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In everyone’s face

Dear Editor,

‘You were always in everyone’s face at med school, too.’

It is remarkable to read a reflective piece of writing of this nature from a surgeon in this country (‘Shouting Abortion’ by Linda Atkins, ABR, June 2022). It should not be. Much of what is amiss in this country would be ameliorated by more involvement from professionals at the high end. Instead of burying themselves in their work, let’s hear more from them. So much of politics and advocacy across a range of areas is attended to by middling nobodies like myself, while those who outperformed us in their education are missing in action.

Patrick Hockey (online comment)

Dear Editor,

This is such an important discussion, and it needs to be out there in the public consciousness. Thank you, Linda Atkins, for lending your voice to this and for all the work you have done in this space.

Sam Abu Hadid (online comment)

East of Suez

Dear Editor,

In her article ‘Britain’s Atomic Oval’ (ABR, June 2022), Elizabeth Tynan understates the level of commitment of Prime Minister Robert Menzies and his cabinet to what File DEFE/2148 calls the pursuit of ‘Nuclear Capability in Australia’. I have reported in Meanjin (‘How Menzies Begged Macmillan for the Bomb’, December 2019) how Menzies and members of his Atomic Weapons Tests Safety Committee shuttled to London in the early 1960s to lobby for tactical nuclear missiles to be left in Australia as the United Kingdom withdrew from East of Suez. How and why Britain refused is instructive as we contemplate the AUKUS era.

Sue Rabbitt Roff (online comment)

Wagner contra Verdi 

Dear Editor,

In your review of Lohengrin in the June issue, you wrote, ‘At his best, Wagner stirs us, slays us, seduces us as no other composer can – a unique entrancement.’ I am ambivalent about Wagner because of his texts and philosophies, not his music. I would have to say – in the terms which you elaborate – I find Verdi and, emphatically, Mozart much more intellectually and emotionally engaging. And at $800 for a ticket in Premium Reserve, Jonas Kaufmann – notwithstanding his voice, musicality, and intelligence – is absurdly expensive.

John Carmody, Roseville, NSW

Safety net

Dear Editor,

Benjamin Huf’s comprehensive review of Joan Beaumont’s book Australia’s Great Depression (ABR, May 2022) draws attention to an aspect of human resilience rarely if ever referred to in the psychiatric and psychological literature. Embedded in the fiscal details of Australia’s Depression-era politics is Huf’s telling reference to the book’s immersion in the Depression movement, highlighting the steely resolve of individuals and groups to be inventive and to transform their hardship via an array of local social and vocational networks. These became a safety net for the dispossessed, the unemployed, and the traumatised. Benjamin Huf’s review provides a significant extra dimension to the literature on human resilience when people are faced with trauma and loss.

Roger Rees, Goolwa, SA

Correction

In Stephanie Trigg’s review of Ann-Marie Priest’s My Tongue Is My Own (La Trobe University Press) published in the June 2022 issue, reference was made to ‘the absence of an index’. The finished version of My Tongue Is My Own does contain an index.

Boyd Turns Ten

ABR was one of the original tenants when the Boyd Community Hub opened to much fanfare in 2012. From lion dancing to African drums to an adult-size Elmo, it was an occasion to remember as the magazine started a new chapter south of the Yarra. After the official opening, attendees filed up the staircase to our office, where they were treated to further festivities: a welcome from Editor Peter Rose and readings by ABR notables, including Lisa Gorton, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, and Rodney Hall. Over the years, such festivities have become a familiar sight at Boyd, with events ranging from ABR prize ceremonies to Shakespeare Sonnetathons to a memorable conversation between Gerald Murnane and Andy Griffiths downstairs in the Southbank Library.

Rather fittingly, ABR is located in Studio 2, which was the sewing classroom in the old J.H. Boyd Girls High School (1930–85). We remain most grateful to the City of Melbourne’s Creative Spaces program for accommodating us at this wonderful community hub.

Since 2012, Boyd has flourished, offering a range of educative, cultural, and health services and initiatives. In addition to serving as the magazine’s headquarters, it is home to Southbank Library, Creative Spaces-affiliated artistic endeavours, and child health and parental support services for Southbank’s burgeoning and diverse community. Nestled amid ever-spreading high-rise developments and the intricate tracery of the city’s arterial roads, Boyd remains a sanctuary for those living in the vicinity and a friendly waypoint for ABR’s contributors over the years.

On 7 July, Boyd will celebrate its tenth birthday. ABR will open its doors to the public from 4 until 6 pm – with plenty of giveaways and the odd impromptu reading. We encourage subscribers, readers, and those simply curious about ABR to come and peer behind the curtain of one of Australia’s leading cultural magazines. Boyd may have been a school in the past, but we promise no pedagogy (on this occasion at least) – only celebration!

Peter Porter Poetry Prize

ABR first offered a poetry prize in 2005, with total prize money of $3,000. Stephen Edgar was the inaugural winner, with ‘Man on the Moon’. Also shortlisted were Kevin Gillam, Jennifer Harrison, Sandra Hill, Maria Takolander, and Mark Tredinnick.

The prize was renamed the Peter Porter Poetry Prize in 2011, one year after the death of Peter Porter, several of whose poems appeared in the magazine. In 2014, the competition became international – open to all poets writing in English.

We’re delighted to be able to offer the prize for the nineteenth time, with total prize money of $10,000 (of which the winner receives $6,000). Entries will open on 11 July, with a closing date of 3 October.

The judges on this occasion are Sarah Holland-Batt (Chair of ABR, author of the new collection The Jaguar, and winner of the 2016 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry), Des Cowley (Principal Librarian, History of the Book and Arts at the State Library of Victoria and publisher of the Red Letter series of chapbooks), and James Jiang (Assistant Editor of ABR and poetry critic).

The Porter Prize is made possible in this lucrative form because of the generosity of senior Patron Morag Fraser AM (past Chair of ABR and Peter Porter’s biographer), with additional support from poet Andrew Taylor AM. We are most grateful to both of them.

Brian Matthews (1936–2022)

Brian Matthews, closely associated with its founding editor, John McLaren, began writing for ABR in 1981, three years after its revival. He went on writing for the magazine for forty years – a total of fifty-four reviews and articles, all of them beautifully crafted and quite distinctive in tone and range. His was a notable contribution to the second series, as frequent users of our digital archive will attest.

Brian’s literary journalism – also represented in Eureka Street and The Weekend Australian – was but one of his myriad contributions to Australian letters. Across his duties as a teacher, scholar, biographer, literary historian, memoirist, department head, and Chair of the Literature Board, his influence was potent and his circle of friends and admirers extensive.

Brian’s son David Matthews – Professor of Medieval and Medievalism Studies at the University of Manchester, and himself an ABR contributor since 1986 – writes about his father and his work in this July issue.

Ray Lawler – 101 not out 

Over the years, Advances has often lamented the paucity of unaffiliated writers who have received national honours, so we were pleased when Ray Lawler – author of the country’s most famous play, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (which had its première in 1955) – received an AO in the Queen’s Birthday Honours. About time too! Mr Lawler, who received an OBE back in 1980, turned 101 in May.

