Review – Non-fiction

Anna Funder, Wifedom (#BookReview)

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Anna Funder’s Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life is a book with a mission, a mission that is implied in its full title. That mission is to examine the notion of “wifedom”, and the way patriarchy works to construct it, through the example of the invisible – or, as Funder also calls it, erased – life of George Orwell’s wife, Eileen O’Shaughnessy.

To do this, she wrangles Eileen out of the shadows of history to produce an intelligent, funny, warm-hearted, loyal and hard-working woman who, observed novelist Lettice Cooper, loved George “deeply, but with a tender amusement”. It’s an engrossing story, well-told. However, it’s a challenging read too.

Funder explains early in the book that her interest in Eileen came from reading something Orwell wrote about women and wives – after Eileen had died. It’s astonishingly misogynistic, and made her wonder who Eileen was and what she might have thought. Funder set about reading six Orwell biographies written between 1972 and 2003, but she found them unhelpful when it came to Eileen. Indeed, she says, they gave so little that they “started to seem like fictions of omission”. Funder then, logically, went to these biographers’ sources. She found some more bits and pieces about Eileen, but it wasn’t enough. All she had was “a life in facts, a woman in pieces”, so she “considered writing a novel – a counterfiction to the one in the biographies”. But, she was fascinated “by the sly ways” in which Eileen had been hidden, and she felt a novel couldn’t effectively explore this. Then she “found the letters”.

These were six letters that Eileen had written to her good friend Norah from just after her marriage in 1936 until 1944, but they had not been discovered until 2005. These letters gave her Eileen’s voice – and this voice was “electrifying”. Funder believed she could no longer write a novel. She writes,

I wanted to make her live, and at the same time to reveal the wicked magic trick that had erased her, and that still holds sway today. I thought of it as writing a fiction of inclusion.

“it’s hard … for history to find you”

This is where the book gets tricky, because, while I found Wifedom a fascinating read, it raised questions too, and they are intrinsic to what Funder is trying to achieve, and how she goes about achieving it. The book is divided into five parts, with the first part titled “Wifedom, A Counterfiction”. What does this mean? She doesn’t immediately explain what I have described above. Instead, she opens her book on a scene in which she imagines Eileen writing a letter to Norah – and she includes excerpts from that letter. This throws us readers in at the deep end. As we get into the book, we come to recognise these imagined sections, because they are identified by indentation, and opening and closing graphical symbols, but at the beginning it’s a bit mystifying, albeit an engaging way to capture our interest.

Early in the read, then, it becomes apparent that Wifedom comprises a complex mixture of processes and forms. The imagined sections are interspersed throughout the book between more traditional biographical writing about Eileen and George’s life. And interspersed between these are reflections from Funder’s own life, because one of her points is that the patriarchy, the “patri-magic”, which erased Eileen’s life from George’s biography, still exists and is evident in her own life as a wife and mother, despite her supportive husband and “egalitarian” marriage. I’m not going to focus on this aspect of the book, though, because it seems to fade away somewhat as Eileen and George’s story picks up, and is not, anyhow, where I want to go in this post.

Instead, I want to tease out the process. Early on Funder writes that

Looking for Eileen involved the pleasure of reading Orwell on how power works. Finding her held the possibility of revealing how it works on women: how a woman can be buried first by domesticity and then by history.

This is not particularly new. Anyone interested in feminism is aware of how women have been lost in (and thus to) history. However, Funder’s book is enlightening in this regard. She does an excellent job of interrogating how it can happen. It happens when biographers ignore or play down the role of women in their subjects’ lives. Through cross-matching her sources she finds example after example of Eileen’s contributions being downplayed or omitted. She shows how the use of passive voice and terms like “wife” rather than Eileen’s name work to make her disappear. (Orwell does it himself in Homage to Catalonia.) She finds examples where biographers, disconcerted by some of George’s behaviour, excuse it (how often are men excused!), or, uncertain about evidence, will rephrase it. For example, Funder writes that Eileen

noted his extraordinary political simplicity – which seems to have worried one of the biographers, who rewrote her words to give him an ‘extraordinary political sympathy’.

Eileen’s words come from a 1938 letter to Marjorie Dakin. The biographer is Crick. (Another of the textual clues to readers in this book is that Eileen’s words are conveyed in italics, while the words of others are enclosed in quotation marks.)

But here’s the challenge – interpretation. Funder writes early in her book that,

As serendipity would have it, in 2020 Sylvia Topp published Eileen: The Making of George Orwell, which contained much material I hadn’t found, and was thrilled to read, though we interpret it differently, and so build differing portraits of Eileen.

She does not explain what she means here, but in the very thorough Notes at the end of the book, Funder elaborates on Topp’s approach to Eileen. Put simply, Topp, Funder says, sees Eileen as one of those celebrated people’s partners who devoted their lives “joyfully to assisting the talented partners in all their various needs knowing all along that they would be under-appreciated, and often ignored, and yet never faltering in their dedication, or in their willingness to submerge their own personal talents into their partners’ success.” Topp, then, sees Eileen as a “helpmeet of genius” while Funder is interested, as she writes in these Notes, “in examining what it took, perhaps, to be in that marriage, and that dream”.

So, what we have here is interpretation. Topp had the same sources that Funder did. Indeed, she added some to Funder’s arsenal. But, she interprets them differently. As a feminist, I easily aligned with Funder’s interpretation, but as I read I also had this little niggle that Funder was interpreting her sources – from the perspective of her times, values and gender – just as other biographers had before her.

Wifedom was my reading group’s April book. Our conversation focused mainly on the biographical content – on Eileen’s life, on George Orwell and his books, and on the impact of patriarchy on Eileen. We were horrified by the life led by Eileen, as Funder tells it – and the facts seem inarguable. Their relationship appeared to us to have been so one-sided. Eileen did all the domestic work, and it was hard work given the primitive rural cottage that they called home. She was, often, the main breadwinner, and she did his typing, as well as offering editorial comment. She was necessary to him. Meanwhile, he focused on his writing and, we gathered, chasing other women. And yet, Eileen stayed with George. Why, we wondered?

We didn’t delve into the interpretation issue, albeit I would have loved to, but I needed more time to collect my thoughts. We did, however, discuss why we thought Eileen stayed with George which, I guess, was us interpreting what we’d read! Various ideas were put forward, including that Eileen might have been a “rescuer”, or that she knew she was unlikely to have been published herself (in a patriarchal world) and so channelled her energies through George, or, simply, that she loved him and, much like Topp argued, willingly helped him in any way she could.

So, there you have it! History, biography, it’s all a matter of the facts you have, and the way you see them. I don’t mean to devalue the biographer’s art by that statement, but simply to recognise that even the most formal, most rigorously documented biography will, necessarily, be affected by the biographer and their times. For this reason, I found Wifedom an absorbing and provocative read, though perhaps only partly in the way Funder intended.

Anna Funder
Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s invisible life
Hamish Hamilton, 2023
511pp.
ISBN: 9781760143787

Richard Flanagan, Question 7 (#BookReview)

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Question 7 is the fifth book by Richard Flanagan that my reading group has done, making him our most read author. That surprised me a little, but he has produced an impressive body of work that is hard to ignore – and, clearly, we haven’t.

We always start our meetings with sharing our first impressions. For this book they ranged from those who were somewhat bemused because of its disjointed nature to those who loved it, one calling it “extraordinary”. My first impression was that it’s a book full of paradoxes, and that these started with my experience of reading it. By this I meant that it was both easy and hard to read, easy because it was so engrossing and moving I was compelled on, but hard because the paradoxical nature of the ideas being explored kept pulling me up to ponder what he meant. What I didn’t add, because I feared overstaying my “first impressions” time, was that Question 7 felt like a humane book, a book about who we are and how we are, about what we do to each other and why. 

