Carmen Callil (1938–2022)

Australia has produced (or welcomed) some fine publishers, but none was more influential on the world stage than Carmen Callil, who has died in London at the age of eighty-four.

Callil, like so many before her, sailed to London as soon as she could escape Melbourne. She was twenty-one – ‘a dumpy little thing with a colonial accent and an inferiority complex … convinced I could do anything’.  And anything she emphatically did. When she was our Open Page subject in August 2018, Advances liked the story about Callil’s advertising in the London Times: ‘Australian BA, typing: wants job in publishing.’ Three offers came her way; she accepted the one at Hutchinson’s. (Those were the days.) Callil worked first as a publicist (a book called A Female Eunuch was one of her early campaigns), then as an editor. She founded Virago Press in 1972 and was managing editor of Chatto & Windus from 1982 to 1994.

She published everyone – Angela Carter, Margaret Atwood, Pat Barker, Iris Murdoch, David Malouf among them – and helped to revive interest in the likes of Rebecca West and Christina Stead. In later years she wrote journalism and judged prizes, not always peaceably (she spat the dummy when the Man Booker International Prize went to Philip Roth). Her own books included Bad Faith: A forgotten history of family and fatherland (2006) and Oh Happy Day: Those times and these times which Brenda Niall reviewed in our November 2020 issue.

In the many fond tributes, Callil has been described as ‘one of the world’s quarrellers’. Her temper was legendary, though some of the anecdotes have an apocryphal, even self-mythological overtone, like the one about the time she sacked a secretary and called the police to have her removed from the building tout de suite.

Interestingly, Carmen Callil accepted a damehood in 2017. Few knock them back in Britain: not even rock stars or feminist publishers with an Australian BA.

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Sticking with Mel Brooks

Dear Editor,

Don Anderson’s review of Howard Jacobson’s memoir, Mother’s Boy, had some very funny lines (t/rope!), and I’m all for a final flourish, but it is unclear what the last sentence is implying (ABR, July 2022). Is it a joke insinuating that Jews are over-sensitive about anti-Semitism? That Jews are allowed to be over-sensitive if they are witty and artful in their paranoia? That Jacobson construed any disagreement with him during his time at the University of Sydney as anti-Semitism? That they are too many Jews in academia? Or that academics hate Jews?

I’ll stick with Mel Brooks for my Jewish jokes.

Gabriella Edelstein (online comment)

'If we take it for granted that John Macarthur was a bad man,’ writes Alan Atkinson, ‘then all the surviving evidence takes on a colouring to match. If we think that, then every word he wrote is suspect. On the other hand, leave the question of character open and the evidence takes on a new richness altogether – a deeper and more complex humanity. That is what I aim to do in this book.’

It is a bold undertaking in the present age, which seems reluctant to approach too near the flawed complexity of our colonial antecedents, acknowledge grandeur of design alongside selfishness of outlook, or understand the conviction of right among those we have convicted of wrong. It is a particularly bold undertaking in the case of John Macarthur (1767–1834), whose character seems fixed in popular understanding as a villain of the deepest dye. He has been the man we love to hate for so long that it seems impossible that there should be another side to the story. Restive, touchy, and imperious, he has figured as a profiteer, plutocrat, and thorn in the side of successive governors. Where trouble brewed, Macarthur was always there. In his own day, he sparked resentment and reproof. In the historiography of the past half-century, informed by labour, feminist, and settler-colonial critiques, his personal shortcomings are exacerbated by what he represents. As Australia’s earliest and most successful capitalist, and one of the most extensive landholders of the early nineteenth century, he profited from and was inescapably complicit in the violent dispossession and genocide that made that land available. Since his reputation for founding the wool industry is said to have rested upon the unacknowledged industry and influence of his wife Elizabeth (1766–1850), he is also the object of feminist scorn.

Without disputing their moral force, Atkinson asks us to set such familiar critiques to one side and see the Macarthurs afresh: to understand rather than judge, and where understanding seems impossible, at least to listen. He points out that most of the charges against Macarthur rest on thin documentary evidence, depending instead on myth and popular narrative. He promises to ‘take everything back to the beginning, so as to start inquiry afresh’. His raw materials are drawn chiefly from the startlingly rich archive generated by the Macarthurs themselves. Under his guidance, we ‘wander’ in the ‘great forest of voices’ they created and preserved. It is an archive with which Atkinson is uniquely familiar, for he has returned to it again and again through fifty years of history-making.  On the strength of this unrivalled authority, he sets out to reconsider ‘everything we think we know’ about the Macarthurs’ lives – and in so doing to reconceptualise also the ‘larger story of British occupation and settlement’ during their lifetime.

This absorbing dual biography gives us John and Elizabeth Macarthur as they saw themselves. Atkinson observes them as they defined and defended themselves, and uses their words to write a history from their point of view, a history that turns what we think we know ‘upside-down – or rather, inside-out’. At the same time, he reminds us that the very quality of self-awareness, the capacity for introspection, was ‘one of the central achievements of the European Enlightenment’. John and Elizabeth, says Atkinson, were adept in ‘self-awareness, self-assessment and self-dramatisation’, and in this they were, both of them, products of their historical moment.

There are no quick answers here, no pithy summaries of argument, no shortcuts or headlines to draw attention to the book’s multiple acts of revision. It demands an immersive reading, a slow relaxation into multiple complex stories that recede and return, shaping the contours of an unfamiliar world. From page one, Atkinson launches us upon a discursive journey, confident that readers will share his joy in uncovering the ‘life of the mind’. Following multiple entwined pathways, we explore the world of words that helped to form the thinking of both Elizabeth and John. We catch the notes of intimate familiarity, the echoes of public discourse, the persuasive influence of friends – and, as a muted backdrop, the simmering hostility of detractors.

While he acknowledges the partiality (in both senses) of his sources, Atkinson rarely allows critique or doubt to disrupt his narrative. He lures you into a world-according-to-the-Macarthurs, and encourages you to believe in it. The Macarthurs’ own truth, filtered through Atkinson’s understanding, is rarely subjected to contrasting points of view. Their (or more accurately, John’s) self-justifications ride supreme above any counter-evidence of the effects of their actions or the – sometimes outraged – responses that they elicited at the time.

Elizabeth and John: the title of this shared biography promises to give Elizabeth at least equal billing with her more celebrated husband, and Atkinson struggles conscientiously to deliver on that promise, although the gender order of the day is against him. Consistent with his method throughout, he does not do so by claiming for her a greater significance than she claimed for herself. Elizabeth’s reputation as a pioneer in the Australian wool industry rests primarily on the fact that John was absent from the colony for years at a time – years in which his flocks grew and multiplied, the quality of their fleece improved, and exports increased exponentially in value. Atkinson makes clear that John’s absence from home did not leave his acres and flocks in exclusively female hands. He reminds us that while Elizabeth’s intellect and capacity for order may have matched and even surpassed John’s, her education and ambition did not. Hers may have been the ordering mind behind the first samples of fleeces sent to England, but John’s contacts and conversations while abroad soon saw his vision expand beyond hers. Elizabeth saw the ‘natural advantages’ of soil and climate with a keener awareness than John, but it was he who ‘took their story to a larger circle’, setting the horizon ‘alight with possibilities’. John’s stories were global, Elizabeth’s were local and domestic – and in this she provided an anchor for his restless soul. Atkinson’s efforts to present her as an equal partner cannot entirely withstand the weight of a sensibility that sees her bounded by familial concerns: less cosmopolitan than her husband, less political, less educated, less familiar with double-entry bookkeeping.

