Category Archives: Books

Larry Niven’s World out of Time: page 76

Posted on 13 Jul 2023 | Leave a comment

Larry Niven, A World out of Time (©1976, Orbit 1977)

It had been a while since I read something that was just good fun, and I turned to my Spec Fic TBR shelf to fill the lack. This yellowing Bookmooched copy of A World out of Time reminded me of the pleasure of Larry Niven’s Ringworld books, of which pretty much the only thing I remember is that I enjoyed them. It practically leapt into my hands.

And now that I’ve read it I don’t have much to say beyond that it is indeed fun. There are whizz-bang planet-shifting fusion engines; there are sex scenes that would barely raise a vicar’s blush these days but were probably titillating for 14-year-old boy readers in 1977; there are chase scenes, theory about the nature of empires, cool improvised weapons, cute mutated animals, scary mind manipulation, and a plot that’s full of unexpected twists. It’s not ‘hard’ science fiction like Kim Stanley Robinson, or weird like China Miéville, or space opera like Star Wars, but it’s got elements of all of them, and it zips along.

It begins, ‘Once there was a dead man.’ People who opted for cryogenics in the 1970s (‘corpsicles’) are revived as slave labour a couple of centuries later; that is, their personalities are harvested and implanted in the bodies of condemned criminals whose brains have been wiped. Our hero, Corbell, is one of the revived corpsicles. The totalitarian government of the future (‘the State’) assigns him the task of piloting a spacecraft on a round mission that is planned to take hundreds, even thousands of years.

The RNA conditioning that enables him to learn his interstellar pilot craft in a matter of days also modifies his brain so he identifies as a servant of the State. But he manages to rebel and takes off instead to visit the black hole at the centre of the galaxy, where he will almost certainly die, again.

I don’t think it’s too much of a spoiler to tell you that, with the reluctant help of his State-loyalist computer Peerssa and the wonders of speed-of-light travel, Corbell survives. My arbitrary policy of focusing on page 76 once again bears fruit, as on that page he has just arrived back on a much-changed Earth not thousands of years but roughly three million years into the future. (Maybe one reason I found the book so refreshing is that though the Earth’s temperature is mostly unbearably hot in that distant future, the global heating didn’t happen in the 21st or even the 24th century and wasn’t brought about by anything as mundane as carbon emissions. Ah, the innocence of 1976 future-imaginings!)

On page 76, while Peerssa is orbiting the Earth in their interstellar spacecraft, Corbell has found what looks like a dwelling in a devastated landscape. It made me think of the house at the end of Antonioni’s 1970 movie Zabriskie Point, except this appears to be a single bedroom looking out over the desert. Corbell tells Peerssa that he can’t find a door, and after they decide that it’s unlikely that the roof is meant to lift off or that the entrance is underground:

‘I’ll have to break in,’ he said.
‘Wait. Might the house be equipped with a burglar alarm? I’m not familiar with the design concepts that govern private dwellings. The State built arcologies.’

I had to look up ‘arcology’. It’s a portmanteau word combining ‘architecture’ and ‘ecology’, meaning, according to my phone dictionary, a city built according to a system of architecture that integrates buildings with the natural environment. Peerssa means something slightly different: the State’s arcologies were integrated ecologies of their own, with little attention to the natural environment. I love a book that makes me learn about such concepts.

‘What if it does have a burglar alarm? I’m wearing a helmet. It’ll block most of the sound.’
‘There might be more than bells. Let me attack the house with my message laser.’
‘Will it–?’ Will it reach? Stupid, it was was designed to reach across tens of light-years. ‘Go ahead.’
‘I have the house in view. Firing.’
Looking down on the triangular roof from his post on the roadway, Corbell saw no beam from the sky; but he saw a spot the size of a manhole cover turn red-hot. A patch of earth below the house stirred uneasily; rested; stirred again. Then a ton or so of hillside rose up and spilled away, and a rusted metal object floated out on a whispering air cushion. It was the size of a dishwasher, with a head: a basketball with an eye in it. The head rolled, and a scarlet beam the thickness of Corbell’s arm pierced the clouds.
‘Peerssa, you’re being attacked.’

Peerssa doesn’t have much trouble repelling the attack, and Corbell gets into the house. Though the washing machine plays no further role, both it and the room’s doorlessness foreshadow the kind of challenges Corbell is to face.

This is now the world out of time of the title: apparently deserted, with faint signs of active energy that are almost certainly just machines that have somehow continued to be active long after their human creators and users have died out. The question I had at this point was: ‘If there are no humans left, and the remaining three quarters of the book is to be a Robinson-Crusoe story, how can it stay interesting; and if there are humans, how can they with any degree of plausibility have survived in the devastation that Earth has become?’ At page 76, the real subject of the book is about to become a little more visible: it takes its time showing itself, and when it does, well, it’s fun.

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Saul Griffith’s Wires that Bind

Posted on 7 Jul 2023 | Leave a comment

tl;dr: This is a review of a book that argues that a future that isn’t devastated by climate change is possible. If you can’t bear to read one more thing about global heating, you might like to listen to Saul Griffith talk to ABC’s Richard Fidler at this link.

Saul Griffith, The Wires that Bind: Electrification and Community Renewal (Quarterly Essay 89, 2023)
– plus correspondence in Quarterly Essay 90

In the late 1960s at Sydney University, when someone from Engineering took the microphone at an anti-war rally, you could be sure he (they were always men) would speak for the forces of reaction. So there’s a frisson of pleasure for me in reading Saul Griffith’s visionary account of an electrified Australia where fossil fuels are kept in the ground, communities thrive, a new kind of politics has replaced the current toxicity, women’s leadership is acknowledged, and global warming is slowing dramatically. It’s visionary, but suffused with an engineer’s practicality, not to mention a baker’s dozen of complex charts.

If you’re tempted to despair about global heating – and who isn’t? – you’d do well to read this Quarterly Essay. It doesn’t offer blind optimism or hope based only in philosophy, but charts a feasible path to a desired outcome. It covers much of the same ground as the 2021 Quarterly Essay on the same subject, Getting to Zero by Alan Finkel, also an engineer. But where Alan Finkel had been scientific adviser to the Morrison government and seemed, to me at least, to be concerned not to antagonise that do-nothing bunch of deniers, delayers and obfuscators, Saul Griffith comes from playing a role in creating Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, and is co-founder of community organisations Rewiring America and Rewiring Australia.

In my blog post on Finkel’s essay, I said:

I was heartened to read Finkel’s lucid, careful, methodical argument that the challenge of the climate emergency can be met – with difficulty, but successfully, and without significant sacrifice (‘No trade off, no dichotomy. Prosperity and low emissions.’). I was also uneasy. Surely something has to change as well as our technology. There was a herd of elephants in the room.

