The topic has also evolved in the published scholarship. For example, the focus of historian Russel Ward’s 1977 A Nation for a Continent (the title snipped from a Federation campaign speech by Edmund Barton) was neatly flipped by environmental historian Libby Robin’s 2007 book How a Continent Created a Nation. Robin advanced the transdisciplinary dialogue between science and history that is central to Billy Griffiths, Larissa Behrendt and Sean Ulm’s new book, The First Inventors: How People Shaped a Continent. As the subtitle indicates, though, the central focus here is on culture rather than the environment.

The book’s immense temporal and spatial reach is organised by chapters focused on journeying, food gathering, landscape management and social organisation. In each, the authors synthesise archaeological evidence, computer modelling and the Indigenous knowledge and cultural memory encoded in song and story to document human flourishing in diverse and changing landscapes.

Like the television series of the same name, which screened in 2023, The First Inventors begins with the peopling of the Australian continent around 65,000 years ago. The Australian landmass, a third larger than today, was part of the Sahul region that included New Guinea and eventually Tasmania. Crossing between Timor and the Kimberley coast, one of the first settlement routes, required watercraft and navigation techniques suitable for over-the-horizon voyaging. This was, the authors contend, the longest sea journey yet undertaken by humans. Several centuries of two-way journeys suggest purposeful rather than accidental settlement, and left an archaeological record that the authors believe provides the first evidence of modern human behaviour.

Much of that evidence was submerged by a sea level rise, eventually reaching some 130 metres following the last glacial maximum around 21,000 years ago. The first humans settled along coastal fringes like those of Timor and Sulawesi, but movement inland — the speed and spread of which has long been underestimated, according to new modelling — required adaptation to hotter, drier environments, and to country that had evolved to burn.

Across the continent, developments in aquaculture, astronomy and pharmaceuticals came through observation, experimentation and evaluation, the hallmarks of science. Archaeological evidence shows the development of hafted axes suited to the dominant eucalypt hardwoods. Maps were encoded in song and story to guide navigation and help locate food and water sources. Fire was repurposed for landscape management, with cool season burns facilitating hunting while preserving local ecologies.

Present-day dating techniques, computer modelling and simulation have produced new evidence of occupation and adaptation that frequently overlays and supports traditional knowledge embedded in stories, songs and cultural memory. “We come to these ancient oral accounts with a healthy scepticism, as well as a deep regard for Indigenous knowledge of Country,” conclude the authors, “and we are persuaded of their veracity by the sheer volume and variety of narratives, both across the continent and within specific stories.”

Describing the earliest Indigenous occupants as inventors might seem implausible to some. The authors tackle this head on, subverting a romantic trope of the inventor as a solitary genius to argue for understanding “invention” at landscape scale, adapted and nurtured across countless generations.

The myth of European exploration and discovery, too, is debunked in the book’s discussion of the songlines and long-distance navigation trails, some stretching across the continent, that facilitated food gathering and cultural diplomacy. European explorers frequently relied on Indigenous guides or followed established tracks, as do many present-day roads. Blaxland, Wentworth and Lawson completed their celebrated crossing of the Blue Mountains in 1813 by trailing a short distance behind an advance Indigenous party.

Yet a colonial mindset lingers. The material evidence of early settlement and trade located by underwater archaeology is unrecognised and unprotected by maritime heritage legislation. Australia is not party to the 2001 UNESCO Convention on the Protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage. Australia’s Underwater Cultural Heritage Act of 2018, the authors assert, prioritises the protection of shipwrecks and submerged aircraft. Conversely, the nomination of the Budj Bim cultural landscape in southwest Victoria, with its network of kooyang (eel) traps, was Australia’s first community-nominated accession to UNESCO’s world heritage list. The chapter featuring Budj Bim shows the capacity of new remote sensing technologies to accurately map the extent and sophistication of Gunditjmara aquaculture in this region.

More encouragingly, settler-colonial perceptions of fire as an alien force and deadly threat is giving way to an appreciation of cultural burning as a strategy for wildfire management.

The First Inventors does feature one figure who might more conventionally be identified as an inventor: Ngarrandjeri man David Unaipon. A chapter recounts the well-known story of Unaipon’s modified design of a sheep-shearing comb, which revolutionised productivity in the wool industry but yielded no financial benefit for its developer. But readers may be less familiar with the oppressive regulation of Unaipon’s daily life. Most of the chapter’s attention, though, is given to his design of a helicopter that applied the aerofoil principle of a boomerang. The final part of the TV series featured a delightful proof-of-concept trial of the design.

Of the three authors, Larissa Behrendt’s name is likely to be most familiar to non-academic audiences, although many may be unaware of the breadth of her activity across academia, fiction, screen and media, and in advisory roles. Larissa wrote and directed The First Inventors series.

Billy Griffiths, a research fellow at Deakin University’s Centre for Cultural Heritage and Museum Studies, enlivened the history of archaeology in Australia in his award-winning Deep Time Dreaming. The accessible, character-driven style of that book is emulated in The First Inventors.

Sean Ulm is a professor of archaeology at James Cook University whose substantial body of work focuses on the relationship of cultural and environmental change in archaeological and paleo-environmental eras. Deep knowledge of the country and longstanding relationships with Indigenous people and disciplinary colleagues come to fruition in this project.

The book, which has appeared after the documentary’s screening, provides space to expand and defend claims and arguments, grounding the project in an impressively wide scholarship. It is also candid about the limits of the archaeological record. Much of the technical innovation described in the text involved the use of fibres, which have limited chances of surviving as material evidence. Beware, say the authors, of conflating the archaeological record with what was once considered important, and which might influence later judgements of cultural advancement. The durability of stone gave rise to the trope of a stone-age people, and to anthropologist A.P. Elkin’s marginally less crude assessment that Indigenous people were parasites, dependent on what nature produced.

But the tendency to essentialise — to fall back on descriptions of timelessness and cultural uniformity — persists. Kevin Rudd’s 2007 apology, note the authors, referred to an “ancient culture.” The demand to prove the existence of native title rests on a static concept of continuity. Perhaps the strongest message of this book is its debunking of a primitivist notion that Indigenous people lived in simple harmony with their natural environment. They were — we all are — living with complex, changing and constructed environments. Successfully navigating the future, argue the authors, will need Indigenous knowledge and Western science working together. •

The First Inventors: How People Shaped a Continent
By Billy Griffiths, Larissa Behrendt and Sean Ulm | Allen & Unwin | $36.99 | 320 pages

The post Shaping a continent appeared first on Inside Story.

I wheeled away from the screen and looked at her for a long minute. A colleague was passing and I called her into my office. “That,” she declared, peering over my shoulder, “is someone I’d want to know more about. She is a real person.”

What does that mean — a “real” person? To begin with, I think, Mary (as I’ll call her from now on) presents a face quite unlike the idealised female faces we see in magazines, movies, the media, advertising and, regrettably, AI-generated images. She had dark hair, sloping deep-set eyes, a wide mouth, and a broad forehead tapering to a small chin. This foreshortening of her face meant those ridiculous hats of her era were entirely wrong for her.

The little there is to know about Mary suggests she was intelligent, energetic, determined and practical. She and husband Joe (as he was widely known) were English, both having been born in Staffordshire. Mary (then Mary Turner) was a schoolteacher before their marriage in 1885. Joe came from a mining family that had known poverty and distress — his father’s death in a mining accident left Joe the main family breadwinner at just twelve. Mary’s brother William had emigrated to New South Wales and settled in Lithgow, and his letters home persuaded Mary and Joe that they too might have better prospects in Australia.

With Mary pregnant, Joe went first, in December 1885, following his brother-in-law to Lithgow where he quickly found work as a miner and built a four-room timber house for his family. Mary eventually arrived in 1887, having made the journey alone with baby George Sydney (known as Syd), the first of the couple’s nine children. All their children survived infancy, which has to be a testament to Joe’s ability to provide and Mary’s skilled parenting and management of the household.

Joe was elected to the NSW parliament in 1891 and to federal parliament in 1901. And so, for thirty years until he left politics in 1921, he was constantly away from home for parliamentary sittings, either in Sydney when the family was in Lithgow, or in Melbourne after the family had moved to Sydney. The rearing of their quiver-full of children fell mainly to Mary.

Mary and Joe must have corresponded during their separations but none of their letters appear to have survived. But among the scattering of records preserved in the National Archives of Australia and the National Library of Australia are many photographs of Mary, more than you might expect. (For comparison, no photograph appears to have survived of Ada Watson, prime minister Chris Watson’s first wife.)

I’ve studied them all, for it turns out that Mary Cook is one of those women, like Mary Gilmore, Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Margaret Walkom, with whom I long to spend time. I don’t go searching for these ghosts, they find me. Mary Cook looked me directly in the eye with the gentle but firm expectation that her story is important and worth sharing.

And so, if the textual evidence is slender but the photographic evidence is plentiful, let’s go with the latter. I’ve selected the three photographic portraits that seem to me to offer the richest insights into her life.

The photograph at the top of this essay was taken by renowned Sydney photographer May Moore. She and her photographer-sister Mina, based in Melbourne, were both known for their skill in creating dramatic effects with light and shadow, and May’s portrait of Mary Cook is a beautiful example.

I never tire of observing how the light gathers at the top of Mary’s head and slides down through the parting of her hair. The photographer has permitted the light to define the merest sliver of the sitter’s profile — her forehead, cheeks, nose, lips, even the eyelashes of her left eye. It pools softly on her shoulder to illuminate the pearls at her ears and throat, and to touch the lace on her dress and the posy of flowers Mary has inclined her head to examine.

The archival description dates the photograph to 1918, when Mary would have been fifty-five, but she looks much younger. It can’t have been taken any earlier than 1910 because that was when May Moore established her Sydney studio, but it’s possible that it was taken in 1913 to mark Joe becoming prime minister. (He was the leader of a recent fusion of several non-Labor groups calling itself the Liberal Party, only distantly related to today’s Liberal Party.) It was the high point thus far in Mary and Joe’s long, upwardly mobile journey from the coal-mining towns of Staffordshire.

As a young man, Joe had become a follower of Primitive Methodism, a sect of Methodism that aimed to “uplift” the working classes and advocated the right of everyone, by self-improvement, to use their own talents to improve their station in life. This exactly what Joe had done. Although opposed to gambling and the consumption of alcohol, he had no objection to the display of worldly success and, according to his principal biographer John Murdoch, was vain of his personal appearance and loved to mix with rich, distinguished people.

Possibly, then, the photograph reveals as much about Joe as Mary: that Joe was proud of his life and proud of his wife, proud of the jewels he could give her and proud that he could afford such a fashionable studio. The sweet moment of repose captured in May Moore’s photograph renders it unlike the style of Mary’s later portraits and I wonder whether she saw herself in it or felt she was being assigned a part to play. The Moore sisters did, after all, specialise in portraying performers and writers.

With nine children swarming around her Mary certainly had little time for sitting about staring at flowers, though by then, fortunately, Joe had sufficient means to pay for domestic help for her. His burgeoning career had enabled the Cooks to move from their original cottage in Lithgow into a large, two-storey house on the main street. When they sold up in Lithgow in 1901 the inventory of their possessions shows how quickly they had covered themselves with the comforts and conveniences of Victorian middle-class existence. Their ever-increasing social status can be tracked from their subsequent moves through some of Sydney’s more salubrious suburbs: Marrickville, Baulkham Hills, Summer Hill and finally, in retirement, Bellevue Hill.

The Bellevue Hill house had expansive views over Sydney Harbour and was large enough to contain the lavish furniture the couple had accumulated over the years after they left Lithgow. They named it “Silchester” in memory of their Staffordshire home towns: Silverdale (Joe); Chesterton (Mary). Then they alighted upon a canny approach to downsizing. They demolished the house, built a block of luxury flats on the site, selected the best one for themselves, and rented out the rest.

If this woman was standing for prime minister you’d be interested, right? You want someone competent, experienced, trustworthy, tough but also empathetic? Yes you do, and that’s what I see in Mary here, but unfortunately it was still many years before women were elected to the Australian federal parliament, and in the meantime the talents of many were confined to the domestic sphere.

Lady Mary Cook, mid-1920s. National Archives of Australia M3606, 16

The photograph of Mary was taken between 1922 and 1927. Joe had left politics and accepted an appointment as Australia’s high commissioner in London. It was taken at Angus Faith’s studio in Hanover Square, and for the occasion Mary has had her hair waved (it was naturally straight) and has selected a silk blouse embellished with sequins, with her customary pearls. One necklace, which she also wore for the May Moore portrait, has two extra pearls suspended by what appear to be tiny strings of seed pearls. The viewer is drawn to Mary’s deep, thoughtful eyes (blue, according to her passport), but although she declines to meet our gaze, I feel comfortable with her.

The challenges Mary faced went further than providing a domestic haven for nine children and a busy husband. The defining feature of Joe’s political life was a complete shift in his principles and allegiances from Labor to conservative, from Free Trade to Protectionism, and from republicanism to ardent support for monarchy and Empire. Cook began public life as a trade unionist, and he was an obvious choice of local candidate in Lithgow when an infant Labor Party was being formed in New South Wales after the failed strikes of 1890. He became one of thirty-five new, inexperienced Labor men to take a seat in parliament in 1891.

Three years later Cook refused to commit to a pledge of caucus solidarity because, he said, he wanted to be free to represent the people in his electorate who had voted for him. In the election that year he stood as an “independent” Labor candidate and easily held his seat. Free Trader George Reid, needing Labor support to form government, offered Cook the post of postmaster-general on a salary of £1500 per year, and Cook accepted. This was what enabled the family to move to their fine new house and fill it with undreamed-of luxuries.

Cook’s political detractors were vicious in their condemnation of his apparent opportunism and surrender to self-interest, and from Labor there could never be any forgiveness: Cook was branded and is still remembered as a traitor, the original “Labor rat.” His most recent biographer, David Headon, notices that a significant absentee from Cook’s funeral in 1947 was the then-prime minister and undisputed hero of the labour movement, Ben Chifley. Never would Chifley’s “light on the hill” wrap its warmth around the reputation of Joe Cook.

