The Jolley Prize

This year we received 1,338 stories for the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. We thank all our entrants.

The judges – ABR Deputy Editor Amy Baillieu, author John Kinsella, and Monash University academic Melinda Harvey – have shortlisted three stories: ‘Dog Park’ by Nina Cullen (NSW), ‘Natural Wonder’ by Tracy Ellis (NSW), and ‘Whale Fall’ by previous Jolley Prize-shortlisted author C.J. Garrow (Vic.). They appear in the fiction section of this issue.

Entries this year came from thirty-six different countries, a testament to ongoing international interest in the Jolley Prize and the magazine. Writers explored themes and topics including the pandemic, climate change, grief, desire, parenthood, and community across a range of genres. Here are the judges’ comments on the three shortlisted stories (presented here, as in the issue, in alphabetical order):

In the tense and atmospheric story ‘Dog Park’, Georgie takes her young son Max on a midday visit to the park where she watches from a shaded bench while he plays. Georgie’s protective love for her son infuses the story even as her desperate longing to shield him from potential pain or humiliation leads to growing tensions and an unsettling confrontation. ‘Dog Park’ is a tender examination of the evolving relationship between an anxious mother and her growing child that is filled with nuanced observations and telling details. The complex interactions between the characters in this story are particularly convincing.

In ‘Natural Wonder’, the narrator watches over three boys – her son and his two cousins – as they spend the first days of a new year playing at a beach on Sydney harbour. This story of children swimming and fencing with toy lightsabers on the sand has a gently melancholic undertow: it emerges that the cousins have experienced the recent trauma of losing their mother. The narrator feels a strong urge to protect and comfort her nephews, but she is also drawn to ideas of escape and freedom. The story is remarkable for its quietness, acknowledgment of knotty feelings, and the room it makes for small miracles.

The bullying of Bernard Tusk at a school for boys ‘of shallow prospects’ is conveyed in a wry, uncanny, and almost defamiliarising way in ‘Whale Fall’, which uses the beaching of a whale carcass as a metaphor for pointless death. As an implicated but also threatened observer, the narrator takes us through the destruction of Tusk who, like all the younger boys, vaguely seeks ‘cool’, but can’t attain it. The triggering complicity of the narrator is both strangely self-exonerating and self-accusatory as he tries to figure out his role between collusion and empathy. The story skilfully examines a fraught complicity and guilt.

The overall winner, who will receive $6,000 from the total prize money of $12,500, will be announced later this month at an online ceremony (details anon).

The shortlist was chosen from a longlist of fourteen stories. The other eleven stories in contention at this level were: ‘by the hour’ by Diana Clarke (New Zealand), ‘Case Notes’ by Sonja Dechian (Vic.), ‘And Then There Is Pink’ by Madison Griffiths (Vic.), ‘Glads’ by Susan Hettinger (United States), ‘half-moons filled with jam’ by Andy Kovacic (NSW), ‘Born for You’ by Magdalena McGuire (Vic.), ‘The Mend’ by Bruce Meyer (Canada), ‘Blowing Up’ by Alec Patrić (Vic.), ‘Not-John’ by Jonathan Ricketson (Vic.), ‘Zamek’ by Alex Skovron (Vic.), and ‘human material’ by Tracey Slaughter (New Zealand).

ABR warmly acknowledges the generous support of ABR Patron Ian Dickson AM, who makes the Jolley Prize possible in this lucrative form. We congratulate all the longlisted and shortlisted authors.

Jennifer Down

Jennifer Down has won the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award for her second novel, Bodies of Light. Susan Midalia reviewed Down’s book for the October 2021 issue of ABR, placed it in the tradition of the ‘feminist Bildungsroman’ and praised the ‘psychological astuteness’ of its ‘pared-back language of abuse and repression’. Down is a past winner of the Jolley Prize. Her story ‘Aokigahara’, which won the 2014 prize, exemplifies her mastery of spare yet resonant prose.

Vale Frank Moorhouse

Frank Moorhouse memorial booklet (photograph supplied)

We tend not to panegyrise local writers and artists in this land, but the death of Frank Moorhouse on 26 June proved rather different, eliciting the sort of coverage normally reserved for sporting personalities and plutocrats.

Moorhouse, who had not been well, died aged eighty-three. Many of the valedictions concentrated on his Edith Campbell Berry trilogy, largely because of the controversial exclusion of the first volume, Grand Days, from the Miles Franklin Literary Award, a fate not visited on the second novel, Dark Palace, which won the 2001 Miles Franklin Literary Award. (The third, Cold Light, was also shortlisted.) But connoisseurs of this inventive satirist looked back fifty years to discontinuous narratives such as Futility and Other Animals and The Americans, Baby – so influential at the time, brave too given the asinine censorship and homophobic policies of the time.

Moorhouse’s dedication to the protection of copyright and his role – not single-handed, but significant – in the creation of public lending rights have also been cited.

On 13 July, a large audience gathered in the Friends’ Room at the State Library of New South Wales for a ‘Farewell to Frank’. Ten speeches at a memorial service can seem de trop, but not on this occasion. First we heard from Frank’s elder brother, Arthur, who charmed everyone with his recollections of their childhood. Young Frank, growing up in Nowra and fantasising about Sydney, was always convinced that cars must drive right over the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge – and was shocked when this proved not to be the case.

Other speakers included Dona Anderson and Nick Horne, who talked about Frank’s long friendship with his late father, Donald. We heard from Frank’s long-time publishers Jane Palfreyman and Meredith Curnow, whose esteem for their lunch-loving, polymathic author was evident. Last came Tom Keneally, beaming, infectious, fraternal. Hilarious if unexpected was his account of the night he accompanied Moorhouse to a strip club. Keneally ended on such a rousing and celebratory note it felt like being at a gospel meeting. Then people repaired to the rooftop bar – for martinis of course.

Before the May 2022 federal election, Anthony Albanese, partly to silence critics of his ‘small target’ campaign and partly to manage wider expectations, proposed to lead a Labor government that under-promised and over-delivered. A deliberately thin ‘look-at-them’ election campaign was designed to keep the focus on a tired and compromised Coalition government, rather than following Labor’s usual approach of fighting for voters’ attention with big new ideas. For a social democratic party which exists for reform, it was an unorthodox strategy and one not without risks. The political capital from any ‘over-delivery’ might well accumulate for a ‘re-election’ bid in 2025, but the thinness of Labor’s 2022 enticements would be obvious.

On 17 November 2011, President Barack Obama quoted Banjo Paterson to an audience of Australian and American military personnel at RAAF Base Darwin. He recited a question that Paterson posed about Australia in a poem he wrote to celebrate Federation in 1901: ‘Hath she the strength for the burden laid upon her, hath she the power to protect and guard her own?’ The question haunts us still. Obama assured his listeners that the answer was ‘yes’, but everything about the circumstances of his speech suggested the opposite.

When out of government, the Coalition parties resemble nothing so much as an ill-disciplined horde, by turns bombastic and bilious, riven with discord, forever tearing down putative leaders and searching for scapegoats to explain their losses and lot. The blame almost always falls on the departed. In the 1980s, it was Malcolm Fraser’s unwillingness to undertake proper economic reform that they most decried; after 2007, it was John Howard’s refusal to relinquish the leadership to Peter Costello. In Aaron Patrick’s new book, Ego, the blame is laid not at the feet of Scott Morrison, as might have been expected, but at those of Malcolm Turnbull.

