Want to write a letter to ABR? Send one to us at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Questions of character

Dear Editor,

Thanks to Penny Russell for her kind and insightful review of my book Elizabeth and John (ABR, November 2022). She raises one particularly interesting question, summed up by her statement, referring to conventional judgements of John Macarthur: ‘his personal shortcomings are exacerbated by what he represents’. That’s to say, he is usually judged as one of the lead characters in the original invasion of New South Wales.

There are several important issues embedded in this statement. First of all, it implies very clearly that books such as this are bound to offer moral judgements on the past. That is certainly true. It also implies that historical actors are to be judged for their lives as a whole. That might be a matter of opinion, but if so then there is another question. In making such judgements, must we also take account of what he or she represents?

In the book, I have tried to draw a clear line between questions of personal character and questions of representation. The effort is there in every chapter. Both matter, but from the point of view of history-writing – not to say the assessment of human character in any circumstances – I can’t think of anything more important.

One of the leading characters in the book, the lawyer Saxe Bannister, in his own efforts to give a new moral basis to relations between invaders and invaded, spoke about the need for ‘justice at every step’. That’s also the aim of this book.

In his History of Australia, Manning Clark took it for granted that, even in the narrow world of colonial Australia, certain men and women might be remembered today as figures of high tragedy. History is literature – it is an exploration of humanity – and that means both remembering and forgetting what they represent. Starting with that ambivalence can take the history of the invasion period in new directions altogether, as I have tried to show.

I have also been inspired by fictional writing (obviously), including historical fiction. Take the late Hilary Mantel’s three-volume narrative of the life of Henry VIII’s minister Thomas Cromwell (Wolf Hall, Bring up the Bodies, and The Mirror and the Light). Mantel not only draws brilliant portraits. She also says, or implies, something wonderfully enlightening about the cultural relativity of violence. It’s clear from her writing that making individuals in some sense representative of their time is crucial to good portraiture. Not only the portraits but also the context provided for them are more telling as a result.

In some sense, Elizabeth and John has been an attempt to combine Hilary Mantel’s methods with, say, George Eliot’s (in Middlemarch, etc.) – shooting at the moon, of course, but certainly, for me, worth the effort.

Penny Russell replies:

Many thanks to Alan Atkinson for this response to my review of Elizabeth and John. Alan seeks to understand individuals in the context of their time, and as representative of it. Elizabeth and John offers a sympathetic rendition of the Macarthurs’ thinking and an exemplary portrait of the assumptions and world view that guided their pragmatic and ethical choices. But historians – even historical biographers – are not concerned only with human character. They study ideas in action, and actions have effects, intended and unintended. No individual’s moral reasoning or self-justification could be expected to address the far-reaching, unimagined effects of their everyday actions. The historian, armed with the benefit of hindsight, should at least try. Character and representation matter, but so does historical agency.

John Howard and inequality

Dear Editor,

Professor James Walter has produced a generous, thoughtful, and balanced review of my new book Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia (ABR, November 2022). I lap up the praise and quibble with the criticisms in the usual manner of authors, especially when both come from a scholar on whose large body of stimulating research and ideas the book draws. But I should correct the suggestion that I made the ‘bald assertion’ that ‘[John] Howard was committed to increasing inequality’. The actual quotation did have a little hair, and was also slightly more nuanced: ‘Schools would soon need to have a pole on which to fly the national flag if they did not want to be financially penalised. Such stunts provided the theatrical side of a government that was committed, in its more substantial policy making, to the steady increase of inequality.’ While only delivered in passing, it is a judgement that, I think, bears scrutiny.

Frank Bongiorno, Scullin, ACT

Handsome Harold

Dear Editor,

As usual, James Walter, in his survey of Ross Walker’s book Harold Holt: Always one step further, has written a careful and insightful review (ABR, October 2022). But I wonder about the suggestion that Robert Menzies and Harold Holt were too willing to follow US policy in Vietnam. My memory of Australia’s role in the Vietnam War is that the Liberal government actively encouraged the Johnson administration to escalate. As Menzies famously proclaimed, he saw the war as ‘a thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans’.

This may only be a difference in emphasis, but given the eerie resemblance to current political rhetoric it seems important to make the point. The Morrison government seemed to echo its 1960s predecessors in its enthusiasm for encouraging conflict between the United States and China.

Dennis Altman, Clifton Hill, Vic.

James Walter replies:

It is certainly true that, in relation to the Vietnam War and the US alliance, Robert Menzies and his successors (including Harold Holt) were seeking ‘a way into’ the diplomatic dialogue and military commitment to Vietnam being considered by the United States after the French rout at Dien Bien Phu in 1954. They were exceedingly concerned about the wider potential for communist aggression, and sought, through ANZUS and SEATO, to achieve something in the Asia Pacific like the defence umbrella offered by NATO in Europe.

There is arguably some resemblance between subsequent attempts, especially by Menzies, to secure the US alliance and the Morrison government’s ratcheting up of the China threat and effort to insinuate itself into partnership with Britain and the United States through AUKUS. But, while intent on winning ‘great and powerful friends’, Menzies’ and Holt’s senior colleagues and officials – Percy Spender, Richard Casey, Garfield Barwick, Arthur Tange, and Paul Hasluck – advocated caution about the dangers of hewing too closely to the American line, and only gradually reached the conclusion that engagement in the conflict (on American terms) was inevitable.

There are fine biographies of each of these major players, and the Cabinet documents on which the biographers draw are usefully assembled in Peter Edwards’s Crises and Commitments (1992) and David Lowe’s Menzies and the ‘Great World Struggle’ (1999). Such research persuades me that Menzies and Holt were too willing to follow US policy, but I remain unpersuaded that they encouraged Lyndon Johnson to escalate.

Unconditional refusal

Dear Editor,

Your compelling review of Shannon Burns’s memoir Childhood highlights not only the graphic story of a traumatic and abusive childhood but also how, as an adult, Burns has unceasingly put himself together again and again, each time as if for the first time (ABR, October 2022). We learn how trauma haunts Burns’s conscious and unconscious mind and also remains in his body, in each of the senses, ready to resurface whenever something triggers a reliving of the traumatic events. How could he have known that too often the worst – the unimaginably painful aftermath of his abusive childhood – was yet to follow, as when he admits to having felt, in his undergraduate years, ‘a murderous impulse on listening to his polished classmates’. Then he admits that even as an adult he ‘still fears his mother more than anyone or anything’.

Your review highlights a deeply revealing story not only about the long-term effects of childhood abuse but also the lasting power and influence of narrative – narrative that helps people like the stoic Shannon Burns to cope, find rewards, and rebuild their lives.

Roger Rees, Goolwa, SA

Time’s wing’d chariot

Dear Editor, 

Has Geordie Williamson confused his poets? Surely ‘Time’s wing’d (sic) chariot hurrying near’ is from Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘To His Coy Mistress’? George Herbert might have been pleased with the phrase, though.

Jeffrey Sheather, Dulwich Hill, NSW

Gail Jones

Dear Editor,

It is a paradox that fine fiction is a mode of truth-telling and Gail Jones’s novel Salonika Burning well justifies ‘taking liberties’ with historical fact. Once again she uses her art to bear witness. Diane Stubbings’s review astutely redirects attention to Jones’s interest in ‘the processes by which “truth” is composed’ and the diversely personal nature of perceived truth (ABR, November 2022). Jones exposes the cost of words and actions, the ‘pretty lies’ and fragility of characters tenaciously striving to sustain life amid the futile and relentless hell-on-earth of war. Within the novel, Jones’s conscripts and volunteers tend mercilessly recycled soldiers in a state of exhaustion beyond words, but even at this outpost of humanity, language may save or destroy. Stubbings’s review highlights the courage, tact, and ‘elegance’ of Gail Jones’s latest novel.

Lyn Jacobs, Aldgate, South Australia

Emilia and Shakespeare

Dear Editor,

Diane Stubbings’s review of the play Emilia suggests that ‘the extensive and spurious use of Shakespeare’s words ... might be read as the suppression of Emilia Bassano’s voice’ (ABR Arts, November). If interested in the proof supporting the playwright’s presumption, consider reading my recent book, Aemilia Lanyer as Shakespeare’s Co-Author (Routledge, 2022). Stubbings insightfully asks ‘whether Emilia was a religious poet in the style of John Milton’. There is tantalising evidence in Milton’s first Italian sonnet that the older Emilia was Milton’s teacher (Edward LeComte, Milton Quarterly, 1984).

Mark Bradbeer, online comment

Vale Colin Nettelbeck (1938–2022)

ABR was greatly saddened by the recent death of long-time contributor and Patron Colin Nettelbeck. Colin was an author and an Emeritus Professor at the University of Melbourne, where he held the A.R. Chisholm Chair of French. He also taught at the University of California (Berkeley) and Monash University. He first wrote for the magazine in 2005 and would go on to appear regularly until 2020, often reviewing works of French fiction, history, and biography. In 2012, Colin’s poignant, meditative essay ‘Now They’ve Gone’, was runner-up in the Calibre Essay Prize. In it Colin wrote movingly about the lives and deaths of his mother, May, and his mother-in-law, Melba. His essay ‘Kneecapper: A Trip to Happiness’ was shortlisted for the 2010 Calibre Prize. One of Colin’s most powerful contributions was a ‘Letter from Paris’, which was published in the year after the 2015 terrorist attacks.