Saul Griffith also seems to offer a way forward that doesn’t involve significant sacrifice, but he does address other elephants. Ordinary householders are at the centre of his argument. We don’t have to see ourselves simply as consumers of whatever is on offer from government and profit-driven businesses; if we act together we can become hugely effective agents for change. One simple thing we can do is to decide that, whenever a household item that depends on fossil fuel needs replacing, we opt for something electrical – an induction stovetop, an electric vehicle, heat pump, and so on. And we can see that our electricity comes from renewable sources. His local postcode, 2515, is making great strides as a community to becoming electrified in this way. If we all did this, without significantly pushing the speed of replacement of devices, we would all be electrified by 2040.

He argues that this electrification would result in cheaper energy and cheaper travel – the expense is all in the initial purchase. Government intervention will be needed to make it possible for less wealthy households to make the shift.

There’s a lot more to his argument. I can’t say I followed it all; some of the more technical bits mystified me; and the economic arguments are out of my league. But having had as an article of faith that technical solutions to global heating exist and all that’s needed is the political will, I’m heartened to read solid argument to back up my sometimes tenuous faith.

My current practice of looking at page 76 can give you a glimpse of how the essay works at a granular level.

The page is in the section ‘Planes, Trains and Automobiles’, which deals with transport (or transportation as he says, reminding us of his years in the USA). The section includes some envelope pushing – every parking space to have a solar roof, small electric aeroplanes with a 500-km range using today’s battery technology, etc. It also lays out some basic facts. The use of cars and trucks ‘for moving us and ourselves around’ is currently the second largest source of CO2 emissions. The switch to electric vehicles (EVs) is under way, but it’s not a panacea. Cars need not only to go electric (and run on renewably sourced electricity); they also need to be smaller, lighter and slower in order to reduce the environmental damage they cause, including the damage to roads. Griffin produces some interesting figures comparing the emissions per passenger of our most efficient public transport system – Melbourne trams – and a light EV with two passengers: the EV comes out ahead. But that’s not so with heavy vehicles.

Page 76 is mostly the subsection with the title ‘Tax the tyres’. It begins with hard facts:

Australians use about 50 million litres of petroleum products per day, We spend $35–50 billon per year importing foreign oil. The government collects 49 cents per lire, after the various exemptions that are granted (thereby subsiding fossil fuels and emissions), which amounts to around $14 bilion per year. About half of that goes to road building and transportation projects. Even so, it is not enough to pay for all our roads, and councils have to pay for much of this from their rate base.
Reforming how we pay for roads is a gnarly political problem that I think we must have some honesty about. Low-income people commute further, often in less efficient cars, and often for work. The crux of the political problem is that those who can least afford to pay for transport pay the most, and fuel excise exacerbates that problem.

Then he takes us on a brief excursion into utopian imaginings:

I would like more kids to walk to school on dirt paths through forests breathing clean air and learning about ecosystems as they do so. I’d like to fly electric aircraft more and have fewer ecosystem-damaging roads.

He may have utopian leanings, and it sometimes feels as if Damon Gameau’s delightfully optimistic movie 2040 is playing in the background (he does mention it once), but he comes beck to the practical problem:

But with all that, I am not going to deny that roads are useful and we need good road infrastructure. …
If you study road wear, it turns out that the damage to a road is proportional to the square of the weight of a vehicle. A ute will do about seven times as much damage as a passenger car, mostly because of the extra weight. If you were designing systems to pay for our road infrastructure, it would be most scientifically done by charging by the weight of the vehicle and the number of kilometres it travels.

Which calls attention to what may not be an elephant in the room, but is maybe a thorny devil. How do these necessary changes get paid for? ‘If you were designing … it would be most scientifically done by’ indeed. The next paragraph is in some ways characteristic of the essay as a whole. In his acknowledgements, Griffith says it ‘would not have been written without community’ and lists a number of people on whom he relied ‘to contribute long passages’. In this passage, he present an idea that came from the audience on his book tour:

An audience member came up after a talk and suggested what we should do is tax the tyres, which would have the same effect. Heavier cars doing more kilometres go through more tyres faster. It would be a way of taxing the system that pays for roads, which would push the system to evolve to smaller, lighter vehicles. That would be a good thing.

I hope it’s evident from that little bit that the essay is multifaceted, trying ideas on like an essay in the classical sense of the term, having a bit of fun, and offering insights and proposals that could have a profound impact.

As usual with the Quarterly Essay series, the correspondence in Nº 90 fleshes out the subject beautifully. It was excellent to note the absence of people wanting to deny the science, or others pushing for nuclear power as Peter Dutton is doing in the headlines as I write this.

For just one example, Christine Milne posed a question that had been niggling me:

Can the Earth afford the transition to renewables if it is embedded in the linear business-as-usual, take-make-dispose model of unlimited consumerism and economic growth? There cannot be infinite growth on a finite planet.

Griffith’s response is worth reading. To paraphrase and crudify his argument: to transform the economic system would take too long – you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs and this omelette is too urgently needed to worry too much about eggshells.

The passage that stands out for me in Griffith’s response to correspondents is this exemplary piece of self-criticism:

Guilty of boostering, addicted to carrots, I have avoided the hard discussion of regulations with teeth. Perhaps my time in the Land of the Free softened me or made me frightened of things that might be conceived as infringing on personal liberty. … To be very clear, it is in the interest of the energy transition to have a phase-out date for all fossil-fuelled machines, and the sooner the better. Governments are scared of the headlines around mandates and bans, but that is what is actually needed, not eventually, but soon.

At the Sydney Writers’ Festival recently, Saul Griffith said that someone described his earlier book Electrify as a brilliant piece of guerrilla policy-writing. The book went on to play a role in developing major climate-change legislation in the USA. I don’t know if it’s all completely practical or if it addresses the social issues adequately or accurately, but the thought that this isn’t just someone having good ideas on the sidelines but solid policy proposals backed up by substantial experience at the community level is surely grounds for hope

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Ronnie Scott’s Shirley: page 76

Posted on 5 Jul 2023 | 8 comments

Ronnie Scott, Shirley (Hamish Hamilton 2023)

Ronnie Scott has played an important role in Australian culture over some decades, not least as founder of the literary magazine The Lifted Brow. So it’s only fair that his novels (Shirley is his second) should be reviewed with respect. It’s not that I don’t respect the book, but I’m definitely not part of its intended readership, so I don’t know that anything I have to say will be of much use.

You can read thoughtful and mostly laudatory reviews in the Sydney Morning Herald (Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen), the Guardian (Bec Kavanaugh), the Newtown Review of Books (Jessica Stewart) and Australian Book Review (Morgan Nunan), to give just a sample.