i

~ dots of colour     points on a complex
          number plane where the x horizontal axis
represents the ‘real’ part number    
          and the vertical y gives us unseen
space      the imaginary i      x=iy
          and i² =-1     which is
the infinite horizon’s periphery
          of scolia     stellate forms     narrow sky
water     earth     data     an exiguous eternity ...
          a free fractal generator
ChaosPro (www.chaospro.de)
          takes our most malleable maps  
and gives back to us     neon lichen     estuaries
          snowflakes     black beetles      astral trees    
tributaries     fjords     coastlines     budding
          spores and flowers     all the river mysteries
Zeus might have seen from heaven
          or the shallop we imagined belonged to the gods
infinitely divine and wise  ...
          kaleidoscopic world     beautiful blaze
enlarged by looking     it took a man his entire life
          to decipher this hidden world
while Zeus had only immortality
          to juggle in the mountain’s clouds
and olive trees    the blue ocean a scimitar
          leaning back on land’s edge to gnaw
the fronds of fate     liturgies leave it up to our kind
          our eyes     to keep the smaller picture in mind ~

ii

~ a new set of chess pieces     unrecognised
          moves and checkmates     no single gene
or game clock to regulate strategy
          and the vertical y gives us unseen
space      the imaginary i      x=iy
          an elastic blueprint     each trait defined
by what we cannot see or hear or know  
          an infant reaching for a mobile phone
listening for the sound of words     phrases
          sentences     imprisoned by lost languages ...
ChaosPro (www.chaospro.de) ...
          Alan Turing imagined a machine
that could decipher the arithmetical world
          without consciousness     calculation hurled
at the mind’s handedness     cryptography
          (Daniel C. Dennett called Turing one of
the twigs on the ‘Tree of Life’ in the 2020 New York
          Review of Books)     his analytic
machines scything through intercepted Nazi
          codes with Darwinian practicality ...
enlarged by looking     it took a man his entire life
          to decipher this hidden world
of spider webs     wasp nests     beaver dams ...
          we have not met our lockdown grandchild
a face already loved beyond imagining
          heart-gesture inherited     transcending
space and time to un-net the spider     un-melt the ice
          un-dam the beaver     welcome to paradise ~

It was in the wake of the landslide re-election of Daniel Andrews’s Labor government in November 2018 that the former Coalition prime minister, John Howard, christened Victoria ‘the Massachusetts of Australia’. Coming from Howard, this characterisation of Victoria was not meant as a compliment. Rather, it seemed designed as a consolation message for the local Liberal Party. He was providing them with an alibi for their lengthening record of under-performance in the state. Victoria, Howard seemed to be saying, was simply impervious to the party’s conservative values.

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Glib wordplay

Dear Editor,

I was dismayed by the quality and tenor of Don Anderson’s review of Howard Jacobson’s memoir, Mother’s Boy (ABR, July 2022).

Jacobson offers a deeply personal exploration of how Jewish identity, as it is refracted through his relationship with his parents (and a series of wives), has shaped him as a novelist. All Anderson can muster in response is a bit of glib wordplay. Indeed, the reviewer seems more interested in displaying his reading than in reading the book at hand. To dedicate a paragraph to Joyce Cary, a writer Anderson concedes Jacobson ‘does not mention and would appear not to have known’, is bizarre, especially in a review that barely scratches the surface of Jacobson’s wonderful book.

It can be hard to draw a line between literary enthusiasm and critical narcissism. I am sure I have been guilty of the latter myself. But it seems that there is something more troubling at play behind Anderson’s allusiveness. Even as he denies it, the review reads as a rearguard action fought on behalf of the ‘eclectic sceptics’ against arrivistes like Jacobson and Sam Goldberg, who attempted to introduce Leavisism to the University of Sydney’s English department. The kicker for me was the conclusion. For a piece that claims a synoptic purview on the teaching of English at university, surely Anderson knows that no such body as the HRC exists. Nor would he need to apply to the imaginary funder for a grant to write a paper on the ‘anti-Semitism of academic appointments’. One need look no further than the binary he imposes: between the genteel guardians of culture in all its variety and eclecticism and ambitious interlopers with names like Goldberg, Felperin, and Jacobson.

Marc Mierowsky, Thornbury, Vic.

Flagrantly gendered 

Dear Editor, 

The second paragraph of Peter Craven’s review of Geraldine Brooks’s novel Horse (ABR, July 2022) begins, ‘And Brooks is as bright as a button.’ This infantilising praise sets the tone for this review, a flagrantly gendered piece of criticism that I wish ABR had never published. Craven hems Brooks in with a phalanx of literary men including Twain, Dickens, Nabokov, Tolstoy, Shakespeare, and Joyce. He characterises her as a ‘senior journalist’ using her facility with facts to spin charming tales, but failing to emulate great literary men.

Most bios of Brooks will mention her former career as a reporter; Craven uses this fact to seek to put her in her place. Tellingly, he takes pleasure in a scene from the novel in which contemporary characters, a scientist and an art historian, clash: ‘There is a formidable confrontation between them when she derides that great critic John Berger and her boyfriend wipes the floor with her.’ Craven does acknowledge Brooks’s achievements as a novelist, then remarks that ‘[g]reat novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, as have middlebrow ones’. In this context, shelving Brooks as middlebrow is an abjectly feminising move, gendering that is reinforced by the complete absence of any other women writers from his discussion. Craven surmises that no masterpiece ‘that simply soars alone like a steeple’ (a steeple, really?), citing David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, ‘could possibly win’ the Pulitzer. Don’t be mistaken, Craven contends: Brooks’s 2006 Pulitzer Prize for March does not signify as much as her training as a ‘rookie journalist’ with a thing for the horses. Brooks deserved a more respectful and sophisticated review than this from ABR. 

Lisa Fletcher, Kingston Beach, Tas. 

Western hypocrisy

Dear Editor,

As an American living in Australia, I too have been painfully aware that the credibility of Western nations was compromised by the illegal invasion of Iraq. I am glad to see Ben Saul’s article ‘The Law of the Jungle: Western Hypocrisy over the Russian Invasion of Ukraine’ (ABR, July 2022). Some readers of ABR may also be interested in these reports from Ukrainian writers.

David Mason (online comment)

Throwing out baby

Dear Editor,

Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s review of Thomas Piketty’s A Brief History of Equality is a strange one (ABR, July 2022). She pays but scant attention to Piketty’s book. Rather, she uses it as a springboard to dive into a pool of her own concerns about colonialism, race, and gender. Little is mentioned of Piketty’s analysis beyond r>g. There is no serious discussion, let alone evaluation, of his suggestions as to how economic, fiscal, and social reforms might rein in inequality worldwide or, more ambitiously, reduce it. Piketty has blind spots, but he deserves a more substantive critique than this. To dismiss Piketty so superficially, with such palpable distaste, is to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Tim Lenehan (online comment)

The novels of Gail Jones present a challenge to would-be critics. Jones being a formidable scholar in her own right, her eight novels to date pose sophisticated philosophical questions within their elegantly structured narratives. Her novels canvass aspects of human experience that are murky and complex: these are often forms of familial or romantic relationship shaped by loss, both personal and historical. The challenge for critics is that the novels are themselves thinking about the potential of fiction to do this kind of philosophical or ethical work. In this sense, Jones might seem to be one step ahead of the scholar who takes her work as their subject. Inner and Outer Worlds, a collection of essays edited by Anthony Uhlmann, steps up to this challenge.

‘Such is life’ is a common phrase in Australian popular culture – it has even been tattooed on bodies – but Joseph Furphy’s novel of the same name, published in 1903, is often forgotten. Ned Kelly mythology suggests that he uttered this phrase just before being hanged in 1880, though some historians argue that what he actually said was, ‘Ah well, I suppose’. Long before Furphy (1843–1912) wrote his magnum opus, the stoic phrase was perhaps wrongly associated with a cult hero’s execution.

Tom Collins, Furphy’s protagonist, is a name that had already been going around in the rich vocabulary of nineteenth-century Australian slang before he chose to use it. It refers to the kind of gossip-monger who knew how to create rumours that would irritate their subjects. Furphy’s meandering narrative, full of lacunae and digressions, is nominally related by Collins, a classic unreliable narrator with notable blindspots.

The great age of sail – of European exploration and colonisation – is typically depicted as trenchantly masculine, with the only ‘women’ being unpredictable ships and the sea itself. Women have traditionally been considered bad luck, distracting, or not tough enough for life at sea. Nonetheless, historical research is increasingly revealing that many women played active roles at sea, as commanders, companions, and crew – from the gundecks of Trafalgar, to the topmasts of the American merchant navy, to the French voyages of discovery to the Indo-Pacific and Australia.

