of Michelangelo, Leonardo, Botticelli, Galileo, Dante, Machiavelli, and the Medicis. I was married in the Palazzo Vecchio a few years ago.

What’s your idea of hell?

An airport terminal or airport hotel with a long flight delay or stopover.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Tribalism. It infuses our politics and parts of the media. Social media has energised it. We are a better people when we respect and appreciate other views and allow ourselves to be persuaded by their merits.

What’s your favourite film?

Back to the Future (1985). It is filled with courage, imagination, and humanity. It mixes adventure, romance, comedy, sci-fi and drama – what more could you want? I was thrilled to interview co-writer Bob Gale a few years ago.

‘Call me Ismail,’ it could plausibly begin: a screenplay not of Herman Melville’s novel Moby-Dick but of the real-life relationship between two filmmakers renowned for their adaptations of a string of other classic novels. Ismail Merchant first met James Ivory on the steps of the Indian consulate in Manhattan in 1961. ‘Call me by your name,’ the Ivory character might wittily retort in this imagined biopic. That, of course, was to be the title of the film scripted by Ivory nearly a decade and a half after Merchant’s death in 2005, but it captures something of the symbiotic nature of their partnership.

Seasoned ABC journalist and presenter Paul Kennedy, also known as ‘PK’, has over the years cultivated an affable, equable public persona. For regular viewers of the ABC’s News Breakfast program, Kennedy is the kind of person with whom one would like to have a drink; to pore over sporting results or the tumult of living through a pandemic. It is a shock, then, to discover that Kennedy was not always this picture of fatherly composure but once an insecure, frustrated, and troubled seventeen-year-old, trapped within the confusing void between boyhood and manhood.

‘Freedom’ is a word that slips off the tongue easily. As the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre notes in his essay ‘Freedom and Revolution’: ‘No word has been more cheapened by misuse. No word has experienced more of the tortuous redefinitions of politicians.’ In the essay, MacIntyre turns to Karl Marx to recover the idea that human beings are essentially free. With the same source of inspiration, but through a poignant and often funny memoir of coming to age in state-socialist Albania, Lea Ypi’s Free attempts the same task.

In Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How we became post-modern, journalist and author Stuart Jeffries explores two hypotheses: that ‘post-modernism originated under the star of neoliberalism’; and that the twin forces of economic neoliberalism and cultural postmodernism combined to shift identities in the global West from citizen to consumer. Jeffries offers a compelling frame through which to examine recent history. Postmodernism’s pluralism can make it seem like a glittering but unwieldy creature; yet, as Jeffries outlines in this book, its influence and contemporaneity with the rise of neoliberalism continue to be important. Jeffries’ approach is to work with, rather than against, the kaleidoscope of postmodernism. Focusing on the years between 1972 and 2001, predominantly in the United States and United Kingdom, Jeffries provides a diverse cross-section of analyses of political and economic movements, popular music, postmodernist art, architecture, Silicon Valley business culture, gender theory, philosophy, hiphop, the Rushdie fatwa, and beyond.

It is 2100, and the states of the world have divvied up the ocean floor, constructing domed cities in which humanity, such as it is, survives. The earth’s irradiated, unliveable surface is the haunt of adventure tourists and archaeologists, the battleground of military androids watched on screens by the humans at the bottom of the sea.

Sheila Heti’s fifth novel Pure Colour imagines God as an artist who has just stepped back from His first draft of the universe. The ensuing story takes place in the expansive moment in which He decides whether or not to scrap it all and start again. The stakes of the narrative could not be higher – if it were not for the marked absence of any sense of human agency.

Other Houses opens with its central character, Lily, cruising a drug-riddled suburb in search of her missing partner, Janks, who has disappeared, leaving her and their daughter, Jewelee, to fend for themselves. From the outset, Other Houses is grounded in Melbourne: from the suburban streets that Lily traverses late at night to escape her trauma to the highways that Janks drives along on a doomed mission as a ‘courier of misery’. Suburbs with names reminiscent of big American cities like Dallas have none of the glitz and glamour of their famous namesakes; they are steeped in substance abuse, poverty, and hopelessness.

The basic facts of William Shakespeare’s life – his baptism, early marriage, three children, shareholder status in his playing company, acquisition of a coat of arms, purchase of New Place in Stratford, and his death in 1616 – are well known. Is there anything new to say?

Australia has a stylish new poetry press. The two books reviewed here by Life Before Man, the poetry wing of Gazebo Books, preference book cover art and poem above all the usual paraphernalia: publishing details, barcodes, author notes – even the epigraph – are tucked into a back page, and there are no apparently distracting contents pages or page numbers. Most of the poems sit neatly on the right side of the page with a private blank beige page buffer. There’s orientation in a contents list, and I trust the poets have a choice about whether they want one. That said, there’s a holiday-like liberation in slipping through unmoored. It’s a subtle reading experience, but do these aesthetic somewhat precious innovations justify the use of extra paper?

In Italy, Dante is known as il sommo poeta (‘the supreme poet’). Ironically, such reverence obscures the creative personality. We know Dante responded to the shock of being exiled from Florence in 1302 by writing a visionary poem of hell, purgatory, and paradise, in which his tormented life and feuding world were set right – but why did he do it? With little biographical evidence and no original manuscripts of the Commedia surviving, most translators and commentators prefer to concentrate on Dante’s myriad historical and theological sources. It takes a simple shift of logic to search them for the missing psychological evidence.

In an impressive first collection, the South Australian poet Jelena Dinić incorporates her Serbian heritage and memories of war-affected Yugoslavia into an Australian migration narrative of clear-sighted beauty. William Carlos Williams wrote in the introduction to Kora In Hell: Improvisations (1920): ‘Thus a poem is tough … solely from that attenuated power which draws perhaps many broken things into a dance giving them thus a full being.’ Although far from improvisational, Dinić’s poetry compositionally integrates both fragility and strength as it draws together diverse experiences of war trauma, cultural displacement, the petty administrative routines of immigration departments, a Malaysian writing fellowship, Australian icons (such as the rainwater tank), folklore, and bathing in the Adriatic Sea.