How was Mary affected by her husband’s abandonment of all his early political beliefs and allegiances? Did she lose friends of her own? What was Joe like at home as he gradually became more irascible and virulent in his opinions? Did the children scatter to the back garden when he was in a temper?

None of Cook’s biographers — John Murdoch, Frank Crowley, Graham Bebbington, John Rickard, Zachary Gorman and David Headon — have bothered much with these questions. They nod respectfully to Mary by noting how, as a former teacher, she had greatly assisted her young, poorly educated husband by spending her evenings correcting his compound arithmetic and reading to him so he could practice his shorthand. But after that the biographers (Headon is an exception) have little further use for Mary.

John Murdoch does acknowledge that the linked decisions to marry Mary and emigrate to New South Wales “immeasurably enriched” Joe’s life. Mary created a home atmosphere of “rest and contentment,” he says, which was important to Joe who was often “tired” after prolonged work. She was a woman of “energy and resource” and the “ideal wife” for him throughout the sixty-two years of their marriage.

Murdoch will not allow that a mother of nine might also be “tired” and doesn’t pause to wonder if Joe was the “ideal” husband for Mary. And consider this: sixty-two years of marriage by itself signifies nothing in an era when divorce was difficult for everyone, and unthinkable for a man in Cook’s position. Some of those periods of “rest and contentment” no doubt resulted in the arrival of the nine children, but did Mary actually want to be nine times a mother? As with most women of her era, her choices were few. If there had been a divorce, what could she have done? Returned to teaching?

Interestingly, before Mary left Staffordshire in 1886 she obtained references from the education authority under which she had trained as a teacher, presumably to give her something to fall back on should she need it. One official noted that in her final year of training Mary had gained a pass rate of 96 per cent. None of Cook’s biographers have noticed this. Why would they? You don’t go looking if you haven’t asked the right questions.

This third photo shows Mary Cook in court dress. The photograph is dated 1926 but other evidence suggests it was taken for a court held at Buckingham Palace in the English summer of 1927. Joe’s appointment as High Commissioner is about to end. The Cooks have been living at 36 Queen’s Gate in Kensington, near the Royal Albert Hall, and mightily enjoying themselves by all accounts. Joe’s biographers have judged his performance in the diplomatic aspects of the role competent rather than distinguished, but he did work hard and successfully at promoting immigration and investment in Australia, and he and Mary relished the social side.

Dame Mary Cook, 1927. National Archives of Australia M3606, 16

Joe had developed a taste for high society during sixteen months he spent with prime minister Billy Hughes representing Australia at the Imperial War Conference in London in 1918, and in Paris for the peace conference in 1919. He was appointed Knight Grand Cross in the Order of St Michael and St George in 1918 and became Sir Joseph Cook. Mary and the family stayed home during that trip, but now, as Lady Mary Cook, she and various of their children went with him.

Joe’s new position meant hosting and attending numerous luncheons, receptions and dinners. He and Mary attended royal garden parties, launches of ships and planes, lunch with Mrs Winston Churchill, “At Homes” with Mrs Neville Chamberlain, Mrs Stanley Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, and society weddings, notably that of the Duke of York (the future King George VI) to the Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.

The absolute pinnacle of social prestige was an invitation (“command”) to attend court, where young, unmarried women from the upper crust would make their social debut by being “presented” to the monarch. Married women such as Mary could also be presented.

It was a highly ritualised event but fortunately for outsiders like Mary and Joe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Office issued a guidebook on court dress. Included were advertisements from specialist tailors and outfitters who could supply all the clobber one needed and advice on how to wear it. The 1921 edition instructed that for ladies, feathers, veils and trains had been abolished, but in Mary’s 1927 photograph she is certainly wearing “Court Dress with feathers and train,” as stipulated on her invitation card. The previous instruction has obviously been reversed.

Unmarried women had to wear white, and their headdress was to consist of two ostrich feathers only. Married women could wear colour, as Mary seems to have done, but their headdress had to be a “Prince of Wales” plume consisting of three feathers, the central feather being higher than the rest. The length of the dress’s train was also prescribed. Mary wears the decorations of a Dame Commander of the British Empire, an honour she’d been awarded the previous year. To celebrate their attendance at court women often had their photographs taken at one of London’s prestigious studios, and Mary chose Hay Wrightson in New Bond Street. Lafayette was another popular choice.

For me there are two striking features of this portrait. First, Mary again wears that favourite necklace with the suspended pearls that was obviously so meaningful for her, surely a gift from Joe from way back although not as far back as Staffordshire, I think. This was not a trinket bought at a country fair by a poor young man. (That I would like to see.)

Second, Mary wears glasses for her court photograph. How many women would do that? For an occasion as important as this most would surely leave their glasses in their handbag, and indeed I’ve studied many court photographs and in none of them are the women wearing glasses. One’s character and personality (and weaknesses) were not to be on show. It was all subsumed into the ritual.

And yet here is Mary Cook, just being herself, a real person. She attended at least two other courts during her London years and wore glasses in all her photographs. (Joe, on the other hand, needed glasses for reading but rarely wore them in public, and certainly not for photographs.) It’s possible that Mary was shortsighted and needed her glasses during the formal proceedings to help her manage her train and to perform the tricky act of walking backwards when required. (It was a terrible breach of etiquette to turn one’s back on the monarch.) The glasses also suggest that here was someone who had not forgotten that she had begun married life scrubbing her own floors and stirring the family’s washing in a copper with a stick.

Mary’s DBE recognised “her services in connection with visitors to London from the Commonwealth of Australia” and was not solely for her work with the Red Cross, as John Murdoch believed. (It was mistake repeated by Frank Crowley; Zachary Gorman doesn’t mention Mary’s DBE at all.) Dame Mary, as she was known thereafter, supported a variety of causes and was as active as Joe in promoting immigration to Australia (he and she being perfect exemplars, of course). Most of the biographers fall short of mentioning that Joe’s social prominence could not have been achieved without her.

Or indeed his career success in general. Joe was able enough and certainly hard working, but although he acted the part of a statesman, he lacked a statesman’s vision and capacity to inspire others. Perhaps it was Mary who had the greater talent and ambition? She who plotted and planned, dreamed of and schemed? Biographer Graham Bebbington concedes (where the other biographers do not) that she was a formidable person who did dominate her husband in some things. Shrewdly, Mary could have assessed the marriageable men in her community and thrown in her lot with Joe Cook because he offered the best prospects and seemed the most biddable.

Without Mary, Joe’s highest achievement might have been a job as an accountant to some firm in Stoke-on-Trent, and the closest he would get to Buckingham Palace a day trip to watch the changing of the guard.

Mary was unable to attend Joe’s funeral in 1947 because she was suffering from dementia. She died in September 1950 and her ashes placed next to Joe’s at the Northern Suburbs Crematorium in Sydney.

On balance, the evidence does suggest that Mary and Joe shared the same aspirations. My point is that, as so often happens, women’s compliance is assumed, not interrogated. If, for the sake of the exercise, we flip the power in the relationship from him to her, we notice niggling, ragged little ends: questions unasked, facts unchecked, assumptions untested, alternative perspectives unexplored.

In 1992 Diane Langmore published a study of ten Australian prime ministerial wives (ending with Hazel Hawke) and was struck by how little had typically been said about them. Her book is a fascinating and successful attempt at filling that gap. However, of the six pre-first world war wives — Jane (Jeanie) Barton, Pattie Deakin, Ada Watson, Florence Reid, Margaret Fisher and Mary Cook — Langmore selected only Pattie Deakin for her book.

The lives of the rest are largely unknown beyond glimpses in their husbands’ biographies. There has been little exploration of these six women as individuals, and no consideration of them as a cohort. No one has wondered how well acquainted they were with each other, and what advice and encouragement might have been shared among them, across political boundaries, as they attempted to fulfill a role they may never have sought or expected. Their support for their husbands constitutes an entirely unrecognised contribution to the making of the Australian Commonwealth. •

The post Three portraits of a lady appeared first on Inside Story.

Janet Flanner is not a familiar name today, but by any measure her career is worth knowing about. Born in Indianapolis in 1892, she saw in her hometown’s endless tabletop of corn fields a life of excruciating boredom. At age twenty, she reacted to her father’s suicide by choosing to live wildly, careering out of her university studies and into a succession of journalism jobs she swiftly made her own. Unwisely married, she escaped to New York and then into a relationship with actress and writer Solita Solano, with whom she decided to emigrate to Paris in 1922.

Like so many other young Americans, Flanner was intent on writing about “beauty with a capital B” in the City of Light. With aspirations on a level with Henry James, Laurence Sterne and “any of the Brontës,” she picked up the odd bit of journalism while pouring her early energies into a novel. Cubicle City (1926) was the result. Though it has since been grouped with landmark works of queer literature including Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928) and Djuna Barnes’s The Ladies Almanac (1928), its lack of contemporary success tempered Flanner’s willingness to persevere with fiction. As a friend said, her desire to write fiction exceeded her talent at it.

But Flanner’s ability with the real was something else. Her letters about life in Paris to family and friends back in the United States sparkled. Whether she described the people strolling through the Tuileries Gardens, what was being said around the nightclubs and galleries, or the dramas and scandals of the American expatriates who increasingly crowded the cafes and bistros, she had a talent. As friend Jane Grant said, Flanner’s letters were “so gay and attractive.”

Moreover, in Grant’s view, such letters would fill a vital gap in the new, weekly magazine her husband had recently founded. “The New Yorker,” Harold Ross famously declared, “will be a reflection in word and picture of metropolitan life. It will be human. Its general tenor will be one of gaiety, wit and satire, but it will be more than a jester. It will not be what is commonly called highbrow or radical. It will be what is commonly called sophisticated, in that it will assume a reasonable degree of enlightenment on the part of its readers.”

Finding a Paris correspondent was part and parcel of such a pitch: Ross expected his readers to be versed in all things French and regard Paris as the world’s centre of art and fashion. For them, Flanner’s letters — as Grant soon wrote to her — were “just the thing.” Thus, for $40 a pop, she should commence sending to the magazine 1000-word letters containing “anecdotal and incidental stuff familiar to Americans… Dope on fields of the arts and a little on fashion, perhaps… There should be lots of chat about people seem [sic] about and in it all he [Ross] wants a definite personality injected.”

Flanner swiftly realised that tone and voice were more important than subject matter. Ross was an editor obsessed with finding the precise word, with prose that was direct and as tight as a drum. Thus, Flanner’s voice became cultivated but detached, wry and often pithy. It resulted in letters that were endlessly amusing. Ulysses, she wrote, was the book “the civilised half of a half-civilised world has long been humbly waiting.” The dadaist writer Tristan Tzara was “a great man of small stature.” A book by Jean Cocteau provided “an hour’s delight” and a memorial to the inventor of camembert cheese unfortunately resembled “a slice of gruyere.” “There is no justice,” she added.

Signed “Genêt,” Flanner’s letters began appearing in September 1925. She would continue filing them — albeit with breaks — for another fifty years. And the magazine she likened at this time to an “oversized minnow learning how to swim” soon became the blue whale of the literary and publishing world.

Mark Braude’s Typewriter and the Guillotine tells the story of that evolution through Flanner’s experiences and work. It is the most notable and most interesting thread of his book, and if it is a story told before — in Brenda Wineapple’s fine biography of Flanner (1989) and in Ben Yagoda’s comprehensive history of the New Yorker, About Town (2000) — it gets a welcome retelling here.

Perhaps most refreshing is Braude’s focus on the women in that “Lost Generation” of artists in Paris. While Hemingway, Joyce and the others make their due appearances, Braude pays more attention to the innovative women also working at their craft and enjoying life on the continent. Cameo appearances by Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Nancy Cunard, Collette, Edith Wharton and more are enlivened by striking details: Djuna Barnes’s preference for nude suntanning, for example, or Toklas’s single-minded interest in herbs.

A central conceit of the book is that the New Yorker’s evolution paralleled an evolution in Flanner’s work. At first, Braude writes, Flanner wrote in a “casual, loose style,” conversational and reminiscent of the cafes in which she gathered information, and left it to editors to refine her prose. Soon, however, she was doing that herself.

The context of her work also evolved. If the Paris she initially wrote of was simultaneously elegant and rough, glittering and squalid, it was also an old-world metropolis in a period of sustained change, where iconic cafes were unceremoniously shuttered and new fashions and ideas in art were constantly swirling. But Flanner rarely wrote about the “lingering sense of mourning” that abided in Paris. Exacerbated by Europe’s economic uncertainty and social unrest, the trauma of the first world war arguably lay at the root of the hedonism and pursuit of abandon charted by Flanner’s letters.

This was not a subject Flanner was prepared to probe: as Wineapple wrote, she believed her Genêt persona was “a high-class gossip columnist.” It couldn’t do that kind of work. Nor was the New Yorker pushing Flanner to do so. As magazine colleague E.B. White once joked, the only strong political stance the New Yorker took in the 1930s was on a proposal to relocate the information booth at Pennsylvania Station. It simply was not part of the magazine’s outlook to be overtly political or so engaged.

This began to change in the 1930s, when Flanner started regularly visiting Germany. At first, her attention to the darkness amid the glitter was fleeting: writing in 1931, she acknowledged that Germany had produced “workers without work and capitalists without capital,” that there was “terrible want in certain quarters.” But, as Braude notes, Flanner then “moved quickly from that gloomy material” to the giddy decadence of the Weimar Republic’s restaurants and cabarets and general party atmosphere.

Two years later — by which time Adolf Hitler had been sworn in as Germany’s chancellor — the darker facets of the country were clear. Signs outside towns announced that Jews were not welcome, Nazi flags were everywhere, and the harassment of foreigners and Jews was not even disguised. During one trip, Flanner saw a Jewish boy “being marched down the street with a placard around his neck, confessing to the sin of kissing a non-Jewish girl.” And yet still her despatches shied away. As she wrote lightly, “All over Europe, 1933 has been a worrying kind of year.”