“The words of a book are never the book, the soul of it is everything”

I can see how Question 7 can feel a bit disjointed – an effect of its stream of consciousness style – but there is a clear structure underpinning it, one provided by three interwoven threads. The first comprises the Hiroshima story, the role of Wells’ novel The world set free, in which he imagined “a new weapon of hitherto unimaginable power”, and the scientist Szilard. Flanagan uses novelistic techniques to link Wells, his lovers, Rebecca West and Little e (aka Elizabeth von Arnim), and Szilard, whose reading of Wells’ novel set him thinking about an atom bomb, and conceiving the idea of a “nuclear chain reaction”. The idea of a chain reaction becomes one of the novel’s connecting motifs or metaphors. One things leads to another, and, as Szilard was to find out to his horror, once started chain reactions are very hard to stop.

The second concerns the colonisation of Tasmania and, bringing in Wells again, his statement that his novel, The war of the worlds, was inspired by the cataclysmic effect of European colonisation on Aboriginal Tasmanians. Wells’ invading Martians become the novel’s second metaphor, Flanagan equating them with the colonising British. In a neat additional link, we learn that Szilard and some of his Hungarian Jewish scientist peers called themselves the Martians.

The third thread encompasses the story of Flanagan’s Tasmanian-based family, particularly his father’s life and his own. The way these threads, and their linking metaphors, coalesce to explore and expose life’s unanswerable questions makes for involving reading, as Brona and Lisa also found.

And yet, there’s more… There is another less visible connecting thread which provides the novel’s backbone and guide to meaning. It comes from Flanagan’s understanding of an essay by a young Yolnju woman, Siena Stubs, in which she discusses “a fourth tense” in Yolnju thinking. As I understand it, this encompasses the idea – in my words – that all time can coexist. For the Yolnju, for example, this means the ancestors were here, are here, will be here. Flanagan uses this concept as a refrain throughout his book, but in different contexts so that we can see its relevance. Thinking about his near-death experience on the Franklin, for example, he writes that “though it happened then it’s still happening now and won’t ever stop happening”. Or, to universalise it, “life is always happening and has happened and will happen” (p. 99). 

A little later on, reflecting on the Hiroshima atrocity, he says:

what if vengeance and atonement both are simply the lie that time can be reversed, and thereby some equality, some equilibrium, some justice had? Is it simply truer to say Hiroshima happened, Hiroshima is still happening, and Hiroshima will always happen? (p. 140)

Further on again, he delves into the horrors of Tasmania’s colonial past and uses the refrain, “we were, we are, we will” to encompass not only the continuation of First Nations culture but the fallout from “the System” that the Martians had created. He concludes this section with another of his paradoxes:

And thereafter it was we who bore the inescapable, ineradicable shame that was not ours and which would always be ours. (p. 230)

Question 7, then, explores some of the toughest imponderables of our existence. It reminds us that once something happens, it doesn’t go away, but is part of the past, present and future, is part of the fabric of our being.

And so, we get to a related idea of memory, which also recurs throughout the novel. Writing about his childhood in Rosebery, Flanagan eschews checking some facts, saying,

This is an account of memory, not fact, and facts are not how we know ourselves, while memory – its tricks, its invasions, its silences, its inventions, its inevitable questions – is who we become as we shuffle around in a circle …. (p. 151)

There’s that circle – or non-linear time – again, because, in Flanagan’s mind “only fools have answers”. It is far better to keep questioning. This might be the appropriate place to share Flanagan’s two perfect epigraphs, as they provide a guide to how to read this book:

The author has not given his effort here the benefit of knowing whether it is history, autobiography, gazetteer, tragedy, romance, almanac, melodrama, or fantasy. It maybe myriad, it may not. The question is put, but where is the answer? 
– Hobart Town Mercury reviewing Moby Dick 1851

and

No, this is not piano. This is dreaming.
– Duke Ellington.

It might also be the time to share book’s framing question, which comes from a short story by Chekhov, “Question posed by a mad mathematician”, in which he parodies a school test problem:

Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3am in order to reach station B at 11pm; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7pm. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?

Ha! This unanswerable non-sequitur of a question, “who loves longer, a man or a woman”, is another of the novel’s framing motifs, alongside the (almost) throwaway line he uses at the end of particularly tragic or egregious situations, “that’s life”.

So, where does this all leave us, the reader? With a challenge, I think, to reckon with our personal histories and the wider histories we are part of – and to do so with a sceptical attitude to logic and rationality, because “the world  from which we presume to derive meaning and purpose is not the true world. It is a surface world … beneath which an entirely different world surges.”

Near the end of the book, Flanagan shares some of the rather bizarre responses he received to his first novel, Death of a river guide, and writes,

After that I knew that the truth wasn’t the truth even when it was.

Here, then, another paradox, one that quietly snuck up on me but that embodies the book. Truths, of one sort or another, come thick and fast as you read, but always there are questions. We cannot, in other words, measure Hiroshima or the impact of colonialism. We cannot pretend

… there is some moral calculus to death. There is no equation of horrors … Who do we remember and who do we forget?

Ultimately, as Flanagan wrote part way through his book, the words are not the book, its soul is everything. In Question 7, we see into Flanagan’s soul and, inevitably, have a light shone on our own. Where to from here?

Richard Flanagan
Question 7
Knopf, 2023
280pp
ISBN: 9781761343452

Ian Terry, Uninnocent landscapes (#BookReview)

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This is my third post on my brother’s beautiful book, Uninnocent landscapes: Following George Augustus Robinson’s Big River Mission. My first post announced its publication, and my second was on the book’s launch and the opening of the accompanying exhibition. Finally, I come to my review post. Yes, you could call me biased, but this project has had so many accolades that I don’t feel my bias contradicts the general run of opinion. However, you must decide for yourselves.

Uninnocent landscapes, as I wrote in those previous posts, is the culmination of an idea Ian started thinking about around a decade ago, but that he actively worked on over the last two to three years. It involved his following the journey taken by George Augustus Robinson on his 1831/32 Big River Mission (brief description), which was a poorly conceived attempt to conciliate between settler and Aboriginal Tasmanians. As those versed in Tasmanian history know, it was a disaster, and effectively ended First People’s resistance in lutruwita/Tasmania (back then, anyhow!) For Ian, who has come to call lutruwita home, there is discomfort in reconciling his privileged life as a middle-class white man with the devastating impact of colonialism on Tasmania’s First Peoples. This is his truth-telling project – his questioning, as he describes it, of how non-Indigenous Tasmanians (and, by extension, all non-indigenous Australians) “come to terms with our privilege and its Janus face, the violent and continuing dispossession of palawa” (and, by extension, all First Nations people). And he found a unique way to do it, by combining the three big passions of his life (besides family) – history, photography and the bush – to produce this book. 

Uninnocent landscapes, then, contains a selection of Ian’s photographs accompanied by excerpts from Robinson’s text. It also contains an introduction by Tasmanian art historian, curator, essayist and commentator on identity and place, Greg Lehman (a descendant of the Trawulwuy people of north-east Tasmania), and five essays, the first and last by Ian, and three he commissioned from:

  • Rebecca Digney (manager, Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania and proud pakana woman)
  • Nunami Sculthorpe-Green (activist/artist and proud palawa and Warlpiri woman)  
  • Roderic O’Connor (sixth-generation woolgrower and Connorville custodian)

These essays provide different perspectives on country and on colonialism’s impact on it. Together they work as a dialogue which encourages us to test our own thinking about what has happened in the past and how we might progress into the future.

