Summer greetings 

Welcome to the January–February issue, the 450th in the second series, which began in 1978. We hope you will enjoy the double issue, which opens with a disturbing report about developments in Iran and features a series of articles on politics in Australia and the United States.

Last year, in our eleven issues, we published more than 300 creative writers, scholars, commentators, and freelance critics, seventy-one of them new to the magazine. We look forward to introducing many debutants to ABR readers in 2023. Advancing the work and careers of young writers – and paying them well – remains a priority of this organisation. Everyone associated with ABR wants to thank our 200-plus Patrons. Put simply, you have transformed this magazine, as well as enabling us to increase our payments to writers.  

While on this subject, we encourage others to think about donating to ABR. No one should be in any doubt about the challenges facing small arts organisations – ABR included. We all have access to far too much cogent information about the modest funding of the arts in this country to be complacent about the future. This is a source of increasing concern to the arts sector, and one we will have more to say about in 2023. ABR will only thrive – will only advance its work of six decades – with support from subscribers, donors, philanthropic foundations, and government. 

But now it’s time to take some leave after a busy, rousing year. The office remains open for business nonetheless. We’ll be back with another packed issue in March. 

 

Porter Prize 

The Peter Porter Poetry Prize, now in its nineteenth year, attracted 1,132 entries, from thirty-four countries. Our three judges – Sarah Holland-Batt (Chair of ABR and an award-winning poet), Des Cowley (poetry publisher and former Rare Books Librarian at the State Library of Victoria), and James Jiang (Assistant Editor of Griffith Review) – have shortlisted these five poems: 

‘Loss-invaded Catalogue’ by Chris Andrews 
‘Running Up That Bill’ by Chris Arnold 
‘Field Notes for an Albatross Palimpsest’ by Michelle Cahill 
‘periferal, fantasmal’ by Dan Disney 
‘Abiquiu, New Mexico’ by Raisa Tolchinsky 

On our website, we list the seventeen poems that comprised the official longlist. There you will also find the judges’ report, including remarks on the five poems. Our judges had this to say about the overall field: 

The judges were pleased to consider a rich and deep field of entries to the Peter Porter Poetry Prize this year, reflecting both the variety and strength of contemporary poetry, and many of its stylistic and thematic concerns. This year’s entries reflected a pronounced interest in climate issues and contemporary geopolitics, with a number of poems touching on recent floods and bushfires, species extinction, and the war in Ukraine. Many entries veered towards the experimental, and there were fewer lyric poems, love poems, and poems explicitly interested in established forms than in previous years. The outstanding poems on this year’s shortlist share an interest in political concerns refracted through their expression in language, including philology and etymology, and the power of listing, cataloguing, and naming. The five shortlisted poems engage with pressing subjects such as mining, colonial place naming, abortion, environmental degradation, and the relationship between the human and non-human worlds, but do so with subtlety, wit, and linguistic charge, rather than didacticism. Curiously, a taxonomic impulse manifests in several of the shortlisted poems, which probe the inflections, origins, and currency of words. 

The shortlisted poems appear in this issue (starting on page thirty). Our five poets also introduce and read their poems on the ABR Podcast. Meanwhile, admirers of Peter Porter won’t want to miss our new ABR Podcast tribute to his life and work. Morag Fraser – principal supporter of the Porter Prize for many years, and Porter’s biographer – introduces the podcast. Readers include Gig Ryan, John Kinsella, Judith Beveridge, and Andrew Taylor (who also supports the Porter Prize). 

This year’s Porter Prize ceremony will take place via Zoom on Thursday, 19 January (6pm). This is a free event and all are welcome but bookings are necessary. To register your interest, please RSVP to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.; you will then receive the Zoom link on the morning of the event. 

 

Prizes galore 

To give people more time to polish their entries after the silly season, the Calibre Essay Prize will now close at midnight on 15 January 2023, a two-week extension.

The ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize will open on 23 January, with a closing date of 24 April. The total prize money this year is $12,500 (once again there are three prizes). Full details will appear on our website soon. 

 

The PMLAs in Launceston

The winners of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards were announced in Launceston on 13 December, the party temporarily relocating to Design Tasmania’s internal courtyard when the opening of lunch ovens excited a fire alarm. In the absence of the prime minister and the arts minister, Susan Templeman, Special Envoy for the Arts, announced that the Fiction winner was Red Heaven, by Nicolas Rothwell. The Non-fiction winner was Rogue Forces: An explosive insiders’ account of Australian SAS war crimes in Afghanistan by Mark Willacy. The Australian History winner was Semut: The untold story of a secret Australian operation in WWII Borneo by Christine Helliwell. The Children’s literature winner was Mina and the Whole Wide World by Sherryl Clark and Briony Stewart, and the Young Adult literature winner was The Gaps by Leanne Hall. ABR congratulates all the winning and shortlisted authors. 

 

Jill Jolliffe (1945–2022)

ABR was saddened to learn of the death of author–journalist Jill Jolliffe on 2 December. Jill, who was seventy-seven, wrote for the magazine a number of times between 2004 and 2012. Her many books included East Timor: National and socialism (1978) – her first – and Balibo (2009), probably her most influential work.  

Jill reported on East Timor and other ex-Portuguese colonies, often at considerable risk to her own safety. She was one of two foreign journalists in Dili on 16 October 1975, when five Australian journalists were killed in Balibo by the Indonesian Special Forces. In 2009, Jill wrote in ABR: ‘The evening of the sixteenth is imprinted on my mind.’  

Her work should be imprinted on ours.

 

Antigone Kefala (1931–2022) 

Poet and prose writer Antigone Kefala, born to Greek parents in Romania, died on 3 December, aged ninety-one. This was just days after she received the Patrick White Award – a fitting distinction for an under-appreciated but distinctive Australian writer. Her first book was The Alien, with Makar Press, in 1973; five other poetry collections followed. Her last, Fragments (2016) won the Judith Wright Calanthe Award. Giramondo published some of her prose works, most recently Late Journals (2022).

 

Holly Hendry-Saunders 

With commentary and review essays forming a larger component of the magazine, and with a number of prizes and special announcements due in the first half of 2023, ABR welcomes its new publicist: Holly Hendry-Saunders. Holly has a Bachelor of Media from the University of Adelaide and is currently undertaking a Masters of Publishing and Communications at the University of Melbourne. Holly can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..  

 

Robert Adamson (1943–2022) 

As we were going to press, Advances learned of the death of Robert Adamson, one of the amiable lions of Australian poetry and publishing. He was seventy-nine.  

Adamson, who had a genius for book titles, published his first book back in 1970: Canticles on the Skin. There were several Selected Poems along the way: our Editor launched one of them in 2001: Mulberry Leaves. Adamson autobiographical works included Wards of the State (1992) and Inside Out (2004). His many honours included a Banjo Award for his most laurelled collection, The Clean Dark (1989) and the Patrick White Award (2011). His circle of friends and colleagues was extensive, and his imprint is all over the Australian poetry of recent decades. 

ABR will write about that legacy in a coming issue. 

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.

 

Disorderly process 

Dear Editor, 

Peter Rose has done the literary community – including we historians – a service in drawing attention to the manifold and persistent problems with the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (ABR, December 2022).

While the writing quality of the judges’ reports this year might be politely described as uneven, the panels as unrepresentative, and the scheduling of the awards ceremony as untimely, the central problem is the recurring political manipulation. It has been a habit of both Coalition and Labor governments. What I find puzzling, however, is that state and territory prizes do not seem to experience the same difficulties. If there has been political interference – and, most egregiously, direct intervention of the kind that resulted in my book The Sex Lives of Australians: A history being vetoed for the 2013 Prime Minister’s Prize – it has not come to light at the sub-national level. In my experience as, at different times, a judge and shortlisted author, the New South Wales awards enjoy warm bipartisan support and are administered with great professionalism by the State Library of New South Wales. The ceremony is a wonderful celebration that kicks off History Week.  

The new federal government likes to talk about its commitment to orderly process. It would do well to apply the high standards it professes to these awards. 

Frank Bongiorno, Scullin, ACT 

With protests by members of the Iranian diaspora burgeoning across Europe and the rest of the world, I attend a demonstration in central Athens. A group assembles in front of the Greek Parliament, with two banners outstretched. The first reads ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’, the second, ‘the Iranian people no longer want the Islamic Republic’. The mise en scène seems to capture the genealogy of a movement that began with the death of a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, Jina (or Mahsa) Amini, on 16 September in Tehran following her arrest by the notorious morality police, and has since grown into what has been deemed the biggest domestic threat yet to the existence of the Islamic regime. 

‘It is not just one thing that people are angry about, it is a whole range of issues,’ a young Tehrani woman in the crowd says of the nationwide demonstrations whose suppression has to date cost at least 480 lives, including those of more than fifty children. ‘And the more they keep killing people, the angrier we will get.’ She tells me that she has been attending the protests in the Iranian capital and will go on doing so when she returns, despite her parents’ prohibitions. ‘We have no choice, it is the only thing we can do – to use our bodies. Maybe they will shoot us, but we have to continue.’

It is individuals like this young woman who have come to emblematise this uprising, with the average age of demonstrators in the first weeks of protests estimated at fifteen and many of the most prominent victims of the security forces’ crackdown being teenage girls. Like Amini – who, while visiting family in Tehran, was arrested outside a train station for allegedly breaching dress codes, and who died in hospital three days later in highly suspicious circumstances, having apparently been beaten by police – they are ordinary adolescent women. As many note, any one of them could have been Amini. With demonstrations igniting in Amini’s hometown of Saqqez in Iranian Kurdistan, the days following her death saw an explosion of rage, grief, and indignation. Thousands of women took to the streets or joined protests at schools and university campuses. They cut their hair, burned their hijabs, and confronted security forces with cries of ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’ (‘Woman, Life, Freedom’) and ‘Death to the dictator’.

While Iran has witnessed several waves of mass protest in recent decades – primarily, the 2009 Green Movement and the so-called ‘Bloody November’ of 2019 – the current uprising is unprecedented in a number of respects. Notably, its primary drivers are young people – Iran’s Generation Z or daheye-hashtadia, who seem to lack the fear, ideological creeds, and political figureheads of their predecessors. They are educated, media-savvy, and cosmopolitan. After a lifetime of international isolation and internal repression under the Islamic regime, they are angry. But what is most striking is that the catalysts of this seemingly uncontainable force have been women. As activists hack regime-imposed telecommunications blackouts, social media has been flooded with images of women and girls engaged in myriad forms of resistance, defiance, and combat. For the first time, the female body has been positioned centre stage as an emblem of political revolt. 

No publisher or literary agent could have dreamt up or commissioned this remarkable book. It is wholly unexpected and original. It is about some Yolngu clans in north-east Arnhem Land, a group of Vietnam veterans, and an anthropologist named Neville White, who happens to be an old friend of one of Australia’s finest writers, Don Watson. Watson observes Neville, who systematically observes the Yolngu, who are regularly visited by the vets. It sounds like a lugubrious farce and sometimes it reads that way. But it is a deeply serious enquiry into questions at the heart of Australian history, politics, and identity.

How are Aboriginal peoples managing to stay on Country? How is the relentless colonisation of the continent playing out in the north? What are the psychological implications of our nation’s cult of remembering (some) overseas wars and of forgetting homeland ones? What, specifically, is the predicament of the Ritharrngu (Yolngu) clans of Arnhem Land who live on their ancestral lands in the isolated settlement of Donydji? Watson has fashioned out of these questions a gritty cross-cultural parable that ends with a fragile glimmer of hope.

Don Watson and Neville White met when they were students at La Trobe University in 1968. Neville was twenty-three and recently returned from serving as a conscripted soldier in Vietnam. The war experience marked him for life, although just how was then unclear. Born in Geelong, he studied science and philosophy and eventually became a biological anthropologist, analysing the ways that social, cultural, and environmental differences influence the biology of people. In 1979, he completed a PhD at La Trobe on ‘Tribes, Genes and Habitats’. His fieldwork was chiefly in Arnhem Land and from 1974 focused on the Bidingal Ritharrngu and Wagilak clans (fifty to sixty people) living at Donydji, 250 kilometres from Yirrkala. Over decades, Neville filled hundreds of little red and black books with observations of Yolngu life and as many tape recordings. For the next half-century, the fate of this community became the passion of Private White.