Prizes galore

Budding Montaignes have until 30 December 2022 to enter the Calibre Essay Prize. The winner will receive $5,000; the runner-up $2,500. Meanwhile, we look forward to publishing the five poems shortlisted in the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize in our January–February issue. This will be followed by an online ceremony on 19 January, when the poets will read their works, to be followed by the announcement of the overall winner. Reserve your place at this free event: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. Those itching to enter the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize can do so from 16 January to 24 April 2023.

Fifteen years ago, the new Rudd government announced the creation of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (PMLAs), to be administered by the Minister for the Arts. There were two prizes at the outset – fiction and non-fiction – each worth $100,000 – tax free to boot. Given the precarious incomes of most Australian writers, the prizes could not have been more welcome. Later, after some lobbying, young adult and children’s fiction were added, followed by poetry and Australian history. Sensibly, like other literary prizes, the PMLA organisers decided in 2011 to reward all the shortlisted authors, not just the winner.

So far, so good.

Doubts soon arose when, first, Kevin Rudd and then Tony Abbott chose to exercise the prime minister’s prerogative to overturn the judges’ decision. Rudd, possibly troubled by the title, deemed Frank Bongiorno’s The Sex Lives of Australians unacceptable and gave the prize to Ross McMullin’s Farewell, Dear People. The following year, Abbott declared Richard Flanagan’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North and Steven Carroll’s A World of Other People co-winners in the fiction category. We learned later, from Les Murray no less, that Carroll’s novel was the judges’ unanimous first choice. Writing in ABR Arts, I asked: ‘Have we really come to this? Taxpayers fund these awards: why should they be in a politician’s personal gift?’

The shortlists for this year’s PMLAs can be viewed at https://www.arts.gov.au/pm-literary-awards. As with all prizes, there are some curious inclusions and exclusions, but quality, we always hope, will prevail, notwithstanding prime ministers’ sentimental attachments.

Three features of this year’s awards are surprising. Of the ten judges serving on the fiction/poetry and non-fiction/Australian history panels, eight live in New South Wales. All five of those appointed to judge our best non-fiction and Australian history of the year are in New South Wales. It’s obvious that the authorities take seriously Paul Keating’s old adage: ‘If you don’t live in Sydney, you’re just camping out.’

Remarkably, six of those ten judges have close associations with The Australian newspaper. This includes no less than three literary editors (including the current one, Caroline Overington). The other three are Troy Bramston, a senior writer and columnist with The Australian, Peter Craven (a frequent columnist), and Chris Mitchell, a former Editor-in-Chief (2002–15) and current columnist.

No other media organisation is represented on these two panels. How can such a preponderance be justified? Try to imagine the furore if the Booker Prize or the Pulitzer Prize were dominated by a single media organisation – let alone the Murdoch press. We know that the Morrison government appointed these panels prior to the May 2022 federal election. It’s further proof of that regime’s cosy association with News Corp.

Finally, and not for the first time, the timing of the PMLA ceremony has dismayed booksellers and publishers. It’s to be held on 13 December, in Launceston. That gives the book industry all of eleven days to galvanise sales before Christmas.

Mark Rubbo, managing director of Readings, told Advances:

I think the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards are the worst-run prizes in Australia; there is no consistency in the timing of the announcements of either the shortlist or the winner, giving neither booksellers nor publishers the opportunity to promote the shortlisted and winning authors. The 13 December date for the announcement is a perfect example of this; there will be no time for booksellers to get copies of the winners in time for Christmas, and therefore no point in publishers expending resources in promoting these books. These prizes should be amongst the most lauded and talked about in the country; the ad hoc way they are scheduled suggests that the prime minister and the minister for the arts have little respect for, or understanding of, the work of Australia’s authors.

Readings works closely with major prizes, such as the VPLAS, the Stella and the Miles Franklin, and have worked hard to promote the shortlists and the winners – with growing success. Those prizes understand it is not just about giving writers some money but also about helping those writers find readers and enhancing their careers.

We put these concerns to the organisers and received this statement from a departmental spokesperson for the PMLAs:

The Prime Minister’s Literary Awards recognise and celebrate the exceptional literary talents of Australians. Each year the Awards’ judges are selected from experts across the literature industry, and panels comprise authors, illustrators, poets, historians, academics, publishers and journalists. Appointments to the 2022 panels were made by the previous Government in early 2022.

Each year the judges and the composition of the panels are reviewed. Diversity, in all ways including across geographic location, gender, expertise and differing backgrounds, will be considered by the current government for the appointment of the 2023 Awards’ judges.

The Awards have been hosted in a range of capital cities since they began, including Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra. This year a regional location has been selected, reflecting the importance of promoting literary excellence in diverse communities.

Considerations made when selecting the Awards date include parliamentary sitting requirements and the availability of the Prime Minister in considering the Award recommendations. Planning for future dates is under careful consideration.

Everyone at Australian Book Review – like writers, publishers, booksellers, and readers in general – wants the PMLAs to flourish. So they should, as our principal national awards, with a hefty price-tag from the federal government that might otherwise be used to bolster the risible budget allocated to literature by the Australia Council. But until such time as the PMLAs are delivered promptly, with representative juries and free of sectional interests, they seem doomed to irrelevance – precious for the honoured writers, but otherwise about as consequential as a hill of beans.

Peter Rose

Disclosure: The Editor was a PMLA judge in 2009 and was shortlisted for poetry in 2013.

The National Anti-Corruption Bill 2022 was introduced into parliament by the attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus KC, on 28 September 2022. After the second reading speech, the NACC Bill was sent for consideration to a Joint Select Committee, which duly completed its report in time to enable the Bill to be considered for enactment in November.

The proposed legislation, some 220 pages long, is aimed at eliminating corruption in the federal public sphere, as well as restoring trust and transparency in our democratic institutions. The National Anti-Corruption Committee will be able to investigate serious or systemic corrupt conduct affecting any part of the federal public sector. The definition of ‘corrupt conduct’ is broad and encompasses conduct by a public official that involves an abuse of office, breach of public trust, misuse of information, or corruption of any kind. The NACC will have a full suite of powers similar to those of a Royal Commission, and will be able to use its powers to investigate a corruption issue if the Commissioner considers that it could involve serious or systemic corrupt conduct. The NACC will be able to hold public hearings, and at the end of an investigation, the Commissioner will be required to produce a report containing findings and recommendations; such reports may include findings of corrupt conduct, but not of criminal guilt. The NACC will be independent, but subject to oversight by a Parliamentary Joint Committee and an Inspector. It will also be supervised by the Federal Court of Australia. The NACC must afford procedural fairness to individuals or agencies who are the subject of adverse findings.

Other welcome features of the Bill are the inclusion of members of parliament and staff as potential subjects of investigation, and the assumed interaction with Codes of Conduct and standards of parliamentary and ministerial behaviour; preventative and educational functions aimed at improving integrity and informing the public sector and the entire community about corruption risks and vulnerabilities; powers of initial inquiry on the basis of complaint, referral or own motion; mandated referral of potentially corrupt conduct by agency heads; and protections, including immunity for whistleblowers and journalists.

Those preparing the Bill must have been greatly assisted by the Member for Indi’s draft Bill, which was proposed but left untabled late in 2021. Dr Helen Haines’s work was specifically credited by the attorney-general in his speech.

Despite the generally satisfactory nature of the Bill, there are several major problems, and a variety of questions remain to be considered by the Joint Select Committee. The first of these is a limitation on the NACC’s ability to conduct public hearings. The Bill entitles the NACC Commissioner to hold a public hearing only if exceptional circumstances justify doing so, in addition to being satisfied that it is in the public interest. Labor’s national ICAC (Independent Commission Against Corruption) design principles announced prior to the election included no mention of ‘exceptional circumstances’. This limitation will be a severe restriction on the NACC’s ability to hold public hearings.

Most Royal Commissions of an investigatory nature hold their hearings in public. Such hearings expose corruption and misconduct to the public; they increase public trust that allegations of misbehaviour are being investigated fairly and in the public interest; they make investigations more effective by encouraging additional witnesses to come forward; they educate and improve the integrity of the public sector, as well as educate the entire community about such matters; and they deter others from engaging in corruption and misconduct in the future.

In 1982, Sir Anthony Mason, then a judge of the High Court, stated in the Builders Labourers’ Federation case in the High Court that an order that a commission proceed in private ‘seriously undermines the value of the inquiry; it shrouds the proceedings with a cloak of secrecy, denying to them the public character which to my mind is an essential element to an inquiry of this kind’. Murray Gleeson AC, former Chief Justice of the High Court, said in his review of the NSW ICAC that ‘public inquiries, properly controlled, serve an important role in the disclosure of corrupt conduct. They have an important role in disclosing the ICAC’s investigative processes.’ Similarly, Tony Fitzgerald AC said: ‘The proposal to close anti-corruption hearings and repress information on public issues to save those involved from embarrassment demonstrates a fundamental ignorance of democracy. Effective democracy depends on informed voters.’

Public hearings are regarded as essential by the Commissioners of ICAC and Victoria’s IBAC (Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission), as a crucial mechanism in promoting integrity and investigating and exposing corruption.