It’s a novel set firmly in Melbourne, Collingwood to be precise, mostly among people involved in the food industry, with unconventional familial and sexual relationships, as the bushfires of 2019–2020 are coming to an end and Covid-19 is taking hold. The unnamed female narrator (who is not the Shirley of the title – that’s a house) tells the story after Melbourne’s many Covid lockdowns. By about page 20 when the narrator does something of a sexual nature that seems to defy the laws of physics, I was reading without much pleasure. A passing, and to me incomprehensible, mention of people licking themselves, a few pages later left me pretty thoroughly alienated,. Nevertheless, I persisted. There’s a twist at the end that reveals a shape in what until then had seemed to be fairly pointless meanderings. For my taste that was far too little far too late, but my taste is evidently an outlier – see list of laudatory reviews above.

Currently when blogging about books I have a policy of taking a closer look at page 76, chosen for the arbitrary reason that it’s my age. On page 76 of Shirley, the narrator has answered a knock on her apartment door and opened it to her affluent downstairs neighbour Frankie, a ‘famous condiment maven’. After a little chat, she yields to unspoken pressure and invites her in. Then, on this page, the narrator resumes the scrambled tofu she was cooking when Frankie interrupted her, while Frankie asks about it: ‘Wait, what have you put in that? Why does it look so much like curds?’

It was just the Safeway brand of melty ‘mozzarella’, and I’d stolen Meera Sodha’s method of pouring a base of neutral oil, frying off some spices, mixing in the ingredients that had to be actually cooked, and then crushing some silken tofu in my hands – splatting it, really – along with the ‘final’ ingredients that just had to be wilted and warmed; when I’d read that recipe, in East, I’d scrambled tofu before, but somehow I hadn’t realised that the tofu didn’t need to be cooked, that it could be honoured as a soft, pillowy additive.

Today was a bit different, as Frankie had interrupted me just after I’d crushed in the tofu, but I supposed it was fine, as I’d decided on impulse to cook a hash brown in the same pan, and parts of it had broken up as I’d initially over-microwaved it from frozen. Coming back to the pan, I noticed these parts were blackening and sticking, and I chipped them off and incorporated them with a wooden spoon.

There’s quite a bit of vegan cooking in Shirley, mostly with meticulous acknowledgement of the source of the recipes. Meera Sodha’s East, acknowledged here, is subtitled ‘120 Vegetarian and Vegan Recipes from Bangalore to Beijing’.

There’s a school of thought that any passage of a novel needs to do one or preferably all of three things: move the plot forward, deepen our understanding of character, and develop theme or themes.

On first reading, nothing much happens on this page, but revisited when you’ve read the whole book, it astonishingly can be seen to do all three things.

In terms of plot, Frankie’s visit occurs almost exactly at the novel’s one-quarter mark. In conventional movie structure, this would be time for the second turning point, sometimes known as the Change of Plans. Indeed, Frankie’s moving into the narrator’s intimate space marks a major shift: Frankie is actively cultivating the narrator, for reasons that will be revealed much later. No doubt more sensitive readers pick up a weird vibe here that only gets weirder as the pages turn. (I was cleverly seduced into thinking it was all just part of a general weirdness.)

The narrator has already been established as a vegan foodie. This passage reinforces that aspect of her character, shows it in action. We learn more about Frankie too: this is the first time we see her outside of an environment where she is ‘the boss’. Here and on the next couple of pages, we see her as, well, a bit of a manipulator: praising, professing interest in what is after all pretty mundane, offering to help …

As far as thematic development goes, a key strand of the book is the narrator’s relationship with her mother, and her attention to the physical detail of food is in contrast to her celebrity-cook mother’s approach, which is mostly showbiz. Interestingly enough, the narrator silently judges Frankie a couple of pages later as ‘an entrepreneur by temperament but a cook only through opportunity and trade’. That is to say, bit the narrator’s mother and Frankie lack her authenticity around food.

The narrator’s veganism, made concrete here, has an important thematic value. I took it, disparagingly, to be part of the book’s inner-city cool vibe. But it’s more than that. It contrasts to a frequently mentioned photo, unexplained until the last pages, of the narrator’s mother holding a knife and spattered with blood. It’s a key piece of character rooted in plot.

So a lot is happening under the bland surface of page 76. For my taste, here and in the rest of the book, it’s all too far below the surface. Maybe on second reading I’d be alert to the subterranean shifts elements. But I don’t want to reread it. Its cultural terms of reference are largely alien to me. I know anything about vegan cookbooks. I don’t know any of the songs the characters listen to. I barely know West Brunswick from Fitzroy. I’ve never heard of Zachary Quinto. Celebrity cooks aren’t part of my internal pantheon, even ironically. Perhaps most importantly, it’s been a long time since I was dealing with the hopes, despairs and confusions of my 20s.

Your mileage may vary.

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Zheng Xiaoqiong’s In the Roar of the Machine: page 76

Posted on 28 Jun 2023 | 1 comment

Zheng Xiaoqiong, In the Roar of the Machine, translated by Eleanor Goodman (Giramondo 2022)

True to the promise implied in its name, the Giramondo Publishing Company invites its readers to travel widely. In the Roar of the Machine takes us into the world of migrant workers in China – that is, the mostly rural poor who have moved to large industrial centres to live and work creating what has been called an enormous floating workforce that, to quote Eleanor Goodman’s introduction, ‘comprises one of the largest human migrations in recorded history’.

Zheng Xiaoqiong, born in 1980 in Sichuan province in western China, moved when she was about twenty to an industrial city in Guangdong province on the south-east coast where she has been a factory worker ever since. Partly for her own mental health, partly to bear witness, she wrote poetry about her experiences, and soon gained a degree of fame – though in China as in most of the world, fame for a poet is a relatively modest affair. She has published a number of books of poetry and essays, and won prestigious literary prizes.

Eleanor Goodman is a poet in her own right and has translated a lot of contemporary Chinese poetry. including Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Workers Poetry (2017), which has been described as ‘a fervent testimony to the horrific, hidden histories of the 21st century’s working-class’. That description could equally apply to In the Roar of the Machines. (You can read a fascinating interview with Eleanor Goodman on the Poetry International website, at this link.)

Two things I think I know about classic Chinese poetry: it often works through a series of images, and it often deals with exile. Both those things are true of this book. In many of the poems, the alienating effect of factory work is conveyed in an accumulation of images. In these lines, chosen more or less at random, from ‘Industrial Zone’, the harsh lights of the factory are contrasted with the moonlight of the mid-autumn festival, and the phrase ‘disk of emptiness’ carries a huge weight of nostalgia for home, family, community:

The fluorescent lights are lit, the buildings are lit, the machines are lit 
exhaustion is lit, the blueprints are lit ...
this is a night on an endless work week, this is the night of the mid-autumn festival
the moon lights up a disk of emptiness

I often struggle with poems in translation from Chinese. Almost every poem in this book grabbed me and held me hard.

There are four sections, each comprising poems from one of Zheng’s books: ‘Huangmaling’ (2006), ‘Poems Scattered on Machines’ (2009), ‘Woman worker’ (2012) and ‘Rose Courtyard’ (2016). A ‘Finale’ contains a single longer poem, ‘In the Hardware Factory’.