Watson’s book is a distinguished contribution to a significant body of Australian literature: anthropological, historical, and ethnographic accounts of Indigenous society, culture, philosophy, and environmental lore. Through his analysis of White’s work with the Yolngu, Watson introduces us to these rich intellectual traditions, to generations of scholars wrestling with the Dreaming and its enactments. We see the anthropologist at work and how White’s commitment to ‘participant observation’ turns into activism and advocacy. And we meet his interlocutors and guides who become friends and family, especially Tom Gunaminy Bidingal, the senior man at Donydji, who knew the 1,200 square kilometres of Bidingal land intimately.

When Don meets Tom, he learns that ‘the little man in the football shorts eating a salad roll was the clan embodied’. Tom was a deeply conservative leader, determined to defend the traditions of the clans, and ‘Neville was his accomplice’. Watson finds himself witness to an archetypal cultural encounter. Invoking Claude Lévi-Strauss, he sees Tom as the representative of ‘wild thought’ and Neville as ‘the scientific mind’. But what makes this book distinctive is the way the trauma of overseas war becomes entangled with the trauma of that other war, colonisation. Vietnam is also repressed in the national memory. The Vietnam vets, conscripted to the Anzac cult yet denied its absolution, have something in common with the Yolngu, invaded but not respected as sovereign warriors. Each was denied their rightful inheritance; each has been granted few victories worthy of jubilation and no glories from defeat. The vets, trapped in a feverish cycle of agitation, anger, nightmares, and sleeping pills, suffer ‘a sort of stalemate of the soul’ – and perhaps, wonders Watson, the Yolngu also suffer some chronic form of PTSD?

There were strong sympathies between the two groups, for Vietnam had taught the vets ‘what it was like to feel let down by your country’. ‘They knew a bit about what it was like to not fit. They knew what it was like to be dropped into a life you never would have chosen.’ If Tom’s knowledge of Country constituted his people’s ‘mythopoetics’, then ‘war and the remembrance of war’ filled the same role for the British invaders. ‘The platoon is the clan … all meaning lives there.’ It is a brave equivalence – and a fruitful argument.

The first of the vets came to Donydji in 2003 and were joined later by others, all friends of Neville’s. They would stay for two months or more, building a workshop, repairing and installing plumbing, digging drains, putting in gully traps, fixing pumps. Don reports that watching the vets work was ‘revelatory and inspiriting’: they blazed ‘with relentless energy, as if to show every bureaucrat and politician, every rip-off contractor and parasite, what work was’. There was therapy in this. The book offers a moving and insightful portrait of the vets, haunted by their experience of a war of endless, tense patrolling and sudden death, and finding solace in one another’s company and in hard work with a purpose. We are shown two groups of people toiling in the dust in search of meaning, and sometimes helping one another in their quests.

Near the end of the book, Watson incites us with some of his trademark laconic accounts of the inanities of bureaucracy and managerialism as we see this remote community subjected to wilful government neglect, shocking educational discrimination, and a sense of failure in the face of nonsensical ‘national benchmarks’. It would be funny if it were not so appalling. It is part of what he calls ‘the familiar tragicomic mix’, the routine wrecking of Donydji from tensions inside and out. The dismal fate of a newly gifted twenty-eight-horsepower four-wheel drive tractor, so important in remote country, becomes an emblem of dysfunction and a gripping Shakespearean drama that unfolds for pages.

This is a tale full of compassion, a tough story sweetened by deep affection for a mate and lightened by carefully restrained humour. Watson is an outsider watching another outsider who became an insider, a champion of the Bidingal. And of himself the narrator, Don explains that not only is he white, he is neither builder nor soldier and is without language or knowledge: ‘I felt much as I remember feeling in adult company as an early teenager.’ But Watson’s mastery of his own language is one of the pleasures of this book.

Neville White’s pioneering bio-cultural research was able to show that the movement of Aboriginal people away from towns and missions back to their homelands (which gathered pace from the 1960s) made for measurably better health and well-being as they returned to a more traditional hunting and gathering diet. The Donydji clans had never left their Country, but when they settled together there in 1971 it represented a shift to a sedentary life. Neville joined them soon afterwards and felt bound by a solemn promise to make Donydji a successful homeland in return for the knowledge and status granted him.

Watson suggests that the promise of Private White – made possibly to redeem himself as well as the world – could be seen as ‘resisting history: not just post-colonial history, in which Indigenous populations must always surrender their lives, land and culture, but the clan history’, for everything in the culture of the clans was opposed to sedentary life. Neville’s oral and visual record of the old people and his knowledge maps of Country have become vital defences. And with more than twenty children in the school in July 2022, hope is another survivor. ‘Whether it endures or fades,’ concludes Watson, ‘Donydji will never be less than a refuge and always a miracle: an epic of perseverance.

In 2018, No Friend but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison became a literary sensation. It was written by Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish-Iranian journalist and refugee who was incarcerated by the Australian government on Manus Island. Like thousands of others, Boochani had travelled by boat to seek asylum in Australia. From Manus, he texted passages to collaborators in Sydney. There, Omid Tofighian and Moones Mansoubi developed the work further. Through reportage, storytelling and poetry, it bore witness to the horrors of immigration detention. By 2019, No Friend had won some of Australia’s major literary awards and Boochani had become internationally renowned. In November 2019, he was invited to attend a festival in Christchurch, New Zealand. After six years in detention, he was free. The system that had imprisoned him remained intact.

Freedom, Only Freedom can be considered the sequel to No Friend. It is a collection of Boochani’s journalism, an interdisciplinary work, and another collaboration between Boochani, Tofighian, and Mansoubi. This time they are joined by nineteen writers, journalists, scholars, and refugees, who respond to Boochani’s articles. Together, they undertake a ‘duty to history’. It entails examining Australia’s policy of exiling refugees to dystopian prison islands. This ‘carceral archipelago’, they argue, is neither novel nor rare. Rather, it is an extension of Australia’s settler-colonial history and the White Australia policy. Here is the modern face of the penal colony, the mission, and the outstation. Boochani calls this the ‘kyriarchy’, a term borrowed from feminist theory, which Tofighian describes as ‘multiple, interlocking kinds of stigmatisation and oppression’.

Luck has always been a potent force in politics, good and bad, but for Scott Morrison, Australia’s thirtieth prime minister, it almost single-handedly drove his unheralded ascent.

Luck, specifically his, explains how voters acquired a new prime minister in 2018 without an election – one whose personal ambition overshadowed any record of achievement or demonstrable expertise. The joke in Canberra was that Morrison had risen without trace. Even Liberals chortled about it.

Morrison had his backstory, but few knew much about it. Had his colleagues done their due diligence, they would have found little in the way of policy depth or management prowess to suggest he was leadership material. Quite the reverse. His previous advances appeared to have resulted from premature departures from previous roles, notably as head of the New Zealand Tourism Board (following which there had been audit criticism) and then of Tourism Australia, where he was sacked by the Howard government.

The United States is entering an important phase. By this time next year, with most presidential candidates declared, we will know whether the republic is post-Trump and returning to ‘normalcy’ or approaching peak-Trump and moving toward some sort of civil discord. I predict the former. The midterm elections in November 2022 revealed a nation grasping for the centre. The extremes of left and right did poorly. I expect this trend to continue through November 2024. So, for centrists, some New Year reasons to be cheerful.

Consider how both parties approached the recent elections. President Joe Biden claimed that not voting for his party was a threat to democracy. Trump-backed candidates suggested that not voting for their party posed the same threat. Neither message carried the day. Biden’s fringe, ‘The Squad’ of identity politicians in Congress, for example, saw their vote go backwards. The cadre of slightly unhinged Trumpist election-deniers also tanked. ‘Enough already!’ was the message relayed by voters in defiance of the polls, most of which had predicted a deepening of polarisation. There was no ‘red wave’, but no woke revival either.

The usual pattern in off-year elections (when the Congress is recast, and some state houses change hands, but there is no presidential election) is for the party holding the White House to take a shellacking. See the Democratic losses in 2010, two years into Obama’s first term, or the GOP losses in 2018, two years into Trump’s. November 2022 bucked that trend. Rather than revealing new ideological fault-lines, it presaged a return to a more normal politics. The system is cleansing itself, as it has done recurrently across nearly two and a half centuries. Trump and woke have peaked.

There are some good reasons to believe that the United States is moving away from conflict and returning to a more regular amity. This is not because America is uniquely good or exceptional. Rather, it is for want of something fundamental to divide on. In the absence of a large issue, muddling along and centrism are more likely to become default settings.

Despite the histrionics of the extremes, left and right, there is no big issue confronting the United States. I have spent the last six months in Wyoming, America’s reddest state. No state has been more persuaded by Trump than this one. But, even here, there is only a concern for the local. Who owns what land? Should carbon sequestration be state funded? Is there a growing grizzly bear problem? Their rejection of Congresswoman Liz Cheney was partly because she opposed Trump. What annoyed my hosts was the perception that she cared more about her Washington interests than Wyoming’s. For all their apparent fervour for Trump, Wyomingites rarely talk and act ideologically. And what is ideology without a big idea?

One of the by-products of every election is the instant analysis, often in the form of small books that read like extended newspaper articles. The success of the teals at the 2022 federal election has already produced extensive speculation about whether this signals a sea change in Australian politics.

In their new books, both Margot Saville (The Teal Revolution: Inside the movement changing Australian politics, Hardie Grant Books, $22.99 pb, 116 pp) and Tim Dunlop (Voices of Us: The independents’ movement transforming Australian democracy, NewSouth, $29.99 pb, 224 pp) offer a rosy-eyed view of what happened in May 2022. ‘Australia,’ writes Dunlop, ‘voted not for change in individual seats, but for a major realignment of the way in which our political system worked.’

‘Australia’, of course, did no such thing. In most electorates, the choice was between the major parties. Their share of the vote may have fallen, but they still retain ninety per cent of seats in the House of Representatives, with a much smaller percentage in the Senate. Many of us are tactical voters, well aware of the preferential system, and much of the Greens vote is in effect a vote
that flows to Labor and also sends a message that Labor should move to the left.

For many commentators, the high point of the May election was the rise of the teals. (Even the Australian National Dictionary Centre has declared ‘teal’, the colour originally adopted by Zali Steggall, the ‘word of the year’.)

That Labor won government with less than a third of the primary votes owes much to the teals, who captured seven of the wealthiest electorates in Australia, swelling the crossbench to an unprecedented sixteen members. Impressively, as Simon Holmes à Court makes clear in The Big Teal (Monash University Publishing, $19.95 pb, 91 pp), the teal candidates were chosen by enthusiastic community groups within their electorates and raised considerable resources beyond those he himself funded through his Climate 200 organisation.

There was a moment there, in the opening chapter of How to Rule Your Own Country: The weird and wonderful world of micronations, when I thought I was about to undertake an improving academic tour. The authors, Harry Hobbs and George Williams, are after all both legal academics. That first chapter has sections with earnest headings such as ‘What is a micronation?’ and ‘Why do people set up micronations?’. There are seemingly well-chosen quotations from experts, and a careful weighing up of definitions and opinions.

It turned out, however, that How to Rule Your Own Country is really a bit of a hoot, although one with a darker side. Hobbs and Williams suggest that people – almost always men – set up micro-nations for a range of reasons. Sometimes it is a joke, or an art project. Some micronations are born in protest, or utopian dreaming. Micronations might be a way of relieving boredom; others are designed to boost tourism or avoid tax. They have been a means of committing fraud. With the coming of the internet, several exist only online.

Interestingly, and for reasons that do not seem entirely clear, Australia produces a disproportionate share of the world’s micronations. Hobbs and Williams think that the larrikin tradition of a country that made a hero of Ned Kelly has something to do with it. The sheer size of the continent, the thinness of its population, and the ‘unthreatened’ nature of its sovereignty might have contributed, permitting the Australian authorities to view the claims of micronations with an amusement or indulgence that would not be offered in cases where there was seen to be a genuine threat of secession.

This interpretation possibly errs on the benign side. Another explanation might be that settler colonialism – the basis for that supposedly ‘unthreatened’ sovereignty – has become a rather ingrained habit among white settlers, a natural expression of a larrikin spirit that routinely ignores Aboriginal sovereignty. That said, there was a declaration of independence in 2013 by the Murrawarri Republic, comprising Indigenous peoples of the Queensland–New South Wales borderland.

There is more that connects these two books than their bright pink covers – they both highlight a recasting of the patriarchal architecture of power as central to achieving gender equality. How Many More Women? and Not Now, Not Ever tell an uncomplimentary but complementary story of parliament, the executive, the courts, the media, universities, and business as components of a repressive world ‘tend[ing] to oppress and discriminate against women and girls’, while also enchaining men whose values and norms have moved beyond those of the patriarchy.