Despite being banned on French naval ships, women travelled with many French expeditions around the end of the eighteenth century, often disguised as men. The first woman known to circumnavigate the world, Jeanne Barret, sailed as the naturalist’s assistant on the Bougainville voyage. Fourteen-year-old Louison Seguin sailed to the sub-Antarctic islands on the Kerguelen expedition. Louise Girardin disguised herself as a steward to serve on D’Entrecasteaux’s voyage, while former convict Mary Beckwith escaped from Australia to Mauritius with Nicolas Baudin.

In 1961, Gwen Harwood submitted a sonnet to the Bulletin under the name of Walter Lehmann. Her poem, ‘Abelard to Eloisa’, held a shocking acrostic secret that many people considered very bad art. Nobody discovered the secret until after it was published. But despite her transgression, as Wikipedia puts it, ‘she found much greater acceptance’ – to the point that she is today considered one of Australia’s greatest poets.

The National Portrait Gallery owns a minuscule sepia studio photograph titled ‘Master Johnny Day, Australian Champion Pedestrian’. From this curious gumnut, Robert Drewe has created a sprawling multi-limbed eucalypt.

In a few months, Drewe will turn eighty. He is part of an extraordinary cohort of Australian novelists born in 1941–43, including Helen Garner, Roger McDonald, Peter Carey, Murray Bail, and Janette Turner Hospital. We now have an opportunity to discover what late style means for these heavyweights.

For Drewe, on the evidence of Nimblefoot, it means intensity rather than looseness. Nimblefoot contains more stuff than Colonel Pewter’s holdall, including Rechtub Klat, Noongar techniques for catching marron, the incineration of a scale model of the royal vessel Galatea in Bendigo, the ‘Lunatic’s Douche’, management of bubonic plague in Western Australia, and Dante Rossetti keeping pet wombats in his London garden.

The book opens with a strong, strange animal interaction – out of register, toppling expectations. The first sentence reads: ‘The Moscow Maestro is wearing a nanny goat around his neck like a scarf.’ It is a gambit that Drewe has used previously. Think of the lion barking at the start of Our Sunshine (1991). Wasn’t that supposed to be a Ned Kelly book?

Immediately we recognise that Drewe’s powers of imagination are undimmed. The bravura manoeuvre of placing a circus at Glenrowan in Our Sunshine and reframing a well-worn tale is echoed as once again he mixes ideas and smiths images to revivify history. The kernel is the little-known story of Day, a race-walking prodigy. By the age of ten Day had won 101 races at a time when punt-struck Australians were betting large sums on pedestrianism. As the sport’s prominence ebbed, he turned to horseracing. In 1870, aged fourteen, he piloted bay gelding Nimblefoot to victory in the Melbourne Cup – then faded from the historical record, freeing Drewe to pursue his fictional fancies.

Master Johnny Day, Australian Champion Pedestrian c.1866 by an unknown artist (National Portrait Gallery of Australia)

In Nimblefoot, Day is whisked away to a brothel after winning the Cup by a group that includes Queen Victoria’s son Prince Alfred and Captain Frederick Standish, Victoria’s Chief Commissioner of Police. After Alfred rapes and injures a young girl, Standish murders her and an African American servant. The teenage jockey, witness to these atrocities, escapes before he can be killed, scarpering to the familiar Drewe territory of Western Australia. Here he falls in and out of employment, luck and love, encountering numerous colourful acquaintances, the kind that Henry Lawson called ‘common brother-sinners’.

Reading a new Drewe novel feels like opening another chapter of a narrative that has unfurled over almost five decades, intensified by the reappearance of familiar tropes. Like Molloy in Grace (2005), Day can’t swim and is anxious around water: ‘he wasn’t sure about an element that required not only mastery but surrender’. A minor character collects the skulls of small native animals; skulls and bones recur in Drewe’s fiction. The outrages perpetrated by Standish and Alfred exemplify the defects Drewe habitually locates in the empire or its representatives. The malign hitman who stalks Day reminds us of Eric Cooke in The Shark Net (2000).

The narrative skips from first to third person, occasionally within the same chapter. Drewe sporadically interleaves fragments from newspaper stories, advertising copy, a promotional poster. Famous figures abound, slightly off-centre – as in George MacDonald Fraser’s Flashman books or Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997). (But then, in Fortune [1986] Drewe warned us that in a country with a small population, ‘everyone over thirty knows everyone else.’) Here is Adam Lindsay Gordon, depicted as he might have described himself, ‘Hard livers for the most part, somewhat reckless as a rule.’ There is Lola Montez, performing the notorious Spider Dance. A set piece concludes with a hungover Anthony Trollope visiting an abattoir and vomiting on his boots. And as the character Day says to Trollope: ‘Wait, there’s more.’

This is a book of abundance. A true picaresque – episodic, rambling, with the central character acted upon rather than agentic, buffeted by fate. Every detail is detailed, every particular particularised; this might be delightful or tiring, depending on your preference. Michael Ackland wrote in Westerly of Drewe’s ‘abiding ambivalence towards history’, that ‘his novels are concerned with defamiliarizing the established record, with highlighting lacunae and neglected episodes or aspects’. I thought of eutrophy, the state of bodies or water that have too many nutrients and not enough oxygen. This quest to conjure depth and vibrancy is freighted with a lot of information that might be shaded as extraneous, and it can be difficult to discern the telling detail from the decoration.

For all that, what a joy to spend time with a writer who does not give us a dog but ‘a loony border collie with one blue eye, the other brown’. After Day’s mother miscarries there is, ‘Dry lightning menacing our house and a carpet of blood from front door to back’. A stock character is brought to life: ‘the rare glimpses of him in shirtsleeves revealing dark armpit stains, stained orange from a strong anti-perspirant ordered from the London perfumer Eugene Rimmel’. Drewe searches always for the startling image, such as horses still in harness that have plummeted from a pier, ‘in petrified mad gallop on the seabed two fathoms down … blowfish and small octopuses politely reduced the horses from the lips and nostrils backwards’.

Wilson Buntine, purportedly the first-ever Black student of Hale School, is one of many carefully crafted characters that appear, seem likely to have narrative significance, then wander off-stage – which is the way things work in life, certainly, but not always in compelling fiction. We are told that Buntine is named after two houses at the school. Hale old boy Drewe would know they are names of twentieth-century headmasters, whereas we meet the student in the 1870s.

Perhaps this dip into asynchronism flags that the novel’s relationship with time unravels in the last portion. My assumption based on the flow of action was that the period of Day’s pursuit in Western Australia lasted a year or less. However, there are references to Ned Kelly’s beard, the Catalpa rescue, and Monet’s move into Impressionism, which suggest that the action sprawls over most of a decade. Then when Standish dies, the wrong date is given and probably the wrong year. Why break some rules of historical veracity and not others? What are these choices telling us?

Twenty years ago, Drewe postulated that there are two Australian myths always fighting for precedence in our literature – the Myth of Landscape and the Myth of Character. Both are on bright display in this late novel. Many readers will be glad they can still accompany him as he referees the wrestle.

In a famous letter to her friend and fellow writer Lorna Sage, Angela Carter declared that no daughter of hers should ever pen a title like Elizabeth Smart’s By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept (1945): ‘BY GRAND CENTRAL STATION I TORE OFF HIS BALLS would be more like it, I should hope.’ The choice between getting sad or getting mad, the dilemma of how to represent the reality of female anguish without romanticising or pathologising it, is a recurring theme in twenty-first-century women’s writing: it forms the main subject of Leslie Jamison’s essay ‘Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain’ (2014); it is the premise behind the post-feminist revenge films Jennifer’s Body (2009) and Promising Young Woman (2020).

Blue Hour by Sarah Schmidt

Hachette, $32.99 pb, 320 pp

Three new Australian novels offer different approaches to the spectacle of women’s suffering. Following on from her début, See What I Have Done (2017), a reimagining of the 1892 murders in the Borden household, Sarah Schmidt’s Blue Hour is an elegiac tale about mothers, daughters, and the traumas they endure. Set in twentieth-century Australia, the narrative jumps back and forth between the perspective of Kitty, a woman whose unplanned pregnancy in 1941 forces her into a marriage she regrets, and her daughter Eleanor, who is grappling with sorrows of her own while on a road trip thirty years later with her baby girl, Amy.

