A modern addition to the pantheon is a university professor and writer who also worked in America’s National Intelligence Council, State Department and Defense Department.

Step forward Joseph Nye, the man who invented the concepts of “soft power” and “smart power” and set them beside “hard power.” Described by one of his Washington contemporaries as “the Grandmaster of the study of power,” Nye coined soft power to describe the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce. The United States could use culture and communications to influence the decisions and behaviour of others in ways that military force could not reach. Nye stands with Talleyrand, who advised Napoleon: “You can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them.”

Military power can bully, economic power can buy, but soft power is blarney magic.

Ideas set international standards in the same way that American software set the standards for the world’s computers. Thus, the lifestyle promoted by American media and the promise of plenty of American supermarkets helped undermine the Soviet Union, backed by the hard power of military forces and nuclear weapons. Mickey Mouse stood with the Marines.

Hard power rests on command, coercion or cash — “the ability to change what others do.” Soft co-optive power, Nye wrote in his 1990 book on the changing nature of American power, is “the ability to shape what others want” through attraction.

Millions of Google citations show the reach of soft power, Nye writes, but “the most surprising was in 2007 when the president of China declared soft power to be their national objective.” For Nye, the result was “countless requests for interviews, including a private dinner in Beijing when the foreign minister asked me how China could increase its soft power. A concept I outlined while working at my kitchen table in 1989 was now a significant part of the great power competition and discourse.”

Nye has seen his idea become an instrument with practical effects: soft power shifts the way leaders talk and generals act. Attending a state dinner at the White House in 2015 (“the hall was filled with cherry blossom and a Marine band in scarlet jackets was playing”), Nye shakes hands with president Barack Obama to be told “everybody knows about Nye’s soft power.”

Nye’s recently published memoir muses about his “life in the American century,” the title taken from a famous 1941 editorial by Henry Luce, creator of Time and Life magazines. Nye, born in 1937, dates the American century from the moment the United States entered the second world war: “Some have referred to an American empire, but our power always had limits. It is more accurate to think of the American century as the period since World War II during which time, for better or worse, America has been the pre-eminent power in global affairs.”

The United States could still be the strongest power in 2045, he thinks; in which case the American century would, indeed, mark a hundred years. The caveats on that prediction are that “we should not expect the future to resemble the past, and my optimism has been tempered by the recent polarisation of our society and politics.”

This leading member of the American foreign policy establishment offers his biography as illumination for fellow foreign policy wonks and tragics. Most memoirs look inward; the chapter headings of Nye’s book are organised around the administrations of US presidents and America’s international role.

Nye and his friend Robert Keohane are identified as cofounders of the school of analysis of international affairs known as “neoliberalism.” While not disavowing that role, Nye writes that he and Keohane regard neoliberalism as an “over-simplified label.”

Whether in government or university, Nye’s life is one of constant travel, constant conferences and constant writing. In the Defense Department in 1995, “alliance maintenance” sent him to fifty-three countries. The military parades became a blur but the banquets were the real ordeal: sent abroad to eat for his country, Nye jested he would go out “in a blaze of calories.”

Emerging from an “unofficial meeting” with Taiwan’s defence minister, Nye is told that his father has died: “On Friday, November 4, 1994, I had the odd experience of picking up the New York Times and finding myself quoted in a front-page story on Saudi Arabia, while my father’s obituary appeared on page thirty-three. I wept.”

The motto of the public intellectual is “I think, ergo I write” (my words, not his). Nye exemplifies the dictum. He is the author of thirty books and contributor to or editor of another forty-five; his textbook ran to ten editions and sold 100,000 copes. (Here’s the Inside Story review of his book on the foreign policy morality of US presidents from FDR to Trump.) He writes a column for Project Syndicate; topics so far this year: “Is Nuclear Proliferation Back?,” “American Greatness and Decline” and “What Killed US-China Engagement?”

Graduating from Princeton at the end of the Eisenhower years, Nye planned to become a Marine officer. (“All able-bodied young men faced the draft in those days, and I was a healthy specimen and looking forward to the challenge.”) Instead, one of his professors pushed him to apply for a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and he won:

One result was that, instead of joining the Marines after graduation and winding up as an officer in Vietnam, it took me thirty-five years before I saw service in the Department of Defense, and when I first went to Vietnam it was as dean of the Kennedy School to visit an educational program we had there. Any time I am tempted by hubris, I remember that much of where the roulette ball lands in the wheel of life is outside our hands.

Nye worked for two Democrat presidents. For Jimmy Carter, he was in charge of policy designed to slow the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Under Bill Clinton, he chaired the National Intelligence Council and then went to Defense to run the “Pentagon’s little State Department” as assistant secretary for international security affairs.

Professors who go to work in Washington can offer an anthropologist’s view of the tribes that serve the president and congress. Kissinger is good on this, but the best rules for working the swamp were penned by John Kenneth Galbraith: have the president behind you (or give that impression); adopt a modest aspect of menace — arrogance backed by substance can work; never threaten to resign because that tells your allies you might leave; but be ready to lose and leave town. Nye gets much outsider understanding into a paragraph:

In Washington, there was no shortage of bureaucrats and rival political appointees eager to take my job — or leave me with the title but empty it of substance. I had been issued a hunting licence, but there was no guarantee I would bag my game. My first instinct as an academic was to try to do things myself, but that was impossible… I realised I was drowning. I discovered that unlike academia, politics and bureaucracy comprise a team sport. The secret to success was to attract others to want to do the work for me. In that sense, I learned soft power the hard way.

Nye records two of the “major regrets” Bill Clinton offered about his presidency: “having an inexperienced White House staff and underestimating the bitterness of Washington politics.”

Because of his diaries, Nye’s memoir offers tone and temperature on how different the world felt as the cold war ended. Washington was optimistic about Russia and fearful of Japan: “economic friction was high, and many in both Tokyo and Washington regarded the military alliance as a historical relic now that the cold war was over.”

Japan debated the idea of relying on the United Nations rather than the United States for security. Nye argued against both the economic hawks in Washington and the security doves in Tokyo, pointing to the rise of China and problem of North Korea. “The logic was simple,” he writes. “In a three-country balance of power, it is better to be part of the two than the isolated one.”

During defence negotiations in Tokyo, Japanese officials took him out for evening drinks and cut to the fundamentals: “How much could they trust us? As the Chinese market grew larger, wouldn’t we abandon Japan for China? I answered no, because Japan was a democracy and was not a threat. It seemed to work.”

In 1995, with “moderates still in control in Moscow, there was a sense of optimism about the future of US–Russia relations.” That mood helped drive the expansion of NATO. At talks in Geneva, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev discussed the idea of a “new NATO” with a “collective security pact” and “partial membership in NATO” for Russia. Nye wrote in his diary that Russia would accept a bigger NATO “if it is done right — and if Russia doesn’t change.”

By 1999, the optimism was gone. The US now believed that “Russia would not collapse but would develop a form of corrupt state capitalism.” Talking to former colleagues in Washington, Nye is “struck that nobody seemed to know much about Putin or to have realised how important he would become.”

As the US century enters this century, China takes centre stage as the peer competitor. Asked by Xinhua News Agency whether he’s a China hawk or dove, Nye replies that he is an owl. At a dinner in Beijing in 2012 a member of the Communist Party central committee tells Nye: “We are Confucians in Marxist clothing.”

The following year, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi invites Nye to a private meal “to quiz me about how China could increase its soft power.” Nye replies that raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and celebrating a gorgeous traditional culture are “important sources of attraction for China. At the same time, as long as it had territorial disputes with its neighbours, and as long as its insistence on tight party control over civil society and human rights continued, China would face serious limits on its soft power in Asia and in the West.”

The US power equation has shifted significantly in two decades. In the early years of this century, as the United States invaded Iraq, Nye’s concern was about “unipolar hubris.” Today, he frets about a polarized America turning inward. He thinks the greatest danger the United States faces “is not that China will surpass us, but that the diffusion of power will produce entropy, or the inability to get anything done.”

In the final pages of his memoir, Nye assesses the balance of power between China and the US, and says America has five long-term advantages:

• Geography: the United States is surrounded by two oceans and two friendly neighbours, while China “shares a border with fourteen other countries and is engaged in territorial disputes with several.”

• Energy: China depends on energy imports far more than the United States.

• Finance: the United States gets power from the international role of the dollar and its large financial institutions. “A credible reserve currency depends on it being freely convertible, as well as on deep capital markets and the rule of law, which China lacks.”

• Demography: the United States is the only major developed country projected to hold its place (third) in the global population ranking. “The US workforce is expected to increase, while China’s peaked in 2014.”

• Technology: America is “at the forefront in key technologies (bio, nano, and information). China, of course, is investing heavily in research and development and scores well in the number of patents, but by its own measures its research universities still rank behind American ones.”

Nye’s fear is that domestic change within the United States could endanger the American century. Even if its external power remains dominant, he writes, a country can lose its internal virtue:

All told, the US holds a strong hand in the great power competition, but if we succumb to hysteria about China’s rise or complacency about its “peak,” we could play our cards poorly. Discarding high-value cards — including strong alliances and influence in international institutions — would be a serious mistake. China is not an existential threat to the US unless we make it one by blundering into a major war. This historical analogy that worries me is 1914, not 1941.

Nye ends his memoir with the humility that befits an old man: “I cannot be fully sure how much of my optimism rests on my analysis or my genes.” In his final paragraph, he ruefully notes that “the more I learn, the less I know… Though I have spent a lifetime following my curiosity and trying to understand us, I do not leave many answers for my grandchildren. The best I can do is leave them my love and a faint ray of guarded optimism.” •

A Life in the American Century
By Joseph S. Nye | Polity Press | 254 pages | $51.95

The post The father of “soft power” appeared first on Inside Story.

Offering another perspective, Ann-Marie Priest’s recent biography of Gwen Harwood presented the case of a woman writer fighting to be published and recognised despite her husband’s obstruction and the daily grind of domestic life. Charmian Clift is a third example of wifedom: a writer married to a writer who was acclaimed for a novel, My Brother Jack, that he admitted could not have been written without her help.

The lives of Clift and George Johnston retain a certain glamour because they were spent partly on the Greek island of Hydra, mixing with Leonard Cohen, Sidney Nolan and other artists, during the 1950s. Interest has been renewed in recent years with the release of Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s study of their role in the Hydra artistic community, Half the Perfect World (2018), Sue Smith’s play Hydra (produced in Brisbane and Adelaide in 2019) and a film rumoured to be in production. Nadia Wheatley, who has long been the leading expert on Clift, published an excellent biography, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, in 2001 and edited a selection of her essays published in a new edition as Sneaky Little Revolutions in 2022.

Now comes The End of the Morning, the first section of an autobiographical novel Clift never completed but Wheatley believes can be read independently as a novella. Readers of Wheatley’s biography will recognise it as a significant source for her account of Clift’s childhood and adolescence in the quarry community near Bombo Beach, north of the NSW coastal town of Kiama.

The novella presents a vivid and charming picture of a childhood spent amid the freedom of the beach and bushland, Clift’s parents managing their poverty with creative resourcefulness and a commitment to literature as a reliable means of access to a wider imaginative world. Some recognisable tropes of autobiographical fiction appear — the rebellious tomboy narrator in rivalry with a more conventionally feminine sister for her parents’ attention; the narrator’s delight in learning — but this is not the conventional story of workers beaten down by the Depression. The father has chosen to live beyond the grind of English city life, among workers in Australia, so that he can enjoy a life with plenty of fishing.

Wheatley explains Clift’s struggle to meet the deadlines of the Commonwealth Literary Fund grant she’d been given for the novel, and gently outlines the anxieties that led to her suicide (which she refers to indirectly as “a cry for help that went unheard”). She speculates about the direction the novel might have taken without suggesting that Clift would have dealt with the sexual experiences that worried her so much at the time of her death.

Many readers will know that as a teenager Clift had a child who was adopted at birth. (She could not know that the child would become the artist and writer Suzanne Chick, herself the mother of Gina Chick who has gained fame in the reality television series, Alone.) But Clift’s concern at the time of her death was the imminent publication of George Johnston’s novel Clean Straw For Nothing, which depicted some of their sexual liaisons on Hydra.

As a kind of scaffolding for the unfinished novel, the rest of The End of the Morning is made up of a selection of thirty essays from the 225 columns that Clift wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald between 1964 and her death in 1969, chosen for their references to family life and childhood. Where the unfinished novel may frustrate the reader looking for a completed story, these short essays show Clift in total command of her form.

These 1000- to 1500-word pieces are full of thoughtful observations about her life and the social world around her. Sometimes she mentions the artistic community on Hydra, sometimes aspects of Sydney life, including renovations to her home in Mosman and the building of the Opera House. Often, she makes literary allusions to John Donne or Laurence Sterne or the most popular Romantic poets, but she never puts on airs — she has met many contemporary English poets and was struck by “over-reverence” before realising “that poets can be just as vain ordinary, peevish, arrogant, timid or plain dull as other people.” The essays assume that her readers also admit literature into their lives.

Clift understood that her column needed to be upbeat and inoffensive, so she makes no mention of her husband’s debilitating illness or the difficulties of her private life. The closest she comes to a political statement is when she contrasts the goals of younger and older women — helping women return to work in one case, engaging them in handicrafts and theatre parties in the other — at the inaugural meeting of a new women’s organisation. There is a lightness of touch and a clear sense of an audience that is made up, by implication, of other intelligent suburban women.

The same close observation enlivens the essays and the novel. Clift delivers wonderful lists of things: “On a Cluttered Mantelpiece” is made up mainly of descriptions of various objects found on her mantelpieces and their histories. “An Old Address Book” does a similar thing with places and people. Here are the county English:

men wearing either tweeds and caps and driving farm utilities or dinner jackets and driving Bentleys, mucking in with the pigs or serving champagne by candlelight and ladies who alternated between maintaining an Amazonian posture on perfectly frightening horses (and that horn so plangent over the Cotswold hills) and rising with that twitch of the trailing skirt that summoned all females at the table to retire and leave the gentlemen to their port.

Reading this you feel there is a novel waiting to happen.

Clift’s writing conveys a nostalgia for a lost Australia, not only for present-day readers but within the essays themselves, as she often remembers Sydney’s past and her own youth on the south coast. The End of the Morning also looks back fondly at the lost world of childhood, giving some clue to Clift’s role in the success of My Brother Jack. The novel is alive with a sense of what it was like to live in suburban Melbourne in the 1930s that Johnston couldn’t match in the Hydra of Clean Straw for Nothing or the Sydney of A Cartload of Clay. Clearly this detailed observation was Clift’s particular talent, just as her adaptation of My Brother Jack (1967) for television showed her gift for dramatic concision.

Clift’s newspaper columns remind me of Helen Garner’s articles for the Age, collected in True Stories and later books, and her comment that feature writing saved her from the loneliness of fiction and the need to “make things up.” Clift also admits to being gregarious, and it may be that she too found personal journalism suited her personality. But the literary world always rates the novel more highly than this kind of ephemeral writing and she struggled to finish her most ambitious work.

As well as her fears about the revelations in her husband’s next novel, perhaps the attitudes of the 1960s made it impossible for her to write about her teenage pregnancy, let alone sex outside marriage. We can speculate and regret the loss of what might have been an important addition to Australian fiction. At least we have these entertaining essays to enjoy. •

The End of the Morning
By Charmian Clift | Edited by Nadia Wheatley | NewSouth | $34.99 | 240 pages

The post A fragment of a life appeared first on Inside Story.

In England, although he had been exhibited at the Royal Academy, it had again rejected his application for membership. His English and European landscapes, they seem to have felt, were not distinctive enough: his watercolours — and he was active in marketing the genre generally — were seen as potboilers. Glover hoped for some sort of rejuvenation. “The expectation of finding a new Beautiful World,” he wrote to a patron, “new landscapes new trees new flowers new Animals Birds &c &c is delightful to me.”

“I mean to take possession of 2,000 Acres,” Glover continued, and “to have a vineyard &c &c upon it.” Born the son of a tenant farmer, a gentleman-proprietor is what he wanted to be, and became. A responsible but strict father, he ran a tight ship: one (unmarried) son functioned as his personal assistant. Altogether, with the sons and their families, free labourers and convict servants, Glover was patriarch to some thirty or forty people. (We tend to forget that big colonial properties were in effect small villages.) Eventually he ran some 3000 sheep on the property, named Patterdale after a favourite spot in the Lake District. And there he died.

Ron Radford’s book, building on the scholarship of Ian McPhee, David Hansen and others, is particularly focused — as the subtitle indicates — on Glover’s Tasmanian period. But due attention is given to the English and Continental paintings, since Glover kept producing them even at Patterdale. The thing was, they sold — in England. In Tasmania, inferior paintings by English artists were preferred by homesick settlers. And they had no interest in local scenes. Apart from a few commissions, it was only at the end of his life that Glover sold one or two major Tasmanian paintings locally. He was, as Radford puts it, “the key, though isolated, figure in what can be called Tasmania’s ‘golden age’ of colonial prosperity, culture and art.”

Radford, as a sometime gallery director, is fully aware of the importance of the market, together with patronage and questions of framing. This practicality carries across to the placement of the sumptuous illustrations: they are always adjacent to the discussion of the paintings, even repeated if necessary.

Glover was a practical, prudent man — except when it came to his house. Perhaps in his enthusiasm he was led to over-estimate his own abilities, for Patterdale was built hurriedly and mistakenly on damp clay, near a soak, and of rubble sandstone. Floors and walls were inadequately joined: the façade fell away in the 1940s, to be replaced by one in concrete and weatherboard. Later there was risk of further collapse. An interesting chapter relates the post-Glover history of the house, culminating in its purchase, rebuilding and elegant restoration by Rodney and Carol Westmore.

Glover had already turned to oils in England, but at Patterdale he painted in them almost exclusively, responding to the new environment with his greatest burst of creativity. The result, writes Radford, is a succession of “realistic and light-filled celebrations of his recently adopted country.” He explains that Glover adapted a technique from his watercolouring, using a white ground which would glow through translucent glazes, helping to capture the intensity of Australian light. Indeed, the painter rose immediately to the challenge of a new country: in an early painting of a gully on Mt Wellington there is no idealisation, but characteristically Australian forest regrowth after fire, and dead stumps.

Even so, while alive to the “thrilling and graceful play in the landscape,” Glover found it more difficult to render than European ones. “There is a remarkable peculiarity in the trees,” he noted, “however numerous, they rarely prevent your tracing, through them, the whole distant Country.”

As was customary at the time, Glover did not perceive such vistas as the direct result of Aboriginal land management — burning the undergrowth to create pastures for kangaroos and wallabies, thereby making hunting easier. The assumption of white settlers was that all this was a God-given natural pasture, just waiting for the sheep and cattle to arrive. (A rare romantic strategy by Glover was to supplant sheep in his paintings with cattle, more picturesque.)

Radford is at pains to show that Glover was keenly sympathetic to the Palawa (Tasmanian Aborigines). The last tribals were being rounded up by George Augustus Robinson when Glover arrived in the colony. Robinson turned up at Patterdale with a small group of them, was well-received, and was shown massacre sites. Tellingly, Glover’s very first — and possibly last — paintings there would be of moonlight corroborees. At every opportunity he inserted the departed Aborigines into his landscapes. For Robinson he produced a painting of Aborigines Dancing at Brighton, Tasmania, explaining that “the figures are too small to give much likeness — my object was to give an idea of the gay happy life the Natives had before the White people came,” and also, he added, “an idea of the Scenery of the Country.” Interestingly, there are almost no whites and no cultivation in his landscapes. They are Edenic, essentially a record of what they were like before the invasion.

At one level Glover was, as the historian W.K. Hancock put it, “shedding an economical tear” about the displacement. For it was so recent, and in stark contrast to Glover’s sense of his own achievement on the same land, caught forever in the famous paintings of his house and garden and in the “My” of My Harvest Home. A contradiction: you might say that — surrealistically — his characteristic spaghetti gum trees had buckled under the strain. For there are few like that around Patterdale, yet Glover fixated on them; they became a trope. Significantly, Radford points to a yearning for synthesis: late works include an ambiguous Ben Lomond (Scotland — or Tasmania?) and the fanciful A Dream At 82.

Glover is still underestimated. Working in Tasmania alone and now perceived as a white man, he was described only a few weeks ago in the press as the “so-called father of Australian landscapes.” Yet, as Ron Radford tells us, he is still the Australian artist most widely represented in galleries abroad — extending to a good half dozen American ones, and the Louvre. Equally tellingly, Tom Roberts — having married into a northern Tasmanian family — painted the landscape Glover’s Country in homage around 1929. When he died a couple of years later, Roberts chose not to be buried where he lived, at Kallista in Victoria, but in a Tasmanian churchyard within view of Glover’s Ben Lomond. And twenty years ago, the locals of Evandale instituted the annual Glover Prize for Tasmanian landscapes, a prestigious and generous award.

In all, it is an impressive node of continuing influence, buttressed by the preservation order recently placed on the Patterdale landscape and the scrupulous restoration of the house. Ron Radford’s book will go a long way to making Glover even better known. •

John Glover: Patterdale Farm and the Australian Landscape
By Ron Radford | Ovata Press | $49.95 | 216 pages

The post John Glover, born-again artist in Tasmania appeared first on Inside Story.

In the latter case, probably not. Yet it is in so many ways both the most intriguing first choice — who, after all, would expect the creator of James Bond to allude to the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Charles Secretan? — and the most portentous revision. The decision to eschew the clumsy homage and instead appropriate the dull name of an American ornithologist underscores Fleming’s ruthless pruning of anything that might unnecessarily adorn the instrument he created in 1952.

That creation, and the long story of its making, is at the heart of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an immense biography by Nicholas Shakespeare. Building on earlier efforts by John Pearson (1966) and Andrew Lycett (1995), the book was prompted by the Fleming estate’s willingness to give Shakespeare access to unreleased archival material that illuminates the real-life source material embedded in the Bond novels. That openness may also have been the estate attempt to adjust the dominant view of Fleming as a man who, where he is not defined by Bond, is derided as a misogynistic, alcoholic wastrel with a penchant for whipping who showboated during the second world war and spent postwar summers in Jamaica fantasising about British grit, foreign villains and sexual conquest in exotic locales.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man has plenty of whipping and wantonness, but it adds nuance to a life whose early years seem to have been spent in guileless and unknowing preparation for important wartime work — work for which he turns out to have been unusually gifted. In fact, it is the observation of one journalist — that Fleming, in this moment, with all his gifts and talents finally in use, was a “complete man” — that gave Shakespeare his title.

But what freight it brings to the book: an intimation of comprehensiveness underscored by its bulk and the vivid cultural history woven through it; an implied claim to being definitive bedevilled by the persistent haze of uncertainty around Fleming’s war record. Then there is the dramatic portent — that Fleming, even as he created the character that secured his fame, was somehow lesser or incomplete in those postwar years.

But perhaps that was merely a reversion to form. Fleming’s early life was monied but grim. His miserly Scottish grandfather was a banker who had survived considerable bereavement (three siblings had been buried before he was born, and three more, plus his mother, would follow by the time he turned fifteen) to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Robert Fleming’s greatest stroke of luck, however, was to be a constituent of a young Winston Churchill, who called on him for donations and provided in his friendship a glow of respectability for Robert’s sons, Val and Philip, whom Churchill nicknamed the “Fleming-oes.”

Val, elected a Conservative MP in 1910, fathered four sons — Peter (1907), Ian (1908), Richard (1911) and Michael (1913) — with socialite Evelyn Sainte Croix Rose, whom he had married in 1906. But his influence as a father was defined by his absence. After war broke out, he joined Churchill’s regiment, trained alongside the future prime minister, and was killed while serving on the Somme in 1917.

Robert Fleming is said to have bellowed in grief at the news, Evelyn painted every room in the house black, and Churchill wrote an obituary for the Times, a copy of which, framed and hung above Ian’s bed, gave the eight-year-old a nightly reminder of the greatness that he could never hope to match.

Val’s estate, meanwhile, gave Evelyn enormous wealth, but in terms that invited her to endure a lifetime of dutiful widowhood: should she ever remarry, the money would be immediately transferred to her children. She responded by elevating her dead husband “from an absent, pipe-smoking, deer-stalker to an iconic figure in the clouds with whom she alone enjoyed privileged communication,” writes Shakespeare, in one of many deft summations.

Controlling, insecure and extravagant, she played her boys off against one another, guilt-tripping them and blackmailing them with threats of disinheritance, pulling out all the stops to ensure they might never suffer the consequences of taking responsibility for their actions.

For Ian, this manifested most acutely in endless reprieves from failure and ignominy, and repeated diversions from paths that might well have led him away from Evelyn. He was pulled out of Eton ahead of trouble over a relationship with a girl and sent to Sandhurst with hopes of joining the Black Watch infantry battalion. Out less than a year later after contracting gonorrhoea in a London brothel, he was dispatched to the Tennerhof, a private school in the Austrian town of Kitzbühel, with freshly adjusted plans that he would pursue a diplomatic career.

Distance from Evelyn allowed promise to flower: linguistic versatility, some artistic ambitions, an engagement to a Swiss woman. But on his return his mother stomped on all these green shoots. After his failure to find a position in the Foreign Office she intervened to get him a job at Reuters, where he made a decent fist of covering a famous Soviet show trial of six engineers employed by a British machinery manufacturer. Then he was off again, moving at Evelyn’s insistence to join a firm of merchant bankers in the City.

Fleming had little to no interest in commerce and even less in maths: “I could never work out what a sixty-fourth of a point was,” he wrote. Yet he flourished to the point of becoming a partner at another firm only eighteen months later. The succession of environments into which he had been dropped had given him a charming veneer that allowed him to adapt and conform while keeping people at a safe distance. Even the jaded journalists he tried to scoop in Moscow had been disarmed to the point that they were willing to help him with his boss: one vouched that Fleming was “a pukha chap.”

The elite education and time spent among the privileged had also knitted Fleming into every club and network that was worth knowing about, giving him vast contacts and points of reference that he wielded readily. The “stockbroker” Fleming would talk to clients about investment strategy, wine and dine them at an appropriate club or hotel, and then turn them over to the pointy heads and bean counters in the office who could make the money flow. On the surface (and, to some, that was all there was), all this made Fleming a Wodehouse character: paid too much to do too little, all charm and glamour and self-obsession.

And yet, Shakespeare suggests, Fleming had by this time planted “miscellaneous seeds.” He could speak several languages, had solid journalistic experience, and was friendly with several notably crotchety press barons. He had contacts and networks across the financial, commercial and intelligence worlds. He even had literary credentials, via the reflected glow of elder brother Peter, who had become a successful travel writer, and his own efforts as a collector of first editions of books that had “signalised a right-angle in the thought on that particular subject.”

The book collecting might not have seemed helpful when war broke out in 1939, but the miscellaneous seeds sprouted once Fleming was recruited to the Department of Naval Intelligence as a personal assistant to its director, rear-admiral John Godfrey. His ability to deal with the press and with people — not least his irascible boss — made him indispensable. His myriad contacts became invaluable. His knowledge of distant worlds and their connections made him insightful. But perhaps most surprising of all was his creativity.

In this vein he was much like Churchill, whom Fleming grew to resemble with his polka-dot bowties and “daily prayer” memos (“Pray, could you find out…”). Under Godfrey, Fleming brainstormed all sorts of schemes, many impractical and far-fetched, to gain an advantage over the enemy. For every hare-brained idea — to have a fake U-boat captain send messages in glass bottles railing against the Third Reich, to create a fake treasure ship packed with crack commandoes (which sounds suspiciously like the Trojan horse) — there was something promising. Perhaps most notable was what Fleming took from a little-known novel, The Milliner Hat Mystery: the germ of what became Operation Mincemeat, a successful tactical deception of the Axis powers.

Placed at the near-centre of British intelligence efforts, Fleming had a wide ambit of activity that Shakespeare believes to have extended to a role in the creation of America’s foreign intelligence service. He was hardly the “chocolate sailor” some contemporaries called him. Godfrey certainly thought highly of his assistant. He called Fleming a war “winner” who was owed a debt that could never be repaid, and Shakespeare adds to this the findings of other historians: “It has taken time to realise how central Ian Fleming is,” says one. “What he was doing touched on so much of the war,” says another.

But ascertaining exactly what Fleming touched, and how lightly or heavily, is difficult. Even the claim to Operation Mincemeat is made via inference, analysis of stylistic tics and coincident timetabling. Secrecy is the issue. With friends and colleagues, Fleming was generally reticent about his wartime service; bar the blurred fantasies of the Bond books, he left few hints of his activities. Shakespeare adds to this the need for confidentiality during the war and, later, during the cold war, when archives were both weeded and closed to access. Then there is the material simply lost to time — damaged, forgotten, burned — and the records that are exaggerated or simply mistaken.

None of this is unusual, yet at other times Shakespeare strains to explain Fleming’s absences from records, or even to gainsay what exists and inveigle Fleming’s way in. “Simply because Ian is not listed in the minutes of a high-level meeting,” he writes at one point, “does not mean he was not there in the room.”

Enough well-documented rooms exist to make arguments like this unnecessary. The array of material Shakespeare proffers is enough to convince this reader, at any rate, that Fleming was an active, engaged, important and unconventional wartime player. While Shakespeare labours the point, it also serves to establish a key fact about Fleming’s literary efforts: while James Bond was depicted in a cold war world, with its dubious moralities and shifting principles, he was fundamentally a creature of the second world war and its starker divides between allies and enemies, good and bad.

The oft-made comparison with John le Carré has never been to Fleming’s advantage, but Shakespeare draws out so many connections, echoes and resemblances between Bond and the second world war that any comparison between Bond and George Smiley or between Fleming and le Carré seems like a category error. In fact, given Shakespeare’s attention to literary antecedents, the better comparison is between Bond and characters such as Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond, Richard Hannay and perhaps even Sherlock Holmes — Britons who, with vigour, smarts and a willingness to do violence, save the world.

Shakespeare is a restless writer. As though to jolt the reader awake, lengthy passages of third-person past-tense narration suddenly crystallise into the first-person present as he tracks down a long-lost colleague of Fleming’s or a vague acquaintance or — in more self-indulgent moments — the descendent of some vague acquaintance. These moments fold into the story of Fleming’s life the story of the stories — of the Pearson and Lycett biographies of Fleming, and of Shakespeare’s biography.

Shakespeare quotes people crowing about their efforts to mislead his predecessors or their determination to shut up shop: “Poor Pearson,” Godfrey writes, of Fleming’s first biographer, “is like a famished man gazing, his mouth watering, into the butcher’s and confectionary shop windows and having to be content with a stale turnip (or swede) from the greengrocer.”

Shakespeare doesn’t conceal his similarities with Pearson, noting his own eager anticipation of new discoveries. But he adds in the dynamics of his interviews, poignant notes about the contingency of historical research, and observations about the dark material at the heart of the Bond novels.

In one scene he arrives in the rain outside a bungalow at Milton Keynes to interview the last surviving member of 30AU, a wartime intelligence gathering unit set up under Fleming’s influence and operating, effectively, under his command. Bill Marshall is ninety-four years old and feels a decade older. He tells Shakespeare he is a week early but beckons him inside anyway. “Later, I am glad I got the date wrong,” Shakespeare adds. “Bill Marshall will be hospitalised five days after our conversation. Had I come at the right time, I would never have heard what he tells me.”

Inside, Shakespeare listens as Marshall — who only days before has received the Légion d’Honneur and a letter from Emanual Macron praising him as a hero — confesses to murder:

On 26 June, Bill watched as German snipers fired through the windows of a hotel, killing one medical orderly and shooting another through the knee as they attended wounded American soldiers in the street. It was raining when the German riflemen surrendered. Another witness told Nicholas Rankin how not long afterwards he had seen their blood flowing in the rainwater.

Bill grows quiet, withdrawn. “I shot four Germans in cold blood.”

“What did you feel?’

“Nothing. How do you feel seeing two men trying to attend being shot?”

What happened next, whether he was reprimanded or Returned to Unit, he does not say. He has said enough. I think of another character who inherited Bill’s licence to kill. This was the compost out of which James Bond emerged.

Much as he had come into his own, Fleming was in an invidious position by the end of the war. Bound by secrecy, he could not dispel or rebut jibes about him being the “Sailor of the Strand.” He was carrying considerable emotional turmoil: his brother Michael had died in 1940 as a prisoner of the Germans; a serious romantic relationship with Muriel Wright, begun in 1935 in Austria, had come to an end with her death in a German bombing raid in 1944. He could too easily see a future in which the skills and talents he had wielded so well went to waste. He was hardly alone in this plight: in the United States, Allen Dulles described his return to the legal profession as an “appalling thing” after heading a spy network. “Most of my time,” he wrote, “is spent reliving those exciting days.”

Where Dulles went to the CIA, Fleming returned to journalism. In 1945, he took a position in the Kemsley newspaper group, handling a network of foreign correspondents. A journalist Shakespeare interviews recounts how Fleming sat in front of a canary yellow map of the world equipped with tiny flashing light bulbs — one for each man.

Shakespeare cautiously ventures that this might have been cover for continuing intelligence work, but the whole portrait has the tragic comedy of a Graham Greene novel: Fleming’s use of naval intelligence lingo with his journalists, his retention of a code and cipher book in his office, the derisive whispers of younger colleagues that his vaunted contacts were nothing but old duffers. Then, of course, there are the corporate machinations: Fleming took the position with Kemsley, which also owned the Sunday Times, on the intimation that he might become the paper’s editor and the hope that he might even get a seat on the company’s board. He also fantasised that the foreign news service he was managing might one day become a rival to Reuters — at which point Fleming would be a press proprietor in his own right.

If true, it was only ever to be a sideline, for alongside a salary of £225,000 in today’s pounds Fleming negotiated an iron-clad policy of two months of paid holiday each year. He would spend those months in Jamaica, at the rather uncomfortable bungalow he had built and initially named “Shamelady Hall” before choosing a name that harked back to a wartime operation — Goldeneye. Here, in daily bursts of 2000 words, he wrote Bond.

In Shakespeare’s telling, the novels came shortly after a burst of disappointments and disillusionments. Fleming’s hopes of advancement at Kemsley had vanished; his long-term paramour, Anne Charteris, had been divorced from her husband and fallen pregnant (again) to Fleming, necessitating a hasty marriage that neither of them much wanted. With fatherhood imminent, wedlock complete, he was looking back to a life he once had and could still have had — in intelligence, on one hand, but also in literature.

Signs of Fleming’s desire for this life recur in the book, especially during Fleming’s time attending the Tennerhof. There, according to Shakespeare, the youthful Fleming was steeped in European history and literature and imbued with ambitions to write a serious novel in the vein of James Joyce or Thomas Mann. He made attempts to act on those ambitions, planning but then aborting a co-authored translation of Paracelsus and, in 1928, self-publishing a volume of poetry titled The Black Daffodil only to become deeply embarrassed by it. “He took every copy that had been printed and consigned the whole edition pitilessly to the flames,” wrote one of Fleming’s friends.

A factor in Fleming’s constant withdrawals, Shakespeare argues, was his elder brother’s success at writing. “Of course, my brother Peter’s rather brilliant as a writer,” Fleming would say, “but I wouldn’t know how you set about writing a book myself.” In the postwar years, however, his attitude changed. One prompt was his belief that he could better his brother’s effort at an adventure novel; another was his sense that he would not be trespassing on his brother’s turf if he did so. Then there was a sense of resentment, aggravated by his failed hopes at Kemsley, as friends, acquaintances and other writers churned out thrillers and spy novels that, in many cases, claimed experiences and actions Fleming saw as his own to write about — the gag of secrecy notwithstanding.

Perhaps too there was a sense of how he might slip that gag: Shakespeare posits that Graham Greene’s difficulties with the intelligence services — it was felt he drew too closely on his first-hand knowledge — may have influenced Fleming to increase the fantastical elements of the Bond stories even as he drew on the real-life material of his wartime experiences and insights. “I think he wrote the books primarily because he had a great deal of knowledge of things like this within him, and he had to get it out,” says one acquaintance.

It is a conflux of influences that Shakespeare presents with considerable verve. He plays with the book’s internal clock, changes style and tone, moves into scenes and back out of them, and in doing so creates vivid juxtapositions and drama. The chapter on Bond’s first appearance on the page follows immediately on Fleming’s decision to marry to create the convincing argument that Bond was an escape for Fleming as much as for an exhausted postwar Britain:

Suddenly, as he floated over the reef [at Goldeneye], above barracuda he had named after battleships, Ian saw an exhilarating path back to bachelorhood — by creating a contemporary naval hero in the tradition of Drake, Morgan and Nelson, loyal to the Crown, who would reaffirm England as a world power, wipe out the shame of the Burgess–Maclean defection, and re-establish SIS as “the most dangerous” Secret Service in Russian eyes. And he would be a bachelor. “If he were to marry and settle down he would be of little value to the Secret Service.”

A chapter later, Shakespeare is looking ahead again, foreshadowing how Bond would consume Fleming. It was not only that Bond’s fame quickly came to define his author’s public persona; it was also that Fleming became reliant on Bond. Advised that it was no good to write just one book, that he had to “hit the nail again and again with the same hammer until it’s driven into the head of your potential public,” Fleming became a factory working on a one-year schedule, the brunt of the work to be done during a spell at Goldeneye.

Fleming went into this routine clear-eyed, seeing it as wholly compatible with his working life as well as a path out of financial difficulties caused by a spendthrift Anne. As he wrote to his publisher Jonathan Cape during negotiations over Casino Royale, “I am only actuated by the motives of a) making as much money for myself and my publishers as possible out of the book, and b) getting as much fun as I personally can out of the project.”

But the fun, in Shakespeare’s telling, dwindled as the money poured in. Lawsuits over film and television rights, accusations of plagiarism, negative reviews and laughter from friends all corroded this late-life literary success. Then there was Fleming’s knowledge that, at some point, he would run out of material. Philip Larkin famously detected in the posthumously published Octopussy (1966) an allegory for how Fleming had used his war experiences as treasure off which to secure his heart’s desires — Bentleys, caviar, Henry Cotton golf clubs. It was acute insight that Shakespeare agrees with. “This was the draining exchange,” he writes. “Once Ian gave birth to Bond, he relied heavily on the hard-earned secret capital of the war. Each book was a different slice of stolen gold until the material ran out.”

The poor quality of Octopussy and The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), also published after Fleming’s death, suggests Shakespeare’s assessment is right. But at play in the preceding Bond books too is a sense of Fleming butting up against the limits imposed on a writer tilling in a single genre. For Your Eyes Only (1960) abandons the novel form in favour of the short story, one of which — the horribly titled “Quantum of Solace” — eschews gunfights and villains in favour of a parable about marital compassion delivered after a disappointing dinner party in a manner reminiscent of Somerset Maugham. The response to this deviation was lukewarm at best.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), meanwhile, is unique among the Bond novels for being framed by a meta-fictive introduction from Fleming, for adopting the first-person perspective of a woman, and for its brutally sleazy and violent story. The book contains the most rounded and complex of Fleming’s female characters, but its reception was so virulently hostile that Fleming, taken aback, suppressed a paperback edition, refused to allow anything but the title to be used in the film adaptations, and went back to his safe patch with the Bond that followed, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963).

One might wonder whether Fleming still yearned to write something that his younger, more highbrow self would have been proud of, and whether he had come to believe that, thanks to Bond, he could not. If so, it is all the more tragic for being a knowing compromise signalled by the early change he had made to the draft of Casino Royale.

A homage to a nineteenth-century philosopher was never going to fit into that work, into that world, and Fleming saw it quickly. He slashed a blue line through Secretan and above it wrote a new name. His protagonist would introduce himself bluntly, almost monosyllabically: “Bond. James Bond.” •

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
By Nicholas Shakespeare | Harvill Secker | $42.99 | 830 pages

The post Grand days appeared first on Inside Story.

During the American half of her life, Arendt worked variously as an editor, a journalist, a writer and a university teacher. She became known as one of the most formidable intellectuals of the twentieth century. Her books — The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) foremost among them — became hugely influential and have aged well. Her essays and published correspondence with key individuals in her life — including her lover Martin Heidegger, her mentor and friend Karl Jaspers, her first husband Günther Anders and her second husband Heinrich Blücher — provide yet more fascinating insights into a brilliant mind.

But it has never been easy to categorise Arendt. A famous interview she gave on West German television in 1964 began with a disagreement. “I think you are a philosopher,” the interviewer Günter Gaus said to her. “Well, I can’t do anything about that,” Arendt interrupted, “but I’m of the view that I’m not a philosopher. I think I’ve finally said farewell to philosophy. I studied philosophy, as you know, but that’s not to say that I stuck with it.”

The biographer is expected to fill in blanks, eliminate uncertainties, fit episodes into a cohesive story, and provide historical context. An intellectual biography should also relate a writer’s life to the texts she left behind and construct a narrative that makes sense of the trajectory of her thinking.

Thomas Meyer’s Hannah Arendt: Die Biografie, published last year in Germany to much acclaim and forthcoming in an English translation in October, does all that. He claims his is the first book about Arendt based on archival research, but even if it weren’t he has obviously done more than others to track down written sources. For many years, he has served as editor of Arendt’s collected writings in German. His understanding of her ideas and his extensive sleuthing has produced a comprehensive picture.

May 1941 also marked Arendt’s entry into an English-language universe. Until that point she had written in German, though she was also at home in French — from 1933 until 1941 she lived in exile in France — and read classical Greek and Latin as fluently as her mother tongue. English hadn’t been part of her world until she began lessons in 1940, but it didn’t take her long to write and publish in that language. She immersed herself in an Anglophone world in the second half of her life, though she never abandoned German; in the 1964 interview she told Gaus she knew a lot of German poetry by heart and the lines kept circling at the back of her mind.

Much to his credit, Meyer is interested in Arendt’s entire oeuvre. She wrote almost all her books twice, usually first in English and then in German (sometimes based on a text prepared by a translator). These aren’t German and English versions of the same text. It’s easier to express philosophical ideas in German than in English, Arendt once remarked, while the English language is better suited to thinking politically. When she imagined her German reader, she assumed some philosophical concepts needed little explanation; her American audience was better versed in a tradition of political thought.

Meyer is a diligent chronicler who avoids anachronisms. He discusses Arendt’s life and intellectual journey against the backdrop of the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, rarely filtering it through the lens of his own times. Only when he writes about the men in Arendt’s life does he become judgemental. He disapproves of her relationship with Heidegger (as do many Arendt admirers), is critical of Jaspers, and seems to consider Blücher, the love of her life and her husband for more than half of it, a philanderer who couldn’t hold a candle to her intellectually.

Meyer is thorough. It’s only after a twenty-two-page family history that readers learn Hannah Arendt was born at 9:15 pm, weighing 3.695 kilograms. I can empathise with him: of course he wants to share all the detail he has been able to unearth. And since Arendt’s life was complex and complicated, why not document all its twists and turns?

It’s time to come clean: I found Meyer’s book unwieldy and unnecessarily slow and his curiosity somewhat antiquarian. But I am being unfair, and I know why: I began reading Meyer’s book at the same time as I started on Lyndsey Stonebridge’s biography of Hannah Arendt, We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love & Disobedience. The plan was to consider these books in tandem, life chapter by life chapter. I soon abandoned that idea. Not because Meyer’s book is boring, but because Stonebridge’s is riveting. I was able to return to Meyer’s text sooner than expected simply because I couldn’t put down Stonebridge’s fast-paced narrative.

Her approach is as anti-antiquarian as could be. She is interested in Hannah Arendt as a companion in today’s dark times. And thus her narrative has two protagonists: the biographer and her subject. “I’ve tried to think my own thoughts in the place of Hannah Arendt,” Stonebridge writes, before conceding that “there may be moments [when she] also thinks her thoughts in my place.”

The two seem to have much in common: both come across as passionate, generous and at times opinionated. They complement each other: Stonebridge is not only Arendt’s interpreter but also the one who knows about the world almost half a century after Arendt’s death. It’s different from the one Arendt inhabited, but no less out of joint. Stonebridge convinces her readers that Arendt would have much to say about a world that “seems to be in the grip of a relentlessly awful plot.”

Stonebridge’s frequent references to her own times help the reader to understand why Hannah Arendt and her writings still resonate. The fact that she is read perhaps at least as much now as in the year she died may seem surprising. After all, Arendt hadn’t gathered followers around her who would take responsibility for her posthumous reputation. Her intellectual taste might be considered old-fashioned: with a few notable exceptions, she was not much interested in contemporary political theorists and philosophers, but instead engaged with Plato and Kant. She was one of the very few women in her line of work, but did not consider herself a feminist. Her writing doesn’t support the kind of identity politics that are so fashionable these days. She could come across as arrogant, if only because she often deemed it unnecessary to translate quotes from other languages.

Besides, Hannah Arendt didn’t leave a grand theory behind. It’s not possible to draw on an overarching “Arendtian” framework in the way some people purport to explain things from a Marxian or Freudian perspective. She is not somebody on whose writings we could comfortably lean. But we can take courage from her highly original attempts to understand the world. “What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing,” she wrote in the prologue to The Human Condition. Is there anything less simple than that? Thinking, though, was something Hannah Arendt was particularly good at.

“She wanted to think exactly like Rahel Varnhagen, to shadow her thought and experience as closely as she could so that she might better understand her own emotional, intellectual and at the time often perplexing life,” Stonebridge says about Arendt’s relationship with the German-Jewish writer and salonnière whose biography Arendt finished writing in Paris. Arendt once called Varnhagen her closest friend, although by then that friend had been dead for about a hundred years. Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka occupied similar roles in Arendt’s life.

Stonebridge’s relationship with Arendt is evidently also close, which makes hers a particularly personal book. Shadowing her biographical subject’s thought and experience, she followed literally in Arendt’s footsteps. Visiting Montauban in the southwest of France, the town where Arendt stayed in the summer of 1940 after her escape from the Gurs internment camp, Stonebridge “carefully counted the sixty steps across the square that it would have taken Arendt to get from her stuffy room to the cool companionship of the library.”

“Perplexing” is an attribute that appears more than once in Stonebridge’s book. For good reason: it characterises the twists and turns not only of Arendt’s life but also in her way of thinking. Stonebridge quotes Arendt quoting Plato’s rendering of a Socratic dialogue: “It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself I perplex other people,” Socrates reportedly said to Meno. “The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.” Whereupon Arendt adds: “Which, of course, sums up neatly the only way thinking can be taught.”

Of course? Arendt was an accomplished teacher who often performed her thinking in front of an audience — in fact the text Stonebridge uses here was labelled “a lecture” when first published in 1971 — but having been a teacher I know that many students resent being infected with perplexity. It requires skill not to lose them.

Skill is also on display when Stonebridge confronts her reader with the perplexities of Arendt’s ideas and life without trying to dissolve them. Arendt would have appreciated that. “I am often captured by the sense that there exists something she will not give up; something precious, mysterious even to herself, but very strongly present,” Stonebridge writes.

But isn’t that just the point of all of this? she might say now, chin resting in her smoking hand from her place in the bar in the underworld where the lost angels of the last century gather at dusk. That we are unknowable even to ourselves, maybe especially to ourselves, and yet capable of collective miracles? Isn’t that what you must fight for again now?

The subtitle of Stonebridge’s biography promises lessons. Arendt may have much to teach us: about indifference, about plurality and about racism, to name but three of the topics she wrote about. Stonebridge avoids turning Arendt into a Vordenker, somebody who does the thinking on others’ behalf. Arendt did not see herself in such a role either. She was principally interested in Nach-denken, in the exercise of chasing and thinking through issues that she found difficult. Such Nach-denken required close attention, patience, imagination and the willingness to leave well-trodden paths.

Without compromising her intellectual independence, Arendt relied on at least one Vordenker herself. Immanuel Kant taught her that our ability to think makes freedom possible and that how we think has moral consequences. From him she learned much else, including the idea that to think politically and critically required an “erweiterte Denkungsart,” which Arendt translated as “enlarged mentality.”

For Arendt, Kant was a familiar figure, and not just because she had read his Critique of Pure Reason when she was sixteen. Arendt grew up in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad), where Kant had spent almost his entire life. After having lived for more than twenty years in New York she admitted to a German journalist: “In the way I think and form judgements, I’m still from Königsberg.”

Perhaps the most important lesson provided by Arendt via Stonebridge is a challenge: Think! How not to think is also a key lesson of We Are Free to Change the World, and here the focus is on Arendt’s essay about Elizabeth Eckford and the other children known as the Little Rock Nine, who in 1957 dared to attend a racially segregated high school in Arkansas’s capital city. “As for the children, forced integration means a very serious conflict between home and school, between their private and and their social life, and… children cannot be expected to handle them and therefore should not be exposed to them,” Arendt wrote.

Here she was not mindful of the need for an “enlarged mentality.” She didn’t travel to Little Rock, she didn’t talk to Eckford and, most importantly, she didn’t take seriously the girl’s experience. Arendt didn’t to think empathetically about Eckford’s situation because she considered empathy an apolitical and therefore inadequate response. But she also failed to think critically about it. It says much about Arendt, however, that after her essay “Reflections of Little Rock” had been published she realised that she had been wrong and admitted as much in writing.

Although Arendt was a public intellectual par excellence in the second half of her life (and one who expertly used the media), she didn’t think it was her role to shape public opinion. Do you want to make an impact with your work, Gaus asked her in 1964. “To be honest with you, I have to tell you: when I’m working, I’m not interested in impact,” she replied. “And when the work has been completed?” he persisted. “Well, then I’ve finished it.” She explained that her main aim was to understand, and that writing helped her to do that. And anyway, asking her about her impact was something only a man would do: “Men are always so concerned about making an impression.”

I loved reading Stonebridge’s book because I felt that in at least four key respects she does justice to Arendt. For one, her biography is exceptionally well written. That matters because Arendt herself wrote well (in German more so than in English) and because she valued good writing. She frequently quoted poetry in her writings — and poets also appreciated reading her. The final passages of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the poet Randall Jarrell told her in 1950, “seem a sort of crushing unbearable poem, quite homogeneous, something the reader feels and understands at the same time… I feel as if I’d seen the other side of the moon.” She is well-served by a biographer whose prose is sharp, elegant and captivating.

Gaus was incredulous when Arendt insisted that she was not a philosopher. Stonebridge understands why she said “goodbye to philosophy for good.” Arendt might not have endorsed Marx’s dictum — “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it” — but she distinguished between philosophising, on the one hand, and thinking politically and critically, on the other.

Arendt was prompted to think not because of an abstract conundrum but because the world was out of joint. Her thinking was informed by her experience as a refugee and as a Jewish woman who had been lucky to escape the fate of the millions of other Jews murdered in the Shoah. All this provides her thinking and writing with a sense of urgency.

Stonebridge shares that sense of urgency. “Hers was not a call for a return to political reason (such as you often hear today),” Stonebridge writes, “but for a kind of emergency thinking that may, she said, in the end, be all we have.” Our world is in much need of the kind of emergency thinking that Arendt practised and Stonebridge advocates.

Yet even while thinking and writing about a world out of joint, Arendt was committed to living well. Friendship and love were important to her, a fact that we might easily lose sight of when reading Eichmann in Jerusalem or The Origins of Totalitarianism. Stonebridge’s biography keeps the loving and much-loved author of these books in focus. It ends with a call to her readers, which would, I am sure, have met with Arendt’s wholehearted approval: “Now pay attention and get on with the work of resisting the sorry reality that you find yourselves in. And for goodness’ sake — a puff of smoke, raising a glass of Campari — have some fun!” •

Hannah Arendt: Die Biografie
By Thomas Meyer │ Piper │ €28.00 │ 521 pages

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love & Disobedience
By Lyndsey Stonebridge │ Jonathan Cape │£22.00 │290 pages

The post Emergency thinking appeared first on Inside Story.

It took a while for diplomats to realise they had a window into the mind of this reticent figure courtesy of a Westerner — an Australian, in fact —who had become part of Soeharto’s household a decade before these events and was to remain a key intermediary between the general and the West until Soeharto stepped down in 1998. In the words of an American diplomat in Jakarta at that time, Clive Williams was Soeharto’s “Australian whisperer.”

But as former Australian diplomat Shannon Smith writes in his intriguing biography, Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher, Williams’s role was kept largely secret from the public for more than fifty years. “Those who knew him in an official capacity are confined to several dozen international diplomats, journalists and politicians, and they had national interest, and sometimes self-interest, in keeping his name, his position and his role out of the public spotlight,” says Smith. The man himself would divulge only that he came from Geelong. “Beyond that, to every single person who ever came across Clive Williams, he was a puzzle, a riddle, a mystery, an enigma.”

So who was Clive Williams? How did this cashiered Jehovah’s Witness missionary and self-trained chiropodist become attached to Soeharto? How important was he in the power transition and Soeharto’s long presidency? And what did he know about the manoeuvrings around the night of 30 September 1965? Thanks to exhaustive research, Smith has answers to the first three of these questions, but only a hint about the fourth.

Williams was born in Geelong in 1921 to a family on the edge of survival, his father shattered by two years as a German prisoner of war. His mother died when he was sixteen, robbing him of close emotional support just as he was coming to the realisation that he was homosexual.

Feeling “hunted” in Geelong, Smith conjectures, Williams needed somewhere to “hide in plain sight.” He found it as a Jehovah’s Witness. Though the sect had only about 2000 followers in Australia, it was well known thanks to its early adoption of new technologies. Sound vans cruising the streets, radio broadcasts, pamphlets and foot-in-the-door house calls — all these were used pushed its millenarian belief that Christ would soon return to Earth and replace all worldly governments with a paradise populated only by Witnesses.

The group was unpopular, of course, and as Australia entered the second world war it was also suspect for its pacifism. Its eventual banning in 1941 added to the attraction for Williams. “An ardent, proselytising Jehovah’s Witness must have felt a real adrenalin rush pitting themself against community standards, breaking laws, and actively seeking pushback or confrontation,” Smith thinks. “Living in a society where one felt pressure for being ‘other’ or ‘less,’ such as a homosexual, it would have been an ideal outlet for barely twenty-year-old Williams to fight back, especially where the attention was on one’s religious beliefs not sexuality.”

Having started out as a self-supporting “pioneer” roaming the towns in a sound-van, Williams graduated to a central role in the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in Sydney, got exempted from call-up as a religious minister even as the sect continued to operate semi-underground, and then, in 1950, gaining induction into the sect’s global training centre, Gilead, in upstate New York. The following year, when his class was dispatched as missionaries, he landed in Manado, the province in the north of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island.

Williams lasted not quite three years in that role. Smith found a cryptic reference in the sect’s records for 1954 — “During the course of the year it became necessary to disfellowship a person from the congregation for unchristian conduct” — but Williams was otherwise expunged from the sect’s history books. He might have been expelled for attending more to charity than conversions, Smith generously observes, but his sexuality seems a more likely cause.

Aged thirty-six, Williams then moved to Semarang in Central Java, taking with him a younger Manadonese man. “It was also a good place to lose oneself or, indeed, hide from view. A place to shake off a religion and find some spirituality, to conceal sexuality, and to reset,” Smith writes. “Over the next few years, Williams delved into Javanese culture, became fluent in the local languages and established a series of lifelong friendships. Like many who enter witness protection, he emerged with a new identity.”

Despite his humble schooling, Williams had always been well spoken, had become a confident speaker from years as a missionary, and no longer had a mission to convert the local Muslims. He quickly tapped into the immense demand for English-language tuition in the new nation, particularly among upper-echelon Indonesians who could pay for classes and textbooks.

Word of Williams’s activities reached Tien Soeharto, wife of the rising army officer. The two struck up a rapport: “he delighted her with his demonstrations of Western etiquette and customs, he became the couples’ English tutor, and like most Australians, he was practical and handy at fixing things (including cutting her in-grown toenails).” Clive also followed international affairs: “he had travelled to London and New York! And his knowledge about the human condition, gained from travelling around the cities and isolated communities of Australia and his missionary work, was extremely broad. To the inward-looking Javanese couple, Williams was a revelation.”

It was during these years, the 1950s, that Soeharto rose to command the army’s crucial Central Java region, building a patronage style of leadership bolstered by commodity smuggling, protection rackets and other business activity. In the process he attracted life-long loyalty from army colleagues like Sudjono Humardhani, Ali Murtopo and Yoga Sugama and among Chinese-Indonesian compradore businessmen like The Kian Seng (known as Mohammed “Bob” Hassan) and Liem Sioe Liong (Sudono Salim).

Eventually the business deals got too much for the puritanical army head, Abdul Haris Nasution, who transferred Soeharto to the new staff college in Bandung in 1959. But that didn’t stop Soeharto’s rise. He took command of a new Jakarta-based ready-reaction force called Kostrad that also had the job of regaining Western New Guinea from the Dutch. Tien stayed in Semarang through this period, with Williams becoming a trusted male presence while frequently flying to Jakarta to see Soeharto.

Smith takes us through much of the still-emerging history and analysis of the events of 1965, though he misses some parts of the story, notably the role of the double agent Sjam Kamaruzaman, an army intelligence asset inside a “special bureau” attached to the top leadership of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party.

What Smith’s research reinforces, though, is that neither the CIA nor other foreign intelligence agencies were masterminding events. Although Western powers quickly piled in with propaganda blaming the killing of six army generals on the PKI, they were taken completely by surprise by the nature of the military putsch and knew virtually nothing about Soeharto. A provincial figure, he had not been among the more cosmopolitan Indonesian officers given US army training.

As Soeharto moved to undercut Sukarno, first by facing down his attempt to appoint someone else army commander, then by forcing the handover of executive powers in the famous 11 March 1966 letter Sukarno was intimidated into signing, then by becoming acting president in 1967, foreign embassies were baffled by the opaque responses they were getting from the emerging leader. When he said “yes” it could mean yes, or maybe, or just “I have heard you,” or even a no.

Then, in mid 1966, Williams was discovered by American ambassador Marshall Green and soon became an indispensable intermediary for the embassy, and vice-versa. He would often turn up on the doorstep of an American diplomat’s house at the behest of the acting president, and the embassy also chose Williams for reciprocal approaches.

Williams was very different from other potential intermediaries including members of the ring of ex-Semarang army officers serving as “special advisors” to Soeharto, or foreign minister Adam Malik and other civilian politicians who sometimes had different political agendas. He was non-political, incorruptible and simply not interested in money. He understood “Soeharto’s nuances and communication style; he could read Soeharto’s mood and could tell whether he was angry or prevaricating or anxious, and he could anticipate Soeharto’s thinking and reaction to an issue.” He also spoke both English and Indonesian fluently, “ensuring there were no linguistic or cultural misunderstandings.”

By 1967, Soeharto was ensconced in the large house at Jalan Cendana in Menteng, the old inner suburb of Dutch officialdom. Williams took a small house, connected by gate, at the back. He would come in for meals, take Soeharto through what the foreign media were saying, coach the six children in English, and guide Tien through the Australian Women’s Weekly.

The Australian embassy was two years behind Marshall Green in discovering Williams as the best conduit to Soeharto. Or at least its mainstream diplomatic staff were. An army attaché, Colonel Robert Hughes, met Williams in Central Java in 1966 and got a meeting with Soeharto, with Williams interpreting. Murray Clapham, a suave young officer of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, became friendly with Williams, as did his chief of station Kenneth Wells.

The ABC’s correspondent, Tim Bowden, also discovered Williams and persuaded him to give a radio interview in October 1966. While current politics were barred, the hour-long encounter went deeply into the kind of divination that Soeharto — like many Javanese — practised as they reached major decisions.

But these insights were disregarded by Australia’s ambassador from 1966 to 1969, Max Loveday, a rigid and self-important character who insisted on using conventional channels, notably the Indonesian foreign ministry and Malik, its minister, whom Soeharto distrusted. The Australian government consequently made a number of diplomat blunders by pushing proposals that Williams would have advised were bound to be refused. A visit by prime minister John Gorton in 1968 to cement reopened political contact was a near failure, redeemed mostly by the Indonesian-language fluency of Gorton’s wife Bettina.

It was not until Gordon Jockel — who knew about Williams from a memorandum the exasperated Ken Wells circulated in Canberra behind Loveday’s back — became ambassador in March 1969 that the embassy tapped into the Whisperer.

Smith’s biography ends about there, with the relationship from 1969 to Williams’s death in 2001 to be covered in a second volume. Those who met Williams over these decades know he remained fervently loyal, especially to Tien Soeharto (and her memory after she died in 1996). During the tension over East Timor he remained a vital channel for Canberra.

His house in Menteng remained a modest one, as did the former home and hobby farm of Soeharto himself by the standards of Marcos, Mobutu or Putin (or even Sydney’s harbourside mansions these days). Whether he exercised any restraint over Soeharto’s children in their business dealings would be interesting to discover. From the available evidence it would seem not. Any role he took in the nuptials of Soeharto’s daughter Titiek to the dashing special forces officer Prabowo Subianto would be of added interest now that Prabowo is president-elect.

On the last question — what did Williams know about 1965–66? — Smith has found only tantalising clues. When a German-born Jesuit, Franz Magnis-Suseno, met him just prior to the 30 September coup, he was surprised by Williams’s conviction that Soeharto was ready to act against the communists. “What was clear from Magnis-Suseno’s account of his conversation with Williams — and it wasn’t a [later] recollection, he recorded it in his diary — was that Soeharto was either planning his own initiative or preparing to respond to another scheme,” Smith writes.

But then Smith backs away. “The 30 September Movement  seems to have been no more than an old-fashioned army putsch by disgruntled middle-level officers using whatever support they could get,” he writes. “But it was a clumsy, poorly planned operation and probably didn’t expect Soeharto’s quick counter-reaction. It might also have been subverted by Soeharto; he certainly didn’t orchestrate the movement but it is very reasonable to assume he knew the plans in advance, and that he both infiltrated the putsch and then took action against it.”

So Smith, despite have read and cited much of the still-expanding literature about 1965, hangs back from the logical leap that other scholars are making, and that the Jesuit’s diary points towards. This is that Soeharto’s own spooks fired up impressionable middle-ranking officers to mount the 30 September putsch against pro-American generals allegedly about to overthrow Sukarno, in the hope of drawing the PKI into a power grab, thereby justifying an army counter-coup.

We live in hope that the second and third volumes of David Jenkins’s account of Soeharto’s rise to power will clarify further, and that Williams grew less discreet in his later years. So far, though, Soeharto’s Australian whisperer remains largely enigmatic. •

Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher: The Enigmatic Clive Williams, Volume 1, 1921–1968
By Shannon Smith | Big Hill Publishing | 254 pages | $34.99

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While he acknowledges the influence of Queensland’s bipartisan history of populist leaders, the best-known of whom was Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Blaine also suggests that John Howard has particularly influenced Dutton’s socially conservative culture-war focus on issues such as race and immigration. But while Howard used a dog whistle, he writes, Dutton uses a foghorn.

Blaine highlights the most contentious statements that Dutton has made about race and ethnicity, from his claims about African gangs terrorising Melbourne’s would-be diners to his criticism of Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser for letting in too many Lebanese. He also analyses Dutton’s most contentious ministerial actions in portfolios ranging from workplace participation and immigration to home affairs. Victims of Dutton’s “bad cop” toughness range from the unemployed and single mothers, who suffered from his demonisation of welfare recipients, to deportees, particularly Māori and Pacific Island New Zealanders, who encountered the sharp end of Dutton’s law and order push.

As a minister Dutton may have been an authoritarian populist, but Blaine reminds us that while he was home affairs minister his department awarded highly questionable and very expensive contracts to the companies chosen to manage offshore detention. Visa abuses involving those who came to Australia by plane — ranging from the exploitation of “modern-day indentured labourers” and “sex slaves” to the entry of “Albanian gangsters” — meanwhile went unheeded.

Dutton’s selective toughness has a clear strategic rationale. On numerous occasions he has set out his plan to win government especially by using culture war tactics to attract working-class voters in outer-suburban seats traditionally held by Labor. He claims that cost-of-living pressures and other challenges faced by workers have been neglected by a Labor government preoccupied with woke “frolics” on issues such as the Voice. He argues that crime (often associated by Dutton with racial or ethnic groups) is out of control, and often a particular threat to women. It is a strategy that draws on John Howard, Tony Abbott and Donald Trump.

Nonetheless, both Liberal and Labor critics believe that Dutton’s strategy is flawed for modern-day Australia. It might be suited to his own seat of Dickson, writes Blaine, where the vast majority of residents are Australian born, “but he has little experience speaking to electorates in Sydney and Melbourne with significant Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas.” Here, Dutton’s bad cop routine can come unstuck, as when his strongman rhetoric on national security issues alienated Chinese-Australian voters.

Nor, Blaine points out, does Australia have the equivalent of Trump’s “heartland states filled with rust belts, nor the political system that makes them disproportionately powerful.” Yet winning back affluent teal seats, whose voters are alienated by Dutton’s rhetoric, may still prove crucial if the Liberals are to win government in their own right.

Blaine is at his best analysing such issues. Nonetheless, some of his insights — particularly regarding Dutton’s strongman persona — could be developed further or in a different direction. He argues that Dutton’s “raison d’être” is to “Make Australia Afraid Again. Then he will offer himself as the lesser of two evils. A serious strongman for the age of anxiety.” Recent events — fears evoked by the Voice referendum, for example, and crime in Alice Springs, and offences committed by immigration detainees released by a High Court decision — have fed into that strategy.

Blaine argues that Dutton is attuned to key voters’ “deepest fears” not because he is “a genius or a psychic, but because he was also afraid of change.” Possibly “because he would have felt emasculated by the truth,” Dutton has never fully explained why he left the police force. Consequently he is “always displaying simplicity and strength. Because he feels so complicated and weak.” Indeed, Blaine depicts Dutton as an inherently fragile human being: “Tall and strong at first glance. But when you watch him for a long time, you can see that the man is small and scared.”

Blaine’s psychological assessment of Dutton is intriguing and possibly insightful. But additional or alternative interpretations would have been worth exploring in more depth. After all, as Blaine himself acknowledges, conservatives’ mobilisation of fear against Labor governments is far from new. Conservative ideology is inherently wary of change, so this doesn’t necessarily reflect Dutton’s own vulnerabilities.

Similarly, the Liberals have a long history of using strongman politics to try to emasculate their Labor opponents, so Dutton’s appearance of strength may not be concealing deeper insecurities about his own masculinity. As Blaine himself notes, Dutton’s comment that Albanese is “a weak and woke prime minister” evokes Howard’s description of Kim Beazley as lacking “ticker.”

The point about strongman politics is precisely that it is a performance of masculinity, and of protective masculinity in particular. Dutton is arguably not so much offering to be the “bad cop” who is the “lesser of two evils,” to use Blaine’s words, as offering to be a strong “good cop” who defends those he perceives as upstanding citizens from the dangers he argues weak Labor politicians are exposing them to. He is offering to be a traditional masculine protector who will keep his favoured voters safe from “woke” identity politics, from the elites, from criminals, from China, from reduced living standards and even from the undermining of gender binaries. He’ll only be the “bad cop” to those his would-be supporters resent and fear.

Dutton’s potential appeal is therefore also broader than Bad Cop credits. Blaine writes, for example, that Dutton is a “practitioner of right-wing identity politics” who highlights difference and has spent his career “persuading Australians to prioritise cultural belonging above egalitarianism.” Dutton does indeed have a narrow view of Australian cultural identity that marginalises some Australians and privileges others. Despite attempts to construct him as a “big gentle giant” who genuinely cares about people, his expressions of empathy are highly selective. Nonetheless, it is a bit more complicated than Blaine suggests.

For example, Dutton’s arguments against the Voice actually constructed him as a champion of egalitarianism, but one who argued that equality means treating all Australians the same regardless of their needs or circumstances. It is a longstanding argument by social conservatives. Dutton highlights difference when it serves his purpose but also denies its salience, arguing that he is defending the vast bulk of Australians from the “divisive” identity politics of the elites. Indeed, this argument lies at the heart of his populism. Dutton’s close association with Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, meanwhile, a National Party senator with a similar conception of equality, helps to defuse accusations of racial bias.

Dutton’s styling of himself as a strong male economic provider who will protect voters from rising living costs is a common political strategy that draws on the traditional role of the male head of household as protector and provider. It too channels Howard, Abbott and Trump. Trump’s campaign in particular has long targeted working-class males.

This is a gender politics that Labor needs to take seriously. Labor won office partly on the argument that the Liberals had a woman problem, as indeed they do. But Dutton wants Labor to have a men problem.

Albanese needs to tread cautiously. His emphasising of the fact that Dutton’s team “is dominated by blokes” and “they keep having preselections and putting up more blokes” will play well with many female voters and socially progressive men. But it could be phrased more strategically. Albanese needs to be careful that he isn’t depicted as being “anti-bloke” as well as woke, especially with the Coalition mobilising old climate wars rhetoric to suggest that real men don’t drive electric vehicles but do embrace nuclear power.

Despite Dutton’s claims, the Labor government has been making serious efforts to tackle wage stagnation, precarious employment and other working-class issues, often encountering business and Liberal opposition in the process. Many of the social equity reforms the government has pursued, including improving the pay of under-valued female-dominated jobs and lowering childcare expenses, have also had benefits for workers and have reduced living costs. Nonetheless, the government is vulnerable to Dutton’s charges of working-class neglect given that inflation and high interest rates continue to undermine many of its best efforts.

As well as successfully tackling living costs, Albanese will need to win the argument that his form of caring, socially inclusive masculine leadership is not a sign of weakness but is better for Australians in general than Peter Dutton’s alternative. After all, gender politics isn’t an aside in Dutton’s politics, it is central. Democrats successfully targeted Trump’s masculinity during the 2020 presidential election campaign by arguing for the benefits of a different kind of protective male leadership — although their task was made easier then by the politics of the pandemic and is made harder now by Biden’s frailty.

We wait to see how successful Labor will be in countering Dutton’s strongman politics, as well as his attempts to encroach on Labor’s heartland. •

Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics
By Lech Blaine | Quarterly Essay | $27.99 | 172 pages

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“The whole process was mysteriously painless,” Dumont recounts in her new book, The Pulling. She discovered that the hairs on her head “sit as shallowly as birthday candles on a cake” and “can be removed as effortlessly as a grape can from its stem.”

More than a decade later, Dumont has been pulling out strands and roots of hair from her scalp for so long that she invests in an expensive, custom-made hairpiece, especially designed to blend inconspicuously into the patchy hair that remains. The catalyst is the publication of her first book, No Man Is An Island (2016), an account of her time teaching English to asylum seekers on Christmas Island. Her motivation, she writes, was not “wanting to look nice” on the publicity circuit but the desire “to be able to stop thinking about my hair altogether.”

As in every other essay in Dumont’s finely wrought collection, “The Piece” stands alone, as well as in unison as memoir. The themes of shame and secrecy, evocatively rendered, pervade The Pulling. Entering the building for her first “hair transition” appointment, Dumont “felt the kind of edginess that I imagine a married man might feel visiting a brothel.” She is assigned Andrew, whose “dispassionate” approach and knowledge of her “problem” put her at relative ease. After her partner M, Andrew is “the second person on the planet to witness my scalp in this state: naked and defenceless.”

Dumont’s “problem” has had a name, “trichotillomania,” since 1987, when it was categorised in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, known as the DSM, under the “dubious heading Impulse-Control Disorders Not Classified Elsewhere.” In DSM V, the current edition, trichotillomania has been reclassified under Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders but, as Dumont notes, there is no medical consensus. Some professionals liken “the disorder to a substance addiction” while others “see it as a form of self-harm.”  Like her own attempts to “get my head around the problem,” the condition, writes Dumont, “seems to resist the medical world’s attempt to categorise it. An unfathomable, shapeshifting thing.”

In The Pulling Dumont sets herself the challenge of putting into words what can’t be captured in an official diagnosis. She begins with her family of origin, and an early onset nail-biting habit, suggesting her condition has its roots in some formative trauma, but from there she avoids the obvious route. There is life before The Pulling but not yet after: hers is not a recovery memoir. If there is a dividing line it is circa 2005, when Dumont finds a book in her university library, published in 1989, by a “Distinguished Psychiatrist” who documents cases of clients with “pointless disorders.” She recognises herself in its pages and furtively photocopies the relevant section.

As the outside knowledge accumulates and she comes to know her condition through authorities other than herself, Dumont initially feels more resistance than relief. She “felt robbed” and wanting “to reclaim my singularity, I decided that even if my condition might align to others’ conditions in its generalities, surely how it manifested in me was unique.” Dumont cycles through numerous therapists, theories and key texts and while she finds some solace, insight and direction, she also remains protective of the enduring mysteries, paradoxes and specifics of her condition.

Some of the most exquisite sentences and passages, in a book full of them, detail what it is like for Dumont inside or in the immediate wake of a “ravenous episode.” To give in is a kind of surrender, what she describes as “a turning.” Then comes the “the deepest pleasure and fullest absorption” of being “inside the experience, when the world is reduced to teeth and touch, and taste.” At the end of an episode, Dumont feels “that I’ve been shipwrecked: dazed and conspicuously fragile.”

On the flipside, Dumont speculates on the view from outside, shifting between awe and shame as the dominant registers. Perhaps, from above, it might appear that “my fingers must be moving in accordance with some greater design, like a needleworker’s, or like a spider darting from point to point to build her web.” Elsewhere, she is convinced that her behaviour “must look masochistic, deviant, repulsive.”

The beauty and power of The Pulling resides in how artfully Dumont balances two sometimes competing concerns — filling a gap and sharing a secret. Dumont makes fathomable and palpable a neglected condition estimated to affect around one in fifty people — more than bipolar or schizophrenia. Readers with trichotillomania will surely be drawn in, as will any of us who have or have had a compulsive habit dating back to childhood that began, as it did for Dumont, as “just something that I did.”

Yet Dumont is as much a writer as she is a person with trichotillomania, and accordingly The Pulling exhibits the propulsive and exacting qualities of a book that had to be written and had been brewing for a long time. Here and there, she addresses the reader directly to tell us that this is not easy, or to reflect on her own motivations. “I ought to say,” she writes, “I am finding it hard to tell you, harder than even I anticipated.” In less skilled hands, such self-reflexivity could easily grate, but Dumont succeeds in creating intimacy with her imagined reader and audience. We come to learn what it has meant for the author to carry her secret, and now to share it.

Beyond liberating herself as a writer, Dumont stakes a powerful claim for all people who have been diagnosed with a condition having the authority to tell their own stories and comprehend their own experience. As she persuasively writes, “my not-knowing that my illness existed was a precondition for coming to know it as intimately as I have.” •

The Pulling: Essays
By Adele Dumont | Scribe | $29.99 | 288 pages

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Witty, smart, zealous for intellectual combat, Friedman enjoyed the University of Chicago classroom but reached well beyond it. Born in 1912, he was already a prominent economist by his early thirties. He won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1976, and continued to advocate his views until his death thirty years later. Through his Newsweek columns, television appearances, relentless cultivation of powerful friends, and frequent travel, he magnified the considerable influence he earned as an economic thinker. It was actually Stigler who came up with the line that “if you have never missed a flight you have wasted a lot of time at airports” but it was Friedman who most strikingly embodied the idea. Gifted with immense energy and verve, he hustled.

Readily conceding some of his big ideas didn’t work, Burns argues Friedman was nonetheless responsible for much of the shape of the world today. He created, she argues, modern central banking, floating exchange rates, and the “Washington consensus” on a universally applicable model of market economies. If she is right it was a considerable achievement for an economist who never ran a government department or held political office, and whose central theory, like that of Karl Marx, turned out to be just plain wrong.

And wrong it was. His big theory was that the rate of inflation — or more broadly nominal income — is always related to the rate of growth of the money supply. It was a claim with important implications. For Friedman, it meant a market economy was inherently stable except for variations in the money supply. If the money supply contracted it could cause a depression. If it expanded too quickly, it could cause inflation. Since the money supply could be controlled by government, it was government that was responsible for inflationary booms and deflationary busts. A capitalist economy would be stable if the money supply grew at a steady rate consistent with low inflation and reasonable output growth.

Friedman’s conviction was sustained by his 1963 finding, with Anna Schwartz, that the US money stock had plummeted during the great depression of the 1930s. Their observation stimulated debate, though it didn’t prove that a fall in the money stock caused the depression. After all, 9000 US banks had failed during the Depression, and the biggest component of money measures is bank deposits. It’s hardly surprising the quantity of money declined.

Put to the test by Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker in 1979, Friedman’s theory turned out to be wrong. To quell inflation, the Federal Reserve announced money growth targets aligned with Friedman’s rule. The targets proved very difficult to achieve. The US central bank did succeed in forcing up interest rates, however, creating back-to-back recessions and dramatically reducing inflation. Meanwhile the money supply continued to increase at much the same rate as before. Contradicting Friedman, interest rates mattered in controlling inflation; the money supply did not.

Though some have concluded that the swift rise in the money supply and the subsequent increase in inflation during the Covid epidemic bore out Friedman’s prediction, it didn’t. The episode was an even more telling repudiation. From 2020 to 2023 the US money supply (measured as M1, which is mainly bank transaction deposits) rose by 400 per cent, the result of the Federal Reserve creating cash to buy bonds and lend freely to banks and business. Over the same period US prices rose by 18 per cent, or less than one twentieth of the increase in the money stock.

(It is true, as Friedman maintained, that inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon. In a certain sense this must be true, since inflation is by definition about changes in the value of money. But changes in the quantity of money need not and evidently do not result in equivalent changes in inflation or nominal income.)

Once followed with eager interest by economists and market analysts, the money supply numbers these days are rarely mentioned. Friedman’s conception of the relationship with inflation survives in elderly conservative haunts (including the pages of Australia’s Quadrant magazine) and among some financial markets people.

It was still a widely discussed variable when I was working on a doctorate in economics in the US in the early eighties. Yet in later years on the Reserve Bank board I can’t recall the money supply being seriously mentioned, ever. Nor in an earlier four years as an economist in the office of the treasurer and then the prime minister. Nor yet was it taken seriously when I was working subsequently as an economist in financial markets. Though dutifully published by central banks, the money supply numbers contain no information useful for predicting inflation or nominal income growth.

But then some of Marx’s central ideas were also wrong. Demand hasn’t proved always to be less than supply, workers haven’t become increasingly poor, and the labour theory of value, which he adopted, has long been superseded by better ways of explaining prices. Yet Marx undoubtedly exerted great influence on the world. While conceding he was wrong on the central point of the “monetarism” he espoused, Burns argues that Friedman was similarly influential.

By 1979, when the central monetarist idea began to fail, Friedman had already given his famous 1967 presidential address to the American Economic Association in which he challenged many of his colleagues’ focus on a short-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment. He succeeded in reorienting economic thinking back to a long run in which there was no trade-off and therefore not much room for stabilising the economy with government spending.

More than monetarism, that address changed scholarly economic thinking. The short-run trade-off survives today in economics teaching, but coupled now with a long-run story in which there is a certain minimum unemployment rate — often disputed — consistent with stable inflation.

Intelligent, well-researched, scrupulous, balanced and clearly written, Burns’s is an excellent biography. Her archival work on Friedman’s relationships with Chicago colleagues, Federal Reserve governors, presidential candidates and presidents is thorough, fresh and deeply interesting. Even so it credits Friedman with more than seems to me reasonable.

Much of Friedman’s reputation was based on a wonderful stroke of professional luck in the late 1960s. As Burns tells it, he observed an increase in the rate of growth of the US money supply and predicted an increase in inflation. In his 1967 address he argued there was no stable relationship between inflation and employment. When people observed that inflation was rising they would increase their wage demands and businesses would increase prices, taking inflation higher. When inflation took off in the late 1960s Friedman claimed to be vindicated. When unemployment also rose in response to a slowing economy, Friedman was doubly vindicated. He had predicted both rising inflation, and unemployment, and by the early seventies both were apparent.

It was also true, however, that the Johnston Administration was financing both the war in Vietnam and its ambitious Great Society program of social spending and infrastructure. Federal spending rose from 16 per cent of GDP in 1965 to 19 per cent in 1968, with almost all of the increase funded by an increased deficit. Inflation rose from 1.6 per cent in 1965 to 5.5 per cent in 1969. During the next decade, helped along by a tenfold increase in oil prices, inflation and unemployment would increase very much more. Even so, the increase at the end of the sixties was a disorienting shock, one that burnished Friedman’s repute as an economic seer. Through the seventies, a decade of high inflation and an intermittently rising unemployment rate, Friedman’s reputation grew.

They were his best years. By the early eighties, with Volcker’s disinflation efforts demonstrating that a money supply target was a lot harder to achieve than Friedman supposed — and unnecessary to combat inflation — his professional reputation lost some of it shine. Even at Chicago, a new school of “rational expectations” pioneered by younger economists was displacing Friedman at the centre of classical economic thinking. At the same time, though, his public reputation became more lustrous with popular books and a television series lauding capitalism, markets and the freedom Friedman argued capitalism encouraged.

Friedman could claim some singular successes, as Burns points out. He was an advocate of floating exchange rates at a time when orthodoxy predicted global chaos if exchange rates were not fixed against each other and the price of gold. When the big market economies were forced to move to floating rates from the end of the 1960s, Friedman was proved right. Markets adjusted, and more importantly monetary policy could refocus on targeting inflation rather than the exchange rate.

Friedman could claim considerable credit not only for arguing in favour of floating exchange rates, which have become nearly universal in major economies, but also for several proposals that for one reason or another were not widely adopted. One is school vouchers, a government payment which would allow parents to choose their children’s school. Another is the negative income tax, which in Friedman’s version would replace other welfare payments with a single payment.

It is harder to praise Friedman alone for widely shared ideas that also proved useful. For example, Burns credits Friedman for insisting on the role of prices as the central mechanism in a market economy. But in this respect he was by no means unique. He deployed a style of economic analysis that Adam Smith called the invisible hand and was most coherently developed by the British economist Alfred Marshall in the 1890s. The technique was used by Marshall’s pupil Keynes and taught at Harvard in much the same form as at Chicago. It is still taught today and remains one of the most powerful tools in economics. Friedman was good at it, but not as good as his contemporaries and colleagues, Stigler and Gary Becker, or many other microeconomists of his era.

Friedman did successfully contest the supremacy of fiscal policy over monetary policy, a lingering legacy of Keynes’s advice for dealing with deep slumps such as the Great Depression. The fiscal emphasis was rooted in Keynes’s notion that the circumstances of the Depression and the fear it engendered meant lower interest rates would not make much difference to spending. It was the “liquidity trap” in which people conserved cash rather than buy things or invest. Direct government spending was a better option to sustain demand and jobs. This aspect of Keynes’s thinking dominated economic thought in the United States, particularly among supporters of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Friedman insisted on the important role of central banks, a reorientation that remains.

Friedman’s enduring contribution, Burns argues, was to remind the economics profession that money matters. She is certainly right, even if the particular mechanism he had in mind proved to be wrong. Even so I am not at all sure of her argument that Freidman resurrected interest in money among economists, or that it had ever ceased to be of interest. After all, Keynes wrote his Treatise on Money before the General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, and the General Theory has much to say about money and interest rates. John Hicks’s famous simplification of the General Theory, still taught as the ISLM equations, is all about interest rates, the public penchant to hold money, and the quantity of money. Friedman himself acknowledged the contributions of an earlier American monetary theorist, Irving Fisher.

Burns also credits Friedman with an important role in creating the “Washington consensus,” the nineteen nineties notion that began as a description of a widespread change of economic policies in South America away from import replacement. Friedman made some contribution, though not as important as that of his trade theory colleagues. Japan, then Korea, then Taiwan, then most of Southeast Asia had in any case focused on export strategies decades before Chicago economists, including Friedman, advised Pinochet regime in Chile to adopt one.

Generalised with Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat into a view that democracy, capitalism and economic globalisation had become the more or less universally agreed elements of human societies, it moved well beyond Friedman’s scope. Friedman certainly welcomed it, but did he create it? A world of liberal market economies had, after all, been an American foreign policy ideal since the end of the second world war. The creation of the modern global economy rested on successive GATT trade rounds, the European common market, the reconstruction of Japan and Germany and other changes Friedman may have applauded but had nothing to do with him. He welcomed China’s accession to World Trade Organization in 2001 but was not an important player in removing the US veto. China’s economic success with considerable state ownership and direction ran opposite to Friedman’s prescriptions. On the Washington consensus, there is anyway today no consensus.

As he became more involved in Republican politics, Friedman’s moral compass became unreliable. Supporting Barry Goldwater’s campaign for the presidency, Friedman opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act. His argument, according to Burns, was that people have a right to racially discriminate if they wish. With economics, you need to know when to stop.

His fans claim Friedman’s ideas also had a big impact on Australia. According to economist Peter Swan, speaking at a Friedman tribute in Sydney in 2007, Friedman’s ideas arguably spurred not only “the demolition of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Soviet Union and of communism [and] the rise of Maggie Thatcher in the UK” but also the “magnificent success of the early Hawke–Keating government,” which “freed up the financial system, floated the dollar, and deregulated and privatised much of the economy. And Friedman’s ideas surely laid the foundations for the great prosperity enjoyed by Australians under the Howard government.”

Putting aside his suggestions about the Berlin Wall and the demise the Soviet Union, Swan’s attribution of the success of the Hawke and Keating governments to Friedman is hard to see. Writing about those governments, researching the archive of Keating’s files, I cannot recall coming across Friedman’s name once.

The Hawke and Keating governments were indeed adherents of what was then broadly known as economic rationalism, but it is fanciful to credit Friedman. It was just regular economics. The Hawke government put in place an Accord with the trade unions which, with the cooperation of the wage arbitration tribunal, restrained the growth of wages. That idea was anathema to Friedman. The Hawke and Keating governments legislated tariff cuts, long advocated by Australian economists and drawn from mainstream economic thinking that long preceded Friedman. (Influenced by Bert Kelly, Whitlam had also been a tariff reformer.) Friedman was an advocate of the sort of privatisations effected by the Hawke and Keating governments, but so were many other prominent economists.

There is perhaps more of a Friedmanite influence in financial deregulation. Australia’s efforts were in some respects more thoroughgoing than in the United States, but somewhat later — as was the float of the currency. In Australia, as in Britain and the United States, deregulation was prompted by the increasing success of unregulated financial businesses, cross-border competition and the opportunities offered by computing and communications technologies. Friedman advocated financial deregulation but, again, so did others.