The inclusion of the phrase ‘exceptional circumstances’ in the NACC Bill is taken from the Victorian IBAC Act, but IBAC Commissioners have repeatedly asked the Victorian government to remove the limitation since it seriously restricts the number of investigations in Victoria taking place in public. In addition to the unsatisfactory vagueness of the phrase, and the resulting possibility of court challenges, only rarely will an investigation meet the test of ‘exceptional circumstances’.

It is generally assumed that this detrimental change to Labor’s original proposal for the NACC resulted from an Opposition offer to support the Bill provided the alteration was made. The government may have welcomed this, since it will lead to fewer public hearings by the NACC during Labor’s term in office; or it may have decided that it is preferable to have the NACC legislation enacted as soon as possible, hoping to strengthen it later. Experience has shown, however, that attempts to toughen integrity legislation have little prospect of success.

There are various other matters of complaint with the NACC Bill of less significance than public hearings. For example, the NACC’s jurisdiction will not capture corrupt conduct by third parties, unless there is wrongdoing by a relevant public official. The government’s purpose is apparently to limit the quantity of work the NACC will be expected to cover because of the likely enormous number of complaints it is expected to receive. But investigations of procurement dealings, whether those of the defence department or elsewhere, will usually involve at least two parties to a proposed transaction: the public servants and outside parties who may be attempting to deceive or corrupt honest public servants. There is much to be said for the view that such matters should be left within the NACC’s jurisdiction, leaving it to the Commissioner’s discretion whether a matter justifies investigation.

A third problem relates to the Parliamentary Oversight Committee, which will have, in addition to its oversight function, the right to deal with appointments to the NACC of the Commissioner, a Deputy Commissioner, and the Inspector. It will also review the NACC’s budget and finances. Under clause 173, the Chair of the Committee must be a member of the government, giving the government control of the appointments and funding of the NACC.

The removal of politics from the determination of budgets and finances for anti-corruption bodies such as the NACC is necessary to ensure that governments of whatever persuasion cannot be able to interfere with the independence of the agencies that are established to hold them to account. There can be no better way of stifling a body such as the NACC than by cutting its funding. Accordingly, the funding of the NACC should be the responsibility of an independent statutory commission or tribunal, with all evidence, reasoning, and recommendations tabled in Parliament to promote full transparency.

Furthermore, appointments of persons to the roles of Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner, and Inspector are of critical importance and should be open, merit-based, and transparent, with selection based on an independent panel’s assessment of an applicant’s merit against publicly available criteria. The fact that the balance of power in the Oversight Committee rests with the government of the day has the potential to adversely impact on public confidence in the independence of the NACC.

A variety of other matters such as Client Legal Privilege and retrospectivity were also considered by the Joint Select Committee, which must report shortly.

That it was possible to introduce the NACC Bill into parliament only some four months after the federal election is a major achievement for Labor, and a triumph for the attorney-general and his staff. The Bill is extremely complicated and covers a number of highly controversial questions, but it has been largely well received by the public and the press. It will be the fulfilment of a signal electoral promise if the government is able to complete that achievement by the enactment of the NACC legislation by the end of this year. The absence of a federal anti-corruption body was regarded by Transparency International as a ‘gaping hole’ in Australia’s integrity system and was a factor in Australia’s fall in Transparency’s Corruption Perceptions Index from seventh in 2012 to eighteenth in 2022. The enactment of the NACC will, it is to be hoped, commence the restoration of Australia’s reputation for integrity in the eyes of the world.

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

When the Howard government committed Australian troops to fight in Afghanistan in 2001, and later in Iraq, it did so without recourse to parliament or the courts. Not only can the prime minister sanction the despatch of the nation’s forces to fight overseas, he or she has no need of parliamentary approval. Indeed, there is no requirement to debate such a proposal before a decision is made. Australia has no equivalent of the US War Powers Resolution of 1973, which limits the president’s freedom to make war.

While reform of this extraordinary power is possible – the High Court has noted that parliament has the power to ‘limit or impose conditions on the exercise of the Executive power’ – no government has seen fit to pursue this option. Australian governments of all persuasions have preferred to retain the power to deploy forces as they see fit and to keep parliament out of the gravest decision that any democracy can take – to risk the lives of its service personnel. Other lesser powers, Norway and the Netherlands among them, foolishly attached to the conventions of democracy, insist on parliamentary authorisation for the despatch of forces. Some have interpreted Australia’s retention of executive authority and the dynamic role in world affairs that it has enabled as a mark of strength. The former foreign minister, Alexander Downer, insisted in his sternest Widow Twankey voice that Australia was not ‘middling’ or ‘average’, like those democratic lightweights Norway or the Netherlands, but ‘a considerable power and a significant country’ – as evidenced by its prominent role in world affairs where it faithfully supports the foreign policy adventures of its principal ally, the United States.

This is an optimistic book about the future of democracy in diverse societies. Yet optimism about democracy is a scarce commodity in 2022. Engaging with the prevailing pessimism forms the basis of Yascha Mounk’s prognosis for democracy in diverse societies. This makes it a worthwhile book, despite some absences in the analysis.

The Great Experiment – Mounk’s depiction of the uncertain future for democracy under conditions of ethnic and religious diversity – is another in a growing list of titles that offer ways to sustain, or even save, democracy. It is an engagement with the spirit of our times, something we might call the politics of polarised pessimism, in which both progressives and conservatives think they are losing.

Of course, there should be nothing too wrong with losing. In a confident and robust democracy, to lose should be met with equanimity: surely ‘our’ side will win again sometime soon. But this is not how things feel today in liberal democracies. Defeat provokes fears of an existential crisis: the inevitable eclipse of former majorities and all the benefits that went with that status; or the onset of authoritarianism with all the historically induced fears that attend such a development.

The origins and manifestation of the politics of polarised pessimism do not make a story that needs much retelling. To his credit, and despite the vitriol hurled at him as a German Jew for raising such issues in public, Mounk doesn’t dwell on this part of the analysis. The majority of the book is devoted to what we might do to move out of this spiral of ideology.

In the 1990s, I was a doctoral student at the University of Melbourne writing on the representations of race in the School of Historical Studies. Geoffrey Dutton’s White on Black: The Australian Aborigine portrayed in art (1974) and Bernard Smith’s European Vision and the South Pacific were essential reading. Over the subsequent three decades, interest in Dutton’s White on Black seems to have languished, but Smith’s magnum opus remains an indispensable text. Writing in Meanjin in 1960, Robert Brissenden noted that European Vision was ‘an extremely valuable and distinguished piece of work, one to which historians and scholars in many fields will be gratefully indebted for a long time’. I doubt he could have possibly imagined that sixty-two years later we would be reading the third edition of this monumental work, now edited by Smith’s biographer, art historian Sheridan Palmer, with an excellent introduction and contextual essay by Palmer and Greg Lehman.

The second edition of European Vision and the South Pacific was published in 1985. In the preface to this edition, Smith marked the rising consciousness around Indigenous issues and what he called cultural relativism. Yet he also bizarrely repeated the falsehood that the ‘Tasmanians and Terra del Fuegians’ experienced ‘extermination’. Even in the 1980s, this was a contentious and disputed concept challenged by Indigenous activists and scholars. It is immensely satisfying, therefore, that the introduction to this third edition is co-authored by the Trawulwuy scholar Greg Lehman, an internationally recognised colonial art historian, curator, and author. Sheridan and Lehman stress the contemporary importance of the ‘contribution Bernard Smith [made] towards a more critical understanding of the ideological and art historical processes at play in the British imagination of how native peoples might, and might not, fit into its expanding empire’. Smith’s monumental work is often recalled as foundational to the postcolonial scholarship that dominated the ‘nineties and noughties’. I recall it being the topic of many discussions at the Postcolonial Institute in North Melbourne, a weekly intellectual home to many in Melbourne’s scholarly community.

In October 2022, the United Nations announced that its Total Digital Access to the League of Nations Archives Project (LONTAD) was complete. For the past five years, archivists in Geneva have been preserving, scanning, and cataloguing more than fourteen million pages of historical documents, making them accessible to researchers around the world. Harnessing a technology that people a century ago could hardly imagine, this project has extended the League of Nations’ foundational values of sharing knowledge and cooperating across borders into the twenty-first century.

The sheer scale of this archive is testament to the ambition of the League of Nations (1920–46) – the precursor of the United Nations – as an experiment in international governance. People initially had high hopes for the organisation, but its legacy has often been considered in negative terms. Traditionally, historians have focused on its failure to institute collective security and to deal with a series of international crises. In recent years, a new body of scholarship has begun re-evaluating the League, exploring its work across a variety of social, economic, and humanitarian activities. As historian Susan Pedersen explained in a 2007 article in the American Historical Review, the most pressing question now is not ‘why the League failed’ but rather ‘the more properly historical question of what it did and meant over its twenty-five-year existence’.

James Cotton’s The Australians at Geneva: Internationalist diplomacy in the interwar years contributes to this growing historiography. Whereas much of the existing literature is centred on the Northern Hemisphere, this book brings an antipodean perspective, exploring how Australians worked with and within the League and the affiliated International Labour Organisation (ILO). Showing them to have been active contributors to the Geneva project, it ‘is intended to carry the revolution in League studies further into Australian historical inquiry’.