At first glance, neither Marlo nor My Heart Is a Little Wild Thing seemed particularly appealing. Both focus on queer men pining for love in a homophobic world. Both appeared to recycle what Jay Carmichael (Marlo’s author) calls ‘the tradition of tragedy in queer literature’. Digging deeper, we find that the novels offer nuanced and even uplifting perspectives on gay male experience over the decades. There are moments of adversity, but it’s the resilience and emotional strength of the protagonists – their ability to find pleasure in even dire situations – that make both books so compelling.

‘Marlo’ is the name of the rural hamlet that young Christopher has just departed. He arrives in Melbourne during the 1950s, having escaped the homophobia and gender stereotyping of his bucolic upbringing, only to confront prejudice everywhere in his new surrounds.

On the surface, Scott McCulloch’s début novel, Basin, takes place in a brutal and degenerated landscape; the edge of a former empire in a state of violent flux. Rebels, separatists, terrorists, paramilitary groups, and the remnants of imperial forces clash over borders and interzones in the wake of the ‘Collapse’, an undefined geopolitical and ecological disaster. Print and broadcast media warn of inter-ethnic conflict and Rebel advances. Bazaars, brothels, and a chain of Poseidon Hotels all operate amid industrial waste and military checkpoints, servicing the region’s fishermen, soldiers, smugglers, and drifters. There is a multiplicity of language and religion (Abrahamic denominations mingle with archaic, pagan beliefs). Alcohol consumption and illicit drug use are rife. The climate is oppressively humid.

Faithless is the third novel by West Australian writer Alice Nelson. Her first, The Lost Sky (2008), saw her named Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist, and her second, The Children’s House (2018), attracted widespread critical acclaim. All three explore themes of trauma, displacement, memory, and love. Nelson, many of whose family migrated here from Europe, once pondered in a 2019 interview with Brenda Walker at the Centre for Stories whether writers write to ‘heal some kind of loss’ and whether for her ‘it began with that sense of loss of homeland, loss of culture and country that ran through my family’.

At the heart of Faithless, set in England, India, and France, is the passionate affair between Cressida, a writer and translator, and her married lover, Max, a renowned German-born writer. The novel is written in the first person and addressed to Max. When it opens, Cressida has just learnt of Max’s recent death and has fled to his hometown of Dunwich in Suffolk with seven-year-old Flora, whose relationship to her is unclear.

Max and Cressida had met almost twenty years before, when Max was a guest at her mother’s hotel in Rajakkad, India. Familiar with Max’s writing, she was twenty and studying Classics at Cambridge; Max was thirty-six and at ‘the beginning of his literary fame’. Their connection was instantaneous and highly cerebral – they discussed poetry, translation, and her desire to be a writer. Before long they commence an all-consuming relationship that will last until his death.

Nelson’s portrayal of their relationship, founded on fierce mutual desire and intellectual attraction, is as compelling as it is convincing. Obsessed with each other, they frequently communicate via poetry and literary allusions, which form a ‘secret language’ between them. To Cressida it feels ‘As if our being together were not choice at all, but fate.’ Yet despite the joy it brings her, their relationship is, from her perspective (we do not see Max’s), also ‘a welter of pain and pathos and jealousy and yearning’ as she is forced, albeit willingly, into the role of mistress, or ‘shadow bride’. As his literary star rises he does not want them to be seen together publicly, he won’t endorse her writing (despite his high opinion of it) or acknowledge her in his own, despite the significant role she plays as his first reader. Cressida, achingly conscious that he does not belong to her, tortures herself by imagining his life of ‘domestic harmony’ with his wife. She clearly pays the higher price for their clandestine love affair, but her obsession with him is such that she accepts this.

Max is a fascinating, complex character through whom Nelson develops the themes of intergenerational trauma and exile. Born in 1944, he grows up in an unhappy home. No one, in his family or the outside world, speaks about what happened during the war. Deeply ashamed of this ‘willed amnesia’, he flees to England where he builds a career writing about Germany’s traumatic past, how ‘we never escape the injuries done to us by history’ and ‘inherited guilt’. Cressida reasons at one point that ‘marrying Clara [who has her own traumatic war history] was your form of reparation, of atonement, for all that shame you carried on behalf of your countrymen’.

Many of the characters in Faithless, including Max, are in self-imposed exile. His rootlessness is something else he has in common with Cressida, who feels at home neither in England where she was born, nor in India where she grew up. He quotes Goethe to her, saying he is ‘everywhere a stranger and everywhere at home’. Cressida’s mother, the beautiful Amandine, is in double exile – she left France to be with her married lover in London, then, at his behest, swapped London for India.

One other theme that Nelson returns to is that of taking responsibility for another person’s child, a central concern of The Children’s House. Max is clearly attached to Clara, but even more to her daughter Ellen, whom he has co-parented from a young age. His desire to protect them at all costs is one factor that prevents him from leaving the marriage. Cressida, too, becomes the carer for Flora, a child who is not her own, but whom she loves fiercely: ‘Flora is not my blood, not my responsibility. And yet there is nothing I wouldn’t do for her.

Faithless is a superb literary achievement that firmly places Nelson among Australia’s leading contemporary writers. The beauty of her language, the sophistication of her ideas, and her skilful interweaving of plot, character, and meaning set this book apart, and it deserves critical acclaim and to reach a wide audience.

I have one fairly minor quibble. In her acknowledgments, Nelson refers to German writer W.G. Sebald, who once wrote that he tried in his own work to ‘raise his hat’ to his literary heroes. Nelson writes that, ‘in the same spirit, some of the lines spoken by Max in the novel are taken from Sebald’s own work … Faithless, however, is a work of invention; though one in which I have raised my own hat to Sebald.’ In fact, there are striking biographical similarities between Max and W.G. Sebald (although the affair between Max and Cressida is not one of them) and between Max’s work and his. (Sebald, of course, also went by the name Max.) Perhaps a more fulsome acknowledgment of the degree to which Nelson is paying homage to Sebald’s life and work might have been appropriate for the benefit of those unfamiliar with them.

A child of nine is taken to Sydney for the first time to visit her mother, a patient at the Coast Hospital lazaret. Upon arrival, she learns that she, like her mother, has leprosy. Her fate is fixed from that day; she will live the remainder of her life in the lazaret. She takes the new name of ‘Alice’ to hide her former self, and the world closes in upon her. There will be no more school, no playing with her younger brothers and sisters, no friends of her own age, no prospect of romance, no hope of freedom.

Only the sea, the protected bay, and the wild, beautiful coast let her know she is alive. Bathing in stinging salt water, picnicking on the sandy shore, or taking a boat out in quest of fish or adventure might almost feel like freedom, were it not for the confinement and repetitive monotony, the bodily decay of leprosy, and the lurking presence of death.

James Joyce’s Ulysses was published 100 years ago by American Sylvia Beach, who ran a Parisian bookstore called Shakespeare and Company. The early history of the work was marked by controversy and censorship. The centenary is being marked by numerous publications in celebration of the work by writers, academic Joyceans, and even the odd Irish ambassador. John McCourt’s Consuming Joyce: 100 years of Ulysses in Ireland traces the reception of Ulysses in Ireland. As much a book about Ireland as it is about Ulysses, it follows the critical, institutional, and popular reception/consumption of the work through the different phases of Irish history.

The centenary also sees the publication of One Hundred Years of James Joyce’s Ulysses, edited by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín. This work is lavishly illustrated and coincides with an exhibition by the Morgan Library and Museum in New York. It focuses on the circumstances of the book’s writing, the different forms of its publication, the censorship trials, and the manuscript legacy in various library collections.

Frank Moorhouse, one of Australia’s most prolific and loved authors, essayists, and public intellectuals, died aged eighty-three on 26 June. Moorhouse left a legacy of eighteen fiction and non-fiction books, a series of screenplays, and countless essays. He was also a tireless activist on a range of fronts, including opposing censorship and promoting copyright law reform.

Moorhouse was born in Nowra in 1938 to a middle-class family. He was the youngest of three brothers spaced five years apart. Moorhouse’s parents were a strong influence on their son and prominent in community organisations, including the Country Women’s Association and Rotary.