The New Yorker didn’t want her to look closer. “AVOID DANGER TAKE NO CHANCES,” the magazine telegrammed when news of riots in Paris reached American shores. The magazine needn’t have bothered: when she realised she couldn’t get through the crowded streets to see the action, Flanner left to have a beer at a brasserie with friends.

As time went on, though, that detachment, that deliberate inattention, became untenable. Flanner’s friends and social circles increasingly acknowledged there might be another war in Europe, and the social unrest evident in those riots continued to swell. By the second half of 1934, convinced Germany was going to “come and gobble France as sure as we sit here,” Flanner was pitching to Harold Ross a profile of the German chancellor. She was second-guessing herself, conscious of her limits and uncertain whether she could transcend them to write about such an important subject. Ross, meanwhile, was reluctant: he had earlier vetoed an interview with Mussolini as “out of bounds for us” and thought serious current affairs material was ill-suited for what he persisted in calling a “humour magazine.”

When it went ahead, the resulting three-part profile didn’t entirely vindicate either Flanner or Ross. Flanner had been fascinated by Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will and aroused by the magnitude and precision of the German military she saw at the Nuremberg rally in 1935. But conversations with everyday Germans and a prolonged period of reading Hitler’s speeches and writings, including Mein Kampf, convinced Flanner that Hitler was a fanatic, that Germans were crazy, that war was likely, and that she shared all anti-Nazi attitudes. And yet she feared a profile saying as much would be used as crude anti-Nazi propaganda. As Braude writes, keenly, “She was a writer, not a publicist. She was certainly no diplomat.”

And so Flanner decided to write that profile in the style she would use for anybody, writing of Hitler’s life without any mention of whether people might agree with his views. She included a considerable amount of information about Nazi dogma, the number of bodies Hitler had climbed over in his scramble for power, and the violent outlook at the heart of the Nazi regime. Yet there was also a measure of detachment and wryness that seemed incongruous. As it began: “Dictator of a nation devoted to splendid sausages, cigars, beer and babies, Adolf Hitler is a vegetarian, teetotaller, non-smoker and celibate.”

It marked a change nonetheless. In 1936, when he asked Flanner to cover the Berlin Olympics, Ross added a new request — that she “get something of the [German] political and economic situation” into her work. And, particularly once the Spanish civil war broke out, Flanner focused more and more on political and military developments in Europe. Over the next three years, the tone of detachment faded and a sense of immediacy and presence took root. “It’s melancholic to see,” she wrote in May 1938, “how quickly humanity, if left free after its initial success, deserts the early, earnest union that gave its cause strength and squabbles itself to bits.”

Within two years, recognising the Genêt persona and style was now fundamentally wrong for the moment, Flanner began signing her columns with her own name. She would not return to Genêt until after Paris had been liberated.

Braude tells this story well, with evocative prose and a sharp eye for the tangible detail: readers will encounter many smells and tastes in this book. Less successfully, he also tries to graft another story onto Flanner’s life — that of German serial killer Eugen Weidmann.

In short, fragmentary chapters spliced between chapters about Flanner, creating an ominous drum beat through the book’s first two-thirds, Braude tells of how this social outcast and misfit turned criminal. Imprisoned in Germany for theft, Weidmann and several accomplices escaped to Paris with a plan to enrich themselves by kidnapping and ransoming rich foreigners.

The men were inept, and soon turned to murder. Weidmann killed six people, including a young American woman, Jean De Koven, unleashing a short and dramatic police hunt in the latter half of 1937 that ended with a shoot-out at a villa just outside Paris. Tried and convicted — a task made easier by his willingness to confess — Weidmann was executed, in public, by guillotine, in June 1939.

Given the geopolitical tensions and anxieties as well as the American press attention engendered by De Koven’s murder, it was no surprise that the trial took on a broader significance than its senseless and squalid crimes deserved. The prosecution and defence, for example, tried to claim Weidmann was representative of a broader German outlook and nature — of violence, bloodthirstiness and depravity. Told in hasty and cluttered chapters, the story of Weidmann’s trial is profoundly anti-climactic, not the least because of Braude’s decision to open the book with the scene of Weidmann’s execution.

According to Braude, strong parallels in Flanner and Weidmann’s lives warrant their stories being told together. But the parallels are generic and strained: “Both were foreigners in France… Both adapted quickly to their new surroundings… Both longed for beauty.” The intersection of their lives, meanwhile, is momentary. While Flanner reported on Weidmann’s trial and execution, nothing suggests it left a deep impression on her.

As a mark of her evolution, the fact she covered the trial is telling. As Braude writes, “She hadn’t come [to Paris] to write about decapitated murderers.” But the more important mark is surely that of her engagement with the looming Nazi shadow in the lead-up to the second world war.

Flanner certainly saw that. Her coverage of war crimes perpetrated by the Nazis, her reportage of the Nuremberg trials and her work on the Nazi looting of priceless cultural artefacts were indefatigable. And they inflected the New Yorker’s style and outlook thereafter.

As Ross wrote to her, in June 1946, “I think our transition to peace, art, amusement, frivolity, etc, will be gradual, and probably the magazine will never get back to where it was.” •

The Typewriter and the Guillotine: An American Journalist, a German Serial Killer, and Paris on the Eve of WWII
By Mark Braude | Grand Central Publishing | $65.99 | 421 pages

The post Just the thing appeared first on Inside Story.

The inquiry’s head, acting justice Robert Hulme, this week found “a reasonable doubt” about the guilt of three of the six — Ilija Kokotovic, Joseph Kokotovic and Mile Nekic. Hulme referred his findings to the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, which will now consider whether their convictions should be quashed. But he declined to question the convictions of the other three — Vjekoslav Brajkovic, Maksimilian Bebic and Anton Zvirotic — each of whom continues to protest their innocence more than twenty years after being released from jail.

The six men, all young tradies in Sydney and Lithgow at the time, were arrested on 8 February 1979 after a seventh man calling himself Vico Virkez contacted state police. Virkez told them he had become embroiled in a Croatian nationalist bomb plot against Yugoslavia’s communist government and wanted to expose it before harm was done. Police raids followed, leading to one of the longest criminal trials in British Commonwealth history and the six men’s conviction in February 1981. Each was sentenced to fifteen years’ jail and served seven to eight years before being paroled.

Gradually, though, an alternative scenario began building up. According to this version, Virkez was actually a Serb named Vitomir Misimovic, masquerading as a Croat, who had accumulated a stash of stolen gelignite in Lithgow with his gullible housemate Bebic. Once he told police that bombs were about to be set across Sydney, the state’s police heavies, the Criminal Investigation Bureau, employed their notorious methods — bashing, verballing and “loading-up” — to frame six Croatian activists irking the Tito regime.

Two applications for judicial review of the convictions, in 1994 and 2013, failed. Then the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation declassified records of phone taps showing Virkez had been communicating with an officer of the Yugoslav intelligence service, the UDBa, at the Yugoslav consulate in Sydney during the six months before the arrests.

A third bid for review was then accepted by the NSW Supreme Court, with Hulme appointed to run it. He heard evidence and submissions for almost a year, with legal teams representing the NSW Police, individual police, the state’s prosecutors, ASIO and of course the six convicted men. More than twenty police officers were brought out of retirement and quizzed about the evidence they gave all that time ago.

Hulme has digested the massive trove of transcripts, exhibits and subpoenaed documents and now, fifteen months later, has published a cautious 543-page report and a similar-sized volume of annexures. Having followed the campaign for the men’s exoneration for nearly twenty years, I was puzzled by some of his assessments — especially on the question of ASIO’s role in a likely miscarriage of justice — and the weight he has given to certain testimony.

Hulme was not inclined to entertain the alternative narrative as a whole. He finds the main part of the evidence given by Virkez, who had turned crown witness for the trial and been given a short sentence, to be credible despite Virkez’s having told the ABC’s Chris Masters on camera in 1991 that he made most of it up — an admission he later repeated to the Sydney Morning Herald’s Paul McGeough. Virkez returned to Yugoslavia after giving evidence, without punishment by its authorities, and died in 2014.

The judge likewise accepts the testimony of the then federal police intelligence official Roger Cavanagh, who flits in and out of the investigation as a specialist on threats from the Croatian extremist Ustaše organisation and other anti-Yugoslavian groups. Cavanagh played down the connection between Virkez and the Yugoslav intelligence service in the NSW Court of Criminal Appeal, portraying  Virkez as a voluntary informant rather than an agent.

“The evidence does not support the contention that Virkez held considerable animus towards Ustaše Croatian organisations and activists and thereby had a motive to frame Croatian people, or to engineer a false flag style operation adverse to their interests,” Hulme found. The judge did not address the evidence that Virkez did indeed hold considerable animus towards Ustaše Croatian organisations, nor his animus towards one of the Croatian Six in particular, Vjekoslav Brajkovic.

The allegation that Virkez “played or held a higher role, such as an ‘agent provocateur’ either in the traditional or confined sense, cannot be sustained,” writes Hulme. “In his role with the Yugoslav consulate, Virkez is best described as an ‘informant’ or ‘source.’ If he is to be considered any sort of ‘agent,’ the qualifying term used by Cavanagh of ‘low-level’ is apt.”

Hulme grants that Virkez “remains a controversial character and there is a lot that remains unknown or is unclear about his background.” And he concedes that Virkez was not truthful in all respects of his trial evidence, for example when he denied he was in contact with the consulate for the purpose of spying on Croatians. But on the “core subject” of the bombing conspiracy, Hulme concludes that Virkez’s account was supported by the call he made to the consulate just before tipping off the NSW police. “The call was, in effect, a plea for help and advice; he said, ‘I am in some sort of trouble,’” he writes.

The judge argues that his evidence is “not in any way tarnished by the claims made by Virkez many years later in interviews with Masters and McGeough, two highly respected journalists who tracked him down in his native country. While those claims provided support at a superficial level for the petitioners’ case, they are replete with inaccuracies and inconsistencies that deny them credibility.”

This interpretation of Virkez’s behaviour is similar to that of the prosecution in the trial. It hardly accords with the more widely accepted picture of Virkez as a malign, cynical character who sprung a trap on his gullible housemate Bebic and the other Croatians while his delighted UDba handlers looked on from a safe distance.

Cavanagh, long retired, died in 2021 before the inquiry hearings began. Curiously, the Australian Federal Police were not represented at the inquiry, and no attempt seems to have been made to seek any records it (or its predecessor, the Commonwealth Police) might have on Virkez. Maybe Hulme had no power to call them. In one interview, Virkez said he had been in contact with “ASIO” and told to speak to a “Kavanagh.” Had Cavanagh been running Virkez as a source himself? It’s an intriguing thought.

Nor did Hulme take up the contention of the lawyers for the Croatian Six that the Wood royal commission’s 1994 finding that systemic “process corruption” existed in the CIB squads brought into question all the police evidence in this case, notably the alleged discovery of gelignite in Sydney homes and the “admissions” some of the accused allegedly made to the CIB after their arrest.

The only way for such a conspiracy to be proven would be if any of the surviving police admitted to have taken part in or known about it. But the legislation setting up this kind of judicial inquiry notably excludes the power of royal commissions and certain other types of inquiry to compel testimony and grant legal immunity in exchange. Hulme said he asked the NSW government during the inquiry for a legislative patch to fix this gap, but without success. “It cannot be known whether the exclusion of the power of compulsion did in fact work to conceal such evidence,” he said.

Hulme did find several police officers involved in Brajkovic’s arrest had severely bashed him, one using a twisted towel to throttle him, and had then conspired to mislead an Internal Affairs Branch inquiry into Brajkovic’s complaint. (The branch accepted the officers’ concocted explanation for his injuries: that he, with help from other accused, had inflicted injuries on himself to discredit police.)

Nor did the police take proper precautions for the potential discovery of massive amounts of explosives in their raids. “Indeed, by today’s standards, the nonchalant way police acted on intelligence that there might be ‘30–50kg of explosives at an undisclosed location’ was rather extraordinary,” Hulme said. “However, the inquiry does not find the inadequate or complete lack of precautions to mean that police had formulated a conspiracy to falsely accuse the Croatian Six before any raids were carried out, knowing that there was no real bomb plot. Instead, more probable is the explanation that the lack of precautions ‘was in all likelihood a product of a cavalier attitude that prevailed at the time and nothing more sinister.’”

Hulme was highly critical of Special Branch officer Victor Jefferies for withholding his knowledge of Virkez’s Serb background and Virkez’s anti-Croatian views, and for endeavouring to keep his Yugoslav consulate link hidden from the committal hearings of the charges against the Croatian Six.

He dismisses for lack of evidence the conjecture that the two half-sticks of gelignite (and associated wiring and detonators) found in each of three Sydney homes raided by separate police groups came from a “stash” of incriminating items kept by the CIB squads to “load up” suspects.

But when he discusses the convictions of the Kokotovic brothers and Nekic — arrested at the same house with sticks of gelignite on a desk at which they were preparing leaflets, according to police — he finds it unclear who possessed the incriminating items. He considers their alleged admissions of joint possession in the CIB “interviews” to be concerning. Together with the sketchy references to them by Virkez and Bebic in Lithgow, he concludes that reasonable doubt exists about their convictions.

It is when he turns to the main new evidence that led to the inquiry — the evidence of ASIO involvement — that Hulme leaves a huge gap in accountability.

ASIO records declassified in 2018 reveal that the security service was tapping telephones at the Yugoslav consulate and monitoring Virkez’s contacts with UDba. Soon after the arrests in February 1979, a secret report was circulated by its head office in Canberra. Virkez, it said, had “for a period of at least six months prior to the arrests acted as an informer on Croatian nationalist activities to a person suspected by ASIO of being an intelligence official attached to the Yugoslav Consulate-General.” The plot revealed “the depth of the penetration of Croatian extremist groups by the YIS in Australia.”

