Tag Archives: non-fiction

Raja Shehadeh, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I

Posted on 22 Jun 2025 | Leave a comment

Raja Shehadeh, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir (Profile Books 2022)

When a young man at the Sydney Writers’ Festival recommended this book to me, I said, ‘What a great title!’ He didn’t miss a beat: ‘Yeah, a great dust jacket too.’ You’ve got to love the sarcastic young.

Superficial old man I may be, but the promise of the its title is what led me to this book rather than one of Raja Shehadeh’s other recent books, such as What Does Israel Fear from Palestine? (2024) or his Orwell Prize winning Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2008) – both with excellent titles. Since reading Annie Ernaux’s book about her father, A Man’s Place / La place (my blog post here), I’ve been hungry for more books in which the writer sets out to understand their father. This promised to be that. I was not disappointed, and I also received a masterly lesson in the history of Palestine since the nakbah in 1948.

In 1984, Raja was 33 years old and working in the legal practice of his father, Aziz Shehadeh, on the West Bank. When he saw a map that he realised was a blueprint for an Israeli occupation, he wanted to challenge Israel’s plan through the courts. His father gave advice and put his name to brief that Raja prepared, but when the PLO failed to support it he didn’t share his son’s surprise and distress. Raja asked, ‘Had he given up on using the law to resist Israel’s occupation?’

The next year, aged 73, Aziz was murdered. (The case has never been resolved. Apparently the Israeli police knew who the murderer was but didn’t want to charge him.) For maybe 20 years, filing cabinets crammed with his papers remained unopened until Raja decided to have a proper look, and found a wealth of well-ordered material which may have been the preliminary work for a memoir. This book is the narrative Raja constructed from those papers.

Aziz Shehadeh was a prominent lawyer in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, who lost everything in 1948. At first he thought he and his family would be able to return home after a couple of months when things calmed down. It was not to be.

What followed was a long, intense engagement in political debate with other Palestinians and endless attempts, some successful, to mount legal challenges to Israel’s actions. And with it all the terrible sense of betrayal by other Arab nations. As Raja said at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, he had known the broad outline of his father’s activism, but only on reading the papers did he understood his suffering.

Page 78* is part of the story of one of Aziz’s great successes, what he called the ‘frozen money case’, an episode that illustrates the way Britain, Israel and the Arab states in effect combined forces against Palestinians.

When the British Mandate ended in 1948, the British Treasury declared that the Palestinian pound was no longer legal tender. This meant that for the thousands of Palestinians who had fled to other countries, any bank accounts in Palestinian currency were useless. Arab banks and the Bank of England denied all responsibility, and the fate of those accounts was left to the new state of Israel.

Israel ordered every commercial bank operating in its territory to ‘freeze the accounts of all their Arab customers and to stop all transactions on all Arab accounts’. Shehadeh points out that they refrained from calling them Palestinian accounts: ‘To them Palestine was no more and the Palestinians had ceased to exist.’

By the end of December 1948 every bank operating in Israel had obeyed the order. The newly established state was exploiting all its power to inflict the maximum amount of damage on its enemies, the Palestinians.

On this page, in measured, objective prose, Shehadeh outlines the ruthlessness of the new Israeli government. First, in December 1948, there were directives called Emergency Regulations on the Property of Absentees, with which both active banks, one British and the other Arab, felt obliged to comply. In February 1949 the Israeli government required the banks to transfer the affected funds to a new entity called the Custodian of Absentee Property. The banks could wipe their hands of the issue.

Within a year it became clear that the freeze was not a temporary measure, intended to last only until peace was established, as had initially been promised. For Israel now proceeded to liquidate the assets in these accounts as if they belonged to the state. Again the banks colluded in this harsh decision against the refugees, who had just lost all their properties in Palestine.
My father was appalled. He could hardly believe that the banks could get away with it and began to explore the possibility of a legal challenge.

The pages that follow tell of a protracted legal battle, which Aziz eventually won, alleviating the suffering of thousands of Palestinian refugees. One significant win along the way.

Aziz was at odds with the PLO. He argued that the refugees should accept that they would never be able to return to their homes. He campaigned for the notion of two states – a Palestinian state and an Israeli state – side by side. His personal story is intimately bound up with the story of the Palestinians, and it is one of many stories of sustained, systematic, heroic resistance.

Edward Said famously wrote that Palestinians have been denied permission to narrate. This book, like others by Raja Shehadeh and a score of other writers, defies that prohibition. I’ve read very little of that writing, but there are a couple of books I can recommend if you’re interested (links to my blog pasts): Drinking the Sea at Gaza (1999) by Israeli journalist Amira Hass; 19 Varieties of Gazelle (2002), a collection of poems by Palestinian-American Naomi Shihab Nye published in response to the rise of anti-Arab sentiment in the USA after September 2001; Palestine (2003) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009), groundbreaking comics journalism by USer Joe Sacco.

I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, whose occupation since 1788 has never been legally resolved. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently 78.

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Helen Garner’s Season at the Book Group

Posted on 18 Jun 2025 | 8 comments

Helen Garner, The Season (Text Publishing 2024)

Before the Book Group Meeting:

While she was writing The Season, Helen Garner described it to friends as ‘a nana’s book about footy’. Her youngest grandson Amby was fifteen, on the cusp of manhood. Being witness to his football games and training sessions was, among other things, a way of enriching and maybe holding onto that precious relationship.

I came to the book with a lot of baggage. For a start I didn’t have a benign experience of fifteen-year-old boys when I was one. My boarding school’s focus on football made skinny, physically inept, nerdy Jonathan something of an outcast, and fifteen year old boys, however sweet they may look to a nana’s eyes, can be brutal to the designated outcasts. (Full disclosure: because the school also prized academic achievement, which I was quite good at, I wasn’t the worst abused.)

What’s more, Aussie Rules is pretty much a closed book to me. I don’t know a mark from a behind, let alone a torp, and nana Helen, who says she knows very little about the sport, is sufficiently steeped in AFL culture to feel no need to explain such terms. My whole family watched my big brother play League on Saturdays, my father yelling at the ref in cheerfully confected outrage. And the footballs I myself played at school, badly, were League, Union and soccer. We referred to AFL, then Victorian Rules, as aerial pingpong.