Grace Tame was sixteen years old, and it was 2011, when the first account of the repeated sexual assault and child abuse she had endured as a victim of her fifty-eight-year-old high school maths teacher, Nicolaas Bester, appeared in her local newspaper, the Hobart Mercury. She was hanging out with two close friends, their parents were at work, and she thinks it was probably the school holidays. The headline (‘Teacher Admits to Affair with Student’) was accompanied by ‘a huge picture of his face’ and a ‘romanticised description’ of the first time her abuser had exposed himself to her.

Tame did not yet have the language she has since acquired to comprehend what happened to her, including the term ‘grooming’. Nor, evidently, did the media. Through her tears, she spoke directly to the journalist responsible, David Killick, who offered to publish anything she wanted to say. For Tame, ‘the damage had already been done’. The ‘injustice’ was that the story had been written without speaking to her at all. ‘Survivors just want you to listen to them,’ she writes, ‘in the same way you listen to perpetrators. Is that too much to ask?’

Seven years later, Tame disclosed her story to a journalist far better equipped to receive it: sexual assault survivor advocate and Walkley Award winner Nina Funnell. In 2018, Tame’s case launched the #LetHerSpeak campaign created by Funnell to change gag laws across the country which prevented survivors from telling their stories in their own name. A year later, the Tasmanian Supreme Court ruled in Tame’s favour, and in April 2020, the Tasmanian law was changed to allow survivors to speak out. On 25 January 2021, Tame became the first Tasmanian and first known sexual assault survivor to be named Australian of the Year. To quote the selection panel, Tame was appointed for demonstrating ‘extraordinary courage’ and for ‘using her voice to push for legal reform and raise public awareness of the impacts of sexual violence’.

By the end of her term, the ABC reported that the Sexual Assault Support Service (SASS) in Tame’s hometown had seen a considerable increase in referrals. Tame had become one of the most recognisable figures in the country, with a strong media presence. There was a dedicated episode of Australian Story; two addresses to the National Press Club, including one with Brittany Higgins, the former Liberal staffer who was allegedly raped in Parliament House; and lots of social media, with Tame’s often irreverent tweets (@TamePunk) a regular highlight. Then came the tabloids and the trolls. Pictures of Tame with a huge bong went viral. Come the next Australian of the Year ceremony, she refused to smile for the then prime minister, Scott Morrison, and instead gave him a frown and a side-eye glance. By this point, whatever some people thought of Tame, her straight-shooting style and commitment to her cause were widely admired.

Given the extraordinary circumstances of Tame’s emergence in public life, and the current historical moment in which historical sexual abuses against children have come or are coming to light in unprecedented numbers, a memoir or biography (or both) was inevitable. What is more surprising – though it shouldn’t be – is what kind of memoir it is. For anyone who has been paying even the remotest attention, it is clear that Tame is her own person, with talents including, but hardly confined to, powerful oratory. Her memoir reads like a book written on her own terms, starting with Tame’s self-portrait on the cover and a title that requires a prologue by way of explanation. Even when sharing that she did not win every editorial battle – her suggested title was Diamond Miners and Rock Spiders or Daddy Issues – Tame succeeds in asserting her dark humour and ultimate authority over telling her story her way.

The disconnect between media portrayals and her own lived experience and self-perception is a recurring theme. Tame has ‘watched in bemusement, from a distance, as a version of a person who is supposedly me has been haphazardly crafted by a portion of the nation’s media. I don’t know her.’  Throughout, she corrects misrepresentations and false assumptions (she’s not a man-hater, and if she must be boxed in, Tame is ‘more of a centrist’ than a ‘diehard leftist’). She indicts some of the worst media offenders (Bettina Arndt obviously, for sympathetically platforming Tame’s abuser, but also a News Corp journalist who sent her partner Max a ‘barrage of texts’, demanding a comment on Tame’s autism as a possible reason she frowned at the prime minister). To go overnight from ‘obscurity to extreme media scrutiny’, writes Tame, ‘is not something you can prepare your nervous system for, even with ample warning’.

Tame’s tenure as Australian of the Year, however, is only a subplot in her compellingly digressive memoir. Tame wants her readers to know where she has come from and that she is much more than just a survivor of sexual abuse. Her parents, extended families on both sides, vast network of friends ranging from her school days in Tasmania through to her years living in the United States and those acquired since, and various mentors and supporters (including the comedian John Cleese, who commissioned Tame to do the artwork for the fortieth-anniversary Monty Python’s Holy Grail tour merchandise) are lovingly evoked. Occasionally these tributes tip over into indulgence, but Tame’s decision to honour and record these relationships reinforces the sense that her memoir is a reclamation – of her own experience and possibly on behalf of other survivors, whose lives are sometimes reduced to their most devastating details.

At the same time, Tame potently shows how deeply abuse and its traumatic effects have shaped her life to date. The chapter on her tender and secure relationship with Max is especially touching, yoked as it is to a complex relationship history shaped by trauma in which, as Tame puts it, her ‘initial frame of reference for interacting with men was with a sadistic child abuser’. Here and there, Tame pans out to align her specific experience with wider patterns – for example, that ‘women with autism have three times the odds of being sexually abused’ – but the true force of her memoir resides in how idiosyncratically she navigates her way through the material. What may seem like a detour – a riff on James Bond movies, John le Carré novels, or the late Robin Williams – is usually revealed as another route through which to reveal the indelible impact of trauma, or to take perpetrators and the wider culture that enables them to task.

While her memoir is unwieldy at times, Tame is a gifted and spirited storyteller who convinces us there is more to come – less tethered to the story she campaigned to tell in her own name. For this reader, The Ninth Life of a Diamond Miner brought to mind another high-profile and uniquely assembled memoir, Hannah Gadsby’s Ten Steps to Nanette (2022). As it happens, both writers are Tasmanian, queer-identified, neurodivergent, survivors of sexual violence, at home on the stage as stand-up comedians, and love their families (or most of them, in Tame’s case – her maternal grandfather being the exception, because of damage wrought on two families). Since Gadsby’s memoir, and the stage show that inspired it, she’s been freed up to tell other kinds of stories. Towards the end, Tame wonders if the memoir would have been more powerful had she written ‘less about the abuse and the man who perpetrated it’. But she also liberates herself by staking a claim for her future as a writer: ‘There will be more books that don’t mention his name than those that do. My life is just beginning.’ 

In the 1990s, seeing a ‘hot-red weapon’ of a motorbike being ridden into the News Corp car park in Sydney, journalist Paddy Manning could not help but ask, ‘What’s that?’ Still wearing his helmet, the rider answered that the bike was an MV Agusta – at which point Manning realised he had yelled at Lachlan Murdoch.

This encounter, described in the acknowledgments of The Successor, hints at the dual focus of the book. Yes, it’s a biography of Lachlan Murdoch, but Manning’s eye, now as then, is drawn more to the noisy, barely tamed vehicle that Murdoch oversees. In the United States, Fox Corporation is regularly accused of coarsening public debate, fuelling the rise of Donald Trump, and promoting conspiracy theories about Covid-19, immigration, election integrity, and more besides. In Australia, News Corp is well known for its newspaper dominance, its clear ideological bent and willingness to bully, and its indulgence of discredited theories and arguments on issues ranging from climate change to gender and sexuality. Knowing how and why Fox and News Corp operate as they do is important; so too is knowing what their futures might be under a man whose life, dramatically speaking, has reached its crucial third act.

Lachlan Murdoch is the third mogul for whom Manning has played Boswell; he is also the third subject to have refused him cooperation. Eternally undeterred, Manning annexes press clippings domestic and international, mines existing biographies and histories for insight, and – most acutely, in this book as in those on Nathan Tinkler (2013) and Malcolm Turnbull (2015) – extracts from business filings and disclosures the information necessary to illuminate his subject’s commercial dealings. He supplements all this with copious interviews, on the record and off. The result is pacy and illuminating, if more distant than one would like and padded by gossip column-style detail and pocked with cliché (on one page alone, Lachlan is ‘paddling hard’ only to be set adrift ‘in limbo’; then, he ‘rolled up his sleeves’ and, despite just ‘keeping the seat warm’, made ‘some big calls’, the first of which was a plain bit of ‘management 101’). As the first biography of a figure exercising significant influence, it is a valiant effort, especially with a figure who has remained enigmatic and silent where possible.

Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch at the 2015 Time 100 Gala in New York (WENN Rights Ltd/Alamy)

The Australian Museum is starting to develop something of a literary landscape of its own. This is not so much through official publications such as Ronald Strahan’s Rare and Curious Specimens (1979) or the flagship magazine in its various incarnations from Australian Natural History to Explore. Rather, it is through more creative or expansive stories of the weird, wonderful, and personable, from Tim Flannery’s amusingly fictionalised historical recounting of The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish (2014) to James Bradley’s disturbing future fiction The Deep Field (1999). Museum spaces – front and back of house – have an intriguing capacity to inspire and document their own strange and evolving histories.

Brendan Atkins, an ecologist who was once himself the editor of the museum’s magazine, continues this process with his latest book, The Naturalist. Rather than focusing on the charismatic megafauna of museum history – George Bennett, Gerard Krefft, Gilbert Whitley,  or even Tim Flannery – Atkins writes a biography of a figure who has slipped into the shadows: Allan Riverstone McCulloch (1885–1925) – ichthyologist, collector, artist, exhibition designer, photographer, educator, adventurer, who died at forty under tragic circumstances.

