An opening montage blends images of an atomic fireball, tanks in the streets, burning villages, crowds tearing down statues and leaders being saluted by military parades. Historian Timothy Naftali speaks through it all: at its peak, he says, the cold war touched every continent, shaping the decolonisation of empires and transforming domestic politics in the great cities of Europe, North America and Asia.

As Knappenberger acknowledges, the series is “insanely audacious.” It features original footage of critical moments, interviews with people who lived through worst of them, and commentary from around a hundred historians and political insiders, many of whom were directly involved in the crises. Lessons have been learned from documentary-maker Ken Burns, with talking heads presented as dramatis personae. It’s all about managing tone and pacing so that reflections from the present create depths of field for visually evoked scenes from the past.

Knappenberger achieves something of the Burns effect in bringing out an at-times unbearable sense of how these events were experienced by those caught up in them. Rapid montages conveying the scale and density of the upheavals are counterposed with sustained evocations of the experiences of those caught up in them.

Hiroshima, considered a purely military target by the US government, had a civilian population of 350,000. Prewar photographs show carts and bicycles in narrow streets spanned by arching lamps, a place of small traders and modest resources. People who were living in the city as small children deliver their testimonies steadily, quietly — though, as one of them says, visibly working to sustain his composure, “I hate to remember those days.”

Howard Kakita, aged seven, was on his way to school with his five-year-old brother when the warnings started. The explosion came as they returned to their grandparents’ house, which was obliterated. They dug themselves out of the rubble and fled the city through the ruins and carnage. Keiko Ogura’s brother told her he had seen something drop from one of the planes flying over, a tiny thing, which did not fall directly, but was caught for a while in the slipstream of the aircraft before arching down. Then came the flash, the loss of consciousness and the awakening to a world in which “everything was broken.”

The effect of the blast on human bodies creates scars in the memory. Corpses turned to ash on contact. The river was full of them. It’s hard to watch, and to listen to these accounts, as it should be. They are a necessary corrective to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, with its brief, stylised evocation of the horrors, firmly subordinated to the main story of an American hero and his tribulations.

Is it even possible to see such a disastrous train of events from “both sides?” That, surely, is the question we were left with by the cold war that followed. For the first time in history, two global superpowers were frozen in a deadlock of mutually assured destruction. The rush to catastrophe was paralysed by symmetry.

That, at least, was one version of the narrative. But mutually assured paranoia, the more complex and confusing side of things, was anything but paralysing. The belief in an enemy working in secret on unimaginably evil weaponry provokes an overriding conviction that your own side must secretly work on something equivalent or preferably more lethal. This is the “hot” equation behind the cold war.

With technological escalation seemingly taking on a life of its own, no one could comprehend the scale of what was being created. The American government’s messaging was all about survivability — backyard fallout shelters, “duck and dive” drill for schoolchildren — as if a small wooden desk might be an effective shield.

The language used at the time betrays a pitiful divorce from reality. A military officer flippantly describes a planned thermonuclear test as something that will make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers. The monstrous Bikini Atoll explosion, with 7,000 times the power of the Hiroshima blast, give its name to a new provocative style of swimwear.

“Institutional Insanity” is the title of the episode that deals with all this. It is as if the human brain simply isn’t coping with the consequences of its own activities. No one really knew what they were doing, comments nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, and testing became a kind of game for hyperactive experimentalists.

In interviews recorded before his death last year, Daniel Ellsberg recalls joining “the smartest group of people I ever did associate with” at Rand Corporation, men seen in contemporary photographs relaxing with their feet up on their desks, sleeves rolled up, smoking. But it is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, grimacing in close-up as he advises on enemy psychology, who gets the last word in this particular sequence. “That was a documentary,” says Ellsberg.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev took a leaf out of the Strangelove manual. With an arsenal that couldn’t catch up with massive overreach of his opponents, he sought to weaponise American fears by making exaggerated claims, mounting the covert Active Measures program, which spread misinformation through news media and other forms of public communication.

Against this backdrop, the achievement of Khrushchev’s ultimate successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, in defusing the collective psychosis was extraordinary, whatever his political failings from the Russian perspective. Polarised views of Gorbachev’s legacy remain one of the deepest challenges to the West’s comprehension of post-Soviet Russia. Putin’s pronouncement that the break-up of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the modern era has driven the new wave of military aggression that now confronts us.

One of Turning Point’s great strengths is its engagement with the complexities of moral arbitration, which are explored in the extensive commentary offered those in a position to offer genuine insights. Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, now a professor of international affairs in New York, gives an account of the secret speech of 1956, in which Khrushchev made public the scale of the purges of the Stalin era and condemned the cult of personality that had poisoned Soviet politics.

Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq and other books on American cold war policy, delivers an excoriating analysis of the thinking behind interventions in Guatemala, Chile and Iran. Covert operations like these were one of the defining elements of the cold war; we get insider views of the activities of the CIA and its Soviet counterpart from dissidents now free to tell the tale and bring into focus some of the minor players who shaped events.

The cult of personality accounts for much of the evil in the modern political world, but an excessive focus on these figures is a problem in itself, as we are learning with the media response to Trump in America now. A personality-driven view of history glosses over the influence of those in the supporting cast — the secret service directors, spies, foreign policy advisers, diplomats, propagandists, journalists — and, it must be stressed, the voting public, who allow themselves to be swayed by flagrant manipulation.

Are we returning to the cold war? That question runs through Turning Point, culminating in the final episode on Ukraine. “History is not history,” says journalist Lesley Blume, “but we are in an ongoing tide.” •

The post Roaring back appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

On balance, British journalist David Stubbs thinks not. His new book, Different Times: A History of British Comedy, opens with a bravura critique of the weakness in the British character that forgave Boris Johnson almost everything because he’s fond of a joke, often apparently at his own expense: “Humour, our craven inability to resist humour, is what created Boris Johnson.” This is a salutary reminder that laughter matters, but it can anaesthetise as well as enlighten. As Peter Cook said about the satirists of the Weimar Republic: “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the second world war.”

Comedy may seldom transform the world but it provides a revealing window on continuity and change in a society. Different Times traces British laughter during the United Kingdom’s decades-long retreat from imperial primacy, and perhaps it is no coincidence that America is getting funnier as it becomes more intractable while China is one of the most dangerous places on earth to crack a joke.

Stubbs has watched a lot of TV and been to a lot of gigs. If you enjoy anything British, funny and filmed, from Chaplin and Stan Laurel to The Office, chances are they’ll be here. It’s a compendious survey that moves decade by decade from the 1920s to the noughties, with a sketchy coda towards the present. Comedy and satire emerge as lagging indicators of cultural change.

As an Australian with an Anglophile education I kept flashing in and out of recognition. A lot of it I know, because a lot of it we see. The British roots of Australian humour remain strong and possibly predominant against the onslaught of American stuff that comes down the wires and through the ether. The bits I didn’t know are well described, but I’m seldom persuaded I was missing much. English comedy, in particular, can appear rather insular at a distance.

So some of the jokes seem inbred, overwritten by class obsessions. But I do sometimes wish our own writers had the time and the patience to write so well. The sophistication of script and characterisation, the attention to human quirkiness — nobody does it better.

The good news for readers is that Stubbs writes as a proper fan but not uncritically. This is a mostly good-natured, sometimes school-masterish book, its critical arc summed up early: “With magnificent but too few exceptions, British comedy in the twentieth century was not so much about the human condition as about the white, male condition.”

So if you are after a “war on woke” lamentation that no one can take a joke anymore, go to another shop. Things are getting better: “Political correctness liberated comedy,” says Stubbs, “forced it to resort to its creative imagination, helped create a new self-consciousness about what it meant to create comedy, to be more inclusive and open to new forms, new avenues of social exploration, rather than falling back on lazy, reactionary stereotypes and tropes.”

What’s important about this is the demand that comedy must do without the lazy and the reactionary, not that it try to do without tropes and stereotypes entirely. Stereotype is a particularly dirty word these days, and the reflex for a lot of people is to assume it is always a terrible thing. But comedy uses various forms of shorthand and thus always trades in tropes, stereotypes and metaphors. The real debates need to be about who the jokes are targeting and whether they conform to the poetic justice of comedy. That’s what makes the lettuce such a perfect joke. It didn’t implicate anything extraneous like Truss’s class or gender — it focused purely and searingly on the public matter of her government’s doomed program.

We can and should move from a narrow set of stereotypes towards a wider and more representative set. This would be progress, yes, but not a revolution. Comedy can’t do entirely without caricature, stereotype, ridicule. If the world doesn’t see another mother-in-law joke, if an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman never walk into a bar again, it will be no loss. But other tropes and stereotypes are filling the vacuum.

The better angels of our nature would prefer to believe that we mostly laugh with rather than at, but that isn’t true. The same overworked angels then try to insist that only punching up can be funny, and that works a little better. Most people I know think it’s fine to laugh at a president or prime minister and not okay to laugh at someone for being gay. But still people laugh at babies suffering mishaps on YouTube — maybe we shouldn’t, but often enough we do. It seems unlikely that many of the babies really deserve it.

Another good thing about this book is that Stubbs tries hard to see things in social and historical context. He doesn’t judge, as people sometimes do, from the perfect moral clarity of the present. The Carry On movies are a necessary and popular part of his story; Dad’s Army is lovingly analysed as 1970s nostalgia for a plucky, unified and rather ridiculous wartime Britain. The radical satire boom of the Thatcher years is lauded, even while we are reminded that it was mostly posh boys who did the shouting in The Young Ones and elsewhere. Working-class comedians from the Northern club circuit get respectful attention despite their reactionary jokes and views.

Or, rather, Stubbs doesn’t judge prematurely. Monty Python’s creators get lavish admiration but lose a few marks on women and race for being the postwar Oxbridge boys they were. In the end, he lets “progressive” and “morally palatable” merge a bit. Occasionally Different Times drifts into marking the exams of comedians of the past by standards they were unaware of.

Here, Stubbs is in good company. The slippage between what is and what should be funny is near universal in humour studies. Laughter feels good, so we want to feel good about why and when we laugh. Often we are kidding ourselves.

Stubbs tries hard to hold a catholic view of British comedy as a sort of fun-park mirror held up to the decline of national significance. Nevertheless, the most abiding impression I got from this book is how pervasive the hegemony of Oxbridge has been and remains. Stubbs admits he arrived at Oxford two years ahead of BoJo and they both expect to be attended to, as of right. Did the British tolerate BoJo’s lying simply because he made them laugh? No, there is also the fact that he came from the class that was born to rule.

We Australians fool ourselves that we don’t have class distinctions. Lined up beside the British, though, we at least don’t have as concentrated a stream of cultural privilege as Oxbridge. With all the self-congratulation, there is still something in the idea of a larrikin sense of humour, a persistent disrespect for authority in a tie. It used to belong entirely to white blokes like me, and we are still wildly over-represented, but more voices are claiming the right to call bullshit than used to be the case. We don’t defer as much as the British to the bright, loud boys who went to Sydney or Melbourne universities. Things could be worse.

But Stubbs’s BoJo thread shines a light on something less pleasing. What a humourless bunch we tend to elect in Australia! Keating had a killer vein in invective that sometimes looked like satire, but only Whitlam and Menzies were genuinely funny, and that mostly counted against them with the general public as aloofness. People say George Reid could be funny on the hustings, but that’s going back a long way. We obviously expect earnestness in our leaders, certainly in the half dozen since Howard set the pattern. Our public figures should be able to bear a joke, but heaven preserve any politician who gives the impression they are laughing at us, for Newspoll certainly won’t.

Are we really much good at laughing at ourselves, I wonder? Some future historian of Australian comedy may have a tale to tell. •

Different Times: A History of British Comedy
By David Stubbs | Faber | $39.99 | 416 pages

The post Born to laugh 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

The post Soeharto’s Australian whisperer appeared first on Inside Story.

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

The post Good cop, bad cop appeared first on Inside Story.

The truth of the matter is more nuanced. The National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, carried out between 2020 and 2022 by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, tells us that 22 per cent of Australians had a mental disorder in the previous twelve months and 43 per cent within their lifetime. Large numbers, no doubt, but no larger than the 20 per cent and 45 per cent figures obtained when the study was conducted in 2007.

But hidden in these aggregated figures is a worrying trend. Among young people aged sixteen to twenty-four, the twelve-month prevalence of mental disorder rose from 26 per cent to 39 per cent, and that increase was especially steep for young women, up from 30 per cent to 46 per cent. When half of this group has a diagnosable mental illness — an underestimate, because the study only counts a subset of the most prevalent conditions — something is clearly very wrong.

A similar story of age- and gender-biased deterioration is told by the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. When an index of mental health is tracked across iterations of the survey from 2001 to 2021, older and middle-aged adults hold relatively steady but people aged fifteen to thirty-four, and especially young women, show a relentless decline beginning around 2014. The pandemic, the usual all-purpose explanation for recent social trends, can’t be held responsible for a rise in psychiatric misery that preceded it by several years, so what can?

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation offers a provocative but compelling answer to this question. Haidt, an American social psychologist known for influential books on well-being (The Happiness Hypothesis), moral psychology and political polarisation (The Righteous Mind) and upheavals on US college campuses (The Coddling of the American Mind, written with Greg Lukianoff), argues that some of the usual explanatory suspects are innocent. They don’t account for why declining mental health disproportionately affects young women, why it is occurring now or why the trendline started to dive in the early 2010s after a period of stability.

The prospect of ecological catastrophe, for example, weighs most heavily on younger people but every generation has experienced existential threats. Wars, natural disasters, and economic crises are conspicuous reasons for distress and despair, but world events have always been terrible. It is not obvious why they should disproportionately make young women anxious and depressed while leaving older and maler people unaffected. The stigma of mental illness may have declined so that people have become more willing to acknowledge it, but increases in the prevalence of mental ill-health among young people are not confined to subjective reports but also found in rates of hospitalisation and suicide.

The chief culprit, Haidt proposes, is technological. Smartphones and social media have rewired young minds to an unprecedented degree, replacing “play-based childhood” with “phone-based childhood.” Portable devices with addictive apps and algorithms engineered to harvest attention and expose children to damaging content have wrought havoc on young people’s mental health. They have done so in ways that are gendered and most severely affect generation Z. Born after 1995, these young people are the first to have gone through puberty in the virtual world.

Haidt marshals high-quality evidence for the decline in young people’s wellbeing over the past decade. Graph upon graph show inflection points in the early 2010s when mental health and related phenomena such as feelings of social connection or meaning in life start to trend downward. These trends are not limited to the United States but occur more or less in lockstep around the Western world. Their timing indicates that it is not the internet or social networking sites themselves that are damaging, but the transformation that resulted from the advent of smartphones, increased interactivity, image posting, likes chasing, algorithmic feeds, front-facing cameras and the proliferation of apps engaged in a race to the bottom to ensnare new users.

Haidt argues that the near-universal use of smartphones in children and especially pre-teens is driving the increase in mental health problems among young people. Coupled with over-protective parenting around physical risks in the real world has been an under-protection around virtual risks that leaves children with near-unfettered access to age-inappropriate sites. Like Big Tobacco, the developers of social media platforms have designed them to be maximally addictive, have known about the harms likely to result, have made bad faith denials of that knowledge, and have dragged their heels when it comes to mitigating known risks that would have commercial consequences.

There are many reasons why phone-based childhood has damaging effects. It facilitates social comparisons around appearance and popularity, enables bullying and exclusion, exposes young children to adult-focused material, and serves individualized content that exploits their vulnerabilities. It fragments attention and disrupts sleep, with implications for schooling as much as for mental health. Smartphones also function as “experience blockers,” reducing unstructured time with friends and the opportunities for developing skills in synchronous social interaction, conflict resolution and everyday independence.

Haidt is emphatic that the problem of phone-based childhood is not just the direct harms it brings but also the opportunity costs: the time not spent acquiring real-world capabilities and connections. Added to a prevailing culture of safetyism that attempts to eradicate risk and prescribes structured activity at the expense of free play and exploration, the outcome is a generation increasingly on the back foot, worried about what could go wrong and feeling ill-equipped to deal with it. Well-documented developmental delays in a range of independent and risky behaviours are one consequence, and the rise of anxiety is another.

When many children and adolescents report that they are almost constantly on their phones we should therefore not be surprised that they feel disconnected, lonely, exhausted, inattentive and overwhelmed. Haidt argues that many of these emotional and social effects are common to young people as a group, but some are gendered. Girls are more likely to be entrapped by image-focused networking sites that promote perfectionist norms, decrease their satisfaction with their bodies, and expose them to bullying, trolling and unwanted attention from older men. Boys are more often drawn into videogames and pornography, which foster social detachment, pessimism and a sense of meaninglessness, sometimes combined with bitter misogyny.

Haidt reminds us not to think of children as miniature adults, but as works in progress whose brains are malleable and developmentally primed for cultural learning. “Rewiring” may be an overstatement — brains never set like plaster and cultural learning continues through life — but the preteen years are a sensitive period for figuring out who and what to look up to, a bias easily hijacked by influencers and algorithm-driven video feeds. Older adults can be moralistic about adolescents who won’t disengage from their phones, but when those phones are where life happens, and when the brain’s executive functions are only half-formed, we should understand why shiny rectangles of metal and glass become prosthetic.

What to do? Haidt has a range of prescriptions for parents, schools, tech firms and governments. Parents should band together to encourage free play, promote real-world and nature-based activities that build a sense of competence and community, limit screen time for younger children, use parental controls, and delay the opening of social media accounts until age sixteen. Schools should ban phones for the entirety of the school day, lengthen recess, encourage unstructured play, renormalise childhood independence and push back against helicopter parenting. There is a social justice imperative here, Haidt observes, as smartphone use seems to disproportionately affect the academic performance of low-income students.

Responsibility for intervening can’t be left to individuals and local institutions alone. Governments and tech firms must recognise their duty of care and come to see the current state of affairs as a public health issue, much like tobacco, seat belts, sun exposure or leaded petrol. Tech firms must get serious about age verification and increasing the age of “internet adulthood” at which young people can make contracts with corporations hell-bent on extracting their time and attention. Governments can legislate these requirements, design more child-friendly public spaces, and remove penalties for healthy forms of child autonomy such as going to a playground without a parent, currently criminalised in the United States as “neglect.”

The Anxious Generation is a passionate book, coming from a place of deep concern, but most of it is written with the cool intonation of social science. The work is accessible and clearly intended for a wide readership, each chapter ending with a bulleted summary of key points. There is a refreshing humility about the empirical claims, which Haidt accepts can be challenged and may sometimes turn out to be wrong, referring the reader on to a website where updates on the state of the evidence will appear.

The part social media plays in mental ill-health is in dispute, for example, although the evidence of a correlation with heavy use is not. Haidt offers up studies supporting the causal interpretation but acknowledges that nothing is straightforward where human behaviour is concerned. Nevertheless, he is justified is arguing that his “Great Rewiring” hypothesis is now the leading account of the origins of the youth mental health crisis. No other contender appears capable of explaining why things seemed to start going wrong around the globe somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

Critics of The Anxious Generation are likely to argue that Haidt’s hypothesis is simplistic or that it amounts to a moral panic. Both charges would be unfair. A single explanatory factor rarely accounts for something as complex as a major social trend, of course, but identifying a dominant cause has the pragmatic benefit of prioritising interventions. If phone-based childhood is the problem then we have a clear target for possible solutions.

As explanations go, Haidt’s isn’t quite as simple as it might seem in any case. The advent of smartphones and all-consuming social media may take centre stage, but earlier cultural shifts that amplified the sense of risk and promote over-protection set the scene and compounded young people’s vulnerability. Haidt’s account of the elements of smartphone use that are most damaging is also highly specified rather than a wholesale rejection of the virtual world.

The mental health field often extols the complexity of its subject matter, which sits at the jumbled intersection of mind, brain and culture, but that recognition can hamper the search for agreed interventions. The usual calls to boost clinical services are understandable, but solutions that address individual distress in the present fail to tackle the collective, institutional and developmental sources of the problem.

Some proposed solutions, such as efforts to build online social connections, may be ineffective because they fail to foster the embodied, real-world connections that matter. Other supposedly compassionate responses, such as accommodating student anxiety with diluted academic requirements and on-demand extensions, may make anxiety worse by enabling and rewarding avoidance. Haidt arguably overlooks how much mental ill-health among young people is being inadvertently made worse by well-meaning attempts to accommodate it and by backfiring efforts to boost awareness and illness-based identities.

The charge of moral panic is equally problematic and doesn’t stick for three reasons. First, evidence for the harmful consequences of phone-based childhood is now documented in a way that past worries about new technologies were not. Second, Haidt’s proposal focuses on the welfare of young people rather than social decay. Although he argues that phone-based life can cause a form of spiritual degradation, his critique is primarily expressed in the register of health rather than morality. Third, although Haidt articulates a significant threat, with the partial exception of social media companies he is not in the business of lashing villains so much as promoting positive, collective responses and a sense of urgency.

The youth mental health crisis is real, and it shows no signs of abating. The human cost is enormous. If rates of mental illness among Australians aged sixteen to twenty-four had remained steady since 2007, around 350,000 fewer young Australians would be experiencing one this year. The Anxious Generation is vital reading for anyone who wants a sense of the scale of the problem and a clear-eyed vision of what it will take to tackle it. •

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
By Jonathan Haidt | Penguin | $36.99| 400 pages

The post Virtual anxiety appeared first on Inside Story.

“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

The post “An unfathomable, shapeshifting thing” appeared first on Inside Story.

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

The post The free market’s brilliant frontman appeared first on Inside Story.

The Allies’ trial of Japanese wartime political and military leaders was intended to lay the foundations of a new, peaceful and democratic Japan by punishing the militarists who had led the country into a disastrous conflict. The notion that victors could judge the vanquished evoked controversy, both within Japan and internationally; yet in the late 1940s the pioneering Japanese feminist Kato Shizue could confidently write that “intelligent Japanese long ago decided that the punishment of the war criminals was inevitable, and they think the verdicts were just.”

Today, feelings are very different. Japanese conservative politicians (including prominent members of the present government) rail against what they label the “Tokyo Trial View of History,” which they blame for instilling a darkly masochistic view of the nation’s history in the minds of the Japanese population. The late prime minister Shinzo Abe was particularly emphatic in denying that the men convicted by the International Military Tribunal for the Far East should be regarded as criminals. The seven who were executed for war crimes following the Tokyo trial — as well as others convicted and given lesser sentences — are among those commemorated in the Yasukuni Shrine, where right-wing politicians and some senior military officers go to honour the spirits of the dead. As political scientist Gary J. Bass argues in his monumental new book Judgement at Tokyo, “the Tokyo trial misfired and fizzled,” revealing “some of the reasons why a liberal international order has not emerged in Asia, despite the wishes of some American strategists.”

The paradoxes at the heart of the Tokyo trial began to be visible well before the International Tribunal opened its hearings on 3 May 1946. Bass’s book starts by guiding readers through the concluding stages of the Pacific war and the impassioned debates among allied leaders about the treatment that should be meted out to the vanquished. (US secretary of state Cordell Hull was among those who initially favoured summary executions of Hitler and Japan’s wartime prime minister, Tojo Hideki.) A central figure in the early part of Bass’s narrative is Henry Stimson, US secretary of war at the time of the defeat of Germany and Japan, who played a key part in creating the conceptual framework that underlay both the German Nuremberg war crimes trials and the Tokyo trial.

In Nuremberg and Tokyo, the wartime leaders of the defeated nations faced three classes of criminal charge. Class A was the crime of waging (or conspiring to wage) aggressive war; Class B covered the war crimes set out in the existing Geneva Conventions, including mistreatment of prisoners of war; and Class C encompassed crimes against humanity. The difficulties lay in Classes A and C. There were no legal precedents for prosecuting people for waging aggressive war, nor for crimes against humanity, and even within the victorious allied nations some leading legal commentators were concerned that the trials were imposing newly invented laws retrospectively on the defeated.

The horrors revealed at Nuremberg helped to embed the notion of crimes against humanity both in public consciousness and in international law. But in Tokyo the key charge (though not the only one) was the crime of waging aggressive war — an offence for which no one had ever been prosecuted before the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials, and for which no one has been prosecuted since.

As Bass vividly shows, unease and disagreement about the moral and judicial basis of the International Tribunal’s proceedings haunted the Tokyo trial. Even Sir William Webb, the acerbic Australian judge who presided over the International Military Tribunal, privately questioned whether waging aggressive war could be treated as a crime, though he managed to suppress these doubts sufficiently to concur in, and hand down, the tribunal’s guilty sentences on all the twenty-five defendants who survived the trial. (Two died during the proceedings, and another was found mentally unfit to be tried.)

A further obvious paradox of the Tokyo trial was the fact that Emperor Hirohito, in whose name the war had been fought and hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers had gone to their deaths, never appeared in court. By the time Japan surrendered, the US government had decided that it would be politically expedient to retain the emperor as symbolic leader of the new Japan. Despite protests from Australia, he remained immune from prosecution.

Judgment at Tokyo, though, is not a dry analysis of judicial principles and legal arguments. It is a vivid blow-by-blow account of the trial, filled with colourful characters and moments of farce as well as tragedy. The Tokyo tribunal, though dominated by the colonial powers, was more international than its Nuremberg counterpart. Its eleven judges represented the United States, Canada, Britain, France, the Netherlands, Australia, New Zealand, the Soviet Union, China, India and the Philippines, and each judge brought with him (they were all men) his own experiences, professional training and personal prejudices. They spent their time in war-devastated Tokyo living an isolated existence in the Imperial Hotel, and relations between them were often tense. Chinese judge Mei Ruao took a deep dislike to Indian judge Radhabinod Pal; the British judge, Lord William Patrick, was derisively dismissive of his Filipino counterpart, Delfin Jaranilla. They were united, it seems, only in their shared aversion to the court’s president, William Webb.

Yet this is not a simple litany of fractiousness and failure. What the Tokyo trial achieved, in very difficult circumstances, was the collection of a mass of vivid and often searing evidence of the horrors of war, including of many conventional war crimes: among them, the massacres and mass rapes of civilians in the Philippines and China, the mistreatment and killing of prisoners of war, and the brutal forced labour inflicted on tens of thousands of Southeast Asians and of allied prisoners of war on the Thai–Burma Railway and elsewhere.

While taking readers through this evidence, Judgement at Tokyo also points out the silences: most notably, the absence from the trial of any serious discussion of Japan’s use of biological warfare in China. The US and Soviet authorities were well aware of this dark story but made sure that it was kept out of the trials because they were busy trying to obtain knowledge of Japan’s biological techniques for their own purposes.

Bass explores not only the events of the trial itself but also the subsequent destinies of the judges — particularly the very different fates of Mei Ruao and Radhabinod Pal. Mei, who had been appointed to the court by the Chinese Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek, decided hesitantly to return to mainland China in 1949 and throw in his lot with the new People’s Republic of China. Ironically, he fell foul of the communist authorities because of his fierce criticism of Japanese war crimes at a time when China’s government was trying to improve the country’s political relationship with Japan. He was publicly condemned during the Cultural Revolution and died soon after — only to be elevated to the status of national hero under current Chinese leader Xi Jinping, whose nationalist rhetoric echoes Mei’s own insistence that China should never forget the wartime horrors inflicted on its people by Japan.

The Indian judge Pal, on the contrary, famously wrote a dissenting judgment that sweepingly rejected the right of the International Tribunal to judge the defendants. (Later, he also questioned the Nuremberg judgements and the reality of the Holocaust.) Pal’s lengthy statement of dissent made him the hero of the Japanese right, who feted him on his later visits to Japan and have cited his judgement ever since as justification for their own revisionist views of the war.

Judgement at Tokyo is based on a mountain of court records, government archives and interviews with the descendants of the judges and defendants, and Bass skilfully weaves all this together into a fascinating narrative. Despite the scale and scope of the book, though, there is one odd lacuna. It barely mentions a crucial counterpoint to the Tokyo trials: the story of the 4000-odd Japanese soldiers and military auxiliaries who were found guilty of Class B and C war crimes in trials held throughout East and Southeast Asia and the Pacific, of whom almost 1000 received the death sentence.

As Utsumi Aiko and other Japanese scholars have pointed out, these were the most tragic of the war crimes proceedings, for many of those who received the harshest sentences were low-ranking auxiliaries — some of them drafted from Japan’s colonies of Taiwan and Korea into the violent world of the Japanese wartime military only to be abandoned to their fate by the collapsing military machine that had recruited them.

As Gary Bass shows, the Tokyo trial had far-reaching implications for Japan and its Asian neighbours. Its fundamental flaw was its shakily based attempt to define the waging of aggressive war as a crime. The spectre of double standards and retrospective justice raised by this concept has never been laid to rest. This in turn allows historical denialists today not only to dismiss the trial as “victors’ revenge” but also, by extension, to whitewash the history of the war and depict the Tokyo defendants as innocent martyrs to a just cause. And the growing influence of that denialism, as Bass trenchantly observes, risks shackling Japan to a narrative of the war that is both “morally odious and historically dubious.” •

Judgement at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia
By Gary J. Bass | Picador | $39.99 | 912 pages

The post Victors’ justice? appeared first on Inside Story.

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

The post A dynamic of acceptance and revolt appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

If these Voices are to be among the next government initiatives to deal with Indigenous disadvantage then we would be wise to study their history — for the idea is not new. For that reason, Max Angus’s new book, Too Far Out, an “administrative history” of the Ngaanyatjarra community of Western Australia, couldn’t be more timely.

The Ngaanyatjarra community — 1542 kilometres northeast of Perth, 750 kilometres northeast of Kalgoorlie, 560 kilometres northeast of Laverton, 1050 kilometres southwest of Alice Springs and (by my estimate) 2200 kilometres from Canberra — is remote from any recognised administrative centre. Imagine a London borough governed by officials living and working in Budapest with oversight from officials in Bucharest.

As a “nation for a continent” (in the words of Australia’s first prime minister) “remote” is what Australia does: assuming responsibility for all corners of this land is our sovereign project. Since the early twentieth century, the Ngaanyatjarra have become interlocutors of  Australia’s three-level state; less and less are they “too far out.” They have been Australian citizens since 1948 (and British subjects before that). They have become literate in English, and were fully enfranchised in 1984. Many would call themselves Christian, and their homeland has been of intermittent economic significance. They have been statistically visible — on the wrong side of the gap — since the 1970s. How their homeland became a governable region is the story that Angus, a former professor of education, wants to tell.

Until 1873–74, when William Gosse, Ernest Giles and John Forrest began to map cross-continental routes, no European had entered the region. An imagined Laverton-to-Oodnadatta stock route would have passed through but it never came into existence; only in the early twentieth century did prospectors venture there and humanitarians begin considering how the denizens of this arid interior might be protected.

From South Australia’s Christians came a proposal, in 1914, to declare reserves — “sanctuaries” — on each side of the border with Western Australia. Would the Commonwealth join them in its adjacent southwest corner of the Northern Territory? After years of negotiation the three contiguous Central Australian Reserves were gazetted in 1920–21 and this “inviolable” region of interacting desert peoples came under three colonial authorities.

But officials in Perth, notionally responsible for the welfare of the Ngaanyatjarra, had no program and no knowledge. In the 1930s, from Mount Margaret Mission near Laverton, pastor Rod Schenk and schoolteacher Mary Bennett peered east and hoped that Perth would not license the Ngaanyatjarra homeland to graziers and gold-seekers. Motor cars were replacing camels but there were still no roads. The Ngaanyatjarra were reported to be “gentle and well mannered” and evidently “contented and well fed.”

The WA government refused tenure in the region to all but missionaries. After Schenk established a mission at the Warburton range, near the reserve’s western edge, in 1934, he persuaded the government to extend the reserve boundary further west to include a permanent Euro-Australian presence, the United Aborigines’ Mission under William and Iris Wade.

With the state stinting the money needed to feed the desert people attracted to the mission, Ngaanyatjarra people, encouraged by the Wades, began competing for the government bounty on dingo scalps with “doggers” already active in the Western Desert. The state government sought to regulate the mission’s scalp dealings, and in 1947 visiting police observed the Ngaanyatjarra hunters breeding dingos for scalp harvesting. (In the mid sixties, anthropologists began learning of a dingo dreaming track starting at a site known as Nanku.)

By then, Australian governments were imagining Indigenous Australians’ secular pathway to economically independent citizenship. Officials wondered if the mission was giving the Ngaanyatjarra enough to eat and whether it was right to house children in dormitories. Native affairs commissioner Stanley Middleton (1948­–62) was committed to “assimilation,” even for the most distant and “primitive” people, but the policy raised a question: could a Christian mission on an inviolable reserve be an instrument of its residents’ progress?

Warburton mission’s government subsidy increased, but it was calculated on the assumption that many who frequented the mission were living as hunter-gatherers and dingo farmers rather than reliant on the mission. But the government began considering a plan to close the Warburton mission and transfer residents 200 miles to Cosmo Newberry, a settlement acquired by the missionaries in 1953 to train children with state government support. Warburton mission found an advocate in Bill Grayden MP, however, who persuaded the Legislative Assembly to set up an inquiry into the welfare of “natives” in the Laverton–Warburton Ranges region. Having found the people at Warburton to be in a depleted condition, the committee recommended that the government subsidise a pastoral enterprise for the Ngaanyatjarra.

A dispute ensued: visitors in 1957 (including a young Rupert Murdoch) debated how well or how badly off were the Ngaanyatjarra, what remedies they were entitled to, who was responsible for delivering assistance and whether English should replace Ngaanyatjarra as the region’s lingua franca. The records assiduously consulted by Angus suggest that the Ngaanyatjarra had no independent voice in these debates.

Meanwhile, the “inviolable reserve” was being subjected to excisions. The Commonwealth’s weapons testing program required it to establish an observation post within the reserve — Giles Weather Station, with connecting roads — and the WA government opened a third of the reserve (7500 square miles) to International Nickel of Canada in 1956. The Ngaanyatjarra thus became a “problem”: in order to protect them, authorities now had to exclude them from places where Commonwealth and company employees — in small numbers — were residing. Middleton hoped that the Commonwealth would assume responsibility for developing all of the Central Reserves; South Australia, for its part, initiated a pastoral enterprise at Musgrave Park, later known as Amata, in 1961.

To begin with, the Ngaanyatjarra are in the background of Angus’s story, but he is able to move them steadily to the foreground. The more their homeland was encroached on, the more their remaking of their life became visible to colonial authority and thus to the historian.

Some 450 residents were counted at Warburton in 1962. They were increasingly dependent on the food the mission provided. The following year a patrol officer reported that the Ngaanyatjarra were using their homeland’s recently graded tracks — even purchasing their own truck from sales of copper ore found near the mission. At this point it becomes possible for Angus to name individual Ngaanyatjarra.

A man called Tommy Simms had discovered the copper, and by 1961 the mission was managing the earnings derived by a small number of men from mining the ore and sending it to British Metals in Perth. The government wanted to develop the enterprise on a commercial footing, but the mission sought to defend its own interests and assure a degree of Ngaanyatjarra control. Western Mining offered to partner with the men, the government approved, and Simms became the first Ngaanyatjarra with the means to purchase his own vehicle (a Toyota and a Bedford truck).

In 1966 the government licensed Western Mining to prospect within the reserve and form partnerships with Simms and other individuals. Between forty and sixty men were involved in mining by 1967; in keeping with Western Desert people’s now well-known respect for “autonomy” within a continuously negotiated “relatedness,” those with tenements preferred individual partnerships with Western Mining to a cooperative. Others participated as employees. Would copper ore pave the way to the future governments hoped for?

But the Ngaanyatjarra easily disengaged from copper mining: the land was unevenly mineralised, the work was tedious, hunting remained an attractive alternative, and the mission would still feed them. “Their deep attachment was to the Ngaanyatjarra people and lands,” writes Angus, “not to a mining corporation or to a Western lifestyle.”

By the time Western Mining decided it was no long profitable to work with Ngaanyatjarra, one in ten Warburton residents had become eligible for the social security payments that now made up two-thirds of the community’s income. In 1969 the payments, previously made collectively, began being paid to individual recipients. The change was conceived and defended as a step towards “citizenship,” but it wrecked the mission’s system of communal provision.

Prospects of further income from the mining of nickel (around Wingellina) and chrysoprase had to be weighed against a growing official concern for the protection of sacred sites whose locations were being revealed to researchers during the 1960s by Ngaanyatjarra. They wanted income from mining, but in ways that respected country.

By this time, a new federal Office of Aboriginal Affairs was looking at how employment could be brought to the region in ways that aligned with local interests. An inquiry proposed that a new, federally funded Central Reserves Trust representing Ngaanyatjarra and neighbouring peoples would gradually assume control of the three reserves, re-establish Warburton mission as a planned township, develop tourism and horticulture, and permit Aboriginal prospecting. Before that happened, the Commonwealth demanded that Ngaanyatjarra land excised for mining be returned to the reserve. Western Australia complied in February 1972, while also amending its own legislation to allow a minister to approve exploration within the reserve.

Where did Warburton mission fit into this plan? Around Australia, Christian missions were relinquishing administration to Aboriginal councils. The WA government considered that its agencies — including the new (1972) Aboriginal Affairs Planning Authority — were better suited to administering Commonwealth investment in the reserves. The missionaries agreed, with misgivings, to confine themselves to “spiritual and linguistic” work. Administering the food supply — the children’s dining room and the store — devolved to Ngaanyatjarra, who were unprepared for the role. They were equally unprepared when a new Warburton Community Inc. introduced unfamiliar modes of governance in mid 1973. It was “a difficult period for all concerned,” writes Angus, but the policy of self-determination was politically irreversible.

For these policies and plans to work as “development,” much depended on which of the proliferating authorities and visitors the Ngaanyatjarra — the intended workforce and clientele — felt comfortable with. Visiting tradesmen were unfamiliar with the Ngaanyatjarra’s opportunistic approach to employment — intermittent and punctuated by spells on unemployment benefits. The local labour markets that worked in some Australian regions seemed not to apply in Ngaanyatjarra country. Teenagers rejected the daily discipline of school attendance and some residents refused to cooperate with nurses employed by the Australian Inland Mission. Blasting for the construction of a hospital upset the custodians of the Marla so much that visiting workers demanded police protection.

By 1975 Warburton was becoming known as a hostile environment for non-Ngaanyatjarra. For reasons cultural and logistical, it was proving difficult to police Warburton from Laverton. One of the Commonwealth’s responses was to assist Ngaanyatjarra to decentralise. The four resulting “homeland” communities — Wingellina, Blackstone, Warakurna and Jameson, each with its own white community adviser — were all places where Ngaanyatjarra had interacted with “whitefellas”: all were on the road network that prospectors and weapons researchers had created since the 1950s.

People from Docker River (a welfare settlement established in the Northern Territory in 1968) and Amata (a South Australian settlement established in 1961) also moved to the four communities. The Central Reserves were being repopulated using resources deliberately or inadvertently provided by a variety of non-Aboriginal intrusions. Their viability was based largely on welfare payments, as Angus writes, for the federal Department of Aboriginal Affairs “had given up pretending that some large-scale economic enterprise, leading to regular paid work, was just around the corner.”

As public health practitioner David Scrimgeour tells it in his recent book, Remote as Ever, a cohort of whites with relevant skills was emerging from southern capital cities to work alongside these Western Desert people. They believed that self-determination could work as long as it was re-spatialised according to Aboriginal wishes and resourced according to their rights as citizens. For Indigenous nations living almost entirely on imported food, the “smoothly operating well-stocked store” was each new community’s foundational institution. Schools and clinics (each with itinerant staff) followed. Able to move among Ngaanyatjarra’s five communities, people occupied their homeland with fewer material constraints; but it was difficult to service “communities” so transient.

The 1967 referendum had created the potential for intergovernmental relationships to change in ways that could work to the advantage of Ngaanyatjarra. The Commonwealth sought to treat the entire Central Reserve as a single “tri-state” object of reformed administration. Decisions in Canberra meant that the Ngaanyatjarra began to look more to the local Department of Aboriginal Affairs office in Alice Springs and less to state officials in Perth. WA government agencies increasingly faced demands from community advisers who answered to Canberra.

Empowering the Commonwealth at the expense of the states caused tensions among non-Indigenous officials. A major Commonwealth innovation in 1977 was to lump unemployment benefits into a single payment to each community — the Community Development Employment Projects, or CDEP, schemes.

When their expectations were not met, Ngaanyatjarra were sometimes violent towards service providers, making policing (where, how many, what methods) a policy issue in the late 1970s. Christian evangelism (including a “Christian Crusade” in 1981) and new by-laws in Warburton reduced but didn’t stop alcohol abuse and petrol-sniffing. Angus argues convincingly that outbreaks of “lawlessness” preceded the 1970s transition to “self-determination.” But the question remained: could the institutions of self-determination reduce the frequency and severity of such “turbulence”?

A certain level of turmoil did not stop the Ngaanyatjarra and their neighbours to the east from collective action using the Commonwealth’s and South Australia’s land rights policies. The formation of the Pitjantjara Council, the continuing interest of mining companies in the reserve’s nickel, and the pro-mining stance of WA premier Charles Court stimulated the formation of the Ngaanyatjarra Council in March 1981. In well-publicised lobbying, the council demanded inalienable freehold title to the WA portion of the Central Reserve.

An inquiry initiated by a subsequent premier, Labor’s Brian Burke, recommended in 1984 a way to legislate land rights. With claimable land amounting to 47.2 per cent of Western Australia’s total area, the Liberal Party argued, as it would in 2023, against “a set of rights which will be attributable to one small group of our population,” and it had the numbers in the Legislative Council to defeat Labor’s bill.

Burke’s government was impressed by the mining industry’s public relations campaign and lobbied for the Hawke government to abandon its planned national land rights bill. Would the Ngaanyatjarra accept a ninety-nine-year lease and the prospect of a nickel mining town (with jobs for Ngaanyatjarra) instead? The Ngaanyatjarra suggested that the government use existing legislation to lease the reserve land and other desired portions to a new body — the Ngaanyatjarra Land Council — some land portions with ninety-nine-year, others with fifty-year leases. Mining companies would apply to the land council, not the mines minister, for permission to explore, with a right to take any refusal to independent arbitration. Visitors could apply to the land council for permission to enter land under lease.

This 1988 deal, which Angus describes as “a masterfully executed compromise,” has lasted through several changes of government.