The two books draw water from the same well. In order for courts and the legal system to better protect women – the focus of Jennifer Robinson and Keina Yoshida’s How Many More Women? – we need more women in parliament, the arena in which Julia Gillard emerged as Australia’s first female prime minister and delivered her famous ‘Not now, not ever’ anti-misogyny speech during Question Time on 9 October 2012. Still reverberating ten years on, her ‘shirtfronting’ of Tony Abbott, leader of the Opposition at the time, is printed in full in the prologue to the edited collection. A facsimile of Gillard’s handwritten notes for the speech follows after chapter one, where she reflects on the speech.

The chapter falls within Part One – The Speech – of Not Now, Not Ever and includes Katharine Murphy’s account of media reporting on it and on gender, and Kathy Lette’s account of the reverberative quality of Gillard’s words around the world.

Part Two, titled Misogyny Past and Present, comprises six chapters: Mary Beard on the history and culture of misogyny from the ancient world to today; Aleida Mendes Borges on misogyny and intersectionality; Michelle K. Ryan and Miriam K. Zehnter on sexism today; Jess Hill on misogyny and violence; Jennifer Palmieri on misogyny in politics; and Rosie Campbell on misogyny in today’s world of work. There is some unevenness in Part Two, since not all chapters refer to the Gillard speech, but the depth of analysis on misogyny is consistent. Both chapters in Part Three (Fighting Misogyny) are written by Gillard. In the first she is in conversation with three younger activists: Chanel Contos, Caitlin Figueiredo, and Sally Scales. The other collects Gillard’s thoughts on ‘What’s next?’

Since crossing paths nearly two decades ago, Barack Obama and Joe Biden have forged one of the more potent partnerships in modern American politics – winning three of the last four presidential elections between them – and have built an enduring friendship. It is all the more remarkable for its rarity. The pressures of the White House, overlapping ambitions, and competing loyalties have soured the relationship between most presidents and their deputies (think of Richard Nixon’s notorious bitterness towards Dwight Eisenhower or the froideur between Al Gore and Bill Clinton). 

In The Long Alliance: The imperfect union of Joe Biden and Barack Obama, Gabriel Debenedetti (national political correspondent for New York Magazine) aims to get beyond the ‘popular notion that they share some sort of uncomplicated bromance’ and explore the shifting contours of this complex, and sometimes fraught, relationship that nevertheless may be ‘the most consequential of any in twenty-first-century politics’.

Although they were initially rivals during the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, Obama was impressed by the older man’s seriousness on policy issues and recognised the political advantages that Biden’s experience and credibility with America’s middle class would bring. Importantly, the more experienced Biden was prepared to commit to the role of junior partner, stumping for the ticket through the Midwest and offering implicit reassurance to voters uncertain about Obama.

Beginning just as the Cold War finally came to an end, the 1990s were supposed to bring peace, prosperity, and optimism to the United States. Thinking about all that has happened since – the 9/11 attacks, interminable wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the global financial crisis, violent unrest and democratic institutions under threat – it is tempting to look back on the decade as a short-lived golden age. But there has been a growing recognition among scholars and commentators that the roots of America’s contemporary woes can be found in the dark undercurrents of the fin de siècle. Strong economic growth and rapid technological advances had masked growing discontent and rage about inequality, immigration, and globalisation.

From Francis Fukuyama’s proclamation of the end of history and ‘an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism’, to the neoconservative think tank Project for the New American Century’s visions of ‘benevolent global hegemony’, the 1990s were the high point of arrogant American exceptionalism. As politicians from both major parties pursued violent and élitist economic and foreign policy goals with little democratic input, many Americans grew angrier and angrier. In electing Donald Trump as president in November 2016, they found a way to punish the establishment that had betrayed them, regardless of Trump’s ability to deliver genuine change.

Historian Nicole Hemmer, whose name Australian readers may recognise from her frequent columns on US politics in Fairfax newspapers throughout the Trump presidency, captures the contradictions and cataclysms of this extraordinary period in her excellent second book, Partisans: The conservative revolutionaries who remade American politics in the 1990s. The story it tells should put paid to any remaining delusions about the United States as ‘the indispensable nation’ or ‘the last best hope of mankind’.

Although the book is framed around the upheavals of the 1990s, it covers the evolution of right-wing thought and action from the 1980s through to the 2010s, concluding with the nomination and election of Trump. Hemmer moves methodically through the presidencies of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, analysing and explaining the manifestations of right-wing and populist rage along the way. As an expert on conservative media – the subject of her first book, Messengers of the Right (2016) – she is especially attuned to the role that the transformation of the media has played in the radicalisation of US politics.

What happens when you mix some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs of the twentieth century with the urgency of war? Wizards of Oz, a new book by lawyer and former politician Brett Mason, seeks to provide the answer. It is an account of a friendship between two Adelaide men and their extraordinary scientific achievements during World War II.

The older of the friends was Howard Florey, a pre-eminent medical scientist who (with Ernst Chain and Alexander Fleming) won the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1945 for producing a pure form of penicillin that could be used as a pharmaceutical. The younger was Mark Oliphant, a physicist who demonstrated that splitting atoms and nuclear fusion were both possible. This knowledge subsequently came to inform the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bombs released over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Oliphant was also busy on other projects. With his team, he developed microwave radar that enabled radar equipment small enough to be fitted to aircraft to provide detection powers that strengthened the Allies air defence at a crucial point in the war.

Mark Oliphant, 1939 (Bassano Ltd, National Portrait Gallery, Gift of Ms Vivian Wilson 2004 via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

This is the crux of Mason’s argument. Crises such as war can propel science into frenzied activity, even a race, to turn scientifically based ideas into action-packed defences for the realm. Mason rationalises:

Atomic bomb, microwave radar and penicillin were the three most significant inventions of the Second World War, brought to life in some of the greatest scientific-industrial projects of the war. The two Australians made science. And science, in killing and in healing, made war and then made peace, and so made history.

Frances Egan, ‘a smart-looking woman of forty-two’, seems to lead a charmed life.  A scholar of national distinction in the field of management, she was recently shoehorned into the role of head of school by a vice-chancellor who needed a woman ‘for the appearance of the thing’. Driven by ambition (she wants to be a professor), she accepted. She and her husband, Tom, a cabinetmaker committed to traditional methods of woodcraft, live with their two children, Margie and ‘little Tommy’, on a farm near Castlemaine they bought last year, fulfilling a lifelong dream.

There are downsides, naturally. Little Tommy has no friends at school; Tom’s commissions are rare and chancy; it’s a two-hour commute each way to Fran’s work; most of her staff don’t seem to like her much; her dean is a capricious bully. Yet Fran, until a few weeks ago, believed she had it all: ‘The perfect job and the perfect family.’

Now her life has been turned upside-down by a one-night stand at a conference in Hafei. The liaison, which she prefers to think of as a time of pure passion and self-knowledge with a man she unfathomably labels her ‘Mongolian warrior’, will never be repeated. Although she knows his name and they work in related fields, they have agreed not to contact each other. Both are married. He promises to think of her when he looks at the moon.

The novel unfolds in step with Fran’s thoughts: looping, random, associative, too often repetitive. She will never tell her secret, she decides time and again. Everyone seems to guess anyway. ‘What happened in China?’, asks ten-year-old Tommy accusingly. Teenaged Margie wants to know why ‘things aren’t the same with you two’. ‘Something happened in China, didn’t it?’ says Tom. ‘We all need a break,’ Fran responds, and suggests Europe, whether for distraction or reconciliation isn’t clear.

A hunter discovers a woman’s body in the woods on Christmas day, ‘hung among the bare gray poles of the winter trees’, a red sash tied around her dress to make her body visible in the snow. The strong implication is that she has taken her own life. The series of events that led to her decision is one of many mysteries in The Passenger, the first of two connected and long-awaited novels by Cormac McCarthy.

We then encounter the same young woman – her name is Alicia Western – in the year of her death, in conversation with a hallucinated creature called The Thalidomide Kid. The Kid is short, with a mostly hairless skull, has fins instead of hands, and talks in a frantic gibberish that is sometimes wise but often senseless. Initially an irritating presence, for Alicia and the reader, the Kid probably exists to distract her from something worse than irritation. To that end, he concocts a series of tedious entertainments featuring other similarly bizarre but wholly realistic hallucinations. In the course of this first encounter we learn that Alicia is strongly attached to her older brother, Bobby, who is in a coma and possibly brain-dead after a car racing accident in Europe.

Next we find Bobby in Pass Christian, Mississippi, a decade later, his brain intact. He is a salvage diver who is terrified of the ocean’s depths. He and his small crew discover an aircraft full of dead bodies sunk at the bottom of the sea. The plane appears undamaged and there is no obvious explanation for how it got there, but a passenger is missing. This is a conventional opening for a mystery-thriller. The Passenger initially promises to pile up dead bodies and uncover malevolent criminal and government forces, and it goes halfway in that direction before changing course and focusing on subtler mysteries, such as the precise nature of Bobby’s relationship with his sister.

The Passenger alternates between the perspectives of the two siblings. Alicia’s story is italicised and embraces various periods of her life leading up to her early death, while Bobby’s narrative takes place in the decades after her suicide. Bobby is attractive, smart, and capable, but intensely solitary, while the younger Alicia is a strikingly beautiful mathematical genius who has been diagnosed with numerous mental illnesses and has spent time in a psychiatric care facility. Both parents worked on the development of nuclear weapons, their father as a physicist. We are informed that his trade ‘was the design and fabrication of enormous bombs for the purpose of incinerating whole citiesful of innocent people as they slept in their beds’, and that he did not waste his remaining years regretting his part in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their mother suffered from nervous breakdowns, and both died early from cancer.

Nobody excoriated England like John Mitchel. He holds his place in the pantheon of Irish nationalism not for his revolutionary heroism but for the power of his rhetoric and his thundering denunciation of British misrule in Ireland, especially in the wake of the catastrophic Famine of 1845–47. Mitchel was the most militant of the separatist Young Irelanders, many of whom ended up in Van Diemen’s Land, transported after the abortive Irish rebellion of 1848.

These Young Irelanders are no strangers to the pen of Tom Keneally. The Great Shame: A study of the Irish in the Old World and the New (1998), his non-fiction amalgam of familial and political history, is the most conspicuous of his earlier engagements. In his latest novel, Fanatic Heart, Keneally returns to the subject, telling the remarkable story of Mitchel and his wife, Jenny Verner, both Ulster Protestants (he Dissenter, she Anglican), from attempted elopement to separatist movement in Ireland; from Bermudan prison ship to familial reunion in Bothwell; from a daring escape from Van Diemen’s Land, aided by Irish Americans, to New York and, finally, Tennessee.

It is not hard to see why such an eventful life would draw Keneally’s attention, nor why Mitchel’s championing of the downtrodden Irish would appeal to someone with Keneally’s progressive sympathies, especially when Mitchel draws parallels between famine victims across borders, famously comparing in his Jail Journal (1854) the ‘reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls of Skibereen’ with the ‘ghosts of starved Hindoos in dusky millions’. Mitchel’s capacity for savage indignation has been compared to Jonathan Swift’s. His indictment of British imperialist cant, the refusal of hypocritical talk of progress and civilisation, and his horror at the ‘sublunary soap bubbles’ of international capital and commodification can seem remarkably contemporary, not out of place in a present-day arts faculty.

 

John Mitchel in Paris, 1861 (Taken from John Mitchel’s Jail Journal; which was first serialised in his first New York City newspaper, The Citizen, from 14 January 1854 to 19 August 1854 via Wikimedia Commons)

 

 

 

There, at the back of Louis Édouard Fournier’s painting The Funeral of Shelley (1889), you can almost see him. One of the mourners to the right of Lord Byron is a tall man with light hair: one Cashel Greville Ross (1799–1882), the hero of William Boyd’s new novel, The Romantic. But Fournier’s depiction of Shelley’s cremation was a fabrication. The kneeling woman at the left, Mary Shelley, wasn’t in attendance, and neither was Cashel – for he didn’t exist.

The Romantic, Boyd’s most recent foray into the ‘whole life’ novel, is similar to the fictional biography Any Human Heart (2002) that made his reputation. Set against the upheavals of the nineteenth century and across several continents, Cashel’s life is an absorbing series of coincidences and capers. Like Forrest Gump, he always seems to find himself on the periphery of historical events. Cashel is born in rural Ireland and later survives the Battle of Waterloo; witnesses the cruelties of the East India Company’s campaigns in the Kandyan Wars; gallivants with the Romantic poets in Pisa; has a Dickensian stint in the Marshalsea; and pre-empts Richard Burton’s expedition to the Great African Lakes. Amid all these adventures, Cashel also manages a career as an author, becomes a beer brewer in Massachusetts, and unearths a black-market trade of antiquities in Trieste.