Museums offer multi-layered experiences, from their imposing architectural façades to the particular arrangements of artefacts and specimens in their exhibition halls, symbolised by the once popular dioramas (of which McCulloch was a master) artfully illuminating an illusion of past worlds. Yet the basements and warehouses stacked with accumulated research collections that lie beneath these public displays have a more complex history: they represent dead specimens collected to preserve the diversity of life and cultural artefacts that simultaneously conserve cultural heritage, often through theft and appropriation.

Since his death in 1926, almost a century ago, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke has remained an anomaly. He was doomed, Lesley Chamberlain says in Rilke: The last inward man, to be a poet ‘in between’: a bridge between modernism and Romanticism, his work an inevitably compromised attempt to reclaim the consolations of metaphysics for a secular age. Despite this – or perhaps because of it – Rilke’s poetry has remained enduringly popular. There are dozens of translations of his notoriously complex poetry into English, and a plethora of critical writing, some of it leaning into a sentimentalised hagiography that is too easily parodied. In Reading Rilke: Reflections on the problems of translation (1999), William H. Gass perhaps best catches the ambivalence one feels approaching the man and his work:

With a romantic naiveté for which we may feel some nostalgia now, and out of a precocity for personality as well as verse, Rilke struggled his entire life to be a poet – not a pure poet, but purely a poet – because he felt, against good advice and much experience to the contrary, that poetry could only be written by one who was already a poet: and a poet was above ordinary life (Villiers de L’Isle-Adam’s famous quip, ‘As for living, we shall have our servants do that for us,’ described his attitude perfectly).

In her own book-length overview of Rilke, Chamberlain is a little sceptical of Gass, but perhaps she could have used some of his robustness. Gass’s fascination is rooted in a deep respect for Rilke’s ‘internal intensity’, which he says demands an ‘absolute intimacy’ of the reader. Perhaps it’s not surprising that this intimacy produces impassioned readers and interpreters, among whom I count myself, and that everyone who engages deeply with his work creates their own particular Rilke. But I own that Rilke: The last inward man disappointed me: it feels like a missed opportunity.

In the introduction to her book about Bryce Courtenay (1933–2012), Christine Courtenay writes: ‘To be Bryce’s wife was both a joy and a privilege, and I remain proud of the contribution I made to our years together. Not long after we became a couple, he said, “I love you very deeply and we make a fantastic team, but you do realise you have taken on a full-time job looking after me? Plus, for seven months a year you’re a writer’s widow while you wait for me to finish each book.”’ It is a paragraph that reveals something about their relationship, including its power balance.

Christine Courtenay came into her husband’s life fairly late; when she met him, he was already the mega-selling author of The Power of One, Tandia, and April Fool’s Day, as well as twenty other novels. He wryly said that for years his books had become fixtures under Australia’s Christmas trees, along with the socks and the chocolates. Christine, an accomplished businesswoman herself, was employed first as Courtenay’s publicist. Before and after they married, they worked together to ensure that Bryce Courtenay remained one of Australia’s bestselling authors.

Here she describes a young boy born in South Africa, brought up with his sister mostly by his single mother, Paddy. He spent his early years in small towns while his mother looked for work. Though his education was constantly interrupted, he became an omnivorous reader, particularly of the novels of Charles Dickens. He managed to be accepted by the prestigious King Edward VII school in Johannesburg. After leaving school, he worked as a miner in Rhodesia (before it became Zimbabwe), saving his money to pay for a journalism course in London.

On the centenary of Jeremy Bentham’s death in 1932, there was widespread and somewhat macabre interest in the Australian press in the commemorative dinner at University College London, at which Bentham’s famous auto-icon made an appearance as the guest of honour. Some of the more serious commentary sought to educate readers about this ‘human bridge between the thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ and more especially about his relationship to Australia. New South Wales was established as an experimental penal colony just as Bentham (1748–1832) was reaching the height of his powers, and could hardly fail to play a dynamic and critical role within his thinking on crime and punishment. Given the origins and nature of the colonies that became Australia’s states, they could not but bear some imprint from the house-philosopher of the Victorian British state, making Bentham, in Judith Brett’s assessment, Australia’s ‘foundational thinker’.

It is perplexing, then, that a diligent bibliographical search just a few years ago for scholarly materials on ‘Bentham’ and ‘Australia’ would have yielded comparatively slim pickings: a handful of articles on Bentham’s attitudes to the developing penal colony, on his works as providing the ballast for anti-transportation arguments and inspiration for the Rum Rebellion, as well as furnishing the blueprint for penal policies and representative democracy. Any search was just as likely to ferret out work dealing with Bentham’s nephew, George Bentham, a celebrated botanist and author of the seven-volume Flora Australiensis (1863–78).

These new books, products of the gargantuan Bentham Project at University College London, are the central planks in a very welcome and accessible corrective. Panopticon versus New South Wales collects Bentham’s scattered works on Australia, with expert editing and contextualisation. The companion volume, taken together with the earlier edition of Memorandoms by James Martin (also edited by Tim Causer) and two recent special issues of Revue d’études benthamiennes, means we now have more than twenty new critical essays on Bentham’s relationship with Australia. Perhaps best of all, the entirety of this work is available in open-access format.

Kieran Pender

Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia by Frank Bongiorno

For progressive Australians, 2022 was a year of optimism. But in these turbulent times, there is much work to be done to translate that hope into concrete reform that makes Australia a better place. My book of the year, Ben Schneiders’ Hard Labour: Wage theft in the age of inequality (Scribe), was a powerful reminder of the inequalities at the heart of Australian society. Schneiders, an investigative journalist, has broken most of the major wage-theft stories in Australia over the past decade, revealing hundreds of billions in unpaid wages by major companies. Hard Labour, his book-length account of that reporting, explains the frailties in our industrial system that permit such widescale exploitation and offers suggestions for reform. Dreamers and Schemers: A political history of Australia (La Trobe University Press, reviewed in the November 2022 issue of ABR), by Frank Bongiorno, promises to become the definitive Australian political history. Essential summer reading.

‘It is tragic how few people ever “possess their souls” before they die … Most people are other people.

Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.’

                                Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Spare me the black ties

Spare me the oaken attitudes, the platitudes of parliament

Spare me Windsor Castle, the Cinque Ports – Calais even, branded on our hearts

Spare me the Tudors and the Stuarts and the Hanovers and the Windsors

Spare me our vestigial appreciation of history – all those lies

Spare me the hurried, ill-fitting suits of the broadcasters

Spare me the gashed shaves eulogising the regal dead

Spare me the reporter’s incongruous green tie which he will regret until the day he dies,

           like a dropped catch or a faux pas on falling in love

Spare me love

Spare me the own goals of my own formation

Spare me glib aubades of the cynical

Spare me the practised intonation of the mourners

Spare me the duke of Norfolk’s deliberations, grave though they are

Spare me the funeral if you don’t mind – just speed it up!

Spare me, dammit, the vox populi

Sanction hallucinogens, satire, merriment

Imagine the inappropriate – ten days of public polyamory

Spare me the furtive humour of the mourners, the off-camera mockery

Spare me the despair of Spare, the ruthless brittleness of brothers

Spare me Coronation Chicken

Spare me, in the bowels of Christ, the prime ministerial recollections

Spare me, god help us, John Howard OM or whatever he is

          (CREEP – Campaign to Re-Elect the Prime Minister)

Spare me the overhead footage of the purple Bentley bound for the capital

Spare me the honours list, the uncles slaughtered in Flanders

Spare me Aunt Rosemary and her sherried remembrances

Spare me deference, good manners

Above all spare me the impeccable ladies-in-waiting

Bring back Crawfie when she’s needed – all her audacities

Tell us about the crumpets, the naughty French lessons

For god’s sake spare me the Abdication – Uncle David and his ‘ice-veined bitches’

Bring back Wallis! Blessed are the chic!

Spare me the corgis, the pedigrees

Spare me the rumoured infidelities

Spare me the discreet mistresses, the oily-royally correspondents

Spare me the rampant lachrymosity of the subjects

Spare me

Spare me

Spare me

When I began work on A Maker of Books, I had no idea that Alec Bolton had succeeded ‘Peter Pica’ (the publisher and bookseller Andrew Fabinyi) as a pseudonymous critic of Australian book design and production for Australian Book Review. He called himself ‘Martin Em’. I had set out to explore in detail Alec’s achievement as a letterpress printer of distinction at his private Brindabella Press, and also his long career in Australian publishing, but this was an unexpected discovery. The clue was a letter from Alec to John McLaren, the then editor of ABR, which I found in a completely unrelated file in the Alec Bolton papers at the National Library of Australia. When I looked at Martin Em’s ‘BookShapes’ columns, published between 1978 and 1982, Alec’s distinctive voice was quite apparent.

He began by chiding his fellow publishers, gathered for the Australian Book Publishers Association design awards of 1977–78, for inattentiveness during the presentation:

It seemed that many publishers who were present did not feel obliged to pay attention, their complacency abetting rudeness. One could almost hear them saying, ‘Well, yes, this was a disaster area up ’til the sixties, but we’ve fixed it now. Everyone knows that Australian books today are the equal of the world’s best.’