The third section, ‘Woman Worker’, is a collection of passionately feminist poems. The poem on page 76 is ‘Hu Zhimin’ (胡志敏), one of its portraits of individual women. (Right click on the image to embiggen.)

It might be worth noting that the poem becomes a lot easier to follow once you realise that, instead of conventional punctuation marks, it signals breaks in meaning or pauses for breath by longer spaces between words and by line breaks.

Hu Zhimin
These days I'm immersed in this enormous era
I'm weak, powerless __ smothering a vigorous life 
in vast denial and ignorance

This sets the tone, leading us to expect a story that will expand on what it is about the ‘enormous era’ that makes the poet weak and powerless. We’re invited to expect her ‘vast denial and ignorance’ to be contradicted in what follows.

It’s nerdy of me, but because every translation is at best an attempt (or so my high-school Latin teacher used to say), I like to compare different translations. I found Zhou Xiaojing’s version of this poem on the Poetry International website (link here). I won’t do an extended comparison of the two – except to say that I think Goodman’s generally has a better feel for what works in English – but here’s Zhou’s version of the opening lines:

These years I am immersed in an immense era
feeling weak and frail     allowing youthful life to be
covered by gloomy negations and ignorance

I prefer Goodman’s first line and a half, as Zhou’s ‘immersed’ / ‘immense’ echo falls pretty flat. But I stumbled over Goodman’s ‘vigorous’ – how can a life be both vigorous and smothered? – and I had trouble with the literal meaning that the poet was smothering her own life. Zhou’s ‘youthful’ resolves my momentary confusion, and the poet is no longer actively stifling herself but allowing herself to be covered/smothered by external forces. Of course, ‘vast denial’ beats ‘gloomy negations’ hands down, though they do mean different things, and ‘gloomy negations’ may be more accurate.

I’m guessing that anyone who understands Chinese would know from the poem’s title that it is about a particular woman. She now makes her entrance:

her death brought the era's wounds with it 
along with men wrangling for compensation 
her brothers and parents _ her corpse ignored 
no one grieved _ no one wept
just the icy numbers of compensation to keep her company
Hu Zhimin: twenty-three years old _ dead from alcohol poisoning

That’s the skeleton of the story, arriving at last at the woman’s name. But what are these ‘icy numbers of compensation’ that displace grieving and weeping? Having raised that question, the poem holds off answering it until the final lines. For now, it continues its broad movement from the general to the specific: 

I have a clear memory of her
my one-time colleague _ who was reduced to a hotel
prostitute _ her innocent smile _ loud talk
worldly experience _ she told me she'd seen
too much of the so-called truth of life _ standing
in the doorway to reality _ such as desire and flesh
she wasn't too shy to discuss her profession
and her plans for life _ in her town there were many
young women who took up the ancient profession
young newlyweds _ sisters _ sisters-in-law
going in together _ to Nanjing _ or down to Guangdong
in hair salons _ gloomy buildings _ she was quite pretty
in hotels _ fancy places _ a happy expression
on her face

So much is conveyed in by piling on these images. This is personal: Hu Zhimin had worked in the factory with Zheng. We have glimpses of her at work as a sex worker: ‘innocent smile’, ‘quite pretty’, ‘a happy expression on her face’. There’s a hint of shame in ‘she was reduced’, but at the same time, Hu Zhimin didn’t try to hide what she was doing and the poem opens out to show us the ‘many young women’ have taken the same course. Their reasons for doing so aren’t named, and I suppose the poem allows the reading that these women took up sex work as an embrace of ‘desire and flesh’ or as a way of earning an income like any other, but I think it’s implied that harsh economic reality was their motivation, and there was an element of degradation in the work.

Then, back to the personal connection:

on her face _ we rarely met _ we had
the same background _ belonging to two
different worlds _ this city _ this moment
two people meeting and parting in life's arbitrariness
each hurrying off in her own direction

Both women came from small towns and migrated to ‘this city’ at ‘this moment’, but one of them left factory work for sex work, the other found a way to poetry. It’s a ‘there but for fortune’ moment.

I found the next words problematic:

and was fate somehow changed

Zhou Xiaojing’s translation came in handy for me:

not knowing what fate would bring

In Goodman’s translation, the line could be a question – did some mysterious force change their respective fates – but it’s hard to tell what’s actually being said. Zhou’s version is clearer: we are still with the two young women at the moment of parting ways, each ‘hurrying off in her own direction’ (or in Zhou, ‘each going her own way in a hurry’), and these words throw forward to the announcement at the end of the line, ‘she’s dead!’ Maybe Goodman’s opaqueness is more accurate than Zhou’s clarity, but I’m happy with the clearer version.

and was fate somehow changed _ 'she's dead!'
a man from her village told me _ then described
how she died _ he said she sent so much money home
said her family home was expensive _ her own brothers used 
her body to make money _ to buy a house in the village and open a shop 
he said after she died _ her brothers didn't even come
to bring her ashes home _ she couldn't be buried in her family plot 
she had sold her body _ she was dirty _ she'd ruin the fengshui of the family home

That’s the real tragedy. There’s no need to repeat that she died young of alcohol poisoning. Now we learn that her sex work was a means to create prosperity for her family back in the village. Though here it names only her brothers, we remember that the opening lines names the parents as well. They ‘used / her body to make money.’ But now that same body is treated as unclean, and left without the proper treatment of the dead.

We’re left with the image of a family home carefully ordered to be in harmony with the universe, but we know that this order has been achieved by the cruel exploitation of a family member that led to her early death. We’re thrown back to the opening line, ‘These days I’m immersed in this enormous era’. Hu Zhimin’s story sends ripples outward: the family home’s fengshui is corrupted by their callousness, the prosperity of China as a whole is built on suffering like hers, and – wider still – capitalism as a system destroys lives.

All that, and yet there’s an immediacy to the poem – we feel the pain of the poet’s loss and her indignation on her friend’s behalf.

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Beginning the Confessions of Saint Augustine

Posted on 20 Jun 2023 | 11 comments

I’ve become attached to the practice of reading a few pages of a classic text first thing in the morning. À la recherche du temps perdu kept me busy for nearly two years. The Iliad and The Prelude followed. Then Middlemarch, which I finished a couple of weeks ago. Now that I’ve stopped missing Dorothea, Will, Celia, Lydgate and even Rosamond, it’s time to move on to my next morning project.

Over the protests of the Emerging Artist, who has barely tolerated my occasional morning chat about Middlemarch (I say occasional; she says far too frequent), I’ve decided to tackle St Augustine’s Confessions next. I hereby resolve to keep any enthusiasms to myself, or at least not inflict them on my nearest and dearest.