A lesser writer than Jon Faine would have found many more cheap laughs in this extraordinary story. One of the two central characters, Paul Alexander McPherson Anderson, was better known as The Mighty Apollo. In what feels like a bygone age, he was the proprietor of The Mighty Apollo Martial Arts centre in West Melbourne. He lived there in spartan quarters, above a panel beater.

His modest circumstances did not imply much modesty of spirit. Paul, ‘Australia’s indestructible man of steel’, was a tireless self-promoter. He performed endless improbable feats such as being stood on by an elephant, being run over by vehicles while lying on a bed of nails, and pulling trams and buses with a bit between his teeth. This last achievement beggars the imagination, especially since, on at least one occasion, he had to repeat the effort for the sake of the newsreel cameras. In between times, Apollo was an oracle with much to say about God and everything else. Yet his communication with his three sons was not so sure.

It does not seem to me, Austerlitz added, that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more
and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces interlocking according to the rules of a higher form of
stereometry, between which the living and the dead can
move back and forth as they like.

W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz (2001)

1.

The library is comprised of every book that does and could exist. Every possible combination of characters has been written and bound and placed in the library, which is also the universe. ‘The certitude that everything has been written [even] the minutely detailed history of the future […] turns us into phantoms.’¹

Somewhere in the library is a description of the sound my grandfather made when he fell face first onto the carpet, dying instantly. When my Buba came in to investigate the noise her first thought was, Shit – I just got the carpet cleaned. 

At least, that’s how she tells it later.

Of the major Anglo-American poets of the previous century, none was more transformed, at least on the surface, by the journey across the Atlantic than Thom Gunn (1929–2004). Travelling in the opposite direction, T.S. Eliot found echoes of his mid-Western emotional repression and discreet anti-Semitism in the England of his era, while W.H. Auden, who carried his world with him, was only mildly affected by his time in America.

‘Every sacred language,’ writes Octavio Paz, ‘is secret. And conversely: every secret language … borders on the sacred.’ In the liminal Pyre, poet Maureen Alsop traverses – and erodes – this secret/sacred border, which is also the border of life and death, ‘the valley between our language’ (‘North Channel’). Each of the book’s section titles is a variation on ‘Selenomancy’, defined on the contents page as ‘a divination by the observation of the phases and appearances of the moon’. That Alsop titles multiple poems ‘Sky An Oar’, moreover, betrays the purpose of these divinations: to reach the other side, the ‘village across the waters’ that ‘burned all night’ (‘Witness’). The collection’s challenge, which it mostly meets successfully, is to remain on the compelling side of hermeticism.

There’s an old Irish saying: ‘If you want praise, die. If you want blame, marry.’ I could add from personal experience, ‘If you really want blame, edit a poetry anthology.’ While poetry is relatively popular, it often seems that more people write it than read it. As a result, poets can be desperate for affirmation and recognition, managing their careers more jealously than investment bankers. What too often gets lost in all the log-rolling and back-scratching is the poetry. We turn to anthologies for help, hoping to find in small, palatable doses good poets we can choose to read in depth. We find anthologies representing nations or geographical regions, literary periods, ethnicities, genders and sexual orientations, forms, categories like postmodernism, post-colonialism, eco-poetry, and themes like love or madness.

The title of Marion May Campbell’s third poetry collection, languish, conjures ideas of laziness, daydream, failure to make progress, ennui, lack of enthusiasm, anhedonia. Campbell’s poetry is concerned with the excitement of language, but also its debasement. Several reviewers have commented on the work’s intertextuality (Campbell often employs compositional strategies such as parody, allusion, calque). Always the audience or reader is integral to shaping the text. For Campbell, importantly, the unsaid or unquestioned are as important as collaged lyric or contemporary language trace, as seen in these lines from the first poem in the collection, ‘speechless’:

the big print men shimmer in as
the luxury of our exquisite unsaid

develops over centuries from the filigree
we grope in the anticipatory susurration

fricatives sizzle somewhere for us
plosives plonk & roll like whiskered seals

amused in reef pools & listen as
the nasals find their flutes

we trust in our long withheld power
verbs that’ll paint us in

Hazel Smith’s ecliptical features an image of a Sieglinde Karl-Spence work of art, ‘Becoming’, a pair of ‘winged feet woven with allocasuarina needles’. It is a striking image, evocative of Mercury, with one foot resting on the other, as if the right foot’s instep is itchy. The idea of ‘itchy feet’ is something that ties ecliptical to Alison Flett’s Where We Are. Flett and Smith are both migrants to Australia; their poetry is sensitive to its site of writing, and to international and interpersonal connections.

Hazel Smith is relentlessly experimental: no two poems seem alike in form. Her poetic range is impressive, too; she works along a spectrum from expansive, prose-poetic writing to highly compressed and disjunctive poems. This means that ecliptical, in spite of its experimentation, is not always difficult to read. ‘The Lips are Different’ writes of Suaad Hagi Mohamud, a Somali-Canadian woman denied re-entry to her home on the grounds that she didn’t match her passport photograph – according to officials, ‘the lips are different’. This poem eschews complex image-making in favour of plain speaking and exposing privilege: for white travellers, ‘they are happy to believe that you are / who you say you are’. Just as the poem moves from lips to voice, noting that Mohamud’s voice wasn’t heard, Smith pauses: ‘let me be clear / it’s unwanted ventriloquism / for me to speak for her’. As activist writing, Smith’s political poems are carefully considered.

In 1908, on 11 September (an ominous day for the changing nature of planes in our dreams), Franz Kafka and Max Brod travelled to Brescia in Italy to watch Louis Blériot fly a plane. For Kafka, and probably most in the crowd, this was the first opportunity to witness a human crawl into a machine and, like something out of Greek Myth, fly towards the Mediterranean sun. Kafka and Brod decided to record their observations. Brod saw the pilot draw inspiration from the adoring crowd. Blériot ‘was being lifted on high by the mounting murmur of the thousands’. Kafka, sensing the crowd’s devoted gaze, had a different impression, ‘twenty meters above the earth a person is trapped in a wooden construction, fighting a voluntary and invisible danger. And we are down here, crowded and insubstantial, watching.’

The ongoing war in Ukraine is not mentioned in Oliver Bullough’s new book, Butler to the World. That is not unexpected: it went to press before Russia invaded Ukraine. But Vladimir Putin’s illegal and reprehensible invasion looms large over this excellent new book about Britain’s role in enabling financial crime. The invasion is an acute example of the real-world consequences of this industry.

Thus, on 9 April 2022, Bullough wrote in a column for the Guardian: ‘the Kremlin is solely to blame for the horror it is inflicting on the Ukrainians, but its ability to wage war derives from the wealth it has accumulated. And that is something we share responsibility for, and something we should address as urgently as we are providing Kyiv with missiles to destroy Russian armoured vehicles.’

In his concession speech on election night, after a perfunctory Acknowledgment of Country and a fulsome acknowledgment of Australia’s defence personnel, past and present; after hymning our ‘functioning’ democracy with reference to Ukraine,  and intimating that without him we imperil ourselves; after mentioning the ‘great upheaval’ of recent years but failing to use the words pandemic, floods, lockdown, bushfire, or climate change; and after reassuring us that he still believes in miracles, outgoing Prime Minister Scott Morrison declared that ‘the one thing’ he had ‘always counted on’ was ‘the strength and resilience and character of the Australian people’.

– that’s Ganesh to you – is pictured                        
with a broken tusk: why?

The tale was added
late on
to the Mahabharata.

Vyasa, author
requiring a scribe
asked that noble child with an elephant’s head.

Only, replied the god,
if once begun we do not cease …
my pen mustn’t rise from the page.

So the poem became
difficult: Vyasa improvised                     
knotty passages

Pillaiyar had to pause and parse
– while he, Vyasa, also took
a breath.
                                    When the pen broke

Vyasa, as promised, kept unrolling
that wonderfully embroidered carpet of verse ...
The elephant-god had no choice.

He snapped off his tusk,
dipped the end in ink and wrote with that.
Since then, all writing, everywhere, has this character.

It can’t decide whether to speed up or slow down. It wants you
to understand. Then it plays hide and seek. There are two people here,
even before you arrive – playing tug-of-war.