And while Australia’s Reserve Bank continued with monetary targets until 1985 the operating instrument and the real focus of policy was always the short-term interest rate. The bank anyway had no more success than other central banks in meeting its money targets. The targets were seen as aspirational projections rather than outcomes that had to be attained. Not long after the float of the Australian dollar, the bank (and the government) dropped what had by then become fictional monetary targets. As the bank’s then deputy governor, Stephen Grenville, pointed out in a canonical 1997 paper, by the late eighties it was widely recognised that the relationship between money and nominal income had broken down. He approvingly quoted a remark of the Bank of Canada governor: “We didn’t abandon monetary targets, they abandoned us.”

For all that, Burns rightly points out that Friedman could claim a good deal of the credit for many of the characteristics of contemporary central banking. One is explicit targets, though now expressed as an inflation range rather than a rate of growth of money. Another is openness, expressed as public information about the monetary policy decisions of the central bank, and its economic forecasts. A third might be the greater independence of central banks from the rest of the government. In the United States all three were in varying degrees absent from the Fed when Friedman began drawing attention to the role of money and monetary policy from the later 1950s onward. He could claim to have had a big influence on central banking, and for the better.

Freidman’s most thorough intellectual biography is the magnificent two volume study by Edward Nelson, an Australian economist working at the Federal Reserve in Washington. At over 1300 pages Nelson’s Milton Friedman and Economic Debate in the United States 1932-1972 (University of Chicago Press, 2020) demonstrates in detail the range of Friedman’s professional impact in the long-running disputes between economists broadly aligned with Keynesian views, and those adhering to the Chicago classical tradition.

As Nelson noted in 2011, some of Friedman’s views have been put to unexpected uses. The then Fed chair Ben Bernanke cited Friedman’s criticism of inactivity of the central bank during the Great Depression to justify the large-scale intervention of the Fed in the 2008 financial crisis. But it is also true that the 2008 crisis was caused by a grotesque failure of financial businesses to control risks. Alan Greenspan’s misplaced confidence that financial markets would correctly price the risks of mortgage securitisation, the most expensive error in the history of central banking thus far, had a distinctly Friedmanite or at least Chicago ring.

Perhaps Friedman’s most enduring legacy is his support for the notion that market economies usually work reasonably well. They occasionally crash but by and large the price mechanism, the invisible hand, guides efficient decisions much better than state control of prices, labour and capital. Friedman argued for this view but it was, after all, the fundamental tenet of economic theory as developed in Western Europe and Britain from the eighteenth century onward, and not a view that Friedman either invented or much improved. A brilliant advocate, an important scholar — that should be enough for one very distinguished career in economics, without also being held responsible for the shape of the world in the second half of the twentieth century. •

Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative
By Jennifer Burns | Farrar Straus Giroux | $59.99 | 592 pages

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Ambitious? Yes. Cyrus Vance, president Jimmy Carter’s secretary of state, called it “a daring stroke.” Foolhardy? Many thought so, including members of Carter’s staff.

Failure was a real possibility and would reflect badly on Carter, already struggling with a perception that he lacked authority. Egypt and Israel were sworn enemies who had been fighting wars since the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Carter took Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains outside Washington, and kept them there for the next thirteen days. A media blackout prevailed until an agreement was reached. Kai Bird, author of The Outlier, a 2021 biography of Carter, described his approach as “sheer relentlessness.”

Sadat and Carter wore down an intransigent Begin until he succumbed, agreeing to a peace treaty with Egypt, including relinquishing control of the Sinai Peninsula, taken from Egypt in the 1967 war, and the dismantling of Israeli settlements there.

The agreement also included the election of a self-governing Palestinian authority in the West Bank within five years, together with (according to Carter’s detailed record) a five-year freeze on Israeli settlements there. Within three months, Israel started on a major expansion of West Bank settlements, with Begin denying the freeze had been part of the official agreement and Carter telling his staff that Begin had lied to him.

The peace treaty with Egypt, the strongest Arab state, stuck, although it cost Sadat his life. He was assassinated in 1981 by members of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, who condemned him as a traitor for the Camp David accords.

Carter’s hopes for a broader Middle East peace have proved elusive ever since, although he could clearly see the consequences. Near the end of his presidency he wrote in his diary, “I don’t see how they” — the Israeli government — “can continue as an occupying power depriving the Palestinians of basic human rights and I don’t see how they can absorb three million more Arabs in Israel without letting the Jews become a minority in their own country.”

Nevertheless the accords were a notable achievement and unimaginable in the context of the Middle East politics of recent decades. Carter reaped a political dividend but also paid a cost: relations with the enormously powerful pro-Israel lobby in the United States were never the same again. They had not expected an American president to act as an honest broker.

Carter’s single term in the White House is generally rated among the less impressive in the presidential rankings. Yet his presidency has undergone a re-evaluation given his significant achievements in foreign and domestic policy, which look all the more substantial from today’s perspective.

In the tradition of the best political biographies, Bird gained access to volumes of material, including the copious personal diaries Carter kept as president as well as those of important figures in his administration. To learn that senior members were eating sandwiches at an important meeting in the cabinet room may not be vital to our understanding but it does point to a notable attention to detail.

Reading the narrative from the inside confirmed much of what I observed from the outside as a foreign correspondent in Washington during most of the Carter presidency. But it did so in much starker relief.

For example, the tensions between secretary of state Vance, the diplomat, and national security adviser Zbigniew Brzeziński, a cold war warrior, were evident at the time, but not their depth. Bird provides instances of what he called Brzeziński’s “highly manipulative” approach; Vance called him “evil, a liar, dangerous.”

Carter, a peanut farmer from small-town Georgia with a distinctive southern drawl, was an improbable candidate for the White House. He was a practising Baptist for whom, unlike many politicians, his religion was more than a veneer.

In a south where the echoes of the civil war still resonated and segregation continued in practice if not in name, he took a stand against racism. Yet he also was a skilled politician, elected as governor of Georgia despite his reputation as not being a typical white southerner and pragmatic when he thought he needed to be, including by downplaying his anti-racist credentials.

Still, running for president was a huge leap. He wasn’t taken seriously until he won the New Hampshire primary, and even then he was viewed with scepticism by leading members of the east-coast Democratic establishment. “He can’t be president,” said former New York governor Averell Harriman. “I don’t even know him!”

Sceptics dismissed him as self-righteous. His promise to voters that “I’ll never lie to you” prompted his friend and adviser Charles Kirbo to comment, perhaps not completely in jest, “You’re going to lose the liar vote.” But he came across to voters as sincere and authentic. And then, as now, coming from outside Washington was an advantage.

Circumstances played a large part: his Republican opponent was Gerald Ford, the sometimes hapless vice-president who had served the balance of president Richard Nixon’s term following Nixon’s resignation over Watergate. Even then, Carter won only narrowly.

In elite Washington, Carter’s team of knockabout southerners were often dismissed as hicks. But, like Carter, they were not easily deterred.

Carter brought a luminous intelligence, idealism and diligence to the White House that stands in stark contrast to the era of Trump. He argued that the world was not so easily categorised in traditional American black-and-white terms — that there was more to foreign policy than a contest between the United States and the Soviet Union. He preached against the “inordinate fear of communism” that had led to Washington’s embracing of some of the world’s nastiest right-wing dictators. The Vietnam war, he said of this approach, was “the best example of its intellectual and moral poverty.”

Bird writes that Carter rejected “any reflexive notions of American exceptionalism. He preached that there were limits to American power and limits to what we could inflict on the environment.” America didn’t go to war during Carter’s presidency — an exception up to that time and since.

He elevated human rights in foreign policy. It earned him derision from hardheads but it enhanced America’s reputation abroad, its so-called soft power.

Like any politician, though not as often, he compromised and backtracked when he judged that politics required it. Against his better instincts, he approved development of the MX missile, an expensive boondoggle championed by defence hawks, writing in his diary that he was sickened by “the gross waste of money going into nuclear weapons.”

In the wake of the OPEC oil embargo, when he was trying to persuade Congress to pass legislation to restrict energy consumption and provide funding for alternatives such as wind and solar, he diarised that “the influence of the oil and gas industry is unbelievable.” To set an example, he put solar panels on the White House roof and predicted that within two decades 20 per cent of the nation’s energy would be generated by solar power. He hadn’t count on his successor, Ronald Reagan, who removed the solar panels as one of his first acts as president, nor the ideological climate wars that followed.

While those actions were triggered by the energy crisis, he was receptive to the emerging issue of climate change. Just before leaving office, he released a report from his environmental think tank predicting “widespread and pervasive changes in global climatic, economic, social and agricultural patterns” if the world continued to rely on fossil fuels. It was a prescient warning almost half a century ago.

Carter’s domestic reforms included deregulation of sectors of the American economy, including banks and airlines, thereby increasing competition and reducing prices, though also bringing negative consequences. Consumer regulations led to mandatory seatbelts and airbags and fuel efficiency standards — something Australia is finally getting around to introducing almost half a century later. Environmental laws were passed to reduce air and water pollution; highly contested legislation locked up a large part of Alaska as wilderness and national parks, preventing oil and gas exploration.

In foreign policy, the Panama Canal treaties relinquished American control of the canal, returning sovereignty to Panama. Carter completed the normalisation of relations with China started under Nixon and negotiated an arms control agreement with the Soviet Union.

Other reforms proved to be harder sledding. Legislation on health reform that Carter thought could pass Congress was judged inadequate by Democratic liberals such as senator Edward Kennedy, who championed comprehensive national health insurance and used it as a platform to unsuccessfully challenge Carter for the Democratic nomination in 1980. It would take another thirty years for Barack Obama’s administration to enact significant, if still not comprehensive, healthcare reform.

Carter was never completely accepted by the traditional Democrats that people like Kennedy represented. It came down to suspicion about his Southern roots. Too conservative for northern Democrats, he was too much of a liberal for many southern Democrats and Republicans.

By 1979, with Americans waiting in long queues to buy petrol and paying what were then exorbitant prices for the privilege (US$1 a gallon), Carter’s presidency was at risk of sliding into oblivion. Against the almost unanimous advice of his staff, he decided on another Camp David retreat, this time a domestic summit, inviting some of the nation’s leading citizens to come up with ideas for the nation’s future. What was unusual then seems extraordinary now.

Over ten days a parade of “wise men” travelled to Camp David to diagnose the nation’s ailments and remedies. As with the Begin–Sadat summit, the rest of the nation was kept in the dark by a media blackout.

Carter emerged to give an address to the nation like none other. Sounding more preacher than president, he said America faced a fundamental crisis of confidence that no amount of legislation could fix. Americans were losing their faith in the future, worshiping “self-indulgence and consumption.”

Taking the side of the people while lecturing them at the same time, he said he no more liked the behaviour of a paralysed Congress pulled in every direction by special interests. The immediate test was beating the energy crisis, on which he announced a series of initiatives taking in a windfall profits tax on the oil industry to finance the development of domestic sources of energy, including coal and a national solar energy “bank.” (His focus was on cutting dependence on imported oil, rather than climate change.) He announced plans for rebuilding mass transit systems and a national program for Americans to conserve energy.

Contrary to the fears of his hard-headed advisors, the speech was a great success, reflected in surges in Carter’s approval ratings of 11 per cent in one poll and 17 per cent in another. He was able to convey that most precious of political commodities — sincerity.

But these and other achievements were overwhelmed late in his term by the Iranian hostage crisis. Its origins lay in the Islamic revolution and the toppling of the Shah, who the CIA effectively had re-instated as ruler of Iran in 1953 following the previous Iranian government’s nationalisation of the oil industry. Concerned by the risk to Americans in Iran, Carter resisted efforts to allow the Shah to seek refuge in the United States; but he eventually succumbed to pressure from David Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger and other establishment figures to allow him in on the pretext of urgent medical treatment.

Two weeks later, Carter’s worst fears were realised when Iranian students stormed the US embassy in Tehran and took sixty-six hostages. When diplomacy failed, Carter authorised a complex and risky rescue mission involving ninety-five commandos, a C-130 transport plane and six helicopters. A series of mechanical failures and accidents, including a collision between one of the helicopters and the C-130, resulted in the mission being abandoned.

The hostage crisis plagued the remainder of Carter’s term, reinforcing perceptions of him as a weak president. It subsequently became clear that the campaign team for Republican nominee Ronald Reagan worked behind the scenes with Iranian representatives to delay the release of the hostages, promising a better deal if he won the election. Yasser Arafat, leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, had negotiated freedom for thirteen of the hostages the previous year and told Carter years later that he had rejected approaches from Reagan officials offering an arms deal if he could delay the release of those remaining.

The hostages were released on the day after Reagan’s inauguration following his landslide win in the 1980 election. Soon after taking office, the new administration, despite publicly maintaining Carter’s embargo on arms sales to Iran, secretly authorised Israel to sell military equipment to Iran.

The hostage crisis was not the only reason for the relatively rare election loss by a first-term president. Carter’s support was sapped by the 1970s ailment of stagflation — high inflation and stagnant economic growth — together with the energy crisis. Reagan, the former Hollywood actor, had an appealing personality and a now-familiar slogan: “Make America great again.”

James Fallows, speechwriter for the first two years of the administration, says that Carter invented the role of former president. He certainly had an active four decades of public life following the presidency, with the 110-strong staff of the Carter Centre in Atlanta working on human rights, preventive health care, election monitoring and international conflict resolution.

Carter raised millions of dollars for a program that virtually eradicated guinea worm, a parasitic disease that had disabled and disfigured 3.5 million people a year in Africa and India. His centre helped distribute twenty-nine million tablets in Africa and Latin America for the treatment of river blindness, another disease caused by a parasitic worm. “Americans got used to seeing this ex-president, dressed in blue jeans with a carpenter’s belt, hammering nails into two-by-fours for a house under construction by a team of volunteers for Habitat for Humanity,” Bird writes.

In the 1980s, he spoke out about the concerns he had developed about the Middle East when he was president but he had judged were too dangerous to express publicly. “Israel is the problem towards peace,” he said, citing particularly the expansion of settlements on the West Bank. Accused of bias, he responded that “a lot of the accusations about bias are deliberately designed to prevent further criticism of Israel’s policies. And I don’t choose to be intimidated.” In 2006, he published his twenty-first book with the provocative title, particularly then, of Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, earning him epithets such as “liar,” “bigot” and “anti-Semite.”

By then Carter had been awarded the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize for “decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights and to promote economic and social development.”

After he was diagnosed with cancer in 2015 he said, “I’d like for the last guinea worm to die before I do.” Nine years later, aged ninety-nine and in palliative care, he is still going, if not strongly — a metaphor for a lifetime of indefatigability. •

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“Would you please send me one of your pipes that you may have laid aside and you will not be likely to be using again,” wrote Mr Reece. “If it should be a bit strong, no matter. I know of a process that will overcome that. I have not been able to get a decent pipe for years.”

A quick glance was enough to tell me that this was not what I was looking for. But I printed the letter out for a closer look anyway. The writer was an aged pensioner, he said, twenty days short of seventy-five years, living alone in New Norfolk, Tasmania. He has raised a family of six daughters and three sons. All of the sons had served in the recent war, he added, with one still with the occupying force in Japan.

Reece had “battled for Labour” since he joined the Amalgamated Miners Union in 1889. “I started in poverty and I’m ending ditto, but I’ve no regrets and have no apologies to offer for my support of the ‘Grand Old Labour Movement.’”

If Mr Chifley were to visit Hobart during the forthcoming federal election campaign, and if Reece is spared that long, he promises to be in the audience. He is very optimistic that the Chifley government will be returned with a strong majority (it was). “I wish you and your good colleagues all the good luck that wishes can express.”

I was busy that day and so, having studied the letter for a few minutes and enjoying a giggle about the pipe thing (what was that all about?) I tossed it aside and moved on. Fortunately, the pile I tossed it into was the “do not throw out under any circumstances” pile, where it stayed until the inevitable desk clean-up late last year when, at last, Mr Reece finally had my full attention.

This is my favourite thing, the deep study of a single archival record. It could be a letter, a telegram or a bunch of postcards discovered in a junk shop. It is remarkable what can be gleaned from seemingly insignificant clues, especially now that these clues can be run through so many newly digitised sources. Becoming deeply immersed in someone else’s life, trying to see the world through their eyes, must be my form of meditation.

Why this Mr Reece though? What is it about him in particular? Partly it was his surname that guided my hand that day towards the “do not throw out” pile rather than the recycling bin. I grew up in Tasmania and I remember my parents talking about the redoubtable Eric Reece, a former long-time Labor premier known as “Electric Eric” because of his ardent support for hydroelectric projects. Surely it had to be the same family.

But mainly I was captivated by what I perceive as a yearning on Reece’s part to stay connected with the world. It’s unintentionally expressed, but it’s there. Looking back over his long life, this proud and, I think, lonely man tells of the things that most matter to him: his work, his family and the labour movement. Not only that, he also imagines Labor’s next victory even if he is not alive to see it.

And the pipe thing? Chifley made his pipe a signature accessory and was rarely seen without one, but it does seem awful cheek to expect him to simply hand one over on request. Chifley wrote back: “Dear Mr Reece, thanks for your letter… I am sorry that for the present I haven’t a suitable pipe to send you. As you say, good pipes are very scarce these days.” (Actually Chifley usually had several on hand, gifts from family and well-wishers.) “I was interested to read of your lengthy support of the Labour Movement. You must have many memories to look back on.” And he signed off with best wishes.

Reece didn’t get his pipe but I doubt he was disappointed. Pipe smoking was a companionable habit the two men shared but Reece’s request, I suspect, was just an opening gambit. It has been said of Chifley that he used the lighting of his pipe as a stalling tactic while he thought through a response to a problem. And so, preliminaries over, Reece felt perfectly free to address his prime minister as an equal, one Labor man to another, to tell his story.

The letter wasn’t really about the pipe, and — fair warning — this essay is not really about it either.

William Henry Reece (often known even in official records as Will Harry Reece) was born in 1872, and he was indeed an uncle to Eric Reece. Fortunately for me, there is a biography of Reece the younger, Jillian Koshin’s Electric Eric: The Life and Times of an Australian State Premier (2009).

Koshin’s book begins with an examination of the Reece family’s working-class origins in mining towns in the northeast and west of Tasmania. The discovery of minerals — gold, silver, copper, tin — in the 1870s brought a sudden and massive economic boom to the colony based on interstate investment, higher export income, higher wages and increased incoming migration. In his 2012 history of Tasmania, Henry Reynolds describes the 1880s as one of Tasmania’s “sunniest” decades.

Patriarch Owen Charles Reece established himself as a miner in the 1870s but was frequently on the move looking for work. Koshin is at pains to show how the wealth that enriched investors and beautified the cities rarely trickled down to the poorest folk who had laboured to produce it. Across three generations, even in so-called good times, little changed for the Reece family.

Owen and his wife Jane had fourteen children but the first three, triplets, died in infancy. Jane was thirty-eight when she died in Scottsdale hospital giving birth to twins, who also died. Owen was left a widower with nine children to raise; our man Will (“I started in poverty…”) was the eldest. A few brothers down the line was George, eventually to become the father of Eric, who was born in 1909.

The Reeces’ lives were characterised by insecure and dangerous work and the strain and expense of constantly moving from one primitive slab-and-shingle hut to another in remote and isolated settlements. Because these clusters of dwellings were expected to be temporary, authorities would rarely invest in public amenities. Close-knit families relied on one other.

Out of these struggles emerged a writer, Marie E.J. Pitt. Originally from Victoria, she was married to a miner, William Pitt, and for about a decade beginning in the 1890s went with him to mining settlements in the northeast and west of Tasmania. They had four children, one of whom died.

Scribbling by lamplight, Pitt wrote of “an austere land of mountain gorges of ice and snow, and raging torrents of creeping mist and never-ending rain.” The land spoke another language, “superb in its silence, appalling in its melancholy grandeur.” Her pen was also driven by anger. This is how she begins her poem “The Keening”:

We are the women and children
Of the men that mined for gold:
Heavy are we with sorrow,
Heavy as heart can hold;
Galled are we with injustice,
Sick to the soul of loss —
Husbands and sons and brothers
Slain for the yellow dross!

Over nine more bitter stanzas she attacks mine owners, politicians and churchmen for having averted their gaze from the misery right in front of them. “The Keening” was published in 1911, but by then the Pitts had moved to Victoria because William had contracted miner’s phthisis. He died in 1912.

Will Reece, his siblings, nieces and nephews were among those children of the men that mined for gold. All the Reece men became union men. Poetry aside, trade unionism was the practical agent of change, the structure within which to advocate for safer working conditions, better wages and political representation.

Reece was a seventeen-year-old apprentice blacksmith at the tin mine in Ringarooma when he joined the Amalgamated Miner’s Union in 1889, the year of its formation in Tasmania. For some reason, though, he broke away from the family and left the mines behind. His parents were married with Baptist rites but Will appears to have converted to Catholicism, a most unusual thing to do in those sectarian times, and certainly enough to cause a family rift.

From the late 1890s he roamed through several agricultural districts in the northeast and in 1909, at St Mary’s, he married a woman named Catherine Cannell. In 1912 they went south to New Norfolk, a town nestling in the Derwent valley thirty-five kilometres northwest of Hobart. The landscape was far kinder than anything Will Reece had known growing up, and here the family settled for good.

Literate, articulate and gregarious, Reece would join anything. He played cricket and football, would swing an axe at a local woodchopping event and was always ready to chair a meeting, MC a church fundraiser or write a letter to an editor about some local grievance. Forced in 1915 to give up blacksmithing because of an accident, he opened a photographic studio; it failed, and he was declared bankrupt in 1921.

Clearly this man had bucketloads of self-belief. He stood twice, unsuccessfully, for the municipal council and then, undeterred, turned to state politics and was a candidate for Labor in the elections of 1919, 1922, 1925 and 1928. He failed each time.

Meanwhile he became an organiser for the Australian Workers’ Union, and here he found his métier. His nephew’s biographer noticed Will Reece signing up shearers, shed-hands, miners, labourers and roadmen across the state, including in mining centres on the west coast. New heavy-industry projects provided fresh fields for the AWU, and there was Will Reece, visiting the new carbide factory at Electrona in the south and the hydroelectricity works at Waddamana in the central highlands. With regular reports (this one is typical) he made himself well-known to the readers of the AWU’s national paper, the Australian Worker.

But the 1930s brought reversals. In 1931, more than a quarter of Tasmanian trade unionists were unemployed because of the depression. All the Reece men let their union membership lapse. Will Reece returned to manual labour and in 1934, aged sixty-two, was severely injured in an explosives accident while quarrying for gravel. He sustained burns to his face and temporarily lost his sight. In 1935 his wife Catherine died suddenly, leaving him with a clutch of children and teenagers.

In 1939 Will’s fifty-year commitment to the labour cause was celebrated at a special meeting of the New Norfolk branch of the Labor Party. Local MP Jack Dwyer spoke Reece’s work to “uplift” the condition of the masses. Many of the privileges now enjoyed by the workers were due to his efforts, Dwyer noted, and the party was much indebted to him.

At about that time Will’s nephew Eric was embarking on his own (in his case spectacularly successful) political career. After failed attempts in 1940 and 1943, Eric was elected Labor member of the state House of Assembly in November 1946. He was in office as premier between 1958 and 1969, and again from 1972 to 1975, and was federal president of the Labor Party between 1952 and 1955.

His formative years had been similar to his uncle’s: he’d worked in mines and on farms from his early teens — joined the AWU at fifteen — spent most of the 1930s depression unemployed — got a job at the Mount Lyell copper mine in 1934 — was appointed organiser for the AWU there in 1935. Strangely, there does not seem to have been a strong association between uncle and nephew. In his 1946 letter to Ben Chifley, Will could have mentioned Eric as a promising youngster to keep an eye on, but he does not.

Still, Will and Eric Reece — and Ben Chifley as well, of course — were haunted by memories of hardship, and all strove for the same things: economic growth, full employment, increased standards of living, and social welfare for those who needed it.

There was nothing in Eric Reece’s makeup to prepare him for the social upheavals and cultural shifts of the 1960s and 1970s. He had grown up believing that the state’s natural resources — its water, timber and minerals — were there to be used for the common good. Famously, he rode roughshod over opposition to the hydroelectric scheme in southwest Tasmania that was to flood Lake Pedder in 1972–73.

Where some people wept at Pedder’s beauty, Eric Reece was belligerent and autocratic. In 1966 he taunted his opponents with the remark that Tasmania’s southwest contained only “a few badgers, kangaroos, wallabies, and some wildflowers that can be seen anywhere.” (Badgers? Did he mean wombats?) Tough old trade unionists like Reece knew what destitution looked like and were lit with a determination to do more than just overcome personal hardship; they were committed to structural reforms to improve the lives of all working people.

By this time, however, there had begun a great grinding of gears in progressive politics as young, idealistic, tertiary-educated people drifted away from Labor to the green movement. While this also happened elsewhere, perhaps the grinding came earlier in Tasmania.

Will Reece didn’t live to see any of this. Perhaps, as promised, he made it to Hobart in September 1946 to hear Ben Chifley’s two-hour campaign speech given to a capacity crowd at the town hall. “The whole country is prosperous,” Chifley declared that night. “That is the first ideal we have, and we go to the people on that record.”

Labor’s election loss in 1949 and Chifley’s death in 1951 must have saddened Reece. He died in 1953, with his boots on (so to speak) I hope, and his certainties still intact. •

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Well-known to Lindsay enthusiasts, Cranny-Francis has written articles and organised conferences about his life and work, maintains a website, arranged the publication of his “political autobiography” The Fullness of Life and edited a volume of selected poems. In this first book-length single-author study of Lindsay’s life and work she has hit on an elegant solution to the problem of the hyperactively full life of her subject. He was someone whose works demand attention to his ideas, and whose ideas demand attention to his life. Jack Lindsay is structured around a core of six chapters, each dedicated to Lindsay’s book-length studies of English authors: John Bunyan (1937), Charles Dickens (1950), George Meredith (1956), William Morris (1974) and two on William Blake (1927 and 1978). This frame is filled in with chapters that provide biographical and intellectual context and discuss his other relevant works, helping the reader to understand, without being overwhelmed, how Lindsay’s approach to writing was influenced by his experiences and ideas.

This structure works well to illuminate Lindsay’s eclectic, self-fashioned life-philosophy, with its associated preoccupations, values and imagery: the struggle for unity, culture as expressive work, the archetype of death and renewal. The system evolved over time, but many elements were present from the first.

Inevitably Cranny-Francis omits or barely glances at much of Lindsay’s output. She makes barely a mention of his forty-three novels and seven biographies of artists. It would be hard to guess from it that Lindsay’s most cited study is about alchemy in Roman Egypt, or that the one most discussed by academics is a historical novel set in the British civil war.

Depending on what counts as a book, Lindsay published about 160 in his lifetime, as well as hundreds of articles, stories and poems. About a half of his writing was historical and biographical, a quarter fiction, and the remainder criticism, social theory, translations, polemics and poetry. Most of his publications were concerned with the past, usually the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. Lindsay’s classical training is apparent in the eclectic character of works in which history, mythology, philology, archaeology, anthropology, aesthetics and philosophy are seamlessly blended.

All of Lindsay’s mature writing was underwritten by a self-fashioned philosophy or credo. Its most fundamental principle was what Cranny-Francis describes as the “embodied connectedness” of things. He often called it “vital unity,” “wholeness,” “Life” or “the fullness of life.”

In Lindsay’s thought the concept of vital unity assumes as many guises as energy does in physics. One of his symbols for it was Dionysus, the mysterious deity of wine and rebirth, leader of a disorganised band of enthralled creatures — satyrs, maenads, nymphs, centaurs, Pan the god of shepherds — who found no place on Mount Olympus. Another symbol was the figure of “the people,” which he sometimes called “the folk,” and occasionally “the masses,” each term with its particular political inflection. Human unity implied solidarity, equality, ethical responsiveness and mutual aid.

As Cranny-Francis observes, Lindsay extends the idea of unity to all spheres of human activity, including the natural world. John Bellamy Foster, noting Lindsay’s evocations of a “patient earth… ‘eternally reborn’ through labour and ritual practice,” identifies him as a forerunner of Marxist ecology.

Lindsay found the origins of the idea of unity in Plato, or even further back in Parmenides and Pythagoras, but a slightly less distant inspiration was the sixteenth-century excommunicated priest Giordano Bruno (1548–1600), who melded Renaissance humanism with materialism. Lindsay was stirred when he encountered Bruno in the early 1930s, subsequently writing a novel about him (Adam of a New World, 1936), and translating De la causa, principio e uno (Cause, Principle, Unity, 1962). Later he would claim that reading Bruno led him directly to Marxism.

Lindsay’s intense awareness of the interconnectedness of the living world had implications for his everyday life. Cranny-Francis quotes from an episode in The Fullness of Life during his years with the poet Elza de Locre in the early 1930s, when he lived in desperate poverty.

A local farmer had gifted a couple of rabbits to them as a neighbourly gesture. Confronted with the reality of having to skin and disembowel the animals before cooking, Lindsay found himself unable to proceed. He contemplates the economy of death on which a meat-eating society is based, particularly when social organisation has reached a point where meat protein is no longer essential to the diet: “One’s symbiosis with the earth is therefore in terms of unceasing violence and murder; and one knows, deep in one’s being, that one lives only by a system of blood-victims.”

“A communist society which is not vegetarian,” he concluded, “seems to me a hopeless contradiction.”

The young Lindsay called the absence of unity abstraction or dissociation; later, under the influence of Hegel and Marx, he favoured the word alienation. He argued that alienation has always been present in human life and has always provoked resistance. Throughout history that resistance has taken many forms — initiation rituals, shamanic flights, alchemy, art and poetry, and political revolt. The struggle against alienation shapes people’s relationships with one another and the world, motivates the protests of the wretched and exploited, and underlies attitudes to nature. Great thinkers and creative artists throw light upon its diverse manifestations.

Blake’s prophetic books explore the “world of false consciousness, of alienation,” according to Lindsay, and he praised Dickens for “the discovery of dissociation and the alienation of man from his fellows and his own essence, the stages of struggle against the dissociative forces, and the intuition (uttered in symbolic forms) of the resolving unity.”

Lindsay regarded religion as both a product of alienation and a form of protest against it. His vision of the world was also infused with hope for a fulfilment somehow always just out of reach. In a letter to Edith Sitwell on her conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1955 he confessed to having been at times “very close to the catholic creed… indistinguishable perhaps from ekklesia of the faithful — the people who are Christ.”

Affinities between his system and Christianity are not difficult to uncover: sin as alienation, humanity crucified, Life the Eucharist, Paradise a vision of love and freedom. He was familiar with such syncretisms in the Ancient World: in a book about Roman Egypt he references a tomb in the Roman catacombs of Pretextatys on which Dionysus is identified with the Lord Sabaoth, the Lord of Hosts, and burials in the Vatican Necropolis of Christians who also worshipped Isis and Bacchus.

Alienation has become all-pervasive in the modern world, chiefly because of money and science. Following Thomas Carlyle, Lindsay often referred to the institutions and customs associated with money as the “cash-nexus.” From all the possible elements of human relationship associated with the exchange of goods, money abstracts a single factor, that of utility, and makes the remainder redundant. The dehumanisation implicit in the use of money reaches its apogee with capitalism, which turns life itself into a commodity. In his study of William Morris he declares that “a genuinely new society can be born only when commodity-production ends, and with it division of labour, money, market-systems, and alienation in all its many shapes and forms — above all alienation from labour.”

The other powerful alienating factor of modernity is the scientific method stemming from Galileo and Descartes, which Lindsay consistently attacked as “mechanical,” “divisive” and “quantitative.” Cranny-Francis notes that “Lindsay returns repeatedly… to Blake’s criticisms of science and the post-Enlightenment rationalism on which it is based.” Lindsay was not at all opposed to scientific inquiry, nor wholly dismissive of the achievements of post Enlightenment science. But in Marxism and Contemporary Science (1949) and a later trilogy on alchemy, astrology and physics in Greco-Roman Egypt he refused to separate knowledge of “nature” from other kinds of knowledge. There is a single interconnected world, and all ways of knowing it are likewise interconnected. The “sciences” discussed in Marxism and Contemporary Science are not physics, astronomy or chemistry, but biology, anthropology, art criticism, psychology and history.

For Lindsay, decisive proof that contemporary science has taken a wrong turning was the atomic bomb, the culmination of alienation’s will to self-destruction. Today he would no doubt make the same criticism of the digital revolution and genetics.

But there is a nagging problem with alienation, though Lindsay, more of a poet than a philosopher, seems never to have addressed it, and neither does Cranny-Francis. It parallels the problem of evil in religions that postulate a benign creator. Where does alienation come from? How can the world be a vital unity and at the same time a site of struggle against division?

Some cosmologies have an explanation. An idealist can say that the world of the senses is a flawed copy of a perfect and eternal world that is glimpsed only in thought. The unity is “above,” the struggle “below.” But Lindsay was trenchantly opposed both to idealism and to hierarchy. For him mental and spiritual phenomena are autonomous, but in the final analysis dependent on matter. Cranny-Francis mentions his debt to the Sydney-born philosopher Samuel Alexander. Alexander was an early twentieth-century advocate of emergence, the theory that complex systems produce attributes and activities that do not belong to their parts. Could emergence explain the origin of alienation? It isn’t clear how.

At a psychological level, though, Lindsay’s biography provides a paradigm case of a conflict between longed-for unity and actual division. Lindsay’s father was the writer and artist Norman Lindsay, one of Australia’s best-known humourists and artists in the first half of the twentieth century, notorious for his sexual libertarianism and hostility to Christianity. Cranny-Francis dwells sensitively on Jack’s difficult relationship with Norman. “The story of father-son relationships threads through all of Lindsay’s writing, fiction and non-fiction,” she writes. When Jack was nine years old, Norman left his wife and three sons. The fatherless family moved to Brisbane, where young Jack lived in a state of genteel but disorganised impoverishment, loved but neglected by his vague and increasingly alcoholic mother until her sister’s family finally took charge and sent him to school. Unsurprisingly, the theme of a lost birthright appears often in Lindsay’s novels and histories.

Norman renewed contact with his son only after his academic achievements had earned him scholarships to Brisbane’s elite Grammar School and the University of Queensland. Lindsay, ecstatic to be restored to his famous father’s attention, was Norman’s devoted acolyte for the next decade. Then they fell out bitterly.

Norman’s entire life was a fierce act of will to sustain the exhilarating freedom of his adolescence, when he had followed his older brother out of a shabby mined-out gold town to marvellous Melbourne and lived in careless poverty, pursuing a self-directed course in drawing, reading, flaneuring and witty companionship until Jack’s conception brought that delightful life to a sudden end. For the rest of his life Norman acted out his ambivalence, alternately praising and denouncing his son. In 1967 he wrote to him, “I can’t help but laugh when I think of what our biographers are going to make of the break and reunion of our relations. They will have to do the best they can with its human dramatics for it is quite impossible for them to realise the compulsions behind them.”

Jack Lindsay did not have children until his late fifties. He was an anxious, self-critical parent, and never ceased to yearn for his father’s distracted attention.

Turn for a moment I say
Turn from your obdurate place
In that clarity of stone,
That terrible folly of light,
Turn for a moment this way
Your abstracted face.

Lindsay understood the importance of this personal history for his literary career, confessing to a close friend that “if my parents hadn’t parted I doubt if I should have become a writer at all.” Cranny-Francis suggests that his description of William Morris also applies to himself:

From one aspect there never was a more impetuously frank man than Morris; he lives restlessly in the open and follows his convictions out without concern for the consequences to himself or anyone else. From another aspect he appears a hidden figure, moved by a passion of which the multiple effects are plain but the central impulse obscured. I suggest that along the lines I have sketched we can bring the man and the artist into a single focus, and see the way in which his personal dilemma was transformed into a dynamic of acceptance and revolt, of deepening insight into the nature of his world and into the ways in which the terrible wounds of alienation can be healed.

A succession of recent British scholars has sought to recover Lindsay as a forerunner of practitioners of cultural studies, an influential field of interdisciplinary research instigated by British theorists — among them Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams — in the 1970s. Although they didn’t reference Lindsay, the founders of cultural studies were almost certainly familiar with some of his work, and there are strong points of similarity in their ideas. In particular, they all affirmed the political significance of culture.

Marx had suggested a base–superstructure model of social formation, according to which economic relationships ultimately determine the organisation of politics, law, religion and creative expression. The implication was that economic interests always trump cultural factors. The practical effect was to concentrate efforts to build socialism in workplaces, which in effect meant and trade unions. This left little place for cultural creators. Like cultural studies, Lindsay steadfastly rejected that model.

Another tenet of cultural studies that Lindsay anticipated was the idea that significant cultural change comes from “below.” Lindsay believed that plebeian practices and values, and their fraught and contradictory clashes with the practices and values of ruling elites, are the major source of cultural innovation. He made the point forcefully in a letter to his friend and fellow critic Alick West:

The concept is that culture is created by the expropriators, fundamentally expresses their position and needs, and has no close relation to the concrete labour-processes and the producing masses. I should like to suggest that something like the reverse is the truth. The people are the producers and reproducers of life, and in that role are also the begetters of culture in all its shapes and forms — though in a class-divided society the ruling class expropriates culture.

Lindsay’s view stemmed from the conviction — shared with Ruskin and Morris — that work and aesthetic production had once “been harmoniously united, and that they still ought to be, despite the general movement towards degradation and mechanisation.” Before commodity production alienated workers from the products of their labour — in this historical sketch uncommodified slavery is conveniently forgotten — work was done in order to create both necessary means of living and pleasing or profound emotions. Each was a joyful undertaking. Once, communal work had always been accompanied by singing and chanting. Understanding this had motivated William Morris to take on, in Lindsay’s dated language, “the full political and social struggle which alone could have as its aim the achievement of brotherhood and the ending of commodity-production.”

In A Short History of Culture Lindsay traced the essential identity of art and work back to the movement of bodies in space. From the classicist Jane Harrison he took the observation that the repetitive, rhythmic behaviours that create the necessities of life — poundings, liftings, plantings, weavings, cuttings, stalkings, throwings — are shared with dancing. Like her, he considered dance to be the primal kind of cultural creativity. Citing another book of Lindsay’s criticism, After the Thirties, Cranny-Francis writes:

Lindsay identifies in dance the rhythmical control of movement that characterises human activity and being. It bodily enacts the purposive behaviours that enable the group to maintain social coherence, engaging them through the rhythm of the breath: ‘Body and mind are thus keyed together in new adventurous and interfused ways.’ The dance becomes an exploration of the embodied being required to achieve a specific purpose, such as a hunt. It lifts the dancer (and observer) into the realm of ‘pure potentiality’ where ‘desire and act are one’; where the bodily disposition required to engage successfully in a particular activity is achieved and communicated. In this process, Lindsay argued, human beings imaginatively engage aspects of everyday life and rehearse the modes of being, thinking and acting that enable them to achieve their needs and desires. For Lindsay this is the role of culture in the formation of being and consciousness, whether it be the ritual art of early societies or contemporary literature, visual art, theatre and dance.

If communism means opposition to capitalism and desire for a future free of oppression and exploitation, Lindsay was certainly a communist. No one seems to know exactly when he joined or if he ever left the British Communist Party, but he was actively affiliated with it from the late 1930s until at least the 1970s. MI5 put him under surveillance. He stayed in the party when it demanded he recant his ideas, and again after Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin’s brutality in 1956. There is no doubt about the strength of his allegiance. But was Lindsay a Marxist communist? He certainly called himself one. Cranny-Francis, along with just about everyone else who has written about him, takes it for granted.

Yet there are grounds for wondering about Lindsay’s Marxism. What kind of Marxist converts on account of a Renaissance philosopher? Marxism profoundly shaped his thinking but it was not Lindsay’s foundational postulate. He came to it as a plausible derivation from a more fundamental constellation of ideas about culture and history that he had already arrived at. Some of his creed was shared with Marxism, some was dissonant with it. If, in the manner of a party apparatchik, one were called on to prepare a list of his heresies, it would be an easy brief: he largely discounts or ignores economic forces, flirts with idealism, sees revolutionary potential in “the people” rather than “the working class,” and has a Romantic, even reactionary, understanding of Communist aims.

Late in life, Lindsay began to concede the point. The Crisis in Marxism (1981) is highly critical of most prominent twentieth-century Marxist theorists, particularly Adorno and Althusser. In one of his last essays he declared that he was “diametrically opposed to all closed systems,” including Lenin’s. “I have found all Marxists, orthodox or not, to be hostile.” Among an eclectic list of influences ranging from Keats to Harrison to Dostoyevsky, only two Marxists appear: Lukacs, and Marx himself.

In a sense, of course, debating whether Lindsay was “really” Marxist is as futile as debating whether Mormons are Christian or Alevis Muslim. In another sense, though, it matters. As long as Lindsay is seen as first and foremost a Marxist, his ideas remain submerged beneath the complexity and weight of a hundred and fifty years of Marxist theorising. To perceive what is most original in his thought, it needs to be disentangled from what has become a distracting integument.

Promised a scholarship to Oxford after he graduated from the University of Queensland but told that he would have to wait a year, Lindsay refused to enrol. For most of his life the lack of a higher degree and his oppositional politics would have made it difficult if not impossible to work as an academic. He gave no sign of wanting to. Even his most esoteric books were not aimed primarily at academics, nor did they please many of them. Ironically, today it is chiefly they who keep his memory alive. Anne Cranny-Francis’s book is no exception, but it deserves a broader readership. We need not agree with Lindsay’s controversial opinions to hope that this remarkable thinker will become better known. •

Jack Lindsay: Writer, Romantic, Revolutionary
By Anne Cranny-Francis | Palgrave Macmillan | €119.99 | 416 pages

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He’d been born in Mississippi in 1968 and lived there in his formative years, so obviously he was a racist. He’d been raised in New Jersey, where he played centre on his high school football team, and then went on to play rugby in college, so of course he was brutish and crude. He had spent twenty-eight years in the US Army and had been in combat, so surely he had killed people.

Obviously, of course and surely, Brent Cummings eludes these reductive inferences. In An American Dreamer, Finkel, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer for the Washington Post, unfurls Brent’s inner complexities and outer contradictions.

Brent appeared fifteen years earlier as an army major in Finkel’s The Good Soldiers, an embedded account of the 2007 troop surge in Iraq, and Finkel’s long connection to him has built the foundation for a work of gripping intimacy. An American Dreamer gets inside Brent’s skull, and those of his wife Laura and neighbour Mike, to capture the emotional landscape of contemporary American life from three diverging vantage points.

Brent is now working stateside at a college with his retirement from the army looming. His soul is troubled. He feels his country has lost its way in the last couple of decades, as if he’s come “out of one war and into another” against enemies on the home front. In a revealing slip, he remarks that the earlier time “felt… clean. No that’s not the right word… It’s slipping.”

What the pollutant might be is not clear to him. Trumpism is part of it. Despite being “probably more Republican than Democrat, probably more conservative than liberal,” he loathes the man for his egotism, ill-discipline and bullying more than for his policies. But the problem runs deeper: Brent has lost confidence in his country’s goodness and shared purpose. “Everything was fraying. That’s what it felt like.”

Brent’s concerns have more to do with meaning than with material or political realities. His belief in American virtue and progress is shaken, and while that abstract dream is disintegrating a real one disturbs his sleep. Not the post-traumatic image of desert horrors we might expect but a chorus of mocking voices from a profound darkness.

His sense that the ground has shifted under him is reinforced by a series of bafflements. He is shocked by the lack of support he receives from colleagues when he challenges the use of a confederate flag on an insignia, upset by activist attacks on his beloved military, appalled by the unthinkable assault on the Capitol. He finds himself in a vanishing middle where the mental habits of a lifetime, grounded in ideas of honour and fair play, have lost their traction. “Am I the one who’s wrong? Am I the one who’s missing something?”

Laura and Mike play second and third fiddle to Brent, but Finkel gives voice to them with the same empathic immediacy. Laura’s main register is anxiety rather than disorientation. She fears violent crime, feels a rising sense of menace in her neighbourhood and worries about the fate of her intellectually disabled daughter when she is no longer around.

Mike, for his part, overlays fear with anger, going full-bore MAGA while railing against the “socialist and communist” treachery of the Democrats. Why Mike, a quadriplegic of modest means, would set aside his early doubts about Trump and come to see him as his infallible saviour is a mystery. His political conversion creates tension with his neighbours, a microcosm of the severing of connections that has played out across the country.

Finkel is a wonderful guide to the inner terrain of his characters. He shows rather than tells, keeping their dialogue and the private thoughts behind it direct and relatable. Brent in particular is brought to vivid life through confrontations with events that confound him. Very occasionally these episodes seem a little forced, notably in the parallels between an encounter with the security wall on a visit to Jerusalem and Trump’s border wall. Mike’s characterisation can also appear ever so slightly two-dimensional by comparison with Brent’s, but the book as a whole is a triumph of compassionate and sympathetic attention.

Finkel inhabits Brent in a rare way, better than a life-long friend could hope to do. More a finely tuned recording instrument than a buddy, he makes no attempt to elevate Brent, hide his flaws or turn him into a morally instructive Everyman. He is an ordinary guy, standing somewhere on the slippery hump of the political bell curve, but he is also a creature of a specific time, place and tradition, not just a symbol of averageness. Witnessing his puzzlement at how things have changed, we might wonder how much his sense of loss comes from occupying a political centre that cannot hold and how much it is a sign that he is getting older and his generation is being unseated.

We hear so much about the growing polarisation of American life. Books like this one help to humanise the conflict, not only by plucking individuals from their political tribes but also by exploring the quieter emotional dimensions of their experience. Beyond the primal fears and hatreds, Finkel suggests, there are people seeking solutions to big, existential questions about purpose, meaning, legacy and value. An American Dream shows us that behind all the yelling and distrust and there is vulnerability and hope. •

An American Dreamer: Life in a Divided Country
By David Finkel | Scribe | $36.99 | 256 pages

The post “Am I the one who’s missing something?” appeared first on Inside Story.

The sheer volume of material continues to fuel efforts to document and analyse the career of Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. The latest is a multi-author, multi-volume (four are promised) appraisal edited by the Menzies Institute’s Zachary Gorman. Based on a series of conferences, the books aim to promote “discussion, critical analysis and reflection on Menzies, the era he defined and his enduring legacy.” Contributions are not limited to those of unabashed admirers; writers from the other side of the political fence also offer their assessments, as do ostensible neutrals.

The first volume, The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942, covers the period from Menzies’s birth in 1894 to 1942, though not all chapters fit neatly within those boundaries. James Edelman and Angela Kittikhoun’s useful chapter on Menzies and the law, for example, takes in the Communist Party Dissolution Bill, eight years beyond 1942.

Following political scientist (and ex-MP) David Kemp’s introduction, the book’s early chapters focus on the family environment into which Menzies was born and the social and political culture of the era. As most readers will be aware, his father ran a general store in the western Victorian town of Jeparit, saving the son from any credible charges of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But while the small business ethos had a crucial impact on Menzies’s political philosophy, he was exposed to a different worldview by his maternal grandfather, John Sampson, an active trade unionist, though without being persuaded to change his own emerging outlook.

Menzies’s academic record in Melbourne University’s law faculty was outstanding and he also took part in student politics and campus journalism. His failure to enlist during the first world war — a family decision prompted by the fact that two brothers were already serving — is well known, and journalist Troy Bramston reveals how it may have contributed to Menzies’s fiancée’s ultimate decision to break off their engagement. Menzies had no doubt that his failure to enlist propelled him away from a brilliant legal career and onto the parliamentary path. He needed to offer “public service.”

For this reviewer, one of the most interesting chapters is historian Greg Melluish’s account of Menzies’s advocacy of liberal education and its connection with his ideas about democracy. That Menzies was a “scholarship boy” at both school and university is reasonably well known and, Melluish argues, helps explain his support for “meritocracy” rather than inherited and entrenched privilege (with an obvious exemption for the monarchy). This commitment seems crucial in explaining Menzies’s insistence that he (and later, his party) was liberal, not conservative.

Of course, conservatism existed (and exists) in Australia, and the parties Menzies joined and led garnered the vast preponderance of that vote. He revered English political and legal institutions as springing from liberal values, but their defence surely entailed a conservative outlook. Melluish stresses that Menzies understood English democracy as reflective of a specific common culture; in contrast to the Americans, “he did not see democracy as being universally applicable.” This could help explain why conservatives may view multiculturalism as a problem, undermining the necessary foundations of their version of democracy — a question that will perhaps be tackled in later volumes. Of course, Menzies’s view could also lend itself to the darker idea that democracy is not suitable for all, especially those viewed as “backward.”

Among other prime ministers, probably only Gough Whitlam could be as closely identified with the case for liberal education. For Menzies, writing in the 1930s, British history demonstrated that such an education “would produce the sorts of people who possessed the capacities to make that system of government [Westminster] work properly.” Ironically, in view of today’s emphasis on utilitarian degrees, Menzies can be seen as enlisting the (now) maligned bachelor of arts in defence of the practical aim of good government.

Melluish also usefully distinguishes between Menzies’s idea of a liberal education and the wider idea of “Western civilisation.” Menzies was fixated on Australia’s British heritage; the Greek and Roman stuff could, it seems, be left to people like Whitlam.

Menzies’s version of the university was obviously not the “oppositional” one. But, as Melluish points out, this critical variant was emerging at the time Menzies was writing. It would probably approach its zenith during the second half of Menzies’s long term in office — which should make for an interesting discussion in the final volume in this series.

Political scientist Judith Brett explores the parallels between Menzies and Alfred Deakin, sons of small businessmen, both of them influenced by the liberalism of the Victorian goldfields, both following very similar educational paths, and of course, both having more than one go as prime minister. It is Deakin, she writes, “whom Menzies might have looked to as an exemplar of national leadership.”

A useful reminder of the important role religion could play in forming political beliefs comes in historian David Furse-Roberts’s chapter on the impact of Menzies’s Presbyterianism. The connection between his faith and his political philosophy seems so strong that a liberal atheist might have felt less than welcome in the party Menzies would form. And, had he been around, Menzies may well have been puzzled to observe some Liberal staffers take an affirmation rather than an oath when they appeared in the defamation case brought by Bruce Lehrmann against Network Ten and one of its journalists.

By contrast, it would be an oddity today if any senior politician identified mainstream religion (as opposed to the “prosperity gospel” variant embraced by some prominent conservatives) as a key factor in their political outlook. As judged by Furse-Roberts, Menzies’s version of Presbyterianism emphasised a “selfless individualism,” acknowledging the ameliorative role of the state but also its limitations: “it fell primarily to the compassionate spirit and self-sacrifice of individuals to succour the needy and further the common good.” This clearly eschews socialism, but Furse-Roberts suggests it goes “far beyond John Stuart Mill’s minimalist ethic of ‘no harm’ to others.” One might observe how that reference to the “common good” contrasts with the overwhelmingly individualist emphasis of the more recent version of the Liberal Party.

Historian Frank Bongiorno’s chapter, “Menzies and Curtin at War,” is a finely balanced contribution, acknowledging the positives of Menzies’s first prime ministership and also (in anticipation) recognising his “postwar nation-building achievements,” which “look better every year, as we contemplate the policy failures of our own century and the conspicuous absence of compelling vision.” This generosity from a Labor-leaning historian suggests that the defensiveness of Liberal partisans in certain chapters may to some extent have been directed at a shrinking target.

Anne Henderson mounts a characteristically robust defence of Menzies from charges of appeasement and softness on Nazi Germany, stressing the absence of a perfect record among any of the key players. Mindful of the passage of time, I was left wondering how many Australians would know to whom “Pig-Iron Bob” refers. How many in the press gallery?

Journalist Nick Cater examines the role of Menzies’s famous “The Forgotten People” radio address in 1942, highlighting the importance of the family home as the central focus of that talk. While a Labor minister could deride this support for increased home ownership as turning workers into “little capitalists,” Menzies’s philosophy emphasised the “social, economic and moral value of home ownership.” Saving for a home was a “concrete expression of the habits of frugality and saving.” National patriotism, in other words, “inevitably springs from the instinct to defend and preserve our own homes.” How might the renters on the battlefields in 1942 have responded to this observation, I wonder?

Political scientist Scott Prasser sums up the learning experiences that would enable Menzies to resurrect his career and become Australia’s longest-serving prime minister. This involves some projection, for he still had much learning to do (during seven more years as opposition leader) after the notional end date for this volume. That quibble aside, Prasser’s contribution is a useful one since Menzies’s success can’t be attributed mostly to luck and dud opponents. The checklist: modest promises, sound coalition relations, a willingness to adopt new directions, and an awareness of the nation’s political architecture. His return to power and the use to which he put his learning experiences await us in the next volume.

In his introduction to the second and latest of the series, The Menzies Watershed, editor Zachary Gorman acknowledges the limitations of the “call for conference papers” method the project employs, which risks missing “certain topics of great interest and relevance.” This dilemma is reflected in the ensuing chapters, with some likely to be of appeal to the general political scholar–aficionado and others more in the niche category. My focus will be largely on the former.

In his chapter on Menzies and the Movement, Lucas McLennan makes the case for a good deal of similarity of emphasis between Menzies’s Anglo-Protestantism and the version of Catholic social teaching (and consequent public policy) embraced by lawyer–activist B.A. Santamaria and his disciples in the (Catholic Social Studies) Movement. It is certainly the case that both men would have seen their vigorous anti-communism as having a strong religious component, especially reflected in the anti-communist foreign and defence policies embraced by Menzies’s party and endorsed by Santamaria and (after the Labor Party’s split in 1955) his political creation the Democratic Labor Party.

McLennan’s case is possibly less convincing on the domestic front. While the Movement may have preferred subsidiarity over centralism, it seems unlikely that Menzies would have seen much merit in the (frankly weird) land settlement proposals advanced by Santamaria. And we can be fairly confident that the Movement’s view (as expressed in 1948) that Christians should seek “to break up concentration of wealth” would not have secured much support at a meeting of the Kooyong branch of the Liberal Party. Ultimately, even Santamaria’s version of Catholic social teaching necessarily involved an element of collectivism that would not have appealed to Menzies.

Anne Henderson’s brief chapter on Menzies’s successful opposition to Labor’s bank nationalisation plans possibly tells the reader as much about the Chifley government’s ideological rigidity (or commitment to principle — take your pick) and misreading of the public mood as it does about Menzies’s deft exploitation of the issue. Two decades after the Depression, the anti-banks sentiment was clearly not what it used to be, although Henderson’s depiction of the banks battle as “class war as Australia had never seen it” might have been challenged by some survivors from that period. In passing, it might be observed that since Labor lost the double dissolution election it provoked on this issue in 1951, it has not held a Senate majority on any occasion.

Tom Switzer evidences and reinforces the generally accepted wisdom that Menzies was no radical right-wing reformer. He retained and relied on several of the senior bureaucrats who had advised Chifley, and his economic policies were of the Keynesian variety, reflecting a consensus that would persist until the end of the Fraser period. In his introduction to this volume, Gorman had noted Menzies’s good fortune in not being “exposed to a centre-right echo chamber of policy advice,” insulating him from big overreaches (with the exception of the attempt to ban the Communist Party).

Keynesianism is again a key theme in David Lee’s chapter on economic management. It also contains a useful outline of cabinet and public service structures and processes in the early years of the Menzies government.

Troy Bramston’s chapter, “The Art of Power,” draws on his well-received biography of Menzies and hence comment here will be minimal: Menzies had been an effective political campaigner, “but campaigning is not government” (wise advice). Building on his previous experience, consultation, reflection and wide reading, he developed a capacity for management and administration that served him well.

Charles Richardson examines aspects of Menzies’s approach to the crown and imperial relations, the Statute of Westminster and the office of governor-general, drawing some comparisons with the attitudes of his nemesis H.V. Evatt. In referring to Menzies’s concern about the “separate status of the crown in right of the different dominions”— the question of how the monarch could be at peace and war at the same time in relation to the same foreign power — Richardson delightfully describes this as an “absurdity” that we still live with. The fact that most wars are now waged without formal declarations of war may help, at least at a technical level.

Richardson endorses the view that Menzies should have made the switch from a British to an Australian governor-general before Casey’s appointment in 1965, but notes the prime minister’s quaint criterion that it was essential with any appointment that “the Queen knew them.”

Lyndon Megarrity seeks to correct the misconception that Australia’s involvement with overseas students only commenced with the Colombo Plan. He outlines the history of such activity (which could involve some fancy manoeuvring round the White Australia policy) and describes policy before the second world war as “ad hoc and reactive.” The Chifley government entered the soft diplomacy business of scholarships, but Megarrity sees any potential benefits as being negated by immigration minister Arthur Calwell’s notorious hardline attitude on deportations: no grey areas in the White Australia policy for him.

The role of the new external affairs minister Percy Spender in the creation of the Colombo Plan in 1950 is well known. While acknowledging the Chifley government’s creation (pre-Colombo) of a relevant policy management framework, Megarrity credits the Menzies government with a defter handling than Labor of tensions between the Plan and the White Australia policy, assisting with the overall enhancement of Australia’s reputation in the region. In the cold war context, the scheme could “help maintain stability in Southeast Asia and increase resistance to Communism.”

Chapters on the creation of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service and on the role of Spender in (among other things) negotiating the ANZUS treaty serve to highlight the electoral supremacy the Menzies government would establish as the guardian of national security, an advantage his party has largely retained to the present day. Nicolle Flint revisits the issue (it probably no longer qualifies as a “debate”) over whether Menzies’s role in the Liberal Party’s creation has been overstated (spoiler alert: no). Lorraine Finlay, addressing the dilemma of “what liberty should be provided for the enemies of liberty,” focuses on the attempts to ban the Communist Party, though current trends may remind us of the timelessness of that dilemma. Andrew Blyth provides an account of think tanks’ influence on the Menzies government, but to some extent the title is misleading: the Institute of Public Affairs was effectively the only player in that game, although pressure groups and committees of inquiry are also covered in the chapter.

Christopher Beer’s chapter uses the federal electorate of Robertson on the central New South Wales coast to make some observations about the impact of early Menzies government policies. He includes useful electoral information about the seat, which serves (for this reviewer) to highlight the absence of comparable nationwide electoral data and commentary on the elections of the period. Clearly, the “call for papers” did not evince the relevant interest.

By the end of the period covered in this volume, Menzies had won three elections as Liberal leader, disarming his internal critics, and even greater dominance lay ahead: Labor partisans might like to look away now. •

The Young Menzies: Success, Failure, Resilience 1894–1942
Edited by Zachary Gorman | Melbourne University Publishing | $44.99 | 222 pages

The Menzies Watershed: Liberalism, Anti-Communism, Continuities 1943–1954
Edited by Zachary Gorman | Melbourne University Press | $45 | 256 pages

The post The younger Menzies appeared first on Inside Story.

While Lumby was working on her book Matthew Lamb was embarked on something different and quite unusual: a two-volume cultural history of Moorhouse. Lamb’s project is also a biography, but the extra length allows him room to explore in more detail the writer’s intellectual development and his role in challenging the restrictions on Australian publishing in the years he was active. Lamb’s first volume, Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths, has just been published.

Both biographers spent time talking to Moorhouse before his death in 2022 and both combed through his extensive archives, so their books raise questions about the role of writers in creating their own lives. In recent years, we’ve seen Ann-Marie Priest’s detailed biography of Gwen Harwood, written after the poet’s archives were opened after many years of restricted access, Brigitta Olubas’s meticulous study of Shirley Hazzard, written with the approval of Hazzard and her friends, and Bernadette Brennan’s sympathetic account of the novelist Gillian Mears, so closely based on the writer’s archive that it reads almost as if Mears had written it. All these subjects clearly wanted a biography to be written, even when, like Harwood, they played off the various aspirants to the role of biographer.

Moorhouse certainly wanted his life examined, and he had a keen understanding of his own role in Australian social and cultural change. But the relationship between a writer’s life and their fiction can present difficulties for a biographer who wishes to secure the facts but can’t afford to ignore the parallels. While a biographer is bound by the records, the subject’s memories so often prove unreliable when they’re compared with the documentary record or the memories of their friends and colleagues.

Lamb has written elsewhere about the peculiar difficulties of recording the life of an author whose stories were often based on real events. As Moorhouse told a friend, a fiction, once written, obliterated the real memory on which it was based. And sometimes Moorhouse was not the only writer using the material: Lamb offers examples of Michael Wilding writing counter-stories to those of his then friend.

One of the effects of this fictional use of real life has been an underestimation of the art in Moorhouse’s stories, to the point that he felt the need to constantly insist on it.

Lamb set out to read all Moorhouse’s work, including the short stories he wrote in high school, his journalism and his essays for the Workers’ Educational Association, and place them in the context of the author’s life. He also tries to encompass Moorhouse’s own reading and the influence of his various mentors to build a narrative of his intellectual development. And he keeps an eye on the shifts in Australian cultural life and the legal restrictions it faced.

Strange Paths is as much about changes in Australian print culture and sexual attitudes as it is about Moorhouse’s life. It is this contextual material that justifies this second, extended biography.

Beginning with a short account of governments’ restrictive controls over local publishing from the very beginning of European settlement, Lamb traces the evolution of censorship and copyright laws in parallel with the lives of Moorhouse’s forebears in the colonies — in his father’s case in New Zealand. Young Frank was born into a society in which publishing was tightly restricted and writers were forced to accept low royalties from a British-controlled book trade.

Lamb makes Henry Lawson’s and Joseph Furphy’s difficulties relevant to Moorhouse’s later struggles for authors’ rights. Despite his popularity, Lawson battled financial difficulties; Furphy’s novels satirise the impossibility of recording Australian speech under the prohibitions on obscenity. The book’s treatment of the two men signals Moorhouse’s position in a tradition of Australian writing and sets up his later challenges to censorship and his part in the campaign for author royalties.

Moorhouse’s education in country public schools might appear limited, but Lamb reveals that encouraging teachers gave him access to magazines like Southerly and Meanjin. At home, he could read his firmly anti-communist father’s copies of Free Spirit, the forerunner of Quadrant, and discuss cold war politics. Though he was expected to follow his two older brothers into the family’s agricultural machinery business in Nowra, his parents were ready to accommodate his aspirations to be a writer. His mother even consulted the poet Rosemary Dobson when she visited Nowra for a talk.

Though Moorhouse later became known as a sexual adventurer he was as ignorant about sex as any other school student growing up in Australia at the time. Like so many Australians of his generation, he and his girlfriend Wendy gathered what information they could from biology textbooks and “hygiene” instruction books that often relied on euphemism. He might have appeared more liberated than the rest of us, but he negotiated the same conventional upbringing, churchgoing and smalltown values that dominated Australian life in the 1950s and 1960s. An exceptional high school student, he learnt the importance of self-education and self-discipline early, writing stories that Lamb reads as evidence of his teenage preoccupations.

The influence of his parents’ devotion to self-help, the philosophies of Rotary and the guidance of the scouting movement was obvious in Moorhouse’s fascination with theories of living. As a young man he was distinguished by an eagerness to learn and a curiosity about people and their behaviour. He read the available books on psychology and sexuality by Hans Eysenck, Alfred Kinsey and Sigmund Freud, and was committed to the “spirit of enquiry” advocated by his journalist mentor, John Penfold, though a long-term homosexual relationship undermined the “Frankness and Sincerity Theory” he advanced as the basis of his relationship with Wendy, now his wife.

He also understood that fiction offers a way for a writer to describe and speculate about human behaviour, including intimate desires evaded in journalism and academic writing. His experiences as a journalist in Sydney, Lockhart and Wagga Wagga gave him the chance to make stories from small events (jellyfish on the beaches of Sydney in one case) but also convinced him that he needed to break free from the cynical, heavy-drinking culture of journalism.

A position with the Workers’ Educational Association in Sydney gave him the chance to explore his ideas about changing print media, sociology, film and folk music. Explore he did, at one point participating not only in the WEA but also in the Film Study Group, the Sydney Left Club, the Libertarian Society and the Push, though he resisted the libertarian view that literature was only an illustration of a philosophy or directed at some didactic goal.

According to Lamb, he regarded the literary imagination as “a form of inquiry in its own right,” a means of exploring reason and its limitations. In practice he also embraced it as a means of examining social taboos and the sexual lives hidden behind prevailing social and censorship conventions.

Strange Paths provides details of Moorhouse’s several encounters with the law. In 1967 his quite unerotic story about a young man’s disappointing visit to a prostitute, “A Barmaid, a Prostitute, a Landlady,” led to a Melbourne bookstall being charged for selling obscene material. In 1969, when the banning of Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint brought the censorship controversy to a head, Moorhouse was part of the Tharunka editorial team that challenged the obscenity laws. In 1973 he was convicted for distributing The Little Red Schoolbook and assaulting the police who had found copies in his car.

Also that year Moorhouse and his publisher agreed to take up the cause of authors’ copyright, successfully suing the University of New South Wales for breaching his copyright by allowing staff and students to photocopy his story “The Machine Gun.” This, too, was an important breakthrough for Australian writers’ freedom to publish and support themselves.

Two things stand out in this account of Moorhouse’s life. One is how his study of popular culture, sociology and the media developed ahead of any interest in such subjects among academics. His time as a university student had been curtailed by his commitment to writing, as a journalist and as a writer of fiction, but he immersed himself in the range of areas that interested him.

Like so many other brilliant Australian writers who didn’t finish university — Hazzard, Harwood, David Ireland, Peter Carey and many others — writing was itself a form of self-education. But the outreach elements of university campuses — the libraries, the magazines, the clubs and visiting lecturers — have provided essential support for the intellectual life of these outsiders; as universities increasingly adopt utilitarian practices they may need to be reminded of their duty to artists and other intellectuals beyond their boundaries.

The second element is Moorhouse’s commitment to fiction writing as an intellectual pursuit free from the demands of political ideologies or moralities. When fiction so often appears to be either mere entertainment or didactic instruction from those who know better than the rest of us, Moorhouse understood that art offers the freedom to explore ideas and areas of life that challenge prevailing conventions. Of course, his work provokes arguments about feminism, sexuality and personal behaviour. That, too, is a role of fiction. Lamb’s book is not a work of literary criticism but his care in placing Moorhouse’s writing in a detailed historical context is revelatory. It places literary writing at the centre of social change.

This first volume takes us to the end of 1974, with the publication of The Electrical Experience and the release of Between Wars, the film Moorhouse wrote for director Michael Thornhill when he was thirty-six. So Lamb’s project has quite a distance to go. Impatient readers will choose to read Lumby’s more concise account, but historians of the recent past will find plenty to absorb their interest here. I may be the ideal reader for this version as I try to make sense of A.D. Hope’s negotiation of Australian censorship at an earlier time. Lamb’s book shows one way that a writer can be placed in an extensive cultural context. •

Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths
By Matthew Lamb | Knopf Australia | $45 | 480 pages

The post Writing life appeared first on Inside Story.

That delicious sentence was written by a woman born Umm El-Banu Assadullayeva, and comes from Days in the Caucasus, her memoir’s first volume. It reveals a distinctive juxtaposition in her prose, in this book and in its sequel, Parisian Days. There’s a curious self-effacement combined with a resolute lightheartedness and flashes of wry wit, the work of a woman whose life was a rollercoaster of heartache, love and adventure.

She was born in 1905 in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea, and came to be known in twentieth-century Paris as the writer Banine. Her mother had died giving birth to her, her three sisters were quite a bit older and her father didn’t remarry for many years, though the family “welcomed polygamy and disapproved of celibacy.” The family she wrote of were “oil millionaires” — stupendously, one might say ridiculously, rich — who in one generation had leapt from peasantry to plutocracy from the oil discovered on their land.

She was a lonely but happy and imaginative child. Her father, still in his thirties and, like his brothers, thoroughly Europeanised from his travels, had hired a Baltic German governess for his daughters. Fraulein Anna was Banine’s mainstay, a mother substitute and “guardian angel” who schooled her in German and encouraged her to learn the piano.

But her paternal grandmother, “a large, fat, authoritarian woman, veiled and excessively fanatical,” ruled the roost, sticking to the old traditions. She loathed Christians, spoke only Azeri, a Turkic language itself a sub-branch of Azerbaijani, wore the clothes typical of observant Muslims at the time, and preferred sitting on floor cushions to any of the sumptuous European-type furniture to be found in the “reception rooms” of Banine’s father’s apartment.

Thus, here was a young girl buffeted between two radically different influences and traditions, though apart from the grandmother the family was not particularly religious. Banine took refuge in books and daydreaming, the necessary humus for any writer it seems, although it took many years before she became one.

Azerbaijan (Persian “land of fire,” for the spontaneous fires occasioned by its oil slicks) was part of the Russian empire. Its people were mainly Christian Armenians and Shiite Azerbaijanis who, as Banine describes it, periodically massacred each other in revolving reprisals. A smattering of Georgians and Russians also lived there. In the year of her birth the empire was in turmoil, until Tsar Nicholas II made his small, grudging concession to democracy.

Then, early in 1918, the year Banine turned twelve, Nicholas was forced to abdicate, not long after which the province became the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic and Banine’s father, now remarried and father to a son, was its minister of commerce. When the Bolsheviks solidified their control, the province lost its independence. Her father was thrown into prison.

The family’s traditionally pragmatic attitude to sex and marriage is relevant here. Polygamy was normalised in Islam, as was same-sex coupling for young unmarried males. For Banine’s father and others of his generation this was changing, but marriage in the upper class was still essentially a business proposition with love reserved for extramarital liaisons.

In this scheme of things the hymen was the husband’s trophy, pleasure an incidental consideration. Banine’s cousin Gulnar, for instance, was eager to get married so she could indulge her sexual appetite with a succession of partners in addition to her promised husband. But Banine, the dreamer, longed for a different trajectory, and had fallen deeply in love with a dashing Bolshevik commissar. Unlike any of Gulnar’s conquests, hers was an intensely romantic affair fuelled by a mutual love of literature (he her Prince Andrey, she his Natasha) but had yet to be consummated. There were plans, though, for her to elope with him to Moscow and be wedded there.

Knowing nothing of this, the family had two other suitors in mind. One was another cousin, the other a man who’d ingratiated himself by helping get Banine’s increasingly weak and emaciated father released. Then there was the problem of getting her father to Paris, where his wife and young son were waiting, and it was this same man’s connections he depended on for that. Still the dutiful daughter, and even though she hated her father for “blackmailing” her, she agreed to marry the man.

“Filial affection,” as she wistfully defined it, won the day. Without a word to her commissar, she failed to turn up at the designated rendezvous that would have swept her off with him to Moscow. Instead she was yoked to a man twenty years her senior whom she loathed with all her heart. She was all of fifteen.

The tone of the memoir’s sequel is even more bittersweet. In Days in the Caucasus she had written of her father and two sisters eventually finding refuge in Paris. Parisian Days finds her on the Orient Express to join them. In Paris her father and stepmother are renting a large, luxurious apartment on the fashionable Rue Louis Boilly, where they stay until they run out of jewellery: “the sole, slim remains of our oil barons’ fortune, democratised, collectivised, nationalised, volatilised in the revolutionary explosion, which consumed all our privileges in its flames.”

From the moment of her arrival, Banine is enthralled with Paris. She is even happy when her father’s “last pearl” is sold and they are all forced to move from the Rue Louis Boilly apartment. Now on her own, she is lent a maid’s room seven flights up in a building on the Champ de Mars, and like many Russian émigrés of the day, some of whom were princesses, she finds work as a mannequin in an upscale Parisian fashion house.

What are they to make of her too-Oriental looks, her large derrière, not to mention the over-fuzzy Azerbaijani hairstyle? She moves to another, more simpatico house, and there she picks up tricks of the trade. But although she makes friends easily there and the job is her only means of survival, she is unrelievedly bored. Augmenting their pitiful wages as courtesans, the women talk exclusively of beauty, clothes and catching ever more wealthy men. They dub Banine the “little Caucasian goose.”

Salvation comes in the form of an older sister. Zuleykha, a painter, had settled in Paris long before, and she and her Spanish husband José, another painter, set up a bohemian salon in their studio compound. (Banine referred to it as Josézous.) “The guests drank, ate, debated and danced with the passion of youth and exotic temperaments prone to excess of all kinds. We couldn’t get away without a bullfight, almost as noisy as a real one.” Her sister and brother-in-law introduce her to the Montparnasse nightclubs and Paris’s huge community of Russians who’d fled the revolution.

These are the Années folles, those crazy years that spanned the end of the first world war and the onset of the Depression. And though she is definitely the young hanger-on, the timid third wheel, she revels in the company and ambience. She is watching, listening, slotting it all into memory.

In a curious way, poverty has released her, as it has softened her father. Regretting her coerced marriage, he readily sanctions divorce. (Because of her refugee status and the husband’s Turkish residence, this is more easily said than done.) Nonetheless the conjugal experience leaves her resolutely chaste for years. The Montparnasse campaigns to correct this routinely fail, even when intensified by the surprise arrival of long-lost cousin Gulnar, who has finally made it out of Baku through her own particular version of the legerdemain that émigrés were forced to adopt. Within a matter of minutes, Gulnar has Banine abandoning her seventh-floor maid’s room and sharing a flat with her.

Was Gulnar the full-blown sexual predator portrayed? The relationship was doubtlessly complicated, yet I detect the writer at work here. Striking, full-lipped Gulnar is the perfect foil, a gift to any memoirist. As is Jerome, the cultured Frenchman who acts as a kind of psychopomp, ushering the two women through the high life of Paris, its sparkling nightlife and the tangles of their love lives. As for Banine, she finally succumbs to the blandishments of one of Jerome’s rich friends, an older Orléans widower surgeon to whom she was unaccountably mean and who, after some time and hardly surprisingly, unceremoniously dumps her.

And so Parisian Days ends. Gulnar has sailed off to America, having bagged a handsome, young, fabulously rich Texan. As generous as she is acquisitive and life-loving, she has left behind all her money for Banine, the handsome husband offering her a pension. Needless to say, Banine is stunned. “My cousin whom I had so often envied and hated overwhelmed me with largesse.”

Alone now, she finds her way to the Bois de Boulogne, considering her future. Because of Gulnar’s wholly unexpected legacy, she can contemplate leaving the fashion house and chance her arm at writing. The book’s last sentences encapsulate the special amalgam of bravery and self-deprecation that characterises its protagonist throughout: “Life was waiting for me. I had to go and meet it despite the burden of my reluctant heart.”

Banine’s first published work was a novel, Nami. Set in Baku and Russia, and based on her experiences of the revolution and civil war, it appeared in 1942. She made her name in Parisian literary circles with Days in the Caucasus, published three years later. Parisian Days appeared in 1947. She wrote in French, which by then had become her natural language. I Chose Opium deals with her conversion to Roman Catholicism. It too had a sequel, After. She also supported herself translating Dostoevsky’s books and those of other writers into French.

Banine is in the process of being rediscovered. Anne Thompson-Ahmadova, the translator of these two books into English, tells us that Days in the Caucasus was reissued in French in 1985. Banine revised Parisian Days in 1990, and it is this version that Pushkin Press has published. The Soviets invited Banine to Baku after Days in the Caucasus appeared, but she declined the invitation, a decision she regrets in an author’s note to its reissue. An Azerbaijani translation didn’t appear until 1992, the year of Banine’s death.

Not having read Banine in her original French, and as is the case with any such translation, I can only take Thompson-Ahmadova’s on trust. Once or twice I came across a phrase where the English rang just a little too colloquial, but overall she seems to have captured the flavour of the author’s voice, and the vividness of the people and events she brought to life.

It’s always exciting to see a long-neglected writer resurrected, and what a gift to readers Days in the Caucasus and Parisian Days are. Others have praised Banine for being another Colette, and there is some truth in that. But I doubt if there’ll ever be another Banine. •

Days in the Caucasus
By Banine | Pushkin Press | $34.99 | 274 pages

Parisian Days
By Banine | Pushkin Press | $34.99 | 255 pages

The post To Paris, from the land of fire appeared first on Inside Story.

Let me give you the Hollywood pitch. In his youth, a boy develops a crush. As a young man, he pursues the desire of his fledgling heart by achieving several eye-catching successes. Approaching middle age, and seemingly running out of time, our hero finally declares his hand and consummates this life-long infatuation. And then, in less than a decade, love lies bleeding.

Since early boyhood, the former British cabinet minister Rory Stewart has been romantically inclined to regard the political life as the sine qua non of existence. Taking charge, getting a grip, getting things done, touring the facility, picking up slack, making the world a better place, fulfilling one’s destiny: these were the ideas that sent Young Rory’s heart aflutter.

And the portal to this personalised Narnia was hidden somewhere in the Palace of Westminster.

From his birth in 1973 until he entered parliament in 2010 — as he tells it in his new memoir, Politics on the Edge — Stewart led a privileged, fulfilling and adventurous life.

His father was the British war hero and spy Brian Stewart, who every morning gave him fencing lessons in Hyde Park. He boarded at Eton, then spent a short stint in the Black Watch, his father’s old regiment, before going up to Oxford, where he attended Balliol, said to be that university’s oldest college. Around this time he became a friend to the future King Charles, and a tutor to his two sons.

After a teenaged dalliance with the Labour Party, Stewart returned to the party of his class. Politics for Stewart is about respect for British tradition and history; the importance of grace under pressure; and the majesty of His Majesty.

His book is filled with beautifully written passages about the natural world and the symbolism of architecture that you don’t normally find in books by politicians. “My office had been that of the Secretary of State for India,” he explains at one point. “A Mughal domed ceiling, plastered in gold leaf, soared above my head. The two curved doors were doubled so that two maharajahs could enter simultaneously with no problem of precedence.”

Stewart is no boorish right-winger; he’s an instinctive One Nation Tory — firmly planted on the left of the Conservative Party — and writes without embarrassment about the need for honour in public life.

For all his veneration of the fruits bestowed on Britain by its long-gone imperial past, he is also a modern human, with an appealing self-deprecatory wit. (During a stoush between his faction and the Tory hard right, he comments, “We felt like a book club going to a Millwall game.”)

He’s free of the racism usually associated with his class and nation. He’s supportive of gay marriage; convinced about climate change; genuinely curious about Earth and the people who live on it. He is also admirably suspicious of his own desire for power.

After university Stewart joins the Foreign Office — naturally — and serves in Indonesia in the lead-up to East Timorese independence, and in Montenegro during the Balkans wars.

In 2000 he makes an eccentric but telling career choice: he leaves the FO and spends eighteen months trekking across Iran, Pakistan, the Himalayas and then, just after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan. Walking stick in hand, an Afghan blanket across his shoulders, and relying on the ingrained culture of Afghan hospitality, he lives off the kindness of strangers as he strides through this roadless landscape like a character out of Kipling.

He writes a bestseller about the journey; Brad Pitt buys the film rights. By luck or design, Stewart has acquired an interesting patina of fame — and in a peculiarly British way.

Like his hero T.E. Lawrence, he enjoys travelling to exotic places, where — occasionally — he’s shot at by the locals. In 2003 he is appointed to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq, where he runs a province at the ripe old age of thirty. Like many Eton-educated Balliol men before him, he is commanding a dangerous outpost of Empire; but as this is the twenty-first century, it’s the American Empire.

He begins as a supporter of the Iraq war but is soon disillusioned. It is a telling moment. Stewart is too insightful and intelligent, and too wedded to his values, to trim his jib to the prevailing winds. He doesn’t recognise it at the time, but it’s a sign that he might not be best suited to modern politics. Screenwriters would call this an example of foreshadowing.

Stewart is immensely talented, but his talents — for writing, debating, organising and enthusing others — don’t satisfy him. He wants, he says, the power to do good in the world. After a stint setting up and running a charity in Kabul, and then some teaching of human rights at Harvard, he takes the plunge.

In 2010 he gains preselection for the rural seat of Penrith and the Borders, located far away from London in chilly Cumbria. Typically, one of his first acts is to set out on foot and visit every village in the electorate. But the tougher footslog awaits him in London: it is the beginning of the end of the affair.

Stewart must have committed some terrible crime in a previous life: as a junior minister, his first three bosses are Liz Truss, Priti Patel and Boris Johnson.

Truss — who will later become the shortest-serving prime minister in British history — is like the Queen of Hearts made incarnate: capable of thinking up six impossible policies before breakfast. And then not caring if anything happens, so long as a press release is generated.

Stewart attends a meeting with Truss after rushing to the bedside of his gravely ill father. She asks how his weekend was. “I explained that my father had died,” he writes. “She paused for a moment, nodded, and asked when the twenty-five-year environment plan would be ready.”

After a reshuffle he falls into the orbit of Priti Patel, who’s been made Secretary of State for International Development, a department she had frequently called to be abolished. When Stewart — who genuinely believes in giving aid to poor nations — tries to engage her about policy, Patel, who has a habit of enunciating every syllable of key words, tells him: “Look Rory, I want you to roll the pitch. Okay? In the end this is about ac-count-a-bi-li-ty.”

Stewart’s time working under Boris Johnson during the future PM’s short and unlamented tenure as foreign secretary is equally instructive. He finds Johnson, ruddy of cheek and untidy of hair, in his magnificent office, his “air of roguish solidity, however… undermined by the furtive cunning of his eyes, which made it seem as though an alien creature had possessed his reassuring body and was squinting out of the sockets.”

Stewart is an expert on the Middle East, so Johnson naturally wants him to become the minister in charge of Britain’s Africa policy. “You’ll love it Rory,” Johnson assures him. “A Balliol man in Africa.”

Stewart had the misfortune to arrive in British politics at a time and place when the performative side of the job was viewed as the only necessity for political success. Like right-wing populists everywhere, Truss, Patel and Johnson loved the spotlight but couldn’t be bothered actually running the show.

And then there’s Brexit. Stewart was a Remainer, and after the disastrous referendum vote he becomes an advocate for a soft Brexit.

The final scenes of a film are the most important. As Sam Goldwyn probably never said, “Start with an earthquake, then build up to a climax.”

The last chapters of Politics on the Edge tell the story of Stewart’s quixotic bid in 2019 to become leader of the Conservative Party and — in his view — save it from itself. Like an episode of Survivor, prospective PMs, including Stewart, fall by the wayside in a series of votes until only Boris the Hutt remains.

Brexit has finally delivered its apotheosis: a man without a moral compass has been chosen to set a new course for Britain.

Meanwhile, somewhere in China, a virus is born. Its hour come at last, Covid-19 slouches towards the old and the weak. Prime Minister Johnson responds with all the alacrity of a distracted sloth.

Soon after losing the leadership ballot, Stewart resigns from the cabinet, the government and the Tory Party and retires hurt from political life. He returns to his family home in Scotland and learns to breathe again by becoming a flaneur of nature.

“One morning” as Stewart is out walking “a roe deer, leaping from the lower field, lands next to me. Startled eyes meet startled eyes.” And then with a bound, “the veins straining against the tight surface of his frightened body,” the deer heads for freedom. •

The post A love gone wrong appeared first on Inside Story.

Apart from its isolation, Tasmania encapsulates extremities. First there is the primeval environment, containing the second-largest rainforest of its kind in the world, now besieged. In the past there has been the near extermination of the Indigenous people, while the simultaneous convict experience was more pervasive and shaping than elsewhere in the country. There remain persisting poverty and lower levels of education among the non-Indigenous than almost anywhere else. All these elements give the island state a particular importance in understanding the nature of settler Australia.

“Change came slowly,” Flanagan writes of the Tasmania he grew up in, and until recently “it was possible to conceive the nineteenth century as a time not unlike now.” The past receded more quickly, “people died younger and memory struggled to see over the great embankments of history — the war, the depression, the Great War.” Yet it projected forward in unrecognised continuities: everyday speech was still peppered with convict terms; labourers on the big sheep properties still received the old convict rations, supplemented by meagre wages. Occasionally a cruel convict man trap, designed to ensnare escapees, might be found in the bush.

Rural Tasmania, while cluttered with ancient gossip, was in denial about convict ancestry and the persistent Aboriginal presence. Except on rare, electrifying occasions — as when the limousine of the visiting governor was stolen by some miners who drove it about with an Aboriginal local character in the governor’s seat, waving to the locals. “A bitter joke which cut every way,” writes Flanagan.

The author is highly appreciative of his parents: of his schoolmaster father, solid and decent, a survivor of Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, who — perhaps partly because of that — believed in the power of small acts of kindness. And his mother, impetuous, boisterous, funny, crimped by the codes of her time and place but for all that fiercely loving. “My parents were frugal,” Flanagan writes, “not simply because they had to be careful, but because they saw little reason in making life about money.” They faced the world with dignity, looking at fate squarely in the eye.

The full contrast came some time after. Flanagan left school, worked as a labourer, and had a near-death experience on the Franklin River (grippingly narrated here). He then decided to go to university, and on graduating won a coveted Rhodes scholarship. But he came to see Oxford, with its superior airs, as a citadel of conceit. He ended up rejecting it — and academic history as well. “In Tasmania,” he came to write, “history was not a story of progress… nothing ever quite went forward and everything finally returned. There was no straight line… only a circle.”

To this Flanagan would eventually bring a necessary double-sightedness — on the one hand understanding what impels the agents of destruction but, at the same time, “be on the side that loses everything.” Readers of The Narrow Road to the Deep North will be familiar with this approach, evident in the empathetic depiction of Japanese officers on the Burma–Thailand railway.

Question 7’s hybridity comes to the fore with two great arcs that run through the book. To round them out, fictional techniques are used — very tellingly in the case of the romance between H.G. Wells and Rebecca West. But Flanagan’s primary purpose is to link Wells’s famous novel The War of the Worlds to Tasmania. This is easier done than might be imagined, for there is a passing reference to the eradication of the Tasmanians in the text, while it seems the germinating idea for that novel had been Wells’s discussion of the Tasmanians’ fate with his brother, as they went for a walk in the English countryside. In a daring leap, Flanagan calls the invading British settlers Martians, and — in retrospective revenge — decides the denizens of Oxford are best tagged that way too.

The second arc is no less daring. A second Wells novel (of 1914) is cited as the first to deal with atomic war. Flanagan traces the development of the idea of the atom bomb, again resorting at times to fictional techniques. His purpose is singular. The opening section tells of his journey to the site of the prison camp where his father was a slave labourer, but finds even the memory of it scarcely remains. At the same time, he knows that had there been an American invasion of Japan instead of the Bomb, his father would have been killed along with all the other Allied prisoners. Richard Flanagan cancelled; instead, a child of the A-bomb. The fortuity of his birth, the fortuity of his later survival. Contingency and fate, and the arbitrariness of destiny, loom large in this book. It poses many fundamental questions.