This is a book that has been around in my life for a very long time, but it hasn’t occurred to me until now to actually read it. Good Counsel College in Innisfail – which I attended aged 9 to 13 – had the Latin motto, Tolle lege, which translates as ‘Take up and read’. Regardless of what personal meaning it might have had to students – it has pretty much become my life’s motto – we were told that the phrase came from a moment in the life of Saint Augustine: when he was living a dissolute life in the fleshpots of Egypt he heard an angelic voice telling him to pick up and read a book he saw lying on a window ledge. The book was a Christian Bible, and the text that he read in obedience to the voice turned his life around. I guess I’m about to find out if that story comes from the Confessions, and if it does, how much of my childhood recollection is true to what the man himself wrote.

I’ve garnered other bits of information about Augustine and this book over the years. That’s one of the things that makes a book a classic: you don’t have to have read it to know a thing or two about it.

I feel as if I’ve always known that Augustine lived a debauched pagan life while his Christian mother wept and prayed for his conversion. His prayer is famous: ‘Lord, make me virtuous, but not yet.’

At one stage of my life his injunction, ‘Ama et fac quod vis’ (‘Love and do what you will’) was a welcome antidote to the rule-bound Catholicism of my childhood.

Augustine invented the concept of original sin, the blight of many young Catholic lives – though James Carroll, in Constantine’s Sword, an excellent book about anti-semitiism in the Catholic Church, argues that for Augustine the concept was about embracing human imperfection rather than condemning us as innately evil.

I’e bought a copy of the Penguin Classics edition, translated in 1961 by the wonderfully-named R S Pine-Coffin, and I’ve found a Latin text on line in case I decide to be linguistically adventurous. I’ll report back in a month …

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Benjamin Gilmour’s Paramédico: page 76

Posted on 19 Jun 2023 | 4 comments

Here’s another post where I talk about a book with a focus on page 76 – chosen because it happens to be my age., but also because I remember someone saying that flicking to a page in the 70s (they may have suggested page 73) was a good way of checking out a book before buying

Benjamin Gilmour, Paramédico: Around the World by Ambulance (Pier 9, 2011)

If you were to judge Paramédico by its bullet-punctured, blood-spattered cover with its photo of an ambulance nosing through an impossibly dense crowd, you wouldn’t be wildly off the mark. To write the book, Benjamin Gilmour spent a number of years’ annual holidays from the NSW ambulance service working in ambulance services all over the world. Gunshot wounds and huge, virtually impenetrable crowds do feature.

But the cover gives no clue to much of the book. Gilmour abandons his holiday plans in Thailand to help treat survivors of a tsunami. He attends elderly people dying in the back streets of Venice. He wakes in fright in outback Australia. In the longest chapter, he explores two different ambulance systems that serve the urban poor of Pakistan. Everywhere he gives vivid accounts of injuries and illnesses the ambulance workers encounter, of the workings of the different systems: some have doctors in the ambulance, for instance, while in others the vehicle exists entirely as a transportation service for the dead as well as the living. It’s a kind of travelogue with a paramedical theme.

The main thing not hinted at by the cover – and as far as I recall not part of Gilmour’s 2012 documentary of the same name – is the book’s intensely personal nature. As paramedic and occasional interviewer of key people, Gilmour is always at the centre of the action. There’s a sense of jeopardy, not just in the proximity to gun violence or the hair-raising races through the streets of London and South African townships with sirens blaring, but in the ways the ambulance staff of various countries let off steam. The book’s comedy brings home the reality that ambulance workers put their bodies on the line: they do it not only in their work, but also in their play. Gilmour has fun mocking his own modesty when expected to sauna naked in Iceland, and plays up his terror of a Mexican initiation ceremony that involves having alcohol poured on his chest and set alight.

On page 76 he’s in Macedonia at the midsummer feast of Saint Nicholas. Even though his crew of four are on duty, they celebrate the feast in the traditional way, visiting a series of friends through the night, joining briefly in a feast at each stop. The page begins soon after they arrive at their first destination, the home of Igor, an ambulance worker on his night off:

Igor puts a strong hand on my shoulder, bangs a small glass down in front of me and fills it from a bottle of crystal-clear rakija inside of which is a miniature wooden ladder, as if inviting me to climb in.
‘Drink! Drink! Drink!’ Igor shouts at me.
Everyone is looking my way, at the foreign guest about to taste their rakija. It is customary in the Balkans to sample a family’s home brew after entering a house and, if one values one’s life, declaring it the best brandy one has ever tasted. Any reservations I have about drinking on shift are subdued by the fact that Sammy [the driver] and nurse Snezhana Spazovska also have a fully laden glass of rakija in their hands, while Dr Aquarius is savouring a mixture of red wine and Coca-Cola known as bamboos.

He drinks, and offers appropriate words of appreciation. The party breaks into approving applause, someone plays the accordion, and then:

Everyone is in fine spirits.
We have been at Igor’s for fifteen minutes when Dr Aquarius – now finishing off her second glass of bamboos – says we should keep rolling. This is not so we can return to our area for work but instead to visit the next home for another round of everything we have just ingested. We get up, offer our thanks and leave.

You get the picture. The visiting and partying continue, Gilmour suffers, and the reader is amused by his bruising journey on a loose stretcher in the back of the speeding ambulance. Then, in one of the moments that makes the book truly memorable, the crew that we just saw carousing is called to the home of a Roma woman who has died. When they arrive on the scene, the dead woman’s sister begins to sing:

Everyone listens intently. Everything is surreal. Quiet grief pours out of each person here. So moving is the sister’s song, my heart is hurting for the woman I never knew. On a card table nearby, tears belonging to Dr Aquarius fall onto the death certificate. She tries her best to dab it dry with her sleeve. In this moment the dead lady is everything and Saint Nicholas is nothing. Nurse Snezhana Spazovska, Dr Aquarius, Sammy the driver; it’s the longest I’ve seen them stay on scene. Never could I imagine that these hardened Macedonian medics on hearing this seemingly endless song would become so sad and – God forbid – weep. Nor could I imagine the gypsies of Shutka would appreciate our presence like they do now, our willingness to stay and listen, to give the most valuable gift a medic can give a patient – the gift of genuine feeling.

(Page 81)

Benjamin Gilmour spoke at the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival. As I mentioned in my blog post about his Curiosity Lecture, I was instrumental in publishing some of his poems when he was a teenager. Since then he has made at least two movies besides Paramédico: Son of a Lion (2007) and Jirga (2018), the latter dealing with a former Australian soldier returning to Afghanistan to submit to the judgment of a tribal court, a jirga. (Here’s a link to the Guardian review, which also describes the conditions in which the film was made, significantly more hair-raising than the adventures in Paramédico).

It’s quite a body of work, one that has involved going to places where most writers and filmmakers fear to tread. Let this be a lesson: if a teenager presents you with a handful of poems with titles like ‘An ode to a snake charmer (from his snake)’, encourage them. You don’t know what might they might do next.