This report went to top NSW police and the Special Branch. In follow-up exchanges with ASIO, then assistant police commissioner Roy Whitelaw said “if the opposition [ie the six men’s defence team] became aware of this information it could blow a hole right through the police case.” Later Whitelaw was advised he could tell his prosecutors about it as long as the source was not made public. Through the trial and appeal, defence subpoenas for relevant intelligence information about Virkez were rejected on national security and other grounds.

As a result, the crown prosecutor, the late David Shillington QC, was able to assert, unchallenged, that there was “not a skerrick of evidence to suggest that [Virkez] was some sort of undercover agent, an UDBa or Yugoslav representative.”

Hulme’s inquiry tried to find out whether ASIO’s information had got to Shillington. Various surviving police witness said he was fully informed about everything he should know. Hulme declines to accuse him of knowingly withholding evidence important to the defence: “[I]t would be neither fair to the late Mr Shillington QC, nor reasonably supported by the evidence before the inquiry, to conclude that he abdicated his responsibilities and acted in a manner inconsistent with his overarching duty.”

The judge noted that when the Croatian Six sought leave to appeal in the High Court in 1986, the then NSW crown counsel, Reg Blanch QC (later chief judge of the NSW District Court), admitted that if the prosecution had withheld vital evidence for the defence “it would be almost automatic that there would be a miscarriage of justice.”

Hulme’s own counsel assisting submitted that the defect in the trial process by reason of non-disclosure was significant. In his finding, Hulme conceded that the nondisclosure “could meet the current day test for a miscarriage of justice in that it could be regarded as an error or irregularity that could realistically have affected the reasoning of the jury to its verdict,” helpfully citing a recent case.

“However,” Hume went on, “the ultimate question for the inquiry is whether there is reasonable doubt as to guilt of the Croatian Six. A flaw in the trial processes is an appropriate matter to report upon and might inform this question, but it is not in itself determinative… The unavailability to the defence of information and evidence concerning Virkez’s allegiance to Yugoslavian interests and his association with personnel at the Yugoslav consulate has no impact upon the question of whether there is a reasonable doubt about the guilt of any of the members of the Croatian Six.”

Hulme circled the subject again in his conclusion, where he referred to “failings” in the disclosure of information about Virkez’s association with the Yugoslav consulate and loyalty to Yugoslavia. “The extent of what was known and should have been passed on is not entirely clear,” he wrote, “but there is no doubt that there was a denial of some probative ‘ammunition’ that could have been effectively deployed in cross-examination of Virkez.”

This non-disclosure, he went on, “arguably was significant and could be regarded as an error or irregularity that could realistically have affected the reasoning of the jury to its verdict and thereby constitute a miscarriage of justice.” He repeated his reference to a recent High Court ruling to this effect.

It is puzzling that Justice Hulme didn’t consider the question of a miscarriage of justice to be within the ambit of his inquiry. After all these years, exactly whose task is it? That question must surely be considered by the two authorities to whom he has given his report: NSW chief justice Andrew Bell and NSW governor Margaret Beazley (herself a former president of the NSW Court of Appeal).

The procedures drag on. Of the three exonerated, Mile Nekic has died and the Kokotovic brothers didn’t seek this inquiry. A ruling that a miscarriage of justice did indeed occur would bring a sort of exoneration for the other three, and for the broader Croatian-Australian community, which has had to live with the stain of terrorism this case has spread over them for nearly five decades. •

► Hamish McDonald’s account of his involvement in the successful effort to reopen the case

The post The Croatian Six inquiry raises more reasonable doubts appeared first on Inside Story.

Despite commanding the world’s most powerful military, Trump looks like achieving, at best, the agreement Barack Obama secured with Iran — the one Trump tore up in his first term on the ground that it was the worst deal ever. Consider the cost in human lives, to the world’s economy and to the vestiges of Middle East stability of his reckless aggression.

In her new book Done in a Day, Elisa Tamarkin wants us to remember how badly an earlier war, in Vietnam, went for the US — not to mention for the millions of Vietnamese killed and injured — and how little politicians, and the public, seem to have absorbed its lessons.

Tamarkin brings an interesting dual perspective to her task. She is a professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and she is the daughter of Bob Tamarkin, a foreign correspondent with the Chicago Daily News. Her family arrived in Vietnam early in January 1975 and her father was on the last helicopter out of Saigon on 30 April. Elisa, then aged four, had been evacuated with her mother to Hong Kong on 10 April.

Tamarkin has both real affection for journalism of the kind her father practised and a critical awareness of its shortcomings. Her book is richly illustrated with photos showing the innards of news work: the reams of telexes, the telegrams between her father and his editors, the final front pages of more than twenty American newspapers between 1978, when the Chicago Daily News closed, and 2025.

There is nostalgia in this and also, remembering the word’s Greek roots, pain (álgos) as Tamarkin recalls the proud history of the News’s early, deep commitment to reporting foreign news. As long ago as 1901 the newspaper’s publisher, Victor Lawson, had set up bureaus in Tokyo, Peking, Egypt, South Africa, Latin America, Australia and various cities in Europe, pioneering the comprehensive surveilling of world affairs that took grip during the twentieth century.

Lawson wanted a “man on the spot” (and they were almost all men) in each of these cities, living in foreign capitals rather than flying in and out. That way they would learn the local context, cultivate local contacts and anticipate events, equipping them to recognise a real scoop when it came their way. By the first world war, the paper had thirty resident reporters covering events from the front lines.

All this cost a lot. But it yielded other dividends: apart from strong coverage of breaking news, the News specialised in what one of its correspondents called “side-light stories” — “the unexpected, incidental angles on events that you could never drop in to find.”

By the time the paper closed in 1978, the amount of foreign news carried by it and its fellow American papers was in decline. In 1970, Tamarkin reports, foreign news occupied 11 per cent of the “news hole” in daily newspapers. By the time the Vietnam war ended the figure had dropped to 6.3 per cent. A decade later, after big companies began buying up newspapers in individual cities and consolidating them into chains, the figure had fallen even further to 1.8 per cent. Today, only the most resilient of the world’s legacy media, like the New York Times, can afford to run foreign bureaus.

Foreign reporting is not without its problems: newspaper publishers’ interests, whether ideological or commercial, are often aligned with their government’s foreign policies, as Tamarkin shows was the case with Lawson. Foreign postings were keenly sought after in newsrooms, leading to a certain arrogance among the species. As a character in Tom Stoppard’s 1978 play Night and Day remarks: “A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel to hotel and thinks the most interesting thing about any story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.”

From the vantage point of 2026, it is also clear something has been lost. Ideally, foreign correspondents go out into the world, get to know other places and people and then translate what they find for their audience at home. They are an inoculation against the kind of news and opinion silos created and then cemented by the digital age.

Tamarkin’s book is carefully researched and genuinely thought-provoking, but it is also dense and allusive. Five extended chapters each cover several meaty topics with digressions into, say, Thomas A. Harris’s 1969 book about transactional analysis, I’m OK — You’re OK, or an early twentieth century “cine-poem,” The End of the World Filmed by the Angel of Notre-Dame.

That aside, the most important theme of the book for me was Tamarkin’s complicating of the history of the Vietnam war. She begins by focusing intently on the final days of a conflict that had begun as a civil war in 1955 and ended in 1973 with the signing of the Paris Peace Accords. Saigon’s fall to North Vietnamese forces prompted the largest evacuation by helicopter of Americans and selected foreign nationals from the US embassy, though not, sadly, many of the Vietnamese who had fought with and supported the Americans.

How the war ended, though, is just the starting point for the author’s meditation on how political leaders think about wars and how the public’s perception of war is shaped by the news media.

Done in a Day also reaches beyond most media history by asking how the interaction between political leaders and the public shapes what each did next, especially after it became blindingly clear to anyone paying attention that the war was going disastrously for the Americans yet the nation’s political leaders kept it going for year after year.

Tamarkin points to Daniel Ellsberg’s famous leaking of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times in 1971. Ellsberg had been among the authors of a secret forty-seven-volume history of America’s political and military involvement in Vietnam since 1945, which had been commissioned by defense secretary Robert McNamara.

Although the New York Times published only part of the 3000-page narrative, writes Tamarkin, it was more than enough to make clear how the public “had been deceived by four presidents who knew from the start that the war would never end until it was lost, even as they continued to drop millions of tons of bombs.”

Even by 1970, before Ellsberg’s leak, there had been no shortage of information about the war’s disastrous progress in news reports and in books by journalists who reported from Vietnam, among them Frances Fitzgerald (Fire in the Lake, 1972) and David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest, 1972).

Ellsberg lamented the “endless, escalating stalemate” that first the Johnson and then the Nixon administrations allowed to continue. In his 1972 book, Papers on the War, he argued that members of the executive branch of government and in congress “had neglected totally to unlock and study its own copies” of the history of the war.

Ellsberg had tried in 1970 to persuade the secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, to skim the study or assign it to an assistant to read it for him, to which Kissinger replied, “Is there really much to be learned from that?” Tamarkin comments: “We know now there probably wasn’t much for Kissinger to learn, since he had been striding toward failure all along with a realist’s resolve, eyes wide open, hoping just to hold it back until… the next election.”

Ellsberg had also revealed parts of the secret history to a Senate foreign relations committee, but with little impact, and later in 1970, presenting a paper at an academic conference, he saw that even political scientists were largely unaware of its contents. As he acidly remarked, “An expert — I once heard — is a man [sic] who has read a book that no one else has read.”

Meanwhile, as Tamarkin notes, another million ton of bombs had been dropped, and hundreds of thousands of people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos had died, along with 10,000 Americans. She quotes Hannah Arendt, writing in the New York Review of Books in 1971: “The public had access for years to material that the government vainly tried to keep from it,” which underscored the news media’s power but also a willingness to turn a blind eye for more than two decades “as though a fact is safely removed from the world if only enough people believe in its nonexistence.”

It is hard to ignore the present-day parallels. I can’t be the only person to have noticed that the news media’s rush to quote Donald Trump’s latest utterance about the war in Iran doesn’t exactly meet the definition of news — reporting something new — but instead underscores how easily the convention of seeking the views of those in power can be gamed by politicians.

Nor can I be the only one to have noticed that journalists reporting for the ABC’s metropolitan stations here in Australia don’t seems to have been listening to the first hour of Radio National Breakfast when various experts have been saying for months that the American president’s war in Iran was ill-conceived, ill-informed and illegitimate.

Either the journalists are not doing their job properly or their deference to power is growing, despite all their protests to the contrary. When the role of journalism is under multiple threats — many of them aggressively shaped by Donald Trump — we don’t need more deference to power, not least because those in power, like Trump, are abusing their positions and damaging so many in the process.

If it is dispiriting to see how easily and thoroughly the lessons of history are erased or forgotten, it is welcome, and bracing, to have them put before us so carefully and thoughtfully as Elisa Tamarkin has in Done in a Day. •

Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon
By Elisa Tamarkin | University of Chicago Press | $46.95 | 300 pages

The post The last helicopter appeared first on Inside Story.

Yet Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu are absent from the index, and Donald Trump gets only passing mentions. Instead, the authors are concerned with tracing the question to its best-known source in the philosophy of David Hume, and even further back to the work of Etienne de la Boétie, who wrote in the sixteenth century, a generation after Machiavelli. Force alone was not enough to account for the submission of thousands to a single tyrant, La Boétie reasoned.

Margalit and Sharon bring exceptional knowledge and experience to their subject. As cultural historians, they draw their lines of analysis through Montaigne, Hobbes, William Godwin and Tolstoy to the twentieth century’s Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky. But what of the twenty-first? When it comes to compliance — a central factor in the success of manipulative politics — the second Trump administration has seen truly stupefying manifestations in the judiciary, the academy, the commercial world and the media. And yet the book doesn’t go there.

The authors make the case that examining political manipulation in ancient democracies and early modern republics helps to make us aware of recurring or enduring elements. Certainly many of the assertions drawn from historical sources have a keen relevance, all the more arresting for the terms in which they are expressed. La Boétie points to “practices and enticements” that serve to keep the people “stupefied.”

“Stupefied” is a good word for a study of manipulation. It communicates so much more than “stupid” and is not so readily weaponised. If claims that the people are stupid are replaced by the question of how they became stupefied, attention turns to causes and remedies. And so the authors set out to offer “a workable account of manipulation.”

The finger is most obviously pointed at propaganda campaigns, with social media as the arena of worst offences. But the authors also quote philosopher Susan Stebbing’s 1939 observation about the need to examine our individual failures of thinking, and the book’s argument is balanced between those polarities: personal responsibility for the formation of opinions versus external influences seeking to confuse or confound ethical judgement.

On the first, Margalit and Sharon take examples from literary and philosophical sources ranging from ancient Greek mythology to classics of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, with Shakespeare’s Othello as a recurrent illustration of how “perverting the way a person reaches decisions” is a deeply psychological process. It is also a form of domination. The authors emphasise that their main interest is in political manipulation, but Othello is a complex case of the personal being weaponised to political ends.

Margalit and Sharon introduce Plato and Aristotle as commentators on the centrality of flattery in tyrannical government. This is not just something that goes on among courtiers, as in Machiavelli’s account. Plato stresses the appetite for flattery within crowds seduced by grandiose figures purporting to embody their interests and aspirations. Aristotle identifies the strategy at all levels as “pandering to extract benefit.” Is this dynamic an insidious by-product of the arts of rhetoric?

That’s a disturbing ethical question. Rhetoric is the art of convincing, which is about more than presenting valid truths and arguments. It works by “engaging cognitive abilities” with opening gambits that implicitly flatter the audience’s intelligence: “This is a deep point…”; “We who can see through the lies…”; or (a Trump favourite) “Not many people know this…” But the book refers only in passing to the culture of sycophancy in the Trump White House.