Elizabeth remains, to this reader at least, a subordinate presence in the book. Is this the fault of the historian or the history? Both she and John, one can’t but feel, would be astonished to see her getting as equal a billing as she does here. To do her more justice would require the employment of a different set of scales. Perhaps it is not possible to assess the nature (let alone the equity) of a marriage partnership without taking a step back – or several steps back – from how the partners themselves understood it, so as to analyse the power dynamics in play. Atkinson chooses instead to step forward, leaning in to catch each whispered thought, to sketch the relationship from inside-out – or, since that is essentially impossible, at least from the partial perspective of a sympathetic eavesdropper.

There is a fugitive pleasure in thus being invited to sit beside the Macarthurs – to appreciate John’s quickness of perception and loftiness of purpose, and share his hopes and disappointments through twists and reversals of fortune. There is a pleasurable poignancy to wincing in sympathy at the wrenching, repeated separations that dogged their family life: husband from wife, children from mother, sister from brothers. But Atkinson hopes that his readers will not confuse understanding with endorsement, commenting at the outset that it is ‘very hard to enter thoroughly into someone else’s world view without at least seeming to take their side’. That ‘at least’ speaks volumes.

Atkinson points the path to critical scepticism, but only intermittently walks it. He writes in two registers: on the one hand extolling, in elevated prose, the romantic promise of the Enlightenment as it drove ‘technological progress, material prosperity, emotional sensibility and cultural refinement’; on the other acknowledging, in disruptive interjections, the structural inequalities of gender, class, and race on which that progress depended. While marriage was the ‘way forward’, for the young Elizabeth as for all girls, its promise was ‘deeply misleading’. While trust lay at the heart of John Macarthur’s vision for an ordered, hierarchical society, trust ‘could not exist between the officers and the suffering poor’. And in the convict settlement of New South Wales, ‘entitlement and violence had been there from the beginning. That was what invasion meant’.

If such sentences – the examples could be multiplied – seem to puncture the insular vision of the Macarthurs, the flow of narrative invariably restores it. Thus Atkinson builds a kind of doubled historical awareness: sympathy and scepticism held in imperfect balance. Critique sends a seeping chill around the edges of a narrative warmed at its heart by a firm belief in the virtues of trust, justice, affection, and improvement. Atkinson’s belief, or the Macarthurs? It is sometimes hard to tell, but the congruence of values between author and subject ensures that, in this book, sympathy will always win the day. 

This is a difficult book to read, not because of its length (nearly 500 pages without references); nor because of its density. It is because this study of prisoners of war in Europe during World War II documents suffering on an almost unimaginable scale. In this theatre of war, more than twenty million servicemen and servicewomen fell into enemy hands. Millions did not survive captivity.

Bob Moore, a well-established British historian of prisoners of war, provides an extraordinarily ambitious account of this often-neglected aspect of national histories. He covers not just the well-known elements – Allied prisoners in Germany, Axis prisoners in Allied hands, and Soviet captives on the Eastern Front – but also the experiences of the French and Belgians captured in 1940, Norwegian and Dutch soldiers who had been told by their governments to lay down their arms, troops fighting in the Balkans, Jews, non-white colonial soldiers, and women. It is a vast canvas requiring Moore to draw on a multiplicity of sources; though these are often secondary, the value of this book is that it makes them readily accessible, to monolingual readers especially.

The picture that emerges is an infinite variety of experiences that makes generalisations impossible. In Western Europe, the Geneva Convention of 1929 was generally observed by both Allied and Axis powers. This was ‘conventional captivity’, with all belligerents believing it to be to their mutual advantage to treat prisoners well while exploiting their potential as a labour force. One example of positive treatment must suffice: Germans interned in Canada were housed in some of the ‘poshest’ facilities, one camp having a forty-five-piece orchestra, two smaller orchestras, two mandolin bands, a fife and drum corps, a choir, and a miniature Bavarian village complete with waterfall.

Two millennia before ‘pretty privilege’ became a TikTok talking point, Publilius Syrus averred, ‘A beautiful face is a mute recommendation.’ The opposite is also true. Facial disfiguration, whether congenital or acquired, can be psychologically and socially debilitating.

This was the experience for thousands of men in World War I who suffered horrific facial trauma. US surgeon Fred Albee, who treated some of these soldiers, described the ‘unmitigated hell’ of going through life ‘an object of horror to himself as well as to others’. Ward Muir, an orderly at the Third London General Hospital, wrote of ‘broken gargoyles’ and the fear that he might inadvertently ‘let the poor victim perceive what I perceived: namely, that he was hideous’.

The best hope for these wretches was to receive the attention of surgeon Harold Gillies, who was born in New Zealand and educated at Cambridge. Gillies’ creativity and courage made him a leader in maxillofacial reconstruction. As with other fields of endeavour, such as aviation, materials technology, and communications, the exigencies of World War I precipitated significant leaps forward in plastic surgery. But at what staggering cost. Military technology wildly exceeded medical knowledge. In the words of one battlefield nurse, ‘The science of healing stood baffled before the science of destroying.’

Medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris has researched the wartime endeavours of the gifted Gillies, and the unconscionable human carnage he encountered daily. She notes that returned servicemen with facial trauma were regarded differently from other maimed soldiers: ‘Whereas a missing leg might elicit sympathy and respect, a damaged face often caused feelings ofrevulsion and disgust.’

'The history of the Victorian Age,’ wrote Lytton Strachey a century ago, ‘will never be written: we know too much about it.’ Instead, he continued, he would ‘row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen … to illustrate rather than to explain’ (Eminent Victorians, 1918).

How much more difficult, then, is it for a contemporary historian to master the huge resources of the information age in a feasible narrative of Australian political history from pre-European settlement to the present? The great Australian historian, the late Stuart Macintyre (to whom Frank Bongiorno’s new book is dedicated), once told me: the trick is ‘to paddle furiously, and never look down [into those submerged canyons of detail below], or you’ll never get to what you are aiming for on the distant shoreline’. Macintyre, however, garnished his considerable gift for synthesising vast tracts of reading and research with the stories of ‘characteristic specimens’ whose experience brought his histories to life.

Bongiorno has learned well from his mentor. Committed to archival research, and a voracious and retentive reader of everything else, he is a master of his material. As a prolific essayist, commentator, reviewer, and habitué of Twitter, with a large following, he has honed his capacity to escape the strictures that often hobble academic writers attempting to engage a broad audience. This is a history that will be enjoyed by the curious reader, carried by a fluent and accessible stylist able to capture the essentials of a period, while enlivening even the most familiar material with fresh vignettes, multiple voices, correspondence, and much more.