Because roads are an essential part of the Ngaanyatjarra’s adaptation, it mattered that, not being rate-payers, they could not vote in shire elections. When the franchise was extended to all adult residents, voter turnout among Ngaanyatjarra was much higher (40 per cent in May 1987) than among all other voters in the Shire of Wiluna, which extended to the west. Recognising that the shire was now two regions distinguished by need, revenue base, economic activity and cultural outlook, the WA government split the Shire of Wiluna in half and established the Shire of Ngaanyatjarraku in the eastern portion in July 1993.

This belated municipal enfranchisement of the Ngaanyatjarra was by then paralleled in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, or ATSIC. Replacing the Department of Aboriginal Affairs in 1989, ATSIC was made up of elected regional councils with responsibility for certain Commonwealth programs. At first, ATSIC comprised sixty elected regional councils; after amalgamations for the second round of elections in December 1993, there were only thirty-five. Ngaanyatjarra objected to being amalgamated with neighbours to their west (Martu) and south (Spinifex mob) and took legal action against the electoral process that chose the Western Desert Regional Council. Their objection — not wanting to be represented by strangers — remains a familiar theme of Indigenous Australian politics. Warren Mundine — campaigning against the 2023 referendum — cited the Ngaanyatjarra as an ally in his critique of the Voice co-design process proposed by Marcia Langton and Tom Calma.

“By the mid-1990s,” Angus concludes, “the Ngaanyatjarra Council could justifiably claim that the region had become self-managing within the state and Commonwealth legal frameworks.” He lists formally incorporated enterprises (transport, stores) the Ngaanyatjarra have developed through collective action.

In an afterword, he briefly takes the story to the present. He condemns the Howard government (1996–2007) and its successors for modifying, then abandoning, the single most important financial basis of “self-management,” the CDEP. An older set of expectations regained authority in government and to some extent among the wider public: the Ngaanyatjarra would develop (must develop) into job-seekers (with “work-like habits”) despite their region still having almost no labour market (other than that provided by the CDEP).

In his valuable ethnography of the social and linguistic practices that have evolved within Ngaanyatjarra transactions with governments, The Dystopia in the Desert, former Ngaanyatjarra employee Tadhgh Purtill argues that the community, its advisers and distant public servants have tacitly agreed never to confront the tensions between the different practical senses of a word that all feel obliged to use: “development.”

Ethnography yields an account of something on which all governance rests: embedded, routinised ways of describing Ngaanyatjarra circumstances. As Purtill observes, talk and text can be seen as enacting a kind of political truce. That is, they shield the fantasy of remote Aboriginal assimilation from a reality test it could not survive. Purtill’s point of view is elusive; he seems, at times, to be a whistle-blower unmasking a systemic rort of public funds. Yet in his account of mutual complicities the reader can see an adaptive structure, a buffer against the ongoing (and potentially lethal) chaos that is settler colonial authority in its liberal democratic form.

Well advised and adept, the Ngaanyatjarra litigated against the smashing of the CDEP in 2021. They won a $2 million payment and a government promise to negotiate a new framework of public financial support. Angus concludes his book wondering how that will work out in a political system that equates centralised decision-making with administrative rationality. There is a Ngaanyatjarra voice, but it is nothing without an attentive listener. •

Too Far Out: An Administrative History of the Ngaanyatjarra Homelands
By Max Angus | Hesperian Press | $66 | 295 pages

The post Voices off appeared first on Inside Story.

We need to focus on the institution, not the individual priest. Practice and policy. Show me the church manipulated the systems so that these guys wouldn’t have to face charges. Show me they put those same priests back into parishes time and time again. Show me that it was systemic, that it came from the top down. We’re going after the system. I think that’s the bigger story.

The team, led by Walter Robinson, kept digging and eventually revealed not only the shocking extent of the abuse but the lengths to which the church hierarchy went to protect the abusers. The team’s 600-plus stories during 2002 eventually led to the resignation of Boston’s archbishop, Bernard Law.

The dramatisation of these events, Spotlight, was released in 2015 and won the Academy Award for best picture. Perhaps even more than All the President’s Men, it is a film that makes journalists feel proud of what their work can achieve.

Less than a decade later, though, Spotlight feels like a relic from a bygone era. Since 2015 the size and influence of the legacy news media have diminished markedly within a media ecosystem in which the majority of people in the United States and Australia get their news from social media.

As Brian Stelter documents in his books Hoax (2020) and Network of Lies (2023), news from established outlets like the New York Times sloshes around the internet alongside the toxic swill from Fox News and elsewhere. This tsunami of news and opinion is further polluted by torrents of misinformation and disinformation on social media, whether it’s about vaccines, the 2020 US presidential election or the Voice referendum.

Into this changed, and changing, environment comes Collision of Power, Baron’s memoir of a forty-five-year career in journalism that took him from the Miami Herald via the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times to eleven years editing the Boston Globe and eight years as executive editor of the Washington Post. He stepped down from that last posting, aged sixty-seven, in February 2021.

Baron has spent his entire career in newspapers and is resolutely old school in his belief in the continuing value of public interest journalism and orthodox notions of journalistic objectivity. Collision of Power reads as something of a collision between the world he grew up in, inspired by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward’s 1970s reporting on Watergate for the newspaper he eventually edited, and a world in which countless journalistic disclosures about Donald Trump’s manifest unfitness for office made not a jot of difference to his supporter base.

Does this mean Baron’s memoir should be consigned to the dustbin of history along with the dinosaurs of print? Well, unlike many journalists’ memoirs, this one is not marinated in tales of derring-do and all-night drinking marathons. Baron spent most of his career as an editor rather than on-the-road journalist and his book is all about the work.

I only know that Baron rarely drinks because he said so after winning the 2016 Christopher Hitchens prize, and then only to compare himself with the famously lubricated Hitchens and make a larger point — that they might have approached life differently but they shared the same journalistic values. But he does wryly acknowledge the accuracy of Schreiber’s portrayal of him in Spotlight as “humourless, laconic, and yet resolute.”

The three main threads running throughout Collision of Power are flagged in its subtitle: “Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post.” Baron was appointed executive editor of that newspaper in 2013, a time when Donald Trump’s name was still good for a laugh, courtesy of Barack Obama, at the annual White House correspondents’ dinner. He stepped down the month after Trump left office still proclaiming he had won the previous November’s election.

Baron reflects that the Post, like the rest of the mainstream news media, had underestimated Trump’s appeal to many Americans. After the 2016 election he resolved to devote more resources to getting reporters out across the country to tap into ordinary people’s experiences and concerns. He also concedes that the Post put too much weight on Hillary Clinton’s slipshod secrecy about her emails during her presidential campaign.

Before the election, Baron and his journalists had learnt how Trump dealt with the media — how he alternated between feeding them stories and gossip, as he had done for years as a New York property developer, and threatening to cut off access or, worse, if he became president, change the libel laws to make it easier for public figures to sue journalists. As Trump railed about “the fake news media” and levelled personal insults at individual journalists, Baron stressed that “We’re not at war with the administration. We’re at work.”

The “work” was published continuously, including in a multi-authored book, Trump Revealed, that covered many aspects of the candidate’s life, from real estate to allegations of sexual harassment, and from his business ventures to his television career. The newspaper’s fact-checking unit tracked Trump’s runaway capacity for exaggeration and deceit, finding that during his presidency he told 30,573 lies.

When the Post’s David Fahrenthold decided to test Trump’s self-seeded reputation as a philanthropist, for instance, he found fallow ground. The Trump Foundation had received US$5.5 million but claimed to have pledged US$8.5 million to various causes. Notoriously, one donation made by Trump was for a portrait of himself that Fahrenthold’s citizen sleuths on social media found in his Florida golf resort. Fahrenthold also broke the story of the notorious Access Hollywood tapes.

Throughout the Trump presidency, the Washington Post and the New York Times competed hard to break stories that would hold Trump and his staff to account. The sheer number of important disclosures they made is easy to forget, partly because there seemed no end of chaos in the Trump administration and partly because no matter what Trump did he was exonerated because the Republicans had the numbers in the Senate. Almost without exception, they refused to examine issues on their merits and voted out of blind, fearful loyalty to Trump.

Baron’s careful recounting of the many scandals of the Trump administration is both a salutary and a dispiriting experience for the reader. Salutary because we may have forgotten how damaging Trump’s presidency was to so many (remember the one million–plus US deaths from Covid-19?) and dispiriting because he continues to evade responsibility for his actions.

As Trump heads towards the Republican nomination for the 2024 election, the various court cases brought against him are mired in process, delays and appeals. Baron’s memoir reminds us that it was the Post’s reporter Amy Gardner who broke the story that led to one of the most serious post–2020 election cases: how Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, received a phone call from Trump urging him to “find” enough votes to reverse Joe Biden’s narrow victory in the southern state.

According to the recording Gardner obtained, Trump said to Raffensperger: “All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” Trump faces thirteen criminal charges for trying to undo the Georgia result.

Baron’s acute awareness of the threat posed by a second Trump presidency explains why he feels compelled to go over events in such detail. What he doesn’t reflect on is how and why Trump has been able to recover from the ignominy surrounding his 2020 loss. It is a commonplace of commentary to say that Trump’s rise is a symptom of disease in the Republican Party. But has there ever been a symptom so potent and deep-seated, given that the Republican Party is now the Trump Party in all but name?

The media’s role in aiding and abetting Trump’s rise from the ashes of 2020 is something Baron could also have reflected on. Trump is an attention magnet, and the news media has been unable to resist the pull of a figure who sees politics in the hyperventilating, hypermasculine style of pro wrestling. Unable but also, perhaps, unwilling: Les Moonves, the chairman of the CBS television company, infamously said in 2016 that Trump’s rise “may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

The evidence is in on the “may not be good for America” part, so it is truly galling to see the news media rushing to cover Trump’s every recent move in classic horserace style. Left behind at the starter’s gate is context, history or a strong enough sense of the grave risk to democracy.

As New York journalism professor Jay Rosen says, the organising principle for the news media as it covers the 2024 presidential election should be “not the odds, but the stakes.” That is, “not who has what chances of winning, but the consequences for our democracy, given what’s possible in this election.” He points to a 2023 piece by Brynn Tannehill in the New Republic as an example of “stakes commentary” whose analysis is both plausible and terrifying. It’s well worth reading.

Collision of Power’s second thread is Jeff Bezos’s surprise purchase in 2013 of the Washington Post from the Graham family, which had owned it since 1933. Like many other media outlets, the Post was struggling to adapt its business model to survive commercially in the digital media age.

One of the world’s richest men (he was worth US$25 billion at the time), Bezos bought the paper out of his own pocket for US$250 million rather than through the company he founded, Amazon. According to Baron, he did so out of a commitment to sustaining public interest journalism.

Bezos’s motivation and plans for the paper attracted a lot of scepticism at the time. Why would a leader of one of the global tech behemoths that had laid waste to the print media’s business model want to buy one of these financially ailing newspapers? Would he allow the Washington Post to report without fear or favour on Amazon, especially given the company’s long history of stonewalling journalists probing its hostility to labour unions, to take one example among many? Would he be an interventionist proprietor?

Soon after buying the paper, Bezos met staff in the “windowless, cavernous and thoroughly charmless ‘community room’” next to the newspaper’s auditorium and fielded questions, including one from famed veteran investigative reporter, Bob Woodward: “How and why did you decide to buy the Post?” (“Hardball,” cracked another journalist.) Bezos answered that he had asked himself three questions before making the decision. Was the newspaper an important institution? Yes, of course. Did it have a future? Yes, in the right circumstances. Did he have anything to contribute, especially as he lived on the opposite coast, in Seattle? Yes, he could provide “runway”; that is, long-term investment that would allow time for experiments to succeed or fail.

And on the question of the newspaper’s coverage of him and his company? “Feel free to cover Amazon any way you want. Feel free to cover Jeff Bezos any way you want.” According to Baron, the newspaper did just that. Its resolve was tested in 2019 when the National Enquirer revealed Bezos had been conducting an affair with a media personality, Lauren Sánchez, including sending her “dick pics.” Baron says the Post covered the issue professionally but acknowledges it could not quite nail down whether the National Enquirer’s story was a political hit job.

The Enquirer, known to be close to Donald Trump, is a supermarket tabloid that engages in “catch and kill”: using a legally enforceable non-disclosure agreement, it buys exclusive rights to “catch” the damaging story from an individual before “killing” it for the benefit of a third party. Trump had been pursuing a vendetta against Bezos and what he called “the Amazon Post.”

On the question of proprietorial interference, though, Baron is adamant: “Bezos never interfered in the Post’s journalism during my seven years plus under his ownership, even if coverage of Amazon put the company in an unfavourable light. For all the speculation that Bezos would use the Post to exercise influence, I never saw any evidence he had or would. I got the sense Bezos relished the challenge of turning around the Post.”

Not that Bezos initially understood exactly how journalism is produced. Like Fred Hilmer, the management consultant who was Fairfax Media’s CEO between 1998 and 2005, Bezos was, and is, obsessed by metrics. He wanted the newspaper’s online website to devote more of its resources to “aggregating” other outlets’ stories into shorter pieces with clickbait headlines, and he wanted each story done in fifteen minutes.

Baron could see the idea’s commercial savvy — it was a “bargain-basement way to profit off the work of others” — but found it intensely annoying that the readers he wanted to consume the newspaper’s original reporting would be drawn in by these “digital gillnets.”

Bezos separated journalists into two categories: those whose work had a “direct impact on the product” (reporters) and those who had an indirect impact (editors). Hire more of the former and fewer of the latter, Baron was told, but he resisted. He believed good editors were essential to “directing and coordinating coverage and ensuring that it meets our quality standards.”

Baron tussled with Bezos on these issues throughout his tenure. He came to appreciate Bezos’s genuine insights into improving the company’s efficiency, and he welcomed Bezos’s commitment to deepening and broadening coverage by hiring more journalists. The number of political journalists at the paper doubled during Baron’s time there, and before the 2016 election an eight-person “rapid-response investigative team” was established. In time, improvements in how the paper’s stories were packaged and delivered to readers reaped rewards in both reach and subscription numbers.

Bezos also came to appreciate the particular role newspapers play in society and the particular culture a newsroom needs if its staff are going to publish stories that anger and upset powerful people, including presidents. When Ben Bradlee, a legendary predecessor of Baron who oversaw the paper’s coverage of the Watergate scandal, died in 2014, Bezos was not planning to attend the funeral until he received an email from Bob Woodward reminding him not only of Bradlee’s importance in the paper’s history but also that he was “the soul of the institution that’s now yours.” Bezos attended, and afterwards described it as an “awakening” for him.

The new owner imbibed the example of Katharine Graham, publisher between 1963 and 1991, whose steadfast support of the paper during Watergate earned her the ire of the Nixon administration, which planned payback by encouraging its allies to challenge the licences of the Graham family’s television stations.

Trump initially tried charming Bezos before asking him to use his position to secure favourable coverage. When Bezos rebuffed his demands, Trump launched a ferocious campaign against Amazon. He claimed the company should pay higher postal rates for its goods and more tax — a bit rich coming from someone who had boasted about not paying much tax.

Partly because of Amazon’s public unpopularity, many underplayed what Trump was doing. Baron, however, cites a 2019 article by Jonathan Chait in New York magazine: “The story here is almost certainly a massive scandal, probably more significant than the Ukraine scandal that spurred impeachment proceedings. Trump improperly used government policy to punish the owner of an independent newspaper as retribution for critical coverage.”

Running alongside commercially oriented discussions are sharpening challenges to Baron’s sense of journalistic ethics. In the third thread in Collision of Power he discusses his stewardship of an important newspaper during what has been, and continues to be, a difficult period for the news media. He illustrates the challenges with detailed accounts of the cases of Wes Lowery and Felicia Sonmez.

Lowery won a Pulitzer for his reporting on police shootings in 2015; Sonmez was a breaking news reporter. Both fell foul of the newspaper’s social media policy by tweeting their views on various controversies, including Trump’s racist comments about four progressive congresswomen of colour (Lowery) and sexual assault allegations against high-profile sports stars and other journalists (Sonmez).

Lowery left the newspaper and began speaking out about what he saw as the bankrupt nature of objectivity in journalism. Last year he wrote a thought-provoking essay, “A Test of the News,” for the Columbia Journalism Review in which he highlighted how journalists from diverse backgrounds are feeling increasingly frustrated and disenchanted by how news stories are chosen and framed from what Lowery sees as a predominantly upper-class, white, male perspective.

The lack of diversity in American (and for that matter Australian) newsrooms has been a problem for many years. In 1971, according to the American Journalist Project, just 3.9 per cent of those working in newsrooms were Black. By 2013 the percentage figure had still only nudged up to 4.1.

Journalistic objectivity has also been the subject of controversy for many years. Historically, journalists and editors liked to think their decisions about news selection were arrived at dispassionately. At best they were discounting, and at worst they were oblivious to, the values — personal, cultural and ideological — underpinning their decisions. Even the language of the newsroom, with its talk of “a nose for news” or, more formally, “news values,” gives the game away. Whose nose, what values?

Behind the cloak of objectivity are hidden all sorts of journalistic shibboleths. The horserace coverage of electoral contests, for instance, has been analysed in the academic literature since at least 1980, but the news media seems unable or unwilling to recognise the problems of reporting politics as if it were a sporting event.

Another example: people in positions of power and authority, especially presidents and prime ministers, are accorded at least 50 per cent of space in news items simply because of their status. When an allegation is made against them, they must be asked for a response. When president George W. Bush built the case — spurious as it turned out — to invade Iraq in 2003, he was able to game the journalistic requirement for balance. Donald Trump, of course, has pushed that game several moves down the board.

Objectivity in a scientific sense is unattainable. Journalists are human beings. The news media industry’s relentless pushing of the idea that news reporting can be objective has simply sent an open invitation to everyone to play spot the bias.

What journalists can and should pursue is an objective method of verification, as is cogently outlined in Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s essential guide, The Elements of Journalism. At its simplest, this means seeking out all perspectives on an issue, especially a contentious issue, and reporting viewpoints dispassionately. Drawing on a range of views blunts a journalist’s tendency to serve up their biases or simply opine.

That doesn’t mean accepting any and every view. As the quote variously attributed to Jonathan Foster and Hubert Mewhinney has it: “If someone says it’s raining and another person says it’s dry, it’s not your job to quote them both. Your job is to look out the fucking window and find out which is true.”

First published in 2001, Kovach and Rosenstiel’s book has been revised three times to keep up to date with trends and debates, including on newsroom diversity. They cite a Black business executive, Peter Bell, who says arguments for greater diversity in newsrooms presuppose that all Black people or all women think alike. “What is the Black position on any given issue? The answer, of course, is that there isn’t one.”

Conversely, a Black journalist, Nikole Hannah-Jones, says the rage she feels about racial injustice drives her reporting. Rather than the word objectivity, she talks about meticulous research, evidence and transparency as guiding principles that strengthen her storytelling.

For Kovach and Rosenstiel, “Independence from faction suggests there is a way to produce journalism without either denying the influence of personal experience or being hostage to it.” As much as greater diversity along racial, gender or gender-identity lines is needed, they argue that newsrooms also need intellectual and ideological diversity.

In 1971, 26 per cent of American journalists identified themselves as Republicans, 36 per cent as Democrats and 33 per cent as independents. By 2013, the number of Republicans had dropped to 7 per cent while the number of Democrats had fallen slightly to 28 per cent and the number of independents had risen to 50 per cent.

In practice, according to Kovach and Rosenstiel, this means “on the crush of deadline, journalists often expect everyone in the newsroom to think the same way rather than embracing debate inspired by personal background… It has been safer to default to a vision of journalistic consciousness that pretends politics doesn’t enter into it.”

Baron, for his part, supports the need for greater newsroom diversity and has seen the benefit of journalists using social media for their work. But he is also a socially conservative person for whom the story is what matters, not him or his opinions. As much as anything, that was what he disapproved of when Lowery (whose work he greatly admired) took to Twitter.

This is a valuable book by a self-effacing but outstanding editor. It is no small irony that, having been inspired by the newspaper’s Watergate reporting, Baron seems blind to the fact that Woodward and Bernstein were the first newspaper journalists to become celebrities. It was their book, All the President’s Men, and the film adaptation starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman (with Jason Robards as Bradlee) that created the Watergate legend.

The horse known as the unheralded journalist has long since bolted. The doors of the stable containing the social media horse were also flung open several years ago. The question now is whether media outlets and their journalists can find the balance between opinion and reporting and between free speech and company loyalty. •

Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post
By Martin Baron | Flatiron Books | $74.99 | 548 pages

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The theme served three purposes. First, it was memorable — hearing the music all these years later, I still think of the masked avenger before the Swiss freedom fighter. Second, television programs went to air at a certain time of the week (The Lone Ranger, for me, was Saturday tea time) and the music served as an alarm call. It even began with a fanfare of trumpets and French horns that could summon you from another part of the house. Today, when many people watch “linear” television only for news bulletins, news themes still often begin with some sort of fanfare.

The third purpose of the Rossini was that it was cheap, and this was a hangover from radio days. It was some time after the advent of radio before anyone thought to employ composers to write themes or incidental music, and it was the same with television. In the short term, much of the music came from stock recordings, and they weren’t always of the highest quality — the trumpets and horns were never quite together at the start of The Lone Ranger. Burlingame’s book tells us that sixty-seven of the eight-nine cuts of incidental music in the series were classical pieces by the likes of Liszt and Tchaikovsky together with a library of generic “Western” music by uncredited studio composers. Most of it had been recorded in Mexico in the 1940s.

By the mid 1950s, television drama was taking music more seriously and this involved drafting film composers to ply their trade in the new medium. Accordingly, Bernard Herrmann, who had composed the theremin-heavy score for The Day the Earth Stood Still in 1951, was invited to supply the theme for the first season of The Twilight Zone eight years later and came up with a score consisting of drifting minor-key harmonies and dreamy harp arpeggios, not unlike his contemporaneous score for Vertigo.

But this is not the theme most people associate with The Twilight Zone, the one with the famous four-note ostinato on an electric guitar. That came the following season (the theme was changed to underline the fact that these were new episodes) and was the result of someone editing together two scraps of library stock. Their composer, the Frenchman Marius Constant, was unaware his music had been used, let alone edited, let alone turned into a theme, and his name never appeared on the credits. As Burlingame explains, it wasn’t until the 1980s that the composer realised how significant his music had been. Having dinner with some American friends, he dropped into the conversation that he had written the theme for The Twilight Zone.

“There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by an enthusiastic outburst,” Constant recalled; “it was as if I had confessed to having written Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.” The anecdote alone demonstrates how important TV had become in people’s lives.

Burlingame’s excellent book, which is full of such stories, is a nostalgia trip, no doubt about it; but it is also what its author intended: “a history of a vastly underappreciated realm of American music.” Divided into television genres — Westerns, detective series, sci-fi, drama, comedy, news, cartoons and so on — it charts the rise in importance of the sound of television and the role of the composer. As soon as composers were attached to projects, music began to establish, from the outset, the pace of the show — the powerful swagger of Fred Steiner’s Perry Mason theme, say, or the five-in-a-bar hell-for-leather of Lalo Schifrin’s Mission: Impossible. With words added, the theme could prime new viewers with details of a show’s dramatis personae; it could even provide the backstory. This was particularly true in the case of comedies.

“Flintstones! Meet the Flintstones!” was the viewer’s invitation, in 1960, to “have a gay old time” with “the modern stone-age family.” Many thousands of years later (in 1963), the family of the future was afforded more specific introductions: “Meet George Jetson, his boy Elroy, daughter Judy… Jane, his wife.” In the 1970s, prime-time cartoon comedies went out of fashion, but when they returned with a vengeance in the form of The Simpsons (1989–) the opening sequence was a nod to both those earlier shows. Danny Elfman’s theme, though it had dispensed with lyrics, borrowed the rising melodic line of “Meet George Jetson,” while, in a pointedly ironic reference to the Flinstones’ trip to a prehistoric drive-in, which is how that show began each week, we saw the Simpson family rushing home to sit on the couch and watch themselves on telly.

“Come ’n listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed,” was the first line of a song with words and music by Paul Henning, the creator–producer of The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–71). The banjo-accompanied song told viewers, at the start of each episode, why and how “a poor mountaineer” and his family had ended up in a Beverly Hills mansion, without which knowledge the show wouldn’t have made much sense. As another producer, the screenwriter Sherwood Schwartz, remarked, “a puzzled audience cannot laugh.”

Schwartz himself was obliged to come up with the theme song for Gilligan’s Island (1964–67) ahead of CBS’s commissioning the show because the president of the company believed it was impossible to give enough backstory for a new viewer. Schwartz was no songwriter, but he stayed up late and wrote a calypso-style number (the island, after all, was in the Caribbean) that at least satisfied the studio. Later, working with composer and music director George Wyle, Schwartz developed the familiar shanty-esque song — “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale” — that provided an introduction to all the characters and a recap of the “fateful trip” that had led to their predicament.

“Here’s the story of a lovely lady,” was the start of a hyper-efficient lyric that explained how the “lady” in question and her “very lovely daughters” had grown acquainted with “a man named Brady” and his sons, and in no time at all (in fact, fifty-eight seconds) become The Brady Bunch (1969–74). You could start watching any of these shows mid-season and know all you needed to know by the time the opening credits are over.

In The Addams Family (1964–66) we scarcely needed the “kooky/spooky/ooky” words to let us know what was going on because lined up on our screens, as if for a family photograph, was the family itself. They weren’t smiling, they snapped their fingers ominously, and really that, together with the sound of the harpsichord, did the job. Perhaps most radical, though, was All in the Family (1971–79), in which Archie and Edith Bunker (Caroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton) sat at a piano each week and sang their theme song (“Those Were the Days”) to the studio audience and to camera. The longer she did it, Burlingame relates, and the more laughs she got, the more raucously off-key Stapleton would sing.

When the first edition of Burlingame’s book appeared in 1996, it ended with a lament that the great days of television were gone, while hoping they might one day return. Almost on cue, cable TV hit its stride, with streaming not far behind. In some ways it seemed as though television music was starting again from the same place.

The Sopranos (1999–2007), eschewing the score its creators believed would manipulate the viewer, opted for existing music (not classical this time, but pop). Stock music was also back, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (2001–) using a twenty-five-year-old library track he had first encountered on a California bank commercial. But composed music was changing, too, the new widescreen televisions taking us closer to the characters and drawing subtlety from composers, even in signature themes. With no need of fanfare-style tunes or (in the age of bingeing) songs that filled in the backstory, David Carbonara’s mesmerising Mad Men (2007–15) theme, the creeping menace of Hildur Guðnadottir’s score for Chernobyl (2019) and Siddhartha Khosla’s wittily compelling music for Only Murders in the Building (2021–) would all have seemed a little underdone in TV’s first golden age.

Is the second golden age already fading? It could be. Certainly the theme is now at the viewer’s discretion, for as the opening credits roll on your favourite show, the streaming service on which you’re watching it will invite you to “skip.” If it’s your third or fourth episode of the evening, you might well be tempted. •

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Accompanying Jimmy on the journey were sundry family members, including three sons and two nephews. They were in search of the family home that Jimmy’s father, Mar See Poy, had left in 1914 and to which he returned after being deported from Australia in 1926. The moment when Jimmy approached the front door, recalls his nephew Phillip, “was remembered [by all] as an emotional ‘high point.’”

Jimmy’s is one of several stories about Chinese immigrants and their hometowns told in a new collection of essays, The China–Australia Migration Corridor. The corridor in question is a virtual one, constituted by the movement of people to and from Sydney and what is now the municipality of Zhongshan, in Guangdong province, where Sha Chong village is located. The stories have a number of common elements: more than one generation, an extended lapse in time between migration and return, a “house-hunting” quest — which is central to the book’s heritage theme — and the “affect,” or emotional content, of the journeys. Jimmy’s has all these characteristics.

The book is an outcome of the Heritage Corridor project, launched in 2017 by Ien Ang and Denis Byrne at the University of Western Sydney. Ang brings to this project a long history of engagement with migration, race and identity. Byrne is an archaeologist working in the field of critical heritage studies. Together with anthropologist Phillip Mar (Jimmy’s nephew), historian Michael Williams, research fellow Alexandra Wong and PhD student Christopher Cheng (now graduated), they have been collecting stories of return as part of an investigation of Australian-Chinese built heritage. The nine chapters in the book, to which the entire research team has contributed, are concerned with memories and material remains almost in equal measure.

The book’s publication follows closely on that of Byrne’s 2022 monograph, The Heritage Corridor: A Transnational Approach to the Heritage of Chinese Migration. Both books are concerned with the migration corridor “as a transnational field of material heritage.” With the concept of the corridor, Byrne takes aim at both the idea of a national heritage bounded by the nation-state and the related top-down definition of heritage. Focusing on the flow of people and money between Sydney and Zhongshan, the project’s researchers have kept an eye on grassroots heritage-making at both ends of the corridor.

Zhongshan, which covers an area considerably larger than Sydney, is part plains, part hills. It used to be called Xiangshan, meaning “fragrant hills”: hence the title of Michael Williams’s informative opening chapter, “Villages of the Fragrant Hills.” Its present name, as a footnote by Williams tells us, is a legacy of its most famous emigrant, “Father of the Republic” Sun Yatsen (1866–1925), also known as Sun Zhongshan. Sun was founder of the Kuomintang, or KMT — the Chinese Nationalist Party, to give it its English name — which was China’s governing party in the years 1928–49. The place that bears his name is the only one of 2000 or so Chinese counties to have been named, like Sydney, after a historical figure.

Zhongshan was a major source of migrants to Pacific Rim countries in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, accounting for perhaps a plurality of Chinese residents in New South Wales and Queensland before and during the White Australia era. In their chapter “Zhongshan in Sydney’s Chinatown,” Ang and Wong note the dominance of Zhongshan natives in the Sydney branch of the KMT, founded in 1921. KMT party members met (and still meet) in built-for-purpose headquarters at 75–77 Ultimo St, Sydney, constructed in 1921 by Robert Wall and Sons. Locally, the party probably served in lieu of a native-place association for Zhongshan people; internationally, it was also headquarters of the Australasian KMT, the party’s regional branch.

The Sydney building has a counterpart in the party’s Victorian state headquarters in Little Bourke Street, Melbourne, which features a facade designed by Walter Burley Griffin. Support for the KMT was strong in both cities but rested on different native-place foundations. In Melbourne, Zhongshan immigrants were well outnumbered by natives of See Yup, a cluster of four districts geographically contiguous with Zhongshan but distinguished by language sub-group and local-place networks.

With strength in numbers, high profiles in Sydney Chinatown’s commerce and politics, and considerable prominence in the business history of China itself, the Zhongshan migrants and their descendants were a natural focus for the Heritage Corridor project. The decision was facilitated by the fact that Michael Williams’s 2018 book, Returning Home with Glory: Chinese Villagers Around the Pacific, 1849–1949, also focused on Zhongshan, provided ready-made foundations for this differently themed project.

Like Williams’s pioneering book, the project foregrounds the home district of the migrants — the place to which they sent money and letters and to which, before the second world war, they not infrequently returned. They typically came from the poorer villages of the hills, which in the first half of the twentieth century sent abroad up to one in every three of their able-bodied males. With their skewed sex ratios and untended fields, these “sojourner villages” (qiaoxiang) became the beneficiaries of overseas remittances and the source of further migration.

A high degree of mobility is a well-known feature of Chinese migration in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Emigrant men periodically returned home for family reasons; a son born in China might then, in his turn, come to Australia as a student or to help in the family business. This was partly an effect of White Australia–era immigration restrictions, which produced a strange pattern of migration in which a family might be in Australia for three generations before anyone was actually born there. The Ma (Mar) family, represented by several people interviewed for this book, is an example.

If these accounts of comings and goings are the warp of the book, then “heritage-making” is its weft.

Byrne distinguishes rather sharply between “heritage from above” and “heritage from below”: the former is evident in the national and state registries of heritage sites; the latter is exemplified in the “quest for the ancestral house” in the course of which “old houses are brought forward into the landscape of the present.” But something exists between “heritage from above” and “heritage from below.” The examples of Sydney’s Kwong War Chong building, discussed by Ang and Wong, and the Ma and Kwok family mansions of Zhongshan discussed by Byrne himself, show that local government in both countries has a significant role in preserving historical buildings, even if — in the case of Sydney at least — the intervention followed community lobbying.

Nonetheless, the book’s accounts of heritage-making as a grassroots social process are persuasive. Returning to the ancestral village and finding the ancestral home, Byrne argues, means inscribing the past in the present. This reading is given force by the fact that the process, in very many cases, involves communicating meanings from one generation to the next. When Mabel Lee went to Zhongshan in the late 1970s it was because her father wanted to go: “He would say, ‘If you don’t take me, I’ll be dead.’” Gordon Mar and his brothers took his mother back in 1997, at her insistence, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer: “She felt it was her duty to bring her sons back to the village to be acknowledged.”

The other aspect of heritage-making concerns the material sites of meaning: the village, the house, sometimes even objects within the house. The buildings described and discussed range from commercial buildings in Dixon Street to “remittance houses” and schools in Zhongshan, built with money sent or brought back to China. Byrne presents a useful typology of these houses, which at the upper end were palatial. The same is true of schools, the focus of Christopher Cheng’s PhD research. Photos of multistorey buildings with porticos, columns, and cupolas show the ambitions of the donors.

Read from cover to cover, The China–Australia Migration Corridor leaves a strong impression of buildings in Sydney, on the east edge of one continent, juxtaposed with buildings in Zhongshan, in the southeast corner of another. For Byrne, these two clusters represent the two ends of the transnational corridor. Yet they also seem to define a period of history. In her chapter on “(Un)making Transnational Identities,” Ang repeatedly refers to a sense of closure in the Zhongshan–Sydney connection. Kam Louie, born in Zhongshan in 1949, is the only one of a family of many siblings ever to have returned to his home village, and his own children show no interest in going. For Gordon Mar, a one-off visit “seems to have reinforced his Australianness rather than his Chineseness.”

Like everyone else interviewed for the book, Louie and Mar are at the tail-end of a history of chain migration and eventual settlement that began under the Qing dynasty in the middle of the nineteenth century. The return to Zhongshan, accompanied in some cases by renewed investment in the ancestral village, followed the huge historical rupture created by war and revolution in China. When a new history of Chinese-Australian journeyings is written to cover subsequent migration, it will mostly be about people from other parts of China whose lives have been shaped by different historical circumstances.

This is an engaging collection of essays that makes an important contribution to the field of Chinese-Australian history. Like all good scholarly books, it opens up new research questions. The concept of “corridor” powerfully evokes the historical connections between Zhongshan and Sydney, but a corridor has walls. Who benefited from Zhongshan networks? Who was left outside those notional walls? How did other native-place connections operate in Sydney’s small Chinese community? Did native-place cleavages inform political cleavages? And in this small community, with its limited number of women of Chinese birth or parentage, who married whom? •

The China–Australia Migration Corridor: History and Heritage
Edited by Denis Byrne, Ien Ang and Phillip Mar | Melbourne University Press | $40 | 288 pages

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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.

Traditional photography, as we seem destined to refer to daguerreotype or digital or anything in between, records something captured in what immediately becomes the past. That doesn’t mean a photograph represents a historical truth — there are many ways, including deliberate fakery, by which the camera can lie. But however much an image may trick or mislead us, we can still be confident that it has its roots in history, that something happened, even if that something was designed to fool us.

That is what is changing. AI images fundamentally challenge the relationship of the image with the past. It is true that AI image-making (or AI-assisted, as some would more carefully express it) does in one sense depend on the past, in the form of the vast number of extant photographic images that AI draws upon to do its work. But the resulting “photography-like” image is indeed new — the person, the object, the event that it depicts did not exist. Nothing, so to speak, happened.

Given the way the ground is shifting, it isn’t surprising that we are witnessing an upsurge of interest in telling photography’s story so far. The huge stocks of photographs held by galleries and libraries and museums, sometimes deliberately collected but often accumulated almost by chance, are increasingly being brought to the forefront, as curators and historians of photography grapple with the most effective ways of displaying and contextualising examples from the vast stocks of images at their disposal.

Three current exhibitions — one at the National Gallery of Victoria, the others at the State Library of New South Wales and the National Archives of Australia — reflect this upsurge of interest. In the words of David Campany, a contributor to the splendid catalogue of the NGV exhibition, Photography: Real and Imagined, photography “finds itself centre stage again.”

The NGV first began collecting photographs more than fifty years ago with a brief “to acquire both Australian and international photography.” The collection began with an emphasis on documentary photography but moved rapidly into what, to use the shorthand, is generally termed art photography. This distinction may once have seemed clearer than it does now, when we are much more likely, as Susan Bright writes in her catalogue essay, to see photographs as belonging “on the spectrum,” somewhere between the polarities of reality and imagination.

Whether a photograph is seen as real or imagined, as documentary or art, amateur or professional, these categories are in fact “intertwined,” to use Bright’s term; whatever its status, whether as snapshot or artistic triumph, the photograph is evidence of something that happened in the past.

Among the exhibits at the NGV is German photographer Thomas Struth’s well-known image Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001). It shows a group of gallery visitors posed in the act of viewing the Telephos frieze in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. For all kinds of reasons, including scale and complexity of composition, Struth’s image announces itself as art.

Thomas Struth’s Pergamon Museum IV, Berlin (2001). National Gallery of Victoria

We are hardly surprised by this — it is part of an exhibition, and it is in an art gallery. The past of 2001 — a group of people arranged around a room in a gallery — is shown in contemplation of the past of more than 2000 years before, suggesting how any photograph, whatever its primary intent, also acts as a record of the time it was made. That photographic record may be as open to interpretation as the surviving fragments of an ancient frieze, but both photo and frieze qualify as history as well as art.

In looking at photographs on display on the walls of a museum or a library, as opposed to a public or private art gallery, we are very much primed to read the images the other way, as history first and art, if at all, second. The exhibitions currently at the State Library of New South Wales and the National Archives of Australia take different approaches to the question of photography’s role in illuminating the past, and of how we should read photographs on display as history — but also, sometimes, as art, depending both on the innate qualities of the image and the institutional setting.

Shot: 400 Photographs, 200 Photographers, 3 Centuries inaugurates the State Library’s new photography gallery, a subterranean space created out of an old storage area once filled with “empty filing cabinets and the like.” It is difficult to think of a more striking metaphor of how photography has assumed a much more prominent role in our public collections, pushing its way forward by way of adaptive reuse.

The role of photography as historical record is emphasised by the organising principle of the exhibition — at least one photograph from nearly every year from 1845 to 2022. The library holds something in the order of two million photograph images; 400 are on display in Shot. This disparity in these numbers gives some idea of the curatorial task involved in choosing what to include.

The library’s inauguration of a dedicated space for displaying photographs is to be applauded, but it is hard not to notice, when descending into the former storage area, how limited that space is. The walls feel crowded, with some images mounted so high that details are almost out of visual reach. They can be examined more closely, however, on one of the wall-mounted monitors that have been distributed around the display area.

This combination of physical and electronic display seems deliberately to be raising the question of how we most effectively comprehend the vastness of Australia’s archive of photographic history. The viewer is being encouraged to see the images on the walls as a starting point, an encouragement to engage in further exploration online. “These 400 works,” we are advised in the useful if all too brief booklet that accompanies the exhibition, “convey some of the rich rewards to be gained by examining the archive as a whole,” suggesting how the role of curator is moving speedily through a process of democratisation — just as photography itself has undergone a similar process over many decades.

On the evidence of one moderately busy morning, that strategy is working: the monitors in the room were all taken up by people zooming in on details of the image — or seeking out further background information, or comparing one image with another — while others patiently waited their turn.

Shot explicitly challenges any distinction between “art” and “documentary” photography, consigning that distinction, not altogether convincingly, to history, to the twentieth century when “the ‘art-hang’ was a popular method for exhibiting the work of artist-photographers.” The library doesn’t abide by that distinction, instead choosing a middle way between a gallery-style “art-hang” and what might be called a documentary-hang. “If they’ve got visible sprocket holes, for example, that’s how we reproduce them.”

The many photographs in the library’s collection have been “sourced from official documents,” from shoeboxes and mantelpieces and from the archives of newspapers and portrait studios, but there are also images that we would conventionally think of as being more at home on the walls of art galleries. Max Dupain’s The Sunbather is there (in two versions) along, for example, with a beautiful autochrome Still Life (1912–20) by an unknown photographer, and Anne Zahalka’s 1988 Cibachrome print The Sisters, which also, as it happens, includes a still life, in the bottom right hand corner of the frame. Zahalka’s is a brilliant image, its forthright compositional techniques — its multiple references to framing, for example — and its combination of visual formality and domesticity inviting reflection on what a difference a frame makes.

Anne Zahalka’s The Sisters (1988). State Library of New South Wales

The inclusion of works by Dupain and Zahalka emphasise the fact that, in addition to their status as photographic art, these images are also part of Australian history and of the time in which they were made. The exhibition makes the further point that all manner of photographic output — studio portraiture, holiday snaps, photojournalism, police mug shots, “art photography” — documents the past, and indeed that examples of all those genres have a place in the library’s collection.

“Most of the Library’s photographs,” remarks curator Geoffrey Barker in the exhibition booklet, “have been acquired for their documentary value rather than for their artistic or aesthetic value, but… when visitors look at these photographs they will realise that often there’s not much between them and art photography.”

Some images, rather more than others, bear out this contention. Photo Kiosk (1949), for example, by the little-known Brian Bird, captures a moment in history, but it would also look perfectly at home displayed among the work of the world’s great mid-century street photographers. As an indication of the richness and variety of the library’s holdings — and by extension of the country’s photographic heritage — the exhibition is best seen as it suggests we see it, as an incentive to look further, to explore and curate these collections for ourselves.

Brian Bird’s Photo Kiosk (1949). State Library of New South Wales

The selection criterion for Focus: Australian Government Photographers at the National Archives of Australia in Canberra, is quite different. This is a selection of the images produced by the professional photographers employed, in various capacities and under various departmental headings, by the federal government. This system of direct employment lasted from its inception in 1939 until 1996, when it gave way to outsourcing.

The job of these photographers was, as Martyn Jolly puts it in his introduction, to “show off” Australia, its landscape, its industry and way of life. The photographs were destined to be printed in brochures and departmental reports, often without attribution. “They weren’t,” says Jolly, “taken for the gallery wall.” And yet here they are, framed and attributed and looking very much like art.