“battered but still recognisable” (Nunami Sculthorpe-Green)

Ian explains in his first essay that the photographs were taken in a sprit of enquiry:

What memories do the landscapes of lutruwita/Tasmania hold? What stories are embedded in the rocks, the trees and grasses, the waters of rivers and lagoons? What could the landscape tell us about invasion, colonisation and the destruction of First People’s life and culture? What could it tell me about my own life here on this island?

The juxtaposition of Robinson’s text to Ian’s images offers literal, historical, symbolic and/or emotional readings of the photographs. They confront us with a colonial way of thinking about country that we haven’t fully shaken. Robinson’s reflection that “the whole of this country is peculiarly adapted for natives” is jolting, when you think about what this is really saying. Some excerpts reveal a man tired of his mission, while others show a sincere wish to be humane, but most of course are also overlaid with the arrogant confidence of the colonist. There is, though, also some humour, such as this:

I cautioned my natives and said if the whites saw them they would shoot them. They replied that they could see the whites first, and that they could not always shoot straight.

The image accompanying this text depicts a road passing through a fence on which is appended a security notice advising the area is under surveillance. It returns us to the reality that despite their knowledge, skills and confidence, the “natives” lost.

I’d love to share other examples of text and image, not to mention the thoughts of all the essayists, but instead, I’ll just say that this book provides a reading experience that is enlightening, provoking, and sobering.

When Ian first told me the title of the book, I thought it was inspired. He explains its origins in his opening essay. It comes from a conversation between two nature/landscape writers, the British Robert Macfarlane and the American Barry Lopez. Referencing the impact on the Slovenian landscape of war and atrocity, Macfarlane spoke of “a sense of the uninnocence of landscapes”. Nunami Sculthorpe-Green, however, expresses a different idea in her essay. She writes that “it is not the landscape that is uninnocent. It was not a party to the atrocities committed here, but a witness to them, and truly a victim itself”. Just reading these two opposing but sincerely felt ideas shows how important open and honest dialogue is if we are to understand each other. In some ways, the actual words are less important than the conversations they generate and what we learn through them.

It’s a big call, perhaps, to say Ian found a unique way to truth-tell, but I’m not the only one to see this project as original. One of those is Sculthorpe-Green who writes in her essay:

I do see this project as something different from the norm, in that it finally takes this story off the paper and re-centres our land as the storyteller and story keeper.

So yes, I’m hugely proud of what Ian has done. It’s a beautiful book that works aesthetically, intellectually and emotionally – and, more importantly, that moves the conversation forward. It’s a book that explores the depredations of the past, but that also contains hope. As Digney says at the end of her essay, “History resonates. We continue.”

Ian Terry
Uninnocent landscapes
Mt Nelson: OUTSIDE THE BOX / Earth Arts Rights, 2023
136pp.
ISBN: 9780646881058
Price $65, with all proceeds going to the Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania’s Giving Land Back fund. You can order here (but supplies are dwindling).

 

Debra Dank, We come with this place (#BookReview)

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First Nations people are advised that this post contains the names of deceased people.

It has been my reading group’s tradition for some years now to read a book by a First Nations writer in July, the month in which NAIDOC Week occurs. Coincidentally, NAIDOC Week’s 2023 theme was “For our elders”, which worked beautifully with our chosen book, Debra Dank’s We come with this place, because a large part of it is about the value and importance of elders and ancestors.

This was not, however, why we chose Dank’s book from the options before us. Its subject matter intrigued us, about which more anon, but we were also influenced by the fact that, at the time we were choosing, it had just won a record number of four awards in the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Awards: the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction, the UTS Glenda Adams Award for New Writing, the Indigenous Writers’ prize, and the overall Book of the Year. It was also shortlisted for this year’s Stella Prize, and, after we scheduled it, it won the ALS Gold Medal. These are significant awards and, for most of us, the book lived up to its advance publicity.

I mentioned the subject matter above, but We come with this place is one of those books that is tricky to categorise. It’s a sort of multigenerational memoir that is also a guide to her culture and a community history of her people, before and after colonisation. It grew out of her PhD in Narrative Theory and Semiotics. Dank describes it in her Preface as a:

strange kind of letter written to my place – a recording of events and activities that I and my family have experienced, in order to tell Garranjini that I remember, and I know. It is all based on real events. Some parts have been reimagined, because they happened outside my presence, and several names have been changed. Our relationship with our place, however, is genuine and lives in ways that not easily told in English words or western ways.

She goes on to say that she wanted to show “how story works in my community, and how it has contributed to our living with country for so long”. It also felt imperative, she says, to talk about the “voices, human and non-human, who guided the Gudanji for centuries before anyone else stepped onto this land”. This is a truly generous thing to do, and my group loved that, loved how Dank shared her story, and particularly how she helped us whitefellas “see” how First Nations people understand and relate to Country. I knew much of this from all I’ve read and heard, but this book really grew my understanding.

The other special thing about this book for me is that it is set in an area I know. I spent three formative late-childhood years in Mount Isa, close to Camooweal where Dank’s mother’s family were based. I visited Camooweal several times, and traversed parts of the Barkly Tableland which encompasses her Country. The first First Nations people I heard of were the Kalkadoons, whom Dank mentions in her book. Dank herself, though, is a Gudanji/Wakaja woman, the former through her mother and the latter, her father.

“to see the pain as it lies in the landscape”

We come with this place is a confronting book, from its perfect and defiant title to its chronicling of the atrocities that her people faced. The fear of children being taken away pervades the book. There are stories of massacres, and other appalling brutalities including a rape of her father’s mother. Lucy’s “choices were both dire – a drover’s boy or a special girl. The same, just in different clothes”. There is intergenerational trauma, which Dank exemplifies through her father, Soda. Hardworking and loving, he bears traumas, which she characterises as “newer stories … that pushed and jostled with the older stories” and sometimes “pushed their way out with a violence” that was often directed at her mother, and sometimes herself.

Dank doesn’t hold back; the way she tells it is strong, speaking her truths and segueing between past and present, between brutal history and rejuvenating story, between people and ancestors. Amongst the tough stories are warm-hearted anecdotes about family life. An example is Dank telling of being on country with her grandfather Bimbo and her surprise and joy in learning how to catch fish in arid land. The stories speaking of deep love sit alongside the hard ones, and together convey that the people, their ancestors, and Country are interconnected. This idea is mirrored in the structure.

However, I admit that I did, initially, find the structure a bit confusing, but as I read on, I started to sense an overriding arc similar to that of Bangarra Dance Theatre’s recent offering, Yuldea. Both start with origin stories, then move through colonial history, and conclude with the power of kinship and connection to Country. But it’s not as linear as this sounds. For example, starting the book, and threading through Dank’s narrative are the three Water-women who came from sea in the Gulf of Carpentaria, and travel far to create “the freshwater and hill country” of the Gudanji. They also end the book, giving it an overall cyclical structure which, I think, reflects First Nations’ understanding of life. Other cycles occur within this structure, so there is a continuous sense of moving forwards and back in time, as experiences and stories build on each other to create “Gudanji memory” – for us, and for her people to whom she is writing. This idea of building “memory” from stories, from lines between places and the things that have happened there, is strange to western ways of thinking, but Dank makes it make sense. She shows us how stories are made and passed on through Country.