Early in their new book, Victory, Peter van Onselen and Wayne Errington pose a simple question that has haunted Labor since 2019: why couldn’t they beat the other mob? After all, their foe was an ‘incoherent’ and ‘second-rate’ government that had accelerated graft, cynicism, and factional cannibalism, and that had produced, in the end, a long list of tawdry failures. The Coalition seemed entropic.

But the chancer from the Shire won his miracle in 2019, and it profoundly shook the Labor Party. After the nausea and demoralisation came a fearful uncertainty: was their new bloke up to it? An interesting feature of Victory, one that is treated cursorily, concerns the internal unpopularity of Albanese’s leadership in 2020 and 2021, the anxiety it generated in some, and how luck (and factional calculus) played its part in his survival (for example, the retention of Eden-Monaro at a by-election might have calmed the itchier trigger fingers).

As outlined in Victory, and as I have discovered during my own conversations with Labor people over the past couple of years, there were pockets of furious disappointment with Albanese. Many associated with the party saw an impotent and inarticulate leader, one too complacent to trouble the wily Morrison. Much of this appraisal was ungenerous, but it was sincerely held: both from people’s horror at the 2019 loss, and from a genuine sense that Morrison was vandalising Australian democracy – a mini-Trump who had to be defeated.

The narrative that has since emerged in victory is that of the hare and the tortoise. It wasn’t complacency that defined Albanese, but patience. He knew that the public was exhausted by the putrid combativeness of politics, that the Morrison government was a perpetual scandal machine, and that Morrison himself, through his compulsive deceit, would inevitably and terminally expose his character to voters. In other words: hold the line, don’t panic, and let the other side destroy themselves. In Victory we learn that Albanese had a sporting metaphor for this strategy: ‘Kicking with the wind in the fourth quarter’.

The list of texts exploring ‘identity politics’ is as long as it is politically promiscuous. From the case against (Identity: The demand for dignity and the politics of resentment, 2018), by Francis Fukuyama) to the case for (literally: The Case for Identity Politics, 2020, by Christopher T. Stout), whether conservative or liberal, if there is a take on identity politics a book has been written about it. The challenge is to pin down a sense of the term on which all the authors could agree.

Popularised in 1977 by a collective of queer Black feminists and socialists, identity politics has become a keystone feature of our era’s nebulous culture wars. The phrase has occupied the minds and attention spans of academics, activists, and media pundits across the Global North for decades, scuppering the intentions of the original organisers. ‘We meant that Black women have a right to formulate our own political agendas based upon the material conditions we face as a result of race, class, gender, and sexuality,’ said Barbara Smith in 2020, co-founder of the original Collective. The concept, Smith acknowledged on Twitter, has unfortunately ‘been maligned and distorted ever since’.

As with critical race theory, cultural appropriation, and other casualties of the twenty-first century battle of narrative, it can be difficult to determine the utility of identity politics in public debate and whether the term is even worth fighting for. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, author of one of the most recent interventions in this ever-expanding discourse, seems to think it is. ‘I’m on team identity politics,’ declares the Nigerian-American philosopher at Georgetown University in interview after interview. Táíwò’s issue is not with identity politics ‘at its core’ but with how it is being used. Praxis, then, is what Táíwò’s new book seeks to correct.

American presidential elections can be frustrating for outsiders. Non-Americans can’t vote, but humanity’s future may depend upon a few votes in a handful of gerrymandered states. I spent much of 2020 driving myself to distraction over the possibility that Donald Trump might be re-elected. I had no such anxiety in 2016: in my opinion, Hillary Clinton did not deserve to win. She personified too many of the failings of what Gary Gerstle (Paul Mellon Professor of American History at the University of Cambridge) has termed the neo-liberal order. Absent Bernie Sanders, I might have voted for Trump myself, had I been a US citizen. Four years on, I believed that foreigners deserved to be able to help unseat Trump. His presidency, as Gerstle explains in his new book, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, was the product of the socioeconomic mayhem created by neo-liberalism – and evidence of its decline.

In this splendid and stimulating history of neo-liberalism’s rise and possible ‘fall’, the sharp and accurate portrayal of the 2020 contest is not the only achievement. Gerstle gives us a comprehensive study of the world order that has dominated our lives since the decline of the US version of the modern welfare state, commonly known as the New Deal state. Written with assurance and insight, the book is necessarily sweeping in its judgments, but clearly conceived. The elements of neo-liberalism, and its genesis as a political order, are expertly connected, enabling us to better appreciate our global present.

Gerstle argues that ideological systems of power work best if they attain the status of a ‘political order’: that is, when they are no longer campaign agendas or political policies, but inhabit the entire intellectual landscape, where a way of thinking about the world is accepted among the major political forces. Neo-liberalism is such a political order, he argues, and so was the New Deal version before it.

Privacy crises come in waves, usually spurred by public panics over new technologies and their exploitation by those in power. In the 1890s, it was the evils of ‘instantaneous photography and newspaper enterprise’ that pushed Harvard jurists Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis to famously advocate for a new common law (‘judge made’) right to privacy. In the mid-twentieth century, the availability of the contraceptive pill set the stage for the US Supreme Court’s declaration of a constitutional right to privacy in the (now threatened) decision of Griswold v Connecticut (1965). Similarly, fears about ‘King Kong’-sized government data centres ultimately led to the passing of the US Privacy Act 1974. In her latest book, The Fight for Privacy, Danielle Keats Citron, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, paints a vivid and compelling picture of privacy now under siege by online invaders. She argues convincingly for a new US civil right to ‘intimate privacy’, and sets out a precise and practical path towards achieving it.

A conceptual chameleon, privacy is notoriously difficult to define. Reams of paper have been used since the late nineteenth century to articulate and communicate its meaning: dignity, autonomy, property, secrecy, ‘the right to be let alone’. Citron’s definition of ‘intimate privacy’ is both encompassing and precise, descriptive and normative, identifying what we want and deserve as individuals. Intimate privacy, she writes, means the social norms – attitudes, expectations, and behaviours – that fortify the boundaries around our personal lives (bodies, minds, health, sex, sexuality, gender, and relationships). Its recognition and protection are essential to trusting and connecting with others; but also, and fundamentally – to how we see ourselves.

Citron drives this point home from the beginning of her book: invasions of intimate privacy can erode, disfigure, or obliterate our sense of self. Take Alex, a nurse, in her twenties, who discovered that her ex-partner had tweeted a video of her undressing (acquired from a ‘nanny cam’ he had hidden in her bedroom). From that moment, Alex became a naked body to future friends, colleagues, acquaintances who happened to google her. She became a video those in her inner circle would need to ‘look past’. And it had already ‘changed how she saw herself’.