So, even though I’m a member of the vast Helen Garner fan club, I would happily have skipped The Season.

But what the Book Group wants …

I can’t say it completely won me over, but it’s beautifully written. While Garner’s intense desire to know her grandson – ‘what’s in his head, what drives him’ – is the heart of the book, it broadens out to look at aspects of masculinity, and aspects of being an old woman, and aspects of the role of football in Melbourne social life, in an engagingly impressionistic way. I doubt if any other book uses words like ‘sweet’, ‘delicate’, ‘graceful’ or ‘beautiful’ about men young and old with as much frequency. In the opening pages, she writes about becoming an engaged grandmother to two boys:

Never having raised a son, I now began to learn about boys and men from a fresh angle, to see their delicacy, their fragility, what they’re obliged to do to themselves in order to live in this world, the codes of behaviour they’ve had to develop in order to discipline and sublimate their drive to violence

In a recent Big Ideas podcast, Tim Etchells from the British theatre group Forced Entertainment talked about learning by finding rather than by searching. He could have had this book in mind. Garner depicts herself as going to training sessions and games and seeing what happens – no agenda, no conclusions, just acute, self-aware, finely articulated observation. Maybe this is why she kept her first husband’s family name: she garners.

The book moves through footy season from February to August. On page 78*, it’s May, and Garner has had Covid. Watching a lot of football on TV, she has surmised that Virgil and Homer would recognise the ‘hulking airborne men’ she sees in those games. After two weeks ‘reading, dozing, reading again, forgetting everything I’ve read’, she opens a newspaper to the sports pages, where she sees a photo of Buddy Franklin, a Sydney Swans player she describes as ‘a hero of the game, a dancing god of the game in his last season’, whom a Collingwood crowd has booed:

Franklin is thirty-six, battle-hardened. His face, in this photo, is calm, composed; but it is also as soft as a boy’s. It’s a wounded face, with that wiped look of someone who’s copped a ringing slap across the cheek: all his expression lines are gone. In my fortnight of isolation I must have lost a couple of skins: I shock myself by bursting into tears.

I found the photo at this link, or maybe it’s this one. To look at them and read Garner’s description of them is to recognise what a fine writer she is. Even when putting herself front and centre, bursting into tears, she communicates elegantly about the observed world.

The next sentence is a rare moment in this book when Garner allows an explicit moral judgement into the text. Elsewhere, when she narrates the attitudes of Amby and other men to physical injury – they almost seem to relish it – she maintains a kind of awed incomprehension. Even here, she doesn’t voice her own opinion, but goes into journalist mode for a moment and quotes someone else.

The Guardian doesn’t hold back: ‘It’s about the internalised hatred that men – who are the dominant force in shaping and sustaining AFL culture – have for themselves and each other. The Great Southern and Ponsford Stands merely provide a haven for the boozed up, brittle and broken to project their own self-hatred and insecurities on to others.’

I don’t read this as Garner using ‘the Guardian‘ as a mouthpiece for her own opinion. It’s as if some judgement is needed once the booing has been mentioned, but to make a moral judgement would be to disrupt her role as witness seeking understanding. All the same, she does let the harsh judgement stand, more endorsed than rejected, and returns to her primary focus.

Thursday, on the way to training.
‘I still haven’t heard about the game I missed.’
‘Okay. Because of the pain all down my leg I told Archie I wouldn’t be able to go hard, so he kept me on full-back and full-forward. It was horrible. I was so cold. I only touched the ball twice. I was on this huuuuuge guy.’
‘But you kicked a goal, didn’t you?’
‘Yes, but I didn’t get any of my anger out. And the goal wasn’t very … nice.
‘You mean it wasn’t sort of heroic?’
‘No.’
‘But nevertheless it was a goal?’
He shrugs and runs off.

The book is full of these wonderful nanna–grandson chats. Throughout, there’s a tension between Helen the invisible old woman who comes to training sessions or chats with other parents during matches, and Hel the grandmother who is almost a confidante. He puts his big arm around her, rebuffs her attempts to fuss over his injuries, lets her tease him about his mullet, is oblivious to her shock when she realises her grandson has turned into a six-foot man, ‘his surfer’s legs covered in golden hair’.

OK, so maybe those front-row forwards who threw their weight around back when I was 15 were also just boys, far from their mums and dads and nanas, and only smaller, vulnerable boys to get their anger out on. The book has enough AFL in it to have made me want to give up on it a number of times, but I stayed to have my perspective shifted by Helen Garner, a meticulous, wide-eyed, sometimes self-mocking, always loving witness.

After the meeting: This is an all male book group. We kicked off our discussion of the book with a round of ‘position statements’ vis à vis sport in general and AFL in particular. From my point of view this round and the conversation that grew from it was at least as interesting as the book.

I was pretty much the only one who both loathed sport at school and was ignorant about AFL. There was only one total AFL tragic – all but two of us grew up with different codes. For most of us, team sport had played an overwhelmingly positive role. One had played second row forward in the same scrum as a future prime minister. Another is directly related to ‘Rugby League royalty’. One, who came to Sydney from a country town as a young man to go to university, found refuge in the football team, and felt it pretty much saved his life. For another, from an non–English speaking background, the different codes signified different relationships to mainstream Australia – and as a young person he had avoided soccer, which his father loved, so as not to be seen as an outsider. There was much more.

When we came to the book, it’s probably fair to say we all enjoyed it, but there were lots of reservations. ‘She doesn’t get football,’ one man said a number of times. Someone explained to me (and by implication to Helen) that the full-on bodily contact of football isn’t violence. Mostly it doesn’t hurt unless, paradoxically, you don’t fully commit, and any injury is incidental. There was general scepticism about the book’s underlying assumption that men have an ‘underlying drive to violence’ which team sports exist to address – there was quite a bit of chat about women’s sport, some but not all of it on this point. We all, especially the grandfathers among us, admired and envied the relationship between ‘Hel’ and Amby – the relative openness of communication, his physical ease, her tact.