Historical parallels can certainly be illuminating. Gustav Le Bon wrote in 1895 that new psychological characteristics emerge among people “from the mere fact of their being assembled.” This quotation appears in a section on mass manipulation, “mass-man” and the mob. Le Bon’s words could be applied, though, in a way he had not anticipated: what of the assemblies at Mar-a-Lago, or Epstein Island?

In our time, the concentration of wealth and celebrity in circles of political influence is a more bizarre and consequential manifestation of “new psychological characteristics” than anything we are seeing on the streets. The normalisation of plastic surgery, huge investments in immortality research, and exhibitions of infantile behaviour recall the excesses of eighteenth-century Versailles. The role of extreme wealth in contemporary manipulation is also something a book on this subject might be expected to deal with.

Concentrated analysis of psychological manipulation through the examples of Machiavelli, and Iago in Othello, may yield insights that apply to strategies used by influencers like Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Ben Shapiro — or, for that matter, the left’s Rachel Maddow and Kara Swisher, who explicitly aim to call out manipulative tactics. Perhaps we should be able to draw the parallels for ourselves, but it’s complex work to untangle what is new and specific to the political dynamics of our times.

There’s certainly a case to be made for critical distance in an overheated political milieu in which public opinion is assiduously stirred by influencers seeking to push it into the red zone. Discussion of how manipulation contributes to the rise of the MAGA movement, the British Reform party or One Nation risks becoming caught up in the incendiary dynamics. The ideological vehemence of the Likud government under Benjamin Netanyahu, for example, has made commentary on antisemitism a high-risk activity, but it is one in which many forms of dangerous manipulation are at work.

What makes Netanyahu an especially striking omission from Captive Minds is the credentials of its two authors. Avishai Margalit is a professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Assaf Sharon is professor of philosophy at Tel Aviv University and co-founder and senior fellow of Molad: the Center for Renewal of Israeli Democracy. Both have impressive records of active intellectual engagement with Israeli politics.

Margalit’s landmark books on the ethics of memory, occidentalism and compromise are informed by a lifelong engagement with the realities of a crisis-ridden nation. As a contributor to the New York Review of Books he has written articles on Yitzhak Rabin, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Shamir and Shimon Peres. In April 2023 he spoke with the New Yorker about the fusion of religion and nationalism strategically promoted in Netanyahu’s rhetoric.

Sharon’s Molad centre conducts research on forms of current populism associated with conspiracy theories, disinformation campaigns and anti-liberal incitement. He discusses the difficulty of speaking plainly in an environment where denunciations of the massacre by Hamas immediately bring accusations of being an apologist for Zionism. He, too, sees religious nationalism as an emergent force that deprives “actual living citizens” of the freedom to define their identity in the face of hereditary determinations.

They do return to the present in the final chapter, with a review of how manipulation is evolving in the present communications environment. They identify two primary aspects. One is the growing dominance of images in public discourse, which they describe as “a shift of momentous proportions.” Perhaps we need the perspective of a deeper history to see it that way, having taken it for granted for more than three generations.

The second factor is the rise of social media and independent blogging, and here the authors fall into the trap of judgementalism. They cite Gresham’s law: bad money drives out good. (Thomas Gresham, an advisor to Elizabeth I, urged her to raise confidence in the coin of the realm by reversing the practice of blending the metals with alloys.) Something similar, they say, is true of public discourse, when professional journalism is driven out by amateur punditry and the viral propagation of shrill opinion.

It’s a common complaint, but one that skates over the more complex realities. Social media is not all bad. To cast it as debased currency is to ignore the amount of genuinely informed and ethical concern circulating among regular contributors. In many situations it serves as counter to the heavily weighted messaging of billionaire-owned newspapers and television networks. Professional journalism is itself a debased currency in an era when media owners determine what is reported, and how.

The authors describe their own conclusion as “unsatisfying,” a word that may echo Margalit’s long engagement with the principle of compromise. Like generals, they acknowledge, philosophers tend to prepare for the previous war, but they rest their case for the value of hindsight on some fundamental principles, the most important of which is freedom. A free society can only be built on the freedom of individuals as thinkers and adjudicators of the most important issues confronting them. It is this freedom at the level of cognition that is the book’s fundamental concern. •

Captive Minds: A Study of Manipulation
By Avishai Margalit and Assaf Sharon | Harvard University Press | $64 | 288 pages

The post Not many people know this… appeared first on Inside Story.

Once, an interviewer asked me a much more interesting question: why does Hitler still exercise such a fascination and loom so large in our culture? I responded with something along these lines: in an era in which there is less consensus about traditional religious definitions of what we should consider to be good, there is a broad secular consensus that Hitler (along with Nazism and the Holocaust) represents a definition of absolute evil.

My vague intuition has received a more developed and thoughtful articulation in a short book (or long essay) by Alec Ryrie, professor of the history of Christianity at Britain’s Durham University. In The Age of Hitler: How We Will Survive It, Ryrie argues that the Christian narratives and moral teachings that were hegemonic in Western societies until the second world war have been replaced. Since the war, he says, “we have all been living through the age of Hitler… the age in which our public morals have come to be defined with reference to the Nazis.”

Ryrie provides a concise sketch of how often references to Hitler, Nazism and the Holocaust appear in popular culture. Initially he seems to be covering similar terrain to Gavriel D. Rosenfeld’s 2013 book, Hi Hitler! How the Nazi Past Is Being Normalized in Contemporary Culture, which surveys popular culture’s treatments of Third Reich historical themes. Think of all the internet parodies of Hitler’s ranting in the bunker in the 2004 film Downfall. Indeed, analogies with Hitler and Nazism became so ubiquitous online that “Godwin’s Law” — which essentially says that the first person to introduce a Hitler analogy into an online argument loses — became a popular means of trying to stem the tide. But Ryrie soon veers in a different direction.

If Hitler represented absolute evil then the war the Allies fought to resist his aggression and defeat his regime was in some senses a “good war.” The title of Studs Terkel’s 1984 people’s oral history of the conflict, The Good War, might have contained a strong dose of irony given that the accounts he gathered didn’t shy away from the grisly aspects of the conflict. But there was no irony in the celebration of the (mostly) men who fought in that conflict as “the greatest generation” during the Reagan years, even though President Reagan himself spent the war in the studio lots of Hollywood.

As Ryrie justifiably points out, however, a war is a questionable thing to base a set of moral values on. I grew up on a diet of wholesome, morally unambiguous tales of wartime heroism (books like The Dam Busters and Colditz, for instance) but historians have since arrived at much more complex accounts of the war. The mass fire-bombing of civilians in German and Japanese cities, the racism and sexual violence, the grimmer aspects of Stalin’s conduct on the Eastern front — all received more attention as time went on. The Allies’ less praiseworthy acts don’t diminish the evil of Nazism, but they do blur the moral certainties of older narratives.

We also risk drawing lessons from the war that aren’t applicable to present dilemmas. Ryrie justifiably points to the inflationary use of the term “appeasement” in international crises. A respectable body of international relations literature has been devoted to the use and misuse of the “Munich” analogy in debates about how to deal with belligerent countries.

This is not to deny that Western societies drew important lessons from that war, notably the ideal of universal human rights. As Ryrie writes, “we cannot imagine our modern faith in human rights without the experience of the second world war.” Among other things, the post-1945 emphasis on universally valid human rights has energised anti-racist and anti-colonialist movements. But Ryrie sees our “faith in human rights” as flawed, because it is grounded in historical experience that is losing its salience in our culture.

It’s possible to show, on the other hand, that our contemporary concept of human rights has roots much further back than 1945 — at least as far back as the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the American and French revolutions. Ideas of human rights are grounded in ethics and philosophy, not just historical precedents and memory.

Ryrie argues that the “age of Hitler” is coming to an end, which he doesn’t view as a bad thing. It’s also inevitable, he says, as the remaining number of living witnesses to wartime events shrinks and societies or cultures with different memories of that period make increasing claims on our attention.

Just over twenty years ago, in an important essay on the Crisis of Antifascism (2004), the Italian historian Sergio Luzzatto diagnosed the waning hold anti-fascism had as a founding ideology of the postwar Italian Republic. The passing of the generation of protagonists of the struggle between fascism and anti-fascism, the banalisation of the memory industry, and the active efforts of elements of the Italian right to trivialise and relativise the crimes of Mussolini’s regime had all contributed to the weakening of the tradition of anti-fascism as a way of mobilising democratic politics.

Today Italy is governed by a party that is a direct linear descendant of the neo-fascist party founded in Italy after 1945 by unrepentant functionaries of Mussolini’s Fascist party. Europe-wide, far-right parties have secured large segments of the electorate. In Germany, the inoculation against the far right lasted longer than in many other countries, but the extremist Alternative for Germany is today polling as the most popular party in the country.

Ryrie doesn’t really engage greatly with political-historical analysis of the kind that Luzzatto practises. Instead, he proceeds to argue that it is time for the culture wars that divide contemporary Western societies to give way to a new synthesis of moral values. To get there, “progressive secularists” will need to learn from the positive dimensions of rooted religious traditions and “conservative traditionalists” will need to relearn the values of humility and repentance.

Ryrie’s argumentation doesn’t take account of the corrosive effects of a generation of neoliberalism, with its elevation of self-interest and its tendency to dissolve older sources of social solidarity. Names like Thatcher, Reagan and Hayek are missing from his book, despite its engagingly wide set of cultural references. He tends to be dismissive of class or economic factors, and it is frustrating to read an essay on contemporary history that has so little to say about actual power relations in society.

It is hard to argue against the value of dialogue with people of differing views, in the abstract. But when peaceful protesters tried to reason with Trumpist paramilitaries in the state of Minnesota in January this year, two of them were shot dead. •

The Age of Hitler: How We Will Survive It
By Alec Ryrie | Reaktion | $34.95 | 160 pages

The post Are we still living in the Age of Hitler? appeared first on Inside Story.

They had much in common. Born only nine years apart — Kafka in 1883 in Prague and Benjamin 1892 in Berlin — they died in their forties. Both grew up in well-to-do households. Both were the children of assimilated German Jews. For the Nazis, the qualifier was irrelevant: Benjamin’s brother and Kafka’s three sisters were murdered in 1942 and 1943.

A recurrent melancholia afflicted both men and affected their work. Their writing was influenced by the emergence of a new technology, the projection of moving images. They were loners, but the women they loved left a large mark: Felice Bauer and Milena Jesenská in Kafka’s case and, in Benjamin’s, his wife Dora and his lover Asja Lācis.

At the time, close friends and some fellow writers considered Benjamin and Kafka exceptionally talented, but while they were still alive, they weren’t well known to a broader public. That’s also because many of their texts were published only posthumously.

Kafka wrote only three books of short prose and Benjamin published four titles: his doctoral and postdoctoral dissertations; Deutsche Menschen, an edited anthology of letters published under a pseudonym in 1936 in Switzerland; and One-Way Street, a collection of philosophical-literary miniatures that appeared in 1928, albeit as a brochure rather than a book. (Benjamin did, however, contribute numerous articles to newspapers, magazines and radio programs.)

Their reputations grew exponentially after they died, not least due to the efforts of close friends who arranged for the posthumous publication of their writings. Kafka’s literary executor Max Brod defied his express wish to burn his manuscripts unread and published his diaries and manuscripts, including The Trial and The Castle. Hannah Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno, above all, ensured that their friend Walter Benjamin’s previously unpublished texts would find a readership.

“Posthumous fame is one of [the Roman goddess] Fama’s rarer and least desired articles,” Arendt noted drily with reference to Kafka and Benjamin. It seems “to be the lot of the unclassifiable ones, that is, those whose work neither fits the existing order nor introduces a new genre that lends itself to future classification.”

Kafka and Benjamin have been the subject of an abundance of studies by scholars, particularly in literary studies and cultural theory, and numerous biographies have shed light on all aspects of their lives. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings’s 2014 opus is the most comprehensive account of Benjamin’s life and thought, covering his many intellectual pursuits and his path-breaking contributions to literary criticism, aesthetics, philosophy and cultural history. Its German edition runs to more than 1000 pages. For good reason, it has been hailed as a definitive account.

Peter E. Gordon’s recently released Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver is concise where Eiland and Jennings’s treatment is exhaustive. Gordon, who teaches European intellectual history at Harvard, has given us a beautifully written biography that is particularly valuable for readers not already familiar with Benjamin’s life and work but also a pleasure to read for others more conversant with his writings.

Like many books about Benjamin, this is a sympathetic account. “I have chosen not to dwell on the less palatable aspects of his character,” Gordon admits, “his gambling, his infidelities, his erratic moods, or his penchant for ruthlessly cutting off friendships when they no longer suited his needs.” But he certainly hasn’t written a hagiography — which cannot be said of all of Benjamin’s biographers.

Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Driver appears in Yale University Press’s Jewish Lives series. The question of the extent to which Benjamin was a Jewish writer provides the angle that distinguishes Gordon’s biography. I found his answers to that question the least convincing aspect of the book — if only because they sometimes read as if they were added belatedly, in response to an editor’s reminder. The need to focus on Benjamin’s interest in Judaism also seems to have led Gordon to privilege his subject’s correspondence with his close friend Gershom Scholem at the expense of other sources.

The book’s structure and Gordon’s reflections on it are a strength. Like others who have written about Benjamin, Gordon confronted the challenge of historicising the life of an intellectual who was preoccupied with history’s potential and who, “perhaps more than most professional historians, was alive to the enigma that works of the past offer more riches than the past can control.”

Gordon has therefore tried — successfully, I think — “to undo the historicist cliché by restoring some measure of contingency to a human life that, like all lives, remains forever open in its meaning.” He begins with Benjamin’s untimely suicide at Portbou, only to leave that “aside and begin anew.”