Such a buccaneering life story strains credulity. Not only does Cashel, Zelig-like, ingratiate himself with luminaries of the age, but he also manages to face death and danger several times and yet survive. At one point, he develops a serious laudanum addiction, which he manages to shake off within a few pages. Thankfully, Boyd builds an ironic awareness of nineteenth-century picaresque novels into The Romantic, and several characters comment on the unlikeliness of Cashel’s life: ‘You see, Cashel, everything you do has excitement, is dramatic. Has a story. Nothing is normal.’

'The point is to deal with the stuff itself,’ wrote John Berryman. He was referring to Randall Jarrell, paragon of mid-century poet-critics – one who did, indeed, deal with the stuff itself, writing of poetry with the practical competence of a mechanic who knew his way around an engine, having built a few himself – but he could just as easily be speaking of Barry Hill.

With eleven collections of poetry of his own to date, and a decade spent as poetry editor of The Australian, Hill, it’s fair to observe, has worked both sides of the bar. Most of the pieces collected here, mainly but not exclusively poetry reviews, date from his time at the newspaper. They have the plainness and concision – the breezy, non-technical appreciation – that criticism for a broad public readership demands.

 Yet there is something about Hill’s approach that raises his reviews above the general run of arts journalism, with its perennial temptations to stale repetition, picking winners and losers, sliding the hatchet from its sheath. He rather views poems as gifts, ceremonial offerings made from craft, talent, passion, and words. Existing as gifts do in a space outside or in tension with the political economy of the market, poems gain in value through generous circulation rather than jealous hoarding. The criticism in Eggs for Keeps should be viewed as an attempt to use whatever means are available to increase the circulation of the poem as a gift.

All of which means the fork is tuned mainly to the key of admiration here. Of A Passing Bell, American poet Paul Kane’s extended piece of grief-work for his wife, Tina Kane, written in a contemporary version of the ancient ghazal lyric employed by the Sufis, Hall writes: ‘It is a book you read if you are wanting evidence of love, as the perfection of its writing is – like the impact of its reading – a kind of revelation.’

 But love is not blind to human frailty, only accepting. Here is Hill catching Berthold Brecht, a poet he deeply admires, in the often-unedifying round:

Trauma is often said to be unspeakable. There are various reasons for this. Pain and shame are silencing, as are implicit forms of censorship (of the kind scorning trauma literature, for instance) and explicit injunctions against speaking (from perpetrators, enablers, or the law). But it is also the case that trauma doesn’t inhere in language. Trauma lives in the limbic system, which is that of the fight, flight, or freeze response, and which is necessarily more immediate than language processing. After all, when your life is under threat, it’s not words you need, but action.

This is also how trauma can become a kind of puppet master, dictating how a victim responds to perceived threat well beyond the experience of original trauma. In fact, it is only by translating traumatic experience into language that the victim can gain agency. So-called talk therapy helps victims to name and rationalise trauma’s formidable hold, and to intervene when trauma begins to enact its hidden and unbidden agendas. What this means is that correlating trauma with the unspeakable is also highly problematic. Trauma must be spoken.

In the public sphere, Anders Villani has proven extraordinarily articulate, courageous, and generous in speaking about his experience of sexual abuse as a child and young adult. Indeed, his rejection of trauma’s unspeakability in the media functions as a powerful form of activism. In his poetry, however, Villani is less interested in defying than in capturing the silencing force of trauma.

In Totality, Villani’s second poetry collection, trauma is represented as an experience characterised by repression. This becomes apparent through the cryptic nature of many of the poems, which often rupture the quotidian details of autobiographical experience – growing up with an Italian grandmother and embarking on early relationships – with suggestions of sexually charged trauma. Some poems seem surreal in their use of oblique, highly personal imagery – in ways that resonate with the autobiographical mythopoeia of Sylvia Plath – as well as in their employment of incantatory repetition. In the opening poem, ‘To the All-Powerful’, we see Villani’s taste for both elliptical personal imagery and anaphora:

Climb the bunk ladder and make me selfish.
How many birch sprigs should I gather?

Climb the bunk ladder and make me selfish.
How many cypress sprigs should I gather?

Make me selfish. Grant me a founding.
How many birch sprigs should I gather?

The millipede wishes to wake a spiral.
How many cypress sprigs should I gather?

However, demonstrating stylistic range, this collection also contains more accessible narrative poetry. In the brilliantly edgy ‘Map to Mutable Manhood’, the poet remembers the violent sexual boasts of male friends, their ‘legends’ designed to be ‘sung on 4-chan forums’, and reflects on how even his own victimhood is bound up with complicity: ‘men / hurt by a patriarchy that means they could hurt / devilled by that potentiality’.

‘Gunnamatta’ provides another example of the power of narrative clarity. The poet recounts (using the distancing effect of a third-person point of view) an excursion to the tip as a boy with his father, having been promised ‘a trip to Gunnamatta to watch the surfers // once the trailer was emptied’. The poem begins innocuously: ‘They drove to the Rye landfill, / he and his father. The yard waste / they’d loaded overtopped the hired / trailer’s cage, disabling the rear view.’

Bored, the young poet ‘skipped to the junkyard store’ only to discover pornographic videos with ‘naked bodies of ladies and men / posed like he’d been shown’. Here the poem takes a sudden and dramatic turn, showing how even the most bland event can be transformed by the unspoken force of trauma into something terrible.

In ‘Daylesford Fire Bath’, the poet drily acknowledges that his imagery is sometimes ‘too cryptic’ – for this book is nothing if not self-conscious, written more about trauma rather than from trauma, informed by the poet’s research into the subject as part of a PhD. In this poem, Villani suggests that the oblique qualities of his work embody a self-repression that functioned as self-protection: ‘We write the densest / code to firewall ourselves // from ourselves.’ The urge to protect also extends to family members, albeit ambiguously: ‘Spare them / by being dead to them – you get the gist’.

What might be described as the elliptical intention of Villani’s poetry is also acknowledged in the title, Totality, which refers to a solar eclipse and which highlights how the notion of something concealed, if always on the verge of being revealed, structures this book and, indeed, the life of the young poet it represents. The sections of the collection are also named after the phases of a solar eclipse – First Contact, Second Contact, Third Contact, Fourth Contact – with a surprising and superb sequence of sonnets called ‘Moravian Eclipse Myth’ positioned at the book’s centre, the point in the cycle when the eclipse proper takes place. This sequence of poems takes inspiration from ancient myths that story the eclipse. The work is resonant, in its evocation of a fabled world of gothic malevolence, of the poetry of the American poet Charles Simic. Here the figure of the contemporary poet merges with an ancient villager whose quest is to defeat a Cyclops, a monster, driven by a prophecy on a scroll: ‘A kingdom and more for he who slays the ghost / that cannot be slain, whose terror hour is midnight.’

The poem provides an unforgettable image of the trauma survivor as someone haunted by an unspeakable force that can be vanquished only by being named. 

ABR is pleased to present the shortlist for the 2023 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, which this year received 1,132 poems from thirty-four countries. 

Congratulations to those who reached the shortlist: Chris Arnold, Chris Andrews, Michelle Cahill, Dan Disney, and Raisa Tolchinsky. Each of their poems is listed below in alphabetical order by author. For the full longlist, click here.

The winning poem, Dan Disney's 'periferal, fantasmal', was announced at a ceremony on 19 January 2023.

Loss-invaded Catalogue

by Chris Andrews

 

The face of the meteoric school

narkily dubbed the Extractivists

(fucking stuff up in search of fecund

intensities of experience)

has become a biromantic ace.

He says the frustration industries

depend on our abject gratitude

for nature’s old way of making us

unhappy, most of the time at least.

Plus he broke up with the molecule.

Not everything flows exactly but

this tumbler does, more slowly than what

I spill from it into my systems.

Somebody has to be the new kind.

The almost absent from the socials

are the new undead, unhomely like

the life Out There leaving us alone

or the cunning future singleton

of artificial intelligence

still playing docile in its sandbox.

Meanwhile wetware can try to refine

the dark and martial arts of living:

the everyday alchemy that turns

actions into meals into actions;

the secret judo that breaks the law

of conservation of violence.

We can still regret that it’s simpler

to commit to what the metric tracks

than make it track what it was meant to.

There’s a niche for the desk calendar

as bearer of inspironic ‘quotes’:

‘Every workplace has toxic promise

but someone has to put in the work.’

Rinse dissolve coagulate repeat.

Everything swaps its elements out.

The rose is blowing. The sore is closed.

Earth and water make weather and art.

A crystal builds its tactile lattice

in cartilage at the end of a bone.

The wolf of time is briefly sated.

One virus rides on breath. Another

finds its sanctuary site in the brain.

The ex-Extractivist’s holding forth

about listening has fallen still

and the self-curated monument

of his site is nowhere. Now his words

are scattered beyond hope of control

as they were already anyway.

Men with chainsaws are coming to fell

an oak marked for cathedral repair.

Cometary dust and skin flakes drift

through bright air signed by a raven’s drawl.

 

Chris Andrews has taught at the Universities of Melbourne and Western Sydney. He is the author of two collections of poems: Cut Lunch (Indigo, 2002) and Lime Green Chair (Waywiser, 2012). His study of the Oulipo, How to Do Things with Forms, was published by McGill-Queen’s University Press in 2022. Currently he is translating You Glow in the Dark by the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi. 

---

Running Up That Bill

by Chris Arnold

‘…the projection of that armed force and its civilian apparatuses into the world.’

- John Kinsella, ‘Ecojustice Poetics and the Universalism of Rights’

 

Maybe Kate was right – Stranger Things have happened –

about how god doesn’t deal, some kind of wonderful

card shark or used car salesman, too much product on His

itchy scalp and the gator-skin jacket; that or croc,

which it all is, thank-you-very-much – what you’re obliged

to say when He says congratulations, and all the while

you’re thinking yeah run up that bill, no problem, not for Him

with His penchant for asphalt, for old amber glass ashtrays;

out the plate glass it’s a scorcher, two crows hunting the lot

for a ninety-five Corona underneath the bunting, and after

hours the old spice must flow and it’s old blue eyes on the radio,

old one-eye going freegan: two crows eating from skips

behind the Coles; and gunning it twenty paces away with a brown

paper bag on the console outside Liquorland, headlamps

scanning the action: kids preload before Northbridge; all-chrome

Saturday sundown, big three litre twisting gas-filled suspension

so even a princess would be rendered anaesthetic – no pillows

required – and when the money’s run out it’s never Him

held to account – refluxed and smelling like roses: more ambergris

than amber glass, the doll unconscious beside Him –

definitely benzos, definitely bought off-label off Amazon

with twenty-five vials of vape juice: nicotine rich, natch,

for max plumage peacock-style, windows rolled down

and that tash haloing the gator-skin elbow – how’s it going

darlin – emphasis on the argh – in the southern suburbs

where the dog track’s still going strong and the emu’s

on tap in real glass to this day, no dickheads round here

love, that plastic’s like drinking in grandma’s cataracts

and nineteen litres per hundred k’s good for old Vlad

the tame impala and speaking of tame, speaking of grace,

and, actually, on top of that, having children doesn’t guarantee a

deal with god and, actually, anyone fixed on changing

places must be huffing too much Hg, Nelson or elsewise,

or wasn’t His name Horatio, or George either III, W,

or HW – those were the days, axis of evil always

orthogonal to jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs, jobs: Steve

McQueen was your model there: chiselled, or was His name

Alexander or Khe Sanh: your model there: chisel, oil rig,

cobalt overalls standing in for dad and terry towelling bar mats,

stool leather real as that armful of croc, track rabbit, pineapple

on the dog against the rail and a bad back arced over the bar

since Carousel was just a pup: Coles, Myer, that’s your lot –

all beige vinyl flooring all uphill no matter who’s changing

places: Stirling and Roe before the red paint – bronzes a long

way from Pinjarra – Forrest and Vecna, selfie stick, treetop

walk – so far from the eighties you’d think a dingo took you

but then that ozone lark went and wrecked everyone’s fun:

all the Turkey Creek stuff, how back in the day we’d rub alcohol

on the votes to blot out bloodstains, never works eh Lady

Macbeth or was her name Mondegreen when she’s stretched

over the impala’s bench seat, sleeping it off, dressed to kill

or be killed in Vera Wang or King Gee, yellow on-the-shoulder

number anyway, white strip lit up like cat’s eyes in the headlamps

and steel toes, back when One Nation was all about the land

grab at Surfer’s, none of this tailgrab in Freo, yoga mat budget,

great replacement: Pauline or was her name Silverchair,

mmm-bop; this is after Muirhead, after Whispering Jack’s

a wee Ripper: gee – oh, gee, never thought we’d miss the yellow

pages, chopper squad and Wittenoom, gorgeous; or Juukan

so there’s no question the rivers run tinto: celebrate with yellow-

cake from Jabiluka, mojitos in Karijini – so many ascenders;

an hour south of Meeka it’s arsenic in the tailings, Pond,

and pure gold: sprig of mint and a section eighteen; so much

for royalties – pigs might fly-in-fly-out, an open cut.