While he conceded that matters had improved in recent years, he attributed this to Peter Pica’s frequently critical remarks and promised to follow suit, beginning with a trenchant critique of a recent biography of Sir Robert Menzies as a ‘shoddy production’:

This year, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) celebrates its centenary as the world’s largest and oldest broadcasting institution (the US company NBC was founded four years later, in 1926). Whether it will reach its bicentenary, or even have another ten years of life in anything like its current form is a question facing other British institutions such as the Conservative Party, the monarchy, and indeed the Union of England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland itself. Placing the BBC among this group signals its estimable role in defining an imagined community but also the possibility that the existence of these other entities and their function in this process might be finite, subject to challenges from their own internal contradictions as much as from hostile external forces without.

As its part in the recent spectacle of the funeral of Elizabeth II demonstrates, the BBC is an institution anchored to the tradition and continuity manifest in the sovereign’s lineage or in the yearnings of the Tories; at least it has been since fairly recently. Yet it is also a product and producer of modernity. The BBC has embodied and mediated versions of historical change in the very invention of broadcasting in a distinctively British guise; in the building of the technical infrastructure with which it enveloped the country in order to serve and address its audiences, and in the creation of ways of representing worlds real and imagined. As these new histories from David Hendy and Simon Potter make clear, the sound, voice, reach, and reception of the BBC are very different from what they were at its inception, even if there are vestiges of its original remit, as determined by Royal Charter: to inform, educate, and entertain.

The task for both is an ambitious one. At the outset, Hendy ponders whether a history of the BBC is even possible. The formidable challenge faced by him and Potter is how to make sense of its millions of broadcasts, the range of personnel who have made it function, the very roles invented in order to do so, its extensive archives, and the wealth of commentary generated by and about it. The story of the BBC has been told many times, and one encounters familiar and unavoidable structuring points at work between them. These include the BBC’s origins as the British Broadcasting Company and the formulation of its work in the terms of a public service, the testing of its degree of independence from the state by the General Strike of 1926 and during World War II, the galvanising effect of commercial television in the 1950s, and the antagonism of the market-driven ideology and deregulatory zeal of Margaret Thatcher. An overarching theme of both books is the embattled state of the BBC – not as a contemporary condition but as constitutive of its historical development. This is summarised most explicitly in Hendy’s structure and narrative approach across four sections: ‘Crucible’; ‘War’; ‘Consensus and Conflict’; ‘Attack and Defence’.

The books are complementary in their insights, building as they do on each author’s established scholarly engagement with the BBC, including citation of each other’s work. Hendy is a practised writer on public service broadcasting, and on radio in particular, which is a curiously exclusive preserve among historians and media scholars given its global impact. His Noise: A human history of sound and listening (2013) accompanied his own foray onto the airwaves, while Life on Air (2008) provided a history of Radio Four, a station approvingly described by Sebastian Faulks as a defining site of the BBC’s role, albeit one that might equally infuriate, its ‘middle-brow seriousness’ heard by some as a complacent and cloying middle-classness. Hendy’s authorised, albeit insistently independent study, draws on substantial mining of the archives, which allows for much original detail. Potter’s pedigree and political attention is evident in work such as Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British world, 1922–1970 (2012); his focus informs a leaner ‘critical, unofficial, and unauthorized analysis’.

Richard Kerbaj is the latest in a long line of journalists and other writers to write a book on the intelligence agencies of the Five Eyes countries (the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand). His major claim is that he has conducted interviews with more than a hundred current and former intelligence officers, as well as four former prime ministers, Britain’s Theresa May and David Cameron, and Australia’s Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull. The willingness of so many intelligence officers to speak openly to a journalist, and in some cases to be identified by name, is a mark of how far the relationship between the agencies and external writers has come.

In the first decades after World War II, when what we now know as the Five Eyes arrangements and many of the individual agencies were established, the authorities sought to impose, by such measures as the Official Secrets Acts 1911–89 in Britain and the Crimes Act 1914 in Australia, virtually complete secrecy, not only on their operations but even on their very existence. In fact, while using the courts to suppress unfavourable or unauthorised stories, the British intelligence agencies MI5 and MI6 employed trusted writers to reveal their achievements. It was by exposing the hypocrisy of this policy that the young Turnbull gained world headlines in the Spycatcher cases in the 1980s.

By the 1960s and 1970s, many books criticised the British and American agencies, often prompted by the disasters of the Cambridge Five in Britain and by the revelations by congressional committees in Washington of the misdeeds of the CIA and the FBI. In the first two decades of this century, a new series of controversies erupted arising from the practices of  ‘extraordinary rendition’ and techniques such as waterboarding by US agencies in the so-called War on Terror; the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which the British government justified by an intelligence assessment in what Kerbaj calls the ‘Iraq Dossier’ or the ‘September Dossier’, but that was more widely called the ‘dodgy dossier’; and the 2013 revelations by Edward Snowden of the extent of electronic surveillance by the American and British signals intelligence agencies. All of these aroused intense controversy in the United States and the United Kingdom, which reverberated in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Across the past fifty or more years, indigenous peoples in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand have increasingly made political and legal claims about sovereignty and land. As this has occurred, numerous scholars in a broad range of disciplines – especially law and history – have tried to explain how these two matters were dealt with by the British empire in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Often that work has been done in the hope that it will bolster the indigenous peoples’ claims or redeem the settler societies whose legitimacy has been drawn into question because of their unjust treatment of First Peoples.

In these circumstances, many Australians have looked across the ditch in envy. They have been convinced that New Zealanders are better able to tackle these difficult matters because their ancestors made a historic agreement – the Treaty of Waitangi – at the very outset of colonisation on the basis that its indigenous people were sovereign and owners of all the land, thereby enabling both Pākehā and Māori New Zealanders today to make moral, political, legal and constitutional claims in regard to authority, rights and history that are accepted in Aotearoa New Zealand in ways they are evidently not in Australia, hence the Uluru Statement’s call for truth-telling, treaty-making, and an Indigenous voice to parliament.

Unbeknown to most Australians, this conviction owes more to a particular kind of history-making than it does to any uncontested body of historical fact. As one New Zealand historian pointed out many years ago, little of the historical writing about the Treaty of Waitangi has been executed in a manner that would satisfy the English historian Herbert Butterfield’s famous dictum that historians should seek to understand the past on and in its own terms. Indeed, much of it has been designed to meet some contemporary purpose. This has especially been the case when the history-making has taken the form of foundational history. This is a kind of historical work in which an author claims that some event or text was the product of moral or political or legal principles that founded the nation. Consequently, it resembles mythic rather than scholarly history, and thereby provides an egregiously incomplete account of the past.

In American culture, the baseball novel is virtually a genre unto itself, baseball offering a metaphor through which the American dream – the rise and fall and rise again of unlikely heroes – might be interrogated. The prologue of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) offers a stunning example: within all the noise and spectacle of a baseball final an entire nation, as it teeters on the edge of the atomic age, is apprehended.

Why there are so few novels deploying cricket as their defining motif is a question that warrants its own thesis. Pressed to name a ‘cricket novel’ many readers might nominate Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008). Yet, while Netherland concerns itself (in part) with efforts to found the New York Cricket Club, cricket operates for O’Neill predominantly as a baseball trope, a means of exploring the aspirations of immigrant Americans in the wake of 9/11.

In the Australian context there is Steven Carroll’s The Gift of Speed (2004) – about a young boy in thrall to the West Indies cricket team – but few other novels spring to mind. Beach and backyard cricket commonly function as expressions of the Australian summer, but to understand anything of the mythology of Australian cricket – what it represents beyond its statistics and scorecards – it has been generally necessary to look to sports journalists, such as Greg Baum and Gideon Haigh.

Inga Simpson steps into this apparent void with Willowman. While a distinct change of pace from the dystopian notes of her most recent novel, The Last Woman in the World (2021), Willowman has its wellspring in the same contemplation of nature – its beauty and sanctity – that characterises so much of Simpson’s writing. The best cricket, the novel stresses, acquires the condition of music, ‘humanity, spirit and nature [working] as one’.

The accordion, or squeezebox, takes its name from the German Akkordeon, meaning a ‘musical chorus’ or ‘chorus of sounds’. This box-shaped aerophonic instrument makes music when keys on its sides are pressed, one side mostly melody, the other chords. Squeezing the instrument and playing with both hands, the musician dexterously produces polyphonous music.

Iris Webber, the protagonist of Fiona Kelly McGregor’s eighth book and fourth novel, Iris, plays the accordion. Living in Sydney’s inner-city Surry Hills in the 1930s, Iris wrests independence and joy from this, as an alternative to being a ‘prossie’ and as respite from pervasive brutality. Though busking – ‘begging alms’ – is illegal, it’s a simpler way to make a living for Iris, enmeshed and dependent on a net of underworld unlawful activity.

Early in The Sun Walks Down, Mary Wallace – mother to six-year-old Denny, who has gone missing in a dust storm – throws her husband a ‘general look of bafflement at having found herself here, in this place, with these people’. It’s a symptomatic moment early in a novel that contains myriad displays of perplexity by various characters – at each other, at situations they create or must navigate, at the meaning of life.

The Sun Walks Down is Fiona McFarlane’s third book of fiction, following her startling début, The Night Guest (2013), and a short story collection, The High Places (2016). It is set in late colonial South Australia, in and around the fictional town of Fairly in the southern Flinders Ranges. The district’s farmers are trying to grow wheat: some have committed ‘to at least one more harvest’, while others have ‘already given up’ or soon will. McFarlane’s prose evokes ambitions and absurdities, but also the familial richness, of white people’s attempts to tame the land.