Another true man of the theatre, and a bastion of this magazine in countless ways, was also rightly honoured. Ian Dickson – author of about fifty ABR reviews since 2013 (most of them theatre reviews) – received an AM for services to philanthropy. ABR is just one of the arts organisations that has benefited from Ian’s generosity. The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize exists in its present form because of Ian Dickson AM.

Tours galore 

Lockdowns being a thing of the past, we’re delighted to be able to offer our first overseas tour since 2018. Peter Rose and Christopher Menz will lead a party of twenty guests to four destinations in England: Stratford-upon-Avon, Oxford, Bath, and London. This fifteen-day tour will take in museums, libraries, galleries, theatres and music – and restaurants of course. The dates are 25 May to 8 June 2023. Join us for a series of events, insights, guided tours, and ABR’s unique brand of conviviality.

Once again we’re working with our commercial partner, Academy Travel. Those interested in joining the tour or finding out more about the itinerary should consult the Academy Travel website.

Russia’s full-throttle invasion of Ukraine is so shocking because it is such a brazen assault on the post-1945 world order. Reminiscent of the age of empire, this is no border skirmish but an attempt to extinguish and cannibalise an independent neighbouring country.

War was first outlawed as an instrument of foreign policy by the Kellogg–Briand Pact of 1928, but it failed to stem the fascist and militarist aggression that consumed the globe during World War II. A more comprehensive ban was placed at the heart of the United Nations Charter in 1945, with the exception of national self-defence. This was backed by enforcement powers of the UN Security Council, which were lacking in its predecessor, the League of Nations Council. All the great powers were also included in the UN tent, unlike the League, where powerful non-member states ran amok, including fascist Germany and Italy, militarist Japan, and the communist Soviet Union.

‘It’s a media beat-up,’ our Brooklyn Airbnb host assured me as we chatted on the doorstep one sparkling autumn afternoon in early November 2016. ‘They need to make it seem like a contest or there’ll be no story.’ It would have been rude for me, as an outsider, to demur. I bumped into him once more, ashen-faced the following morning, after Pennsylvania had finally swung to Donald J. Trump, delivering him the presidency. Our conversation was brief; his sense of disorientation palpable.

Katharine Susannah Prichard is one of those mid-century Australian literary figures like Vance Palmer whose name is mentioned in literary histories more often than her books are read. As it happens, she was a schoolfriend of Vance’s future wife, Nettie, née Higgins, who became a distinguished literary critic, as well as of the pioneering woman lawyer Christian Jollie Smith, and Hilda Bull, later married to the playwright Louis Esson. All were politically on the left as adults, and Prichard and Jollie Smith joined the Communist Party. It was the distant Bolshevik Revolution in October 1917 that converted Katharine to the communist cause; she was a communist in Western Australia before there was a party there for her to belong to.

Lydia Davis writes long essays and short stories; some of them, like this one of six words, very short indeed: ‘INDEX ENTRY: Christian, I’m not a’. Influenced by Kafka and Beckett, she is drawn to Anglo-Saxon words, complex sentences, and literary forms which are hard to define. In the United States she has been awarded Guggenheim and MacArthur Genius Grants; in France she is a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters; in the United Kingdom she won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize for what Christopher Ricks, chair of the judges, called her ‘vigilance … to the very word or syllable’. Rick Moody calls her ‘the best prose stylist in America’, The New York Times compares her precision to that of Vermeer, while for her publisher she is simply ‘beyond compare’. Claire Messud, looking for fresh adulatory epithets, says that Lydia Davis ‘has the gift of making us feel alive’. What, then, am I missing?

A History of Masculinity begins with the observation that we live in a global patriarchy that restricts the rights and freedoms of women, and that remedying this situation is a matter of urgent concern. To that end, ‘we need egalitarian men who care more about respect than power’. Ivan Jablonka acknowledges the accusation that men who are active in the feminist movement simply amplify sexist dynamics by ‘speaking in women’s place, as usual’, only to dismiss it summarily. He believes that a book such as his is vital because the feminist cause is ‘a fight that men have shunned’ until now. He hopes to correct his own failings and encourage other men to be ‘good guys’ in the battle for gender justice.

Lessons from History is a big, ambitious book. Its twenty-two essays – amounting to some 400 pages of research, reflection, and references – seek to pin down, in accessible form, the combined expertise of thirty-three practitioners of history and related fields. Together they address a mélange of pressing issues facing Australia today, testament to the diversity of contemporary Australian history and its interdisciplinary reach. Political, social, economic, business, environmental, and oral historians are all represented, alongside authors whose institutional base is in strategic studies, economics, politics, or administration, but whose work is informed by a keen interest in the past and its lessons.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2013), by French economist Thomas Piketty, is wholly unlike Sally Rooney’s Normal People (2018) bar one telling, if esoteric, similarity. For a period of time during the 2010s, being seen with the book mattered more than having read it. Ed Miliband, former leader of the British Labour Party, boasted that he had not progressed beyond the first chapter. WIRED reported that the five most highlighted passages on Kindle were in the book’s first twenty-six pages. But finishing either text was immaterial (though, on this front, one suspects that Rooney fared better). Lavishly praised on both sides of the Atlantic, the bestsellers were transformed into cultural totems, sufficient as references in conversation, signifiers of a particular white, liberal, progressive sensibility (or anxiety). ‘It looks good on a bookshelf,’ said the Harvard Business Review of Piketty’s 696-page tome, ‘plus every copy sold makes Piketty wealthier, allowing us to discover whether this alters his views about inequality.’

Piketty has never claimed an issue with inequality per se. The problem arises, he says, when inequality ‘becomes too extreme’, reducing mobility, and is thus ‘useless for growth’. Capital, backed by troves of long-run historical data, chronicled a return to extreme levels of inequality across select Western nations surpassing the rich–poor gap of America’s Gilded Age. Piketty’s assessment of the root cause was distilled to a simple equation, r > g. R, the rate of return on capital (wealth), grows faster than g, the overall economic growth. Income from capital outstrips income from labour. Money reproduces itself faster than humans earn it. Capital served as a warning against this ‘central contradiction of capitalism’, which, unless checked, would plunge us (presumably the West) into an ‘endless inegalitarian spiral’.

Following the recent federal election, we invited several senior contributors and commentators to nominate one key policy, direction, or reform they hope the Albanese government will pursue.

Joy Damousi

The one single policy decision that would send a powerful message to Australia’s research community would be to abolish the law that currently permits a government minister to veto Australian Research Council grants.

The independence of research in any field is core to a thriving, healthy, and robust democracy. It is a fundamental principle of best practice in research that scholars are allowed to work rigorously and fearlessly – free of any threat of government intervention that might shape or determine it. And yet, under the Australian Research Council Act 2001, the minister of the day has the power to overturn the decision made by a panel of experts to fund research projects. This ministerial intervention is unprecedented in countries that fund research activity and that value the vital importance of independent thought, the pursuit of new knowledge, and vigorous critique: principles that underpin the most outstanding and distinguished research projects. 

The Haldane Principle has been invoked in these discussions. The Haldane Principle states that funding decisions on research grants should be made by independent research councils, free of any intervention by politicians. Since 1918, when it was enshrined in British government policy, it has been one of the guiding principles of research in the United States and in countries across Europe. 