As Peter Carey recently remarked in the Age, “Question 7 may just be the most significant work of Australian art in the last hundred years.” He may very well be right. •

Question 7
By Richard Flanagan | Knopf | $35 | 280 pages

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How rare it is then to read a collection like Alex Miller’s A Kind of Confession: The Writer’s Private World, a rich blend of letters and notebook extracts by one of Australia’s most loved novelists who is still here and still writing. We may mourn the loss of the paper trail since the advent of the internet, but one thing this book demonstrates is that emails can be crafted as carefully and thoughtfully as letters written by hand on the finest notepaper.

Stephanie Miller, who skilfully and sensitively selected and arranged the pieces, notes in her introduction that this book can be read as a complementary volume to her earlier edited collection of her husband’s stories, excerpts and commentary, The Simplest Words, the two books forming, in her words, a kind of autobiography. A Kind of Confession may be seen as a form of life writing as it delves into the inspirations, joys, struggles and frustrations of the storyteller behind Miller’s thirteen (to date) novels and one biography.

In this different kind of confession from most memoirs, Miller’s friends and fellow letter writers share his private world and play a crucial role in it. Most of the words are Miller’s — only occasionally are his friends’ responses included — but the warmth and inclusiveness of his letters create the illusion of multiple voices. Stephanie Miller has also included succinct notes introducing each of the correspondents.

Organised chronologically from the early 1960s to 2023, the letters and notes are diverse and engrossing. As they are written in the perpetual present, time becomes both immediate and retrospective for readers — who may be familiar with many of Miller’s novels — as they observe his ideas developing and dive deep into his life, his beliefs about the writing process, the background to the production of his books, and his reactions to their reception. The journey is absorbing, touching, at times funny and always enlightening.

The correspondents are too many to do justice to in a review, but among them are familiar names, such as writer and philosopher Raimond Gaita, biographer Hazel Rowley, historian Tom Griffiths and artists Rick Amor and John Wolseley. Miller also corresponds with friends he gathers during the writing of his novels and biography. Some appear briefly, others recur.

One with whom Miller discusses literature, politics, his writing highs and lows, and life in general is Ron Sharp, an English professor at Vassar College in New York State, whom Miller met at the Mildura Writers’ Festival in 2004 and with whom he and Stephanie have become close friends. “Ronaldo” is the first to hear about Miller’s tentative plans to research the life of his long-term friend and mentor Max Blatt, as well as his reservations about writing the book that would eventually become the acclaimed biography, Max.

An academic but also a confidant, Sharp is a friend to whom Miller can confess the “zones of emptiness” he is sometimes plunged into or the vulnerability he experiences, familiar to many writers who work outside the academy: “that tightening of the gut every time I see an academic looking sideways at me, as they do.” Another academic correspondent with whom Miller has a warm relationship is Robert Dixon, an Australian literature specialist from the University of Sydney, who organised a 2011 symposium on Miller’s work and later produced an edited collection from it, The Novels of Alex Miller: An Introduction, to which several of the correspondents in this volume contributed essays.

Another regular correspondence is between Miller and his long-time publisher, Annette Barlow, who share such a trusted relationship that he can respond to her suggestions about revisions to The Passage of Love with a pleasant but firm “I hope you won’t be too upset, but I’ve decided not to delete the first twenty or so pages of the book.” Her reply shows a respect and engagement with her author’s work that any writer would envy: “And the ending, Alex! ‘She is one of my present dead. There are a number of them’… evocative, meaningful and stunning.”

A different side of Miller’s personality is shown in an exchange with artist John Wolseley, who lives in the Whipstick Forest in central Victoria, not far from the Millers in Castlemaine, as the two friends enjoy discussing books and jokingly reminiscing about Somerset life and language. “Dearest Alecko the old Gecko,” writes Wolseley, “Begorrah that were a wonderful and nourishing email wot you sent.” A response of Miller’s begins: “Maister, I be delighted to ear from ee! It do my hart much goode. I see that even as a boy, when you painted this lovely picture, you had the soul of colour in your eye already.”

If there is one slight disappointment it is that only one of Miller’s letters to Hazel Rowley is included. Their close friendship was conducted mainly by email between Australia and the United States. Sadly, she died suddenly not long before they were due to meet up in 2011 for a conversation about her joint biography Franklin and Eleanor at Melbourne’s Wheeler Centre. Miller shares his sadness at the silencing of her voice in a letter to Ron Sharp, who had sent him her New York Times obituary.

Alex and Stephanie Miller’s family form a delightful personal thread through A Kind of Confession. He encourages their Berlin-based daughter Kate in her creative ventures and chats about her brother Ross and his family, who live near Castlemaine. “Steph” is a steady undercurrent through the book (we even catch a glimpse of her in one letter, sitting at the breakfast table in her green dressing-gown, the cat on her knees). In an email following a discussion at their local cafe about material from The Passage of Love that Miller is working on, he offers this heartfelt tribute to his wife and true collaborator:

I feel very encouraged from what you said this morning at Apples to begin reworking the ms [manuscript] as Lena in the third person — the standard story-telling voice…

What would I do without you! I think I’m writing a certain story and you read it and see not the story I thought I was failing to write but the story I’m actually writing despite myself.

What can I say? Alxxx

Stephanie literally became Miller’s life support a few years ago when he suffered a serious but puzzling decline in his health. For eighteen months she persevered doggedly in hunting for a neurosurgeon who could diagnose the problem. Eventually they met with a specialist about to retire — “the first one who had observed his patient rather than his screen” — who was able to diagnose the issue. He contacted his son, also a neurosurgeon in Melbourne, who performed the necessary brain surgery successfully.

James Baldwin’s observation that “all art is a kind of confession” is an apt epigraph for this book. Miller emerges as a kind and compassionate man, a humanitarian, whose determination to write underpins his notebooks and correspondence. He notes despairingly in 1971: “I’ve been committed to writing since I was twenty-one, thirteen years. Quite a stretch considering I’ve yet to publish. Still, the seed is eternal.” Publication did not come until 1988, when he was over fifty.

He is a novelist who looks beyond himself to research widely, in books and in person. He even borrowed money to take his wife and young son to China when he was seeking insight into the suicide of his friend Allan O’Hoy, the inspiration for The Ancestor Game. He is a keen and intelligent observer too — of people, of landscape, of the world around him — drawing on the lives of his friends for his characters. Friendships with both white and Aboriginal people form the basis of memorable characters in Journey to the Stone Country and Landscape of Farewell, novels that are even more relevant today, since the failure of the Voice referendum, than when they were written.

Miller is also an introspective writer, searching deep within himself to find the elements to create his characters with truth and honesty. “I live alone in a world of my imagination,” he writes, “contemplating the motives of my characters (who are, I dare say, no more substantial than shadows of myself) that become apparent to them only in the deep interior of their most intimate thoughts and actions.”

Thus, the characters in Miller’s novels have a complex genesis, created from various external sources and from his own profound questioning of himself until they are transformed imaginatively into fictional beings. He warns readers against making too-literal connections, of equating Autumn Laing with Sunday Reed, for instance, writing that “Autumn Laing is the story of an examined life. Autumn’s examined life.” Writer Brenda Walker suggests in her essay in Robert Dixon’s edited collection that “Alex Miller may be Australia’s greatest living novelist,” a claim about which readers of A Kind of Confession can make their own judgements.

Miller’s generosity in reaching out to people leads me to a confession of my own. I am privileged to have a few letters to me included in this book. He contacted me a few years ago after finding inspiration for a character in the novel he was writing in a blurry portrait of Aileen Palmer, glimpsed behind a photo of her better-known parents, Vance and Nettie Palmer, in my biography, Ink in Her Veins. The novel was published as A Brief Affair in 2022. I have only met Alex and Steph a couple of times at book launches, but an epistolary friendship has developed between us that has enriched my life and my writing, for which they have my heartfelt thanks. •

A Kind of Confession: The Writer’s Private World
By Alex Miller | Allen & Unwin | $39.99 | 360 pages

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Her causes are many and diverse, but linked by a unifying thread: always, Sylvie sides with the oppressed. For nearly sixty years she has fought for women’s rights, refugee causes, and for anyone whose treatment she deems unfair. Perhaps the best measure of her conviction is that she holds fast to causes, even at risk of personal cost.

Sylvie traces her radical roots to her Jewish paternal grandparents, David Leber and Rivka Szaladajewska, whose motivating creed was social and political change. Rivka was born on 26 September 1896 to an observant Jewish family in the Polish city of Łódź. She would later reject religion, and her family her, but she maintained a cultural and social connection to Judaism, working at the Grosser orphanage for Jewish children in the central Polish city of Piotrków Trybunalski. Her fierce commitment to the politics of the left, at a time when Jews were among the most prominent advocates for social democratic causes in eastern Europe and Russia, was another point of connection to her Jewish heritage.

David Leber was born in Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland, on 10 January 1887. While the details of his early life are sketchy, he was motivated from a young age by the tenets of social democracy. He was schooled first at a yeshiva, but left religious education to embrace Bundism, the influential secular Jewish movement that agitated for social and labour reform.

Bundism led David to Russia, and trouble. The February revolution of 1917 saw Bundists and Mensheviks align in a union of social democratic parties. When the February, or Menshevik, revolution was supplanted in October by the more radical Bolsheviks, the Bundists who supported Menshevism became pariahs, dismissed by the new regime as ineffectual gradualists and enemies of the communist state.

Though not a Menshevik himself, David was damned by association. His link to the Menshevik cause appears to have led to his arrest and deportation to Siberia. An accusation that he had sought to assassinate a public official may have been the pretext for his arrest. Whether or not he escaped from Siberia or was released, he is thought to have been rescued from the Soviet Union on a British ship.

Now back in Poland, David found work as a waiter, and met Rivka. Worsening anti-Semitism prompted them to leave their homeland for France in 1922. Rivka was pregnant when they made their way west, and a son, Samuel, was born in Paris on 3 December 1922. Against Jewish custom he was not circumcised, and David and Rivka didn’t marry until twelve years after his birth, with Rivka keeping her maiden name. Her choice to be known as Rivka Szaladajewska was both a stab at patriarchal custom and an affirmation of identity. Others might have seen the Polish suffix “jewska” as a millstone, but not her.

David and Rivka became part of a Parisian left-wing milieu that included other Jewish émigrés, among them the Russian-born artist Marc Chagall, with whom they became good friends. John-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were part of the same circle. David and Rivka brought their passions with them to Paris: they were united in their dislike of conventions for which they saw no purpose and in their commitment to social democratic principles and secularism. David continued to see these beliefs as inherent in Bundism: his experiences in Russia didn’t dim his enthusiasm for the Bundist approach to social change. A manifestation of his commitment to community and history was his involvement in founding the Medem Library in 1929, which is still the most important site of Yiddish learning in Europe.

David and Rivka were two of the thousands of Jews ensnared in 1942 by Operation Spring Wind, in which officials of the Vichy French state cooperated with the Nazi regime to arrest foreign and stateless Jews living in France. The operation was the first step in a plan to send Jews east to Auschwitz and their deaths. The two of them were arrested on 16 July in the infamous Vél d’Hiv round-up, interned at the Drancy transit camp in Paris, and then deported to Auschwitz on 24 July as part of convoy number 10. They were killed at Auschwitz, probably later in 1942, though when exactly isn’t certain. Rivka is thought to have taken her own life, throwing herself on an electric fence after she learnt that she was to be a victim of one of Josef Mengele’s depraved experiments.

Two years earlier, when the Germans marched on Paris, Rivka and David’s son Sam was a seventeen-year-old school student living with his parents in the 20th arrondissement. His response to the German advance was to cycle to the port of Royan on the Atlantic coast in the hope of finding passage to England. This plan failed and he returned to Paris, where he remained until November 1941, when David and Rivka compelled him to leave the city for Lyon in the zone libre, where he lived with friends.

German occupation of the zone in November 1942 prompted Sam to move to Grenoble, where he worked as a lathe turner before being corralled into the Chantiers de la Jeunesse Française, a national service scheme imposed on French youth by the Vichy state. Released from this obligation in mid 1943, he managed to avoid another, more insidious labour scheme — the Service du Travail Obligatoire, which sent young French men to Germany as indentured labour — by joining the Resistance in late 1943 or early 1944.

For life as a maquisard, Sam chose the stirring alias Serge Rebel, his new surname a testament to his task and heritage: Rebel is the anadrome of Leber. From David and Rivka he had inherited a commitment to the ideals of Bundism and socialism. He had joined the SKIF, the youth wing of the Bundist movement, in 1931, the year he turned nine. A strong anti-communist streak may have been another inheritance, though his opposition was fed also by his own experiences.

During the Spanish civil war of 1936–39, he had travelled to Spain to fight with the Republicans against Franco’s Nationalist forces. He was turned away on account of his youth, but took from the war an understanding that communists had undermined the Republican cause by concerning themselves more with anarchists than fascists.

His dislike of communism hardened when the French Communist Party, echoing Moscow’s line, adopted a neutral position at the start of the second world war, a stance he thought amoral and hopelessly naive. Later, in the Resistance, he objected to the division of the organisation along communist and anti-communist lines as a needless distraction. In his thinking, communists too often missed the point of the fight. And the point of any battle was to act, not to posture.

In the Resistance Sam worked in intelligence and sabotage. He and his fellow maquisards couldn’t spare explosives to destroy railway tracks so prised them out of position, ensuring that carriages travelling the tracks at Grenoble, an important railway junction connecting different parts of France, would tip over. Precious explosives were reserved for attacking factories that sustained the German war effort. In one instance, Sam recalled, bombs were used to kill German soldiers, but more often their targets were objects rather than people, collaborators aside. For traitors, direct violence always seemed justified.

Sam served with the Resistance until the liberation of France. His rewards were the Croix de Guerre, citations for brave conduct and good service, and a bullet wound, sustained during a firefight with German soldiers in March 1944, which led to three months in hospital, a shortened leg and a permanent and painful limp. Several decades on, Sam was diagnosed with motor neurone disease, which doctors linked to spinal damage caused by his limp.

In later years Sam mentioned his war rarely, and usually only when pressed. School students and Holocaust historians sought him out for interviews, seemingly surprised to find a decorated maquisard living in McKinnon in suburban Melbourne. Sam obliged these requests, with humility and a trace of bemusement. He had fought the war against fascism as a solemn and obvious duty, a position that precluded the shaping of recollections as personal achievement. The fact he was speaking in his third language, after Yiddish and French, may also have shaped his responses, which could seem blunt.

“Sometimes an action went wrong and people got killed and things like that,” he told two interviewers in the 1980s. Nazi collaborators, he added, were “interdicted” on their way to or from work. These answers, on first reading dispassionate and perhaps even callous, did not reflect the man. Rather, they hint at Sam’s lifelong and noble belief in the primacy of the collective cause over the claims of the individual.

After the war Sam returned to Paris, a city that had visited both kindness and cruelty on the Lebers. His parents had found blessed sanctuary there in the 1920s; twenty years later, it was the place of their betrayal. He met Madeleine Benczkowski, and they married in 1948. His new wife, also French-born of Polish Jewish heritage, had been born in Paris on 20 January 1926. Her parents, Herschel and Chaya Benczkowski, had emigrated west from Poland in the years after the first world war.

Herschel was murdered at Drancy in 1942. Madeleine, her brother Sam and their mother Chaya survived the war thanks to the people smugglers who spirited them from Paris to Lyon, where they lived under false names and Madeleine was able to earn money as a furrier’s apprentice. In Madeleine’s vocabulary, “people smuggler” could be a term of endearment and a pejorative. She knew three types of people smuggler — humanitarians, money-makers and “bastards” who betrayed Jews to Nazis. The Benczkowskis’ saviour was a humanitarian and a money-maker, having taken payment in jewellery.

Sam and Madeleine began their married life in Paris as tailors, making men’s trousers from home. Their daughter Sylvie was born on 30 May 1950. The next year they resolved to emigrate to Australia, their decision to leave France prompted by the Korean war and the threat of another world war. They considered Canada, but chose Australia on the advice of Rose and Leon Goldblum, Sam’s cousin and her husband, who were living in Melbourne and recommended the city as a good, safe place to raise children. Rose and Leon were Auschwitz survivors. A preference for a warmer climate may also have influenced Sam and Madeleine’s choice. The Lebers sailed on the Italian ship Sydney, arriving at Station Pier, Port Melbourne, in February 1952.

The family settled into Australian life in Grey Street, St Kilda, within a milieu that offered comfort and connections to the world from which they had come. Melbourne in the 1950s, and St Kilda in particular, was home to a community of French-speaking Jews from France and Belgium. In their company Sam and Madeleine found friends with whom they shared a common language and aspects of a common heritage. As for so many other migrants across time and place, such connections to the familiar were a sustaining tonic in difficult years.

Before the war, Madeleine had hoped to be an accountant, Sam an engineer. After the war, steady work and a safe home were aspiration enough. Madeleine sought work as a jewellery shop assistant but was rejected on account of her French accent, so she returned to what she knew, working from home as a seamstress. Sam worked as a toolmaker, and fitter and turner. He joined the Australian Metal Workers’ Union: the union movement, and the postwar Australian Labor Party, reflected some of his Bundist ideals.

For Sylvie, the initial contrast between life in Paris and life in Melbourne was less abrupt than it was for her parents. She spoke French at home and Yiddish at her kindergarten at the Bialystoker Centre at 19 Robe Street, St Kilda, which served also as a hostel for Jewish migrants and refugees from Europe. The Alliance Française, where Sam and Madeleine borrowed French-language books, was on the same street. Such was Sylvie’s immersion in this European milieu that she knew little English when she started at St Kilda Park Primary School. Daniel, her brother, was born in 1959.

***

If Sam, who died in 2011 aged eighty-eight, was an “activist,” he probably didn’t recognise it. His engagement with the political was not a conscious choice but the manifestation of a commitment to social democratic ideals; in his conception, actions gave honour and worth to thoughts. To be political, if that’s what others called it, was simply his way of being.

Sylvie has followed the same path, her activism inseparable from her work and passions. In this regard she is her father’s daughter. Madeleine, who died in 2015, was a quieter social democrat than her husband: she voted Labor and hoped for a society ordered on fairness and merit rather than money and privilege, but was not overtly political.

In 1979 Sylvie and her friend Eve Glenn formed Girl’s Garage Band, a seven-woman punk rock band with Sylvie on bass guitar, Eve on lead guitar, and Fran Kelly, not yet an ABC journalist, on vocals. The band became better known as Toxic Shock, the name a pointed reference to the bacterial syndrome associated with tampon use that at the time was harming and killing many women. The band’s 1981 single “Intoxication,” written by Sylvie, protested at the complicity of tampon manufacturers in the prevalence of the syndrome.

Through Toxic Shock, Sylvie could voice specific protest, rail against the patriarchal nature of the punk and post-punk scenes and the music industry generally, and express her passion for music. Give-Men-a-Pause, a women’s music show she hosted on 3RRR in the early 1980s, offered another stage to voice thoughts on life and music. In a 2015 article about the contemporary Australian popular music scene, she wrote of her enduring love for playing and listening to music, and her dismay at the persistence of the boys’ club that Toxic Shock strove to disrupt.

For Sylvie, music has been a passion, a motivation and, on occasion, a refuge from horror. In Queensland in 1972, some years before forming Toxic Shock, she was raped and very nearly murdered. She has written with compelling honesty of these crimes, the toll they have taken on her mind and body over half a century, and her determination always to fight back lest “the bastards win.”

Her response to the assault might be described as Leberian, for its hallmarks are concern for others and a remarkable and enduring capacity to resist. Initially she sought to shield her parents from the attack, worried that they, as European Jews who had lived through the war, had experienced enough anguish. Later, her understanding of the Lebers’ commitment to social justice motivated her to speak publicly about what she had suffered. A year after she was assaulted, she and a group of friends founded Women Against Rape, Victoria’s first rape crisis centre, housed within the Women’s Health Centre on Johnston Street, Collingwood. Women Against Rape supported victims in every way possible, while advocating simultaneously for legal change and community education.

Sylvie is a passionate advocate for the rights of refugees and asylum seekers, the experiences of her parents and grandparents having taught her something of the pain and indignity of being denied a home. When Arne Rinnan, captain of the infamous MV Tampa, made his last voyage into Australian waters before retirement, Sylvie and other Melbourne members of the Refugee Action Collective took to a small boat so that they might approach his cargo ship and salute him for his role in rescuing imperilled refugees during the Tampa affair of 2001. Rinnan’s moral example elicited an idiosyncratic touch: to signal her admiration, Sylvie fashioned a placard decorated with a love heart. Love, Sylvie believes, “is a revolutionary emotion.”

Sylvie named her daughter Colette Anna — Colette for the pioneering French author and feminist, and Anna for a great aunt who survived Auschwitz. Colette is a social worker, committed to many of the same causes as her mother. She works to prevent violence against women, and argues for the rights of refugees, including protesting their abysmal treatment by Australian governments, Liberal and Labor. Colette is another Leber ratbag, which makes her mother proud. It’s in the blood. •

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Thus, in 2013, while working on his biography of David Cornwell — known the world over as John le Carré — Sisman understood immediately what Cornwell was saying to him in the following letter:

It is no coincidence that in Spy [Who Came in from the Cold], A Perfect Spy, and A Constant Gardener [sic], the protagonist kills himself. Ditto The Tailor of Panama. Enough?

As Sisman writes with considerable understatement in his latest book, The Secret Life of John le Carré, “I was alarmed.” His project was at risk and his subject was hinting that he might kill himself.

Cornwell’s letter was triggered when Sisman revealed that he had accumulated evidence of Cornwell’s repeated infidelity during his marriage to his second wife, Jane Cornwell (née Eustace). Some of the relationships in question were shortlived, some never even consummated. Some were conducted almost entirely via letters, with only one or two meetings in the flesh. More than a few were of a long duration and had a significant effect on both Cornwell and the women with whom he had the affairs. Common to all was fervent passion on Cornwell’s part, an insistence on secrecy, and evasion and dissembling as he extricated himself from relationships when they came to demand he make honest choices.

Sisman had not gone hunting for this material. Word of one affair arrived during a drunken discussion at a party about the merits of various Proust translations. Word of another came from Cornwell’s half-sister. Another Sisman came across while reading letters in Cornwell’s home. He heard of more still from Cornwell’s friends. Sisman was not wholly interested in this part of Cornwell’s private life, per se, and nor did he initially think that the affairs were important. And yet he saw a connection with Cornwell’s oeuvre: “I could scarcely ignore the fact that betrayal was a current theme of his work.”

Over time, as he learned more about these affairs and detected their influence in Cornwell’s fiction — in how characters resembled lovers and how Cornwell took new lovers for each new book and discarded them shortly afterward — Sisman became convinced of their importance. Cornwell’s behaviour was a key to his fiction, unlocking a duality and tension that seemed necessary for Cornwell to write. According to his lovers, Cornwell went out of his way to provoke this tension: he insisted on using dead letter boxes for correspondence, recorded his lovers’ addresses and phone numbers in code, would mislead taxi drivers about their destinations, and would give the women cash to book trips and holidays so that he could evade his wife’s scrutiny.

Sisman and Cornwell had enjoyed a relatively fruitful relationship since Sisman’s proposal, in 2010, to write the biography. Cornwell, cautious at first, had been “very divided about how to respond.” His messy private life was in conflict with his wish that Sisman write “without restraints.”

His fears had been assuaged by a formal agreement between the two men in which Cornwell agreed to grant access to his archives, offer introductions and be interviewed at length. Sisman, in turn, agreed to allow Cornwell the opportunity to correct factual errors and advise whether “any passages should be amended or removed on the basis that they do not give due respect to the sensitivities of living third parties.” Introductions that Cornwell readily supplied testified to his willingness to live up to this agreement. “I have put my trust in him,” Cornwell told an old friend and former lover. “I have no editorial control over what he writes, beyond checking dates, places, & bald facts.”

In the early days, Cornwell seemed pleased by Sisman’s efforts. “Wherever you’ve been, you’ve left a benign impression, for which I am very grateful,” he wrote him, in January 2012. “I can’t imagine how I will come out of it, but I think that’s what drew me into it: the notion that this was never something I could do for myself, & that somehow, whatever the outcome, this was going to be a gift of sorts to my children; a gift of truth, insofar as there ever is one, & it can be told.”

And yet, by the end of the year, as Cornwell learned that Sisman had contacted at least one former lover, Cornwell’s pleasure and peace of mind vanished. “I admire your work & your tenacity; I would wish that in your position I would show the same acumen; I have a genuine respect for your tact & integrity. I also have a sense of, on the strength of recent experience, of impending disaster in my life — i.e. in the lives of those I hold most dear — and I can’t allow any more time to pass without expressing it to you, and indicating to you the heavy footmarks of your recent explorations.”

Cornwell wanted to revise the terms of their agreement, principally to make the biography “authorised” and thereby, presumably, denuded of the material about his infidelities. Sisman resisted, but Cornwell’s intimation of suicide meant he couldn’t ignore the grave implications of continuing without compromise. An uneasy détente followed when Cornwell seemed to “calm down” and recover his composure. Sisman continued to work, but there was no denying that the relationship between biographer and subject was changing.

Sisman mentioned he had met with another of Cornwell’s lovers; Cornwell mentioned that he was contemplating writing a memoir — a book that could overshadow or gazump Sisman’s biography. Sisman responded by proposing a shorter first volume that would be published before Cornwell’s memoir and then, after Cornwell’s death, publishing a second volume that would cover Cornwell’s life after the end of the cold war. Jane Cornwell, meanwhile, suggested her husband’s patience with the whole project was flagging: “The constant pressure for more sessions with David may make him feel that he has to draw a line and say, That’s enough.”

“We feel we are living with a ticking bomb,” Cornwell soon told Sisman, and over the year that followed Cornwell made repeated efforts to dispose of the bomb. He took exception to the proposal for two volumes (from fear that it would suggest, as many critics already did, that he had lost his subject when the cold war ended), pushed again and again for a change in the agreement with Sisman, then shelved his memoir and agreed to go back to the original plan.

When he was given the draft manuscript, Cornwell was predictably dissatisfied with its conclusions, tone and implications. “You can’t expect me to enjoy, least of all applaud, my own trivialisation,” he wrote. At one point Cornwell complained that the book was “all warts and no all,” and became suspicious and panicked: “There are glaring omissions that almost seem deliberate. There are a string of small calumnies and one or two large ones.”

Cornwell used every advantage he could, it seems, to push Sisman into changes. He claimed that the biography could hurt the forthcoming “sensational years” in his career and implied that Sisman’s project was responsible for the limp, heartless novel that he had laboured over and then shelved: “It’s pretty clear to me that my (exaggerated) apprehensions about the biography played a part.” In the background of these negotiations and arguments, for Sisman, lurked predecessors who had failed to produce the goods: the journalist Graham Lord, whose effort had been sued into disappearing, and Robert Harris, the journalist-turned-novelist who had been encouraged, then discouraged, then monstered into silence. There was also the possibility of Cornwell’s withdrawing his cooperation and waiving of copyright, which would all but kill Sisman’s book.

In the face of all this, Sisman hedged, acquiesced, resisted. He compromised on little things, deleting references to “Huns” and “Krauts” in Cornwell’s correspondence out of deference to his German readership. He took in edits, tweaked passages. At times he pointed out to Cornwell that, in taking exception to something, he was disputing himself: “You asked me in your list of the questions what my source was for saying that you had fallen out of love with Ronnie [Cornwell, David Cornwell’s father], and at the time I couldn’t remember, so I took this out,” Sisman wrote, in May 2015. “But I have just stumbled across it, at the beginning of the last section of your wonderful New Yorker article…”

Sisman was understandably feeling “divided in two.” He was grappling with the competing duties he owed — to truth and transparency, to his subject and the imperative to ameliorate the prospect of harm, to the ownership of the book he was writing — yet he also simply wanted to get the job done. His work was being chipped away, his energies were flagging. He wanted “simply to get to the end of the process, one way or another.” He got there in October 2015, when John le Carré: The Biography was published by Bloomsbury.

“I’m sure you’re having a great time, so enjoy it,” Cornwell wrote him, on the day of publication. “What’s done is done.”

Cornwell had, in many ways, won out. As Sisman recounts, reviewers of John le Carré, while otherwise praising it, noted that the detailed and relatively open account of Cornwell’s life changed profoundly in its second half, just as Cornwell married Jane Eustace. “At a certain point,” wrote Theo Tait in the London Review of Books, “the reader is banished from Cornwell’s life.” Certainly, from page 320 — exactly halfway — the book becomes repetitive and distant: yet another novel, yet another dust-up with publishers and literary agents (Cornwell was perennially dissatisfied with the publishing industry), yet another award, yet another film or television adaptation, and yet more grumblings from Cornwell about snubs from the “literary establishment.” Hanging over all this were two weighty paragraphs, full of portent but shorn of the information and evidence that might have backed them up, on page 320:

In Jane [Eustace], David had found a helpmeet, a companion, who would support and encourage him in his writing for the rest of his days. She recognised from early in their life together that she would have to share him with other women. The restless, self-destructive search for love is part of his nature. It has led him into impulsive, shortlived affairs; none of them has threatened the stability of his relationship with Jane. “I think we’re more monogamous than most couples,” he told one guest. For him, she would always be his best friend, his wise counsel and his anchor through every storm.

David’s infidelities have created a duality and a tension that became a necessary drug for his writing, often brought about by deliberate incongruity. The secrecy involved and the risk of exposure have themselves been stimulating, bringing a dangerous edge to the routine of everyday existence. From an early stage in their relationship Jane has suffered David’s extramarital adventures, and tried to protect him from their consequences. Though it has not been easy for her, she has behaved with quiet dignity. “Nobody can have all of David,” she said recently.

That comment of Jane’s, Sisman suspects, was dictated to her by Cornwell as an answer to the indignities she had been forced to bear by her husband and his biographer. It was, of course, also a message to Sisman — that he would not be permitted the full life he was hoping to depict. Perhaps too it was a message to the public-at-large that, no matter the claim John le Carré: The Biography made to being definitive, it was not the whole story,

If that message was too subtle, Cornwell made sure to underline it. Within ten days of publication of Sisman’s book, Cornwell announced the revival of his memoir, The Pigeon Tunnel, to be published the following year. Sisman knew immediately that the announcement’s timing had been designed to damage his biography. Correspondence in the posthumous A Private Spy: The Letters of John le Carré (2022) confirms this: writing to Tom Stoppard, Cornwell called his memoir a “sort of antidote to Sisman,” and in the introduction to Pigeon Tunnel he conspicuously pulled rank on his biographer:

A recently published account of my life offers thumbnail versions of one or two of the stories, so it naturally pleases me to reclaim them as my own, tell them in my own voice, and invest them as best I can with my own feelings.

Yet Cornwell still hadn’t exhausted his ambivalence about Sisman’s biography. It is possible to detect his feelings in A Legacy of Spies (2017), in which an aged Peter Guillam, former right-hand man to spymaster George Smiley, is called from retirement to answer for the events of The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1962), the book that made Cornwell’s career. Amid interrogations and documents exposing again and again the gap between reality as recorded on paper and as Guillam recalls it (or, at least, is willing to explain it), Cornwell writes of the fugue that sweeps over the former spy:

Humiliation, certainly. Frustration, bewilderment, no question. Outrage at having my past dug up and thrown in my face. Guilt, shame, apprehension, any amount. And all directed in a single blast of pain and incomprehension…

For Sisman, this and the other novels that Cornwell was now writing were “less interesting and more formulaic” than his earlier works and unwittingly betrayed the absence of tension in Cornwell’s life as he aged. By now in his eighties, his lovers were infrequent. “Without a new muse for each book, his inspiration dried up.”

And while the le Carré novels kept coming — angrily railing against Brexit and the dangers of populism, each one more uneven and slighter than its predecessor — Sisman was aware that his dealings with Cornwell were likely soon to change. Since 2010, his relationship with Cornwell had fulfilled a basic tenet of biography. As he puts it: “The subject is, almost by definition, the senior figure; the biographer is in a subordinate position. Each is thinking about posterity. In any agreement between them there will be an element of quid pro quo: while the subject remains alive he or she retains some measure of control, even if the restraints are rarely visible.” Once the subject was dead, however, that changes: “The biographer is likely to have the last word.”

Thus, three years after Cornwell’s death and two years after Jane’s, we have Sisman’s Secret Life of John le Carré. The book is not a substitute for the biography, nor a condensation of that book. It is, Sisman writes, a supplement to it, containing the material he felt obliged to cut and information that has come to light since. The idea was seeded by Cornwell’s eldest son, Simon, back in 2014–15 when tensions between Cornwell and Sisman were at their height: “He fully agreed with me that David’s relations with women were key to a full understanding of his work, and proposed that I should keep a ‘secret annexe’ for eventual publication in some form after both David and Jane were dead.”

At its most obvious, the Secret Life goes a significant way to backing up the pregnant paragraphs that Sisman wrote but could not provide evidence for in the original biography. In considerable detail, he tracks Cornwell’s infidelities and their influence on his fiction. He establishes correlations between lovers and characters — journalist Janet Lee Stevens was central to The Little Drummer Girl (1982), activist Yvette Pierpaoli was the model for Tessa Quayle in The Constant Gardener (2001) — and shows Cornwell’s awareness of their influence on him. His infidelities, Cornwell admitted to Sisman, were not a “dark part” of his life, separate from his work, “but, alas, integral to it, & inseparable.”

A good deal of it is dark. While still married to his first wife, Cornwell lured Liz Tollinton, a typist in MI5, to become his secretary and then seduced her. After six months during which she attempted suicide, he bought her a ring that she wore on her engagement finger — then he dumped her as both lover and secretary. He seduced the family au pair, who fell pregnant and suffered a miscarriage, and accused her of wanting to sell his secrets to newspapers. American journalist Janet Lee Stevens had an affair with Cornwell and was killed in the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut while pregnant with a child that might have been his.

Cornwell was also mercurial with Sue Dawson, a researcher who met him during recordings for his audiobooks and become his lover afterward. During a long-running affair, he once leapt onto Dawson, pinned her down with his forearm on her throat and accused her of walking in such a way that his wife might hear, through the telephone, her heels clacking on the floor. Dawson observed that Cornwell took as much satisfaction from reading his own work as he did from sex; after their affair, when she considered writing a memoir, he sued to ensure it would not see the light of day (it was published in 2022 under a pseudonym).

“Much of David’s behaviour described in these pages is reprehensible: dishonesty, evasion and lying, for decade after decade,” Sisman writes. “Does it lower him in our estimation to know that he lied to his wife? Yes, of course it does; it is natural to feel dismay when those whom we admire behave less than well. But few individuals would be comfortable in subjecting their private behaviour to public scrutiny.”

Nor would all biographers be so comfortable exposing the ups and downs of their relationships with their subjects. In this vein, The Secret Life of John le Carré fits into an admirable tradition of biographers writing, with apparent candour, about the tensions and ethical problems of the form. If he is not as self-flagellating as James Atlas in The Shadow in the Garden (2018), nor as revealing of his own doubts and regrets about his own choices during the years working on Cornwell’s biography, Sisman is remarkably forthcoming about his subject’s interventions. Excerpts from letters are abundant, and photos of these and typescripts of his own manuscript — with Cornwell’s handwritten edits — offer insight about the long and wearying struggle of writing the biography of a living person.

It is frequently fascinating, always salutary, and a fitting reminder of Samuel Johnson’s declaration of the biographer’s duty: “If we owe any regard to the memory of the dead, there is yet more respect to be paid to knowledge, to virtue, and to truth.” •

The Secret Life of John le Carré
By Adam Sisman | Profile Books | $32.99 | 208 pages

The post The biographer’s last word appeared first on Inside Story.

Michael Wolff, prolific chronicler of American media mega-trends, wrote a book about it, Autumn of the Moguls. Network TV was a mess, he said. The music business was a mess. Jayson Blair’s saga of journalistic fraud at the New York Times had left Arthur Sulzberger Jr “not at all a sun god, but merely a mogul manqué.” A “countdown” was under way for ageing Rupert Murdoch at News Corporation, Sumner Redstone at Viacom, Michael Eisner at Disney. Barry Diller was giving the media industry “the finger,” leaving behind his “old mogul life” in charge of a Hollywood studio and TV network to concentrate on a company that owned Expedia, Ticketmaster and other digital businesses.

The idea resonated strongly in Australia. Rupert Murdoch had started out there a long time ago and now dominated the commercial media scene with another elder, the third-generation Packer mogul, Kerry. When Kerry died in 2005 and son James sold the family’s cherished television business, the forecast for moguls looked on target, though not especially astute given the older Packer’s heart had stopped once before.

Moguls generally, though, were hanging on. “Self-made” media boss Kerry Stokes was now being described as a mogul, having taken control of the Seven Network in the 1990s and then added newspapers when cross-media ownership rules were relaxed in the 2000s.

In America, the autumn proved long. There is still enough life in Murdoch moguldom for Michael Wolff to have published another book about its impending death, The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire, just the other day. While Redstone did finally die, Eisner’s successor at Disney, Bob Iger, stayed and stayed, buying and buying. He stepped down, only to be called back as CEO last year. Tech titans Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos added “media” to their realms, Jobs through his own investment in Pixar and Apple’s pioneering plays in digital music, movies and television; Bezos by acquiring the Washington Post and founding Amazon Studios and Prime Video.

Then, a year ago, the CEO of another Silicon Valley giant decided to buy one of the town squares of online speech. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter might be going as poorly as AOL/Time Warner, the fin-de-siècle merger that Wolff thought marked “the beginning of the end” and the start of “a new phase, a whole new era, of resistance and revision.” But it happened, Twitter continues to exist, though with a new name and direction, and Musk is still in charge, behaving much like those mercurial, autocratic moguls of old. Obituaries are being written for the company and the deal, but so too is a new book about Musk. It devotes a lot of pages to the Twitter/X saga and its content-moderation challenges, and it is written by no less than the biographer of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Henry Kissinger: Walter Isaacson.

Media moguls don’t endure merely because particular men live long: they all die in the end. Nor do they survive because the specific media technologies they happen to control turn out to be attractive to users, although that helps: some moguls have been good at parlaying control of one medium into dominance of another, from radio and newspapers into television; from movies to programming for TV, video cassettes and DVDs; from free-to-air broadcast television to multi-channel cable and satellite subscription services. Not even the propensity for some with fortunes from other fields to crave power over a society’s messages can fully explain the dogged durability of media moguls.

Moguls endure because their ranks are constantly replenished by a culture that craves them and because storytellers find subjects to satisfy the hunger. Exactly which of society’s messages constitute “media” has proved malleable. Of newspapers, news and information, Wolff wrote in Autumn, “If you knew anything about anything, you understood them to be not just equivocal businesses but plastic concepts. They were in transition and if you weren’t ready to be part of that transformation you and your business would die.”

More broadly, he thought a mogul was “an adventurer, a soldier, a conqueror, even a crusader, and, yes, a saviour, willing to march off and take territory and subdue populations and embrace the unknown and do whatever was necessary to do to make the future possible ― no matter what the future was.”

That is the kind of person Walter Isaacson saw in Elon Musk — pioneer of Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla — and it was why he wanted to write about him. He had seen the type before. Steve Jobs, too, was a man with huge ambition and capacity to direct the building of new products and experiences, to transform the lives of the people who used them and the industries that created them. Jobs is referred to several times in Elon Musk, and it is clear that Isaacson sees the two in a similar frame. They are heroes standing in the way of American Decline, outsized personalities who think big and take risks while controlling every detail. They stamp themselves on their enterprises and outputs. Their personal quests, he thinks, shift the nation and the world.

Musk agreed to let Isaacson “shadow” him for two years, and Isaacson tells us what he saw and heard. With Musk’s encouragement, he interviewed “friends, colleagues, family members, adversaries, and ex-wives” as well, and he tells us what they told him. This method makes it a book in two parts.

In the first part, the biographer is assembling evidence about things that have already happened. A lot of this is familiar from other works about Musk, especially the amateur psycho-sleuthing about a brutal upbringing and possible Asperger’s producing a ruthless guy who struggles with empathy but dreams big, drives people hard, sometimes sleeps in his own factories, and achieves the impossible over and over again. Ashlee Vance and Tim Higgins have covered this and it is not clear that Isaacson adds much to their excellent work beyond the constant presence of Musk’s own voice.

Once Isaacson is there himself from 2021, in the thick of the unfolding events, the second part of the book becomes a different exercise. The biographer is now a witness to the roiling present, not an inquisitor about history. How reliable a witness is for the reader to judge, but we are there for the thrilling ride. Isaacson becomes part of Musk’s family, a trusted confidante. He is in Musk’s house, his car. He receives messages from him at crazy hours about really weird stuff. He offers advice, judges Musk’s moves.

While he is doing all this, he gets lucky. Musk, already a mogul, decides to buy Twitter. Is this “media”? If so, Michael Wolff’s autumn is over. Elon Musk is going to become a media mogul in front of Walter Isaacson’s eyes.

Or is it the other way around? Is it Musk who has got lucky? With his road-tested storyteller in the passenger seat, his every word, every angle, every image, will be recorded, stored, shaped. A book, half-written already. What better time for “an adventurer, a soldier, a conqueror, even a crusader, and, yes, a saviour” to march off and take media? •

Elon Musk
By Walter Isaacson | Simon & Schuster | $59.99 | 670 pages

The post Making media moguls appeared first on Inside Story.

That comic song charts how a whiskey-loving hod carrier, Tim Finnegan, falls to his death while hungover, only to revive miraculously at his own wake when a bucket of whiskey thrown in a fight splashes the liquor on his head. Up Tim rises, berating those around him, crying “t’underin’ Jaysus, do you think I was dead?” Joyce knowingly deploys the song’s title, but by eliminating the apostrophe he gives himself freedom to explore questions of life and death, dream and reality, myth, religion, philosophy, history, language and much more beyond the scope of the song.

At the most superficial level, for example, “Finnegan” suggests endings (from the French word fin) and repetition (“egans” hints at “again,” the plural “s” implying more than one “again”) while “Wake” advertises the act of “waking” that each of us repeats endlessly, until we don’t, after which we enter (to quote Raymond Chandler) “The Big Sleep,” which, for atheists at least, is endless. But at least for the Irish, as the song reminds us, a subsequent ceremony or “wake” celebrates the dead person’s life. We must die to deserve a wake, and eventually and inevitably the people who attend the wakes of others become the guests of honour at their own.

This sense of potentially infinite beginnings and endings is built into the first word we read in Finnegans Wake — “riverrun” — which pulses with visual and vocal potency. Joyce’s games are afoot before we know it, though, with the absence of a capital “R” at the beginning of “riverrun” indicating that we are not so much at the start of the novel as already somewhere within its insistent stream.

The reader new to Finnegans Wake (spoiler alert) must wait 628 pages in the Penguin edition to read the beginning of that sentence, which loops back to “riverrun.” In a sense this novel never ends. Many potential readers never get that far. Or, if they know this fun fact about Finnegans Wake, they flip to the end, read the start of that sentence, nod their head in recognition and place the book back on the shelf. In a career teaching literature at university, this reviewer has only ever met three people who have read the book from cover to cover.

Note that I did not say three other people. For while I think that Joyce’s Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses are among the great literary achievements of the twentieth century, I admit to never having finished Finnegans Wake, nor in fact got anywhere close, wandering several times around its foothills before turning back, mystified.

Gabrielle Carey’s slim new book, James Joyce: A Life, is written for me and for people like me, including those who have (as yet) not read a word of Joyce. Indeed, the dust jacket of the book advertises that “If you know nothing about James Joyce but would like to — without the bother of reading him,” or “If you know a little about James Joyce and would like to know more but not too much,” or “If you are a die-hard Joycean who has spent a lifetime puzzling over his work but know nothing about his life,” then “this is the book for you.”

Of the three groups the third is the least likely to have many members, if only because Joyce’s life, and the Dublin he inhabited and left as a young man in order to become a writer, is so intertwined with his own work. It is hard to think that someone might have puzzled over his writing for a lifetime and not know anything about this writer’s life. But the other two groups should have enthusiastic members, and Carey’s posthumously published account (she died earlier this year at the age of sixty-four) is serious enough to encourage new readers by presenting engaging and meaty matter, while being light-hearted enough to entertain.

Carey has read Finnegans Wake, although she was honest enough to admit several years ago that the task took her and her reading group from 2004 to 2021. Her book is a much less time-consuming affair, being written to make converts, not just for Finnegans Wake but for Joyce generally. As she notes in an Apologia: “I offer this incomplete story of the life of James Joyce as a loving in memoriam.”

Joyce, like Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, Gertrude Stein and other great Modernist figures, is often treated with a numbing or crushing solemnity, as a figure we feel we should like or at least grudgingly admire in order to be, or to feel, sophisticated. Carey does away with this solemnity, her short (130-page) book offering a quirky, always lively take on Joyce’s life threaded with details and anecdotes about his work. For many people a further attraction is that it is not burdened with footnotes and other scholarly apparatus.

Broken into eighty-four bite-sized pieces (with a short Coda to take us beyond Joyce’s own life) Carey’s book is enthusiastic and intelligent, her portrait of the artist rendering Joyce as brilliant and incessantly driven to write, but also as a flawed and exasperating figure, selfish, self-pitying, smutty and fickle. As Carey tells it, he is someone you would find fascinating to meet — perhaps until, like Tim Finnegan, the drink kicked in.

Unlike Finnegans Wake, Carey begins at the beginning: “James Augustine Aloysius Joyce was born on 2 February: Candlemas Day.” Given Joyce’s Jesuit schooling, so acutely captured in A Portrait of the Artist, Carey might have focused on the Catholic resonances of his middle names Augustine and Aloysius. Instead, she introduces a traditional English rhyme on Candlemas, and mentions that Candlemas is also Groundhog Day and that Joyce arranged to have Ulysses published on his fortieth birthday.

Her approach throughout foregrounds associations and connections, what she calls “a bower bird approach,” rather than historical sequence. So, section 1 (barely longer than a page) starts with Joyce’s birth and ends with a reference to Finnegans Wake. There are positives and negatives to this tactic, one negative being that (to use another metaphor) the book has at times a slightly scattergun feel, while one positive is that readers are entertained by a life rich in amusing and intriguing associations. Given that its central character himself gloried in finding, creating, embellishing and mocking associations across all aspects of life, this seems entirely appropriate.

An early example helps to explain how this approach works. Joyce suffered from astraphobia, a fear of thunder and lightning. In section 2, Carey connects this biographical detail to meteorology and to language and literature, noting how Finnegans Wake has ten “thunderwords” in it. These, she explains, are “100-letter words, incorporating words from other languages and with multiple meanings,” one of which appears on the first page of Finnegans Wake: “bababadalgharaghtakaminninarronnkonnbronntonnerronn-tuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk!” Thankfully she adds that “while it looks like nonsense, it is actually made up of the word thunder in various languages” including Hindi and Japanese, and that it embodies a linguistic representation “of one of Joyce’s favourite themes: the thunderous sound of the fall of man.”

It is probably worth mentioning at this stage to “those who know nothing about James Joyce but would like to” that by comparison with Finnegans Wake, his Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist and (the majority of) Ulysses are a doddle. Carey plays the role of the genial and comforting guide throughout; the book benefits immensely.

Which is not to say that it cannot be faulted. At times the “bower bird” approach creates the possibility of confusion, particularly for a section of its potential audience, those new to Joyce. So, when Carey writes that W.B. Yeats never finished Ulysses but was right to think that in that novel what “Joyce was trying to do was replicate the rambling mind. His intention was nothing less than to document the experiential nature of consciousness,” it might be more accurate to say that this is true of sections of Ulysses rather than of the book in its totality.

Someone fresh to Ulysses and expecting to plunge headfirst into the stream of consciousness will be disappointed. That novel is better understood as an “encyclopedia of styles,” Joyce fashioning a new style for every chapter.

Readers from beyond these shores might be nonplussed by the occasional Australian references, as when reviews of Ulysses are quoted from the Brisbane Telegraph, or, as in section 74, when we hear in greater length than the section on Joyce’s birth a tale of an Australian couple who meet Joyce in Paris in 1935. When Joyce suggests that as they had come so far “I couldn’t very well refuse you,” we are told that the couple were embarrassed because they had “been living in London for several years.” It is not quite clear why even Australian readers of the book need to know this.

For the most part, though, Carey sets out valuable information and insights into Joyce’s life and his fiction, explaining for example what a Martello tower is, noting that the one that appears in Ulysses is now the James Joyce Tower and Museum, and adding encouragingly that admission is free. And she tells those new, or relatively new, to Joyce about his fixation not only with the dates on which his works might be published but also with their appearance. So, he insisted that for Ulysses, “the colours of the binding (chosen by me) will be white letters on a blue field — the Greek flag though really of Bavarian origin and imported with the dynasty.” This phrase beautifully captures how Joyce is both arch-aesthete and arch-pedant.

Perhaps appropriately then, the dust jacket of Carey’s book performs a strange disappearing act. On the back are the enticements to the book’s different potential readers mentioned above. Clearly, like all dust jackets, it is meant to persuade readers in a bookshop to buy the book. But the front of the dust jacket configures the book’s title in clumps of three letters with alternating colours for each word, placing Carey’s name beneath, like so:

One perhaps unplanned-for effect of this artful design is that, at least initially, “James Joyce” is less visible than “Gabrielle Carey,” which clearly is not what Carey aims for, nor what the book itself strives to achieve.

The stark truth is that books in some sense “outlive” their authors. This is the case for both fiction and non-fiction, including (as here) a book that is non-fiction both about another person’s fiction and about the life of that person. Both the life and the work allow for continual, sometimes interactive interpretation, posthumously and post-publication.

While literary criticism and biography necessarily trail the work and the life, they can illuminate both for those who come after. Carey necessarily plays the roles of interpreter, instructor and encourager here, but any descent into po-faced scholarship would have sapped this book of its vigour and perhaps of its purpose, undermining her own obvious joy in reading, thinking about and discussing Joyce’s life and his work.

The fact that Carey hosted a reading group on Finnegans Wake for seventeen years underscores the commitment built into A Life, which gives it a very personally engaged quality. This intermingling of biographer and writer is ironic, in that Carey herself came to national fame as a writer through a fictionalised account of her own teenage life, the modern classic Puberty Blues, co-authored with Kathy Lette.

Lette would go on to a highly successful career as a novelist and columnist, whereas Carey concentrated, as the dust jacket of A Life tells us, on “acclaimed books of biography, autobiography and memoir.” Unless there are unpublished works by Carey to appear posthumously, James Joyce: A Life might seem to complete the narrative of her life as a writer. But, as we read her book, that narrative begins again. •

James Joyce: A Life
By Gabrielle Carey | Arden | $39.95 | 140 pages

The post Neverending story appeared first on Inside Story.

Number one: she takes infinite trouble in giving equal time to her two subjects, the Wangal man Bennelong and Arthur Phillip, first governor of New South Wales. These two came to know each other as a result of the British invasion and yet they led largely separate lives. Throughout the book, in a spirit of strict equity, Fullagar moves backwards and forwards from one to the other in a process of interweaving. For the reader moving through the book it is like handling particoloured rope.

And then, secondly, she tells their story, or rather their two stories, backwards.

Fullagar’s project for equality reminds me of the famous passage in Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land (1941) where the fictional elder Tirrawuul advances to meet Phillip during the first hours of invasion. Each man watches the other, eye to eye. “Tirrawuul saw a smallish man, quite incredibly ugly, with a pale face and a very large nose [and so on]… Phillip saw an elderly savage, quite incredibly ugly, with greying tangled hair, and alert dark eyes [and so on].” That is literary equity par excellence. What Dark achieved through the liveliness of historical fiction Fullagar manages in a more assiduous, methodical way. Reading Dark and Fullagar together shows up better the purpose of each.

Dealing one after the other with invader and invaded, Eleanor Dark gives a keen impression of mutual strangeness and of how each man searched the other’s face for a shared humanity. Kate Fullagar’s method is more roundabout — not so much literary as ethnographic. She gives descriptions, side by side, of how each man and his people enacted the rituals of death and burial, and their different uses of violence, including ceremonial violence, and of dance, dress and display.

Questions of culture and personality necessarily intersect. Neither Bennelong nor Phillip was perfectly typical of his kind, whatever that might mean. Bennelong seems to have had a strong emotional dependence on women, for instance. Phillip, on the other hand, seems to have needed female company markedly less than most other Englishmen of his day. One of the best things about Fullagar’s book is how she uses the grid of culture as a powerful background for personality. The tension between culture and individual character vividly complicates the tension between the two men, played out as it is in the highly dramatic circumstances of invasion.

There is another complication, less obvious but more profound. In her book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum sketches the varied ways in which culture shapes feeling, while acknowledging it is often hard to distinguish the thing from its expression. Grief among the Balinese, says Nussbaum, looks and sounds very different from grief among the Ifaluk, a people of the Caroline Islands. The Utku people of northwest Canada condemn anger as childish but the ancient Romans saw it as manly and noble; the Utku keep a lid on it but the Romans made all the noise they could.

The anecdotes in Fullagar’s book show differences of the same kind, in feeling and expressions of feeling, between First Nations peoples and the invading British. Fullagar makes good use of this material, though she probably doesn’t push the question as far as Nussbaum might have liked. She quotes David Collins, Phillip’s secretary and judge-advocate, describing the mysterious combination of feeling and violence among Indigenous people. Men known to be good friends fought each other, so Collins said, “with all the ardour of the bitterest enemies,” apparently intent on wounding if not murder, and yet they were friends again afterwards. The officers were also baffled by Bennelong’s violence towards the young woman Kurubarabula, his promise to kill her, her running towards him all the same, and then their marriage.

The feelings of the invaders themselves must have been just as impenetrable to First Nations people, as they often are to us today.

Throughout the book Fullagar shows an ongoing interest in the possibility of a treaty engineered by Phillip, as governor, with Bennelong, as a representative of the invaded peoples. Phillip was anxious, for instance, that Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne should meet George III during their stay in England, 1793–94, because, Fullagar says, such a meeting might have led to a “formal agreement” between the British government and the Indigenous population. Something might have been done, in other words, to register Indigenous “consent” to the settlement at Port Jackson.

There was certainly talk now and again of the need for “consent,” but there is no surviving evidence that the British government ever thought of making an agreement of this kind. Unlike other Indigenous communities affected by colonisation, the people at Port Jackson were understood to be wanderers, “not attached to any particular spot.” After five years on the ground, Phillip knew this was not true. Individuals and groups were obviously attached to certain places, though exact ideas about possession were so far hard to decipher.

And yet, as far as we know, even Phillip never argued for any kind of agreement about land use. It would have been a feather in his cap if the king had deigned to notice Bennelong, however briefly, with an “audience,” but it seems likely that that was the limit of the governor’s hopes.

All the same, by circling as she does around the idea of a treaty, Fullagar hints at a larger and deeper question — the possibility of ongoing mutual respect, including the invaders’ capacity to listen, in an official sense, to Indigenous voices. Presentation to the king was called an “audience” because it involved listening by the executive. In this case, for whatever reason, the king chose not to listen. While in England, Bennelong and Yemmerrawanne were dressed as English gentlemen and entertained with all sorts of display, military, theatrical and cultural, but they were not invited to perform themselves as a representative Voice. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So we come to the second distinctive feature of this book’s structure. Its story or stories are told backwards. In describing the lives of Bennelong and Phillip, Kate Fullagar begins with the end and ends with the beginning. In the first couple of chapters we hear about how each man has been understood since his death — the ups and downs of each “afterlife.” Combined with that and just as important is detail about the network of friends and kin each left behind him when he died. So we are introduced to each life as a creation of human circumstance, and to each individual as a focal point of feeling and attention. After all, other people make us what we are. It is a subtly powerful point, and it tends to pervade the book.

Ending with the beginning can have the same sort of effect. So, in the last chapters we read of Bennelong and Phillip, each in his own way, born into a family network and into a store of traditional knowledge — a rich cultural inheritance. Here is another point of creative tension. Quite apart from the inevitable push and pull that goes on between the two men during their period of contact, we sense a striking ambivalence in the way each of them stands out from their crowd of friends and associates while at the same time being continuously drawn back in. Such is life, now as then.

Fullagar offers an interesting explanation as to why she has chosen this back-to-front approach. Partly, it is another part of her project of equity between Bennelong and Phillip. Telling stories in the normal sequential way means giving preferential treatment to Phillip. Phillip represented an empire on the move. British energies and British achievements gave men like him a right to possess the future. He is a founder of nationhood, a cultural hero, and as such inevitably mythical in some sense. That makes Bennelong his antithesis, a figure attractive enough but doomed to fail. Phillip represents high-principled government, good order and the inevitable progress of Western civilisation. Bennelong stands in his shadow, childlike, irresponsible and ultimately tragic.

Fullagar is not entirely free herself from this framework of thought. In the European context she pits “conservatives” of the 1790s, including Phillip himself, against “the liberal spirit of French popular democracy,” and yet such terminology is surely imposed by us in retrospect. In those days, “conservative” implied a power to nurture and sustain life. The sun, for instance, was called “a conservative,” and by the same token words like “liberal” and “democracy” seem to jar with the actual methods of the Jacobin revolutionaries in France.

Altogether, British ideas about the relationship between past and future were still fairly fluid in the late eighteenth century. The mindset of the first invaders is a topic of enormous complexity and weight, and in tackling notions of time, “progress” and so on, it might be better to avoid such words altogether.

But then, Fullagar is right. Our own assumptions about “progress,” as she says, make the violence of empire “the unfortunate means to a justifiable end.” Telling the story in the old-fashioned way would also give a shallow idea of individual character, including moral character. An iconic and ideal Phillip, assimilated to the statue in Sydney’s botanic gardens, cannot be genuinely human. The same straitjacket gives a kind of narrative uselessness to Bennelong’s life during his post-Phillip years. No longer a valued go-between, he seems to be trampled underfoot by “galloping global empire.”

Freeing herself from this old paradigm, Fullagar also frees Bennelong and Phillip. The various life phases of each take on a new significance. More than that, invasion, occupation and settlement can be more clearly understood because nothing is preordained.

In 1788 nobody could have known whether there would be a second fleet or whether the settlement would survive at all. By 1800, if those questions were answered, no one could have known whether the occupiers would ever be more than a circumscribed small-farming community. When Bennelong died in 1813, settlers were beginning to take up large grants, suitable for sheep and cattle, and in the same year country west of the Blue Mountains was opened up for settlement. Even so, no one so far could have predicted occupation from shore to shore.

This was indeed a galloping empire, a brutal impulse of power that in the end passed Bennelong by. Whether his latter years were miserable or not, the balance of power that had seemingly existed between himself and Phillip had been radically undone.

The book is subtitled “A History Unravelled,” and in a couple of places Fullagar talks about lives “unspooled.” It is an interesting image. Cut loose from its conventional framework of long-term achievement and/or loss, the old Bennelong–Phillip tapestry comes apart, falling into a multitude of brightly coloured episodes and life phases. Each man is caught more completely in his own time — but caught, as it were, with no memory of earlier events, because with Fullagar’s chosen structure he has not got to those yet.

In short, her biographical method is not problem-free, but it serves a vital purpose. It will appeal to some readers more than others, but no one can avoid having their ideas about invasion challenged to some extent by this remarkable book. •

Bennelong & Phillip: A History Unravelled
By Kate Fullagar | Scribner | $55 | 320 pages

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Walter, a British feminist writer and activist, has written an evocative book, Before the Light Fades, that begins as an exploration of the emotional aftermath and turns into an examination of the lives of Ruth and her refugee parents. At first her grief is raw, turning her into “a little scuttling mollusc without armour.” It is compounded by the lingering stigma of suicide, which somehow coexists with a new cultural openness to talking about it.

Walter struggles against the view that her mother had the worst kind of death and that her suicide could only be attributed to mental illness. She bristles at the modern tendency to see all dark emotions through a psychiatric lens, but also worries that towards the end Ruth was in a state of despair rather than Socratic composure.

Friends who use the well-meaning but “off the shelf” language of self-care to comfort her provoke the same irritation. She tries out a range of healing distractions — yoga, swimming, running, gardening — but the idea that we should soothe and coddle ourselves in times of loss seems to her self-absorbed and alien to the generation that is being lost.

The book’s account of the changing seasons of grief is intense and unsparing. Walter has tears, self-reproach and regret, as our current bereavement script leads us to expect, but also times of anger, bitterness and misanthropy. Mourning does not always deepen or ennoble. At times it leads her to resent the living and become hardened, cauterising her empathy to stem the flow of pain. “I am becoming less human, the more I grieve.”

Walter captures the experience of having an ageing parent beautifully. Her relationship with Ruth is about as solid and unambivalent as two strong personalities can have, but she confesses to having experienced a growing annoyance with her mother’s growing vulnerability. Ruth’s preoccupation with dementia, amplified by experiencing her own father’s illness and her work in aged care, seemed out of proportion. Walter is saddened by the loss of Ruth’s independence, fearlessness and rebellious spirit, but her sadness is mingled with an implied criticism of her slide into weakness, as if Ruth should have tried harder to embody the maternal ideal she represented as a younger woman.

Walter reclaims that younger self in a compelling retelling of Ruth’s past, from the horror of her parents’ early life as Jews in Nazi Germany, to their circuitous escape into an unwelcoming England that sent them to internment camps, their shrinking into postwar suburban anonymity, and their upset when the young Ruth resurrects her father’s abandoned radicalism in the fight for nuclear disarmament in the 1960s. Georg knew where dissent could lead.

Ruth’s involvement in Bertrand Russell’s Committee of 100 is a mix of clerical tedium — so much typing, copying and mailing — and daring escapades, peaking when she helps uncover evidence that the British government had built bunkers to house the great and good in the event of nuclear apocalypse.

Ruth’s politics extended beyond the nuclear issue, leading her into a brand of feminism that would later conflict with her daughter’s. Walter recounts how the power feminism she embraced in the 1980s rejected Ruth’s critique of femininity. She believed she could remain glamorous while the last few glass ceilings were quickly shattered. That former self was naive, Walter writes, failing to anticipate that “objectification would be sold back to us as an empty mirage of empowerment.”

This realisation becomes part of a broader and more sympathetic re-evaluation of Ruth’s unorthodox and sometimes puzzling life choices. Even the suicide becomes intelligible, “like leaving a party when you’ve had enough.”

Before the Light Fades reveals not only the courage and creativity of Ruth’s generation of protesters, but also how the disarmament movement’s mission to avert global disaster is echoed in the climate emergency movement of today. Ruth herself comes across as a free spirit who retained her own parents’ sense of displacement and never became entirely settled. Marriage to a fellow activist burns brightly for a while but ends badly. She throws herself into study, social work with refugees, and being a mother and grandmother: “the myth maker of the family, the one who told us who we were.”

Walter’s writerly voice is distinctive without being showy: she is humane, curious and allergic to cliché, but also sceptical, half in the world and half on the sidelines looking askance. She is a deep thinker but not a wallower or a theorist. As her grief starts to lift, she recommits to political action as if carrying forward a family tradition. Her book is a moving meditation on ageing and loss, the persistence of the past, and the necessity of hope in spite of it all.

It’s a funny kind of hope, peeking through a cloud of pessimism, but it seems a fitting tribute to Walter’s lineage of brave and beleaguered radicals. •

Before the Light Fades: A Memoir of Grief and Resistance
By Natasha Walter | Hachette | $32.99 | 256 pages

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I have to start with my parents because without them I would not be here. My mum was born in 1910. She is a Binjarib woman, a direct descendant of the original Nyoongar people from the Pinjarra area in the southwest of Western Australia. A Binjarib Nyoongar. We consider ourselves coastal plain people and we have a strong spiritual and cultural connection to both fresh water and salt water.

Fresh water because we lived right near the bilyah, the river which flowed down from the hills to our east. Salt water because within walking distance of where we lived, the river emptied first into the estuary, then the ocean to the west. It was the perfect location for hunting and fishing throughout the year.

Our mob are the Binjarib traditional and custodial owners. Our ancestry can be traced through both our oral history and the recorded history of the wadjerlar [white people] colonists since settlement. It was Mum’s people, my ancestors, who were killed by white soldiers at the massacre which took place in Binjarib country at Pinjarra in 1834.

Our stories and songlines, our sacred and special sites, and our very cosmology are deeply imbedded in our Binjarib language, land and cultural knowledge. My mum taught us her Binjarib Nyoongar language, but insisted we never spoke it at school. To the white authorities our language was the devil’s own. We risked being taken away from our families if we were ever heard speaking it.

We loved listening to the yarns Mum told. She made us so proud that some of our people had survived the 1834 massacre. How our ancestors had come up against wadjerlar soldiers on horseback, with guns and swords when our maaman only had spears, koondees and boomerangs. Yet despite the overwhelming odds, with many of our people dying, there were those who had lived to pass on to our own children and grandchildren the stories and language for us to share the truth of what happened.

My mum was a very special woman. She was born in Nyoongar Boodja — Nyoongar country — the only sister with five brothers. Like my mum, my uncles passed the Binjarib stories on to their children. Of course, their recollections were from a male perspective, but the outcomes all tallied. Each one of her brothers loved Mum and treated her with utmost respect. I have never known any of my five uncles to say even one angry word to their sister. Ever!

Mum was the keeper of our Binjarib history and stories, a very strong-minded woman, much loved and respected by all her family. Not even government policy could break the family bonds that existed between Mum, her husband, ten children and all her brothers.

One particular policy that really irked Mum related to the citizenship rights papers, as they were referred to among our family at the time. Those Aboriginal people who were given the papers were allowed to enter pubs and buy alcohol. They were also permitted to be on the streets before the six o’clock morning curfew and after the six o’clock evening curfew. It gave them quite a bit of freedom to go about their business and they were seen as “white citizens.”

On the downside, anyone granted those papers was not allowed to interact or socialise with other Aboriginal people. Family members included. If caught doing so, they would lose their papers and face jail.

As Mum told us, “I would never apply to get those papers. I have spent too much of my life being separated from my brothers. First, in New Norcia Mission, and then I was put in Moore River Native Settlement. My brothers and their families are worth more to me than being classified as a white person. I love my family so the government can keep their papers.”

Dad, too, was born in 1910, in the springtime. At least, that was the year the authorities estimated he came into the world. Dad was not a Nyoongar man. His mum, my paternal Nanna Mary, was a Palyku Mulbpa woman from around the Nullagine area. His father was a wayfaring Irishman.

Dad was born in the Pilbara on the banks of the Shaw River at Hillside Station. The homestead was not far from Marble Bar, about seventy miles southwest of the small goldmining town, but it was more than 900 miles north of Perth. He was taken away from Nanna Mary and sent to Perth when he was very young, about eight years old.

Dad always told us that he first met Mum when he was living in Moore River Native Settlement. Mum had been sent to the same place from New Norcia Mission as a fourteen-year-old when she was deemed old enough to go out and work on the stations.

Although they were never sent to work at the same place, Mum and Dad told us it was really tough working on the stations. He cleared the land, put up fences, broke in horses, rounded up cattle and fixed windmills on the stations where he worked. Mum worked in various homesteads as a housemaid. She kept the homes clean and cooked all the meals for the station owners and their family, sometimes for ten or more people.

The hours were long, from sunrise to sundown, and they were paid a pittance. But my mum and dad were survivors. And they always caught up with each other whenever they were sent back to Moore River Native Settlement if their work ran out on the stations.

As it turned out, government and religious rules proved to be hurdles to their plans for a long-term relationship. Back then, if Aboriginal people wanted to marry, they had to apply to the government, and their respective churches, for permission to do so. When my parents finally married in 1934, after years of red tape, they shared a whole lot of love, mutual respect, appreciation and tolerance for each other, and it endured over their years together.

As Dad often told us, “I met the love of my life at Moore River Native Settlement when I was fourteen years old, back in nineteen twenty-four. From that day onwards, I knew your mother was the only one for me. I have never regretted marrying that beautiful girl.”

Theirs was a love story that lasted more than fifty years. Right up until he died in August 1992, many years after Mum, who passed away in 1975, Dad still proclaimed his love for her.

Apart from his own children and our mum, Dad had no other immediate family living around Pinjarra. From time to time he was visited by our people from up north. And though it was usually very late when they turned up, Dad always walked to our fence line to talk with them. Mum warned us kids not to stickybeak when we tried to sneak a glimpse of them standing out in the moonlight talking with Dad. From what I could barely hear, the men spoke in a language I couldn’t understand. Mum said it was “men’s business.”

I realised later that us kids were multicultural even in our own country: Binjarib Nyoongar, Palyku Mulbpa and Irish. When tracing our family tree, very early mention is also made of an American ancestor who sailed here and married a Nyoongar woman from the Albany region. Another interesting fact Mum often told us was that her great-great-grandmother was of Chinese heritage. In the features of some of my siblings there is definitely a strong Asian influence.

Ancestry aside, to the Australian government back then we were classified as Aboriginal. Since colonisation, our people had been through some traumatic times with very limited freedom to do what we wanted. Even when we were adults, government policy dictated everything we did. The rules applied to everyone, and authorities made sure they were diligently enforced. Our people had to be strong just to survive.

In those days, as long as I had my mum and dad, a feed and a bed, I was okay. But I have to tell you, there were periods in my life as a young Nyoongar girl that I found really hard going. To some I know it may sound petty, but back then it bothered me, especially when I got to an age where I began to notice things happening around me and I overheard comments by family and friends.

For instance, when people talked about who was the prettiest in our Connell family — and there being six sisters — my name always seemed to be last on the list. My older sisters with their pretty faces, perfect brown skin and long jet-black hair have won beauty contests. Rightly so. They were very beautiful. Glamorous photographs and huge beauty competition trophies attest to those facts.

My youngest sister, Hannah, much like our oldest one, Janie, has a natural Nyoongar and Asian-influenced beauty, with her black hair, dark doe eyes and smooth unblemished olive skin. But me? With my very pale skin, honey-blonde hair and hazel eyes, thanks to the genetic traits I inherited from my Irish grandfather, I seemed destined to miss out on the compliments. Especially from other Nyoongars.

When my brothers wanted to be extra mean to me, they said our mum had brought the wrong baby home from the hospital. I hardly ever got any compliments. Oh, I sometimes received a mention, but mainly because I was very good at sports and smart in schoolwork. But as a young girl I always felt I missed out when the really pretty faces were handed out in heaven.

I know Mum loved me and she always said, “Lavinia, it’s not what you look like on the outside. It’s whether you are a good person on the inside that counts. God is watching what we do, not what we look like. He already knows those details. So you remember that’s how He will judge us. By our actions. Who cares what other people think? They are just ordinary humans.”

My mum’s words eased my mind. Still, at the time I always thought maybe I should have been the one called Jane. In my mind it surely was a match with me being plain.

There were other tough things about being a Nyoongar girl. And knowing how to fight was one of them, and it was going to come in useful throughout my life. When my four brothers had to fight five other boys, I always fought the boy who was about the same age as me. No hair pulling, biting or scratching like girls fight. It was stand back, shape up and punch each other. Queensberry Rules boxing, Dad said. Maybe if I wasn’t such a tomboy and hadn’t belted them up, those boys might have called me pretty.

Though I was never — and I am not now — a vain person, there were times when people commented on my appearance in a really spiteful way. It was so hurtful to be told, “Lavinia, you wanna know something? From a distance, yeah, you looked gorgeous. But up close? Nah. Nah. You don’t even look Nyoongar. Are you sure you’re Aboriginal? You are so white.” Then the laughter.

When I was thirteen, this was said to me in front of a group of my peers. My two best friends got so angry with the person who said it, they wanted to punch into him. At the time I retorted by telling that bloke to get nicked. He apologised only because he was scared my friends wanted to hit him, but I could tell his apology was fake. Besides, his words were out and they couldn’t be taken back. It stung. I realised later that I was angry for two reasons. One for being called ugly, but also it hurt more to be challenged about being a Nyoongar just because of the light colour of my skin. Thanks, Grandfather!

Another time, I was asked by an acquaintance if I was truly an Aboriginal and whether I should be talking about Nyoongar people. I turned and walked off, but not before I told him to go fornicate with himself with the old Queensland bush medicine, a big prickly pineapple.

I told that mean-mouthed bastard in both English and Nyoongar. Fortunately, that second time I was no longer a teenager. I was in my mid twenties, yet it brought back a reminder of the days when I was younger and more vulnerable to mean comments like these.

Another painful memory as a youngster relates to government policy and its impact on our people. At any given time, it wasn’t hard for the authorities to keep track of us Nyoongars. Especially those six families who owned land and were permanent residents in the town, like our family and Uncle Levi’s.

Because our land was near a big swamp, the police identified us as the “Swampies.” There were also about seven other Nyoongar families living in the area, but they had all set up camps on reserved government land. They became known as the “Reserve Mob.” They had found steady work on the farms and with government agencies, like the public works department, and settled with their families in Pinjarra. In all, there must have been close to eighty Nyoongars in the town who had no intention of moving away.

Then there were transient families who only came to town for seasonal work and moved on when that ran out. They usually stayed with relatives for the duration and sent their little ones to the same state school we went to. Sometimes when that happened, the number of Nyoongar kids in the classes almost doubled. Some families also enrolled their children in the local Catholic school. Strict government rules said it was compulsory for all young Nyoongar kids to get educated. Rain, hail or shine.

If we missed even one day, there had to be a note from Mum or Dad or one of the older sisters who had already left school. If there was no note, the police could be, and often were, contacted by the school and sent to check why we hadn’t turned up.

There was one cardinal rule for every Nyoongar, whether you were transient or a permanent resident. If you were moving into town or leaving the place, you had to report your movements to the police. Failure to comply could mean jail for the parents and the forced removal of their children.

I remember when my first cousin Gertie, who was some twenty years older than me, had her six children taken away from her. Her oldest child, Margie, at eleven, was only a year older than me, and Nina, the youngest, only six. Yet they were unceremoniously placed in a Catholic mission because she could not account for why her koolungahs were not at school.

It didn’t matter that Gertie was heavily pregnant and needed help with other serious health issues. Or that her husband, Dan, had to travel away for weeks at a time shearing sheep for farmers in other towns so he could earn some money for his family.

Her children were attending the local Catholic primary school, so maybe they were under even closer scrutiny and monitoring by the convent nuns. More so than those of us at state school. I don’t know the reason. I do know that it upset a whole lot of people in our Nyoongar community.

Those six kids were an integral part of our family group. Everything changed when they were taken away by the government. Everybody grieved for them, it was so sad. We missed them terribly. It took a long time, especially for everyone in our close-knit families, to adjust to not having them around.

Even though they were allowed to come home during the summer for the school holidays, it was never, ever the same. Most people seemed to understand why their mother, after delivering her seventh baby, turned to alcohol to blot out the hurt of not having all her kids with her. Luckily other family members helped to rear the new baby. But as a one-year-old, that little boy was taken away too. It was a terrible time for everyone, especially us kids. Their departure hurt even more because we kids had spent a whole lot of our lives growing up with them. Then suddenly, they were gone.

We had all gone bushwalking together, hunting for kaardas (big yellow speckled goannas), rabbits, parrots, koomools (possums) and wild ducks. Picking wild berries. Pinching mulberries from the big tree in the middle of the wadjerlar neighbour’s farm, running through the paddocks and being chased by big angry cows and bullocks.

We would spend nearly all our summer months together at the river swimming, fishing and catching marrons — freshwater crayfish. The river sustained us in so many ways. We not only had our bush tucker, but pinched the juicy grapes and ripe stone fruit — apricots, nectarines and peaches — from the orchards that grew near the river. As a last resort, there were always the nuts from the pine trees that grew alongside the Anglican church. Mum didn’t like us eating those because it was said they caused rickets or some illness like that in kids.

And I remember a big mob of us kids crammed together on the back of my dad’s old Model T Ford going to the estuary, crabbing and camping out. We rarely went alone, with other family members in their own vehicles forming a mini convoy of winyarn, rickety old trucks and motor cars heading out.

I clearly remember being taught what we could and couldn’t eat from the bush, and all about our medicine plants. Making sure we tossed some sand into the river to let the spirits know we were there before we cast our fishing lines. Learning from our oldies about our culture and using our own language. We felt so special, having our own Binjarib words. Like some secret code that only we would know. Being reared in the mission, Mum and Dad would have never, ever allowed it, but in secret our older girl cousins taught us our Nyoongar swear words.

At home we were taught our Nyoongar language and culture. We learned that unlike the wadjerlars, who only had four seasons in a year, we had six. Biruk — when it is very hot in December and January; Bunuru — still hot but with the promise of cooler days in February and March; Djeran — cooler weather with signs of early rain in April and May; Makuru — when the heavy showers come down in June and July; Djilba — a time of new growth and flowers everywhere in August and September; and Kambarang — warmer sunny days around October and November. Our Elders explained that our bush medicines and our food supply depended on and varied with each of our seasons.

We were taught what signs to look for when hunting kangaroos, emus, goannas, possums and rabbits. The one thing our family was never allowed to eat was the booyaiy — long-necked turtle — because that was our totem. We spent so much of our time honing our bush skills. To us it was childhood heaven.

Sometimes we even packed some bread or damper and cold meat from home and took it with us, along with a flagon of sweet black tea. That way we would stay at the river nearly all day. If any of us kids happened to have some money, we’d chuck in and buy a loaf of bread, chips, tinned meat or polony and a bottle of cool drink to share. There were even times when Mum let us book up at the local grocery store and paid the account on Dad’s payday. Whenever that happened, a couple of packets of Granita biscuits was the favourite with all of us.

Things were tough at times, but we rarely went hungry or thirsty over summer because we all shared what we had. While in primary school, I remember reading about the adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. Those two may have had the mighty Mississippi but they had nothing on us lot. We had the pure, clear waters of the Murray. It was like God himself had given us Nyoongars this special gift out of nowhere. Serendipity. •

This is an edited extract from Louise K. Hansen’s Smashing Serendipity: The Story of One Moorditj Yorga, published by Fremantle Press.

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Who Sam Goldbloom was and why he came to be honoured thus is the focus of Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo’s My Father’s Shadow. While most of Goldbloom Zurbo’s published work has been fiction — stories in literary journals, the acclaimed novel The Book of Rachel — this new book is a work of remembrance, a memoir.

As most of us who have ever tried this form know, writing a memoir is far harder than it seems. What to put in, what to leave out — that’s the perennial question, and at bottom is the problem of memory itself, when so much of what’s remembered can’t be corroborated and our recollections, by their very nature, are riddled with fiction.

In a forthright introduction, Goldbloom Zurbo confronts the difficulties head-on. You learn (if, like me, you didn’t know already) that Sam Goldbloom was a prominent activist in the international anti-nuclear peace movement. A founder of at least two of its key Australian branches and secretary of the Vietnam Moratorium Campaign, he also belonged to the Labor Party.

Through thick and thin, though, he was a loyal supporter of the Soviet Union, his Communist Party membership largely a secret except within ASIO and Victoria’s Special Branch, the secretive intelligence-gathering section of the police. Handsome, tall and charismatic, reputedly an electrifying public speaker, he was a hero to Sandra, the eldest of his three daughters. Yet he was also her “nemesis all the days of his life.”

The story she tells of this filial relationship will resonate with many readers. Our parents are magically powerful beings, exerting a hold both positive and negative until with maturity we see them for what they were: flawed human beings who did their best at parenting according to their circumstances and the precepts of their day.

But Goldbloom Zurbo portrays a family drama unusually Shakespearean, not to say Freudian, in its intensity. Hers was a rebellious adolescence, which for all her father’s left sympathies puzzled and dismayed him. For minor misdemeanours and well into her teens, he administered humiliating physical punishments. Today we would look askance, if not in horror, at a father spanking his teenage daughter on the buttocks or the backs of her thighs, acts in our reckoning disturbingly sexual as well as psychologically charged.

Nor did the stories Goldbloom routinely told about himself hold up to his daughter’s scrutiny. As in Germaine Greer’s Daddy, We Hardly Knew You, though not to the same degree, Sam Goldbloom’s past proved a fertile ground for myth-making:

Mystery surrounds many of the stories he told about his life. True, he was a flight mechanic in the airforce during the war. But was he in New Guinea? Did he really learn Japanese to act for the Australian armed forces as an interpreter of Japanese prisoners of war — he who could speak very little Yiddish and barely a word of any other non-English language? What about the story he told of his father pretending to beat him at the behest of his cruel mother? Was that true — or did his father really beat him?

On the positive side, her father’s political involvements widened her horizons. His daughters came to know a dazzling cavalcade of guests — people like Jessie Street, Doc Evatt, Paul Robeson, Benjamin Spock and Danny Kaye. Accompanying him to Indonesia, sixteen-year-old Sandra was enchanted by the sights and smells of a wildly different culture and danced with President Sukarno not long before he was toppled by Suharto. In Moscow she met Wilfred Burchett, the exiled Australian communist known as the first Western journalist to write of the horrific civilian casualties at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

At home it was obvious the family was under surveillance — the van parked outside the house, the telltale clicks during telephone calls — a circumstance they handled as other left-wing families did with nonchalance and humour, yet taking certain precautions. When Sandra was old enough she too joined the Communist Party, but her membership didn’t last long.

The quashed Hungarian uprising, Khrushchev’s speech to the twentieth Party Congress, the Soviet tanks rolling through Prague — each of these prompted people to abandon the party. But Sam Goldbloom held his ground. The New Left, civil rights and women’s liberation all marched past, sweeping along his daughters, but Soviet Russia remained for him the vanguard of world peace. Sandra argued with him at the same time as she worshipped him and dreaded his disapproval.

Before going further I have a couple of admissions to make. Readers should know that Goldbloom Zurbo and I met in the 1970s at a women’s liberation conference and she’s been a friend of mine since. I’ve also admired her writing, but all that she’s written in this book has been news to me. And as one who’s had a go at memoir-writing myself and so far failed with it, I’ve developed an interest in what makes memoirs work, and why the best of them are so absorbing.

It seems to me now that good memoirs have a focus, are organised around a theme, instead of strictly following chronology. They don’t seem to work so well as straightforward, linear narratives — indeed, it seems to be the writer’s task to play havoc with chronology.

A successful memoir, then, isn’t an exposition steadily plodding from one phase in life to the next. In any case, as the French philosopher Henri-Louis Bergson showed us, that isn’t the way we live our lives, or experience them. The past is the mulch of our present as well as a powerful determinant of our future. Still, Goldbloom Zurbo has structured a courageous, compelling narrative that in its way moves forward in time, much of which is concerned with the long, fraught, painful trajectory of Sam Goldbloom’s dying.

Throughout the looping accretion of memories we gradually learn more about him: that, British-born and Jewish, he migrated to Australia as a youngster with his parents and and his brother; that though he wasn’t observant, his Jewishness was important to him; that, uxorious, he was nonetheless a serial philanderer. We see him young, all six-foot-three of him, with large ears, freckles and reddish-brown hair; we see him ageing. We learn that he had beautiful hands, with long fingers that Sandra admired so much she couldn’t begin to contemplate pairing up with a stubby-handed man.

And still there’s a lot that’s missing. We glean in passing that Goldbloom Zurbo was married to a man named Jack, but what happened after that, and when and how, is unsaid. She’s the oldest of three sisters, but we know them only as Sister Two and Sister Three, as she is Number 1, as their father was given to call her. She is a mother, now a grandmother, but such momentous experiences in a woman’s life get little more than a glance.

On the other hand, Rosa, or Rosy, her mother and Sam’s wife, and two other women with whom he had affairs are vividly depicted. But although Rosa and Sam ran a wholesale business from the garage of one of their houses, we learn little about how he, or they, made a living.

That the narrative succeeds when so much is left out — or possibly because it is left out — is intriguing. I point to these lacunae not to criticise but to emphasise the skill with which the author tells her tale and how she deploys the emotional freight it carries in the strikingly visceral tenderness of her prose. Here she is, massaging her dying father’s feet.

“I take his foot and cradle it between my warm hands. ‘Cold,’ I remark, discomfited by the prickliness, repulsed by the thick, chilly flesh.” To this he replies, “They are always cold. No circulation, they tell me. Ever since the surgery.” Then, from her: “I do not enquire which surgery; it is unlikely we will agree. We would grow irritated with each other. Eventually, we would bicker.”

What is a man, his life? What remains of him in the hearts of those who were closest to him? Whatever we make of it turns out to be a great deal more than a street in a new Canberra suburb. Memoir, fiction, non-fiction… perhaps these categories are meaningless; marketing tools, little more.

The real truth is that My Father’s Shadow is a powerful, unputdownable book. •

My Father’s Shadow: A Memoir
By Sandra Goldbloom Zurbo | Monash University Publishing | $32.99 | 288 pages

The post The art of a memoir appeared first on Inside Story.

As a historian Davison has long been interested both in material culture and “commonplace objects,” and — as he showed in his earlier book, The Unforgiving Minute — in the history of time-telling itself. The scholars who shaped his vision of history were “preoccupied by the mystery of time and change.” Small wonder that when a grandfather clock, a family heirloom, came into his possession, it should have inspired him to commence an investigation of its place in history and heritage, and a meditation on “the nature of time in both its personal and historical dimensions.”

Notwithstanding the book’s evocative title, it was never really Davison’s grandfather’s clock. His great-aunt “Cissie” (Elizabeth Anne Davison) brought the clock with her to Australia in 1934, twenty-two years after his grandfather emigrated and only a few months before he died. The clock had passed from father to son for generations, but for years it stood in Elizabeth’s crowded bedroom, among other relics of her former life that she had brought with her from England. On her death she bequeathed it to Davison’s father, with instructions that it should pass, eventually, to Graeme himself. Women, Davison acknowledges, “are often the great keepers of family memory,” although patriarchal society and patriarchal sources tend to obscure their role.

The search for the longer history of the clock’s place in the family sent Davison along the path of his ancestors to the moment of its acquisition — and then further still. Digging into his ancestral past, he followed the male line into deep time where “conventional genealogy loses its footing.” He found the misty origins of his family story in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when Davisons and Davidsons were caught up in the blood feuds that convulsed the borderlands between Scotland and England.

Any sense of connection to those Davisons of yore can exist only in imagination; but Davison’s surrender to the romantic myth itself belongs to the pattern of history. The impulse that draws us to such places, he suggests, has its origins in the discontents of modernity. In our “mobile, globalised, urban world,” the family history trail seems to promise the possibility of return to an ancestral homeland and a “more primitive, unspoiled version of ourselves.”