The Tasmanian childhood recounted by Heather Rose sounds idyllic, to the point of being suspect, a too-perfect vision of wholesome family life. ‘We do not own a television. Books and games, music and friends, the radio and the outdoors are our entertainment,’ she writes. In this paradise of neighbourly trust, ‘no-one locks their doors. We are welcome in everyone’s houses.’ Rose remembers her mother as a domestic goddess: ‘Along with a career, four children and a husband, she bakes and cooks, sews, preserves, sings, embroiders, gardens, arranges flowers, decorates cakes, and makes kayaks and pottery’, while also contriving to be ‘slender, elegant’, and beautiful. At this point, you might wonder if the title – Nothing Bad Ever Happens Here – is not, as you first assumed, meant to be ironic. But how long can this flawless, nostalgic reverie be sustained?

The answer is, not very long. The inevitable ‘Bad Thing’ arrives when Rose’s older brother Byron drowns along with her grandfather in a boating accident near their holiday house at Saltwater River in south-east Tasmania. Byron is fifteen; Rose is twelve. This is the end of the idyllic family. It precipitates the breakdown of her parents’ marriage as well as an enduring, painful rift between Rose and her mother.

In her acclaimed novel The Museum of Modern Love (2018), Rose quotes the legendary acting teacher Stella Adler: ‘Life beats down and crushes the soul, and art reminds you that you have one.’ Byron’s death, this crushing blow delivered by fate, offers a key to the prevalence of loss and grief in Rose’s fiction.

Rose does write about her eventual discovery of art, but the book focuses heavily on the contours of her eccentric spiritual journey, first as a young woman still traumatised by loss, and later as a mother searching for meaning, apparently summoned by mystic forces beyond her conscious understanding.

As chance would have it, this review was written following the retirement, aged forty-one, of Roger Federer from top-tier competitive tennis. Federer’s decision might be regarded as tricky for Geoff Dyer, since his latest work of essayistic autofiction leans heavily on the notion that while Federer, one of the giants of the sport, is forever about to retire, he never actually does.

But pedantic attention to real-world events misses the point. Federer is richly praised in the new book’s pages (Dyer is unashamedly lyrical in his writing about tennis), yet he is mentioned only intermittently throughout, in a kind of recurring sidebar. He seems to stand as a breathing exemplar of the instinctual genius and mysterious command that belong, less visibly, to the true artist, musician, poet, or novelist.

While The Last Days of Roger Federer turns out to be a work more concerned with the ‘other endings’ of the title – the late work of artists of all kinds – they are endings which Federer, with the mute grace of the athlete, tells with his body. The years of supernatural speed, strength, and poise give way to slow diminishments and sudden ruptures, then arduous recuperation or miraculous returns to form: qualities of resilience that have kept the player going long after others have fallen aside.

It should be noted that Roger’s ever-impending retirement imposes a deadline – one more metaphysical than pecuniary or professional – on the author. Dyer wants his book about ‘things coming to an end’ and ‘time running out’ to appear before Federer’s does too. Federer’s career is, for Dyer, much as ‘time’s wing’d chariot’ was for George Herbert.

Fans of the English author may bridle at this point. Dyer is a youthful sixty-four years old – an age when many writers, unlike athletes, are still in their prime. Isn’t it premature to be writing of last things so far in advance? The author’s response is to worry not just that he has begun this book too early, in bufferish anticipation of hanging up his slippers, but that he’s started it too late. Death doesn’t telegraph its intentions. No one can be sure what their last creative gesture may be.

In the essential ambiguity of human mortality lies the crux of Dyer’s thesis. The artists he explores – Bob Dylan, Friedrich Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, jazzman Pharoah Sanders, Eve Babitz, and Beethoven – are always gesturing offstage but rarely taking a final bow. Again and again in these pages, the stage lights come back on, and one more encore is played.

Earlier this year, I took a group of students to the State Library of Victoria (SLV) to see its impressive Joyce collection. We examined some special books, including lavish editions of Ulysses: the 1935 Limited Editions Club edition, with Matisse’s accompanying etchings; the 1988 Arion Press edition, with illustrations by Robert Motherwell – and various others. But the one that had lured us down Swanston Street was the iconic first edition, with its famous blue cover, fortuitously acquired by the SLV in 1922.

The story of how James Joyce’s masterpiece was published is well known. Ulysses, the scandalous, ‘obscene’ book, was scuppered by censors even before it was launched. Some episodes from the novel had appeared in the American modernist magazine The Little Review. Copies were seized and destroyed, and the editors of the journal prosecuted for obscenity. As a result, no publisher wanted to touch the full novel. An American expatriate, Sylvia Beach, who ran Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris, came to the rescue. She offered to publish the novel for a disheartened and discouraged Joyce, and the book duly appeared in time for Joyce’s fortieth birthday in February 1922.

A facsimile of this text has now been republished by Cambridge University Press under the editorial guidance of Catherine Flynn, a Cork-born Joycean based at Berkeley, California. The first thing you notice about the Cambridge Centenary Ulysses is its heft. As with the blue-wrapped original, its dimensions are as generous as a Holy Book, and it weighs in at 3.08 kg – the weight of a healthy newborn. You definitely get a lot of book here for your buck. Yet it might seem a strange decision for Cambridge to reproduce the first edition, which is notoriously riddled with errors. Joyce rushed to meet his self-imposed birthday deadline, finishing final chapters and adding copious emendations to galleys and proofs. The printer Beach deployed, Maurice Darantiere of Dijon, was hardly ideal for a complex experimental work in English, one with thousands of literary allusions and complex verbal play, as well as multiple languages, and cultural references, including vernacular, Irish-inflected English. (Flynn and Ronan Crowley explain here in a piece on the textual genesis that within a few weeks of beginning the first edition, the print shop had exhausted its supply of the characters w, b, and y – used less frequently in French – and e.)

Oxford is not what it was once. We scholars swot too hard. Even the Bullingdon has lost its brio. It’s hardly surprising that this Age of Hooper has ushered in a cottage industry of aesthetes’ nostalgia, for many sense that the time when students could still be boys, and boys could be Sebastian Flyte, was just more fun. No reports, recorded lectures, or Research Assessment Exercises to interrupt the heady days of evensong, buggery, and cocktails (to paraphrase Maurice Bowra’s infamous utterance).

I quote Bowra not only because he was the most waspish of Oxford’s interwar dons – a man for whom no bon mot could pass unbarbed – but also because Bowra, alongside Gilbert Murray and Eric Dodds, is one of three classicists around whose lives Daisy Dunn’s entertaining tome turns. Classics had class in those days – and heft. ‘Greats’, as it was known, was the University’s most prestigious school and the finest minds of two generations, though scattered across the colleges, were concentrated within the faculty which taught it. Some of the men who possessed those minds had fought in the Great War; many were to become heroes fighting Hitler – the spine of British intelligence. As Dunn shows, they were remarkable in their erudition and unparalleled appreciation of the ancients. Indeed, one can imagine both Bowra and Dodds – two men with little else in common – crimson with shame at the low technical standards now required for admission to study antiquity’s pre-eminent languages.