Impulse and form. Breath and language.
And since the pen is a torn-out tooth
red between the lines
                                                                        you’ll taste blood

This is the third book dedicated to the koala that I have reviewed in ABR in the past fourteen years. That level of attention says much about the place we hold in our hearts for this endearing marsupial. It also relates to the fascinating natural and social history of the koala, along with the wildlife management conundrums it throws up. The koala is probably the most widely recognised of Australia’s animal species. It is also probably the most studied of our roughly 380 mammalian species, so there is a strong knowledge foundation around which to build a good story.

The first two books I reviewed – by Stephen Jackson (2007) and Ann Moyal (2008) – are fine works that thoroughly cover the natural and social history of the koala as it was then understood. However, they are rather academic in their approach and thus narrow in their appeal. By contrast, Danielle Clode takes a more relaxed and engaging approach, deftly maintaining scientific accuracy and credibility as she brings us up to date with the rapidly expanding scientific literature. She ranges widely across koala ecology, evolution, anatomy, physiology, reproduction, diseases, and conservation. Further, she doesn’t hesitate to take the reader on side excursions into related topics such as the fossil history of marsupials, Holocene environmental fluctuations, the evolution of eucalypts, and Aboriginal prehistory. Do not be put off if this subject matter sounds technical – Clode is a master at popularising science and making the complex understandable.

Michael Winkler lives in Melbourne. His most recent book is Grimmish (Puncher & Wattmann), which was shortlisted for the 2022 Miles Franklin Literary Award. He was the winner of the 2016 Calibre Essay Prize for his essay ‘The Great Red Whale’.

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

My sister died seventeen years ago and there aren’t many days I don’t miss her. I’d like us to be walking together beside the Murray River near our place in Merbein, hearing her laugh, and being renewed by the sunshine through the river red gums.

What’s your idea of hell?

Being trapped. Physically, mentally, emotionally, financially, morally.

What do you consider the most specious virtue?

Temperance.

Georgie heads towards a bench in the shade. No prams or bags or snack boxes on it. No other parents looking for playground chitchat. Max scuffs along a few metres behind her. He’s waving a stick like a metal detector and mumbles to himself. Georgie sits down and waves for him to hurry up. She should’ve shelved it by now. You can’t hurry Max. He’s always walked to the beat of his own drum. At his own pace. He stops for a moment to look at the sky and holds two hands up around his eyes like binoculars. He’s looking, maybe at something, maybe at nothing.

Georgie whistles. He takes his hands down and comes over to her, sitting on the bench and pulling off his sandals.

‘Not so fast, mister!’ She grabs an arm before he slips away. ‘Sun cream.’

‘Okay.’ He holds his hands out for a squirt and gets to work on arms and legs while she deals with his neck and face. He’s still going when she is done, rubbing in any leftover cream. More thorough than she is, these days.

‘Now can I go?’

‘Yes!’ Georgie leans her cheek out for a kiss and grabs him into a cuddle at the same time. He’s soft and if she catches the right place on his head, she swears it still smells like a baby.

They both have pale skin and freckles and no business being in the midday sun, so their park visits are usually in the early morning or late afternoon. Fine by Georgie. It’s just babies and toddlers at that time and tired parents who need to get out of the house. The kids toddle around Max but don’t demand anything of him. They take a bucket or spade occasionally. The parents bend down and ask if it’s okay and he nods. He’s always been a generous kid. Sharing has never been the issue.

Max crouches over the sand with his legs spread wide. Georgie stands up, ready to take him to the toilet block. He’s never done a wee in the sandpit before. But he bends down lower and sand is suddenly flying out from between his legs.

‘Are you digging up a bone, Maxie?’ Georgie sits back down.

‘Arf. Arf.’ He keeps digging.

‘Found anything yet?’

‘Roooow.’ He walks over to her on all fours with a sad dog face. Georgie leans in and gives him a scratch behind the ears. One of the mums looks over at them from the swings.

‘Probably no bones here, Maxxie. How about we build tunnels and castles instead?’

‘Woof.’ He shakes his bum in lieu of having a tail to wag. They play this doggy game at home. Sometimes, she even gets down with him and they roll around on the floor with tickles and Max’s gulped giggles. It started as a distraction from his screaming. When he didn’t get something, he would scream and hit. She spoke to him about using his words, but that didn’t resonate. One day, he screamed in her face and she barked at him. He stopped and laughed and started barking too. Then when he got angry, instead of yelling he would bark. She would try not to smile when he stood there with his arms crossed and brows ridged, barking like a dog. It got it out of his system. He’d turn from an angry pup back into her little boy, and she’d go from growly top dog back to his loving Mamma. He’d come for a cuddle and they’d snuggle on the couch. She’d pet him. A little scratch behind the ear. A pat along the back. And he’d fetch something, a book to read or toy.

‘Okay. Enough of the playful puppy game. That’s one for at home.’ Georgie leans down to Max and brushes some hair out of his eyes. There are a few more families in the playground now. Some of them with older children. Max leans back on his haunches ready to howl. ‘How about a cheese stick.’ Georgie quickly finds one in the snack bag and holds it out like a treat for a good boy. She pats the seat next to her and he sits down and grabs the snack.

‘Yummmm.’

Georgie scruffles his hair. ‘I think you’re really a mouse. All the cheese you eat.’

‘Squeak,’ Max answers. He swings his legs and takes a sip from his drink bottle.

Her beautiful boy. Sometimes, Georgie looks at him and thinks that her heart is going to burst. At pick up time, everyone stands around, waiting like a crowd at the airport. She’s not good at school gate small talk, so she is always a little off to the side. They’re all there, parents, dogs, younger siblings, grandparents, and nannies, stretching a neck to see if their child is coming. She can’t see him. And then he’s there and her heart bursts. He’s carried by the crowd and jostled towards her by the bodies on either side of him. He’s made smaller by a big bag and long shorts, but he’s there.

Max holds his hand out for more cheese.

‘No, mister. Have a bit of a play. We can have more later.’

His hand is still out. She tickles it and nods to the sandpit. Max gets down in the sandpit. Georgie packs his drink bottle back in her bag and fishes around for her phone. Max is at her feet on all fours again.

‘Woooof. Woof. Woof.’ He has his angry face on. Georgie giggles and looks back at her phone. He barks again. She looks around the playground. A few of the kids are watching.

‘Come on Maxxie. Let’s leave it for now.’

He sits on his haunches and holds his hands out. ‘Roooow. Rooow.’ His pleading puppy is perfect. His eyes are big, head cocked to the side, whine drawn out long and loud. Two kids walk over. They’re bigger than Max. Older. Probably brother and sister. They have the same thick dark hair and long faces.

‘Okay. Maybe some crackers.’ Georgie gets the snack box out of her bag but is too late.

‘Here, boy.’ The girl smiles at her brother who whistles and holds his hand out. Max turns around and pants with a tongue hanging out. He’s smiling and goes towards them. There’s usually a rush of relief when Max finds other kids to play with. He’s not generally part of the pack. Georgie sometimes worries that this precious child of hers isn’t a great fit with the modern world. He has a big heart and a wild imagination. He’s sensitive and dreamy and a total original. Kids sniff that and try to snuff it out. He’s told her that he sometimes spends lunch in the library. She hopes it’s because of his love of books rather than any lack of friends.

Georgie doesn’t like the girl’s tone. She sits forward. Alert. Ready. She can’t control what happens in the school playground or the classroom. But every other moment, outside those gates, she can be his mother.

Max follows the kids out of the sandpit on all fours.

‘What’s your name?’ The girl squats down next to him and strokes his head.

‘Max.’

‘He’s even got a dog’s name,’ the boy says. The two kids giggle and Max joins them. Georgie is ready to pounce.

‘Want to play with us?’

‘Yeah!’ Max jumps up and follows them as they run off towards the slide. They climb up the side, then take the stairs, then swing themselves up along railings before sliding down every time. They chase round and round and after each other in circles. The sister throws herself down the slide, head-first on her tummy, then head-first on her back. Max hovers at the top of the slide. He lies down head-first and then gets back into a normal position and pushes himself down. His shorts slow him to a stop and the other two pile up behind him. The brother pushes Max’s back with his feet. They all get moving again and end up in a tangled heap at the bottom of the slide. Georgie stands up to see. There aren’t any tears, just Max is rolling around and laughing. She sits back down again but still leans forward to see them past the bushes. They come back to the sandpit but settle in at the far end from Georgie.