Here, as throughout the book, Davison unostentatiously weaves reflection on his feelings and methods into the account of his findings. The social, cultural and emotional impulses of genealogical research are shown to be themselves a product of the history of modernisation he relates.

For all that, he insists, the possibility remains that “some part of us is indeed a relic of things below the horizon of history.” With that conviction, he peers into “that dark space where heredity and nurture, memory and history combine to make us who we are.”

The Davison surname provides the unbroken thread the historian can follow through multiple generations, up to and even beyond the point where parish records peter out. Davison acknowledges that this is a selective path, albeit one balanced somewhat by his earlier exploration of his mother’s forebears in Lost Relations (2015). But the profound implications of his choice are worth pondering for a moment — precisely because they are so easy to forget.

Little in our society owes more to social convention than surnames, which inherently claim patrilineal descent as the primary defining relationship. To say nothing of the possibility of error in any attribution of paternity, the thread that follows the male line is just one among the thousands, or millions, that make up the spreading fan of our ancestry. When we follow a single line, as sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel points out, we consign to oblivion three out of four grandparents, or sixty-three out of sixty-four great-great-great-great-grandparents.

To come at this from the other side: the most we can inherit from the four times great-grandfather whose surname we may bear is something less than 0.05 per cent of our genetic material. In the “inherently boundless community” of family, argues Zerubavel, the traditions of classification that determine kin recognition are matters of convention, not genetics. Genealogies do not passively document who our ancestors were; they are “the narratives we construct to actually make them our ancestors.” Such narratives exclude far more than they include, and not always with benign intent. So it behoves us to remember how tenuous is their basis in fact, and scrutinise the cultural assumptions they perpetuate.

Davison is rightly sceptical of the idea of genetic affinity with distant ancestors. While he surrenders willingly to the gravitational pull of the male line, he does so out of a combination of sentiment and pragmatism. The Davison name is the most “stable marker of personal identity” available to establish ancestry, while the records of women’s lives — the wives and mothers who might expand the picture — are even more scarce than those for men. Taking the ancestral line on which he can rely with greatest certainty, he uses it to ponder not genetic continuity but cultural continuity in the midst of social change.

The “things below the horizon of history” that form part of our identity, his book ultimately suggests, are not genes so much as elements of culture, beliefs, skills and aspirations that have passed quietly from one generation to the next. Untold generations of Davisons belonged to the “middling sort,” who struggled for life on the margins on whatever terms society offered them. Such experiences form family character in stubbornly enduring ways. The Davisons of whom he can write with personal knowledge “were modest, practical, plain-speaking folk, their manner abraded by the grit of their industrial origins. There was something uptight as well as upright about them; an effect, I suppose, of the hard school in which they had grown up.”

More than a mystical search for origins, this is a historian’s account of the place of the individual, or the family, in history. Davison’s ancestors come dimly into view in the context of great, if gradual, social transformation. Step by step, one decision at a time, sons moved away from fathers to establish new homes and learn new occupations: from a precarious existence in ancestral homelands to the acquisition of craft skills in a farming village, a port town, a factory suburb, and an industrial metropolis — until early in the twentieth century John Davison moved with his wife and children to the other side of the world.

The perspective of family offers a corrective to the generalisations of academic history, Davison suggests. Through the eyes of the people who lived through it, the industrial revolution can be seen as an evolution, the making of the modern world “more like a series of small adjustments than a leap from one way of life to another.” Each step, he argues, “was a one-off response to the map of opportunity at the time, but seen over the longue durée the moves fall into a pattern that suggests the operation of powerful unseen forces.”

In this story the grandfather clock, that accurate keeper of family time, becomes a powerful symbol tying the individual to the historical moment. Measured time, says Davison, was the foundation of modern life: when another John, six generations back, acquired the clock around the turn of the nineteenth century, “my family were joining a very large project indeed.”

For John the clock may have been chiefly a marker of growing prosperity and social status. For his son William, a skilled block printer paid on piece rates for what he and his sons could produce, it had an added utility, regulating the daily activities of his industrious household. Superseded by newer technology in the late twentieth century, it lost much of its earlier importance and stood idle for years, until rescued and repaired by a sentimental historian who likes to think, when winding the clock, of the “foggy fingers” of the ancestors who have wound it before him.

Pondering generational change, Davison offers a persuasive and thought-provoking account of the relationship between the agency of the individual (man) and the impersonal forces of modernisation. Yet I wondered at times whether a more expansive exploration of family within each generation — of the horizontal, as well as the vertical, structures of kinship — might have brought into view more of the “invisible” factors that enabled or constrained their choices.

Let us not forget, for example, how the clock made its way to Melbourne and eventually to Davison himself. Not by direct transmission through the male line, but through the agency of great-aunt Cissie, whose “map of opportunity” after her father’s death in 1930 showed only one path to survival, in her brother’s household on the other side of the world. While her journey and her bequest eventually restored the clock to its traditional path from father to son, her story has deeper significance, as a reminder that for some family members, women especially, survival has often depended on more complex webs of kinship. Though their stories may rarely be preserved, they too imprint a ghostly presence on the family tree, for those who care to look. Their imprint on family culture was profound.

But any account of family origins must leave out far more than it can ever tell. Each journey through family history is as selective as it is idiosyncratic. Though he doesn’t dwell on their implications, Davison doesn’t hide the choices he has made. His gentle, reflective, beguiling narrative invites us to travel at his side as he pursues his individual quest, and to surrender to the charm of the knotted threads of sentiment, imagination and hard-edged research that bind him to his forebears and to history. •

My Grandfather’s Clock: Four Centuries of a British-Australian Family
By Graeme Davison | The Miegunyah Press | $50 | 319 pages

The post Time’s quiet pulse appeared first on Inside Story.

The ostensible hook of Arrangements in Blue, a memoir in chapters that correspond to the album’s ten songs, is that Key’s love life has not turned out as she eagerly anticipated when she was fourteen. Now in her forties, Key has not had a serious boyfriend since she was twenty-two, though not for want of yearning or trying. She lives alone with her two cats and has heard Blue so many times that she can “summon every element of the music” in her head without having to play it. The book opens with Key telling a taxi driver she’s come to Los Angeles to write a book about Joni Mitchell.

Middle-aged woman writes a book about being single and loving Joni Mitchell. Perhaps especially for readers like me who are of a similar age and circumstance to the author, and/or who share her music obsession, that summary is as enticing as it gets. Yet it only hints at the riches on offer. At least two entwined stories reflect the influence of Blue. One is the story of how the pursuit of and desire for romantic love have loomed over Key’s life, with Blue serving as a kind of aspirational benchmark. The other is about how for Key, Blue became “part of the language I had to express myself.”

What Key heard that night back in 1992 when she first encountered Blue was a woman who took herself and her art seriously. Key does similar work in Arrangements in Blue, and it has not been without struggle. She writes early on that it “scares me to lay out all the ways in which absence of romantic love touches my life.” In reckoning with the enduring desire for a relationship, and with the shame she sometimes feels about it, Key takes stock, the song cycle of Blue providing the structure that otherwise may have taken the form of more conventional life markers like marriage and children.

Mitchell and Key, poets both, are attuned to quotidian details and their larger resonance. In “My Old Man” Mitchell sings that when her lover is away “the bed’s too big, the frying pan’s too wide.” Key observes the “easy intimacy” of a couple sharing a pillow on a plane, and watches with “deep interest” the “ordinariness” of couples interacting at home. Among them are her maternal grandparents, whose ordered, tranquil domestic world provided an alternative to her parent’s unhappy marriage.

Although the rite of passage that is moving in together has not so far been part of Key’s experience, home-making and home-owning have. She captures their hard-won satisfaction and pleasure without side-stepping the difficulties or the persistent longing for a romantic love that she imagines feels like her ideal of home: “warm, intimate, symbolic in all the aesthetic details of it, and after the inevitable addictive whirr of lust, secure.”

In Mitchell’s heavily autobiographical catalogue, the song about giving up her daughter for adoption, “Little Green,” is among the most poignant. Key connects with it through recounting her abortion as a teenager and the vicissitudes of her feelings about children and parenting since. The link to Mitchell’s experience is historically contingent, with their reproductive lives defined by different options, but Key finds solace in the singer-songwriter’s words to her daughter: “sometimes there’ll be sorrow.” As a contribution to the growing canon of literature about maternal ambivalence, Key’s is distinguished from another notable work, Sheila Heti’s Motherhood (which she mentions) by being less tethered to the art vs. motherhood conundrum.

Every chapter in Arrangements in Blue is revelatory in some way. In the contemporary belief in self-love as a prerequisite for any other kind of love, for instance, Key sees a “terrible burden” that can lead to debt and more self-loathing. She prefers the “less intimidating” idea of “self-friendship,” captured in the “ordinary joy of supermarket flowers around my room, rather than the unattainable perfection of a long-stemmed red rose.”

Without the validation or momentum of a partner and family, Key shapes a “life that has its own rituals, events to assign meaning to and rules to live by.” She vows to swim “in every body of water” she encounters before turning forty; and through repeated attempts comes to properly inhabit the confident persona of a solo traveller in a world where “public space is not designed for a person on their own.”

Inevitably, for a memoir written at midpoint, there is regret and grief. If in life Key is “too often held back by my own censure” when speaking of “painful feelings,” on the page she doesn’t hold back. She stands crying outside the old house in Laurel Canyon where Joni Mitchell wrote Blue, hoping no one passing by will notice. “I didn’t understand how I’d got to this point in my life.”

In writing it out, though, Key gets closer to the sources of her pain, some of them beyond her control (childhood abuse and trauma), but not all. Her “undealt-with heartache for romantic love,” she shares, “had begun to make me bitter” and negatively affect her friendships, of which there are many. Readers may think Key is too hard on herself, but there is something both deeply relatable and hopeful in how she comes to comprehend her own self-delusions.

Among the men Key has been entangled with, but with a special spot of his own, is the late Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden, who died in 2020 from cirrhosis of the liver. Key’s talent and her love of language saturate every page, but it seems she came to poetry as if by accident and had the good fortune to have Lumsden as her teacher and then, quickly, her close friend.

Lumsden’s words preface the book alongside Mitchell’s and his influence is at least as profound as hers, with the added messiness and intensity of an intimate friendship that did not fit the container of a conventional relationship. Even more so than Key, Lumsden sought “romantic salvation,” including with her. It was not to be (she did not feel the same way) and in his darkest hours she was “sometimes a bad friend.” Still, in the dedicated chapter Key magnificently does what she struggled to do at Lumsden’s funeral: “explain the nature of my relationship with him.”

In 1979, Joni Mitchell told Rolling Stone magazine that “there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals” on Blue. “At that period of my life, I had no personal defences. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a packet of cigarettes.” Arrangements in Blue is Key’s equivalent. I predict that, like Blue, its fans will find in it both enduring companionship and new “chords of inquiry” for years to come. More than homage, Key has paid Mitchell the ultimate tribute by creating a transcendent work of art, wrought from one woman’s bountiful life. •

Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Love and Making a Life
By Amy Key | Jonathan Cape | $36.99 | 240 pages

The post Shades of blue appeared first on Inside Story.

Evatt’s move from court to federal parliament was considered “a most regrettable precedent” by Menzies, who was by then prime minister. (While it may have been regrettable, it wasn’t much of a precedent, never being repeated over the ensuing eighty-three years.) Evatt responded in kind, suggesting that Menzies would lose the next election. (That, too, proved a less than accurate prediction.) As Anne Henderson sees it in her new book, Menzies vs Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics, battle was joined from that time.

Reading Henderson’s opening chapters it’s hard not to be staggered by Evatt’s workload as external affairs minister and attorney-general. No minister today would take on these dual roles, and Henderson highlights the difficulties the combination caused for Labor in government, especially at a time of war.

It would have been a punishing load for the best-organised minister (which Evatt clearly was not), and was exacerbated by his frequent absences overseas in the pre-jet age, including a year as president of the UN General Assembly. As an often-absentee attorney-general, he was unable to contribute fully to vital tasks, including defending the government’s bank nationalisation plan before the High Court.

Evatt became Labor leader after Ben Chifley’s death in June 1951. His role later that year in defeating Menzies’s referendum to ban the Communist Party is seen by many as his finest moment, but Henderson downplays the victory. Support for the ban was recorded by polls at 73 per cent in early August but by polling day, six weeks later, it had dropped to just under 50 per cent. (The referendum was carried in only three states.) Henderson cites the history of defeated referendum proposals and asks why the Yes even got close — as if falling support for the ban followed a law of nature regardless of effective political campaigning.

It’s true that early support for many referendum proposals has evaporated by polling day. But it is difficult to think of a question for which Yes campaigners enjoyed more favourable circumstances than this one. The cold war was in full swing, Australian troops were fighting the communists on the Korean peninsula (under a UN flag), and communism was seen as an existential threat, broadly detested within the electorate. Menzies had warned of the possibility of a third world war within three years; strong anti-communist elements within Evatt’s own party supported the ban.

Indeed, one might equally ask why Menzies couldn’t pull it off. I suspect that he would have appreciated the irony that it was the internationalist Evatt, not the Anglophile Menzies, who campaigned by citing British justice’s onus on the state to prove guilt rather than (as the anti-communists proposed) on the accused to prove innocence.

As with most failed referendums, the loss did the prime minister no harm. In fact, Henderson makes the interesting suggestion that it saved him from having to enact legislation that may “have been as divisive and unsettling to civic order” as the McCarthy hearings were in the United States. It’s impossible to prove of course, but Australia definitely didn’t need that kangaroo court–type assault on individuals’ reputations and lives.

Henderson’s account of the Petrov affair and the subsequent royal commission — a disastrous time for Evatt — traverses territory that is probably less contentious than it was a generation ago. On the Labor Party’s 1955 split, she quotes with approval the claim by former Liberal prime minister John Howard that Labor’s rules afforded too much power to its national executive: a more genuinely federal structure (like that of the Liberals) would have rendered Evatt’s intervention more difficult and a split in the party less likely.

Whether a Victorian Labor branch left mostly to its own devices would have sorted out its problems is unclear, but the opportunity was unlikely given the hostility of Evatt and his supporters to the group of Victorians they saw as treacherous anti-communists. Ironically, it was this capacity to intervene that would facilitate a federal takeover of the moribund (and still split-crippled) Victorian ALP fifteen years later. That intervention eventually reinvigorated the state branch, establishing a Labor dominance in Victorian state elections and in the state’s federal seats that persists to the present day.

Henderson also poses the question of whether a different Labor leader could have avoided the split. What if deputy leader Arthur Calwell had been installed after the 1954 election loss? She speculates that Calwell might have been able to offer concessions to the anti-communist Victorians and stresses an absence of intense ideological fervour among many of those who would soon be expelled from the party.

While it is hard to envisage a leader handling the crisis less effectively than Evatt did, Henderson quotes Labor MP Fred Daly’s view that Calwell at the time was “hesitant, uncertain and waiting for Evatt’s job” — hardly the stuff of firm leadership. Arthur was always prepared to wait.

It may be true that most of the anti-communist Labor MPs, even in Victoria, were not fervent ideologues, but possibly more relevant was the ideological predisposition of the powerful Catholic activist B.A. Santamaria, who was able to influence state Labor’s decision-making bodies and preselections from outside the party. Santamaria boasted in 1952 to his mentor, Archbishop Daniel Mannix, that his Catholic Social Studies Movement (the infamous “Movement”) would be able to transform the leadership of the Labor movement within a few years and install federal and state MPs able to implement “a Christian social program.”

This may have been overly ambitious nationally, but Santamaria’s undue influence over Victorian Labor was already a concern for some. Moreover, the party Santamaria envisaged might be viewed as essentially a church or “confessional” party, at odds with traditional Australian “Laborism,” not to mention with the main elements of a pluralist, secular democracy.

Henderson’s most interesting observation, for this reviewer, is her contention that Evatt’s lack of anti-communist conviction owed much to his being “an intense secularist.” It is certainly the case that critics of communism in this era often preceded the noun with the adjectives “godless” or “atheistic.” In a predominantly Christian society like Australia, communism’s atheistic nature was a damning feature, especially among Catholics, including Catholic Labor MPs. Presbyterian Menzies also held strongly to this view.

If this review has focused more on Evatt than on Menzies, this reflects the enduring questions Evatt’s leadership raises — including the state of his mental health, which is seen by some as helping to explain his erratic and self-destructive behaviour. (Henderson doesn’t consider this question, but it was well covered by biographer John Murphy.)

Menzies, having survived the referendum result, was also undaunted by his narrow election victory in 1954, secured with a minority of the vote, a lucky escape to be repeated in 1961. He went for the Evatt jugular whenever it was exposed — which was often, as Henderson shows vividly. John Howard would later claim, on his own behalf, that the times suited him. Menzies had that advantage in spades, and he exploited it artfully.

If there is a central theme to Menzies’s approach to his battle with Evatt, it is his characterisation of the Labor leader as a naive internationalist, oblivious to the emerging threat of monolithic communism, especially to the north of Australia. This is a criticism endorsed by Henderson. A cynic might suggest that the communist threat was not only electoral gold for Menzies but also provided a convenient pretext for him to maintain his unwavering support for European colonialism. Better the colonialists than the communists.

Neither character was a team player by instinct, but Menzies adapted better and learned from mistakes. Among other flaws, Evatt’s lack of self-awareness was both crucial and crippling. There is no doubt that the winner of the “great rivalry” was Menzies.

As a known partisan, Henderson runs the risk that her book will be seen in that light, and that her put-downs of Evatt’s admirers — “a collective of scribblers,” “the Evatt fan club” — will be viewed accordingly. Her failure to acknowledge any merit in Evatt’s referendum victory will seem churlish to some. But Henderson can’t be faulted on the book’s readability: it’s a one-sitting job for those fascinated by the politics of that era.

I was left wondering about the depth of the personal animus between the two men. Henderson quotes Menzies accusing Evatt of being too interested in power — as “a menace to Australia” to be kept out of office “by hook or by crook.” Prime ministers and opposition leaders routinely find themselves in settings where some form of civil, non-political conversation is virtually unavoidable. What on earth might these two have talked about? Well, both of them loved their cricket. •

Menzies vs Evatt: The Great Rivalry of Australian Politics
By Anne Henderson | Connor Court | $34.95 | 236 pages

The post Clash of the titans appeared first on Inside Story.

It is a difficult thing to write a biography of a writer who drew on his own life so fully for his fictions and journalism, and with many friends and lovers very much alive. In Frank Moorhouse: A Life Catharine Lumby allows her subject to take the lead, interviewing him, tracing his experiences through his substantial personal archive and talking to his friends.

Lumby decided not to write a literary biography but to concentrate on placing Moorhouse within his milieu, drawing out some of the contradictions in his personality and adding new information about his background that make his work even more intriguing. She adds to our understanding of Moorhouse’s writing without grappling too seriously with its ongoing significance as literature.

The biography follows a loose chronology, beginning with his parents’ origins and his family life in Nowra and then describing his escape to Balmain and embrace of the writing life. It deals with his idiosyncratic “rules for living,” his fight against censorship, his ambitious commitment to a trilogy of historical novels about a woman working for the League of Nations, and his frequent returns to the Bush. If you are a Moorhouse reader you will enjoy it immensely; if you are part of the generation who grew to adulthood in the 1960s and 1970s you will recognise Moorhouse’s role in helping break down the moral constrictions on ordinary middle class Australians.

Moorhouse’s parents, Frank and Purthanry Moorhouse, were not merely upstanding citizens of Nowra but exceptional people in their own right. Readers may have guessed that Frank senior was the model for the smalltown soft drink manufacturer, T. George McDowell, who first appeared in The Americans, Baby and returned in later fictions right up to Grand Days. Moorhouse gave his father’s commitment to community and his belief in self-discipline to McDowell but not his creativity; Frank senior invented a machine to preserve milk that changed the lives of dairy farmers in Australia. His agricultural machinery business prospered so well that he expected all three of his sons to join it. Frank went his own way, but his rigorous daily work routine was a clear legacy of his father.

Purthanry was an equally impressive person, president of the local Country Women’s Association, a girl guide leader and a homemaker concerned with living well. Moorhouse acknowledged that his mother’s concern for aesthetics and social protocol gave him one model for Edith Campbell Berry in his historical trilogy, but he came late to an awareness of the more complex lives of his own parents.

In his last years he realised that his mother had befriended a local Aboriginal woman, Belle McCleod, who helped in the house. Together they set up a CWA branch in the Aboriginal community at Worrigee on the edge of Nowra. He had missed the story of the Indigenous people living close to him.

The entire Moorhouse family were committed to the scouting movement, with Frank senior a scout leader, Purthanry a leading girl guide and all three sons boy scouts. It isn’t difficult to see Moorhouse’s concerns for correct behaviour and good preparation, and his need for regular forays into the bush, as an inheritance from the scouts. Lumby notes the creative tension between Moorhouse’s resistance to convention and his fascination with the protocols that make social and working life run smoothly.

Moorhouse made the journey from a country town to inner-city Sydney and beyond it to Europe. Driven by curiosity about people and their social world he discovered art and fine living at the same time as he was exploring various forms of sexuality. He never completed a university degree but his desire to learn led him to pursue matters often regarded as trivial or beyond acceptability.

Lumby tells us of significant moments in his life, such as his first experience of a camembert cheese, his relish in eating oysters from the shell and, of course, his fastidiousness about martinis. While these subjects may seem frivolous, in his fiction Moorhouse often undermined his obsessions with irony: his oft-quoted advice to anyone lost in the bush was to mix a martini and wait for someone to turn up to correct your method.

After an early marriage Moorhouse realised that he couldn’t remain monogamous, let alone exclusively heterosexual, and set about living a life outside the “bourgeois” confines of conventional suburbia. From his mid-twenties he determined to own neither a car nor a house, and sometimes juggled credit cards to ensure he could eat out for every meal. At times, he relied on the generosity of friends to keep him housed and fed. Women often took the role of provider of financial as well as domestic support, though they sometimes found his rules for living rather self-serving.

Lumby nevertheless renders bohemian life in Balmain as youthful and glamorous, the members of the libertarian Sydney Push meeting for philosophy discussions before seducing each other in pubs. Despite his unfaithfulness and exasperating fastidiousness about domestic life, Moorhouse’s lovers remember him as generous and, of course, he was funny.

In his fiction and journalism Moorhouse reported on his exploits in the sophisticated, cosmopolitan world that many suburban Australians dreamt about. His “discontinuous narratives” resisted the plotting of the traditional novel, observing the lives of characters making their different ways in a shared society. In stories as much reportage as fiction, Moorhouse showed us his version of Sydney’s bohemianism.

Lumby draws on other critics to respond to Moorhouse’s fictions and, apart from the occasional charges of sexism in his early work, they are all positive about his achievements. I am not a member of the Edith Campbell Berry fan club — the club Annabel Crabb imagines to be full of mainly women enthusiasts for Frank Moorhouse’s League of Nations heroine who ask themselves in a crisis: “What would Edith do?”

Edith strikes me as insufferably self-important, a kind of Barbie doll that Moorhouse dresses up in different clothes (cowboy suits, silk lingerie, capes) and tries out in careers impossible for most women of her generation. I was dismayed to see the wonderfully perceptive and funny observer of the foibles of real people in the contemporary world had moved off to a dreamland of historical fiction, where a Miles Franklin award might be (and eventually was) acquired.

In his grand trilogy, unlike his earlier fictions, Moorhouse was not writing about a world he had experienced — except, perhaps, in the sex scenes. After I read the celebratory appendix on file registries in Grand Days, I felt the need to tell him personally that these were familiar to anyone who had worked in a government department. By the time I read Cold Light, I wished that I had also explained to him that married women could not become permanent employees in the public service until 1966. Once he had married Edith off, she could never be promoted. If he had known, he might have kept her single so she would not be relegated to an outer office in Canberra rearranging the pencils on her desk and watering the pot plant.

Of course, that is judging fiction against historical reality and the novels may best be read as documents of Moorhouse’s own imagination and obsessions. Some realities, such as the actual restrictions on women’s lives, could only limit his fantasies.

On the back of Lumby’s book the publishers express astonishment that this is the first biography of Moorhouse, suggesting that they, too, imagine a fantastically cosmopolitan world where authors are given their due. In Australia, literary biographies are usually reserved for the long dead, and they can seem to mark the end of interest in a writer (studies of both Patrick White and Elizabeth Jolley, coincidentally, declined after their biographies appeared).

For readers of my generation, Moorhouse takes his place alongside Helen Garner as the recorder of the 1970s and explorer of possibilities for contemporary life. His work will always be significant to us. Pace Annabel Crabb, what reader in their thirties and forties knows of it? The work may yet fade away, like so many other writers who were significant in their moment.

Perhaps the difficulty is in the public preference for the monumental novel over the evanescent observations and speculations that Moorhouse wrote so well. Moorhouse, the performer, may matter more than Moorhouse the writer of a trilogy. This is why this biography matters: it tries to appreciate the performance of a life, not simply its residue of work.

While I will continue to resist the Edith fan club, I am now fully signed up to the Frank Moorhouse club. Frank, forgive me. I wish this book had been published before you died so that you could enjoy more of the acclaim you longed for. •

Frank Moorhouse: A Life
By Catharine Lumby | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 304 pages

The post Grand days appeared first on Inside Story.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror —
The wide brown land for me!

My memory of the poem is inseparable from the sound of more than a hundred young voices reciting it in unison — as a dirge, with no inflection or rhythmic variation — in the school assembly hall.

It was not until I read Deborah FitzGerald’s Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar that I discovered these well-known lines are not the first stanza of “My Country” but the second. The poem was inspired, at least partly, by a friend’s reference to England as “home,” common among descendants of white colonial immigrants, and the first verse evokes the “green and shaded lanes,” the “grey-blue distance” and “soft, dim skies” of England. Not only that: another four verses follow the one I am familiar with. Read as a whole, Mackellar’s vivid use of colour, a salient feature of her work, is evident.

Having toyed with the idea for several years, Mackellar composed “My Country” in the first months of 1908 at the drought-gripped family property of Kurrumbede, near Gunnedah in inland New South Wales. The property was her refuge and she was always inspired to write there. Away from the constraints of city life, she could indulge her desire for freedom, roaming the paddocks, riding her horse or lying in the grass on the banks of the Namoi River.

First published in the London Spectator as “Core of My Heart” (a title Mackellar preferred), the poem was reprinted in a number of Australian publications as “Core of My Heart — My Country” and eventually became known under the shorter title. The poet was twenty-two at the time of its first publication and the poem, hailed as a patriotic anthem, would become both “a triumph and a burden,” overshadowing her subsequent work.

Dorothea Mackellar was born in Sydney in 1885, the daughter of prominent surgeon and politician Charles Mackellar (later Sir Charles) and his wife Marion, also a member of a distinguished colonial family. Dorothea and her three brothers grew up at Dunara, a mansion in the exclusive harbourside precinct of Point Piper.

Dorothea’s parents were loving and generous but their benevolence did not stretch to allowing a university education for their precociously intelligent daughter. She did eventually manage to sit in on some university lectures, although not formally enrolled, and became proficient enough in four languages to travel with her father to conferences in Europe as his translator.

Tragedy befell the family when their oldest son and Dorothea’s beloved brother Keith was killed in 1900 during the Boer war. He was not quite twenty years old and his sister’s profound grief at his death lingered for the rest of her life. At around that time she wrote “When It Comes,” a moving tribute that shows a maturity beyond her fifteen years. It concludes:

So should I like to die, but where?
On the open plain, in the open air,
Where the red blood soaks in the thirsty grass,
And the wild things tread my grave as they pass,
There would I die.

A few years later she would begin to experience insomnia, dizziness and heart palpitations, symptoms of an illness that would become chronic yet never diagnosed at a time when women’s mysterious illnesses were often attributed to “nerves.” She also experienced episodes of what we would now call clinical depression.

To write the official biography of Dorothea Mackellar, FitzGerald was allowed access to previously unseen parts of her diaries, some of them written in a code that had been cracked by the editor of other published sections. Unfortunately they lack the wit and verve of the coded diaries of her contemporary, Miles Franklin, which have provided useful information to many literary scholars. Much of the Mackellar diaries is devoted to somewhat repetitive descriptions of rejected suitors. At times her biographer’s engaging prose shifts towards the style of a romance novel:

Dorothea… was delighted to find Captain Hugh Scarlett — the Governor’s aide-de-camp — waiting for her when the train pulled into the railway station. She could not help but notice his handsome face and warm smile as she was ushered into a luxurious Mercedes with red leather interior, and her bags were retrieved from the train. She smiled back at him, holding his gaze a little longer than necessary, and thought this might be an even more enjoyable trip than she had anticipated.

Curiously, Miles Franklin receives no mention in Her Sunburnt Country, although her novel My Brilliant Career, published in 1901 when she was nineteen, also haunted her throughout her career. The two women both published novels with the English publisher Mills & Boon in the 1910s, Franklin’s under a pseudonym.

The other major strand of Mackellar’s hitherto unseen diaries concerns her “unorthodox friendship” with writer Ruth Bedford. After they meet as young adults and share holidays, swimming, lying on the beach and sleeping in a hammock, the tone of Mackellar’s diary is quite different. The young women “play-act” together, creating and fleshing out characters who would later provide the material for two published novels they wrote together.

FitzGerald attempts to grapple with the importance of this relationship in the context of the times, though not entirely convincingly. The extensive work of American scholar Martha Vicinus in the area is reduced to a sentence on how a romantic friendship with another woman was seen at the time as a normal prelude to marriage. The statement by the biographer that “friendships between women that interfered with relationships with men by assuming too much importance were viewed as abnormal” is referenced (to my surprise) by an article of my own, written almost thirty years ago and rendered meaningless without contextualisation.

Mackellar’s relationship with Bedford becomes the steadying raft on the turbulent sea of her emotional life and is also the basis of much of her literary life. Together, they were involved with the Zonta Club and the Sydney chapter of PEN in the 1930s, and that love of “play-acting” led them to the Community Playhouse in Darlinghurst.

Neither woman married. Mackellar published four volumes of verse, but her involvement with writing and the literary scene waned in her fifties and she spent the last ten years of her life in a nursing home. Although Mackellar published no more work, Bedford remained a supportive presence in her life.

Her Sunburnt Country is a curious mix of a biography. Based on a doctoral thesis in which one might expect some rigorous analysis of Mackellar’s literary and personal life, it is clearly aimed at a general readership and packaged as such, with its Barbie-pink dustjacket announcing that it is “the official biography.” Its hyperbolic subtitle is undercut by minimal endnotes, no list of published works and no bibliography or index.

The book is written in the life-and-times mould of biography, but world events often appear primarily as background to Mackellar’s travels and travails, and connections between her life and her times are occasionally strained, as in an awkward segue linking Mackellar’s drinking habit to the effects of the Great Depression. A young Patrick White’s description of her as “pissed” when he meets her on board ship is countered by their exchange of bookplates showing “mutual respect” in later years.

The image of Mackellar’s bookplate is shown in the illustrations section with no explanation or attribution, while White’s is simply described in the text. In fact, both feature wood engravings by the well-known flower painter and bookplate artist Adrian Feint. His bookplate for Mackellar is one of his most enigmatic designs, the central figure depicted as a centaur from Greek mythology — half human and half horse — symbolising duality and paradox.

The androgynous human half with its outstretched arms is a far cry from the tawny-eyed beauty of the biography — a contrast FitzGerald might fruitfully have explored in this charmingly written book that accurately describes its subject’s restless spirit, contradictory nature and longing for freedom. •

Her Sunburnt Country: The Extraordinary Literary Life of Dorothea Mackellar
By Deborah FitzGerald | Simon & Schuster | $55 | 336 pages

The post A triumph and a burden appeared first on Inside Story.

Embarrassed by her escape, William decided to pay Bee a weekly allowance in the hope she would keep as far away from him and the family as possible. This she mostly did, but she was unable to curb her disruptive and sometimes violent public behaviour. She was constantly being arrested, charged and fined, and was jailed when she could not pay the fines; many times she was forced back into asylums. This was the pattern for almost the rest of the life of the woman widely known as  a Sydney bohemian.

During and after the second world war Sydney’s acute housing shortage forced Bee to sleep rough. It is a common myth that she chose homelessness. “No one chooses to be homeless,” notes Rose Ellis, in Bee Miles, the first major biography of her subject. When Bee could no longer afford to rent a room but her allowance meant the city’s social services couldn’t help her, she declared herself a “tenant of the city.” Writes Ellis: Sydney’s “public heart became home, its streets and steps her bed.”

Bee would wake at 5am, hook her blankets to her belt and make her way from wherever she had been sleeping to Mason’s Café in Elizabeth Street, opposite Central Station. She breakfasted there on steak and eggs every morning for nearly twenty years. Afterwards she would go to Dobson’s Turkish Bathhouse where she was given a regular free timeslot to have a bath and wash her hair and clothes. The myth says that Bee was “dirty,” but it wasn’t so. She loved a long, hot bath.

Bee’s working day as a “roving reciter” (Ellis’s words) then began. Passing a delicatessen where she received a free bottle of milk and a barrow where she received a piece of fruit, she would catch a bus from Eddy Avenue to some destination, Watson’s Bay perhaps, where she would offer recitals of poetry and prose for money. Her rates varied from sixpence to three shillings, and Shakespeare was her favourite. To advertise this service she wore a sandwich board.

Back in the city she would perform through the afternoon at a regular spot, such as the steps at the Mitchell Library where there was a regular flow of students. She used to enjoy visits to its reading room until she was banned for smoking. She might end her day with a visit to a friend, not that she had many, or a bookshop or cinema. She dined at 5pm, always curried tongue and peas, and chose her place to sleep for the night, which could be a cave at Rushcutters Bay, under a shed in the Domain, on the steps of St James church opposite Hyde Park Barracks, or in the bandstand at Belmore Park.

After years of being moved on and jumped on, having her blankets and shoes kicked away, and sometimes even being urinated on by the police, Bee finally accepted refuge from Father John Hope (uncle of Manning Clark), rector of Christ Church St Laurence. She slept on the floor of the laundry in the clergy house.

Bee Miles was always on the move. She loved speed — and risk.  As a young woman she became known as “mad Bee Miles” for jumping on and off moving trains on her way from the family home in Wahroonga to the University of Sydney. Her university career lasted only a year and it was said (another myth, of course) that her mind was “turned” by too much study.

She would cling to the bumper bars or footboards of cars, or climb right into a car or taxi and order the driver to drive on. She refused to pay on public transport and conductors learned that it was often wiser not to demand a fare, fearful of the scenes she could cause. Some of her most violent confrontations came when taxi drivers, judging her dishevelled appearance, refused to take her as a paying customer. She suffered several serious assaults this way, the driver-perpetrators never charged.

Prodigiously researched (it began as a PhD), Ellis’s life of Bee Miles unfolds elegantly, uninterrupted by personal perspectives or anecdotes of Ellis’s own. She shares nothing about the relationship she must have developed with her subject (surely every biographer has one). If she essayed a night sleeping in the bandstand in Belmore Park, she doesn’t say. She’s not that kind of biographer.

Her book begins serenely enough. We discover a small girl seated at a piano in a room with a vaulted ceiling and long stained-glass windows overlooking a sprawling garden. The girl is Beatrice Miles and she is practising under the careful but kindly gaze of her grandmother, Ellen Cordner-Miles, a celebrated contralto in Sydney in the 1870s. The afternoon light fades but the girl plays on in the otherwise silent house.

Ellen’s son William Miles, Bee’s father, had taken on various family business enterprises and of these Peapes & Co., a men’s clothing store in George Street, was the most successful. William and his wife Maria had five children. Bee (she insisted on “Bee” and not “Bea”) was born in 1902.

William was a man of contradictions, as famous for his business acumen as for his political radicalism. A devotee of the rationalist and free-thought movements, he raised his children as atheists and taught them the rationalist dictum to reject all forms of “arbitrary” authority. During the first world war he took to a speaker’s box on the Domain to rail against the proposed introduction of conscription, and he instructed his three daughters to wear “No” badges at their school, Abbotsleigh College. Bee relished the ensuing controversy, though her sisters did not.

William might have encouraged Bee’s agile mind but he didn’t expect her to reject his own authority. Her adolescent years were torrid. “Family friction is a battle fought daily,” Ellis observes. “Superficial wounds heal quickly in readiness for the next confrontation. But parental rejection leaves scars that are deep and enduring.”

Fifty years later Bee recalled that her father loved her until she reached the age of fourteen, after which he hated her, angered by her “wilful” nature and jealous of her superior intellect. And yet she also claimed that her mother became jealous of the close relationship between father and daughter, which was more than close, Bee said, it was incestuous. Bee believed that William feared that his wife would go to the police or tell a doctor.

Further trouble came when, at seventeen, Bee contracted encephalitis lethargica, known as “sleeping sickness.” She was with her mother buying gloves at Farmer’s department store one day when she fell asleep at the counter and could not be woken. She had fallen victim to a pandemic, brought to Australia by a returning Anzac, that caused 500,000 deaths in Europe and Australia.

Encephalitis lethargica mainly targeted young people, leaving survivors like Bee with lifelong side effects. Unusually, she escaped the Parkinsonism that afflicted other sufferers, but sensitivity to light (in later years she often wore a sunshade), obesity (she put on weight massively in her forties) and, most significantly, her exhibitionism and her addiction to movement: all were probably the after-effects of encephalitis lethargica.

Here then is the “untold story” of the title of this book, and an ah ha! moment for readers who have heard of or still remember Bee Miles. Ellis treats the subject of Bee’s illness very carefully. Early on she gives enough information about the disease and its effects for the reader to carry forward into the rest of the book because it explains so much about Bee.

But encephalitis lethargica was not the only thing to shape Bee. What with adolescent trauma and her own questing mind, she may never have settled for the life of a North Shore lady anyway. Ellis wants us to know about the joys and freedoms Bee experienced, as well as the pain and loneliness.

By the time she returns to Bee’s illness in the penultimate chapter of the book I was ready and eager to know more. Bee became ill in 1920 and nearly died. Ellis has worked through thirty-six years’ worth of Bee’s medical case notes and finds that although encephalitis lethargica was mentioned many times, specifically or in passing, her doctors condemned Bee through the lens of their own morality. She was “wilful,” “restless,” “impulsive,” “childish,” “arrogant,” “impudent” and “tearful.”

All of this, as well as her attention-seeking behaviour and love of speed and movement, was consistent with well-documented observations of post-encephalitis syndrome. But no one fully explored the link, even though the syndrome was being identified in Australian medical literature at the time. Doctors chose instead to believe her father, who may also have been her abuser, who claimed that Bee had always been “wilful” and lacked “respect for authority” — even though he himself had actively taught her to reject arbitrary authority.

Was Bee herself aware of the probable impact of her illness? Apparently so. In front of a magistrate in 1932 she shouted at her solicitor to “shut up” when he alluded to the effects of sleeping sickness. Many of us would find relief in a formal diagnosis (“at least I’m not actually mad”), but Bee never did. Refusing to be labelled, she rationalised her behaviour into her own view of herself.

She built this view through her public performances and the many press interviews she gave over four decades. She also wrote prolifically and longed to be published. Some of her short travelogues did appear in regional newspapers, but her longer work, including accounts of her incarceration in the 1920s and the massive journeys she made to northern Australia in the 1930s, never found a publisher. Ellis quotes Bee’s own words extensively, however, and thus ensures that she can be known on her own terms and not just as the construct of a male gaze captured in court records and medical case notes.

At sixty-two, after a life of fiercely resisting authority and convention, Bee finally accepted a place in a Catholic-run nursing home, where she died in 1973. A journalist for the Daily Telegraph who visited her in her cave near Rushcutters Bay in 1948 had listed Bee’s fifteen “rules for living.” They included avoiding covetousness, being content with what you have, singing when you are happy, sleeping when it’s dark, and living “toughly, dangerously, excitingly, exhilaratingly and simply.” •

Bee Miles: Australia’s Famous Bohemian Rebel, and the Untold Story Behind the Legend
By Rose Ellis | Allen & Unwin | $34.99 | 336 pages

The post Living toughly appeared first on Inside Story.

In updating his account Rees has been assisted by access to the subject’s extensive personal archives granted by Fischer’s wife Judy. These cover his army experience, his parliamentary career and his time as Australian ambassador to the Vatican, and include a family memoir and (bravely) a pocket diary covering his final months of cancer treatment. Rees also lists an impressive number of interviewees (including Fischer).

Fischer was born to a Catholic sheep-farming family in southwestern New South Wales. After state primary school, he undertook his secondary education at the prestigious Jesuit-run Xavier College in Melbourne. He found the experience less than totally enjoyable, but was no academic slouch and matriculated easily.

He eschewed immediate university study, however, in favour of a return to the farm. He was soon conscripted for national service, and declined to opt for an alternative scheme available for those on the land. Opposed neither to conscription nor to the Vietnam war, he undertook officer training after induction.

As Rees tells it, there was more to Fischer’s decision than the simple conservative principle of doing one’s duty. He extended his national service in order to see action, contending that he would have wasted his eighteen months’ officer training if he didn’t perform the role on the battlefield. His superiors had identified leadership qualities in Fischer and it seems that he was keen to put them to the test.

In Vietnam, Fischer saw death and wounding at close range, and was himself the victim of non-life-threatening wounds. He secured the respect of his superiors and of those under him as a well-organised and measured decision-maker, thoughtful and clear-thinking.

By the time he joined the (then) Country Party in 1969, his war service could only be a plus for his chances of parliamentary preselection, a career direction he seems to have settled on after his return to the farm. If any nascent political ambition played a role in his decision to seek battlefield action, it is mentioned neither by Fischer in his memoir (as related by Rees) nor by Rees as biographer.

At the politically precocious age of twenty-four, Fischer won Country Party preselection for the new seat of Sturt in the NSW parliament. Rees notes the comparative novelty of a Catholic in that party’s ranks, with Fischer mischievously suggesting that his surname (as spelled) may have misled some preselectors to assume that he was of solid Lutheran stock.

Military precision proved to be a transferable skill, and Fischer was able to make good use of his organisational and logistical talents to secure preselection and subsequent election to parliament at the 1971 state election. No matter how small, towns were visited and meetings addressed. He became a prolific worker of local media, print and electronic, as a prelude to doing the same on a national stage.

State parliament proved a frustration for Fischer, possibly stimulating his penchant for the attention-grabbing gimmicks that would be associated with him for much of his career. A speech about lions at risk of escaping the Dubbo Zoo and surviving in the mountains, threatening humans and fellow beasts, was a case in point. On a more serious note, he obtained first-hand experience of the corrupt behaviour of Liberal premier Robert Askin but took no action — a failing he later claimed to regret.

Like many state politicians before him, Fischer decided national politics was where the action was. He secured preselection for the federal seat of Farrer for the 1984 federal election and easily won the seat. But he couldn’t have known that twelve years in opposition lay ahead. After advancing to the opposition frontbench (with, appropriately, the veterans’ affairs portfolio) after John Howard’s accession to the Liberal leadership in September 1985, he established himself as a serious player in both his party and the Coalition.

Straddling the proverbial barbed-wire fence over the unhinged prime ministerial ambitions of Queensland Nationals premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen, which effectively rendered the Coalition unelectable in 1987 against Bob Hawke’s Labor government, Fischer justified his ambivalence as a case of not wanting to split his own organisation. A demoralised opposition reverted to internecine wrangling, and in May 1990 a recycled Andrew Peacock replaced Howard. For the first time in their history, the Nationals dispensed with a leader, replacing Ian Sinclair with Charles Blunt. Fischer was active in bringing about the change.

Although the Nationals lost five seats in the Coalition defeat of 1990, Fischer increased his majority in Farrer. Post-election, he decided to contest the party leadership (vacant following Blunt’s loss of his seat) and defeated John Sharp twelve votes to eight after the elimination of the three other candidates. Sadly for many a subeditor, the Nationals had passed up the chance to replace Blunt with Sharp.

Fischer is depicted as a lukewarm supporter of Liberal leader John Hewson’s plan for a goods and service tax, which proved to be decisive in the Coalition’s fifth successive election defeat in 1993. He was clearly more at home with Howard as a Coalition partner and, after Alexander Downer’s failed Liberal leadership, was probably relieved to contest the 1996 election alongside the veteran.

The Coalition victory in March 1996 saw Fischer assume the roles of deputy prime minister and trade minister, later admitting to having elements of self-doubt at the time of his swearing-in. A month later, the first crisis for the new government would come from a tragically unexpected quarter with the mass shootings at Port Arthur in Tasmania.

The Howard government’s consequential restrictions on gun ownership were widely supported in the community but not necessarily in the constituency represented by Fischer’s party. But he was unwavering in his advocacy and made the case to those affected, accepting that the newly elected right-wing populist Pauline Hanson would exploit the situation to lure resentful Nationals voters towards what subsequently became her One Nation Party. Targeted for abuse and threats, Fischer stayed the course in what qualified as one of his most meritorious contributions to public life.

Fischer had taken the leadership when the Nationals were dealing with the winding down of much of the traditional tariff protection that had long been the party’s raison d’être. The result was an identity problem and a new vulnerability to electoral challenge. This added significance to his role as trade minister as he sought new markets for the products of his rural base.

He is generally seen to have done a good job in the portfolio, an impression probably reinforced by the overall bipartisanship in this policy area. His keen interest in Asia, and his success in establishing good relations with various Asian leaders over many years are cited by Rees as contributing factors.

Fischer’s accession to party leadership seems to have prompted him to tackle the conservative male politician’s version of the first sentence of Pride and Prejudice: he was “in want of a wife.” In 1992, at forty-six, he married Judy Brewer. Two sons followed, but the customary family problem of the absent parliamentarian parent hit the family harder than most after his first son was diagnosed with moderate autism spectrum disorder. Duty, of a different nature, now called and he stepped down from party leadership and the ministry in July 1999, and declined to recontest Farrer at the 2001 election. He was only fifty-five, but had been an MP — state, then federal — for more than thirty years.

He was appointed chair of Tourism Australia in late 2004, not long before Scott Morrison was appointed managing director. Suffice to say that nothing in Fischer’s account of Morrison’s turbulent tenure will do anything to improve the former prime minister’s tattered reputation.

Later, Fischer accepted prime minister Kevin Rudd’s invitation to serve as Australian ambassador to the Vatican, which he did from 2009 to 2012. He was an active diplomat and relished the contacts and lifestyle. Of interest in this context was his subsequent reluctance (unlike John Howard and Tony Abbott) to provide a character reference for Cardinal George Pell when he faced a jail sentence over allegations of child sex abuse. A more liberal Catholic than the dogmatic Abbott, Fischer was disturbed by Pell’s refusal to accept responsibility for what happened on his watch and his apparent indifference to the fate of the victims of abuse.

Fischer was silent when Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce, defender of traditional family values and opponent of same-sex marriage, was exposed as having had an affair with a staff member, but recorded for his memoir that he viewed him as a hypocrite.

While Fischer was an active Catholic, he was open to the positives of other religions, notably Buddhism, an interest developed during a long relationship with Bhutan and its people. He was also a devotee of classical music and art, but these were possibly not credentials likely to enhance a National Party MP’s standing, and some colleagues were unimpressed when details surfaced.

Rees credits Fischer with ensuring Coalition unity during his years as leader by keeping the Nationals backbench in check, a claim made more credible in light of the subsequent leadership instability, which continues to this day. A believer in climate change and concerned about its effect on his primary-producer constituency, he would probably have struggled to accommodate its emergence as part of the culture wars agenda rather than a matter of science.

Rees clearly admires Fischer, but he is not entirely uncritical. In particular, he instances some of Fischer’s intemperate reactions to the High Court’s Mabo and Wik native title judgements, suggesting that “Fischer’s Social Darwinist speech reflected the thinking to be found in postwar primary school social studies textbooks.” At the time of Wik, Fischer was rebuked by the chief justice for possible breach of the separation-of-powers doctrine. He was suitably chastened, but his “defence” that he should have run his comments by his staff seemed somewhat lame.

A defence of his constituents’ interests might have been mounted with more moderate language, suggests the author, while leaving open the inference that leaders should sometimes lead (as on gun control) rather than follow. In reflective mood, Fischer would later acknowledge to Rees his regret about errors such as these.

In his time, Fischer was probably Australia’s most prominent advocate for rail transport — for both freight and passengers — but reality was always likely to win the unequal battle with the Very Fast Train and other dreams. This magnificent obsession did, however, add a point of difference to Fischer’s political persona. He retired from parliament with the respect and affection of his peers, sentiments that seem to have been echoed in much of the population, especially among his rural constituents.

The stereotype of the unsophisticated yokel politician whose language and manner disguise a shrewd and effective political operator can be overdone, but in Fischer’s case it may have been close to the truth. Peter Rees’s very readable book allows us to judge for ourselves about this very distinctive Australian. •

The post Straddling a barbed-wire fence appeared first on Inside Story.

If Armstrong is ever to pursue such a possibility he could do a lot worse than take out options on two new books that tell the story of the original succession, when Rupert Murdoch inherited the keys to his media kingdom from his father Keith. Together, they not only provide a Succession-worthy dose of power plays and court intrigue; they also offer a profound insight into where Rupert Murdoch came from, what he would become and how he has shaped our world.

Walter Marsh’s Young Rupert provides a richly detailed and intricately interwoven close-up view of the young Murdoch on the make in 1950s Adelaide, building the business he inherited from his father. Media Monsters, the second volume of Sally Young’s exhaustively researched and endlessly fascinating history of the Australian media, tells that story in more condensed form but takes it further, as Murdoch extends his operations to the east coast, creates the Australian and throws all his weight behind the election of the Whitlam-led Labor Party in 1972.

The first succession, it turns out, involved at least as much Machiavellian intrigue, internecine struggle and human frailty as the present one; its consequences, it need hardly be said, are still being felt today.

The story begins, inevitably enough, with a very powerful man who, despite age and ailment, can’t bring himself to relinquish control. In 1949, Keith Murdoch was chairman of the board and managing director of Australia’s largest newspaper company, the Herald and Weekly Times, or HWT. There he had grown accustomed to unrivalled influence, claiming credit for the rise and fall of governments and prime ministers.

“I put him there and I’ll put him out,” Murdoch contemptuously said of prime minister Joseph Lyons in the 1930s. When Bob Menzies became prime minister for the second time he immediately sent Murdoch a note thanking him for using his newspapers to energetically campaign on his behalf. There was nothing self-effacing in Murdoch’s reply, which noted that the swing to Menzies was largest where his papers held sway.

But ill-health was catching up with Murdoch, forcing him to spend long periods away from the office. And so he announced a kind-of-retirement. While he would remain on as chairman, he was stepping down as managing director, charging one of his “bright young men,” Jack Williams, with responsibility for day-to-day affairs.

Except Murdoch couldn’t let go. He surrounded Williams with rivals, bad-mouthed him behind his back and sometimes to his face, and constantly interfered in day-to-day management. Williams had his faults, not least a serious drinking problem; one night he was arrested for urinating in Melbourne’s Alfred Place. But friends believed it was Murdoch who was driving Williams to drink.

The simmering tension between the chairman and his erstwhile protégé came to a head in late 1952 when Murdoch gathered together his fellow board members and persuaded them that Williams had to go. Having reclaimed undiluted control, Murdoch travelled out to his property on the Mornington Peninsula to spend the weekend.

And there he died. Within hours of the news, Williams had returned to the HWT offices where he ordered an engineer to blast open the now deceased chairman’s private safe. Armed with the revelations contained therein, he managed to persuade the remaining board members to reconsider their decision to terminate his own employment. At a hastily convened meeting he was reinstated — and the minutes of the previous meeting were expunged from the record.

For all that Keith Murdoch had refused, in the last years of his life, to let power slip from his hands at the Herald and Weekly Times, much of his energy had been focused elsewhere. As a minor HWT shareholder, he knew he would never be in a position to pass on the reins to his young son, Rupert. Thus he had devoted himself to building a media business of his own, one to which the laws of primogeniture would apply.

To set up his son’s inheritance, Murdoch had taken on substantial debt and a shady business partner, refusing to let his fiduciary duties to HWT shareholders stand in the way of securing the succession he cared about most. Or, as Young puts the matter bluntly, Murdoch “conned News Limited off [the HWT] for his son.”

Three years before his death Murdoch had told the HWT board that their position in Adelaide, where the company had effective control of both the city’s daily newspapers, was no longer tenable. In the wake of a royal commission into the press in Britain, monopoly power was under intense scrutiny. It would be prudent, he suggested, to pre-empt government intervention and offload one of their papers.

But Murdoch was less than candid about how such a move might benefit him personally. “When Murdoch told the annual meeting of shareholders in December 1949 that the HWT’s shares in News Limited had been sold,” writes Marsh, “he did not disclose that he was the purchaser.”

Murdoch’s extracurricular activities, as Marsh aptly describes them, were no secret by the time of his death. But his private papers revealed the full extent of these operations and the tremendous conflicts of interest they entailed. Like the secret negotiations Murdoch was conducting to defect from the HWT and merge his company with the owner of one of its main Melbourne rivals, the Argus. Or the fact that Murdoch’s partner in Queensland Newspapers, owner of the Courier-Mail, was none other than the underworld figure made famous by Frank Hardy’s Power Without Glory, John Wren.

Jack Williams was back in charge, and one of his first tasks was to produce a glowing obituary for his mentor-turned-nemesis; he would also serve as a pallbearer at Murdoch’s funeral some days later. As Marsh wryly observes, “It’s hard to imagine any circumstances in which Sir Keith would have approved of this chain of events, but as Williams helped carry him from the church, he was in no position to object.”

Nor could Murdoch object as his old colleagues at the HWT sought to reacquire the company he had prized from it, News Limited. Barely had Keith been buried before his young widow, Elisabeth, was approached. The HWT, she was informed, was about to begin a Sunday edition of the Advertiser that would in all likelihood kill off News Limited’s Sunday Mail. Wouldn’t she prefer to sell first, they asked. Indeed, wouldn’t life be easier without the burdens of owning and running her late husband’s entire newspaper business?

Elisabeth didn’t take the bait. But — determined to clear the significant debt her late husband had racked up — she sold them the Courier-Mail. The young Rupert, who had hurried back from Oxford to claim his inheritance, was bitterly disappointed. “Cunning old bastards,” he called his dad’s former colleagues, but he must have recognised that his father was the most cunning of them all, and he was the prime beneficiary of the bastardry.

Thus Marsh and Young tell a story that revolves around not one succession but two — the fates of the very large business Keith Murdoch managed and the much smaller one he owned — and the conflict between the two. The resulting inheritance might have been smaller than both Keith and Rupert had hoped but, as Sally Young emphasises, it was nothing to complain about: three newspapers (the daily News and the Sunday Mail in Adelaide, and the Barrier Miner in Broken Hill) as well as a significant stake in the weekly women’s magazine New Idea, and a number of radio stations.

But young Rupert inherited more than assets with the potential to generate substantial revenue. He entered an elite club that exercised enormous control over Australia’s political and economic life. A large part of Sally Young’s achievement in Media Monsters is to lay bare the true extent of that power; in so doing she offers a profound insight into what Keith Murdoch really bequeathed his son.

As familiar as the troubling relationship between politicians and newspaper proprietors is, the effect of Young’s meticulous research is to surface details that still retain their power to shock (as well as containing remarkable contemporary resonances).

Witness the remarkable role of the press barons in the founding of the Liberal Party. In late 1944, Menzies was invited to dinner at the Melbourne home of a senior mining executive. In attendance were all the country’s leading media figures, including Keith Murdoch, Frank Packer and Rupert Henderson, manager of the Sydney Morning Herald. By the end of the evening, all those present had agreed to do everything in their power — which was considerable — to bring the Liberal Party into existence. “None of this secret compact was disclosed in the attendees’ respective newspapers,” Young sharply observes, “and nor is the remarkable dinner mentioned in official accounts of the Liberal Party’s history.”

The press proprietors collectively backed the party to the hilt over subsequent decades. Measured in terms of editorial support during federal elections, Australia’s daily newspapers supported the Liberals 90 per cent of the time during the fifties and sixties. But it’s the details of this cosy collaboration that are truly revealing. After the half-Senate election in 1953, Menzies sent a message to the editor of the Courier-Mail, Colin Bednall. “My dear Colin,” Menzies wrote, “I cannot go abroad without writing to let you know how much we have all appreciated the attitude of the Courier-Mail during the Senate campaign. No government could have asked for its case to be better or more enthusiastically presented.”

Menzies received an equally sympathetic hearing on radio. He requested, and received, extraordinary, unfettered access to the listening public through weekly ten-minute Man to Man broadcasts on forty stations across the country. The media barons hoped the opposition leader, H.V. Evatt, “would not complain or demand equal time,” Young explains. “He did both, but was ignored.”

The Liberal leader made sure these favours didn’t go unrequited, making a series of decisions that shaped the new medium of television in the interests of his powerful media allies. When he announced a royal commission into the introduction of television, the first commissioner chosen was the aforementioned Courier-Mail editor, Colin Bednall. Suitably stacked, the commission delivered predictably congenial recommendations, and Menzies did the rest to ensure the newspaper proprietors who already had a licence to print money would be well positioned to make even more.

The television market established by the Menzies government was at once highly concentrated and poorly regulated, lacking the pluralism and diversity of American television on the one hand, or the public service character of the British model on the other.

The UHF band already in operation in the United States could carry hundreds of television stations, including channels reserved for community groups and educational purposes; Australia opted for the much more restricted VHF band. In Britain commercial broadcasting took place under a public service model with similar obligations and programming standards to the BBC’s. In Australia, such regulation and oversight was successfully resisted, and private ownership of television transmitters made it practically impossible to revoke commercial television licences, and therefore to rigorously enforce any standards.

If blatant partisanship, the parlaying of political support into commercial benefit and the concomitant degradation of the public sphere would, in time, come to epitomise Rupert Murdoch’s way of doing business, what is remarkable in both Young’s and Marsh’s accounts is the extent to which he initially resisted playing this game. To be sure, he took to the role of publisher with gusto, fending off the HWT’s assault on his lucrative Sunday paper in Adelaide, acquiring Perth’s Sunday Times in 1954 (where he first exhibited his talent for tabloid sensationalism) and securing the license for the NWS-9 station when television came to Adelaide in 1958.

Marsh comprehensively establishes that Murdoch was always ruthlessly ambitious and that intellectual consistency was never really his thing (he believed in the benefits of competition as long as he was the beneficiary). But, for all that, the young magnate forms a striking contrast to his father, his contemporaries and, above all, his older self.

It may just be a historical curiosity that the young Rupert was an ardent socialist known as Comrade Murdoch at Geelong Grammar; that he installed a bust of Lenin in his rooms at Oxford; or that he engaged in an admiring correspondence with Ben Chifley. But even after he had taken over the family business his politics retained a decidedly leftist hue. In Adelaide he hobnobbed with future Whitlam minister Clyde Cameron, and flirted with the Fabian Society. “He was much further left than me,” Cameron recalled in his memoir.

Even if Cameron exaggerated for effect, his recollection clearly contains a strong kernel of truth. Sally Young describes the Adelaide News in the 1950s as “the most liberal daily paper in the country, one with a social conscience that published very different views to the establishment Advertiser.” Similarly, in its early years the Australian was exceptional in its willingness to question conservative governments. It was the sole morning newspaper to editorialise against Australia’s commitment of troops to Vietnam. Then, of course, there was Murdoch’s energetic and enthusiastic campaigning for Labor in 1972, prior to his rejection of Whitlam and his long march to the right.

The most revealing insight into Murdoch’s politics in this period is found in Marsh’s rich account of the case of Arrernte man and itinerant carnival worker Rupert Max Stuart, sentenced to death in 1959 for the gruesome rape and murder of a young girl. In the wake of Stuart’s trial, Murdoch’s News ran a series of reports that brought the veracity and justice of the conviction into serious question. First, it was revealed that Stuart had neither translator nor legal representation on hand when he made a confession; then that it had been beaten out of him; and finally that he appeared to have an alibi. With financial support from the News, a concerned clergyman had tracked down Stuart’s former employer, now interstate, who testified that the convicted man was with him at the time the crime occurred. PRIEST: STUART HAS PERFECT ALIBI, ran the headline in the News, DELAY THIS HANGING.

South Australian premier Tom Playford announced a royal commission and a one-month reprieve for Stuart, and one British newspaper described Murdoch’s editor, Rohan Rivett, as the “Zola of South Australia.” But Murdoch’s convictions were about to be tested further, when the royal commission the News had done so much to establish ended in acrimony, with Stuart’s counsel, Jack Shand, walking out. COMMISSION BREAKS UP — SHAND BLASTS NAPIER, read one News headline; SHAND QUITS — “YOU WON’T GIVE STUART FAIR GO” blared another.

If, with the passing of half a century, these statements seem like a pretty reasonable rendering of what had transpired, that was not how they were received at the time. The News was deemed to have impugned the integrity of the court, and Rivett and Murdoch found themselves facing a series of libel and seditious libel charges. They stuck it out and, ultimately, the charges were dropped but only after a long, expensive and intimidating legal action. Meanwhile, Max Stuart’s conviction stood, and he served out a lengthy jail sentence (the question of his guilt remains murky). But his life was spared.

It’s impossible to absorb these events, also comprehensively covered in Media Monsters, without reflecting on the story of a similar — and similarly horrifying case — that occurred three decades earlier. On the last day of 1922 a twelve-year-old girl was found raped and murdered in an alley off Melbourne’s Little Collins Street. Soon a local publican, Colin Ross, was in the police’s crosshairs. The editor of the Melbourne Herald, Keith Murdoch, was thrilled: he had learned firsthand from his British mentor, Lord Northcliffe, what a good murder could do for circulation.

Under Keith’s direction, the sensational allegations against Ross were flogged for all they were worth, sales nearly doubled, and Ross — who was exonerated by DNA evidence seventy-five years later — was convicted and hanged. So notorious was the Herald’s commercialisation of the case that its new headquarters on Flinders Street, built in the years following Ross’s hanging, were long known as the Colin Ross Memorial. The Colin Ross Memorial was where the teenaged Rupert Murdoch would get his first taste of the newspaper business. It is difficult to believe the case was far from his mind as he campaigned against the execution of Max Stuart throughout 1958 and 1959.

For all that the Stuart case exhibited Murdoch’s long-lost idealism, it also taught the young proprietor a critical lesson about the newspaper business and the consequences of offending the advertisers who were his main source of revenue. With the case still in full swing Murdoch told Clyde Cameron, “I’m in a spot Clyde. Myers have phoned to say that unless we drop our campaign in favour of Stuart, they are going to withdraw all of their advertising from the News and that means a lot to us…”

In the short term, Murdoch withstood the pressure, but only weeks after the conclusion of legal action against the News, he sacked Rohan Rivett. Keith Murdoch had confidently predicted, a year before his death, that his then socialist son would “eventually travel the same course of his father.” This sacking was one of the first signs that Keith would in time be proved completely correct (with interest on top); it also indicated that Rupert had fully registered the true commercial consequences of his editor’s campaigns.

Around the same time, Murdoch learned an even more important lesson about surviving and thriving in a business in which the majority of revenue came from selling advertising, when he witnessed the spectacular failure of the Melbourne Argus. In 1949, the Argus’s editorial line had taken a sharp turn to the left, a marked departure from the arch-conservatism that had characterised the paper for most of the preceding century.

The shift from right to left was effected at dizzying speed and in the process the paper’s new British owners made a number of serious missteps. But, as Sally Young explains, when the Argus was shuttered in 1957 its audience had actually grown. The problem was that “advertisers had shunned the bolshy, down-market, more left-wing paper. That was the deathblow, rather than a loss of readers,” writes Young. “When the paper closed in 1957, it had 170,000 readers, and that was 42,000 more than the Age, and a higher circulation than five other capital city dailies had at that time.” The Argus failed because its moderate leftwards tendency attracted less pecunious readers who were less sought after by advertisers.

The case of the Argus is crucial to understanding the nature of the Australian press in Rupert Murdoch’s formative years. The ideological commitments of proprietors provides one explanation for the overwhelming conservatism of Australia’s newspapers, but not the only one. After all, the proprietors had to win a readership and this meant selling their papers to a nation that was roughly equally politically divided. Even at its high watermark in 1966, the Coalition’s two-party-preferred vote was only 57 per cent — evidence of a far more politically divided nation than its daily newspapers suggested.

What the Argus experiment clearly indicated was that the preferences of readers were of secondary financial importance to the preferences of advertisers for the attention of a particular type of reader — one with high disposable income. Left-wing working-class newspapers faced a structural obstacle: a lesson not lost on Rupert Murdoch who, Young notes, “would use the Argus as a cautionary tale. He said a lack of advertiser support killed it and only 5 per cent more advertising would have made a big difference to its future.”

In their seminal history of the British press, Power Without Responsibility, James Curran and Jean Seaton attribute a decisive role to advertising in determining the commercial viability of newspapers since the nineteenth century. And they also tell a story of central importance in the career of Rupert Murdoch: the strange death of a newspaper called the Daily Herald and its rebirth under a new name, the Sun.

The demise of the Daily Herald was similar in nature to that of the Argus, only amplified in scale and consequence. When it was shut down in 1964 its circulation was 1.26 million, greater than that of the Times, the Financial Times and the Guardian combined. Surveys indicated that its readers took in more of their paper than the readers of other major dailies — and felt more attached to it. Its problem? It ultimately couldn’t compete financially with rivals who enjoyed the favour of advertisers. The Daily Herald readership might have been very large but it was overwhelmingly working-class, with minimal disposable income, reflective of the paper’s radical politics, and thus relatively unattractive to advertisers. Despite obtaining 8.1 per cent of national daily circulation in its final years, the Herald received only 3.5 per cent of net advertising revenue.

A decade before its downfall, the Daily Herald’s owners had recognised that they faced a choice. Either they could go really mass-market and cater to the advertisers who were more interested in quantity than “quality.” To do this, the paper would have to shed its political identity, and associated coverage of union matters, and ratchet up the human-interest stories, cartoons and horoscopes. Or they could go for quality by focusing on attracting the young, affluent audience that advertisers were willing to pay top dollar for.

The rebranding of the paper as the Sun was a belated attempt to pursue this latter strategy, but its half-hearted execution lacked strong internal support. And so, in 1969, the floundering paper was offloaded to Rupert Murdoch. Unlike the previous owners, Murdoch decided to take the Sun down-market and brought an unabashed and unqualified commitment to doing so. “I want a tearaway paper with lots of tits in it,” was the edict delivered to the Sun’s new editor. Circulation doubled within twelve months.

Rupert Murdoch is, of course, far from the first person to cast aside youthful ideals in pursuit of profit and power, or to tread the path from rebellion to reaction, a journey abetted in his case by the coincidence of middle age with the global turn to neoliberalism. But if a person is ultimately an opportunist it pays to attend to the opportunities the world affords them. The young media mogul on the make was consistently confronted with a powerful set of commercial incentives that decisively shaped his course: avoid offending advertisers and maximise the audiences that advertisers are willing to pay for.

When Murdoch made his next big move, to the United States, he entered a media landscape that had been powerfully shaped by the same forces he had encountered in Australia and the United Kingdom. In the 2019 book No Longer Newsworthy the American media scholar Christopher R. Martin describes how postwar American newspapers became increasingly defined by the pursuit of high socioeconomic status readers, the kind advertisers desired. Editorially, that meant a declining coverage of industrial relations, and strikes in particular. And when strikes were reported, the framing shifted from open-minded engagement with workers’ demands to an increasingly dominant focus on inconvenienced consumers.

As reporters were taken off industrial relations beats, financial self-help columns and coverage of the stock market increased. And as the mainstream media stopped telling working-class stories, right-wing cultural warriors were only too willing to fill the vacuum, with figures like televangelist Pat Robertson and ultraconservative shock jock Rush Limbaugh stepping into the void — as, eventually, did Murdoch’s Fox News. But, says Martin, America’s “right-wing media complex got its start with Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of the New York Post in 1976.” •

Young Rupert: The Making of the Murdoch Empire
By Walter Marsh | Scribe | $35.00 | 352 pages
Media Monsters: The Transformation of Australia’s Newspaper Empires
By Sally Young | UNSW Press | $49.99 | 576 pages

The post The first succession… and its consequences appeared first on Inside Story.

But Albanese was also that very modern species: the student politician who came to parliament via a career as a political staffer and party official. His only experience of paid work outside of professional politics occurred while he was a student. After university, he was employed as a staffer by that doyen of the Sydney left, Tom Uren. He married Carmel Tebbutt, who would also become a politician and rose to the position of deputy premier of New South Wales. He spent more than a quarter of a century in parliament before becoming prime minister. His was a long game, and there was nothing inevitable about where it led.

These were the outward expressions of Albanese’s rise: prominent in campus politics at the University of Sydney; NSW Young Labor president; rising political staffer; NSW Labor assistant general secretary at twenty-six, and therefore de facto leader of the left in the party machine; member for Grayndler at thirty-three. He would go on to hold senior positions in the shadow ministry during the Howard era and cabinet office under Rudd and Gillard, as well as being leader of the House. But Albanese’s more private world disclosed a complexity barely hinted at in these impressive career landmarks.

Albo — the nickname that attached to him from boyhood — was born in Sydney on 2 March 1963 and raised by his mother, a disability pensioner and Labor Party member, in public housing in Camperdown. The official story was that Anthony’s father, an Italian ship’s steward named Carlo, had died in a car accident soon after marrying his mother. They had met while Maryanne was travelling on an ocean liner to Britain.

Early in his teenage years, Anthony learnt from Maryanne that she had never married Carlo, and that he had not died. Nonetheless, Anthony made no attempt to find his father for many years. He was close to his mother, who held lofty ambitions for her son: she told friends Anthony would one day become prime minister. In the meantime, she had a short-lived and unhappy marriage to another man, whose surname Anthony briefly adopted before reverting to that of a father he had never met.

Albanese attended Catholic schools and then the University of Sydney, where he studied economics. The university had a broad left that took in a wide range of ideologies and affiliations, and Albo, a charismatic figure, got on well with people across the spectrum of radical politics. His affiliation, however, was with the ALP Club, and he was best known on campus for organising a successful campaign to defend the teaching of political economy, a program that offered a left-wing, Marxist-inflected alternative to neoclassical economics.

But Albo regarded grown-up Labor politics as the real game. He had joined the party in 1979, still at school, and would later rise through the ranks of the Young Labor organisation, which, unlike the NSW Labor Party, had a left majority.

Albo was determined that NSW Young Labor would remain left, and he displayed an early ability to round up the necessary numbers. The origins of the NSW Labor left, also known as the Steering Committee (and from 1989 as the Socialist Left), stretched back to the Labor split of the 1950s. Of its sub-factions, the “soft left” was closely associated with the Ferguson family: Jack, who was Neville Wran’s deputy premier, and his sons. The alternative and rival “hard left” was the group to which Albanese gravitated. While the right was their mutual foe, there was no love lost between the two left sections.

Anthony took over many responsibilities connected with his mother’s precarious health and finances. While mother and son were devoted to each other, the absence of his father shadowed Albanese’s life. Even the pronunciation of his name was unsettled, then as now.

Tom Uren, a former boxer, prisoner of war and leading minister in the Whitlam government, took him on to his staff and became a mentor and even something of a father figure. Uren was by this time an elder statesman of the NSW left but on the outer in the Hawke government, which had little interest in taking up the kind of ambitious policy associated with Uren’s time as urban and regional development minister (1972–75). A deep affection developed between the older and the younger man. Before the decade was through, Uren was publicly describing young Albo as a future Labor leader.

In 1989, Albanese won the position of assistant general secretary of the NSW Labor Party. This was no bit part. Having emerged in the early 1970s out of a power-sharing arrangement between the majority right and minority left factions, it was one of the toughest gigs in backroom politics. As the left’s man in the Sussex Street party office, the assistant general secretary could expect relentless obstruction, and not a little hostility; there was no pretence of comradeship across factional lines. On one occasion, while Albanese was overseas, his rivals from the right faction turned his office into a library and changed the locks.

But Albanese was already a tough political operator. For many ordinary Australians, their first encounter with him would have been in a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the 1994 election for mayor of Leichhardt, Rats in the Ranks, even though he remained off-screen. Albanese was alone among the main players in refusing to cooperate with the filmmakers and appear on-screen. In this, he showed an astuteness about the damage that might have been done to his political career if he had been seen as centrally involved in the plotting of what proved to be an unseemly struggle for a minor local office.

The future prime minister won preselection for the safe Labor seat of Grayndler ahead of the 1996 federal election that saw the defeat of the Keating Labor government by a resurgent Coalition under John Howard’s leadership. Normally, preselection would have been a near-guarantee of election. On this occasion, there were predictions that it might be more difficult because of the controversy aroused by the building of a third runway at Sydney Airport. Albanese faced a candidate from the No Aircraft Noise Party, who won enough of the vote to reduce the Labor candidate to a bare majority of the primary vote.

In his first speech to parliament, Albanese began by thanking his mother, who had raised him “under very difficult economic circumstances” and instilled in him “a strong sense of social justice and fairness.” His “politics as a democratic socialist,” he said, had “been developed from my experience in life.” He defended the public sector and criticised “strict adherence to dry economic philosophies.”

These were noble words, but he soon showed on the floor of the House his fighting instincts, honed in Sussex Street and party conferences at the Sydney Town Hall. In April 1998, he made a memorable attack on Howard: “You can trim the eyebrows; you can cap the teeth; you can cut the hair; you can put on different glasses; you can give him a ewe’s milk facial, for all I care; but, to paraphrase a gritty Australian saying, ‘same stuff, different bucket.’” The usual phrase would have been “same shit…” but Albanese was sufficiently familiar with parliamentary rules to know that he would not have got away with that.

He continued: “Here is a man who lived at home until he was thirty-two. You can imagine what he was like. Here were young Australians demonstrating against the Vietnam war, listening to the Doors, driving their tie-dyed kombi vans, and what was John Howard doing? He was at home with mum, wearing his shorts and long white socks, listening to Pat Boone albums and waiting for the Saturday night church dance.” It was very impolite but contributed to Albanese’s image as a bomb-thrower.

There was more to Albanese than such fun and games. He opposed a bill that Liberal parliamentarian Kevin Andrews introduced to overturn voluntary euthanasia legislation in the Northern Territory. He pursued reforms to allow same-sex couples to gain access to each other’s superannuation on the same basis as heterosexual couples. These years also provided Albanese with an opportunity to demonstrate his devotion to another part of that Sydney working-class trinity: he was centrally involved in the successful campaign to save South Sydney from the National Rugby League’s effort to get rid of it.

As Albanese’s standing in the party grew, his views on matters such as the leadership came to count for a great deal. He supported Kim Beazley in both of his periods of leadership (1996–2001 and 2005–06) and Simon Crean (2001–03), until the latter decided, without consulting him (or, indeed, the caucus), that Labor would oppose a new airport for western Sydney. He opposed Mark Latham’s ill-fated ascension to the leadership in December 2003 and three years later supported Beazley against Kevin Rudd while maintaining a strong relationship with the man who would take Labor to victory a year later.

He also gained increasingly important shadow ministries. After Labor lost the 1998 election, he was shadow parliamentary secretary for family and community services. Later, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander affairs and the arts were added. He arrived on the frontbench as shadow ageing and seniors minister after the 2001 election loss, followed by education and training, and then the environment. When Rudd became leader, he got the infrastructure and water portfolios. Having come to be seen as a skilled tactician, he rose to become manager of opposition business in the House.

Here was the story of a man playing to his own strengths and interests, rising steadily rather than as a shooting star (in contrast with Latham), building trust with straight-talking, discretion and competence, and wielding power and organising numbers in the party as an old-school factional leader.

Albanese’s marriage to Tebbutt, the birth of a son, Nathan, and the devastating death of his beloved mother in rapid succession in the early years of the new century mellowed him. He enjoyed warm friendships with some members of the opposition. And he commenced a search for the father he had never known. In a highly emotional encounter, he met an elderly Carlo on a visit to Italy in 2009. A missing part of his life fell into place.

Albanese was a heavy hitter in the Rudd government that came to power in 2007. With ministerial responsibilities covering infrastructure, transport, regional development and local government, he had an important role in a government that said it wanted to renew nation-building after years of neglect under Howard-era market fundamentalism.

The establishment of Infrastructure Australia was integral to this effort: there were major investments in road and rail, but the global financial crisis distracted the government from its larger ambitions towards everyday survival through quick, smaller-scale spending projects. Albanese, as a member of the left long sceptical of inflated claims for the value of markets, supported the thrust towards a more ambitious role for government.

Albanese was leader of the House — and therefore responsible for the smooth running of parliament — as well as a loyal Rudd supporter, despite his misgivings about some of the prime minister’s bad calls, notably the abandonment of legislation for an emissions trading scheme. He was dismayed as Rudd’s critics moved against the prime minister in mid 2010 in favour of the deputy, Julia Gillard. Albanese and Gillard had an association going back to student politics but had never been close. Albanese believed the switch ill-judged, but he took on the task of talking with Rudd to persuade him that he should not run in a leadership contest that he was destined to lose badly.

While known to be a loyal Rudd supporter, Albanese continued as a senior minister in Gillard’s government both before and after the 2010 election that sent Labor into a minority government facing a resurgent opposition led by Tony Abbott.

Unlike many of his colleagues, Albanese managed to avoid the impression that he was a plotter. Trusted on both sides of the bitter Rudd–Gillard rivalry, his reputation as a party man, his astute leadership of the House and his capabilities as a minister made him valuable to whoever was in office.

His factional leadership was another reason why he was to be taken seriously. Albanese’s value only increased when Labor, lacking a majority in the House, depended on the support of Greens and independents. He formed excellent relations with the independent parliamentarians on whom Labor depended for continuation in office. Some 561 pieces of legislation were passed during Gillard’s prime ministership, and each required someone to reach beyond the Labor Party to gather the numbers needed. That someone was often Albanese.

He also had the melancholy duty of engineering the replacement of Harry Jenkins as speaker with the Queensland Liberal National Party member Peter Slipper, a manoeuvre Albanese had devised to get Labor an extra vote in parliament. While many regretted the idea when Slipper became mired in scandal, it seemed like a good idea at the time, and Albanese conceived and executed the plan well.

Rudd’s destabilisation of Gillard’s leadership couldn’t but draw a figure of Albanese’s standing into the fray. Just how involved in the decline and fall of Gillard he became remains contentious. But when Rudd challenged Gillard’s leadership in February 2012, Albanese held a media conference in Sydney at which he shed tears for what the government had become. There were references to his mother and her three great faiths and to the values on which he had been raised. What the party had done in June 2010 in replacing Rudd with Gillard was wrong, he said, and he would now be voting for Rudd. “I like fighting Tories — that’s what I do,” he added.

It was a supreme performance of the party man, an old-fashioned demonstration of tribal loyalty in an era of fluid identities and shifting allegiances. Gillard had refused his offer to resign, she won the leadership vote, and Albanese continued as a minister in a tired, staggering government.

Rudd defeated Gillard in a second bid to return to the leadership on 26 June 2013. Nobody accuses Albanese of doing the numbers for Rudd, yet few doubt that his involvement behind the scenes must have been significant. Those who recalled Rats in the Ranks might have been reminded of Albanese’s presence during that drama, always off-screen but a player nonetheless. Albanese’s reward came with the office of deputy prime minister. He was conscious of the honour. As so often at significant moments in his career, he would return to where he had come from: “It says a great thing about our nation that the son of a parent who grew up in a council house in Sydney could be deputy prime minister.”

That was true, but he would have only a few weeks in the job. On 7 September, the government was swept from office and Abbott became prime minister. There were small consolation prizes for Albanese: an inner-city pub had named a beer after him, and he had been given the chance to host the ABC’s music video program Rage.

Rudd had left a parting gift. The parliamentary leadership was now to be decided, in part, by a vote of the ALP’s rank and file. Party members’ votes would count for half the weighting; those of a diminished caucus would make up the other half. Bill Shorten, a figure from the Victorian right, contested the leadership; so did Albanese, representing the left. There were weeks of speeches and debates. Most agree that the ritual was a positive one, generating friendliness and goodwill, and engaging ordinary members in a novel outbreak of party democracy. Indeed, the experiment was seemingly so successful that it has never been repeated.

Albanese won the rank­and-file vote easily, but Shorten gained sufficient support in caucus to win the contest. Several members of the left voted for Shorten; Albanese was left to lick his wounds just ahead of a final, emotional visit to his dying father in Italy.

In running for the leadership, Albanese had formally announced that he regarded himself as a potential future prime minister. Inevitably, and even allowing for the protections that Rudd’s reforms offered an incumbent leader between parliamentary elections, that also made him the most obvious alternative to Shorten. Whenever Shorten was faring poorly in public esteem, there would be chatter about the possibility of an Albanese leadership.

Meanwhile, Albanese worked hard to raise his public profile, to show that he was neither just a Sydney brawler nor a man destined to rise no higher than second-rank portfolios. His profile was raised by a regular slot on Nine’s Today with his Liberal Party friend Christopher Pyne. He cooperated with a biography written by leading journalist Karen Middleton, which was published in 2016. (I have relied on it, among other sources, for information.) A photograph of a young and handsome Albanese from 1985 — dubbed “Hot Albo” — circulated widely on social media from the time of the leadership election of 2013, quite obviously with his cooperation.

Albo also cultivated an image of retro hipness as “DJ Albo,” performing the role of disc jockey at pubs and clubs — sometimes for charity, sometimes as a party fundraiser — with an emphasis on 1980s and 1990s numbers. He assured journalists that it was “part of who I am” and not a publicity stunt aimed at winning over younger voters. In truth, it was likely something of both.

Labor’s strong performance at the 2016 double dissolution election largely put paid to chatter of a change of leaders. Shorten had almost edged out Malcolm Turnbull, who seemed a beaten and bitter man on election night. In the circumstances, Albanese quickly ruled out any challenge to Shorten, who therefore retained the leadership unopposed.

In the years ahead, prominent members of the political class found it increasingly hard to visualise a future Albanese prime ministership. Some considered him worthy of it but thought that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Others believed that he had kept too many of his old left-wing sympathies. Inevitably, new prospective leaders gained attention, notably Tanya Plibersek, a fellow member of the NSW left. But Albanese had the virtue of patience. His views might have become milder over the years, but he had the lodestar of his upbringing. It was hard to accuse him of believing in nothing, of being a mere careerist. He could also sound the right note at the right time. His 2018 Whitlam Oration was widely perceived as a call for the party to “engage constructively with businesses” at a time when Shorten’s rhetoric seemed likely to alienate “the big end of town.”

He was entering an era, too, in which the political insider was on the nose. Albanese celebrated twenty years in parliament in 2016, managing in that year to hold off a challenge in his electorate from the Greens after a redistribution in their favour. The Greens challenger professed radical ideas of a kind that might once have been close to those of a younger Albanese. Albanese’s marriage to Tebbutt ended in early 2019 — they had been together for three decades and married for nineteen years.

Both personally and professionally, Albanese seemed to have reached a crossroads. As the Coalition government lurched from one crisis to the next, and from one leader to the next — Malcolm Turnbull to Scott Morrison in 2018 — a Shorten Labor government seemed more likely than not. A Labor victory at the 2019 election would have ended any prospect of an Albanese prime ministership.

Since September 2013 Albanese had been shadow infrastructure and transport minister, also covering tourism — responsibility for cities was added in 2014. But the best he could look forward to in a Shorten government was a role of secondary importance, doing the kinds of things he had done before. He was not close to Shorten and was never part of his inner circle; Albanese was only brought onto the tactics committee in 2016, ahead of that year’s election.

Shorten and Labor’s shock loss at the 2019 election changed things entirely; Morrison retained the prime ministership and Albanese assumed the Labor leadership without a contest. The Victorian right’s Richard Marles was his deputy. Albanese had secured the prize he coveted in vain in 2013, but the pathway to the prime ministership, even in the third term of a deeply mediocre government, looked treacherous. Morrison’s majority was, like Turnbull’s had been, a small one, but the margins needed to win many seats had blown out, especially in Queensland.

Labor jettisoned the policies that were seen to have created trouble at the recent election, working hard to counter a perception that its environmental policies were a danger to job opportunities without alienating too many voters committed to countering global heating. And it waved through income tax cuts that would, when they reached their third stage in 2024, involve large gains for high-income earners.

Morrison’s ill-judged response to the devastating bushfires during the summer of 2019–20 gave Albanese and Labor their first chance to gain ground. Morrison was taking a family holiday in Hawaii while the fires raged. The poor impression created by his absence was compounded by his office’s decision to obfuscate about his whereabouts.

Albanese, meanwhile, was on duty and conspicuous in the media, giving interviews, visiting bushfire sites and serving meals to firefighters. He avoided an aggressive partisanship, allowing Morrison to make, and then suffer for, his own errors. Albanese also called for volunteer firefighters to receive financial compensation for their efforts. It was a masterly performance.

After the bushfires came the Covid-19 pandemic. These were dark days, but an unexpected opportunity for Morrison to rebuild his credibility. The government instituted measures that helped avert both mass death and economic disaster. The formation of a national cabinet that included leaders of all state and territory governments excluded Albanese as opposition leader.

Inevitably, the decision-makers hogged the limelight, Morrison’s own approval rating recovered, and Albanese disappeared from public consciousness. Disruption of the normal schedule of parliamentary sittings also reduced visibility. But in retrospect, Albanese’s low profile was advantageous. It allowed him to maintain a decent distance from the government, which was beneficial when things eventually went wrong.

In the meantime, Albanese was able to offer bipartisanship on most major matters and to appear constructive while his party quietly went about developing new policies. Labor’s victory in a by-election in Eden-Monaro in July 2020 might have helped his leadership survive in dark times. He had formed a new romantic relationship, too, with Jodie Haydon, which boosted his personal happiness.

But a month after that by-election, several leading colleagues had a meeting with him that was also a warning: the party would be defeated if an election were to be held then, and he needed to improve his performance. In the wider commentariat, too, were several who thought Albanese not up to it. Even in May 2021, when Labor’s prospects looked rather better, political historian and journalist Chris Wallace thought Albanese “a bloke past his prime.”