Many photographers worked for the government in this way. Eighteen are represented in the exhibition, complete with names and brief biographical details, the recovery of which in many cases required diligent research. Only one, the pioneering Aboriginal photographer Mervyn Bishop, could be described as widely known outside professional circles.

The names of the other seventeen will almost certainly be less familiar, including that of the sole woman among them, Jocelyn Burt, for whom entry into the world of professional photographers was no easy task. “I ran headlong into male chauvinism before I even started to work professionally,” she says in her laconically knockabout memoir Shutterbug in the Bush (1981).

Seeing these works displayed alongside one another gives an idea of the tightly encompassing brief to which the photographers were working. The human subjects look happy or purposeful or occasionally pensive, with few images of suffering or deprivation and only occasional ones of delicately implied sadness. People are typically arranged in groups, working on some common task or engaging in sport or leisure activities in a spirit of cheerful competitiveness. (Buildings, meanwhile, are shown as modern and clean-lined, embodying Australia’s commitment to the future.)

We cannot help but be conscious of how people have been directed to stand here or there or hold their heads just so. In John Tanner’s Workers at the BHP Steelworks (1956), for instance, a trio of men in hard hats gazes towards the future. One of the men is shown with his arm draped over the shoulder of his colleague, looking very much as if this is the first time he has ever done such a thing. And yet the image works. It conveys both the social constraints and the essential optimism of the time, suggesting by the bright-eyed way in which the men look into the distance that, those social constraints notwithstanding, the future is open.

John Tanner’s Workers at the BHP Steelworks (1956). National Archives of Australia

While the emphasis is on the vitality of youth, the relatively fewer images of older people treat them with an amused affection. In Jim Fitzpatrick’s Fruit Connoisseurs Assess the Produce (1968) three elderly women in complementary hats look balefully at a display of apples, determined not to be fooled by anything less than the best, while in Keith Byron’s Veteran Punter Outsmarts the Flies (1969) the veteran of the title, with netting draped over his hat, conveys a similarly robust resourcefulness.

It is Byron’s work, along with Mervyn Bishop’s, that most stands out among these resonant images; Bishop’s for his ability to capture both social disadvantage and genuine spontaneity in his pioneering photographs of First Nations people, and Byron for his instinct for unshowily combining documentary and art. Byron’s Tensions Run High Among Brokers at the Melbourne Stock Exchange (1968), with its multiple visual cross-references, is one to keep coming back to.

Given that the national stock of photographs is almost unimaginably vast, it is not realistic to think that more than a very small proportion can ever be displayed on the walls of cultural institutions. Just as we are all photographers now, so we are being encouraged to become curators too, exploring and researching the national collections for ourselves.

We don’t yet know where artificial intelligence is taking the practice of photography itself but, as Martyn Jolly points out, AI can already assist immeasurably in productive searching, finding links and illuminating correspondences that might otherwise emerge only by chance. Whatever its implications for the future of photography, when it comes to getting the most out of the photographs we already have, AI could well be a good thing. •

Photography: Real and Imagined
The Ian Potter Centre, NGV Australia, until 4 February 2024

Shot: 400 Photographs, 200 Photographers, 3 Centuries
State Library of New South Wales until 3 November 2024

Focus: Australian Government Photographers 
National Archives of Australia until 10 June 2024

The post What a difference a frame makes appeared first on Inside Story.

Historian Benjamin Wurgaft and anthropologist Merry White’s Ways of Eating: Exploring Food through History and Culture features no images produced by a food stylist; nor does it include instructions about how to make any dish. Instead, the authors interweave stories and analyses of food — its production, its preparation and the meanings people attach to eating — to provide a fascinating cultural and historical overview.

People hunted and gathered food for thousands of years before they developed systems of agricultural subsistence. Wurgaft and White concentrate on how food was produced after agriculture’s arrival, noting the debates that rage in archaeology about its origins. Did people invent cultivation, drawing on observations of the reproductive cycles of animals and plants? Or did climatic change foster the conditions for sedentary settlements that required more intense food production?

Technological changes, migration and population pressure all contributed, and it is probably impossible to isolate any specific causal chain. But whatever the essential conditions were, the results were transformative — of landscapes, ecologies, work, crops, foods and ways of eating.

Wurgaft and White begin by exploring how the domestication of plants and animals spread across world. Drawing on James Scott’s historical analysis of state formation, they dismiss the notion of simple linear progress from nomadic barbarism to settled civilisation. Pastoral nomadism and sedentary farming coexisted for millennia. But they note that farming does appear to “encourage a particular style of cooperative work and social life” and that the material qualities of grain — it can be stored, transported and exchanged for other goods — “aided the rise of the state.” Wheat, rice and corn fed courts, armies and bureaucrats.

The relationship between imperialism and agriculture is complex and the authors succinctly summarise debates about their interaction. Roman and Persian empires, for instance, were built on the wheat that flourished in the regions they originally occupied. The Han Chinese empire was based on rice, and — as the authors write — “no other civilisation, until the rise of industrial agriculture in modernity, reached the same heights of agricultural productivity.” Deforestation, terracing and irrigation, nitrogenous fertilising and soil modification enabled intensification on a grand scale.

All along, productivity and population growth were interacting with changes in agricultural practices and cooking techniques. Deforestation, for example, meant that food preparation had to be quick in order to use a minimum amount of fuel; hence, the invention of the wok and a cuisine using small, thinly sliced meat and vegetables.

As Wurgaft and White observe, we know much more about the dining habits of the wealthy than we do of the poor. The feasts of Roman emperors, medieval courts and aristocratic households were far more likely to be documented than the everyday meals of peasants. Moreover, they were more varied and abundant. Descriptions of patrician feasts, from the Romans to the British Edwardians, reveal an astonishing range of meats, imported fruits and beverages. Patterns of consumption have always reflected economic and social status, with bread and cakes made from fine, white flour exclusively for the rich, and coarse grains providing bread and porridges for the majority. When famines strike, the poor starve.

The history of changing food and eating habits is the history of the movement of people, plants and animals across continents and between nations. During the Middle Ages, people from northern Europe encountered new foods as they waged wars and made pilgrimages. Conquerors brought back new ingredients and slaves who knew how to prepare them; pilgrims returned with a taste for “foreign” dishes and drinks. The use of rare and exotic ingredients, then as now, was indicative of wealth, social status and worldly sophistication. Spices, imported from China, India and the Middle East, were used not only to preserve food but also to display social status and cultural capital.

But the most dramatic transformation of European and Asian cuisines occurred during the “Columbian exchange” that followed the conquest and colonisation of the Americas. Historian Alfred Crosby, who coined the term in his 1972 book on the subject, revealed the complexity and extent of transatlantic exchange and the magnitude of its impact across the globe. Wurgaft and White endorse his view that this constituted a “tectonic shift” in agriculture, staple foods, national cuisines and eating habits.

Plants and foodstuffs now associated with Mediterranean cuisines, such as tomatoes, capsicums and corn, were initially treated with suspicion. Potatoes — disparaged as suitable only for peasants and their animals — were embraced by the bourgeoisie after cooks discovered their delicious flavour when combined with cream and butter. It is difficult to think of Italian food without tomatoes and astonishing to imagine the foods of Korea, India and other Asian countries without chillies.

People and plants flowed in both directions. Sugar, originally from India, was an established crop but a luxury foodstuff in Spain by the sixteenth century. Until the eighteenth century, honey remained the main culinary sweetener for rich and poor throughout Europe; then, with colonisation and the exploitation of African slave labour, sugarcane plantations flourished in the Caribbean.

English sweet puddings, German cakes, Belgian chocolate and French patisserie, all relatively recent inventions, evolved in the context of the Atlantic slave trade. Rice varieties from West Africa were introduced to feed slaves in the Caribbean and Central America, and were only gradually replaced by Asian varieties a century later. Peanuts arrived in Northern Africa from Peru and Bolivia, and were incorporated into many regional African cuisines. Creole cuisines in the southern states of America were dominated by rice and Old World vegetables, especially okra.

Ways of Eating, a broadbrush history written for a general readership, is full of fascinating stories. Vignettes interspersed between chapters describe specific food producers, foodstuffs, culinary techniques and cultural ideas about food. White, recounting a visit to a coffee plantation in Panama where the highly prized gesha beans are produced, compares her tour to a hajj, not only a signal of “a coffee person’s seriousness of intent” but also a means of gaining esoteric knowledge and status in the world of coffee connoisseurs. Gesha coffee’s apparently unique flavour ranges “from a tea-like smokiness to something like grapefruit peel.”

Novelty, rarity and heritage varieties continue to lure the gourmet and the chef. Pepper and cinnamon, once rare commodities, are now so common as to be mundane. Even so, spice’s exotic appeal persists, and for the discerning consumer Tellicherry pepper from Malabar or Kampot pepper from Cambodia are more prestigious than common black pepper, their use in a recipe lending cachet to dish and chef.

The emphasis on authenticity or the exact replication of a dish from a region or a restaurant menu is a recent phenomenon. White suggests that those who denigrate dishes that don’t match some culinary Platonic ideal make “a fetish of the social and environmental conditions that make an ingredient or dish possible.” Food has fashions and recipes have always depended on the availability of ingredients as well as the skill and imagination of cooks.

In fact, all “national” cuisines have adopted novel foreign ingredients and adapted recipes to local tastes. Japanese Hawaiians invented Spam sushi. After Senegalese soldiers in the French colonial army developed a taste for nem, sold as street food in Hanoi, some returned home with Vietnamese wives whose adaptations of the recipes using local ingredients naturalised these fried rolls. Senegalese nem are different from the Vietnamese originals — but they are not ersatz, just distinctive. The same can be said of Japanese croissants or Australian gelato. White and Wurgaft are clearly connoisseurs of food, but their book challenges ideas about refined taste, authenticity and tradition.

Colonisation, commoditisation, industrialisation and globalisation have transformed diets at an unprecedented rate. Rare and exotic ingredients that were formerly delicacies for the wealthy can now be found on supermarket shelves. Food has always provided ways of expressing cultural identity, regional differences, degrees of sophistication and economic status. Wurgaft and White trace these processes over centuries and across the globe. Their conclusions are both celebratory and thought-provoking.

Agriculture has brought humans extraordinary benefits, but it has also resulted in disastrous depletion of soils and environmental devastation. Many foods arrive in our homes with a heavy carbon footprint. The most common foods touted as “fair trade” are coffee, bananas, tea and cocoa — all grown in countries where many people, including growers, continue to live in poverty. There are ironies and paradoxes in contemporary ways of eating, and the combined forces of history and anthropology are excellent ways of thinking about them. •

Ways of Eating: Exploring Food through History and Culture
By Benjamin A. Wurgaft and Merry I. White | University of California Press | $45.95 | 256 pages

The post Making a meal of it appeared first on Inside Story.

Schreiber is the author of several literary essays and biographer of Susan Sontag. The original edition of this memoir was a bestseller in Germany and stands out among the flood of books addressing our supposed epidemic of loneliness. The idea that social connection is the key to happiness and disconnection the root of mental ill health has become the new commonsense, stamped into our consciousness by lockdowns and compelled distancing. Many writers have offered diagnoses of the problems of loneliness and prescriptions for overcoming it, but few provide such a vivid first-person account and fewer still bring such an erudite sensibility to the task.

The backbone of Alone is life-historical. In 2019 Schreiber has an epiphany that things are going wrong; by Christmas “I stop believing that this life, as I live it, as I live it alone, is a good life.” He is partly restored by a writing trip to Switzerland, struggles through the compounding isolation of the pandemic, and embarks on a trip with friends to the Canary Islands that turns into a sort of sabbatical. Along the way he finds a series of therapeutic diversions, all of them physical activities that relieve some of his self-consciousness: gardening, hiking, knitting and yoga.

Off this narrative spine Schreiber hangs a series of meditations on the solitary condition, heavily supported by big thinkers. His intellectual tastes run philosophical and French, and anyone with a passing acquaintance with the humanities in the 1980s and 1990s will recognise many of his theoretical muses: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard. At times the insights are rich, especially in contrast to the shallowness of some psychological and sociological accounts of loneliness, but at other times the price seems high. I had hoped never again to encounter the word “phallogocentrism,” but there it was. And do we need a deconstructionist to tell us that we should not insist our friends conform to all of our wishes?

Schreiber’s analysis of friendship is powerful, pointing out its many forms and virtues — it is non-exclusive, voluntary, enduring — but showing how often it is made to defer to coupledom and the “grand narrative” of romantic love. Friendship is often pictured as a stage of life prior to nesting, and Schreiber notes with some disdain how many couples withdraw inward, a dynamic especially evident during the pandemic. Even so, he is scathing about how friendship has been misrepresented in the Western philosophical tradition, in which he claims it is portrayed as a quest for similarity and equality, the perfect friend idealised as “another oneself.” There is an element of straw-manning (and patriarchy-bashing) here, but Schreiber is adamant that friendship needs to be celebrated for its embrace of diversity rather than sameness, a conviction that resonates with his emphasis on the importance of friendship in queer communities.

He is equally incisive and contentious on the topic of loneliness. Drawing the standard distinction between loneliness and being alone, the latter an objective lack of social contact, the former subjective distress over the degree or quality of contact, Schreiber writes of the pleasures and benefits of solitude, admitting to enjoying some aspects of pandemic isolation. Being alone can be good and loneliness is not all bad. Though painful, it is not a disease, and the important lessons about loss and compassion to be learned from it mean it should not be dreaded. Some hand-wringing about the loneliness epidemic is reactionary, he suggests, motivated by nostalgia for the traditional family.

But Schreiber also muddies the conceptual waters. Solitude would normally be understood as positively valued aloneness, but he criticises it as “the presentable, dignified version of loneliness,” a word people use to deny the shameful reality of their true but taboo feelings. Although he sometimes confuses the picture by using solitude and loneliness interchangeably, Schreiber adds some useful complexities here. Loneliness may be distressing but also ethically and existentially desirable, and solitude may be a pathway to self-knowledge but also a cover for self-deception.

Schreiber makes no attempt to hide his ambivalence about being alone. He can present himself as bravely fronting the challenges of solitude and rising above coupled conformity but also admit to holding petty resentments and vulnerabilities. He can clothe his loneliness in grand ideas and social critique but also express his unhappiness with naked honesty. In one breath he flays romantic relationships and claims not to want them anymore, and in the next he confesses to feeling unlovable.

At times these vacillations suggest a cerebral Schreiber who reads the loftiest French theory and criticises the idea of self-care as “the ultimate victory of neoliberal late capitalism” while coexisting uneasily with a visceral Schreiber who likes to watch Friends, loves yoga and acknowledges that his neurotic misery may be due more to a lack of sunshine and exercise than existential angst.

Schreiber is a perceptive and relatable writer. He grapples with many of the same trials of social life that we all face, trials that became significantly more challenging in recent history. As a character in this memoir, he is not so much rounded in the literary sense — deep, complex and many-faceted — as he is jagged. The conflicts and quirks that other writers might edit out are on candid display in this book. It is well worth spending a few hours of quality solitude with it. •

Alone: Reflections on Solitary Living
By Daniel Schreiber | Reaktion Books | $34.99 | 152 pages

The post Jagged solitude appeared first on Inside Story.

A famine that killed tens of millions of people? Blame it on natural disasters and that damn Khrushchev. Political campaigns that became wildly murderous? Not our fault — those excesses were the work of overly zealous, even rogue, local officials. Any awkward truths that can’t be swept under the carpet must be explained away, woven together with half-truths and lies into the fringe of the carpet itself.

Journalist Ian Johnson’s new book, Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future, relates the stories of people, extraordinary in their tenacity and courage, who persist in peering at the mess under that carpet and unpicking the tightly knit threads. They sneak their cameras into former labour camps to reveal human bones still protruding from the soil, interview the last survivors of famines and massacres, and create online archives and offline samizdat journals to record their findings. Among their number are the “citizen journalists” who record history in the making, including those who documented scenes in hospitals and elsewhere in Wuhan during that city’s draconian Covid-19 lockdown in early 2020.

For thousands of years, as Johnson notes, history has been “inseparable” in China from the concept of moral instruction. The independent researchers devoted to historical investigation he is writing about believe that “a moral society cannot be based on lies and silence.” But to refute the lies and break the silence, these intrepid men and women, sometimes armed with little more than curiosity, a smartphone and internet access, must play a dangerous cat-and-mouse game with security forces.

Many do their work under suffocating levels of surveillance. Others have been put under house arrest or worse, with some prison sentences longer than those handed out to convicted rapists. If they risk their freedom and even their lives to shine a light into some of contemporary Chinese history’s darkest corners, they do so because they believe that “the party’s monopoly of the past” is “the root of their country’s current authoritarian malaise.”

These “counter-historians” are generally less interested in the elite machinations behind catastrophic events than the “degradation of the individual” after the events have been set in motion. To discuss the culpability of party leaders would be asking for even more trouble, of course. But they are genuinely devoted to recovering and honouring the stories of ordinary people. At the same time, Johnson writes, they tend to avoid “heroizing” the victims. The histories they produce may necessarily be incomplete, but they are persuasively nuanced.

The carefully constructed official history, by contrast, is intolerant of nuance or deviation. Engraved in textbooks, promoted in films, enshrined in museums and embodied in the sacred sites of “Red tourism,” it lies at the heart of the party’s legitimacy. It narrates the story of how the communists saved the Chinese people from a “feudal” past as well as the Japanese enemy without and the class enemies within. It tells how the party has kept China safe in a hostile world, governed it wisely and justly, and raised it from poverty to prosperity and power.

Over the past eighty years the party has produced three historical resolutions, “each a cartoonish version of history” intended to justify the rule of the latest leader. The official history endorses the party’s right to rule China today, more than seventy years after the revolution that brought it to power. It paves the way for that rule to continue into the future without any need for checks and balances or popular elections.

To raise questions about the great famine or the systemic nature of the violence during the land reform era or the Cultural Revolution is to ask, in effect — why are you still the boss of us?

The party watched with apprehension and then with horror as the policy of glasnost (transparency) championed by Gorbachev in the mid 1980s led to a rush on the Soviet Union’s historical archives. Soviet citizens were suddenly free to remember and discuss the savagery of the Stalinist era: the political purges, the famines, the midnight knocks on the door, the desolate and murderous gulag of labour camps, the ruined and wasted lives. Just six years later, the Soviet Union collapsed.

Lesson taken. The Chinese Communist Party’s post-Mao leadership, also shaken by the mass pro-democracy protests of 1989, tightened control over political and intellectual discourse. Yet independent thinkers, many of whom had personal experience of upheavals like the famine and Cultural Revolution, both as participants and victims, were compelled to record, research and analyse. Work that couldn’t be published in the mainland was frequently published in Hong Kong.

Among those who laid the path walked by the generation described in Sparks were the oral historian Sang Ye, the writer Liu Binyan, the historical investigator Dai Qing and the journalist Yang Jisheng. If there is one criticism I have of Sparks, otherwise an exemplary, well-researched and vital book, it’s the author’s failure to mention these pathbreakers, the post-Mao pioneers of the movement to which the people he writes about belong. Another curious omission is Wang Youqin, whose epic archival work on the victims of the Cultural Revolution was published in English in an abridged and edited form in 2023.

Johnson’s focus, however, is on more recent times. He observes that a confluence of events and trends in 2003 led to a surge in grassroots history writing. Contributing factors included popular outrage over the government’s suppression of news about the SARS epidemic that year and the application of market forces to Chinese media, which led to a partial liberation from direct control by the party. Xi Jinping’s ascension less than a decade later marked the end of this brief golden age and the beginning of what Johnson describes as Xi’s “forever crackdown” on “historical nihilism.”

And yet the independent historians persist, driven by the importance of what they are doing. The focus of their work may be as narrow as the experience of a single county in a single month of the Cultural Revolution or as broad as the question of guilt and the value of apologies. Collectively, their work reveals that even when the Communist Party shifts the blame for mistakes and crimes onto a few bad eggs, it rarely punishes them, and if so, even more rarely to any degree commensurate with their crimes. They also demonstrate that violence has always been far more pervasive and systemic than the official story suggests.

It’s not just the Communist Party that resists telling these stories. Many of those who have suffered through the events these historians are studying don’t want to talk about them. Some just want to put the trauma behind them. Others don’t want to get in trouble or jeopardise their children’s futures. They have buried the past to rebuild their lives as though, Johnson writes, “The suffering somehow cheapened this world of newfound prosperity, a reminder that it was built on violence.” In a different context (the Wondery podcast Ghost Story) the British historian Nicholas Hiley has discussed the “destabilising” nature of revealed historical truth — the past is not always a happy place and the truth does not always set people free. And yet we carry that past around with us — and it informs the present whether we like it or not.

Ian Johnson is a veteran, Pulitzer Prize–winning China journalist and a Sinophone whose work balances academic rigour with good storytelling. Sparks is the culmination of years of meeting with and even going on reporting trips with the underground historians he profiles here. He inserts between the chapters short vignettes, “Memories,” that offer, in his words, “sketches of people, places, and iconic works of counter-memory that demonstrate the ambition of China’s underground historians: to write a new history of contemporary China in order to change their country’s future.”

Sparks takes its title from a samizdat journal from the 1950s whose history has been uncovered by one of the historians Johnson profiles. The book joins a growing list of publications in English that together are creating a far richer picture of China’s history than that to which non–Chinese speakers have previously had access. They include works like Yang Jisheng’s Tombstone and Wang Youqin’s Victims of the Cultural Revolution, both of which were edited and translated by Stacy Mosher and Guo Jian; Louisa Lim’s brilliant Indelible City, about Hong Kong; Jonathan Clements’s essential new history of Taiwan, Rebel Island; and Tania Branigan’s Red Memory, in which Wang Youqin features heavily.

Johnson contends that the “vibrancy of China’s counter-history movement” — which also includes creative reconstructions of historical events and personages by artists and writers — “should force us to retire certain clichéd ways of seeing China.” These include the tendency to see its authoritarianism as successfully monolithic. While not denying that “these are dark times,” he champions the counter-history movement as a significant form of resistance. As one of the young members of the group behind the original samizdat journal Spark put it back in the 1950s, “If you do not break out of silence, you will die in silence.” •

Sparks: China’s Underground Historians and Their Battle for the Future
By Ian Johnson | Allen Lane | $55 | 400 pages

The post China’s underground historians 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.

Beard, a deeply read classicist, is also a commentator, TV star and bestselling author; one of the great populist-scholars of our time, she has brought the ancient world into contemporary consciousness like no other.

She is right to insist that the inhabitants of the past can’t be expected to project any sort of ready-made solution onto our troubles. Besides, judging by the findings of her latest research, the kinds of suggestions the Romans themselves would make might not be palatable; they might indeed hasten the decline of our familiar institutions and make the slide towards one-man rule inexorable.

Beard’s third book-length analysis of Rome — following her narrative history of Rome SPQR (2015) and the quirkier art history of Twelve Caesars (2021) — focuses on the emperors who ruled Rome for more than 300 years from Augustus to Alexander Severus. Her latest book, Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World, is not a chronological narrative of the careers of individual emperors but a thematic, institutional description of what Beard calls the “category” of emperor: the Roman system of one-man rule.

This institutional approach allows her to discern patterns and themes, and to ask questions like: How did one-man rule work? How did the emperors get things done, in Rome and abroad? And, more pertinently, how did they get a republic — albeit a deeply flawed oligarchy already succumbing to warlordism and civil war, and a slave state to boot, but a vibrant political and social culture all the same — to accept, comply with, and ultimately embody a system of autocracy, a culture of political strongmen?

The first part of Beard’s answer is that the emperors purchased stability by bringing the military under close personal control. Under the Roman republic, legions had theoretically been controlled by the Senate but increasingly, in practice, by wealthy warlords. From Augustus, the emperors put the legionaries, auxiliaries and veterans on the state budget and acted as commander-in-chief — to use the American term — to exert force against external enemies on the distant frontiers and to protect the regime against internal ones in Rome.

This did not mean Rome was “full of men in uniform and march-pasts… such as Trooping of the Colour or Bastille Day,” Beard notes. “The city of Rome itself was strikingly demilitarised even by the current standards of Western capitals.”

Indeed, a second part of Beard’s answer is that the emperors were also careful to preserve the trappings of republican norms and institutions. Even if the Senate became a powerless debating forum, and even if the consular officials served for only two months instead of twelve as formerly, they kept the wealthy “senatorial elite,” as Beard calls them, busy, respectable and ever looking to promotion and proximity to imperial power. And, as Beard dryly notes, replacing elections with imperial appointment saved the elite the tedium and expense of populist politics.

With the imperial palace now the real source of executive authority, who did the actual work of running the city and the empire? Beard describes a system of “government by correspondence,” with letters flowing between the emperor and governors around the empire. The emperor was also personally involved in receiving petitions and adjudicating tricky lawsuits. Literate and loyal staff were needed.

But this kind of work was too menial for the wealthy elite. They would rather govern a province or command a legion than push paper in the palace. Besides, allowing a powerful citizen to become established in the back rooms of the palace was a risk an emperor might well have wanted to avoid.

Better, it seems, to rely on trusted and tractable slaves. In the imperial court, it was slaves and ex-slaves, or freedmen, who did most of the actual work. Cooks, doctors, footmen, hairdressers, gardeners and the all-important food-tasters: they provided the personal service to keep the ruler, and his family, comfortable and alive.

And they also provided the administrative, managerial and clerical muscle that the imperial system — the financial controllers, secretaries, letter writers in Latin and in Greek, librarians, petitions clerks, advisers and counsellors, and trusted emissaries — needed to control a boisterous city and a huge empire. Skilled and experienced officials provided administrative continuity from one emperor to the next.

But this politico-administrative logic generated what Beard calls “pressure points” in the imperial system. Senators were aghast that freedmen could enjoy imperial trust and exercise imperial power. Ultimately, it forced the question: who was really running the show? Pliny complained that the “chief sign of a powerless emperor was powerful freedmen.” As Beard acutely observes, that “d” in freedman is crucial.

Ultimately, though, even strongmen weaken and die, highlighting the ultimate vulnerability of one-man rule: mortality and the problem of succession. All despots are would-be dynasts, but hereditary succession can be messy when it involves feckless sons or scheming brothers; mutinous generals and seditious senators pose further risks. Augustus hit upon a novel solution. His natural heirs having all died, he ended up choosing his wife’s son by a former marriage, Tiberius, and made his wishes clear by “adopting” him as his son.

Adoptive succession became the norm. It served to widen the talent pool, even creating the impression of an imperial meritocracy, Beard observes, “while still presenting the transmission of power in family terms.” It was not until 79 CE, after more than a hundred years of imperial rule, that a biological son (Titus) actually succeeded his father (Vespasian); it didn’t happen again for another century. Meanwhile, for eighty years, five emperors in a row from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius “adopted” their successors.

It is as if an American president could nominate a vice-president into a powerless but prominent role on the explicit understanding that she will succeed when the president dies (and not before). There is no “lesson” in this for today’s politics, of course.

Though plenty of assassinations and two further civil wars caused rapid turnover in the imperial throne, the practice of adoption did stabilise and strengthen the imperial system.

Beard’s entertaining style conceals the seemingly effortless command of the scholarship that underpins Emperor of Rome. She ranges across time and across source material; she tirelessly draws on the archaeological evidence of palaces, statues and coins, the literary evidence of poetry, speeches, letters and histories, the epigraphic evidence of tombstones and miraculously preserved legal documents; she takes nothing at face value, and is constantly challenging received historiographical wisdom. A particular pleasure are the bibliographical essays that summarise the relevant scholarship of each chapter in place of footnotes.

But at times the great populariser is guilty of over-popularising. Her focus on the institution of the emperor doesn’t prevent her from indulging some of the juicier tales. “This was a world of toddlers and teenagers as well as grown-ups and greybeards” is one of several sentences that could safely have been subbed out. Mary Beard is also unaccountably mean to Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, retitling the great Stoic’s philosophical autobiography as Jottings to Himself.

Anyone familiar with the murderous court intrigues of Hilary Mantel’s Tudor Court in Wolf Hall, or the tamer Windsor jostling in The Crown, will be right at home in Beard’s imperial Rome. Less fictionally, the cronyism and flattery of Trump’s (first?) White House, its performative bombast and self-indulgent fakery, may also be recognisable in Beard’s account of the same pathologies displayed by the ancient autocrats. Don’t forget that Rome, cynical and secular, even posthumously declared some of its emperors as divine.

As one-man rule arrived and stayed, Beard points out, scarcely anyone complained. Senators became, in the words of Tacitus, ineffective dissidents or cowards, flatterers and job-seekers; “power dining” with the emperor became, as she brilliantly demonstrates, an occasion of risk and uncertainty as well as an opportunity for promotion and proximity to power.

In short, “despite the loud protests against the crimes and misdemeanours of individual rulers, or the discontent with some aspects of one-man rule, there is hardly any trace of significant resistance to one-man rule as such.”

Indeed, as Beard observes in the closing paragraphs of this book, autocracy throughout history has depended on people at all levels accepting and adjusting. “It is not violence or the secret police, it is collaboration and cooperation — knowing or naive, well-meaning or not — that keeps autocracy going.” This is the lesson we are to mark. •

Emperor of Rome: Ruling the Ancient Roman World
By Mary Beard | Allen & Unwin | $65 | 512 pages

The post Ancient autocrats 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. •

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During those two weeks the Financial Review began a series on “the new middle class.” It opened with a long article analysing survey results that revealed how households on $140,000 a year — a lot of money in those days — didn’t consider themselves particularly well-off. Great, I thought — this’ll make for a solid ten or fifteen minutes. I hurried over to the presenter of the program and showed him the article. “Good God,” he exclaimed after reading the opening paragraphs. “How do people manage on that kind of money?”

Sociologists Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell open their new book, Uncomfortably Off, with an incident that makes a similar point in a slightly different way. In an episode of the BBC’s Question Time during the 2019 British election campaign, IT consultant Rob Barber accused a Labour MP of lying when he said the party’s plan to lift taxes on high earners would only affect people on the highest incomes. Labour wouldn’t be lifting taxes for the remaining 95 per cent, the MP promised.

“But you are!” Barber replied angrily. “Because I’ve read your policy!” The tax would apply to incomes above £80,000, and that meant he’d be among those who’d pay it. “I’m nowhere near the top 5 per cent, let me tell you. I’m not even in the top 50 per cent.”

Barber was wrong: a salary of £80,000-plus put him comfortably in the top 5 per cent of earners. (At around the same time, an Australian earning $180,000 would have snuck into the same bracket here.) His likely mistake, according to Hernando and Mitchell, was to habitually compare himself with people who earn as much as he does or, more importantly, those who earn much more.

As its title suggests, Uncomfortably Off attempts to explain why people on relatively high incomes don’t feel particularly affluent. (Hernando and Mitchell’s interviewees, all British, were drawn from the top 10 per cent of earners, though not the top 1 per cent.) Partly it’s because, like Barber, they compare themselves with people who earn more than they do. Partly it’s because their spending has increased as their incomes have risen and they have to find the money to cover increases in school fees, rising private healthcare costs and mounting lifestyle expectations.

These pressures contribute to what the authors call a fear of falling — the fear that they or their children will end up further down the income ladder. And those pressures have only worsened in recent years. The Conservative government’s austerity program of 2010–19 encouraged wealthier households to abandon overstretched public schools, healthcare and other publicly provided services, adding to the pressure on household finances, and the growing crisis in British schools, hospitals and community care has only added to the incentive to bail out.

But why would well-heeled earners look up rather than down when they’re assessing their own position? Increasingly segregated schooling and housing, more marriage within rather than between income groups, much less shared experience of healthcare and other social services, a greater focus on paid work and its monetary rewards — these are a large part of the explanation, say Hernando and Mitchell.

“All these tendencies,” they write, “mean that it’s increasingly rare for high earners to get to know people outside their usual interaction with friends, family, work and education, especially when other networks (such as those based on religion or hobbies) either dwindle or move online.” Asked to place themselves in the income hierarchy and feeling under pressure, they compare themselves with the relatively small segment of the population that seems typical to them.

This wouldn’t be quite such a problem if it weren’t for the fact that wealthy people have disproportionate political power. Once they withdraw from the spheres that most people inhabit — government-provided schools, healthcare or childcare, for instance — it’s no longer in their interest for those services to be adequately funded. This sets up a malign cycle: underfunded public services push people who can afford it into the hands of private providers. Their services cost more — often much more — and that puts pressure on their own finances, increasing their resistance to taxes and making them more likely to support government cutbacks.

Some of these trends are hard to reverse. We can’t do much about people marrying within their own milieu, for example. But we can begin the slow process of changing that milieu. The obvious place to start is in the school system, where private schools (generally the preserve of the wealthiest families) are reinforcing social segregation to an alarming degree.

Hernando and Mitchell conclude that cracks are opening up in the fearful barriers wealthy Britons have erected against an increasingly underresourced public sphere. “This book’s aim is to invite the top 10 per cent to consider a future in which, for the price of giving up the barriers through which they seek to distinguish themselves from the rest” — a price that would include higher taxes — “they could become less anxious, more secure and less isolated.”

Can Australia learn from Britain’s uncomfortable wealthy? While 7 per cent of British children are educated in private schools, the Australian figure is 35 per cent. Add in selective government schools, particularly in New South Wales, and our school system rates among the most segregated in the Western world. But the groundswell of support for the Gonski report (before it was fatally compromised by federal and state governments of both varieties) shows the soil is fertile. •

Uncomfortably Off: Why the Top 10% of Earners Should Care about Inequality
By Marcos González Hernando and Gerry Mitchell | Policy Press | £19.99 | 256 pages

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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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Come Christmas Eve, there, under the tree, was the twelve-inch square LP, all wrapped up. Unable to wait, Gavin took a kitchen knife and slit open the wrapping paper, sliding out the album so he could hold it at last. Not play it, you understand — the rest of the family was asleep — just hold it. That was the thing about LPs: music aside, they were objects of wonder.

Some eight years before that night before Christmas, I’d had a similar, though more extended, experience. I was twelve and had saved up my pocket money to buy Abbey Road. Much had been made of the fact that this was the first Beatles album to be released only in stereo; printed on the inner sleeve was a warning to the effect that playing the record on the wrong equipment would damage the vinyl.

My family didn’t own a “stereogram,” only an old mono record player. So for months my appreciation of Abbey Road consisted of admiring its famous cover photo, reading the extensive list of song titles on side two and wondering what they sounded like, occasionally rereading the warning to be certain I had it right.

Eventually, I could bear it no more. I took the record from its sleeve, put it on the old gramophone and discovered it sounded fine. I still thrill to Lennon’s opening “Shhht!” and it is partly because of those months of delay in hearing it.

I no longer own a turntable. Back in 1986 I sold my vinyl and began to collect CDs and while I have always lamented the shrinkage in size (and experience) of the artwork that came with the smaller digital format — the gorgeous cover of Abbey Road was undeniably diminished by being scaled down — I lament, even more, that the surprisingly abrupt demise of the CD ushered in the age of streaming.

I lament it not only when I read my royalty statements but also at Christmas, because you can no longer give someone a thoughtfully chosen album without doing a background check on whether they have a turntable or CD player. Many people have neither. A vast array of music is available on most people’s phones — there’s no more waiting — and the musical object under the Christmas tree is increasingly a thing of the past. It all adds up to the possibility that music is mattering less.

The notion of music as an object predates recording. In the late Middle Ages, as notation became more than an aide-mémoire, manuscripts were treasured, even by those who couldn’t read music. Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo, Europe’s first great opera, was performed precisely twice in 1607 at the Mantuan court of the Gonzagas, and we might know nothing of it but for the existence of a score. In the early seventeenth century full scores were not used in performance, but the Duke had one produced as a souvenir to have and to hold.

The other form of musical object I confess I miss is the carefully constructed compilation tape. A ninety-minute cassette could take the best part of a day to get right, the handwritten list of contents inevitably involving Tipp-Ex, and made a particularly thoughtful gift. In his novel High Fidelity Nick Hornby writes touchingly about the art of the mixtape and its potential role as a form of long-distance foreplay.

In my home are ten such cassettes that I made in 1999 and 2000 for my wife (she wasn’t then my wife) but we no longer have anything to play them on, so they are purely objects, which, for sentimental reasons, we can’t throw out. Mixtapes, too, are now part of history and I doubt if “I’ve made you a playlist on Spotify” is going to help anyone find a life partner.

For those who still value musical objects (you can also download them if you must) and who have yet to complete their Christmas shopping, allow me a few recommendations.

• ZÖJ is a collaboration (they call it a conversation) between Iranian-born singer and kamancheh player Gelareh Pour and drummer Brian O’Dwyer. Their album Fil o fenjoon (CD from Bandcamp) is by turns exhilarating and heart-stoppingly beautiful.

• Jazz trumpeter Phil Slater’s Immersion Lure (CD from Bandcamp) brings together some of Australia’s finest players (Matt Keegan, Matt McMahon, Brett Hirst and Simon Barker) for a musical meditation of a particularly intense sort. You are gently drawn in and then they won’t let go.

• A similar (if more laid-back) intensity marks recently discovered Chet Baker radio sessions recorded at Hilversum in 1979. The Blue Room is late Chet at its very best and may be my favourite listening of the year. A double album on vinyl or CD from Birdland.

• German violinist Isabelle Faust, Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov and others play Schumann’s piano quintet and quartet on instruments of Schumann’s time, the natural balance putting paid to all those tired criticisms of Schumann’s music being opaque. It’s also beautifully paced and phrased. CD from Harmonia Mundi.

• And, staying with period instruments, the Australian Romantic & Classical Orchestra’s pairing of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony and his A major piano concerto K. 488 is similarly revelatory, not least for Neal Peres da Costa’s endlessly thoughtful traversing of the solo part. I know this music very well but found myself hanging on every note. CD from the orchestra.

* The Music Show’s conversation with James Gavin on the subject of ravaged voices may be heard again on Sunday 7 January, and if you’d like to hear it now the podcast is available here.

The post To have and to hold appeared first on Inside Story.

Amid those anniversary moments, US president Joe Biden flew to Vietnam in September, the fifth sitting American president to visit since Bill Clinton re-established diplomatic ties in 2000 and “drew a line under a bloody and bitter past.”

In Hanoi, Biden and Communist Party general secretary Nguyen Phu Trong “hailed a historic new phase of bilateral cooperation and friendship,” creating a strategic partnership that expressed US support for “a strong, independent, prosperous, and resilient Vietnam.”

With such flourishes, history delivers irony garnished with diplomatic pomp. Expect many shades of irony in April 2025, the fiftieth anniversary of the end of the war, when Saigon fell to North Vietnamese forces. (Note the way the war is named: Australia joins America in calling it the Vietnam war; the Vietnamese call it the American war, the concluding phase of a thirty-year conflict.)

The shockwaves that ran through Asia after the second world war were driven by geopolitical fears that imagined nations as dominos toppling into communism. As France fled Indochina and Britain retreated from Southeast Asia, the United States stepped in to stabilise what it saw as a series of tottering states in Southeast Asia.

The proposition that the Vietnam war was “fought for, by, and through the Pacific” was the focus of a conference at Sydney’s Macquarie University that is now a book with nineteen chapters from different authors.

The editors of The Vietnam War in the Pacific World, Brian Cuddy and Fredrik Logevall, describe a wide gap between US rhetoric and the military reality of the region. The US claimed it was acting to save the whole of Southeast Asia, they write, but “the documentary record suggests that Washington lacked a suitable appreciation of how the war in Vietnam was linked to the politics of the wider region.”

In a chapter on “the fantasy driving Australian involvement in the Vietnam war,” the historian Greg Lockhart, a veteran of the war, writes that the “red peril” rhetoric of the Menzies government “disguised its race-based sense of the threat from Asia.” By 1950, he writes, Australian policy had been shaped by an early British version of domino thinking and the “downward thrust of communist China,” a thrust that linked the perils of geography to the force of gravity.

Just before the defeat of French colonial forces at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, US president Dwight Eisenhower proclaimed the fear that drove US policy: “You have a row of dominos set up, you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over fairly quickly.” The theory held that the Vietnam domino, with pushing by China, would topple the rest of Indochina. Burma and Malaya and Indonesia would follow. And then the threat would cascade towards Australia and New Zealand.

Lockhart scorches the way these fears led Australia to Vietnam:

Between 1945 and 1965, no major official Australian intelligence assessment found evidence to support the domino theory. Quite the reverse, those assessments concluded that communist China posed no threat to Australia. Shaped by the geographical illusion that “China,” or at least “Chinese” were “coming down” in a dagger-like thrust through the Malay Peninsula, the domino theory was the fearful side of the race fantasy, the nightmare that vanished once it had fulfilled its political function.

The US strategic ambition of containing communism in Asia “had been very largely achieved before the escalation of US forces in Vietnam in 1965,” Lockhart concludes, because Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Indonesia were already “anti-communist nation-states.”

The same quickly became true of Indonesia, where the military takeover in 1965 was a decisive shift towards the United States, destroying the largest communist party outside the Eastern bloc. Yet US president Lyndon Johnson used Indonesia to proclaim what American historian Mark Atwood Lawrence calls “the domino theory in reverse.” LBJ’s argument by 1967 was that the Vietnam war was necessary as a “shield” for a virtuous cycle of political and economic development across Southeast Asia.

Lawrence laments that few in Washington followed the logic that “Indonesia’s lurch to the right, far from justifying the war in Vietnam, made that campaign unnecessary by successfully resolving Washington’s major problem in the region.” He cites evidence to a Senate committee in 1966 by a legend of US diplomacy, George Kennan, that events in Indonesia made the risk of communism spreading through the region “considerably less.”

In 1967, the US Central Intelligence Agency appraised the geopolitical consequences of a communist takeover of South Vietnam. Lawrence says a thirty-three-page report “concluded that the US would suffer no permanent or devastating setbacks anywhere in the world, including even in the areas closest to the Indochinese states, as long as Washington made clear its determination to remain active internationally after a setback in Vietnam.” The study, as he observes, had no discernible impact on LBJ’s thinking. Instead, Washington stuck with its “iffy” and “problematic” assumptions about falling dominos and the interconnections among Southeast Asian societies.