‘I’m just getting my things.’ Max is breathless.

‘You’ve made some new friends?’ Georgie puts his hat on and offers him a sip of water. He takes a quick gulp and nods. Then he runs back to them with his sand toys. The sister takes the bucket. The brother gets the spade and Max is left digging with a plastic crab. They build castles and knock them down, then run around the playground marking their territory.

Max will sleep well tonight. On the weekends, Georgie has to plot in enough activities to tire Max out. It’s different with an only child. They won’t just run around a garden on their own. Or the park. Well, Max won’t. So, she makes sure they go to the pool or get on their bikes or scooter up to the shops to drop off their library books. She thought clock-watching was something only mothers with babies did but here she is having a quick look at the time and hoping this might last for another forty minutes.

Mornings are what Georgie likes best. Max crawls into her bed with three soft toys. He lifts her arm to position himself just right. They often fall back to sleep, tucked tightly into each other. She gives him warmth and comfort and security and surely that goes some way to balance what she can’t give him. On bad days, when other people make themselves feel worse by thinking about what they haven’t done with their life or how ugly and unlovable they are, Georgie thinks about Max growing up. She thinks about lengthening limbs and a deepening voice. Her beautiful boy is replaced by an unrecognisable man, one who leans away from her hugs and kisses and doesn’t need a soft pat to fall asleep. She has nightmares about this stranger in her house, this man-son. And when she wakes from them, she feels dirty and distressed.

Every few minutes, Georgie looks up. The kids never settle for long and there are five of them now. Two preschool girls have joined them. They run a few metres behind but catch up eventually and no one seems to care too much. They’re back at the slide where a few toddlers climb the steps carefully and hold up the line. The oldest girl pushes forward. Somebody falls over and one of the toddlers starts to cry. By the time the parent arrives, the big kids are long gone.

It’s getting hotter now and the bench is losing its shade, so Georgie moves along. She scans the playground perimeter but can’t see Max. She stands up. Dread spreads through her. She’s suddenly cold. Max gone. On her watch. All her vigilance. All these years. All the precautions she’s taken, the way she’s lived with her body as a shield for him, all the decisions she’s taken on his behalf in the name of protection, all of that and he disappears while playing in a park. She grabs her bag. Panic and tears combine as she calls his name.

‘Max!’ She scans and stops. He’s crouched low behind a bush. He has a finger up to his lips and Georgie sees the oldest boy leaning into a tree and counting with his eyes closed. It’s gone. In the same instant that her life could have been taken, it is restored. She feels silly and looks down. She doesn’t want to know if other parents are looking.

Someone else has taken her seat in the shade, so she ends up on one of the rocks. It’s not as comfortable but has a better view of the whole playground.

‘Woof! Woof!’ Max is on all fours again. He has a big puppy-dog smile and rubs against the knee of the older girl. One of the preschoolers hands over a stick. She throws and points to it.

‘Fetch. Go on. Fetch.’

‘Fetch!’ the boy says.

‘Fetch it. Fetch it.’  The girl starts a chorus and the preschoolers join in. Max happily crawls after it and comes back with the stick in his hand. He drops it at the feet of the older girl.

‘Good dog,’ she says. The older boy comes back with a packet of crackers. He holds it out to her sister. She takes one and pushes it in the direction of the preschoolers. They take one each. Max stands up too.

‘You have to beg for it,’ the girl says. Max gets back down and kneels with his hands held out in front of him. ‘No, like a dog. Paws.’ She holds her hands up curled like two paws. Max copies and tilts his head to the side.

‘Roooow,’ he says.

‘Good doggie.’ The girl gets down and scratches around his ears then holds the packet out to him.

Georgie is gripping the edge of the rock. She’s about to go over but the kids are all standing again and Max is laughing and eating snacks with them, so she stays where she is. The girl disappears and comes back with a sarong. Georgie can’t hear them but Max is back on the ground. The preschoolers laugh
while the older girl tucks the sarong into Max’s T-shirt. It’s rolled like a leash and she gives him a bit of a push to get him
moving.

‘Enough!’ Georgie shouts it over the playground. She marches over to them. ‘We’re going. Max.’

Max stays where he is. Georgie pulls the sarong out from his T-shirt. ‘It’s time to go.’

‘We were just playing.’ The girl’s shifted stance is concave and full of attitude. Georgie throws the sarong at her and holds a hand out.

‘Now. Max, come now. We’re going.’

‘I want to stay.’

Georgie bends down to pull him up. She can’t. He’s made himself heavy like a toddler. She used to grab for him, to pick him up mid-tantrum. But she couldn’t. He’d be loose-limbed and impossible to lift.

‘I’m playing with my friends.’

Georgie crouches down and takes a deep breath. She and Max are eye-to-eye. ‘Come on. Time to go.’ He doesn’t move. The other kids stand above her in a line. The oldest girl is right by Max. Her brother is next to her. The little ones fall in on the left. Georgie is in their shadow. She looks at her little boy. ‘Come on.’

‘Stay Max,’ the girl says. She rests her hand on his head and he leans in to her leg.

‘Let’s go. Now.’ Georgie holds a hand out.

Max springs forward and snarls at her. His canines look more like fangs and Georgie falls back in the sand. The kids laugh and she hears Max’s gulped giggle, louder than all of them.

In the stillness, after the fireworks, I stood for a while at the window. The bay below was crammed with the pretty lights of marine craft and it looked as though you could step from one boat to another, all the way across the harbour.

‘Why don’t I do that?’ I thought, and stayed there for some time, plotting my passage across the decks and bows.

The next day was New Year’s Day and I waited until quite late before taking the three kids down to a sheltered harbour beach. There was my son – Cosmo, aged eleven – and his cousins Ed, ten, and Elmo, nine. I watched as they swam, clambered over the rocks at one end and then the other, and marked out an imaginary ball game in the sand, miming moves and even arguing over the pretend rules and the pretend score. I had a headache and sat in the shade behind sunglasses watching a large white boat, just offshore, caught by a stubborn anchor. It throttled back and forth, motoring in circles. When the skipper left the cabin to peer over the side, the boat drifted towards the beach. He hurried back and the engine gurgled to life, but the boat floundered in circles again.

A man towelling himself off after his swim tried to strike up a conversation with me. Perhaps he thought I was alone. He reminded me that the beach is called Shark Beach – a name no one likes to use. A net strung from wooden pylons encloses the swimming area.

The kids don’t see their luck yet, spending summers like this. They don’t see privilege or ponder reasons. Maybe Ed, the older cousin does. I overheard him asking his father to explain the share market, and last night, with some solemnity, he asked me why time slows down when you travel into space and whether, if you went far enough and fast enough, it would be possible to go back in time. I’ve been pondering this myself ever since.

I was thinking about it again while watching their imaginary ball game and missed the moment when the snagged boat cut loose its anchor. I looked up as it motored off, a clump of seaweed swinging from the chain on the bow. It pulsed over the wake of another boat and evaporated in the setting sun.

I’m hoping the cousins will come to stay for a few days like this every school holidays, if I can work it out with their father and grandmother. I send a text a few weeks before the end of each school term: ‘Are the kids coming up?’

I know it’s not my problem and I shouldn’t take it on like a cause, but when they were smaller and I watched my son wrestle with them like cubs, I imagined all three were mine and felt a primal urge to protect them, even before anything happened.

Elmo bumped his head yesterday. Crumpling in tears, he ran to be comforted. I was just out of the shower and he pressed his face into the towel around me and I held him, standing awkwardly in the hall. I was about to say, ‘There, there, you’ll be okay,’ and pull away, but thought I’d just hold him until he let go by himself. But he didn’t let go.

‘Have a lie down on my bed,’ I said, so I could at least get dressed. Then I stroked his hair and patted his back until his tears dried and he got up and went to play with his brother and cousin again.