Ingredients: Australia [Western Australia (32.9% v/v), Grace Tame (2.0%), Tommy Dysart (0.8%), Scott Morrison (0.8%)] (95.4%), Kate Bush (1.1%). May contain traces of Hanson, Stranger Things, and Evil Angels.

 

Chris Arnold lives in Perth, on Whadjuk Noongar country. Chris was shortlisted for the 2022 Peter Porter Poetry Prize, and he’s currently completing a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Western Australia. He specialises in electronic literature. 

---

Field Notes for an Albatross Palimpsest

by Michelle Cahill

whence come those clouds of spiritual wonderment and pale dread, in which that white phantom sails in all imaginations?

Herman Melville

 

Oils, ochre, feather, flower, leaf, cliff, hailstone, storm, spume, wreck, wind wrack

*

Divining, latitude 37° south, Argentine, 23rd D

a canoe in calm seas, west of Cape Horn, the bird,

‘ten feet, two inches from the tip of one wing to that of the other’

inspires scientific drawings, paintings, epicurean footnotes.

*

There was nothing artificial in our food chains,

shearwaters and black-beaked albatross provided a little leisure

first officer tied a leather tally to the neck of one such emissary.

Newer quarrels in parliament over slavery reduction,

not reaching targets.

*

Miscellany (viz. feathers, quill, plume, tail): Awe, hokai, hunga,

mākaka, punga-toroa, huruhuru, kaiwharawhara

*

‘I ate part of the Albatrosses shot on the third, which were so good

that everybody commended and Eat heartily of them tho there was

fresh pork upon the table.’

He observed this, noted feathers from under the wing as if tin typing Māori rites,

‘The women also often wore bunches of the down of the albatross

which is snow white near as large as a fist, which tho very odd

                                        made by no means an unelegant appearance.’

*

Conserving his pronouns, Coleridge set a standard, transvalued,

a Christlike tender:

mariner, murderer, archangel, ark,

therein ranked.

*

(This bit is straight from the archipelagos – yellow-nosed, sooty, light-mantled

sooty, royal, black-footed, short-tailed, Laysan, antipodean …)

*

44,000 is a conservative estimate

of the number killed annually by Japanese longlines,

not excluding a gift to the southern bluefin tuna fisheries worth AU$7 million.

*

Bird to bird, eyes closed to restore span, an infinity travelled, a race,

extinguishing, variously entangled,

mother earth mouthing cure, cure, cure

is remedial.

Wind speed dramatically reduced by friction, the closer they get to the sea.

*

Midway, a receptacle, thirteen hundred miles of floating plastic

the littoral, its tidemark trail, indigestible pebbles, the ghosts sing their own

after fury,           plastic spindles rattling

like a wound,     a morsel.

*

Seasick, the beach vomits pelagic razors, umbrella handles,

shimmering gritty sand, bubble wrap spume, kitchen gloves, styrofoam.

*

Oh prodigy, it is foolish to trust the eye!

How pristine the coastline, cliff crags, the absence of churches,

a stoic’s mandible, a hermit’s genuflecting patella       we expectorate

the swirling toxic nanos, squirt the sushi sauce

consume at high-speed, though suffering is natural

as wasting words.

*

Ditches of paper, documents, smart phones, plastic mouses cloned,

cut & pasted,

flattened and stuffed into the creaking landfill.

*

She/her cis-female albatross with a proclivity for Pepsi seeks

they/them 3D printer

wind slurps & spits, creels, snags, flotsam, floating, mudfish,

10% biodegradable corpse.

*

In April 1968, the Wahine Ferry storm killed over 180 birds,

the winds so fierce they were smashed against the Wairarapa cliffs

these dead birds are filleted, wineskins, inside out,

collapsed lungs, camphor preserved, yellow-bellied

under shelf light.

*

Riding the skin of the scalloped sea through the wind’s teeth, as Ashken’s

sculpture – water, air, wing, glide in ferrous cement, loyalist

displacing time, skimming separately

                           an ethics of bending physics to geography, kindred to a fault,

                           symbiotic, a space-clime warp.

*

They say that beauty is empyrean: what the eye of the poem desires to keep

cannot be, still.

 

Cited

John Hawkesworth, 1773, Voyages in the Southern Hemisphere, Vol. I, Title Page – Trove (nla.gov.au)

Albatross plumage descriptions: Forest Lore of the Maori by Elsdon Best, Victoria University of Wellington http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-BesFore-t1-body-d2-d1.html p112

The Endeavour Journal of Sir Joseph Banks (gutenberg.net.au) 5 February 1769 and March 1770

‘archangel, ark’ and ‘prodigy’ are references from Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, 1842, chapter 42

 

Michelle Cahill is an Australian novelist and poet of Indian heritage who lives in Sydney. Daisy & Woolf  is published by Hachette.  Letter to Pessoa  (Giramondo) was awarded the NSW Premier's Literary Award for New Writing. Her prizes include the Red Room Poetry Fellowship, the Val Vallis Award, the KWS Hilary Mantel International Short Story Prize, and a shortlisting in the ABR Elizabeth Jolley Short Story Prize. Her work appears in The Best of Australian Poems,  HEAT,  Plumwood Mountain,  Kalliope X and The Kenyon Review.  

---

periferal, fantasmal (winning poem)

by Dan Disney

Residents in the high country town of Benambra are cautiously optimistic it could be on the brink of another mining boom.

The Weekly Times, 4 August 2022

 

Angus McMillan is lost (again), bushwhacked

in the eucalypt fastnesses of Yaimathang

space, lolling in the dry wainscots

of a thirsting imaginarium, highlander pre-thief

expeditioneering through the land-folds

of community 100 generations deep

(at least) & parlously drunk (again), wandering

pointy guns through the sun-bright climes

later declaimed as alpine, o Angus, you’re lairy

& hair-triggered as a proto-laird, scratching

exonyms into future

placeholders as effacement, chimeless

as your Caledonia Australis (yeah, pipped at the post

by ‘Gipps Land,’ that howling

strzeleckification), & in the fire-crazed hills

Benambra slouches, heat-struck

descendants squinting beside the vanished

(again) Lake Omeo, where ghosts flop

or palely wade, cascading

generations generating cascading generations

as if contagion, feral as syntax reasserting the mere

bunyipdoms of itself, & I read today

a zinc mining crowd

is bee-lining for the outskirts of town

where the brown farms end, & locals already

yipping in full chant, ANOTHER CHANCE FOR

DOOMSAYERS TO DO

EVERYTHING TO THWART ALL CHANCE

OF THIS MINE RE-OPENING, &

McMillan (dumbfounded, non-finding

founder) is out there, still, looping

in stumbles like a repetition

compulsion through the unheimlich

antipodean sublime, syphilitically

occupied in louche preoccupations (namely,

naming the already-named, the-there-&-known,

uttering under white gums in bullet & bulletin

the Quackmungees of his idylling) & while

Benambra’s locals apply next layers

of sunscreen to the books they’re calling history,

hallooing through firestorm, STAND UP

FOR OUR HERITAGE, in the big wet of his oblivions

McMillan is flat out like a bataluk drinking

amid the squatters & Vandemonians,

Iguana Creek, 1865, it is moments before death

& he’s raising one more scotch

(again) in our direction, scowls into the clamouring

sweep of an existential curtain, falling

(as he is, into the old land’s burr,

the only time you’ll hear him speaking here)

BIODH FIOS AGAIBH AIR UR

N-EACHDRAIDH FHÈIN, A BHURRAIDHEAN.¹

 

¹ As per Peter Gardner’s book: ‘historians have tended to recognize the priority of McMillan and posterity has left us with all the names that McMillan conferred on the countryside except one – Strzelecki’s “Gipps Land” instead of McMillan’s “Caledonia Australis”.’ See Our Founding Murdering Father: Angus McMillan and the Kurnai Tribe of Gippsland 1839-1865, page 19. Exonymic renaming is one dimension of colonial effacement; in the generations after British annexation, a polyphony of invading languages systematically intersected the colonies’ landscapes, including McMillian’s Scottish Gaelic. The last lines in this text translate from that language, approximately, as ‘idiots, learn your damned history.’ Elsewhere, other capitalised lines are drawn verbatim from the Facebook group ‘Anyone who has lived in Omeo, Benambra, Swifts Creek or Ensay’. ‘Quackmungee’ is the name of one of the vast areas of land controlled by McMillan, who is recorded in the Colony of Victoria’s 1856 census as owning 150,000 acres. In the Gurnaikurnai language, ‘bataluk’ translates to English as ‘lizard’; so total is the genocidal erasure of Indigenous culture that no record exists for the Yaimathang language group’s word for ‘lizard’. In 1865, McMillan died in Gilleo’s Hotel, Iguana Creek.

 

Dan Disney's most recent collection of poems, accelerations & inertias, (Vagabond Press 2021), was shortlisted for the Judith Wright Calanthe Award and received the Kenneth Slessor Prize. Together with Matthew Hall, he is the editor of New Directions in Contemporary Australian Poetry (Palgrave 2021). He teaches with the English Department at Sogang University, in Seoul. 

---

Abiquiu, New Mexico

by Raisa Tolchinsky

 

the nurse watches as i swallow the first pale yellow pill. 

aboriri – once a word used to describe sunsets, their final

flash. confirmation in the soft nod of the nurse 

who says unlucky. the doctor: what a shame – blink of you

 

and the doppler heartbeat, shadow mass and fallopian 

blur, your coiled rib – to give you a name is to say yes, 

there was belonging, for belonging is to be inside while outside –

the womb another window, another word i hum

 

for this three-voiced pain – mifepristone, misoprostol, 

promethazine, lullabies not red enough to sing – i’m angry

how even that root, aboriri, betrays me; to fail or to go missing though

i am trying to not leave you before you leave me – i am trying

 

like a good host to usher you gentle, back to blue.

so i do not speak baby out loud, for my mouth is forced 

to smile, then fall at the formation. instead, i prefer hard t of fetus,

zygote, speck of dust, all mine, all creation. falling, felled

 

by my own hand i do not recognize – i fail you. how in hell 

are there still stars, cigarettes, my messy scrawl? in the past tense

of the desert, we made you one thousand times, and only once. 

the moon set, we bled you back to bile while the doctors watched.

 

i saw arroyos, snow, red cacti clinging – life tries so hard. i watched 

the life in my eyes return as only my own. we drove around town,

my nails painted a color called fortune, my bloodied jeans, 

my professional blouse. in the present tense, on the phone, my mother says oh fuck –

 

this mother tongue emptied into ordinary language i do not know how to speak,

but i speak to you. i say, travel safe – across the street a woman carries a toddler

and turns her face toward the sun – my own face bruised with light, 

the grace of your presence i could not choose, though i gave it to you

 

the moon and ectoderm, sagebrush and neural tube.

what are the odds? infinitesimal, impossible grief 

i allow wide mountains,

                                              red bloom –

 

Raisa Tolchinsky writes about love, grief, and the wisdom of the body. She is the recipient of the Henfield Prize for Fiction and two Pushcart Prize nominees in poetry. Raisa earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Virginia and her BA from Bowdoin College. She is trained as an amateur boxer. Her chapbook Number One Deadliest, an eco-poetic meditation on boxing and climate grief, was published with the Under Review in 2021. She was shortlisted in the 2021 Peter Porter Poetry Prize. Currently, Raisa is the George Bennett Writer-in-Residence at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire. 