Someone said the book read like a diary – proposing no particular thesis and coming to no conclusion. Only one of us had read Helen Garner’s diaries (Yellow Notebook, One Day I’ll Remember This and How to End a Story), and said they were wonderful. Alas, he confessed at the end of the meeting that he’d only read 10 pages of The Season, so he couldn’t compare it with the more substantial work.

This post may be too much about me and too little about the book, but I came away from the discussion feeling that just as writing the book gave Helen Garner gained some access to arcane rituals and tenets of sporty masculinity, so did I in our conversation, from a different outsider perspective. Long live the Book Group.

The Book Group met on Gadigal land and I wrote this blog post on land of Gadigal and Wangal of the Eora Nation, where we’re fast approaching the shortest day of the year. I acknowledge the Elders past and present of this country, never ceded and welcome any First Nations readers of this blog. The sport of AFL, like much that is distinctive in Australian settler culture, owes much to First Nations influence: some historians believe that it owed a lot to marn grook, a game played by First Nations people.

* My blogging practice is focus arbitrarily on the page of a book that coincides with my age, currently page 78.

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The Book Group and Wolfram Eilenberger’s Visionaries

Posted on 9 Apr 2025 | Leave a comment

Wolfram Eilenberger, The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy (©2020, translation by Shaun Whiteside 2023)

Before the meeting: It’s unlikely that the group would have read The Visionaries if we chose books by consensus. But The Chooser has spoken and we’re out of our comfort zones.

It’s a hard book to describe. Without anything by way of preamble or general argument, it plunges straight into its story. The first chapter, ‘Sparks: 1943’, introduces the book’s four subjects: four quite different women writers, each heroic in her own way, poised to take a major leap forward In the midst of the horrors of the Second World War. As with each of the book’s eight chapters and Coda, the chapter is subtitled:

Beauvoir is in the mood, Weil in a trance, Rand in a fury, and Arendt in a nightmare.

And the four philosophers are introduced:

  • Simone de Beauvoir, aged 35, is in occupied France in her famously unconventional ‘family’ with Jean-Paul Sartre, with ‘better things to do than worry about the judgment of that petit-bourgeois fascist’ (that is, Adolf Hitler): she is on the brink of ‘a new definition of man (sic!) as an acting creature. And one that was neither empty of content, as in Sartre’s latest work, nor bound to remain absurd, as in Camus’s writing.’
  • Simone Weil, 34, is in London, desperately ill and in pain, but lobbying for the creation of ‘a special unit of French nurses at the front who would be deployed only in the most dangerous places, to provide first aid in the middle of battle’. She would head this unit personally, in what looks awfully like a plan to commit suicide by altruism. De Gaulle dismisses the proposal out of hand: ‘She is mad!’ Instead she writes urgently and copiously, including ‘a 300-page redesign of the cultural existence of humanity in the modern age’ before collapsing in exhaustion.
  • After ten years as a freelance writer in New York City, Ayn Rand, 37, sees the publication of her 700-page novel, The Fountainhead, and launches her passionate espousal of independence, her worldview that saw altruism as the great destructive force.
  • Hannah Arendt, 36, also in New York, has been driven out of Hitler’s Germany, and is now finding in herself the courage to face the reality of the industrialised murder of millions of Jews. What mattered was ‘to be entirely present’, or, as paraphrased by Eilenberger, ‘to philosophise’.

In the following chapters, Eilenberger tells us the story of the life and work of each of these four women over the preceding decade. It’s left to the reader to discern any unifying theme or concern. In my reading, the closest he comes to articulating a central theme is on page 69:

The philosophising person seems to be essentially a pariah of deviant insights, the prophet of a life lived rightly, whose traces can be found and deciphered even in the deepest falsity. At least this is one way to understand the role that Ayn Rand as well as her contemporaries Weil, Arendt and Beauvoir assumed with ever greater confidence. Not that they had expressly made a choice. They simply experienced themselves as having been placed fundamentally differently in the world from how other people had been. And deep inside they remained certain of who or what the problem needing treatment was: not themselves, but the Others. Possibly, in fact – all the Others.

If one were to pursue that view, the actual impulse of astonishment at the beginning of all philosophising is not the surprise that there is ‘something and not nothing’, but rather, honest bafflement that other people live as they do.

If I understand this correctly, part of what he is saying is that whereas their male colleagues were interested in the individual human being in relation to the world, these four women were interested in human beings in relationship to each other.

It may be that what you find in any book depends on what you bring to it. A reader well-versed in 20th century philosophy would read this one differently from me: it seems that each of these women was pushed to the margins of political and philosophical thinking, and this book is part of a movement to rectify that. But I’m not that well-versed reader. I haven’t read a whole work by any of them, but I’ve known about all four in a general way.

In my mental landscape, Simone Weil is a weirdly saintly figure who embraced suffering (and loved one of my own favourite poems, as I blogged recently), a Jew who was lived her own intense version of non-Church Christianity; Ayn Rand is a demonic figure who celebrated and justified libertarian capitalism; Simone de Beauvoir is Jean-Paul Sartre’s devoted lover who wrote The Second Sex, a key text of second-wave feminism; and Hannah Arendt is a woman of extraordinary integrity who coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ and wrote about totalitarianism.

This book leaves those thumbnail sketches pretty much in place, but I now have a much richer understanding of the people and their works. I didn’t know, for instance, that Simone Weil had worked as a trade union organiser and had brilliant political insights, that Simone de Beauvoir had such a complex set of intimate relationships, that Ayn Rand was married and counted on her husband Frank O’Connor while she wrote fiercely about independence (and that ‘Ayn’ rhymes with ‘fine’), or that Hannah Arendt was quite so marvellous a human being as she appears in these pages.

Their stories are told independently, but Eilenberger makes occasional telling comparisons, and sometimes the women’s paths cross. I love the meeting between the two Simones on page 55, quoted from Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter:

I managed to get near her one day. I don’t know how the conversation got started; she declared in no uncertain tones that only one thing mattered in the world: the revolution which would feed all the starving people of the earth. I retorted, no less peremptorily, that the problem was not to make men happy, but to find the reason for their existence. She looked me up and down: ‘It’s easy to see you’ve never been hungry,’ she snapped. Our relations ended right there.