At the end of 2020, Morrison appeared to be coasting towards another victory, and some suspected he might call an election sooner rather than later. In January 2021, Albanese was badly injured but fortunate to survive a car accident when a young driver hit his car in Sydney. The year that followed, however, saw Albanese recover both his personal health and his political fortunes. Morrison muddled pandemic management; Albanese stepped up his criticism, arguing that the prime minister had “two jobs,” quarantine and vaccination, and that he had failed at both. A new round of restrictions became “Morrison’s lockdowns.” Meanwhile, Albanese and Labor benefited from the perception that the government was hostile to measures to counter global warming, to women’s rights, and to clean and accountable government.

Labor entered the campaign for the 21 May 2022 election ahead in the polls and modest favourites to win. Albanese seemed to many to lack star quality, but he looked good, having lost weight and acquired stylish glasses. While no one could discern any great wave of enthusiasm, Labor seemed to have a fair prospect of at least minority government. Albanese has a reputation for an excellent memory, especially for figures, so it was remarkable that early in the campaign he found himself unable to recall the Reserve Bank’s cash rate during a media conference. The unemployment rate also eluded him. The media were ruthless, and Morrison pounced, presenting this lapse as evidence of Albanese’s unfitness for the prime ministership.

When, later in the campaign, Albanese responded to another question from a journalist that he believed the minimum wage should be increased at the same rate as the present level of inflation, 5.1 per cent, there was initially adverse media reaction, with Morrison now calling him a “loose unit.” In reality, Albanese’s response helped to provide Labor’s campaign with some much-needed ballast amid the activities of a media pack that seemed more interested in testing his memory than his policies.

Albanese performed effectively in the three formal debates. Labor ran a professional and disciplined campaign under national secretary Paul Erickson and, notwithstanding the occasional setback, by election day Albanese had every reason to be hopeful.

Election night began at Albanese’s Marrickville home with Penny Wong, a factional colleague, close confidant and shadow foreign minister. She would later introduce Albanese when he made his victory speech. As he had done on several occasions in the campaign, Albanese spoke feelingly of his mother, and he committed his government to the full implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart, which called for a First Nations Voice to Parliament, a treaty and truth-telling.

Labor had won a narrow majority, with a primary vote in the low thirties. Independents and Greens had taken seats, mainly from the Liberals, but the size of the crossbench was widely interpreted as a symptom of disillusionment with the old parties and an old politics. Albanese, a factional warrior from way back, in some ways seemed an unlikely herald of a new order. But he had come a long way since his 1998 excoriation of John Howard as the latest in the Liberals’ “pantheon of chinless blue bloods and suburban accountants.” Albanese could now have passed for a suburban accountant himself.

Still, he hit the ground running. He and four colleagues were sworn in the Monday following the election, just ahead of an overseas visit to Tokyo for the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (“the Quad”) with Japan, India and the United States. High in the government’s early priorities was repairing Australia’s international relationships, including with France — which resented what it saw as Morrison’s dishonesty over the purchase of submarines — and with China, which had placed relations with Australia in the deep freeze.

Albanese — as well as foreign minister Wong and defence minister Marles — spent a good deal of time overseas in the early weeks of the new government, during what was a period of considerable international turbulence following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Wong visited several Pacific nations in an effort to counter Chinese influence in the region. Albanese undertook a tightly controlled visit to Ukraine himself.

Rising inflation, accompanied by climbing interest rates, contributed to the most serious cost-of-living crisis in three decades. Energy prices were particularly troublesome, especially in light of Labor’s pre-election commitment to get prices down. In December 2022, after a tussle between the minister, Chris Bowen, and energy companies extending over several months, the government used its powers to intervene directly in the energy market to cap coal and gas prices.

An October 2022 budget delivered by treasurer Jim Chalmers advanced the implementation of election commitments in areas such as the extension of paid parental leave, higher subsidies for childcare, and more social and affordable housing. A May 2023 budget would offer further cost-of-living relief for the most vulnerable and a boost to Medicare bulkbilling. The parliament also agreed to industrial relations reforms intended to strengthen enterprise bargaining and boost wages, especially for women. A bill for the long-anticipated and long-delayed federal anti-corruption commission passed before Christmas 2022.

In the first year of the government, there were consultations and inquiries across a wide range of areas, including a royal commission into robodebt, the Coalition government’s illegal effort to extract money from welfare recipients by raising fictional debts against their names, created by averaging their income over a year. The Reserve Bank, criticised for its recent interest rate hikes when its governor had previously given the impression an increase was unlikely before 2024, was also the subject of an inquiry, as was Australia’s immigration system and the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

A consultation was launched on a proposal for an Australian Universities Accord, and another led to the launch of a new cultural policy, Revive, followed by a major financial boost to the national collecting institutions. And amid all this, the parliament found time for a two-week period of mourning following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Albanese attended the coronation of Charles III in May 2023.

The emphasis was on order, regularity and trust — a rebuke to the Morrison government but also, arguably, to the Rudd and Gillard era. Albanese had some of the instincts of the “lone wolf,” as journalist Katharine Murphy put it, but his approach in both opposition and government had become increasingly collaborative. He relied on the competence of a strong frontbench, and he made it clear that he wanted to re-establish Labor as the natural party of government.

Like Hawke, even in his first year Albanese was criticised for being too moderate, too cautious in pushing back on Coalition-era initiatives, too attached to old ways. Several of the new independent parliamentarians expressed outrage when the government reduced their staffing entitlements. There were also criticisms, from the outset, that Labor’s middle path on the shift from fossil fuels to renewables lacked sufficient ambition.

In its defence policy, the government added crucial detail to the bare bones of the Morrison government’s AUKUS agreement, with expensive plans for nuclear-powered submarines. Critics argued that the government was surrendering Australia’s sovereignty to the United States, an accusation that Albanese and Marles denied.

The government introduced only modest increases to JobSeeker — the unemployment benefit — in its May 2023 budget, which delivered a small surplus that the treasurer said was likely to be a one-off. Yet it was committed to fulfilling its pre-election promise not to dismantle the Morrison government’s stage three tax cuts, despite the windfall they would offer the wealthy. Albanese wanted to avoid accusations of breaking a core election promise, or of profligacy.

In one area in particular, however, his approach seemed to owe more to Whitlam-era idealism than to the more cautious and pragmatic Hawke tradition. The Albanese government’s commitment to holding a referendum on the First Nations Voice to Parliament before the end of 2023 remained steadfast, even as an otherwise demoralised opposition, led by Peter Dutton, did its best to use obstructionism as a means of reviving the Coalition’s political fortunes.

These had declined to alarming levels for the Liberal Party especially, and voters were unimpressed by its attempts to lay blame for the nation’s difficulties, such as the rising cost of living, at Albanese’s feet. At a by-election on 1 April 2023 for the outer-suburban Melbourne seat of Aston, long held by the Liberals and recently vacated by scandal-plagued ex-minister Alan Tudge, Labor won a two-party-preferred swing of more than six percentage points. It was the first time since 1920 that a federal government had managed to win a seat in such circumstances.

It was hard not to read into that result a wider verdict on the performance of the government. Commentators wrote of a sense that the country was being run by “adults,” and Albanese’s own image as a likeable, trustworthy and competent leader contributed something to that impression. We do not yet know if Anthony Albanese will be a short- or long-term leader — the last in the procession of two-to-four-year prime ministers that we have had since Howard, or a more lasting proposition. His age works against Howard-like longevity, but he could well emulate Hawke’s eight years. •

This is an edited extract from the new edition of The Good, the Bad and the Unlikely: Australia’s Prime Ministers from Barton to Albanese, by Mungo MacCallum and and Frank Bongiorno, published this month by Black Inc. Inside Story readers can order a copy at a 30 per cent discount by using the code InsideStory at checkout here. 

The post The making of a prime minister appeared first on Inside Story.

Labor’s Dorothy Tangney made history in 1943 when she became the first woman elected to the Australian Senate. But though she sat in that chamber for twenty-five years, no Labor woman ever joined her. Instead, she watched as the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh women were elected to the Senate — all of them Liberals. And while Tangney spent her entire career on the backbench, two of those six Liberals managed to become ministers.

They hardly shattered the glass ceiling. But that first wave of elected Liberal women — six senators, along with Enid Lyons elected to the House in 1943 — were real pioneers, prising open the men’s world of parliament.

Who were these pioneering women? And how did they get there? Recent biographies of two of them, Dame Annabelle Rankin and Dame Margaret Guilfoyle, describe two very different women who took strikingly different paths to power and who, against the odds and in different eras, became ministers.

Rankin, a Queenslander who became the first Liberal woman in the Senate, served from 1946 and eventually became Australia’s first female minister; her biography is written by long-time Canberra journalist and lobbyist Peter Sekuless. Three months after Rankin left the Senate, in 1971, Margaret Guilfoyle, a Victorian, entered; she served until 1987, becoming a senior and powerful cabinet minister. Her life is told by the prolific Anne Henderson of the Sydney Institute.

For both, the path to power, and the exercise of it required innovation, political smarts and sheer tireless persistence. But both operated within heavy constraints imposed on them by the masculine character of their chosen career. These biographies tell us important stories about the past that prompt good questions about the present: in particular, they stand as an implicit challenge to the present-day Liberal Party which, by its own admission, struggles to find and promote female members of parliament.

Annabelle Rankin came from a prosperous middle-class family in Queensland’s coastal Wide Bay region. Her father, a Boer war veteran, was elected to state parliament as a conservative; he then ran a colliery. The elder of two daughters, Annabelle later claimed in a well-worn anecdote that a childhood game had involved imitating her father “being a member of parliament. I would play that I was opening fetes and all that sort of thing and making speeches.”

Rankin attended the all-girls Glennie (Anglican) School in Toowoomba, and her path forward continued via women’s and girls’ associations as state secretary of the Girl Guides and assistant commissioner with the YWCA. But it was the second world war that made her, opening up leadership roles in two women’s paramilitary forces, the Voluntary Aid Detachment and the Australian Women’s Army Service.

Sekuless suggests Rankin’s constant travel and networking within local communities in these roles provided invaluable training for the future senator. Before long, her political potential was recognised and she was encouraged — by a man — to seek Senate preselection with the conservative-leaning Queensland People’s Party, or QPP (which soon merged into the Liberal Party).

In July 1946 Rankin, a thirty-eight-year-old single woman, found herself as one of two women and four men seeking endorsement for two QPP Senate spots. The gender make-up of the interviewing panel is not recorded, but one can assume a predominant male gaze. One of those present, state director Charles Porter, resorted to the language of love to describe the “splendid” impression Rankin made:

She was a strikingly handsome young woman, with a fine lot of auburn hair and she had this ringing clear voice, and she enunciated the principles that she believed in with such a fervour and dedication that was almost a passion…

She also wore her service uniform, which no doubt helped.

After making her speech to the panel, Rankin went home convinced she had lost, walked the dog and went to bed. But she’d won, and within days — a novice and a novelty — she was campaigning around the state. Her first rally, near her hometown at Maryborough, attracted 150, two-thirds of them women, and it was the women who led the cheering as Rankin outlined her political philosophy/strategy.

“I honestly believe,” she told the meeting, “that the need of a woman’s voice in the Senate is vitally necessary.” The audience applauded, and she went on: “For a number of years I have worked with women’s and children’s organisations all over Queensland. I have been honoured and privileged to meet and know so many women and men of our fighting services during my service years during the war years. I worked for those women and men during the war, and I want to go on working to help the woman and the wife during the years of peace.”

Rankin and her handlers carefully fostered her image: within a month, she was being widely described in the press as “our Annabelle,” creating what Sekuless describes as “a cosy familiarity” about her. She also carefully deflected questions about her decision to remain single. (Sekuless suggests there may have been a fiancé, who may have died, but he leaves it unclear.) In any event, Rankin routinely generated a high personal vote; in 1946, at third spot, she recorded twice the vote of the man at number two.

Rankin became the first female opposition whip, but was dumped when Menzies won government in 1949. Reinstated as whip in 1951 and despite tireless service, she was never promoted to the ministry by Menzies. It was Harold Holt who appointed her as the first female minister in 1966 (in the housing portfolio; Enid Lyons had been made a minister in 1949, but without portfolio — a deliberately toothless honorific).

Rankin then suffered the distinction of becoming the first woman dumped from the ministry (in 1971, by Billy McMahon). She quit the Senate in March 1971, reportedly in tears, and accepted as consolation prize another first — as first female head of a diplomatic mission (high commissioner to New Zealand).

The Belfast-born, state school–educated Presbyterian Margaret McCartney had few of Rankin’s social advantages. Night school at Taylor’s College led to accountancy qualifications, a corporate job, and a friendship with young RAAF veteran Stan Guilfoyle. They married in 1952.

Margaret and Stan quickly got involved in local Liberal Party work. Stan’s mother was a member of the Australian Women’s National League — one of the women’s organisations that later merged into the Liberal Party — and she had enrolled Stan as a Liberal while he was still in uniform; he was destined to be elected to the state executive.

Margaret became branch secretary in South Camberwell, set up her own accountancy business and produced three children. With the state’s Liberal Party division requiring fifty–fifty organisational power-sharing between men and women, Margaret steadily acquired influence and leadership in the Victorian Liberal Women’s section, the state executive and the Federal Council.

But these positions didn’t translate easily into parliamentary preselection. When senator Ivy Wedgwood, elected to the Senate for the Liberals in 1950, prepared to step down in 1971, it was Stan she first approached about replacing her; only when he demurred did Margaret come into the frame.

Even so, of the twenty candidates for Wedgwood’s spot, seventeen were men. Guilfoyle was opposed by the premier, Henry Bolte, and by a (male) member of the interview panel who asked her who would look after the children if she were in the Senate. An unimpressed Beryl Beaurepaire, another member of the panel, put the same question to the next (male) candidate. Guilfoyle won.

Guilfoyle became the third female Liberal senator elected from Victoria (after Wedgwood and Marie Breen) and the seventh overall. In opposition during 1975 she was one of the key Liberal senators, along with Reg Withers and Ivor Greenwood, who hung tough in refusing to pass Gough Whitlam’s budget, paving the way for his dismissal. Her reward was a senior position in the incoming Fraser government, becoming the first female member of cabinet as minister for social security (1975–80) and finance (1980–83).

As a young journalist in the press gallery I had the distinct joy of covering both the Senate and the social security portfolio. To visit Guilfoyle’s office was to undertake quite a trek: she occupied room M152, the most remote point on the southwest corner of the old Parliament House, accessed at the end of a long, gloomy, empty, creaking corridor.

The office was diametrically opposite the prime minister’s office in the northeast corner, and this seemed a metaphor for the way the Senate exercised power in those days — with aloof disregard for the hustle and bustle of executive government. There was no mistaking the silent sense of power in the air. Once admitted, I would sit with her private secretary Rod Kemp, who imparted as background a few carefully selected crumbs of news.

Henderson provides the broad context of Guilfoyle’s portfolio battles and crises, informed by interviews with former staffers and departmental officers, and analyses the complex way in which, even as a Fraser loyalist, Guilfoyle’s defence of her social security budget and turf managed to thwart the prime minister’s overall drive for reforms.

These interviews yield the gem that Guilfoyle’s always-assured and measured parliamentary performance was enabled by her “handbag statistics” — a notebook of key portfolio facts maintained by her department. But unfortunately we don’t hear Guilfoyle’s own voice; perhaps because of that same understated style, her Hansard is dull rather than daring.

These easily readable biographies form part of a series of short biographical monographs edited by political scientist Scott Prasser and published by Connor Court. Prasser describes the series as “scholarly rather than academic” — a very fine distinction that seems to mean narrative in form with clear referencing of sources. Fair enough, though a few of the “academic” virtues would not be out of place, such as a critical approach to sources and a more considered acknowledgement of previously published research (for example, Marian Sawer and Marian Simms’s A Woman’s Place: Women and Politics in Australia).

Neither author really probes the institutional obstacles and advantages facing these women. As becomes clear, though, both careers were at least partly subject to the will and whim of the (male) prime ministers of the day. Menzies fully recognised the importance of women for the Liberal Party, as a matter of organisational structure, political philosophy and electoral strategy. But talented women were routinely overlooked in preselections. And as PM he ruthlessly pruned the ministerial careers of colleagues male and female.

Rankin had to wait for her promotion until Menzies had finally gone. Fraser, by contrast, had to repay Guilfoyle’s loyalty in 1975 with portfolio heft in government; it probably helped that she was Victorian in a time when all but one Liberal prime minister had been from the jewel-like state.

Equally, it’s clear — though again, not analysed in either biography — that the political careers of these women depended heavily on the dynamics of the Senate. Fewer elections, longer terms and a less volatile statewide electorate helped to protect incumbents, including women. Once Rankin was in, she stayed in. A similar dynamic was at work in Victoria.

In fact, Guilfoyle’s replacement of Wedgwood was a watershed moment, effectively reserving one Senate spot in Victoria for women. (When Guilfoyle retired in 1987, she was replaced by Kay Patterson; when Patterson retired in 2008, Helen Kroger was elected; but the sixty-three-year line came to an end in 2013 when Kroger, from third spot, lost to Ricky Muir the Motoring Enthusiast — a perfect symbol of the decline of Liberals, and Liberal women, in Victoria.)

But these institutional explanations deny the agency exercised by each of these women in negotiating a narrow path into and through their male-dominated workplace.

After one setback in 1949 — when she was dropped as opposition whip — Rankin sought the comfort of Enid Lyons. Lyons told her that she would be accepted, “so long as you manage to do the work that men do and do it as well, and at the same time don’t antagonise them.” In remarkably similar terms, the newly elected Guilfoyle was advised by husband Stan “not to take on any responsibilities or portfolios that were women’s issues. If she was to make it, she would make it as a person like any man.”

Both women did indeed do “the work that men do”: long hours, late nights and mute persistence in hard slog. Both had a prodigious work ethic. It might have been harder for Rankin, a curio item in the 1940s and 1950s, than for Guilfoyle, who in the 1970s and 1980s was able to become a serious player. Rankin remained unmarried and lacked the personal support of a family; Guilfoyle had to negotiate a more complicated work–family balance.

But who would offer such advice to today’s female MPs? With unprecedented numbers of women in parliament, ten cabinet ministers, and teal and Green crossbenchers galore, the numbers have changed, thanks in part to Labor quotas. The nature of representative political work has changed as well. In today’s politics, does anyone (even a man) need to work “like” a man or “as well as” a man?

As for “antagonising” male politicians, Julia Gillard and others have shown that outing misogynists is a legitimate and valuable part of a female political career. But in an earlier era, it is notable that so many of these Liberal pioneers were rewarded — partly in tacit exchange for not antagonising the men — with the highest imperial honours. Rankin, Guilfoyle, Wedgwood, Lyons were all titled “Dame.” Even Tangney accepted one, though it was against Labor policy. •

Annabelle Rankin
By Peter Sekuless | Connor Court | $19.95 | 134 pages

Margaret Guilfoyle
By Anne Henderson | Connor Court | $19.95 | 84 pages

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Australia’s luck, Horne suggested, had acted as a buffer for the mediocrity of its elites and might well be running out. Even on that supposed sewer of public discourse, Twitter, you will occasionally find someone reminding us of the book’s killer line: “Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck.”

The relevance of that famous remark to Australian public life almost sixty years later is debatable. Is “second-rate” now too generous for our elites? Do many Australians feel a great deal less lucky in 2023 than their counterparts of 1964, in an environment of global warming, soaring house prices, rising inequality and democratic decay?

Ryan Cropp has written a fine biography of Horne. Based on a University of Sydney doctoral thesis, Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country is fundamentally a study of Horne’s public life — his role as editor, writer, thinker, administrator and activist. Cropp might sometimes seem reluctant to take us too far in probing the inner or private life, but he is perhaps following some of his subject’s own hesitations in such matters.

The book is also a reminder that universities continue to produce authors who can write for a general audience without sacrificing academic rigour. Horne himself, addressing graduating students at the University of New South Wales in the mid 1980s, was critical of the taste for “legitimating rituals,” “secret languages” and “moribund Talmudisms” in universities, the trend towards over-specialisation and the contracting audiences. Cropp would surely impress him with the accessibility of his writing and ideas.

Much was happy about Horne’s childhood as the son of a schoolteacher who was also a returned soldier. His early years were spent in Muswellbrook, but as David, his father, became increasingly difficult to live with, the family moved to Sydney. David Horne’s mental health would eventually collapse, and accusations of sexual misconduct were made by a student. If Donald’s earlier life in a country town had been largely carefree, the famous pessimism associated with the early decades of his intellectual life might date from those latter experiences.

The basic outline of Horne’s early years would have been familiar enough to many young Australians of the era: the troubled Anzac father; the move from country town to big city; the bright state school boy who creates plenty of sparks at the university — editing the student newspaper as a stirrer and crusader — but leaves without a degree, his studies interrupted by unsatisfying war service.

Yet Horne also had exceptional talents, even if they took some years to yield the fruit that might have been expected to come earlier. Like many of his contemporaries at the University of Sydney he came under the influence of the Challis professor of philosophy, John Anderson, and he carried a version of Anderson’s realism and libertarianism into his intellectual and professional life.

“If history can be spoken of as having ‘lessons,’ one of its lessons is the futility of human schemings,” Horne said in the late 1940s. “Historical situations arise from other factors than, and often in spite of the desires and intentions of men.” That made any form of planning by government, or perhaps any effort at social improvement by anyone, a futile exercise.

Horne’s activities as a student journalist attracted the attention of the legendary Daily Telegraph editor Brian Penton, who employed him even while Horne remained at the university, and again a few years later. The core of Horne’s thinking, such as it was in the period before he turned forty, seems to have come mainly from his understanding of Anderson, but the hectoring, aggressive style came from Penton.

In fact, the early Horne, as painted by Cropp, is a deeply unattractive figure. The retrospective assessment of one of the friends with whom he fell out — that Horne was a “posturing prick” — seems accurate. Put bluntly, he comes across as a chancer and, at times, a bully, a master of the putdown with “weathervane critical instincts.”

Cropp allows us to see as much, but shows forbearance in offering judgement. He lets the suggestion hang over his narrative that much of the bitterness of Horne’s persona came out of personal trauma, and it is hard not to see the decline of Horne’s family life in his remark that “the harsh fact of human existence is that there are always clouds on the horizon.” He read voraciously, but the intellectual shallowness and derivative nature of most of what he had to say before the late 1950s are striking. And he could be brutal in his dealings with others, especially with pen in hand and press at the ready.

He was also good at serving powerful masters, to his (and often their) advantage, while seeking to maintain the conceit that he was really an outsider gatecrashing the party. We are familiar with his kind of elite populism from our own times. Invective triumphed over argument, ritualised scepticism over evidence, the too-clever-by-half smart alec over the searcher for truth.

All of that might have been forgivable in a student journalist or politician; it is less so in a man in his late twenties spouting nonsense about economic planning and rising totalitarianism among Canberra politicians and bureaucrats. It is among the ironies of Horne’s career that he barracked so hard in the 1940s and 1950s for the political and policy mediocrity that he would later condemn in his most famous writing.

His curriculum vitae during these years was various but untidy. He was bright enough to be among a dozen recruits into the Department of External Affairs’s diplomatic cadet scheme. He gained some pleasure from the study, but disliked Canberra and drifted towards journalism — and then back to his hero, Penton, and to Sydney. There was an early marriage to an English divorcée, Ethel, and the two of them were soon off to England. Horne thought of Australia as dull and second-rate and wanted an escape.

In Britain, living with his wife and some of her relatives on a farm — and for a time in London, which suited him better — Horne learnt that there was also a local franchise on the dull and second-rate. He became a would-be novelist: his two efforts each failed to find a publisher. Cropp presents him as somewhat in the spirit of England’s Angry Young Men of the era — but obviously without the literary success. He became involved in local Conservative politics, a would-be revolutionary of the right come to clear away the political rubbish of postwar Britain, then drifted back into journalism, writing rubbish for a tabloid before taking up a job with his old paper, Sydney’s Telegraph, in London.

For the paper he reported from Kenya, where the Mau Mau rebellion was beginning, and wrote of “terrorists,” “brutes” and “black monsters” who were “filled with an animal-like bloodlust that nothing can control.” As ever, he was good at writing what the powerful wanted to read, condemning critics of colonialism for their naivety. As Cropp points out, readers would not have known from Horne’s account that the whites were doing almost all of the killing. Still, Horne thought he might become a foreign correspondent: “Horne of Africa.”

We don’t normally think of Horne as one of the Australian postwar expatriates, presumably because his time there was only four years and his fame came in Australia a decade later. But there are good reasons to think that these years mattered a great deal to his intellectual development and later thinking. He didn’t do well among the British, but nor did he think highly of them — despite having arrived with a fairly conventional middle-class Australian view of Britain as the measure of all things. It is hard not to connect his later nationalism to this experience.

But perhaps that is to draw too straight a line — for as always with the rising Horne, it is wise to follow the money, or at least the ambition. In 1954 he agreed to return to Australia at Frank Packer’s behest: he would edit a new tabloid, Weekend. He agreed he would come back for six months, and left his wife behind in England, but he remained in Australia and the marriage ended.

Weekend was tabloid trash but sold very well, reaching a half-million circulation and boosting Horne’s stocks in the company and the world of Sydney journalism. The aspiring novelist who had abandoned mediocre Australia now built a career wallowing in that very same mediocrity as the editor of a rag that featured swimsuit models, but it also meant he was a well-paid Packer executive.

The identity as “intellectual” remained, however, and Packer was prepared to indulge him by supporting a new venture, the Observer. It was part of an efflorescence of new quality publications of the late 1950s and early 1960s that also included Tom Fitzgerald’s Nation. A talented group of writers and thinkers coalesced around these publications — Peter Coleman, a former philosophy lecturer and future politician, worked on the Observer, for instance, and the young art critic Robert Hughes would write for both publications.

Packer’s acquisition of the ailing Bulletin brought the Observer to an end, for he wanted Horne to edit it and refused to support two such publications. Horne famously modernised the Bulletin, removing the “Australia for the White Man” slogan from the masthead as well as much of the old staff. But Packer removed Horne himself from the job in 1962, causing him to fall back on tabloid editing. That was never going to last, and it didn’t. A humiliated Horne temporarily left the Packer stable.

Next for Horne came a period in advertising, and a role editing Quadrant. In many ways, his timing for the latter was poor, for that magazine, founded in 1956, was an instrument of the cultural cold war and, as would soon be revealed, was receiving CIA funding. Horne had nonetheless found a group of intellectual — and dining — companions in the Australian Association for Cultural Freedom, which published the magazine.

But he was moving leftward. A cold warrior with the worst of them in the 1950s, a stance that proved a useful substitute for thinking seriously about the complexities of international politics, Horne now began to have second thoughts. Or rather, he began to think. He remained staunchly anti-communist, initially supporting Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war, for instance. The Bulletin under his editorship also published meaty — and sometimes rather obsessive — articles about communism’s influence in various corners of Australian life.

But he seems now to have regarded cold war anti-communism as an inadequate instrument for considering Australia’s place in the world. Where once it had seemed five minutes to midnight for isolated Australia in a world of unforgiving international rivalry, he now wanted to talk about the implications of the decline of the United Kingdom for a country that had long regarded itself as part of Greater Britain. He wanted to talk about how Australia, still attached to racial exclusion, might relate to Asia other than as part of an anti-communist alliance. How might Australia adapt to the opportunities offered by new technologies? How might it begin to think and act for itself instead of simply moving from under the domination of an old empire and into the orbit of that newer power in the world, the United States?

Horne was a legend of the long and liquid lunch, and an enthusiastic conversationalist. Many of his friendships with figures on the right would decline as he moved leftward. The Lucky Country: Australia in the Sixties was more a signpost along the journey than a fork in the road: it encapsulated many ideas he had been developing, and had often already placed in print, well before its appearance at the end of 1964.

The book’s basic optimism about the Australian people was a contrast with his earlier Pentonesque attitude, which condemned them for their complacency. It was the leaders who Horne now thought mediocre. In a country where most were partisans of one or another of the parties, he confused everyone by condemning both the Liberals and Labor, Bob Menzies and Arthur Calwell.

As late as 1965, though, having returned to the Packer fold, he was playing a leading role in Liberal leader Robin Askin’s successful state election campaign (a matter Cropp strangely overlooks). He had not yet abandoned the Liberals. That would come later, with the rise of Whitlam, whom Horne came to think of as the kind of moderniser he had been wanting for years. He was devastated by the dismissal of Whitlam’s government, and played a role in leading anti-Kerr protests. Along the way he lost more friends on the right, who now saw him as a Labor stooge.

The Lucky Country had made Horne a famous Australian, and his life, ever after, was that of a celebrity, not merely a public figure. There would be many more books, including a highly regarded autobiographical trilogy, most of them worthy and interesting, all attracting significant media and public attention, yet none as successful as the first, freakish success of 1964.

Never, in Australian cultural history, has a book been better suited to a moment — but that moment passed, and more quickly than most moments because this was the 1960s. Cropp does well in taking us through the rest of the oeuvre right through to Horne’s brave, posthumous Dying: A Memoir, without dwelling too long on any particular publication.

Horne would leave journalism for academia — the University of New South Wales — in the 1970s, and he turned out to be rather good at it, even as he continued to balance the life of national figure with the everyday duties of university work. He read widely, including theoretical works by Antonio Gramsci and Roland Barthes. Where his earlier books had been intuitive and polemical, he now sought to provide greater system and depth. It was a testament to his openness of mind that he was willing to do so, and Cropp rightly gives him credit for it.

He was prolific, a workaholic, a buzzing enthusiast for ideas, books and argument. He took on the role of chair of the Australia Council for the Arts and threw himself into that with the same energy that he gave to most things. He was a co-founder of the Australian Republican Movement in 1991, but found himself increasingly marginalised. It is surely remarkable, and disgraceful, that neither the ARM nor the Howard government was able to find a place for him at the Constitutional Convention of 1998. By then, he was a venerable elder but seemed to come from another time. Still, he continued to write, to publish books, and to ponder the country’s future.

As in any successful biography of a complex subject, puzzles remain. Just how much of the bitterness of Horne’s early career in public life, and the pessimism of his theory of history, came from the ordeal of his father, and how much from Anderson and Penton, is hard to say. Similarly, the greater optimism, and pluralism, of Horne’s mid- and late-life public persona seem to map rather uncannily onto a second and happier marriage to Myfanwy (née Gollan), herself a journalist and the daughter of a journalist.

Two children, a girl, Julia, and a boy, Nick, came along to complete the family, and the impression is of a happy home, if one designed to ensure that Donald was able to get on with his professional life, and especially his writing, without too many disturbances or interruptions. Cropp has a little to say about these matters on the way through and especially near the end of the book — enough to suggest their importance to the public man and the critical thinker and writer. But they form a subplot in this book, not the main story.

Cropp concludes that we will not have another Donald Horne, and it is easy enough to see why that would be so. It is one of this book’s achievements to contextualise his remarkable career and show how our own times are not his. Horne was what Patrick Buckridge, Brian Penton’s biographer, has called an “editor-intellectual.” Penton was the model, and figures such as J.D. Pringle and Paul Kelly would come later. But in an age of media concentration and shrill op-ed commentary, that species is dead, even while Kelly lives on.

Horne’s career assumed the existence of a public sphere in which one could participate as a citizen, a place where ideas could be debated between rational beings, possibly oiled by a few bottles of wine. Horne’s early efforts often failed to rise to that ideal, but in the second half of his life he played the role of editor-intellectual and then citizen-intellectual with notable success.

In our own times, civil disagreement has become more difficult, even as Australia, as a nation, faces dilemmas that are sometimes uncannily similar to those Horne grappled with: how to respond to the decline of a great empire; how to respond to the changing balance of power in our region; how to modernise our political life and constitutional arrangements so that they better reflect our present rather than our past. Horne’s example of vigorous but respectful disagreement, as Cropp shows in this compelling and important biography, is well worth revisiting. •

Donald Horne: A Life in the Lucky Country
By Ryan Cropp | La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. | $37.99 | 384 pages

The post Donald Horne, citizen intellectual appeared first on Inside Story.

The interesting addendum to this parade of facts is the covert nature of abortion procedures. The number performed in Australia is nearly impossible to accurately calculate because no specific Medicare item number exists (the rebate is shared with that for miscarriage curettage) and only South Australia collects data on pregnancy outcomes. Medical abortions are even more difficult to numerically assay.

Think about those facts for a minute: it’s the third most commonly performed surgical procedure in Australia but nobody, anywhere, is analysing or even supplying accurate statistical information as to numbers, types or reasons.

I am a women’s health services provider, and we professionals are all in agreement: the most fundamental right of those with uteri is to have agency over their bodies, their lives, and the means and methods of personal choice in reproductive health. And yet a procedure that is swift and accessible has been legalised in Australia on a piecemeal, state-by-state basis, influenced by differing standards of acceptability based on geography and local attitudes.

Abortion is the secret obverse of motherhood, a choice rather than a sacrifice, and that makes people, especially right-wing male Christian politicians, uncomfortable. You could say that Australia’s abortion policy comes down to this: you’re welcome to have one as long as you promise not to talk about it.

Madison Griffiths’s memoir Tissue positions her squarely in the eye of the abortion discourse storm. She is a feminist, a vegan, a cis-queer artist and published essayist, a podcaster and a domestic violence campaigner. In the middle of the Covid lockdowns in 2021 she was confronted with a pink line on a test strip, undeniable evidence of her own pregnancy. What action she chose to take is, of course, at the centre of this narrative. Griffiths decided to have a medical abortion.

There are things we never find out about Griffiths’s choice. We do find out about her problematic relationship with her own mother and her mother’s anorexia, about the love between the pair, and about Griffiths’s considered intention to become the opposite daughter to the child her mother asked for and expected.

Griffiths puzzles her conservative mother, with her unshaven underarms and legs, her non-conforming clothing, her same-sex relationships and her drug use. “[W]hen I consider my own connection to my mother,” she writes, “there has always been, injected into every goodnight kiss, every tense phone call, a complex thread of guilt; the feeling of having failed, having committed a grievous wrong against her, having let her down.”

Griffiths accepts her mother’s anorexia without qualification, and there is a moment in Tissue that made me catch my breath in wonder: the comparison between the fat-melting cling wrap encasing her mother’s abdomen and the condom Griffiths’s lover refused to wear. Her lover “felt suffocated once fitted in a clear casing, their body robbed of glee. They too, were hungry. But unlike my mother or myself, their hunger mattered.”

Griffiths’s central and complicated relationship with her mother is never completely resolved, although ultimately she implies that the choice to pursue termination, to opt out of parenthood, has given their dyad a degree of resolution. She describes her mother’s love after the abortion as “urgent and keen to shelter me from scorn, determined that I not become her parody, for she is my mother, and I am hers to protect.”

Abortion is, at the core of it, about choosing or denying motherhood, a choice formed from past experiences that will echo into the future: the branch in the path, one course taken and the other unseen, unknown, unknowable. Implicit in Griffiths’s decision-making is the knowledge that she may well experience premature menopause, an inherited condition that heightens the chance this will be her only pregnancy.

But we learn more about her thoughts after the abortion than before, once the termination has been given personhood in its own right and discussed like a breathing individual, both in the abstract and the concrete. Ironically, though, by discussing the effacement of her body by the unwilling nourishment of a being whose existence she considers complete and separate, Griffiths avoids a journey to the latest frontier in the war against women’s bodies.

The battlefield is shifting from women’s reproductive rights to the joyless self-effacement of modern motherhood, misogyny’s newest and most sinister gift. It is no longer considered acceptable to mother in any other way than by the most arduous of labour. Griffiths mentions the Instagram moments of parenthood, a newborn suckling its mother’s breast, a proud father in the background. But modern motherhood is now a matter of continuous soul-obliterating attention to each child, broken sleep for years at a time, an insistence that a crying baby or toddler risks severe psychological harm.

Where Griffiths’s mother’s abdomen was “ripped open” by childbirth, Griffiths spared herself the agonies of parenthood, describing her abortion as “a celebration of my vibrant, colourful, beautiful life. A homage to my joy.” And yet, and yet… Abortion is seldom chosen lightly. Of the aftermath of my own abortion, I once wrote, “I was unbalanced I knew, filled to the brim and over with rage — pure, white, volcanic anger. What tiny chinks remaining were stuffed with grief.”

We never really get to see any great ambivalence in Griffiths’s account of her feelings and motives. It is possible that she genuinely saw her abortion as an unmixed blessing, but she describes an episode of short-lived sobriety afterwards, the creation of a Spotify playlist that reflected her decision, a playlist in which the word “baby” featured in the titles of a third of the songs, which seems to suggest that the impact was greater than she had expected, perhaps more than she was easily able to accept.

Griffiths’s words can seem like they were carefully selected to obscure rather than clarify, as though within the 200-odd pages of her narrative we are given Griffiths only in glimpses, a minnow in a deep, still pool seen in flashes and fragments rather than as a discrete and integrated whole.

This left me musing on the obligations intrinsic to publishing a deeply personal narrative. What portion of the author’s life and experiences do we have a right to expect? Can we find a way of listening without considering ourselves entitled to the whole gory story?

But there are moments that invite elucidation in this book: the incident, for example, in which Griffiths smeared the blood of her abortion over the toilet in her boyfriend’s share house then motioned to him: that’s your problem, clean it up. We never learn what was going through her mind, what her boyfriend’s response was. Her actions are left hanging, without expansion, without analysis. It seems a strange place to exercise coyness.

In rebuttal, one could argue that memoir is selective by its very nature. The author weaves a story from a series of small but significant incidents, moments that, taken together, illustrate and unpack a greater whole. But Griffiths has opened up only part of her tale, and this causes her book’s straddling of the divide between the personal and the polemic — both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness — to be uneasy.

Truly, in its looping, discursive, sometimes unfocused and repetitive recitations, Tissue parallels the conflicting thoughts and emotions Griffiths must have felt when attempting to make sense of the event during three months of late-night sessions in front of the screen: the real-time processing necessary to place a life, unlived by choice, into the past. As a reader, however, it made me wish that Griffiths had spent more time with an editor.

There were also prolonged discussions of the impact of Roe v. Wade in America, but conspicuous in its absence was any reference to Griffiths’s home in Australia, a country in which abortion is legal and the tablets Griffiths took to procure her abortion easily obtained. Again, I wondered where this discussion would fit into the range of Australian experiences, and whether her narrative could be considered as representative. Australia is filled to the brim with stories, other women, other men, other lives.

Perhaps the strongest of Griffiths’s themes comes in her chapter on queerness and unplanned pregnancy. While it is a fact that very few trans men or lesbians will ever require an abortion, perhaps the marginalisation of that tiny minority means a genuinely queer-centred discussion is long overdue, and Griffiths is ideally placed to begin that process. I found myself impressed by the chapter and, later, thinking hard about the issues it raises.

I have provided abortions; I have had an abortion. My daily working life is a study in abortion and its consequences, in foetal abnormalities, terminations after the most bitter and agonising of discussions, sleepless nights and tears blotted by tissues drawn from the box that sits always on my desk.

I have needed to face my anger and grief honestly, head on, and acknowledge that my choice to prioritise myself — the right decision then and afterwards — came at a significant cost. I have subsumed my pain, transformed it into a crucible, a map to something new, something better. The consequences of my loss have made me a more feeling person, tougher and more aware. Perhaps because of that, I am strongly inclined to respect abortion narratives, and I found much to respect in this flawed but energetic book.

Griffiths recites her feelings over and over, each iteration varying only in its minutiae, creating a strange and tangled web of deliberation, her body a citadel invaded by a barbarian horde, the cells of her unplanned pregnancy. She reads widely; she quotes impressively; and many of those quotes made my heart sing.

Though her story ultimately feels to me like a delta — more breadth than depth — Tissue contains moments of great beauty and clarity, sentences that had me gasping, hand over mouth, in which I felt seen. This book has a tremendous heft, a combination of muscularity and verve, and I came away from it with benefits that are likely to increase with time. •

Tissue
By Madison Griffiths | Ultimo Press | $34.99 | 320 pages

The post Eye of the storm appeared first on Inside Story.

There is no dearth of biographies of George Eliot. From markedly unpromising beginnings, the woman who was born Mary Anne Evans became one of the nineteenth century’s most successful authors. Carlisle lists more than half a dozen full-length lives in her endnotes, in addition to the published journals and letters — much of them digitised in the enormous George Eliot Archive — and the books about George Henry Lewes, her spouse of twenty-five years, and by their many associates, all of whom took part in the century’s intellectual ferment.

But although scholarly interest keeps growing, as far as I can tell no other philosopher has been moved to write a book about Eliot. Here, in her preface, Carlisle tells us why:

When I studied philosophy at university, most of the authors I read were unmarried men: Plato, Descartes, Spinoza, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein. Did they regard marriage as a hindrance to the serious work of philosophy, rather than a spur to thought? My friends and I were constantly analysing relationships — our own and other people’s…

Beneath its conventional surface, marriage simmers with tensions between self and other, body and soul, passion and restraint, the poetry of romantic love and the prose of domestic routine… For better or worse, the answers we find to our marriage questions — whether to marry, how to live in a marriage, whether to remain married — are often close to the heart of our life’s meaning. Over centuries these questions have shaped religious, political and social histories.

We could ask why Carlisle chose to embed her discourse in a study of the life and works of the author we have come to know as George Eliot, and not, say, Jane Austen, whose specialty was dissecting unhappy unions with wit and style and guiding her heroines towards happier ones. Eliot read Austen and couldn’t have failed to have been influenced by her. Yet when she did turn her hand to fiction her approach was darker and broader.

Like Charlotte Brontë, whose work impressed her deeply, Eliot was less concerned with finding the right husbands for her protagonists than with what came after the nuptial knots were tied. And it was the complexity and contradictions in Eliot’s own life and work that Carlisle found particularly useful for exploring the enigma of marriage itself.

George Eliot — variously, Mary Anne Evans, Mary Ann Evans, Marianne Evans, Marian Evans, Marian Lewes, Mary Ann Evans Lewes and finally Mary Ann Cross — was born on 22 November 1819 in Nuneaton, Warwickshire, the third child of Robert Evans, an estate manager. Her father saw that she was formally educated until she was sixteen, when he lost his wife and the children their mother.

At that point, as Mary Ann, she became her father’s housekeeper. She still had access to the library at Albury Hall, where he worked, and quickly plunged into a course of self-education, principally in the classics. After the family moved to Coventry she was introduced by a wealthy couple, Charles and Cara Bray, to England’s radical intelligentsia. Then, after her father’s death, she went to Geneva, boarding with an artist and his wife, and after that to London, where her talents expanded and her circle of connections grew.

It’s hard to imagine a better instance of landing in the right place at the right time. It was as though fate had taken her by the hand and led her to milieus where her intellect could thrive. It also, admittedly, reflected her own determination, her lifelong need to define her identity and, not the least of it, her longing for intimacy. Carlisle, like other biographers, traces her failed relationships (the philosopher Herbert Spencer was one) before she found love and the stability she needed with the journalist-cum-philosopher George Henry Lewes.

The Marriage Question opens with the couple eloping in July 1854. She was thirty-four and had established herself in literary circles by her editorial work, now signing herself Marian Evans, at the prestigious Westminster Review and by her own essays, criticism and translation. But she was not a marriage prospect; her age and prodigious intelligence put off duller men than Lewes, and throughout her life people felt free to comment on what were perceived to be her physical deficits. An overlarge chin was the chief problem, if compensated by a surprisingly beautiful voice.

Nor was Lewes — “slight, short,” his face scarred by smallpox — an oil painting; one contemporary uncharitably remarked on his “immense ugliness,” though photographs show him in a better light. Whatever his physical drawbacks, though, they were more than overcome by a lively, gregarious personality combined with the seriousness of his pursuits.

A perfect match? Not entirely, and more on that later. For now it’s important to note that Lewes also came with baggage — namely, a wife and four children, so Marian Evans was taking a huge risk running off with him. But by the time they boarded the train to Weimar, they were passing themselves off as man and wife, and from that moment she discarded the Evans for Lewes. Throughout their twenty-five years together her husband who was not her husband referred to her affectionately as Polly.

The dash to Weimar was a momentary escape from the scandal that would dog her in Victorian England, but also served to widen her horizons further. Lewes and she were following the path “trodden by other intellectual pilgrims — Romantic radicals who worshipped… the miracle of Genius.” The genius in question was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the Frankfurt-born polymath poet, novelist and scientist who had settled in Weimar as a young man and remained there until his death in 1832. The couple had learned of him by reading Madame de Staël, who had taken the pilgrimage when Goethe was still alive.

With a letter of introduction from Thomas Carlyle, they attended the salon of Goethe’s daughter-in-law, befriending the composer Franz Liszt and other members of Weimar’s creative society. Lewes was halfway through his Life of Goethe, but Marian, Carlisle writes, was particularly ripe for inspiration. Moving among free-thinking artists and intellectuals in Weimar led her to wonder if she could match them.

Into the biography Carlisle weaves many influences of the time. Chief among these was the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza, whose writings were gaining serious attention some hundred and fifty years after his death. Marian began translating his Ethics into English in 1855. The translation languished for a publisher as Spinoza’s works had, and like his only appeared well after its creator’s death. (Carlisle has edited the 2020 edition.) But the undertaking was a clear indication of the strength of Marian’s ambition and the depth of her intellectual capacity.

It was also a measure of Lewes’s support. Knowing what we do of many couples in which the woman’s aspirations take a back seat, the extent of his interest was rare. Aside from the demands of his own work, he was both her critic and agent, assuming control of her business transactions, eventually  leaving her free to concentrate on her writing. It turned out to be a wise investment. With the success of her first novel, Adam Bede, she was making more than he did, and she turned it all over to him in accordance with the rules of marriage at the time.

More importantly perhaps, she found that, more than poetry or essays, fiction was her true metier. Here she would combine her prodigious capacity for thought with the heightened emotional sensitivity that was equally part of her nature. Like the Brontës before her, and for the same reasons, she adopted a male pseudonym (George being Lewes’s given name, Eliot the most English surname she could think of) for her collection of stories, Scenes of Clerical Life, but with Adam Bede the author’s identity became an open secret.

Then, in 1859, while researching for what would become The Mill on the Floss, she produced “The Lifted Veil,” a short story along the lines of Edgar Allan Poe’s science fictions. The clairvoyant protagonist describes his gift as a form of “double consciousness” — a term, Carlisle tells us, that Eliot used to describe “her own self-doubting, self-critical inner voice.”

It’s telling how often the phrases “lifted veil” or “lifting a veil” recur in this biography, acting as a key to other kinds of double consciousness, and how suited the words are for interrogating the questions about marriage that Carlisle has chosen as her theme. Almost to a woman, Eliot’s heroines, unlike Austen’s, make poor choices and suffer terribly for them before they find happiness, if they ever do. Domestic violence, sometimes in the extreme, is a constant in Eliot’s fiction, and Carlisle’s examination of her partnership with Lewes does raise questions about what today we might call coercive control.

Yet that didn’t seem to put Eliot off marrying. Fifteen months after Lewes died Eliot wed John Cross, a man twenty years younger than she was, as devoted to her as Lewes had been, and who authored the first of her posthumous biographies. She also changed her name to Mary Ann Cross, which appears on the headstone of the grave where she was buried, near Lewes, in Hampstead. It’s not too farfetched to take this as yet more evidence of her deep need for the stability and companionship marriage can offer and how much she must have missed the one she had with Lewes, however irregular and scandalous for the times it was.

I make no claim to Eliot scholarship. Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda are the only two works of hers I remember having read. But if one of the aims of literary biography is to rekindle interest in an author’s work, Carlisle has certainly succeeded with me. Everything Eliot wrote is examined in the round as the life and thought that nurtured them unfold — an approach I found as illuminating as it is thorough.

As for myself, I’ll be reading whatever of George Eliot’s I can lay my hands on, and rereading what I have read with renewed understanding and attention — how the gambling scene that opens Daniel Deronda, for example, is not just a clue to Gwendolen Harleth’s character but can also be read as a metaphor for marriage itself and the risks it inevitably entails.

Did I pick that up on my first reading? Possibly unconsciously, but probably not, because my interest in the book began with Eliot’s philosemitism and that’s largely where it stayed. But The Marriage Question chronicles Eliot’s wide, encompassing vision, her impeccable research, the complexity of her fiction and, as a sidelight, her exasperation that the reviews of her books were generally restricted to commenting on the development of character and plot.

Carlisle, a philosopher, has shown literature to be much more than that. A lot has changed in the world and in the world of letters since Marian Lewes starting writing fiction, but how surprising it is to learn that on the whole reviewing hasn’t changed much at all. That said, I hope I’ve given you in the space I’ve had some idea of the level of Carlisle’s achievement. •

The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life
By Clare Carlisle | Allen Lane | $45 | 367 pages

The post Sense and sensibility appeared first on Inside Story.

In Wifedom, Anna Funder — award-winning writer of the non-fiction Stasiland (2003) and novel All That I Am (2011) — strips everything from the edifice on which George Orwell’s reputation has stood and finds beneath it his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy: unthanked, unloved, neglected and certainly exhausted. She was also, as Funder relates, an intelligent and discerning woman whose energy and promise were fed upon and ultimately drained by her husband.

A graduate of Oxford who started her own typing agency while studying for a master’s degree in psychology at University College London, Eileen married a moth-eaten and prematurely aged Orwell in 1936 after they met at a party at a friend’s house. For the next nine turbulent years, she worked to financially support his writing while keeping house for him and directly aiding his work by editing, typing and advising.

While doing so, she bore an enormous number of indignities. Almost without exception, Orwell gave his needs and desires higher priority than hers. He rarely lifted a finger around the house and his work kept them on the edge of penury. He was repeatedly, callously, unfaithful. He also persistently erased her contributions.

Much of this was evident from the earliest days of their marriage when they settled in a damp, cramped cottage in rural Hertfordshire. In the seclusion of a room upstairs, Orwell wrote and wrote and wrote, and Eileen — despite having a thesis to finish — was kept on her feet from dawn to dusk, cooking, cleaning, attending to the shop they purported to run, and editing her husband’s work at night — by candlelight — while he, upstairs, made use of the only paraffin lamp.

Then Orwell decided to go to Spain to join the socialists in their bitter civil war against the fascists. His experience as a soldier provided a hideous scar for his neck and the material for Homage to Catalonia, and also became another conspicuous occasion on which Orwell wrote Eileen out of history. Bored by the prospect and dreading the back-breaking labour required to keep the Hertfordshire home running, Eileen followed him to Spain.

Formally she was a lowly typist in the offices of the Independent Labour Party; in reality, her duties required her to lift her eyes much higher than the keys of her Olivetti. She worked variously as an organiser, banker, logistics manager, newspaper and radio editor, writer, producer and more besides. It was work every bit as dangerous — if not more — as Orwell’s, particularly as the tide of the civil war changed; quite likely it was more important work than his, too. Nonetheless, despite her saving Orwell’s life and enabling their escape from Spain, Eileen’s presence and contribution were all but expunged in Homage.

Back in England, Eileen worked at all manner of jobs to make ends meet, including a lengthy stint at the information ministry during the second world war. She continued to keep the house, and she continued to carry the load of her husband’s whims and sometimes callous wishes, including his affairs with her friends and the couple’s adoption of a child, Richard, in 1944. She provided invaluable advice on her husband’s writing during the period when he produced Animal Farm and a succession of essays that became classics, while suffering from tumours that caused her to bleed and faint at disturbingly frequent intervals. During an operation to remove those tumours, she died, aged thirty-nine.

Orwell, who was in Europe reporting on the war, quickly cast about for a new wife — or, really, a replacement live-in servant. He proposed to at least four women and began writing Nineteen Eighty-Four in the Jura house that Eileen, in one of her last acts, had arranged to rent for them. That book was the death of him but the birth of his enormous reputation: seven months after it was published, he died, aged forty-six.

Most of the facts of Eileen’s life make for grim reading, and they are of a kind with the lives of other women with famous writer spouses. The question Funder poses about Eileen is one that could apply just as easily to Jane Welsh (wife of Thomas Carlyle), Catherine Hogarth (wife of Charles Dickens) and Elizabeth Howard (second wife of Kingsley Amis), among others: why did an intelligent, brave and insightful woman become so ground down? In crude terms, how did Eileen not tell Orwell to take his aspidistra and fuck off to Wigan Pier?

Funder’s answer, in short, is patriarchy. It is her awareness of its insidious influence in her own marriage — in how the equal share of the work of life and love has become unbalanced, with the result that her sense of self was being crushed — that prompts her to turn to Orwell’s writing in the first place. She admires his work, the way he illuminates power and its dynamics, servants and masters. “I would read Orwell on the tyrannies, the ‘smelly little orthodoxies’ of his time,” she writes, “and I would use him to liberate myself from mine.”

But that reading of Orwell is not so freeing. She is disconcerted by a stray passage on the dirtiness of women and their “terrible, devouring sexuality.” That it appears to have been written about Eileen troubles her. That the six biographies of Orwell produced between 1972 and 2003 neither explain it nor even really explain Eileen causes Funder’s concern to harden into something approaching suspicion. She begins to wonder about why this woman has been pushed to the periphery. “In the end,” she writes, “the biographies started to seem like fictions of omission.” To what extent, she asks, are these biographies influenced by patriarchy?

With this question in mind, Funder uses these works, Eileen’s letters, and Sylvia Topp’s 2020 biography of Eileen to guide a new reading of her life and her marriage to Orwell. Funder studies how the weft of the facts — as they have been established, and can be established — combine with the warp of those Orwell biographies: what is left in, what is taken out, what the biographies disguise and downplay. Funder reads to see the gaps where Eileen might be apparent: “The way the text buckles and strains to avoid her is the way I can see the shape she left.”

The buckles and strains she notices are striking. Funder spotlights passages and techniques by which Orwell’s biographers portray a great man doing everything alone and women as little more than nursemaids or helpless victims, if they are acknowledged at all. Omission is one method; another is the manipulation of chronology, so that cause and effect are separated and the credit for action is denied to the women who act. The most pervasive — ironically, considering Orwell’s famous injunction on it — is the use of the passive voice. In Orwell’s biographies, this is frequently wielded to erase Eileen’s financial and domestic labour, which created the conditions in which Orwell could write, as well as her courageous actions. As Funder writes, “Manuscripts are typed without typists, idyllic circumstances exist without their creators, an escape from Stalinist pursuers is achieved.”

The outrageousness of Eileen’s erasure is compounded by the biographers’ apparent over-reliance on Orwell’s versions of events, most notably in his claim to have had an open marriage. Funder espies a convenient fiction that Orwell told and his biographers swallowed because it preserved an untroubled decency that they projected onto his character. The claim that Eileen also had extramarital affairs is another convenient story, Funder argues: “One revolutionary tryst would transform the Orwells’ marriage to an ‘open’ one in which infidelity was the deal. It wasn’t.”

For these reasons (and more), readers with only a casual acquaintance with Orwell’s life will find in Wifedom a brutal dispelling of any image of a virtuous and decent Orwell, a wizened Saint George whose “wintry voice of conscience” is still heard in debates over totalitarianism, bureaucratic obfuscation, social oppression and colonialism. It will, for those readers, be a harrowing account — yet another, to go up there with Carmela Ciuraru’s Lives of the Wives or Phyllis Rose’s Parallel Lives — of how a monstrous and entitled man took from a woman everything that he should not have. Deepening this tragedy will be the apparent complicity of Orwell’s biographers, and their willingness to consign Eileen to the periphery, if not the shadow, of the biographical spotlight.

Wifedom is a forceful and powerful book, relentless in its advocacy for Eileen and the horrifying injustices done to her. It is also salutary for biographers — a thumping reminder to broaden the spotlight of their inquiry, to peer more closely at the forces at work on their subjects and themselves, and to be ever more careful about the implications of their prose and the benefits they grant their subjects.

Yet for all its close reading, Wifedom is also curiously uninterested in what makes biography a uniquely charged genre to work in. While a biography is concerned with a single subject there is a tension in the simultaneous need to take in the people, institutions and forces that shape the life. A biographer’s sources are much less than everything and they can only work with what they can get, yet they must at some point decide they have enough source material to make a judgement.

Biography, for all its empiricism and evidential rigour, is subjective in nature. While there is a narrative tug to assume a god-like omniscience, there is also an ethical tug to admit to gaps, ambiguities and possibilities. It is axiomatic that no biography is ever definitive, yet it is less well understood that biographies have a shelf life which, if not quite as short as a carton of milk’s, certainly gives the same sour smell when it is exceeded.

Wifedom ignores much of this in its treatment of the Orwell biographies. After their first mention, Funder never again identifies the books or their authors by name except in her endnotes. In anonymising the biographies in the text of her book, she plasters them with a homogeneity that erases how their authors contended with the inevitable tensions and imperatives. One effect is to suggest that the biographers were entirely of the same mind and view and all had the same evidence to hand.

While the biographies are all written by men, and may treat Eileen with less than her due, they are also profoundly different in focus, depth and outlook, and deal with very different ranges of sources. They make for conflicting accounts, and indeed the writers have conflicted with one another. When Peter Stansky, the co-author of the first Orwell biography (1972 and 1979), was once approached at a conference by Bernard Crick, author of a 1980 biography of Orwell, he briefly wondered whether they would come to blows. Crick, however, pointed out that another Orwell biographer was soon scheduled to speak. “Shall we bury our hatchets,” he began, and paused, “… in Jeffrey Meyers’s skull?”

All these men had hatchets. None had an interest in upholding the Saint George figure canonised in Christopher Hollis’s enormously influential Study of George Orwell: The Man and His Works (which goes uncited by Funder). That figure took root and went without an advocatus diaboli for a considerable period because of the unwillingness of anyone to challenge Orwell’s deathbed opposition to any biography at all and his second wife Sonia’s determination to uphold that wish.

Yet palpable across the six biographies published between 1972 and 2023 is a willingness to assail the saintly halo and draw attention to Orwell’s myriad flaws. None of the six biographers is reticent about Orwell’s infidelity, his potential repressed homosexuality, his chauvinism and his racism, among other matters, yet the strength of the criticism for him on these and other fronts increases noticeably in volumes closer to the present day. This reflects, I think, both the increasing size of the Orwell archive — which has just resulted in a new, expanded edition of D.J. Taylor’s biography (reviewed by Peter Marks for Inside Story) — and the new questions biographers have been spurred to ask by societal changes. If these biographies have not wholly dispelled the popular image of Orwell, it has not been for lack of trying.

They certainly have their blind spots, but they are not wholly blind to Eileen’s significance and Orwell’s treatment of her; nor are they uniform in what they do perceive. Funder admits this in a comment she consigns to her endnotes: “[Jeffrey] Meyers is the only biographer to address directly who did the work.” She quotes him, too: “Orwell enjoyed this hairshirt existence [in Hertfordshire], but Eileen, who did most of the work, suffered terribly.” Crick points to how friends and acquaintances understood Eileen:

Her friends are vehement that she understood people far better than George, and that her range of interests was almost as wide. They were not to be perfect together, but always a good match. She fought his fights and looked after him as well as he would allow — although she was a woman careless of creature comforts herself. She indulged, even enjoyed, his eccentricities. Brenda Salkeld thought well of her, believed her to be the kind of woman George needed. Some of Eileen’s friends, however, were not so sure that George was the right man for her, and were puzzled that such an emancipated and forceful woman was so willing to play second fiddle to what appeared to be a rather self-absorbed and gawky minor novelist.

In his 2003 biography, meanwhile, D.J. Taylor points out that Orwell obscured Eileen’s presence in their life: “One could read Orwell’s account of the time they spent together in Morocco — sedulous nature notes and climatic observation — without ever realising that another person was there.” Taylor was also aware enough to write that, in the retrospective glare of Orwell’s reputation, Eileen “never quite exists in her own right.”

One way that Funder has Eileen exist again is by extensively quoting a batch of letters, discovered in 2005, that Eileen posted to a friend during her nine years of marriage. Those letters formed the core of Sylvia Topp’s 2020 biography of Eileen (which reaches very different conclusions from Funder’s) and were also critical to Funder’s decision to eschew a novel about Eileen. “A novel was impossible now, because it would devour the letters as ‘material’ and privilege my voice over hers,” she writes. The solution was to have it both ways: to “make her [Eileen] live and at the same time reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her.”

The latter half of this sentence accounts for the close readings of Orwell’s biographies and for the sections of first-person memoir-cum-travelogue-cum-polemic; the first half accounts for what Funder calls “a fiction that tries not to lie.” These are scenes, or vignettes, for the most part centred on the letters Eileen sent, quoting the letters and surrounding them with novelistic texture and evocation. Funder suggests that the imagination informing this — the flesh she adds to fact’s bones — is modest, built on factual knowledge of what was happening. “Mostly,” she explains, “I supply only what a film director would, directing an actor on set — the wiping of spectacles, the ash on the carpet, a cat pouring itself off her lap.”

One such scene has Eileen and Orwell sitting in an inn in the Atlas Mountains in 1938, eating stew and drinking tea. Orwell eyes some young Moroccan women outside, and then tells Eileen that he has been working so hard:

“I deserve a treat,” he says, blowing a thin stream of smoke away from her.

A small thing inside her turns to stone. He doesn’t mean her. She forgets to breathe, then does. Closes her mouth. He says he wants one of these Berber girls, “just one.”

“And from me you want?” she says.

“I just thought I should tell you.”

At this, I had a shudder of disgust so strong I had to close the book. The scene is excruciating — in the torment it evokes in Eileen, in the gross and dehumanised entitlement Orwell claims, and in the leaden weight it settles on Eileen while she waits for Orwell’s return afterward. It is an apt example of Funder’s power and formidable talent as a writer.

But this scene is also troubling for precisely that reason. It includes more than just some modest filmic details. The dialogue and Eileen’s reaction are all made up. Its power, especially in that dialogue and imagined reaction, is so enormous that it easily withstands the disclaimer that Funder immediately follows it with: “I am imagining these details, but because this is what happened, there must have been some kind of scene.”

Is it what happened, though?

Funder cites two sources. First are the 1982 memoirs of Tosco Fyvel, who wrote of Orwell telling his wife during the second world war of his attraction for “young Arab girls” and Eileen’s permission for him to “have one of these girls on just one occasion.” Second are the 1970 memoirs of Harold Acton, which recounted, in paraphrased terms, a conversation with Orwell in 1945 in which Orwell had spoken about the beauty of Burmese and Moroccan women and then “admitted that he had seldom tasted such bliss as with certain Moroccan girls.”

This is the sum of it: two recollections independently made twenty-five years after the event of paraphrased conversations about events taking place a minimum of five years before that. Only Fyvel’s makes a specific mention of the incident; the other alludes to something like it only. Fyvel’s also suggests some ambiguity: “True or imagined? It hardly mattered.”

Funder is scathing of that (“I bet it mattered to her,” she writes of Eileen’s reaction), yet there is a very real question to be asked: are these recollections strong enough to support the scene Funder writes? Are these strong enough to declare, as Funder does, that “this is what happened,” that this is “fact”?

Certainly they are strong enough, and of sufficiently grave import, to warrant inclusion and discussion in a biography, with evaluation from the biographer about how the reader can understand them one way or the other. And this is indeed the approach largely adopted by Orwell biographers Stansky and Abrahams (1972 and 1979) and Crick (1980), who had only Acton’s recollection to work with. All are sceptical, but don’t cast the matter wholly aside. Nor is Stansky and Abrahams’s “8-pt footnote,” as Funder calls it, quite as far banished and hidden as she implies: it is printed in the body text of the book.

What is also not noted by Funder is that the biographers after 1980, working with the benefit of Fyvel’s memoir, give the claim more credence. Meyers (2000) implicitly accepts that it happened, offers a rejoinder to Stansky and Abrahams’s caution, and grants an expansive ambiguity about Eileen’s reaction. “Eileen may have allowed Orwell to go with a prostitute,” he writes, “but it must have made her unhappy and hurt their marriage.” Gordon Bowker (2003) and Taylor (2003) implicitly accept it too, though Taylor suggests that Orwell’s disclosure to Fyvel gave “an odd gloss to an otherwise conventional relationship, the thought of shadowy, secret recesses stretching away beneath the surface of their public lives.” Funder is critical of this sentence, seeing it as an unwarranted attribution to Eileen of secret recesses, yet a plainer reading is that Taylor is merely relaying Fyvel’s projection of those recesses.

None of the Orwell biographers declares emphatically that it happened. None of them denies with the same feeling that it did. Nonetheless, Funder finds their treatment wanting, accusing them of trying to “excuse Orwell’s behaviour” and “transmute fact to a rumour.”

“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent,” Orwell once wrote. Wifedom follows that advice to a tee. In its exploration of Orwell and Eileen it finds considerable evidence for a man undeserving of the pedestal on which he has been placed and a woman who has been unfairly cast aside. It will prompt a better reckoning for Orwell scholars and it will be salutary for writers working with other subjects. But, in time, it too will be seen as an instalment in an arc that ultimately bends towards greater illumination. •

Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life
By Anna Funder | Hamish Hamilton | $36.99 | 464 pages

The post Buckle and strain appeared first on Inside Story.

John Carey called Morrison’s study “astute and revealing,” and it made the shortlist for the James Tait Black Prize, Britain’s longest-running biography award. As it happened, Carey’s own William Golding: The Man Who Wrote Lord of the Flies won that year. Revealingly, Carey incorporated Golding’s classic debut novel into his title, suggesting that without overt semaphoring even informed readers might struggle to recall the 1983 Nobel Prize winner.

Morrison once told me his publisher had admitted that only four writers in English could be guaranteed a readership sizeable enough to make a biography an attractive business proposition: Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf and George Orwell. Which in part explains why D.J. Taylor’s new biography of Orwell does not come subtitled The Man Who Wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell needs no prompt. But the subtitle of Taylor’s Orwell: The New Life is revealing, for his own Orwell: The Life was published in 2003. And that raises the question: how is Taylor’s new life of Orwell “new”?

Orwell hoped no biography of him would be written, but the renown of Nineteen Eighty-Four and the enduring appeal of Animal Farm made that unlikely. He died in 1950 at the age of forty-six, but nearly three-quarters of a century on he is regularly quoted (and sometimes misquoted) by journalists and politicians, and taught in schools, a writer whose impact on language and the public imagination extends to people who have never read him.

His early death meant he never truly experienced that celebrity. Homage to Catalonia, for example, now understood as a classic account of the Spanish civil war, sold fewer than 700 copies in his lifetime. And while he came to be acknowledged as a great essayist, most of his short works first appeared in obscure journals with paltry readerships.

In many ways, though, he is a biographer’s dream, a quirky figure with a sharp intelligence and sharper opinions who lived a brief, eventful life in troubled times. The years between 1903 and 1950 witnessed two world wars, the British Empire’s decline, the rise (and sometimes fall) of left- and right-wing totalitarian regimes, a global depression, the Spanish civil war in which he fought, and the cold war, which he is credited with naming in his 1945 essay “You and the Atom Bomb.” Even better for the biographer trying to construct the narrative arc of his life, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published barely six months before his death. To add to the pathos, he died alone at night in hospital, haemorrhaging from the effects of the tuberculosis that haunted his life.

Born Eric Blair in India to parents who were minor figures in the Anglo-Indian community administering that part of the Empire, he was educated at an English prep school he later eviscerated in “Such, Such Were the Joys,” a memoir so libellous it was not published in his lifetime. He then seemed to consciously squander the prestigious and highly competitive King’s Scholarship he had won to Eton, rejecting the route to Oxbridge taken by contemporaries such as Cyril Connolly and Steven Runciman, later a renowned classicist.

Instead, he worked for five years in Burma with the Imperial Police before returning to England, then spent the next half-decade trying unsuccessfully to write novels in Paris. (He managed only a few articles in Parisian newspapers — in French.) He worked there as a kitchen hand and in England as a teacher, living for brief periods among tramps and itinerant rural workers and mooching off his bemused parents, by now in retirement in the staid English town of Southwold.

He used much of this experience in articles and essays, novels and documentaries. In some sense he was his own biographer, although critics and actual biographers sometimes struggle to distinguish fact from fiction. Did he witness “a hanging” — the title of his first great essay — in Burma? Or, given its undertones of Somerset Maugham, is that work actually a short story? Or some hybrid? Is another essay, “Shooting an Elephant,” an eyewitness account or a crafted “sketch” (the term Orwell used for it) using a first-person narrator for dramatic effect?

Taylor thinks treating both as “straightforward pieces of autobiography” is “a mistake.” “A Hanging” was published in 1933 under the name Eric Blair, while “Shooting an Elephant” appeared in 1936 as the work of “George Orwell,” a pen name that first appears in Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). Biographers suggest that Blair adopted it to avoid his parents being publicly embarrassed by the book’s squalid details. “George Orwell” was only one of four names he suggested to his agent, two others being the uninspired “Kenneth Miles” and the laughable “H. Lewis Always.” The published title was also a late choice. Potentially, Eric Blair’s first book might have been published as The Lady Poverty, by H. Lewis Always. Thankfully, Down and Out in Paris and London and George Orwell prevailed.

Writing by Eric Blair continued into 1935, and the BBC hired Orwell under his real name during the second world war, but critics often see the adoption of the pseudonym as part of an ongoing psychological and political evolution. In this reading, Blair sheds many of the trappings of middle-class life, though the accent honed at Eton never leaves him and he might dress formally for dinner. He adopts the somewhat ascetic, combative and consciously quirky persona of Orwell, dressing with a provocative déclassé dowdiness and rather clumsily adopting working-class mannerisms such as hand-rolling cigarettes and drinking tea from a saucer.

All this suggests some level of inauthenticity, and Taylor repeatedly points to Orwell consciously fashioning a persona: “as well as being a biography,” he writes, “what follows is, ultimately, a study of Orwell’s personal myth, what might be called the difference between the kind of person he was and the kind of person he imagined himself to be.”

We might read this as less duplicitous than aspirational, but the undoubted tensions between middle-class and working-class perspectives finds literary form in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). This bifurcated study begins with Orwell’s report of conditions in working-class sections of northern England, a section meant to shock and educate middle-class socialists in southern England likely to read it. The book’s second half presents Orwell’s account of his upbringing and political development, a precursor to his idiosyncratic argument for an English socialism, shorn of Soviet affectations, in which the middle class merges in solidarity with the working class.

Homage to Catalonia road-tests Orwell’s developing socialist views in extreme circumstances, while Coming Up for Air (1939) tracks with wry affection the journey of a nostalgic Everyman who yearns for a past now long gone but senses impending war. The transformation from 1933’s Eric Blair to 1939’s George Orwell is dramatic, but had he written nothing after 1939 he would have at best been a literary footnote. Instead, he writes Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), two of literature’s greatest political fictions.

Without these late works, Orwell would hardly warrant one biography, let alone the half a dozen that have appeared from Bernard Crick’s 1980 study to Taylor’s latest life. But that simple sequence conceals a fraught narrative. Orwell’s second wife Sonia knee-capped Peter Stansky and William Abrahams’s early biographically based studies, The Unknown Orwell and Orwell: The Transformation, denying them the right to quote from Orwell’s work. She also floated the idea that Orwell’s friend Malcolm Muggeridge would write the first authorised biography, possibly to put off other potential candidates. Then, after selecting Crick, a political scientist, she disavowed his study as too dull, trying unsuccessfully to break the book contract. Sonia Orwell died before Crick’s account of Orwell was published to general acclaim — Orwell’s friend, the writer Julian Symons, called it the “definitive biography.”

When a study authorised by the Orwell Estate eventually did appear, Michael Shelden’s Orwell: The Authorised Biography (1991) took pains to dismiss Crick’s biography as a collection of facts that failed to illuminate Orwell’s character and motivations. (Crick returned fire in the 1995 reprint of his work.) Shelden’s study reflects his training as a literary scholar interested in character and motivation, while Crick adopts a more objective social science approach.

Jeffrey Meyers’s Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation (2000) seeks to portray Orwell as a more problematic individual, a man with “a noble character, but [who] was also violent, capable of cruelty, tormented by guilt, masochistically self-punishing, sometimes suicidal.” Neither Crick nor Shelden paint Orwell as saintly, but Meyers strives to present him as a dark figure, without fundamentally changing the narrative outline of his life.

Biographers from Meyers on have enjoyed access to The Complete Works of George Orwell (1998), a twenty-volume set brilliantly edited by Peter Davison that presented not only Orwell’s published work but also masses of previously unpublished letters and documents. This and other material made available in the ever-expanding Orwell Archive at University College London afford and sometimes demand more recent reappraisals.

The centenary of his birth in 2003 prompted two more biographies, Gordon Bowker’s George Orwell and Taylor’s Orwell: The Life, proof that publishers saw an audience large enough to justify concurrent studies. Bowker continued the desanctification of Orwell, accepting him as a “writer of great power and imagination” but making much of what he saw as his subject’s deceptive character, infidelities and chauvinism. He declares that the “main thrust” of his book is to “reach down as far as possible to the roots” of Orwell’s emotional life,” to get “as close as possible to the dark sources mirrored in his work.”

Taylor’s biography is less lurid, but he too exposes Orwell’s less-appealing qualities. And he intersperses the chronological biographical narrative with short essays on topics such as “Orwell and the Jews,” examining Orwell’s problematically complex attitudes, or “Orwell’s paranoia,” about “malign exterior forces that he suspected of interfering in his and other people’s lives.”

Like Bowker, Taylor understands Orwell as a great writer — both come to praise Orwell rather than to bury him — but he too acknowledges substantial personal flaws. Taylor even includes a short “case against” Orwell, written in the persona of a Marxist critic who claims that “as a novelist, Orwell scarcely begins to exist” and declares him a “hopelessly naïve” political thinker. Taylor himself is far more positive.

Unusually, both of Orwell’s wives have merited biographies. The title of Hilary Spurling’s The Girl from the Fiction Department: A Portrait of Sonia Orwell (2002) overtly connects Sonia Orwell with Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Julia, while Sylvia Topp’s Eileen: The Making of George Orwell (2020) argues for the influence of his first wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy, on his life and writing. Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, published this month (and reviewed for Inside Story by Patrick Mullins), advances that general case, presenting a complex mix of critique and life writing that faults Orwell himself for largely “erasing” Eileen from his writing and accuses previous Orwell biographers (all male) of failing to pay due respect to Eileen’s intellect and emotional support, as well as to the “free labour” that allowed Orwell to pursue his life as a writer at the expense of her own considerable abilities and ambitions.

Funder’s fictionalised vignettes, based on known facts and exchanges of letters with Eileen’s female friends, reposition her centrestage. All this takes place within a larger investigation of “wifedom,” the general condition Funder maintains continues to require wives (including herself) to operate within patriarchal power arrangements detrimental to their own flourishing. Provocative, fluent and energetic, Wifedom will activate lively debate among Orwell scholars and the general readers interested in Orwell and his milieu.

Which brings us to Taylor’s New Life. As with Funder, Taylor has access to new information unknown to earlier biographers, including Eileen’s often deeply personal letters to her friend Norah Myles, made public in 2005, which detail her life with Orwell from 1938 to 1941. Recently uncovered caches of letters also illuminate Orwell’s already known relationships with two women he pursued romantically before and after his marriage to Eileen.

Revelations have also emerged about Eric Blair’s problematic last meeting with his teenage love, Jacintha Buddicom, an event that might count as sexual assault. And Taylor assigns much greater importance to Orwell’s “ever-supportive Aunt Nellie,” who proved a key benefactor. Nellie’s living in Paris offered him literary and political connections in that city; her friends Francis and Myfanwy Westrope ran the bookshop where Orwell worked in the early 1930s; Nellie secured the spartan cottage Orwell and Eileen lived in through much of the late 1930s.

Women play a far more significant role in The New Life than in Taylor’s earlier book, so that Norah Myles, who does not appear at all in The Life, is referenced more than twenty times in the recent work, part of a more extensive and nuanced account of Eileen’s life and friends. Taylor also accepts Robert Colls’s criticism in George Orwell: English Rebel (2013) that Orwell’s depiction of the working class in The Road to Wigan Pier effaces the vitality of working-class life. Integrating these and other pieces of information and scholarship adds colour and shade to the image Taylor previously depicted, without changing the outline.

Taylor also deals with the relative paucity of primary information about key sections of Orwell’s early life, particularly at Eton and in Burma. All biographies are complex weaves of available evidence and interpretation, but how to proceed if little evidence exists? Michael Shelden, for example, took Orwell’s essay about prep school, “Such, Such Were the Joys,” almost as documentary, even though it was written when Orwell was in his forties and many of his contemporaries thought it exaggerated.

If Shelden accepted the essay too easily as fact, at least it was written by Orwell himself. Taylor at times adopts an odder tactic, at one point deploying the novel Decent Fellows by a rough contemporary of Orwell’s at Eton, John Heygate, to convey a sense of the school a decade earlier. Taylor’s claim that “all this sheds a fascinating light on Orwell’s time at Eton” seems a stretch. And on the question of whether Orwell saw a man hanged in Burma, Taylor connects Orwell’s essay to Thackeray’s 1840 “Going to See a Man Hanged” claiming that the later narrative “could not have been written in quite the same way without the ghostly presence” of Thackeray’s account. This claim, simultaneously large and odd, is somewhat undermined by the fact that The Complete Works of George Orwell makes no mention of Thackeray’s piece.

Even the best real detectives (as opposed to the fictional ones) must deal with the reality that sometimes there is no evidence to be found, and Taylor is honest enough to admit more than once that we simply do not or cannot know. At other times, though, he uses questions to generate potential answers, so that in a late “Interlude” titled “Orwell and his World,” he asks: “Some basic behavioural questions: What was Orwell like? How did he seem? If you were in a room with him, how might he conduct himself and what would you talk about?”

This is a little too close to “showing your workings,” an unnecessary act given the impressive amount of detail Taylor fashions into a coherent and insightful character study. He also retains from his earlier biography the two- or three-page essays on topics he deems worth individual attention. Some are only cursorily rewritten, while new ones are added: “Orwell and the Working Classes” or “Orwell and the ‘Nancy Boys.’” The latter begins with the terrible line “Orwell’s dislike of homosexuals follows him through his work like the clang of a medieval leper bell.” While the topic itself is significant, the dislocation of the narrative that this and similar pieces effect is heightened by its coming immediately after a chapter ending with Eileen’s death during an operation for uterine tumours; the juxtaposition is jarring.

For all this, Taylor assembles a wealth of information, some of it new, much of it intelligently reinterpreted, into what can justifiably be claimed as a “new” biography based on decades of close attention to Orwell’s life and mythology. The occasional medieval leper bell apart, he writes with a fluency that injects the narrative with vitality and significance. The New Life is a knowing biography, incorporating changes and advances in our knowledge and assessment of Orwell without being modish or attempting to defend the indefensible (or at least reprehensible) aspects of his life.

Almost alone among his contemporaries Orwell can still attract a sizeable new audience. W.H. Auden and Evelyn Waugh are still lauded, but they seem figures from a past that is recognisable as the past. As proof of Orwell’s status as a still-relevant writer, at least five books about him have appeared or will appear in 2023: Taylor’s biography; Peter Stansky’s The Socialist Patriot: George Orwell and War; Glenn Burgess’s Orwell’s Perverse Humanity; Masha Karp’s George Orwell and Russia; and Peter Barry’s forthcoming George Orwell: The Ethics of Equality. To which we might add Anna Funder’s Orwell-adjacent Wifedom.

Have we hit peak Orwell? Perhaps. But just as the election of Donald Trump in 2016 rocketed Nineteen Eighty-Four back to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, so the prospect of a second Trump presidency suggests that Orwell might again speak to a new set of readers. To this we can add the menace of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and their abominable clones. The man whose writing spawned the adjective “Orwellian” seems unlikely to go out of fashion. •

Orwell: A New Life
By D.J. Taylor | Little, Brown | $34.99 | 496 pages

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Bowker is the “dean” of an exceptional group of Australian diplomats who dedicated their careers to understanding the region. That description comes from Nick Warner, a wise owl of Canberra foreign policy, defence and intelligence, who says Bowker throws much light “on the history of our relationship with the Middle East, where we have gone wrong and right, and what we should do now.”

The book’s title — Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: An Australian Diplomat in the Arab World — gives a taste, in several senses. Bowker explains that the apricot prophecy is a Syrian saying similar to “pigs might fly.” The hope for apricots, he writes, “captures an unquenchable, droll optimism which, together with the deep appreciation of culture and hospitality, ranks highly among the virtues that define what it means to be Arab. It also reflects an abiding scepticism towards the pretensions of those in positions of authority.”

In just 300 pages Bowker offers two books. The first traces his career in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, or DFAT, as a Middle East specialist, after he joined as a diplomatic cadet in 1971. The second, “Reflections,” is an analysis of the big issues confronting the region.

The two-in-one package is a fine blend of the personal and the policy, describing a fifty-year journey: thirty-seven years with DFAT and twelve years as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments and an academic at the Australian National University.

“Being an Australian diplomat in the Arab world was more than a career: it was an adventure,” Bowker writes. “In many ways it was my life.” He reminds us that former prime minister John Howard labelled himself a cricket “tragic” because he was tragically in love with the game. Bowker embraces the hopelessly-in-love thought, titling the first half of the book “The Career of a Middle East Tragic.”

It’s notable the book starts with that light-hearted reference to Howard, because one of the great policy fights of Bowker’s career was Howard’s shifting of Australian policy on Palestinian self-determination to lean towards Israel. The diplomat notes he was “trumped by the prime minister” and “went down in flames.”

A great scene in this flame-up has Bowker locked in a shouting match with the prime minister’s foreign policy adviser at the annual conference of the Zionist Federation. Howard was sitting only metres away, preparing to address the conference dinner. His breach with Canberra is an example of Bowker’s observation that the policy choices the Middle East must live with are divided between bad and much worse.

Tragically in love with the Middle East in all its tragic complications, Bowker offers great yarns, finely told. He has an ear for the telling quote and an eye for a good scene.

Heading off for his first overseas post as a third secretary only seven months after joining the department, he records the three pieces of advice given him in the conversation that amounted to his consular “training”: “Never take possession of a corpse. Never take possession of a madwoman. Use your common sense. And that was it.”

At his second post in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, his struggle learning Arabic is illustrated by his regular visit to a roadside stall: “I later realised that when I thought I was asking, in terrible Arabic, for a freshly cooked chicken, I was actually asking for a fresh wife. The stall owner didn’t seem to mind.” But Bowker’s “colloquial Levantine Arabic” had uses beyond talking to stallholders and taxi drivers. To impose ceremonial pain on Sudan’s president for atrocities by his tribal proxies in Darfur, the ambassador gave “my speech on presentation of my credentials in Arabic.”

A gem of a chapter entitled “Touring Tobruk by Moonlight” captures Libya’s “blend of chaos and impenetrability under the Ghaddafi regime” by describing Bowker visiting, as the non-resident ambassador, as scout for a visit to the war cemetery by the Australian defence minister. Two Libyan minders drive Bowker from Benghazi in a car that “sounded very sick indeed” to visit a range of war cemeteries — British, French and German — but can’t find the Australian site until the moon is out.

At the end, the minders have an animated discussion about the report they must file “on why the ambassador chap had been scoping out the port area and surrounds of Tobruk, especially the high ground overlooking the harbour, quizzing the locals about the layout of the urban area, and doing so in execrable Arabic.” When they got back to Benghazi at 1.30am, one of the minders “shook my hands and planted kisses on both my cheeks. When you are kissed by a Libyan security official, you know it is time to go home.”

Writing of his time in Syria in the 1970s, Bowker recounts a local quip: “Saudi Arabia exports oil, Iraq exports dates, Egypt exports jokes and Syria exports trouble.” The three-line description of president Hafez al-Assad, the late father of the incumbent, is a miniature masterpiece of disdain: “his smile was like moonlight on a tombstone,” he had a “penchant for delivering historical lectures” and he dominated meetings with “his awe-inspiring bladder control.”

Bowker’s sad conclusion is that the Assad family — Hafez and now his son Bashar — has become the regime that outlasted its country. The bedrock of Bashar’s rule is its brutality, he writes, and father and son always avoided “questions about the appropriate relationship in Syria between state and society.”

Among his reflections, Bowker considers the department that made his career, lamenting how the role of Australia’s diplomats in Canberra has changed, “and not for the better.” DFAT, he argues, gives priority to trade and consular crisis management ahead of the research and thinking needed for effective foreign policy planning and advocacy. Policy is made in ministerial offices, with the department seen as mere implementor. “This is a deeply problematic direction for any government, or government department, to take.”

DFAT no longer debates with itself and the rest of Canberra through despatches and cables: “The final decade or two of my time in the department saw a shift to reporting by cable that was prone to be concise rather than nuanced. It was directed in its brevity towards immediate briefing needs, rather than the evaluation of trends and their consequences for Australian interests.”

Under the Howard government, he notes, the lengthy despatch from an overseas post became a thing of the past: “By the time I retired it had become almost unthinkable to reflect on broader issues, let alone to challenge policy settings, in cable traffic.”

In this second half of the book Bowker considers three core questions:

• “How do you build peace between two peoples — Israelis and Palestinians — with compelling national rights, human rights and historical narratives, but who have a clear imbalance of power?”

• How do you connect the present, the past and the politics of Palestinian identity? This is an intellectual who twenty years ago wrote a book called Palestinian Refugees: Mythology, Identity, and the Search for Peace. As a diplomat, he offers the answer (“if there is one”) of negotiating on interests, because beliefs are “organic, structural and fundamentally non-negotiable.”

• How does the Arab world confront its demographic fate (a Middle East population of 724 million people by 2050) and its economic and social challenges while preserving its Arab and Islamic identity? “None of the current leaderships of the major Arab states and Iran have answers to the problems of legitimacy and governance,” Bowker writes. His fear is that governments will “grow more authoritarian, transactional and violent in their instincts and behaviour.”

Defending privilege and predictability, rulers have found that repression works for them, arguing that “freedom is more likely to produce chaos and division rather than bread and social justice.”

The Arab outlook, Bowker observes, feels like being on the bridge of the Titanic smelling the ice. It took the Titanic a long time to sink, though, and the modern Arab world has no way to stop the drivers of change, which are “generational and societal as well as political.”

On the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, Bowker declares that the two-state approach pursued since the 1990s is “dead.” He pointedly calls it a two-state “approach” because no solution is in sight. If that option is mired in fundamental conundrum, the path to justice is by “building a foundation for Palestinian rights and dignity among Israelis.”

Israel can facilitate a new, more positive future for Palestinians and Israelis, he says, without raising existential questions for Israel: “The absence of sovereignty is a legitimate grievance for Palestinians, but in practice it is the absence of dignity and economic security that matters much more.”