For the new nation of Singapore, separated from Malaysia in 1965, the era offered the chance to build links with the United States and hedge against bilateral troubles with Malaysia and Indonesia. S.R. Joey Long writes that prime minister Lee Kuan Yew used Washington’s Vietnam focus to cultivate America for both weapons and investment: “The inflow of American military equipment and capital enhanced the Singaporean regime’s capacity to defend its interests against adversarial neighbours, further its development strategies, distribute rewards to supporters, neutralise or win over detractors, and consolidate its control of the city-state.” A later chapter quotes a CIA report in 1967 that 15 per cent of Singapore’s gross national product came from American procurements related to the war.

During his long leadership, Lee Kuan Yew always proclaimed the one remaining vestige of an argument for the US war — the “buying time” thesis, which claims that the US provided time for the rest of Southeast Asia to grow strong enough to resist domino wobbles.

Mattias Fibiger’s chapter on buying time calls the idea a “remarkably durable” effort to transmute US failure into triumph. What president Ronald Reagan later called a “noble cause” is elevated to a constructive breathing space. “America failed in Vietnam,” according to the Henry Kissinger line, “but it gave the other nations of Southeast Asia time to deal with their own insurrections.”

From 1965 to 1975, the region “became far more prosperous, more united and more secure,” Fibiger notes, and he finds “some truth to the claims that the Vietnam war strengthened Southeast Asia’s non-communist states, stimulated the region’s economic growth, and led to the creation of ASEAN — all of which left the region more stable and secure.”

The creation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in 1967 (with an original membership of Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand) is a milestone in the region’s idea of itself. ASEAN’s greatest achievement is to banish — or bury deeply — the danger of war between its members. This is region-building of the highest order. Earlier attempts at regional organisation had failed. Indeed, Fibiger notes, conflict seemed so endemic that a 1962 study was headlined, “Southeast Asia: The Balkans of the Orient?” ASEAN has helped lift the Balkan curse.

The founders of ASEAN certainly looked at Vietnam and knew what they didn’t want. While the war inspired “fear of American abandonment,” Fibiger thinks any relationship between the conflict and the strength of the region’s non-communist states is indirect. American military actions had little bearing on the ability of governments outside Indochina to command the loyalty of their populations.

Commerce, not conflict, became the region’s guiding star. In the quarter-century after 1965, the economies of East and Southeast Asia expanded more than twice as quickly as those in other regions. The eight “miracle” economies — Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand — grew more prosperous and more equal, lifting huge numbers of people out of poverty.

Fibiger writes that the Vietnam war served as an engine of economic growth in Southeast Asia and fuelled exports to the US market. Growth legitimised rather than undermined authoritarian regimes in ASEAN, and deepened oligarchy. The war, he says, helped create strong states, regional prosperity, and ASEAN.

Beyond that summation, Fibiger attacks the buying time thesis as morally bankrupt because it is a metaphor of transaction, “implying that the Vietnam war’s salutary effects in Southeast Asia somehow cancel out its massive human and environmental cost in Indochina.”

America’s allies joined the war to serve alliance purposes with the United States. South Korea sent 320,000 troops to South Vietnam between 1965 and 1973, Australia 60,000, Thailand 40,000 and New Zealand 3800. The Philippines contribution was a total of 2000 medical and logistical personnel. Taiwan stationed an advisory group of around thirty officers at any one time in Saigon but sent no combat troops for fear of offending China.

For their part, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea fought “not for Saigon,” writes David L. Anderson, “but in keeping with their established practices of protecting their regional interests and constructing their national defence with allies.” By 1970, Australian opinion was divided over the war, Anderson notes, but the alliance with the United States still had popular support:

The war polarised the politics of the US, Australia and New Zealand. Antiwar sentiment in the three countries did not alone bring an end to their military engagement, but protest movements conditioned the political process to accept negotiation and withdrawal when government strategists decided national security no longer required the cost and sacrifice of the conflict.

In the years after the Vietnam war, Anderson says, the former junior partners maintained friendly relations with Washington even though the United States “was seen as a less reliable partner.” The new need was “greater self-reliance and independence from the US.”

Editors Cuddy and Logevall conclude that studying the regional dynamics of the Vietnam war is not purely of historical interest: “American foreign policy is turning its attention — even if haltingly and haphazardly — back to the Pacific… Understanding how the region reacted to the American war in Vietnam and how the war changed the region might help the United States and its Asia-Pacific partners navigate the currents of competition in the future.”

The Vietnam history offers cautions about the new competition between the United States and China. The United States again seeks regional allies and is gripped by vivid fears about the threat China poses to the system. The region again ponders the level of US commitment and its reliability.

The two giants compete to hold friends close and ensure no dominos fall to the other side.

Vietnam is a haunting demonstration that the Washington consensus can misread or even obscure Asian understandings and the complex politics of the region. Those truths from history matter again today. As America’s greatest strategic blunder of the twentieth century was in Asia, so in this century America’s greatest strategic challenge is in Asia. •

The Vietnam War in the Pacific World
Edited by Brian Cuddy and Fredrik Logevall | University of North Carolina Press | US$29.95 | 382 pages

The post Domino days appeared first on Inside Story.

Marr paints his characters meticulously. Richard Jones, an astute businessman and Christian evangelical, amassed large tracts of land on which to graze his sheep. His accumulation of wealth rested on clearing the land of its original occupants. Aboriginal people were slaughtered with no protection from the colony, a process that Jones was able to keep at arm’s length by giving others the bloody work of “dispersal” or “reprisal.”

Like many other Christians, Jones failed to see the humanity in Aboriginal people and so his charity couldn’t extend to them. At the height of his landholding, he would have more than 600,000 acres. His is the story of the “entrepreneur gentleman,” a type whose wealth was often portrayed as coming from acumen and savvy but who, in truth, took land with brute force (even if not by his own hand) and then used his wealth, power and position (in parliament, commerce and banking) to ensure that laws favoured his interests and didn’t protect those who had been removed.

Marr’s profile of Edmund B. Uhr reveals a man with his own aspirations for large landholdings and status, whose appointment as magistrate gave him the power to condone violence or turn a blind eye to it, often for his own convenience. Marr then tracks the exploits of two of Uhr’s sons, brothers Reg and D’Arcy, as they move through Queensland and into the Gulf country as officers of the Native Police. They helped clear Aboriginal populations from traditional lands, suppressing resistance while avoiding having literal blood on their hands.

This is a two-generational account of the colonisation process. Through the stories of his subjects, Marr shows how land was taken by force and without payment, and how these men used their wealth, status and power to create the rules that validated their theft and turned a blind eye to the violence used to take the land. Marr also illustrates how, on the rare occasions when colonial law sought to temper the excessive violence and murder and hold its perpetrators to account, new strategies emerged to achieve the same end with less accountability. Humanitarian concerns were met with derision by those who charged that sympathetic city-dwellers had no understanding of life on the frontier and in the newly conquered lands.

Marr’s recounting of barbarities against Aboriginal men, women and children is factual and to the point. He understands that this is no place for timidity and euphemisms. But nor is there any need for exaggeration or hyperbole. His account is thorough, searing and unflinching, the stories of these four men compellingly framed by his knowledge of the legal frameworks and politics of the time and his attention to the public debates playing out in the era’s newspapers.

Killing for Country also sets what was occurring in Australia in the context of colonisation processes around the globe, a facet that is too often overlooked. He notes, for instance, that the American war of independence had been sparked by a refusal to grant more land to the colonisers, and the British weren’t keen to make that mistake again. When the line around the Sydney colony’s nineteen counties was breached, there was little appetite to rein anyone in.

Through these prisms, Marr presents a broader narrative of Australian history. In bringing together the personal and the political, he presents a story of power, privilege and the process of aggressive colonisation — of brutal, concerted and bloody dispossession — with not even the facade of a treaty offered to those being conquered.

But Killing for Country is also the story of resistance. Unmasking the violence needed to take country and keep it exposes as a convenient and necessary colonial lie the myth that Aboriginal people simply faded into the background, inevitably ceding ground to a superior force. What emerges clearly from the conflict explored in Marr’s book is that Aboriginal people fought tenaciously for their land, at many moments repelling the onslaught of colonisation ferociously and fearlessly. It was the depth of this refusal to cede that prompted the more shamelessly brutal force in which Marr’s four subjects played their roles.

Marr has been one of the great intellectual contributors to the critique of Australia’s national narrative. Through his body of work, including his books Dark Victory and Panic, and his Quarterly Essays The White Queen and His Master’s Voice, he has been a persuasive critic of the divisive race politics of the Howard era and their legacy, and a compassionate contributor to debates about the type of country we should be. Killing for Country continues his thoughtful interventions in and critiques of the story Australia wants to tell about itself.

With his meticulous, time-consuming research clear in each page, Marr couldn’t have anticipated the exact moment in history when his book would be released. His account of how the country was taken comes just as Australia is processing the fallout of the failed Voice referendum.

The lead-up to the vote saw an increase in the visibility and vitriol of racist tropes — that Aboriginal people are savage and backward, that they were getting ‘something for nothing’ and that recognition of their distinct place would “divide the nation.” Killing for Country reminds us of the seeds of those antiquated and racist ideologies and the purpose they serve.

Marr would also be fully awake to the ripples in the pond that a book like this creates. As a public intellectual who has constantly interrogated what racism and prejudice does to the fabric of Australian society, he is aware of the history of ideological resistance to the forceful telling of frontier history. There is no longer a black armband or white blindfold: they were part of a contest of ideologies over what story Australia wanted to tell itself. Marr slices through this. There is no place for the heroic “white man conquering the land” narrative and there is no excuse for shying away from words like “conquest,” “invasion,” “genocide” and “massacre.” These debates about whether there were massacres or stolen generations were never about a truthful Australian history.

But it is hard to read Marr’s book as an Aboriginal woman and not feel it personally. Massacre sites litter the rivers of my traditional country, and accounts like Killing for Country are a form of validation, however tough the read is at times. The violence perpetrated against our ancestors, often coupled with sexual violence against Aboriginal women, was sparked not just by the taking of land but by Aboriginal communities standing up against settler abuse of women and children. The treatment of Aboriginal women in the process of colonisation still feels under-researched; it is not adequately captured in the archives or written colonial records.

I read Killing for Country as I was travelling on my own traditional country where family members can still point out where massacres took place along our rivers. While the material in Marr’s book felt raw, it is also incredibly important that the gaslighting of history that remains strong in the oral histories of Aboriginal people is replaced with an honest account of what it takes to claim a continent and its human cost.

This is a deeply personal historical account for Marr as well. These are his ancestors. His approach challenges us to think differently about what a truth-telling process might be. It is not just about creating the space for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to tell their truths. It also requires the kind of historical accountability that sits on the other side of the ledger.

What is admirable about Marr’s approach in Killing for Country is that there is no handwringing as he lays bare the exploits of his ancestors. Instead, he poses the question that should be asked: if we can accept true accounts of our past, what will it mean for the shape of our future? What happens if the true history is acknowledged and we can admit that this is a country that was acquired by conquest?

The impact of this type of truth-telling should not be a sense of collective guilt but instead the impetus for meaningful and collective action. With that message, Killing for Country could not be more necessary or more timely. •

Killing for Country: A Family Story
By David Marr | Black Inc. | $39.99 | 432 pages

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My Damascene conversion came only recently, and it occurred at Bega, a dairy town on the NSW south coast near where I now live. Far from the urban smog and traffic jams and celebrities, the south coast celebrates its own distinct cultural vibe. It has just reopened its art gallery — mid-town, gem-like — with an exhibition of the 2023 Archibald finalists.

Like any collective venture in regional Australia, the gallery needs volunteers. I put my hand up, and since the gallery opened I’ve spent several full days as a gallery volunteer prowling around in the silent presence of the fifty-seven portraits. It’s been a full-immersion experience, and now, like any new convert, I’ve become a zealous proselytiser.

What is it about the Archibalds? Since childhood, we’ve learned to appraise the people we meet by looking at their faces. We learn their age, their experience, their character; we understand whom we can trust. Show us fifty-seven faces on the walls of an art gallery and it’s the same: we’re all experts.

So people feel comfortable walking into the Archibalds — this is as true in Bega as it is in the city — and expressing strong opinions about what (that is, who) they see. Greeting them as familiars, paying them rapt attention, glancing at them sideways or dismissing them with a shrug.

Inevitably the popular portraits are of popular people. The winner of the People’s Choice award in Sydney was Noni Hazlehurst, who appears in Jaq Grantford’s portrait as a wise friendly spirit peering at us through a misty window — the epitome of trustworthiness, with fond memories of Play School thrown in for those of a certain vintage.

The challenge for the artists is to reveal the inner character of their subject by displaying their external appearance — their face, clothing, posture, location. And the challenge for the viewer is to decipher the inner life by inspecting that external paraphernalia. There’s a dual level operating, and we zoom backwards and forwards as we go.

Zoe Young’s portrait of NRL star Latrell Mitchell captures this best. It is actually two paintings, both larger than life. On the left we see the public footballing star, isolated mid-game under artificial lights, his Rabbitohs jumper covered with logos; he’s further objectified because we can only see him via the medium of a TV screen. On the right we see the private man, stripped to his waist, holding his child, under natural light in the natural landscape of his Country. Each Latrell is looking towards the other, across the frame of the paintings, but neither is connecting; one wonders how the man keeps both sides together.

It’s a profound moment, and when the school group came through the Bega gallery last week, they spent more time talking about Latrell than about Noni.

Being able to host an exhibition of this scale is a big deal for Bega. Sydney is a six-hour drive up the highway, so having the Archibald come here provides connection and stimulation. Tourists like having something different to do, school kids appreciate it, but the locals love it most of all. They feel respected, as they should, and treat the occasion seriously.

One of the little tricks portraitists can use is to give their sitter a prop — something distinctive to hold or wear or sit on — which helps us identify and understand them. This can be wonderfully subtle, as in the portrait of journalist Katharine Murphy. She looks just as we know her from Insiders — except here, as she serenely sits for Judith Sinnamon, she’s actually listening to a podcast through an ear bud. She’s busy, right?, and won’t waste a moment.

Without doubt the best prop in the show, not at all subtle, is an oversized crown made out of shiny colourful baubles and dolls’ heads and other tinselly things, worn with style by the late lamented comedian Cal Wilson. You can’t look at it without smiling. (Andrea Huelin’s portrait won the Packing Room prize in 2023.)

So, props are great. My pet peeve is text. I’m a text person, but to me, too much text defeats the purpose of a visual image and weakens the emphasis on the face. (And I note that none of the previous winners employs text.)

The question I get asked most frequently by visitors, as I stand around waiting to be asked questions, is: who won? Because ultimately the Archibald is a competition, and we need to rank what we see against everything else on display and come up with a favourite.

I point our visitors to the last portrait they’ll see before leaving the exhibition: Julia Gutman’s painting of singer-songwriter Montaigne. It’s a beautiful evocation, in oils and embroidered textiles, of a young musician’s dynamic creativity, with the excellent title Head in the Sky, Feet on the Ground. Some of the visitors grumble about textiles not being “appropriate” but most are delighted with the choice of the Trustees of the Art Gallery of New South Wales…

… except, in the Archibald sprit of everyone being entitled to their own opinion, I think it’s a shame they overlooked Natasha Bieniek’s Self-Portrait — tiny, exquisite, a microscopic universe of light and vegetation. And not a celebrity. •

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Across four seasons, with the fifth commencing this month, Fargo has created conventions of its own, one of which is to mix up the psychological profiles typically associated with violent acts and spin counterintuitive narratives accordingly. If the stories aren’t true then they could be, in the way truth is often said to defy the limits of credibility imposed on fiction.

To begin with, we have a cast of characters from a small regional community where it is important to be nice. “Minnesota nice,” as we’re informed at the start of the first episode of season five, is the term for a code of manners characterised by “an aggressively pleasant demeanour, often forced, in which a person is chipper and self-effacing, no matter how bad things get.” Nice people like to live regular, comfortable lives. They don’t like to take risks. Even the state’s distinctive accent, with its soothing, predictable intonations, communicates security.

People like these are naturally going to attract predators set on exploiting their inability to anticipate bad things happening. At least that’s the premise. As with all crime stories set in local communities, the predators come in two kinds: the home-grown, and the ones who cruise in from elsewhere, bringing new kinds of trouble. And the attraction between the predator and the prey cuts both ways, which is where the dynamic becomes perverse. The people who should be the victims in Fargo never quite turn out that way.

It’s this mutual engagement between predator and prey — or, perhaps more provocatively, between the sinister and the naive — that drives each season. Standard psychology would suggest that the more calculating, determined personality is going to be the catalyst, with an ingenuous counterpart co-opted as a mere pawn in the game, but that doesn’t account for fate itself, which is always an overarching influence.

Some killers know exactly what they intend, and plot accordingly, but others, the more interesting kind in this absurdist world, haven’t the slightest idea of what they are about to do until they’ve done it. Like season one’s failing insurance salesman, Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman), seemingly intimidated by everyone he meets until his wife goads him more fiercely than usual and the hammer he’s holding develops a will of its own.

Questions of causality are always unresolved. When fate is the determining agent, the hammer might well be its instrument and Lester a mere channel. But Fargo also has real villains, affording opportunities for charismatic performances like those of Billy Bob Thornton as Lorne Malvo in the first season, David Thewlis as V.M. Varga in the third, and now Jon Hamm as fundamentalist cowboy sheriff Roy Tillman.

Apex predators might have cunning and sadism woven into their DNA but their blind spot is an incapacity to believe in anything other than the force of their own will. Fate, ever a trickster, has the capacity to outwit any of them.

Season five, under the direction of series creator Noah Hawley, opens in a school hall festooned with Halloween pumpkins for a presentation by the Fall Festival Planning Committee. For whatever reason (if there is one, we aren’t to learn it at this point) the meeting has turned into an all-out brawl. A terrified woman cringes in her seat, trying to shield her child from the melee.

Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) is a diminutive presence, seemingly fragile and surely “nice.” She makes pancakes for breakfast and meatloaf for dinner, serves on the school library committee, knits in front of daytime TV and is adored by her nerdy husband, Wayne (David Rysdahl). Under threat, though, she whips out a taser or turns a hairspray can into a flame thrower.

After fighting her way out of the school hall Dot undergoes the embarrassment of police arrest and is released just in time for a formal dinner with her wealthy mother-in-law Lorraine (Jennifer Jason Leigh). Lorraine, a formidable matriarch, kicks off the festive season with a photoshoot for the family Christmas card in which she and her inner circle pose with automatic firearms. Over dinner, she makes carping remarks to her daughter in law, who plays Minnesota nice.

Somewhere out of town, around a table in an open paddock on a vast cattle ranch, another family meal is being presided over, this one by Sheriff Tillman, who leads the company in saying grace with joined hands. True to the stereotype, he rides the property in a ten-gallon hat and supervises the training of horses in a massive barn. But that’s not all he supervises. His employees include a couple of hired killers and a mistress who engages in hardcore roleplay on demand.

Tillman’s obsession, though, is his missing wife, who suddenly appears after ten years when her photo is registered on the state law enforcement database after she is fingerprinted following the school hall riot.

Between that vengeful ex-husband and her gun-toting mother-in-law, Dot has her work cut out for her. She goes about it assiduously, creating a household defence system involving a lot of crushed lightbulbs. As if the dice are not already sufficiently loaded against her, an apparently supernatural being arises during a Gothic Halloween ritual and stalks abroad, bloody from head to foot.

What kind of story are we in here? Figuring that out is detective work for the audience.

If the mix of ingredients is verging on the preposterous, the dramatic tension is always in sure hands, with a terse and witty script from Hawley and Lee Edward Colston, wonderful cinematography from Dana Gonzales and his team and, as always with Fargo, actors of genius in the lead roles. •

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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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The great thing about Joe Biden as a subject is his verbosity. He does a terrible job at suppressing his internal monologue. His staff and friends have a clear understanding of his mind, because they are exposed to so much of it.

Biden’s tendency to bloviate — a word that has failed to establish itself this side of the Pacific despite favourable conditions — and his habit of veering dangerously off-script at critical moments are the stuff of legend. His ascent to the presidency drew a collective eye roll among some Democrats, but also the hope that his ordinariness would bring about a period of dull but competent politics. The nation might at last have a chance to catch its breath and lick its wounds.

Despite that hope, tedium has been in short supply. Beginning shortly after the Capitol riot, his administration had to cope with the continuing Covid crisis, the withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, not to mention punishing domestic battles over immigration, inflation and the overturning of Roe v. Wade.

The Last Politician leads the reader through the first two years of Biden’s presidency with an occasionally breathless immediacy. Foer’s liberal use of fabricated dialogue and rapid shifts of perspective among a large cast of key players enliven his book, which has become a bestseller in the United States. The product of around 300 interviews, it offers West Wing–style personal conflict and colour, and the same semi-heroic portrayal of the sleep-deprived governing elite.

Foer conveys the limitations and quirks of his protagonists without falling into easy cynicism or caricature. Criticism of politicians is muted except when their wrongdoing is blatant, the petulant obstructionism of the Trump administration during the transition of power being a case in point. The depiction of Joe Manchin, the senator for West Virginia who repeatedly held his party hostage as the fiftieth vote in the Senate, might have been scathing. Instead, Foer offers a humanising sketch of a self-important geezer with one eye on his legacy and another on his easily bruised sense of honour.

Biden is drawn in an equally generous light. He can be short-tempered when challenged but swallows his pride and breaks bread to bring legislative combatants back to the negotiating table. He is occasionally caught flat-footed, notably in response to the Supreme Court’s dismantling of abortion rights, but quickly finds his way back to clarity. His oratorical aspirations are undermined by faux pas, as when an off-script remark suggested he was seeking regime change in Russia. He owns his administration’s failures in the chaotic evacuation from Kabul and steers a steady course between his party’s progressive wing and what the electorate will tolerate.

To Foer, Biden has been consistently underestimated, partly for reasons of social class. As a “lunch-pail cornball” he lacks Obama’s Ivy League lustre but can arguably connect to people more authentically. (Biden told a friend that his former boss couldn’t even say “fuck you” properly.) For all his chronic “indiscipline and imprecision,” Biden’s term has seen significant achievements. He stood firm against Putin, helped to corral European states in defence of Ukraine, began to restore America’s global reputation as a responsible power, and averted the expected Republican “red wave” in the midterm elections.

The domestic achievement that draws the most attention from Foer but is less well known in Australia is the passing of the Inflation Reduction Act, which provides a transformational boost to solar and wind energy and other green technologies. The act’s path was littered with obstacles, and Foer credits Biden with the perspective, farsightedness, persistence and willingness to compromise that made it possible.

In praising these geezerly virtues Foer offers a partial and unconvincing defence of American gerontocracy. Age brings wisdom, but not reliably. Biden may have a rare and insufficiently acknowledged gift for getting things done within the political institutions he loves, but The Last Politician reveals those institutions to be open to abuse precisely because of their reliance on the transactional deal-making at which Biden excels.

Two senators can meet secretly to carve hundreds of billions of dollars from a piece of legislation to meet one senator’s idiosyncratic demands. Vast, nation-shaping agreements can be made on a houseboat over beer and pasta. Deals can be undone by perceived slights to a congressman’s honour. War efforts can be endangered because the leader of an embattled country’s tweets convey insufficient gratitude to his American funders. Members of Congress can be made to demonstrate their trustworthiness by looking one another in the eye.

The denizens of Washington can be divided into hacks and wonks, Foer writes. “You were either a political animal or a policy nerd.” Biden, he says, is an “old hack,” one of the last, wisest exponents of the dying art of congressional horsetrading. The Last Politician mounts a convincing case for Biden’s presidential achievements, but it is less clear that we should mourn the passing of his generation’s style of politics. •

The Last Politician: Inside Joe Biden’s White House and the Struggle for America’s Future
By Franklin Foer | Penguin Press | US$30 | 432 pages

The post The old hack who could appeared first on Inside Story.

Kurkov is right. Reading books about this war can have a soothing effect. Only once we look up from the pages that have captured our imagination are we propelled back to the awful knowledge that Russia’s war against Ukraine continues. Blood keeps flowing. People keep getting injured and killed. A country is being destroyed. There seems no end in sight.

Looking at the pages in front of them, historians have another experience as well. Trained to read for argument and to classify books into schools of thought, they begin to think about the books dealing with this war as part of its “historiography” — a corpus of texts engaged in a discussion with each other attempting to understand the past and its meaning for the present.

To see a historiography forming while the event it describes is still unfolding is unusual. Normally decades, even centuries, pass before historical schools solidify around a particular event. In this respect, the literature on Russia’s war against Ukraine resembles the historiography of Stalinism in its formative stages, but its historiographical schools are developing much faster in our present, pressurised environment.

Somewhat schematically, we can distinguish five schools of thought about the origins of this war. One group of writers sees the West at fault, and particularly NATO. Another blames Russia and the Russians, opponents of peace and democracy. A third group sees Russia’s imperialist past at the core of a war that expresses the legacy of a lost empire and the failure to overcome its culture. A fourth group, the intentionalists, focus on Vladimir Putin and his perhaps irrational, or at least idiosyncratic, motivation for waging war. A final group sees the war as a struggle between dictatorship and democracy reflected in Putin’s attempt to quash any potential challenge to his rule, at home or abroad. The war, on this reading, is part of Putin’s “preventive counter-revolution.”

There are, of course, combinations of these viewpoints. Blaming NATO can go together with a notion of Russia’s ongoing imperialism: given the latter, the argument goes, NATO should have abstained even more emphatically from expanding into Russia’s supposed backyard. Russia’s imperialism and continued quest for a great power status can be linked, in turn, to its hostility to Ukraine’s quest for democracy. Intentionalists, too, can see Putin as drawing on a wider Russian culture of imperialism, which can go hand in glove with a quest for dictatorship and therefore preventive counter-revolution.

Perhaps the most well-defined position in the debate on the war’s origins is the first: blaming NATO for provoking the conflict by expanding into Russia’s “sphere of influence.” This path has been taken most prominently by international relations scholar John Mearsheimer. As critics of this view have pointed out, it has its history backwards. It was not when NATO enlarged into Eastern Europe that Russia became aggressive but when it showed weakness — by failing to agree on a response to the accession hopes of Georgia and Ukraine at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, for example. Moreover, it is difficult to see Putin’s aggression, “riddled” as it is with “irrationalities,” as some kind of logical response to a putative Western threat.

NATO-blaming has recently lost some of its dominance over public discourse. But it continues to be popular on the far left, sometimes amended to an opposition to both Russian and NATO imperialism. Beyond the extremes lingers the view that, whatever bad things happen in the world, “the West” must be to blame.

Historian Philipp Ther is clearly affected by such sensibilities. He feels “comfortable” in the company of “leftists,” he writes in the introduction to his latest book, and he feels that “the West” (whatever that might be) has lost its way. The multiple crises we encounter today, including the war against Ukraine, are part of a “wrong turn” in economic policy after 1989–91. “The West lost the peace” after the end of the cold war, he says, because it became self-satisfied and embraced unfettered capitalism (or “neoliberalism,” defined as the conglomerate of “liberalisation, deregulation, privatisation, the reduction of state influence on the economy, and global financial capitalism”).

NATO expansion, then, is not at the centre of Ther’s argument in How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War. A social historian, Ther is much more interested in political economy than international relations. He flags in his introduction that he feels uneasy about NATO expansion, and at one point suggests Russia should have joined the alliance. But he hastens to add that his critique is “absolutely not meant to relativise Russia’s attack on Ukraine.” The latter “deserves the full support of the West and the entire world — otherwise Russia’s pursuit of a multipolar world order with a Russian sphere of influence in Eastern Europe will instead lead to maximum global disorder.”

Elsewhere in his book, Ther declares Russia’s enduring “imperial legacy” to be the core cause of the war. The early 1990s might have been a moment to cast off the legacy, but it passed, first because of Boris Yeltsin’s shelling of a recalcitrant (and imperialist) parliament in 1993 and then because of the rouble crisis in 1998, “when most of the Russian middle class sank into poverty again.” The latter is something of an overstatement, as a middle class continued to exist thereafter, but Ther’s overall point is well taken: “Neither of these traumatic moments had anything to do with the expansion of NATO or the EU; they were domestic problems first and foremost.”

Rather than an outcome of international relations, Russia’s trials and tribulations were part of the global malaise Ther is exploring. His great bugbear is the failed prophet of the “end of history,” Francis Fukuyama, whom he sees as the chief ideologist of Western triumphalism; his intellectual hero is the sociologist Karl Polanyi, analyst of the “great transformation” of the long nineteenth century.

Like Polanyi in the interwar years, Ther argues, we find ourselves at the tail end of another transformative period: the one that ran from 1989 to 2022. This transformation had two aspects — post-Soviet transformation in the former Soviet empire and “late-capitalist transformation in the West” — and they were held together by a shared framework of “neoliberal globalisation.”

Far from being the end of history, this period was one of profound economic, social and political upheaval, with winners and losers dotted around the globe, both between countries and within them. The claim that unfettered capitalism would somehow lift all the boats, making us all more prosperous, happy and democratic, turned out to be a pipedream at best and ideological obfuscation at worst.

Instead came the global financial crisis, followed by the annus horribilis of 2016, with Donald Trump’s victory in the United States and the Brexiteers’ in Britain. Then the “one-two punch of the pandemic and the biggest war in Europe since 1945… brought to an end the era for which historians have not yet found a name.” In line with Polanyi, Ther proposes calling the period from 1989 to 2022 “the age of transformation.”

Transformation to what? We don’t yet know, but it might not be good. Overall, Ther is quite pessimistic, but he does hope that his exploration of the history of our present will help open up “new opportunities for a progressive politics and society,” a political thrust that fits in well with other recent attempts to reconstruct the social democratic project for the twenty-first century.

To Ther, this is an existential quest. Like the unfettered capitalism of the nineteenth century, he fears that the new age of transformation might lead to some kind of fascism. The pendulum, to use his metaphor, having swung all the way towards a neoliberal abandonment of state protection, is now swinging back the other way. But Ther’s pendulum, in a hard-to-visualise twist, can swing in two ways: “left towards democratic socialism, or right towards fascism.”

Does any of this explain the war against Ukraine? Not really. Ther struggles to make Russia and Ukraine fit his explanatory scheme. True, the economic crisis triggered by Gorbachev’s reforms and deepened by the breakdown of the Soviet Union “plunged much of Russia’s population into destitution and misery,” which is never a good foundation for a democratic polity. But the same was true for Ukraine, which became democratic. And while Ukraine’s economy remained sluggish, Russia’s has grown by leaps and bounds since Putin came to power.

Neoliberalism, then, is of little use as a scapegoat for Russia’s aggression. Instead, Ther evokes a combination of the preventive counter-revolution argument and the anti-imperialist paradigm. Putin’s goal, he argues, is “to rewrite the end of history — with the creation of a new Russian empire.” The “larger dimensions of the conflict” also include the confrontation between “an authoritarian system” (Russia) that has evolved into a “hard dictatorship since Putin’s second term,” on the one side, and a country (Ukraine) that “has continually moved in the direction of liberal democracy ever since the Orange Revolution, and especially since 2014.”

Ukraine is far more democratic than Hungary, an EU member. Its governments have repeatedly transitioned smoothly and peacefully after elections, “something that unfortunately cannot be said for the USA since the storming of the Capitol.” Putin’s war on Ukraine is “also a war on democracy,” Ther writes, a “declaration of war against the EU and a free Europe.”

By evoking imperialism, a global transformation of capitalism, and a systemic confrontation between dictatorship and democracy, Ther avoids the position of authors who find the origins of this war in Russia’s national character, its history or its culture. I have argued elsewhere against such views as ahistoric and simplistic. Mikhail Zygar’s recent magnum opus War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance, can serve as evidence of some of their shortcomings: it is the book of a Russian democrat, a Russian anti-imperialist and a Russian enemy of this war. Were the arguments about Russia’s national character as militaristic, imperialist and anti-democratic correct, he should not exist. And yet he wrote a book — a long and eloquent one at that.

Zygar is a Russian intellectual, and he knows it. And he’s an anti-imperialist. His book is framed as a long letter to his Ukrainian friend Nadia, at whose house in Bucha — the scene of one of this war’s massacres — he wrote much of his earlier book, All the Kremlin’s Men. “Nadia no longer speaks to me,” he writes in distress. “Because I am Russian, she considers me an ‘imperialist.’” He hopes his book will change her mind, and the minds of his compatriots: “Nadia, I am not an imperialist, and I am writing this book so that others will not be either.”

War and Punishment is made up of two, very different, parts. In fact, it is two books pressed into one volume. The first is a series of historical essays on major moments in Ukrainian–Russian relations that have been turned into myths in both Russian and Ukrainian historiography. They include Hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky’s ill-fated alliance with Muscovy against Poland in 1654, which Russian historians have used to claim that Ukraine voluntarily subjugated itself under Moscow’s tsars; Ivan Mazepa’s alliance with Sweden against Peter the Great in 1708, which was declared a “betrayal” by Russian imperialists; Catherine the Great’s destruction of the remnants of Cossack Freedom; the life and work of Taras Shevchenko, Ukraine’s national poet of the nineteenth century; the Ukrainian revolution and Ukraine’s independent state at the end of the first world war; the Great Famine, or Holodomor, of the early 1930s; and nationalist resistance against German and Soviet occupation during the second world war.

Zygar provides a fresh and readable account of the historical background of each of these episodes and how they persist as anti-Ukrainian myths in Russian historiography.

Like anti-Russian authors, then, Zygar is well aware of the imperialist mainstream of Russian culture. His book is an attempt both to condemn it and to reconstruct, or strengthen, its anti-imperialist counter-current. Like anti-fascist German intellectuals after 1933, and for similar reasons, he is scathing about the culture in which he grew up:

Many Russian writers and historians are complicit in facilitating this war. It is their words and thoughts over the past 350 years that sowed the seeds of Russian fascism and allowed it to flourish, although many would be horrified today to see the fruits of their labour. We failed to spot just how deadly the very idea of Russia as a “great empire” was… We overlooked the fact that, for many centuries, “great Russian culture” belittled other countries and peoples, suppressed and destroyed them.

But his reaction is not to treat Russia as some kind of historical anomaly but to change what it means to be a Russian. “Russia as an empire has been consigned to the past, as a direct and irreversible consequence of the war,” he writes. What remains, however, is imperialism, a mindset, an emotional state, that needs to change, not just because of what it does to others, but also because of how it deforms Russia and the Russians:

Imperial history is our disease; it’s inherently addictive. And the withdrawal symptoms will hurt. But this is inevitable. We have to return to reality and realise what we’ve done.

We have to learn this lesson. To stop believing in our own uniqueness. To stop being proud of our vast territory. To stop thinking we’re special. To stop imagining ourselves as the centre of the world, its conscience, its source of spirituality. It’s all bunk.

Decolonising the Russian mind means democratising the country. Or, put the other way, democratisation can only succeed with the defeat of the imperialist mindset, which legitimises the subjugation of citizens as subjects:

We must strip the state of the right to impose its own view of the past on us. We have to roll up our sleeves and completely reinterpret our history, or rather the history of the peoples who fell victim to the empire…

Looking back, we see a horrific sight; our ancestors, indoctrinated to believe they were victors, were themselves victims. They were forced to kill, to rejoice in the killing, to take pride in the killing. And they were good at it. They were proud; they got high; they wrote beautiful poems, songs, and books glorifying blood and violence, the crunching of bones. And they forgot it was their own blood, their own bones.

This position is a radical departure from Russian liberal thought, both past and present, which often remained deeply imperialist (and racist), while espousing individual autonomy and democratic governance for Russians. At the same time it builds on anti-imperial Russian thinkers and the work of critical historians working, for example, in the now illegal organisation Memorial.

The second part of Zygar’s book is very different. It tells an integrated story, with a huge number of characters, reminiscent of the big Russian novels the title alludes to. This story begins in 1991 and ends in the present. While readers with little background in Russian and Ukrainian history will benefit greatly from the punchy and often inspired historical vignettes of the first part, they will likely get lost in the details of the second. It provides political history in its purest form: a tangled web of personalities and the relations between them; a history of power, corruption, loyalty and betrayal; and a history of powerful men and women: politicians and powerbrokers, oligarchs and gangsters, businesspeople and soldiers. In between, we learn about the unlikely rise of the comedian-turned-politician-turned-wartime-leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

This focus on personalities, their relations and the complex history of events over three decades — the same decades covered by Ther’s great transformation — sits somewhat uneasily with the framing of the book as an exploration of Russian imperialism. Given that many actors in Ukraine also pursued their own interests, connected to Russia as much as to Ukraine, the emergent story of oligarchic politics is much more messy than the subtitle of the book suggests: this is not just a story of Russian oppression and Ukrainian resistance.

When it comes to explaining the outbreak of the all-out war in 2022, Zygar is an intentionalist: the fourth emergent school of the history of this war. Intentionalists focus on the decision-makers and their motives. My own recent book, informed in many ways by Zygar’s earlier work, was intentionalist in this regard: while I saw, again like Zygar, Russian imperialism as one of the underlying structural causes, I also argued that the timing of the invasion becomes intelligible only when we understand that Putin, his seventieth birthday approaching, was looking for a legacy. He had spent the Covid years in splendid isolation, stewing in his own juices and reading Russian imperialist history. He wanted to get into the history books as an empire builder alongside Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, and Stalin.

Zygar tells a similar story, but he sees Putin driven less by his own historical ambition than by domestic politics. Spooked by the failed Belarusian revolution of 2020–21, the Russian president decided to remove the most prominent opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. Putin’s agents poisoned Navalny on 20 August 2020 but the attempt on his life failed. Evacuated to Germany, Navalny launched a counterattack: a YouTube video with the results of his team’s investigation into the poisoning, which was watched by some twenty million people at the time.

Navalny returned to Russia on 17 January 2021, triggering anti-regime protests and his own arrest. Two days later his team released a video about a private palace owned by Putin on the Black Sea coast. “This revelation,” writes Zygar, “strikes perhaps the most powerful blow to Putin during his entire reign. The video is watched by 120 million people, that is, almost the entire adult population of Russia.” Demonstrations have to be clubbed out of existence “Belarus-style.” The “damage to Putin’s credibility is colossal,” and he fears losing control. It is in this context, Zygar argues, that Putin’s administration is beginning to hatch new war plans: Ukraine can serve as the successful little war that saves Putin’s rule.

This is why Putin returns to history and, with the help of his former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky, writes his notorious July 2021 essay on the alleged historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians — the historical treatise that part one of Zygar’s book is trying to counter. It is a historical justification for the coming war, but not its origin. The origin is the attempt to forestall revolution at home.

Here, then, Zygar partakes of the final emerging school of thought on the origins of this war: that it is an attempt at preventive counter-revolution. As the Australian political scientist Robert Horvath has argued, Putin has long attempted to immunise his regime against the “colour revolutions” that seemed to be breaking out periodically both in Russia’s immediate vicinity and further afield.

One way to link this anti-revolutionary quest to aggression against Ukraine is to see Ukraine as a vibrant democracy at Russia’s doorstep and hence an example of what could be for the domestic opposition. The problem with this interpretation is that there was no renewed democratic revolution in Kyiv in 2022, and hence no reason to quash it.

Zygar’s interpretation is closer to Horvath’s original reading: Putin went to war not because Ukraine posed a democratic threat to his rule but because he faced a democratic threat at home. The war was a distraction: an attempt to reignite the imperialist jingoism of the Crimea annexation of 2014 that propelled Putin’s approval ratings upwards.

Two interpretive problems remain. For one, Putin didn’t order the invasion when he needed the distraction but well after the domestic crisis had passed. The 2021 protests were well and truly over by the time he published his Ukraine manifesto in the middle of that year. By early 2022, when he sent in his troops, there was no challenge to his regime.

Second, as Zygar documents himself, the war plans were hatched in secret. If the regime as a whole was under threat and the war was part of an attempt to prevent revolution, it is hardly credible that even Putin’s closest advisers were not aware of the war plans even at the eve of the invasion.

Be that as it may: Putin’s invasion on 24 February 2022 started a new historical epoch. As Ther points out, that might well be true for the globe as a whole but it is certainly true for Russia and Ukraine. At the centre of this new epoch is the war, its history being written as events unfold.

We already have military history in the more narrow sense of the term: an appreciation of unfolding events at the frontline; analyses of the technical aspects of the fighting, the evolution of tactics and weaponry; and a focus on what lessons professional soldiers can learn from this fighting. More readable for non-specialists are initial narrative accounts of this war. Among the steady stream of these, some are penned by historians but more by journalists. The latest addition is Andrew Harding’s A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine, an account of the battle of Voznesensk in March 2022.

Harding’s slim volume is a gem. A masterpiece of journalistic storytelling, it has the qualities of a good novella. It may be the most readable book about this war published to date. Based on interviews with some dozen survivors of the battle — soldiers and civilians, men and women, Russians and Ukrainians — the book tells a tale of survival and resistance on Ukraine’s side as well as aggression and frustration on Russia’s. It also explores the sometimes unclear loyalties, and indeed identities, of both Russians and Ukrainians, and doesn’t shy away from unsentimental depictions of war crimes.

Harding’s book thus explores some of the complexities of the real history of this war without falling into relativism: it is clear that Harding’s sympathies are with the defenders rather than the aggressors and that he doesn’t find it difficult to distinguish between the two. He leaves us with the despondent nightmares of his interviewees. They are haunted, he writes, “by the notion that this conflict may never end, and by the fear that Russia’s capacity to absorb suffering and its unflinching willingness to continue inflicting it will eventually enable it to grind out some kind of victory.”

As Ther warns, such an outcome would be catastrophic. It can be avoided if Ukraine’s friends in what is left of the democratic world stay the course. The biggest threat to Ukraine’s independence today derives from phantasies that this war might be stopped if Russia were to be accommodated by reasonable diplomacy. As Zygar notes, Russia in its current configuration cannot be accommodated. Defeat, not victory, might set Russia on the path Zygar proclaims with grim optimism: “Future generations of Russians will remember with horror and shame the war that Putin unleashed. They will marvel at how archaic hubris came to dominate the minds of twenty-first-century people. And they will not tread the same path if we, their ancestors, bear the punishment today.” •

How the West Lost the Peace: The Great Transformation Since the Cold War
By Philipp Ther | Translated by Jessica Spengler | Polity Press | $36.95 | 304 pages

War and Punishment: The Story of Russian Oppression and Ukrainian Resistance
By Mikhail Zygar | Weidenfeld & Nicolson | $34.95 | 424 pages

A Small, Stubborn Town: Life, Death and Defiance in Ukraine
By Andrew Harding | Bonnier | $32.99 | 160 pages

The post Writing the history of the present appeared first on Inside Story.