And on page 190, the moment that has stayed with me as a piece of wisdom to live by – far from the self-abnegation of Simone Weil or the grand existentialist abstraction of de Beauvoir. Hannah Arendt, Eilenberger writes, is ‘laying the foundation of her own ethics of true self-determination in the face of the Other’:

Gratitude, for the existence of other people in the world, and active concern, for their always given vulnerability, are for Arendt the two true sources of our moral life. And it is no coincidence … that these two predispositions are the very ones that are essentially alien to Ayn Rand’s superhuman ideal figure, Howard Roark.

Amid all the egotism, altruism, self-sacrifice, angst, ambition, bitterness, sweetness, ruthlessness, pain, of those brilliant young adult lives, the notion that gratitude and concern are central went straight to my heart.

After the meeting: Usually, we spend quite a bit of time chatting before turning to the book of the night, but this time we were into it before we even sat down. The food was, as always, excellent. Our host had done a huge tray of roast vegetables and the contributions of the other five of us, with minimal advance coordination, worked well. He Who Usually Brings Dessert was on the other side of the continent, but it was someone’s birthday, and we had cake.

Though the book took us well outside our collective comfort zone, I think we were all glad to have read it. Most enjoyed it for the history, and tended to skip the philosophy. One of us is doing a philosophy course with the University of the Third Age, and had read Wolfram Eilenberger’s previous book, Time of the Magicians, about four male 20th century philosophers. He gave a couple of mini-lectures that cast light, gratefully received, on some of our dark places.

We had three different readings of ‘the Salvation of philosophy’ in the subtitle: these four women were saved by philosophy in times of extreme hardship; they saved philosophy from the dried-up mainstream by focusing on the connections among people; in the terrible time of the Second World War and Nazi atrocities, they kept the flame of philosophical thinking alive. Maybe all three are correct. (I’ve just seen the subtitle of the original is Die Rettung der Philosophie in finsteren Zeiten (1933-1943), literally The Salvation of Philosophy in Dark Times (1933–1943). And the title itself is Feuer der Freiheit – Fire of Freedom. It’s kind of intriguing that the four woman aren’t named, and there’s not even a hint that the book focuses on particular women. I wonder how much that change of packaging influences out reading.)

A couple of guys took against Simone de Beauvoir. I tried to defend her, and was supported by someone drawing a comparison between her and one of the participants in Australian Survivor that was as obscure to me as the extracts from Simone Weil’s journals. Incidentally, I now know how to pronounce Weil (it’s VAY).

We were in awe at how young the four women were in the years covered by the book. Some were pretty sure that Simone de Beauvoir’s entanglement with a student would get her fired and publicly shamed these days. It was a revelation that for de Beauvoir the war at times barely disturbed her way of life (someone had been to see the Anne Dangar exhibition in Canberra and had a similar revelation – ‘Oh yes, Hitler’s doing all that stuff,’ the artists in France said to each other, ‘but cubism is so interesting.’) It was pointed out that two of the four women were novelists rather than philosophers as such. Someone thought Hannah Arendt was a bit dull (I was shocked). Some were surprised to find themselves feeling sympathy for Ayn Rand (I was ashamed).

We barely talked about Donald Trump. I hope he noticed the lack of attention.

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Isabella Tree’s Wilding

Posted on 18 Feb 2025 | 3 comments

Isabella Tree, Wilding: The return of nature to a British farm (Picador 2018)

The environmental-activist friend who gave me this book for Christmas says he gives it to everyone. Having read it, I can see why. Apart from its fascinating subject matter, it’s very engagingly written. My friend wrote on the title page, ‘A taste of what the future holds (if there is one)’.

Isabella Tree (her real name) and her husband Charlie (Sir Charles Burrell) were dairy farmers in Sussex. They were also the lord and lady of Knepp Castle, Charlie’s ancestral home. In the 1990s, in spite of following all the best practice recommendations of the time, their dairies were operating at an unredeemable loss, so they decided to put their 3,500 acres (1,400 hectares) to different use. First they sought and received funding to make part of the land into a park, and eventually the whole property became what is now the Knepp Wildland rewilding project.

The book ia an exhilarating account of the process of bringing that change about – or to a great extent allowing it to happen, as a lot of what was needed, it turned out, was for well-meaning humans to get out of the way of natural regeneration. I won’t try to summarise the process. Enough to say that the experience of Knepp has challenged many received ideas about what the English countryside was like before large-scale human intervention. It seems unlikely, for example, that the country was covered in closed-canopy forest – grazing and browsing animals would have kept a lot of the land relatively open, and the much treaured English oaks don’t grow well in a closed-canopy environment.

That orthodoxy isn’t the only one to be challenged. Isabella Tree writes persuasively about the phenomenon of the shifting baseline: people think back with nostalgia to the land as they knew it in their childhoods, thinking of that as its natural state – whereas in fact that state was already deeply affecred by industrialisation. Animals and birds who are regarded by the scientific community as belonging to a particular habitat turn out, once destructive processes have been reversed, to prefer quite a different one – the one we have seen them in all our lives is just the best they could manage given that their preferred homes had been destroyed.

Film critic Mark Kermode is fond of saying that a good documentary can make you interested in a subject you didn’t think you cared about. That’s true of this book. It’s not that I don’t care about environmental issues, but I thought I knew enough about rewilding when I knew that wolves had been restored to Yosemite in the USA with extraordinarily beneficial effects. This book discusses that and laments the unlikelihood of wolves being allowed onto the Sussex estate, but it also makes me care about nightingales, turtle doves, butterflies (there’s a brilliant description of butterflies kelling), oaks and water violets.

Isabella Tree even makes compelling reading from the business of forming committees, consulting experts (including a brilliant forerunner of Knepp in the Netherlands), dealing with grumpy neighbours and dealing with government bureaucracies.