If the two-state vision/solution is dead, as Bowker avers, then Palestine’s dream of independence must fade. As the Economist observed recently, the Palestinian diaspora has “begun to call for a one-state solution, where Jews and Arabs between the Jordan rivers and the Mediterranean would live together in a single democratic state — and where Arabs would have a slender overall majority.”

For Israel and the Arab world, demography should meet democracy, and history must reconcile with geography.

Bowker concludes that the fun and frustrations of his life as a Middle East tragic have forced him to accept key realities. Middle East policy is not a morality play; expediency shapes decisions: “The logic of strategy is not always consistent with the logic of politics.”

Diabolical complexity rules. It is in the nature of the Middle East for problems to linger and become more complex: “We must accept that views, interests and values within Arab societies are more likely to differ from our own: any apparent synchronicity of views should be cause for caution, as well as celebration.”

The final sentence of this tragic’s meditation on his life’s works reads: “And, despite almost fifty years of exposure to the Arab world, I remained free of tribal delusions, except where Collingwood is concerned.”

Ah, the Melbourne conundrum of the Collingwood Football Club — the only passion running through this fine book that (in the tribal view of this reviewer) does not bend towards truth and logic. •

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots: An Australian Diplomat in the Arab World
By Robert Bowker | Shawline Publishing | $24.95 | 307 pages

The post Memoirs of a Middle East tragic appeared first on Inside Story.

When Williams recorded Happy Woman Blues in 1980 for the Smithsonian Folkways label she was twenty-seven years old, the genre of “alt country” (a term she’s perennially associated with but not fond of) had yet to be coined, and her biggest album, Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, was eighteen years off. This year, Car Wheels turned twenty-five (another of those classic album anniversaries guaranteed to make gen X people feel their mortality) and Williams turned seventy. She’s also released a new album, gone on tour, including to Australia, and published her enthralling memoir, the enticingly titled Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You.

“I don’t want to be one of those sugarcoated books like you find at Walgreens,” Williams tells an interviewer as prelude to the book. No chance. As every fan knows from her songs, steeped in experience and hard-won wisdom, she’s done her time: on the road, with men who broke her heart, and in the small and big towns she eventually felt compelled to leave or return to.

One of the thrills of reading this memoir is the chance to go behind the scenes of those songs, both in terms of her process and in relation to life. Throughout, I had to stop reading and listen immediately to the song being discussed, whether it was an old favourite of mine like “Side of the Road,” from her 1988 self-titled album, or a hidden gem I’d never clicked with before, like “Crescent City” from the same album.

First though, we read about the forces that shaped her, beginning with her parents and the southern towns and families they came from. Eschewing the advice of an “older gentleman” not to write about her childhood and just “write about the music,” Williams — who is candid about the therapy she’s had — puts her early years front and centre. On both sides are ministers and poets, including her father, the award-winning poet and university professor Miller Williams. He thought the “poets were doing the same thing his father, Ernest, had been doing through his ministry — teaching something that was mostly hidden to the rest of the world.”

Williams is indebted to her lineage — “it’s easy for me to find myself in my ancestry” — and this includes frankly addressing its darker aspects. Among the most bracing secrets she shares are about her mother, Lucille Fern Day, who “went by Lucy” and grew up in abject poverty in an abusive family headed by her “hell-fire and brimstone” Methodist minister father. Williams offers a loving, complex and open-ended portrait: Lucy played piano and read voraciously, and Williams’s happy memories of her include laughing at “all sorts of things.”

Like Sylvia Plath, though, Lucy would “drift in and out” of mental illness and was hospitalised numerous times. It was only decades later that Williams learned from her father and sister Karyn more details about the “horrifying ways” her mother was molested by men in her family, revelations she is “still trying to process.”

Perhaps inevitably, her parents’ marriage eventually collapsed under this and various other pressures, including constant changes of location while her father pursued his academic career. At eleven, her family moved to Santiago, Chile. From fourteen to sixteen, Lucinda happily lived in New Orleans, where she saw Jimi Hendrix live and was later expelled from school for protesting at racial injustice by refusing to say the Pledge of Allegiance. In 1970, aged seventeen, she played her first live shows with family friend and folk musician Clark Jones (the first of a series of “guardian angel” figures in her musical life) while living in Mexico City. In all, she moved house twelve times before she turned eighteen.

Given the perpetual movement, Williams has “always been comfortable on the road, to keep my career going. It’s in my blood.” The “special bond” she shared with her father also endured right up until his death in 2015, and it was him she chose to live with when her parents split up. The bond was tested when she was twelve, when her thirty-five-year-old father moved his undergraduate student Jordan — Williams’s “future stepmother” — into the family home as a babysitter while her parents were ostensibly still together. Williams dates her obsessive-compulsive disorder to this development, but overwhelmingly her portrait of Miller is imbued with gratitude and affection.

More than once, Williams wryly notes that literary types — like her dad and one of his famous party guests, Charles Bukowski — are far more hedonistic in her experience than musicians are. Still, as delicious as the literary anecdotes are, it’s when she writes about music that her memoir truly soars. When she was introduced to Bob Dylan’s new album Highway 61 Revisited at the age of twelve, “it struck me like a bolt of lightning” and set her on her life path: “Between that record and Joan Baez with her jeans and little t-shirt and bare feet and long hair, I knew this was what I wanted to be.”

When she moved to New York City in 1979, after the release of her first album, a mutual friend introduced her to Dylan after one of her gigs. The “kinetic energy,” she writes, “was palpable.” Two decades later, “Dylan’s people” offered her an opening spot on his tour with Van Morrison, but — Bob being Bob — they didn’t speak during the whole tour.

For Williams, there is no higher compliment than to be compared to Dylan or Neil Young, artists who “could pretty much do whatever they wanted,” an opportunity she knows “not many women are given.” But while her songwriting is now widely recognised as comparable to theirs and other greats’, Williams’s road to fame was full of detours, setbacks and obstacles. These include dodgy record deals, shelved recording sessions and a music industry that didn’t quite know whether to classify her and her music as country or as rock (she prefers to align herself with “the blues”).

And, of course, there’s sexism in there as well, evident in how her attention to detail and determination to get it right — captured most vividly in the re-recording of Car Wheels after she was left unsatisfied by the first version — have seen her labelled as an “obsessive perfectionist.” As music writer Holly George-Warren has pointed out, this characterisation as “difficult” is not doled out to male artists like Bruce Springsteen or John Fogerty, who have also taken a long time to make records.

When Williams’s breakthrough self-titled album came out in 1988, she was thirty-five years old and had “basically been playing music every day since I was twelve, hustling day jobs to make ends meet.” As she writes, “I’m a complete anomaly in the music world, a late bloomer.” By her account, it took some time to communicate “what I felt and heard in my head,” but she never stopped moving or honing her craft as she immersed herself in one music scene after another.

Along the way there were also “stupid flirtations with various men,” as well as more substantial love affairs and connections. As she confesses, the type of man she was attracted to — prior to settling down with her current husband, her manager Tom Overby, whom she married on stage in 2009 — is best described as a “poet on a motorcycle.” Among them is the singer Ryan Adams (he inspired the song “Those Three Days” on her 2003 album World Without Tears), for whom she has maintained affection despite sexual misconduct allegations against him.

Lucinda Williams, if it isn’t clear by now, has lived a rich, exciting and challenging life and Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You emerges from her determination to reckon with it in all its shades and seasons. With themes and insights that should resonate with readers beyond her substantial and devoted fanbase, it makes for riveting reading. As with her songs, her prose is both economical and poetic, and radiates with truth and authenticity. Over the past decade or so, there has been a boom in memoirs and autobiographical writing by women in music, and hers enters the field — like her album Happy Woman Blues — as an instant classic. •

Don’t Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You
By Lucinda Williams | Simon & Schuster | $39.99 | 400 pages

The post Late bloomer appeared first on Inside Story.

The answer, of course, is yes. Australians have always been “unsettled settlers,” to use historian Jill Julius Matthews’s term; and the mind maps of our theatrical people have, from the beginning of European settlement, ranged widely through the English-speaking world.

Australians were present at the birth of the American movie industry, when D.W. Griffith began filming in the small village of Hollywood. They have remained a constant part of its history as stars, bit players, directors, cinematographers… in fact, in every aspect of filmmaking. At the same time they have struggled to develop and support an industry at home, and have been pushed and pulled between these two poles by changing industry structures in Hollywood and government policies in Sydney.

In Cast Mates: Australian Actors in Hollywood and at Home, Twyford-Moore ambitiously sets out to tell the story of this troubled relationship from the 1930s to the present through the stories of four Australian actors who made their mark in the world of Hollywood: Errol Flynn, Peter Finch, David Gulpilil and Nicole Kidman. Each chapter — and life story — illustrates a moment in the attraction between Australia and Hollywood.

Errol Flynn (1909–1959) and Peter Finch (1916–1977) represent the long period, from the 1930s to the 1960s, when Hollywood, trailed by Britain, could command the world’s best talents. This was the time when local moviemakers such as Charles Chauvel and Ken Hall saw their discoveries lured away and built up into world stars by the superior moviemaking machines of Classical Hollywood. David Gulpilil (1953–2021) is a brilliant choice as a representative of the golden period of Australian filmmaking, from the late 1960s to the mid 1980s, illustrating its failure to nurture an amazing Indigenous talent.

The fourth, Nicole Kidman (born 1967) is the poster child of the period from the early 1990s, when Australian stars like Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett have been able to remain Australian, moving between their native country and Hollywood, controlling their own lives and careers in a way that was not possible when the Hollywood machine was all-powerful.

Don’t look in Cast Mates for any clear argument about the “gangway between Sydney and Los Angeles, Sydney and Hollywood,” whether psychic or economic. Twyford-Moore is a storyteller rather than an analyst; and he is a very good one. We get no exposition of how Classical Hollywood exerted its control over world moviemaking, or the various schemes by which Australia attempted to battle against that control. This account of the industry emerges instead from the careers of the four main characters and the many cast mates Twyford-Moore showcases along the way, including Judith Anderson, Diane Cilento, Paul Hogan, Brian Syron and Cate Blanchett.

We learn, for instance, that Errol Flynn’s Hollywood career began in a British “quota quickie” in the years when the rest of the world was trying to fight the domination of Hollywood. We learn that young Peter Finch’s career in Australia during the war years was stymied by local representatives of Hollywood studios who preferred more traditionally handsome heroes. During the fifties, when production by Australian studios had virtually ceased, he returned to Australia from England to play in The Shiralee (1957) for Ealing Studios and Robbery Under Arms (1957) for Rank. (Interestingly, that iconic Australian movie, A Town Like Alice, was mainly filmed in England.)

Later, with Old Hollywood dead, Finch’s rugged, world-weary face was perfect for the part of Howard Beale, the NBC newscaster who spectacularly melted down on air, shouting he was “mad as hell.” After building a career despite Hollywood, he was sought out by Hollywood and rewarded with its highest accolade, an Academy Award. Alas, too late: it had to be awarded posthumously.

Although we learn much about the structures within which these Australian stars made their careers, the true richness of Cast Mates is in the telling of their life stories. These are fascinating people drawn towards a certain cosmopolitanism by virtue of birth, upbringing or temperament.

Errol Flynn’s parents were temporary Australians who returned to their native Ireland in retirement. Peter Finch became an Australian at the age of ten after an extraordinary early childhood of abandonment and displacement. David Gulpilil was an Indigenous Australian moving between a remote community and modern white urban life. Nicole Kidman, daughter of an Australian father studying abroad, was born in Hawaii and spent her early years in the United States. With the pale skin of a redhead, she chose reading, theatre and movies over Sydney’s beach culture.

Twyford-Moore tells these life stories with a density of striking detail that can be exhausting; but it is this detail that makes the book. David Gulpilil’s chapter is a case in point. He was a fifteen-year-old schoolboy and sometime stockman at Maningrida, 500 kilometres east of Darwin, when he was chosen for his part in Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout (1971). He had won a dance competition at the Darwin Eistedfodd and was recommended for the role by the director of welfare for the Northern Territory administration, to whom he wrote of his adventures during the world tour organised by the film’s US distributor, Twentieth Century Fox. He became a good friend of Dennis Hopper (whom he decribes as “fucking crazy”) during the shooting of Mad Dog Morgan (1976). He had a meeting with Clint Eastwood about a possible collaboration that came to nothing.

In a long, sad, discussion of movies never made, Twyford-Moore gives details of an early, rarely seen documentary, Walkabout to Hollywood (early eighties) — in which Gulpilil visits Disneyland with his young family and tries on cowboy boots — made by Bill Leimbach, who had wanted Gulpilil for a movie (never made) that he wrote about Governor Phillip and Bennelong.

Worth the book’s price alone is the section on Biripi actor and director Brian Syron, whose Kicking Down the Doors: A History of First Nation Films 1968–1993 is, for Twyford-Moore, “a wildfire of condemnation” of the Australian film industry. “The paucity of Australian films through the twentieth century,” he writes, “can make Australia look like a victim — hurt by the impositions of Hollywood — but it was a perpetrator too.”

This is a book written by a fan — a very intelligent and hardworking one — and Twyford-Moore lavishes his greatest love on his final subject, Nicole Kidman. Her story is almost as extraordinary as David Gulpilil’s. A very tall schoolgirl, fourteen years old, with pale skin and a mop of unruly red hair, she was noticed in 1983 by Jane Campion, then at the Australian Film and Television School, who had wanted her for her final student film, A Girl’s Own Story. But others also saw her potential: Storm Boy’s director, Henri Safran, cast her in his remake of the Australian classic Bush Christmas, and Brian Trenchard-Smith starred her in the wonderful Sydney Harbour chase movie BMX Bandits that same year.

Kidman emerged as a beauty in David Williamson’s Emerald City in 1988, her hair somewhat tamed but still spectacular. The following year she made her breakthrough film, Dead Calm, produced by George Miller and directed by Phillip Noyce. (You have to read the book for the long story of how they secured the rights from Orson Welles’s widow.) This led to her signing, at twenty-two, with Hollywood “superagent” Sam Cohn, and being chosen by Tom Cruise as his love interest in Days of Thunder (1990), described by one Australian journalist as “a ninety-minute first date for Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.”

We know the rest of the story — the marriage to Cruise; her American breakthrough role in To Die For (1995); Stanley Kubrick’s erotic Eyes Wide Shut (1999); her collaborations with fellow Australian Baz Luhrmann, Moulin Rouge! (2001) and Australia (2008); her marriage to Australian singer Keith Urban; her emergence as a producer of independent films such as Rabbit Hole (2010)oleb Hole (2010).HH and successful TV series such as Big Little Lies (2017–19); her life divided between Nashville (not Hollywood) and Sydney. Twyford-Moore fills this out with a plethora of delicious and informative background stories, from Matthew McConaughey’s five months in Gorokan High (the same “shithole public school” on NSW’s Central Coast that Twyford-Moore attended) and Stanley Kubrick’s love of the telephone and the fax.

This is a fascinating book to dip into in short, intense bursts. Its stories will delight you, instruct you, make you furiously angry, make you laugh out loud. Above all it will send you back to the movies these Australian stars made. It will also lead you to read it with Google open by your side, to follow Twyford-Moore even further down some rabbit hole or to get a timeline on the various government policies or changes in the movie industry. You will come away entertained and educated. There is an excellent index, an absolute necessity for any biographical publication, but no illustrations. Not a good decision, NewSouth!

Sam Twyford-Moore’s skills as a biographer are clearly demonstrated in Cast Mates. I predict that his next book will focus on one intriguing individual: perhaps someone from Australia’s new success story, Indigenous filmmaking — Rachel Perkins, Aaron Pedersen or Warwick Thornton — or the multicultural actors and filmmakers he features in his epilogue — Bina Bhattacharya, Geraldine Viswanathan and Arka Das. Whomever he chooses to write about, I look forward to another delicious read. •

Cast Mates: Australian Actors in Hollywood and at Home
By Sam Twyford-Moore | NewSouth | $34.99 | 306 pages

The post Fantales appeared first on Inside Story.

That fragment of a story began its evolution when the well-known Melbourne Aboriginal activist Gary Foley came across a brief report about the event in a newspaper of the time. In an essay published in 1997 he drew a connection between the League’s protest and the event now widely known as Kristallnacht, a Nazi-sponsored pogrom against Jewish people. Foley believed the League was the first group in Australia to try to formally protest against the German government’s persecution of Jewish people, but his main aim was to draw attention to Australia’s persecution of Aboriginal people by noting the comparison with the Nazis.

The story Foley told about the League’s protest piqued the interest of staff at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Museum and Research Centre (known widely at the time as the Jewish Holocaust Centre). It no doubt struck them as a good example of a people seeking to combat racism, and especially anti-Semitism. Telling a story about it would be a means of advancing the centre’s educational goal.

In the years that followed, the thread of the story told by Jewish institutions and organisations, here and in Israel, solidified into the account we know today. The protest at the consulate was the heroic work of one man, William Cooper, rather than the political organisation he represented, let alone any broader political movement of which it was a part.

According to this account, Cooper’s was the only non-governmental protest made in Australia, or even the world, against the Nazi persecution of Jews. In raising his voice, Cooper was bearing witness to the Nazi genocide of European Jews. His act sprang from his courage, humanity and compassion, and his empathy with the Jewish people, rather than any intention to advance his own people’s interests. It was all the more remarkable and worthy because he was standing up for the rights of Jewish people despite having no rights himself.

How did the story come to take on mythological qualities in this way? When they learned of Foley’s discovery, leading figures at the Holocaust Centre may well have also been influenced by two other narratives: that Kristallnacht was a turning point in the history of Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jewish people, which culminated in the Holocaust, and that tens of millions of gentiles had stood by while the Holocaust took place.

Foley’s argument that the League had been the first Australian organisation to raise its voice against the pogrom provided a striking counterpoint to the behaviour of other bystanders, or so it was believed. Just a few years earlier, Steven Spielberg’s remarkably popular Hollywood movie Schindler’s List had told a similarly uplifting story about an unlikely figure who rescued hundreds of Jews from the Nazi genocide.

I imagine the Holocaust Centre — and Melbourne’s Jewish community more generally — would also have been attracted to the story of the League’s protest because a particular kind of politics had become increasingly influential in Australia and many other Western societies — the politics of recognition, whose key words included remembrance, rights and reparation. Many non-Aboriginal people, or at least Anglo-Australians, now felt moved to tackle what was called “the great Australian silence” about Australia’s history of Aboriginal dispossession, displacement, destruction and discrimination. Increasingly, some were characterising this history as genocide — most recently in a report for the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission about the stolen generations.

The Holocaust Centre’s key figures would likely have been influenced, too, by a shift in how the past was being recounted and how people were relating to it, namely the rise in both scholarly and public circles of what was called “memory,” especially in the form of testimony, which had occurred most notably in accounts of the Holocaust. Those who had experienced a historical event had come to be seen as the most authoritative bearers of the truth about the past, so much so that “memory” was increasingly regarded in the media, and even by some scholars, as a substitute for history as told by academic historians, rather than just a supplement to those accounts.

An emerging scholarly and popular discourse also encouraged dividing those present in difficult historical circumstances into perpetrators, victims, collaborators, bystanders and resisters. In the case of settler societies, Indigenous people were called on to recall the past as victims; and non-Indigenous people were urged to listen to their testimony, acknowledge the truths they uttered, recognise the pain they had suffered, repudiate a past in which European ancestors were held to have been perpetrators, collaborators or bystanders (though sometimes resisters), and make amends for its legacies.

Over many years, this story has been told repeatedly in myriad forms outside the Jewish community: in commemorations, memorials, exhibitions, re-enactments, naming ceremonies, news reports, radio programs, books, magazine articles, essays, plays, paintings, musical compositions, blogs, videos and podcasts. It has been taken up by numerous government institutions and embraced by many sympathetic Anglo-Australians.

In December 2010 the largest and most senior Australian parliamentary delegation ever to visit Israel travelled to Jerusalem to participate in a series of events commemorating the League’s protest. In November 2017 a representative of the German government responsible for relations with Jewish organisations and issues relating to anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, accepted a document purporting to be the petition in Berlin, and in December 2020 he issued a formal apology for the German consul’s refusal to accept the petition some eighty years earlier.

In Australia, government bodies decided to name places in Melbourne in Cooper’s honour — a federal electorate, a building that houses several law courts and legal tribunals, an institute at a university, and a footbridge at a train station — and in each instance reference was made to the protest to the German consulate. The Aboriginal filmmakers Rachel Perkins and Beck Cole saw no reason to discuss the protest in their 2008 documentary First Australians; in 2020 the Aboriginal radio broadcaster Daniel Browning commissioned an episode of the ABC’s AWAYE! about Cooper that was framed by the story.

Cultural institutions have followed suit. The National Museum of Australia’s website feature “Defining Moments in Australian History” includes the story. Heritage Victoria has taken an interest in two of the houses in which Cooper lived, each of which displays an account of the story. The Victorian government department of education and training has included the story in its curriculum. And a historical society in Cooper’s traditional country has created an online exhibit about Cooper that focuses on the protest to the German consulate.

In the account of the protest I give in my life history of William Cooper, key historical facts are different. For example, the deputation to the German consulate can’t be attributed to Cooper alone, for while he was the Australian Aborigines’ League’s principal figure, League members (who included a whitefella by the name of Arthur Burdeu) played a major role; and the League, let alone Cooper, was by no means the first in Australia to formally protest against the Nazi German persecution of Jews after Kristallnacht, for two left-wing organisations had already tried to deliver a protest to the consulate in Melbourne. Nor can we be sure that Cooper was present when the attempt was made to hand over the petition — indeed, it is quite likely that he was not, as his health had declined considerably by this time.

More importantly, in the story that I tell, the meaning of this event is different. My point of departure is that the League was quintessentially a political organisation — and an Aboriginal one at that — and that it consequently went about its work in a strategic fashion, always considering what might be the best possible ways to fashion a case that could persuade white Australians to support its struggle to improve the lot of its people.

In the month prior to drawing up its petition, the League had evidently been conducting much of its political work by drawing parallels between Nazi Germany’s persecution of Jewish people and more than one Australian government’s treatment of Aboriginal people. It pointed out that the persecution of Indigenous people in Australia was akin to that experienced by racial minorities in Europe, and asserted that Australia should be as concerned about the rights of its people as it was about the rights of those other minorities.

One sentence in particular in the League’s petition — or what has survived of it — provides evidence that this was the point of its protest: “Like the Jews, our people have suffered much cruelty, exploitation and misunderstanding as a minority at the hands of another race.”

Other parts of the historical record also suggest that the League’s protest sought to draw attention to similarities between the treatment of the Jewish minority by the Nazi German government and the treatment of the Aboriginal minority by Australian governments.

Barely ten days after the League left its petition at the German consulate, a letter in Cooper’s name sent by the League to a federal minister said, “We feel that while we [Australians] are all indignant over Hitler’s treatment of the Jews, we [Aboriginal people] are getting the same treatment here and we would like this fact duly considered.” Several months later, in a letter now held in the National Archives, Cooper told prime minister Robert Menzies, “I do trust that care for a suffering minority will… not allow Australia’s minority problem to be as undesirable as the European minorities of which we read so much in the press.”

Shortly afterwards, following the outbreak of war, Cooper spelled out the kind of connection he and the League were trying to make in protesting against the Nazi persecution of German Jews. “Australia is linked with the Empire in a fight for the rights of minorities…” he told Menzies. “Yet we are a minority with just as real oppression.” A year later, Cooper’s protégé Doug Nicholls posed this rhetorical question to a congregation in a Melbourne church: “Australians were raving about persecuted minorities in other parts of the world, but were they ready to voice their support for the unjustly treated Aboriginal minority in Australia?”

My interpretation of the League’s protest rests not only on these written historical records but also on a source that can be seen as the product of collective memory or tradition. About a year before the League’s deputation to the German consulate, Cooper, in the course of speaking at length to a white journalist, referred to his people’s “horror and fear of extermination,” saying: “It is in the blood, the racial memory, which recalls the terrible things done to them in years gone by.” (His most important political act, a petition to the British king, also expressed a fear of extermination by speaking of the need to “prevent the extinction of the Aboriginal race.”)

These statements give a sense that the League was drawn to make its protest to the German consulate because, consciously or unconsciously, its members identified themselves with German Jews as a result of their own people’s experience of violence.

The story I have told of the League’s protest makes clear that the story of Cooper as the man who stood up to Hitler has leached the event of the meaning it had at the time for those responsible for it, and the meaning it could have today.

In everyday parlance, “myth” refers to a statement that is widely considered to be false. In using this word to describe the story of Cooper as the man who stood up to Hitler I don’t want to exclude this connotation, but I have something more ambiguous in mind.

Most myths have a genuine link to a genuine past. To be considered plausible, an account of the past must have at least a partial relationship to past reality, and thus to what is regarded as historically truthful. In this instance, it is a historical fact that the Australian Aborigines’ League sent a deputation to the German consulate in Melbourne in December 1938 to present a petition in which it protested against the persecution of the Jewish people.

But the rest of the story is a good example of what the great British historian Eric Hobsbawm once called “the invention of tradition.” It has been created by projecting onto Cooper a purpose and a character that the storytellers wish him to have had. The historical fact of the deputation aside, none of the story has been formed on the basis of the historical record.

Like most myths, this story achieves its most powerful effects not by falsifying historical material — though one of the organisations that has played a leading role in producing the story has fabricated the petition the League presented to the German consulate — but through omission, distortion and oversimplification.

Consequently, Cooper is recognised not because of his people’s loss, pain and suffering, but because he recognised the Jewish people’s loss, pain and suffering. This is the point of the storytelling. As a result, the popular account deflects attention from the devastating impact of racism and colonialism on this country’s Aboriginal people, and their struggle to lay bare its legacies and get them redressed. Such can be the cunning of recognition. What might purport to recognise the history of Aboriginal people misrecognises it.

The degree to which this myth has distorted how Cooper should be remembered — and the costs of that distortion — is highlighted by comparing it with what Gary Foley was doing. He was practising history in keeping with the discipline’s protocols, which include the recovery of the relevant historical texts and historical contexts, and was also adopting the techniques of Aboriginal history, a subdiscipline that seeks to make sense of the past and its presence by engaging with Aboriginal historical sources, subjects, agency and perspectives. The evolving story of Cooper’s protest ignored Foley’s main aim: he was seeking to draw attention to parallels between the murderous Nazi German campaign against the Jews of Europe and what had happened and was still happening to Aboriginal people in Australia.

In Australia, as elsewhere, history as a way of knowing and understanding the past threatens to be displaced by myth and memory (or what is deemed to be memory) that make claims about the past that are seldom tested and provide little explanation for what happened and why. Yet, as historian Allan Megill has suggested, “truth and justice, or whatever simulacra of them remain to us, require at least the ghost of History if they are to have any claim on people at all. What is left otherwise is only what feels good (or satisfyingly bad) at the moment.” •

The post The evolution of a myth appeared first on Inside Story.

The task is complicated by a paradox. As well as having a great gift for friendship Robert was in many ways a very private person. So I’ll leave it mainly to the extract below — from a short family history he was working on — to give a sense of the forces that created a gifted reporter who published thousands of carefully crafted pieces over a more than fifty-year career.

Robert spent his childhood in Wingham, a NSW town on the Manning River, where his parents ran a residential hotel. Those years left him with warm memories of the character and pace of postwar country life, tempered by a growing sense that change was inevitable. More importantly, life at the Wingham Hotel — a microcosm of rural Australia — fuelled in him an intense curiosity. Journalism seems always to have been the logical end point of those early influences.

After studying politics at the University of New South Wales he took up a cadetship with the Sydney Morning Herald, where his reporting skills were soon apparent. He became known to readers outside Sydney after he moved to another Fairfax paper, the National Times, to write and edit features.

He was also contributing Australian news to the Guardian in London, and it was probably those pieces that attracted the attention of the Independent, the exciting new paper launched by a trio of journalists in London in 1986. One of his first assignments as the paper’s Australian correspondent was the legally delicate job of covering the Spycatcher trial. Reporting on this attempt by the British government to suppress the Australian publication of a controversial MI5 memoir was complicated by a ruling by the Law Lords back in London, who had declared any mention of the book’s contents off limits for the British media.

After more than a decade with the Independent Robert was appointed Australian correspondent for the Economist, to which he continued contributing — regularly then occasionally — until quite recently. Throughout those years he also contributed to Australian magazines including Australian Society, Anne Summers Reports, the Good Weekend and, from 2009, Inside Story. For a time he wrote editorials for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Somehow during these years he found time to write a history of British nuclear testing in Australia, a book about rural Australia’s social and economic upheaval and a biography (extracted here) of the pioneering rock journalist Lillian Roxon.

Among his articles for Australian Society were two on the royal commission into Aboriginal deaths in custody. That interest in Indigenous affairs carried over into two outstanding pieces for Inside Story based on visits to Bourke and Moree to see innovative justice projects in action. Among his other features for Inside Story was a profile of the maverick western Sydney Liberal Craig Laundy, an account of the migration-led revival of Dubbo, and a report on the unveiling of a new statue, also in Dubbo, of Aboriginal rights leader William Ferguson.

He was a fierce critic of Australia’s treatment of refugees and an equally fierce advocate of an Australian republic. He wrote meticulously but responded amiably to editorial meddling. His circle of friends and acquaintances was wide, and he was invariably a welcoming presence during my visits to Sydney. I am among the many who will miss him enormously.

Here, then, is a short extract from Robert’s last writing project…

On Friday 20 September 1946 the Wingham Chronicle carried a small item near the top of its “Personal” column: “Mr and Mrs Dave Milliken, of the Wingham Hotel, are being congratulated on the birth last weekend of a son and heir.”

The son and heir was me. My sister and only sibling, Sue, had been born six and a half years earlier, but no one ever called her a daughter and heiress. My birth came in the first year of the baby boomers, the post–second world war generation whose arrival presaged big social change. But old attitudes on women’s role in society, and much else, still died hard.

Heir to what? My grandfathers, Harry Cross and James Milliken, had separately built enterprises of the kind around which life on the mid-north coast of New South Wales, and in many other rural regions, revolved: a country hotel and a dairy farm. The worlds these tow institutions encompassed had barely changed in at least fifty years. But they were about to do so, not least for their baby-boom grandchildren.

It was probably 1950 when the first of us boomers became aware of the world around us. Shorn of the privations of economic depression and war, we were defined by youth and renewal: the opening up of education, the postwar rebuilding, the arrival of different sorts of people from the mono-Anglo immigrants of our parents’ generation, and a new popular culture captured largely by the biggest glamour figures of all time, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. All this spelled confidence. How could we not be different?

I’ve long wanted to write about my childhood in an Australia that has largely passed, where people in New South Wales, at least, lived according to simpler patterns and precepts. Political trends and social mores seemed set in stone; few, if any, questioned them. There were no movements to advance the interests of women, immigrants, First Australians, gay people and others outside society’s masculine conformity because they barely seemed to exist.

Inevitably, my two grandfathers — whose businesses defined much about the rural Australia I entered — provided the stepping-off points. The first baby boomers were born during a crucial transition, from the tail end of the era of European expansion to the opening up of new cultural frontiers.

The Wingham Hotel, also known as Cross’s Hotel, stood confidently and invitingly at the entrance to Wingham, a town of perhaps 3000 people on the Manning River, about 320 kilometres north of Sydney. The Milliken farm, “Magheramorne,” faced the Wallamba River at Darawank, a hamlet near the Pacific Ocean about thirty-six kilometres southeast of Wingham.

Before the days of motels and licensed clubs, country hotels like ours played key roles in country life. They were the places where people stayed, ate, met, did business and, at the Wingham Hotel at least, lived. The residents weren’t people just looking for somewhere cheap to doss. They were what today would be called young professionals, for whom the hotel offered comfort and security.

In my first few years, residents included a pharmacist, a doctor, an ex–prisoner of war from Changi, and the venerable Miss Paterson, who became Wingham’s first female health inspector in 1949. They were the “permanents” who, in some ways, became part of the family.

Yet social mores kept familiarity at a distance. We called them Mr, Mrs or Miss, never by their first names (the honorific Ms hadn’t been coined). When I met her again fifty years later in her retirement in a mid-north coast beach town, Miss Paterson gave a sense of how these rigidities were starting to break down when she landed in Wingham after the war.

“There was a first-name basis largely, and I didn’t think that was right,” she told me. “You weren’t going to have a disciplined staff if they were going to call you Bill and Joe and whatever. So I was trying to educate them, but I don’t think I had any success at all. In the office itself, the girls all called one another by their first names, but maybe I just looked difficult. The town clerk always called me Miss Paterson. Some of the labourers would come in and say, “Is Jim in?” meaning the town clerk. I’d give them a lecture, and say Mr-whoever-was-the-town-clerk was in.”

Social life was more relaxed, with people expressing their feelings in sayings that have largely fallen out of use. Instead of swearing, publicly at least, they said “Strike a light,” “Spare me days,” “God strewth” or just “Strewth” to convey shock or exasperation, and “God give me strength” for outright disapproval.

I didn’t inherit either the hotel or the dairy farm, but each of them has remained embedded in my imagination. That’s because the hotel in particular, but even the farm, were such vibrant places where people, not machines, computers and algorithms, were the drivers of daily life.

By the time I was born, both grandfathers were dead. My parents, Thelma (known as Thel), Harry Cross’s elder daughter, and David (known as Dave), James Milliken’s youngest son, had married in 1939 and, the following year, taken over the Wingham Hotel in partnership with Thel’s younger sister, Jennie. We lived as a family in a sprawling flat upstairs, and while Thel, Dave and Jennie were running the business downstairs Sue and I were endlessly fascinated by the colourful cast of characters — staff, patrons, diners, drinkers, travelling salesmen and visitors of all kinds — who thronged the hotel’s kitchen, dining room, bars and lounges.

In some ways, it was like living in a frontier town of the kind depicted in the Westerns that featured in Wingham’s two cinemas (then known as picture theatres) in the 1940s and 50s. One artist’s depiction of the approach to Wingham — looking across the Cedar Party Creek bridge and up the rise of Wynter Street to the Wingham Hotel — evokes the town entrance of my childhood, unchanged as it must have been for decades. I imagine coaches bringing people along the dirt road and bullock trains taking freshly sawn native cedar and eucalyptus logs from forests in the hills around Wingham, down Isabella Street to the wharf, where they were shipped to Sydney and the wider world.

Wingham’s own world was a self-sufficient one. There were no supermarkets, no clothing or hardware chain stores owned by distant conglomerates. Local families — the Moxeys, the Gleesons, the Maitlands, the Mellicks and others — owned and ran the local businesses that provided food, groceries, clothes, farm equipment and almost every provision townsfolk needed.

This self-sufficiency helped to give Wingham and its district’s tight-knit population a strong sense of identity. So did the local economy, which revolved around dairy and beef farming and timber. It belonged to a world in which most of Australia’s exports came from the bush. That, too, was about to change, as hardships from the past faded away and the new golden age, born with the baby boomers, began.

Thel, Dave, Jennie and their generation had lived through two of the worst events of the twentieth century: the Depression of the 1930s and the second world war. The war had come to the Wingham Hotel in various ways. Family friends went, or were sent, to live there, seeking sanctuary from isolation and attack. And Dave fought battles of a different sort with government authorities over the rationing of beer.

Although the war had ended just a year before I was born, through my childhood eyes it was as if it had never happened. A new world of abundance and prosperity was unfolding.

A fortnight after I was born Ben Chifley won the 1946 election for the Labor Party, claiming Australia was “about to enter upon the greatest era in her history.” The start of the baby boom fuelled demand for housing and consumer goods, and a big rise in immigration helped to underpin postwar economic expansion. As the historian Stuart Macintyre observed, “The third quarter of the twentieth century was an era of growth unmatched since the second half of the nineteenth century.”

Along with growth and prosperity, three events in 1949, three years after I was born, roughly defined the world I was entering. Mao Zedong led the Chinese Communist Party to power, founding the People’s Republic of China. The Soviet Union successfully tested its first atomic weapon, ending America’s monopoly as a nuclear power. Those two events consolidated the cold war: a strategic rivalry between the West and the Soviet Union and its allies, including the fear of nuclear war, that was a fundamental feature of the 1950s.

The third significant event of 1949 that helped fix Australia’s political world happened closer to home. Bob Menzies, founder of the Liberal Party, won the 1949 federal election, and remained Australia’s prime minister for a record seventeen years. Menzies was a consummate politician for whom the economic boom at home and the cold war’s uncertainties abroad facilitated a hold on power. The government’s anti-communist rhetoric pervaded the 1950s, with Menzies warning of Australia falling victim to a “thrust by Communist China between the Indian and Pacific Oceans.”

There was little sense of a new form of postwar Australian nationalism emerging. Another twenty years had to pass for that to happen. Menzies, the ultimate Anglophile and monarchist, folded Australia’s identity into its British colonial heritage just as that world was growing rapidly out of date. In a speech to the US House of Representatives in 1950, he declared: “The world needs the United States of America. The world needs the British peoples of the world.” He made no mention of his own land as a separate sovereign entity.

As a child at Wingham public school, opposite our family’s hotel, I attended Empire Day, a curious annual celebration of the British Empire, with bonfires and fireworks, that ceased only in 1958. The Biripi Aboriginal community, who’d lived in the Manning Valley for tens of thousands of years before the Crosses, Millikens and other settlers arrived, were not included. The empire had robbed them of their lands and much of their cultural heritage. They were not seen, and nor did the school mention their names or story. As a child, I didn’t know they existed; to my knowledge, I never saw an Aboriginal person in Wingham.

In the first years of the baby boomers, Aboriginal Australians were kept in their colonial-era places, the missions and settlements, usually in squalor. Purfleet, near the Manning town of Taree, and a settlement in Forster, at the mouth of the Wallamba River, offered my first childhood glimpses of Aboriginal people, but only as we drove past, and with no discussion of who they were or how they got there. Righting injustices was not part of Australia’s immediate postwar agenda.

Too much else was happening to redefine postwar Australia as a land of wealth, confidence and leisure. The first Sydney–Hobart yacht race was held in 1945. Australia started making cars in 1948. Construction of the most ambitious public enterprise — the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme — started in 1949. Many of the workers who built that project, who comprised the first wave of immigrants drawn from European countries other than Britain, were trailblazers of the multicultural profile that eventually changed the country’s human face.

The changes didn’t stop at home. Overseas, Australia was joining the American Century. To replace our old dependence on Britain, we looked across the Pacific to form security alliances with our new “great and powerful friend,” as Menzies called the United States, which had led us to victory in the Pacific war. America’s cultural influence reached a zenith during the 1950s, when the first wave of baby boomers came into childhood. The surge of popular culture from America included the birth of rock-and-roll, resonating among a new generation in an Australia that had given barely any encouragement to local voices in film, drama or music.

All this gave a young baby boomer the sense of an exciting and prosperous, yet secure world. Menzies’s reassuring tones on the radio and in newsreels (television didn’t come to Australia until 1956) helped see to that. The rhythm of life in the sheltered worlds of the Wingham Hotel and the Magheramorne farm, and elsewhere, hardly varied from one year to the next.

And yet it was about to change. In the mid 1950s, Thel and Dave sold the Wingham Hotel, bringing to an end a family ownership of three generations. We moved to Glory Vale, a beautiful farm near Gloucester, also on the Manning River. I rode a horse every day to a one-room bush school. In this unlikely place, we had a brush with Hollywood glamour when the star Anne Baxter settled incongruously for a time further along the Manning. A way of life for rural Australians would soon pass forever. •

The post Boomer time appeared first on Inside Story.

Perhaps the sheer number of Žižek’s books — averaging about two each year since the early 2000s — makes it hard to find a definitive entry-point. Perhaps it is his free-flowing style, alternating between anecdotes and esoteric, jargon-laden philosophical argumentation. Or perhaps it’s a well-deserved dose of his own medicine: he confesses to not having seen half of the movies he criticises, with the latest offence being committed against Matrix Resurrections in 2022.

For some, his wide-ranging commentaries and humorous style signify a public intellectual par excellence; for others, they reveal a clownish charlatan. A podcast dedicated to discussing his ideas is called Žižek and So On, capturing his most famous signature phrase (“pure ideology” comes a close second). His personal idiosyncrasies include incessant nose-rubbing and sniffling and a studied refusal to wear a button-up shirt in public appearances.

Two YouTube videos, in juxtaposition, testify to Žižek’s internet-era pop-star status. The first is a nine-hour collage of a lecture series he delivered on Friedrich Hegel; the other, a seven-second clip, shows the philosopher obliviously enjoying hotdogs on the street, probably in his hometown of Ljubljana, Slovenia, where he still resides. Both have attracted hundreds of thousands of views and many adoring comments.

Although Žižek made his name interpreting Marx, Hegel and Jacques Lacan — and interpreting the world through them — he seems to have consciously renounced the position of authoritative intellectual. His eccentricities are the performative embodiment of this stance — as the philosopher himself insists, the truth of one’s belief is in one’s actions, not some elusive, self-deceiving inner life. Perhaps his nervous tics are a physiological manifestation of the imposter syndrome which he fully embraces.

Bar-El’s new book, How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual, likewise embodies some of the qualities it ascribes to Žižek. As his title suggests, Bar-El is not concerned primarily with Žižek’s theories or politics, but the sociological and historical process by which he became a global phenomenon. The substance is in the form.

Zižek’s emergence from the political and intellectual crossroads that was Slovenia, where he was born in 1949, had a certain inevitability. As the west-most component of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, Slovenia enjoyed a connection with the “free world” unmatched by other socialist states thanks to the relatively liberal rule of Josip Tito and his successors. A vibrant intellectual scene was facilitated by its soft border with Italy and thus the rest of Western Europe.

In the absence of a unified and rigid official Marxist doctrine, Yugoslavia’s door was open to various theoretical formations. The Frankfurt School, Existentialism and Structuralism all found audiences and interlocutors there. Žižek was reading “Marx at age fifteen, Heidegger at twenty, Derrida at twenty-five, and Lacan and Hegel at thirty,” writes Bar-El, and embarked on his second PhD in Paris in 1979, having worked briefly in the communist bureaucracy.

Žižek and his theoretical fellow-travellers formed the Ljubljana School in the early 1980s. Rather than submitting to Eastern Marxism or Western Structuralism, they appropriated the core insights of Hegelian dialectics and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and also drew on a mix of other traditions. It was an early example of Žižek’s “superpositioning,” a term from quantum mechanics that Bar-El uses to describe the creation of a third position from an existing opposition as a way of breaking out of theoretical and political deadlocks.

Žižek’s move to France had a crude materialist rationale too: he wanted to escape his uncertain prospects in an institution in which the Yugoslav party-state pickled its dissident intellectuals. Unemployed on returning from France, Žižek is no stranger to marginalisation.

Dissidents enjoyed much greater freedom in Yugoslavia than in any other self-proclaimed socialist countries. In fact, not only did the authorities tolerate cynicism about the country’s doctrine of “self-managed socialism” but also they regarded such cynicism as a prerequisite for continued compliance to the system. One of Žižek’s favourite anecdotes was how, in the mid 1970s, two of his acquaintances lost their party jobs for being true believers of official ideology.

The best way to challenge a purportedly tolerant, self-critical regime was therefore through self-conscious “overidentification,” which dissident art collectives, especially the punk movement, increasingly did in their public performances throughout the 1980s. While attacking an ideological edifice from without could unwittingly reproduce shared presuppositions, overidentification threatened to lay bare their hidden reversal in the regime’s operation.

Like Žižek’s other lessons from “real socialism,” this insight would be applied to his intellectual intervention in the liberal-democratic West. The torture carried out in Abu Ghraib prison, for instance, was not scandalous because it deviated from “American values” but because it was the “obscene supplement… the barbarism that sustains our civilisation” in the middle of a “pre-emptive war” that sacrificed the lives and livelihoods of Iraqis for the perceived security of America and its allies.

Žižek’s theories are always immanently political while seemingly easily discoverable in popular culture. Having himself undergone military service, he finds overidentification in Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, in which the protagonist remains a proficient soldier because of his cynical distance, while “Private Pyle” is subsumed by the “voice of the superego [of military discipline]” and becomes (self-)destructive. Bar-El doesn’t include this example, but he does identify superpositioning between fact and fiction as another characteristic Žižekian move.

As “actually existing socialism” crumbled and the future of Slovenia became uncertain, pluralist left-wing movements vied for influence against neoliberal nationalists. The vision of a capitalist regime contained in an organic national community was the antithesis of the Ljubljana School’s theoretical lynchpin of the “split subject”: the inherently contradictory individual subjectivity within any politico-ideological system, which are themselves contradictory too.

Žižek narrowly lost the race to be one of four presidents of Slovenia in 1990, running as a candidate of the Liberal Democratic Party — a move intended, he explained, to claim the popular banner of liberalism before free-market proponents could. He seems to enjoy performing such politically charged linguistic manoeuvres. During the 2020 US election campaign he advised progressives to embrace the label “moral majority” on the basis of their commitment to equality and meeting human needs, in contrast to a political right that was increasingly resorting to “alternative facts,” brutality, and obscenity. It was the same reason he gave for his tame presentation — for some, frustratingly tame — in his famous 2019 debate with Jordan Peterson.

Bar-El details the contrast between Žižek’s lacklustre reception in France in the late 1980s and his subsequent phenomenal success in the Anglophone world. The making of a public intellectual is inexorably social. The French scene, with long-established and heavily fortified intellectual communities, left little room for a new entrant distinguished by his superpositioning between disciplines, between academic and politically engaged writing styles, and between French theories and German Idealism. Nor was Žižek helped by the controversial status of his PhD supervisor, Jacques-Alain Miller, or his own insistence on taking Lacanian psychoanalysis out of clinics and into the realm of philosophy (to the disapproval of Miller himself).

Helped by the “post-Marxist” political philosopher Ernesto Laclau, who also provided a preface, Žižek published his first English-language book, the theory-dense The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989). As Laclau articulated it, Zizek was positioned — by himself and others — “to address the problems of constructing a democratic socialist political project in a post-Marxist age.” Thus began his long association with the leftist non-academic publisher Verso, which would open up an international readership for others in the Ljubljana School.

Professional and personal networks brought Žižek and his theories into dialogue with Judith Butler, Terry Eagleton, Fredric Jameson and other prominent intellectuals. The fall of communism in Europe also created a space for him to, as Bar-El succinctly puts it, “explain the East to the West, in Western theoretical terms and channels.” An early example, not mentioned in the book, was a 1996 documentary that opens with Žižek standing on a bridge in Ljubljana and informing his audience that the river beneath him is the geographical boundary between Mitteleuropa (Central Europe) and the Balkans. On one side is “horror, oriental despotism,” where women are subject to horrendous violence and “like it”; on the other is “Europe, civilisation,” where women suffer likewise “but don’t like it.” The obvious materialist point aside, this was the quintessential Žižek: forsaking scholarly respectability for black humour; delving into “low culture” to reveal inherent, deep contradictions; questioning seemingly natural oppositions to gesture at what he sees as a true alternative.

Žižek’s rise in the global scene coincided with the onset of the digital revolution during the 1990s, a decade in which his unparalleled output and “copy-and-paste” quality (“self-plagiarism” for his critics) fitted perfectly. His “Hegelacanese” — as Bar-El calls his synthesis of Hegel and Lacan — proved remarkably apt at encoding key ideas in easily transmittable packages, regardless of whether the consumer has the wherewithal to decode them properly. If anyone was producing memes it was Žižek.

After the 9/11 attacks and during the war on terror his prolific and timely commentary propelled him into prominence, and here Bar-El provides an excellent summary of his counterintuitive arguments and their reception. From then on, Žižek would not let an international cataclysm go untheorised — the global financial crisis, the Arab Spring, the ongoing ecological crisis and (presumably too late to be included by Bar-El) the Covid-19 pandemic, publishing a book on the latter as early as March 2020. His growing intellectual and cultural impact is attested to by his growing associations, including with Julian Assange, Yanis Varoufakis and Sophie Fiennes, who directed two documentary films that brought Žižek and psychoanalysis into the cinema.

The public interventions came at the expense of Žižek’s scholarly credibility, with academics increasingly viewing his (often suspiciously) swift public interventions as regurgitative and crowd-pleasing. Some, such as the political philosopher John Gray, fault Žižek for “reproduc[ing] the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism” and thus achieving a “deceptive substance.” His Hegelacanese has attracted controversy, and his ever-expanding interdisciplinary forays also led to further questions of his status as a philosopher. Indeed, Žižek positions himself as a member of the public that he addresses, with his subjective doubt resonating with that of his audience.

Bar-El is very precise here: “Žižek both assumes and rejects the position of an authoritative intellectual, enjoying its universal and general status while denying its elitism and exclusivity.” In this he follows Lacan in arguing that the “subject-supposed-to-know” — the benevolent, internally consistent authority, fully identified with the role conferred by the social order — does not exist. As Lacan famously put it, “The madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king, but also a king who thinks he is a king.”

Like the French, the Anglophone world has trouble determining what Žižek’s role really is. His work is often introduced in the context of literature studies rather than philosophy, and most of his followers discovered him outside the universities. And yet, as evidenced by the commercial success of his thousand-page doorstopper, Less Than Nothing (2012), there is a hunger in the reading public for a philosopher who brings the intellectual ivory tower and the masses to each other’s level, seemingly without compromising either philosophical niceties or socio-political relevance.

Žižek’s insistence on demonstrating philosophical ideas through examples, even mundane or vulgar ones, is not merely a pragmatic choice. He treats pop-culture artifacts as a window into the ideological unconscious that operates beneath visible social phenomena. In accordance with his reading of Hegel, he doesn’t regard theory as existing separately from its concrete manifestations. Indeed, examples can subvert the ideas they are supposed to reflect.

He thus rejects a common leftist refrain that Marxism was never truly practised in the communist countries, as if there was some “pure” spirit of Marxism on an astral plane invariably perverted by historical contingences. The failure of “actually existing socialism” must instead be traced to the blueprints and their authors — though without negating the necessity to continue to “fail better,” as Žižek’s favourite Samuel Beckett refrain goes.

This is one of most important keys to understanding Žižek. It isn’t mentioned by Bar-El, whose focus on the process and phenomenon of Žižek’s rise and fall within the confines of 189 pages inevitably requires trade-offs. Certain historical details, especially pertaining to the Slovenian scene of the 1980s, could also have clarified Žižek’s positions and performances. Bar-El might well have looked with understandable envy at Žižek’s freedom from constraints of contemporary academic publishing.

By the late 2010s, with his habitual “superpositioning” earning him increasing ire in progressive and leftist circles, Žižek had essentially vanished from publications like the Guardian and the London Review of Books. One controversy Bar-El briefly mentions is Žižek response to the refugee crisis, though his views on the 2016 US presidential election and transgenderism also rankled (and the latter continue to do so), and some further details here might be illustrative. Rejecting the mainstream humanitarian framing of the issue, Žižek argued that Europe has an obligation to resettle many more asylum-seekers because it was culpable in the destruction that generates mass dislocation. Resettlement must be conducted in a highly organised and coordinated way, he opined, rejecting the “open border” stance of many on the left. And the visible suffering of the drowning migrants shouldn’t obscure the plight of those who don’t even have the means to escape.

More controversial is Žižek’s critique of multiculturalism. He insists that irreducible differences exist between communities’ “ways of life,” the shared ethical frameworks and customs that enable them to function. Any polity that hopes to accommodate immigrant populations successfully must therefore openly renegotiate some of the basics so that discontent isn’t repressed and harnessed by xenophobic reactionaries.

True to his Hegelian bent, though, Žižek also contends that some struggles “cut across civilisations” to form the basis of universal solidarity — and who could deny that Europe and America are not themselves grappling with fundamentalism, of the Christian variety, and anti-feminist backlash? I leave it to the reader to judge for themselves whether Žižek’s suggested renegotiation is more practical than calls for “open borders.”

While Bar-El’s purpose largely precludes subjective judgements about Žižek, he doesn’t conceal his sympathy. And given his often-brief treatment of the content of Žižek’s various interventions, a reader needs to be somewhat familiar with the Žižek cannon and style in order to follow the narrative with ease. Fortunately, aside from Žižek’s voluminous writings and innumerable public appearances available online, there is also The Žižek Dictionary, published in 2017. (For his critics, its existence — and that of the International Journal of Žižek Studies, is further evidence of the self-indulgent posturing of the man and his disciples.)

Bar-El’s repeated invocation of terms like superpositioning can, at times, make his text feel mechanistic, although it does double as a tribute to Zizek’s own highly reiterative style. His sympathy extends to somewhat uncritically using the term “cancel culture” to describe Žižek’s intellectual marginalisation, a move that uncannily mirrors his subject’s insistence upon terms like “gender-identity ideology,” which risks lending credence to conservative rhetoric. As Bar-El points out, however, the function of Žižek’s transgressions has been to reveal the “normative social field” — the unquestioned presuppositions that have led to the ideological deadlocks in which the left too often finds itself.

Ultimately, Eliran Bar-El offers a useful framework with which to examine Žižek’s work in the past and present: as an intellectual who defies easy categorisation, as a one-man phenomenon made in a network of influences and for a digital age, and as a figure whose performances are inseparable from his philosophical insights.

His latest act of superpositioning, responding to Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Žižek rang the alarm on Putin’s expansionist intent and called for a “stronger NATO — but not as a prolongation of US politics,” making him even more suspect among some leftists as well as alienating him from Moscow-controlled Russia Today, one of the few remaining outlets that still regularly published him and with a wide reach. On the other hand, his warning of Ukraine’s other “colonisation” by Western neoliberalism has not endeared him to the liberal or conservative mainstream either.

It is perhaps appropriate to consider how the term “superpositioning” serves as a signpost to a relatively recent iteration of Žižek’s philosophy. Explicitly borrowing from the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics, Žižek posits “ontological incompleteness” — that our reality itself has an inherent incompleteness at its most fundamental level. This is Žižek at his purest, as Bar-El accurately describes: superpositioning himself as an (anti-)philosopher attempting to grapple with the horizon of understanding imposed by language. The Lacanian “lack” at the heart of the human subject and the “big Other” — the virtual symbolic order that guarantees meaning — is thus inscribed into existence itself, as if the universe rejects its own authority.

This incompleteness has a temporal dimension as well, in that the meaning of the past is determined by what transpires in the future. For Žižek, catastrophes like the failed communist experiment cannot be redeemed. But whether they remain meaningless deviations from progress or a manifestation of historical cycles, or whether they can be re-rendered into the first iterations of an emancipated world we can’t hope to foresee, is the stake of the universalist struggles being waged today. •

How Slavoj Became Žižek: The Digital Making of a Public Intellectual
By Eliran Bar-El | University of Chicago Press | $49.95 | 256 pages

The post And so on appeared first on Inside Story.

Freud’s interpretation hinged on the mythology of vultures — including the ancient belief that they were exclusively female and impregnated by the wind — and the frequent depiction of the Egyptian goddess Mut with a vulture’s head and an androgynous body. He argued that Leonardo was preoccupied with vultures and had concealed one in the blue drapery of The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne, which hangs in the Louvre.

There was one small problem. The bird Leonardo recalled was not a vulture but a kite, a creature with no special mythic significance or any hint of sexual ambiguity. The error, made by a German translator of Leonardo’s writings, undermined Freud’s thesis and demonstrated the challenges of doing psychoanalytic interpretation at a distance. When the subject cannot be put on the couch, the already dangerous work of psychic excavation becomes even more hazardous.

This embarrassment might have led Freud to abandon psychobiography altogether, and indeed the general view has been that he did. In the monumental, twenty-four-volume Standard Edition of his work, his English editor and translator James Strachey wrote that “this monograph on Leonardo was not only the first but the last of Freud’s large-scale excursions into the field of biography.”

But that claim only stands if a notorious study of US president Woodrow Wilson written by Freud with American diplomat William Bullitt is brushed aside. This act of repression has been sustained for more than half a century by charges that Bullitt was a reductive amateur who was driven by personal animus towards Wilson and exaggerated Freud’s involvement.

Patrick Weil’s new book, The Madman in the White House, overturns this received view. Weil, a distinguished French political scientist, has written a captivating analysis of the history of the Wilson psychobiography that doubles as a biography of Bullitt. Along the way it vividly documents the shifts in American engagement with Europe from the first world war through the cold war from the standpoint of high-level diplomacy.

The book combines a masterful grasp of political history with original archival research and a humanising appreciation of the quirks and foibles of the dramatis personae. It does much more than resolve the status of a largely forgotten book about Wilson, also making a case that prevailing beliefs about responsibility for the failure of the post–first world war peace are mistaken. More broadly, Weil demonstrates how much personality matters in politics. “Democratic leaders,” he writes, “can be just as unbalanced as dictators and can play a truly destructive role in our history.”

William Bullitt emerges as a kaleidoscopically colourful and complex personality who witnessed the defining events of the first half of the twentieth century up close. After a brief period as a journalist, he was recruited in his twenties to work under Wilson during the negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles. He served as the first American ambassador to Moscow and as ambassador to Paris, helped to negotiate the Korean armistice and advised Chiang Kai-shek in Taiwan. He played major diplomatic and policy roles in both world wars and mingled with the political and cultural A-list: Wilson, Roosevelt and Nixon; Churchill and Lloyd George; Clemenceau and de Gaulle; Hemingway and Picasso; Lenin and Stalin (or “Stalin-Khan,” as he referred to him).

Bullitt’s life wasn’t all memos, starched collars and negotiation tables, and it had many Gatsbyesque elements: tumultuous marriages, hosting a Moscow soirée with performing seals and a champagne-drinking bear, enlisting in his fifties in the French army, landing upside down in a plane in a Leningrad swamp, and being shipped home to the United States from Taiwan in a coffin following a spinal injury.

Woodrow Wilson (standing) in New York after returning from the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. Historica Graphica Collection/Heritage Images/Alamy

There was also a dark side, with depressions, impulsive actions and a tendency to self-destruction, including a fall from a horse that he attributed to an unconscious wish. These symptoms led him to meet with Freud in Vienna for personal psychoanalysis in 1926, beginning a long association that saw the two become unusually close and Bullitt playing a role in helping Freud escape the Nazis via the Orient Express.

Their book project grew out of Bullitt’s plan to write a study on diplomacy that would include psychological analyses of world leaders, with Woodrow Wilson as one case. Bullitt had fallen out with Wilson over his failure to have the Treaty of Versailles ratified by the US Senate in 1919, despite Wilson having been a visionary architect of the treaty and its proposal of a League of Nations to secure global peace. He saw Wilson’s apparent inability to make concessions with Republican senators at critical moments as a colossal sabotage of what Wilson himself had created, an exercise in “strangling his own child,” and he ascribed it to Wilson’s character flaws.

This was a widespread view at the time: Keynes described Wilson as a “blind and deaf Don Quixote.” Freud agreed with his general assessment, once describing Wilson as “the silliest fool of the century if not all centuries” and Bullitt as “the only American who understands Europe.” The two men hatched a plan to collaborate on a study that would focus on Wilson alone.

Psychobiography is often viewed — and sometimes practised — as an exercise in armchair speculation and hatchet work unencumbered by evidence, but the dissection of Wilson’s character was anything but. Freud, perhaps stung by the Leonardo fiasco, insisted on collecting and analysing a substantial body of information on Wilson; Bullitt obliged with not only his extensive first-hand working experience but also interviews with several of Wilson’s high-ranking colleagues, hundreds of pages of notes, and countless diary entries from Wilson’s personal secretary. Then, at least on Bullitt’s telling, he and Freud met and communicated frequently over a period of years to formulate a shared understanding of Wilson’s psychodynamics and edit drafts of one another’s chapters.

The essence of their formulation was that Wilson lived in the shadow of his idealised father, a Christian minister, whom he believed he could never satisfy or equal. This father complex was shown in his driven approach to work, his tendency to present a Christ-like persona when defending his views, his moralising streak, his unwillingness to brook criticism or compromise when he took principled stands on issues, and his passivity towards paternal figures — a stance that led to bitter fallings-out with erstwhile good friends that haunted him for decades.

Bullitt and Freud attributed Wilson’s failures in delivering on Versailles and the League of Nations to this incapacity to make necessary accommodations at the last hurdle. They also drew attention to his tendency to defer to some national leaders during the earlier negotiations to the detriment of the treaty, including allowing Britain to make the excessive demands for postwar reparations that contributed to German resentment.

After extensive reworking over a period of years, the Wilson manuscript was completed in 1932, each chapter signed off by both authors. And yet it was not to be published until 1967. The reasons for the delay initially included Bullitt’s desire not to endanger his employment prospects in future Democratic administrations, a wish not to hurt Wilson’s widow, and an awareness that Wilson’s once tarnished reputation had been restored by mid-century, making a critical study unwelcome. Later, in the 1960s, Bullitt found it difficult to find a publisher and to obtain permission to publish from Freud’s estate. Freud’s daughter Anna, whom Bullitt had helped to rescue from Vienna in 1939, was deeply concerned to protect her father’s legacy and sceptical of Freud’s involvement in the book; she insisted on making numerous revisions, which Bullitt refused.

In the end, the book appeared to a chorus of critical reviews. Erik Erikson, the leading light of psychobiography at the time, attempted to block publication on receiving an advance copy. The book was criticised for being spiteful towards Wilson, repetitive, and clumsy in its psychoanalytic formulations and therefore unlikely to have been genuinely authored by Freud. Bullitt, who died only six weeks after publication day, must have felt crushed.

With the reputation of Thomas Woodrow Wilson: A Psychological Study going down in flames, the question of Freud’s co-authorship might have gradually lost what little intellectual interest it still held, especially as the published manuscript appeared lost or destroyed. Enter Weil, who rediscovered it in the archives at Yale University in 2014.

The Madman in the White House reports two significant findings. First, Freud’s heavy involvement in writing the book is now undeniable, established by his signature on all chapters and evidence of extensive revisions and annotations. Weil backs up this textual evidence with other quotes from Freud that express an unambiguous sense of personal ownership of “our book.” Critics who charged that Bullitt had deceptively Freud-washed his own work are mistaken.

Second, and perhaps just as importantly, Weil shows that Bullitt made several hundred revisions to the “final” manuscript prior to publication. Some of these edits are largely cosmetic: omitting one section on a political conflict that no longer seemed topical, updating some psychoanalytic terminology, and removing some very dated ideas about masturbation and castration anxiety. But many edits were substantive, involving removal of references to Wilson’s supposedly homosexual orientation. This inference didn’t imply conscious awareness or overt behaviour on Wilson’s part, and Freud believed everyone was to some degree bisexual, but Bullitt must have judged the claim too contentious to put in print.

Weil presents these discoveries with scholarly thoroughness but also with a light touch that makes the book a delight to read. Despite his implied criticism of the psychoanalytic establishment’s reception of the Wilson psychobiography, he defends the relevance of psychological insight to the understanding of political leadership. He accepts some of the contours of Bullitt and Freud’s analysis but disagrees about the nature of Wilson’s father dynamic. Joseph Wilson was a less perfect father than his son imagined and had a cruel tendency to humiliate him, Weil suggests. In his view, Woodrow’s political and interpersonal conflicts stemmed from his sensitivity to public humiliation more than anything else. Such an interpretation, invoking wounded narcissism and pathological autonomy rather than father or Christ complexes and latent homosexuality, certainly has a more twenty-first-century feel to it.

Whether or not readers are open to this kind of analysis, Weil makes a powerful case for the role of personality in politics. He closes with a counterfactual history of a Europe in which Wilson had not failed to deliver on his idealistic vision. British and French financial and territorial demands on the Germans following the first world war would have been moderated and less punitive, diminishing German bitterness. Squabbling nations would have been dissuaded from armed conflict. American intervention in the second world war would have been triggered earlier by security guarantees to France. So much carnage might have been averted had the men in charge been less damaged and better able to understand and regulate themselves at critical times.

Woodrow Wilson was in no real sense a “madman” and Bullitt and Freud were hardly unbiased observers. Even so, their book was a significant historical attempt to demonstrate how the psychology of individual leaders can have collective reverberations. With some caveats, Weil would probably agree with the basic sentiment he attributes to Bullitt, that “the fate of mankind was determined over millions of years by geography, over hundreds of years by demography, over tens of years by economics, and year over year by psychology.” His book is a brilliant historical investigation of an early attempt to reckon with those year-by-year influences. Both as a work of scholarship and as a sweeping, almost novelistic tour of twentieth-century political affairs, it deserves a wide readership. •

The Madman in the White House: Sigmund Freud, Ambassador Bullitt, and the Lost Psychobiography of Woodrow Wilson
By Patrick Weil | Harvard University Press | US$35 | 400 pages

The post President Wilson on the couch appeared first on Inside Story.

The link: over a period exceeding fifty years the two have collaborated on five volumes of biography, four of them dealing with the same man. One a decade. Big, fat books, each a thousand pages or more in length. Doorstoppers.

Outside work, they have little contact. They aren’t particularly close. Each lives a quiet life, working, sleeping, seeing his family.

That’s it. That’s the story. That’s the movie.

And yet from these unlikely materials, Lizzie Gottlieb has made a wonderful film, Turn Every Page: a witty, loving portrait of two lions in winter, one of whom — Gottlieb — is her father.

In some ways the two men are quite similar. Urbane New Yorkers, each with his memories of reading books as a child in Central Park. And yet they are very different men — Gottlieb is opinionated and dripping with self-regard; Caro is quiet, thoughtful and modest.

Gottlieb is the former editor-in-chief of Simon & Schuster, Alfred A. Knopf and the New Yorker. He’s been responsible for hundreds of books and a stable of authors that has included Doris Lessing, Salman Rushdie, John le Carré, Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller and Bob Dylan. He’s fun, charming.

Caro is the winner of multiple Pulitzers and National Book Awards. He has written just five big books (along with a slim memoir); each of his bigger works is incredibly detailed, immersing its reader in particularities of times and places, and describes in great detail the ways in which talented, driven individuals — US president Lyndon Johnson and New York planner Robert Moses — made things happen that would not otherwise have happened (or that would perhaps have happened more slowly, and slightly differently).

This ability — of making things happen — Caro calls “power.” It is for his deeply informed and sensitive analyses of the particularities of power — intoxicating, deeply evidenced, personality-driven — that Caro is famous.

The title of the film nods to the lengths Caro goes to in researching his books. “Turn every page,” his first editor told him; certainly, that is the advice he has followed.

The accusation can be made — reasonably in my view — that Caro’s work sometimes verges on “great man” history, because it focuses so heavily on the acts of pivotal individuals, of men who sat at the heart of formal power structures, and pays too little attention to structural shifts and history-shapers that lie further out of the focus of state archives.

This criticism is not entirely fair; Caro’s greatest strengths lie in the deep effort that he puts into contextualising the lives of his subjects and explaining the cultural and political constraints — the power blocs, institutions and hidden barriers to change that locked in the status quo — within which these ingenious and creative people worked.

Caro is very popular; and the way he breathes life into these topics — which can seem so abstract — is the reason for that popularity.

Turn Every Page is at its best when it seeks to show how Caro went about adding this texture and depth to his research.

It describes, for instance, his decision to move from Manhattan to the Hill Country of Texas so as to better immerse himself in the world from which Lyndon Johnson came. It shows Caro and Ina, his wife and lifelong research partner, visiting the LBJ Memorial Library, home to forty-five million pages of documents. The two are filmed poring over document boxes as Caro talks of how happy he and Ina are working there, bathing themselves in presidential minutiae.

Interspliced through the whole is (wonderful) archival footage — snapshots of a past when these men were handsome, young and ambitious. When they were shapers of the future, rather than survivors from the past.

The film’s pathos lies in how it captures these elderly men continuing — fighting against the dying of the light — to live deeply analogue lives. One scene involves Caro and Gottlieb wandering around their publisher’s office looking (in vain) for a pencil. In others, we see Caro, dressed as always in a full suit and tie, sitting at his desk writing longhand drafts, before transcribing them, two-finger typing on an ancient typewriter.

We see him stuffing carbon copies into a cupboard for safe keeping.

Perhaps the best insights the film has to offer are at the level of craft. “He’s a word painter… he paints with words,” says Gottlieb of Caro. Gottlieb is certainly a man who knows a little about word artistry, and what he says is true.

Caro talks of finding writing hard, of how he struggles to get the details right. Of how important that struggle is. Non-fiction that lasts, he says, is non-fiction in which mood, setting and context are given as much attention as they are in the best novels.

Turn Every Page is a great little film. Nearly two hours long, it doesn’t outstay its welcome. I watched it on a train journey from London to Edinburgh, ears hidden under big noise-cancelling headphones, and I laughed the whole way through. •

Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb
Directed by Lizzy Gottlieb | Streaming on Amazon Prime and other services

The post Does anyone have a pencil? appeared first on Inside Story.

To research and write queer history before living memory — without oral testimony, that is — is to enter a much darker place. The last man to hang for sodomy in the British Empire was in Tasmania in 1867, and in 1997 Tasmania became the last Australian jurisdiction to decriminalise male homosexuality. Relationships and life choices that are criminalised, stigmatised and pathologised are unlikely to leave much of an imprint on the public record, and surviving historical evidence is often patchy, obscure and cloaked in euphemism.

In 1990 I wrote an honours thesis in the history department of the University of Tasmania on the Tasmanian writer Roy Bridges. It wasn’t a piece of literary criticism, for that would have been a short thesis indeed. Most of Bridges’s thirty-six novels were adventure stories for boys or middle-brow historical romances and melodramas dealing with the early days of Tasmania and Victoria. Frequently he was inspired by stories his mother, Laura Wood, told of her family history on their farm near Sorell, east of Hobart, going back to the earliest days of white settlement.

Bridges was Tasmania’s most prolific novelist, successful and admired in his time, but his reputation didn’t outlast his death in 1952. I wasn’t interested in the quality of his writing so much as his interpretation of Tasmanian colonial history, and how his own deep connection with the island was refracted through his works of fiction and memoir.

Born in Hobart in 1885, Bridges started publishing in 1909, and at first wrote prolifically for the gutsy little New South Wales Bookstall Company. Time and again he sold his copyright for fifty pounds per novel, whenever he was hard up (“which was often,” he once observed), grateful for the support the Bookstall gave to new Australian writers.

In his mature period his novels were published in London by Hutchinson or Hodder and Stoughton, but during and after the second world war his output declined. The gratifying success of That Yesterday Was Home (1948) eased his final years. Part history, part family history and part memoir, the book is a passionately expressed meditation on memory and connection with place. He died in 1952.

Roy Bridges in 1937. Inscription reads, “To my friends at Robertson & Mullins. Roy Bridges. 1937.” State Library of Victoria

By the time I started work on Bridges he was remembered mainly by enthusiasts interested in the literary culture of Tasmania. As a thesis project, though, he was perfect. No one else was claiming him, and significant collections of his papers were held in libraries in Hobart, Melbourne and Canberra. Methodologically I had Bridges’s memoir as a guide, which, unreliable as any memoir always is — and I knew this — was at least a place to begin.

I bought a 1:25,000 map of the Sorell district and pinned it to my wall in the history department. I drove out to meet Bridges’s nephew and his family, who were still working the property that Bridges had named “Woods” after his mother’s family.

The town of Sorell has always been a stopping point for travellers from Hobart heading either to the east coast or to the convict ruins at Port Arthur. To get there you must first drive across Frederick Henry Bay via the Sorell causeway at Pittwater. “All my life,” Bridges wrote in 1948, “Frederick Henry Bay has sounded through my mind and imagination. Like drums… or like cannonade in storm, or in the frozen stillness of winter’s nights.”

Every time I drive across the Sorell causeway I think of him, and did so again one brilliant day in February this year while heading up to Bicheno on holiday. With the sun sparkling off the bay I shouldn’t have been brooding on old stories, but suddenly I knew that the time was right to tackle again a biographical dilemma I had evaded, all those years ago.

The few others who have written about Bridges have struggled to understand the source of the loneliness and sorrow which, towards the end, amounted to torment. His journalist friend C.E. (Ted) Sayers first met Bridges in 1922 and remembered him as a haunted, “tense little man,” a chain smoker, embarrassed in the company of women, who had allowed a streak of morbidity and violence to enter his fiction. I developed my own suspicions about this haunting, and in my thesis in 1990 I speculated, briefly and carefully (because this was Tasmania), that Roy Bridges had been a closeted and deeply repressed gay man.

I wouldn’t have thought of this except for a conversation I had with the one friend of Bridges I could still find, a well-known local historian named Basil Rait. I visited the elderly Mr Rait in a tumbledown house in north Hobart somewhere near Trinity Church. Just as I was deciding that his recollections weren’t going to be particularly useful, he astounded me with the remark that one day, Roy Bridges had been seen emerging from the Imperial Hotel on Collins Street in central Hobart, and that the Imperial was a known place for homosexual men to congregate.

When did this occur? And did Rait see this himself? I was too amazed — and too timid, I think — to ask enough questions and, rookie historian that I was, I did not record the conversation. Why was Rait so frank, and what did he think I would do with his information? Perhaps I’d gained his trust because I had arrived without a tape recorder. I don’t know.

But I did consider his revelation very carefully. The once-elegant Imperial was rather seedy by then, which seemed to lend plausibility to what Rait had said. I had gay friends and I asked if anyone knew anything about the Imperial’s reputation. No one did.

Unable to verify Rait’s assertion, I turned to the textual sources. Although I was aware of the danger of reading too much into odd snippets of evidence that might have signified nothing, I was also unwilling to ignore what I had been told, which, if true, might explain everything. To speculate about Bridges’s sexuality in the thesis, or not: my thesis supervisor left it up to me. On an early draft I can see in his handwriting: “You decide.”

Royal Tasman (Roy) Bridges came from a family of prosperous wicker manufacturers and retailers. His father Samuel and uncle James ran Bridges Brothers, in Elizabeth Street, Hobart, which had been founded in 1857 by their father, Samuel senior. After graduating with an arts degree from the University of Tasmania, Bridges joined the Tasmanian News as a cadet in December 1904. Journalism was his career for most of the next twenty-five years. He accepted a job with the Hobart Mercury in 1907 but soon became disaffected by poorly paid sixteen-hour days on what his memoir described as a “rotten sweat-rag” and headed for Sydney.

He got a job immediately on the Australian Star under its editor, Ralph Asher. Sydney was a relief from Hobart’s “superficial puritanism, social restrictions and moral repressions of human nature,” but in 1909 the chance of a job on the Age lured him to Melbourne, where he settled in happily for a decade. Then, between 1919 and 1935, when he retired permanently to the farm near Sorell, he switched between freelance writing and journalism, mostly with the Age but also, briefly and unhappily, with the Melbourne Herald in 1927.

A shy man, Bridges did love the companionship of other journalists. Keith Murdoch, future father of Rupert, was one of his early friends on the Age, although they didn’t remain close. There was Neville Ussher, of the Argus and the Age, who died during the first world war and whose photograph Bridges kept close to him for the rest of his life. And then there was Phillip Schuler, son of Frederick Schuler, editor of the Age.

High-spirited, charming, handsome: Phillip Schuler’s nickname was “Peter” because of his Peter Pan personality. Friendship “blossomed” during a bushwalk on a “golden August Sunday at Oakleigh,” then only sparsely settled, and after that the two young men spent many weekends together. They read the same books, roistered in restaurants and theatres, and tried their own hands at writing plays.

On a walking holiday in Tasmania in 1911 the two men tramped from Kangaroo Point (Bellerive, on the eastern side of the Derwent) down to Droughty Point, “the way of many of my boyhood days.” They climbed Mount Wellington to the pinnacle and spent two nights at the Springs Hotel, part way up the mountain (sadly burned to the ground in the 1967 bushfires). From an upper window they watched the “glory of the sunrise,” looking across to Sorell and Frederick Henry Bay. In 1948 Bridges wrote:

The beauty and wonder of the island rolled on me, possessed me, and possesses me yet. We were talking and talking — life, Australia, journalism, literature; always we planned; always we hoped. We were worshipping life, the island, the sun.

If you are thinking what I think you are thinking, then no. Schuler returned Bridges’s friendship, but as his biographer has made clear, Schuler was thoroughly heterosexual and Bridges knew it. This could have been one of those passionate platonic friendships between men, but in 1990 I thought, and I still think, that Bridges was absolutely in love with Schuler.

After brilliant success as the Age’s correspondent during the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, Schuler enlisted for active service but was killed in northern France in June 1917. His last letter to Bridges ended: “Keep remembering.” Schuler’s photograph was another that Bridges cherished always, and indeed he had it reproduced in his 1948 memoir, but Bridges himself was no Peter Pan. He had to carry on facing the disappointments that life inevitably brings, and he was not stoic. In his fifties, living with his sister Hilda back at Woods, he felt the loneliness deeply and became a demanding, querulous, self-pitying man who drank too much.

He did still have many friends though, and in 1938 he began corresponding with Ted Turner, an amateur painter whom he met through their membership of a Melbourne literary society known as the Bread and Cheese Club. Bridges was only a distant member because he rarely left Tasmania by then, but he took a fancy to Turner and found great entertainment in the younger man’s letters, which reminded him of his own Bohemian days in Melbourne. Bridges heaped affection and confidences on Turner, requested a photograph and was delighted with it. He was cross if Turner delayed writing and begged him to visit Tasmania (“Ted old son… I wish I had your friendship — near me!”), but Turner never did.

The two men met only once, in April 1940 when Bridges made the trip to Melbourne, but Bridges went home hungover and with a bout of influenza. He admitted to Turner that the trip had been “a series of indiscretions.” What exactly that meant I couldn’t tell, and their correspondence declined later that year.

Did I indulge in absurd speculation in my thesis about domineering mothers and emasculated fathers? No, but it was impossible to ignore the breakdown of the marriage of Samuel and Laura Bridges, Roy’s parents, in 1907 when Roy was twenty-two. Samuel was pleasure-loving and extravagant, and eventually the house in north Hobart where Roy and his sisters were brought up had to be sold. Of Laura, Samuel apparently said that she “may as well” live with Roy because “it’s plain she’ll never be happy without him.”

Laura managed the household while Hilda became her brother’s amanuensis, writing or typing all his novels from his rapidly scrawled sheets. Roy supported them all financially, although Hilda earned an income as a musician and fiction writer. Only now does it occur to me that there might have been an understanding among the three of them, tacit one would think, that Roy would never marry. Before Laura died in 1925 she begged Hilda, “Whatever happens, look after Roy,” which Hilda did. She never married.

Hilda Bridges, probably in the 1910s. State Library of Victoria

Did I mine Bridges’s writings for autobiographical clues to his sexuality? Yes, for no one warned me against mistaking writers for their characters, and anyway there was so much material to work with. Convicts, bushrangers, and the endeavours of the early colonists to establish a free and democratic society on Van Diemen’s Land: Bridges wrote obsessively on these themes for years.

Novel after novel, especially in his mature period, features a misaligned relationship between a beautiful, passionate woman and an unsuitable man. A son of the relationship will turn up as a convict in Tasmania, and the plot revolves around whether the mother’s folly can be forgiven and her son redeemed by love. Bridges despised hypocrisy and religious intolerance, and his clergyman characters are tormented by unsuitable desires and undone by having to preach Christianity to convicts who are not inherently evil but victims of an unjust society.

Symbolic of society’s condemnation of a convict were the physical scars left by flogging, for which Bridges seemed to have a horrified fascination. In his final novel, The League of the Lord (1950), the Reverend Howard France sits in his study in Sorell picturing an illicit meeting between a beautiful young local girl and her convict lover, which he knew was occurring at that moment. France is jealous of them both. “[Joan’s] eyes are deep blue… her mouth is red, her hands long and white… exquisite…” Further down the page France imagines the couple being caught, which would mean the triangles for young Martin: the “hiss and crack of the lash across strong young shoulders… red weals… red flesh… red running… red.”

Martin is deeply ashamed of being a convict and struggles to accept the love offered by his (free) family in Tasmania. He recalls his journey there on a transport ship, hoarded below decks with hundreds of other convicts:

The faces, the eyes, the voices, the hands; the loathsome, pawing, feeling, gliding, gripping hands… the squeaking laughter in the obscene dark… the foul perverted horde that [had] been men and boys… the brooding, breeding evil, the bestiality, lifelong contamination, incurable, malignant, cancerous.

I underlined this passage in my copy of The League of the Lord but didn’t know how to use it. Now I see it two ways. It could simply be an evocation of Marcus Clarke–inspired Tasmanian gothic. Or it could be evidence that Bridges’s many convict characters are studies of profound shame, self-hatred and alienation. In this reading, those convict characters were versions of himself, their alienation his own, and homosexuality his source of shame. Either interpretation is possible.

Roy and Hilda Bridges’s return to Woods in 1935 fulfilled a promise Bridges had made to their uncle, Valentine Wood, who’d died in 1930, to take on the old place. He knew that Woods meant more to him than Melbourne: “that I was of this land; that it was stronger than I, and that when it willed it would call me back.” Still, brother and sister missed Melbourne terribly, even though overstrain and a nervous dread of noisy neighbours had driven Roy to the brink of a breakdown.

It might have been in these years that the Imperial Hotel incident occurred. Did it? Bridges disliked Hobart, but if it was casual sex he needed, where else could he go? And yet, if the Imperial was a known place for gay men to meet, the police would surely have been there too. Put that way, the incident seems unlikely.

Bridges’s heart condition worsened in the late 1940s and he had a chronic smoker’s cough. He refused to go to Hobart for tests and hated doctors visiting from Sorell. One doctor threatened to have him certified to get him to hospital. “He implied my not liking women about me in such treatment was an abnormality,” Bridges grumbled to a friend. The burden of his care fell as usual on Hilda. Eventually he had to be rushed to hospital in Hobart anyway, and he died there in March 1952 aged sixty-six. Hilda stayed on at Woods for many years until she moved to a Hobart nursing home, where she died in 1971.

I never spoke with Bridges’s family about his possible homosexuality because I was relying on them for recollections and photographs. I drove out to Woods for a final polite visit to give them a copy of the thesis, and after that, unsurprisingly, I never heard from them again.

My research had not included any reading on the ethics of biography so instead I learned it the hard way. I’d gained the trust of my subject’s family only to betray that trust in the end. However, this time — for this essay — I contacted a relative a generation younger and did have an open conversation. There is nothing new to say except that Bridges left a complex personal legacy that is still being felt.

Some people blame homosexuality among male convicts for the long shadow of repression and homophobia in Tasmania that delayed gay law reform until 1997. Perhaps. Such a thing would be hard to prove, and in any case, what is “proof”? What constitutes “evidence” of a queer life? When found, how do we assess its significance? The thing is to not shrink from the task, because with patience and honesty we might still open up some of these painful histories to the light. •

The post Lifting the shadow appeared first on Inside Story.

Margaret Simons acknowledges the crude misogyny implicit in such a remark, but also that it was “in line with the views of most political hardheads.” The hardheads are not all misogynists: Julia Gillard and Penny Wong lean in that direction, though they would reject Latham’s terminology. Others, Plibersek a leading voice among them, would argue that bringing issues like childcare, domestic violence, human services and social inclusion to the centre of the policy arena is some of the toughest work around.

Taking this difference in perspective as a central theme, Simons begins her new biography, Tanya Plibersek: On Her Own Terms, by paying her respects to Jane Austen, for whose work she and Plibersek share an enduring love. Given that Austen is not a political novelist, it’s an unlikely starting point. If you read all her works twice over you’d be forgiven for missing any reference to major national crises of the time: the madness of the King, the Highland clearances, the Luddite riots and (aside from the appearance of handsomely dressed soldiers) the Napoleonic wars.

And yet. She is the first English-language novelist to portray social and family relations as a form of politics. Social hierarchies display the dynamics of control and subjugation. Personalities are formed and deformed through ambition. Economic factors determine the composition and management of households, and underlie the all-important negotiations over marriage partners. At the heart of each story is the question of how personal integrity may play out in the midst of all this.

What piques Simons’s interest from the outset is that Plibersek has a special admiration for Elinor Dashwood in Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, a character remarkable for “strength of understanding and coolness of judgement.” Dashwood’s good sense enables her to steer through thickets of vested interest and covert motivation towards a secure future. “It is rare, in fiction as in politics, for sensibleness to be cast as heroic virtue,” Simons observes, as she embarks on a political narrative that will have little in the way of major intrigues, crises and dramas, because these are not Plibersek’s milieu.

What she presents is an interesting case study in female ambition. Simons cites some stern remarks from Anne Summers on a 2001 interview in which Plibersek responded to a question about her ambitions by saying she was “not desperate to be a minister.” She’s known as a good communicator, never a fiery orator. Colleagues say she lacks “the vision thing.” Her career has been one of steady ascent, slow at times and rather predictable.

The daughter of Slovenian migrants whose skills and hard work brought the family to middle-class prosperity in a single generation, Plibersek grew up in Oyster Bay in Sutherland Shire and graduated as dux of Jannali Girls High School in 1987. Her association with the Labor Party began earlier, at the age of fifteen, and it was then that she first encountered Anthony Albanese as a fellow member of Young Labor.

After completing a degree in communications at the University of Technology Sydney, where she served as women’s officer in her honours year, she became involved in feminist networks that helped frame her enduring priorities. Meredith Burgmann, Wendy Bacon and Ann Symonds were important influences.

Her first big break came early, when it was suggested she run for preselection for the seat of Sydney after sitting member Peter Baldwin’s resignation. In her own words, it was “an audacious move,” and one that introduced her to the nasty business of factional politics. Simons emphasises this aspect of Plibersek’s story as background to the damaging Labor leadership battles that began when Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard replaced Kim Beazley in 2006, and continued through the chaotic alternations of the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments.

How do you maintain an ethic of loyalty in an environment riddled with treachery? On a personal level, Plibersek steered a discreet course, never wavering from her loyalty to Beazley but serving the regimes that followed him with consistency and good grace.

Sometimes, though, loyalty to principles conflicts with personal loyalties, and the Tampa crisis of August 2001 was a crucial test in this regard. Beazley’s capitulation to the Howard government’s decision to refuse landing to the Norwegian freighter after it rescued 433 shipwrecked asylum seekers went against everything Plibersek believed in, yet after speaking out in fraught party meetings she, too, capitulated.

“I don’t think I’ve ever found it so hard to walk into the chamber and vote for something in my life,” she told Simons. She was only a backbencher, but perhaps this was, to use one of the metaphors employed in the book, a “sliding doors” moment in her career, as it was in Australian politics.