But it is complicated by social and economic inequalities, as Wanning Sun explains in her new book, Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences. And in the case of China’s migrant workers, it can’t be considered apart from broader issues of history, politics and economics. Reading this important, pathbreaking study of the personal lives of the new Chinese proletariat, we might well conclude that if love really is chicken soup for the soul, those at the bottom of China’s social and economic heap struggle for a sip.

For most of Chinese history, parents arranged their children’s marriages, a deal typically cemented by either a dowry or bride price, depending on local custom. Men of means were free to seek romance outside the home with professional courtesans or bring choice into the home through concubinage. Women enjoyed no such second shots at happiness.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, progressive and revolutionary thinkers advocated for an end to arranged marriages. The end of dynastic rule and the birth of a modern republic in 1911 created the opportunity for change, with rising educational rates for girls, industrialisation, the entry of more women into the work force, and exposure to Western ideas and culture all playing a role. The wild popularity of a sentimental literary genre known as “Butterfly and Mandarin Duck” fiction over much of the first half of the twentieth century reflected widespread yearning for relationships based on romantic love.

When it came into being in 1949, the People’s Republic of China abolished arranged marriages and other “feudal” customs such as bride prices. Yet its new, purposeful culture subordinated romantic love to revolution and comradeship. By 1966, when Mao launched the decade-long, ultra-left Cultural Revolution, the only sanctioned passion was for revolution itself. With the arrival of the Reform Era in 1978, love quickly divorced revolution to flirt with freedom and eventually marry the market.

Fast-forward to the 2010s, the decade when China’s economy roared past Japan’s to become the world’s second largest. Sun, who provides a brief overview of the history, picks up the story here. If revolutionary China had never been quite as egalitarian as it claimed to be, by the mid 2010s, she notes, it was “one of the most unequal countries in the world.” The new urban middle classes — including, with some caveats, those in the LGBTQI community — enjoyed relative freedom in their romantic and sex lives. Those with more precarious social status and economic stability, such as the migrant workers who are the focus of Sun’s study, faced a very different situation.

The legacy of the decades-long one-child policy, particularly in rural areas has been an outsized gender imbalance. Which is why so many of China’s internal migrants who travel from the countryside to the cities to seek work — its “migrant workers” — are male.

Unlike in nations where people are free to settle where they find work, the People’s Republic has a strictly managed system of urban residence permits called hukou. These permits define who may reside legally and permanently in a city and enjoy its hospitals, schools and other social services. The hardworking villagers who build China’s fast trains and gleaming office blocks, keep its assembly lines humming, deliver its meals and packages, and cook, clean and otherwise serve the middle classes and their businesses don’t for the most part have the right to settle in the city or send their children to schools near where they work.

They’re not an insignificant portion of the population. Before pandemic lockdowns returned most of them to their hometowns for a spell, they numbered 286 million. That’s about a fifth of China’s population. This makes Sun’s close look at how social and economic inequality affects their lives — and at the interdependent structures of capitalism, patriarchy and state socialism that reinforce these inequalities — essential reading for anyone interested in a deeper understanding of China today.

By the mid 2010s, when Sun began her field research, many of the migrants she met belonged to a second generation, born in the 1990s. The first, born in the eighties or earlier, typically retained stronger ties to their home villages, to which they planned to retire. Many were already married when they set out for the cities. The second generation, which includes children of the first, enjoy a less certain identity, caught between home villages to which they lack strong emotional connection and the cities whose urban and consumerist dreams they have absorbed while lacking the means to realise them.

They are thus more or less permanently migratory, mobile mainly in a lateral, geographic sense. With hard work — and most of their work is punishingly hard — they can improve their situation. Buying a flat in a township close to their village, where they can live with their children (typically farmed out to grandparents in the meantime) is a common aspiration. But the difficulty of obtaining an urban hukou means they have only limited hopes of joining the urban middle classes.

Those middle classes, in turn, regard them with a mix of conditional appreciation, distaste and fear. Sun notes that the Communist Party itself, for all its trumpeted and historical proletarian affinities, shares the middle-class unease at the “perceived threat” this majority-male cohort poses “to public health, moral order and social stability.” A key source of anxiety centres on the sexual desires of a floating single-male population, and the ancillary underground prostitution industry, involving migrant women, that has sprung up to service them. Many of the migrant workers (including sex workers) with whom Sun has spoken appear to have internalised this shame, knowing that they may be (however unfairly) perceived as living on the moral as well as economic margins.

I recall when migrant workers first began appearing in the cities in significant numbers in the 1990s. Friends in Beijing and Shanghai expressed what seemed to be outsized fears of these mostly male workers, whom they believed capable of the most heinous crimes. It was reminiscent of the eighteenth-century “soulstealers” panic, when mass hysteria grew around the idea that sorcerers disguised as itinerants were clipping the ends of men’s queues for dark rites that allowed them to steal the men’s souls. As Philip A. Kuhn wrote in Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, such apprehensions reveal much about a society’s structure and internal tensions.

Researching Love Troubles, Sun cultivated relationships with workers at the Foxconn plant in Shenzhen, speaking to them at length and over the years to be able to present nuanced portraits of their lives. There’s PC, for example, witty, vivacious and talkative, whose two children live with different sets of grandparents back home. She is constantly arguing with her husband about his gambling habit — not an uncommon vice among migrant workers. He infuriated her by secretly giving away half a year’s wages to his nephew, another gambler, while she was slaving on the assembly line to buy a three-bedroom apartment in a township near their hometown. She became a campaigner against domestic violence and a labour activist with links to a local NGO involved in workers’ rights. As her NGO-backed struggles with Foxconn’s management accelerated, her husband’s support for her activism helped them reconcile.

PC’s story is just one of many personal accounts threaded through this book, deftly contextualised and considered through the lens of ethnographic and other theories. The examples illuminate not just the variety of migrant experience but also issues including “male grievance” among the involuntarily single (and often celibate) members of the migrant labour force; the cohort’s higher-than-normal divorce rates; the “dark intimacy” of prostitution, exploitation and abuse; and how women especially typically face “compromises” rather than “choices” in their intimate lives.

Among the many intriguing subjects tackled in Love Troubles is the politics of romantic imagery. Sun begins the book with a description of her first meeting with some of the workers who would become her long-term informants. She thought to break the ice by asking about their favourite love stories. Some of the men openly scoffed at the idea, saying there was no such thing as true love. Then one of them began talking about the film Titanic. This drew the group into passionate discussion.

What most resonated with them was the fantasy of a poor working-class boy being loved by a rich girl — and how it was doomed to a tragic end, as they felt it certainly would be in China. One young woman, meanwhile, was most struck by the fact that following the death of her true love the heroine was nonetheless free to find happiness with another man, whereas traditional Chinese mores would have condemned her for not remaining chaste and “virtuously” true to his memory.

Other types of romantic imagery discussed by Sun include migrant workers’ self-portraiture in photography and literature, the culture of wedding photography (including a controversial artistic intervention in which an urban photographer posed migrant couples dressed in wedding clothes inside the factories where they worked), and documentaries produced by state media that portray workers’ relationships as unfolding within a broader China Dream narrative of hard work towards a brighter future.

The workers’ responses to such imagery often contrast with the reactions of the wider community. For example, a migrant worker published a suite of photographs of his peers titled “Rural Migrants’ Love in Dongguan.” It included candid shots of lovers, sometimes still in their factory clothes, snatching a cuddle on a park bench or sharing other intimate moments. (Two of these photos appear in the book; one wishes for more.) Widely viewed online, the series incited a range of comments from the patronising and sentimental (“how sweet”) to the moralising and condemnatory (“they’re not interested in learning, they have no souls”).

As Sun writes, the migrant workers’ “right to intimacy” is inescapably “contingent, conditional and vulnerable to violation and exploitation.” In their search for happiness in their personal lives they must balance their employers’ demands on their energy and time, frequently measured in twelve-hour shifts, with family pressures (including around the resurgent custom of bride prices) and their own desires for, and definitions of happiness. As Sun amply demonstrates, neither the men nor the women of this precariat are free from the “triple oppression” of “global capitalism, state socialism, and familial patriarchy.” Love can try bloody hard, and it does, but it can’t always conquer all. •

Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences
By Wanning Sun | Bloomsbury Academic | $153 | 216 pages

The post Stolen moments appeared first on Inside Story.

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.

In 2008, Michael Wolff published a book called The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch. Wolff had benefited from far greater access to Murdoch and his family than any of the magnate’s earlier biographers. He taped more than fifty hours of interviews with Rupert himself, spoke to all immediate family members, and put questions to senior company executives.

In an article in GQ three years later, Wolff revealed that he received this level of cooperation because Murdoch and others close to him didn’t want Murdoch’s legacy “forever yoked” to Fox News and its powerful head, Roger Ailes. The biography would be a weapon in the “increasing war” against Ailes. Wolff acknowledged that he had made “a devil’s bargain not to talk to Ailes.”

It is plausible that Murdoch’s inner circle was disillusioned with Fox News and Ailes. Rupert’s main focus during 2007, dwarfing everything else, was his long-cherished dream of owning the Wall Street Journal, and he was keen to ease fears among the paper’s board members that he would dumb it down.

Moreover, Fox was on the losing side of the election that swept Barack Obama to victory. Even before his inauguration, the network was abandoning professional standards, becoming more propagandistic and, as the election had shown, increasingly out of touch with majority opinion. Fox went on to nurture and support the extreme-right Republican faction, the Tea Party, even helping it appeal for funds. It aired the groundless “birther” theories that Obama wasn’t born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to be president.

Yet the only member of the family to publicly express any criticism during this period was Murdoch’s son-in-law, Matthew Freud, husband of Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth, who said in 2010, “I am by no means alone within the family or the company in being ashamed and sickened by Roger Ailes’s horrendous and sustained disregard of the journalistic standards that News Corp, its founder and every other global business aspires to.”

Those comments were immediately and forcefully disowned by Rupert, and he subsequently gave Ailes a large bonus and a pay rise. Any lingering internal disillusion with Fox News was snuffed out by the results of the 2010 midterm elections, in which the Republicans gained an extra sixty-three seats in the House of Representatives, the biggest success of its kind since 1948. Fox News hosted a televised victory party with many Republican candidates and officials. Never again during Ailes’s tenure were there internal rumblings of any significance.

While Murdoch’s defence of Ailes at the time may have been a commercial necessity, he never in subsequent years showed any inclination to distance himself. In 2016, following Ailes’s resignation in disgrace after allegations of sexual harassment, Murdoch had the chance to change the network’s approach, as his son James was reportedly urging him to do. Instead, he kept change to the minimum. “We’re not changing direction,” he said a few months later. “That would be business suicide.”

But if Murdoch’s aim was to enhance his own legacy, then selecting Wolff as authorised biographer was wrong-headed in every respect. Wolff — once described in the New York Times as “a prime piranha in the Manhattan media pond” and by high-profile magazine editor Tina Brown as “the sour savant of American media” — had demonstrated much greater skill at tearing down reputations than at building them up.

Wolff’s main attempt to distance Murdoch from Fox News comes in the last few pages of the book when he suddenly asserts that the Murdoch children, his wife Wendi Deng Murdoch and even Murdoch himself were all “liberals,” a term he conspicuously fails to define. The claim is made without elaboration or any evidence (except that some of them supported Obama). It is a lame and unconvincing note to end on.

Rupert was widely reported to dislike the book. Ailes, on the other hand, had no reason to be disappointed. Wolff notes several times that the one person in his employment whom Murdoch never interferes with is Ailes. He even says Ailes is “possibly the one man of whom Murdoch is afraid.” Going further, he claims that Murdoch had “a crush on Ailes. For a very long time, having dinner with Ailes is the most galvanising thing in Murdoch’s life — it makes him feel in the game, it’s pure pleasure.” There’s more: “Murdoch backs [Ailes] all the way” because of Fox News’s success.

Whoever suggested Wolff could write a book distancing Murdoch from Ailes must have been unaware of just how strong the relationship between Ailes and Wolff already was. Wolff describes how he got to know Ailes in 2001:

I’d written something about him that he didn’t like, but then he invited me to lunch. At that first lunch I thought, Oh my God, this is gold. First thing, he’s incredibly knowledgeable about the media business, insightful about everybody, couldn’t stop talking. The gossip flowed in a non-stop way, and I took every opportunity in the subsequent years to sit down with him. So we became friends.

Wolff had another blockbuster success in 2018; again his degree of access was marvelled at, and again Ailes played a central part. Fire and Fury was probably the biggest-selling book on the early years of the Trump presidency. At the book’s centre is an individual who is intellectually, emotionally and morally unfit to be president. Wolff’s access to Trump’s staff and his revelation of their intensely negative view of the president are the book’s core.

Even before it was published, Fire and Fury created a furore. When Trump threatened to sue Wolff for defamation and invasion of privacy, the publisher simply brought forward the release date. High sales were guaranteed.

Graydon Carter, ex-editor of Vanity Fair, summed it up: “The mystery is why the White House let him in the door.” Once again Ailes figures prominently. According to Wolff, Steve Bannon and Ailes were guests at Wolff’s home for dinner in January 2017, and Wolff suspected that Ailes told Bannon that Wolff was someone he could trust. Up until his death Ailes was a “terrific source” for Wolff, who also had many conversations with Bannon. His closeness to the two men opened other doors.

Now Wolff has published The Fall: The End of Fox News — and the hero of this book is, yes, Roger Ailes. Ailes is an absentee hero: forced to resign from Fox News in 2016, his departure sweetened by a US$40 million payout, he died after a fall in 2017. But not only is he the most quoted figure in the book, he sets the standard by which others are judged and inevitably found wanting.

For Wolff, Ailes was the key to the success of Fox News: his “bravura leadership” created “brilliantly marketed and packaged news for the better part of twenty years.” Moreover, “the ousting of Roger Ailes in July 2016 presaged the end of Fox and conservative media’s industry dominance.” Ailes was “a sui generis talent [and] without him the playing field was suddenly level.”

This last claim proved inaccurate. For the four years of the Trump presidency — the years following Ailes’s departure — Fox had bigger audiences and more influence than at any other time. The direct line into the White House gave the network a centrality in the news mix that it had never enjoyed before.

Since Trump’s defeat, the network has hit much rougher times, and a lack of leadership, vision and strategy has become more obvious. The certainties of the Ailes era are being recalled nostalgically. But it is far from clear how Ailes would have responded. Would he have peddled election fraud to please the audience’s prejudices? Would he have responded differently to the Dominion Voting Machines lawsuit, which produced the biggest corporate defamation payout in American history?

Or are the network’s problems simply the result of his successors’ lack of ability? Ailes’s widow Beth is in no doubt. Wishing her husband a happy heavenly birthday last May, she said, “It took you twenty years to build Fox News into the powerhouse that it was and only six years for the Murdochs to wreak havoc. Rupert thought he could do your job. What a joke. He has the chequebook but could never come close to your genius.” The Murdochs “weren’t born here and don’t have the same pedigree” as Roger.

Wolff is also dismissive of the Murdochs. Rupert is too old, is often disengaged for long periods, and isn’t capable of sustained leadership. Lachlan and James — Tweedledum and Tweedledumber, according to Ailes — are even worse. Lachlan “is so absentee, fundamentally, living in Australia and running an American company,” more interested in spearfishing than running the company, incapable of making decisions. James, who left the company in early 2018, is aggressive and arrogant, and becomes furious when anyone contradicts him; his empty rhetoric about making Fox a force for good has no business sense or strategy behind it. The other key managers, both of the business and its journalists, lack vision, courage and ability.

Wolff was approached a decade and a half ago to write a book that would distance Murdoch from Ailes. In the latest book he has come full circle, a spear carrier for the Ailes legacy, and part of that involves demeaning the Murdochs. •

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Remarkably, that report was written not in February 2022, on the eve of the full-scale Russian invasion predicted by Western intelligence, but a century earlier, on 7 February 1922. The coincidence underlines both the scope and one of the themes — continuity across time — of Calder Walton’s ambitious and thought-provoking new book, Spies: The Epic Intelligence War between East and West.

Stretching from 1917 to the present day, Spies covers the intelligence contest between Russia, Great Britain and the United States that extends over more than a century. Perhaps surprisingly, Walton argues that Russia has invariably been one step ahead of the West. Especially before 1945 and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian intelligence services were an underestimated threat. Dating back to the conspiratorial traditions of the Cheka, the secret police created by Lenin, they were simply better spies and used deception more effectively.

The greatest, perhaps even “epic,” achievements of Soviet foreign intelligence occurred in the 1930s and during the second world war. Soviet agents penetrated the highest levels of government and the security services in Britain and the United States.

Walton, a distinguished British historian currently at Harvard, covers well-trodden ground but his analysis is sharp. Soviet agents like Alger Hiss, Harry Dexter White, Laurence Duggan and Ted Hall (in the United States), and the Cambridge Five, Alan Nunn May, Klaus Fuchs and George Blake (in Britain) are all familiar to scholars in the field, but Walton’s discussion is enriched by his engaging prose, his access to fresh archival records (some only declassified in 2022), and his sketching in of the military, political and cultural tapestry into which espionage was woven.

Although the intelligence provided by MI5 defector Kim Philby cost the lives of dozens of Allied agents, among other things, its immense potential value to the Soviets (and incalculable damage to the Allies) was undercut by Stalin’s paranoia or hubris. For the Soviet leader it was a case of “too good to be true.”

Stalin’s suspicion of disinformation was also evident when his spies warned of Germany’s imminent invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. He dismissed the warning from the celebrated spy Richard Sorge, whom he called a “lying shit,” and his pencilled response on the report of a German agent inside the Nazi regime (which I still recall seeing in the British National Archives) was “Fuck him.”

Stalin’s failure to believe the warnings about Hitler’s attack didn’t apply to material Moscow was receiving from spies who had penetrated the Manhattan Project in the United States. Stalin knew well before Harry Truman did that America was developing the atom bomb and, as is well known, expressed no surprise when the American president informed him of a new super weapon at the 1945 Potsdam conference. He also knew of the Venona operation, to which I’ll return, six years before Truman or the CIA.

For the United States, the cold war began in 1947. Three pivotal documents — the Truman Doctrine, the National Security Act (which created the CIA) and the text of Cominform’s “two camp” thesis — all appeared in that year. For Walton, however, it began with the Bolshevik revolution. In the 1920s, the Cheka had a division of officers coordinating foreign operations (and more than 100,000 agents inside Russia); at the time, MI5’s counterespionage unit had just five officers. In 1929 the US secretary of state shut down the government’s code-breaking agency because “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” In 1936, a decision to open an MI6 station in the British embassy in Moscow was thwarted because it was “liable to cause embarrassment.”

By the beginning of the second world war, Walton wryly notes, Soviet intelligence “had more graduates of British universities than Britain’s own intelligence services.” Despite the wartime alliance against Germany after 1941, the Soviets intensified their espionage; Western intelligence operations, especially from Bletchley Park, were meanwhile preoccupied with the Nazi threat and dutifully ignored the Soviet Union.

The one exception was the Venona project. This ultra-secret operation was launched in 1943 to decode cables sent from Moscow to its embassies and went on to expose networks of Soviet spies operating in the West. (These included Walter Clayton’s KLOD network in Australia, which Walton doesn’t mention.) Although MI5 and MI6 had fewer than 200 officers between them in 1947 while the KGB was soon employing about 200,000, the process of redressing the imbalance had begun.

But the Russians were unrelenting. Despite the Venona crackdown, they set about interfering in Western elections. In one of the more startling revelations in Spies, obtained from Russian archival records, Walton contends that Stalin colluded with the Progressive Party candidate in the 1948 US presidential elections, Henry Wallace, formerly Roosevelt’s Soviet-friendly wartime vice-president. Wallace appears to have secretly liaised with Stalin, who aligned himself closely with Wallace and vetted some of his campaign material. This, according to Walton, turned Wallace “into an asset for Stalin, if not a recruited Soviet agent.”

That may be an overstatement, but it at least confirms that the far more extensive election interference conducted by Russia in favour of Trump in 2016 (and before then in support of Gerald Ford in 1975) was not unprecedented. It was part of the arsenal of “active measures” against Britain and the United States that included bribery, forgery, misinformation, assassinations and the planting of deep-cover “illegals.”

Walton also probes the Soviet Union’s main adversary, the United States. American covert operations, termed “back-alley actions” by secretary of state Dean Rusk, became the weapon of choice in postwar Washington. They stretched from the CIA’s intervention in the 1948 Italian elections to the CIA-backed coups against democratically elected governments in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), the Dominican Republic (1961), British Guiana (1962), Iraq (1963), Bolivia (1971), Chile (1975) and many more, to the proxy war in support of the anti-Soviet mujahedeen in Afghanistan (from 1980). One fact of which I was unaware is that a secret annex of the Marshall Plan channelled reconstruction funds to the CIA for clandestine political-warfare activities in postwar Europe.

Walton’s most chilling, and disturbing, account of covert action concerns the American destabilisation of Congo and its complicity in the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the country’s popular, left-leaning president, in 1960. Walton cites Eisenhower telling his national security adviser, Gordon Gray, that he was “very eager indeed that Lumumba be got rid of.” Lumumba was got rid of and the brutal, corrupt and despotic — but US-friendly — Joseph Mobutu ruled Congo (later Zaire) for the next thirty years. (In a wonderful vignette, Walton describes MI6’s head of station in Congo, Daphne Park, who helped coordinate Lumumba’s murder but who “looked, and acted, like Miss Marple from Agatha Christie’s novels.”) By taking in Africa, the Middle East, Latin and South America, Walton emphasises the global dimension of this long intelligence war.

The roles of high-ranking Soviet defectors to the West and moles working within the Russian intelligence services were crucial in the great cold war struggle, and their stories are compellingly told. Once again, most are familiar and well documented: Walter Krivitsky, a foreign intelligence officer who was eventually assassinated by Soviet intelligence (1941); Igor Gouzenko, who first exposed Moscow’s atomic espionage (1945); Oleg Penkovsky, perhaps the most prized agent, who played a pivotal role in the Cuban missile crisis (1962); Oleg Gordievsky, whose intelligence helped avert a nuclear first strike codenamed Able Archer (1983); Vasili Mitrokhin, who defected with a tranche of Moscow’s innermost intelligence secrets (1992); and Alexander Poteyev, who escaped an assassination attempt on US soil (2020).

A surprising omission is Vladimir and Evdokia Petrov, who defected from the Soviet embassy in Canberra in 1954 and provided immensely valuable intelligence over the next five years. It was Vladimir who revealed the whereabouts of the “missing diplomats,” Burgess and Maclean, a revelation absent from Walton’s extensive discussion of the Cambridge Five. ASIO is also absent from the text (and index), though listed in the glossary, and Australia, despite its membership of the unprecedented Five Eyes intelligence-sharing network, is similarly overlooked.

What are treated in some detail are the continuities. Boris Yeltsin dismembered the KGB, but the security services reconstituted under former KGB officer Vladimir Putin have retained and expanded their power. As Walton writes, the FSB and SVR (the domestic and foreign agencies) “inherited the KGB’s infrastructure, archives, agents, skill set, ideology and operational approach.” Only the acronyms changed.

Similarly, the cold war didn’t end with the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Diverting its attention to counterterrorism after 9/11, the West failed to appreciate that the Russian security apparatus was becoming even more aggressive or that a revanchist Putin would use asymmetric espionage — hijacking the internet to disseminate disinformation, for example — to Russia’s advantage.

Once again, the West had to play catch-up. By 2019, 77 per cent of Kremlin staff had a background in the security services. Intelligence in Russia was intensely politicised, as it always has been, which helps explain why the planned swift invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, based on prewar intelligence analysis and briefings that could not contradict Putin, was a failure.

Christopher Andrew — that doyen of intelligence historians with whom Walton collaborated on his history of MI5 — calls Spies “a masterpiece,” but it does contain errors. Russian tanks never “rolled in” to Prague to enable the Czechoslovak coup d’état in 1948, and nor was it a “military takeover” (unlike 1968); it was engineered by the NKVD — the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs — and the local Communist Party. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg never “confessed to spying,” and nor was Julius “a Soviet agent in Los Alamos”; he coordinated a New York–based spy ring and engaged in industrial rather than atomic espionage. Stalin’s death in March 1953 did not “bring the Korean War to an end”; the reasons for the armistice signed three months later lay elsewhere. During Gordievsky’s exfiltration from Moscow, crisps, not soiled nappies, were thrown from the car window at the Finnish border to deter sniffer dogs; the nappies did exist, but were changed on top of the car boot directly over the hidden Gordievsky to successfully foil Soviet guards and Alsatians — an improvisation perhaps unique in espionage history.

Notwithstanding these quibbles and Walton’s questionable conclusion that “the age of the secret service is over,” Spies brims with insights and fascinating details, encompassing a full century in a global setting, and should attract an audience otherwise unacquainted (beyond film and TV) with the murky world of espionage. •

Spies: The Epic Intelligence War between East and West
By Calder Walton | Simon & Schuster | $34.99 | 625 pages

The post The spies who went into the cold appeared first on Inside Story.

Her sources are “the papery remains of blighted affection,” the records of the 1000 or so cases involving alleged breaches of promises to marry that were brought before Australian courts between 1788 and 1976. These papery remains are brought to vivid life by her broader research — in archives, museum collections, newspapers, memoirs and genealogies — into the lives of the women and men who were at the centre of these cases. As she promises, she writes “a peopled history, one in which the reader gets an insight into the inner lives of women and men in the past, a feel for the textures, sounds and smells of the world which they inhabited.”

Courting is organised around eleven case studies, in the full sense of the term: eleven breach-of-promise cases divided into four time slots, each focused on a period of change. Her choice of cases is shaped by the themes she wishes to investigate: the use of marriage to civilise the convict colony, when law and love were entangled; the geography of mid-Victorian courting, when bourgeois scripts were not always followed; the social turmoil of turn-of-the-century Australia, most strikingly in terms of racial politics; and the commodification of love in a psychologised, therapeutic society, when law and love went their separate ways.

Along the way the reader meets some fascinating people. Outstanding for me was Sarah Cox, “young, feisty, and possessed of ‘killing beauties,’” a seamstress who in 1825 successfully sued a lover for breach of promise but was then disgraced by bearing an illegitimate daughter fathered by her lawyer. That she later married the lawyer and became Mrs William Charles Wentworth did nothing to restore her to Sydney society.

Though her daughter Timmie married well, Sarah was banned from any contact with her other than by letter. When William died in 1872 she wrote to Timmie: “The light of our dwelling has left us so desolate for he was the one that made our house so very cheerful.”

Then there was James Lucas/Jamesetjee Sorabjee, a South Indian merchant from Hong Kong who won his breach-of-promise case in Sydney in 1892. Simmonds’s research makes Lucas an understandable, sympathetic figure: he was a Parsi, and therefore “raised among people who delighted in going to court.”

In 1916 there was schoolteacher and “flighty flapper” Verona Rodriguez, who claimed £5000 for breach of promise, including £180 for her trousseau, and lost the case. Simmonds take us into the warehouse of the Powerhouse Museum to finger with her “the buttery softness” of silk nightdresses from trousseaux of the period so we can imagine the salacious scene in the courthouse when Miss Rodriguez’s nighties were produced as evidence. This is intimate history indeed.

Together with this close reading of the past, Simmonds offers some broad-reaching readings of historical change. She delights in challenging established truths — those established by historians and those assumed by experts and activists in the past and the present. Lawyers and psychologists, feminists and defenders of human rights — all will find their preconceptions under challenge in this ambitious volume.

Simmonds teaches law at the University of Technology, Sydney, and law students and professionals are one of her intended audiences. The backstory to her trail of breach-of-promise cases tells of an evolving legal practice and profession that became more abstracted over time from ordinary reality. In the earliest years “ordinary people” used the common law as “a set of ancient rights and inherited privileges” and “as successful stories became binding precedents, common people, as much as judges and legislators, made law.” By the end of the nineteenth century civil law was turning away from torts to contract law, privileging material evidence (like nightdresses) and bureaucratic logic. And today, says Simmonds, we live with a “divided legal system” in which the poor “are channelled into the criminal law while the wealthy have the comfort of the civil courts.”

Simmonds’s litigants are not wealthy, and mostly not very respectable, for “working-class people… were the people who went to court.” As a corrective to bourgeois scholarship, she draws on their voices to argue that the rules of nineteenth-century working-class courtship were different from those of middle-class courtship. Women in paid employment were never limited to the private sphere like their middle-class employers, and “they also had more sex.” Sex before marriage was perfectly acceptable so long as marriage followed. Simmonds writes with cheerful bias that the “countervailing working-class romantic culture… was delightfully resistant to respectable mores.”

But Simmonds’s corrective goes further. American and British histories of love mark the 1890s as the period of greatest change, the time when women moved into the public sphere and capitalism moved courtship out of the home. But “Australia tells a different story,” says Simmonds. Capitalist prosperity came early to Australia, and by 1880 Australian city environments were “based more on pleasure than prohibition,” offering cost-free romantic opportunities to lovers of all classes:

Far from being a classic tale of embourgeoisement — of the working classes becoming respectable — what we see by the 1880s is the middle classes gradually taking up more expansive working-class romantic geographies.

Perhaps this reading would apply to all industrialising, city-building societies at the time.

Simmonds’s reading of the decline and eventual abolition of the breach-of-promise action denies — or at least sharply modifies — the understandings of the feminists and equal rights advocates who consigned it to legal oblivion in 1976. Second-wave feminism’s focus on making women economically independent made them understand breach of promise as reactionary, forcing women “back into dependency on men and marriage.” Simmonds recognises that its abolition marked an advance in women’s status, but she is more concerned with what was lost.

Her revision is based on an understanding of common law as privileging a public language of “moral norms and economic responsibility.” Within this frame the action of breach of promise “produced feminist political subjects.” This seems a large claim, and it is based here on the evidence of a single case study.

But Simmonds’s structural analysis is compelling. Breach of promise required women to take a public stage, to stand in judgement of men, to take their own feelings seriously. The action “elevated private pain to a question of public justice,” and “put a price on the unremunerated feminine labours of love.” Its abolition marked the loss of “compensation for psychic and economic injury” and “the individualism of emotional harm.” It was not “the triumph of love over sexist tradition” but “the final chapter in a story of how love… lost many of its ethical and material foundations.”

This is a radical rewriting of legal and emotional history. It will be fascinating to see how historians currently researching these fields choose to engage with it. •

Courting: An Intimate History of Love and the Law
By Alecia Simmonds | La Trobe University Press/Black Inc. | $45 | 448 pages

The post Blighted affections appeared first on Inside Story.

That someone was Chris, Bronwyn’s son, who spent several evenings in October 2011 waiting near Ray’s flat, a large spanner in hand. He also recruited his best friend Zak, who waited beside him each evening with a steel pipe. Zak in turn recruited Spider, friend of no one, who hefted a baseball bat while he spent Bronwyn’s money in his head.

How was justice meted out to these five in the Northern Territory a bit over a decade ago? Bronwyn got an eight-year prison sentence with a four-year minimum. Chris, Zak and Spider each got life, with minimums of eighteen years for Chris and twenty each for the others.

As for Ray, he got a quick but brutal death, courtesy of Chris’s wrench, and was dumped in a roadside clearing, one of the few spots in the outback a body is likely to be found. That was one reason the rest of them were swiftly caught. The other was that Spider forgot to delete the group’s texts from his phone before the police brought him in for a chat.

Did you pick Zak and Spider as equal worst of the survivors? The judge who sentenced them, Dean Mildren, sure didn’t. If he could, he’d have given Spider credit for pleading guilty and testifying against the others, and Zak still more for pulling out of the plan early. But, as journalist Dan Box incredulously reports, the pair’s judge lacked the power to do justice.

Box produced an impassioned documentary about the judgement, The Queen & Zak Grieve, in 2017, successfully pressing for the Territory government to show Zak some mercy. Now he’s written a far less certain book about the case. What’s changed in six years? Mainly, Dan Box.

Box opens his third book with a confession: he made his documentary because he “wanted to win another Walkley.” He’d won a couple the previous year for his reporting on three murders in Bowraville, including the first such award for a podcast. But he never won a third and soon left the Australian and its podcasting scene to Hedley Thomas.

The Englishman doesn’t reveal exactly where he went, but he mentions enduring occasional snow and regular depression. He also decided to speak with Zak for the first time. He wrote letters to Grieve “to reassure myself that I’d been right, and he really wasn’t a killer.” The pair’s correspondence is the heart of this book, the recently released The Man Who Wasn’t There.

I don’t think Zak is the title character. He was barely a man in 2011. The nineteen-year-old spent his time in Katherine on his Xbox and watching anime, and he’s been in stasis ever since. And he was very much there for most of the plot against Ray.

His co-conspirators split on whether Zak was still there during Ray’s final minutes or had pulled out hours before. Zak’s judge had to give him the benefit of the doubt on that point, but Box didn’t have to. Since the documentary, he’s read phone texts casting doubt on Zak’s claim that he cut ties when he realised that what he’d agreed to wasn’t a beating but a killing.

“You have to ask, Why lie?” writes Box of Spider, who testified that Zak was the first person Ray saw in the last horrible moments of his life. By contrast, Chris — “a kind and decent person, for a killer” — had every reason to “protect his friend.”

At some point in their correspondence, Zak became Box’s friend too. Box writes that this may be why his “doubts about Zak’s involvement in the murder itself have receded.” When it’s someone “you care about… it’s not enough to say this is not your fight [and] you don’t have to pick a side.”

In 1991, Helen Garner famously picked a side early on and, like Box, spent a book (The First Stone in her case) mulling over her instincts. Then, in 2004’s Joe Cinque’s Consolation, she befriended a bereft parent and, like Box and Zak’s mother Glenice, came to share her rage at the machinations of justice.

Some couldn’t stand how Garner inserted herself into the narrative, but I prefer my true crime writers to be there. You can see the difference in Box’s two works on Grieve. His documentary, made before he said more than a handful of words to his subject, ended with a dogged pursuit of a possible fourth co-conspirator who was never charged at all.

Box’s book reveals that Chris himself had named a fourth participant. But this time the journalist opts not to go there. Naming names, writes Box, “risks causing hurt, not just to his family, but to Zak’s also.” And to Zak. “Knowing whether Zak was right or wrong no longer matters to me.”

It never mattered to the courts. In 2014’s This House of Grief, Garner looks a man in the eye who drove his three kids into a dam and sees a failed suicide rather than a vengeful homicide. Either way, Robert Farquharson was still a murderer and so is Zak Grieve, whether he was there at the end or not.

Zak was guilty of conspiracy as soon as he joined Chris’s plan, and was guilty of murder the moment it succeeded. Conspirators can pull out of planned crimes under Australian law, but withdrawal is a tricky, unpleasant and fallible method of avoiding unwanted convictions. Zak had to not only exit before Ray was struck but also do whatever he could to save Ray’s life. His jury ruled that he failed one or both of these tests.

It’s a fair rule, but Territory law made it very tough in Zak’s case. A decades-old statute requires that murderers serve at least twenty years in prison. There’s one exception for good people who kill bad ones, hence Chris’s eighteen-year minimum. But Zak (and Spider) weren’t eligible, in part because Zak sometimes sold cannabis but mainly because neither of them knew much about Ray.

Thanks to Box’s documentary and a petition by his lawyers, Zak ultimately got a lower sentence, courtesy of the Northern Territory government’s power to grant mercy. This combination of legislative toughness and executive whim produced the same outcome that justice would have: a twelve-year minimum sentence, which expired last week.

Rank these punishments. Life in prison. Losing your life. Losing your child to prison. Losing your child.

Garner’s This House of Grief is named after a line in a 1930s Hungarian novel that laments how a troubled crime journalist’s “finest years had slipped by in this treasury of pain, this house of power and grief.” The author, Desző Kosztolányi, was describing a bustling Budapest police station, while Garner was thinking of Victoria’s Supreme Court.

Zak’s house for much of his twenties was the Darwin Correctional Centre. Known as Holtze, it’s a freshly built failure housing a thousand residents with no respite from heat or boredom. The in-cell screens, replacing the correspondence courses Zak once devoured, have never worked. The library he worked in was shut. His sole escape is handwriting a sprawling sci-fi novel he sends outside in five-page instalments that are checked for security threats.

Zak shared a wing with other lifers, including Chris, Spider and backpacker murderer Bradley Murdoch. One eighty-year-old got parole after his minimum twenty years but asked to stay in Holtze to avoid burdening his family. He hung himself on a ceiling fan when he learnt that the Territory government had banned lifers from work release. Authorities replaced the fans with desk ones.

Here’s how some other punishments have been meted out in recent years:

Spider never got his own documentary or the credit Mildren recommended for ratting on Zak and Chris. Friendless as ever, he’s the only one of the conspiracy still left in prison.

Halfway through his eighteen years, Chris died in his cell, bleeding from his anus. It wasn’t what you might guess. Many Holtze residents passed their days using Kronic, a potent synthetic cannabis they often concealed in their bodies.

Murdoch, who has never revealed where he hid Peter Falconio’s body, even when he was offered a transfer to Western Australia, hated the drug. He told Chris’s coroner that Holtze was to blame: “That’s why other people smoke Kronic. It takes them to another place.” Authorities gave the lifers board games.

Zak saw another culprit. When he and Chris took Kronic, they took turns to ensure that the other didn’t suffocate when they became “stuck.” But Zak was sent to another wing three days earlier for making a sexist joke. He wasn’t there for his best friend. Again.

Box might name another. Zak’s mother Glenice, attending the inquest to see her son testify, “found Chris’s mother Bronwyn sitting watching from the public gallery.” Bronwyn, who was convicted of manslaughter, has always said she had no idea Chris would murder Ray himself. She told Glenice “she would soon be leaving Darwin, to go somewhere small and isolated.”

Did you pick these punishments as the worst ones? Box wouldn’t. His daughter Poppy “counts off the days she’s spent in hospital along one wall,” he writes, “using coloured pens to draw four vertical lines with a fifth running diagonally through them, like some kindergarten prisoner.” Halfway through his correspondence with Zak, Box felt a lump in his nine-year-old’s tummy. The doctors gave her a fifty-fifty chance.

Zak was released last week. He’d already told Box it wasn’t an end: “I’m on a life sentence. On parole.” So are Box and his daughter. She had two years of chemo but the tumour is still there. “We leave hospital knowing we will be back there, every three months, over and over, always in fear, always not knowing.”

Why would Box include this in his book? Well, how couldn’t he? He’d learnt what mattered, and it wasn’t justice. “While I wouldn’t recommend having your child diagnosed with cancer as a cure for depression,” he writes, “it seems to have worked for me, at least.” Being there is a complete nightmare, of course. But not being there is worse. •

The Man Who Wasn’t There
By Dan Box | Ultimo Press | $36.99 | 320 pages

The post This house of Grieve appeared first on Inside Story.

Giuseppe Verdi was nearly eighty when he presented his final and, for many, greatest opera, Falstaff, in 1893. But Falstaff, his only comic opera, had a quality of lateness about it and lacked the dramatic urgency of Nabucco and Rigoletto. In contrast, Hackney Diamonds, from the venerable trio that is the remains of the Rolling Stones, is as full of youthful swagger as almost anything the band has done. For the record, Mick Jagger is eighty, Keith Richards will be eighty next month, and Ron Wood is seventy-six.

This album is many things: a reaffirmation, a summing up and a celebration — Mick, Keith and Ron sound as though they’re having a whale of a time. If it sounds formulaic, well the Stones always were. If the production tries a little too hard, wouldn’t you?

The lyrics are mostly workaday, but no one ever bought a Stones record for the words. Half the time it was impossible to make them out. When, two years ago, the band announced they were no longer going to perform “Brown Sugar,” one of their biggest hits and the song always guaranteed to bring a flagging party to its feet, I had to look up the words to discover why. Among my childhood mondegreens, now clarified fifty years on, had been the line, “Hear him with the women just around midnight.” As probably everyone except me knew, it was “whip the women” and the “him” referred to a slave trader.

“Brown Sugar” was the opening track on Sticky Fingers, and Stones albums have generally begun with similarly danceable numbers, often heralded by a few syncopated chords from Richards’s guitar. Hackney Diamonds is no exception, though what’s most striking about “Angry” is Jagger’s self-mocking vocals — on this song he seems to have become a Jagger impersonator, all leers and pouts.

Among the standouts from the twelve new tracks are two slow songs. “Depending on You” has a strong melody — good tunes are a feature of the album — and a stronger lyric. It’s a heartbreak song, with a chorus that includes the line “I’m too young for dying and too old to lose.” There are lots of “depend/depending on you” songs out there, but they’re all present tense; this one is past: “I was depending on you.” An old man’s lyric, you might say, which, from these Peter Pans, is refreshing.

The other slow song is, believe it or not, a slow-burning prayer. “Sweet Sounds of Heaven” features two of the album’s guest artists, Stevie Wonder on piano and Lady Gaga getting her Merry Clayton on. Clayton, you may recall, provided the searing soul embellishments to “Gimme Shelter,” but truly Lady Gaga outdoes her.

Other guest artists include the ubiquitous Paul McCartney, who provides a strong, fuzzy bass solo on “Bite My Head Off”; Elton John, whose piano playing features on two of the tracks; and, remarkably, Charlie Watts, who had recorded the drum parts to two songs before his death and is joined on one of them by the eighty-seven-year-old Bill Wyman, emerging from retirement to play bass on his first Stones album since Steel Wheels thirty-four years ago. For three minutes and 52 seconds, the gang’s all here.

It is something of a Stones tradition for Keith Richards to take lead vocals on one song, and here it’s “Tell Me Straight,” another slow, heartbreak song that’s perhaps Richards’s best since the magnificent “Thru and Thru” (on Voodoo Lounge). It also showcases the album’s best guitar playing.

So what is this? A Rolling Stones renaissance? You wouldn’t bet on it or even necessarily wish it, though Jagger has denied that Hackney Diamonds will be their final album. But if this is it, it seems like a suitable valediction, not only because the album is generally so strong, but also because of how it ends.

Hackney Diamonds’s final track is the song that gave the band its name, Muddy Waters’s “Rolling Stone,” touchingly performed by just Mick and Keith, the last two originals. There’s a distinctly lo-fi, homemade quality to the sound — they might be in one of their bedrooms — and it would seem a good place to stop. It is, after all, where they started. •

The post Too young for dying appeared first on Inside Story.