Because one of my regular readers loves them, I can’t resist quoting this lovely passage about pigs from Chapter 6, in which old English longhorns, Exmoor ponies and Tamworth pigs (approximations of the animals that were on the land before human activities wiped them out) are introduced to the estate (page 109-110):

Intelligent, inquisitive, imperious, myopic, sociable, gluttonous, grunting, ungainly, it is easy to recognize ourselves in them … Which is why, perhaps, the Tamworths are constantly forgiven their antics at Knepp. The instant they were let out of the acclimatisation area in the Rookery, they applied themselves to destroying Charlie’s manicured verges along the drives with the unstoppable momentum of forklift trucks. Then, two abreast, they unzipped the turf down the public footpaths, following the exact routes on the Ordnance Survey map, heading diagonally across the fields. We realised that what they were doing, with the undeviating propulsion of slow-motion torpedoes, was zeroing in on slivers of the park that had never been ploughed – margins rich in invertebrates, rhizomes and flora. In the first few days of their release the pigs drew an accurate blueprint of what modern farming had done to our soil.

The ornamental grass circle in front of the house, another patch of pristine turf, proved to have a magnetic attraction, too, and Charlie was compelled to take to his bicycle, jackeroo stock-whip in hand, to impress upon them that this area was sacred ground …

As Winston Churchill once observed, ‘A cat looks down on you. A dog looks up to you. A pig looks you straight in the eye.’

As a relatively ill-informed Australian, I read the book with a double mind: on the one hand learning so much about what remediation looks like in England, and on the other wondering what would have to be done to reverse the relatively more recent but possibly more radical damage done to Australian environments by, for example, hard-hoofed grazing animals, artificial fertilizers, and crops like sugar cane or wheat. Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Pascoe’s work at Yumburra might be a partial answer. I’d love to see them in conversation with Tree and Burrell.

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Julianne Schultz’s Idea of Australia

Posted on 31 Aug 2023 | 2 comments

Julianne Schultz, The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation (Allen & Unwin 2022)

Julianne Schultz is best known as the founding editor of Griffith Review, where she made a substantial contribution to Australian literary culture over 15 years, publishing and engaging with the work of a vast array of writers (including more than one piece by my niece Edwina Shaw), facilitating a rich and complex conversation about things that matter.

The Idea of Australia was originally imagined, according to Schultz’s Acknowledgements, as a meditation, a short volume about Australia, ‘one that floated lightly over the past to make sense of the present to distil a rich, multilayered identity’. That’s not how it turned out. It’s a shaggy, baggy monster of a book, part history, part memoir, part polemic, part reportage, part Covid opus. It’s as if the process of writing that short, light mediation was disrupted by the hundreds, even thousands of voices from the Griffith Review days, each of them with a compelling case for inclusion. Add the sound journalistic and academic practices of quoting sources meticulously, and the project got right out of hand.

There are wonderful things. The twenty-page chapter on the Australian Constitution, ‘Small Brown Bird’ (as opposed to the American eagle) is a brilliant account of how the Constitution was created, and why it is so little read and so hard to change. The impact of John Howard’s time in office on the national consciousness is rendered with heartbreaking vividness in the chapter ‘Soul Destroying’. If you’re looking for a concise and engaging account of Rupert Murdoch (for whom Schultz worked for a time as a journalist) you’d have trouble finding better than the chapter ‘Power Players’. Schultz has interesting things to say about Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Kath Walker, Henry Reynolds, Bernard Smith, Alexis Wright, Mary Gilmore, Galarrwuy Yunupingu and more.

The book turns a critical eye on the idea of Australia as the land of the fair go, including well known stories of exclusion (the White Australia Policy, the dictation test, the ‘offshore solution’ and so on), and doesn’t turn away from the monstrous history of genocidal white supremacy. It is full of riches.

But too often digressions pile upon digressions; there are alarming time switches – from the early days of the Sydney colony to the late 20th century in a single sentence; the elements of memoir and family history aren’t well integrated. It looks as if the book began with the idea of Covid producing an X-ray that shows up the fault lines of our society, but that idea pretty much disappears after a couple of pages to resurface occasionally like the ghost of a discarded structure. And – this may be just me – there are some strange tics in the language: Australia is assigned the pronouns ‘she/her’; and eighty-three years, say, is regularly phrased as ‘four score years and three’. Either the copy editor was overwhelmed or her/his suggestions were overruled. The effect is weirdly alienating.

I’d be lying if I said this book is a must-read. If you know nothing about the history of Australia it is more likely to bewilder than illuminate. If you are already well-informed, depending on who you are, it will either infuriate because of its left-liberal point of view or frustrate because of the its out-of-control elements – or both.

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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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Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Haunted by the Past

Posted on 14 Feb 2023 | 2 comments

Ruby Langford Ginibi, Haunted by the Past (Allen & Unwin 1999)

Ruby Langford Ginibi (1934–2011) was a Bundjalung woman who among many other things wrote five autobiographical books. The first, which lifted its title from a song made popular by Kenny Rogers, became a bestseller when it appeared in 1988. Tara June Winch has written about it:

What Langford Ginibi produced in penning Don’t Take Your Love to Town was a broad-scoping segment missing from the body of Aboriginal literature, published in 1988 amid the fanfare and patriotic celebrations of Australia’s bicentenary. Decades later it retains its relevance and importance, still sounding a clarion call to the future for understanding and a breaking of the cycle of social and racial disadvantage for Aboriginal Australians, at long last.

Tara June Winch, ‘On “Don’t Take Your Love to Town” by Ruby Langford Ginibi‘, Griffith Review 80, May 2023.

Haunted by the Past, published a decade and three books after Don’t Take Your Love to Town, continues and amplifies that call to the future. In a writing style that feels unstudied and conversational, it tells the story of Nobby, one of Langford Ginibi’s nine children. This is a mother’s story of seeing her son sent to boys’ homes as a child and then incarcerated more than once as an adult for something he didn’t do; the terror that he would die in custody as so many Indigenous Australians have done; the joy, hers and his, of taking him to his traditional country on his release after eight years in prison; his development as a painter (his artwork is on the cover of this first edition); and in the final pages, his marriage with the prospect of a stable future. Even if you suspect that motherly bias influences the account of Nobby’s ‘crimes’ and punishment, the picture of legal system’s treatment of young Aboriginal men is damning.