She had been speaking out on asylum seekers in alliance with Western Australian MP Carmen Lawrence. Suppose she had held the line, displayed some of the oratorical fire Simons finds lacking in her rhetoric, and taken a lead on “the vision thing”? It might have marked her out as a future prime minister. Surely that is what Jacinda Ardern would have done.

Opting instead for good parliamentary behaviour, she identified herself in the party room as someone to be thoroughly trusted with whatever brief she was given. Her ministerial portfolios in the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd governments were in line with her established priorities: housing and the status of women, human services, social inclusion and health.

It was not until 2013, when she became shadow foreign affairs and international development minister, that she stepped outside what some might have termed her comfort zone, though “comfort” would be an ironic word to describe areas of responsibility in which so much human suffering is at issue, and where she has so often taken courageous personal action.

Simons astutely does the work of a Jane Austen, insisting on the centrality of what others might consider incidental matters. There is the account of how she noticed a man in a boarding house whose fingers were gangrenous, and drove him to hospital in time to get life-saving surgery. It’s one of countless incidents in which she intervened immediately to assist someone in a critical situation.

Preparation for a white paper on homelessness involved meetings around the nation in remote communities, homelessness centres and refuges. Plibersek was present whenever she could be. She would read correspondence from constituents, checking official replies to ensure that someone in urgent need was not left without a line of help.

According to staffers, she is not just “as good” as her reputation, but exceeds it. She takes home-cooked food to elderly neighbours and serves cake in the office for those working long hours. If someone brings an infant to work (as she did herself with two of her children), she adapts the office environment to suit their needs.

“She lives with great complexity, and handles it well,” as one colleague puts it. It’s the complexity that’s easy to miss, and that Simons is determined to capture. Demarcation lines between domestic and professional life, personal commitment and political statement, urgent situations and long-term objectives, are constantly being erased. This is unusual in a senior minister, even among women at that level.

There’s much in this book about Plibersek’s family: the challenges faced by her migrant parents, the murder of her dynamic brother Philip in Papua New Guinea, the well-known troubled past of her husband Michael Coutts-Trotter, now a distinguished senior public servant. And towards the end of the book, an exclusive interview reveals how her daughter Anna’s personal crisis led to Plibersek’s decision not to oppose Albanese for the leadership.

The question of whether she will at some stage become prime minister, and if so whether she would be a good one, hovers over the book, and draws with it another, larger question: what do we most need in a national leader?

As geopolitical tensions intensify, economic challenges deepen and ecological catastrophe looms, the main concern is how a prime minister can perform on the world stage, something Plibersek has never had a chance to demonstrate. But revelations from the robodebt inquiry draw the attention back to home ground, and the rot beneath our feet when human principles are discarded. Is Jane Austen’s prime minister the answer? •

Tanya Plibersek: On Her Own Terms
By Margaret Simons | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 320 pages

The post Jane Austen’s prime minister? appeared first on Inside Story.

Somewhere between 150 and 200 people showed up, and the party quickly degenerated into fighting, much of it at Mailer’s instigation: he greeted at least one guest at the door with an invitation to box. The drunk host tried to fight George Plimpton, assaulted another man who in turn punched him in the jaw and drenched his shirt in blood, then left the party. He returned, left again, and returned finally at 4.30am, by which time there was barely anyone left.

Without warning, Mailer approached his wife, Adele, and stabbed her with a penknife: once in the back and once, thrusting upward, from the front beneath her lower ribs. Shocked friends lay her down and called a doctor, who in turn called an ambulance that took Adele to hospital for life-saving surgery.

To attend to Mailer, meanwhile — who had begun scribbling in a diary — his friends called a psychiatrist and then drove him around in a car, hoping to calm him down. They also began to obfuscate about what had happened (one, seeing Adele off in the ambulance, told her to tell anyone who asked that she had fallen on a broken bottle). They sought out a retired detective who told them that police enquiries would be best frustrated by Mailer’s leaving New York: Mailer volunteered to go to Cuba. Then they took him to the hospital where Adele lay recuperating. “Do you understand why I did it?” he asked her, as she begged for him to be taken away. “I love you and I had to save you from cancer.”

That afternoon Mailer went to a television station to record an interview for his mayoral campaign, where he talked about knives as symbols of manhood and laughed off questions about his black eye. He met briefly with a doctor and then returned to his apartment. There he was arrested and, after being formally charged, detained in a psychiatric hospital.

By February 1961, Adele was refusing to make a police complaint or sign a letter agreeing to formal charges. With the police stymied by Mailer’s friends, the matter was downgraded: by March he was facing only a charge of felonious assault, for which he would eventually receive a three-year suspended sentence.

In the meantime, he gave a reading to an audience at the 92nd Street Y, a Jewish cultural centre in Manhattan. The event had been organised much earlier, when Mailer was known predominantly for his bestselling novels, his idiosyncratic column in the Village Voice and his controversial essays and polemics. But it was his assault on Adele that most interested his audience. With the charges still pressing, and Mailer’s mayoral campaign not yet ended, there was an air of expectation, of anticipation, among those present. What would he say? What would he read?

The answer shocked. Noting he had written nothing but poetry since November past, Mailer read the following words:

At these lines, the centre’s educational director ordered the curtain lowered.

A curtain call of some kind is probably appropriate for Mailer, who died in 2007, aged eighty-four, leaving behind six wives, nine children (one of them adopted) and a shelf’s worth of books: thirteen novels, nine works of what Mailer calls non-fiction, two volumes of poetry, a screenplay, a play script, a book of short stories and more besides. Much like John Updike and Philip Roth, two other giants of mid-to-late-twentieth-century American letters, Mailer’s literary reputation has shrunk as much as his personal reputation.

While some of his works retain their fame and admirers — The Naked and the Dead (1948), The Armies of the Night (1968) and The Executioner’s Song (1979), in particular — others have been re-evaluated against contemporary standards and found wanting or beyond the pale, much like their author.

Last year, Mailer’s long-time publisher Random House declined to publish a posthumous collection of Mailer’s essays after staff objected to the inclusion of “The White Negro,” a provocative and distasteful essay about (among other things) minority groups as models for resistance to totalitarianism. “You can’t cancel Norman Mailer,” his son said, and as if to prove it the collection was picked up by Skyhorse, the US publisher that has made a specialty of publishing books dropped — or “cancelled” — by mainstream publishers. (Other titles on the Skyhorse list include Woody Allen’s Apropos of Nothing and Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography.)

Rehabilitation may yet come for Mailer’s literary works, but if it does it will owe nothing to Richard Bradford’s new biography, Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer. An English literature academic at Northern Ireland’s Ulster University, Bradford apparently comes well credentialed: he has written or edited more than thirty books, lives of John Milton, Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis and Martin Amis, among them.

Yet most of Bradford’s biographies bear unmistakable warning signs: produced quickly to coincide with anniversaries and using the first-hand research of earlier biographers whom Bradford treats gracelessly rather than gratefully. His books are prone to sweeping judgements, pocked with repetition, errors and inconsistencies, scornful of artistic successes, damning rather than insightful, and depressing as examples of the belief among publishers that any book about a famous person will sell, irrespective of its flaws.

The most notable aspect of Bradford’s biographical practice, though, is his palpable disdain for his subjects. His Ernest Hemingway (2019) is a mendacious liar and artistic failure; his George Orwell (2020) is a depressed clod with feet of clay; his Patricia Highsmith (2021) is an unredeemable grotesque. Bradford’s dislike seems so avid that it is possible to empathise with Martin Amis’s dismay, voiced after reading the first draft of Bradford’s biography of him: “It is quite something to have a biographer who is even more hostile and mendacious than even the scurviest of tabloids.” It is yet another to then think, as Bradford did: “That would make an eye-catching cover blurb.”

Tough Guy is consistent with the above. It has been published to coincide with the centenary of Mailer’s birth and comes hard on the heels of Bradford’s Hemingway, Orwell and Highsmith. It is drawn almost entirely from earlier Mailer biographies, to the point that when Bradford refers to archival or unpublished material he invariably cites the stocky biographies by Peter Manso or J. Michael Lennon (whose cover image Tough Guy also filches).

The inconsistencies, errors and repetitions accumulate: Mailer stabs Adele in the kitchen on page two and in the dining room on page 152; we are told the story about Mailer starting a fight over his poodles Tibo and Zsa Zsa three times. Tough Guy is cluttered with abrupt dismissals and declarations of absolute truth, making the same banal argument for 300 pages: namely, that Mailer was a self-aggrandising narcissist who mined his own life for his work.

The Fight, Mailer’s account of Foreman vs Ali, aka the Rumble in the Jungle, is “an exercise in self-aggrandisement.” Harlot’s Ghost, Mailer’s swollen spy novel, is less about the CIA than “a labyrinthine extension of Norman Mailer.” On Mailer’s final novel, The Castle in the Forest: “He chose to write about Hitler because he had exhausted all other exhibitions of literary self-aggrandisement.”

The big claim of Tough Guy, the ostensible rationale for its existence beyond the centenary, is that “Mailer’s life comes as close as possible to being the Great American Novel; beyond reason, inexplicable, wonderfully grotesque and addictive.” Tossed out in the introduction like bait, it’s interesting enough to warrant turning the first page. But after Bradford’s failure to take it up again, to expand on it or substantiate it in any way for 300 pages, the claim seems less like bait and more like an undersized fish: best thrown back in the water.

The PR guff advertises Tough Guy as “merciless” and in every way this is true. The book is joyless and unremitting in its efforts to take Mailer down. Bradford allows no disreputable incident to pass without condemnation, no mitigating circumstance to ameliorate judgement, and certainly no achievement to escape without belittling. Given Mailer’s behaviour, there is much to work with. Even so, Bradford’s contempt for his subject is notable.

Take The Naked and the Dead, Mailer’s first novel, about a platoon of marines fighting against the Japanese in the Pacific during the second world war. Written when he was twenty-five, The Naked and the Dead sold 70,000 copies, was adapted into a film, launched Mailer’s literary career as if he had been “shot out of a cannon” (as he put it) and was described by George Orwell in 1948 as “the best war book of the last war yet.”

In the longest consideration he gives to any of Mailer’s titles, Bradford stresses the real-life counterparts to characters and the letters Mailer sent home from the war and then recycled. He points to similar passages, notes critically where words have not changed, derides suggestions that Mailer had portrayed something more universal than his own impressions, and declares that everyone in it “carries a trace of Norman Mailer” (there’s that self-aggrandisement again). The Naked and the Dead, Bradford judges finally, was acclaimed “not so much for its intrinsic qualities” — about which he says nothing — but because it launched a “brutally realistic subgenre of military fiction.”

Anyone expressing admiration for Mailer’s work gets similar treatment. The Armies of the Night won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award but Bradford regards the judges and critics who praised it as “cultural mongrels.” The Executioner’s Song won another Pulitzer but is an exercise in condescending literary ventriloquism and was celebrated by “critics who saw themselves occupying the intellectual high ground.” One Mailer biographer terms Marilyn: A Novel Biography (1973) exactly that — a novel biography — but Bradford begs to differ: “A more accurate description would be verbal masturbation.”

“Bradford strikes again,” the blurb tells us. No, he doesn’t, and even if he did this is not a virtue to aspire to. The blows Bradford lands on Mailer are well telegraphed by the supercilious tone and land feebly in predictable places. Reading this unrelenting crusade to lay Mailer out on the canvas only reminded me of how, in the 1950s, Mailer paid former professional boxers to spar with him. He became convinced that he held his own with them, but in truth they were pulling their punches and Mailer’s own blows were only moderately effective.

The titular tough guy of this book is supposed to be Mailer, but it seems better applied to its author. His publisher calls this book “unique, snappy, and convincing” but it is limp, trite and alienating. In any event, to be proud of a biography that claims to extend no mercy, which glories in striking at a subject, is bizarre.

Mailer was a pugnacious and controversial writer whose work was often maddening and indulgent. But his propensity for causing outrage was, to some extent, cultivated and affected so that he might extinguish, once and for all, the “last remaining speck of the one personality he found absolutely insupportable — the nice Jewish boy from Brooklyn.”

A more thoughtful biographer might have pursued this line of enquiry, which comes via Mary Dearborn’s 1999 Mailer biography. (Bradford misnames her “Dearlove.”) A more judicious inquiry might also have provided more empathy than this book extends. It might have found more light and depth in the contradictions of a man who could be violent, offensive, quarrelsome, brutal, compelling, insightful, illuminating and needy — sometimes all at once. As Mailer wrote to Hemingway, in 1955, enclosing a copy of his second novel, The Deer Park:

Because finally after all these years I am deeply curious to know what you think of this.

— but if you do not answer, or if you answer with the kind of crap you use to answer unprofessional writers, sycophants, brown-nosers, etc., then fuck you.

Tough Guy: The Life of Norman Mailer
By Richard Bradford | Bloomsbury | $42.99 | 304 pages

The post Traces of Norman Mailer appeared first on Inside Story.

Still Pictures, Malcolm’s just-published final work, is a collection of twenty-six short chapters, or meditations, on this relationship. It amounts to a fragmented yet highly evocative autobiography, a genre of which she also remained wary to the end.

Most, though not all, of the chapters begin with a photograph. A few contain no reproductions at all, a few contain several, but mostly there is just one photograph, acting as a starter culture for the reflections that follow. The illustrations as they appear on the page are small and of low resolution; they don’t seem to have much of a life or significance of their own. Some come, we are told, from a cardboard box marked “Old Not Good Photos,” clearly signalling their lack of aesthetic value. They certainly don’t leap from the page, demanding our attention. It is Malcolm’s words that make them.

The title, Still Pictures, refers to the essential quality of photographic images, their status as frozen moments in time. The subtitle, “On Photography and Memory,” provides a bit more of a hint of what to expect. Are photographs, these frozen moments, the embodiment of memory, or at the very least stimulants to memory (whether those memories are collective or private), or do we accord photographs a status and power they don’t really merit?

Which takes us back to the main title, and its subtle ambiguity. Photos and snapshots, made with the greatest care or taken casually and unthinkingly, may well provide keys to the past. Or they may, in the end, still just be pictures.

Malcolm repeatedly approaches this question, before feinting and dancing away from it. We are not to be treated to conventional or indeed unconventional analysis of why this or that image works or doesn’t work, of why it might qualify as art. This is no surprise, given that she became, over many decades of engagement with photographs and their impact on our view of the world, increasingly uninterested in the theoretical exploration or artistic appreciation of photography.

In an email exchange with fellow writer on photography Geoff Dyer in 2014, published in the journal Aperture, she asserts her complete lack of interest in that trio of giants of photographic theory, John Berger, Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag. Their “writings on photography have meant almost nothing to me,” she tells Dyer in characteristically take-it-or-leave-it style.

Malcolm does however directly follow the Barthes of Camera Lucida in her insistence on the essentially private nature of our response to photographs. In Still Pictures, her readings of the photographs she has selected are partial, tentative and very personal. Our interaction with a photograph is “always, at bottom, a private reading,” Barthes wrote, a reading in which the subject of the photo intertwines with our own past and our own memories. It is not the photo that we see, but what it says to us, the memories it evokes.

Malcolm differs from many a speculative and freewheeling reader of photographs in that even what is for her a very personal image, one with an earlier version of herself in the frame, may not offer very much in the way of material. Photos, like memories, possess a natural resistance. “I am in the front row, third from the left,” she says of a class photo, but beyond that “the picture brings back no memory.” Another image, of Malcolm, her sister and “three people I don’t recognise,” is dismissed as “barely readable… It has no artistic merit and summons no memories.”

This is one of many comments Malcolm makes on the failure of photographs — photographs in this case related directly to her own life — to deliver in the memory department. I remember nothing, she will say of a photograph, yet paradoxically Still Pictures is packed with memories. Even as she tells us that, memory-wise, this or that photograph is a disappointment, the memories take off — usually in unpredictable directions, but memories all the same.

“Barely readable.” Janet Malcolm

In that image of a young Janet, her sister and the three women she does not (at first) recognise, the figures are variously arranged, in a row, against a car. The woman on the left of the frame is half standing, half leaning behind and against the driver’s open door, her face full on to the viewer, framed by the car window. A frame within a frame.

But Malcolm — and this is a sign of her dismissive brilliance — gives only the most cursory nod towards this rather obvious piece of compositional analysis. Instead, she mimics the process of looking more closely at a photograph and of a memory suddenly coming back to her. She does, after all, remember this woman in the window, but then the memory begins to fade. “There may have been some tragic story, or there may not.”

“I have a memory,” she remarks in a further reflection, and the memory sounds from her telling of it to have many of the qualities of a photograph. It is from her teenage years. Leonard and Sue are “standing together at the back of an assembly hall.” It is a highly romantic, evocative image. Both of them “exceptionally good-looking.” They form a composition on their own, apart from their “unformed” fellows. Their apartness, Malcolm says, has “stayed with me through the years.” But it isn’t a photograph, she reminds us — it’s a memory.

In this retained, unphotographed memory, Malcolm resists what can often seem to be the inevitable takeover of memory by physical and digital images. Images from our personal archives pop up unbidden on our screens and we have rapidly learned to call them what they call themselves, “memories.” Advertisements for cameras and smartphones exhort us to “make memories.” We frequently ask ourselves whether it is the event, the person, the landscape that we remember, or the photos we have of them, and we can be forgiven for suspecting it’s the photos.

In defiance of photography’s takeover bid, Malcolm makes the case for memory as memory, rather than slave to photography. In pursuit of this objective, her repeated failures to remember the events captured in a photograph can sometimes seem almost too insistent — a way of putting photographs in their place.

Yet time may be on her side. We now have the capacity, by means of AI and image-generation models, to turn memory into image using text commands, upending the balance between the two. Malcolm’s memory of Leonard and Sue, standing at the back of the assembly hall, can now be turned into a photographic image, stealing a march on the camera.

For Malcolm, Leonard and Sue notwithstanding, “most of what happens to us goes unremembered,” either by us or by photographs. When photographs of past events do exist, they don’t necessarily help in the process of recall. Rather than acting as memories on our behalf, photographs from school and holidays and family occasions can unsettle us, exactly because we may not remember anything about the event, or the people recorded in the photographic moment. A photograph, even one in which we recognise ourselves, can leave us questioning our own capacity to remember much at all.

We will sometimes look at a photograph of our past selves and be unsettled by how long ago it seems. Even or perhaps especially if the image comes with a date-stamp, we can feel disoriented. The date just doesn’t seem right. The photograph could easily belong to an earlier period of history, before ours. Instead of bringing back our youth, a photograph can push it further away. “I am struck,” Malcolm says of that school photo, “by how different the girls look from some of the girls of today, as though they were living in the nineteenth century and being photographed by Mrs Cameron.”

At the same time as she identifies the gaps that separate photography and memory, Malcolm also emphasises their similarities. She likens the events of our lives to photographic negatives — “the few that make it into the developing solution and become photographs are what we call our memories.” The photographs we retain in our heads are the ones we have developed, curated and stored. The others have been discarded with the contact sheets.

Strikingly, Malcolm compares the creation and retention of memories to a photographic process that is now outdated, one of analogue cameras and darkrooms and developing fluid; it is an old method for old memories. But this metaphor has a notable absence: there is no mention of the photographer, no human hand placing the negative in the tray. In the same way, the images that Malcolm reflects upon in Still Pictures are by photographers unknown or unsung.

Occasionally, a professional, named photographer does intrude. Decades after they were taken, a small bundle of photographs turns up unexpectedly in the mail. They are part of a set by Marjory Collins, one of the remarkably gifted photographers deployed by the Office of War Information to document American life during the second world war. Malcolm’s family, as Czech immigrants, was selected to be photographed as part of a “propagandist” project designed to show America’s rich and welcoming social variety.

Young Janet Malcolm with “Slečna.” Marjory Collins/Library of Congress

The photograph that begins the chapter shows Janet’s teacher of Czech in pedagogical pose, pointing at the blackboard, while Janet herself, not yet tall enough to do so with ease, reaches up aspirationally with her chalk, her back to the camera. What follows on from the image is a moving reflection on the teacher, known to her pupils only as “Slečna,” or “Miss,” about whose life Malcolm knew and knows little. She can speculate, but can’t in any meaningful sense remember, either the events depicted in the photograph or the specific moment in which it was taken.

The unexpected package contains only a dozen or so photos — the one of “Miss” at the blackboard and other moments involving her childhood self — but there must, we infer, have been a good many more. Indeed “must have” becomes a brief refrain. Marjory Collins “must have” spent several days on these photo sessions. She “must have” sat in that empty chair after taking her photos of the family at table.

By this stage, a third of the way through the book, we are already unsurprised as Malcolm distances herself from these photos of her and her family: “I have no memory of the sessions with Marjory Collins.” In Malcolm’s memory, Collins as photographer is near to invisible.

“Outstandingly terrible.” Janet Malcolm

In her final chapter, “A Work of Art,” Malcolm returns to this question of authorship in photography. She recalls the publication in 1980 of a collection of her photography pieces, Diana and Nikon, pieces that had previously appeared, without illustrations, in the New Yorker. To support her text, Malcolm selected examples, by prominent practitioners, “of a new kind of avant-garde photography that took its inspiration from — and to all intents and purposes was indistinguishable from — the home snapshot.” The provocativeness of that word “indistinguishable” foreshadows what comes next.

Among her examples of “artless” photography, Malcolm includes a bit of mischief — an “outstandingly terrible snapshot” of unknown provenance that her husband had long ago chanced upon and kept for its very awfulness. She connives to attribute the image to her husband, thereby identifying him as creator rather than mere collector. With gotcha delight, Malcolm describes in Still Pictures how this interloper of an image, with its newly assigned authorship, assumes an afterlife of reiterated artistic merit, solely because she has deemed it such.

In her study of the impact of social media on memory, The End of Forgetting (2019), Kate Eichhorn argues that the ubiquity and digital longevity of photos mean that “the ability to break away from the past is severely compromised.” How can we move successfully into the future, she asks, “carrying an archive of past images?”

Photographs are everywhere, their numbers increasing daily to reach yet further unimaginable heights. Everyone takes them, looks at them, exchanges and archives them. They are in danger, we fear, of overwhelming our lives, substituting recorded memories for the real thing, for what we have come to defiantly call our “lived experience.”

For Janet Malcolm, this is to exaggerate the power of photography. Her personal, randomly retained collection of largely undistinguished images is not so much a burden as a mystery. These photos stimulate memories, again often at seeming random, but they don’t substitute for them. Sometimes we connect with the past our photos represent, sometimes we don’t. The memories contained within the photos are anything but simulacrums of her own — the most she can expect is that if she looks at an image long enough, a connection will form, and something in the frame will “begin to speak.” •

Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory
By Janet Malcolm | Text Publishing | $29.99 | 155 pages

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When Julia Gillard was deputy prime minister, Chris Wallace began work on an unauthorised biography. Kevin Rudd’s government had yet to flounder on the shoals of his inability to manage the business of government and deal with factional ambitions. Gillard was in line to be Australia’s first female prime minister, but not yet, and not in circumstances where she could forever be blamed for stabbing Rudd in the back.

By the time the biography was finished and about to be published by Allen & Unwin, Gillard was prime minister and leading a minority government. Her ascension to power, both the fact and the manner of it, had unleashed an appalling campaign of misogyny, sanctioned if not overtly led by opposition leader Tony Abbott, supported by right-wing journalists and carried in a stream of filth on social media. She was also being undermined from within, by Rudd and his supporters.

As publication date approached, the publisher’s publicist told Wallace to expect a media frenzy. Gillard’s enemies were waiting to pounce, to comb the book for dirt.

Wallace already knew how a biography can be used against its subject. In 1993 she had published a biography of then opposition leader John Hewson, who looked likely to defeat Paul Keating at the forthcoming election. Her motivation was public interest — Hewson was relatively unknown — but the Keating camp scoured the book for scandals and insights into Hewson’s vulnerabilities.

This could happen again, she realised. Gillard is a human being and had her flaws, but Wallace didn’t want to contribute to the destabilisation of her government and the election of the Abbott-led alternative. So she pulled the book and paid back the advance. She felt, she told her disappointed publisher, that she had “no other moral choice.”

“I did not intend the Gillard biography to help or hurt Gillard’s political fortunes,” she writes in her new book, Political Lives: Australian Prime Ministers and Their Biographers. “When I conceived it, I did not foresee its potential exploitation by ‘bad actors’ in the supercharged political climate which developed.”

The experience got her thinking about other political biographers who had written about living subjects. Did any of their books influence their subjects’ career, for good or ill? So she embarked on a PhD, researching every biography written during the active career of every twentieth-century Australian prime minister and interviewing every living Australian PM and every living biographer of a contemporary PM.

What becomes clear as the book proceeds is that her question really only applies to the period since Whitlam became leader of the Labor Party in 1967. For the first half of the twentieth century her research question barely applies. Before John Gorton, only two contemporary biographies of prime ministers — of Billy Hughes and John Curtin — were published.

But Wallace did discover some unpublished gems in the archives: Herbert Campbell-Jones’s “The Cabinet of Captains,” which covers the first six prime ministers, and Alfred Buchanan’s “The Prime Ministers of Australia.” Both men were journalists, as have been most of the writers of contemporary biographies.

Also in the archives was a manuscript biography of Robert Menzies by Allan Dawes, based on interviews with Menzies undertaken in the early 1950s, before his electoral dominance was established. Wallace speculates that as Menzies’s popularity rose he saw less need for a humanising biography.

In the first half of Political Lives, rich in detail, Wallace proves herself to be a consummate archival detective. One example touches on my own work. Part of the Dawes manuscript is in Menzies’s papers at the National Library, and I drew on it for my book, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People. But Wallace found more in Dawes’s papers, where I hadn’t thought to look. What she found has much historical interest, though the men and the times are now a long way from popular memory.

The second, livelier half of Political Lives begins with Alan Trengove’s book John Grey Gorton: An Informed Biography, which revealed the potentially controversial fact that John Gorton’s mother was unmarried. Published after Gorton succeeded Harold Holt as prime minister in early 1968, and cleared by Gorton himself, the revelation had little impact on his reputation. But it marked a turning point in Australian contemporary political biography. Revealing rather than concealing personal information now became an option, and politicians could consider managing the release of awkward facts.

But the genre really takes off with Gough Whitlam. When he became Labor leader in 1967 he was little known outside political circles, and many of those who did know of him were puzzled as to what this supremely confident, urbane, middle-class man with a penchant for quoting the classics was doing in the Labor Party. In 1970 the young Laurie Oakes began researching a biography, though Whitlam PM didn’t appear until late 1973, a year after Labor won office.

Oakes’s book was a revelation to many, especially in its account of his subject’s childhood and parents. Growing up in Canberra as the son of the Crown solicitor made Whitlam a social democrat with a belief in the capacities of government to improve people’s lives.

Oakes wrote a quartet of books about Whitlam (two of them with David Solomon), but Whitlam’s great biographer was his legendary speechwriter, Graham Freudenberg, who was so close to Whitlam that he could speak on his behalf. Freudenberg’s A Certain Grandeur was published in October 1977, after Whitlam’s government was dismissed and just before the election that would be his last. The book didn’t have enough time to influence the outcome of the election, after which Whitlam retired from active politics, but it did put the travails of his government into the broader context of the economic and political forces that battered it.

The book that most fits Wallace’s question is Blanche d’Alpuget’s biography of Bob Hawke, published in 1982 when he was positioning himself to wrest the leadership of the Labor Party from Bill Hayden and become prime minister. D’Alpuget, a successful novelist, had just completed a well-regarded biography of Sir Richard Kirby, former president of the Conciliation and Arbitration Commission. She knew Hawke well — they were lovers — and he trusted her to write a “warts and all” biography, with his womanising and drinking included alongside his political achievements and talents.

Through Angus McIntyre, whom she had known when she was living in Indonesia with her diplomat husband, d’Alpuget had got to know Melbourne University’s Graham Little and others in the Melbourne Psycho-Social Group, a loose association of academics, psychoanalysts and therapists interested in the application of psychoanalytic ideas outside clinical settings. D’Alpuget’s biography is far more psychologically acute than the usual political biography, with a rich account of Hawke’s childhood and family relationships, especially with his difficult and demanding mother.

The book gave the Labor caucus a more nuanced understanding of the man, winning him votes in the leadership contest with Hayden. More interestingly, it gave Hawke greater insight into himself. D’Alpuget conducted long interviews with him, stirring up memories of his childhood which, she believed, helped him conquer his compulsive drinking. Wallace’s chapter on Hawke, with its intriguing insights from d’Alpuget about how she wrote the book, and its effects, is the highlight of Political Lives, and d’Alpuget and Hawke appear on the cover.

Wallace also discusses Stan Anson’s Hawke: An Emotional Life, published just after Hawke had survived a leadership challenge from Paul Keating. Anson made overt use of psychoanalysis and ideas of narcissism to understand Hawke, and drew heavily on d’Alpuget’s account of Hawke’s childhood. She was furious and threatened legal action under the Trade Practices Act, accusing Anson of passing off her work as his own.

Wallace concludes that the fuss stopped psychoanalytically informed biography dead in its tracks in Australia, at least when it came to contemporary politicians. This is probably true, but it doesn’t mean that psychoanalytic ideas disappeared from writing about Australian politics. Psychoanalysis was one of the intellectual traditions shaping my Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (1992) and Graham Little drew on psychoanalytic ideas in the profiles of leading politicians he published in the press and in his last book, The Public Emotions (1999).

Wallace ends her book with a plea for more psychologically sophisticated biography writing. Most contemporary biographies of politicians are written by journalists, who often uncover hitherto unknown facts but are generally short on ideas and thin on interpretation. That’s why d’Alpuget’s biography of Hawke stands out, as does, more recently, Sean Kelly’s The Game, a devastating dismantling of Scott Morrison’s smoke and mirrors.

Kelly may not have drawn explicitly on psychoanalytic theories, but by paying close attention to his subject’s language and characteristic rhetorical strategies he showed what can be done within the bounds of the genre. His book probably didn’t damage Morrison’s political fortunes, however. That was something Morrison was already doing for himself. •

Political Lives: Australian Prime Ministers and Their Biographers
By Chris Wallace | UNSW Press | $39.99 | 336 pages

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Perhaps it’s understandable: this is a Sydney story, and I live in Canberra. In Sydney his memory seems to be still strong — although, since Stace died in 1967 — fewer people will remember having discovered an “Eternity” inscribed by the man himself in his famous elaborate copperplate. It would be even rarer to find someone who actually glimpsed him at work in the pre-dawn, head bowed, kneeling to leave his one-word message in chalk or crayon.

I became curious about Stace during trips to Sydney in the 1990s, when a highlight was to call in at the Remo store in Darlinghurst to browse all manner of cool stuff you probably didn’t need but was fun to own, including t-shirts, prints and other merch emblazoned with Stace’s “Eternity” in a design by artist Martin Sharp.

Sharp had been incorporating Stace’s “Eternity” into his work for years, and a five-metre rendition on canvas adorned Remo’s Crown Street window — stopping traffic, according to proprietor Remo Giuffré. From beyond the grave, Stace was very good to Remo. “We were never ones to miss a good merchandising opportunity,” he recalled.

Arthur Stace posing for photographer Trevor Dallen on 3 July 1963. Sydney Morning Herald 

Stace’s fame peaked in the 1990s, but Sydney had always been fascinated by him. From the 1930s onwards the discovery of an “Eternity” on pavement or wall was a unique and unifying experience for Sydney residents. Graffiti was still uncommon, and the letters were so perfectly formed, the meaning so tantalising. Who was this Eternity man? No one knew.

By the 1950s there were so many rumours, so much press speculation, and increasing numbers of false claims by impostors that in 1956 Stace allowed his identity to be revealed. By 1965 he estimated he had written “Eternity” 500,000 times all over Sydney.

Stace’s story, as he told it, was that he was born into poverty. His parents, two brothers and two sisters (actually he had three sisters) were all alcoholics, he said, and he himself was a drifter, a petty criminal and an alcoholic for decades before he converted to Christianity. That happened after he joined, by chance, a service in August 1930 at St Barnabas’s Anglican Church, Broadway, on the promise of tea and cake afterwards. The preacher was the Reverend R.B.S. Hammond, famous in Sydney as a “mender of broken men” — men like Arthur Stace who believed themselves beyond help. Years later Stace was fond of saying that he went in for rock cake and came out with “the Rock of Ages.”

He gave up alcohol and was befriended by Hammond, who gave him a job at the Hammond Hotel, a hostel he ran in Chippendale. Stace worked in its emergency depot helping men in need of a wash and a shave, or repairs to their clothes and boots.

Spiritually, though, Stace was more drawn to the services at the Burton Street Tabernacle, a Baptist church in Darlinghurst. There, in 1932, he heard a sermon by a famous evangelical preacher of the day, John Ridley. “Eternity! Eternity!” Ridley cried. “I wish I could sound, or shout, that word to everyone in the streets of Sydney. Eternity! You have got to meet it. Where will you spend eternity?”

Stace was profoundly moved. Leaving the church, he discovered a piece of chalk in his pocket and bent down and wrote “Eternity” there and then on the ground. He joined the community at Burton Street, and that was the beginning of his new life as a reformed alcoholic and self-described “missioner” seeking to convert others.

Arthur Stace (seated) as emergency depot manager at the Hammond Hotel in the 1930s. Courtesy of HammondCare

When an energetic new pastor, Lisle Thompson, arrived at Burton Street in 1951 the two men immediately became friends. One day, after an outdoor service, Thompson spotted Stace at work with his chalk: “So you’re Mr Eternity, Arthur,” he queried. “Guilty, your honour” was the reply. Thompson wanted to share Stace’s story and eventually he persuaded Stace that an account of his conversion, written as a “tract,” would be a good evangelistic tool, an exemplar for others. Titled The Crooked Made Straight, Thompson’s eight-page account briefly noted that Stace was the Eternity man. “This one-word sermon has challenged thousands and thousands,” he added.

The tract circulating quietly among churches was not enough for Thompson, and finally Stace let him take “Mr Eternity” to the press. The scoop went to Tom Farrell at the Daily Telegraph and the story covered six columns in the Sunday edition on 24 June 1956. The mystery was solved, and overnight Arthur Stace, living modestly in Pyrmont with his wife Pearl (they met through church activities and married in 1942), became one of Sydney’s most famous citizens.

In the ensuing years Stace was happy to grant a further press interview now and then. In 1965, two years before his death, he told a journalist that he had tried a few different slogans — “Obey God” for instance — but that “I think eternity gets the message across, makes people stop and think.” It certainly did, but what Stace might not have realised was that with increasing material prosperity, secularism and multiculturalism in Australia, younger people were becoming baffled.

Martin Sharp first spotted an “Eternity” in 1953 when he was just eleven, and was captivated. “What does it mean? Why is it there? Who wrote it?” He didn’t learn the full story of Arthur Stace until 1983 when he was given a copy of Keith Dunstan’s book Ratbags, published in 1979. Along with Percy Grainger, Barry Humphries, Frank Thring and others of that ilk, Arthur Stace was one of Dunstan’s “ratbags.”

In 1958 journalist Gavin Souter had compared Stace to bohemian rebel Bea Miles and other Sydney “characters,” including a man who sat perfectly still on a bench in Hyde Park with an open packet of peanuts in his lap, covered head to foot in pigeons. In 2001 Peter Carey declared that Sydney didn’t love Stace because he was “saved” but because he was “a drunk, a ratbag, an outcast… a slave to no one on this earth.” Clive James in 2003 simply called him a “lonely madman.”

Christians, on the other hand, had little difficulty in interpreting Stace’s message the way he meant it — that there is a life after this one and we need to be prepared for it. For them there was nothing peculiar about a devout Christian wanting to spread such a message. In 1994 the Reverend Bernard Judd, an Anglican rector and long-time friend of Stace, declared emphatically in a filmed interview that Arthur was not a fanatic, not obsessed, and rejected the association with Sydney’s eccentrics. Stace was “a thoroughgoing reasonable rational Christian.”

When a full biography of Stace, Mr Eternity: The Story of Arthur Stace, appeared in 2017 it was published by the Bible Society. The avowedly Christian co-authors, Roy Williams and Elizabeth Meyers (the latter a daughter of Stace’s friend Lisle Thompson), reiterated Judd’s assessment to again counter the idea that Stace was a “weirdo,” or mentally ill. He was unusual, they conceded, but that could be said of any “prodigious achiever” in human history.

Poet Douglas Stewart could embrace the sublime and transcendent in Stace while avoiding the preachy context, and in so doing helped propel Stace’s work into our modern, secular age. The oft-quoted first stanza of his poem “Arthur Stace,” first published in 1969, runs thus:

That shy mysterious poet Arthur Stace
Whose work was just one single mighty word
Walked in the utmost depths of time and space
And there his word was spoken and he heard
Eternity, Eternity, it banged him like a bell
Dulcet from heaven sounding, sombre from hell.

Stewart’s poem helped inspire Lawrence Johnston’s documentary film Eternity in 1994. Parts of the poem are read during the film, and its beautiful cinematography encompassed a similar sense of light, shadow and mystery. The soundtrack was adapted from Ross Edwards’s haunting orchestral work Symphony Da pacem Domine.

Like Stewart, Johnston wanted to explore Stace’s part in the biography of Sydney, and black-and-white recreations feature an actor (Les Foxcroft) as a silent, lonely, Stace-figure in an overcoat and felt hat, head bowed, walking, kneeling and chalking. An assembly of people, including Bernard Judd, Martin Sharp and artist George Gittoes, describe how Stace had inspired or influenced them.

Gittoes was one of few to have witnessed Stace at work. He had been staring idly into a shop window early one morning in 1964 when he became aware of the image of a man reflected from across the street. As he watched, silently, unwilling to interrupt, the man knelt “almost as if in prayer” and wrote something on the ground. Gittoes had never heard of Arthur Stace then and thought that “Eternity” had been written just for him. As a fifteen-year-old boy “looking for signs,” he said, that one word seemed to be “like a whole book of words,” and the experience had remained “like a tattoo on [his] soul” ever since.

There was something else that struck the artist’s eye, and he remembered it even after thirty years: Stace’s shoes were too big. As the man knelt, Gittoes could see clearly into the gap between his sock and his shoe.

I too am fascinated by this detail. Everyone remembers Stace as a carefully dressed man, always in a suit, tie and felt hat, and an overcoat for winter. The few photographs of him attest to this. But Gittoes noticed that his shoes were much too big, clearly not originally his own. This could have been because as a small man, only five foot three, Stace had trouble finding shoes to fit. Or because even in the relative comfort of his later years Stace was still too frugal to buy new shoes. Whatever the case, my imagination gets to work in that gap between the actual man and how he presented himself to the world.

Stace’s adeptness at controlling his own story for public consumption leads me to wonder: what was in the gap? What would drive someone to write “Eternity” on the footpath every day for thirty-seven years? Half a million times. Was Stace “unusual”? Obviously. A “madman”? Unhelpful. “Obsessed”? Yes, I think so.

Stace was always a poor man, but the dimensions and impact of that poverty have until recently been under-appreciated. The trauma that would afflict his life began even before he was born. His biographers have shown that his mother, Laura Lewis, had two children with an unknown father, or fathers, while she was a teenager living at home with her parents in Windsor, New South Wales. The first baby died, and the second, Clara, born in 1876, nearly did too.

One day Laura left the three-month-old with her own mother, Margaret Lewis, while she visited a neighbour. Ten minutes later Laura was called home to find Clara pitifully unwell. Margaret claimed to have given her granddaughter a drink of tea, but a doctor was called and, as he later testified, found the baby suffering from “gastric irritation of the stomach and bowels,” retching and crying incessantly. Soon it was discovered that what Margaret had actually given Clara was carbolic acid, a common disinfectant. A local chemist confirmed that he had sold it, diluted in oil, to Laura during her pregnancy to treat an abscess.

Remarkably, Clara survived, and although Margaret appeared before a magistrate, a murder charge seems to have been dropped. Why? If Margaret had been making a sudden wild attempt to eliminate an unwanted mouth to feed, there seems to have been insufficient evidence for a conviction, but Stace’s biographers, Williams and Meyers, offer the simple conclusion that it was a genuine accident in a chaotic household.

Four years later, in 1880, Margaret’s husband John was imprisoned for assaulting her, and on his release in 1882 immediately sought her out and assaulted her again. Evidence suggests that the whole family lived in fear of this man. Laura escaped to Sydney with Clara but found no real refuge there. She took up with William Stace, an Englishman from a modestly prosperous background, and together they had six children; Arthur was the second youngest, born in 1885.

But William was feckless and, in the deepening depression of the 1890s, could not hold down a job. The family moved frequently among Sydney’s cramped inner-city suburbs, sliding into poverty. By 1892 they were accepting charity, and in November William Stace deserted the family, leaving Laura destitute. Her only option was the Benevolent Society Asylum, a huge institution located near where Central Station is today. After a Christmas spent within those grim walls, Arthur, his older brother William and younger brother Samuel were fostered. Arthur was seven.

Williams and Meyers mention that later in life Arthur would not speak of his time in foster care. The years he blanked out were spent with a family in Goulburn. Later he was placed with families in Wollongong, and as a teenager he found employment in the coalmines there. (With his first pay, he said, he bought a drink: the first step towards decades of alcohol addiction.)

The Stace family was scattered. William and Laura reconciled, but their lives were marred by alcohol and violence, and all their children were fostered or left of their own accord. By the time Arthur returned to Sydney in about 1905, when he was twenty, William had become a chronic and violent alcoholic, and Laura appears to have taken to prostitution. William died in the Parramatta Hospital for the Insane in November 1908, aged about fifty-two. Laura died of cancer in 1912.

Considering all this, the gaps and inconsistencies in Stace’s account of his life are unsurprising. I think he exaggerated his and his family’s criminal associations a little, probably to make his conversion in 1930 seem more powerful. Especially interesting is his claim that as a child he had very little schooling, and that he couldn’t account for his ability to write “Eternity,” and only that word, in perfect copperplate.

Although he implies it was done by some kind of divine guidance, there is ample evidence that he could write quite well and had obviously received some primary education. When Stace said he couldn’t write, the deprivation he was describing was perhaps not education — it was love.

The gap between the shoe and the sock turns out to be vast. It’s not just the gap between Stace the man and what he said about himself, but the gap between the historical sources (newly digitised, many of them) and how we interpret those sources in our own times.

In fact, the gap is so vast I hesitate to approach it because I respect Stace’s telling us only what he wanted us to know. But also, he invited us to wonder, as he wondered, about unfathomable existences beyond our small selves: he walked in the “utmost depths of time and space,” as Douglas Stewart put it.

So let me suggest that what was in that gap was intergenerational poverty, violence, substance abuse and trauma. The twin pillars of Stace’s trauma may have been, first, the poisoning of his half-sister Clara in 1876, and later, his separation from his parents and siblings when he was seven.

What happened on that day in Windsor in 1876? There was baby Clara, “retching and crying.” There was the shock, the panic, the tears and outrage, and the smell of carbolic around Clara’s mouth. All the witnesses would have had their versions of events, but only the baby’s grandmother really knew, and how could Margaret have explained her actions if she herself was a victim of earlier circumstances impossible to describe? How did Laura cope with the memory of that day, and how could she establish a future for herself and her children? Whom could she trust? Not William Stace, as it turned out.

Arthur’s early childhood memories were of sleeping on bags under the house when his parents were “on the drink,” and having to steal milk from verandas and food from bakers’ carts and shops. Fostering might have given him and his brothers proper beds, food and clothing, but at the cost of everything and everyone they had ever known.

Did they know what had happened in Windsor? From under the house they might have picked up bits of it from abusive arguments between their parents, or perhaps it was never mentioned. Either way, spoken of or not, the story was surely always there, impossible to un-remember.

Our increasing knowledge of trauma and its effects on mind and body may offer new insights into Stace’s behaviour as an adult. For years, both before and after his identity as “Mr Eternity” became known, he told his story many times in Protestant services and prayer meetings: how he had been brought up in a “vile” environment, how he had lived a “slothful drunken life,” going from job to job, jail to jail, and how finally, at his lowest point, he had been “plucked from the fires of hell” at St Barnabas’s when “the spirit of the living God” entered his life.

Conversion gave Stace not just a community to belong to — probably for the first time ever — but an audience for his story. It was common in Baptist services for people to give “testimony” by describing their lives before and after conversion, and so here was an accepted language and a template for Stace to craft a narrative of his own. He could stand outside his story and gain comforting distance from it, always with a group of the faithful to take it and hold it for him without judgement.

So then, those half-million eternities could have been another form of repetitious behaviour, born of trauma. His message could have been not only a one-word sermon or a one-word poem, but a one-word trauma narrative. Mightily told, over and over. In those daily pre-dawn excursions around Sydney, the act of kneeling to write “Eternity” every few hundred yards might have put Stace into a meditative state that kept him separated from his past, eternally in the present. Hoping, with his chalk-dry fingers, to convert his suffering into something redemptive for other people. •

The post Arthur Stace’s single mighty word appeared first on Inside Story.

Menzies, aged seventy, is about to open a new telescope in the Canberra hinterland. Long experience of public speaking in the open air has given him an aversion to flies, and he has hit on the deterrent of shrouding himself in insecticide.

The young man is Tony Eggleton, thirty-three. Just hired as Menzies’s press secretary, he is ambitious, conservative and diligent. If spraying the prime ministerial personage is part of the job, he’ll do it obligingly and he’ll do it thoroughly. And later that day he will type up the incident in a note for his private file.

Here is a puzzle worth unravelling. Aren’t nice guys supposed to come last in politics? Yet that obliging young man ended up as top dog in the Liberal Party organisation. “Neither belligerence nor assertiveness were part of his persona,” according to biographer Tom Frame in his new book, A Very Proper Man; yet he became a prominent player in every twist and turn of the Liberal saga over twenty-five years from Menzies to Hewson: Holt’s disappearance, Gorton’s chaos, Whitlam’s dismissal, Fraser’s supremacy, Howard’s and Peacock’s failures, the Joh-for-Canberra fizzer. He was there through eleven federal elections, including a still-unbeaten record of seven as the Liberals’ national campaign director. And he went on to work at a high level in international affairs, in the Commonwealth during the Whitlam years and in the development assistance organisation CARE International.

Along the way, Eggleton practised a lifelong discipline of typing up notes recording his immediate impressions of events he was involved in. The result, says Frame, is “thousands of documents, memoranda, letters, newspaper clippings and photographs” in thirteen boxes, as well as a “personal chronicle” written by Eggleton for his family.

This remarkable trove of contemporaneous firsthand records sees the light of day for the first time in Frame’s biography. A Very Proper Man contains no startling revelation that reshapes our understanding of Liberal politics; but its deep detail, long span and central perspective will make it a very valuable resource for future historians of Liberal politics.

Frame declares himself a friend of Eggleton, and this is a friendly biography. But while it is thorough and substantial in tracing Eggleton’s progress, I don’t think it fully succeeds in explaining his success and longevity.

Born into a middle-class family in Swindon, England, in 1932, Tony (not Anthony) Eggleton left school at fifteen to become a reporter with the local newspaper. Rapid promotion led to an invitation in 1950 to cross the globe to join the Bendigo Advertiser. Supportive parents paid his passage; the adventure became a career. He joined the ABC in Melbourne the following year; by the end of 1954 he was an “A” grade journalist responsible for morning bulletins of radio news. Then along came TV, and Eggleton was included in the ABC’s first training courses — truly, as Frame notes, a “career-enhancing opportunity.”

When the ABC’s Melbourne office began a TV news service shortly before the opening ceremony of the Melbourne Olympics, Eggleton was chief of staff. In his new role, his working life involved “identifying good news stories, assigning reporters and cameramen, supervising newsroom management and logistics, and assessing the film ‘rushes’ in the viewing room. With his office in a prominent corner of the newsroom, he was close to all the drafting, editing and production.”

And then he joined the navy, as its coordinator of public relations. Why? He had reached the top of the ladder in journalism at the age of twenty-seven; perhaps he saw a path into government, to a life among the news makers rather than the news reporters. If so it was an inspired gamble.

The navy minister was John Gorton, whom Eggleton had profiled for the Bendigo newspaper as a newly elected senator from Victoria. Gorton remembered him and liked his work — not least, perhaps, an opinion piece in which Eggleton had declared his support for Menzies’s proposed Communist Party dissolution bill. (“The local branch of the Communist Party is… an active tentacle of the Kremlin octopus… We must ensure the reds are prevented from infiltrating further.”) Gorton, the most junior minister in the government and not entitled to a staff press secretary, was hungry for profile and looking for someone experienced in the new medium of television.

Gorton overruled his department and offered Eggleton the job, and in March 1960 Eggleton moved to Canberra and into the Liberal orbit. They made a complementary pair: Eggleton initiated the now-standard practice of issuing ministerial announcements on Sundays, typically quiet news days; Gorton got increased coverage and was delighted. Eggleton also set up a navy film unit to produce professional newsreels of ships and sailors, and distribute them to TV stations. This innovation, too, has continued.

Frame, who has written extensively on Australian naval history, suggests Eggleton was perhaps too good at his job, insofar as his “effective promotion” of the navy may have obscured the problems that would manifest in a series of collisions and other fatal mishaps. These incidents culminated on the evening of 10 February 1964 when the aircraft carrier Melbourne collided with the destroyer Voyager. Eighty-two men were killed in the navy’s worst peacetime disaster.

Frame provides a terrific description of how Eggleton battled the bureaucracy to ensure “a continuing flow of accurate information” to the public, for which he received the respect of the media and, as it turned out, the prime minister. Menzies appointed him press secretary in late 1965 and allowed him to organise a live broadcast of the press conference in early 1966 at which the prime minister announced his retirement.

Eggleton was passed down, like a piece of valuable china, to the incoming prime minister Harold Holt. If Voyager was Eggleton’s trial run in crisis management, Holt’s disappearance in the surf off Portsea in December 1967 triggered his supreme test.

Thanks to his press gallery contacts, Eggleton appears to have been the first of Holt’s people to hear rumours of something amiss. He was the first to get to Portsea, travelling with Holt’s wife Zara. While the military and police conducted their fruitless search, Eggleton took control of the external story, filling the leadership vacuum and managing the maelstrom of media and public anxiety by personally conducting six televised press conferences over three days. He also communicated with the governor-general, the Liberal Party and US president Lyndon Johnson. In the process he became famous.

When the Liberal Party met in Canberra in January to elect Holt’s replacement, it was naturally Eggleton who announced to the media that the new prime minister was John Gorton. Gorton’s trainwreck prime ministership provides Frame’s most entertaining and astonishing chapter, informed by Eggleton’s contemporaneous file notes covering Gorton’s divisive and conspiratorial relationship with his staffer Ainsley Gotto, his hatred of the media, and his numerous domestic and international faux pas.

The highlight, deservedly, is the late-night drinks party at the residence of the US ambassador Bill Crook on 1 November 1968 — surely the most infamous and embarrassing incident ever in the Australia–US relationship.

Earlier that day, Crook had met with Gorton to confirm LBJ’s announced suspension of bombing of North Vietnam. The advice was tardy, annoying Gorton, who kept the ambassador waiting. That evening Gotto attended a dinner with others at Crook’s residence, and pressured Eggleton to persuade the prime minister to pay a visit to smooth things over. Gorton went to a press gallery dinner instead, and it was only late at night, well lubricated and in the company of a young journalist, Geraldine Willesee, that he agreed to do so. What could possibly go wrong?

In what now reads like soap opera, Gorton was miffed to see Gotto with another guest and Gotto was appalled to see Gorton with Willesee. Eggleton thought it was “incredible… unreal.” While music and dancing continued, Gorton at some point divulged that he wanted to withdraw Australian troops from South Vietnam but was prevented by Liberal Party policy. Crook invited Eggleton into the study for a private talk about Vietnam. Eggleton finally extracted Gorton “between 2am and 3am.”

Frame asserts that Gorton had “fallen short of every standard of acceptable behaviour,” and that when the story came out months later it was Eggleton’s personal reputation that helped save the PM. This seems fair. The Liberals were spending their inherited political capital like drunken sailors — or ex–navy ministers — and Eggleton proved himself the only adult in the room.

When Gorton was finally replaced by William McMahon in 1971, Eggleton opted to join the Commonwealth secretariat in London. He was lured back to Canberra in 1974 to help the Liberals, now in opposition, as the party’s federal director. In this role he worked very closely with Malcolm Fraser as PM, winning three elections, only to then lose four in a row to Labor’s Bob Hawke and retire in 1990.

So what does explain Eggleton’s longevity and prominence? Part of the answer is his loyalty to the cause. Hardworking, methodical, unflappable, an early riser and a non-drinker, he started out as useful and became indispensable.

Eggleton himself told a press gallery farewell dinner that as press secretary he had been “valet, chauffeur, decoy, bag carrier, sounding board and whipping boy.” He protests too much; he also brought exceptional skills in managing the news flow to suit his political masters, while also retaining the confidence of the working press. Veteran journo Alan Reid (providing Frame with his title) described him as “a very proper man.”

A further part of the answer lies with the old adage that proximity is power. Menzies disliked talking on the phone; he let Eggleton answer his calls. Gorton hated briefing the media; he let Eggleton do it for him. When Fraser campaigned, Eggleton travelled with him on the plane. Eggleton spent his career “in the room,” listening and learning and becoming, in the admiring description of another veteran scribe, Max Walsh, a “one-man intelligence network.”

Importantly, he didn’t seek to wield power or advise on policy outside his area of responsibility. He didn’t take sides and he didn’t blab. (A later Liberal press secretary, David Barnett, described Eggleton as like a built-in wardrobe — invisible and discreet.) Tact and discretion earned him the trust of those he dealt with and extended his influence.

At the same time, as he grew in experience and influence, he didn’t fail to perceive the benefits of centralised coordination of the government’s and the party’s communications. While still press secretary, he suggested the prime minister’s department create an office of public affairs and information to monitor and coordinate media units within the various departments and ministerial offices. In opposition, under Billy Snedden and later Andrew Peacock, he expanded the remit of the party office at the expense of the leader’s office.

Similarly, and more significantly and permanently, he secured appointment, under Fraser, as the Liberals’ first national campaign director, with effective (though often porous and conditional) control over the campaign activities of the nominally autonomous state divisions. Frame’s narrative is a bit light on here and could have devoted more space to the internal workings of the Liberal organisation and the personnel under Eggleton’s long regime.

As noted, this is a friendly biography. Frame’s criticisms, muted and elliptical, are largely confined to the introduction. He suggests that Eggleton should at times have “taken a stronger stand against bad behaviour” without specifying which incidents he is referring to. It seems clear that Eggleton’s tolerance of Gorton, especially his appalling behaviour at the US residence, is one of those occasions.

By today’s less forgiving standards, senior advisers become complicit if they put political or personal loyalty ahead of a higher responsibility to the nation or the government — especially if they are public servants, as Eggleton was at this stage. They have the option of calling it out, or walking away. Eggleton did neither.

Likewise, when Fraser blocked supply to the Whitlam government, Eggleton’s predecessor Tim Pascoe opposed the strategy. He even presented a memo to Fraser in October 1975 arguing that forcing an election for short-term gain would deprive Fraser of long-term moral authority. (Fraser burned the memo and never forgave Pascoe.) But Eggleton had no such qualms. In his own personal file note on 10 November 1975, he wrote that the governor-general would surely soon feel compelled to intervene; meanwhile, Liberal fundraising was ahead of target.

Such are the dilemmas and tensions inherent in the concept of political professionalism, which requires primary devotion to the client but also adherence to objective standards of conduct. It is only easy with hindsight. (For the record, I should note Eggleton’s generous consideration in giving me a lengthy interview for my doctoral research into the Liberal and Labor campaign professionals; he is indeed a very proper man.)

After he retired in 1990, feted and honoured, Eggleton worked in the aid sector with development assistance organisation CARE. Fraser, now chair of the global body, had invited him to apply to become its secretary-general. They travelled extensively and were an effective team, which suggests their close political relationship was based on solid personal sympathies.

Picture this then. A light plane touches down on a tiny airstrip somewhere in Somalia during the civil war in the early 1990s. Malcolm Fraser alights and, with him, a dapper and still obliging Eggleton. They climb aboard a convoy of jeeps, with a machine gunner for protection. Fraser, however, urgently needs to pee. There is no toilet, not even a tree. While Fraser unzipped, Eggleton was, in Frame’s words, “assigned the task of acting as a tree to afford the very tall prime minister a little dignity.” One can’t help admiring the man. •

A Very Proper Man: The Life of Tony Eggleton
By Tom Frame | Connor Court | $49.95 | 320 pages

The post One-man intelligence network appeared first on Inside Story.

Biography shouldn’t interfere with our reading of fiction, but it does. Photographs of the well-groomed author with her dark coiffure and pearls suggest that she belonged to an elite world, the New York literati who “sojourned” in Italy each summer. In 1984 this glamorous writer returned to Australia to express her disdain for the provincialism of her homeland in a series of Boyer lectures. She was probably right about the land she had left behind, and those Australians who took umbrage may have been unduly sensitive — even displaying some of the nationalism she deplored.

Given the nature of Hazzard’s public profile, Brigitta Olubas’s meticulous new account of her life, Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life, reads as a necessary corrective to prejudices about the author and her fiction. Olubas clarifies Hazzard’s association with British intelligence and the nature of her work at the United Nations, where she performed basic secretarial duties. In the way of these things, her actual experience was more complex but also more typical of clever women of the time.

Always bookish, Hazzard attended Queenwood private school on Sydney’s North Shore, where she and her older sister Valerie both thrived. But their father’s extraordinary trajectory — from orphaned child to Australian trade commissioner — gave him little sympathy for the educational aspirations of his daughters. After the second world war the sixteen-year-old Shirley left school to travel with the family to Hong Kong, where Reg Hazzard took the pre-eminent diplomatic role for Australia.

Through her father’s contacts she was employed in the office of a British military intelligence unit that had the job of monitoring the Chinese civil war. Shirley did, indeed, travel into China in a failed attempt to gather information about a British expat living in Canton (now Guangzhou).

The more significant figure in the unit was Alexis Vedeniapine, a Russian-born British officer who had grown up in Shanghai. He knew several Chinese languages and had been decorated for his heroic feats behind enemy lines in the Netherlands during the war. Although he was fifteen years older than she was, Shirley fell in love with this dynamic and cultivated man.

Olubas considers the various accounts of this relationship with sensitivity, suggesting Vedeniapine’s embarrassment at this young woman’s intense passion and his reluctant attraction to her. Within a year, though, Valerie had contracted tuberculosis. The family returned to Sydney, where Shirley’s education progressed through Miss Hale’s Secretarial College. She and Vedeniapine considered themselves engaged to marry with a view to reuniting in England once she had come of age.

Hazzard’s readers will recognise this love affair as the basis for her last novel, The Great Fire, which consigns its lovelorn heroine to the dullness of Wellington, New Zealand. Her father took the family there on his next posting, and Shirley continued writing to Alexis, now back in England and planning their future together on a farm. Until she didn’t.

Though Vedeniapine appeared committed to the relationship, Shirley must have realised that life as a farmer’s wife in Hertfordshire might be even duller than that of a typist in Sydney or Wellington. As Olubas puts it, “she simply refused to become provincial again after Hong Kong had connected her to the significant action of the world.”

Then her life opened up again. The family travelled to London, where she failed to contact Alexis, and New York, where her father had been posted. There, Shirley’s secretarial skills led to a job in the technical assistance administration section of the United Nations. Though she could never manage promotion to more senior UN positions, the work gave her the opportunity to mix with an international group of well-educated people and an insider’s view of how McCarthyism destroyed the careers of some of its most talented.

She soon became entangled in love affairs with older, married men. Olubas compares her to the Shirley MacLaine character in Billy Wilder’s The Apartment, the “lift girl” who has an affair with a senior executive, but perhaps she was more like the office girls at the sexual mercy of married men in Mad Men and romantic enough to hope for ongoing commitment. Stories such as Hazzard’s “A Place in the Country,” republished in her Collected Stories in 2020, suggest the emotional cost of these doomed relationships.

After the collapse of one such love affair, Hazzard escaped to Italy, where she worked, like Jenny in her novel The Bay of Noon, in a UN emergency force office at an airfield outside Naples. It was her first sustained encounter with her greatest love, Italy.

Naples had been partly destroyed by bombing and its people were desperately poor, but Hazzard felt privileged to be in such an ancient and resilient place. Most of all, she found solace for her broken heart in Capri, still unspoiled by tourism in those hard postwar years. Leaving Italy at the end of 1957 she wrote in her diary, “Capri saved me — dear, lovely loved place.”

UN friends organised an introduction to the Vivante family, who ran their house outside Siena as a kind of holiday retreat for artists and intellectuals. Friends made there went on to include her, in turn, in their social circles back in New York. In 1959, partly through these connections, she had her first story accepted by the New Yorker. Italy and writing had saved her from a dreary life as an office worker, and by 1962 she felt confident enough to resign from the UN.

A year later she met the widowed Francis Steegmuller at a party given by their mutual friend Muriel Spark. This middle section of Olubas’s biography is full of people Hazzard met through her New Yorker editors and friends — people like Robert Penn Warren and Eleanor Clark, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen and James Merrill, as well as musicians and artists. She was sometimes accused of name-dropping, but her friends genuinely were from the New York and British cultural elite. They satisfied her longing for high culture and good taste. She became an American citizen in 1974.

Olubas devotes a whole chapter to Francis Steegmuller’s life, explaining how he and Shirley shared relatively humble beginnings and how he had become an acclaimed expert on Flaubert as an independent researcher rather than an academic. His first wife had left him in comfortable circumstances, so he and Shirley could live in New York and visit Europe regularly. He was older and better educated than she was, continuing the pattern by which she educated herself through her relationships with men.

The last section of this long biography records her friendships, her difficult relationship with her unstable mother, her occasional irritations with her husband, her many disagreements with friends and her deliberate shunning of relatives. Olubas tells us that Hazzard, perhaps typically for a self-taught intellectual, liked to dominate conversations and display her learning.

Hazzard emerges as a sometimes naive idealist sure of her own intelligence but needing to assert her claim among those with more formal credentials. This tendency goes some way towards explaining her longstanding criticism of the United Nations, no doubt justified to a degree but a little quixotic in retrospect. Perhaps it also encouraged her to return to Australia for those Boyer lectures.

She lived the latter part of her life among American intellectuals at a time when US cultural power increasingly dominated the world. Her friends were sure of their place at its centre though they valued European civilisation as the source of their moral understanding. With Steegmuller, Hazzard participated fully in this cultural homage through their regular trips to Italy, their language studies and their writing. Olubas’s biography offers a valuable tangential perspective on this commitment to high culture by the American intelligentsia in the decades after the war.

Of course, most of us know Hazzard through her stories and novels. If we hadn’t guessed, Olubas makes clear that the early novellas, The Evening of the Holiday and The Bay of Noon, are based on Hazzard’s own experience in Italy in the 1950s. They are small gems that offer readers vicarious delight in the beauty of Italy and its vivacious people.

Most of her stories, too, observe the emotional crises of women rather like Shirley Hazzard as they negotiate often unequal relationships with men. They are quiet stories told from the point of view of rather passive women but sharpened by wry satirical observation. Hazzard always takes great care with the physical details of her fictions, and her dialogue is concise and witty. She wrote novels of sensibility, closely observing the emotional shifts in her characters as they proceed through an uncaring universe.

Though Olubas claims that The Transit of Venus is one of the great novels of the twentieth century, some readers will resist the way its author so obviously stage manages the lives of her characters. Caro Bell is another passive woman allowing herself to be carried along by the activities of more privileged men. Though Caro’s love affairs seem accidental and passionless, the novel comes alive in interludes where Hazzard gives free rein to her more satirical instincts.

The panoramic view of the daily life of the working girls of London that begins the novel’s twenty-third chapter has stayed with me since my first reading decades ago. This sharpness reveals Hazzard at her best, offering sympathy to all the intelligent women at the mercy of a system that gives pre-eminence and power to men.

Olubas shows how important Hazzard’s experiences in the immediate postwar years were to her sense of the world’s dangers, a residue of the damage she saw in Hiroshima and Naples. They clearly gave her a sense that love and life could be random and imperilled.

It is surprising, though, how much her fictions depend on memories of her early love affairs. Olubas remarks on how memory provides its own form of fiction as Hazzard transforms her affair with Vedeniapine in The Great Fire. Published in 2003, this last novel offered a kind of elegy for those who had suffered and died fifty years earlier. Despite the absence of any reference to the “phases of Australian life” (was New Zealand close enough?) it was awarded the Miles Franklin prize in a retrospective reclaiming of the novelist.

Perhaps Hazzard was most Australian in her autodidacticism, in her snobbery and commitment to good taste, and in her immense appetite for European culture and its deep history of civilisation. But she remained a citizen of the world, receiving honorary citizenship of Capri late in life.

As was the case for Henry Handel Richardson and Christina Stead, it has taken an Australian biographer to account for an international literary figure who would otherwise be overlooked in favour of her more famous British and American peers. Olubas has managed to create an engaging narrative from a wide range of sources. Best of all, she has incorporated Hazzard’s own versions of her life, both fictional and documentary, to create a character more interesting than we might have imagined. Like all good literary biographies, this one sends the reader back to its subject’s writing. Olubas’s edition of Hazzard’s stories is a good place to start. •

Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life
By Brigitta Olubas | Virago | $34.99 | 576 pages

The post With sojourns in Italy appeared first on Inside Story.

Like its model in London — the British Museum, which opened in 1759 — it was a flower of the Enlightenment. Its role was twofold: to explore, classify and exhibit the peculiar animals and plants of the Antipodes, and to document the peoples newly encountered by Europeans.

As became the notorious case for the British Museum and its counterparts in France and Germany, colonialism and settlement accompanied and aided the collecting of specimens. By the time the Australian Museum got into its stride in the second half of the nineteenth century, Voltaire’s “noble savages” had been overtaken by evolutionist attempts to rank human subspecies. As Brendan Atkins observes in his compact but panoramic new book, The Naturalist: The Remarkable Life of Allan Riverstone McCulloch, “Darwin’s theories became evil in the wrong hands, as they drew conclusions about racial superiority from bone measurements.”

Atkins’s subject is a little-remembered scientist whose brief but highly productive career covered both natural history, brilliantly, and ethnography, more controversially. McCulloch started work at the high-water mark of evolutionary theory and colonialism, and ended just as broadcast media was beginning to challenge and rival the static collections of museums.

Allan Riverstone McCulloch was the great-grandson of Scottish Radicals transported to New South Wales in 1820 for demanding universal suffrage, lucky not to be hanged and beheaded like their two leaders. The family flourished, with a grandson becoming a member of NSW parliament and a land developer, a symbiosis that continues to plague the state. McCulloch’s middle name derives from this uncle’s greatest deal, the subdivision of an estate that became a Sydney suburb.

When his uncle went bankrupt “he did what any gentleman would do in the circumstances: he fled the colony.” This left McCulloch’s widowed mother without much support for herself and her four children. At age thirteen, through family connections, Allan was placed as an unpaid cadet in the Australian Museum, apprenticed to Edgar Waite, the curator of vertebrates.

It was the start of a deep education within the museum and on expeditions with Waite around the coast, islands and waterways of Australia. McCulloch became a world-leading fish biologist and, with the help of artistic training from Julian Ashton, a superb illustrator of his specimens.

His public lectures, livened by lantern slides, were packed. The Latin tag for the Murray cod includes his name. Just before his death in 1925 he had written a script for the newly introduced radio and was using a movie camera to document wildlife on Lord Howe Island. In more modern times, he would have been a local David Attenborough.

Atkins, who trained as a zoologist himself and then, after a career as an environmental scientist on the Murray, edited the Australian Museum’s magazine, was intrigued by McCulloch’s story. Why was such a successful scientist airbrushed out of the museum’s history, snidely derided in its 150th anniversary history, and still occasionally subject to rumours he was syphilitic or a drunk sipping on his own preservation alcohol? (The latter transgression was by an earlier curator.)

The Naturalist circles towards its unhappy end in chapters focused on McCulloch’s artistry, his work on fishes and his ethnographic asides. It was in the latter, Atkins thinks, that “cracks first appear in McCulloch’s persona.” Visiting the Torres Strait Islands in 1907, he and senior colleague Charles Hedley were primarily collecting fish and shells but had also been asked to augment the museum’s collection of Indigenous artefacts.

Already, the locals were making artefacts for sale to visitors rather than for their own use. Seeking more original objects, the scientists went to a hidden grave on Nagir Island, where their delving in the dirt revealed a model of a bird made from turtle-shell plates sewn together with split cane. They smuggled it out.

Much later, in 1922, McCulloch accepted an invitation from photographer Frank Hurley to join an expedition into the remote waterways of the Papuan Gulf, Fly River and Lake Murray. One of McCulloch’s roles was to relay Hurley’s accounts of his daring exploits by Morse code to a sponsoring Sydney newspaper. Atkins recounts more dubious acquisitions, some by outright theft, others by purchase under intimidating circumstances from village elders who would not normally allow strangers to see, let alone take away, their sacred objects.

McCulloch and Hurley sent one shipment of this plunder back to the museum without the Papuan administration’s knowledge when they sailed their ketch Eureka directly to Thursday Island, an Australian territory, for repairs. A larger second shipment was impounded at the Papuan port of Daru after a missionary recounted Hurley and McCulloch’s frank admissions of their collecting methods.

An aggrieved Hurley kept up an acrimonious public correspondence with Papua’s governor, Sir Hubert Murray. But McCulloch’s notes, included in the second shipment, revealed feelings of guilt about the acquisitions. The shipment was eventually released to the museum, with a few confiscations, and Hurley gave up his protests.

McCulloch was to “take the fall for these thefts,” Atkins says. Soon after he returned to Sydney in 1923, wracked by dysentery and malaria, a fight erupted at the museum. Two powerful trustees appointed by the state government, auditor-general Frederick Coghlan and businessman Ernest Wunderlich, decided the place needed to be more popular.

They ordered the museum’s scientists to curb their expensive research and get out into the suburbs and country towns to spread their knowledge. On a pretext, they dismissed the senior-most scientist, Charles Hedley. Two eminent scientific trustees, professors Edgeworth David and William Haswell, resigned in protest, but to little avail. “Now with Hedley gone, the trustees took aim at McCulloch,” writes Atkins, “who had by default become their most senior scientist and star curator.”

In May 1924 an invitation came for McCulloch to deliver a paper at a big scientific conference in Hawaii on the Pacific’s food, agriculture and fisheries. Coghlan and other trustees voted against his attendance. It was a devastating blow to McCulloch, still reeling from illness and with his battering over the Papuan artefacts worsening his tendency to bouts of depression. After he suffered a breakdown in early 1925, he was given a year’s leave on half-pay. Respites on his beloved Lord Howe Island helped a patchy recovery.

At this point a former NSW premier, Joe Carruthers, stepped in. He was going to Hawaii, and persuaded the state government to pay half of McCulloch’s expenses to go along and attend another conference, this one focused on fisheries. 

There, McCulloch found the event still vaguely in the planning stage. But he wrote a paper, was invited to give talks, and enjoyed the company of local figures while waiting for proceedings to begin. It seemed like a turning point. A proposed Pan-Pacific institute wanted him as chief scientist. After a long bachelorhood, he had fallen in love with a woman, Jean Innes, on Lord Howe. Yet he was still disturbed in mind and unable to sleep.

In a poignant chapter, Atkins delves in great depth into the feelings of regret and self-reproach that might have deepened McCulloch’s mood swings, and reaches a tentative diagnosis of bipolar disorder, or manic depression as it used to be called.

On his death, McCulloch was lauded as a great scientist. But no church in Sydney would bury a suicide. His friends at the museum raised funds for a granite monument on Lord Howe Island’s seafront, facing the reef he had explored, and buried his ashes beneath it.

Coghlan’s arrogance in a non-museum matter got him removed from office and the museum celebrated its centenary amid reports of internal disorder. It was not until 1975 that new legislation removed outside trustees and put scientific and professional directors in charge.

Conflicting pressures of popularity and science remain. The Australian Museum is currently hoping for a record million-visitor milestone this year on the back of a Lego dinosaur exhibition and another featuring fibreglass sharks. It’s no doubt true that schools and parents are less likely to bring their kids to another exhibition showing how the land snails of Norfolk Island have been rescued. Science is now more likely to deal with the gloomy subjects of species extinction and climate change, while ethnology turns to revisionist accounts of colonialism, turning the concept of “savagery” around.

Since at least 1981, when a large timber slit-drum was returned to newly independent Vanuatu, the Australian Museum has been returning objects to traditional owners, mostly in quiet fashion. But the turtle-shell bird stolen by McCulloch and Hedley from the grave on Nagir Island is still in the collection. In June this year, in the village of Usakof on Lake Murray, I found villagers demanding the return of “powerful objects” stolen by Hurley and McCulloch from their longhouse in 1922.

The museum is now readying a new Pacific gallery to be opened next year. It would be wonderful if this could be accompanied by a more visible examination of its vast holdings of Oceanic objects, mostly in off-site storage, with objects taken in less scrupulous times identified and their disposition with their communities of origin discussed.

It would be satisfying, too, to see McCulloch’s wonderful watercolours of fish made available as prints and his surviving dioramas of sea and birdlife accorded heritage status. Yet none of the museum’s senior directors turned up to the launch of Atkins’s book, which is nonetheless a fine memorial to this outstanding Australian. •

The Naturalist: The Remarkable Life of Allan Riverstone McCulloch
By Brendan Atkins | NewSouth | $34.99 | 190 pages

The post A museum’s fall guy appeared first on Inside Story.

Jill witnessed Indonesia’s military incursions first-hand when she was part of a student delegation visiting the new nation in 1975 to celebrate its release from Portuguese colonial rule. A group of journalists covering the invasion for the Seven and Nine networks asked her about conditions at Balibo, a town on the border with Indonesian West Timor that she had just visited.

It was a bush warfare situation out there, she told them, but if they kept their heads down they should be okay. Regardless of their precautions, though, all five journalists in the group were murdered by members of the Indonesian military and became known as the Balibo Five. Journalist Roger East, who was sent to investigate their deaths, was also executed.

Jill — who died in Melbourne on 2 December aged seventy-seven — began doggedly and dangerously seeking the truth about the murders and reporting on conditions more broadly in Timor-Leste. She spent twenty years in Portugal working with the Timorese resistance-in-exile and making secret visits to the island (from which she was banned by the Indonesian government). On one occasion she was captured and briefly imprisoned. Her determination to keep the story alive often met with media indifference and Australian government attempts to play down a complex geopolitical situation.

Her first book, East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism, was published in 1978, three years after Indonesia’s invasion, and her 2001 study, Cover-Up, became the basis of the highly regarded feature film Balibo in 2009.

Timor-Leste regained its independence after much bloodshed in 2002. By then, Jill had set up the Living Memory Project, which recorded the testimonies of former political prisoners and victims of torture. Her reporting also played a crucial part at the 2007 NSW coroner’s enquiry into one of the murders, which finally established the role of the Indonesian military in all the journalists’ deaths.

“I was told recently that my coverage of the Balibo story was what really alerted people to the East Timor issue and that began it all,” Jill said in a documentary we made together for ABC Radio National in 2017. “I felt proud of that… An injustice is an injustice and it doesn’t change with time and people need to be brought to account.”

After moving back to Australia in 1999, Jill lived in Darwin and then Melbourne, where she wrote Finding Santana (2010) about her secret return to Timor-Leste for a rendezvous with guerilla leader Nino Konis Santana. But her last book, published in 2014, was quite different.

Run for Your Life covered her unhappy childhood with outwardly respectable but violent adoptive parents in the Victorian seaside town of Barwon Heads, and her political awakening at Monash University. Her well-honed sense of rebellion made her a natural for membership of the radical Monash University Labor Club, and her achievements included disrupting a Billy Graham evangelical gathering and being one of the only female speakers at Melbourne’s 1970 anti–Vietnam war march. She also ran a feminist bookshop — Alice’s Restaurant — in Greville Street, Prahran, and helped found an early feminist magazine, Vashti’s Voice.

Jill found out later that her adoptive mother had dobbed her in to ASIO for subversive activities. When she gained access to her file she was amazed and amused by its size.

It was only when she reached her sixties that Jill decided to risk finding out about her birth parents, and that story too is covered in Run for Your Life. To her relief (and with a great degree of trepidation) she discovered that her mother was still alive and willing to meet. “I’ve thought about you every day” were the first words she said to Jill when they spoke by phone.

Having known Jill since her return from Portugal I was honoured to be asked to drive her to the rendezvous with her mother at an anonymous bus stop in a northern suburb in 2013. The woman we saw walking briskly towards us was remarkably like Jill, with her short crop and outfit of baggy trousers, loose shirt and small beaded necklace. Given the age gap was only fifteen years, she could have been Jill’s older sister.

The hug they shared was their first bodily contact in sixty-eight years. They quickly established how much they had in common: both were atheists, passionate about history and politics, and fiercely independent. As Jill said at the time, “I think we shared more than a few genes.”

Although her mother died two years later, the reunion was profoundly healing for both of them.

Jill was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at the end of 2016. It was a particularly cruel diagnosis for a woman whose life had been spent travelling and uncovering truths in very dark corners of the world, and she took it badly.

In the radio documentary about her life, we covered her medical diagnosis and its ramifications, which included severely curtailed freedoms.

As she commented rather bitterly, “People say that my capacity to cope with [dementia] is very limited but I don’t see it that way, because I have spent most of my life as a foreign correspondent and I’ve been under fire from the Indonesian army and from the American air force and I’ve come up against quite hair-raising situations; I’ve survived all of these, some people might say through my rat cunning.”

Jolliffe was nuggetty, cynical, sometimes ornery but also generous, witty and fiercely principled. She was also a very fine journalist and, for the people of Timor-Leste, a hero.

One of many fine tributes to her came from Timorese leader Xanana Gusmão: “Jill was an activist, a rebel and a fighter. At great cost to herself, she persistently exposed the reality of the Indonesian military occupation of Timor-Leste and supported the struggle of our people. She is one of us.” •

The post Running for her life appeared first on Inside Story.

Full disclosure: like Private Neville White, I began PhD fieldwork as a mature age anthropology student in a remote Arnhem Land community in the 1970s. Unlike White, I was studying social rather than physical anthropology. White gave up his research in favour of providing financial and practical help to a Yolngu community at Donydji. I continued research with Rembarrnga people around Bulman and in the archives.

What keeps me connected to Arnhem Land are friendships that are indistinguishable from family ties, as well as an ongoing interest in the way conditions there are being “developed” by the peculiar, problematic governmental processes that also intrigue the author of this rather baffling book. Arnhem Land is indeed Another Country, as David Gulpilil says in the film of that name.

The Passion of Private White opens in 2005 with Watson’s first arrival at Nhulunbuy, a town on the Gove Peninsula, where he is met by his old friend Neville White. This, he says, is “mining, hunting, and fishing country, and Aboriginal country, so it is also Toyota HiLux country.” The cafe–store is named Captain Cook, a hint of the casual racism that pervades Australia’s remote mining towns.

Watson introduces Tom, Neville White’s main Yolngu friend, as “the senior man” at Donydji, one of many scattered outstations in the Arnhem Land bush and the main site of White’s efforts. He smiles at Watson and climbs into the HiLux beside him. Tom has “only a few words of English,” which made me wonder whether either Watson or White spoke Kriol. After several hours’ drive on the dirt track that is also the Central Arnhem Highway, they reach the outstation.

From the start Watson interweaves his own experiences with accounts of White’s past and present projects, and with fragments of history — Yolngu contact with Makassans and missionaries, the depredations of pastoralists and police — as well as more recent events and scattered quotations from anthropologists (on one page, fifteen are named). The narration is confident, as if the past is settled and known and the present readily understood, but Watson’s diary-like depiction of events and his speculations and evaluations reflect balanda (whitefella) common sense. His stories of White’s efforts are those of a surprised stranger revealing Australians’ colonising passions. The practices and priorities of the colonised remain obscure.

Chapter two provides harrowing details of Neville White’s Vietnam experiences. While critical of the war, he didn’t refuse the call-up and in Vietnam found himself engaged in hideous combat and moral dilemmas that haunt him to this day. Bitter experiences upon his return added damage to body and soul, now evident in PTSD.

White attended university after his tour of duty, eventually undertaking doctoral fieldwork using biological methods and oral histories to ascertain facts about population flows in the deep past. He collected fingerprints and blood samples from 2360 people, and “walked the country,” covering large areas with local guides and informants. His research was applauded in the academy and published extensively. Now, decades later, local rangers are able to rely on his maps.

Gradually, his academic work gave way to a passion for helping. Decades after receiving his doctorate he continues to visit Donydji, building houses, toilets, a school and a workshop, installing water pumps and solar panels and providing equipment, often using money he raises in Melbourne. We are not told of requests from the Donydji residents nor of any negotiation about what is built, or where or when.

White found the work therapeutic and recruited Vietnam vet mates who make short visits, camping separately from the community and working efficiently from dawn to dusk. When Watson first visits, a contractor is building a school with the help of Neville’s volunteers from Melbourne. A few Yolngu participate but most appear as passive observers of White’s projects. There is no mention of whether these strangers, or Watson himself, are properly introduced to Country.

When they arrive at Donydji, Watson sees half a dozen houses, an airstrip, and about eighty Yolngu whom he cannot communicate with. They unload supplies at the various camps. With Rotary funds White has built a workshop that houses vehicles and equipment to enable young men to “learn the trade and make an independent living” as mechanics, although there is no working economy here. Watson later describes the amazing skill of one Yolngu bush mechanic, but as shown in the Walpiri film Bush Mechanics, such skills are usually deployed locally and voluntarily. Donydji women garner sustenance from the bush, men shoot and butcher buffalo, and fish are caught in a distant river. Demanding and dangerous bush expeditions reveal beautiful dramatic country, but its meaning to Yolngu is touched on only briefly.

Tom is Neville White’s close friend and trusted informant at Donydji and authorises White’s activities. Tom tells White that Tom’s authority and plans are being threatened by a Yolngu man known here as Cowboy, who wants to establish a cattle station in the area. We are told that Cowboy is an illegitimate interloper whose plan is a threat to traditions rather than a possibly viable enterprise that could provide an income. Later, though, Cowboy’s presence at Donydji is treated as legitimate. White and the author appear unaware that lengthy negotiations over competing claims and plans are typical of Yolngu politics. The anthropologist Les Hiatt’s film Waiting for Harry illustrates such a process.

Arnhem Land, an area of 97,000 square kilometres, was designated an Aboriginal Reserve in 1931 after a century of intermittent, violent intrusions. Several pastoral and mining ventures had failed, and many and varied missions established. When bauxite was discovered at Gove in the 1960s, the government ignored the reserve’s status and the Yolngu protests and allowed a large mine, refinery and town to be established.

Since the 1970s the federal government has supplied modest funding for outstations to enable a “return to Country” from missions and towns. Outstations like Donydji rely on government support and services that are often appallingly unreliable and inadequate, as we see in Watson’s later chapters. One small but telling example involves the Donydji teacher, who is employed three days a week but spends two of those days travelling.

It is government incompetence that energises White’s work, along with his determination to provide what he sees as necessities. Yolngu live largely outside during the dry season, but houses have become necessary as they have accumulated possessions. In balanda eyes the buildings are the very core of community life, more important than the service and shelter they supply.

Neville White is engaged in a sort of “borderwork,” a term anthropologist Barry Morris coined for work at the interface of the cultural worlds of Indigenous people and Europeans — also known as Yolngu and balanda, natives and settlers, blackfellas and whitefellas, or “them” and “us.” Neville White is intent on improving things in this “remote Indigenous community,” a concept that was cruelly pathologised in the national imagination when the NT Intervention was launched in 2007.

I admired Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart (2002), a kind of ethnography of the cultural realm that politicians create and inhabit in Canberra. Watson understood that setting well and could assume readers’ knowledge of how Australia’s political system works.

He is less comfortable in Arnhem Land. His broader erudition is clear from a multitude of quotations and aphorisms from dozens of local and international anthropologists, along with citations of intellectuals from Lucretius to Simone Weil and Sontag, Sophocles to Hume and Camus, and of the Bible. I wondered if he was offering readers alternatives to his own ambivalence about White’s quixotic efforts. Or was he excusing his own bafflement, which is partly a consequence of his inability to communicate with Yolngu residents?

Watson makes several more visits to Donydji with White, describing several individual veterans and relating numerous exciting, surprising or humorous events. White’s work includes training Yolngu men in building and mechanical skills, but his efforts are up against floods, droughts, distances and wild animals. A septic tank floods, a badly installed generator fails, solar panels cease to work. Government stuff-ups cause further frustrations.

Cooperation seems to be lacking from those White believes he is helping, as evident in an apparent carelessness with the things he has supplied for community use. Expensive new tools are locked in the workshop, but returning from Melbourne White finds the lock broken and tools scattered or lost. He describes this as a break-in, ransacking and stealing. But the workshop was intended for community use, and it turns out that there was a desperate need to repair a vehicle. Most of the equipment is retrieved.

When a house is damaged White tries to shame the owner, saying the house was bought with money he collected in Melbourne. The offended owner responds, “Your money; my house.” White and Watson seem oblivious to this clue to a different system of ownership, responsibility and authority.

Bafflement is not surprising in the face of a traditional society organised in ways fundamentally at odds with those of Europeans. There are other clues to these balandas’ misunderstanding of Yolngu social structure. When Watson says White was “granted the name Balang” and, later, that balang means brother, he shows a common confusion about the everyday language of kinship. Personal names are private and not used as English names are. A “skin name” like balang refers to one of the eight categories that position everyone within a system of relationships Yolngu absorb in infancy. Because I became ngaritjan, my husband became balang, and my children gamarang and gamayn.

Everyone is enfolded within this system and everyone is family. Some are close, others distant, and their roles carry specific but not necessarily strict obligations and expectations. English terms such as brother, mother and cousin mean quite different things here. Concerns are all personal but not individualistic, meaning that an impersonal “community interest” is often absent. Moreover, one does not interfere with others, something “we” balanda do constantly with our opinions and judgements.

Watson is not to blame for misunderstanding Yolngu naming practices and interpersonal manners and protocols that are quite different from those of English speakers. Like an unfamiliar language, they can be learned only with experience.