I’ve always found this class fascinating for the intergenerational transfer of ideas it affords, and as a means of tracking changes in students’ approaches to sex and gender. When I began teaching it more than ten years ago, everybody thought that MacKinnon “denied women agency” and nobody identified as a radical feminist, or a feminist at all for that matter, except for the clever girl in Birkenstocks, cargo pants and a women’s collective T-shirt down the front.

By around 2017, after Beyoncé declared herself a feminist and #MeToo swept across the globe, all my students became feminists. Men wrote essays on sexual assault that began with an asterisk next to their name linking to an admission that, yes, they were cis, white, straight, bourgeois men but they had attempted to amplify the voices of the marginalised to compensate for their privileges. MacKinnon was still on the out because this cohort thought women could be empowered by sex work, pornography or kink, and because nobody liked being a victim.

But this year, like last year, I have noticed a distinct change. My students appear to have returned to 1970s radical feminism. It’s not the postmodernist celebration of agency that speaks to this generation but the anger and the structural critiques of patriarchy found in Catharine MacKinnon, Susan Brownmiller and Andrea Dworkin.

Chanel Contos is part of this apparent radical feminist revival, and she has written a book that is erudite, powerful and urgent. I confess I was surprised to enjoy Consent Laid Bare as much as I did: the type is overly large (a friend called it idiot font), it’s aimed at teenagers, and twenty-five-year-old Chanel looks more like a student than a feminist critic.

I was expecting the kind of book we’ve become accustomed to from mainstream feminism: homespun wisdom gleaned from a few popular Netflix series, a few zingers and a rousing call to arms. Instead, Contos’s book is well researched and superbly argued, drawing on radical and postcolonial feminism to widen our understanding of what constitutes sexual violence and to contribute new solutions to a global problem with epidemic proportions.

Contos also extends radical feminism in clever ways. Where MacKinnon and Dworkin in the 1980s called on the state to prohibit pornography (and soon found queer erotica banned) and where #MeToo activists often have a carceral logic to their campaigns (the ideal end point is a lawsuit, then prison), Contos’s solutions are pedagogical and therapeutic. Thinking only in terms of law, she argues, ignores the fact that many survivors don’t want their attackers to go to prison; many simply want validation and an apology.

Where radical feminists critiqued the contractual origins of consent, Contos expands its meaning into the realm of emotion. The etymology of consent, she reminds us, is con, a bringing together, and sentio, to perceive with the senses. Sexual violence occurs when a man’s sense of entitlement overrides his empathy. To this extent, legal consent is a bare minimum. What we need is sex as a form of empathic communication: don’t treat someone how you want to be treated, treat someone how they want to be treated.

Contos’s journey as a consent activist began with her shock as a high school student when a sex-ed speaker came to her school and described a series of commonplace sexual scenarios but labelled them as sexual assault. It wasn’t just that Contos and most of her female friends could identify with these scenarios; their male friends were often the ones responsible.

In 2021, troubled by the pervasiveness of the problem, Contos decided to obtain solid empirical data by asking people online to share their stories of sexual assault during their school years. Seven thousand people sent in testimonies describing behaviour that would fit legal definitions of rape, also mentioning the good jobs their attackers held in order to show both a lack of accountability and the fact that “normal and functioning” people were typical rapists, not strangers in the park.

Contos then built a website called Teach Us Consent that included a web petition signed by nearly 50,000 Australians demanding mandatory consent education in schools. A year later, state education ministers met and agreed to her demands.

These nationwide changes to our education system have happened around the same time as shifts in consent’s legal definition towards active and ongoing consent. The question is no longer whether the person said no, but whether they said yes. Intoxication now completely vitiates consent.

Consent Laid Bare is divided into ten chapters, each of which is aimed at expanding our narratives of sexual assault, whether they concern what a rapist looks like; what causes rape (specifically how rape culture normalises sexual violence); how women respond to rape; how digital technologies and pornography have created new forms of violence; and how we need to go beyond legal solutions when trying to hold men accountable, and to end sexual violence.

Contos’s arguments about the causes of sexual violence will be familiar to anyone versed in radical feminist literature. Because rape is construed as an expression of masculine power and domination — an act that keeps all women in a state of fear and hypervigilance — education about consent is necessary but not sufficient. The problem is wider and deeper.

Girls are raised to accommodate the desires of others, to evacuate the self, to feel shame around their own sexuality and to feel like they don’t have a right to demand pleasure. Boys, on the other hand, are taught to not take no for an answer, particularly if they’re the entitled private school boys that Contos grew up with. They’ve absorbed the view that their sexuality is biologically irrepressible, hydraulic and ungovernable, and that they can offend without consequence. Where girls receive social rewards for their passivity and self-abnegation, boys are rewarded for acts of physical intimidation or ability, wealth and sexual conquests.

This socialisation is part of what Contos, and the radical feminists before her, term “rape culture.” This is a world where sexual assault is normalised by gendered expectations of men and women, where girls are told that wearing a short skirt is distracting for the boys in the class (who simply won’t be able to contain their sexual urges) or where a victim of sexual assault is immediately disbelieved and socially shamed, while the boy walks off scot-free. This wider context helps us to understand not simply why some men feel entitled to rape, but also why women often put up with sex that is uncomfortable, unwelcome or coercive.

Any person over the age of twenty will likely read sections of Contos’s book in a state of fascinated horror: the chapters on sex and the online world and pornography make for particularly grim reading. I was quite unaware that strangulation had become a normal part of sex, which boys assumed girls enjoyed so much that consent was unnecessary. Given that 84 per cent of men aged between fifteen and twenty-nine watch porn at least once a week, there’s no prizes for guessing where these new sexual scripts might be coming from. I was also shocked to find that a girl might now be sitting on a bus or train and a man could send an unsolicited dick pic by airdrop on to her phone.

In Contos’s experience, girls begin being asked to send nudes to boys around the age of twelve (yes, twelve!) while a 2022 Australian study found that 86 per cent of students aged fourteen to eighteen had received sexual messages or images, and 71 per cent had sent them. By the time Contos, as a consent educator, speaks to high school students aged fourteen and older, she says that many say that they’re “over” the sexting stage. In a digital extension of the centuries-old tradition of slut-shaming, a girl whose nudes get “leaked” faces embarrassment and shame, while the boy doing the leaking usually rises up the social hierarchy, congratulated by his male friends on a new conquest.

In this context, it is entirely understandable that generation Z might be rejecting what Contos calls “modern feminism” and returning to the clear, unambiguous critiques of sexual violence offered by radical feminists. Why are all the things  popular feminists celebrate women “choosing” to do — from watching porn, to shaving legs, to wearing high heels, to engaging in sex work — exactly what patriarchy and capitalism want them to do?

“Modern feminism has framed sex work as sexually liberating and put pornography and sex work in the category of strictly Do Not Debate,” Contos argues. Far from being a “righteous reversal of the gender hierarchy,” sex work is not only the most dangerous job in the world, but it also goes hand in hand with capitalism. Unlike radical feminists before her, however, Contos doesn’t argue for state regulation, simply for a more open debate and for an end to the popular, uncritical equation of sex with empowerment.

I suspect that the predominance of psychological discourse among gen-Zers — their tendency to describe their identities through languages of trauma, fragility or pathology — also makes them less concerned about the elements of radical feminism that see women as victims. This is a generation who accept their vulnerability and woundedness, and for whom the most important question is not how they have agency but how to end sexual violence and gender oppression.

In short, this is a book that you should thrust into the hands of the teenage boys and girls in your life. But you should also read it yourself first, both as a fascinating document that signals what might be a historic shift in discourse away from poststructuralism towards radical feminism, and also because Chanel Contos, with her well-researched, well-reasoned and well-written arguments, is smart and inspirational. •

Consent Laid Bare: Sex, Entitlement & the Distortion of Desire
By Chanel Contos | Macmillan Australia | $36.99 | 368 pages

The post Active and ongoing appeared first on Inside Story.

In our times Indigenous people live in nation-states in which sovereignty, territory and laws are defined and maintained by the descendants of the settlers who invaded and conquered the original inhabitants. Although the terminology used to describe them has shifted from “Natives” to “Aborigines” to “Aboriginals” to “Indigenous” and “First Nations People,” the colonisers have consistently disregarded their primal relationship to land. In many countries, indigeneity is increasingly defined in terms that constrain membership of specific social groups and limit the territory Indigenous people can claim.

Taiwan has experienced successive waves of colonisation over several centuries. The original inhabitants were Austronesians, who were themselves the original colonisers of the Pacific region. They now constitute about 3 per cent of Taiwan’s total population. Like their counterparts in Canada and Australia, they feel the dispossession of their land deeply.

As in other nations where settlers imposed state control over land, indigeneity is highly politicised. Indigenous Taiwanese are entitled to six representatives in parliament but remain disadvantaged socially and economically. They have higher unemployment, they are poorer and their life expectancy is lower. They are culturally marginalised by the dominant Han Taiwanese population and experience discrimination in education and employment.

Using standard human development statistics, Simon notes that the Taiwanese Indigenous population is much better off than Canadian First Nations people. (Had he used Australian statistics, the gap would be much greater.) Simon documents the current resurgence of indigeneity as a political and cultural issue in the context of the Taiwanese government developing policies of recognition.

Simon’s ethnography focuses on two of Taiwan’s Indigenous groups, the Sediq and the Truku, mountain people who were once subsistence farmers and hunters. They grew millet and reared pigs, the latter to be used mainly in marriage, propitiation, the celebration of significant events and other rituals. Simons outlines the history in some detail and discusses the effects of successive colonists (Chinese and Japanese) on Indigenous lives.

The Sediq and Truku cosmologies and ways of life drew no basic distinction between “culture” and “nature.” Gaya, the concept that dominates their lives, encompasses ideas of the sacred, ancestral law, moral relations between people and their environment, and cultural values. It can also simply mean a “mode of life.”

Simon explores Gaya in five “ethnographic reflections,” each one devoted to a specific cultural concept or practice. He begins with Samat, the forest animals hunted by Sediq and Truku men, exploring the relationships between humans and their prey as well as the accumulated effects of colonial exploitation of forest resources. Hunting is a masculine activity and accomplishment, making it a contentious issue for contemporary Sediq and Truku men who resent and resist government restrictions on this activity. But for centuries hunting prowess also involved headhunting and, as Simon explains, this too was inspired by Gaya.

Although headhunting was outlawed by the Japanese in the late nineteenth century, the practice continued for decades, rendered easier by the introduction of guns. Simon depends on early Japanese sources for his descriptions, noting similarities to other Austronesian cultures. As in Borneo and some parts of the Solomon Islands, the taking of heads was a means of attaining masculine adulthood and increasing the strength or power of one’s group. Heads were trophies taken in vengeance, but once displayed they were incorporated as ancestors, welcomed into the village and offered food and drink. Women danced before them and sang songs to them.

In the chapter on “Heart,” Simon explores the moral and political domains of Indigenous life. As in many cultures, the heart is the metaphorical locus of interpersonal relationships and emotional states. Personal trust is a major factor in political allegiance. Prior to colonial governments’ insistence on appointing leaders for bureaucratic purposes, Truku and Sediq were egalitarian, with leadership status earned rather than inherited. Men became leaders because of their generosity, courage and capacity to influence people.

These “Big Man”–based forms of political organisation have been described for other Pacific Austronesian societies. Given the prevalence of local feuding and the taking of heads, it is unlikely that these societies are, or were ever, more democratic or peaceful than other political systems where conflicts often escalated into violence.

As evidence of the persistence of Gaya, Simon stresses the ethical and moral principles that people appeal to in contemporary life. In many respects, though, these virtues — generosity, goodness and loyalty­ — are consonant with those in most cultures. Given that Truku and Sediq people are now almost all practising Presbyterians or Roman Catholics, and have been for decades, they themselves appear to have recognised similarities between Gaya and Christianity. But they have abandoned almost all the rituals associated with their old religion: while they still kill pigs on special occasions, now the religious dimensions of the practice “vary greatly according to community, household, and even individual preferences,” says Simon, adding: “Some families invite the Presbyterian pastor to pray before the pigs are slaughtered.”

Simon doesn’t explore such a radical transformation of practices once linked to ancestor worship, instead glossing it as part of the “flow and ebb of religious practices.” Sometimes he dismisses an Indigenous explanation, presumably because it is in some way at odds with his own understanding. Analysing the meaning of headhunting, for instance, he reports that “people told [him] that their ancestors believed that the heads held energy,” but premises that observation by saying “Perhaps because they have read it in ethnographies.”

This is a complicated book. In many respects it is a conventional ethnography, documenting and describing the lifeworld of Indigenous Taiwanese mountain people. Simon has lived and studied the people of whom he writes for almost two decades and has a clear command of the languages they speak.

It is also an exercise in anthropological reflexivity, with Simon describing his relationships with Sediq and Truku individuals, his data collection methods, his experiences as part of their communities and the knowledge he has gained during more than a decade of fieldwork. As a Canadian, he compares and contrasts Indigenous knowledge and politics in Taiwan with those of his home country.

Simon is also concerned to “decolonise the way in which we do ethnography, putting local, Indigenous ontologies at the heart of the reflection and writing.” This entails embracing Sediq and Truku ways of experiencing and understanding the world by eschewing distinctions between nature and culture. It means accepting other, alien forms of knowledge as true — or at least as true as Western, scientific understanding of the material world. Ideas and concepts that appear “irrational,” or simply fanciful to a Western observer must be accepted as ontological truths: thus, ghosts, spirits and omens are manifestly real because Indigenous people experience them as such.

This analytical move — “the ontological turn” — has been a subject of debate within anthropology for decades. In many respects it is simply an extreme form of relativism; but it is also an attempt at intellectual restitution, refusing to relegate indigenous knowledge to “belief systems.” It also demands a rather different interpretation of the meaning of the word “ontology” from that used in philosophy, where it refers to the philosophical discourse about “being” and “existence.”

Within anthropology it has taken on the meanings Simon gives it when he refers to “a mode of living” or “the concepts that people use to understand their existence.” Although he distances himself from the term “culture,” he uses the term “ontology” in ways that make it synonymous with “culture” or “cosmology,” at least as these terms are commonly understood. His insistence on Gaya’s continuing grip on Indigenous ontology invokes a sort of ethnic essentialism at odds with the evidence of historical, social and cultural changes that challenge or repudiate the concepts or practices that inform it. As in the majority of societies where they have been subjected to colonial appropriation and mass settlement, the lives of Indigenous people have been transformed and so has the world they inhabit.

Truku and Sediq people, like other Indigenous people, are engaged in a politicised cultural resurgence that aims to reclaim their identity and culture. As Simon’s ethnography reveals, this resurgence is constrained and articulated in terms of an indigeneity defined by the state.

Swathes of land have become the Taroko National Park, where hunting is banned. People work in the local Asia Cement factory and as day labourers. They perform aspects of their cultural identity for a thriving tourist trade. Much of their social life revolves around their churches. They attend schools and learn Chinese. Some go to universities and even become anthropologists. The majority vote for the conservative Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, rejecting the Democratic Progressive Party — which would appear to have policies more protective of Indigenous rights — on the grounds that the KMT manages the economy more effectively.

Given the abundant evidence of dramatic social change over centuries of successive colonisation, Simon’s insistence on continuity and the persistence of radical ontological difference is ultimately distracting and unconvincing. Certainly Sediq and Truku people emerge from this study as “truly human,” but not quite in the way its author proclaims. •

Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa
By Scott E. Simon | University of Toronto Press | C$38.95 | 388 pages

The post Being human 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.

Early in that decade the first-born of the children who made up the postwar baby boom began to challenge their parents with slogans like “Never trust anyone over thirty.” Those parents — retrospectively labelled “the greatest generation” for having endured the 1930s depression and the second world war — had come to regard their kids as lazy and spoilt.

As the children born in the 1940s became thirtysomethings and the youth revolts of the 1960s faded away, the generation gap was mostly forgotten. Its revival in the 1990s came in a quite different context. By then, the lazy equation of “boomer” and “young person” was clearly obsolete.

The members of the post-boom cohort, who became known as generation X, were seeking to make their way in the world but found their way blocked by the much larger generation above them, who occupied all the desirable cultural niches and weren’t planning to move on any time soon. Mark Davis’s Ganglands: Cultural Elites and the New Generationalism was one of the earliest expressions of this frustration.

Davis’s work was well received in Australia. But the terms of the debate were set in the United States by William Strauss and Neil Howe in their bestselling book, Generations. As well as making the now-standard claims about the characteristics of the boomers, Strauss and Howe theorised that major events caused generations to cycle through four different types: idealist, reactive, civic and adaptive.

Strauss and Howe’s model was initially accepted uncritically. This mode of classification was a boon to marketers and lazy journalists, functioning largely as a more respectable form of astrology. Rather than engaging in tedious discussions of economic and foreign policy, for example, presidential campaigns could be discussed in terms of the generations to which the contenders belonged.

Pushback came soon enough, not least from me. (Disclosure: the fact that my cohort, generation Jones, 1954–63, isn’t recognised in standard generational classification predisposes me to dislike the entire generational punditry genre.) In a piece written in 2000, I made a number of not entirely original observations:

• Claims about generations are often restatements of longstanding clichés about the laziness and irresponsibility of the young or the rigidity and hypocrisy of the old. Demographers distinguish these “age effects” (as well as “time effects,” the influences that affect all age groups) from the “cohort effects” specific to those growing up during a depression, for example, or a long postwar boom.

• Differences associated with race, class and gender are mostly more significant than those associated with birth cohort. Donald Trump might share a birthday with a Black woman paid the minimum wage to clean one of his hotels, but that doesn’t mean they have any significant experiences in common.

• The boomer generation is particularly problematic because the demographic event after which it is named doesn’t match the cultural events with which it is associated. At one end, many of the leading figures in boomer culture were actually born during the war years — in other words, before the boom. At the other end, those born after 1954 were too young to experience either the full employment of the postwar economic boom or defining cultural events like the Woodstock rock festival or the fights over conscription and the Vietnam war. Barack Obama (born 1961) is classed as a boomer, but his political awareness was shaped by the presidency of Ronald Reagan (whom he saw as a role model) rather than that of Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon.

• More generally, the typical gap of fifteen to twenty years between their oldest and youngest members means that generations are too big for any real commonality of experience.

As criticisms of this kind multiplied, generational analysts lost credibility, though very slowly. It was only in May this year that the Pew Research Center, widely seen as an authoritative source of survey findings, conceded most of the points made above and announced that its audiences “should not expect to see a lot of new research coming out of Pew Research Center that uses the generational lens.”

Nevertheless, the generational bandwagon rolls on. A new arrival is Jean Twenge’s book Generations, whose title recycles Strauss and Howe’s though she rejects a good deal of their analysis. Twenge adopts a narrative format to apply the generational frame to Americans born in the last one hundred years, beginning with the silent generation (born 1925–45) and ending with polars, her own term for children born since 2013.

Twenge avoids some of the pitfalls discussed above. Most importantly, she pays attention to the distinction between age effects, time effects and cohort effects. She compares the experience of different generations at the same age, and tries to take account of long-run trends like the rise of computers. She uses long-running data sets such as the Panel Study on Income Dynamics to assure consistent comparisons of different cohorts at the same age.

This approach yields some interesting insights. For example, the silent generation married and had children earlier than any previous or subsequent generation, and had more children per family. One interesting implication of early childbearing is that most of the later boomers were the children of parents from the immediately preceding generation, the silents, unlike the more common gap of two generations between parents and children.

Another, not particularly startling, observation is that boomers have been bigger consumers of alcohol and recreational drugs than any other cohort. That phenomenon has continued from the upsurge in youthful drug use in the 1960s to the present day. Younger generations like the millennials and gen Z are more abstemious, perhaps as a result of a lifetime of exposure to messaging about the dangers of substance (ab)use.

More fundamentally, Twenge makes the point that technological change has different impacts on different age cohorts. One claimed effect is increased individualism, though this ignores how the once widely held admiration for “rugged individualism” is now rarely heard in the United States.

Twenge is on stronger ground when she discusses the slower life trajectory created by two things: the need for young people to spend more time in education in a technologically complex society, and the longer life spans enabled by improvements in health. These changes inevitably alter the timing of the processes that define generations: leaving the parental home and forming new households, entering and leaving employment, old age and death. While they don’t really follow generational boundaries, they provide a useful narrative device.

Twenge concedes a related point. “It’s also true that generations are sometimes too broad: those born ten years apart but within the same generation have experienced a different culture,” she writes. “Still, too many micro-generations would be confusing and would make it harder to discern broad generational trends.”

Familiar analytical problems remain. Like nearly all generational analysts, Twenge consistently downplays the importance of class. This passage is truly striking:

The charming novel Nine Ladies, by Heather Moll, imagines the aristocratic Mr Darcy from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice time-travelling from 1812, when race, gender, and class were destiny, to 2012. He’s of course amazed by smartphones, airplanes, and restaurants, but the advice the born-in-1987 version of Elizabeth Bennet gives him the most often is, “Remember, treat everyone equally.” Equality is one of the unifying themes of cultural change over the last one hundred years, making it one of the unifying themes of generational change.

This claim would have been unremarkable if it had been made in the 1950s, when America was a proudly middle-class society. But the rise in inequality and the decline in social mobility have been central to the disasters that have befallen the US polity in the last few decades, culminating in the emergence of Trumpism.

Turning more specifically to generational analysis, there is the problem that the demographic baby boom from 1946 to the early 1960s does not match cultural and economic history, which shows a sharp break at the end of the postwar economic boom in the early 1970s. Economically and culturally, as I pointed out back in 2000, the Vietnam generation has a lot more in common with the “baby busters” (the last of the silents, born during and just before the second world war) than with baby boomers:

[M]ost of the cultural icons of the Vietnam generation were actually born before 1945. Obvious examples are the Beatles and Rolling Stones, not to mention James Dean, Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley. Throughout the 1960s, rock music was made by the children of the baby bust, who were in the fortunate position of having the largest audience in history. Other members of the baby bust cohort took the chance to establish themselves as the social and political voice of youth, a position which they then sought to maintain well into middle age.

Twenge implicitly concedes most of this, noting that the last of the silents were anything but silent.

A more coherent generational analysis could be achieved by having the boomer generation born between the late 1930s and the mid 1950s, too young to have real memories of depression and war but young enough to come of age during the seemingly endless prosperity of the postwar boom.

Then, following the suggestion of cultural commentator Jonathan Pontell, the rest of the (demographic) baby boom could be assigned to my cohort, generation Jones. The most appealing etymology for generation Jones is the slang term “jonesing,” referring to withdrawal after a drug-induced high. As summarised by Wikipedia: “Jonesers inherited an optimistic outlook as children in the 1960s, but were then confronted with a different reality as they entered the workforce during… a long period of mass unemployment.”

On this division, the remaining boomers would be a shrinking minority in their seventies and eighties, soon to pass from the scene altogether. And without the boomers, the journalistic generation game would cease to be of much interest.

Even in the toned-down version offered by Twenge and the Pew Research Center, generational analysis misleads more than it enlightens. For serious scholarly work, five-year birth cohorts, categorised by race, gender and class background, are much more useful. For entertainment purposes, astrology is just as good and less divisive. •

Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents — and What They Mean for America’s Future
By Jean M. Twenge | Atria Books | $32.50 |  560 pages

The post Can generational analysis be saved? appeared first on Inside Story.

Can a purgatory of this kind be avoided? Can you slow down the perception that time is raging like a careening mobility scooter as you approach extinction?

The most famous strategy — as set out in Graham Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt — is to travel. Greene’s book features a character called Honest Jo Pulling, a wealthy bookmaker who, as the eponymous Aunt explains, “felt that by travelling he would make time move with less rapidity.”

After a long and relatively stationary life, he purchases a ticket on the Orient Express. Unfortunately he’s carried off the train in Venice after suffering a stroke. Undeterred, the adventurous would-be rover buys a ruined palazzo with fifty-two rooms. He moves in and re-embarks on his journey — but this time with a scaled-down itinerary.

Every seven days, he packs his belongings into a weather-beaten suitcase and sets out not for Turkey or Persia or beyond, but for the next room along the corridor. “I’ve seldom seen a happier man,” explains the Aunt. “He was certain that death would not catch him before he reached the fifty-second room.”

Sadly, the old bookmaker dies in transit — between rooms fifty-one and fifty-two. His last words: “Seemed like a whole lifetime.”

The fictional Jo Pulling and the non-fiction writer John McPhee have never met, of course. But they do share a singular idea: it’s possible, they believe, to decelerate senescence.

McPhee has spent much of his professional life turning observation and research into prose for money. Now, at the age of ninety-two, he clearly qualifies as a grandee in the great game of journalism.

He’s been a (very) long-time staff writer at the New Yorker; he’s won a Pulitzer; he’s been the Ferris Professor of Journalism at Princeton; he’s written more than thirty books. He is a master — indeed, part inventor — of what the kids call creative non-fiction.

The optimism inherent in his latest book, Tabula Rasa: Volume 1, is fully intended because McPhee claims to have found the secret to eternal life (or at least the perception of it): like Jo Pulling, who never stopped moving, McPhee intends to never stop writing.

“Old people projects,” McPhee explains, “keep people old. You’re no longer old when you’re dead.”

McPhee’s old person project is to resurrect and publish the many stories he failed to deliver for various reasons throughout his long career. Even if he can’t get out on the road — or river, or ocean — anymore, he can still pry open the filing cabinets in his basement and rediscover the faded notes of long-ago false starts.

In this endeavour he claims to have been inspired by his fellow American, Mark Twain. McPhee counts Twain’s autobiography as the greatest old person project in history. Twain wrote it in parts, with the intention of adding chapters of memoir to his existing works, thereby extending their copyright and making money in the future for his daughters.

For this task, Twain counselled a random, digressive, structureless structure, McPhee winkingly explains, with yarns tumbling together like a haberdashery in an earthquake.

The great man’s memoir runs to 735,000 words. “If Twain had stayed with it, he would be alive today,” says McPhee.

As any journalist will tell you, finding the story is the hardest part of the job. The second-hardest is convincing an editor to commission it.

Editors in my experience are parsimonious, opinionated to a fault, and casual in their cruelty. When he was Australia’s immigration minister, Philip Ruddock was known in Jakarta as “the minister with no ears.” He was probably an editor in a previous life.

Editors refuse to understand, even when you explain it to them in plain English (something they claim to relish, by the way) that they are making a terrible mistake by rejecting your unquestionably great idea for a story.

Luckily for McPhee, he’s had a few wins. You don’t get Pulitzers for stories you didn’t write.

One day at New York’s Pennsylvania Station back in the early 1960s McPhee stood in front of a new-fangled invention: a machine that automatically juiced citrus fruits for frazzled New York commuters. McPhee saw the flicker of an idea.

He finagled an audience with William Shawn, legendary editor of the New Yorker, and delivered his one-word pitch: “Oranges.”

Part of the Shawn legend is the speediness of his response to mendicant writers. Straight away he’d say either “No. Sorry. Not for us” or — as he did in this case — “Yes. Oh, my, yes.”

The pitch turned into a piece called “Oranges,” and then into a hardback called Oranges. And then into several paperback editions, also titled Oranges. It’s possible Mr McPhee’s epitaph will read: “Here lies the guy who wrote a whole book about oranges.”

Convincing Mr Shawn to say “Yes, oh, yes” became a passport to adventure for McPhee. He wrote about tennis, nuclear engineering and basketball; about how to make bark canoes and how to explore the Alaskan wilderness. He wrote about rivers and dams. (He loves a good paddle with interesting people.) Much of his best work is about nature, including the slowest story known to humankind: geology.

Like all good journalists, McPhee enjoys the challenge of making the average reader come to appreciate something they may not know they could be interested in.

But, as Tabula Rasa reveals and revels in, sometimes McPhee would schlepp all the way from Princeton into New York on the train only to hear Mr Shawn invoke his paid-up membership of the Editors and Bastards Club by murmuring, softly but definitively, “No. Not for us.”

McPhee wanted to — but never got to — write about golf course architects, the Outward Bound inventor Kurt Hahn, the Swiss bridge engineer Christian Menn, and the Spanish comunidad autónoma Extremadura.

Sometimes it wasn’t Shawn’s fault; sometimes the myrmidons of Corporate America stood in his way. He never, for example, got to traverse California’s Sacramento–San Joaquin River Delta on a Unocal tanker called the Cornucopia because the trip was nixed by a party pooper from head office.

Sometimes he did the preparatory work but couldn’t find the right structure. Long ago he wanted to write a piece about The Music Man’s creator Meredith Willson, famed for being the only composer to write not only a Broadway musical’s tunes but also the words and the book. Try as he might, McPhee could never get the idea to take voice and sing.

I could go on. Like many toilers in the Literature of Fact (the name of his course at Princeton), McPhee spent a lot of his precious time on Earth not writing things. Bonjour tristesse.

The flotsam and jetsam of McPhee’s writing career — the features forced down the gangplank, the pieces tossed impulsively overboard, the pet projects abandoned on desert islands — are all brought back to a glowing afterlife in this compact and thoroughly enjoyable book about the endless vagaries (and occasional joys) of the writing life.

According to press reports, the nonagenarian McPhee is contracted to deliver Volumes II, III and IV. He might yet live for ever. Let’s hope so. •

Tabula Rasa: Volume 1
By John McPhee | Farrar Straus Giroux | $49.99 | 192 pages

The post The old codger project appeared first on Inside Story.

For Newman, this cultivation was not about social mobility, though it might well encourage it, but about the life-altering nature of contact with “universal knowledge.” But his impassioned advocacy for the university was undergirded by a subtle sense of threat, a fear that the university had lost much of its authority to the fast-paced and glittering world of journalism.

A century later, and concern had grown, in some eyes, to a “crisis.” In The Crisis in the University, published in 1949, another theologian, former Manchester University vice-chancellor Walter Moberly, lamented the moral decline of universities as institutions for producing cultivated men and women. He noted that the university had ceased to fully believe in its own sacred task and was uncertain what it stood for. Later, in 1996, Bill Readings, in one of the most incisive of the critiques that were to become a staple of late-twentieth-century scholarly analysis of the university, declared the university to be “in ruins.”

Michael Wesley does not, as far as I can recall, use the word “crisis” in his latest book, Mind of the Nation: Universities in Australian Life. In fact, he opens his readable and insightful account with the claim that universities entered the third decade of this century “secure and confident.” Having worked as an academic in Australian universities for more than three decades from the early nineties, I baulked at this. Many — if not most — of the securely employed academics I know are ground down, quietly despairing, and looking for a Plan B.

But I soon realised that in Wesley’s book, as in higher education policy and politics more broadly, “universities” does not mean “academics.” This ought not to have surprised me. After all, Étienne Pasquier’s venerable idea of the university as “built of men” has been extinguished, having taken its last breaths over recent decades as the highest levels of university governance were slowly but surely removed from the hands of “ordinary” academics and a managerial pathway established for those with that type of ambition. So while Wesley’s story of the sudden unexpected plummet in universities’ fortunes with the onset of Covid-19 speaks accurately to the shock experienced across the sector, including by students, many academics would, I am sure, have given this story a longer prequel — that of a slow decline before the calamitous fall over the precipice.

Wesley brings both institutional experience and academic expertise to his analysis. As a deputy vice-chancellor at the University of Melbourne, he opens a window into the high-stakes world of higher education policymaking; as an international relations scholar and former director of several research institutes on Asia-Pacific relations, he brings a world, literally, of understanding about the internationalisation of universities.

His book contains masterfully condensed explications of government policy, university funding, marketisation and internationalisation, and is all the more remarkable for having been produced during Melbourne’s long Covid lockdown. It is structured around six single-word “lenses”: money, value, loyalty, integrity, ambition and privilege. I played along at home, experimenting with my own six words. There was only one overlap — privilege — though plenty of points of agreement with his observations and analysis.

Wesley argues that Australian universities occupy a paradoxical space in Australian life. Among the many contradictions he observes are that while higher education is not an electorally significant policy issue a university education has a major impact on how Australians vote; that Australia is now a majority university-educated society but this has made us less egalitarian; and that the more that universities report back to governments, the less they are trusted.

While the “sublime ideal of the university endures in the Australian subconscious,” Australians are, he says, ambivalent about their universities — eager to malign them and oddly angry when they succeed financially — yet we attend them in ever-growing numbers and remain in support of funding them publicly. We regard our universities with an odd mixture of “agnosticism, aspiration and antagonism.” In sum, Australia’s universities, once (he argues) barely noticed by most people, are at the centre of a maelstrom of conflicting ideas about what we value, what knowledge is for, and who should pay for it.

Wesley paints a picture of a sector shaped largely by the interventions of governments yet locked into relations of “mutual incomprehension” with them, especially where funding is concerned. He argues that government policy has, for decades, been driven by three overarching agendas: expanding the number of tertiary-educated Australians while maintaining the quality of a higher education; containing the costs of this expansion and keeping universities accountable for public funding; and promoting universities’ role as significant contributors to technological and scientific innovation and to the economy. These are entirely reasonable goals, but the conflicts and tensions embedded within and between them have never been reconciled.

Instead, as Wesley notes, and as critical academics have strenuously argued for decades, governments have had only one solution — the imposition of a quasi-market model for the university sector. University managers have then mirrored this model of competition within their own institutions, imposing principles and practices that individualise academics and put them in competition with each other and reward those who play the game in its currently mandated form.

Wesley singles out global ranking schemes as particularly potent agents in turning a university education into a prestige good, thereby exacerbating the competition between universities and, he argues, paradoxically undermining the distinctiveness and diversity of particular university offerings. As he notes, “corporatisation was a fractal process.”

Wherever this neoliberal proxy-market model has been imposed, it has resulted in exhaustion, despair and moral injury. Yet this quintessential quality of contemporary academic life remains unexplored in Wesley’s account, in which the working life of academics plays little part. In fact, even though Wesley notes that the current confused state of universities is pre-eminently a result of government policy interventions, he nonetheless goes on to quote, and seemingly endorse, an accusation made in 2000 by emeritus history professor John Molony, who held academics responsible for our own unhappy state. We didn’t fight hard enough, he argued.

There is no doubt some truth in this. Some academics did ride the changes to their own advantage, or focused on personal survival, or put their head in the sand, or quietly waited for retirement. And inevitably, some individuals and some disciplines fared better than others under the new ideological regime and thus had less stake in contesting it. But this picture of a quiescent or complacent response to the marketisation of the sector bears no relation to what I witnessed as a humanities academic over those transformative decades. Frankly, the quotation from Molony about academics’ “supine compliance in the face of manifest tyranny” is inaccurate and insulting.

For the marketisation of universities was met by an explosion of critical scholarship especially, but not only, from the humanities and social sciences, and fierce opposition from both academic and student unions. It also created a new praxis, turning the daily life of an academic into a struggle to maintain value in the face of corrosive top-down pressures.

This struggle comes in many shapes and forms: academic scholarship and debate, canny strategising, occasional acts of point-blank refusal, and bouts of industrial action, including strikes. It also consists of countless daily collegial acts of care, strategy, support and cunning aimed at collective survival and the preservation of valued ideas, practices and people. The managerial ranks also include many people of good faith, who experience the squeeze of trying to be good managers, implementing policies set from the top while also defending and representing their colleagues.

This is exhausting work, and some are much better at it than others. Meanwhile, many teaching and research academics are demoralised and bone-weary. Quite a few dream of leaving. What a bitter irony: while young and eager scholars strain to find a secure toehold within the universities, many of the occupants of those coveted positions look for safe ways to exit.

In fact, I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that most of the humanities academics I know dream, not just idly, of finding a suitable exit strategy. I know this from many whispered conversations but also from a research project I conducted on academics leaving the profession “early” (a hitherto unknown phenomenon), which gave me a distressing close-up insight into the human, intellectual, cultural and economic tragedy of training people (often at public expense) to reach an intellectual and professional peak, and then dismissing their concerns as the perennial whinges of an out-of-touch elite unable to come to terms with a changed global reality.

This brings me back to privilege — a complex matter, which is why it figured as one of my own imaginary analytical lenses and why Wesley often returns to the question of the individual and social benefits of a university education. He reminds us that Robert Menzies made the case for the shared value of university education to the whole of society. For decades, though, governments have insisted that a university education is an individual benefit and have admitted only a narrowly framed conception of universities’ contribution to Australian society, expressed largely through economistic rubrics of productivity and “innovation.”

Like many commentators, Wesley notes that belief in the university as an institution for the social good has been eroded by the competitive and individualist discourses of neoliberalism and consumerism. These forces have threatened to undermine universities’ social licence, including the case for public funding and some measure of autonomy in governance.

Wesley claims that a holistic public discussion about the purpose and value of universities has been missing; universities are central to Australian life, but “rarely discussed, debated, examined.” The closest we come, he says, are the reviews periodically instigated by governments and read “only by a select coterie of higher education specialists and bureaucrats.” His proposed remedy — the book’s call to action — is a “national conversation.”

I’m afraid this call to action did not rouse me. For one thing, it’s a very academic “solution,” a contemporary iteration of a philosophical tradition that goes back centuries, one in which, as Erin Elizabeth Greer argues in a forthcoming book about the ideal of conversation in modern thought, “‘conversation’ has been made to index lofty aspirations for both public and intimate life.” Conversation is, in her words, “a hazy but stirring metaphor” for a public sphere understood as constituted through lively but civil conversations between citizens. Calling for a national conversation is a familiar, and ironically very academic, rhetorical move.

Type “national conversation” into Google Scholar and you instantly get a sense of the reach of this taken-for-granted metaphor. Paper after paper calls for, or weighs into, a “national conversation” on anything from early learning to flexible workplaces, American pluralism, female academic emergency physicians, carbon capture and storage, engaged fatherhood, disaster resilience or the use of low-titre group O whole blood in blood transfusions.

The repetition of this metaphor in academic scholarship might seem an unimportant point. But, as Stanford cognitive psychologists Paul H. Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky have shown, metaphors shape and constrain the terms in which we can think about a social issue: “Far from being mere rhetorical flourishes, metaphors have profound influences on how we conceptualise and act with respect to important societal issues.” Metaphors — “even fleeting and seemingly unnoticed metaphors in natural language” — influence reasoning, surprisingly substantially. So if metaphor tips into cliché, it might actually hinder our efforts to find new intellectual and practical resources.

A telling hint at this comes, aptly enough, from the same edited collection from which the John Molony quotation that irritated me was drawn, titled Why Universities Matter. Published in the year 2000, its diagnosis of the malaise afflicting the university sector matches that outlined by Wesley, with public ambivalence, political disdain, values conflict, and funding dilemmas being among the issues noted. The book’s subtitle? “A Conversation about Values, Means and Directions.” Twenty-three years later and we still have the same problems and the same metaphorical solution.

Of course, all writers of critique face this problem: we are duty-bound, both ethically and aesthetically, to propose a pathway forward, especially in our concluding chapters. And the idea of a public sphere constituted via robust but civil debate and disagreement is a noble tradition, one that remains central to contemporary universities’ understanding of what it is they teach and practise. No longer the custodians of “universal knowledge,” universities instead seek to be exemplars of the art of “disagreeing well.”

Alas, they are not joined in this endeavour by many of the political and financial elites who hide themselves behind populist causes. So a rational national conversation is an optimistic call in the nasty post-truth political world in which we find ourselves. The proof — if proof were needed — is the supposed national conversation that Australians have just undergone: a referendum campaign in which mis- and disinformation ran amok, scaremongering was an effective political tool, and civility was often trumped by ugliness and vitriol.

Newman worried that the slow work of deliberation and debate could not compete with the seductions of faster-paced journalism. Today, we worry that journalism cannot compete with the reach and lightning speed of digital communications, in which text messages can be sent by political operators to carefully selected subsections of the voting public on election day or in the lead-up to a referendum.

With the press of a button, thousands of Chinese Australians can be told via WeChat that they risk being expelled from Australia if the referendum succeeds, or Muslim Australians told that if the Voice succeeded, their relatives would no longer be able to come to Australia, as political journalist Niki Savva recently reported happening.

But like Wesley, I am duty-bound, by both ethics and the requirements of the essay genre, to gesture towards a pathway forward. While I saw Wesley’s call for a conversation as a writerly deus ex machina, I nonetheless believe the ideal of informed civil debate to be worth fighting for, but in specific forms rather than as a vague aspiration. So I am cheered by the emergence of forums (like Inside Story and the aptly named The Conversation) that bridge the worlds of academia and journalism, prizing and promoting expertise, transparency, trust and access.

I also take heart from the rise of conversations, in the plural. The teal wave of community independents that was a novel feature of the last federal election was underpinned by sincere and committed community engagement, including in the form of “kitchen table conversations.” A technique invented and mobilised by Black feminist anthropologists, these conversations are moderated, guided conversations, held in a domestic setting, where no one tries to persuade the others of their views and differences are listened to respectfully. This slow and painstaking feminist work stands in marked contrast to the belligerent theatre of televised “debates” or the vitriol of anonymous trolls. In its reach and temporality it is, of course, no match for the rapidity and reach of digital scare campaigns, but that doesn’t make it worthless.

So too, the revival of civic forums like town halls, panels and forums can also produce conversation as a structured social medium underpinned by some measure of patience, good faith and openness. In the aftermath of the referendum, leading Indigenous Yes campaigner Thomas Mayo wrote with extraordinary optimism and grace of the solidarity generated when goodwilled communities show up to listen to each other.

These curated contexts for face-to-face group engagement are not spontaneous expressions of authentic relations but structured forms that aspire to both aspects of what Greer identifies as the “elusive ideal” of conversation: authentic intimate interpersonal exchanges and the civil debate that underpins a democracy. For the ideal of public and private conversations to be protected, reinvigorated and shared — and for it to grow into new shapes — we clearly need investment not just in public conversations themselves but, more fundamentally, in the whole subterranean architecture of customs, laws, values and networks that underpin and enable them. For this, we need a raft of committed actors, including a vibrant university sector staffed by academics with the energy and optimism to be part of that fight. •

Mind of the Nation: Universities in Australian Life
By Michael Wesley | Black Inc. | $34.99 | 256 pages

The post University challenge appeared first on Inside Story.

What probably doesn’t come to mind is Cyprus’s leading role in selling passports to members of the global elite. Since the 2008 global financial crisis the island has joined the growing number of small countries that peddle their passports in the growing citizenship-by-investment market.