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Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy

Posted on 11 Jun 2023 | 2 comments

This post continues my experiment of taking page 76 – because it happens to be my age – and writing whatever comes to mind. For a book as vast and challenging as Praiseworthy the approach would be inadequate for a thorough review of the book but it’s appropriate for a modest blog post.

Alexis Wright, Praiseworthy (Giramondo 2023)

Page 76 of Praiseworthy is almost exactly a tenth of the way into the book. If this was a movie, it would be the moment for the first turning point, the ‘opportunity’. And maybe it is.

Tommyhawk has just been introduced. He is a pudgy eight year old, the youngest member of the family at the centre of the story. His father, Cause Man Steel (also known as Planet and Widespread), has a vision of ensuring that Aboriginal communities and culture thrive in the climate catastrophe by creating a global transportation conglomerate using feral donkeys (the book gets pretty surreal). His mother, Dance (called ‘moth-er’ for the first time on this page), has a mystical connection with moths and butterflies, and is often surrounded by millions of them. His older brother, Aboriginal Sovereignty, is to take on a weird allegorical significance as the tale unfolds.

Depending on your point of view, Tommyhawk is the book’s villain or its tragic hero. The real villains are the colonisers, who are described on the very first page as ‘land-thief criminals’ and referred to frequently as ‘the national Australian government for Aboriginal people’, but who are almost completely offstage. (All but two ‘onstage’ characters are Aboriginal.) Assimilation is the great moral evil in this book. Other characters, including the albino Major Mayor of the community of Praiseworthy, have assimilationist goals, but for Tommyhawk, as we begin to understand on page 76, it’s personal.

Tommyhawk has done well at school and has been given a bunch of electronic devices, which he uses to listen to mainstream media, and becomes entranced by the version of Aboriginal people he hears, especially a much repeated assertion that Aboriginal men are paedophiles.

On this page:

Tommyhawk became convinced that these good white righteous people were speaking to him in particular, and not to other Aboriginal children, because he was special, and this made him most at risk. He believed they were speaking directly to him, and what they were saying ran through his mind in sleepless nights this way and that while he tossed and turned in the heat until he became wholeheartedly convinced that he had not been placed on this Earth to be stuck with dangerous people. Even!

Even like his parents. They were a danger to him. That Cause Man Steel person could kill him. And Dance, the moth-er, she only noticed him, took pity when she had mistaken him for a butterfly, or as a cocooned baby being cared for by butterflies flying among the reeds, pandanus fronds, mangrove leaves, drifting in from the sea, like the story of Moses. Hatred was not a word strong enough for how he felt about his parents.

The radio voices are Tommyhawk’s equivalent of Macbeth’s witches. Where Macbeth is tempted to kill the king, Tommyhawk is called away from his Aboriginal family and culture. He decides, soon after this page, that he wants to be adopted by the Minister for Aboriginal Affairs (whom he sees as an apparition in the sky) and be taken to live in the palace of Parliament House in Canberra. It’s absurd, comic and tragic all at once. I won’t spoil it by saying if he succeeds.

I can imagine a Reader’s Digest Condensed version of Praiseworthy that was about a third as long. Such a version would capture the whole plot and and lose almost everything that makes the book interesting. The same can be said of this page. If you read it simply for what moves the story forward, what follows the paragraphs I just quoted adds almost nothing.

But you don’t read this book just for the story. Alexis Wright appeared at the recent Sydney Writers’ Festival in conversation with Ivor Indyk, her publisher. For me, the most revelatory moment of the session was when she talked about the relationship between her writing and music. While writing, she listens mostly to classical Indian music and yidaki. Both those musics have a kind of pulse to them, and she tries to create something similar in her prose. It’s the pulse of country, she said: ‘We say that we’re of one heartbeat with the country.’

The second half of page 76 is far from the most ecstatic passage in Praiseworthy. It doesn’t defy punctuation conventions or twist language in a way that so discombobulates people like me who can’t lay their internal proofreader aside (see my blog posts on Carpentaria and The Swan Book), but it’s a good example of the way Alexis Wright’s prose circles around itself in long, looping sentences, repeating motifs (‘the Australian government for Aboriginal people’), using words that aren’t technically accurate but create the right effect (‘smithereens’), tossing in an awkward cliché (‘plain as day’), making an acute observation (‘passionately, or indifferently’), all in a seemingly unstoppable flow. It’s prose that needs to be heard.

Try reading this aloud, exclamations and all. What I hope you’ll hear is the rhythm of the prose, its weirdness, and – now that Wright has given me the word – its pulse.

So! Very well then! Tommyhawk’s endless deciphering of the barrage of voices on the radio went on through the night and continued as relentlessly as the haze-loving mosquitoes buzzing around him, but neither the activity of squashing blood-bloated mosquitoes to smithereens, or growing his monstrous brain from listening to what was being said on the radio passionately, or indifferently, about the Aboriginal world, was without success. All was gained, and while Tommyhawk had initially wondered why these people were talking the way they did about Aboriginal people like himself, he finally broke the code. He knew the plan as plain as day, that his national Australian government for Aboriginal people was actually speaking directly to him through the voices of random bigots on talkback radio, or in the news, or whatever running commentary he was listening to where anyone was having a good go, giving it all about what they thought of Aboriginal people. This was how he always found the message that the government was trying to get to him. Mostly it was about how the government was trying to tell him, You must escape your black parents

Added on 16 June: Mykaela Saunders has a brilliant long review of Praiseworthy, ‘Think of the Children!’, in the Sydney Review of Books, which you can read at this link.

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Jeannie Baker’s Desert Jungle

Posted on 6 Jun 2023 | 2 comments

Jeannie Baker, Desert Jungle (Walker Books Australia 2023)

There are no books quite like Jeannie Baker’s. For four decades she has been creating picture books that are immediately recognisable as hers. Where the Forest Meets the Sea (1988) was the first one I encountered. In it, a small boy wanders through the Daintree rainforest in North Queensland. The forest is recreated in collaged materials, most of them gathered in the real-life rainforest, to stunning effect. The book is meant for young readers, but readers of all ages are intrigued and delighted by the extraordinarily detailed work that has gone into the images.

Since then, every couple of years, a new book using similar collage techniques has appeared. All of them reflect a deep concern and love for the natural environment. Window (1991) traces the changes to a rural environment brought about by urban sprawl as seen through a child’s window. The Story of Rosy Dock (1995) features a beautiful but destructive invasive weed. Circle (2016) is about migratory birds.

Jeannie Baker has made short films of Where the Forest Meets the Sea and The Story of Rosy Dock – both of which are available from the National Film and Sound Archive. And there have been many exhibitions of her original artwork.