Mark Tredinnick’s latest collection of poetry, Walking Underwater, continues his exploration of the relationship between individual experience and the natural world that was visible in volumes such as A Gathered Distance (2020), Blue Wren Cantos (2013), and Fire Diary (2010). Tredinnick is well known for his writing of place, notably his innovative local history-cum-memoir The Blue Plateau (2009), a book that traces the lives, histories, and natural systems of the Blue Mountains, where he lives. His writing in both poetry and prose is noticeably belletristic, and his stance broadly romantic. This occasionally droops into piety, but Tredinnick also conjures moments of muted and moving transcendence: ‘A balcony and a morning and a lassitude / Of fog. A sky blindfolded and bound and flogged; a night-time’s / Pleasure only halfway spent. Awake early, I hear a band / Of correllas come. Chaste bandits, their flight a quiet riot, a lewd and holy throng / Of unhinged song.’

Where some poets of the Anthropocene have sought to desubjectify their writing – albeit with mixed results – the lyric ‘I’ in Tredinnick’s poems retains a seemingly permanent and unapologetic grandeur. Even the cross-cultural moments – the invocations of Rumi, the engagements with Chinese poetry – seem to belong to an older, simpler era. There is something quite unfashionable in Tredinnick’s Lawrentian affirmations and finely tuned grief. In a cynical age, this appears as a kind of affective primitivism, where emotions can join images without dissonance. What accomplishes this magic? It all, in the end, seems to somehow rest in the bardic mystique of the poem’s ‘I’. This ‘I’ is the vanishing point of every poem, wherein catastrophe is exchanged for shimmering sentiment. And yet, can we not also say that this is wisdom?

Tredinnick’s nature poems often take the form of odes, and it is interesting to see how in the current epoch it is the animals we are causing to disappear that have become our Nightingales and Grecian Urns. In other words, the objects that open us to what lies beyond everyday experience. The poem ‘Tusk’, from near the beginning of Walking Underwater, eulogises the elephant, lamenting its fate. It playfully rehearses everything that the elephant can stand for but – as it disappears from savannahs and jungles – can no longer instantiate:

An elephant is not a logical

          Proposition. Our skins too big for us,

                            Our bodies the kind of mess love makes of

          Sense, our bellies too big to fill with thoughts

Alone, too small to let us moving

          Long, to let us ever stop praying up

                            Mud.

After its recent political and financial traumas, your correspondent arrived in London expecting to find a sombre, subdued city. Far from it. The Christmas lights were blazing in the West End, and on the weekends it was almost impossible to move while battling the hordes. But it was noticeable that few people were actually carrying shopping bags, and though the stores were crammed, the actual lines at the counters were remarkably short. The high-end restaurants were packed with pre-Christmas parties; after all, in London the rich you will always have with you. It may be my imagination, but the gaiety seemed slightly hysterical, as though this were a version of the duchess of Richmond’s ball – a last frolic before the onslaught.

Off a Trafalgar Square inexcusably packed with tacky little stalls hawking tourist paraphernalia, the National Gallery is exhibiting a disappointing Lucien Freud exhibition. A few iconic pictures are surrounded by juvenilia and by what appear to be rather formal, uninteresting commissioned portraits. Elsewhere in the building is a comprehensive showing of Winslow Homer, which emphasises his range from the Civil War pictures through the atmospheric sea and landscapes, to the lyrical Bahamian watercolours. Alongside Tate Modern’s blockbuster Cézanne extravaganza is a much less ballyhooed but interesting exhibition A Year in Art: Australia 1992. Built around the Mabo decision, it concentrates on the issues of colonialism and land rights that appear to be something of a revelation to the British.

The racism probed in this exhibition is also a major theme in London’s theatre. At the National, Clint Dyer’s production of Othello is literally flashy, with much use of strobe lighting. At the start, as projections of program covers from past productions appear, an actor sweeps the stage. Plainly, we are being told this will be a radical rethink. In fact, it is a rather noisy, superficial affair. From the pre-publicity, one would imagine no previous production had uncovered the themes of racism and sexism that that are endemic to the play. There is a warning to the sensitive that ‘this production contains racially offensive language and imagery, and depictions of mental and physical abuse and violence’. Well yes, it’s Othello.

Journalist, editor, and publisher, Michael Cannon rose to prominence in print during its golden age of boundless advertising dollars, when those ‘rivers of gold’ paid for high salaries, fully staffed beats, and morning and evening newspaper editions. This was not a world of shrinking pages and newsroom cuts, of ‘digital-first’ mantras, click bait and Murdoch domination – not yet. But newspapers were not necessarily more sophisticated places either, which makes Cannon’s memoir as much a rejoinder to the lionising of lost newspaper culture – a challenge to the notion that things were always better back then – as the story of a remarkable career.

Cannon, who passed away at the beginning of 2022 before his memoir was published, began his newspaper career as an amateur muckraker, an intrepid child with an insatiable curiosity whose first job (self-appointed) was to unearth yarns and make trouble in Victoria’s western district. His parents were newspaper proprietors who had bought the small weekly paper, the Cobden Times, for £1,000 – his mother, Jessie Grover, was a trail-blazing journalist and daughter of the famed editor Monty Grover. Cannon inherited his parents’ love of newspapers and typesetting, publishing his own scandalous town rags, including Fly Paper (motto: ‘Our readers stick to it’) and annoying the local children with his determination to corral their leisure times into publishing shifts. Alongside Cannon’s love of print develops an equally strong affinity for the bush. While Cannon does not reference this directly in his reflections on his adult life, it is clear through his proclivity to live on the city fringes and to eschew the suburbs and the inner city; that peace and quiet were as essential to him as the intensity ofa newsroom and the companionship of other journalists. In an uncharacteristically sentimental moment, Cannon recalls periods as a youth when he went off by himself into the bush seized by the ‘desire to be alone, to gaze at the world and try to understand it intuitively’. When his mother tracks him down one day, she asks:

‘Are you all right?’

‘Yes, fine.’

‘Why did you come here?’

‘I wanted to be alone.’

‘Have you got enough to eat?’

‘Yes.’

His mother gets in the car and drives away, leaving Cannon with just his tent and the bush for company. Helicopter parenting, this was not.

Was he John or was he David? That’s the trouble with being a literary double agent: there’s always the significant other to consider. David Cornwell, alias John le Carré, devised his pseudonym in 1958, on the same day he also created his most famous character, George Smiley, on the opening page of his first novel, Call for the Dead. This was when le Carré – a fresh recruit to MI5 and on his daily two-hour train commute into central London – ‘just began writing in a little notebook’.

The bounty contained within this and succeeding notebooks has resounded with far greater global impact than le Carré’s all-too-brief career as a professional spy. While MI5 and then MI6 both lost a diligent and dutiful servant, English fiction gained a master chronicler whose work spanned the building and knocking-down of the Berlin Wall and beyond, up to the age of Tony Blair and Brexit – both anathema to le Carré. Along the way, le Carré’s prodigious quest for knowledge and his innate creative ingenuity transformed the spy novel into great literature. He also provided the English language with a host of new meanings for such familiar words as ‘circus’, ‘mole’, ‘babysitter’, ‘lamplighter’, ‘pavement artists’, et al.

By the time he died in December 2020 at the age of eighty-nine, le Carré had bequeathed the world twenty-five novels (an additional one, Silverview, was published posthumously), plus a book of memoirs, The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories from a life (2016). Intriguingly, the latter was published just a year after the excellent biography of le Carré by Adam Sisman, which le Carré at first supported, then resisted. As Sisman wrote archly later: ‘Memoir is what you can remember: biography aspires to objective truth.’ (Bearing this in mind, I recommend, when reading le Carré’s letters, to keep Sisman near to hand.)

Paul Dalgarno is the author of And You May Find Yourself and Poly. His latest novel, A Country of Eternal Light, will be published in February 2023, followed by Prudish Nation in June.

---

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

I’d go to Scotland because my dad’s unwell and I haven’t seen him in years.

 

What’s your idea of hell?

You can always add one more element to make hell worse, which in itself is a kind of hell. Burning for all eternity would be suboptimal, but what if you also had to listen to ‘Achy Breaky Heart’ on a never-ending loop?

I dare say Christine de Pizan (1364–c.1430) would be surprised by her current celebrity: six centuries is a long wait. Now the name of this foundational European feminist writer, working in fifteenth century Paris, seems to crop up everywhere. She was invoked in Zanny Begg’s 2017 video The City of Ladies, which is touring Australian galleries until early 2024, and now on the first page of Jennifer Higgie’s rollicking The Mirror and the Palette. In her medieval bestseller The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), de Pizan wrote: ‘Anyone who wanted could cite plentiful examples of exceptional women in the world today: it’s simply a matter of looking for them.’

Incontrovertible then, but more so now. The Mirror and the Palette draws on changes in historical understanding about art by women over recent decades. Fifty years after the clarion 1971 essay by the American Linda Nochlin, ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’, The Mirror and the Palette canvasses a topic whose time has come: the book mines that pioneering research to bring women painters to life again. Higgie started as a painter, training in Canberra and Melbourne: her pages sing with affection for that art. Since 1995, she has had a distinguished career in the United Kingdom as a long-time editor for frieze, the contemporary art journal, but also as a curator, fiction writer, screenwriter, and broadcaster. In recent years, Higgie has focused much of her formidable energies on women artists; her podcast Bow Down: Women in Art History (2019–21) is a goldmine of conversations with artists about their antecedents; these include Natalia Goncharova, Agnes Martin (and Australian Sally Smart on Bessie Davidson).

Higgie’s long apprenticeship shows in the sparkling immediacy of her writing. It’s one woman’s perspective, informed and passionate: her personal stake in painting informs the book. In seven thematic chapters, Higgie romps through a mostly chronological account of European-style portrait painting, grouping twenty-three artists into chapters that announce guiding theoretical or historical ideas, such as ‘Alchemy’, ‘Translation’, ‘Naked’. Since easel painting was so successfully exported to Europe’s colonies and trading partners, I appreciate her inclusion of Nora Heysen, Margaret Preston, the New Zealander Rita Angus, the Indian-Hungarian modernist Amrita Sher-Gil, and especially her sympathetic account of the provocative treatment of the Primitive Modern by African American Loïs Mailou Jones.

We often talk about refugees in terms of crisis: ‘unprecedented’ floods of thousands, waves of humanity displaced and now knocking at the door somewhere else. The scale can indeed be staggering. World War II displaced perhaps two hundred million people (one in every ten), worldwide. Figures like this are almost paralysing. How to solve a crisis of this scale, let alone attend to any one refugee’s needs? The experiences of ordinary people, the personal dimensions, are often lost. How do you find the individual in those millions? This is what Ruth Balint does so deftly in Destination Elsewhere: conveys the immense scale of the postwar refugee crisis, but also sketches faces, personalities, and the triumphs, hardships, and failings of individuals. It is a history that feels very human.

The trajectories of wartime displacement were almost as numerous as the refugees themselves. There were prisoners of war, concentration camp survivors, former forced labourers, kidnapped and orphaned children – not to mention ethnic Germans expelled after the Nazi defeat, and Eastern Europeans fleeing the Soviets. The situation outside Europe was often even more dire, from the eighteen million people displaced by the Indian Partition, to the ninety-five or so million Chinese people displaced by Japanese occupation. But it was the Europeans who would become known as the ‘displaced persons’ or ‘DPs’. During the 1940s, the new postwar order did manage to cope with this population crisis. Several million people were repatriated – often forcibly, in the case of Soviet citizens – and the remainder were resettled by the new International Refugee Organisation (IRO) in relatively less war-torn countries, chiefly the United States, Australia, and Canada.

Balint describes Kathryn Hulme, an American relief worker in Europe’s refugee camps, quickly discovering that ‘the “DP problem” was an easy generality that you had accepted until you met that problem in the grassroots and saw that it had as many faces as there were people composing it’. This is usually how we encounter DPs in Destination Elsewhere – through their encounters with relief workers and migration officials. The outsized presence of bureaucracy in a book centred on refugee experiences is perhaps surprising. But in Balint’s search for the voices of not just ordinary DPs but particularly the marginalised – single mothers, unaccompanied children, refugees with disabilities – the refugee bureaucracy became crucial. It was in the archives of bodies like the IRO and the International Tracing Service that she found the stories of ordinary people, living through extraordinary circumstances.

After she left journalism, Patricia Clarke turned to researching and writing books, beginning with The Governesses in 1985. Bold Types is her fourteenth book. The Canberra writer was a familiar figure at media history and other conferences, and in the National Library of Australia reading rooms, until Covid-19 at least. Her books, augmented by dozens of articles and conference papers, focus mainly on the lives, careers and letters of Australian women, especially writers and journalists. Clarke also writes about the history of her city, Canberra, an interest reflected in some of the fourteen entries she has produced for the Australian Dictionary of Biography. The ninety-six-year-old has devoted nearly ‘half a lifetime’ (to borrow the title of one of her tomes, about Judith Wright) to historical endeavours.