In the introduction to their excellent collection of essays, Class in Australia (2022), Jessica Gerrard and Steven Threadgold note the eclipsing of the word class in our public discourse. Other descriptive markers are more commonly used, words such as disadvantage (by scholars) and bogan (in popular culture). In my own work on the Australian English lexicon, I have been intrigued by the contemporary language of class. The words we choose to use when talking about class can tell us much about changing popular perceptions.

One word that continues to dominate our language of social status is bogan. We first recorded bogan in the 2016 edition of The Australian National Dictionary: Australian words and their origins (AND), as well as a few derivatives and compounds, such as boganhood, boganism, boganity, and bogan chick. But our 2016 entry is currently being substantially revised. From bogan briefcase (cask wine) to boganese (the language of bogans), the evidence suggests that bogan is far more productive than our previous entry suggested, and we are considering around thirty new bogan-related entries.

Bruce Moore, editor of the 2016 edition of AND, has argued that bogan is ‘the most significant word to be created in Australian English in the past 40 years’. It is hard to refute this. Its importance in expressing aspects of ‘Australianness’ and shaping notions of identity – especially class identity – is indisputable.

Bogan emerges in Australian English in the early 1980s, generally referring to someone who is similar to a Sydney ‘westie’ – they stereotypically wear flannel shirts, sport a mullet hairdo (or maybe a rat tail), and put a cigarette behind their ear. We have traced bogan back to 1983, with the first evidence we have located appearing in a West Australian school magazine. Not long after the word emerges, a slightly different sense can also be identified – bogan as synonymous with ‘loser’ or ‘dag’.

In 1917, at the height of World War I, a fire destroyed the Greek city of Salonika (Thessaloniki), a staging post for Allied troops. The centre of an ‘Ottoman polyglot culture’, Salonika was at the time home to large numbers of refugees, many of them Jewish and Roma. It was in one of the refugee hovels that the fire started, an ember from a makeshift stove igniting a bundle of straw. From that single ember grew an inferno that burned for thirty-two hours, obliterating three-quarters of the city and leaving 70,000 people – by some estimates half the population – homeless.

The Great Fire of Salonika, as it came to be known, is the starting point for Gail Jones’s elegant and intensely ruminative new novel, Salonika Burning. ‘By midnight,’ Jones writes, ‘all was blaze and disintegration.’ Those watching from a distance, ‘[wondered], every one of them, what might afterwards remain’.

Our high school art teacher would often look at a student’s work and judge it ‘interesting’. Sometimes this was a written comment, accompanied by a lacklustre mark like 14/20, which led us to suspect – perhaps rightly – that ‘interesting’ was a euphemism for ‘inept’. Now I wonder if it occasionally meant: curious, out of the ordinary, sui generis, hard to grade or categorise, or distinctive if not fully achieved. If so, Luke Carman’s short story collection An Ordinary Ecstasy is ‘interesting’: eclectic, uneven, at times ungainly. You have the sense that Carman is following the maxim ‘write for yourself’. Past success has earned him that privilege and, as Carman’s tumbleweed talent rollicks untamed across the streets of Sydney’s Inner West out to Blacktown and as far north as Byron Bay, the results are never pedestrian.

Carman spent his formative years in Liverpool, but his centre of imaginative gravity has shifted out of Sydney’s west. An Ordinary Ecstasy lacks both the gritty, insistent sense of place and the metafictional play that lent a fusing grace to his earlier, acclaimed collection An Elegant Young Man (which won the 2014 New South Wales Premier’s New Writing Award). There is also less critical, dialogic engagement with ideas of nationhood, multiculturalism, and suburban tribalism. The new book’s interests are more eclectic, less self-evident. Its cover blurb does not mislead in praising Carman’s distinctive way of rendering ‘emotion as it grows in intensity, often comically’ from unexpected starting points. The first instance of ordinary ecstasy arises in the first story, ‘A Beckoning Candle’, when a cheap Elvis poster summons memories of one of the King’s concerts as a secular communion, uniting flawed mortals in ‘sustaining tenderness’, and the tacky artefact becomes imbued with quasi-divine agency in a manner reminiscent of Flannery O’Connor. But Carman is less interested in full-blown epiphanic transports than in calling our attention to the more low-key, transient intensities occurring in those passages that make up life’s ‘filler.’ If you resist this, An Ordinary Ecstasy may lose you.

Trap metal cathedra.

Her breathing unmists

the mirror at the prospect

of pearls against skin,

purchased with a promissory note

from this cowled figure

in the open phaeton,

exposing the seams

of auriferous country,

sifting their colours:

Admirers of Carol Lefevre’s earlier books, and nostalgists in general, will delight in her latest offering. Her artistic eye evokes the patina of a silvering vintage mirror reflecting societal and literary traditions. Both in tone and preoccupations, The Tower (Lefevre’s sixth book) continues traditions cast in several Australian literary classics. Familiar, too, is Lefevre’s favoured form. Several of the book’s chapters have previously been published as short stories, but Lefevre has worked them seamlessly into this novel’s overarching chronicle.

Interweaved linked stories are Lefevre’s signature style, central to earlier books, The Happiness Glass (2018) and Murmurations (2020), but so finely knitted here, that previously visible separations are smoothed over. Its tapestry of stories gradually resolves into a grand narrative showcasing a vast ensemble of characters, to deliver a fully formed novel. Many of the archetypes are familiar, both from Lefevre’s own work and the Australian canon. In the second chapter, ‘Fish’ – previously published in Overland – young Marial yearns to escape and make a name for herself as an artist, following the path established by Sybella (My Brilliant Career), then Nora (Tirra Lirra by the River), among others. Her mother, Freddie, atrophying in small-town disillusionment, conjures Irene in Kate Jenning’s Snake. Elsewhere, Elizabeth Bunting, central to the book’s spine of repeating ‘Tower’ chapters, is the fictional embodiment of real-life Stella Bowen, drawn so beautifully in Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s Lunch.

While each her own person, these characters also typify the archetype of ‘struggling female-artist’, well established in Australian literature, usually constrained by rural, small-town life and burdens of domesticity. While somewhat confined by style, if not period, these experiences are not limited to local vintage. It’s no accident that Virginia Woolf is evoked in the book’s early pages, appearing in the visage of protagonist Dorelia’s oldest friend, Bunty, as they travel together across Europe. The book’s central concern is Dorelia’s reclamation of a ‘room of one’s own’ – her Tower – and the right to pursue artistic freedom; a common quest among Levefre’s leading characters.

Philip Salom, now in his early seventies, has been a steady presence in Australian literature for more than four decades. Until a few years ago he was mainly known as a poet. He has published fourteen collections and won two awards for lifetime achievement in that field. Having turned to fiction in 2015, he has now published six novels. In Sweeney and the Bicycles, he returns to themes that have woven their way through much of his fiction: identity and selfhood, family and friendship, damage and healing, unlooked-for and unlikely middle-aged love.

Sweeney is a good-looking man with an acquired brain injury and a past involving an awful childhood, a few years living in a commune, another few years in jail, and now ownership of the prime piece of inner-Melbourne real estate that was his grandmother’s house. Along the way, he has collected a degree in literature, and he has just begun having treatment by a nice psychiatrist called Asha Sen. He is also a compulsive stealer of bicycles.