After the most recent intervention by acting education minister Stuart Robert on 24 December 2021, when six projects were vetoed on the grounds that they did not represent value for money and were not in the national interest, the research community across Australia covering all fields in STEM and HASS called for the abolition of this law. Professional bodies, the learned academies, and individual researchers were vociferous in their denunciation of Robert’s use of the veto. An open letter expressing indignation and concern about the veto was signed in January 2021 by over 140 members of the ARC College of Experts; two resigned as an act of protest. A parliamentary inquiry was held where there was overwhelming opposition expressed against the continued use of the veto. Although only one side of politics has exercised the veto, both support its existence. When the Greens education spokesperson Senator Mehreen Faruqi tried to amend the Act to repeal the veto, her Bill was defeated when both Liberal and Labor parties voted against it.

Since the establishment of the ARC in 2001, a minister has exercised a veto over grants on four occasions. The ministers, all from the Liberal–National Coalition – Brendan Nelson, Simon Birmingham, and Stuart Robert (with Dan Tehan upholding Birmingham’s decision) – intervened to stop grants that the ARC peer review process involving expert assessors in the field had recommended to the minister for funding. It is incumbent on the new Labor government to show leadership for the future in ensuring independence for researchers by abolishing this draconian legislation. The argument put forward by successive governments is that the veto is necessary because it ensures ministerial oversight and accountability of the use of public funds.

There are three further aspects of this argument that require interrogation:

First, the grants in question are all in the humanities disciplines. This suggests an insidious bias against humanities research conducted in areas and on topics conservative politicians believe are not worthy of study, and/or the individual minister believes should not have access to funds. These include topics such as various aspects of climate change; studies of sexuality; Cold War politics; work on China; and gender studies. All the projects affected were examined and assessed by an expert panel and subject to the most rigorous examination by peer review. The political implications are clear when on a minister’s whim a research grant is dismissed, raising concerns about censorship, academic freedom, and the integrity of the review process.

Second, and relatedly, a ministerial veto does not apply to grants awarded by the National Health and Medical Research Council. It is to be applauded that medical research is not subject to a veto. But this inconsistent position is inexcusable; it is difficult not to conclude that humanities research in the ARC scheme is intentionally targeted.

Third, accountability of public money is imperative in the use and dispensing of ARC funds. There is no argument with this principle, and it is one that all researchers must uphold. Public accountability, however, cannot be used as an excuse for an individual minister to allow their personal judgement to cloud what research is appropriate for funding and what is not. Other measures currently exist through the Excellence in Research exercise, which demonstrates the quality and quantity of research being produced through funded projects. 

As the nation moves to a more positive and optimistic political landscape after nine years of conservative rule, the research sector looks to the Labor government to abolish this invidious law.

Joy Damousi is Director of the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences at Australian Catholic University. She was President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities from 2017 to 2020.

Stephen Charles and Catherine Williams

If the Labor Party’s resounding win at the election was a considerable surprise, so was the number of independents who took seats formerly considered safe by Liberals. The teals, as most of these independents are known, proclaimed support for climate action and a strong National Integrity Commission (NIC). In doing so, they shared the views of a large proportion of those elected, since Labor and the Greens, along with most of the former crossbench, certainly support such action. Only the former Coalition members were laggards. Since the election, the new Coalition leaders, Peter Dutton and David Littleproud, have both asserted support for a robust integrity commission. The new parliament is expected within a year to establish a much stronger NIC than Christian Porter proposed in 2018, as well as a series of crucial reforms to accompany it.

Robert Gottliebsen in The Australian (May 25) wrote that the Integrity Commission will be ‘a game-changer’, noting that it will ‘dramatically improve the way both the Australian public service and Canberra politicians operate’, which is precisely what those arguing for an NIC hope to see. There remain, however, difficult questions for the new parliament to settle.

First, it will be necessary to decide the jurisdiction of the NIC, including the ambit of the term ‘corrupt conduct’. The definition will be broader than just the criminal offences that the Porter model insisted on for politicians and most public servants. That model would have seriously limited the NIC’s jurisdiction, as well as providing a threshold which created obstacles to impede the investigation of programs such as the Community Sports Infrastructure Program (known later as the Sports Rorts scandal). Much governmental impropriety does not, at least at the outset of an investigation, include criminal offences.

Secondly, the NIC’s ability to hold public hearings must be considered. No one suggests that all the NIC’s investigations should take place in public, rather that only after detailed, often prolonged, secret hearings and other examination of material will a conclusion be reached as to whether it is in the public interest to conduct a public hearing. In this way, the subject’s reputation will be protected.

Next, it will be necessary to insist on the fairness of any investigation, which can be provided for in various ways: by virtue of the oversight of the Federal Court, or by a provision which requires natural justice to be given to a witness or suspect, or by explicitly requiring certain steps to be taken by the NIC.

The NIC must then be able to make public findings of fact, including of corrupt conduct. It may be expected that the emphasis of the NIC will, as was suggested in The Australian, be on integrity rather than on corruption. Examples of what Transparency International regard as corruption include matters such as the Sports Rorts and the Car Park Rorts. Most politicians and public servants are not corrupt, but an NIC will in future foster the expectation that they must act with integrity. This means that before deciding to award a contract or other position, those involved must have made a careful study of all relevant factors and must have given proper opportunity for competitive tenders to be received and fairly considered. Frank and fearless advice on these issues must be given by senior public servants to politicians and acted upon by them.

Oversight will be a critical matter, including by an inspector, by a bipartisan parliamentary committee, and by the Federal Court, and it will be necessary to consider whether there should be a means of appeal, or rectification, if a reputation has been damaged by a finding which is wrong or unfair.

These are only some of the issues that parliament must consider in the establishment of the NIC, and there are many other matters that require consideration and action. Codes of conduct for public servants, parliamentarians, and ministers must be in place and made effective by enactment. Ministers’ diaries must be made public. Lobbying must be properly regulated. Political donations pose a direct threat to the integrity of Australian democracy and should be capped, as should expenditure by parties and candidates before an election. The issue of a revolving door should be resolved by, say, legally prohibiting politicians and public servants from accepting private sector positions in areas in which they had previously worked officially.

The Labor Party, before the election, positioned itself as intent on renewal and integrity, determined to rid Australia of rorts and programs that misuse vast amounts of taxpayers’ funds for improper electoral purposes; and also to tackle other misconduct such as favour for favour, returning benefits and access to large donors, and giving contracts to friends and allies.

Now is this government’s chance to demonstrate real integrity. We look forward to the result. Our democracy, judged in 2022 world rankings (Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index) to be among the fastest decaying from integrity into corruption, must be defended and rebuilt, whatever the cost.

Stephen Charles and Catherine Williams co-authored Keeping Them Honest: The case for a genuine national integrity commission and other vital democratic reforms (Scribe, 2022).