I’ve been trying to decide how to end this post, and then it came to me that the best way might be with some words from Dr Tyson Yunkaporta’s Introduction to the book. He is a First Nations scholar, founder of the Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab at Deakin University in Melbourne, and the author of Sand talk. He admits to not being able to face “the through line of history from the savagery of the frontier wars to the interventionist policies of today”. Dank, though, has. He writes:

She hurts us, digs bullets out of old wounds that never healed properly, sucks out the poison and then begins our healing with love and laughter. She does this for everybody, no matter which side of the rifle you’re on.

Dank, in other words, doesn’t pull any punches, but neither does she ram them down your gullet. Her aim is to tell the truth, proud and clear, but to do it in order for healing to take place. Isn’t that what we all want?

Kim (Reading Matters) also loved this book.

Debra Dank
We come with this place
London: Echo, 2022
252pp.
ISBN: 9781760687397

Biff Ward, The third chopstick: Tracks through the Vietnam War (#BookReview)

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Biff Ward’s The third chopstick was my reading group’s October selection. It’s the second book by Ward that we’ve done, the first being her memoir, In my mother’s hands (my review), about growing up with her academic father, the historian Russel Ward, and her mentally ill mother, at a time when mental illness was shameful and to be hidden. It was a moving book that engendered an engaged and wide-ranging discussion. Biff Ward, in fact, attended that meeting.

The third chopstick is another personal book, but one that’s not so easy to classify. I would describe it as hybrid memoir-creative nonfiction. Memoir, because it’s about her experience as an anti-Vietnam war protester who later chose to meet Vietnam veterans and listen to their stories. And creative nonfiction, because, although nonfiction, it uses some of the devices of fiction to engage its readers. These include hinging her story around one particular vet, Ray, whom she describes as her “muse”, her “archetypal veteran”, her conduit, perhaps, to “the missing piece”. His story, combined with his powerful presence, gives the book its compelling, narrative drive.

The implication of what I’m saying here is that while The third chopstick is historical it is not an academic history. Although Ward did the historian thing, and conducted recorded interviews with vets, she does not attempt to present an “authoritative” analysis of protesters or of vets, but a thoughtful, personal quest. It has no footnotes, although there is a selected reading list at the end, and there’s no index. This is not to say, however, that it doesn’t add to our understanding of history, because it certainly does.

The book has a logical, and more or less chronological, structure, though there is criss-crossing of timelines where appropriate. It has three main parts – Protest, Veterans, Vietnam – which are bookended by a Prologue and Epilogue. In Protest, Ward describes her life as a protester, and introduces us to her ongoing interest in Vietnam long after the war ended. In Veterans, she introduces us to the veterans she met and interviewed, shares their stories and experiences, and reflects on these. Finally, in Vietnam, she discusses post-war Vietnam, including how Vietnamese people have processed, and live with, what happened. She has visited the country many times – as a sole tourist, on war-themed tours, and as a tour leader herself. On some of those visits, she either accompanied or met vets. Through these postwar connections, she starts to bring together her central questions concerning how we Australians got caught up in this, and what it did to us – as a nation, as individuals – though, of course, there are no simple answers.

“a scrambled snarl”

A bit over halfway through the book, while interviewing Nick, an SAS veteran of the war, Ward confronts the issue of “killing”. Nick’s story causes her to think about that and, thence, her stance as a pacifist. She realises she’d never really grappled with it. She had, she writes, a ‘”natural” antipathy to killing, a generalised kind of pacifism which yearns for peace’ but she also believed that, if needed, she would strive as hard as she could to defend “me and mine”. Her pacifism was “a scrambled snarl of thoughts and feelings”. She doesn’t explore this further, as it’s not the subject of the book, but …

… I liked this expression because what her book does is explore just what “a scrambled snarl” war is, whichever way you look at it. I particularly liked her various reflections on war. She makes the point early on that it is well known that war takes years to recover from. Vet Graham tells her that medieval knights “used to go into a monastery after being on a crusade”. He himself had, after leaving the army, been ill; he’d been in hospital and at a health farm, before spending “thirteen years, mostly alone, making music, keeping quiet”. By the time Ward met him, he was working with the Federation for Vietnam veterans.

Throughout the book, then, Ward reflects on war in general, but I’ll just share a couple that captured my attention, both resulting from her reading of Ray’s journal, where he expresses the trauma he experienced. It leads Ward to suggest “that the truth of all war is only these depthless oceans of grief”. A few pages later, she discusses “moral injury”, which “refers to an injury to the soul, to morality, to what can happen when a soldier has to do something against his own sense of what is right and wrong.” The injury done to Ray is immense.

Ward may not have intended this, but her book also functions, at least a little, as a cautionary tale, because she shows how easy it is to believe you are doing the right thing when you protest for a humane cause, and be oblivious to the potential for unintended consequences. The anti-Vietnam War protesters’ beef was with the government and its policies, but the result, as we all know now, was that the soldiers who went to Vietnam were vilified – not so much by the core protesters but by others who took their ideas on without understanding the politics. Ward shares some of the facts and myths about how it played out.

Ward also discusses those other two big fall-outs from this particular war – Agent Orange and its ongoing impact on the health of both soldiers and Vietnamese people, and PTSD, which she describes as the Vietnam vets’ gift to the world.

What makes this book a particularly good read, besides all this subject matter, is the language, which mixes journalistic-style reportage with more evocative writing. There’s too much to share, but here’s one describing her experience of transcribing Ray’s journal:

As I transferred his words from the page to pixels on my screen, they sometimes spiralled off and pranced about the room like leering pixies.

(This sometimes necessitated her needing to take a break!)

Here’s an appropriate point to explain the title, because it came from Ray, as she explains in Chapter 2. While in a restaurant, he places two chopsticks in parallel lines, about two centimetres apart, across a bowl, and names the space between the two as “normal life … where people get born and grow up …” etc. Then, he takes another chopstick (“the third chopstick”), places it parallel to the others, the same distance apart, and says

The veteran lives here, alongside but separate, see? He can see this life, he pointed back to the first space. He can see what other people are doing, but he can’t join in. He doesn’t know the rules anymore. It might look like like garbage to him. It’s got no connection to what’s happening inside him, see?

The secret, Ray continues, is for the veteran to be able to handle both “his own stuff” and join in. There’s a little more to it but that’s the gist.

    Lest you be thinking so, The third chopstick is not just relevant to those who lived through the Vietnam War era. As I read this book, I couldn’t help thinking about a war that is happening right now. Near the end, Ward writes:

    So even today, for the People of the Bag*, the mountains and the rivers, the land and the water and their interconnectedness are concepts integral to the way Vietnamese conceive of themselves. And, I chucke to myself, those men in Washington and Canberra thought they could somehow beat them, that the People of the Bag would eventually give up? Really?

    Given its origins in a leftie anti-Vietnam war protester who went on to engage openly and genuinely with soldiers involved in that very war, The third chopstick is quite an astonishing book. For anyone interested in the complex experience of war, it makes excellent reading. All eleven who attended my reading group agreed.

    * The Vietnamese, from their Creation Myth

    Biff Ward
    The third chopstick: Tracks through the Vietnam War
    Penrith: IndieMosh, 2022
    313pp.
    ISBN: 9781922812025

    Mark McKenna, Return to Uluru (#BookReview)

    / whisperinggums / 13 Comments

    Mark McKenna’s engrossing history, Return to Uluru, takes as its starting point the arrival in Central Australia, in 1931, of 29-year-old police officer, Bill McKinnon. Of course, Uluru’s true history reaches back into the almost-incomprehensible mists of geological time, and its human history back to the arrival of Indigenous Australians tens of thousands of years ago. But, a historian has to start somewhere, and McKenna’s choice of McKinnon’s arrival speaks to the particular story he wants to tell.