The plot is unremarkable: a child is missing in harsh terrain – perhaps lost, perhaps kidnapped. The days pass, the sun is punishing, the searchers may or may not be competent. But beyond the opening pages, there is little tension. The story’s qualities stem not from the account of the search for Denny but from the big-picture questions the search enables.

The covers of comic books/graphic novels/sequential narratives, call them what you will, have a fundamentally different relationship to the contents of their books than the covers of ‘ordinary’, text-only works. For the latter, the cover image is usually produced by a designer whom the author does not know and may never meet. In the case of comics, however, the cover image is made by the same hand that creates the images that proliferate within the book. The cover of a text-only book is communicating a sense of what the book is like through the totally different language of images. For the browser, that’s like trying to decide whether to attend a concert on the strength of a billposter. With a comic book, the sort of thing you see on the cover is the sort of thing you get inside. A comic book begins before you even open it. Basically, you can judge a comic book by its cover.

Two recent début graphic novels by Lee Lai and Tommi Parrish (friends and ex-Melburnians now living in Montreal) give us a chance to examine this relationship of cover to content, and to broach the vast discussion of a comic book maker’s style, their approach to art and design, their visual voice. Both these books focus on a pair of women working away at the mystery of a complicated romantic relationship. These characters are flailing through the doldrums of their twenties and thirties, assailed by momentum-sapping cocktails of aimlessness, depression, alcoholism, anxiety, and self-hatred. Oof.  In both books, one of the protagonists goes back to live with their parents. The father supports the mother and the mother battles with a brittle, baffled incomprehension at her daughter’s mental health woes. So much for the older generation. Luckily, both books feature young children (in Stone Fruit a niece, in Men I Trust a son) and on the pages on which they appear these narratives become most emotionally vivid, as the children demand attention and action from their beleaguered, becalmed mothers and aunts. Panels dominated by images from children’s television– Garfield and Peppa Pig – not only tell us what shows the children are watching but also gesture towards the main characters’ affliction by a sense of childish helplessness. The actual children, on the other hand, display occasional adult levels of empathy for, and forgiveness of, their careening carers. Forces for id, imagination, and energy, their appearances give both narratives the chance to burn brightly for brief stretches.

Miniatures by Susan Midalia

Night Parrot Press, $24.99 pb, 175 pp

What is a short short story? More specifically, how short is it (or how long)? The most famous tiny example is attributed to Ernest Hemingway: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ Whether he wrote this or not, it represents the gold standard in suggesting much in little. Like poetry, microstories or flash fictions allow no formal wobbling as authors tread a perilous tightrope between banality and inspired ingenuity.

The other risk of the very short story is its ephemeral nature; those weak on narrative can be merely a wisp of smoke in a breeze. In Miniatures: A collection of short stories (Night Parrot Press, $24.99 pb, 175 pp), Susan Midalia’s very short shorts (well over one hundred of them) prove that it’s possible to offer a story – that is, something with a narrative, with progression – within a few words. Some of these stories are a page, some a paragraph, while one is only a sentence. Witty, endearing, subversive, inventive, delightful – there are many apt adjectives for these beautifully polished gems.

In other hands, the risk does not always pay off. For example, some of the microstories in Julia Prendergast’s Bloodrust (Spineless Wonders, $24.99 pb, 160 pp) rely entirely on voice or mood rather than narrative and they seem somewhat provisional, still in draft. That said, they also flow like poetry: the final story, ‘Riddled Gestures’, is more poem than prose. Midalia’s pieces are undeniably stories and her style is realism, but Midalia’s scenarios are not necessarily realistic ones, and the fine control she maintains draws us into their surreal and surprising premises, even in that one-sentence story.

Theatre director John Clark’s close namesake John Clarke, in character as that infamous Kiwi schlep Fred Dagg, once averred that autobiography

is a highly recommended form of leisure activity, as it takes up large chunks of time and if you’re a slow writer or you think particularly highly of yourself, you can probably whistle away a year or two … It’s not a difficult business and remember this is also your big opportunity to explain what a wonderful person you are and how you’ve been consistently misunderstood …

Clark (no ‘e’) may not feel misunderstood exactly, but his memoir, An Eye for Talent – a diaristic account of his remarkably enduring directorship of the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) from 1969 to 2004 – certainly reads like the seizing of an opportunity to burnish the author’s legacy.

The book joins others by contemporaries of Clark – Jim Sharman’s Blood and Tinsel (2008) and David Williamson’s Home Truths (2021) to name two – as insider chronicles of Australian theatre’s coming of age. The beats are well-trodden, from the early dominance of commercial theatre under the aegis of J.C. Williamson’s to the rise of ‘indigenous’ (i.e., not US or British) playwriting via trailblazing works such as Ray Lawler’s Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1955) and the ‘ocker’ plays which constituted the New Wave of the 1970s.

The dedication in Barbara Kingsolver’s new novel reads ‘For the survivors’, and its epigraph is taken from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849), to which Kingsolver’s title pays a sly homage. Her book is a self-conscious reworking of Dickens’s famous novel about an orphan making his way in the world, with Kingsolver’s treatment being narrated by a boy born as Damon Fields in Lee County, Virginia. He acquires his nickname partly from the colour of his hair and partly from the venomous copperhead snake, and after losing his father and mother he finds himself thrown back on his own resilience and talents to keep moving forward. There are many structural parallels with Dickens’s novel – the malevolent Uriah Heep, for example, morphs here into a similarly sinister figure known as ‘U-Haul’ – but these literary allusions never become too intrusive, and Kingsolver’s novel is robustly realistic in its general demeanour.

While Dickens is the most direct model, Demon Copperhead has an iconoclastic hero whose colloquial, first-person style may put the reader more in mind of classic American fictional rebels such as Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn or Saul Bellow’s Augie March. Just as Huck Finn mocks the Sunday school axioms of the Widow Douglas, so Demon mocks clichés about ‘bad choices’ delivered by the department of social services, while resisting their bureaucratic method of ‘rotating and merchandising foster boys’. Demon develops instead a sturdy self-reliance that enables him to survive the poverty of a trailer house, various forms of abuse by his stepfather and other relatives, and also a crippling knee injury that ends his promising high-school football career. Despite these setbacks, he always seeks to avoid being categorised as ‘Poor Demon’ or defined by adults: ‘What if I was depending on the Miss Barkses of this world,’ he asks, ‘instead of my own bad self?’

For Australian readers, this rejection of ‘Mom-assigned names’ and an eagerness to reinvent personal identity might seem culturally alien. Though Demon is interested in the hybrid ‘Melungeon’ blood that he inherited from his father, there is little sense here of acquiescing in tribal or ancestral loyalty. Instead, he admires chameleons such as ‘Snoop Dogg’ or ‘Scarface’ who do not ‘stick with the name they start out with’. This power of invention is reflected in Demon’s ultimate career success, which comes from his skill in drawing cartoons. Such artistic expertise enables him to devise imaginary superheroes that strike a chord with newspaper readers and thus to escape from the confines of Lee County, which he describes as ‘a place where you keep living the life you were assigned’.

Ned Beauman’s latest novel – his first since Madness Is Better Than Defeat (2017) – marks something of a stylistic departure for the British writer. Where Beauman’s work has for the most part experimented with history and genre, Venomous Lumpsucker is set squarely in our collapsing planetary future. With typical wit (something that has fortunately not been lost with the shift in subject matter to climate change) Beauman prefaces the novel using a devilish author’s note:

This novel is set in the near future. However, to minimise any need for mental arithmetic on the reader’s part, sums of money are presented as if the euro has retained its 2022 value with no inflation. This is the sole respect in which the story deviates from how things will actually unfold.

In Novelist as a Vocation, Haruki Murakami describes himself as a ‘very ordinary person’ who has ‘a bit of ability’ in writing novels. It is a point Murakami labours in the eleven essays loosely focused on the craft of writing in this book, where he variously insists that ‘I was just a regular guy who in his spare time tossed off a novel that happened to go on to win a new writer’s prize’. While it is difficult to imagine that an international bestselling author is a kind of everyman figure, these statements are put under pressure in this volume in discussions about his ‘magical’ creativity.

Two examples will suffice: Murakami describes his ‘mental chest of drawers’ and also his automatic process, dubiously named ‘Automatic Dwarves’, as being akin to the first time he drove an automatic car and imagined there were dwarves in the gearbox, ‘each in charge of operating a separate gear’. This kind of pairing of the everyday with the extraordinary (and occasionally inappropriate) and Murakami’s appeal to magical realism and neo-surrealism are features of his fiction. His use of memorable conceits and slant ways on his writing life are important elements in his essays on writing, but they chart his remarkable rather than mundane circumstances.