Frank Bongiorno

It took me until 19 May to see that a change of government might offer something better than relief from the nightmare of the Abbott–Turnbull–Morrison era. At a Labor doorstop in Sydney, a journalist questioned the value of offering a childcare subsidy to people earning more than half a million dollars a year. As usual, in responding, Anthony Albanese took a while to get there, lurching this way and that like a plane negotiating turbulence on its course towards the runway. But once he landed, it began to seem that he might lead a government with a Labor soul.

At first, he started talking windily about ‘class warfare’, the implication being that no one could accuse him of that, given that benefits were being offered to the wealthy. That made him sound like a Hawke-era Labor leader. No thanks.

Then he started talking the language of feminism: a woman wanting to work full-time should not suffer on the basis of her husband’s income. That was better, signalling Labor’s support for women’s rights and opportunities. Good, but no surprise.

But then Albanese started to talk a language that has been less familiar among Labor leaders since Gough Whitlam’s day. He started to talk in the language of universalism. Once the effects of Labor’s childcare policy had been reviewed, he said, the government would consider moving to ‘a universal subsidy’.

Then a personal story. Albanese likes these – especially involving his mum. When Kerry Packer had a heart attack, Albanese recalled, he went to Royal Prince Alfred Hospital Emergency Department, the same place that looked after Albanese after a car accident, and the same place his mother attended as an invalid pensioner – sadly, she never made it home. ‘I literally was in the same room,’ he added. ‘Public services which are universal make a difference to strengthen our society. They do. Our medical system is a public universal service. And I have said quite clearly that childcare is something that we should consider as a service that benefits the entire society.’

Talk is cheap, but this is quite different from the language of targeted welfare that increasingly became the norm in the Hawke era, building on an older Australian tradition of means-tested social security funded out of consolidated revenue. There was always another strand to Labor thinking: a universalist one. It was in play in 1912, when the Fisher Government introduced a maternity allowance of £5 on the birth of a child, in or out of wedlock, alive or stillborn. It was, like the Albanese policy on childcare, feminist – the payment went to the mother, as an assistance to her – and it was universal for white women (in line with the racism of the times, it excluded Indigenous women). The Whitlam era saw a boost to ideas of universal provision and the Hawke era a retreat; although Medicare, which revived the Whitlam government’s short-lived but popular Medibank, embodied the principle.

Labor is not offering free and universal childcare. But its subsidies for low- and middle-income earners are substantial, with significant increases on the current rates for the first child in the family in care. For families earning $75,000 or less, the subsidy is set at ninety per cent. That rate declines as incomes rise but remains generous well up the ladder – a family on $200,000 would still get back almost two-thirds of the cost. The policy is progressive and redistributive, while being designed to lift workplace participation and productivity. It will, of course, encounter the challenges that all governments now face, in terms of both cost and quality, when pursuing policy goals through marketised social services. And the fiscal and economic environment will pose many difficulties. In particular, Labor is constrained by the revenue hit that will come from the third stage of the massive income tax breaks recklessly initiated by the Morrison government, and which a humiliated Labor opposition agreed to soon after its 2019 defeat. These sit alongside the many other tax benefits that this country offers its wealthiest, from superannuation concessions through negative gearing on investment properties, to franking credits on shares to people who pay no tax.

Albanese is a child of the Whitlam era. While he was raised in straitened circumstances, he benefited from public provision: in housing, pensions, and education. Tom Uren, doyen of the New South Wales left and Minister for Urban and Regional Development in the Whitlam government, was his mentor, a ‘father figure’ to him, and, for a time, Albanese’s employer. His dilemma will be that of pursuing a path towards the universal provision of services that he sees as being for the public good in a constrained economic environment – and with a structurally hostile media – mainly quiescent during years of Coalition profligacy, allowing Labor little leeway, however cautiously it proceeds. 

Frank Bongiorno is Professor of History at the Australian National University.

Dennis Altman

Not since John Curtin came to power during World War II has a newly elected prime minister or his foreign minister been so swiftly immersed in international affairs. When Anthony Albanese flew to Tokyo on his first day in office, President Joe Biden remarked that he would be excused were he to fall asleep during the meetings. No sooner back in Canberra, Penny Wong flew off to Fiji, clearly a response to China’s courting of the region. While there were good reasons for this frenetic activity, it hardly replaces the need for a deep repositioning of Australia’s place in the world.

The incoming government shares two central assertions with its predecessors: faith in the US alliance and distrust of China’s ambitions. It has one striking difference, and that is a willingness to make climate change central to its domestic and foreign policies. This alone should ensure that Wong can establish a better rapport with Pacific Island states than could the Morrison government.

The underlying assumption of Australian foreign policy remains supporting American efforts to limit the influence of China, with the hope of retaining the ‘rules based international order’. Undoubtedly, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has made this a popular position, although there is a certain hypocrisy in denunciation of China’s ties with Russia while passing over those of India.

Reappraising Australia’s role in the world might begin by questioning the centrality of the US alliance. It would mean greater attention to the attitudes of the countries of Southeast Asia and less willingness to echo the rhetoric of Washington and London.

To proceed on the assumption that growing hostility with China in inevitable is likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. While China is an autocratic and brutal dictatorship, it is also behaving as do all great powers in seeking dominance within its region. Liberal democracy at home restrained neither Britain nor the United States from pursuing imperial ambitions abroad.

In her pre-election speeches, Wong reasserted the importance of relations with Southeast Asia, a welcome shift from the bizarre Anglospheric preoccupations of the Morrison government. The countries of ASEAN range from corrupt autocracies to populist democracies, but they all seek to balance the clout of China with the need for national autonomy. Closer relations with Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, etc. might require Australia to speak less of its partnership with Western democracies and more about genuine global inequities.

Warm rhetoric about shared democratic values cannot disguise the reality that many countries in our region have appalling records in human rights. Nor will language about our ‘Pacific family’ prevent small Pacific countries from balancing their reliance on Western powers by creating ties with China, however distasteful we find them. The realities of geography and trade mean that Australia, too, needs to find ways of coexisting with China, even if this distances us from the United States.

Labor has supported the AUKUS arrangement, which presumably means that nuclear submarines will arrive in Australia sometime after the next election but four. Sadly, it seems that Labor is as willing as the Coalition to assume that Robert Menzies’ appeal to our great and powerful friends in the Atlantic north remains an eternal guarantee of Australian security.

Albanese is likely to establish a close relationship with President Biden, as did John Howard with George W. Bush and Julia Gillard with Barack Obama. After a rocky start, both Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison did well to maintain relations with the Trump administration, although in ways that may have reinforced regional perceptions that Australia was too subservient. But if Trump is re-elected in 2024, there may be real costs to that closeness.

It is impossible to predict whether a future United States will move towards greater belligerence or greater isolationism, but a prudent Australian government should prepare for both possibilities. Our security would be greatly enhanced if we balanced growing military expenditure by investing more heavily in diplomacy and international development. The more we identify with ‘the West’ and the more deeply we incorporate ourselves within US military planning, the more difficult it will be to manage a radically different international environment.

During the campaign, Albanese was careful to distance himself from Paul Keating, whose disdain for current foreign policy orthodoxies was seen as electoral suicide. Now in office, Labor might well reflect on Keating’s warning that the previous government displayed ‘a monster level of incompetence to forfeit military control of one’s own state’ (The Age, 22 September 2021).