It’s a deceptively simple book, just seeming to tell it as it was, one thing after another. There are straightforward quotes from court documents, including psychiatric assessments of Nobby’s suicidal state of mind at one point. Nobby gets to speak for himself in sections written for the book at his mother’s behest. There are detailed accounts of organising prison visits, and hiring cars, and visiting relatives. There are Mum jokes, as when the band strikes up ‘Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town’ at a wedding, and her family start singing it to her:

I called out to them, ‘If I didn’t take my love to town, you mob wouldn’t be here!’

(Page 178)

But the cumulative effect is far from simple. From the opening words – ‘Where does Nobby’s story begin? With his birth in 1955? Or further back …’ – Langford Ginibi is clear that she is telling her son’s story in the context of the long story of colonisation. Without using terms like intergenerational trauma, her story-telling challenges versions of Aboriginal experiences that ignore this country’s continuing history of racist and genocidal policies. She shows us the human, everyday faces of people who might other tend to be reduced to statistics in the mainstream media. Everything seems intensely ordinary, but long history is there at every moment. It’s a history of resilience and achievement as well as oppression.We are told a number of times about the Aboriginal cricketer who bowled Don Bradman for a duck. You get a strong sense of the warmth of family life – the extended family of people who haven’t seen each other for years as well as the immediate family. The opening pages that tell of her family’s background and, especially, her time in a bush camp with an uncle, are filled with rich experience of community, culture and the natural world.

The darker context becomes explicit in Chapter 6. Chapter 5 has given us pictures of Nobby’s despairing state when he was sentenced to jail again, including one suicide attempt. Chapter 6 begins:

While Nobby was doing this long stretch in jail, the Royal Commission into Black Deaths in Custody was going on. Even before the official inquiry I was always worried about Nobby when he was in jail. I received a letter from him that stated: ‘Mum, if I ever go back to jail again, they’ll bring me out feet first because bein locked up like an animal and bein told by screws, do this do that, it’s nearly drivin me mad! I can’t take it anymore.’ The pressure was so bad. And Nobby was very depressed from time to time. It really got me down. I was always worried that he would have survived the police, the wardens and the other inmates, but then take his own life.

(Page 75)

Characteristically, Langford Ginibi doesn’t linger over her fears. Nor does she milk the situation for suspense:

But he has survived.

And then, the perspective widens:

Not everyone has been so lucky.

The next 15 pages tell the stories of eight Aboriginal men who died in custody or, in one case, were killed by police during a raid on the man’s home. This book is the story of a survivor, but we can never forget the ones who didn’t survive. On the very last page, when Nobby’s story seems to have reached a happy landing, the ghosts of those men appear:

They were callin out to Nobby, sayin, ‘On ya brother. You survived the brutal jails. We didn’t make it. Long life and much happiness to you and your lady. Go in peace, and live for all of us!’

(Page 179)

I picked this book down from my TBR shelf after reading Gregory Day’s Words Are Eagles. The opening essay of that book invokes an Indigenous perspective that written words are dangerous because they can be divorced from particular places and from direct interpersonal communication. It does this without quoting from Indigenous people. In the spirit of counterpoint as recommended by Edward Said in Culture and Imperialism, I needed to read something by a First Nations writer, and this book was right there. It doesn’t address Day’s point directly, but it does achieve the thing he advocates. Reading it feels like sitting down for a long chat, a yarn, with a remarkably assured, relaxed matriarch. When you put it down, you see the world differently.

Ruby Langford Ginibi received the Special Award at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards in 2005, where I had the good fortune to be sitting on the table with her at the awards ceremony. Her other books are:

  • Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town (Penguin Australia 1988)
  • Real Deadly (Angus & Robertson 1992)
  • My Bundjalung People (UQP 1994)
  • All My Mob (UQP 2007)

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Kathryn Mannix With the End in Mind

Posted on 23 Dec 2022 | 2 comments

Kathryn Mannix, With the End in Mind: Dying, Death, and Wisdom in an Age of Denial (William Collins 2017)

Kathryn Mannix is a British doctor specialising in palliative care. She brings to this book 40 years’ experience of tending to people who are in the process of dying. Death, she says in her introduction, has become increasingly taboo. The vast improvements in healthcare in the last hundred years

radically changed people’s experiences of illness and offered hope of cure, or at least postponement of dying, that was previously impossible. This triggered a behavioural change that saw the sickest people being rushed into hospital for treatment instead of waiting at home to die.

While these changes have been of immense benefit to countless people, they have changed our sense of what is normal when it comes to dying:

Instead of dying in a dear and familiar room with people we love around us, we now die in ambulances and emergency rooms and intensive care units, our loved ones separated from us by machinery of life preservation.

(Page 2)

It’s time, she says, to talk about dying, and she gets the conversation rolling by telling 30 death stories.

I approached the book with a sense of dread: did I really want to read story after story of people dying? The dread was misplaced. The exemplary nature of the stories is always there, and names etc have been changed to protect people’s privacy in the manner of clinical case studies, but these are compelling stories of recognisably real people facing extreme challenges. There are moments of horror, and moments of enormous relief – more of the latter than of the former, as palliative medicine exists for the sole purpose of relieving suffering ( mental and spiritual pain as much as physical). If I have to die, and if it’s from some other cause than a piano falling from the sky or the long leaching away of dementia, I want Kathryn Mannix or a similar death-midwife to be there to help manage the process.