These countries — often island microstates with British colonial histories — offer citizenship to anyone who can afford prices ranging from around A$200,000 to A$1 million. You don’t necessarily need to visit the country whose citizenship you buy, let alone live there, but you’ll gain much easier access to the countries your new passport opens up for you. A passport for tiny Saint Kitts and Nevis, for example, entitles its holder to ninety-day visa-free access to Britain and the countries of the European Union — not a privilege available to many citizens outside the West.

As sociologist Kristin Surak observes in her new book, The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires, citizenship was once an equaliser, neutralising some aspects of class inequality. Now that it’s for sale, it has become another fading feature of the twentieth-century nation-state and its mildly redistributive policies. Hypermobility and growing inequality have created a business that, while still very small, threatens to replace our current sense of citizenship and nationalism with a more elastic variety of belonging based on class.

Some of the island microstates that figure prominently in the citizenship-by-investment market have also used their sovereignty to attract offshore banking. But this is not what motivates people to buy a passport, says Surak: wealthy countries like Britain and Switzerland have more than enough tax loopholes to go around.

Rather, non-Western elites are driven by the disjuncture between their economic status and their national belonging. They are mostly the wealthy, but not uber-rich, of the Middle East, Central Asia, Russia and China. They have enough funds for a business class ticket but are hassled at passport control. They have places to go and people to see and are sick of waiting weeks for visas to the European Union, the United States or Australia.

Increasingly, these wealthy individuals buy citizenship in places like Saint Kitts, Antigua, Dominica and Saint Lucia in the Caribbean; Cyprus and Malta in Mediterranean Europe; Vanuatu in the Pacific; and, surprisingly, Turkey. Of course, they could invest for citizenship in the United States, Canada, Britain or Australia, but those countries’ programs cost US$1 million or more and require residency.

The citizenship-by-investment industry emerged in the Caribbean in the 1990s but was largely kept in check by American concerns about money laundering. It started to pick up steam with the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997, when a plethora of citizenship-by-investment stores with names like “Emergency Exit Company” sprang up in Kowloon. After the 2008 financial crisis, Spain and Portugal also launched popular residency-by-investment programs, which are more like regular immigration.

The Hong Kong example reveals another built-in attraction of these programs: many people want an extra passport as insurance. Hong Kong’s political future was uncertain in the 1990s, but it also had a roaring economy fuelled by mainland China’s free-market reforms; wealthy Hong Kongers, with their extra passport, could continue to make money while having a concrete exit plan.

The same goes for Russians, Kazakhs, Vietnamese and many other elites today. Doing business in a place without democratic institutions can be lucrative, but being able to leave — when there is a coup, mass imprisonment of those charged with corruption (sometimes by the very governments that cooperated with them), or a war — is prudent. That’s why Jho Low, a Malaysian business figure who stole US$4 billion from his government with the connivance of former prime minister Najib Razak, became a Cypriot in 2015. His new passport has allowed him to evade capture despite an Interpol warrant.

The programs that most interest Surak are those that involve a simple exchange of passports for cash. The European Union reluctantly allowed Cyprus and Malta to go ahead with their programs because migration is controlled by individual member countries despite local citizenship giving passport holders access to the Schengen zone. You can organise a flat in Malta (for the property rental requirement of its citizenship-by-investment program) but actually live in Paris. Similarly, investors in Caribbean countries might be taking a first step to using their new passports for investor-residence permits to the United States and Britain under their E-2 and Tier 1 visa programs respectively. Thus, citizenship in an island country is a backdoor to residency and investment in a global superpower.

As Surak shows, the leading citizenship-by-investment countries are accommodating elites despite growing anger among their own populations. In Malta the program was shut down after corruption allegations and the fatal car bombing of investigative journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia, who had reported on cash-for-passports. In Cyprus, a sting report by Al Jazeera showed someone posing as a Chinese citizen-investor being cleared by government officials after announcing he had a criminal conviction.

Cyprus and Malta responded to the economic challenges brought on by Europe’s 2009–10 sovereign debt crisis by setting up their lucrative schemes. In the Caribbean islands the schemes have been even more successful: they are the biggest export product in Saint Kitts, where citizenship-by-investment made up about 40 per cent of the economy before Covid-19 struck, and in Dominica.

Although lawyers, accountants and property developers get a good cut (the leading global citizenship-by-investment firm, Henley & Partners, makes €32,000, or about A$54,000, on each Malta deal), governments get the majority, and the evidence shows that the more formalised the scheme, the less likely the money goes into officials’ pockets.

It costs a family of four €975,000 for Maltese papers and the government gets €700,000 of that for social and infrastructure programs. In the five years of the ironically named “Identity Malta” program, the country made €1.4 billion, or 2.1 per cent of GDP. This is why resistance, although present, isn’t strong.

Many former colonies have complex attitudes towards immigration after having governments thrust upon them by foreign powers. Rather than opposing newcomers, locals often feel that if people want to stay — and some citizen-investors do stay — then they can pay. In Cyprus, even the communist AKEL party supports citizenship-by-investment. As Surak points out, “Microstates in particular are diaspora societies. Their small size means that, by nature, bigger and more diverse opportunities are available only abroad.” These schemes add income to economies driven by remittances and bring people to places that are ageing and depopulating.

Yet the practice of selling citizenship is taking on extra poignancy as conflicts spread across the world. The biggest new player is Turkey, which is growing so quickly it may forever alter the market, particularly because it is a major regional power with NATO membership and a huge military. While its passport sales are probably driven by the collapse of the Turkish lira, they appeal to wealthy displaced people (as do the citizenship-by-investment programs in Egypt and Jordan). Syrians, Palestinians, Lebanese, Iranians and many others may use this industry not as a backup plan but as an immediate means of escape. Some are also being encouraged to “buy in” to societies where they are already refugees.

The Golden Passport opens with an account of a citizenship-by-investment conference in Montenegro where Robert De Niro and Wyclef Jean were guests. Drawing on his own background in the Armenian diaspora, the founder of the Global Citizen Forum, investor Armand Arton, declares that “migration needs a new brand.”

Surak is adept at showing how the citizenship-by-investment sector often exploits the language of human rights and freedom of movement while commodifying citizenship and stripping it of its former values. She lays out the contours of this surprising industry very well, though I would have liked to hear more from the buyers themselves, whose voices only appear in one small chapter. What drives them to invest? How does it affect their feelings of nationalism? Do they think it is fair that they can buy their way into better mobility at the very moment of multiple migration crises?

There are wider questions too. Citizenship-by-investment only accounts for 50,000 naturalisations a year, but what if it were to grow? Other writers, most notably the journalist Atossa Araxia Abrahamian, have shown how Gulf states bought thousands of Comoros Island passports in order to give their Bidoon populations mobility while simultaneously depriving them of state benefits. Others have warned that these schemes could be adopted to forcibly remove citizenship from political dissenters or ethnic minorities.

Citizen-investors mostly want to get a new passport to move somewhere else. Yet, given that most of these places are islands highly susceptible to climate change, there is a grave irony in this flexible sense of citizenship. Funds from the programs have been used to build apartments and infrastructure, but often in places ill-suited to more people.

Dominica, for instance, constructed a world-class eco-resort with citizenship-by-investment money, only to see it levelled by a hurricane. Vanuatu hopes to build an entire new city with Chinese funds, some from citizenship-by-investment, but it is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change (and some have even raised the possibility that the entire population may need to relocate to Australia during this century).

Looking at this phenomenon more critically, we can see programs run by small countries that have often been denied sovereignty in the past and now also face an uncertain future. This disconnect between the bright skies and sandy beaches of brochures and the pessimism of those actually living on the islands that pioneered these schemes can be startling. What will new citizens do for their new countries besides opening their wallets? And will their incomplete sense of national community catch on more widely? •

The Golden Passport: Global Mobility for Millionaires
By Kristin Surak | Harvard University Press | US$35 | 336 pages

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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

The post Freeing Bennelong and Phillip appeared first on Inside Story.

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

The post The one who told them who they were appeared first on Inside Story.

Khrushchev’s eyes slid across the appliance, deadpan. “We have such things,” he replied.

Nixon tried again: “This is our newest model. This is the kind which is built in thousands of units for direct installations in the houses. In America, we like to make life easier for women.” Khrushchev bristled, perhaps at the assumptions about gendered work. “Your capitalistic attitude to women does not exist under communism,” he said.

Apparently missing why his praise of a dishwasher might have drawn such a reaction, Nixon barrelled on: “I think that this attitude towards women is universal. What we want to do, is make life more easy for our housewives.” The “American system” gave consumers “new inventions and new techniques” so rapidly, he said, that this very kitchen — currently so up to date — would itself be obsolete in twenty years.

“In Russia,” said Khrushchev, “all you have to do to get a house is to be born in the Soviet Union. You are entitled to housing… In America, if you don’t have a dollar you have a right to choose… sleeping… on the pavement. Yet you say we are the slave to communism.”

It was the mention of this exchange in Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek’s new book, After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time, that prompted me to watch Nixon and Khrushchev talking past each other. It is good viewing, if only for the unintentional cringecore. Squirm as Nixon digs himself deeper; behold two different views of the world butting up against one another. It’s obvious that the US president didn’t understand Khrushchev, but did he also feel that he was being laughed at, outsmarted or outwitted by one to whom he felt a natural superiority?

I happened to watch the video in Laos, just one of the countries Nixon ordered to be bombed in the name of crushing communism, but one particularly devastated by that crusade. I wondered if humiliations like this kitchen debate partly motivated his inhuman insistence on bombing this country “back to the Stone Age” (in the words used during the Indochinese war by General Curtis LeMay) a decade later.

Sitting on the banks of the Mekong River, I could see traces of the poverty, grief and physical devastation left by the war. Amid all this, it seemed indecent to be ruminating on the difficulties of the life I lead at home in Australia. My life, and presumably Hester’s and Srnicek’s, is the kind common across what they call the “rich world”: chronic overwork, real or imagined precarity, a constant feeling of being harried, kids I adore but can’t be with enough, and endless domestic chores at the end of a long week.

This crisis of work in and out of the home has been building for some time, but, as writer Angela Garbes says, “Over the course of the pandemic, many people came to understand — for the first time, deeply, or with renewed agency — that American life is not working for families.” It is easy to dismiss these as “First World problems.” But they are real all the same.

After Work fuses visions for a post-work world with calls to recognise and tackle the crisis in care. Reading it in Laos forced me to see the history of coercion behind the crisis Hester and Srnicek describe. It is not that we “find ourselves” in isolated nuclear families and impossible work–life imbalances. And not everyone lives that way today. But everyone is affected by the struggle over how to live. The fight for free time might not have drawn bombs and bloodshed in Australia and the rest of the rich world, but in other theatres it was violent and prolonged.

Understanding how we got into this mess is surely an important step towards finding a way out. That said, After Work is not really a history book. Perhaps a librarian would place it in the critical sociology section. I read it as myth.

It reminds me of a myth told by the ethnic Katu I work with in Laos. Before the flood, they say, everything was different. The stars were people and the people were stars. Animals were people and people were animals. With the flood, everything swapped places. Those who were rats turned into people, which is why today some people have a lot of hair and others are bald — the bald ones were rats that had been captured and plucked for eating when the flood came. And so on: every element of the current world is explained by how different things were before the flood, and how everything changed and bore the stamp of that change.

Hester and Srnicek describe the Industrial Revolution as an “unprecedented change” that “utterly transformed” domestic life: “Prior to this transformation, housework was exhaustingly laborious.” Heating was apparently a large part of this labour, but not cooling: so by implication they are describing life in a cold climate. We are also in a dystopian world: the authors tell us that children were usually put to work and demands for elder care were few because “working to death was standard.”

We are in a city, probably somewhere in Europe or America, because running water, electricity and gas appeared “as the twentieth century dawned” in this everywhere–nowhere home. The authors briefly mention “the Western household” but this is not a frequent phrase: most of the first half of the book describes an unspecified location.

Then came the flood. The “industrialisation of the home,” a “radical” change, “significantly reduced the burdens of domestic labour” and ushered in “peak family.” Labour was split between a male breadwinner and a female homemaker, producing the image of the nuclear family.

The “second key phase” in this history is the neoliberal stagnation of the 1970s through to the 1990s. The floodwaters receded, leaving a detritus of expectations about the home (for instance, as the key site of almost all unpaid care work); at the same time, anyone who could work for money was expected to do so. These demands bred “a universal sense of growing time pressures.” Today, say the authors, “We remain enmeshed in a world of domestic technologies whose potential to reduce work has gone largely unfulfilled.”

Hester and Srnicek take issue with Joel Salatin, the advocate of whole foods and farming, for evoking a mythical past. But here they offer another myth: that “most” of our great-grandparents “were more likely to be eating stale and monotonous food, plagued by scarcity.” If Salatin’s myth is a classic Garden of Eden story of paradise lost, Hester and Srnicek’s is of the Katu flood variety: everything swapped places, one dystopia replaced another.

The book’s discussion of bathing shows the limits such a view places on imagination. They write that “when bathing meant lugging water into the home, warming it up, and removing waste afterwards, the sheer amount of work required limited how often baths could be taken.” It is as if the only alternative the authors can imagine to a hot bath in a nuclear family’s bathroom is one where hapless family members create the conditions for such a bath using sheer manual labour.

Looking at bathing across cultures and times shows that we (and I use this word in its most inclusive sense) can and do bathe in many ways. We have bathed daily in the Mekong River as the sun set red over the rushing current. We have bathed in water captured from a mountain stream in bamboo pipes and fed across the village fence. We have bathed in Japanese sentō. We have bathed in Minoan palatial throne-room “lustration basins” under paintings depicting menstruation.

Following anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow, we can see that “we” have a capacity for imagining new ways of living and bringing those imaginations into being. Innumerable experiments in living are evident across the anthropological, archaeological and historical record. There is not just one “before” and one “after” in the human story. This diversity is key to the thinking the way out that Hester and Srnicek so rightly seek.

Hester and Srnicek envision a post-scarcity world. By this they mean not an overabundance of consumer goods but a world in which selling one’s labour is not a prerequisite for remaining alive. They propose reducing necessary labour (“work”) as much as possible by improving domestic technologies, accepting lower standards (messier homes, wilder childhoods), and making care work more efficient by removing it where possible from private homes (think: kitchen-less apartments, laundry services). The goal is to expand freedom — defined as time spent in autonomously chosen activities — as much as possible.

The second part of After Work introduces historically grounded alternatives as inspiration: the Russian commune in the early twentieth century; social housing in Vienna; the hippie movement in North America. It is a relief to be grounded after the nowhere–everywhere of the previous chapters.

Hester and Srnicek dutifully mention the well-known shortcomings of each of these “missed futures.” They do include among their inspirations Cuba’s recent family code, which defines a family as “a union of people linked by an affective, psychological and sentimental bond, who commit themselves to sharing life such that they support each other.” But Cuba is not treated as an extended example and nor are criticisms identified. Uncomfortably, all the significant inspirations described in After Work are decidedly white.

“Even in the most gender-equal countries, such as Norway and Denmark, women continue to do nearly 1.5 times as much” unpaid domestic labour as men, Hester and Srnicek write. This is considerably less than the world average, in which women do 3.2 times more unpaid work than men. Here in Laos, though, women do only 1.4 times more such work than men. On this count, Laos outshines Norway and Denmark: by a tiny margin, true, but I still wonder why Laos was left out of the praise granted the Nordic countries.

Of course, I don’t expect all authors to write from a Laos-centric perspective. But living here and being part of a Lao extended family means I read from that perspective. I share Hester and Srnicek’s frustrations with work in the rich world: reading After Work felt like having a sociologist explain a typical week in my Australian life. But I also know that my typical is very strange from the perspective of my Lao family.

Khrushchev and Nixon’s kitchen debate shows how wild the misunderstandings can be when one way of life is perceived from the perspective of another. The mistake Nixon made was assuming that his vision of domestic labour and technology represented progress, and thus assuming that the Soviets were behind. Khrushchev, too, indulged in teleological visions.

Students of conflict in the twentieth century know the violence of such one-track stories. Hester and Srnicek speak truly when they say that typical lives in “the rich world” are now untenable. I agree. Better lives are possible. In building these, let’s not narrow our vision needlessly. The sparks of yet-to-be-realised futures may be hiding in plain sight. •

After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time
By Helen Hester and Nick Srnicek | Verso | $29.99 | 208 pages

The post How should we live? appeared first on Inside Story.

I found myself among the forty-one academics suddenly “disestablished” from their continuing positions at the Australian Catholic University in the name of creating a “more agile and sustainable” education environment. I was then invited to compete in a Hunger Games for fourteen replacement positions. As one of the senior historians among the targeted, more privileged than several others, I have absolutely no intention of doing so.

It’s been an interesting, and unexpected, context for my reading of Mac Sweeney’s brilliant book on the history of the idea of Western civilisation. Back in August I thought I might consider it from the position of one of the few universities in Australia to have recently invested in those disciplines most strongly associated with the West — history, philosophy, religious studies, literary studies and political theory.

Where other universities have been trimming or at least following a course of “natural attrition” when it comes to these subjects, ACU pursued over the last few years a deliberate push to elevate its profile in what is also often called the humanities. The university systematically hired humanities researchers from around the nation and world at senior, middle and junior levels.

In 2020, ACU also became the third and final university in Australia to partner with the private Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation, with which it now runs a Bachelor of Arts program in “the great books, art, thought and practices” that have shaped the West. This program remains largely segregated from both ACU’s regular BA offerings and its humanities research institutes.

In the face of a baffling and partial reversal, however — a reversal that slashes most of its recent research hires but leaves the Ramsay program intact — I now read Mac Sweeney’s book as one of the ousted, a living effect of the extreme tenuousness of the hold of the idea of “Western civilisation” in Australian society.

Tenuousness, in fact, is Mac Sweeney’s primary point. Her central argument is that our modern notion of Western civilisation is not only much newer than we thought but also unstable, compromised, frequently incoherent and indeed “factually wrong.” That notion, briefly, is that Western civilisation emerged from a shared Graeco-Roman antiquity that melded with the rise of European Christendom and led to the Renaissance, the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, in the process giving birth to liberal capitalist modernity. All these developments occurred on an ever-westward sweep from southern Europe to North America.

Mac Sweeney’s secondary point, pursued more subtly throughout, is that grand narratives of the West have always been used ideologically to justify political ends, either for or against its central claims.

Such a twofold argument might suggest a book that covers only the span of time in which Mac Sweeney reckons our current notion of Western civilisation has been brandished — roughly from the late seventeenth century to the present day. But The West traverses all the ages currently understood to fall within the narrative, starting with the fifth-century BCE Anatolian thinker Herodotus. In fact, more than half the book is dedicated to the pre-seventeenth-century world. The subtitle should more accurately, though surely less cutely, have been “A New History of a Newish Idea, With a Good Chunk of Its Prehistory.”

Mac Sweeney was aware from the outset that her rather abstract subject matter could “easily get stuck in the realms of the theoretical.” To avoid this, she explores her ideas via fourteen lives, each with his or her own chapter. A couple are expected: Herodotus himself, as well as the English Tudor polymath Francis Bacon. The others are mostly surprises, including the Islamic philosopher Abū Yūsuf Yaʻqūb ibn ʼIsḥāq al-Kindī, the Ottoman Sultan-Mother Safiye and Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam.

All up, Mac Sweeney’s fourteen lives comprise two Anatolians, two Romans, two Britons, two Africans, a German, a Baghdadi, an Albanian, an American, a Palestinian and a Hong Konger. There are eight men to six women. Around two-thirds are scholars of some description; about half of them are significant political rulers.

The book’s biographical method and its vivacious and direct writing style are among its best features, turning Mac Sweeney’s compelling ideas into an enticing, delightful and sustaining read. But not all the figures do the same work. Some are discussed as presumed contributors to the Western tradition while others exemplify its contrary aspects.

The starting line-up shows these two modes neatly. Herodotus, in chapter one, has long been thought an original contributor to the Western tradition, inaugurating the binarism at its heart between “us” and “them” with his depiction of Greek heroes and barbarian enemies. Mac Sweeney insists, though, that Herodotus invoked this binarism solely to undermine it. He was repelled by the increasingly xenophobic triumphalism of his contemporary Athens, writing instead a history that showed equivalent heterogenous societies in all the regions of his known world. He eventually abandoned Athens in disgust at its invention of a singular, superior Greek culture.

Chapter two’s character, meanwhile, the Roman powerbroker Livilla, represents the people who are usually considered the inheritors of Greek culture, the Romans of the first century CE. Livilla’s turbulent life adds great colour but its pertinent part concerns how much Livilla — granddaughter of Augustus — nodded to “Asian Troy” as her most important heartland. Her Rome was an empire born of Trojan refugees and powered by absorbing every set of people within reach. It had no understanding of itself as being oriented towards Europe over Asia, and especially not to the conquered Hellenes.

Baghdadi al-Kindī demonstrates how much the Byzantine empire of the ninth century engaged with the Greek and Roman philosophers of the past. In fact, Mac Sweeney holds that the Byzantines took the thought of the varied ancients more seriously than did anyone in this era, proving that Greek and Roman influence did not “flow in a single channel” to western Europe but instead “sprayed rather chaotically in all directions.”

Godfrey of Viterbo and Laskaris of Albania both feature as warnings of how uncomfortable was the blending of medieval Christendom into Greek, Roman or Byzantine history. They similarly refute any sense of a single flowing channel: the retrofitting of Christian theology into pre-Christian traditions was awkward, painful and sometimes frankly denied.

Chapters six to eight traverse a long Renaissance, showing how this era “stitched together… the uneasy hybrid we now call ‘Greco-Roman antiquity.’” Even so, the Roman writer Tullia D’Aragona shows that there remained much respect in the sixteenth century for the traditions of Mesopotamia, Egypt and Ethiopia. So, too, Safiye Sultan shows that the attraction of the east for many Protestant Europeans was often greater than was an increasingly papalised West. And Francis Bacon exemplifies how emerging scientists, though they learned much from ancient texts, remained wary of any attempt to dictate how or what to think.

American revolutionary Joseph Warren brings the reader finally to the birth of the modern idea of Western civilisation, a truncated version that burgeoned through the prior two centuries but was, we now know, almost incomprehensible to thinkers of earlier ages. Mac Sweeney argues that the idea finally became “mainstream” as a helpmate to the success of the American Revolution. American-tinctured Western civilisation not only instantiated the idea that the West came from a fused and exclusive tradition of Greek and Roman practices, but also implied that those living on the latest western frontier — Americans — perfected the Christian, scientific and liberal threads that adhered seamlessly to the tradition along the way.

Chapters on the Angolan Queen Njinga and the West African poet Phillis Wheatley provide searing counterpoints, highlighting the ever-sharpening racial exclusions embedded in the modern idea of Western civilisation.

Perhaps the most contentious of Mac Sweeney’s biographical choices come in the final three chapters, where British prime minister William Gladstone, Palestinian critic Edward Said and Hong Kong premier Carrie Lam stand in for the last 200 years. Those who support the extreme tendency to favour the recent past in historical studies will protest that too much is missed, especially the cold war version of Western civilisation: the Plato-to-NATO narrative that focused so intensely on capitalism and founded so many “Western Civ” university courses around the Western world. As a former member of a “Not the Twentieth Century” reading group, however, I am happy to accept the author’s brevity here.

Gladstone represents the West’s zenith, when the idea bolstered a Western bloc that was also dominating the world. Said represents how the West started to come apart via its own critical methods during the twentieth century. And Lam, intriguingly, is a conduit to the challenges the West now faces from without — from a militant Islamic State, from post-Soviet Russia, and most of all from a soaring China.

Mac Sweeney spends less time on her second theme, the ideological weaponisation of the idea of the West, though it is implied throughout. She is clearest on how Warren and Gladstone wielded the idea to justify the rise to “domination” of Euro-American norms. She suggests that it’s less powerful today, when “most people in the modern West no longer want an origin myth that serves to support racial oppression or imperial hegemony.”

I’m not so sure. Advocates don’t have to carry placards of Donald Trump as a gladiator to reveal a desire to perpetuate certain conventions about Western primacy, exceptionalism and natural linearity.

The fact that Mac Sweeney wrote this book suggests she, too, may realise the idea still has dangerous legs. One of her implied points could well be that while the West wreaked plenty of havoc (dispossession, slavery, colonisation) between 1776 and 2001, it may inflict even more damage when brandished in a fractured, unmoored and uneven manner as it is today.

Most importantly, her book is not a call to cancel the study of what apparently constituted the West. Instead, she contends that by investigating the very tenuousness of its claims we can come to see more than just falsity. We get the chance to discover a richer and more diverse global past than we previously knew.

In endeavouring to trace the genealogy of the West back through liberalism, rationalism, Christianity, Rome and Greece, we will find a kaleidoscope of ingenuity, creativity, contradiction and interconnected collaboration in place of a neat arrow. Together, these complexities point to something far closer to universal humanity than was ever imagined in any Western narrative. They should inspire us to move beyond the binary of the West versus the Non-West that yet inflects much modern thinking.

I have no idea if the Ramsay programs currently being unrolled in Australia present the history of Western civilisation in Mac Sweeney’s critical and expansive way. What I do know is that the possibility of studying the politics, religion, literature and theories of the world in which the West arose is now significantly foreclosed at my university. Many regular students, and scholars, will have to turn elsewhere to continue to discover and to explain the ideas that have shaped all our lives. The West would make an excellent starting point. •

The West: A New History of an Old Idea
By Naoíse Mac Sweeney | WH Allen | $35 | 448 pages

Just noting that she uses this spelling but a quote later has Mac Sweeney using Greco.

The post Western civilisation and its discontents appeared first on Inside Story.

In a nutshell, that is the case advanced in The Age of Scientific Wellness. It’s a new science book looking at the world of AI and genomics in medicine. Throughout, the authors — two highly qualified and very well-respected scientists with decades of experience behind them — weave a tale in which what we call medicine is irretrievably broken and our health will only improve once their futuristic paradigm emerges from the ruins.

As the story goes, what we currently call healthcare is, in fact, “sickcare” or “deathcare.” Right now, most treatment is provided to people when they are already suffering from disease’s symptoms, but that’s backwards. Instead, the authors propose, we should use the vast wealth of data that people now generate about their own health to better understand their long-term risks, and figure out how to identify problems with health long before they happen. We can then prevent these conditions, thus saving us all a great deal of suffering.

This brave new world will be built on emerging healthcare technologies. The authors focus particularly on genomics, microbiomics — the study of the bacteria and other micro-organisms that live in and on our bodies — and brain health. The book wends its way through a tapestry of possibilities, discussing how we can improve cognitive outcomes and capitalise on the vast promise that AI holds for improving our lives.

The Age of Scientific Wellness starts out strongly, but ultimately much of it rings a bit hollow. The authors focus relentlessly on the positives, but to those of us who remember IBM Watson, an enormous investment into medical AI that crashed and burned over the course of a decade, it’s harder to be optimistic. The authors talk about a wonderful future where we all have access to endless data about ourselves, but they also acknowledge that they already tried to form a company based on this promise, Arivale, and it fell apart in 2019.

There’s not much evidence in the book to back up its relentless optimism. From the first chapters, the focus of wellness and personalised medicine is clearly defined as common chronic diseases — diabetes, heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — but the success stories included in the book simply don’t match the hype.

We’re introduced to Lynn, who was experiencing the early symptoms of Hashimoto’s thyroiditis and was diagnosed a bit earlier than expected because of the huge gamut of tests Arivale ran on her. Max, another patient, was experiencing health problems that were traced back to extremely low vitamin B12 levels. Another woman, Beth, was diagnosed with colon cancer because of anomalous blood cortisol results.

These are not grand stories of a novel way of medicine. They are boring, everyday stories of how medicine works already. Despite the heady rhetoric of the book about finding people long before they become unwell, virtually all the practical examples deal with illness the traditional medical system would usually pick up anyway.

The authors blame much of the inertia within healthcare on profit incentives, saying things like “trillions of dollars have already been spent for infrastructure and disease strategies that are expected to pay off in the long run… if that changes, the equation changes.” That reads oddly coming from the former owners of a company, Arivale, that charged people thousands of dollars a year for testing and treatment that the book’s descriptions suggest were not proven to have any specific benefit.

This is a well-known problem with precision medicine, and something the book silently struggles with right the way through. We have been capable for years of identifying the people most likely to experience a gamut of diseases, but we have yet to be able to change their fate. A famous saying in medicine is “treat the patient, not the x-ray”: this book seems focused on sorting out minor inconsistencies in various tests rather than on healthcare improvements that will make a difference in people’s lives.

Everyone who has prediabetes is at a pretty high risk of developing diabetes in the near future, something we’ve known since at least the 1980s, but the treatments we have to prevent that transition are still fairly slim — essentially, we recommend diet, exercise and sometimes one or two medications. The main theme of The Age of Scientific Wellness — that identifying illness risk early can completely prevent negative disease states — is missing a crucial step.

There’s also not a great deal of evidence that personalising treatments makes them more effective. Trials of personalised diets have shown, at best, minimal benefits when compared with generic advice. One of the main take-homes from the book — that you should train your brain to reduce your long-term risk of cognitive issues — has very weak evidence behind it and may not improve your outlook.

As a visionary tract, The Age of Scientific Wellness ultimately doesn’t feel convincing enough. The authors are genuine authorities and they lay out their arguments methodically, but I was left sceptical about their vision of the future. We’ve had access to most of this technology for more than a decade. It’s already long past the time when any of this could revolutionise the world overnight.

The book is also not one I’d recommend for those looking for an easy read. Phrases like “these data will allow us to identify data-informed multimodal intervention strategies for personalised care and disease reversal” are pretty common throughout. It often feels like a book written for other scientists working in non-healthcare disciplines rather than for a wider audience.

If you have an advanced degree in a scientific discipline and are looking for a well-written review of some of the more hopeful treatment paradigms that people are spending enormous sums of money on these days, The Age of Scientific Wellness is worth picking up. And the chapters on Alzheimer’s are a harrowing and worthwhile read for anyone with a family member suffering from the condition.

For me, though, the combination of extreme complexity and overwhelming — at times inappropriate — optimism ultimately felt just a little bit misleading. If it had been written in 2013, this book would be visionary, but in 2023 it feels a bit more like a sales pitch for something that has already been and gone. •

The Age of Scientific Wellness: Why the Future of Medicine Is Personalized, Predictive, Data-Rich, and in Your Hands
By Leroy Hood and Nathan Price | Harvard University Press | $55.95 | 352 pages

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Lee is a novelist, painter and human rights lawyer. Her debut novel The Healing Party was shortlisted for several prizes, including the Victorian Premier’s Literary Award.

Born with spinal muscular atrophy and using a wheelchair, she is also the author of the latest Quarterly Essay, Lifeboat: Disability, Humanity and the NDIS. Of all the millions of words written about the National Disability Insurance Scheme, few have been as incisive as these, bringing to us the dimensions of her lived experience.

The NDIS has transformed the lives of tens of thousands of people — something that Lee acknowledges. “For those who can access the scheme and turn funds into the support they need,” she writes, “the NDIS is, as many have said, life-changing.” Without the NDIS, “I wouldn’t be able to pay for the support workers I need to live independently in my home.”

But she also argues that it has not lived up to expectations. The activists who fought for reform for many years focused on three principles: that a new scheme had to be based on rights; that those with disability should be able to decide themselves the supports they need; and that these supports should enable them to participate on an equal basis in economic, social and cultural life.

The NDIS’s design means it delivers these goals in theory but compromises them in practice.

Many have been unable to exercise choice or real management of their supports, Lee writes. She describes the process of drawing up an NDIS plan as “notoriously disempowering,” with processes hard to navigate and the planners who assist likely to change every year.

On one occasion she was told that her funding would be reduced as she became better or more independent, in line with the goals of the NDIS. Lee explained that her condition was progressive and she was likely to need more supports in the future rather than fewer. “You’re talking to a real person,” she told her planner, “not someone who has to fit into one of your boxes.” Her plan was reduced anyway.

The market-based approach that underlies the NDIS and the light-touch regulation that accompanies it means the government and the National Disability Insurance Agency, or NDIA, which administers the scheme, often have little knowledge of the scheme’s impact on individuals. Lee cites cases of private providers refusing to take on people who display challenging behaviours — people who have no government service to fall back on.

Her critique echoes that of Mark Considine, whose book The Careless State cites numerous examples of the failure of Australia’s privatised and deregulated social policy system, including the NDIS. Rather than competition among private providers making services cheaper and better, she writes, the opposite is the case. “Once they know you are on the NDIS, many providers will charge the maximum rate allowable under the scheme.”

The scheme also has had perverse effects, such as the assumption by society that it means those with a disability always have their own help. Flying to Byron Bay for the writers’ festival, where she would meet a support worker, Lee decided not to arrange for a separate support worker on the flight, which she estimated would have involved about fourteen hours of paid time, including the flight back.

But she could find only one airline that would allow her to travel alone. At security, where in the past staff had always helped her, she was asked where her carer was and had to rely on a friendly woman in the queue to lift her bag on to the belt. She was asked the same question at the boarding gate and by the flight attendant. “The NDIS has helped to minimise the individual effects of my condition but it has not helped make society more accessible,” writes Lee.

Nor has it led to a more inclusive society in other respects, a point also highlighted by last week’s report of the disability royal commission. Lee explained to her long-time friend Frida, who had a mental health condition, how the NDIS might be able to help her get back to work. “Yeah sure, but what can they do if no one wants to give me a job?” Frida replied. A new client rejected Lee, who works as a lawyer, as soon as he saw her. “He told the manager that he needed a lawyer who would look the part in court.”

According to the NDIA, 20 per cent of NDIS participants had a job in 2020, with another 31 per cent saying they were unemployed but wanted work. “We are disabled by society as well as by our bodies,” writes Lee.

She charts her journey from when she was young and “disability was something I had to deny and overcome” to acceptance: “You can accept your disability. What is not acceptable is when the world treats you as second class and excludes you because of it.”

As a young woman, her fear of becoming increasingly disabled and dependent drove her to travel widely in Europe and Africa alone and without support. “I was spurred on to experience everything, not miss out, never miss out, no matter how hard it was. Paradoxically, by experiencing my own helplessness, I was able to discover my inherent worth and power.”

Many of the shortcomings mentioned by Lee have been acknowledged by Bill Shorten, the minister responsible for the NDIS. The review he has commissioned is due to report by the end of October. Lee is hopeful. “The tide is turning,” she writes. •

Lifeboat: Disability, Humanity and the NDIS
By Micheline Lee | Quarterly Essay | Black Inc. | $27.99 | 144 pages

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The way we talk about Google has also changed, reflecting a wider reassessment of the costs and benefits of our connected lives. In its earlier days, Google Search was enthusiastically embraced as an ingenious tool that democratised knowledge and saved human labour. Today, Google’s many services are more popular than ever, though Google Search is the subject of a major antitrust case in the United States, and governments around the world want to regulate digital services and AI.

In Power and Progress, Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson take the project of critical reappraisal further. Their survey of the thousand-year entanglement of technology and power is a tour de force, sketching technology’s political economy across a broad historical canvas. They chart the causes and symptoms of our contemporary digital malaise, drawing on a growing volume of journalism and scholarship, political economy’s long tradition of analysing “the machine question,” and the work of extraordinary earlier American technologists, notably the cyberneticist Norbert Wiener, the network visionary J.C.R. Licklider, and the engineer Douglas Engelbart.

If, as Acemoglu and Johnson argue, our digital economy is characterised by mass surveillance, increasing inequality and destructive floods of misinformation, then the signal moments from the past will inevitably look different. From this angle, the great significance of Google Search was its integration with online advertising, opening up the path to Facebook and a panoply of greater evils.

The strengths of Power and Progress lie in the connections it makes between the deficiencies of current technology and the longer story of innovation and economic inequality. History offers many opportunities to debunk our nineteenth-century optimism in technology as a solution, and to puncture our overconfidence in the judgement of technology leaders.

A particular target is the idea that successful innovations produce economy-wide benefits by making workers more productive, leading to increased wages and higher living standards generally. The theory fails to capture a good deal of historical experience. The impact of new agricultural technologies during the Middle Ages provides a telling example. Between 1000 and 1300, a series of innovations in water mills, windmills, ploughs and fertiliser roughly doubled yields in England per hectare. But rather than leading to higher incomes for most people, living standards appear to have declined, with increases in taxation and working hours, widespread malnutrition, a series of famines and then the Black Death. Average life expectancy may have declined to just twenty-five years at birth.

The cities grew, but most of the surplus generated by improved agriculture was captured by the church and its extensive hierarchy. A religious building boom proceeded on spectacular lines. Vast amounts were spent on hugely expensive cathedrals and tax-exempt monasteries: the same places, as Acemoglu and Johnson note, that tourists now cherish for their devotion to learning and production of fine beer. The fact that better technology didn’t lead to higher wages reflects the institutional context: a coercive labour market combined with control of the mills enabled landowners to increase working hours, leaving labourers with less time to raise their own crops, and therefore reduced incomes.

If medieval cathedrals give rise to scepticism about the benefits of tech, it follows that we should think more carefully about the kinds of technologies we want. Without that attention, what the authors call “so-so automation” proliferates, reducing employment while creating no great benefit to consumers. The self-checkout systems in our supermarkets today are a case in point: these machines simply shift the work of scanning items from cashiers to customers. Fewer cashiers are employed, but without any productivity gain. The machines frequently fail, requiring frequent human intervention. Food doesn’t get any cheaper.

The issue then is not how or whether any given technology generates economic growth, but which conditions make possible innovations that create shared prosperity. The recent past provides examples of societies managing large-scale technological change reasonably well. The postwar period of sustained high growth and “good jobs” (for some but not all) had three important features: the powers of employers were sometimes matched by unions; the new industrial technologies of mass production automated tasks in ways that also created jobs; and progressive taxation enabled governments to build social security, education and health systems that improved overall living standards.

For technology to work for everyone, the forces that can temper the powers of corporations — effective regulators, labour and consumer organisations, a robust and independent media — play an essential role. The media are especially important in shaping narratives of innovation and technical possibility. Our most visible technology heroes need not always be move-fast-and-break-things entrepreneurs.

Finally, public policy can help redirect innovation efforts away from a focus on automation, data collection and job displacement towards applications that productively expand human skills. Technologies are often malleable: they can frequently be used for many purposes.

Acemoglu and Johnson would like us to divert all that frothy attention on AI to what they call machine usefulness, focused on improving human productivity, giving people better information on which to base decisions, supporting new kinds of work, and enabling the creation of new platforms for cooperation and coordination: a course they see as far preferable to a universal basic income.

Kenya’s famous M-PESA, introduced in 2007, is one of many examples, offering cheap and convenient banking using basic mobile phones. On a larger scale, the web is also a human-oriented technology because its application of hypertext is ultimately a tool for expanding access to information and knowledge. Acemoglu and Johnson concede that the idea at the heart of Google Search can also be understood in this way: a mechanism that works well for humans because it is constantly reconfiguring itself in response to human queries.

The authors’ ideas for positive policy interventions can usefully be read alongside those of the Australian economists Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, whose 2019 book Innovation + Equality remains less used than it should be.

One way to read Power and Progress is as a historically informed guidebook for the conflicts of our time — in the courts, where Lina Khan’s Federal Trade Commission has launched far-reaching cases against Google and Amazon, in the new regulatory systems emerging in the European Union, Canada and elsewhere, and in the wave of industrial actions taken by screen industry writers and auto workers in the United States.

In Australia, we are also at a point where governments will soon make decisions about the kinds of technology we want to support or constrain. We can have no certainty about the outcomes of any of this, but Acemoglu and Johnson argue that such conflicts are both necessary and potentially productive. They diverge here from one of the main currents of liberal technology critique: where writers like Carl Benedikt Frey, whose The Technology Trap (2019) covers some of the same terrain, see redistributive policies as necessary for managing the consequences of automation, Acemoglu and Johnson point to the positive potential of political and industrial conflict for reordering technological agendas. They want to place more emphasis on our capacity to choose the directions technology may take.

The recently concluded Hollywood writers’ strike offers an intriguing example. The key point is that the screen writers didn’t oppose the use of generative AIs such as ChatGTP in screenwriting. Instead they secured an agreement that such AIs can’t be recognised as writers and that a studio may not require the use of an AI. If a studio uses an AI to generate a draft script that it then provides to a writer, the credit or payment to the writer will be the same as if the writer had produced the draft entirely themselves; and a writer may use an AI with the permission of the studio without reducing their credit or payment.

The settlement clearly foreshadows the extensive use of generative AIs in the screen industries while offering a share of the benefits to writers. The critical point, as some reports have noted, may be that the revenue-sharing deal with writers preserves the intellectual property interests of the studios, since works created by an AI may not be copyrightable.

Meanwhile, AI raises other important issues about automation, quite apart from the focus on work. When we are relying on machines to make or inform decisions, we are also moving into the domain of institutions, with the obvious risk that existing technology-specific laws, procedures and controls can be bypassed, intentionally or otherwise. This, after all, was what robodebt did with a very simple automated system. In the absence of wide-ranging institutional adaptation and innovation, more complex modes of automation will pose greater risks.

More generally, the authors’ framing of the “AI illusion” appears to be premature. Power and Progress was clearly substantially completed before the appearance of the most recent versions of ChatGPT. Accustomed as we are to AI’s many failures to match its promises, we should now be considering the surprising capabilities and broad implications of large language models. As Acemoglu and Johnson would insist, if generative AI does turn out to be as powerful as many believe, then it will necessarily be capable of far more than “so-so” automation. •

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity
By Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson | Basic Books | $34.99 | 546 pages

The post Machine questions appeared first on Inside Story.

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

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Two high-rating television series devoted to the volatile lives of celebrity newsreaders show how the role has transformed. Morning Wars (Apple Plus) presents the contemporary newsroom as a chaotic epicentre through which producers, presenters, assistants, camera operators, technicians and guests make rapid transit as they attempt to head off a breaking story and give it their own spin.

ABC TV’s The Newsreader takes us back to the less frenetic media world of the 1980s, but acceleration is already a central theme, with presenters Helen Norville (Anna Torv) and Dale Jennings (Sam Reid) constantly running to front the camera as the latest rapidly unfolding story threatens to leave them in its wake.