Dennis Altman is a Professorial Fellow in the Institute for Human Security at La Trobe University.

David Latham

Having a government that supports the role the arts play in our cultural and social life is a welcome change, but the uncertain economic situation for artists is one that needs to be addressed by Labor in funding and in policy.

Australian writers, like most artists, live in a precarious financial situation. Australia Council funding for Australian literature was recently cut by the Morrison government by forty per cent, reducing it to a paltry $5 million a year. That’s hardly a platform from which to relaunch an Australian literary resurgence.

Emerging writers, some of them potential prize-winners, find themselves having to work full time to meet the cost of living and attempting to eke out a second or third novel in the hours left to them after a full working week and household responsibilities. Penury is not a recipe for developing a strong literary culture in Australia. Professional writers need time to hone their craft. That’s how the Labor government needs to treat Australian writers who have established themselves as strong early talents.

Fund the Arts would like to see five policy changes to help Australian writers.

During the 2022 federal election campaign, Fund the Arts pushed for Creative Fellowships for talented artists from across the arts disciplines. A modest annual income of $85,000 for three years would allow 300 talented Australian artists to hone their craft and to build an audience for their work.

A second is for government to help promote and sell Australian art (films, music, theatre, visual art, and books) overseas in much the same way the Australian government helps find markets for beef, wine, and cauliflowers. With the right level of energy and investment, we could see a cultural renaissance for Australian stories.

The third policy that would provide a greater reward and opportunity for Australian writers would be to expand the Electronic Lending Rights and Public Lending Rights scheme to include digital. We would like to see that budget doubled to $46 million per annum. More money for translation of Australian novels into other languages and their marketing overseas would also expand the market and remuneration for Australian writers.

The fourth is copyright and intellectual property reform. Novelists and screenwriters need to be better remunerated for the work they produce, especially when a work is adapted for screen. We’d like to enshrine the right to fair remuneration for authors, commensurate with the success of their work.

The fifth policy area we’d like to see change in is funding for our tertiary training sectors that help develop the next wave of Australian screenwriting and novel writing talent. Talent doesn’t drop from the sky: it has to be nurtured and mentored, through greater funding and closer ties with industry.  

David Latham is the campaign manager and lobbying strategist for Fund the Arts.

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

My father, Brian Matthews, who has died of cancer aged eighty-five, was a contributor to Australian Book Review for forty years. He enthusiastically supported the journal from the early days of its re-establishment in 1978 under the editorship of John McLaren. He wrote for it prolifically under later editors – never more so than under the current editorship.

A founder of Australian studies in the 1970s, Brian strongly believed in the promotion of Australian literary culture. Though he was an academic throughout his career – at Flinders University, the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at the University of London, and the Victoria University, Melbourne – by the late 1980s he had largely given up academic forms of writing and aimed instead to communicate with the broadest possible audience.

Brian began as a university teacher in the late 1960s at the new Flinders University in South Australia, teaching the standard English literary curriculum of the day. He never lost his interest in Romantic poetry or in the great nineteenth-century novelists. But an MA under the direction of Vincent Buckley at the University of Melbourne consolidated his interest in Henry Lawson and led to a first book, The Receding Wave: Henry Lawson’s prose (MUP, 1972).

I have very dim memories of his doing the index himself on a set of cards. He would later say that he had done an injustice to Lawson’s mother, Louisa, in this book. In fact the entry for ‘Lawson, Louisa’ in the index is slightly longer than that for Henry.

A seed must have been planted then: though academic essays in the quarterly journals and a doctoral thesis on George Orwell would follow in the 1970s, he was increasingly preoccupied with the figure of Louisa Lawson. At first he attempted a biography, but lack of material quickly made that unfeasible. Gradually, something much less conventional began to take shape, perhaps reflecting his own reading in postmodern fiction at the time.

McPhee Gribble in Melbourne was then throwing down a major challenge to the big players in Australian publishing. Hilary McPhee became interested and published the new book under the simple title Louisa in 1987. It was an instant hit with reviewers and went on to win the Victorian Premier’s Award for non-fiction and the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal. McPhee Gribble brought out a collection of short stories, Quickening, in 1989 and the self-described ‘larrikin essays’ in Oval Dreams in 1991.

On the strength of Louisa, another publisher commissioned a biography, this time of Manning Clark. Almost immediately, however, Brian was offered the directorship of the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies in London. He began a four-year stint there early in 1993 – a rewarding time but the first of many delays to the Clark project, which eventually appeared with a new publisher, Allen & Unwin, in 2008. In the late 1990s, following a return to Australia in the role of director of the Europe–Australia Institute at Victoria University, Brian found many literary distractions: Federation appeared in 1999 at the time of the republic referendum; a memoir, A Fine and Private Place, in 2000, and in 2003 what I suspect was his favourite book, an eccentric history of the MCG entitled The Temple Down the Road. At the same time, regular columns flowed in The Australian.

In retirement after the Clark biography appeared, Brian slowed down on the books, while still writing a monthly column for Eureka Street. His last book, Benaud: An appreciation, appeared with Text in 2016. Unauthorised, and not really a biography anyway, the book brought together most of the things he was interested in: the elusive biographical subject, and popular culture, especially Australian sport, and a preoccupation with mid-twentieth-century Australia.

In recent years, Brian suffered various health problems. Earlier this year he turned down a review request from Peter Rose (itself a near-historic event). He was having problems with his right arm and consequent difficulty using a keyboard. This proved to be the harbinger of a serious illness. He died on 2 June in the tranquil surrounds of the district hospital in Strathalbyn in the heart of the Adelaide Hills, where he had made his home, on and off, for the past fifty years. 

Australia’s new Commonwealth government has pledged to initiate a ‘universities accord’ and build consensus on higher education policy questions. This follows a period of torrid relations between universities and the government where constructive dialogue was patchy at best. We may have heard little from Labor about universities over the course of the past nine years, but its ‘universities accord’ election pledge at least recognises that, for the good of Australia and its people, it’s time to reopen constructive channels of communication.

Labor often looks for inspiration to the Curtin and Chifley governments (1941–49) and Labor’s great social-democratic experiment of postwar reconstruction, which included an ‘accord’ of sorts with universities that set in train grand plans for the nation.

A dubious privilege of belonging to Generation X is that your life straddles the period during which the internet went from being science fiction to settled fact of life. Take, for example, Justin Smith, the American-born, University of Paris-based historian of philosophy and science, a professor who turns fifty this year. He started out on dial-up message boards in the 1980s, saw his first HTML web page in the 1990s, and now maintains a well-regarded Substack newsletter, where, in between meditations on the historical ontology of depression and the metaphysics of onomastics, he writes with a subtle eye regarding online culture in all its manifestations.

In other words, Smith’s is a binocular vision: an effort to apply the intellectual longue durée of humanistic enquiry to a world increasingly shaped by experience of the digital. In recent years, however, the author’s early optimism about the liberatory possibilities of the internet (a catch-all term which, employing a kind of reverse synecdoche, he uses to define that tiny portion of the web that we mainly use, particularly social media) has curdled.