Early chapters introduce the idea of a recognisable dying pattern. Contrary to the image often presented by movies and so on, panic and terrible pain aren’t part of that pattern. In a number of the book’s stories, a doctor or nurse describes this pattern to someone who is nearing death, or to those at their literal or figurative bedside (‘Look, see what’s happening now,’ they say, quietly). The first description comes when Mannix is in training. A hospital patient with a terminal illness is terrified of dying, and with the patient’s assent, Mannix’s leader describes to her what dying is like. His description takes several pages. Here it is, omitting the specifics of the scene, such as Mannix’s initially shocked reactions and the patient’s increasing relief:

‘What we expect to happen from now on is that you will just be progressively more tired, and you will need longer sleeps, and spend less time awake …
‘As time goes by, we find that people begin to spend more time sleeping, and some of that time they are even more deeply asleep, they slip into a coma. I mean that they are unconscious …
‘So if people are too deeply unconscious to take their medications for part of the day, we will find a different way to give those drugs, to make sure they remain in comfort ….
‘We see people spending more time asleep, and less time awake. Sometimes when they appear to be only asleep, they are actually unconscious, yet when they wake up they tell us they had a good sleep. It seems we don’t notice that we become unconscious. And so, at the very end of life, a person is simply unconscious all of the time. And then their breathing starts to change. Sometimes deep and slow, sometimes shallow and faster, and then, very gently, the breathing slows down, and very gently stops. No sudden rush of pain at the end. No feeling of fading away. No panic. Just very, very peaceful …
‘The important thing to notice is that its not the same as falling asleep. In fact, if you are well enough to feel you need a nap, then you are well enough to wake up again afterwards. Becoming unconscious doesn’t feel like falling asleep. You won’t even notice it happening.’

(Pages 19–20)

That is the guts of the book: both the common pattern and the usefulness of talking explicitly about it. Mannix isn’t prescriptive or doctrinaire. People face their own imminent death and that of loved ones in ways that are particular to each person. There are stories of people who simply don’t want to acknowledge that they are dying, and there are deaths that don’t follow such a peaceful course. One of the most moving stories is the one about Sally, who remains relentlessly optimistic even when it’s evident to everyone around her that she’s dying. The dilemma of the palliative care specialist is captured in a moment when Mannix has tactfully attempted to point out that the dying process has begun, but Sally insists on talking cheerfully about beating her cancer:

This was exactly the same coping style Sally had used of old: downplay the negatives, emphasise the tiniest positives, pretend it will all be fine, make plans for the future. She seemed unaware of her true situation, but a single glance at Andy [her husband] told me that he was fully alert both to the devastation that was unfolding, and to his wife’s inability to contemplate it.

What will happen if I say ‘Hospice’? I wondered. Will she find an excuse? Will she be shocked? Will she dismiss me? Will all her denial come crashing down around her? How on earth do I play this?

(Page 75)

The suspense is genuinely huge. I won’t spoil it except to say that the resolution manages to be respectful, kind and smart – and as in many of these cases it’s arrived at by the grieving family as much as by the professionals.

This is the kind of book that prompts autobiographical reflection, especially if you happen to be older than 70. I’ll spare you my thoughts about my own mortality, but there’s a terrific little section on talking about death to children, that prompted me to try to remember how I was introduced to it. Mannix says that at around the age of seven children understand that death happens to everyone, and a little later that it will even happen to them. I’m pretty sure I knew about death well before I was seven: my father would cut off the heads of chickens with the axe for special occasions, and we routinely sold cattle to the butcher. When one of us little ones cried too long or too loudl, my mother would say, cheerfully, ‘You sound like Paddy the bull. I’ll sell you to the butcher.’ There’s more: by the age of seven (Grade 3 in convent school), I wasn’t particularly worried about death, because I’d known for some years about heaven and hell, and terror of hell made death seem pretty much like a non-event. No doubt that early experience influences my emotional response to the subject of death in ways I’m not aware of, but I do know that I am hugely relieved that, for me as a thinking feeling being, death is the end of life and not a transition to anything.

It’s also a book that makes one wonder about cultural differences. It sure looks as if the NHS ensures that dying people are much better cared for in Britain than in Australia. And it’s hard to imagine this book written in a US context. What on earth would USians do in place of all those cups of tea-and-sympathy? Given what we’re told about healthcare in the US, an equivalent book written there would feature only the affluent, leaving a great silence about the uninsured who are doomed to die without access to Dr Mannix’s palliative care specialist teams?

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Antigone Kefala’s Late Journals

Posted on 7 Oct 2022 | 2 comments

Antigone Kefala, Late Journals: Reflections 2000–2020 (Giramondo 2022)

I’ve come late to Antigone Kefala’s work, having previously read only her 2016 book of poetry, Fragments. When I blogged about that book (here), I responded to a comment Kefala had made elsewhere that she was always seen as an ‘ethnic’ writer, ‘constantly being compared to other ethnics, but not to Australian writers’, by comparing one of her poems to one of Les Murray’s. A little later I actually met her at a poetry reading. It felt a little like being presented to royalty, but she was all modest grace, called me ‘Mr Shaw’, and was amused that I had taken her challenge so literally.

Appearing six years after that encounter, Late Journals is full of that same modesty and grace. It’s a collection of fragments from a life, organised into six years divided into months. Given that the book’s subtitle tells us it covers 11 years, it’s evident that the book isn’t literally a diary, and attempts to tie entries down to specific dates will likely as not be thwarted.

For example, I flipped at random to page 62, the end of February of Journal III:

Nikos is having an exhibition in Vienna. He will send a catalogue, I was thinking of the early opening at Barry Stern’s.
In the silence of the gallery his fruit waited against a brooding metaphysical background. These magnificent shapes absolutely as if made of volumes of colour, colour with an amazing solidity, yet light, the two quinces, the cherries, the pears … The most amazing, rich, yet explosive colour.
A beautiful balanced group.
In spite of so many invitations sent out, only friends came. And no sales.

Characteristically, ‘Nikos’ is not further identified. Nor is the Viennese gallery or the date of either exhibition. A quick web search turns up Nikos Kypraios, who had exhibitions in Vienna in 2011 and 2012. His website has a page of paintings of fruit that were ‘made in 2010’. (I found a record of an exhibition at the Barry Stern Galleries in Sydney more in 1985/1986, but that’s probably not the one she means.) What matters isn’t the date and place. This isn’t a newspaper report, it’s a note about a friend’s achievement, and the editorial decision not to include the friend’s full name, here and in many other places, keeps the reader in the listener-in role. We are given a glimpse of how Kefala’s friendship circle, of how she responds to this work, and to its reception.