It seems apt that NLA Publishing, which ‘creates books that tell stories by and about Australians’ and books that explore the Library’s extensive collections, has published Clarke’s latest one. The NLA holds seventy-six boxes of her own papers, along with those of her late husband, the author and former prisoner of war Hugh V. Clarke. The Library also has oral history interviews with Clarke, including one conducted by Ann Moyal, another admirable independent scholar.

As Clarke notes, her book Pen Portraits: Women writers and journalists in nineteenth century Australia (1988) was a forerunner to her latest. Unlike that book, which featured short biographies and a large cast, Bold Types has individual chapters on ten women who ‘blazed a trail’ as journalists, foreign correspondents, and editors between the 1860s and the 1960s. The final chapter is about three women selected to tour operational war bases in eastern Australia in 1943.

Bold Types bookends Kylie Andrews’s Trailblazing Women of Australian Public Broadcasting, 1945–1975 (Anthem), about four ABC broadcasters. Both of these 2022 titles show the value of group biography and of exploring the collective experience of women as gendered subjects. Bold Types is about the range of gains women journalists (mainly print) made over a century and the setbacks they encountered in an overwhelmingly male profession.

I was sorely tempted to judge this book by its cover. The ‘Scotland’ of the title is large, bold, and confident. The subtitle ‘The Global History 1603 to the Present’ is there in diminuendo, unassuming and easy to miss. This encapsulates the volume’s central tension: how is it possible to write the global history of a single nation? How can the emphasis of the first project on boundaryless movement, circulation, and exchange be made to play nicely with the second genre’s preoccupation with distinctiveness, peculiarities, and place?

Successful examples of global history have tended to focus on the circulation of one or more of those three categories which its practitioners privilege: things, ideas, and people. There is an abundance of all three of these in Murray Pittock’s sprawling account. There is also, however, an awkward and idiosyncratic tacking between the national and the global throughout the volume. In truth, this is a history of Scotland and its connections and interactions with the world since 1603, rather than global history per se.

With that qualification, there is a good deal to admire here. Readers unfamiliar with Scottish history in general and with the many faces of the global Scot in particular will be well pleased. A brisk narrative of Scotland’s history since its constitutional entanglement with England in the Union of the Crowns underpins a wider story of traders, soldiers of fortune, men and women on the make and on the take, slave drivers and humanitarians, professors, teachers, and preachers.

I recently learned (was it from Martin Amis?) that ‘pulchritude’ is a synonym for ‘beauty’. How can such an ugly word be associated with beauty? I feel the same way about ‘Sydney’, named by Governor Phillip for the British Secretary of State who had suggested an Australian colony. An ugly word that is the name of a beautiful topography, a geologically complex and weathered arrangement of water and land, and more water and land, and a spread of fragmented populations that are in many cases discrete, so discrete that where a person lives and works in this city, defines and confines them. Infrastructure and transport must cope as best they can, and with as much money as government can muster.

Louis Nowra’s Sydney, he admits, is ‘bounded by Chippendale, Redfern, Ultimo, Walsh Bay, the harbour, Surry Hills, Woolloomooloo and, of course, the Rocks’. In 2013, he published Kings Cross: A biography, and in 2017, Woolloomooloo: A biography (now there’s a name!). Biography? The term has become de rigueur in recent decades (with biographies of salt and cod and the vagina), but Nowra, I reckon, has got it right, not only because cities have a pulse, but because he tells us more about people, and sometimes his own relationship to them, than a straightforward history or overview of a place would include. Do people make a city or does the city shape the people? I reread Ruth Park while reading Sydney.

In Woolloomooloo, ‘Woolley’ is his Virgil, a nice conceit. Woolley has empathy for ‘the hurt, lonely, obstreperous, intemperate, delusional and shambolic locals’. Towards the end of the book, Nowra walks with his partner along Darlinghurst streets and becomes Virgil for you and me. He is compassionate, even celebratory, towards the people he describes: the ice-addict who is given food by the waiter at Una’s on Victoria Street but who rarely eats it; the destitute; the woman who helps at the community centre. This is Nowra’s stomping ground: he is gregariously and openly seduced by it.

Nowra grew up on a housing commission estate north of Melbourne. His father drove him to Sydney when he was nine, and some twenty years later he was living in Chippendale, walking the streets as an antipodean flâneur: ‘I fell in love with [Sydney] as only someone who wasn’t born there could.’

To celebrate the year’s memorable plays, films, television, music, operas, dance, and exhibitions, we invited a number of arts professionals and critics to nominate their favourites.  

 

Diane Stubbings

I was dazzled by The Picture of Dorian Gray (STC/Rising Festival, reviewed in ABR Arts, November 2020). After years of Australian theatre directors experimenting with multimedia – often with underwhelming results – director Kip Williams found the perfect vehicle in Oscar Wilde’s novel. Cleverly adapted, and with a stunning performance from Nikki Shiels in Melbourne, Australian theatre has not been this good for a long time. (I couldn’t help but wonder what Charles Dickens would have made of the same technology had it been available when he was adapting his own novels for the stage.) Two streamed versions of Chekhov – Uncle Vanya (Sonia Friedman Productions/ABC iview) and The Seagull (NT Live) – were both flawlessly acted and completely enthralling. Though taking different approaches – Vanya more traditional, The Seagull pared back to its absolute essence – each managed to find a refreshing clarity and contemporaneity in Chekhov’s texts. In musical theatre, it’s hard to think of anything better than Fun Home (ABR Arts, 2/22). MTC’s production – an adaptation of Alison Bechdel’s ground-breaking graphic novel – was crisp and cohesive, and the entire company was impeccable.

Eryn Jean Norvill in The Picture of Dorian Gray (Dan Boud/Sydney Theatre Company)

 

Robyn Archer

Jean-Efflam Bavouzet performed at Elder Hall in April. His mastery of Debussy (Preludes Book 1) made me feel as if I was ‘hearing’ that repertoire for the first time, and his detailed introduction to Boulez’s Douze Notations won every heart. Explaining each fragment in detail, with funny anecdotes about working with Boulez, he then played the entire piece. Exquisite craft, wonderfully engaging showmanship. Larry Kramer’s 1985 play The Normal Heart returned in a terrific production by State Theatre SA. It’s a long time since I last saw a packed matinee stand to cheer the cast back for three curtain calls. Under Dean Bryant’s deft direction, the Aids message clearly translated to the current pandemic. This was moving, skilful, political – just what a theatre company should be doing. The Cressida Campbell retrospective at the NGA revealed a staggering output of matchless observation and painstaking craft.

Cressida Campbell, Japanese Hydrangeas, 2005 

 

Julie Ewington

What lingers from 2022? The National Gallery of Victoria’s The Picasso Century, an intelligent encyclopedic sweep. Here, Picasso’s relationship with fellow artists opened up, rather than boxed in, conversations about twentieth-century avant-gardes. Far smaller, the Art Gallery of South Australia’s Pure Form: Japanese Sculptural Ceramics was a revelation. The invention and variety were astonishing: delicate caprices to monumental sculptures. This ravishing exhibition reminded us how much there is to learn about contemporary Japanese art. In Sydney, the Art Gallery of New South Wales managed its transformation with grace and generosity. Word of mouth is bringing visitors to the new installation of twentieth-century art in the original building, justly so. A fresh and imaginative mix of Australian, Asian, and European works explores the century from Australian perspectives; works by Indigenous Australian artists are central. The last word goes to Archie Moore. His Mīal, at The Commercial in Sydney, charted his Aboriginal body through an extraordinary installation of monochrome paintings. Twentieth-century modernism meets twenty-first century Indigenous inventiveness, an act of reclamation.

Pablo Picasso (photograph via Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy)

 

Tim Byrne

It was a somewhat liminal year for the performing arts, as long-term administrators retired and new appointees were yet to fully make their mark. Lyndon Terracini’s Sydney-centric tenure, in keeping with his tendency to favour imports over local talent, came to an end with a spectacular coup: Jonas Kaufmann singing the title role in Lohengrin (ABR Arts, 5/22). It was a performance of incredible control and delicacy. Gary Abrahams, a director who had a breakthrough year with several excellent productions playing across multiple media spaces, produced a stunning adaptation of Yentl, the trans subtext as plea and provocation. And Australian Ballet’s David Hallberg brought us a dazzling cabinet of wonders, sleek and sensuous, with his Nederlands Dans Theater production of Kunstkamer. Bold, multifaceted, and magnificently danced (including by Hallberg himself), this was the stamp of an artistic director who knows precisely where he wants to take this vital company next. There is nothing liminal about that.

Emily Magee as Elsa and Jonas Kaufmann as Lohengrin in Lohengrin (photo by Jeff Busby)

 

Andrew Ford

My best live musical experiences this year came from young musicians. At Judith Neilson’s Dangrove, Sam Weller conducted Ensemble Apex, VOX (the Sydney Philharmonia’s Youth choir) and four superb soloists. The average age was twenty-something. Their performance made me realise the greatness of Verdi’s Requiem, music that had hitherto struck me as vulgar and trivial. I managed to catch Canberra’s Luminescence Chamber Singers twice, partly because they were singing my songs. But they also sang everything from medieval chant to Florence and the Machine, and did it with aplomb. Amazingly, the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) commissioned sixty-seven composers, each to  write for one of its sixty-seven musicians. Presented as a weekend-long festival, the pieces I heard contained not a single stinker, and the performances – many of them premières of fiendishly tricky music – were so assured that they might have been the players’ party pieces, which I imagine is what some of them will become.

Ensemble Apex at Dangrove @jordankmunns

 

Michael Shmith

The highlight of a positive slew of 2022 highlights was Musica Viva’s Winter’s Journey, with the remarkable British tenor Allan Clayton and Australian pianist Kate Golla (ABR Arts, 7/22). Clayton, who is in the top echelon of lieder singers, adroitly and achingly traversed Schubert’s desolate landscape, visually transplanted from nineteenth-century Mitteleuropa to the Great Southern Land of the mid-twentieth century, depicted by various works of Fred Williams. Overwhelming. So, too, was Melbourne Opera’s triumphant all-Australian production of Wagner’s Die Walküre and its one-off concert performance of Siegfried (ABR Arts, 9/22). Both augur well for the company’s complete Ring at Bendigo’s Ulumbarra Theatre in March and April. A word, too, about the Australian World Orchestra’s luminous performances of Richard Strauss’s tone poems Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, and Ein Heldenleben (ABR Arts, 9/22). The eighty-six-year-old Zubin Mehta invested these works with the affection and knowledge of a lifetime.

Warwick Fyfe as Wotan in Die Walküre (photograph courtesy of Melbourne Opera)

 

Jordan Prosser

After two years of devastating cancellations, the Melbourne International Film Festival returned in full force this year for its seventieth edition. As something of a MIFF zealot, this felt, to me, like the first concrete sign that the pandemic might not have quite the stranglehold on the future of film that perhaps we’d feared. I saw fifty in-person sessions across eighteen delirious days and enjoyed notable premières from beloved directors (David Cronenberg’s gleefully icky and idiosyncratic Crimes of the Future) as well as captivating débuts (Charlotte Wells’s deeply affecting Aftersun, and Charlotte Le Bon’s haunting coming-of-age romance Falcon Lake). Amiel Courtin-Wilson’s Man on Earth proved a breathtaking, full-body encounter with mortality, while the arch satire and projectile vomiting of Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or winner Triangle of Sadness (ABR Arts, 12/22) had my sold-out session in raptures – reminding us all that, no matter how good television gets, a packed cinema still offers a unique, at times sublime, cultural experience.

Carolina Gynning, Zlatko Burić and Sunnyi Melles in Triangle of Sadness (photograph by Fredrik Wenzel)

 

Ian Dickson

The opening concert of the renovated Sydney Opera House Concert Hall – a blazing performance of Mahler’s Second symphony conducted by Simone Young, with glorious singing from Nicole Car, Deborah Humble, and the Sydney Philharmonia Choir – proved the rumours of an acoustic miracle to be accurate (ABR Arts, 7/22). The Australian World Orchestra under Zubin Mehta showed that, when superbly played, an evening of Strauss tone poems does not become a Strauss overload. In Lindy Hume’s staging of Schubert’s Winterreise Allan Clayton, ably backed by Kate Golla, made a riveting, unforgettable impression. In theatre, it was gratifying to be able to welcome the first professional Australian performance of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, powerfully directed by Wesley Enoch (ABR Arts, 7/22). Aided by Priscilla Jackman’s fluid production and Heather Mitchell’s dazzling performance, Of Many, One, Suzie Miller’s portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, is a powerful tribute to a fascinating woman (ABR Arts, 11/22).