In a viral essay published in The Point Mag in 2019, Smith wrote:

It has come to seem to me recently that this present moment must be to language something like what the Industrial Revolution was to textiles. A writer who works on the old system of production can spend days crafting a sentence, putting what feels like a worthy idea into language, only to find, once finished, that the internet has already produced countless sentences that are more or less just like it, even if these lack the same artisanal origin story that we imagine gives writing its soul. There is, it seems to me, no more place for writers and thinkers in our future than, since the nineteenth century, there has been for weavers.

‘This predicament,’ he concluded, ‘is not confined to politics, and in fact engulfs all domains of human social existence.’

The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is expands on the implications of this darkening view. It is Smith’s attempt to explain how and why he has come to regard the internet as inimical to human thriving. It explores, with hypertextual agility and philosophic rigour, everything from the concentrated power of tech monopolies, the crimping effects of algorithmic decision making in domains as disparate as filmmaking and credit ratings, the corrosive effect of misinformation on our politics and even the grounds of our shared reality, the gamification of our online existences, and the enclosure of our attentional commons. But it does so in a novel way – by zooming out ‘to consider it in relation to its precedents, or in relation to other things alongside which it exists in a totality’.

This is a more radical manoeuvre than it looks. The internet is a phenomenon closely tied to its technological manifestations and our historical moment. Any attempt to decouple the web from the networks and protocols on which it runs seems weird, a message divorced from its medium. For Smith, however – a scholar of Leibniz, and an intellectual omnivore more generally – the internet has a prehistory old as our species: 

It is … only the most recent permutation of a complex of behaviours that is as deeply rooted in who we are as a species as anything else we do: our storytelling, our fashions, our friendships; our evolution as beings that inhabit a universe dense with symbols.

Not only that: Smith even goes so far as to argue that the networked nature of the internet is not solely a human characteristic. The clicks of Humpback whales that can be heard by fellow cetaceans an ocean away. Foot-stamp telegraphs employed by African elephants. The ‘wood wide web’ in which mycorrhizal fungi colonise root systems and use fungal filaments, or mycelia, to create an underground network between trees. All these ‘natural’ networks share commonalities with human efforts, Smith argues. They suggest that ‘the internet is not best seen as a lifeless artefact, contraption, gadget, or mere tool, but as a living system’.

Smith makes a convincing argument that technology has obscured the organic origins of this universal drive to amplification, connection, augmentation, and exchange. Viewed from this perspective, even the most complex inventions, made from material wholly abstracted from their biological substance, remain instances of natural technique. We are spiders who spin with fibre-optic cable rather than protein-silk, ‘an excrescence of the species-specific activity of homo sapiens’.

But if this potential has always existed, why only now has such ‘excrescence’ been manifested? In a chapter dedicated to the genealogy of computation and AI, Smith takes us all the way back to Roger Bacon’s thirteenth-century ‘Brazen Head’ (a kind of medieval Siri that could answer any question) via Leibniz’s 1670 stepped reckoner calculating device and Lovelace and Babbage’s nineteenth-century ‘Analytical Engine’, and suggests that even when such devices were merely fantasies of computational power or communication ability, they nonetheless opened up potential for subsequent thinkers to realise.

By 1685, Smith notes, ‘Leibniz was already envisioning a machine-aided society’, one, moreover, in which humans were assisted by machines rather than being dominated by them. This utopian potential is followed like a golden thread through the centuries to the present – call it an alternative history of the pre-internet – as a way of holding open the possibility that the internet as we currently know it might be other than it is.

Here lies the paradox of Smith’s historicising efforts. For all its broadening and deepening of the context by which we understand the internet, the book returns us to those established technological structures and networks he collectively arraigns ‘for crimes against humanity’. There is no off switch for what we have made.

The philosopher’s negative portrayal of the internet in these pages is, in most respects, an unanswerable jeremiad, thrilling for the cogency with which it identifies those aspects of online experience most inhospitable to either the growth of individual selves, or else the encouragement of civil debate intrinsic to democracy’s maintenance. Smith knows the internet is a system that slays individual attentiveness, one built from a concatenation of soul-flattening algorithms. He rightly regards social media as a perpetual grievance machine.

And yet. Though the internet ‘is the primary motor for the spread of this new system, it is very likely that whatever new sanctuaries we might yet hope to build, where the rapacious logic of this new system does not have any purchase, will also come through the internet’.

The gravest affliction we suffer, he suggests, is also our greatest hope. 

On 15 August 2022, it will be seventy-five years since Jawaharlal Nehru declared that India’s ‘tryst with destiny’ had finally been ‘redeemed’. The rapturous crowds that gathered outside the Constituent Assembly in New Delhi on that sultry summer night cheered as loudspeakers relayed the words: ‘At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.’

Midnight’s children, some 1.3 billion of them, can look back with pride on their country’s achievements, including not least an enduring commitment to democracy and the transformation of a nation crippled by colonialism into an economic powerhouse. But India’s tradition of tolerance, which has seen it absorb and assimilate different ethnic and religious groups to create what is perhaps the most diversified nation in the world, is today threatened by a wave of Hindu majoritarianism.

‘Country’ – the land of Indigenous peoples (minus their Dreamings) – is the great subject of settler-colonial art, an act of appropriation in which the dispossession of its original custodians is rendered invisible. As Jarrod Hore establishes beyond doubt in Visions of Nature, it was landscape photographers who proved to be one of the more significant cultural agents of settler colonialism across the Pacific Rim in the second half of the nineteenth century. What his important study reveals even more clearly is just how much they and their images were shaped by the times and societies in which they worked.

Eda Gunaydin’s collection of essays, Root & Branch, centres on migration, class, guilt, and legacy. It joins the surge of memoir-as-début by millennial writers, who interrogate the personal via the political. Gunaydin, whose family immigrated to Australia from Turkey, grew up in the outer suburbs of Western Sydney – home to a historically migrant and working-class demographic. We learn that her father, a bricklayer, has been the household’s sole income provider as the health of her mother, Besra, meant that she ‘never had a job in this country except cleaning’. Gunaydin meanwhile accepted off-the-books employment in hospitality and retail until she was able to ‘crack into a white-collar position’ at the university where she is completing her PhD. This left her hyper-conscious of intergenerational mobility and class disparity. She worries about what it means ‘to instantly unlock an easier life … while others continu[e] to struggle’. Those others being, namely, her family, whose Blacktown postcode means limited access to adequately funded essential services, reliable public transport, and affordable housing. It is a concern driving much of the book – how to reconcile gratitude with guilt, particularly when Gunaydin cannot divorce the opportunities available to her in life from her family’s sacrifices.

When Susan Varga made the momentous, long-delayed decision to commit herself to writing, her first task was to write her mother’s story – that of a Holocaust survivor who migrated from Hungary to Australia with her second husband and two daughters in 1948, when Susan was five. That story, which is also one of a complex and difficult relationship between mother and daughter, became the award-winning Heddy and Me (1994). 

Daisy Simmons – twenty-four years old, the wife of a major in the Indian Army, mother of two children, ‘dark [and] adorably pretty’ – is an ephemeral presence in Virginia Woolf’s fourth novel, Mrs Dalloway (1925). Clarissa Dalloway’s former lover, Peter Walsh, has travelled to London from India to secure a divorce so that he might marry Daisy. From a mere handful of references, we are able to glean the wavering nature of Peter’s devotion to Daisy and his suspicion that she will, as Woolf writes, ‘look ordinary beside Clarissa’.