In this book about the nature of identity and the self, names are important, as are faces. Salom tells stories in realist mode about ordinary folk, but you could also call his books psychological novels and novels of ideas. Where, this novel asks, does the self reside? Is it in someone’s name or face, in memories, in family? The cast of characters here is a kind of social molecule, in which the main figures are connected at various angles and inhabit various different groupings. Sweeney has no immediate family, but the legacies of his father and his grandmother loom large in the hinterland of self. He has two homes, switching between the house he has inherited from his grandmother, where he lives alone surrounded by good memories, and a nearby boarding-house where he has found a kind of stand-in family made of social offcuts like himself. Sweeney is clearly a sweetie, but being bashed in jail has left him with personality problems: impulsiveness, lack of concentration, outbursts of anger.

There is an experiment at the heart of Angela Meyer’s second novel, Moon Sugar. Without going into spoiler-level detail, it unlocks something in her protagonists, offering them new ways to connect with each other and the world around them. This experiment is a neat metaphor for Meyer’s own; by slipping between genres, her fiction strives to upend readerly expectations, expanding the possibilities for engagement.

Though the experiment is hinted at from the beginning, Moon Sugar starts out on a more direct, realist path. Mira is a forty-year-old woman who has left a long-term relationship and is coming to terms with the ruin of her life plans, including the idea of children. Looking for something more, she makes an appointment with a sex worker named Josh, and quickly becomes close to the younger man. Then he disappears.

Mira’s search for what has happened to her younger lover – the term fits, though the relationship begins as a transaction – takes her from Melbourne to Europe, where she encounters his friend Kyle, a reserved counterpoint to her more impulsive character. These two unlikely companions band together, moving from Berlin to Prague to Budapest, wonderful backdrops for the kind of mystery/romance crossover story Moon Sugar seems to be promising. Sex, death, and train travel: it’s an irresistible combination.

The pace moves quickly with the changes of location, and the question of what has really happened to Josh provides a satisfying structure. The search drops in and out of focus for the characters, as both are also concerned with their inner lives and emotional responses to grief, Josh, and each other. Threaded through Moon Sugar are deeper questions about the layers of intimacy, the boundaries between people, and how we can find ways to connect in spite of social conventions.

In her ninth novel, The Marriage Portrait, British writer Maggie O’Farrell engages with the enduring speculation that Lucrezia de’ Medici, daughter of the Grand Duke of Tuscany Cosimo de’ Medici, was murdered in 1561 by her husband Alfonso II D’Este, the duke of Ferrara.

Such speculation has been amply assisted by Robert Browning’s 1842 dramatic monologue ‘My Last Duchess’, which spins a tale of courtly intrigue from the perspective of a duke who brags about his dead wife: ‘That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall, / Looking as if she were alive.’ Later in his monologue, the duke recalls the words of the painter, who told him: ‘Paint / Must never hope to reproduce the faint / Half-flush that dies along her throat.’ It falls to O’Farrell to break the enduring silence surrounding Lucrezia’s story.

O’Farrell’s previous novel, Hamnet, which won the 2020 Women’s Prize for Fiction, garnered her a legion of new readers and numerous comparisons to Hilary Mantel. While her meticulous eye for historical detail is also evident in The Marriage Portrait, the subject matter also allows O’Farrell to exploit her long-standing fascination with the gothic. Not only does this recapture the sense of haunting that pervaded her earlier novels, but
it also situates her more clearly alongside her literary influences, who include Charlotte Brontë, Daphne du Maurier, and Angela Carter.

Poet, essayist, and librettist David Mason grew up in Washington State, worked for many years in Colorado (where he became the state’s poet laureate) and a couple of years ago moved to Tasmania. Pacific Light, his new collection, is largely about that transition and his getting to know the landscapes and cultures of his new country.

While Mason is to be welcomed as an Australian poet (the acknowledgments here feature several Australian publications, including Australian Book Review), he is still very much an American poet, an heir to the great tradition of modern American poetry beginning with Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, going on to flourish between the wars and through to the 1970s. To those who know and love that tradition (including this reviewer), it’s a great pleasure to feel some, if not all, of those poets continuing, in a sense, to speak through him – despite Mason’s clear originality.

Robert Frost is plainly a major influence on Mason, in both subject matter and tone. The lyricism of Wallace Stevens (including his fluency with the pentameter) is also present. Theodore Roethke is likewise another presence and so too arguably, with his view out over the Pacific, is Robinson Jeffers.

A second important pleasure in Pacific Light is Mason’s way with form. He uses rhyme, for instance, in creative ways that remind us of the technique and its virtues while not being too much confined by the old rules. Readers thus gain a double satisfaction. They enjoy the echo of the old device – and the cleverness of the variations on it.

The near-religious title of Alan Wearne’s new selection of poems, Near Believing, gives an impression of bathos and deprecation, while nevertheless undermining structures of belief, as represented in the book; at times this belief is explicitly Christian, but can also be seen more generally as belief in others, or in the suburban way of life. It is, then, while modest-seeming, highly ambitious – and, in another irony, further evokes the pathos, and hopelessness, of wanting to believe. In the title poem, which appears in the uncollected section, ‘Metropolitan Poems and other poems’, a ‘near-believer’ is defined by the poem’s priest speaker as ‘that kind of atheist I guess who prays at times’. This formula captures the ambiguity of the book’s many speakers and their addresses.

A highlight of this section of new poems is ‘They Came to Moorabbin’, about Nance Conway, a diplomat’s widow, who repeatedly refers to post-World War II Moorabbin as Mars, and her relationship with married couple Iris and Keith. The play of voice in this poem is as complicated (or rich) as in Pride and Prejudice. For example, ‘That something / also saying Please never lay a hand on me …’ is a paraphrase by the poem’s speaker of ‘something’ that is not exactly spoken, nor thought, by Nance. Later in the poem:

         ‘Possibly,’ Nance muttered back to Keith,

Keith speaking for his Iris.

                           Possibly?

He lets her say it since, except when Iris contradicts,

Keith rather likes an opinionated woman,

each brings out a similar boorish edginess.

In the middle of 2022 researchers at the Kirby Institute at the University of New South Wales announced that Covid-19 had infected more than half of Australia’s twenty-six million people. The number came not from polymerase chain reaction tests, nor from the results of rapid antigen home tests, but from the sampling of Australian blood banks. After all the tables, graphs, and pressers, the serosurvey demonstrated that the virus was everywhere among us and inside us, reconfiguring our bodies as well as our social and political worlds.

Not that this was news: we knew it in our bones. Many had already, in earlier phases of the pandemic, fallen into pandemic fatigue. We were exhausted by talking about the virus and the vaccine, exhausted by the numbers, exhausted by the moral labour of reading about death, counting deaths, all around us, while trying to function. As 2022 wears on, that exhaustion is compounded by the sequelae of the virus in our health systems and our bodies and minds. We are fatigued by coming to terms with novelty.