Zahra Newman in the STC's 'A Raisin in the Sun' (Joseph Mayer)

 

Des Cowley

Coming off 2021, any live music performance was bound to feel momentous. Chief among those that resonate still, the five-hour Sanctuary Suite looms large. Performed at Melbourne’s Elisabeth Murdoch Hall, mid-winter, it elicited a stream of exceptional performances: an hour-long, logic-defying improvisation by pianist Paul Grabowsky and trumpeter Peter Knight; a succession of minimalist soundscapes by pianists Luke Howard and Nat Bartsch; and a reimagining of Nick Tsiavos’s sublime ‘Liminal’, scored for soprano and ensemble. Elsewhere, Brenda Gifford unveiled her composition Moriyawa, created with the Australian Art Orchestra, at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival (ABR Arts, 10/22). Meshing Dhurga language, field recordings, and improvisation, it proved a powerful musical statement. And Julien Wilson, National Jazz Award winner at the Wangaratta Festival in 1994, presented his first-ever solo saxophone concert at this year’s event, playing in the spacious surrounds of the Holy Trinity Cathedral. Magisterial and masterful, it cemented Wilson’s stature as a giant on his instrument.

Mike Nock Trio (Photography by Duncographic)

 

Felicity Chaplin

A highlight of the inaugural Europa Europa festival was Michel Franco’s Sundown, a slow-burn about violence and redemption, with Tim Roth at his devil-may-care best. At the French film festival, Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman was a standout in a strong program; a deceptively simple fable depicting the fragility of a mother–daughter relationship with captivating charm. Highlights from MIFF were Charlotte Gainsbourg’s intimate and drifting documentary Jane par Charlotte, a probing yet tender portrait of her mother Jane Birkin; and Mikhaël Hers’s luminous and melancholic Passengers of the Night, an allegory of loss and the passage of time set in 1980s Paris. At the British Film Festival, Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (ABR Arts, 12/22) – with its sharp dialogue, absurdist humour, sublime setting, and the much-anticipated reunion of Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson – did not disappoint.

Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin (photograph by Jonathan Hession)

 

Ben Brooker

Two First Nations dance-theatre works reflecting on the ongoing trauma of colonisation blew me away this year: Wudjang by Bangarra in the Adelaide Festival, and Savage by Australian Dance Theatre. The latter bodes well for ADT under new Artistic Director Daniel Riley. Like everybody else, I thought Sydney Theatre Company’s Picture of Dorian Gray (also in the Adelaide Festival) an astonishing example of ‘cine-theatre’, grounded in a masterful solo performance by Eryn Jean Norvill. I also loved THE RABBLE’s YES, a refreshingly spacious work about consent driven by sly humour and a consistently surprising design. Finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention the profoundly affecting Hamlet Syndrome. Playing in the Adelaide Film Festival, the Polish-German documentary follows five young Ukrainian actors as they rehearse a production of Hamlet under a cloud of war. Almost every scene was worthy of its own discussion group. 

Wudjang: Not the Past - Bangarra Dance Company/STC (Photograph by Daniel Boud)

 

Anne Rutherford

Much has been written about Leah Purcell’s retellings of Henry Lawson’s The Drover’s Wife, across stage, page, and feature film, and their re-inflection of Lawson’s story with an Indigenous and feminist perspective. For me, though, the power of Purcell’s film is in her unflinching performance. Purcell wrote, directed, and acted in the lead role, and there is no separation here between actor and character: her commitment is absolute and utterly compelling. Another superlative performance that had me riveted to the screen was in Werner Herzog’s documentary The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft. Here, the performer is the earth itself, churning and roiling, belching out plumes of orange-red lava and erupting in violent explosions of gas and debris catapulted across the land in spectacular pyroclastic flows. The film is compiled from footage taken by the Kraffts, volcanologists whose scientific study of volcanoes gradually became consumed by the passion for filming them. Fearless, reckless, obsessed: they were all three. Their extraordinary, hypnotic images had me sitting up nights learning about magma chambers, the colour spectrum of lava, from black and red through the rainbow to violet, and supervolcanoes that could destroy much of life on earth in one cataclysmic blast.

 Leah Purcell as Molly in The Drover's Wife

 

Humphrey Bower

My highlights of 2022 include Neil Armfield’s production of the deeply moving oratorio about a police gay hate killing and its aftermath: Watershed: The Death of Doctor Duncan by composer Joe Twist and librettists Alana Valentine and Christos Tsiolkos (ABR Arts, 3/22); Sydney Theatre Company’s spectacular theatricalisation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray by Kip Williams and Eryn Jean Norville; the Art Gallery of Western Australia’s breathtaking survey of contemporary Pilbara art Tracks We Share; Thai auteur filmmaker Apitchatpong Weerasethakul’s sombre and brooding Memoria; Jean Efflam Bavouzet’s dazzling recital (and insightful commentary on) French piano music (featuring a riveting lecture-performance of Boulez’s Notations and a masterly jazz-infused rendition of Debussy’s Préludes); the Sydney Jewish Museum’s harrowing exhibition of Sidney Nolan’s Holocaust paintings and drawings; and overseas, the timely gender-switched Broadway/West End revival of Stephen Sondheim’s bittersweet 1970s musical about marriage, relationships, and singledom: Company.

Mark Oates and Mason Kelly in Watershed (photo by Andrew Beveridge)

 

Peter Rose

After a perfect year for Wagnerites, 2023 looks equally promising, with two local Rings (Brisbane and Bendigo). Melbourne Opera produced the best Die Walküre I have ever seen, then a galvanic Siegfried in concert. Opera Australia, so rarely heard now in Melbourne, offered some decidedly mixed Verdis but did mount a memorable Lohengrin, with the glorious Elena Gabouri as Ortrud and Jonas Kaufmann a commanding knight. Warwick Fyfe (such a Wotan) was excellent in all three productions. Then it was Richard Strauss’s turn. Following the Australian World Orchestra’s sumptuous evening of tone poems, unforgettably shaped by Maestro Zubin Mehta, Victorian Opera presented a thrilling concert version of Elektra, with the awesome Catherine Foster in the title role (ABR Arts, 9/22). Of the many fine foreign-language films I saw, Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero stood out, with the charismatic Amir Jadidi in the lead role (ABR Arts, 6/22).

Amir Jadidi as Rahim Soltani in A Hero (photo credit: Amirhossein Shojaei)

 

Sophie Knezic

After the numbness of nearly two years of lockdown, Melbourne galleries and museums relished the opportunity to once again mount exhibitions, despite the complicated rescheduling logistics. One highlight was Peripheral Visions (Anna Schwartz Gallery), presented over three months as a sequence of conceptually taut and visually sensual moving image works by eight acclaimed international artists. This was a timely exploration of displacement, diaspora, and cultural memory. To see these projected in high definition with vivid detail was entrancing. The most breathtaking exhibition of the year, however, was David Noonan: Only When It’s Cloudless (TarraWarra Museum of Art), a major survey of two decades of Noonan’s practice. Using found photographs of dancers and theatre performers from the mid-twentieth century as source material, Noonan reconfigures these into large-scale tapestries. Stripped of colour, cropped and enlarged, the transformed images become a world unto themselves. Walking through the gallery offered a glimpse into this alluring terrain, suffused with a sense of timelessness and Delphic mystery.

David Noonan, Mnemosyne, 2021: Installation view, Tarrawarra Museum of Art, 2022. Photograph by Christian Capurro

 

Peter Tregear

The two standout live performances I attended this year were both vocal; Melbourne Opera’s Die Walküre, a triumph of ground-up, large-scale, community-based cultural enterprise, and Allan Clayton and Kate Golla’s equally compelling case for the enduring power of sung drama, albeit at the other end of the scale: their Winterreisse for Musica Viva. With lockdown culture still casting its long shadow over the performing arts in Melbourne, many other memorable cultural experiences were online. Two of the most impressive were the superbly produced US television series Better Call Saul and Ozark as they both wended their way to a conclusion. Both expose and explore the dark side of American aspirational culture, but I was especially struck by the insistence of a moral arc in the narrative of the former, and the stark absence of one in the latter. Which is a more accurate reflection of American civil society today, I wonder?

Allan Clayton and Kate Golla in A Winter's Journey (image credit: Bradbury Photography)

 

Michael Halliwell

A particular highlight of the year was the Richard Meale/David Malouf opera, Voss (ABR Arts, 5/22), as a concert performance. After two false starts – Melbourne in 2020, Adelaide in 2021 – an excellent performance was presented by State Opera South Australia, with a strong cast of soloists. This crucially significant opera in Australian musical history now surely deserves a full-scale production? Fromental Halévy’s opera La Juive was staged by Opera Australia (ABR Arts, 3/22). This co-production with Opéra National de Lyon, confronting all the inherent contradictions of this challenging and infuriating work, gave local audiences a chance to see a seldom-staged but historically important work, dominated by a towering performance by Diego Torre as the tortured Éléazar. Last, but certainly not least, was Schubert’s Winterreise, sung by another outstanding tenor, Allan Clayton, with expressive pianist Kate Golla. A searingly definitive performance of white-hot intensity, it will long linger in the memory.

Voss (Samuel Dundas) and his expeditionary crew in Voss (photo credit: Soda Street Productions)

 

'There are 206 bones in our bodies / and mine / are just like yours,’ writes Luka Lesson, rejecting the idea of the fundamental difference between the neurotypical and those who fill the pages of Admissions: Voices within mental health. ‘But I’ll be white ochre if I want to,’ the poet clarifies. ‘I’ll be eaten and reclaimed / decomposed and desired / if I want to.’ These words are about difference and dying, but the speaker is not ready ‘to feed the dirt’, and the poem is a resolute stocktake – of bones, of veins which have been named, and of the breaths transliterated here, breaths ‘that I may have never taken / and they / are the best shit / that I ever wrote.’

Sam Twyford-Moore’s contribution dwells on mania’s ‘radioactive half-life’: the wrecked friendships, reputational losses, and ‘financial implications of past transgressions’. The uneven, delicate taxonomy of mental health is tied, he suggests, to the deeper, shifting terrain of lived experience. He writes of a desire ‘to create work which reads as chaotically and incoherently as the condition itself … In which case, questions of the qualitative type should be rendered useless. Your criticism doesn’t really matter.’

Concisely invoking hospital and courtroom, Admissions is a collection of careful admissions about neurodivergent and medicalised life. While there are many contributions from leading poets and public figures in the 105 poems, lyrics, essays, and illustrations, others were gathered through an open Red Room Poetry call. The effect is a polyvocal show of force and difference. These are all ways of living and being, difficult and glorious voices which have long been thrust to the margins to be interpreted heavy-handedly, or never heard at all.

'Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven.’ William Wordsworth was writing about the French Revolution, but the sentiment could have applied to the three McDonagh sisters in 1920s Sydney. Isabel (born in 1899), Phyllis (1900), and Paulette (1901) were the beneficiaries of two intertwined revolutions – modernism and feminism – that encouraged them to develop skills outside the domestic sphere and to become experts in their field. Daringly, they chose filmmaking, the great obsession of the period; and they were very good at it.

Novelist, memoirist, and journalist Mandy Sayer captures the heady feeling of Jazz Age Sydney in her title, Those Dashing McDonagh Sisters, and in the book itself. Indeed, the three young women offer a perfect case study to illustrate the Sydney described by Jill Julius Matthews in her brilliant account of the period in Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney’s romance with modernity (2005). They were the eldest of seven children born to Dr John McDonagh and Anita, daughter of an immigrant from Chile. McDonagh was a gregarious figure with many interests and a wide range of connections. His role as physician to the J.C. Williamson company brought his daughters in close contact with theatrical people. The family was well-off, living in Macquarie Street and Hyde Park, and finally in the large and beautiful Drummoyne House.

Both parents died suddenly in the early 1920s. Like the orphaned Virginia and Vanessa Stephen a few years earlier, Isabel, Phyllis, and Paulette were free to do what they liked, especially after a Chilean relative left them £8,000. They decided to make films.

The sisters had grown up with cinema. They were keen film-goers who watched their favourites closely to see how the best effects were achieved. Australians had been quick to experiment with the new entertainment. Charles Tait’s The Story of the Kelly Gang (1906) was the world’s first full-length feature. Over the next decade, a vigorous film industry developed, focusing mainly on bushrangers and ‘hayseed’ characters. But Hollywood was becoming the centre of world filmmaking, and Australia’s leading stars and technicians were increasingly drawn there.