The essays explore a range of topics from more practical ideas to deeply esoteric themes, and contain some cracker lines. In ‘Are Novelists Broadminded?’, Murakami states: ‘Writers are basically an egoistic breed, proud and highly competitive.’ Some of the more useful essays for writers include ‘Making Time Your Ally: On Writing a Novel’, where Murakami discusses the importance of writing a set number of words each day (for him this is the equivalent of sixteen hundred words) and the importance of feedback; ‘What Kind of Characters Should I Include?’, which includes ruminations on his early use of first-person narration and his current preference for the third person; and ‘A Completely Personal and Physical Occupation’, which foregrounds ‘mental toughness’ and ‘loneliness’ as part of the writerly experience. Some of the most memorable moments are expressed in ‘When I Became a Novelist’, where Murakami reanimates the ‘satisfying crack when bat met ball’ at a Yakult baseball game and ‘it suddenly struck [him]: I think I can write a novel’. He also writes about the time he held a carrier pigeon with a broken wing: ‘as the warmth of the wounded pigeon sank into his hands’, he knew he would win a literary prize.

Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018) was an interdisciplinary thinker who helped establish the field of the environmental humanities (or ecological humanities); in 2012 she also co-founded the scholarly journal Environmental Humanities. Having initially trained in anthropology, Rose strove to push that field and other ethnographic studies beyond their stubborn anthropocentrism. She came to Australia in 1980 from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, to undertake PhD research in Aboriginal Australia. Her thinking was shaped by the decades she spent with Aboriginal mentors and friends, in the Northern Territory communities of Lingara and Yarralin. Across her writing, in books such as Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and extinction (2011) and Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness (1996), Rose demonstrated and promoted attentiveness to, and ethical engagement with, the plethora of beings on Earth.

These strange years of pandemic and lockdowns certainly brought challenges and unusual experiences – those of constraint but also, surprisingly, of opportunity and richness. The curious spaces we occupy in the ether have become a seedbed for conversation and exchange; for connections that otherwise might not have found a field in which to prosper. Despite or perhaps because of the limits of the digital, perhaps even because we were undistracted by physical proximity, these spaces seemed to offer the potential for a raw honesty – lacunae of sotto voce conversations which brought us ironically into a form of seemingly unmediated communication. From the hermetically sealed bubble of lockdowns, digital connect took on the intensity of embodied dialogue, the intimate voice in the ear.

This is apparent in the new collaborative volume by poets Audrey Molloy and Anthony Lawrence. ‘Are there things you never knew you loved, / until our lives were altered, / the new jargon of social distance / too big for our mouths?’, they ask in Ordinary Time. What essential understandings and experiences were we suddenly able to touch in the strangeness of that time of isolation? As Lawrence and Molloy tell us in the preface, they had not actually met until the launch of this book. Early in the pandemic they commenced an exchange of work, one poem at a time, building slowly and inexorably a fabric of intense poetic and personal connection. Like a kind of ‘epistolary love letter’, these poems, and the synergy of book which they have produced, embody this kind of space in which physically separate individuals weave conversations together that challenge notions of what being ‘together’ might actually mean.

The rhythm of these one-for-one poems embodies this dance of connection. There are moments when it seems possible to tell ‘which poet is which’, to differentiate styles and hear the distinctive cadences of the older established male poet and the younger Irish-Australian female poet. However, as in the deep textures of any relationship, we also hear both voices melding together as ‘Anthony’ and ‘Audrey’ throw words, images, ideas, the art of textual poesis into the crucible of their shared space, the tabula rasa of electronic forms of communication. Something in one poem is responded to, or riffed on, in the next and thus the conversation meanders and returns. For instance, one voice begins:

Maps are central to Kim Mahood’s practice as a writer, artist, and intercultural collaborator. She began making them in the wake of her father’s death in a helicopter mustering accident thirty years ago. This tragic event compelled her to make a pilgrimage to the country where she spent her late childhood and teenage years living on Mongrel Downs cattle station in the Tanami Desert. This journey became the subject of her award-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake (2001). This journey set in motion a renewed relationship with the place that has seen her return to the Tanami annually for more than twenty years. The relationships that developed during this period resulted in Mahood’s longstanding preoccupation with maps and mapmaking developing into collaborative mapping projects with Walmajarri and Jaru peoples, the contours of which she traces in her second book Position Doubtful: Mapping landscapes and memories (2016).

Mahood’s interest in collaborating with First Nations people to co-create maps was entangled with her family’s role in dispossession; her own name is etched onto a map of the area, which was created by her father. She acknowledges in Position Doubtful that ‘exploration and colonisation are part of my heritage’. As symbolic representations of places that help us to figure out where we are and where we want to go, maps are an apt metaphor for Mahood’s body of writing that centres on the uncertain search for self and meaning in the colonised landscape of the Tanami deserts.

Mahood’s new book, Wandering with Intent, brings together a collection of essays written over a period of fifteen years that traverses terrain that has been shaped by both a lifetime of experience in the desert regions at the centre of the continent and the ‘undertow of its original custodians’. Having lived in ‘the zone between black and white’, at places such as Hooker Creek, Finke, Alice Springs, Mongrel Downs, and, later, the communities of Mulan and Balgo, Mahood’s life, as she describes it, has been ‘entangled in particular Aboriginal families in multiple ways’ and her ‘sense of the world has been constructed by that experience’. Mahood’s writing is compelled by this point of intersection and emerges from her observations of the places, both physical and psychic, where cultural systems encounter and ‘battle and subvert each other’.

i.m. Peter Porter

I should have seen

all those words crowded at the door

of Peter’s apartment

when I stayed with him –

so many jostling verbs

outstretched adjectives

and nervy adverbs all

rubbing shoulders with those little

ands and buts and ors, etc.

But I didn’t. His shepherding voice

and kind manner ushered me

past them. They were there

as usual, but for another time

when he could invite them in

– his customary friends – undistracted

by visitors, so they could roam

and explore, until with patience

and a home-made miracle

their jostle would subside

and they would converse with him

and later, on the page

with us.

Few names are so ubiquitous in Australian culture or hold such a significant position in its history as that of Matthew Flinders. More than one hundred sites across Australia have been named in his honour, commemorating his accomplishments as a navigator, hydrographer, cartographer, and scientist. Among them are several statues featuring Flinders with Trim, his ever-faithful pet cat and companion, as well as numerous geographic landmarks, electoral districts, and a university. 

Flinders’ short life was as remarkable as it was tragic. He was the first European to circumnavigate Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in 1798, proving it to be an island, and Australia three years later, after which he produced the first complete map of the country. Docking at Mauritius for repairs in 1803, Flinders was arrested by the French authorities and detained for more than six years, estranging him from his wife. Their eventual reunion in England was cruelly cut short by his untimely death at the age of forty.

Early biographers tended to present Flinders as a hero. In The Life of Matthew Flinders (1914), Ernest Scott hailed the captain as an ‘Englishman of exceptionally high character’. Later writers such as Sidney Baker and Geoffrey Ingleton painted a harsh portrait of an arrogant man whose stubbornness was his downfall. Miriam Estensen’s 2002 biography presents a more even appraisal. As its subtitle suggests, in Matthew Flinders: The man behind the map, librarian, literary scholar, and Flinders aficionado Gillian Dooley embarks on a journey to discover the person beneath the legend. Focusing on his personal life and characteristics, she seeks to counterbalance previous accounts that were overly concerned with his career and achievements.

Don’t let the title put you off: this book is not purveying social theory but investigates the historical process by which economics became a university discipline in Britain, focusing on how that event changed the nature of economic knowledge. It thus mixes intellectual and institutional history of the highest quality. ‘Constructing’ in the title refers to the cover image of the model built by Vladimir Tatlin and his colleagues of his planned 400-metre tower. Tatlin was a ‘constructivist’ in the sense of the Russian art movement that needed engineers not philosophers. The tower was never realised, much like the ambitions held for economics by Alfred Marshall, its champion at the University of Cambridge, c.1885–1908, who sits at the centre of this book.

Tribe is the only person who could have completed this study. It draws on a lifetime’s knowledge of British economic literature, which Tribe has been mastering since his book Land, Labour and Economic Discourse (1978). That research has been conducted in parallel with work on the history of German economics, beginning with Governing Economy: The reformation of German economic discourse 1750–1840 (1988). The combined effect is one of Tribe’s distinguishing features as a scholar – the ability to view the British through German eyes and vice versa. This, incidentally, makes him one of the few people in the world who can conduct source criticism on Karl Marx’s Capital, the results of which are devastating for Marx’s standing as an economic theorist and historian (see chapter six of Tribe’s The Economy of the Word).

The intersection of German and British economics is also at play in this volume. The German story is one of a policy discourse (Kameralwissenschaft) that was being taught at university to future administrators until it was transformed into metaphysical soup once it came into contact with post-Kantian philosophy around 1800, and then disappeared into irrelevance. Seen from this point of view, the comparatively modest penetration of British universities by German metaphysics in the nineteenth century prompts the question: what happened to British political economy? We have not been in a position to answer this question due to the sorry state of the history of economics.

Fiona Kelly McGregor has published eight books, including Buried Not Dead and Indelible Ink. Her latest title is the historical novel Iris. McGregor is also known for her performance art and event curation, and contributes regularly to The Saturday Paper, Sydney Review of Books, and The Monthly.  

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why? 
I would head west to witness the effect of rain across the continent. As the floods recede, I’d check out the Barka, Murrumbidgee, and Darling rivers. If accessible, I’d camp at the AWC property near Kathi Thanda: the wildlife would be going crazy, the birds and the flowers. Or I’d go to México.  

What’s your idea of hell? 
Peter Dutton as PM.  

What do you consider the most specious virtue? 
Chastity and decorum – characteristics overwhelmingly expected to be demonstrated by women, which are only excuses for patriarchal oppression.