That’s particularly appropriate given the widespread morbid fascination with the last twenty-four hours of Benjamin’s life (crossing the Pyrenees on foot, clutching a briefcase that may, or may not, have contained a precious manuscript; writing a letter to his son that the woman to whom it was entrusted mysteriously destroyed). Gordon’s writing strategy is appropriate also in light of Benjamin’s afterlife as a cultural theorist of our time, which often seems to dwarf his life as a son, husband, lover, father, friend and impoverished writer.

Eiland and Jennings’s book was exceptional in paying close attention to Benjamin’s family: his parents and siblings, his wife Dora and their son Stefan. Gordon, too, is interested in Benjamin as a person rather than merely a thinker and writer, but he mentions Stefan only in passing.

Dora and Walter divorced in 1930, and four years later Dora moved to San Remo in northeastern Italy, where she opened a pensione. Stefan joined her in 1937. “But he could not stay there long,” Gordon writes. “Lacking citizenship, he was deported in 1941 from Italy to Australia; he survived the war and became an antiquarian bookseller in London, where he remained until his death in 1971.”

It wasn’t Italian citizenship that Stefan needed (and even that would not have saved him, as Italian Jews too were deported to concentration camps once Nazi Germany occupied Italy in 1943). Stefan left San Remo in 1938 and moved to London (a fact that is, to be fair, mentioned elsewhere in Gordon’s book). Dora, who had married a British national to be able to live in Britain, followed him in 1939 and again ran a guest house. Having become an enemy alien when Britain declared war on Germany, Stefan was interned on the Isle of Man and in 1940, together with more than 2500 others, shipped to Australia, where he was interned in Hay (New South Wales) and Tatura (Victoria).

Dora Benjamin with the couple’s son Stefan, c. 1920.

Encounters and conversations during Stefan’s journey to Australia aboard the infamous Dunera occupy most of John Schad’s quirky and delightful Walter Benjamin’s Ark: A Departure in Biography, published late last year. It is a book about Stefan (called “S.”, “Steffe” or “the prince” in the book, and Stefanzerich when he was little), who has sometimes been absent from accounts of his father’s life. In an afterword, Stefan’s daughter Mona Benjamin applauds Schad for making “the footnote the story.” He turns Stefan from a mere witness to the greatness of his father’s life into a central character. But Walter Benjamin’s Ark is also a book about Stefan’s larger-than-life father (“the king”) who, in the book, is imagined to have reunited with Stefan aboard the Dunera.

Schad is a professor of modern literature at the University of Lancaster and the author of several works of experimental criticism, including The Late Walter Benjamin (2012). It’s not easy to pigeonhole his latest book. It qualifies as creative fiction but is also a piece of innovative and meticulous scholarship. It strikes me as a departure from rather than in biography. Perhaps it’s best described as an annotated novel. Or a script for a radio play.

Mind you, much of its text is not made up. Like Benjamin himself, who likened quotations in his work to “wayside robbers who leap out armed and relieve the stroller of his conviction,” Schad juggles other writers’ fragments, often deliberately out of context. Rather than expecting readers to recognise quotes, Schad italicises them, references them in footnotes, and provides introductions in which he directs his readers’ attention and provides tongue-in-cheek justifications for his selection. Unlike his father, Stefan was not a writer, but Schad quotes him at length, using notes of his utterances as a child Benjamin kept and titled “Opinions et pensées.”

The Dunera left Liverpool for Australia in July 1940. Its human cargo included some Italian and German POWs and some Nazis, but most of those on board were Austrian and German refugees who had been interned in Britain after the fall of Dunkirk. Schad’s narrative features a handful of the actual passengers, among them three men who shared the surname Wilde, the actor Sigurd Lohde and an acrobat called Zeppie.

Biographies of Benjamin, including Gordon’s, make much of Benjamin’s friendships with other intellectuals: Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Siegfried Kracauer, Gershom Scholem, Adorno, Gretel Karplus (who in 1937 became Gretel Adorno) and others. Schad isn’t interested in such obvious interlocutors. Rather, he introduces a cast of characters most of whom never met either Stefan or Walter Benjamin but who, in Schad’s text, are also sailing on the Dunera. Virginia Woolf, Rosa Luxemburg, Hamlet, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gertrud Kolmar — all are part of “the ship’s company” and of Benjamin’s “very own queer kingdom.”

Biographers tend to rely heavily on written sources. It’s therefore no surprise that those writing about Benjamin’s life have highlighted his relationships with people whose correspondence with him survived. Schad, however, goes much further than to rescue those of Benjamin’s acquaintances from oblivion who didn’t archive their letters (or talked to him mostly on the phone, as Schad’s Virginia Woolf does). He imagines conversations with historical figures whom Benjamin never met and who may not even have been of much concern to him.

That kind of irreverence is refreshing. (While Schad’s writing is no doubt inspired by Benjamin’s, the irreverence appears to be very much his own.) Sometimes the imagined conversations aboard the Dunera are outright funny. But the light-hearted banter characterising some of the dialogues is a thin layer over a darkness: the catastrophe of the Shoah that forms the historical backdrop to the narrative, and the loss experienced by Stefan, which becomes only more acute with his father’s appearance aboard the Dunera. Light-heartedness is entirely absent when Rosa Luxemburg, who was murdered by members of a far-right militia, her body thrown into the Landwehr Canal and retrieved not until several months later, is referred to as Mermaid.

Schad restores more than “some measure of contingency” to Benjamin’s life when he reunites Benjamin with his cousin, the poet Gertrud Kolmar, who was murdered in Auschwitz on 3 March 1943 and whose brother was on the Dunera. Her appearance is prompted by the opening of a lecture by Wittgenstein, “Suppose a story began with ‘She wore a black dress.’” She may or may not be the female counterpart of the angel in the Paul Klee painting “Angelus Novus” that was Benjamin’s most prized possession. And that angel may, or may not, have been none other than S., “the prince” and (quoting Kolmar now) “a youth with gleaming and quivering wide-spread wings” “whose countenance is sorrow.” After all, his middle name Rafael (which does not appear in the Australian internment records) came from one of the archangels.

The title of Gordon’s biography cites Hannah Arendt. In an essay published in 1968 — first in German in the literary journal Merkur and subsequently in the New Yorker and in Illuminations, an anthology of Benjamin’s writings — Arendt writes about Benjamin’s rare “gift of thinking poetically”:

Like a pearl diver who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths, and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past — but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages.

Not only was Benjamin capable of thinking poetically — he was also able to convey his thinking to others. He was not only one of twentieth-century Germany’s most influential thinkers, but also one of its most elegant writers. That’s particularly evident in Benjamin’s 1928 collection of miniatures, One-Way Street, and in his memoir of sorts, Berlin Childhood Around 1900, in which he delves into his childhood to “pry loose the rich and the strange.”

The young Walter, c. 1897–1902. Selle & Kuntze

The German publisher Suhrkamp brought out a first version of Berlin Childhood, an edition prepared and introduced by Adorno and dedicated to Stefan, in 1950. The first book of Benjamin’s writings published after his death, it received positive reviews but turned out to be Suhrkamp’s least successful title that year. Adorno blamed “the trauma that asserts itself as soon as the name Berlin is mentioned.”

Benjamin had begun working on a series of vignettes about his childhood in the second half of the 1920s. The first texts appeared in print in 1926 in a literary magazine. But it was not until six years later that he decided to write a book composed of short “expeditions into the depth of memory.” By the end of 1932 he had completed a typescript of thirty pieces.

Unlike Kafka, Benjamin tried, often desperately, to have his writings published. That was also because — unlike Kafka, who worked for an insurance company — he did not have a steady income, relied on the support of his father and later of Gretel Karplus and his ex-wife Dora among others, and tried to survive by writing for newspapers and radio.

He sold the collection of vignettes to the Frankfurter Zeitung, a liberal daily, which intended to serialise it. But the Nazis’ seizure of power in March 1933 meant those plans came to naught. Altogether, only eighteen vignettes were published, some of them under the pseudonyms Detlef Holz (which he also used for the book Deutsche Menschen) and C. Conrad to circumvent the ban against the publication of texts by Jewish authors.

Benjamin meanwhile kept revising the texts and adding to the collection. He approached publishers in Germany and Switzerland, but to no avail. By 1938, he had put together several versions, copies of which were with publishers and friends. That year, he prepared a final typescript comprising thirty-two vignettes, this time also indicating the order in which they were to appear.

When he fled Paris in 1940, he entrusted the typewritten pages, together with other manuscripts, to the philosopher and surrealist writer Georges Bataille, who hid them in the Bibliothèque nationale. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben discovered them there forty-one years later. It is this final version, the Fassung letzter Hand, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, that has just been published by Verso.

In A Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Benjamin carried “the rich and the strange” to the surface, because, as he explains in a foreword, “[i]n 1932, while abroad, I began to realise that I would soon have to take a fairly long and perhaps permanent leave of the city in which I was born.” The tenor of some of these vignettes is reminiscent of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu, parts of which Benjamin had translated in the 1920s. But Benjamin’s remembering differs from Proust’s. He had lost “the security that had been granted his childhood” not only when he ceased being a child but also because after 1933 a return to Berlin was no longer an option.

The Berlin that Benjamin remembered and brought back to life is the comparatively affluent western part of the city, where his family lived. The vignettes feature the zoo, which must have been a frequent destination for young Walter and his nanny, his school, and the family’s summer residence near Potsdam. The backdrop for many of the vignettes, however, is the interior space of the family’s apartment, where the child’s sleep is invaded by frightful dreams and where the telephone, a seemingly innocuous apparatus, “disfigured and outcast, between the laundry hamper and the gasometer in a corner of the back corridor,” had the capacity to annihilate “all thought of my time, my intention and my duty.”

Franz Kafka, c. 1915.

The final piece in the Fassung letzter Hand is titled “Das bucklichte Männlein” (“The little humpbacked man” in Shierry Weber Nicholsen’s and “The little hunchback” in Howard Eiland’s translation). In it, Benjamin remembers peering down a shaft that provides a basement window with light and ventilation. At night in his dreams “looks that paralysed me were shot out of such basement holes.” Lines from a children’s book convince him that the looks were those of a little humpbacked man, who couldn’t be seen but who ever saw young Walter.

“He has long since abdicated,” begin the concluding lines. “Yet his voice, like the humming of the gas mantle, whispers to me across the threshold of the century: ‘Liebes Kindlein, ach ich bitt, / Bet für’s bucklicht Männlein mit!’ [Dear child, I beg of you, / Pray for the little humpbacked man too!]”

The little humpbacked man also appears in an essay Benjamin wrote about Franz Kafka, whom he recognised as a kindred spirit. “Among the images in Kafka’s stories, none is more frequent than that of the man who bows his head far down on his chest,” writes Benjamin. “It was always this way with Kafka. Compare this early diary entry: ‘In order to be as heavy as possible, which I believe to be an aid to falling asleep, I had crossed my arms and put my hands on my shoulders, so that I lay there like a soldier with his pack.’”

Like many other Dunera deportees, Stefan opted to return to Britain when he was offered the opportunity. On 12 December 1941, he left Australia aboard the Largs Bay, a passenger ship converted into a troop carrier. Via Auckland, the Panama Canal, Curaçao, Bermuda and Halifax he travelled to the UK, where he was initially reinterned, once again on the Isle of Man.

A certain Karl Kafka, a textile salesman from Vienna, blue-eyed like Stefan and, like Stefan’s father, born in July 1892, had also been taken to Australia on the Dunera. Like Stefan, he chose to return to Britain during the war. For Schad, that’s a good enough excuse for imagining conversations between Stefan (“the prince”), “the king” and “a Herr Kafka who is neither quite Franz nor indeed Karl.”

Kafka and Benjamin never met. But unlike Rosa Luxemburg, Virginia Woolf or Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kafka meant a lot to Benjamin. He was an admirer of Kafka’s writings and defended Max Brod against those who accused him of disrespecting his friend’s instructions to burn his manuscripts. Kafka was never far from Benjamin’s mind, and wrote three essays about the Prague writer, one of them a script for a radio broadcast.

In “Some reflections on Kafka,” part of a 1938 letter Benjamin’s to Scholem, he observes: “as Kafka puts it, there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us. This statement really contains Kafka’s hope; it is the source of his radiant serenity.” “Ah yes. [Clears throat]. There is an infinity of hope —,” Schad lets Kafka (“neither quite Franz nor indeed Karl”) say, whereupon the king completes the sentence: “But not for us.”

Kafka: Exactly. Satisfied, your highness?

[The king does not reply.]

I said, is your highness satisfied that there is an infinity of hope, but not for us?

[The king does not reply. Kafka thus speaks to S.]

Sir, your father is hesitant with his reply.

Benjamin provides one possible response, all to do with an infinity of hope, and again he casts a humpbacked man in a lead role. In the first of his “On the concept of history” theses he describes a puppet-like automaton capable of playing a winning game of chess. But rather than being a precursor of a machine powered by AI, the apparatus conceals a little humpbacked man who is an expert chess player and guides the puppet’s hands by means of strings.

Benjamin, influenced by Marxism and mysticism, imagines a philosophical equivalent to this apparatus: the puppet is called “historical materialism,” and it wins if it “enlists the services of theology, which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.” Kafka (Franz or Karl?) may have agreed.

The king: By the way, Herr Kafka …

Kafka: Yes, sir?

The king: Would it surprise you if I tell you how enormously delighted I am to discover such a profound and spontaneous communication between our thoughts?

Kafka: No, no it would not surprise me. Not at all. For, you see, there are nothing but surprising things in the world. •

Walter Benjamin: The Pearl Diver
By Peter E. Gordon | Yale University Press | $34.95 | 224 pages

Walter Benjamin’s Ark: A Departure in Biography
By John Schad | UCL Press | £30 / open access PDF | 302 pages

Berlin Childhood Around 1900
By Walter Benjamin | Translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen | Verso | $32.99 | 115 pages

The post Walter Benjamin reloaded appeared first on Inside Story.