Similarly, the frequent mention of clans, language groups and owners of Country shows understandable confusion; these are matters of multiple, cross-cutting and often disputed rights and obligations, making the term owner inappropriate. Attachment and responsibility for Country are more useful terms, and these are linked to positions in the kinship system. Shared and competing obligations — to mothers’ country or to fathers’ country — are expressed in the roles taken in the major ceremonies. These are negotiated over extensive periods, and particular individuals’ responsibilities are never settled once and for all. I claim no special expertise in these matters, but their significance and meaning in everyday social interaction becomes apparent in any sustained participation in Yolngu community life.

It was not inaccuracies in Watson’s account but the constantly implied sense of “our” normality that kept me on edge. Watson’s own view of what he is observing is both elusive and intrusive. Early in the book, while trying to describe rather than analyse what is going on, Watson notes White’s zealotry, commenting on his “characteristic short, rapid strides: the driven soul’s indifference to anyone else’s capacities or inclinations.” I was reminded of the self-important way the manager hurried around the Bulman community and the concealed mirth it evoked among Rembarrnga women. They recognised his pedagogic intent as they sat around the fire, but were far too kind to let him know. Women’s “domestic” and “social” work was invisible to him. Private White, too, appears to largely ignore the women, at least until one throws a spear at him, skilfully missing.

Watson’s comments on Yolngu character and behaviour can seem presumptuous. As such descriptions unquestioningly accrue, Watson inadvertently endorses the familiar view that traditional Yolngu practices are no longer appropriate in contemporary conditions.

Yet we can thank him for illustrating the profound contradiction within Australian public discourses; we are urged to celebrate “the oldest culture in the world” while refusing respect to those who carry its original form. In the name of “equal human rights,” Indigenous peoples are being induced to accept the authority of outsiders with their mysterious access to apparently limitless resources. The sophisticated Yolngu system of order and authority, achieved through everyday interpersonal negotiations between people related in embedded, normative ways, is invisible to colonisers.

Later in the book White announces plans for an elected council, with a general manager, an administrator and other positions. Tom accepts these strange ideas and asks White to write an agreement. Tom doesn’t speak or read English, but recognises that writing carries authority. When Watson and White return, though, they find “grass and weeds… halfway up the red, yellow, and blue plastic slide in front of the new school” and Watson says that Donydji is “slipping between Chaos and Eden.”

“Weeds”! Here we see a link between aesthetic, moral and political judgements. Watson’s renderings are morally ambiguous, but his comments on Yolngu attitudes often struck me as misperceptions, perhaps based on White’s understandable frustrations. It is difficult for balanda to respect people who appear to resist the hard work we do for them. But look closer and we see that our insistent concern interferes with Yolngu’s own ways of adjusting to colonised conditions and the strange, intrusive habits of outsiders.

Watson’s dry wit and clever, often ironic phrasing are born of his interest in Private White’s passion rather than his own experiences in Arnhem Land. He wisely limits his explanations and judgements of Yolngu; those he does offer can be disturbing. In the wake of the workshop destruction, he says: “Nothing so grieves a balanda — especially, perhaps, a balanda army veteran — as the casual anarchy and selfishness the [Yolngu] philosophy allows” (my emphasis).

What Watson and presumably White judge as “casual anarchy and selfishness” is better understood as a deeply held belief in individual autonomy, often expressed as “I am boss for myself.” Yolngu people don’t moralise, instruct or interfere with each other in ways familiar and normal among balanda. Nor do they expect interference and instruction, especially from people from elsewhere. Yolngu communal enterprises require careful suggestions and inducement rather than taken-for-granted cooperation or attention to “time constraints.”

The anthropologist Kenneth Maddock described the Aboriginal polity as “a kind of anarchy, in which it was open to active and enterprising men to obtain some degree of influence with age, but in which none were sovereign.” And Hiatt wrote that “few peoples can have placed higher value on altruism and mutual aid than the Aborigines of Australia. The genius of the Australian polity lay in its deployment of the goodwill inherent in kinship as a central principle… Government in these circumstances is otiose.”

Thus, the affront to Yolngu is profound when balanda take it upon themselves to assume authority in Yolngu country. Even as Private White tries to rectify government incompetence he embodies the common sense of the Australian state. Yolngu’s slow and subtle ways of practising politics are frequently interrupted by urgent and arrogant balanda intrusions. But balanda are unavoidable and Yolngu are dependent. The uncomfortable modus vivendi can be seen as an ongoing struggle between cultural norms.

Don Watson is a gifted writer, but his casual wit, irony and poetic style in telling of White’s heroic efforts fail to recognise that Yolngu do things very differently. Their different language and different conceptual framework are up against implacable, pervasive change that some try to embrace and others resist. Even their practical, everyday knowledge of the bush is challenged by balanda equipment and desire for comfort, arrogantly displayed as if unambiguously superior.

An anthropological maxim is relevant here: we are particular, not universal human beings. Our impulsive judgements as well as our deepest convictions are context-bound, cultural, shaped by the social world we assume to be normal, even natural. In other human worlds a different normality exists. The perceptive reader will find much to ponder in Watson’s book. •

The Passion of Private White
By Don Watson | Scribner Australia | $49.99 | 336 pages

The post Ambivalent in Arnhem Land appeared first on Inside Story.

It is a brave act, then, to see ourselves as Indigenous authors and researchers responsible for telling histories from a first-person perspective, and to radically decolonise that writing by others. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, the Ngāti Awa and Ngāti Porou godmother of Indigenous methodologies, forged these two powerful Indigenous methodologies and taught us that our voices need to “talk back to” and “talk up to” research. The academic drive to speak for and about us through a Western cultural lens is starting to be deeply interrogated and increasingly found unhealthy.

In Tasmania, the need for local Aboriginal voices to “talk back to” those who profit from our dead, our dispossession and our trauma is imperative. When the strangers in the boats appeared on our trouwunna shores in 1803 to claim our country — by any means — in the name of a faraway British Empire, they really meant it.

In less than thirty years our plentiful peoples were reduced to a handful by planned massacres and declared war, theft and slavery of women and children, and the impact of being treated as less than human. By 1876, with the death of our countrywoman Trucanini, we were subject to mythical extinction, extirpation and elimination.

Yet we did survive after 1876. We survived in the pockets and shadows of colonial Tasmania to raise families and communities. We survived in out-of-the-way places like Flinders Island in the Bass Strait, and in the middle of townships like Latrobe in the northwest.

Among these survivors, one amazing family was never far from the colonial capital city of Hobart — the family of the matriarch Fanny Cochrane Smith. Fanny, who died in 1905, was the ultimate survivor of the abuse that the colonisers so freely gave in return for taking our lands. Now, one of her great-great-grandchildren, Joel Birnie, has decided to tell her history, and his family story, of surviving colonisation.

Joel’s reclamation of important ancestral and familial women in My People’s Songs: How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania is a shockingly rare example of a Tasmanian Aboriginal history told through the research of a Tasmanian Aboriginal person. From the narratives of others, he retrieves Fanny, her sister Mary Ann Arthur and their mother Tarenootairer — women who shaped colonial moments and spoke their own truths even while captive and exploited — and returns them to Country and power.

Joel offers readers hospitality to join him on his family’s journey. His introductory section regenerates the “Song of Welcome” that Fanny recorded on a phonograph in 1903. From there he returns to the first years of the damnation wrought on our people, when Joel’s many-times grandmother Tarenootairer was stolen as a young girl for slavery, her life thereafter shadowed by the evil that men did to her as a chattel. By creating her own family, Tarenootairer is one of the only women to have create generations that survived the colonial genocide.

Joel restores one daughter, Mary Ann, from the periphery to her rightful place as a central figure in the first Australian call for recognition of land and sovereign rights in 1846. While her death in 1871 was a solitary and degraded affair, her afterlife now becomes rich with heroic dimensions of meaning and survivorship.

Mary Ann was able to use her “educational instruction” to talk back to the colonisers through her letters, and to leave a legacy of women’s advocacy as a natural way of being Tasmanian Aboriginal. Joel follows in her footsteps, for in his writing he too talks up and back and recovers the space to write and speak, in reshaping both Mary Ann’s legacy and his own as an Indigenous academic.

Tarenootairer’s younger daughter, Fanny Cochrane Smith, while suffering the same kinds of degradation as her sister in early childhood — stripped, whipped and tied to a kitchen table, locked in a crate, separated from her mother to be housed in an “orphan” school — veers away from Mary Ann’s organised marriage and childlessness to become an eminent member of colonial Tasmanian society.

Fanny’s reputation and standing as an “industrious” Christian and an Aboriginal woman meant she lived apart as one of the first Tasmanian women to be given a land grant south of Hobart. Parliament debated the paradox of granting land to a recognised Aboriginal woman when the colonial government, vociferously defending their extermination of Tasmanian Aboriginal people, could not acknowledge what she was known for.

All three women lived lives of hardship and poverty. They were all under an intense colonial gaze, though neglected in every other way, but Joel is able to emblazon the spaces where they resisted colonisation. He shows us Tarenootairer laughing, smoking and sharing her life with a group of kinship women in the mission gulags of Wybalena and Oyster Cove, privately communicating in ways that cannot be known by the colonisers, and yet out in the open as a resistance taunt.

He shows us Mary Ann’s feverish writing at her desk, her contributions to political discussions led by the men, and her absolute care for her younger sister Fanny, all hard fought for, on her terms and in defence of her right to belong to Country as a free woman. He shows us Fanny and her husband, newly married, opening a boarding house in Hobart that became a refuge for her family and others, a place where she gave privacy and comfort to our peoples outside the colonial gaze.

In every way, these three women, while subject to deprivations, survived on their own terms to poke back just a little bit.

Joel’s work is an exceptional piece of accessible and vivid writing that smashes the colonial, racist depictions and brings to the surface stubborn, vital Tasmanian Aboriginal women. He has given back to Tasmanian Aboriginal communities a story of ourselves and a template of how we might proceed to think of other men and women who need to be reclaimed.

A small quibble is that the book is written as a third-person narrative of “them” and “theirs,” even when these women are his family. It is disconcerting to read — a reminder of the unconscious adoption of the academy that displaces Indigenous peoples into the “you” not “us,” but this speaks to the infancy of an industry of Indigenous authors and academics within Western spaces rather than a deficit within us. Our minds were conditioned all that time ago, when the boats came and the strangers took our lands, a reckoning that Linda Tuhiwai Smith suggests is still ongoing; but at least we now have a way to proceed to untangle the colonial from the Indigenous and to tell our stories.

My People’s Songs is a book that should evoke pride in Tasmanian Aboriginal people, helping us see ourselves and speak to the courage of our survival. It may not be joyous to read of the horrors of what happened to us, but in Joel’s decolonising of the old narratives we find a space to simply be, to breathe easy in having confirmed what we already knew — we come from warriors, we protect fiercely what we love, and we will always be strong Tasmanian Aboriginal peoples. •

My People’s Songs: How an Indigenous Family Survived Colonial Tasmania
By Joel Stephen Birnie | Monash University Publishing | $34.95 | 256 pages

The post The matriarchs appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite the misgivings of professional historians, this quest for understanding — the hope that we can learn from history — is indeed one of the reasons why historical works continue to attract readers well beyond academe.

Philosophers have long debated the question of agency and constraint, and Kershaw’s introduction is a clear-sighted guide. For determinists, leaders are driven by passions and hindered by their location and time, the consequences of their actions building up into processes and systems no individual controls. For romantics, at the other extreme, history is made by “great people” (or, mostly, “great men”) who shape events with vision and willpower.

In any polarised debate, there’s a golden middle. Remarkably, here it was formulated by a radical: Karl Marx. From a determinist starting point, he tried to make sense of how, at certain historical moments, individuals can prove decisive. He distilled this insight in a statement that has become something of a platitude: people make history, but they make it under conditions they neither created nor fully control.

Kershaw is a historian, not a philosopher. And historians can’t say in the abstract whether a person can “make history.” It depends on context. Certain situations and certain institutional arrangements lend themselves more to romantic-looking action, while others might constrain even the most headstrong and visionary individual. Power, of course, plays a role here: it’s the ability to make others do as you please. If you are in a position of power, your decisions — good or bad — tend to have more of an impact than if you are not.

Even among political leaders, though, circumstances matter: the domestic and international context, the problems needing to be solved and the means available to do so, and whether or not they are lucky. Some contexts will allow the leader’s personality to have a massive impact; others will not. And a strong personality’s impact on the course of events can be altogether different from their long-term legacy.

The two extreme cases in Kershaw’s sample are Yugoslav dictator Josip Broz Tito and German chancellor Helmut Kohl. Tito clearly impressed Kershaw. He appears larger than life on these pages: a man of strong intellect, physical and political bravery, expansive sexual appetites, brutality, callousness and charm. Able to suffer stoically during the war, he embraced the good life once he could: this was partisan leader turned head of a communist nation who liked to cruise the world on his private yacht.

Contradictory as Tito was, he was the ultimate example of a charismatic leader: without him, the Yugoslav partisans could not have done the incredible and defeated the German occupiers with only minor outside help, a unique achievement during the second world war. Without Tito, likewise, communist Yugoslavia could not have stayed out of the Soviet orbit after 1945, taking a leading role in the movement of non-aligned states during the cold war. And without Tito, Yugoslavia, that somewhat artificial creation of the aftermath of the first world war — neither a nation-state nor an empire — would have disintegrated long before it did.

At the other end of the spectrum is Kohl, German chancellor for an incredible decade and a half, 1982–98. Something of an unimaginative nonentity, he was often clumsy on the world stage and entirely lacking in vision beyond what he could see from his reserved table in his local pub, where he would talk to his cronies and eat the most ghastly of all German dishes, Saumagen. The butt of jokes by the German intelligentsia throughout his years in power, his ordinariness was what attracted many voters: this was a dull country longing for stability rather than excitement.

To his credit, Kohl was a far cry from the neoliberal disruptors in Britain, Australia and the United States. His government reacted to the same crisis of postwar welfare capitalism that brought Margaret Thatcher to power by adjusting the welfare state rather than destroying it.

Had Kohl resigned in 1988, he would have been no more than a footnote in the history books: in Kershaw’s words, “an entirely unexceptional democratic leader.” But then came 1989, the year the crisis erupted in Eastern Europe and the Soviet empire imploded. The wall dividing East and West Germany, that concrete symbol of the cold war division of Europe, came down and Germans celebrated on its ruins the reunification with their cousins on the other side.

Kohl had little to do with these stunning developments. Propelled by events, though, he took the initiative. His somewhat dull personality proved useful in establishing good relations with world leaders: he was the personification of a Germany that was too interested in local cuisine and a quiet life in the provinces to threaten Europe ever again. He became the “chancellor of unity,” a major figure in the history books with a legacy even his later entanglement in a corruption scandal could not blemish.

Ironically, then, the type of person the romantics would champion as a genius, Tito, has left no legacy. Not only does communism no longer exist; Yugoslavia has gone too. Meanwhile, a nonentity interested in little beyond maintaining power left a united Germany within a still relatively united Europe.

Tito and Kohl are only two of the twelve leaders Kershaw explores. He begins with Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin, then shifts to Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, and Konrad Adenauer before exploring the lives of Francisco Franco, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Each chapter is informed by the latest historiography and provides a sure-footed and balanced interpretation. Anybody who wants a quick, readable and well-informed introduction to the life and legacy of any of Kershaw’s twelve protagonists can reach for Personality and Power. Anybody who wants a well-constructed political history of Europe in the twentieth century can read the book cover to cover, as Kershaw skilfully links his narratives with a thread of themes and findings.

As a history of Europe, this is “history from above,” the kind of history social and cultural historians have rebelled against since the 1960s. These critics have condemned the writing of history as a chronicle of the actions of “pale males” in positions of power. Is Kershaw suggesting we resume ignoring women, people of colour, and common folk? No, he is not. His focus is certainly on those in power, and most of his case studies are of men. And all of them would be regarded as “white.”

But this is not a book about “great men who make history.” Kershaw is dismissive of the entire idea of “greatness,” an analytically vacuous and politically dubious concept. The reason most of his actors are male and white is because, in twentieth-century Europe, Margaret Thatcher was one of very few women who made it to the top of a country’s power structure, and only recently could people of colour make political careers in that part of the world.

Moreover, Kershaw’s analysis is rooted in a deeply understood social and cultural history of Europe. He explores the lives of leaders who emerged from and remained embedded in the societies they led. This history of (not so) great men thus combines social and political history in a genre Kershaw helped shape with his pioneering two-volume study of Hitler, published in 1998 and 2000.

Some of the social history that shapes Personality and Power is couched in somewhat old-fashioned language, particularly the hazy concept of “modernisation,” a shorthand for all those larger social forces beyond the control of any one individual. Lenin’s family, we learn, supported “modernising reforms that would make Russia more like the more enlightened societies of western Europe.” Did they mean the same thing as Lenin’s successors, who fought over “the question of how quickly the Soviet Union should modernise”? Or Adenauer, who as lord mayor of Cologne during the Weimar years “introduced modernising improvements to the amenities of Cologne”?

A little later, Mussolini struggled with the “inadequate modernisation” of Italy’s armed forces, while Hitler oversaw “economic modernisation” only in the armaments industry. De Gaulle was unable “to bend to his brand of authoritarianism the forces of modernisation… which were coursing through France and the rest of Europe in the 1960s.” Likewise, in Spain, “modernisation increasingly showed Franco and his regime to be obsolete leftovers from a bygone age” and, later, “the forces of modernisation were overtaking the outmoded authoritarianism of the system.”

In 1970s Britain, meanwhile, “the spread of global modernisation” meant that other countries had caught up with Britain’s level of development, leading to a perception of decline. In the Soviet Union “the economy had to be modernised,” a fate that also befell “German conservatism” under Kohl.

What does any of this mean? It’s clear enough what “technological modernisation” entails — the embrace of newer and better cars, tanks, can openers and telephones. But what is political, social or cultural modernisation? Here the word simply stands for “change,” often with the implicit meaning of “change for the better.”

“Modernisation theory,” once popular among non-Marxist social scientists and historians, was a way to talk about directed change without having to embrace Marxian principles. But the premise of this framework has undergone rather severe critique since the 1970s and it’s somewhat baffling to find it in the writings of a historian as sophisticated as Kershaw.

The absurdity of the concept can be illustrated by applying it to recent political developments. Has Donald Trump “modernised” US politics, for example? His popularity was founded on his status as a TV celebrity — “modern,” no doubt — and his campaigning and even governing (if that is the right word) relied heavily on Twitter — also very “modern.” Hence, should we call him a “moderniser”? Or was his undermining of democratic governance and even the very concept of truth a “de-modernisation”?

The other somewhat old-fashioned aspect of this book is its Eurocentrism. This is a history of personality and power in twentieth-century Europe rather than the wider world. This constraint is regrettable because readers would have benefited if Kershaw had more widely applied his judgements and ability to carefully synthesise the historiography. A chapter on Mao, for example, would have been enlightening, as would one on Indira Gandhi. This would also have made the book more useful for the undergraduate classroom, as political history today is more likely to be taught in a world-historical frame than a European one.

What, then, can we “learn” from this history? Kershaw tries to distil his conclusions into a series of seven propositions. They appear a bit clumsy, a somewhat pedestrian form of social science, and stand in sharp contrast to the sure-footed and well-written interpretations of the twelve individuals.

More powerful is his own personal preference, stated early in the book: “I would be happy to avoid ‘charismatic’ personalities altogether in favour of leaders who, if less colourful, can offer competent, effective governance based on collective deliberation and well-founded, rational decisions aimed at improving the lives of all citizens.” But, as his book shows, circumstance can throw such leaders into situations where they will have to act in less deliberative, quasi-dictatorial ways. And it is in these circumstances that their personal qualities will matter most. Hence, we should all worry about those who lead us.

In ordinary circumstances, personal qualities might not matter much; in extraordinary circumstances (pandemics, wars, natural disasters), they do. •

Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe
By Ian Kershaw | Allen Lane | $55 | 512 pages

The post Do leaders matter? appeared first on Inside Story.

As is often noted, this small Asian country — a country that most Australian conscripts had never heard of before they were drafted — was the target of three times the tonnage of bombs dropped during the second world war. The exact figure varies, though not significantly, and the bombing was just a part of it. The land was heavily drenched and its people poisoned by the chemical defoliant Agent Orange.

Note, too, the word “conscript.” After Vietnam there were no more conscripts, and both the books, each in its way, tell us why. Though they come to the subject from different angles, reading them together is like entering a long-overdue discussion about an ugly yet largely forgotten war, the painful reverberations of which extend to this day.

Bronwyn Rennex is the daughter of a man she scarcely knew, a man who was sent to Vietnam in 1965 when she was only a year old. Fifteen when he died in 1980, she noted in her schoolgirl diary: “Everyones really upset. I was crying all night. He died of a heart attack about 1/4 past 12 last night.” Now a woman in her fifties, an artist, curator, former part-owner of a Sydney gallery, she documents her search for the cause of his death at fifty-two and her inability to reach him when he was alive.

Life with Birds: A Suburban Lyric is also a record, as its subtitle suggests, of a kind of suburban life that has passed from contemporary reckoning. There’s the modest house set on a reasonable-sized block on the city fringes. There’s the male breadwinner and the mother who looks after the house and three daughters.

But there’s also an embroidered green silk coat that Bronwyn, the youngest, and her two older sisters think is a kimono, though the father had sent it from Vietnam. “Coming from the suburb of North Ryde — a land of wood panelling, beige carpets and wall units filled with clown statues and crystal trinkets — the coat didn’t just seem from another place, it was from another planet.”

By the time her father returned, Bronwyn was four, old enough to pretend to be a dog, “growling and tearing at the bottom of his trousers with my teeth, while he tried to hug Mum.” She didn’t think much of this stranger, and a stranger he largely remained.

John Rennex’s early death was not just a shock but also placed a great strain on his widow. At one level, though, she must also have been relieved. In the letter Elsie Rennex wrote to the veteran affairs department in pursuit of a war widow’s pension, she claims that her husband had once been “a loving outgoing type of person” but after his service “the close communicative relationship we enjoyed before his departure had changed considerably, he became quite withdrawn, he refused absolutely to speak of his term in Vietnam, and our everyday problems were left for me to resolve.”

He couldn’t sleep, took to smoking heavily and developed a persistent cough. Despite a doctor’s warning, he kept smoking. He had pains in his arms and was treated for rheumatism instead of the heart condition ticking away like a bomb. Elsie leaves it to her last paragraph to explain the reason for her request for help: “I still have two daughters dependent on me.”

She never got her pension. The repatriation board found no direct connection between John Rennex’s service and his death. He was overweight and smoked too much: end of story. Her pursuit of a pension is a biting illustration of the Kafkaesque maze she had to contend with, as her daughters did later.

Years down the track, after finally locating the relevant section of the veteran affairs department, Bronwyn requested a photocopy of her mother’s letter, eventually receiving one with the bottom chopped off. Asking about the missing lines, she was informed by a department office that the original was foolscap and they only had an A4 printer. She then asked why they couldn’t print the letter out on two pages. The second page would only have two lines on it, came the reply. Was she exasperated? Was she angry? Of course she was. My head spun just reading about it.

Yet Life with Birds is a beautiful poem of a book. I’ve given you the bones but little of its spirit, which is lyrical and quirky, if laced with piercing irony. Accompanying the text we have the author’s photographs, mostly underexposed and blurred, mimetic of Rennex’s defective memory of her early years and her long, slow awakening to her father’s story.

Like a Greek chorus, they offer a running commentary on the action. With few exceptions, only the reproduced documents are sharp enough to determine: the girlish diary pages, some army report sheets, a curious photo of a delayed christening with the tops of the heads missing (perhaps reiterating the missing lines in the departmental photocopy?).

So why the birds — creatures already so pregnant with symbolic import that they resist simplistic interpretation here? Birds crop up in songs and poems quoted, and they are resonant in the author’s own flying back and forth overseas. Home again after her mother’s death, she finds a myna bird trapped in the garage while hunting for her things stored there. The dehydrated bird is given water and released, but takes its time remembering how to fly. “Do birds have knees?” is the kind of question Rennex is prone to ask.

Life with Birds is both an idiosyncratic and a resolutely personal book. Its focus is on one family but the circle of its light spreads further.

As we 1970s feminists repeatedly insisted, the personal is political. These three explosive words became the movement’s central tenet as well as its most effective slogan. Nothing illustrates this more than Biff Ward’s The Third Chopstick, a book of great breadth and depth that answers many of Rennex’s questions yet is every bit as personal.

Here I must mention that Biff is a friend of mine, and that we met through Canberra Women’s Liberation. We both appear in Brazen Hussies, the award-winning documentary of the 1970s women’s movement released in 2020 and later screened on ABC TV.

All this is to say that we go well back, and one of the many things that struck me when reading Biff’s book alongside Life with Birds is that both of us are old enough now to be Bronwyn Rennex’s mother. Indeed we both have daughters around her age, neither of whom were left in the dark about Vietnam.

Though they had little choice in the matter, our girls were exposed to the radical movements of the day, for the war John Rennex went to was the one we vehemently protested. Our vocal, passionate opposition was the crucible in which grievances that had simmered through the fifties boiled to bursting point in the sixties.

The Third Chopstick’s first chapter vividly describes such a protest. It’s 1965. The woman who would come to write this book is walking past the Commonwealth Offices in Sydney’s Martin Place handing out leaflets and crying, “Get Out of Vietnam.” To begin with, only a gaggle of protesters had met there every Friday, but their numbers have steadily grown, and on this particular Friday, a group of 200 starts marching along Pitt Street until they meet a police blockade on the King Street intersection.

Prevented from going further, dozens of them sit down on the road, blocking the traffic. The police try to move them; the protesters resist. It is a rough confrontation; some are injured. Pushed against a jewellery store window, they have entered a dangerous new phase.

“I hadn’t seen this before,” Ward writes. “Australia had not seen this. My eyes raced from sitters to police to the onlookers collecting on the pavements. The tone of the surround sound had changed, the car horns now cut through with screams and voices barking on police walkie-talkies.” The next morning the papers were filled with reports of the incident. Forty-seven protesters had been arrested. A doctor, who’d gone to the jail to bail out his son, was arrested as well.

What I’ve left out in this summary is the extraordinary immediacy of Ward’s depiction, so skilfully sustained. For The Third Chopstick is a perfect blend of memoir, history and biography, beautifully and sensitively written. In its short introductory chapter we have the beginning, the veil of smug suburban complacency irreparably torn. What followed were the draft resisters, an easing of censorship, women’s liberation, the freedom rides and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the Whitlam government and its dismissal.

But the question to ask is why, after so many years have passed and events have erased the intensity of that day, Ward’s visceral connection with Vietnam remains. She has had a busy life teaching, running a practice for facilitating dialogue, attending other demonstrations and protests, and publishing poetry and two other books of non-fiction. But as soon as she could she visited Vietnam, and it wasn’t long before she was conducting tours through the country herself.

Occasionally I was tempted to sign up for one of those tours but circumstance and other priorities stopped me. I knew she was working on a book about Vietnam and was interviewing veterans for it, but I watched, intrigued, from the sidelines, never understanding the importance of what she was attempting.

In our time of niche politics, deepening polarisation and plummeting trust in governments, it’s easy to forget that we have been here before. We may find comfort in imagining that things were different back then, but The Third Chopstick reminds us that we’ve been divided, and angrily so, before.

It also shows us what it takes to walk across that divide, to establish genuine connections with people whose experiences and views on life are radically different from your own. You need imagination, compassion, commitment and, admittedly, the special skills Ward acquired in years of mediation work. As such, the book is as much about that process as it is about the veterans she meets, and her reactions to them and theirs to her.

Bit by bit, she stepped forward. She approached a speaker at a conference of former protesters, veterans and Vietnamese Australians. He introduced her to another man and so her involvement grew. She learned about Granville, where a federation of Vietnam veterans had its headquarters in a rundown community centre of the kind that resembled women’s refuges she had worked in.

Gradually this one-time Vietnam protester turned radical feminist turned professional mediator acquired the trust of many men who ended up allowing her to record their stories, and in the majority of cases welcomed the opportunity. Even now, I’ll be damned if I know how she did it. All I do know is that The Third Chopstick is a wonderful achievement, a book unlike any other, though I can understand why it took so long to bring to fruition. The stories the men told are painful. Not all of the connections went smoothly; one of the most important was arguably the most difficult.

Wars are hell for humans, whether they are the bombed civilians, those who are conscripted to fight or choose to enlist, or the families left behind to suffer long-lasting consequences. To acknowledge this in the face of war’s glorification and its industrial-scale infrastructure is essential. Australian governments have drafted no conscripts since Vietnam, conscription having proved too politically risky, yet they have eagerly signed up for so-called “coalitions of the willing,” and there’s a serious risk we’re heading for war on a scale much larger than those we’ve participated in so far, one with the potential for striking, literally, home.

Ironically, Ward’s deep involvement with Vietnam, the country itself and its people, has made her question whether she’s a pacifist after all. What were the odds that a small Asian country would bring the might of America and its allies to their knees? In their place, or a similar one, wouldn’t she have fought the invaders as the Vietnamese did?

That may be so for any of us. But I see it another way. These two books have convinced me, if I needed any convincing, that nothing is more important, or conducive to peace, than suspending judgements in our search for understanding. •

Life with Birds: A Suburban Lyric
By Bronwyn Rennex | Upswell | $29.99 | 204 pages

The Third Chopstick: Tracks through the Vietnam War
By Biff Ward | IndieMosh | $42.95 | 315 pages

The post Ticking like a bomb appeared first on Inside Story.

Julian’s personal library is a little lifeless now, ignored by most, treasured by a few. In a thousand ways, this Intimate History of Evolution is an effort to interpret that library’s meaning, an intellectual ecosystem of the modern natural and human sciences.

Julian’s “personal library” was bestowed on him by his grandfather, a titan of nineteenth-century zoology and comparative anatomy, and a competitive, combative self-made scientist who revelled in his title “Darwin’s bulldog.” Julian (1887–1975) overlapped Thomas Henry (1825–1895) by eight years. His inheritance, of which the library is a symbol, was rich, strange, complex and multivalent — “an intellectual ecosystem” indeed.

Alison Bashford is a distinguished Australian historian whose global perspective and research experience — in science, naval, medical, environmental and population history — equip her well to explore and elucidate that “ecosystem.” Her Intimate History is scrupulously researched and broad in scope, taking in three generations of the talented Huxley dynasty.

A formidable undertaking, yes, but also lucid, lively and addictive — a book for that creature beloved of publishers, the avid general reader. Its weighty scholarly apparatus does not interfere with the narrative flow; the generous visual component of the book is not merely illustrative but rather an integrated and striking adjunct to which Bashford often has recourse. She enjoys picturing and analysing her “primate” subjects through their milieux. (In one shot, for example, those “fraternal primates,” Julian and Aldous Huxley, are fondling “a young relative” — a chimpanzee? — in the San Diego Zoo.) Some of the book’s photographs are unforgettable, most notably the contrasting images of Julian’s “adored” Guy, the lowland gorilla, “caught” hauntingly by Wolfgang Suschitzky in the London Zoo in 1958, and confrontingly as a “latex-stretched” specimen in his glass case in London’s Natural History Museum.

Hovering over all of An Intimate History is the towering figure of Charles Darwin. The Huxley name has not, like Darwin’s, gone into the language as an adjectival football to be kicked around for all manner of purposes even 140 years after his death. (If much of America’s media culture had not descended into fatuity, one might expect to hear it traduced, still, on Fox News.)

But Bashford is interested not in a hierarchy of “great men” but in context, fortuitous combinations, and pivotal moments in history:

The explosive idea of evolution by natural selection was as suited to Huxley’s character as it was a paralysing ill match for Charles Darwin. Together, and with a close circle of like-minded friends, they drove a new scientific naturalism in the middle of the nineteenth century, contesting any explanation of nature, old or new, that relied on a beyond-natural or supernatural force or origin.

The double act — Charles Darwin + T.H. Huxley — brings to mind another forceful duo, Martin Luther and Lucas Cranach. Luther was not, like Darwin, shy of confrontation, but he needed the skilled woodcutting hand of Cranach to illustrate and make accessible the complexity of his Reformation proclamations and turn his German translation of the Bible into the age’s equivalent of a bestseller.

Thomas Henry was, of course, so much more than a carnival barker to Darwin, as Bashford makes clear. If he had to found an intellectual lineage through his own labours rather than inherit one, he did so rapidly and successfully, in fertile partnership (eight children) with Henrietta Heathorn, whom he met and fell in love with in Sydney during a stop on his only field exploration voyage, on the Royal Navy’s wonderfully named HMS Rattlesnake. Darwin on HMS Beagle, Huxley on HMS Rattlesnake: Bashford must have smiled to see some of her work mapped out for her!

Huxley was commissioned as a surgeon, not a naturalist, for his Rattlesnake voyage, but he nonetheless used his Pacific time (the voyage took years) to dissect, study and record some of its creatures, notably the jellyfish. Bashford has fun with lovesick Huxley and his jellyfish:

Thomas Henry was subject to “a painful and unbalanced mental state,” “lethargy,” “self-questioning,” and “depression”… When he felt discontented, he said he reached for Carlyle, and tried to discipline himself by scheduling thoughts-of-Henrietta into his daily routine. One hour before bedtime should do it, allowing the rest of his waking hours to focus on his jellyfish.

But lovesickness had its dark shadow side. Thomas Henry suffered from serious and debilitating depression throughout his life (which makes his prodigious output all the more remarkable). And so did his “Inheritor” (Leonard Huxley’s term for his son, Julian Sorell Huxley). Thomas bequeathed more than his library to his grandson. With it came the burden of expectation, generational pressure, ambition, and the kind of intelligence that could simultaneously suffer and analyse some of the causes of his mental agony — self-inflicted or externally imposed.

Julian was every bit as complex and volatile a human being as his forceful grandfather. And he was, again like his grandfather, skilled at communicating science to a wide public. (They were “unquestionably the founding masters,” Bashford claims.) In Julian’s case, this is perhaps unsurprising — he came out of a family of professional wordsmiths. Thomas Henry and Henrietta’s second son, Leonard, married Julia Arnold, granddaughter of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, niece of the poet Matthew, and sister of novelist Mary Augusta Ward. Julia founded Prior’s Field, a progressive school for girls, and was a formidable woman and educator for all of her short life (she died at forty-six). Her photograph is the other riveting “see-right-through-you” portrait in the book.

Julia and Leonard’s third son, Julian’s brother, was Aldous Huxley. The Huxley family all wrote poetry. They lectured, taught, and wrote novels, essays and memoirs. (Bashford includes a helpful five-generational family tree — one of a number of illustrative “trees” in a book where the crossovers of evolution, descent, genetic inheritance, ecospheres, ethnology, zoology, anthropology et cetera often call for a reader as “disciplined” as T.H. Huxley himself.)

And the communication line continued: Julian was successfully hectored into writing for a general public by H.G. Wells; he made films, winning an Oscar for his Private Life of Gannets in 1934. David Attenborough’s first television production was presented and narrated by Julian Huxley. He was prominent in wildlife conservation, a correspondent and friend of Jane Goodall. In 1975, the year he died, the first edition of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals was published. Bashford: “Between them, Thomas Henry and Julian Huxley embodied and enacted the modern shift in animal research and animal ethics from imperial natural history, in which animals were collected, and then pinned, stuffed or pressed, to the modern phenomenon of the ‘zoo’… and onwards to early environmentalism, the ‘conservation’ of wild species and their habitats.”

The organising principle of Bashford’s Intimate History is its focus on the lives and works of the two Huxley individuals, Thomas Henry and Julian. But the time span — almost 200 years between T.H.’s birth and Bashford’s reflections on the twenty-first-century relevance of Julian’s cautions about “an imperilled global ecology” — provides her reader with a panoramic view of an era of extraordinary and accelerated change.

The book asks: “How are we humans animal and how are we not? What is the nature of time and how old is the Earth itself? What might the planet look like — with or without humans — 10,000 years hence?” That the Huxleys had the nerve, the effrontery, to offer answers to these questions is a cause for celebration, and the book is, in part, a celebration of intellectual bravery. There is something disarmingly frank about Thomas Henry’s plans, itemised in 1860:

To smite all humbug, however big; to give a nobler tone to science; to set an example of abstinence from petty personal controversies, and of toleration for everything but lying; to be indifferent as to whether the work is recognised as mine or not, so long as it is done:— are these my aims? 1860 will show.

That grandfather and grandson made mistakes was inevitable. That they were fallible, sometimes irascible, often insufferable human beings is unsurprising. Perhaps more remarkable is the way they were able, sometimes, to temper and bend their natures in the search for truth, and that others of less volcanic but equal intellect loved them. Bashford: “Huxley and Darwin’s friendship was a strong one, and lifelong. They acknowledged births and deaths, the most joyful and difficult family moments alike… Their interactions were sincere, direct, authentic and forthcoming.”

You could strip out all reference to personal and family life from Bashford’s work and still have a vivid, fine-grained account of the complex history of evolutionary theory, natural selection, sexual selection, the decline and revival of “Darwinism,” and the mutations and developments during the century after Darwin’s death (language that mixes Darwin and Mendel is always a metaphorical minefield). Many of the (male) players would still appear, T.H. Huxley and his anatomist antagonist Richard Owen would still do battle (“a silverback and a blackback asserting dominance in the family group that was British natural scientists”), and the intricacies of the intellectual disputes would still be teased out. But the story would be a partial sketch of their world, and readers can, in any case, go elsewhere for evolutionary history (Bashford’s unobtrusive forty-page index might be a start).

This is social and scientific history, the two inextricably combined, its great virtue being that it provides the context, the “ecosphere” if you like, in which ideas were explored by men and women who depended on one another, and for whom thinking was as natural as breathing.

Bashford is clear-eyed about the blind spots of her protagonists. T.H. Huxley, “the nineteenth century’s most famous fact-finder and lover-of-evidence fell in with presumptions about higher and lower humans.” We could call those views “racist” now. But in doing so we’d have to contend with the complexities of debate about what “race” means, if anything. Julian’s investigations into eugenic theory could easily (but incorrectly) be confused with the National Socialists’ deadly application of it. And as Thomas Henry refuted the theories of his contemporaries, so Julian corrected, adjusted, modified and developed the theories of his grandfather and his grandfather’s great friend and colleague Charles Darwin. So, we move forward, step by imperfect step, leap by occasional leap.

The melancholia that afflicted Thomas Henry on HMS Rattlesnake was visited on Julian. (It seems to have skipped over his father Leonard.) His sexual life was fraught, from the time of juvenile infatuations at Eton to his hectic affairs before and throughout his long married life to an assertive and yet loyal Juliette Baillot. For Julian’s memorial service, Juliette, with their children Anthony and Francis, designed the cover sheet. It depicted two birds facing one another, derived from Julian’s best-known (to this day) zoological work, The Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe.

By the time of his death in 1975, eighty years after that of his grandfather, and ninety-three after Charles Darwin’s, the world was in a position to understand, much more fully and richly, “man’s place in nature.” But Julian Huxley was also keenly aware of the fragility of ecosystems; he lived through the Cuban missile crisis and understood how modern humanity, for all its knowledge, could obliterate itself and its place in nature. And in 2022, his grandfather’s ambition to “smite all humbug” and show “toleration for everything but lying” resonates like thunder. •

An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family
By Alison Bashford | Allen Lane | $59.99 | 576 pages

The post Smite all humbug appeared first on Inside Story.

Like many of my friends I continue to fall back on Christie as solace when I am sick or travel-weary. As W.H. Auden observed, one forgets the story as soon as it’s finished. (And James Baldwin spoke of Christie consoling him in many a lonely hotel room.) Her magic was to create intriguing puzzles around stock characters that depend on the reader’s ability to ignore the sheer improbability of her solutions. Her books are mercifully short and broadly predictable, even though their settings range from English country houses to ancient Egypt to the stranded passage of the Orient Express.

As detective stories have got longer and more detailed — think of the weighty tomes of Elizabeth George, the American whose pseudo-English snobbery outdoes even Agatha’s — few display the ingenuity that characterises the best of Christie. The narrator as murderer? — done that (Roger Ackroyd). The entire cast as co-killers? — done that (Orient Express). Longest-running play in the West End? — yes, that as well (and The Mousetrap is set to make a belated appearance in Melbourne next year). The play even provides the backdrop to a very confusing film, See How They Run, which is replete with Christie references.

And Then There Were None, with its careful destruction of an entire group, cut off from the outside world, has given rise to at least seven film adaptations, including a Soviet version. And at least half a dozen lesser-known Christie mysteries are equally ingenious. Much of what she wrote — the heavy-handed spy thrillers, the romances under the name Mary Westmacott, the mysteries solved by that irritating couple, Tommy and Tuppence — are at best superior trash.

With a number of Christie biographies already in print, why, we might ask, do we need another? Lucy Worsley makes two claims for her entry into the field, Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman: that she has uncovered new clues about the apparent disappearance of Christie, and that she wants to portray Christie as a feminist icon, although Christie herself would have scorned the term.

What emerges from her book is a not particularly likeable woman who was a terrible mother if a devoted grandmother. As the poet Dorothy Porter would point out, when we met for coffee and what she called “Aggie” talk, there are few children in her books, and at least one is a murderer.

Christie’s disappearance in 1926, when she apparently suffered a mental breakdown and booked into a Harrogate hotel under an assumed name, has occasioned vast speculation. Worsley adds very little, though she devotes forty-six pages to chronicling the event. It was a sensational news story in its day, with thousands searching for her, and I am no surer now than before I read this book whether it was a case of genuine amnesia or a clever publicity stunt by a writer who needed attention.

Worsley claims that Christie “redefined the rules for her social class and gender.” This is a large claim and one she hardly bears out. It could equally be argued that Christie reinforced existing views of class and triumphed as a successful writer in one of the few literary genres where women dominate. She was, after all, part of a group of writers that included Dorothy Sayers and Ngaio Marsh and was succeeded by P.D. James and Ruth Rendell. Rather like the redoubtable women of the royal family, whom she somewhat resembled, Christie failed to challenge existing views of what was possible for women. She was hardly Virginia Woolf.

In an era that demands we rename Quidditch because of J.K. Rowling’s trans views, it is extraordinary that Christie remains so popular despite her racism, anti-Semitism and general xenophobia. Worsley tries, I think unsuccessfully, to explain if not fully excuse. It is true that Christie echoed the prejudices of conservative middle-class England of the 1920s, but there is a venom in some of her comments that shocked even when they first appeared. As Worsley acknowledges, complaints came from the United States about her anti-Semitism, which endured even after the end of the second world war.

Worsley wants us to believe Christie is a better and more serious writer than most of us think she is. Her “thrillers,” she writes, “are arch, glamorous, implausible and pacey,” which is a more generous assessment than mine. But if we viewed her as a literary figure then her prejudices, which seem to cover everyone beyond the middle classes of southern England, would weigh more heavily. Yes, “each story is an artefact of its writer’s class and time.” (I was reminded of Gore Vidal’s remark, when accused of racism, that what else could one expect given how he was raised.) But we expect writers to examine those assumptions, not reflect them unthinkingly.

In an acid review in the New York Review of Books, Frances Wilson says that “Worsley fails to prove that as an iconoclast Christie broke anything very much, other than the world record for bestselling author of all time.” I think this is unnecessarily harsh, but Worsley fails to explain the most interesting facts about Christie, namely her uncanny ability to dream up improbable but captivating plots, and her diligence in writing them. Robert Barnard explains her much better in his A Talent to Deceive. (Barnard’s own mysteries are great fun to read — Death of an Old Goat is based on an unhappy period at the University of New England — but they lack the cunning of Christie’s plots.)

Christie’s ingenuity is best understood by reading those who have sought to imitate her. It must have seemed a good idea to HarperCollins to invite twelve authors, all women, to write a story featuring Jane Marple. My most generous assessment is that only half of the stories should have been published — and that to place Miss Marple in the United States, as several of the authors do, almost guarantees a lack of authenticity. Nor would Jane Marple ever address her servant as “love.”

But six out of twelve is not a bad score: I particularly liked the stories by Leigh Bardugo, Kate Mosse and Val McDermid, the best known of the contributors. Surprisingly, none of the stories picks up on Christie’s fondness for butch women and effete men. Worsley, for her part, is indebted to the young English scholar J.C. Bernthal, who has written a book called Queering Agatha Christie — an idea that Dorothy Porter and I discussed at a raucous Sisters in Crime event many years ago.

Her books frequently make discrete references to homosexual characters. In her early work, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, she describes one character as having “a deep voice, almost manly in its stentorian tones, and… a large sensible square body, with feet to match.” As she grew older, lesbian relationships become overt, as in A Murder Is Announced. Miss Marple might well have been less squeamish in acknowledging same-sex relationships than the authors in this collection appear to be.

One of the problems for anyone trying to write in Christie’s voice is her consistent racism, and several of the authors try to correct this by introducing sympathetic non-white characters. Sadly this makes their stories ring false. I admired the guts of Naomi Alderman, who allows a character to express the sort of anti-Semitic remark found in so many of Christie’s books. The valiant attempt by Jean Kwok to give Miss Marple an understanding of Chinese culture has Jane even doing tai chi, which I suspect would have horrified Agatha.

Like P.G. Wodehouse and Enid Blyton, Christie belongs to an England long gone. I have no doubt that she remains popular in those Tory redoubts that supported Liz Truss. But her appeal goes far beyond those readers who inhabit the worlds she writes about. As Worsley demonstrates, many of her stories are based on real events and people in her life. But rather than read 400 pages about her life, I’d go back and reread the dozen or so Aggies that set a standard for ingenuity no one else has matched. •

Agatha Christie: A Very Elusive Woman
By Lucy Worsley | Hodder & Stoughton | $34.99 | 432 pages

Marple: Twelve New Stories
Various authors | HarperCollins | $32.99 | 384 pages

The post Agatha’s artefacts appeared first on Inside Story.

The corner room is John Macarthur’s bedroom at Elizabeth Farm, Parramatta, and John is seriously unwell. His wife Elizabeth believes he “labours under a partial derangement of mind.” She and the family have feared for some time, she writes to their eldest son Edward in England, that John’s “mighty mind would break down, and give way.”

It does. In April the family decides John must be forcibly moved to their other property, at Camden, where they hope the change will improve his state of mind. And so, struggling and shouting, he is driven away to be cared for by his sons James and William.

In our bright day, this image of John Macarthur in humiliating vulnerability might surprise many readers of Alan Atkinson’s new biography of the couple, Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm. Our prevailing impression of that colonial figure, Atkinson notes, is of a “strange genius,” a “ruthless bully” and “a colonial monster,” a man novelist Kate Grenville recently characterised as having no redeeming features other than his ambition and his skill with “bullying, flattery and fibs.”

In those years, the early 1830s, John had “all the symptoms of bipolar affective disorder,” says Atkinson. It would have made no difference if Elizabeth had accompanied him to Camden — the feelings of others had become a “blank” to him — so she stayed at Elizabeth Farm in the house they had built for themselves in 1793. There, she shut herself off with her misery, knowing that John never asked after her. He died at Camden in April 1834. He and Elizabeth, married for forty-five years, had both turned sixty-seven that year.

John Macarthur is remembered today as an instigator of the “rum rebellion” of 1808 and, as the “father of the Australian fleece,” producer of the sheep on the backs of which Australia’s prosperity is said to have ridden. Elizabeth was his loyal helpmeet and the able manager of the family interests during John’s two long absences from New South Wales, from 1801 to 1805 and 1809 to 1817.

Atkinson begins his biography by tackling accepted views of Elizabeth and John head-on, beginning with the earliest publications about the couple and noting especially Malcolm Ellis’s 1955 biography of John, which he admires for the grasp Ellis had of the characters of his two protagonists. Historians of the 1960s were more sceptical of the Macarthurs’ achievements, and John emerges from Margaret Steven’s 1967 entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography as an “emotional cripple” (Atkinson’s term), unable to sustain personal relationships. This, he contends, is patently untrue.

Atkinson wants to take us back to the beginning, to start the enquiry afresh, to tackle the surviving evidence with an open mind, “searching for a deeper and more complex humanity.” The internet is his friend here, not just for the new evidence that allows him to efficiently piece together kinship and social networks around the family, but because it enables a better understanding of how people in the past spoke and thought.

Atkinson often mentions the books Elizabeth and John read — Coriolanus was John’s favourite Shakespeare play — and has been able to match phrases in published books, recently digitised, with their letters. Now we can imagine lives from within (his emphasis): what it was like to live in a faraway time “as a thinking, feeling being.” A theme to which he returns repeatedly is that Elizabeth and John were natives of the late-eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, beneficiaries in particular of the “new skill” of introspection, looking inward and thinking about thinking about oneself.

Elizabeth’s and John’s thoughts were formed by writing. They and their children were all prolific letter writers and, when separated, as they so often were (their son John left for England aged seven and Elizabeth never saw him again), wrote to one another constantly. The family papers were transferred to the Public (now State) Library of New South Wales in 1940 and 1957. In this “forest of voices” as he calls it, Atkinson has been travelling for fifty years.

Atkinson unfolds his view of John’s character slowly, guarded in his judgements and avoiding unnecessary drama. (His treatment of Governor William Bligh’s downfall in 1808 is so laconic I found myself flipping back and forth in those chapters, wondering if this really was the most sensational event in Australian colonial history.)

Little is known about John Macarthur’s mother Catherine, and Atkinson is careful to note where he is speculating. In assessing the mark she left on his character, Atkinson suggests that the success of John’s partnership with his powerfully self-reliant wife Elizabeth would have been impossible without a mother just as strong.

Political economy was John’s great interest all his life. This new “science,” Atkinson explains, explored the interweaving of material welfare and human welfare, and how “men of capital” might secure the happiness of mankind. He learned it during a boyhood at Plymouth Dock (now Devonport) near Plymouth on the Devon–Cornwall border, where his father was a linen draper. The shifting, opportunistic economy of the shipbuilding town, a “hurried and hybrid” place, taught him much about money: that its value was contingent on how it was moved around via human connections, often through conversation, the shake of a hand or “the measured dance of a pen nib.”

One of John’s early experiments was taking up the job of the colony’s inspector of public works in 1793. Freehold grants of land were made to groups of men in the NSW Corps, not just officers like him but also soldiers, to work to feed themselves under their own arrangements of trust, effort and risk. The scheme failed, Macarthur resigned in 1796, and Governor Hunter wrote that he was “restless, arrogant and overbearing.”

John had more success on his own property, but there he worked in harmony with his wife. Elizabeth too was a keen observer of interconnecting patterns and systems. Ever curious, she began studying algebra, astronomy and, especially, botany. Atkinson ventures that it might have been Elizabeth who first thought of keeping — and breeding — sheep for their wool as well as their meat. She was interested by the way hair could change to wool from one generation to the next.

It might have been Elizabeth who prepared eight samples of fleece to send to London in 1801 for expert assessment, annotated to show how the fleeces changed across the generations. The finest of these samples were judged by English experts to be among the best they had seen. But it was John who, in London, took advantage of scarcity of homegrown wool to gain support for expanded production in New South Wales. The result transformed their lives.

Atkinson tackles questions he believes his predecessor Malcolm Ellis shied away from. John was a born “planner and organiser,” according to Ellis, and Elizabeth could translate John’s views and intentions from the “visionary to the practicable.” But what exactly did that mean? With Atkinson’s analysis of the various intellectual influences on the Macarthurs — he discusses prominent writers and thinkers, and how their ideas spread, in considerable detail — his answer is that there developed at Elizabeth Farm a “shifting pattern of need, obligations, questions and answers, mutual adjustment and shared understanding.”

John, Atkinson concedes, was bold, self-dramatising, supremely self-confident, clever, dogmatic and conceited. Did this make him a “monster”? No. Always reaching for a bigger stage on which to develop his ideas and plans, though, he had less capacity for happiness than Elizabeth.

After only nine months in New South Wales Elizabeth wrote that since she had “powers of reason and reflection” she had never been more “sincerely happy” than at that time. The concept of happiness was a little different then, Atkinson shows, and for Elizabeth it meant a satisfaction that she was able to make the most of what God had given her. Her curiosity and sense of adventure were amply gratified. She loved walking in the Australian “forest” and was happiest with her children, her work and her garden at Elizabeth Farm, which she greatly preferred to Sydney.

Elizabeth and John is preceded by two pages of endorsements by eleven leading Australian historians. The book is a stunning achievement… a magisterial work… enthralling and powerful… amazing… breathtaking…

Not that I’m arguing, but I am struck by the fancy that these historians are forming a protective cordon around Atkinson’s book against another incursion by novelist Kate Grenville. Grenville received huge media attention in 2020 with the fictional notion that “Elizabeth Macarthur” had left a sealed box at Elizabeth Farm containing her long-hidden memoirs, which had miraculously ended up in the hands of “Kate Grenville,” who transcribed and edited them under the title A Room Made of Leaves.

Until then, we are told, Elizabeth has been an “enigma,” known only for a few unrevealing letters, a half-finished shipboard journal and a lot of “dull correspondence” with her adult children. The blurb on the back cover calls it a shockingly frank memoir of Elizabeth’s marriage to a “ruthless bully.”

I tried to read A Room Made of Leaves shortly after it came out but gave up when I found the character of Elizabeth simply didn’t grip my imagination. I didn’t care what happened to her and that, in a novel, is fatal. Atkinson dismisses the novel with the curt remark that it is “cut loose from evidential moorings.” Grenville later published an edited selection of Elizabeth’s real letters, so she clearly believes there is value in them.

And yet — did Elizabeth feel constrained from expressing her feelings in her letters, given that they were probably shared around among family and friends? Atkinson doesn’t say. If the Macarthurs were skilled at introspection, what then was their idea of privacy? Did Elizabeth expect to have an outlet for her innermost thoughts?

In some respects Grenville’s and Atkinson’s books are not so different. Both authors endeavour to give us access to the minds of their characters. Atkinson uses some of the skill of a novelist in shaping his narrative into forty-six short, carefully paced chapters, which helps to make a 500-page book (including notes and bibliography) accessible for a general reader. The beautiful cover design features Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s depiction of a flowering plant, an Amaryllis Josephine. The Macarthurs grew one at Elizabeth Farm. A colleague passing my desk picked up the book thinking it was a novel.

As with a novel, I found myself wondering what the characters were doing while I was away from the book. In odd moments, making a sandwich, or in the car waiting for the lights to change, I thought about Elizabeth and her eight fleece samples. I pictured the diamond ring John bought her in Paris, and longed to listen in to her talk with her daughter Elizabeth as they walked around their garden together.

I greatly enjoyed reading about this younger Elizabeth Macarthur, who was born in 1792. Although her health was poor as a child (she may have had polio), she gradually took on much of the household management at Elizabeth Farm, especially the garden, where she showed real talent as a botanist and horticulturalist. Deeply loved by both her parents — her father missed her terribly during his second sojourn abroad — young Elizabeth had suitors but never married. She died suddenly in 1842, aged fifty.

“She was a clever woman, well worth knowing better,” Atkinson observes. I would rather hear more about her from Atkinson than from anyone else. •

Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm
By Alan Atkinson | NewSouth | $39.00 | 500 pages

The post The Macarthurs from inside out appeared first on Inside Story.

But he was troubled. His direct boss, Peter Chernin, apparently believed he was “callow and insubstantial” and was undermining him. Chernin had sided with the controversial Fox executive Roger Ailes, who was particularly scathing of Lachlan’s control of Fox Broadcasting. Cruellest of all, Ailes had labelled him “un-Murdoch like.”

As Paddy Manning recounts in The Successor, his new biography of Lachlan, the crunch came when Lachlan blocked a plan to hand over a primetime slot on Fox to one of Ailes’s friends and then vetoed Ailes’s plan for an expensive series called Crime Line. Lachlan said he was cutting costs but Ailes wasn’t having it. He went over Lachlan’s head to Rupert Murdoch, who told him, “Do the show, don’t listen to Lachlan.”

Never mind that Ailes was later dismissed for sexual misconduct, or that Lachlan’s father would describe his backing of Ailes at that moment as “one of the worst decisions of my life.” No, Lachlan had had enough. Not even mentors like News Australia boss John Hartigan could convince him to stay. Within hours he had bundled his young family onto a private jet and flown out of New York, heading for Sydney.

Author Manning isn’t responsible for all the expectations I brought to my reading of his book. For a start, he picked a vital but underdone subject in Lachlan Murdoch, so he needed to deal with a bunch of questions about what sort of media mogul Lachlan is — and will become after his father departs the scene. But I was doubly demanding because the book was published not long after he launched his curious defamation writ against Crikey. I needed Manning to help me understand why Lachlan would be so affected by the comments of a small Australian news site when large publications in the United States were making similar allegations.

To be fair, Manning’s narrative of Lachlan’s life ends just before Crikey republished its article alleging the Murdochs were “unindicted co-conspirators” in the uprising in Washington on 6 January 2021. But The Successor nevertheless recounts much of the unedifying behaviour of Fox News in the lead-up to 6 January and attempts to explain what, if anything, Lachlan was doing about it.

By then Lachlan had rejoined the company. During his long sabbatical in Australia some of the investments made by his private company, Illyria, had spectacularly failed, but others had hit the jackpot and made him a billionaire in his own right. More fortuitously, he had avoided the British hacking scandal that had tarnished the image of his younger brother James, who was now on the outer partly because he could no longer abide the company’s editorial direction.

So, by early 2021, a decade and a half after his clash with Ailes, Lachlan was seemingly unassailable. He was co-chairman of News, and executive chairman and chief executive of the Fox arm of the empire, which had been spun off from News in 2018 and was home to Fox Sport, Fox Entertainment and the Fox News juggernaut. But, as Manning suggests, that didn’t necessarily mean he was in charge. For a start, the spectre of his father loomed over big decisions and, while Roger Ailes had gone, other aggressive company lieutenants wielded their own power and sought to undermine him.

And anyway, what did it mean to be in charge of the most politically provocative arm of the family’s empire at such a fraught moment in history? How much of the rumour-mongering and disinformation spewing out of Fox during and after Trump’s presidency could be attributed to his management? Did that coverage reflect Lachlan’s own political beliefs or had he accepted that his role, whatever his views, was not to mess with the formula that had made Fox so profitable?

Manning’s subject opted not to talk to him, so he didn’t get to ask how Lachlan reconciles the damage Fox is doing to the fabric of American society with his view that Australia is a nicer place to live and raise children. Surely he can see that much of what makes Australia good is the subject of Fox’s scorn? Without such an interview, Manning was obliged to curate all the snippets of information on the public record and add whatever insights he could glean by interviewing others. The result is a highly readable and very useful distillation, but the book generally leaves it up to readers to draw their own conclusions about Lachlan’s motivations.

So, what is the relationship between Fox’s ultra-right-wing coverage and Lachlan’s own politics? For years, many Murdoch watchers believed Lachlan’s brother James was the right-wing sibling — at least since he described the BBC as authoritarian during the prestigious MacTaggart lecture in Edinburgh in 2009 and argued that “the only reliable, durable and perpetual guarantor of independence was profit.” Since then James has walked away from an executive role at News after speaking up against the company’s support for Trump and its denigration of climate science.

Three years later sister Elizabeth gave the same lecture and denounced James’s prioritising of profit. She had long ago quit as head of News Corp’s British satellite TV network BSkyB to form her own production company, Shine. By 2012, says Manning, she was “almost estranged from her father, waging a war for integrity inside the company.”

This seems to leave Lachlan as the most conservative — and we’re not talking in a patrician Grand Old Party sense. He’s got some out-there views. For example, Manning quotes former Australian editor-in-chief Chris Mitchell’s recollection of Lachlan arguing for the death penalty for Australian drug smugglers Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. He’s to the right on gun laws and was a generous backer of Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who has made it his life’s work to stack the US Supreme Court with socially conservative judges.

But Lachlan sees himself as an independent thinker, and believes this is an essential quality for a person running a media organisation. He says he is conservative on economic policy but more liberal on social matters. He told journalist Andrew Ross Sorkin in 2018 that he didn’t “fit neatly into a left–right, Republican–Democrat bucket.”

He also revealed what appeared to be contrarian leanings, putting him in company with many on the reactionary right of US politics, where people simply won’t be told how to live their lives by big government, big tech or the liberal media. Lachlan told Sorkin, “What I find is that when people tell me to think a certain way, I’m more inclined to think a different way, or certainly examine, ‘Why are they telling me that?’”

So what if Lachlan is right-wing and has a reactionary or contrarian bent? That doesn’t necessarily mean he led the programming of Fox in the lead-up to 6 January, does it? Manning suggests he’s more interested in making money by “leveraging brands” or “building verticals” for new business ventures like gambling. He’s not so interested in prosecuting political causes like his often-activist father. But that hardly absolves him of responsibility for the appalling content on Fox and for the rantings of some of the network’s presenters.

Take Fox host Tucker Carlson, for example. His primetime program has been described as “the most racist show in the history of cable news.” He race-baits and targets vulnerable people, and promotes the crazy “great replacement theory,” which claims global elites are working to replace whites by encouraging non-white immigration. The theory surfaced in the United States at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.” It motivated terrorists who targeted Jews, Muslims and Hispanics respectively in mass shootings in Pittsburgh, Christchurch and El Paso. Carlson has also defended the anti-Semitic QAnon conspiracy and denied white supremacy is a problem in the United States.

Where was Lachlan while Carlson’s deranged hatred was going to air? According to the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt, the Murdochs — father and son — gave up trying to rein in Carlson and forgot they were in charge. “Someone needs to remind the Murdochs they pay Tucker,” said Greenblatt. “Tucker is their employee. They’re allowed to sanction him.”

On other occasions, though, Lachlan did speak up. After George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer he sent a memo that urged Fox staff to “listen closely to the voices of peaceful protest and fundamentally understand that Black Lives matter.” It was a plea to an organisation that had been antagonistic to BLM since 2014, when host Megyn Kelly claimed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown, the victim of a police shooting, was in fact the aggressor. Another Fox presenter likened the movement to the Ku Klux Klan. Such was the authority of Lachlan’s memo that Tucker Carlson labelled BLM a “terror organisation” a few days later.

When the independent media advocacy group Media Matters awarded Lachlan the title of Misinformer of the Year in 2018, it said it didn’t know whether he was idly standing by in the face of Fox misinformation or encouraging the network to shift its position. Either way, it concluded, he was “gaslighting America about the damage Fox News is doing to the country.” As Manning points out, Lachlan saw this kind of criticism as left-wing bullying that only tended to strengthen his resolve to stand by the network.

A picture emerges of a defiant, conservative contrarian who reacts badly to criticism from the left. And we’re reminded elsewhere in The Successor that Lachlan has sued before and has a “talent for vengeance.” If this picture is accurate, then Crikey’s article would have indeed been triggering, even when bigger publications in the United States had made similar observations in even more strident ways.

But perhaps there’s another reason why Lachlan opted to sue, and it’s got to do with the fact that the Crikey piece was published in Australia. I’m not talking about our defamation laws being more friendly to plaintiffs, though that is undoubtedly true. No, the book makes the point that Lachlan, despite his distinct American accent, very much identifies as Australian. He prefers living here. He chose to return to Australia during the pandemic and ran Fox from Sydney by working nightshifts, albeit in the comfort of his sprawling Bellevue Hill mansion.

Manning reminds us that Lachlan voted a portion of his News shares against listing the company on the US stock market because he had a sentimental attachment to the company’s roots in Adelaide. He clearly likes the values and safety of this country, and much else besides.

Could this mean he actually cares what people think of him here as well, enough to sue a media company that dares suggest that the business he runs is opposed to such values?

It’s just another question to put on the ever-growing list. After reading Manning’s important and timely book, I may not have all the answers, but I’m grateful for this valuable addition to our understanding of someone we should all know more about. •

The Successor: The High-Stakes Life of Lachlan Murdoch
By Paddy Manning | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 336 pages

The post Does Lachlan care? appeared first on Inside Story.

I only once had the opportunity to speak to him, in 2014, for a book I was writing. Cannon was eighty-five but busy, still busy, excited to be editing a new collection of writing by “The Vagabond,” the versatile nineteenth-century journalist John Stanley James. He talked expansively of other projects he had planned. He reminded me of the conductor Sir Charles Mackerras, who as an octogenarian would sign contracts to conduct orchestras with the notation: “Will play if alive.”

Busy Cannon remained. When he died on 24 February this year, he was at work on a memoir, Cannon Fire, which has now been published by Melbourne University Press. It shows no sign of hurry. Rather, it has the tone of someone for whom writing was not just a pleasant pastime but also far preferable to any other activity. It covers almost exactly the same period of Melbourne and Victorian history as Cannon’s near contemporary Geoffrey Blainey traversed in Before I Forget (2019). I can pay it no greater tribute than by stating that it does not suffer by comparison.

Cannon, it shows, did not so much hide behind his work as fully inhabit it, living out a set of abiding interests in social, media and institutional history. He was mainly self-educated, another graduate of the school of Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, and self-taught, in the newsrooms of Melbourne, Sydney and London.

As books displaced daily reporting as a proportion of his output, he continued writing history with a journalistic sensibility. That hybrid status has made him difficult to classify: he gets one paragraph in The Oxford Companion to Australian History and goes unmentioned in A Companion to the Australian Media. Still, when the effect worked, it was electrifying. The Land Boomers, still the definitive text on the period of Melbourne’s halcyon 1880s and hungry 1890s, reads as though composed contemporaneously in a succession of thrilling scoops.

In this memoir, Cannon describes the thrill of disinterring trunks of salient Crown Law Department documents from the State Library’s basement.

As I unpacked them in dim light, excitement began to take hold of me. Here were details of the dirty doings of most participants in the land boom — all the chief financiers like W.L. Baillieu, the sly solicitor Theodore Fink, and crooked politicians like James Munro and Thomas Bent. The archives had no photocopying facilities at the time so week after week I painfully transcribed every relevant detail of all the ambitious individuals and their fraudulent company flotations.

Extraordinarily, we learn, the Sydney Morning Herald declined to publish extracts from the book: given the archaic defamation laws in New South Wales, which offered descendants recourse for libels of their ancestors, the new light Cannon shed on the period was too salacious. Sydney booksellers were circumspect too. Melbourne took a more robust attitude: Baillieu, Fink and the like might have eluded their importunate creditors but not, in the end, the footslogging penman.

Cannon’s particular voice — readable, curious, discursive, anecdotal — means his work sits somewhat to one side of academic history. He was a low-temperature writer with a moral rather than a political centre who wrote for readers rather than colleagues or causes.

In that sense, Cannon took after both his parents. His mother Dorothy was the daughter of Monty Grover, doyen of tabloid editors, who herself “crackled with obsessive energy” as a pioneering journalist on the Morning Post and the Argus: it was she who obtained her son his first job as a copyboy on the latter paper.

Yet Cannon paints perhaps an even fonder portrait of his “simple, kind-hearted, unfortunate” father Arthur, whom Dorothy met when he was a ship’s wireless operator: “My middle-aged father, sweat-stained grey Akubra planted squarely on his head, pipe clamped in his mouth, remained at heart a simply country bloke.”

There is a particular poignancy to Cannon’s description of the end of his idyllic rural childhood, ushered in by Robert Menzies’s declaration of war: “War to me was a glorious manly affair. So when I looked around at the adults, I could scarcely believe what I saw. Tears were rolling silently down their faces, women and men alike. Never before had I seen grown men cry. I hadn’t known they could cry. But they had realised what I had not: that the happy times were over.” He watches his laconic father grow more so:

My father gave me some parting advice before he went to the RAAF training camp. “Never be beholden to anyone,” he told me gravely. This meant, he said, that you should never accept favours or assistance from anyone if you could possibly avoid it. In other words you had to learn to stand on your own feet. This was the longest talk I ever had with him. Aged eleven, I would mull over his words and eventually agree that they formed a sensible philosophy of life.

But when Dorothy at length abandons Arthur, Cannon is too callow to understand: “Only my poor old dad tried to discuss the situation with me. ‘I want you to know that I’ve never loved anyone but your mother,’ he once told me, on the verge of tears. With the careless brutality of youth, I muttered something to the effect that, ‘These things happen — you’ll find someone else.’ He simply got up and walked away.” On his deathbed, Arthur says simply, “It’s goodbye, son.”

A prodigious, indiscriminate reader particularly inspired by H.G. Wells’s Outline of History and Science of Life, Cannon junior was not much of a student at not much of a school: his history master’s observation that he had “a liking for startling views” was not a commendation. With his headmaster, however, Cannon developed a curiously simpatico relationship: “He has imagination,” the older man wrote, “and if he could regain the enthusiasm of childhood and keep it through the experiences of manhood, he might have success as a writer.”

He was indulged also by Keith Murdoch, via a family friend, who enjoyed Cannon’s response to a question in his job interview for the Herald. “Tell me, young man, are you a c-c-communist?” asked Murdoch. “I used to be, sir,” the nineteen-year-old Cannon replied helpfully. “But that was when I was young.” Murdoch laughingly hired him, whereupon Cannon went straight to a milliner in Flinders Street to equip himself with a pork-pie hat.

For all his decades in the trade, however, Cannon concedes that he was a very loose fit for journalism: “As a journalist supposedly attuned to public tastes, I was pretty much a failure.” Cannon Fire is unusual in the annals of journalistic memoir in that the newsroom anecdotes take second place to Cannon’s adventures as a freelance roustabout and wannabe mogul, notably at Henry Drysdale Bett’s Radio Times, antecedent of the Age’s durable Green Guide.

Cannon is seen flitting from one quixotic endeavour to another — licensing the American satire magazine Ballyhoo and domestic bible Family Circle; working for Sports Novels, a magazine publishing fiction with sporting themes; starting Science Fiction Monthly, Australia’s first sci-fi magazine; publishing Tele View even before television’s Australian advent. A copy of his booklet How Television Works would be given to every purchaser of a set made by Electronic Industries.

The ems and ens of printing absorbed him every bit as much as the p’s and q’s of writing: perhaps his most successful venture was Fashion News, an independent industry journal produced on a leftover press from the defunct Argus. He had a short-lived gig as Cyril Pearl’s right-hand man attempting to domesticate Truth and the Sunday Mirror for Keith Murdoch’s son Rupert, which ended predictably badly, and succeeded Peter Ryan as “Melbourne Spy” for Nation, which suited him rather better.

Cannon’s debt to Arthur is more discernible when he writes about his personal life. His first wife took her own life after they had been married for four years; of his second marriage, he decides “not… to write much more about it, or the anguish caused on both sides.” His children are well loved but not conspicuous. He condemns himself as an “overambitious idiot… concentrating too hard on my work, not devoting enough time to my family, and excusing myself with the notion that to support them financially was enough.” But he repeats the effect in his memoir, leaving his heart barely reachable, save in evoking the love of his work. It was worth loving. •

Cannon Fire: A Life in Print
By Michael Cannon | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 256 pages

Michael Cannon’s articles for Inside Story

The post Tell me, young man, are you a c-c-communist? appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet Andrews’s years in power — and especially his record-breaking pandemic lockdown — has divided the state more bitterly than those of any premier since Kennett. He’s a typical political strongman: quick to decide what he wants to do, determined to carry it out, and contemptuous of anyone who gets in his way. In the homeland of Aussie Rules, he’s the standout resourceful tough guy who bursts through the pack to deliver what his fans want from him.

In his first term, the fans liked seeing him deliver the transport infrastructure Melbourne had been deprived of for so long — particularly when he got rid of all those level crossings that stopped traffic whenever a train came through. In his second, they admired him as the strong leader whose readiness to take tough decisions kept them safe during the pandemic.

But many other Victorians hate him, with a passion not seen since Kennett ruled the roost. Daniel Andrews oozes arrogance. He can’t take criticism, and contemptuously dismisses or ignores adverse reports or anyone disagreeing with him. Many of those tough decisions he made during the pandemic were foolish, even harmful ones — such as banning children from playgrounds, closing schools, or locking up thousands of residents in public housing towers without warning.

Whatever you think of his policies, he is darn good at politics. The polls put him way ahead of Liberal leader Matthew Guy as preferred premier, and a third four-year term — which he says he intends to serve out in full — seems a formality. The most recent published polls were taken in September, but even the closest found Labor ahead by a whopping 56–44 majority in two-party terms. A month-old Morgan poll released last week put the gap at 60.5–39.5.

Yet, for a leader so dominant, he is not well understood. After eight years as premier, we at last have a biography of him: albeit one he did not cooperate with and, since he hates being criticised, by an author he definitely would not have chosen.

Sumeyya Ilanbey is a trailblazer, the first Victorian political reporter in a hijab, and one of an outstanding group of journalists now covering state politics for the Age. Her account of the premier, Daniel Andrews: The Revealing Biography of Australia’s Most Powerful Premier, doesn’t let you down: it really is an inside story. Andrews refused to be interviewed but Ilanbey talked to many of his colleagues, past and present, and collected a lot of revealing stories and perspectives, even if most of them are passed on unsourced.

She pulls no punches. Daniel Andrews emerges from the book as a highly successful, hard-working, utterly determined, socially progressive despot — with little respect for people who get in his way or for the democratic infrastructure in which he has to operate.

Andrews, we learn, is a boy from the bush who developed a relentless work ethic and a talent for political infighting, which took him from stacking Labor Party branches in his youth to becoming premier at forty-two, and dominating state politics in a ruthless autocratic style unlike any Labor predecessor.

So far it hasn’t hurt him. Yet Victoria is used to premiers being nice blokes — Dick Hamer, Lindsay Thompson, John Cain, Steve Bracks, John Brumby, Ted Baillieu, Denis Napthine — or once, a nice woman, Joan Kirner. Andrews clearly doesn’t fit in either group. From Ilanbey’s portrait, he belongs squarely in Victoria’s minority of authoritarian leaders: Henry Bolte, Kennett, and himself.

All three have been lucky to rule against weak opposition. The Bolte government ran Victoria for seventeen years, but Bolte was realistic enough to tell his last biographer, Tom Prior, “I don’t think I ever won an election. Labor lost them.” Kennett and the Murdoch media left Labor winded for years by getting Victorians to blame the 1990s recession on the Cain–Kirner government when it was clearly the result of an awful policy overkill by treasurer Paul Keating and the Reserve Bank.

Ilanbey’s focus is naturally on explaining Daniel Andrews, and she does it very well, highlighting the diverse and contrasting aspects of his personality: he presents himself as the daggy dad who likes nothing better than relaxing at home with his wife and kids, yet is nonetheless a workaholic control freak. But it’s also important to note how much the poor quality of his opposition (including Murdoch’s Herald Sun) has contributed to his success.

Since 1996, Victorians have voted in fifteen federal or state elections, and have preferred the Liberals in just one of them. Why? The party has been controlled by ultraconservatives who have used that control to narrow the broad church Menzies created to a small congregation of what seem like cranks and fogeys who react against anything more modern than the world they grew up in. Victorians have moved into the 2020s, but the Victorian Liberals stay put, digging deeper trenches and waiting for the voters to come back to them. It could be a long wait.

Their one win was at the 2010 state election, after a succession of mistakes by the Brumby government allowed the lofty small-l liberal Ted Baillieu to break through on a platform of integrity in government. But his government floundered among sabotage from within; Baillieu quit and Denis Napthine took over; and that instability helped Andrews to lead Labor back into power in 2014. Since then the Liberals have obliged him by stepping up factional warfare and, with their Murdoch partner, running crude, simplistic campaigns that appeal to their narrowing base more than the mainstream. Andrews has had a dream run.

Daniel Andrews grew up as a bright boy in a working-class family that experienced a ghastly bit of bad luck and responded by moving to the country and working long hours to get back on top. It’s fair to assume that some of his hyperdetermination and mania for control comes from that upbringing.

Like so many male politicians, Daniel was a firstborn son (that probably explains a bit too). He was born on 6 July 1972 in Melbourne, where his parents, Bob and Jan Andrews, owned and ran a milk bar on Pascoe Vale Road. One night when Daniel was ten, an arsonist blew up the supermarket next door, taking out the Andrews’s shop with it. It was underinsured, and they were suddenly left with next to nothing.

The family made a fresh start by moving to Wangaratta, where his parents bought a house on a two-hectare block on the outskirts of town. Bob began rising at 4am every day to deliver Don smallgoods throughout the region, while Jan got the kids off to school before going to work as a teller at the Commonwealth Bank. They were churchgoing Catholics, and Daniel was schooled in the faith: mass every Sunday, school under the Marist Brothers at Galen College.

His parents’ influence perhaps deserves more attention than it gets in Ilanbey’s story. Bob Andrews was clearly a man of ability and determination. As his business grew, he took on employees, became president of the footy club, and bought “Old Kentucky,” a nearby beef cattle stud around a century-old four-bedroom country home with wide verandas. One night at a meeting of the local Victorian Farmers Federation branch, the Labor leader’s dad stunned his mates by confiding, “I’ve always voted for the National Party.”

His son Daniel inherited Bob’s determination to achieve things. “Dan’s life started just out of Wangaratta on the family farm,” his website tells us. “His mum and dad — Jan and Bob — taught him life lessons that stay with him today: hard work, the importance of making a contribution, and that when you make a promise, you keep it.”

But Daniel didn’t inherit his father’s politics. School done, he headed to Monash to study arts — living at Mannix College like a good Catholic son, but joining the Labor Party, where he became deeply involved in the Young Socialist Left. His organising talents caught the attention of local left MP Alan Griffin, who took him on as a casual electorate officer.

Ilanbey tells us that Andrews developed quickly as a factional warrior: “He became known as Alan Griffin’s ‘numbers man,’ the main go-to guy for the Socialist Left’s branch-stacking operation in the south-eastern suburbs, a meticulous and detailed young operative whom Griffin trusted wholeheartedly.” Apart from student jobs selling hotdogs and driving trucks, it was his first real job.

His career since has been entirely inside Labor. At twenty-three, branch stacker in an electorate office. At twenty-six, assistant state secretary. At thirty, the new MP for Mulgrave and assistant minister for health. At thirty-four, gaming, consumer affairs and multicultural affairs minister. At thirty-five, health minister. At thirty-eight, Labor leader and opposition leader. At forty-two, premier. He is now fifty.

From a young age, he clearly stood out from the pack in the eyes of those who mattered. We can debate whether he’s a good premier, but he’s certainly a highly successful one. Other than having weak opposition, what makes him such a hit with Victorian voters?

Ilanbey keeps coming back to his punishing work ethic, his political instincts that anticipate so well how developments will play out, his readiness to back his judgement and take a risk — although he can be extraordinarily stubborn about backing down when he gets it wrong — and the systematic way he analyses the game. He is capable of being warm and supportive to colleagues in trouble, but it doesn’t happen very often. They are more likely to find themselves in trouble with him, and being cast into “the freezer” — a state of being coldly and completely ignored — from which some never escape.

Political biographies sometimes market themselves through their scoops. But Sumeyya Ilanbey’s real scoop in this biography is her compilation of a devastating dossier on how Daniel Andrews treats those who “disappoint” him — particularly, as several colleagues told her, if they are close to him. He cannot take criticism. Once he has made a decision, he cannot tolerate disagreement with it. That inability to listen probably explains why his second term has seen so many bad decisions.

One telling example. Gavin Jennings was an older leftie, and already a minister, when Andrews entered parliament. Ilanbey describes him as “Andrews’s closest confidant in government… to whom he would turn to fix his problems and sort out his political headaches”:

Labor MPs often described Jennings as Andrews’s conscience, and as one who would do the premier’s dirty political work… It was Jennings who would talk to colleagues on behalf of the premier; it was Jennings who was asked to fix any political mess the premier found himself in.

But as Andrews grew into his leadership, he began to grow tired of Jennings, who saw his role as playing devil’s advocate, questioning policies and the government’s intentions. Andrews did not like this, and came to view Jennings as an agitator and a hindrance to his agenda. Where Jennings saw his role as improving a policy by focusing on its deficiencies, Andrews saw it as a nuisance. The relationship was slowly becoming toxic.

According to multiple sources, [Jennings] started questioning Andrews on the billions being poured into the government’s mammoth transport infrastructure agenda. Andrews’s once-close relationship with his mentor had disintegrated.

Many in the Labor Party point to the deterioration of Jennings and Andrews’s friendship as evidence of the premier’s crash and burn style; and of his contempt [for] those around him. If that friendship broke down, they said, what hope is there for the rest of us?

In March 2020, as Covid-19 broke out across Melbourne, Jennings quietly quit politics. Andrews seized the opportunity to announce that to handle the crisis better, he would create a crisis council of cabinet, comprising himself and eight senior ministers, as a top-level executive body.

A few months later he sacked one of them, health minister Jenny Mikakos, making her the scapegoat for Covid getting into the community from quarantine hotels. That December the widely respected attorney-general Jill Hennessy quit cabinet to “spend more time with her family.” In June this year, deputy premier James Merlino, health minister Martin Foley, police minister Lisa Neville, industry minister Martin Pakula and planning minister Richard Wynne all announced that they too would quit politics at this election.

That’s some turnover. The only members left from the nine-member Covid crisis council are Andrews himself, his new deputy and heir apparent (but not anytime soon) Jacinta Allan, and veteran treasurer Tim Pallas.

The upheaval could be seen as recognition of the need to bring fresh blood into the senior portfolios — after all, most of those retiring had been ministers for twelve years. Or it could be seen as a sign that the Andrews cabinet is not the happiest place to work. In eight years, sixteen of the twenty-two members of his original ministry have either quit or been sacked.

Throughout the Victorian bureaucracy, it has been a similar story. Political loyalty — to Andrews — seems to be a prerequisite for running a department or agency. After the revelation that thirty-three Victorians in the last year died after their calls to triple-zero went unanswered, the Age reported that the former chairman of the service, Roger Leeming, warned ministers and officials back in 2016 that it was critically underfunded, and was rewarded by being told to quit. Two former Labor staffers were then appointed to the board.

These things have serious consequences. Before the pandemic, the government received repeated warnings from below that Victoria’s public health services were severely underresourced. The advice was unwelcome, so it was ignored — until Covid arrived, when it was too late. The ineptness of Victoria’s pandemic response reflected the reality that it didn’t have experts trained to handle it.

Andrews’s response was to double down on a futile crusade to eliminate Covid. His government imposed the most severe lockdowns in Australia, and the longest ones. Mildura and Mallacoota, more than 500 kilometres from the capital, were locked down because there were Covid cases in Melbourne. Schools were closed and the premier closed his ears to expert advice on what having no school would mean for the mental health and educational development of children.

One could go on, but Chip Le Grand’s book Lockdown and a fine report published last week by the Paul Ramsay Foundation say it better than I could. The bottom line is clear. So far, 877 of every million Victorians have died of Covid, as against a toll of 506 deaths per million in the rest of Australia. Victoria’s death rate has been 73 per cent higher than in the other states. It is ludicrous to argue that Andrews’s hard line kept Victorians safe.

The Andrews who emerges from Ilanbey’s book is a complex man, with real achievements to offset those failures. His first term was more impressive than the second. The government doubled investment in Melbourne’s transport infrastructure, wisely focusing on removing the level crossings that caused daily traffic jams in most suburbs of Melbourne, but also pushing ahead with a short but expensive underground line (Metro 1) from North Melbourne through the city to South Yarra.

Andrews stayed in the background but lent his support as Jill Hennessy and Gavin Jennings shepherded Australia’s first assisted dying legislation through parliament. A pioneering royal commission was held into domestic violence — albeit one that focused on looking after its victims rather than stopping it from happening. He and his government were rewarded with an electoral landslide in 2018, one of Labor’s three best in Victoria.

The second term has been less impressive. Covid saw two years of grossly excessive restrictions followed by a year of “let it rip”: in both stages, Victoria’s death toll was the worst in Australia. An official inquiry by former justice Jennifer Coate into how Covid escaped from quarantine hotels was derailed by dissembling — or worse — by the premier and senior officials, who all seemed unable to remember who had decided to put private security firms in charge.

Now we have the so-called Suburban Rail Loop: in reality a twenty-seven-kilometre underground line in an arc between Cheltenham in the south and Box Hill in the east. Tunnels are very expensive, and the government estimates that this one will cost more than $30 billion — an amount that, even with an ill-advised $2.2 billion donation from us taxpayers via the Albanese government, will use up funds that would otherwise have built better projects like the Metro 2 line to Fishermans Bend.

The project stinks of the worst kind of political cynicism. There is no demand for it. The idea did not come from rail experts but from Andrews’s political staff. The line would run almost entirely through marginal Labor seats. The government committed without submitting the plan to Infrastructure Victoria, supposedly its adviser on infrastructure priorities, and without waiting for a business plan. When the latter finally appeared, it claimed the project would have a positive benefit–cost ratio — but it got that figure only by breaking the Victorian Treasury’s rules for such analysis. The auditor-general has since found that applying those rules, it is likely to cost Victorians twice as much as the benefit they get from it.

With scores of examples, Ilanbey shows us a leader whose decision-making has become warped by a self-indulgent culture of cronyism, surrounding himself with yes-men and yes-women, making snap decisions and ignoring warnings about their consequences. She depicts Andrews as a narcissist who thinks he’s the smartest man in the room and ignores any questioning of his decisions. He decides issues on political grounds and treats their merits as secondary. His decision made, to question its logic is to challenge his authority. It’s then a matter of who’s running the state.

The long-term consequences for Victoria could be serious. The Labor governments of Steve Bracks and John Brumby (1999–2010) were fiscally cautious to a fault. So was Andrews at first, but he quickly warmed up. In the past five years, Victoria has gone from repaying debt to running up $29 billion a year of net new borrowing. The state has lost its AAA credit rating and the Liberals are right when they warn that within four years, on current projections, Victoria’s net debt will exceed that of New South Wales, Queensland and Tasmania combined.

Crossing the entrance hall of Victoria’s lovely old Parliament House, you pass a mosaic with a line from the Book of Proverbs: “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.”

That beautiful, poetically worded Jewish folk wisdom still resonates. But that’s not how Victoria’s government now operates. Rather, its people have one counsellor with a multitude of staffers.

It can’t have been easy to write a book like this about someone so powerful and hostile to criticism. Sumeyya Ilanbey has been courageous, persistent and thorough in interviewing so many of Andrews’s colleagues, asking the tough questions and collating their answers into this coherent, convincing, fair-minded but always hard-headed account of what drives him and how he runs Victoria. This book justifies her sources’ trust in her. She deserves our thanks. •

Daniel Andrews: The Revealing Biography of Australia’s Most Powerful Premier
By Sumeyya Ilanbey | Allen & Unwin | $32.99 | 312 pages

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