The older brother, Ed, lost a wiggly tooth on his first night here. He’s probably too old to believe in the tooth fairy, given he can grasp the theory of relativity, but I washed it and put it in a dish beside the bed and swapped it for a coin as he slept. I can never quite bring myself to throw away baby teeth so I put it in a little zip-lock bag – the tiny ones that drug dealers use. Not that I know any drug dealers. They say cocaine flows in the sewers around here. It makes a good story, but it’s not the only story. Some of us just don’t like to be too far from the sea.

I forgot about the tooth in the zip-lock bag and opened my desk drawer in front of Ed the next day and he saw it. He said nothing. There was no accusation, no ‘you told me the tooth fairy took it’. At what age do children start protecting adults? Even lying for them?

The boys don’t mention their mother. No one does, and it would be selfish of me to remind them just so I could comfort them.

‘Why don’t I do that?’  That’s what I thought when I heard. Not the first thought. First there was No. Followed by How – not how did she do it, but how could she. Now there is just Why. A question I don’t like to get too close to for fear of finding the answer.

I first met her when she was pregnant with Ed. She was very beautiful, prettily tattooed, enigmatic. She still looked like a child herself. I was a new mother and out of my depth, clutching my baby, frozen with anxiety. She spoke very little, so I asked all the questions in an incessant, insecure prattle.

When she moved back to the country, taking the kids with her, I didn’t ask or get involved. I tried not to speculate or gossip about the break up. Even her own mother refused to take sides: ‘There’s his story, her story and the truth,’ she said, with that country pragmatism. It can be refreshing when no one else is talking and questions hang in the air like a fog.

I called whenever we were passing through so that Cosmo could see his cousins. I have a photo of the last time. We met in the Memorial Gardens on a winter’s day. She was dressed in a long tweed coat with a black scarf, jeans and Converse sneakers, a vintage hand-tooled leather bag over her shoulder.

There was no clue.

The boys stayed for three days and on the last night it was stiflingly hot, so after dinner we went down to the harbour again to sit by the water. It was getting dark already, but they waded in the shallows and fenced on the sand with their toy lightsabers. They wanted to swim out to the pontoon but I said no. Cosmo says I take the fun out of everything, but I know they can’t resist a challenge and would dare each other to swim under it or dive down until they touched the slimy mud on the harbour floor – the same things I did at their age. I let them walk around the boardwalk instead. The tide was low, leaving a long drop to the harbour. Christmas king tides. There’s a railing on the harbour side, but not the pool side and I worried about Elmo – still not convinced he can swim properly. When I’d mentioned this to his father he looked bewildered. ‘Right,’ he said, considering the implications, like it was all a bit overwhelming for him, which it probably was.

Cosmo’s lightsaber flashed on and off as he swung it around. When I couldn’t see them on the far side of the boardwalk, I could still track the red light flashing occasionally. Their three black shadows disappeared, then reappeared as a Manly ferry, that hardy maritime vessel, passed in the distance behind them, framing their silhouettes in the blocks of gold light from its warm interior. They slowly made their way the length of the horseshoe boardwalk. When they got to the ramp on the sand at the other end, Elmo ran, shouting, ‘I dropped my lightsaber!’

Elmo’s lightsaber was blue and didn’t light up like Cosmo’s. Its telescopic plastic tubes collapsed into a hollow handle and I imagined it had sunk straight to the bottom.

‘Did you drop it in the pool, or outside, in the harbour?’ I asked.

‘Outside!’ he said, his voice a husky baby-animal growl.

‘Mum gave it to him,’ said Ed.

We walked across the beach back to the boardwalk. The sand was soft and starting to cool, the boards on the deck felt dry under foot and worn smooth.

‘There it is,’ said Cosmo, racing ahead.

The four of us leant over the railing to see the toy, a plastic crucifix floating majestically, shimmying and swaying on the rippled mirror, halfway between us and a clinking moored yacht.

I considered swimming out to get it, but the spectre of the man with the towel whispered ‘Shark Beach, Shark Beach’. I looked for an oar or for some movement, someone out there on the water to help. Up on the sand, under the Moreton Bay figs, there were a dozen dinghies and kayaks, all padlocked to the fence or to each other. Useless.

We watched the toy drift further away and I told Elmo we’d come back and look for it in the morning. I explained there was a chance it would wash up on shore, if the tide came in and the southerly held off. It sounded like a hollow promise and I don’t think he believed me. But he accepted it like he was used to hollow promises, to being kept in the dark.

By dawn the next day, there’d been no change in the weather, not even a breeze, so I was hopeful. It was worth looking, at least. But first I had to pick up the boys’ grandmother from the station. I left them sleeping, flung across the sheets. She’d spent all night on the train to come and take them home. I lifted her small suitcase into the boot and we drove back through the still, almost deserted streets. It would have been a good time to ask her how she was, but I made small talk instead. I’d written to her when it happened but she’d never mentioned my letter. Only immediate family were allowed at the funeral. Her daughter’s friends had to pay their respects in a separate gathering in the park. If she’d died any other way it would have been a public tragedy, not a private one.

The boys greeted their grandmother with hugs. I turned the portable fan up high, plumped the pillows on the couch and made her a cup of tea, then said to Elmo, ‘Shall we go see if we can find your lightsaber?’

The sun was high now. It was searingly hot and the beach was crowded. We walked the length of the boardwalk and scoured the water’s edge back on shore. Elmo’s small feet stamped perfect footprints into the sand ahead. When he stopped to look back and make sure I was still there, I glimpsed his mother’s face under the peak of his cap, with its splash of freckles and thick black eyelashes.

We walked all the way to where the sand ended in oyster-covered rocks at the foot of the sea wall, and searched the crevices and shallows until the beating sun wore us down and it was hard to find an excuse to continue. I’d kept my promise to him, and I could see he’d accepted his loss, so we made our way back.

As soon as we stopped looking it appeared. We were climbing the concrete stairs to the carpark. I glanced to the right and there it was, lying on the grass, found and then discarded by another child.

‘Elmo,’ I said, ‘Is that it?’

His eyes widened. I hardly believed it myself. Only the tide can bring things back.

It was clogged with sand and grit but once we were back home I flushed it under the tap in the bath, as if it were Excalibur and the Lady of the Lake had risen in a halo of phosphorescence from the dark harbour to return it. When the moving parts worked again, I collapsed it down and packed it into his suitcase.

In the lounge room, I heard Ed asking his grandmother the same question he’d asked me about space travel and whether you could go back in time.

‘Well it’s natural to wonder about these things,’ she said, ‘But even if you could go back, I don’t know if you could change anything.’

It was just Cosmo and I again that evening and it was quiet. When he’d gone to sleep I turned off the lights in the lounge room and stood at the window. The boats had all gone from the bay. There was no twinkling raft left to cross.

A video in the museum foyer chronicles the dismantling of a rotting whale that had beached itself on a nearby coast. The machinery hauling away its distended remains and the workers standing knee-deep in the guts of the creature arrest my attention; for the longest time I thought the death of a whale one of the saddest things imaginable. My teacher, Mr Maurice, schooled me otherwise. What’s worse than death is death without purpose.

Most whales don’t die on sand but in open water. As the carcass descends, sharks savage its soft hide and spill a fecund chaos that will nourish sea creatures for a century. This harassment was Mr Maurice’s lesson. For months the mobile scavengers gorge themselves on this flesh with the relish of a child who has happened upon a forbidden idea, thinking themselves the first in history to have encountered such an abundant resource, even countenancing the possibility that this might see them right for life (the shark) or make the older boys laugh (me), neither of us realising that as we tear chunks from the descending whale we send tiny, scuffed, and unhonoured remnants travelling ever upward, nourishing strata we will never meet – plankton and other forms of ocean lint – while the slurry of nutrients cascading towards the ocean floor equally invites creatures to burrow into whale marrow and flesh, and, we’re not done yet, grinned Mr Maurice, at the same time bacteria feast on the viscera and in turn vomit up hundreds of years of dinner for clams and snails, the meals kept refrigerated by the plummeting temperatures – like the Titanic, those that fall into deep waters are doomed to preservation, he said – and so as generations of land-dwellers rise and crumble, this single whale slowly passes through the ocean’s twilit realms towards the midnight zones, where frankly obscene bottom-feeders who have never seen light will still suck sustenance from the sinking hulk; it justifies a death.