The quote is from William Graham Sumner, an economist and contrarian who opposed the American takeover of the Philippines at the turn of the last century. Sumner summed up the prevailing attitude of the American colonisers thus: “We know what is good for you better than you do yourself and we are going to make you do it.” Easterly’s contention is that such an attitude — haughty, high-handed, intolerant and with a distinct intimation of menace — has been all-prevalent over the past five hundred years.

Easterly is a former World Bank economist turned academic gadfly. He has been writing piquantly and unsparingly for decades about the arrogances, futilities and often-thin development outcomes rendered by foreign aid. He has long argued that aid is too top-down, managerialist and untethered from history.

A frequent cadence in his writing — and the focus of his previous book, The Tyranny of Experts — is that aid is too indifferent to the perspectives of people within the countries where it is delivered. The perspectives of experts in airconditioned rooms are preferred to those of the ostensible beneficiaries of assistance. As you can imagine, Easterly’s work is divisive. His admirers cheer his enunciation of inconvenient truths while his detractors accuse him of cherry-picking examples to boost his case.

Violent Saviours, a broader and deeper extension of these arguments, will probably divide his readers along similar lines. His case is that today’s prevailing attitudes aren’t new but, in many ways, are milder and less bloodthirsty strains of the intellectual ballast for centuries of conquest, colonialism and slavery. His is a disquieting story with many villains and far fewer heroes.

Easterly begins his tour du monde near present-day Boston with a chapter about the justifications used by John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, to take over land effectively owned by the Indian tribes of the area. Winthrop was one of the early Puritan settlers and the man who coined the phrase “city on a hill.” A lawyer, he realised that he needed to develop an official rationale for doing what he was planning to do.

The argument Winthrop settled on was as self-important as it was self-serving. He and his fellow Puritans had a right to the land because they had the know-how to improve it. This was his contention and his contention alone; as Easterly explains, none of the Indian tribes of what we now think of as New England was consulted. Nor did things end well for the putative recipients of Winthrop’s “beneficence.” Tribes that resisted the colony’s expansion were brutally put down and their members banished to slave plantations in the Caribbean, where they were subjected to similar rationalisations about positive economic ends justifying the means.

Easterly calls the wordplay of Winthrop et al “the Development Right of Conquest.” By this he means the “for the greater good” rationale used by people or companies that regarded themselves as enlightened to justify their rule over lands or control of other peoples. As a line of thinking it was seductive. It was used to justify slavery, create colonies across the world and turf native peoples off their lands. It served as the ideological basis for the atrocities that punctuated the early years of the United States’ “civilising mission” in the Philippines so scathingly critiqued by Sumner.

Even ostensibly charitable benevolence generated ghastly outcomes, as Easterly shows in chapters about efforts by American and British leaders to set up homelands for returned slaves in Liberia and Sierra Leone respectively. Neither the slaves nor the people indigenous to those lands were consulted. So awful were both places that many freed slaves in America and Britain wanted to stay put rather than take a free ticket to these malarial corners of Africa.

As the twentieth century progressed, some of the world’s most notorious leaders took the West’s self-serving argument and tauntingly served it back against them with interest. Lenin and Hitler pushed the examples of the Development Right of Conquest to ever more murderous extremes. Hitler was “delighted to cite some American precedents” such as the treatment of native Americans as justifications for his own racial policies, Easterly writes, and Stalin deployed similar arguments. Easterly sees a positive trendline but stop-start progress in the years since the war. The tendency to aggregate groups into “us” and “them” remains powerful.

At one level, there is nothing particularly new in Easterly’s argument. Elements of it are an abiding theme in the reading list of many postgraduate colonial and development studies course. What sets this book apart is its sheer intellectual verve and the depth of reading and understanding that powers it. Easterly hopscotches across centuries of world history but never in a way that feels like he is skimping on facts or overpowering or hectoring the reader. His tour lands on shores as varied as British India, Bandung, Caribbean islands and Vietnam.

I can see why detractors will argue this book again bundles too many diverse examples into one argument. Yet the prose is so compelling that I for one found myself swept along with it. Easterly is a joy to read, his style an engaging mixture of narrative, anecdotes and puckish asides. He particularly enjoys poking at the absurdities, arrogances, hypocrisies and stupidities of ruling classes and their intellectual and bureaucratic enablers throughout history.

American president William McKinley, for example, who presided over the takeover of the Philippines on the basis of the need to “uplift and Christianise” the locals. “God forgot to tell McKinley that devout Filipino Catholics were already Christian,” observes Easterly. He is particularly droll when drawing impish parallels between the past and the present ways development aid is organised. Recalling a young Cherokee activist, Easterly writes that he was “in a role familiar today in development efforts: the local working for a foreign NGO whom nobody listens to.”

Yet there is a profound pathos to the book, especially when he name-checks fellow stirrers through history. A few are still relatively well-known — the novelist Joseph Conrad, the anti-slave campaigner Frederik Douglass and the humourist Mark Twain, who lampooned the US colonisation of the Philippines — but most are forgotten. Poking at dominant narratives results in professional, personal and financial detriment.

At times, the book left me feeling me despairing about the state of the world. Easterly shows a bit too well how the game stays mostly the same, no matter the epoch. I found myself applying the Development Right of Conquest when I was reading news stories: I’d take in US posture on Canada, Cuba, Greenland, Iran and Venezuela and recall McKinley, an often-cited role model for Donald Trump. On social media, I’d see government officials trumpet weasel words about the “partnerships” they were creating, strengthening and building on, and see the term as poor camouflage for the real power dynamics at play.

Thus, the book seems well-timed for this present ruptured era. It offers us no easy answers, which is maybe just as well. As Easterly shows, it is those through history who have offered the most beguiling answers who we should probably worry the most about. •

Violent Saviours: The West, the Rest, and Capitalism Without Consent
By William Easterly | John Murray | $34.99 | 448 pages

The post The self-servers appeared first on Inside Story.

Historically, the concept is associated first with German and then with British and American strategic thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. More recently University of Melbourne political scientist Michael Wesley recast it as “not an ideology or a theory but a cast of mind” that “challenges governments to think spatially about threats and opportunities: how their territories, topographies, waterways and seascapes make them either vulnerable or powerful.” As an analytical approach it informs choices about the use of (always scarce) resources to “limit the weaknesses and exploit the advantages conferred by geography.”

Geopolitical thinking inevitably deploys terms linking geography (North and South, East and West, Europe and Asia, the Americas, the Pacific) with political, social and cultural features. The emerging amalgams link geography, power and history in terms as familiar as they are ill-defined: “the West,” “Europe,” “the Global South,” “Eurasia.”

Here, I want to explore two of these concepts — “Eurasia” and “the West” — through two recent books: Brands’s The Eurasian Century, from which I’ve already quoted, and Georgios Varouxakis’s intellectual history of The West. I am particularly interested in whether these two books, written mainly for audiences in Europe and North America, make sense for Australia: a country located in the southern hemisphere and east of the Americas but usually seen as part of the “West” rather than the “Global South.” Do they offer useful insights for democratic middle-power strategy in the Asia-Pacific?

The history of “the West”

The West and The Eurasian Century are very different books. Varouxakis is an intellectual historian and his nearly 500-page book is a close reading of a dizzying array of sources and their interrelations. He rejects the notion that “the West” emerged as a concept after the second world war — when the United States sought a historical justification for its hegemony by constructing a line “from Plato to NATO” — but also takes issue with those scholars who argue the concept gestated as a corollary to high imperialism in the 1880s and 1890s.

Instead, Varouxakis shows that “the West” developed much earlier in the nineteenth century as an alternative to the term “Europe.” The distinction was a reaction to the Russian empire’s rise as a major European power: “It was as opposed to Russia, primarily, that ‘the West’ emerged and gained a meaning.”

The major theorist was the French philosopher Auguste Compte (1798–1857), who dreamt of a “Western Republic” as the avant garde of humanity. Having abolished all empires and replaced them with peaceful federation, it would be joined voluntarily by other parts of the world convinced of the superiority of “Western civilisation.” Its centre would be France and its capital, “naturellement,” would be Paris. Over the course of seven centuries, Compte believed, all of humanity would freely become part of the West and the West would thus wither away. The capital of the free republic would then move to Constantinople.

As the logical extension of this “supranational cultural identity… based on civilisational commonality and shared historical antecedents,” the West included the European colonial powers’ settler colonies. After 1871 the Russian empire’s “otherness” was allied with Prussia-dominated Germany, further entrenching the West’s Francocentrism.

While German and Russian thinkers were puzzling over whether they were part of this sociopolitical space (and whether that would be a good thing), Compte’s disciples had spread the concept to Britain. The United States was more resistant, as the young republic defined itself both against the moral and political corruption of “Europe” and its violent embrace of its own “West” — wild as it might be, but also central to the self-understanding of the American settlers. There, exceptionality was the dominant intellectual stream.

The first world war began to change this state of affairs. The journalist Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) was at the forefront of those who argued the United States needed to overcome isolationism and join “the West” because it was part of “the Atlantic community,” another product of Lippmann’s word-smithery (the “cold war” and “stereotype” are attributed to him too). Terms like these would help make American intervention in a European war thinkable.

As American troops were being shipped to Europe in 1917, American universities began to teach what would become that staple of US higher education: the “history of Western civilisation.” As one of the most influential textbook authors in that tradition, William McNeill (1917–2016), later put it, “Western Civ was designed to teach soldiers what it was they would be fighting for in Flanders Fields.” American exceptionalism thus transmogrified into a new manifest destiny: to lead the West (though initially against the Teutonic rather than the Russian barbarians, who had exited the war with the Russian revolution).

In the interwar years, then, Germans celebrated The Decline of the West (Oswald Spengler’s multi-volume work, 1918–23), British thinkers developed large-scale theories of the histories of civilisations, and many others tried to grapple with exactly what the new world order might be in the aftermath of the most destructive war since Napoleon’s campaigns of conquest and the American civil war. Bolshevik Russia transformed from a revolutionary republic into a severe, brutally modernist dictatorship, its grim totalitarianism enhancing “the established perception of Russia as alien and non-Western.”

This long-term attitude towards the Russians was interrupted by Hitler. At first, his alliance with Stalin in 1939 seemed to confirm a world divided between a liberal-democratic West and a totalitarian East. But his turn against Stalin in the summer of 1941 brought together the world’s greatest capitalist economy, the world’s largest empire, and the anti-capitalist, anti-imperial, revolutionary Soviet Union in a temporary Grand Alliance. For a moment, the Soviets joined the free world and expanded “the West” all the way to the Urals. Meanwhile, talk of “Western civilization” and the “Atlantic community” swirled around the heads of those daydreaming, in Britain and the United States, about how the aftermath of war would be ordered.

As the postwar order solidified into a confrontation between the United States and the enlarged, victorious Soviet Union, the terms were thus available to quickly conceptualise it as a conflict “between East and West.” Germans, once part of the “Eastern” opposite of Western civilisation, now quickly became “Westerners” — or at least those of them who had ended up under US, French or British occupation. Westorientierung, an “orientation towards the West,” became the watchword of the Federal Republic of Germany (“West Germany”) while the increasingly fortified borders with the German Democratic Republic (“East Germany”) now marked the frontier of Western civilisation.

Central Europeans, meanwhile, stuck on the other side of that line, complained that their countries had been “kidnapped” from a West they were a hereditary part of.

All this set the scene for the enthusiastic embrace of NATO and the European Union once the Soviet empire imploded in 1989–91. Today, there is much talk about whether the term “Eastern Europe” is a permissible categorisation for these Westerners. If you ask your trusted AI companion if Poland is part of the West, for example, you receive the paradoxical answer that “Poland is generally considered part of ‘the West’…, despite its geographic location in Central Europe.”

The problem with “the West”

As Varouxakis’s book demonstrates, then, nobody really knows where the West begins and where it ends. Is Japan part of it? Here, AI is more categorical: no, it is not, says that statistical aggregator of received wisdom. Why? Because “it is located in East Asia.” Evidently, geography matters more for categorising Japanese than Poles.

But Japanese intellectuals frequently disagree with such robo-wisdom. Like Russia or Germany, Japan has long struggled to find a place in a world where being part of the West comes with considerable prestige and claims to civilisational standing. If what the term refers to is the part of the globe that is democratically governed, economically prosperous and committed to the rule of both domestic and international law, then post-1945 Japan is self-evidently part of this “confederation of like-minded polities.”

But Japan’s inclusion in this civilisation is always tenuous, as Varouxakis points out: “Japan came to be considered a member of ‘the West’ during the cold war; but then it found itself… regarded as the main (economic) threat to ‘the West’ immediately after the collapse of the Communist bloc in the late 1980s.” And a little later, in political scientist Samuel Huntington’s 1996 map, it became the one country that formed a civilisation of its own: neither East nor West, but “Japanese.”

If the United States stops behaving like a member of the West — as it has been doing under Donald Trump — that would do more than just exclude it from this like-minded grouping of countries. It would threaten the edifice as a whole, with analysts declaring that “the ‘West’ cannot conceptually exist” when the United States “appears hostile to liberal democratic values under the rule of law.”

Confusing? The muddle stems from marrying a geographical concept (European countries to the West of either Germany or Russia, plus their settler-colonial outposts) with a set of political, economic and ideological commitments. Given that the latter were, and are, neither universal in Western Europe and its settler colonies nor absent from other places, the term is of little analytical value.

Indeed, its inherent Eurocentrism is a hindrance in a world where democratic middle powers need allies from a huge variety of cultural and geographic backgrounds. Thus, it is best discarded as a remnant of earlier geopolitical era — consigned to history, if you will. That is not Varouxakis’s conclusion, but it is one possible reading of the evidence in his book.