After the first shocking news about hard lockdowns in China, social distancing in Hong Kong, the grim footage of ventilating, prostrate patients in overflowing Italian hospitals, we struggled to adjust to what was being asked or demanded of us. And yet all of us, even vocal libertarians and protesters, have adjusted in myriad ways to the post-pandemic world, sometimes intuitively, even unconsciously. Now that the virus seems to be in an excruciatingly slow ebb, perhaps it is time to revisit Covid-19. Given the extent and pace of social change, we might wonder how historians, those whom Tom Griffiths calls ‘time travellers’, have been making sense of the pandemic.

Within the Australian natural history genre, this book stands out: a quirky mix of autobiography, insights into the behaviour and adaptability of familiar Australian birds, and a fine example of the role of science-based enquiry to help solve human–wildlife problems. Darryl Jones, the author, is one of Australia’s most engaging and high-profile ornithologists. Although the tone of this book is decidedly non-academic, it is packed with information and insights.

The first third of the book is autobiographical. With much self-deprecation, Jones recounts important themes and events in his rural childhood and student years that led to a fascination with wildlife, culminating in an academic appointment at Griffith University in the late 1980s. The remainder of the book describes selected elements from his research career focusing on urban birds that manage to annoy us, including the Australian Magpie, Australian Brush-turkey, Rainbow Lorikeet, Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, and the enigmatic ‘curlew’ of the title – properly known as the Bush Stone-curlew, a surprising resident of many cities in northern Australia, but seriously in decline in the south.

Jones has been at the forefront of Australian research into human–wildlife interactions, positive and negative, and how the negative aspects can best be mitigated. To succeed in this field requires an understanding of human behaviour and attitudes, and the ability to investigate wildlife behaviour in the field. The inclusion of this human element among the wildlife science adds greatly to the interest and entertainment provided by this book.

Terri-ann White was Director of UWA Publishing (2006–20). In 1999, she established the Institute of Advanced Studies, a cross-disciplinary centre at the University of Western Australia. She has been an independent bookseller and writer. In 2021, she established a new publishing house, Upswell Publishing, based in Perth and building a list of distinctive literary works in fiction, poetry, and narrative non-fiction.

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What was your pathway to publishing?

A pathway of passion. Corny but true. A lucky break in my university career: asked to develop a creative writing list for a seventy-year-old publishing house that had never published fiction and poetry. I started the task by writing to people I trusted in universities around the country asking for the best work by their students, as I knew most were not being published. The first book I published was Josephine Wilson’s first novel, Cusp, in 2005. (I also published her second novel.)

How many titles do you publish each year?

When I announced Upswell in early 2021, I declared I’d be doing four to ten books each year. I released the first three at the end of 2021 and somehow managed to release eighteen in 2022, my first full year. I’m a maniac, but perhaps I was also getting something out of my system. Each of these books was given dedicated attention before being released.

When Australians working in diplomatic posts share anecdotes, the best usually come from the consuls. They recount travellers’ tales of love and loss, dissipation and disaster, adventure and misadventure from Australians perpetually on the move – at least until the pandemic. It’s the consuls’ job to help those who are injured, robbed, kidnapped, arrested, or otherwise distressed abroad.

Their tales could fill more books than this one by Ian Kemish, who headed DFAT’s consular service for five momentous years. His engrossing account reveals what happened to travelling Australians, particularly between 1999 and 2004, and what followed. I’ll divide what seemed an epoch of its own to the consuls into the age of innocence, the age of terror, and the age of experience.

In the age of innocence, Australians who assumed they could go anywhere and do anything kept the consuls busy. In Manila, there might be a queue of elderly Australian men seeking certificates of no impediment to marrying young Filipinas. In Kathmandu, the consuls often had to rescue Australian mountaineers with altitude sickness or to repatriate dead ones. In Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, arrests and executions for drug trafficking preoccupied them and the Australian media.

Scott Morrison needn’t waste time writing a political memoir: the work of self-vindication has already been attempted on his behalf by Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers, both columnists at The Australian, in their now highly controversial book Plagued: Australia’s two years of hell – the inside story. Theirs is a largely heroic story about Morrison’s leadership, which ‘served the nation well’ amid a ‘most extreme period of adversity’.

The general outline and subject of this book are not without merit. Benson and Chambers have retraced the unfolding pandemic (particularly 2020) in great detail, and they have located Australia’s changing relationship with China at the centre of that story. They convincingly show that the ‘Australia–China dynamic was a backdrop to many if not most of Morrison’s conversations’ with world leaders throughout the pandemic.

There is some value in seeing parts of the pandemic from the window of the prime minister’s office. The early chapters offer an engaging account of the incipient crisis, compounded by the death of Morrison’s father in January 2020. Later, the breakthrough of the virus into the aged care sector is covered compellingly. The authors avoid dwelling on the details of specific lockdowns, but the latter still evoke painfully fresh memories for some. By way of contrast, the second year of the pandemic is essentially relegated to the last eighty pages, leaving little room for cautious analysis or reflection.

Perspective, though, is this book’s most significant limitation, as Matthew Ricketson has noted in The Conversation. Plagued is the gospel according to Morrison, chief of staff John Kunkel, Chief Medical Officer Brendan Murphy, and Health Minister Greg Hunt – the self-styled ‘Covid Brains Trust’ on whose WhatsApp messages and phone calls our lives hinged. Medical advisers, state premiers, and fellow world leaders abound, but there is scarcely a Cabinet minister in sight, aside from Hunt, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, and Morrison (a Cabinet in his own right). Benson and Chambers legitimately allow Morrison’s account to be heard, but at times his testimony fills entire pages without any authorial intervention. That is as much bad journalism as it is bad history.

This is a story of predictable enemies, too. The flat-footed federal medical bureaucrats who needed to be dragged by the Commonwealth to issue medical advice; the NSW Teachers Federation, which selfishly thwarted the government’s plan to keep schools open; the ‘hawkish’ Brett Sutton; and the entire Victorian public health system, on whom the worst missteps are pinned. The ‘Queensland regime’ under Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk was particularly villainous at the border (Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan gets off lightly). The big surprise is that Benson and Chambers treat Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews quite favourably. Whatever its shortcomings, this book bears none of the ideological zealotry and rancidness that stained the front pages of the Herald Sun through the pandemic.

Still, proximity with the subject leads too often to historical protection. Morrison’s misguided ‘snapback’ notion in the early phase of the crisis, lampooned as it was, is absent; Kevin Rudd’s critical intervention with Pfizer in mid-2021 is nowhere to be found; and the mishandling of the Brittany Higgins rape allegation and of the allegations concerning Attorney-General Christian Porter are relegated to two pages. Supply chain troubles, European obstructionism, and the University of Queensland’s failure to get a local vaccine through clinical trials were the only real roadblocks on an otherwise well-considered path to national vaccination.