    Uluru

    Before I get to that, though, I would like to share my own little story. Mr Gums and I have visited Uluru three times (so far), in 2000, 2009, and 2015. Each visit, we walked around “the rock” rather than climb it, because that was the expressed preference of its traditional owners, the Anangu. In 2019, the climb was finally closed. Interestingly, each of our circumnavigations was a bit longer than the previous one, stretching from around 9kms the first time to around 11kms the last. This is because the Anangu have gradually moved the route away from particularly sacred sections of Uluru. It’s been a very slow process for the Anangu to claw back ownership of their own country and it is to this, really, that McKenna’s book ultimately speaks.

    But, that’s not immediately obvious at the book’s opening. It’s divided onto four parts, with Part one, “Looking for the centre”, introducing the reader to Central Australia. It teases out the role of “the centre” in Australian life and culture, pitting its Indigenous history and significance against the early settlers/explorers’ “awe, terror and incomprehension” at what they found. McKenna writes that for the settler “to find the centre was to confront the metaphysical dilemma of being a white man in an Aboriginal country”:

    What they saw as empty was layered with story … Where European explorers saw arid desolation, Aboriginal people knew a larder teeming with sources of animal protein and fat and a wide variety of plants that provided nutrition, medicine, tools and shelter.

    McKenna then shifts from traditional history-writing to the personal, placing himself in the story by sharing his own experience of the Centre but continuing to reveal its history as well. This approach enables McKenna to reflect philosophically, as well as historically, on what he was doing. He conveys how confronting, and how paradoxical, the Centre can be. “It laid everything bare at the same time as it pushed all language and emotion within.” But, most significantly, he writes how actually visiting the centre “unsettled the history” that he had intended to write. So, let’s get to that.

    Part two, “Lawman”, returns to a more traditional history – or biography, now – style. It tells the story of Bill McKinnon, who he was, how he ended up in the Centre, and what he did there. The focus, though, is a particular expedition in 1934 whose goal was to capture some Aboriginal men accused of killing, under Tribal Law, another Aboriginal man. One of these men, Yokununna, was shot and killed by McKinnon. This incident was to be just part of McKenna’s history but, as he wrote in Part one, it became the centre of the book when he recognised that the “biography of one moment in one man’s life encompassed the entire history of the centre and went straight to the heart of the nation’s long struggle to come to terms with its past”.

    “Lawman” is the longest part of the book. Bill McKinnon was a complex man. He unquestioningly bought into the settler project and saw “discipline” as the key to maintaining control, a discipline that, of course, frequently involved brutality. But he wanted “to be both the centre’s law enforcer and its storyteller”. He was keenly interested in the centre’s history, and, writes McKinnon, had “moments of contemplation … when he became faintly aware of the depth and complexity of Aboriginal culture”. He was also a meticulous recordkeeper, and retained his records because “his desire to be present in history was insatiable”.

    Part three, “Uluru”, the second longest part, returns, obviously, to focus on Uluru. Here, McKinnon comes back in the frame. He delves more deeply into the settler-era history of Uluru, interweaving it with Indigenous culture and stories. He traces the dispossession of the Anangu, as the settlers moved in, and their gradual return in the second half of the twentieth century. He identifies McKinnon’s shooting of Yokununna at the rock’s Mutitjulu Waterhole as “the foundational moment in a long history of injustice”. It is here that McKenna shows his historian’s eye for the symbolic that makes a point:

    Uluru’s creation story and the frontier murder which defined the killing times for the Anangu more than any other event in the twentieth century took place at the same sacred site.

    It is also in this part that we see the historian’s drive for the clue that nails the truth, and the challenge that can result. It occurs when he visits McKinnon’s daughter, and is given access to McKinnon’s archives. Remember what a recordkeeper he was? What McKenna finds transforms the story he was telling.

    In the final part, “Desert Oak No. 1”, McKenna remains in the frame, as he shares more of his research journey. The focus is Yokununna (“Desert Oak No. 1”) and we start at the South Australian Museum where Yokununna’s skull had been identified. Till this point, I felt McKenna had managed well the tricky business of being a non-Indigenous historian writing an Indigenous-focused history, but I did feel he made a false step when describing the centre as a “region where darkness stalked the landscape”. The word “darkness” seems unfortunate in the context. This, however, is a small miss in a work that recovers a significant story and carefully places it within the context of the return of Uluru to the Anangu in 1983, and the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart. Returnng Uluru to its rightful owners is a win for all Australians because Uluru is the spiritual heart of our nation, and it’s critical that our heart be in the right place – if you know what I mean!

    Return to Uluru is a beautiful book in every way. It is gorgeously produced. Those of us in my reading group who read the physical version loved the paper and the extensive images. We felt sorry for the Kindle readers who missed this experience. But more importantly, Return to Uluru is sophisticated, conceptually, in the structured way McKenna elicits the symbolism from the facts to make very clear not only what happened but why it matters.

    For an historian’s perspective, check out Janine’s review.

    Mark McKenna
    Return to Uluru
    Carlton, Vic: Black Inc, 2019
    256pp.
    ISBN: 9781760642556

    Jess Hill, See what you made me do (#BookReview)

    / whisperinggums / 16 Comments
    Jess Hill See What You Made Me Do

    I took me a long time to read Jess Hill’s 2020 Stella award-winning See what you make me do, partly because I bought the e-book version which I read in fits and starts and partly because of its content. As the Aussies among you will know, Hill’s book is an intense, thorough discussion of domestic abuse. It’s not an easy topic but it is a critical one because if statistics tell us anything it’s that the situation in Australia is not improving.

    There’s no way I can share the wealth of information or fully convey the impressive depth of research Hill has done. However, I’ll do my best to give a sense of what this book does, and how Hill does it. She starts on definition, explaining that wherever possible, she replaced the term “domestic violence” with “domestic abuse” because “in some of the worse abusive relationships, physical violence is rare, minor or barely present”. “Domestic abuse” is the term now used by UK police because it undercuts the assumption that abuse is only serious if it’s physical.

    Those of you versed in trauma will appreciate a fundamental challenge Hill faced, which, as she describes it, is that “power imbalance built into the journalist–source relationship: the journalist usually has ultimate power over what gets published”. For survivors of abuse, who have suffered at the hands of power, this could effectively mean abusing them all over again. So, Hill “wanted to flip that and give the power back to them. If this process was not a positive experience for them, there was no point in doing it”. So, she gave “them the chance, wherever possible, to review their story, suggest revisions or ask for things to be deleted – especially if there were safety concerns”.

    In her Introduction she lays out the road map:

    In the chapters that follow, we will travel through an extraordinary landscape, from the confounding psychology of perpetrators and victims to the Kafkaesque absurdity of the family law system.

    And so, in eleven chapters, Hill traverses domestic abuse from multiple angles, grounding it in case studies – usually with names changed – which force us to put a face on the accompanying theories and statistics.

    Hill starts by establishing coercive control as a fundamental aspect of domestic abuse. Our understanding of its techniques, she writes, come from the Cold War and US Air Force social scientist Albert Biderman’s recognition of how the tools of coercive control had been used on American POWs in North Korean camps. From here she analyses how the same techniques are used by intimate partners – almost always male, though there is a chapter on women who abuse – to create a threatening atmosphere that will convince the victim of the perpetrator’s omnipotence, the futility of resistance, and the necessity of compliance. The aim is total dominion (which is exactly what Wemyss’ wanted over Lucy in the prescient Vera). Hill describes the techniques in detail, and it’s chilling.