In Chris Womersley’s novel Cairo (2013), a middle-aged man looks back as his seventeen-year-old self is caught up in the notorious theft of Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman from the National Gallery of Victoria by a group of bohemian artists. The heist-Bildungsroman combination is energetic, and decades of distance give Tom Button’s narration a lush, nostalgic quality. His sifted memories of 1986 fall gently, landing somewhere between regret and sustained desire.

The Diplomat is less a sequel to that novel than a coda. Only five years have passed since the theft, and one of the conspirators, Edward Degraves, returns to Australia after spending those years in London. Broken-hearted and insolvent, his heroin addiction possibly in remission, Edward cuts a bleak figure.

Womersley has a gift for atmospheric settings, and his Melbourne circa 1991 is quietly feral and lightly but evocatively drawn. In their Gen X heyday, Brunswick, Fitzroy and St Kilda have a down-and-out energy, a whiff of rot and failure. Visiting recently, I noticed that something of that grim 1990s energy has returned to parts of the city, as if, left alone during lockdown, it has reverted to some weedier nature.

Where Cairo had a warm, soft Instagram filter, The Diplomat offers high-contrast glare. Details are offered sparsely but judiciously: a few moth-eaten lounge chairs, or a flash of red lipstick, can carry an entire scene. Tom’s distance allowed him to write about himself with a degree of self-forgiveness, but Edward’s reflections are firmly on the side of regret. The money is long gone, the dreams of adventure are over. It is fitting that the prose here is starker.

‘Like the exiled monarchs of a kingdom imagined by Lewis Carroll’ is how Edward and Gertrude were described through Tom Button’s eyes in Cairo. We are a far cry from the fantastical now. At thirty-seven, Edward is a lost soul, filled with self-doubt and grief. Having lost Gertrude and sabotaged whatever potential he may have had as an artist, he is not expecting salvation; rather, he is looking for something more fragile, perhaps forgiveness or a thread of grace. As he struggles to keep his addiction at bay, he reflects on sobriety’s raw exposure with a clarity that can be uncomfortable: ‘My God. The world. It was so overwhelming.’

The Diplomat is slow to get going. It’s hard to write about failure and disappointment, about depression and paralysis, without becoming bogged in the sticky mud of your characters’ interior landscapes. It is testament to Womersley’s poise that he gives this tale of woe such emotional momentum. The first-person narration has a deceptively easy rhythm that brings complex ideas and emotions into quick and concentrated focus. The brooding, noirish energy of the book is enticing.

It was Gertrude who had any talent, either as a painter or a forger. In London, she disguised her work as that of an invented Polish painter, sparing her somewhat outmoded style from criticism by setting it in the past. The fraud enables Gertrude to protect her art from commodification while also generating an income. Here, there are echoes of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley Under Ground, particularly the layering of its enquiry into authenticity. Forgery only works because of the art world’s capacity for self-delusion.

Through its plot and also directly, The Diplomat asks how a work of art acquires its value. What makes a painting good? Is the aura of a work simply the buzz of celebrity? (‘Real art was like charisma,’ Edward reflects.) Is quality merely elusive, or is all art false? Of course, these questions can also be asked of fiction, an art form which is expected to generate a sustained illusion.

As in Cairo, the longing to be an artist has a greater pull than the art itself; Womersley’s artists are driven by an aspiration to be extraordinary people. For Edward, heroin offered a shortcut to countercultural identity: ‘Part of the appeal of drugs ... was of marching to the beat of your own drum, of not doing what everyone else was doing.’

Now the bohemian dream has evaporated, and poverty has lost its sheen. Taking place over a few short days, with flashbacks to Edward’s life in London interspersed like fragile leaves, The Diplomat is a book of disillusionment. Without a belief in art, Edward is left to reckon with the relationships he has sustained or defiled along the way. The only things that might matter are moments of beauty that shimmer with an elusive quality close to the grace our narrator is seeking, but these moments are only understood once they have been lost.

‘As Plato put it: everything that deceives may be said to enchant,’ Edward tells us. I was expecting a swindle at the centre of this novel, but Womersley is less interested in the hoax this time around. Like Highsmith, he wants to unearth the emptiness at which that deceit scratches. In his pared-back descriptions, there is the feeling of a curtain being pulled away. But in that glare, The Diplomat reveals a deep sincerity, a desire to make something meaningful and true – to be worthy.

This sincerity gleams through the grime: in Edward’s clumsy attempt to show care for his father, in the tenderness of grief-struck memory, in the solace of Narcotics Anonymous testimony. The latter reminded me of the way David Foster Wallace sifted through AA meetings in Infinite Jest, looking for authenticity’s trick. You start to wonder: what if there isn’t one?

Though The Diplomat lacks the curious excitement and energetic plot of Cairo, Chris Womersley’s sensitivity and moral depth give weight to this study of human frailty. The novel circles back on itself, the structure gently making its own redemptive offering in the capacity for self-reflection and for change. What’s left is not romantic, bohemian, cool, or ironic; it is something more sustained and affecting. Neither deceit, nor enchantment, after all.

Horse? Could that title sound familiar because it was a Richard Harris movie of the 1960s? Well, Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for March (2005) and author of novels about everything from the characters in Little Women to the life of King David, is not one to be deterred by daunting precedents. She is a senior journalist who has gone on to use her capacity to master information and then spin it to spectacular effect in order to tell a story in which historical data and its artful arrangement yield an effect that is epical because of the way a many-voiced choir animates the chorales that underline the Passion that is dramatised.

In the wake of other recent compelling débuts – Paige Clark’s meticulously crafted and imagined She is Haunted being a standout – three new short story collections, varying markedly in tone, style, and setting, offer bold and unsettling visions of twenty-first-century life.

The Teeth of a Slow Machine by Andrew Roff

Wakefield Press, $29.95 pb, 207 pp

Andrew Roff’s The Teeth of a Slow Machine melds the domestic, virtual, mechanical, and corporate realms. Most stories are set in what seems to be a dystopian present or near future. ‘Bock Bock’ (think of the sound a chook makes) opens the collection with two employees of corporate giant Dark Meat investigating illegal use of a patented chicken recipe. Narrated by an uncompromising staffer committed to his employer’s brutal methods, the story – engaging if shackled by mundane detail – establishes the collection as an exploration of the quotidian and subtly otherworldly. It is also the first of many stories in which characters find themselves subject to stringent corporate, as well as personal, codes of conduct to which they doggedly adhere – sometimes to the point of stretching credibility for the reader.

Zach Jones’s début novel, Growing Up in Flames, unfolds after a tragic bushfire, while an approaching bushfire stalks Carly Nugent’s protagonist Persephone in Sugar. The only noticeable flames in Allayne Webster’s That Thing I Did (Wakefield Press, $24.95 pb, 336 pp) belong to a foul-mouthed granny named Daisy, who uses them to light her cigarettes, but Webster’s novel about an unlikely group of strangers on a madcap South Australian road trip is as poignant as it is funny.