Which brings me to Desert Jungle. I read the book at the Penrith Regional Art Gallery, at an exhibition of the collages for this book. The gallery website describes the work (and the book) in these terms:

In this new story, Jeannie explores the Valley of the Cirios in Mexico, through the perspective of a young child and his grandfather. In parts of the Valley, towering stands of Cardon Cactus – some of the largest cacti on Earth – and Elephant Trees, mix with Cirios and other unique desert plants as a ‘forest’, almost a desert jungle. These cacti and other plants form both subject and material for Jeannie, who incorporates clippings from plants in her intricate and stunning works

https://www.penrithregionalgallery.com.au/events/jeannie-baker-desert-jungle/

The collages are in effect dioramas, displayed behind perspex that is curved to accommodate their depth. Part of the fascination is to read the labels, to see that most of the images are made from parts of the plants they represent. Even, in an image of the young boy sitting with his grandfather, the hairs on the old man’s arm are actual human hair meticulously glued in place.

In the context of these wonders, the book’s story is almost of secondary interest. When the boy visits his grandfather, he doesn’t like to go out into the surrounding desert because he’s afraid of coyotes, so he stays by the house and plays on his tablet. A coyote steals his precious technology and when he wanders out to search for it, he finds the desert isn’t so scary after all. He even encounters the coyote and nothing bad happens. It’s an understated little drama about facing one’s fears, and at the same time has something to say about the importance of engaging with the natural world.

I haven’t read it with a small child yet. I’ll be interested to see how it goes.

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SWF 2023: My sixth day

Posted on 31 May 2023 | 4 comments

Another early start with 10–11 am: Barrie Cassidy & Friends: State of the Nation

Veteran journalist Barrie Cassidy has been a regular at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, but this is the first time I’ve been to one of his sessions. He was on stage with what the festival program calls ‘his hand-picked squad of the country’s sharpest pundits’: Amy Remeikis, Niki Savva and Laura Tingle. They’re all regulars on current affairs TV, but I don’t think I’d seen any of them in person before.

The subject was politics, that is to say mainly electoral politics and the state of the major parties. The most telling comment was towards the end when Barrie Cassidy said, ‘When there’s consensus between the major parties, the media doesn’t chase it up.’ This means that the press doesn’t do a lot of interrogating of the AUKUS deal – is it actually in Australia’s interest or is it a matter of us serving the interests of the UK and the US? Similarly, coverage of climate issues through a party-political lens can often miss the point.

Nikki Savva’s subject seems to be the Liberal party. She sees the current dominance of Labor in Federal parliament and in all mainland states is largely due to the decline of the Liberals as a fighting machine and also as representative of a population. They are ceasing to be an effective opposition, or even an opposition at all. Peter Dutton’s survival strategy depends on three things: the failure of teh referendum on the Voice; an economic crash; and the rise of intolerance. Hard to cheer for him, then, and she says many dyed in the wool Liberals can no longer bring themselves to vote for what the party has become since Howard.

Amy Remeikis, introduced by Barrie Cassidy as political correspondent for The Australian much to the amusement of the Guardian readers in the audience, thought Labor’s ascendancy had something to do with changing demographics. Millennials now outnumber boomers, and in addition to the tendency of people to be more progressive when young, there’s the fact that life is particularly tough for the young these days.

Laura Tingle added that politics tends to go in cycles. This is Labor’s time for dominance, it was at rock bottom in 2014.

All agreed that there is a growing disconnect between the political class – politicians, political journalists, people who turn up for panels like this one – and the rest of the community. People are doing it hard, inequality is bigger than it’s ever been, our sense of common life is being eroded (not as badly in the USA, yet). Things are better than they were before last year’s election. The people in charge now are there with good motives, but business as usual could lead to disaster. We need grown-up conversations about tax and climate policy, and we’ve got a way to go for that.

A non-party-political subject that got some airplay was the recent resignation of Stan Grant after he was subjected to vicious and sometimes racist attack for giving a Wiradjuri perspective on the British Crown. Laura Tingle, as recently elected member of the ABC’s Board, said she had been out of action for a couple of weeks because of a bereavement, but deeply regretted Stan’s lack of support from management and the Board.

I haven’t ever watched Insiders, which used to be Barrie Cassidy’s Sunday morning show on the ABC. I imagine this was a slightly generalised version of that. One of the questions at the end referred to the fact that over a number of years not one non-white panellist had appeared on that show (the questioner didn’t need to point out that all the panellists today were white). Barrie did the only thing he could do and said it had been a mistake.

11 am: Osman Faruqi on Australia’s War Against Hip Hop

I listened to this Curiosity Lecture almost by accident. I know almost nothing about hip hop, and I guess I skip over headlines saying that it has been banned in venues including Sydney’s Royal Easter Show.

Osman Faruqi’s exasperated plea could have been meant specifically for me: ‘For once, listen to some art that doesn’t come from Bondi or Balmain.’ (Though, to be honest, I don’t know when I last listened to music from either Bondi or Balmain.)

He told us that NSW Police have taken steps to ban particular hip hop performers saying, nonsensically, that their music is used to ‘procure’ members for criminal bikie gangs etc. This censorship, he said, is ‘the greatest example of artistic suppression in Australia’s history’. If Nick Cave, who is white and part of the music establishment, sings about murdering every woman he sees, no one bans his song as inciting murder. When Bill Henson’s photographs are taken down, there’s an outcry. But if a brown rapper uses violent imagery they are banned from performing and police have their videos removed from YouTube, and there is resounding silence from the art world, including from successful white rappers.

Showing my age: in the 1970s the campaign against censorship focused on erotic material, because the banning of material deemed pornographic (the famous example if Lady Chatterley’s Lover, but Norman Mailer’s Why Are We in Vietnam was also banned). You don’t have to love pornography or be a fan of drill-rap to be uneasy about what’s happening now

12–12.30 pm: Beginnings: Remembering Robert Adamson and Frank Moorhouse

There were a number of ‘Beginnings’ sessions. It’s a nice idea: people read the beginnings of their favourite books, or perhaps their own books, on the assumption that writers put a lot of attention to their opening paragraphs.

This short session used the format to honour Frank Moorhouse and Robert Adamson, who both died in the last 12 months. I wonder if it would be an idea to plan a couple of elegiac sessions along these lines for every Writers’ Festival. Spaces could be left blank for people who die too late to be included in advance publicity. John Tranter, who died on 21 April this year, might then have been honoured.

As it was, Annabel Crabb and Mark Mordue read to us.

Annabel read the opening pages of the first two ‘Edith’ books, the first line of the third, and then the final pages, Edith’s death scene, from Cold Light, the third book. It was shockingly good.

Mark Mordue opened with a letter found in Adamson’s papers in which Frank Moorhouse responded warmly to one of Adamson’s poems. He spoke briefly about Adamson’s life, including his time in prison, his drug addiction and the role of his wife Juno Gemes. He finished with a poem that Adamson wrote for her, ‘The Kingfisher’s Soul’, which Adamson himself read at at least one previous Sydney Writers’ Festival. It ends:

_________________________ the future awaits you.
I stepped into the day, by following your gaze.

I want to make a final small observation about acknowledgements of country.