    The best word for this book is forensic, because Hill burrows deep. She confronts us with our uncertainties – why did she stay, for example – and makes us see just how deep the degradation goes. She explains how a concussed women can look drunk and so be missed by the police as the victim. She shows how a traumatised woman can come across as irrational and erratic in court versus her cool, calm, well-presented abuser. She interrogates the role of patriarchy, and how it damages men, as well as women. Feminists, as many of us know, were the first to recognise this.

    She looks at disabled women. She looks at children and the way they are used and treated by abusers in power plays. Indeed, her chapter on children and the courts is horrifying. She details the gradual weakening of the Gough-Whitlam-established family court system through successive, mostly conservative, governments. She shows how some of this weakening has been underpinned by a particularly egregious theory called Parent Alienation Syndrome. She reveals the perfect storm created for children caught up in a family court softened by law and bolstered by such spurious theory.

    And, she devotes a chapter to First Nations women, who are at significantly greater risk of abuse than their non-Indigenous peers. The stories just keep on piling up as you read, stories that you can barely countenance, except that anyone with any semblance of awareness will know they are true.

    It’s tough going but it’s valuable reading, because for all I thought I knew, there were details I didn’t know or appreciate. Hill asks some pertinent questions, like:

    In the years I’ve spent writing this book, I’ve found that it’s the questions we don’t ask that are the most confounding: Why does he stay? Why do these men, who seem to have so much hatred for their partners, not only stay, but do everything they can to stop their partner from leaving? Why do they even do it in the first place? It’s not enough to say that perpetrators abuse because they want power and control. Why do they want that?

    Or, as “Survivor Queensland” put it, ‘I want people to stop asking “Why does she stay?” and start asking “Why does he do that?”‘

    Some of the answers lie in “traditional notions of masculinity – particularly male entitlement” which are at “the core of men’s violence against women”. But Hill identifies more questions, such as “what are the different reasons men have for needing to dominate their partners?” and what is going on in their minds that makes them “sabotage the lives of their partners and children – to the point where they destroy even their own lives?” These are “critical parts of the puzzle” that are “missing from our public conversations about domestic abuse”. 

    Hill titles her final chapter “Fixing it”. She notes Australia’s excellent record in tackling public health problems. “From thwarting the tobacco industry to criminalising drink-driving, Australian governments have shown they are willing to burn political capital to save lives”, she says, and have achieved results. She then shares some of the actions currently being taken – but, of course, this was just before the pandemic so I suspect some of them have fallen by the roadside.

    In 2017, she writes, a KPMG report concluded that although “significant progress” had been made against the “National Outcomes”, not only was there no evidence of reduction in “domestic violence”, in fact, the evidence suggested that “the incidence and severity of domestic and family violence” was increasing. However, lest we close the book feeling completely hopeless, Hill concludes with examples of two recent programs that have worked. We just need government will and support to back more such targeted programs. It can be done.

    Janine (Resident Judge) also reviewed it.

    Jess Hill
    See what you made me do: Power, control and domestic abuse
    Carlton, Vic.: Black Inc, 2019
    416pp.
    ISBN: 9781743820865 (eBook)

    Sarah Krasnostein, The believer (#BookReview)

    / whisperinggums / 28 Comments

    One of the reasons I love reading fiction is to be introduced to lives and cultures I know nothing about. This is less so in nonfiction, but Sarah Krasnostein’s latest book, The believer, fits the brief. In it she explores questions concerning what people believe and why through six different people (or groups of people), all of which were foreign to me.

    The six “beliefs” are eclectic, but can be divided into three categories : personal lives (a death doula and a woman who had been incarcerated for over 30 years for murdering her violent husband); religious lives (through a Creation Museum and some Mennonite families); and the unexplainable (paranormal seekers/ghostbusters and ufologists). These six “cases” all come from either the USA or Australia.

    Different readers will be drawn to different ideas in the book, but in my reading group, the most popular were the two personal stories – death doula Annie, and ex-prisoner Lynn. Lynn’s story of abuse at her husband’s hands first and then the justice system’s was heart-rending. Yet Lynn had come to understand that she’d made choices, and had gone on to use her life to make things better for others. Inspiring.

    The book has a disjointed three-part structure, with one of each of the three categories explored in “Below”, the remaining three in “Above”, and then some reappearing in the final “Coda: Here” section. Within these sections, the stories are told over several alternating chapters, so no one story is told in one go. One of the questions my reading group discussed was whether this structure helped or hindered our reading. We didn’t resolve this, though the overall consensus seemed to be that the alternating did keep us interested. There was probably method to the placement of the stories, but it wasn’t always clear to us, which might be more to do with the time of year and our concentration levels.

    Lightbulb moments

    What we did all agree on, however, was that the book had some great lightbulb moments – and for many of us, it’s the lightbulb moments that make a book special or memorable.

    One refrain that ran through the book was that life isn’t easy or simple. Mennonite Becky says that “life isn’t just a bed of roses”, and ex-prisoner Lynn understands that “pain is a part of life”. Ufologist Jaimie has a more positive spin, seeing that life “is not just going to work and dying”. There are mysteries out there to explore.

    However, for me, the most significant moment occurred in “Before”, in a Paranormal/Vlad chapter. It concerned the need for certainty. Krasnostein references German neurologist, Klaus Conrad, who coined the term apophenia, which essentially means that we look for meaning and coherence, and will go so far as to perceive them in unrelated events and ideas. We will, writes Krasnostein, “choose certainty over accuracy”. “We are compulsive converters of fact into meaning”.

    I hope I’m not oversimplifying, but Krasnostein then cites a Science article which talks about the human desire to “combat uncertainty and maintain control” and the importance of this to psychological wellbeing and physical health. You can probably see the lightbulb here: it explained, to me, why some people have found the pandemic harder to handle than others, and why some people can become susceptible to conspiracies. People who feel out of control will look for patterns and answers. For me, living with questions is interesting – and in fact real, because I’m not sure there always are answers – but I feel I better understand now, those who do not feel this way, those who demand certainty, such as “promise there will be no more lockdowns”. I better understand why people might turn to conspiracies when authority doesn’t (indeed, sometimes can’t) provide consistent answers.

    Other lightbulb moments were less applicable to my life, but were interesting nonetheless. An example was the Mennonites fear of higher education. It “contains an unacceptable risk of assimilation”, potentially causing tertiary educated members to leave the community (the Mennonite kingdom) and be assimilated into wider society. Higher education threatens their understanding of the world, their faith in the Bible as explaining the world. Krasnostein writes of one Mennonite man who had moved to New York in a mission “to make a difference in people’s lives”:

    Anthony’s conflict comes from the fact that the certainties he received instead of education are poor tools for daily living.

    There’s that idea of certainties again. Anthony tells Krasnostein that “Theology always scares me because it takes the things that seem simple and makes them complex”. This too returns us to the idea of certainties. Anthony sees life simply. In the Mennonites’ belief in a “loving presence”, they see (create?) “a perfect pattern embroidered into the fabric of reality”. Patterns, again.

    What added to the book’s interest was that Sarah Krasnostein was, herself, searching to understand “belief”. She admits to occasionally envying Anthony and his co-believers’ “refusal to accept the absence of evidence as the evidence of absence”. She says at one point, “If I could only ask the right questions I could understand”.

    This has not been one of my typical review posts, partly because this is a different sort of book, but mostly because I finished it nearly two weeks ago and am not in the brainspace for doing my usual thing. Forgive me. However, you should be grateful, because this book is jam-packed with stories – some tragic, some poignant, some inspiring and some, I have to admit, infuriating (I’m looking particularly at you Creation Museum) – and it would have been tempting to share too many of them. They weren’t, of course, all equally interesting. And occasionally, they got a bit bogged down in detail to the point that I risked losing the thread. That’s the challenge Krasnostein faced in meeting so many people and wanting to explore all their thoughts and ideas. Overall, it works. Her lyrical prose, and warm, open heart play a big role in that.