It’s instructive to watch the two series in tandem. As a symbolic indicator of the growing stature of the presenter in the twenty-first century, the desk in Morning Wars has grown to absurd proportions, and the high voltage personalities who preside over it exercise dynamic influence. Promoted as celebrities in their own right, they become the brand that sells the news and know that their own survival is at stake in the cycle of evolving crises.

As the third season opens, the network, UBA, is the target of a takeover bid by maverick tycoon Paul Marks, whose love of high-speed vehicles — from cars to space rockets — evokes obvious associations. Played by Jon Hamm, he’s nicely matched with Billy Crudup as Cory Ellison, UBA’s own corporate Machiavel. Playing squash together, they plan a publicity stunt in which one of the star presenters, either Alex Levy (Jennifer Anniston) or Bradley Jackson (Reese Witherspoon), will take a trip in the space shuttle, live to air.

Each of these four principals has a different kind of leverage in the power play. What unites them is a determination to upstage any real-world news with their own storylines. It’s a risky enterprise for each of them, subject to sabotage by the others and by external players. When a hacker takes the network down mid-show and then threatens to release a cache of embarrassing communications, strategic realignments happen at lightning speed.

Some of these moves produce compelling items for the daily broadcast. The chair of the network’s board, Cybil Richards (Holland Taylor), is outed for a racist text and forced to do a mea culpa interview with the target of the slur, new presenter Chris Hunter (Nicole Beharie). In a ruthless encounter, both parties vie for new levels of frankness: Richards through candour and contrition, Hunter to force a reckoning for a whole suite of offences on the part of management.

The scene makes compelling viewing, not least for the culturally diverse staff gathered in the studio, whose reactions are shown in close-up. Perhaps they’re relishing it a bit too much, and there will be other kinds of repercussions. Until someone fronts the camera to give the wheel another spin, what happens next is anyone’s guess.

The Newsreader portrays a contrasting world in which television reporters are still chasing actual events rather than creating a hyperreality revolving around themselves. Compared to its US counterpart, the Australian series is a scaled-down production, reflecting the simpler enterprise of current affairs reporting at the time as well as the constrained budgets of today’s Australian producers.

The cast is smaller but strong, and director Emma Freeman makes the most of a talent pool that includes — as well as Torv and Reid in suitably charismatic lead roles — William McInnes as the irascible boss and Robert Taylor as the problematic eminence grise who has been forced to cede the anchor role to the next generation but is looking for payback. Michelle Lim Davidson suppresses her comic talent to play an earnest young producer crossing the cultural divide from a migrant family to the evolving multicultural environment of the television business.

Well-researched storylines draw on landmark events, including the July 1987 federal election, Melbourne’s Hoddle Street shooting a month later, the impending break-up of Charles and Diana, and the 1988 bicentenary. The ABC has released a weekly podcast hosted by Leigh Sales and Lisa Millar detailing the background to these events. Interviews with journalists involved are correlated with perspectives from members of the cast and production team.

In the second podcast, journalist Steve Carey, who was part of the original media response to the Hoddle Street massacre, recalls the experience as one of utter chaos, in which the reporter was just one more figure on the scene, as confused a witness as anyone else. On-screen, writer Kim Ho effectively grounds the episode in the detail of recollections such as Carey’s, while spinning a personal story for Norville, who makes a spontaneous decision about coverage of the fatalities just as the families are receiving the shock. The interwoven lines of tension make for a tightly constructed script.

For all its relatively modest production values, The Newsreader at its best gains dramatic traction of a kind that eludes Morning Wars, where the constant borderline hysteria palls and the ethos of hyperreality lacks genuine urgency.

So what is it that fascinates us about the news presenter as a public figure? Following their interview with Anna Torv, Sales and Millar recall Jana Wendt as a defining presence: the glamour, the command of the medium and the capacity to identify the running edge of a story.

But things have changed since Wendt’s prime years on 60 Minutes (1982–87) and hosting A Current Affair (1987–92). Judging from social media, the public are more frustrated than fascinated by those who tell the stories that make news. No doubt in an attempt to tackle this problem, Sales has compiled a collection of some thirty interviews with colleagues in television journalism, inviting them to reflect on the particular skills and qualities called for in their profession.

Storytellers features such distinguished contributors as Chris Reason, Marian Wilkinson, Robert Penfold, Stan Grant and Niki Savva beside younger talents who offer insights into newer problems and challenges facing reporters and presenters. Disability reporter Nas Campanella talks of the importance of voice quality in creating an empathic relationship with viewers. Bridget Brennan, who has become the ABC’s Indigenous affairs editor after a period as Europe correspondent, focuses on the selection and genesis of stories.

The interviews are brief, occasionally revealing, but not probing; together they seem too random an assemblage to offer any overarching perspectives. If there is a consistent theme that threads through the collection, it is the nervous challenge of holding the story together in a wide range of entirely unpredictable situations. As Lisa Millar says, “You never know what might happen.” •

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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.

ANDREW FORD: You once told me the piano was the centre of your musical universe. This suggests that being alone at the piano is where everything starts. Does it?

PAUL GRABOWSKY: Every musician would regard their instrument as the centre of their musical universe, but there’s an additional philosophical proposition behind that to do with what the actual relationship is between playing music and life more generally. What I’ve said many times over the years is “the piano never lies,” by which I mean that the piano, as beautiful as it is, is ultimately a large, complicated piece of essentially nineteenth-century technology, utterly mute, even useless, until it becomes the means of expression for a player. It will quickly reveal to the player where they are at, no quarter given. So that’s been my relationship with the piano: my lover, my scold. Does everything start there? Yes, because my musical language was developed at the piano, and informs everything I make, whether orchestral music, which has lately taken up a lot of my time, or anything else, down to solo piano music per se.

AF: During the pandemic, there were two things I genuinely looked forward to. One was Tim Stevens’s daily “quarantune,” the other your Friday night offering from the piano — and it was an offering, a sharing, a weekly gift. What did you get out of that?

PG: The lockdowns were famously severe in Melbourne. Our communal patience was tested to its limits. There were no gigs for quite a while, but luckily we had the ability to communicate via other means. I’ve long harboured the belief that music is forged out of the mysterious moment of exchange between player and listener; that until that exchange occurs there is no “music,” just latency, intent. To be able to play on those Fridays gave me something to look forward to, a virtual happy hour, which we would prepare for in the home with nice food and drinks, to create a sense of occasion. I did it for the sake of my own morale initially. Just before the first wave of Covid really hit, I had heart surgery, so I was convalescing, and the playing helped greatly. It was only later that I started to realise that a lot more people were listening in than I’d realised, and from all over the place. Now I know that it helped other people find their Fridays, locate themselves within the temporal wasteland, join in the occasion, and I am deeply grateful to have been able to make even a small difference.

AF: You’ve been a collaborator from the start — in trios, leading bands, working with singers — but some of your most surprising and memorable collaborators have been from outside jazz. Do you suddenly think, “This might work”? And how do you know?

PG: I think the word “jazz” has been something of a shibboleth for me. I deeply love the music, and still regard it as describing some of the greatest art produced in the twentieth century, but I’ve felt more drawn to the processes that arrive at certain outcomes than the notes that define what we might call “style.” This was the philosophy behind the Australian Art Orchestra from its beginnings in the early 1990s, that collaborations involving the creative application of improvisatory paradigms, including (but not exclusively) jazz, could lead to fascinating and meaningful outcomes.

A lot of the thinking here has been influenced by my love for the art of Ornette Coleman, where what he called “harmolodics” — and I call “relationality” — is the driving principle of both the music and everything that informs it. This thinking inspired early AAO projects (Ringing the Bell Backwards, Passion, Into the Fire, Sita) and then found its most satisfying outcomes in collaborations with Uncle Archie Roach and Aunty Ruby Hunter (Ruby), and with the Young Wägiluk Group (Crossing Roper Bar). So it has been relatively straightforward to apply this idea of relationality to one-on-one projects with singers (Vince Jones, Kate Ceberano, Paul Kelly, Emma Donovan, Ngaiire, Joe Camilleri, etc.), as I come to them with an open mind, not trying to impose “jazz” onto their songs, but simply to make music together.

AF: The collaboration that has persisted longest is the deep engagement you and other improvising colleagues have had with the songmen of Ngukurr in Southeast Arnhem Land, which I think started with Crossing Roper Bar. How did that come about?

PG: For years I wanted to connect with the oldest musical tradition on the planet. It confused me that Australians were quick to see the unique qualities of the visual art of our First Peoples, even adorning our passenger jets with their designs, but seemed oblivious to their music, other than perhaps knowing what a didgeridoo looks like. Of course it’s not easy to have access to language and culture-based First Australians; the locations are often difficult to get to, and just being there isn’t necessarily going to get you very far. I have a friend, Steve Teakle, who was working with various remote communities in the Territory at the time, and he took me to Ngukkur on the Roper River in Southeast Arnhem Land, as he felt sure that the ceremonial songmen there would be happy to talk. Within minutes of arriving there I met Benjamin and Roy Wilfred, and they were singing the Djawulparra manikay (song cycles) to me. It was utterly overwhelming. Nothing had prepared me for the sheer visceral power of this music. That was in 2004 and I haven’t stopped loving the music and its makers and regarding them as one of the world’s great artistic treasures.

AF: You’ve worked with Daniel and David Wilfred on a number of projects. How do you work together?

PG: The willingness of the Wilfreds to collaborate was there right from the beginning, but it took me years to understand the reasons why these collaborations were second nature to them. It had to do with a belief system that expresses the interconnectedness of all things, including time and space, and that these manikay are expressions of that interconnectedness, that everything that happens within the ceremonial framework of the manikay is the manikay, not some form of provocation. The generous spirit of sharing, of commonality of being, that lies at the heart of this form is the gift we have been offered by our First Peoples since colonisation began, but the colonisers have largely chosen to ignore it.

The latest iteration of the relationship is a project called Raki. This word means several things, including the “bush string” used to make dilly-bags for food; it also signifies “law” in the sense of being the string that binds people together, and conveys knowledge and protection across country and between different peoples. Daniel Wilfred leads the project, together with Peter Knight on trumpet and electronics and me on piano. Daniel explains the significance of the word, and conveys the rhythmic modes played on the bilma (clapsticks). I have to perform some of the yidaki (didgeridoo) functions, and he is very insistent that this is done with the necessary degree of intensity and accuracy. In manikay the yidaki functions as a drum, not as a drone, which is the way it is played in some contemporary practice. The yidaki rhythmic patterns in manikay are very complex, and tightly related to the melodies.

The music follows the start/stop form of manikay: tight bursts of great intensity, followed by what Daniel would call “head song,” which takes the form of a spacious improvisation that often invokes locations and ancestors, roaming through space and time and allowing for freewheeling interaction across the trio until the commencement of the next section.

AF: You mentioned visual art before. There have been some objections in non-Indigenous visual art circles about “traditional” art by First Nations artists turning up in “contemporary” shows. I imagine that to you, as a collaborating musician, such a distinction is moot, but I wonder if you think about it at all — I mean from a philosophical point of view? Wynton Marsalis once insisted that all jazz is contemporary because it’s made in the present and never the same twice. Is it the same with all traditional music?

PG: It seems to me the critique around “traditional” versus “contemporary” when it comes to art is a furphy when we’re talking about the world’s oldest living culture. Was Emily Kngwarreye a “traditional” artist? Rover Thomas? Surely not in a precolonial sense. These ancient practices adjust to changing times and conditions without the teleological overlay of “modernism” playing any role. The same is true of manikay. Songs can be about ancestor creator-figures, but can equally be about smoking, drinking and going fishing (in a powered vessel).

Blues music makes a reasonable point of comparison. When was it ever “traditional”? We use the same term applied to New Orleans–style jazz, too, and this is I guess what Wynton means about all jazz being “contemporary.” My projects with the Wilfreds don’t comply with any need to justify their contemporaneity, as they express a timeless belief system within a contemporary collaborative paradigm.

AF: What do you gain from this collaboration as a musician and — if you can make such a distinction — personally?

PG: As suggested above, my work with First Peoples has been quite literally life-changing. I mentioned the influence of Ornette Coleman’s harmolodics to my understanding of musical processes, and this idea of relationality has been clearly revealed to me in the practice of manikay and more generally in my interactions with the Wilfreds. I must add that my work with Uncle Archie Roach was equally profound, and that the generosity of spirit of which manikay is such an eloquent expression was also evident in every word, sung or spoken, by the great Uncle Archie Roach and by Aunty Ruby Hunter.

This is my lived experience of working with our First Peoples, and I wish that every Australian could share in that love. This is why the Voice means so much to me. We as a nation have not listened to our First Peoples, and their right to an advisory body collecting information and making it readily available to governments as they come and go should be enshrined in, and protected by, our Constitution.

AF: This might be hard to answer, but what do you think you offer someone like Daniel Wilfred? Do you think you’ve changed him musically?

PG: It’s not that hard to answer. Like every great artist, Daniel sees possibilities arising out of collaborations that may not have otherwise occurred to him. He sometimes says that his grandfather, the great songman and painter Djambu Barra Barra, comes to him in dreams and gives him new songs. He introduces these into projects like Raki or the work he has done with Peter Knight’s Hand to Earth project.

Manikay is a living, dynamic art form, and while its roots lead deep into the well of time, it remains vibrant, new and exciting in many projects emerging in contemporary Australia. I don’t expect Daniel to gradually reinvent himself as another type of singer, but I do know that he is contributing to the ongoing relevance of the world’s oldest form of song. •

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The Oxford English Dictionary was partly based on these assumptions. But the idea didn’t come out of nowhere. In Germany, the brothers Grimm (yes, they of the fairy tales) had embarked on a German dictionary that proved the exemplar. Applying comparative linguistics, it was they who pioneered the descriptive method of defining and tracing a word’s meaning across time — and who also, more practically, devised the crowdsourcing techniques and everyday policies and practices adopted by the OED editors.

Arising from a proposal made to the London Philological Society, the dictionary took some time to attach itself to Oxford. But in practice — rather like the University of Melbourne and Meanjin — Oxford was reluctant to fully endorse the project.

James Murray, whose long editorship from 1879 to 1915 was crucial, was never embraced by the establishment. He was underpaid, given a grant by the university which (unrevised) had to cover expenses as well as provide him with a salary. Indicatively, the dictionary operated not from an office amid the dreaming spires, but from a large tin shed — “the Scriptorium” — built by Murray in his own backyard. It was often so cold that staff working there had to wrap old newspapers around their legs.

In Oxford Murray was an outsider: a Scot who left school at fourteen, an agnostic and a liberal moving among Tory Anglicans — and without benefit of the usual social props, for he was a teetotaller and non-smoker. Beyond concerns with his large family — often recruited to dictionary work — Murray applied himself totally to the great project.

When Sarah Ogilvie happened upon Murray’s (undisturbed) address book, she realised she had found the key to how the dictionary worked. Here all the contributors were listed — the people who read books (usually sent to them) and recorded strange words, with their context, on standard slips that were then sent back to Oxford. (So many arrived that the post office put a special pillar box outside Murray’s house.) Often they read in areas totally disjunctive from their professional concerns; they were complemented by specialists who were consulted as the need arose. Staff then organised the citations according to shades of meaning, Murray generally providing the definitions.

Ogilvie soon found that a lot of the readers were outsiders too. “The OED,” she writes in The Dictionary People, “was a project that attracted those on the edges of academia, those who aspired to be part of an intellectual world from which they felt excluded.” And some had been, in the most absolute sense. One was Dr Minor (whose story has been told by Simon Winchester in The Surgeon of Crowthorne), locked away as a murderer in an institution for the criminally insane. Others too had mental problems; obsessionals were attracted to such projects.

But many were also progressives; a number of the women were suffragists — less militant than the suffragettes — while the men were sometimes rationalists or vegetarians. One contributor, the acclaimed writer of verse dramas Michael Field, was in fact a lesbian couple, doubling their everyday roles as aunt and niece. But conventional families were also involved: reading for the dictionary around the fireside could be a wholesome collective enterprise.

As one might expect, there was a contingent of vicars. But the army of readers included a great variety of people, many of whose stories are briefly told. Perhaps the most extraordinary was Sir John Richardson, a survivor of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated polar expedition, who had been reduced to cannibalism and also killed a man. Then there was Eleanor Marx, Karl’s daughter, unsatisfactory from the dictionary’s point of view but a notable translator and political activist. Contributions also came from Henry Spencer Ashbee, who had built up the world’s largest collection of pornography, an embarrassment to the British Museum when he left it to them. And so the list could go on — although it includes few novelists.

But it did extend across the world — to places as different as Jamaica, China and Madagascar. Particularly significant was a node in Melbourne, where E.E. Morris, building on a network of well-placed English immigrants, gathered so many words that he was prompted to write a special Dictionary of Austral English.

Yet the OED, while both an exercise in soft power and a kind of cultural stocktaking, was not overtly imperial. This can be seen in its attitude to America, where it enjoyed huge support — the New York Times publicised the venture and American academics were always helpful. (English ones were rather frosty.) For his part Murray maintained that Americanisms “must be admitted on the same terms as our own words.” This involved recurrent tussles with the Delegates of OUP. He was right: later H.L. Mencken pointed out that in the eighteenth century, the fastidious had bridled at the transatlantic crossing of such words as “talented,” “reliable” and “lengthy.”

Murray was interested in local, indigenous words that were in common use among English-speakers. British imperialism and interaction across the world was so extensive, and English’s origins so mixed, that the language is said to contain almost three times as many words as French. This partly explains the size of the dictionary, with its ten walloping volumes, and the fact that it wasn’t completed till 1928.

A number of books have been published about the dictionary. There’s Peter Gilliver’s The Making of the Oxford English Dictionary and the acclaimed biography of Murray written by his granddaughter, Caught in the Web of Words. But the unique attribute of this one is that it is focused on the foot soldiers of the enterprise, and the contribution they made.

In the last few pages of the book, Ogilvie reveals that she is from Brisbane, and had been fascinated by the slips that arrived in Oxford from a Mr Collier, bundled together in old cereal packets. He too was from Brisbane, and so on a return visit she sought him out. A bachelor and a shorts-and-T-shirt man, he was capable of casting off his clothes and running nude through suburban streets in the dead of night.

Since Collier had been so assiduous — sending 100,000 slips — she raised the possibility of his being flown to Oxford. “No way,” he said; “imagine all the Courier-Mails waiting for me on my return.” Indeed, as she points out, the citations from the Courier-Mail exceed those from Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot or the Book of Common Prayer.

In his own distinct way, Collier fitted what Ogilvie would come to see as the classic contributor template: an autodidact, an isolate with strange ways, but hell-bent on getting a word into the dictionary. She took steps to have him awarded a gong for services to the Australian language, but unfortunately he died too soon. Ogilvie’s interest in contributors broadened then, and this book is the happy result. •

The Dictionary People: The Unsung Heroes Who Created the Oxford English Dictionary
By Sarah Ogilvie | Penguin Random House | $35 | 368 pages

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Now their voices can be heard, clearly and sometimes passionately, in journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s A Stranger in Your Own City, published this year to coincide with the invasion’s twentieth anniversary. This is a compelling, challenging, disturbing and ultimately illuminating account of what happened to the people of Iraq and their homeland over the two decades after they were invaded and conquered. It exposes the ignorance and demolishes the myths and false assumptions of many Western policymakers, think-tank analysts, pundits and correspondents — myths that Howard clung to in his speech.

Abdul-Ahad grew up under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein, an absurdly quintessential Third World tyrant. It was a time of futile and costly wars with Iran and Kuwait and the West, of repression, poverty and hardship exacerbated by foreign sanctions. It was a period that made many Iraqis optimistic that the Americans would bring change.

If Abdul-Ahad — an architect and army deserter at the time — shared that optimism, it quickly faded on the day American tanks rumbled into Baghdad in April 2003. He watched with dismay as US marines pulled down a statue of Saddam one of them had draped in the American flag. He had thought the facade of liberation would last at least a day, “but no, with all the arrogance of every occupying soldier throughout history, [the marine] covered the face of the defeated dictator with the flag of his victorious nation; briefly, but long enough to seal the fate of the invasion in the eyes of many.”

The next day, after a chance meeting with a correspondent from the Guardian, Abdul-Ahad was hired as a fixer and translator and eventually a reporter — in which job he embarked on a journey through a country he increasingly couldn’t recognise, a devastated human and physical landscape of unspeakable brutality, destruction, indignity and corruption. He felt like a stranger in a foreign land.

Whatever optimism his fellow Iraqis felt when the Americans arrived soon dissolved, too, eroded by the occupiers’ sheer inefficiency and shattered by the first car bombing. Abdul-Ahad witnessed and reported on many such atrocities in the coming years, so many that “they are all welded in my head into one newsreel of charred human remains mixed with shreds of tyres and crumpled debris.”

Instead of peace, the US occupation unleashed something terrible, imposing a political system that gave power and the spoils of office, along sectarian and ethnic lines, to a “coalition of corrupt, imbecilic religious warlords to rule the country for the next twenty years and create one of the most corrupt nations on earth.”

Militias — “hundreds of cells with hundreds of motives” — emerged soon after the invasion. Many were criminal gangs; others sought simply to protect their neighbourhoods; still others were nationalists humiliated by foreign occupation. Later came Iraqi and foreign jihadis chasing fanatical dreams of a pure Islamic state. The occupation ultimately transformed what had been a fissure between Shias and Sunnis into an abyss.

In Baghdad and elsewhere, men with guns controlled every aspect of life, even as the United States and its allies deluded themselves they were bringing democratic progress. A year after the invasion, “people started uttering the unthinkable, that maybe life under Saddam was better.”

Abdul-Ahad takes his readers through the bomb-shattered suburbs, shrines and markets of Iraqi cities and towns, across barricades and streets awash with sewage, to meet ordinary Iraqis — teachers, doctors, soldiers, refugees. With a reporter’s eye for detail and ear for a telling quote, he brings us their faces and voices. His writing is wry at times, sometimes caustic, usually sensitive but not sentimental.

A bridegroom in a mixed Sunni–Shia marriage recounts his wedding day — a perilous military-style operation to get the wedding party across militia checkpoints — and describes “my bride and her relatives yellow with fear.”

We meet a schoolteacher, a man with a cheerful face struggling in a collapsed education system, who insists to his students that Iraq is not a sectarian country, and who limps to and from class, the result of having been shot three times because he spoke out against the clerics and urged his students not to join their militias.

We join a dreary queue at the passport office where fear and anxiety fill the air. A Christian man in his sixties, a teacher accompanied by his three daughters, insists the official writes his occupation in his passport. But there is no space for profession on the new passport form. The teacher insists his occupation be included because he wants a visa to go to Australia. Don’t worry, a man in the queue tells him, no country will give Iraqis a visa anyway. A big-bellied bureaucrat openly boasts that he takes bribes — “I only take $500” — to speed up the passport process.

In the cramped waiting room of a medical clinic, a gaunt psychiatrist with a soft reassuring voice describes how “the pressure, the war, the economic situation, fear, anxiety — all chip away at patients’ resistance.”

A Sunni militia commander, a middle-aged man with soft brown eyes, acknowledges having rejoiced when Saddam fell, but also having then joined the insurgency: “As time passed, and the occupation became more visible, patriotic feelings inside me grew greater and greater. Every time I saw the Americans patrolling our streets, I felt ashamed and humiliated.”

Abdul-Ahad takes us into the courtroom for Saddam’s trial, the former dictator slowly and deliberately entering the room, sighing and sitting down “with the air of one settling down to a day’s work.” We learn how, after his hanging, Saddam’s corpse was flown to the house where prime minister Nouri al-Maliki was celebrating his son’s wedding: “The grotesque pettiness of Iraq’s new masters ran rampant as the shroud was pulled back to allow guests to photograph the corpse.”

On a sweltering and humid day we go to a Baghdad morgue, where crowds of anxious relatives press against the fence to find and reclaim the bodies of family members. The morgue is stacked with corpses, mostly the victims of death squads, and there’s no room for the crowd to enter, so officials improvise a “hellish slideshow” on a computer monitor that families watch in silence as pictures of the mutilated dead flicker on the screen.

Two years after the invasion, Iraq was sliding towards civil war, a conflict more complex than the West’s binary narrative of Sunni versus Shia. As Abdul-Ahad points out, this war included “a wide range of localised schisms and fault lines, feuds based on class or geography or long-dormant tribal feuds.”

These rifts were exacerbated by the Americans, who, “like conquerors, aimed to simplify their occupation by breaking it into components,” using Shias to fight Sunni insurgents, and in the process entrenching and exacerbating sectarianism.

Six years after the invasion, Maliki had concentrated unaccountable power through patronage, shadowy intelligence services and all-encompassing corruption. Security officers took bribes from families to release their sons from detention and torture, and then sometimes killed them anyway.

By the invasion’s tenth anniversary, Islamist jihadis had entered this ghastly scene, seeking to impose an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islam not only in Iraq but in Syria and across the Middle East. Abdul-Ahad travelled to Syria to meet the groups who called themselves ISIS and were consolidating their power. He met an ISIS commander who spoke of his dreams of a borderless Islamic state: “I can’t remember much else of what he said in the meeting because I was terrified and trembling with fear.”

By the middle of the following year, ISIS had swept into western Iraq and on to Mosul, Iraq’s second city, where Maliki’s “brave new army” collapsed, partly out of a justified fear of the ISIS fanatics and partly because all-pervading corruption had eaten out its heart. Recruits who had paid to be enlisted to escape lives of dismal poverty found their wages stolen by their officers. Non-existent “ghost soldiers” padded out the payroll.

When ISIS captured Mosul many welcomed their discipline, administrative efficiency and promise to restore basic services and end corruption. Instead, the extremists turned Mosul into a huge prison controlled with brutality and viciousness. “They brought terror into our hearts and inside our own homes,” said one resident. “I feared my neighbour, my brother and my son… They used to say Saddam’s regime was brutal. Well Saddam was a picnic compared to them.”

The brutality of ISIS prompted many men to join the army, which was supported by US air power. Abdul-Ahad joined these soldiers — young but old before their time; devoted to war yet cynical about their senior officers — as they fought to reclaim Mosul. They were brave and selfless, too, but also capable of the worst acts of barbaric cruelty.

Abdul-Ahad portrays them dispassionately, with gritty, graphic, courageous reporting. While his writing is clear and compelling, at times it is so confronting that it’s hard to read — as when he describes captured ISIS prisoners being tortured for no purpose “beyond the primordial imperative to exact pain and revenge and prove to the soldiers that they had defeated ISIS.”

Having humanised the people he encounters — victims and perpetrators alike — he then goes beyond his masterful on-the-ground reporting. Placing these human stories in a wider political and social context, he demolishes the myth that the quick military success of US forces was subsequently marred by ill-advised decisions and a lack of planning for the second phase of the US adventure — the occupation and handover. In his 2013 speech, Howard understated these failures as “problematic.”

That’s not how Abdul-Ahad sees it. He argues that the occupation was bound to fail not because of lack of planning but “because a nation can’t be bombed, humiliated and sanctioned, then bombed again, and then told to become a democracy. No amount of planning could have turned an illegal occupation into a liberation.”

A Stranger in Your Own City also debunks another central tenet of the pro-invasion narrative — that Iraq’s main religious sects are monoliths that had either uniformly supported and benefited from Saddam (the Sunnis) or uniformly opposed and suffered under him (the Shias). It’s another element of the narrative that Howard endorsed in his retrospective speech, declaring in coldly passive language that “it was inevitable that after Saddam had been toppled a degree of revenge would be exacted.”

Despite all that he has witnessed and Iraq has endured, Abdul-Ahad sees signs of hope in an outburst of popular dissent by euphoric young Iraqis in 2019, known as the Tishreen Uprising. While it failed to bring down the post-2003 system, it showed how young people led by secular activists recognised the US-bequeathed democracy to be a kleptocracy of fossilised hierarchies and archaic bureaucratic rules, with a security system of violence, torture and killings. The Tishreen protesters saw themselves as victims of a “terrible con perpetrated by those professing to defend them and their sect against the ‘other’.”

“Tishreen showed the power of the people when not cowed by sectarian fears,” Abdul-Ahad writes, “and indicates that the post-2003 state can no longer satisfy its own people.” He concludes that the failure of Iraq’s leaders to heed the warnings of Tishreen will lead to their demise. •

A Stranger in Your Own City: Travels in the Middle East’s Long War
By Ghaith Abdul-Ahad | Hutchinson Heinemann | $59.99 | 480 pages

The post An invasion’s long shadow appeared first on Inside Story.

All right, enough gush; what is going on here? Like last month’s Driving Madeleine but even more so, Past Lives has little to do with the conventions of, say, classic Hollywood cinema, in which an orchestrated collection of cause-and-effect-related events lead to a gratifying closure, whether of crime resolved or romance clinched. Instead, it calls on viewers’ powers of observation, their openness to the circumstances that create relationships and can interrupt them, and shows how, despite separation, the main characters retain — and wish to retain — indelible memories of what that past meant and how the present might deal with it.

Celine Song, director and screenwriter of this South Korean/US production, has also had a career as a playwright, and the film’s meaning is conveyed for much of its length by the placement of its key figures and what their faces reveal. But the film is not the least stagey and never becomes a talkfest, opting instead for a quiet realism.

Song was born in South Korea and moved to Ontario with her parents when she was twelve. The only point of mentioning that biographical detail is that she seems to have drawn on aspects of her own background when planning Past Lives, her first feature, which uses both English and Korean dialogue.

Two youngsters at school in South Korea share a bond of serious affection, which is made clear very early when the boy, Hae Sung (Seung Min Yim), tries to comfort the girl, Na Young (Seung Ah Moon), as he tells her he has outdone her in an exam she had set her mind on. She is somewhat solemn, but there is a clear sense that they really matter to each other.

When her parents decide to emigrate — like Song’s, though in this case to New York — Na’s mother shows her understanding of the kids’ wish to go on a date when she explains that “if you leave something behind, you gain something too.” In their last moments together in Seoul we see Hae Sung looking bleak as Na talks of departing. They walk together until their homeward paths diverge, and there is nothing sentimental in this touching image.

Twelve years later, when they are both twenty-four-year-olds and their lives have necessarily taken different turns — his including a stint in the Korean army, hers as a writer in the United States — they make contact via social media. What will be crucial to their relationship and to the film’s concern with their lives, and indeed with life itself, is what happens when, a further twelve years later, Hae Sung (now played by Teo Yoo) flies into New York.

Na has now become Nora (Greta Lee), and the two of them spend time together, walking the streets and on a ferry with the Statue of Liberty in the background, before they fetch up at Nora’s apartment. He has had a failed relationship and she is married to Arthur (John Magaro), a likable Jewish man, also a writer, who greets Hae Sung with quiet affability.

This meeting is clearly not going to be a matter of wild pyrotechnics, but rather of three decent people pondering the past. Sitting in a bar with Arthur listening silently, Nora and Hae Sung come to terms in Korean with their meeting’s impact on their present lives. The scene recalls the image with which the film opens: Song seems to have sought to frame the film in a way that suggests its most important preoccupation is with how time can bear on a relationship without ever quite expelling what made it so potent and long-lasting.

In her treatment of such thematic concerns, Song never resorts to triangular romantic tensions or any other kind of melodramatic narrative predictabilities. Odd memory flashes recall something from the years between, but their purpose is essentially to capture a moment that has stayed in the characters’ minds rather than to advance the plot. What is most striking is the extent to which Song relies on her characters’ facial expressions.

Past Lives also makes eloquent use of moments of silence, allowing time for the protagonists (and the viewer) to reflect upon the turn these lives have taken. This technique is especially potent near the film’s end, when Nora (now absorbed into her American life) accompanies Hae Sung to find a cab, and when a moving and complex moment of silence leads to an embrace, the meaning of which is not spelt out.

The point about communication is subtly underlined when Nora first takes Hae Sung home to meet Arthur. As she talks to her husband in English and then passes on their remarks to Hae Sung in Korean, and vice versa, the film makes clear that the action will proceed with as little hurt as possible to any of the three. And in creating these characters Song has secured performances as near to perfection as one might imagine.

In fact, “performances” suggests a degree of artifice at odds with the sense of three people who seem to be living rather than acting. •

The post Life itself appeared first on Inside Story.

Personality is usually defined as an individual’s typical way of thinking, feeling and behaving. The word comes from the Latin persona, meaning “mask,” referring to what actors in classical theatre once wore to play different characters. We now think about personality as our psychological uniqueness, closely related to our sense of self or identity. It is usually described as a particular set of enduring characteristics or traits.

Every one of us has a distinctive combination of these traits. Personality researchers have identified as many as 4500 trait words in the English language, such as sociable, curious, callous, irresponsible, optimistic, immoral, warm and impulsive. But, you might ask, are there really so many ways people differ from one another? Or is there, perhaps, a limited number of basic personality types or dimensions amid all this complexity?

Sure enough, many attempts have been made to distil personality down to a more manageable number. The psychologist Raymond Cattell, a pioneer, applied sophisticated statistical techniques to construct a set of sixteen factors, each on a continuum stretching between two poles. Your position on each continuum, such as reserved–warm, shy–bold, relaxed–tense and serious–lively, summarises your unique personality. For example, someone might be very low on the reserved–warm factor, average on the shy–bold factor, well above average on the relaxed–tense factor, and slightly above average on the serious–lively factor.

Although boiling 4500 distinct words down to sixteen basic personality factors was an impressive feat, other psychologists found that number to still be unwieldy. Over time, researchers suggested that an even more basic set of five personality factors lurked beneath these sixteen, unimaginatively dubbed the Big Five: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness. This has become the pre-eminent model of personality structure, and as we shall see, it sheds light on the concept of personality disorder.

Once we appreciate that personality factors fall on a spectrum, we must grapple with the question of when a personality pattern crosses the boundary from normal to problematic, or even whether such a boundary exists at all. If we fall at the extreme end of one or more of the Big Five factors, we may tend to think, feel and behave in ways that cause problems in our everyday lives. For example, if we score extremely highly on neuroticism, we are likely to suffer storms of negative emotion and self-criticism that will adversely affect our close relationships, capacity to work and sense of general wellbeing.

If we are extremely low on agreeableness, on the other hand, we will tend to distrust and act in a hostile way towards others, leading to conflict with them and social rejection. If we are extremely low on extraversion, we are bound to be painfully shy and isolated, unable to reach out for the social connections that all of us need and incapable of developing interpersonal skills.

Mental health professionals adopt a pragmatic position in diagnosis: if we show longstanding inflexible, maladaptive patterns of functioning that adversely affect our lives in the spheres of family and general social relationships, work and recreation, then the possibility of our personality being dysfunctional arises.

We ourselves have reservations about the term “personality disorder” since it has often been used in a derogatory and stigmatising way. Mental health professionals are obliged to understand why people behave the way they do, and not to trivialise or dismiss their problems with a throwaway label. It is regrettable that these attitudes prevail given that people with personality problems are vulnerable to a full range of mental illnesses and are candidates for treatment, and stigma can affect their response to treatment.

Interest in types of problematic personalities goes back to ancient Greece. The Greek philosopher Theophrastus, in the fourth century BCE, described no fewer than twenty-nine troublesome types, including the flatterer, the grumbler, the boor, the buffoon, the tactless and the patron of rascals.

More objective and methodical efforts were only initiated in the early nineteenth century. People who showed a pattern of behaviour that suggested the absence of a conscience — that is, lying, stealing, assaulting, even killing, without remorse — were the first to be studied. In 1835, James Prichard, an English physician, postulated that what he called “moral insanity” might represent an illness, related to an aberrant moral centre in the brain. He included among its features “angry and malicious feelings, which arise without provocation” and elicit “the greatest disgust and abhorrence.” It later came to be called “psychopathic personality.”

It may strike you as questionable to define such behaviour as a psychiatric condition rather than as a moral failing or a criminal propensity. This thorny question has confronted both the mental health and the legal systems for many years: are people labelled as psychopathic responsible for their actions? That is, do people who kill without remorse deserve punishment or medical treatment?

The “psychopath” was soon joined by many other categories of problematic personality, culminating in the 1920s when a renowned German psychiatrist, Kurt Schneider, grasped the nettle and attempted to bring order to the chaos. Some of the ten personality disorders he identified have continued to be applied in the sphere of mental health, particularly by the American Psychiatric Association, which groups them into three clusters.

We examine each of the ten disorders in our new book, but for the moment let’s familiarise ourselves with the clusters and their underlying themes:

• Cluster A is marked by odd, eccentric behaviour: schizoid, paranoid and schizotypal personalities.

• Cluster B is typified by dramatic, explosive, emotional and erratic behaviour: histrionic, antisocial, narcissistic and borderline personalities.

• Cluster C is characterised by anxious and fearful behaviour: avoidant, dependent and obsessive-compulsive personalities.

Although these three clusters are helpful for getting a general sense of the personality patterns, the specific conditions remain somewhat controversial for a few reasons. They have no distinctive biological features, such as unique patterns of genes or brain chemistry, their causes remain unclear, the boundaries between them are blurred, and a person may satisfy the diagnostic criteria for more than a single disorder.

Because personality exists on a spectrum, determining whether someone’s personality problems are severe enough to warrant a diagnosis is often a source of disagreement among clinicians. How many personality disorders exist is hotly debated and will no doubt continue to remain controversial. Moreover, even in the modern era, some have already been ditched. The proposed “self-defeating personality disorder” is one example, removed on the grounds that it might be inappropriately applied to survivors of domestic violence.

Given this plethora of reservations, some influential systems for classifying personality problems, such as the World Health Organization’s ICD-11, have dispensed entirely with the idea of distinct personality disorders. Instead, personality disorder is diagnosed according to one or more problematic traits, and is deemed mild, moderate or severe depending on how much the traits disrupt a person’s life (being called, for example, “moderate personality disorder with detachment” or “severe personality disorder with negative affectivity and disinhibition”).

Although it is clear from our comments that distinguishing between personality disorders is a conundrum, mental health professionals need a workable framework. Such a system enables people whose personalities cause them difficulties to receive professional treatment.

Roughly one in ten adults, both men and women, meet the diagnostic criteria of a personality disorder. The rate jumps to one in three among those who have other psychiatric conditions, such as depression, anxiety and substance use. And about two-thirds of people with a personality disorder also have at least one of these conditions.

In the general population, the prevalence of specific personality disorders is around 1 to 2 per cent. Rates tend to decline with age, although middle-aged adults with a past diagnosis may continue to lead troubled lives. Although early signs of a problematic personality can be observed among children and adolescents, mental health professionals are reluctant to apply a diagnosis to them since these features may be a manifestation of another psychiatric disorder.

The factors that lead to personality disorders are complex and imperfectly understood. Studies of identical and fraternal twins point to a substantial genetic component. Interestingly, genetic influences overlap a great deal with the genetic factors underpinning the Big Five factors of (high) neuroticism, (low) agreeableness and (low) extraversion.

Biological factors besides genetic influences are also implicated. Although research findings tend to be inconsistent and hard to summarise, abnormalities in specific chemical messengers in the brain (neurotransmitters) and in the size or activity of certain brain regions have been detected.

Narcissistic individuals, for example, have been found to have smaller brain structures associated with empathy. And in those with an avoidant personality, the amygdala, a structure involved in fear and anxiety, appears to be more reactive in social situations. Problematic personality traits can also emerge after physical damage to the brain, caused, for instance, by tumours, head injuries or the emergence of dementia.

Psychoanalytically oriented theorists assert that problematic personalities are mostly psychological in origin. Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson, among others, posit that conflicted interactions between children and their carers can create problematic ways of coping and relating. For example, a deep lack of trust might result when the child’s need for consistent care is not met. A tendency to blame others or seek attention in response to conflict as a child might become the foundation for paranoid and histrionic personalities, respectively. When parents fail to be empathically attuned to their infants, their children may fail to develop a stable sense of self, paving the way for borderline or narcissistic patterns of personality.

A related approach, based on John Bowlby’s attachment theory, proposes that children who do not develop a stable emotional bond with their carers are vulnerable to personality disturbance in adulthood. Maltreatment in childhood, particularly physical and sexual abuse, are noteworthy risk factors for certain types of personality disorders.

People with problematic personalities may seek professional help but just as often are urged to do so by distraught relatives or friends at a time of crisis such as a family or workplace conflict, breakdown of a key relationship, or excessive substance use.

Offences such as physical assault, drink driving and shoplifting may lead to the police or courts initiating the process. An impulsive overdose or self-inflicted bodily lacerations are often the route to clinical attention for people with borderline personalities; they tend to present repeatedly in this way. Alternatively, help may be sought for psychiatric difficulties associated with a problematic personality. The failure of a psychiatric disorder to respond to treatment may indicate a previously undetected problematic personality.

Less dramatically, a person may request help from a mental health professional for persistent low morale, anxiety, self-doubt, failed relationships, preoccupation with bodily symptoms, or other personal difficulties that they feel unable to change. An unrecognised personality disorder may also reveal itself in the wake of a failure to engage in treatment, a clash with a therapist, or even a threat of litigation.

Mental health professionals aim to capture as complete a picture as possible of a patient’s past and present life. An account of childhood and early relationships within the family (and with significant others) is at the heart of the inquiry, as are methods typically used to deal with the challenges and demands of life.

This emphasis on gathering information about multiple aspects of the person’s life contrasts with a more symptom-focused approach typical of a discrete mental illness. Personality difficulties are not like such illnesses: they are woven into a way of being in the world, encompassing how the person relates to others, and their self-esteem, coping styles, motivations and aspirations.

Pinpointing a specific personality disturbance requires learning about a person’s lifelong patterns of thinking, feeling and behaviour. For example, a severely depressed executive in charge of a large company may be utterly reliant on his family and on professional staff for even the most trivial decision. Such reliance could well constitute a longstanding feature of a dependent personality disorder, but could also be a feature of a troubled mood state, or could be a combination of both. Talking with him alone may not yield enough information to reach the correct diagnosis. Since we are not always the most objective observers of ourselves, the views of parents, siblings and friends are invaluable.

As you can see, assessing personality to ascertain if it is disordered is challenging to say the least. A thorough evaluation by highly skilled mental health professionals is essential, and even then, doubts may remain. Questionnaires to identify personality disorders have been available for many years but are of limited utility, in part because respondents tend to have limited and often distorted insight into the nature of their personality and its problems. •

This is an edited extract from Troubled Minds: Understanding and Treating Mental Illness, published by Scribe ($35).

The post Personality problems 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

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