My initial prompt for this was an acknowledgement that was gobsmackingly perfunctory: the presenter didn’t look at us, but read hurriedly from a clipboard, stumbling slightly over the words. Disrespect may not have been intended, but it was certainly there.

I started to notice how other presenters made their acknowledgements personal. For example:

  • Michael Williams spoke briefly of how the land was unceded and so the issue of sovereignty was unresolved
  • Omar Sakr noted that some people object to the acknowledgements and responded that words – words like ‘genocide’ and ‘sovereignty’ – matter, that words give rise to actions
  • Sisonke Msimang made acknowledgement first in her own mother tongue and then in English
  • Felicity Plunkett quoted two lines about the power of country from First Nations poet Ellen van Neerven
  • Barrie Cassidy drew our attention to the coming referendum on a First Nations Voice to Parliament.

I was born on Mamu land in what is now North Queensland, and my father remembered as a child hearing ceremony down at the river behind our place. I’m writing this on Gadigal-Wangal land. Both places make my heart sing.

And the Festival is over, bar the podcasting.

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SWF 2023: My fifth day

Posted on 30 May 2023 | 3 comments

12–1 pm: Crime and Justice

This session demonstrated the strengths of a two-person panel. It was progressing quite nicely, as Sarah Krasnostein (my blog post about her Quarterly Essay Not Waving, Drowning here) introduced the talent, Helen Garner (my relevant blog post here) and Hedley Thomas (creator of the podcast Teacher’s Pet), and asked about their writing process.

When Helen Garner is embarking on a long project, she buys a spiral bound A4 notebook and keeps a kind of diary of everything related to the project: not transcripts of interviews, but odd details, what she did, and thought, and felt. When it came time to marshal the material she had accumulated for Joe Cinque’s Consolations she was at a loss where to start, looked to the notebooks for inspiration and discovered that they contained the skeleton of the book.

Hedley Thomas was in the middle of answering a similar procedural question, when Garner was visibly excited by something he said. With a quick look at Sarah Krasnostein, half asking permission and half apologising, she interrupted to take the conversation off in a whole new direction: the way footballers tend to have a degree of immunity from police investigation because of their almost hallowed status in Australian society. From then on we were treated to a lively conversation between two people who had deep appreciation for each other’s work and were swapping stories and genuine compliments.

Sarah Krasnosteiin made a couple of attempts to restore order, but I think she could tell things were going swimmingly. This session is sure to appear on the SWF podcast during the year.

5–6 pm Alexis Wright: Praiseworthy

Alexis Wright’s third massive novel, Praiseworthy, was published just a couple of months ago. Ivor Indyk, director of Giramondo Publishing, stepped in at short notice to discuss it with her, replacing Sisonke Msimang, who had been called home to Western Australia unexpectedly. So, in this session, an author discussed her novel with her publisher and editor – that is to say, with a reader who had some influence on how the book turned out.

I was one of the few people in the room to have read the book. I was keen to lap up any guidance from either Ivor or Alexis on how to make sense of the experience. I’m glad to report that I got plenty.

For a start, it was reassuring that Alexis mentioned some of the more bizarre plot developments with a wicked smile, and the audience laughed quite a lot as the two of them named odd characters and moments. Ivor said towards the end of the conversation that the comedy of her work was often overshadowed by its epic qualities. For me, the issue was more how seriously to take the epic qualities when, as summarised by their author in this conversation, they had such absurd qualities.

Asked about the original idea for the book, Alexis Wright said she didn’t remember – she’d have to look up her notebooks. Perhaps it had to do asking what Aboriginal people are to in the new era of global warming and climate change. She started writing it when she was working on her multivocal biography of Tracker Tilmouth in 2017 (my blog post here), and the visionary at the heart of the novel ‘Cause Man Steel, Widespread or Planet, whatever you want to call him’) is in part based on Tracker. Widespread’s plan for a global transport conglomerate using Australia’s five million feral donkeys, though, is all hers: it’s absurd to the point of surrealism, but there’s something true in the way it leads to a cycle of vision and disappointment.

The book is in part a celebration of Aboriginal people’s will to survive, manifested in many ways, tainted by 240 years of living in the coloniser’s world. The enemy in this book is the project of assimilation.

Perhaps most interesting to me was the exchange about music. Referring to the Ice Queens – grotesque, larger-than-life women who appear toward the end of the book – Ivor wondered about the influence of opera. Alexis agreed that she loved opera, but seemed nonplussed at Ivor’s suggestion that these characters are operatic. The music she listens to most while writing is classical Indian music and yidaki (didgeridoo). She tries to capture the tone and rhythm of that music – the pulse, the heartbeat: ‘We say that we’re of one heartbeat with the country.’

‘You hear what you’re writing,’ Wright said. ‘Then it gets recorded and you want it to be the voice you heard, but it can’t be that voice.’

There was a lot more. Ivor touched on the way Wright defies conventions, at times inventing words that look like mistakes, but which are anything but.

I’ll be attempting my own blog post about Praiseworthy in the next couple of days. Wish me luck!

We made a quick dash to a smaller venue for 6–7 pm State of the Art

Kate Evans of ABC’s The Bookshelf presided over another panel. This time it was Eleanor Catton, Richard Flanagan, Tracey Lien and Colson Whitehead invited to discuss the state of the novel and the future of fiction.

I haven’t read anything books by any of these authors, apart from one novel that I hated, which I’m told is completely unrepresentative of their work. I enjoyed the ebb and flow of conversation, but didn’t have anything to ground myself in.

Kate Evans asked if ChatGPT and other AI content producers spelled the end of novelists. Tracey Lien, the youngest on the panel and the only one without a string of awards to her name (and not at all intimidated by that, she said smiling bravely), said she used ChatGPT as a research assistant, but it couldn’t do the writing. On the one hand, it doesn’t have a brain, but produces word after word by complex algorithms, and the act of reading is a back-and-forth between minds. On the other hand, ChatGPT lies.

Richard Flanagan, whose scowl occasionally gave to an appreciative grimace at another panellist’s point well made, said he didn’t care about AI. He’d just keep writing.

The subject of decent recompense for the work of writing, and of all creative work generally, provoked more interest. Digital publishing changes the landscape significantly. They all agreed they weren’t in it for the money, but money would be nice. Eleanor Catton said that working as a scriptwriter was hugely more remunerative. Responding to a question at the end about how to become a writer and also earn a living, Flanagan said he had decided to be a writer when he was very young and in order to achieve it he lived in poverty for years. There was no other way. Colson Whitehead said something similar: after a significant number of successful novels he was at least temporarily able to live on his earnings as a writer. He implied that this is precarious.

Whitehead, Flanagan and Catton spoke interestingly about not repeating themselves, each new novel being a whole new challenge.

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