    Talking about UFO sightings, ufologist Ben tells Krasnostein that “we need to find all these little stories. They build up into a big matrix of stories” which, for him, might locate the “truth” of the events. However, this is also exactly what Krasnostein did in this book and, in doing so, she found, as she writes at the end,

    six different stories, six different notes in the human song of longing for the unattainable.

    My reading group was a little disappointed that in the Coda, Krasnostein didn’t give us a clear summation of the sort you often find in nonfiction works. In fact, though, I think Krasnostein did find something very real, a belief that could help us accept each other’s wildly different shores a little more: it’s that we are “united in the emotions that drive us into the beliefs that divide us”. That is quite profound, and worth spending some time absorbing.

    Challenge logo

    Sarah Krasnostein
    The believer: Encounters with love, death and faith
    Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2021
    351pp.
    ISBN: 9781922330208

    Chrystopher J. Spicer: Cyclone country: The language of place and disaster in Australian literature (#BookReview)

    / whisperinggums / 6 Comments

    I love thinking about place in literature, so I was intrigued when Chrystopher Spicer, cultural historian and adjunct senior research fellow at North Queensland’s James Cook University, offered me his book Cyclone country: The language of place and disaster in Australian literature for review. Unfortunately, I’ve taken a while to get to it.

    Place can be a contentious issue for readers, and I’ve become embroiled in many discussions over the years on the topic. However, this is not going to be one of those, not because I have nothing more to say, but because Spicer’s book looks at place from a different angle. His focus is, obviously, cyclones, and was inspired by the fact that he lives in northern Queensland, a tropical region known for its often highly destructive cyclones. Despite this, people stay. How do they incorporate their experience into their sense of place, and, more significantly, into their understanding of who they are personally and as a community? Cyclones bring chaos and destruction, but, paradoxically, they are also part of the fabric of place they destroy.

    It is in this context that cyclones (and similar “nature catastrophes”) can be catalysts for literature. It specifically was for Susan Hawthorne’s eco-poetry collection Earth’s breath. Spicer wanted to explore whether such literature provides “a means by which individuals and societies can cope with and integrate these events into their lives, culture and place” and how weather catastrophes like cyclones “speak of our relationships with place and the people in it”. Concluding his introduction, he identifies his objectives as

    to explore how we integrate a violent, chaotic, and destructive weather feature into our culture through the use of storytelling and structure. At the same time, I hope to convey a sense of the connectivity and commonality of people search for meaning amid the meaninglessness of chaos and catastrophe.

    “in with through” (Hawthorne)

    Spicer explores all this through eight chapters. The first two and the last are devoted to general discussion about cyclones, cyclones and place, and cyclones in literature. In these chapters in particular, Spice draws on academics, critics, and other writers to provide a theoretical underpinning to his argument. The fundamental point is that stories shape the places in which we live and that in the same process people and place are mapped by those stories. He adopts the word “terroir”, traditionally used to describe wine regions, arguing that it encompasses both the tangible habitat and the spiritual sense that is imbued in that habitat from living within it. Weather, he argues, is inseparable from the physical and experiential aspects of the landscape. As poet Susan Hawthorne writes:

    I am in with through the cyclone
    which is inside with through me

    The book’s other five chapters explore his ideas through specific works set in or around Queensland and its cyclonic environment: Vance Palmer’s Cyclone (Lisa’s review), Thea Astley’s A boatload of home folk (with references to other works including The multiple effects of rainshadow which I’ve reviewed), Patrick White’s The eye of the storm (Lisa’s review), Susan Hawthorne’s Earth’s breath, and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (my post).

    Storms and cyclones have, of course, featured in literature as long as people have been telling stories, and Spicer provides many examples. Their “propensity to be intense life-changing personal experiences” naturally leads to their use in literature, often as metaphor for “epiphany and revelatory apocalypse”. I’m sure all of us have examples from our reading. For me, Shakespeare stands out.

    Alexis Wright, Carpentaria

    The five authors Spicer explores use cyclones in different ways, but there are recurring ideas. Epiphany, revelation, with a corresponding opportunity to change or start afresh, underpin the stories. Serpents and similar monsters feature frequently, whether it’s Palmer’s Leviathan, or Hawthorne’s ouroboros, or Wright’s Rainbow Serpent. I’m simplifying here but, essentially, their role varies from being the monster that embodies and explains the chaos to something that is more organically part of the process of chaos and renewal. Somewhat related to this, but separate too, is a cyclical view of nature and thus life. This idea is particularly developed by Hawthorne and Wright, in whose works the apocalyptic event contains the cycle of beginning and end, of life and death and life again.

    For White, the image or metaphor is a little different again, but also related, with his using the spiral and the mandala or circle. For his protagonist, it’s in the “eye” of the storm, or the “still point” of the spiralling word, that revelation is found, and epiphany achieved. Astley, too, suggests Spicer, sees us as all being “part of a swirling, spiralling, cyclonic universe”. However, instead of going into the eye, her characters try to escape the cyclone, something which Astley herself said, “is not possible”. The main Astley book that Spicer explores, A boatload of home folk, has been criticised as awful, unlikeable, but Spicer disagrees, arguing that, ultimately, Astley, like the other writers, “uses the elemental cyclone as a trope of apocalypse that is both an instrument of destruction and a catalyst of revelation.” It is what the cyclone draws out of the despair in the novel’s characters that is significant.

    In the end, there are two main ideas I took from this book. One is that cyclone literature helps us to understand the event, to incorporate the resultant chaos into our lives, and thus, to “integrate nature catastrophes” into our sense of place, or terroir. While Spicer’s focus is cyclones, he also mentions “nature catastrophes”. Consequently, I’d argue that his argument holds for places which frequently experience other such catastrophes, like bushfires, tornadoes, earthquakes, and recurring long droughts. People who live in places frequented by such catastrophic events, and who choose to remain in those places, must surely “integrate” the experience in some way into their identity as a person of that place, and into their understanding of how to live in that place. Spicer’s discussion of Susan Hawthorne’s Earth’s breath addresses this idea in depth.

    The other idea relates more generally to how writers use cyclones/storms to explores broader ideas. In a way, this extends beyond Spicer’s specific goals regarding place. Whether or not writers are inspired by actual cyclonic events or purely imagined ones, in real or imagined places, they can and do use cyclones to explore spiritual and/or psychological upheavals in their characters’ lives. Spicer’s selections are all Queensland-related, so place is quintessential to the stories, but his analysis shows that cyclones in literature also transcend place to encompass something more universally human.

    In the final section of his book, “The Cyclone as Universal Trope”, Spicer writes that –

    Such events and the stories of them can challenge previous human experience, thereby providing opportunity to move forward and rebuild, opportunity for the emergence of the new.

    – with “the new” embodying both the tangible and the intangible aspects of our lives.

    Spicer’s book is well-researched and thorough in its analysis, and is supported by an excellent bibliography and index. I found it fascinating. It’s not for everyone. However, it makes an excellent contribution to our understanding of the tropes of Australian literature, including reminding us that it’s not all about “the bush”.

    Lisa also reviewed this book.

    Chrystopher J. Spicer
    Cyclone country: The language of place and disaster in Australian literature
    Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2020
    202pp.
    ISBN: 9781476681566

    Review copy courtesy of the author

    Sara Phillips (ed), The best Australian science writing 2020 (#BookReview)

    / whisperinggums / 18 Comments

    In 2016, my reading group discussed the 2015 edition of The best Australian science writing. We enjoyed it so much that we decided to do it again, and so this month we read the 2020 (tenth anniversary) edition. Our discussion was as engaged as before (and the overall reasons I enjoyed this volume are the same as those I listed in my post on it, so I won’t repeat them here.)