Nikolai Freudenstein was born in St Petersburg in 1894 and wrote his first novel, Deceit (обман), under the pseudonym Yuri Felsen. In 1923, he fled the Bolshevik Revolution, first to Riga then to Berlin, eventually settling in Paris, where the novel takes place. At the height of his career in 1943, he was caught in German-occupied France, deported to Auschwitz, and murdered there in a gas chamber. Bryan Karetnyk, in translating Deceit into English from the Russian, has sought to bring the modernist work out of obscurity.

Each federal election brings with it a bunch of promises, attacks, blunders, and unpredictable moments. During the recent federal election we had Anthony Albanese’s ‘gaffe’, Scott Morrison’s undercooked chicken curry, and #JoshKeeper. As usual, the intrepid (and long-suffering) lexicographers and language watchers were hard at work monitoring the language of the campaign.

It takes genuine courage to attempt a synoptic history of India and considerable skill to abridge the story of more than five thousand years into a book of fewer than three hundred pages. For a start, the evidence we have for what occurred during the first forty centuries is scarce and uneven. Archaeologists have unearthed planned towns, figurines, seals, pots, and tools that attest to the existence of a sprawling and successful society flourishing in the Indus Valley from around 3300 BCE until 1300 BCE. But as John Zubrzycki explains in this clever book, we know little if anything about how this Harappan civilisation was ruled or organised, partly because its script has not been deciphered and partly because no buildings akin to palaces or temples have yet been found.

A Writer’s Beginnings begins: ‘My mother died today.’ One could be excused for thinking that one was reading not a memoir but a Campus Novel without the ‘p’, an experience that Howard Jacobson will suffer later in this book. Who could read this incipit without hearing the famous beginning: ‘Aujourd’hui maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas.’ Jacobson, on the other hand, knows. He continues: ‘It is 3 May 2020. She is ninety-seven years old.’ I cannot recall whether Albert Camus specifies his protagonist’s mother’s age in L’Étranger (1942). A Camus novel is surely a Campus Novel without the ‘p’, the latter a sub-genre that Jacobson will both live out teaching English at a polytechnic in a defunct football stadium and come to write. Indeed, so insistent is his use of the locution ‘we’ll come to that later’ that one could be excused for thinking prolepsis a Finklerish (see below) rhetorical device. Give Howard Jacobson enough trope and he’ll surely hang himself.

In her introduction to Sydney Review of Book’s latest anthology, Open Secrets: Essays on the writing life, Catriona Menzies-Pike quickly establishes what readers should not expect. ‘There are no precious morning rituals here,’ the editor promises, ‘no magic tricks for aspiring writers.’ It’s true that these essays, each a mix of disarming honesty and polymathic intelligence, hover far above the glut of literary listicles clogging the internet. And thank goodness: if I have to suffer Hemingway mansplaining show-don’t-tell one more time, I may go out and shoot a lion myself.

Across Australia today, exciting work is being done to strengthen and renew Aboriginal languages and their deep associations with Country. In those parts of the continent where the history of dispossession has been most traumatic, language regeneration calls for research and reconstruction, for the rediscovery of the old words for places, features, and life itself. Gregory Day’s new book is a distinguished and discerning quest for the lore and language of his beloved place. It eloquently reflects on what it means for a non-Indigenous fifth-generation Australian to seek to live ‘in a properly symbiotic way, in this soil’. Words Are Eagles is more than a book of ‘selected writings’: it is a sustained manifesto for how to think and feel one’s way into Australian nature, place, and history following invasion and at a time of global environmental crisis.

Michel Houellebecq has never been one to hide his light under a bushel. Since the publication of his second and best-known novel, Atomised, in 1998 (the same year some of the pieces included in Interventions 2020 were originally published in French), Houellebecq has established himself as the enfant terrible of French letters, primarily through his provocative and at times incendiary remarks. Indeed, there is a certain expectation that Houellebecq will live up to his reputation, something he notes in his reflections on paedophilia: ‘Through the wording of your questions, I feel I am subtly being asked to say something politically incorrect.’ Rarely does he disappoint.

Every time I open Ocean Vuong’s Time Is a Mother, that Sam & Dave lyric ‘Hold on, I’m comin’!’, pops into my head. Is it ars poetica? Hold on: language, arranged in a holding way, might help us manage loss, though no hold will forestall it. I’m coming: the radical presence of the poetic speaker, whose ecstatic ‘now’ of speech exists in strange tension with the past, a thing lost, that full and irretrievable ‘then’. Anne Carson has written memorably of the strange telescoping of now and then in lyric poetry. This is the dilemma of the poet–lover: ‘pinned in an impossible double bind, victim of novelty and recurrence at once.’ Or, as Vuong puts it, ‘[t]he way Lil Peep says I’ll be back in the mornin’ when you know how it ends.’

The life and work of Charles Baudelaire (1821–67) must be viewed against the historical background of the crushing failure of the Paris revolution of 1848, in which soldiers massacred three thousand workers. In the elections that followed this unsuccessful working-class uprising, which Baudelaire and his fellow artists supported, the French Romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine received 18,000 votes, while Louis Napoleon received fifteen million. As Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire, it was an historical moment when ‘the extra-parliamentary masses of the bourgeoisie’ called upon the regime of the Second Empire ‘to destroy their speaking and writing segment, their politicians and literati’ in the interests of ‘strong government’. The new materialism of what Eric Hobsbawm terms The Age of Capital had little use for the Romantic role of the artist as ‘unacknowledged legislator’: scientific ‘progress’, economic determinants, and consumption become the ruling values of the modern world.

Umberto Eco once described the text as a ‘lazy machine asking the reader to do some of its work’; to contribute, in other words, to the production of meaning. Poetry has a particular reputation for being demanding, but Tracy Ryan’s tenth poetry collection, Rose Interior, isn’t challenging in the way that Eco envisages. It is less about engaging readers in the masculinist energy of the ‘machine’ and ‘work’ than about inviting them into a feminine world of domestic spaces and quotidian phenomena. If a reader were to conceptualise the text in the way that Eco describes, the engine for Rose Interior might be located in a poem called ‘Request’, where the poet announces her interest in whatever is

little and liminal,

won’t take much space, the odd
moment you think of ...  / or don’t,

whatever you wouldn’t look twice at ...

Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies were begun in a burst of inspiration while he was staying at Duino Castle near Trieste in 1912. Walking along the battlements after receiving a difficult business letter, he heard a mysterious voice calling to him from an approaching storm. Their composition was then interrupted by a personal and artistic crisis that lasted until 1922, when he finished them in an even more astonishing afflatus which also included the gift of their companion-masterpiece, the Sonnets to Orpheus, at the Château de Muzot in Switzerland.

Susan Varga is the author of Heddy and Me, Happy Families, Broometime (co-authored with her partner Anne Coombs), Headlong, and Rupture. Her most recent book is Hard Joy (Upswell, 2022).

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

A somnolent village in the French countryside during summer.

What’s your idea of hell?

A crowded restaurant, bare floors, scraping chairs, careening waiters barking off all the ingredients of every dish. Everyone shouting.