Then there is the inconvenient matter of history. Morrison’s claims to global leadership against Chinese aggression are dramatised with simplistic references to appeasement and the 1930s. The first chapter of the book, which briefly examines the 1919 influenza pandemic in Australia, is comprised of equal parts archival material, scholarly narrative, and journalistic cliché. Midway through the book, Morrison (apparently a ‘reader of history’) likens himself to Joseph Lyons, who faced the Great Depression with ‘strong empathy’ and ‘disciplined economic principles’ in equal measure. The dearth of sources and the deluge of typographical errors suggest carelessness. Also, Lyons required no empathy consultants.

None of this was what helped this book make headlines. In just one page, we learn that Morrison secretly swore himself in as health minister and finance minister alongside Hunt and Matthias Cormann respectively, without the latter’s knowledge. Between 12 and 14 August, this revelation appeared in News Corporation headlines, followed by the extract itself in the Weekend Australian. By 16 August, the controversy had drawn comment from Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, his successor, and threatened to ensnare the office of the governor-general. Another, more humanising morsel from the book appeared online that day, revealing that Morrison had used a ‘mild sedative’ during the pandemic, but by then nobody was terribly interested in this.

Political books in Australia have often been time bombs manufactured within the walls of mainstream media companies. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, press gallery doyen Alan Reid published two famous books about leadership ructions inside the Liberal Party. The Power Struggle (1969) and The Gorton Experiment (1971) were both designed to be political explosives, igniting further crises within the government when detonated. As Bridget Griffen-Foley explained in Party Games (2003), Reid was a journalist on Frank Packer’s payroll, and these books were conveniently published through Packer’s own publishing house: Shakespeare Head Press.

For media proprietors, a journalist with a book is a very convenient thing. Economically, it allows for cosy cross-promotional deals among different wings of the media empire. Politically, it means that media companies have a clear role in shaping the first draft of history (in the form of daily columns and headlines) and the second draft as well (in the form of their journalists’ published books). Paul Kelly, a prolific journalist and author, has consistently paid dividends for the Murdoch Press in this regard. In news media terms, a controversial book allows companies to effectively generate their own headlines.

The whole system of book production and corporate cross-promotion is illuminated when it goes wrong. In 2002, former Democrats leader and Labor shadow minister Cheryl Kernot published Speaking for Myself Again with HarperCollins. News Corporation papers obtained exclusive serialisation rights and were horrified when their sister company accidentally violated those rights by publishing Kernot’s first chapter online for competitors to see. The book quickly began making headlines for other reasons, but the incident illuminated the commercial system of political book production.

Benson and Chambers have earned themselves a unique place in this history of explosive and cross-promotional publishing. Plagued is a product of Pantera Press, a social enterprise whose mission is apparently defined by ‘Good Books Doing Good Things™’. It is not clear why such a publisher produced such a book, and there are no Acknowledgments or Author’s Notes in the book to shed light on this (merely a disclaimer in the event of ‘errors or omissions’, professing to have ‘published in good faith’).

The authors’ exclusive scoop will now see them called before Justice Virginia Bell’s inquiry. Unlike Reid or Kelly, whose books usually landed their punches or cast shadows over their competitors, Benson and Chambers have scored what Ricketson calls an ‘eye-watering own goal’. Their story about Morrison’s ‘unquestionable success’ has instead become, in the words of Stephen Donaghue, the federal solicitor-general, a story of sound governance ‘fundamentally undermined’. And given that the book lacked the full story, it was made redundant almost overnight.

In keeping with his successful début fiction, Shaun Prescott’s Bon and Lesley is set in a declining regional Australian town filled with oddball characters and plagued by otherworldly phenomena. The Town (2017) was published in seven countries and garnered apt comparison to, among others, Franz Kafka and László Krasznahorkai, as well as Australian writers Gerald Murnane and Wayne Macauley. Like these influences, Prescott’s work eludes definitive categorisation, though his second novel maintains distinctly ontological and surrealist emphases.

It is fitting then that Bon and Lesley begins with the fulfilment of a dream. The titular Bon disembarks at Newnes train station, a random stop in New South Wales that for years he has imagined visiting on his daily commute between Sydney (where he lives) and the Central West (where he works). There is nothing particularly appealing about this ‘ugly and unfussy town’, and it is not an ideal time for a spot of tourism. Although it is the middle of autumn, bushfires still rage in the mountains that separate Newnes from the city, and Bon is stranded for the night when the fires cause the trains to be cancelled. This mundane visit to a dead-end town becomes more daring when, after an evening spent drinking with local larrikin Steven Grady, Bon elects to stay for good. Phone wiped and SIM card discarded, Bon swiftly abandons his job and his life in Sydney, surrendering himself to chance and spontaneity by moving in with the voluble Steven. Within a month, the titular Lesley (a stranger to the town and to Bon) will arrive in almost identical circumstances.

Recently, I overheard a commercial television promotion for some current affairs or lifestyle program on Australian farming. ‘Of course,’ the gruff male voiceover intoned, at pains to ward off any idea the reportage might be unpatriotically negative, ‘Aussie farmers are doing a bang up job!’

To suggest otherwise is, of course, tantamount to sacrilege in a country steeped in the mythology of The Good Farmer: rugged and hard-working, in tune with the natural world, and heroically resistant to both the vicissitudes of the weather and the enfeebling effects of city living. So pervasive are idealised depictions of ‘life on the land’ in this country that we rarely pause to consider what they might be masking. This includes the reality that farming is the world’s greatest cause of environmental destruction, and is responsible for more habitat destruction and loss of wildlife than any other factor.

This is British environmentalist and writer George Monbiot’s overarching theme in his important new book, Regenesis. While focusing primarily on his native Britain, Monbiot uses a wealth of research – there are almost one hundred pages of notes, and he claims to have read more than 5,000 papers and ‘a shelf of books’ – to argue that the global food production system is in a parlous state. Without comprehensive reform, Monbiot warns, we risk nothing less than the survival of our species.

Armando Iannucci, creator of the darkly comic series Veep and The Thick of It, is surely one of our more perceptive contemporary political observers. While making us laugh or grimace with recognition at the manoeuvrings of his characters, he can also pull us up cold. For example, Iannucci spends most of The Death of Stalin mocking the posturing of the politburo following the tyrant’s death in 1953. Then, suddenly, disturbingly, the merry-go-round judders to a halt and Beria is ambushed, tried, and executed in a courtyard. It echoes the mockery of the shirtless and mounted Vladimir Putin – before he invaded Ukraine.

An Iannucci line that’s stayed with me comes near the end of the third season of The Thick of It. The famously profane Malcolm Tucker, back from the political dead, has ‘grabbed the initiative’. When someone points out how short-lived this advantage might be, Tucker replies, ‘Well, life is just a succession of five minuteses.’

As I read Russia: Revolution and civil war 1917–1921, this phrase kept returning to me. Antony Beevor’s signature style is to recount World War II battle histories as a dizzying series of ‘five minuteses’, integrating the perspectives of soldiers and civilians at the street level with those of the military and political leaders directing events. This simultaneous perspective of the battles on which the world turned from panoramic and microscopic lenses has made him a rightful master of the enormously popular military history genre.