    The publishers invite a different editor each year, and for 2020 it was Sara Phillips, a respected and award-winning science writer herself, with a particular interest in environmental science. The edition opens, however, with a Preface by UNSW Press’s publisher Kathy Bail. She references the annual Bragg UNSW Prize for Science Writing, which was named for the father and son who were Australia’s first Nobel laureates. All shortlisted pieces are included in the anthology. 2020’s winner was Ceridwen Dovey’s fascinating, moving essay, True grit. (Dovey, many of you will know, is also a respected writer of fiction.) The runners up were Ricky French’s Case of the missing frogs and Konrad Marshall’s Jeepers creepers. Lesley Hughes’ The milk of human genius, Donna Lu’s Stranger things, and Nicky Phillips’ Bringing home the ancestors, were the other shortlisted articles.

    COVID-19?

    There is so much I want to share about this volume, but I’m going to start with a quote I used in my 2015 edition post. It came from one of that edition’s Bragg Prize runners-up, Idan Ben-Barak’s Why aren’t we dead yet. This essay provided a wonderfully lucid description of pathogens and the immune system. You can guess why I want to share it again!

    And so, an immune system must correctly identify a diverse array of harmful creatures and react to each one in its own special way. Oh, and you know what would be very helpful? If it could remember the pathogens it’s encountered before and store this information on file, somehow, so that it could make short work of them the next time they pop in. And it needs to be prepared for new invaders it’s never encountered before, because life is like that. And it needs to be prepared for completely new invaders nobody has ever encountered before in the history of humankind, because pathogens evolve over time. And it needs to be economical, so the body can keep it operational. And it needs to be fairly unobtrusive, so the body can keep functioning normally. And it needs to do it all very quickly, every time, or the body will be overrun, because pathogens multiply like the devil.

    It sure does, as we all now know only too well. However, if you’re expecting pandemic articles to dominate the 2020 edition, you would be wrong, because the edition’s cut-off was March 2020. There are a couple of articles on the topic, but presumably there’ll be more in the 2021 edition. The two in this edition are Liam Mannix’s The perfect virus: two gene tweaks that turned COVID-19 into a killer, which tells us exactly what the title says it will (and in a clear, intelligent way), and Tessa Charles’ Synchrotons on the coronavirus frontline, which describes the importance of synchrotrons to mapping the crystallography of the SARS-CoV-2 protease. Knowing this is critical for the development of drugs/vaccines.

    Science and politics

    Each edition seems to have threads, which must surely relate to the “zeitgeist”. Introducing the 2015 edition, editor Nogrady wrote that while the 2014 anthology featured several articles “on our changing climate and its repercussions, this year there were an overwhelming number of submissions about our vanishing biodiversity, and what could be or is being done about it”. There were also several articles on robotics and artificial intelligence. Well, five years on, issues like climate change and biodiversity still feature strongly, as Phillips writes in her introduction, but there are some different threads too, as she also identifies, such as the role and importance of description and taxonomy, which, in fact, underpin many of the biodiversity articles. Dyani Lewis’ Identity crisis for the Australian dingo, is an example.

    But, Lewis’ article also references something else I detected running through the volume, the close – and sometimes uncomfortable – relationship between science and politics. In the case of the dingo, there are political implications for whether the dingo is classified as its own (native) species (canis dingo) or as a dog (canis familiaris). As a native animal it “could be listed as threatened” if its populations decline, but as a dog “it wouldn’t qualify”. Some scientists accuse others of “bad science”, of forcing the dingo into its own species in order to protect it, when, they believe, the scientific arguments aren’t there for separate classification or taxonomy.

    Nicky Phillips’ Bringing home the ancestors discusses the use of DNA to help identify indigenous remains held in museums (and similar institutions) but, she writes, “As a result of the history of mistreatment, some Indigenous people fear that unscrupulous governments or scientists might misuse their genetic information”. To invoke the potential of science or not, that is the question! The following article, The Murray–Darling’s dry mouth, by Jo Chandler, uses the stressed ecology of South Australia’s Coorong to exemplify “the mal-administration, negligence and ignoring catastrophic risks of climate change” that has brought the river-system to the parlous state it is in.

    These are just three of many articles which explored the science-politics nexus. I’d love to share them all with you, but, given the year it is, I’ll end this section with an article written before the pandemic but which is so apposite, Felicity Nelson’s Pathogen sovereignty. Nelson explains how such a thing came to be and its implications for scientific research into, yes, pathogens like SARS-CoV-2. “For poorer nations, exercising state power over pathogen samples was quite often their only point of leverage”. Fair enough, as they’d been taken advantage of, but you can see the implications for the quick-sharing of samples so needed during pandemics.

    A related thread through the volume concerned the practice, philosophy and funding of scientific research, but I’ll have to leave that, as I do want to get onto …

    Inspiring people

    It’s not surprising that articles written by journalists for educated-but-lay readers will often hang their information on the stories of inspiring personalities. Bragg Prize winner Ceridwen Dovey did this in True grit, by telling the story of Brian O’Brien, whose inspired idea about gathering and measuring moon dust in the 1960s was overlooked until the 2000s, when, quite serendipitously, his work was noticed by a scientist after NASA realised that it did indeed need to understand moon dust! Jo Chandler tells her above-mentioned Coorong story through the work of ecologist David Paton. He has studied the region for decades, and, though now officially retired, is not giving up, “not least because of his concerns about the capacity of working scientists to conduct deep, unfettered research. ‘You talk, they cut your funding. It’s as simple as that.’”

    The inspiring people aren’t all old, however. Cameron Stewart’s Brain wave tells of Vietnamese-Australian inventor, Tan Le, whose work on producing technology that can read brain waves is already providing benefits – to quadriplegics, for example. The potential of this technology is immense, and Tan Le, herself, is astonishing, particularly when you read her trajectory from boat-person to Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

    To end …

    It’s impossible to do justice to an anthology like this, so, as I did last time, I’m concluding with three quotes that make important points, to my mind anyhow. First is Michelle Starr, who reminds us about the practice and limits of scientific research in The repeating signals from deep space are extremely unlikely to be aliens – here’s why:

    ‘Wild speculation can sometimes inform the next generation of instrumentation, which can then either confirm or refute the wild hypothesis, or see something else entirely unexpected. And that too is what makes science fun.’ The difficulty lies in understanding the difference between pondering wild ideas as a thought exercise, and evidence based on data and prior experience, observation and conclusions.

    Then comes Brian Key from Peter Meredith‘s Underwater and underrated, which is all about fish brains and intelligence:

    On the question of animal welfare, Brian emphasises it needn’t be linked specifically to an animal’s ability to feel pain. ‘You can apply human principles to animal welfare,’ he says. ‘Those principles don’t have to be based on scientific evidence; they can be based on the morals and ethics of a society.’

    Finally, here is a Moore Foundation grant recipient in Smriti Mallapaty’s For risky research with great potential, dive deep commenting on one of the Foundaton’s sensible research grant conditions:

    ‘Science has a rich history of not talking about what doesn’t work,’ says Wilhelm, a grant recipient …. ‘By sharing our failures, we have been able to help each other and avoid making the same mistakes over and over again’ … 

    Another rich volume, with so much to offer, but I really must end here – or, I’ll be putting you all to sleep.

    Challenge logo

    Sara Phillips (ed)
    The best Australian science writing 2020
    Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2020
    ISBN: 9781742245072 (ebook)