The warm appreciation of the paintings and the lament for their lack of local success are typical of much of these journals. This is sometimes about contemporary culture in general – as when she goes to see Fellini’s Ginger and Fred, and describes it as ‘baroque, magnificently funny and satirical, a total indictment of television and advertising, this listening to music while talking, the television sets everywhere’. Sometimes it’s specifically about non-Anglo-heritage artists, possibly most explicitly in this, from May in Journal VI:

Looking at the latest Companion to Australian Literature – we appear in a subsection called ETHNIC MINORITY WRITING. After so many years of writing here we are still totally outside the whole scene. Not only Ethnic, but Minority as well – a double blow.
The literary scene, as the sports scene and so on, seems to be dominated by a few names, as if written by adolescents who can only remember one name, more names in a scene impossible to sustain.

But that’s only one aspect of these journals. As Michelle De Kretser says in a back-cover blurb: ‘In poetry as in prose, Kefala has made the fragment her form.’ A single spread may include a character sketch of an unnamed woman (a journalist?), a description of a dance between the cat (Max) and a magpie, a quote from a New York Review of Books article, incisive praise for a new book of poetry, and a cutting comment on astrophysicists and theologians on TV.

From the accumulation of fragments, made readable by the diary-like presentation, there emerges a quiet self-portrait of a creative spirit, part of a creative community, immersed in the world of literature, music, drama, art, doing her bit to make sense of it all. A self portrait of a woman facing the vicissitudes of ageing and mortality. A generous sharing of self from someone who is immensely likeable.

Antigone Kefala was born in Romania in 1935 and after living in Greece and New Zealand migrated to Australia in 1960. Her first collection of poetry in English, The Alien, was published a little over a decade later. She has written three works of fiction, five poetry collections and two collections of journals. This book, which has been ominously described by its publisher as her final work, is the second of the journals.

I am grateful to Giramondo Publishing for my complimentary copy of Late Journals.

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John Blay’s Wild Nature

Posted on 30 Jul 2022 | 2 comments

John Blay, Wild Nature (NewSouth 2020)

When I read Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, in which sclerophyll forests might as well not exist, I yearned to read a book about the Australian bush. She who is known in this blog as the Emerging Artist had been urging me to read John Blay’s Wild Nature for more than a year. So, though I didn’t expect it to be an Australian extension of Wohlleben’s book, it pretty much leapt from the bookshelf into my waiting arms.

The book is made up of three major strands.

First, there’s the narrative through-line: the author’s account of an intrepid walk through Australia’s south-east forests, often following animal tracks and sometimes, memorably, forcing a way through thick vegetation by throwing his body against it. A woman named Jacqueline accompanies him on much of his journey. We never learn her second name and are left to deduce that she is his partner. The narrative is based closely on journals he kept on his walks.

Second, he gives a history of the ‘Forest Wars’, the bitter conflict between those who wanted to exploit the forests for timber and woodchips, and those who wanted to preserve it – with the Forestry Department, which once played a custodian role, at times coming down heavily – and, though Blay doesn’t ever say so, corruptly – against the ‘greenies’. This strand is the fruit of extensive work by Blay recording oral history from participants in both sides of the wars. Although his sympathies are clearly with the conservationists, he has warm, respectful relationships with people who have the industry’s interests at heart.

Third, he incorporates the fruits of research, including his broad botanical and ecological knowledge, and colonial and pre-settlement history. What Wohlleben calls the hidden life of trees is mentioned briefly, and at one stage Blay follows the path of early nineteenth-century shipwreck survivors, an episode explored in historian Mark McKenna’s From the Edge.

It’s a strange book. Too often, reading it is like going on a long bush walk with an enthusiastic guide who names every tree and bush you pass, except of course the reader can’t see them, so all we get is a list of botanical and geological names. I smiled ruefully when I read Blay’s comment on the shipwreck survivors’ account:

Without the on-ground knowledge of where they were from time to time, it would have made so little sense to those who seldom ventured into the outdoors that the long journey might as well have taken place on the moon.

(Page 263)

The slog is made worse by moments, all too frequent, that seem to have come straight from a journal and escaped the revising eye. This little passage is a good example:

All the tracks are treacherous bogs. Bandicoots have made trails in the wet earth. Across the heath, crimson bottlebrush and fairy fans glow brightest. Grevillea, bracelet honey-myrtle and banksia alike take the form of ground cover. A black snake suns itself on a sandstone pavement. The place is always full of surprises even as the landscape itself is surprising, it also has the potential to astonish.

(Page 111)

This list isn’t so bad – at least bottlebrush and grevillea are reasonably well known. But how did the triple tautology of that final sentence get past the copy editor?

So John Blay isn’t one of the great nature writers. But his enthusiasm for the south-east forest is infectious, and here are thrilling moments, of which two stand out for me.

In the first, he and Jacqueline come upon a grove of waratahs. Here is just part of the encounter:

In photographs the flowers seldom look as beautiful as they do in nature. They look too blue, too muted, grubby. Where is that red inner glow? How could they change like that? Photograph after photograph, they come back imperfect, in shades of dull murk, and each one makes me more determined to capture the flowers in their full crimson magnificence. In this heavily canopied forest the light changes subtly, as does the glow of the flowers. Their flashes can surround you like wildfires on a mountain. Any shards of sunlight cut through too brightly and wash out the subtleties. At times there is a halo miasma around the trees caused by the intensity of insect life attracted to the sweetness of the flowers; some insects are so tiny as to be visible only when the clouds of them are lit. One moth hovers, others strike at eccentric speeds, the native bees, wasps. All love the warmer morning air. As the heat increases, so do the insect numbers, until the dews dry and it gets hotter and just about all retire for a siesta.

(Page 167)

The other moment I want to mention takes the experience of reading the book onto a whole other level. On a spread toward the end there are two full-page maps of the area facing each other. One shows the forests of south-east Australia; the other the area burnt out by the bushfires of the 2019-20. The two areas are virtually the same. It’s like being hit over the head with a club: all of that wilderness we have been slogging through, the passionate object of John Blay’s attention, the bringer of aesthetic joy to Jacqueline, the terrain of the bitterly fought forest wars, all of it, has been ravaged by fire. As he tells us in the text, the heat from the fires has almost certainly damaged the complex underground web of fungus so necessary for the forest’s health. The scale of the disaster is close to unimaginable.

For all its faults, this book helps us to imagine it, helps to make the climate emergency viscerally real

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