The borders of “Eurasia”

At first glance, “Eurasia” seems to refer to a more clearly defined geographical space: the Euro-Asian landmass. Upon closer inspection, of course, doubts creep in. Here is how Brands defines it in The Eurasian Century:

Eurasia consists of the combined expanse of those two Old World continents of the Northern Hemisphere, Europe and Asia. It includes the outlying islands of those continents, which are closely connected to them by Eurasia’s marginal seas, as well as north Africa, which is as thoroughly linked to Europe by the Mediterranean as it is blocked form the rest of Africa by the Sahara. Eurasia thus runs from littoral Asia in the east to the Iberian Peninsula and the British Isles in the west, from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Indian Ocean in the south.

Comprising steppes, mountains, plains, deserts, jungles, and nearly every other topography, Eurasia accounts for more than one-third of the land on Earth. It possesses some 70 per cent of the world’s population as well as the bulk of its industrial might and military potential… In short, Eurasia represents a prize without equal; it is the strategic centre of the world.

This is a quite different “Eurasia” from the one scholars of the post-Soviet region imagine. The term became ubiquitous after 1991 as “a convenient way of referring to what had been Soviet territory.” When the implosion of the Soviet empire in 1989–91 showed the old equation of the Soviet Union with “Russia” had been fundamentally flawed, Russian studies departments rebranded as “Eurasian studies.”

The American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies became the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the Slavic Research Center at Hokkaido University became the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, or SERC, and scholarly journals started to feature “Eurasia” more and more often in their titles. In most cases, the change didn’t penetrate much beyond the surface: what was taught and researched remained deeply Russo-centric. SERC was a remarkable exception. Located to the south east of Russia, the Japanese scholars could build on a long tradition of paying attention to the Asian part of the Russo-Soviet empire rather than to its European core alone.

In Russia, meanwhile, “Eurasianism” (евразийство) made a comeback. This 1920s émigré philosophy had portrayed Russia as a sui generis civilisation located not in Europe or Asia (as in the older debate between Westernisers and Slavophiles) but thoroughly rooted in the broader region of Eurasia. Russia was thus destined to be a territorial super-state and the saviour of the rest of the world. The most prominent post-Soviet apostle of this reinvigorated ideology was the fascist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, author of The Foundations of Geopolitics (1997).

This appropriation of “Eurasia” by Russian neo-imperialists, including (occasionally) Russian president Vladimir Putin, prompted former subjects of the Soviet empire and victims of Russia’s contemporary aggression to condemn the term. In one memorable essay, a historian of Ukraine denounced “Eurasia” as the functional equivalent of “Lebensraum,” a central term in the German, including Nazi, school of geopolitics.

Geopolitical nightmares and realities

A historian of US foreign policy, Brands is blissfully ignorant of such polemics among post-Soviet scholars. He comes to “Eurasia” from the Anglo-American geopolitical tradition. Its founding fathers were Halford Mackinder (1861–1947), the inventor of “heartland theory,” and Nicholas Spykman (1893–1943) with his “rimland theory.” Its central concern is that a single power might come to control the “world island” of Eurasia, and with it the world. The twentieth century’s two contenders were Germany and the Soviet Union. Today, the threat allegedly emanates from China, possibly in an axis with Russia and Iran.

Spykman’s rendition of Mackinder’s “world island.”

The problem with this theory is twofold. For one, Brands’s expansive definition means the region encompasses nearly everything in the northern hemisphere except the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa. If that is so, the theory’s major thesis — who controls Eurasia controls the world — is circular: any one power dominating 70 per cent of the world’s population or well over a third of the world’s land area would, ipso facto, control a vast segment of the globe’s resources.

This leads to the second problem: at no point in history has any one power dominated this widely defined “Eurasia.” A contender would have to cover some fifty-five million square kilometres, or 37 per cent of the world’s land area. The three who have come closest — the Mongols, the Germans and the Soviets — were off by a large margin.

At its peak, the Mongol empire (the largest land empire in history) covered maybe twenty-four million square kilometres, or 16 per cent of the world. It did take in much, but not all, of Asia and subjugated the lands of the Rus and other parts of Eastern Europe, but it never took Vienna, let alone lands further to the west. The British Empire — a maritime, non-Eurasian affair — was considerably larger, covering nearly a quarter of the world.

Even at its largest expanse, the Third Reich was considerably smaller. It claimed only 3.3 million square kilometres, or 2 per cent of the world, taking in much of Western and central Europe as well as the Baltic states and Norway in the northeast and Ukraine and Belarus in the east. But it only ever held a small section of European Russia, and none of the vast expanse of Siberia, Central Asia and the South Caucasus.

The Soviet Union was based further to the east and covered larger sections of the Eurasia’s Asian part. The historical successor of the quite successful Russian empire, it managed to add an outer rim of satellites to the west after 1945, but at no point penetrated further into Europe or effectively controlled China or even North Korea. At its greatest extent, it covered some 22.4 million square kilometres, or about 15 per cent of the world’s land area. Adding the satellite states in Eastern Europe brings that number up a little to 23.4 million (nearly 16 per cent), similar to the Mongol empire but more to the north and west than its historically closest rival in the contest of Eurasian supremacy.

That proved a lot of territory, people, and resources for the Soviets to swallow, even with twentieth-century technology. Having indeed bitten off more than they could chew in 1945, they spat out areas they had occupied in the Asian “heartland” without trying to digest: they discarded Manchuria in 1945–46 and the northern part of Korea in 1948. In the “rimlands,” they abandoned northern Iran in 1946; in Europe, they let go their Austrian zone in 1955.

Might it be that both the dreams of German Nazis and Russian “Eurasianists” — not to mention the nightmares of Mackinder and Spykman — were always unrealistic? Is it possible to rule a region as enormous, diverse, and geographically as well as climatically challenging as “Eurasia”?

The thought that it might not be possible has crossed Brands’s mind. At the very end of his book he writes that the “history of the modern era might make one think Eurasian gambits are doomed to fail — that seeking hegemony is tantamount to committing strategic suicide. After all, from Mackinder onward, every Eurasian challenger was defeated, because every challenger provoked a pack of enemies that killed its prey.” But he dismisses such obvious conclusions as “pleasing” but “profoundly dangerous.”  “Each fight for Eurasia could have gone differently,” he writes. And it was the United States that saved the day.

The second world war exemplar

Did it? Let’s take the second world war as an example. Here, Brands over-emphasises contingency in order to heighten the role of the United States. The Battle of Britain was won much less “narrowly” than he claims. German bombing caused significant damage but did not bring Britain to the brink of surrender. Germany had no amphibious invasion force able to overcome Britain’s moat, the English Channel, and then “fight on the beaches,” in Churchill’s memorable phrase.

As the leading historian of Britain’s war machine, David Edgerton, has pointed out, Britain sat at the centre of a global, seaborne economy that included the Empire and much besides. German submarine warfare never effectively interrupted the globalised network supporting Britain’s war effort. The island nation was “never alone.”

Nor was it helpless or unarmed. In the 1930s, it had been the world’s leading arms exporter. As Edgerton concluded, when Britain went to war in September 1939 it was “well-armed, united and confident of victory. It was under no immediate threat.” The bombing campaign of the Battle of Britain was “considerably less intensive, and less deadly,” than war planners had predicted.

As far as rescue by the United States is concerned, Edgerton was unequivocal: “The aggressive, defiant and powerful British Empire of 1940–41 had not been saved by the USA but rather had been spectacularly overtaken by it, not in 1940 but in 1942, in the wake of defeat in the East [that is, the fall of Singapore].”

Unable to defeat Britain, Hitler went to war against the Soviet Union, which he hoped to knock out quickly in order to appropriate its significant resources to continue the fight. This was indeed a “Eurasian” strategy: the goal was to make the Europe–Asia landmass the basis of a German bid for world power. According to Brands, it might well have succeeded: Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union “almost worked.” That is a highly misleading interpretation, though, and his claim that “only winter and a thrown-together defence of Moscow saved Stalin’s regime” ignores the mainstream of professional historiography on this war.

War, of course, is always unpredictable. But waging war in “Eurasia” is extremely difficult, as Putin’s forces are learning the hard way. The road to Moscow was always long and winter comes every year in “Eurasia.” Moreover, the Soviet Union outmanned, out-gunned, and out-tanked the Germans from the start of the war; the Red Army fought an aggressive retreat, which cost the Germans much blood, treasure and time; the German army was largely horse-drawn; and throughout the war the Soviets outproduced their enemy in all classes of weaponry. The margin for German victory was extremely narrow.

Brands instead focuses on the role of American aid (“lend-lease”). Like many American historians he overestimates its significance, going as far as claiming “the United States delivered a quarter of the vehicles and much of the gas that helped Stalin’s forces defend Moscow in December 1941.”

As the standard operational history of this war points out, “Lend-Lease aid did not arrive in sufficient quantities to make the difference between defeat and victory in 1941–1942.” The vast majority of new tanks the Soviets received in late 1941 were British, not American, and while these foreign tanks did “play a role in both the defensive and offensive fighting near Moscow” (as a major archival study demonstrates) this assistance was “far from decisive.”

Hitler’s gamble of 1941 was not truly Eurasian either: it ignored the Far East of the Soviet Union as well as China. “Had Japan and Germany teamed up against the Soviet Union in 1941,” Brands writes, “the democracies might have faced a consolidated Eurasia.” But Germany and Japan did not team up, because they could not. Japan had fought, and lost, an undeclared border war with the Soviets in 1938–39, and that led the government to confront the United States instead (a fateful decision, as it turned out).

Even if a different decision had been made in Tokyo, Japan didn’t have troops available to attack the Soviets. Much of its land force had been bogged down in China since 1937. Well before the US Navy began to draw away Tokyo’s attention and resources, Stalin’s support for China’s desperate war of survival helped keep the country in the war and hence the Soviet Union’s back free from Japanese attack.

Eurasia — large and diverse as it was — could not easily be conquered, however well-armed, modernised and aggressive the attacker. Japan’s aggression, moreover, was not built on a Eurasian base but on a maritime empire surrounding the waters of the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea and the East China Sea. Once it was decided not to attack the Soviets, this regional empire expanded into southeast Asia as well.

Discarding the terms of an earlier era

Thus, the second world war was not a Eurasian war in any meaningful way. It was a global war, with nodes in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Pacific. In Europe, its centre of gravity was not a war between a Eurasian land power and a non-Eurasian maritime power, but a struggle between the German and Soviet land empires. Britain and the US did play a role, but it was secondary.

In the Pacific, meanwhile, it was a confrontation between two maritime powers, Japan the United States, the latter supported by Britain. None of this fits neatly into any “Eurasian” theory.

But historical accuracy is perhaps beside the point here. In its major thrust, Brands’s book is an attempt to jolt US foreign policymakers into re-embracing the idea of their country as a liberal world hegemon. To this end, Brands mobilises the old nightmare of a Eurasia dominated by a Sino-Russian axis of authoritarians. That might well be a worthy cause to fight from Baltimore or Washington, but for analysts and policymakers outside the United States this book’s “lessons of the past” are misleading: we can’t wait for the Americans to come to their senses on the assumption that history teaches us we are otherwise doomed. Instead, we need to urgently figure out how to live without them.

As we do so, we need to look at the present rather than the past. At stake today is not dominance over “Eurasia.” China is not trying to dominate that “world island” but is instead focused on East and Southeast Asia, with the South China Sea and the straight of Taiwan as centres of gravity. The alliance with Russia is of mutual benefit because it keeps both countries’ backs free: for Russia to wage war in Europe, for China to entrench itself in Asia.

The real threat is China’s growing naval power, not some combined Sino-Russian march on Warsaw, Berlin and Paris. If it takes over Taiwan, as many fear it will, its ability to project power across the Pacific will open up. That would be a problem for the United States, but it would be a fundamentally un-Eurasian challenge.

From Australia’s perspective, meanwhile, the issue is China’s attempt to build a sphere of influence in Southeast Asia, not its hypothetical potential as a “Eurasian” superpower. In both these quests China stands much more in the tradition of imperial Japan (“Asia for Asians!”) than of any of the land-powers who tried, unsuccessfully, to control Eurasia.

In building alliances to counter these threats, we need to overcome both dreams and nightmares from the cold war. The fear of a “Eurasian” superpower is one of these nightmares. And the desire for something called “the West” to serve as a counter-weight is one of these dreams.

Today, the geography of democracy is global rather than regional.  Democracies still make up about half of the world’s countries and can be found in Asia, the Pacific, Africa, Europe, and the Americas. Nor are potential allies for democratic middle powers like Australia exclusively to be found in the democratic world. Many non-democratic nations share similar geopolitical interests, not least a preference for a stable international environment not dominated by a small set of uncontrollable great powers. But the geopolitical terms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are of little help in this quest, and are best discarded. •

The West: The History of an Idea
By Georgios Varouxakis | Princeton University Press | $69.99 | 512 pages

The Eurasian Century
By Hal Brands | W.W. Norton | $49.99 | 320 pages

The post Geopolitical dreams and nightmares appeared first on Inside Story.

As Hitler prepared for war, the Lüneburg Heath region on the northwestern German flatlands was increasingly used for military exercises, with army barracks built in the area around the small town of Bergen and the nearby village of Belsen. After war broke out in September 1939 the army used these barracks as prisoner-of-war camps. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Belsen POW camp and its environs held tens of thousands of Soviet POWs who suffered a horrendous mortality rate from disease, hunger, overwork and mistreatment. Around 50,000 Soviet POWs died in Belsen and the camps in its vicinity.

In the spring of 1943 the SS acquired part of the POW camp to use as a special camp for foreign Jews. This plan for a Bergen-Belsen concentration camp originated in a cynical calculation by SS chief Heinrich Himmler: with Germany chronically short of hard currency to finance its war effort, individual Jews could be ransomed to foreign countries, such as neutral Sweden or even the United States, where Himmler assumed many European Jews had wealthy relatives prepared to pay large sums for their release.

Belsen was thus intended as a transit camp for a relatively privileged group of Jews selected as potential hostages for exchange. (Jews for sale, to borrow the title of Yehuda Bauer’s book on the subject.) Conditions were intended to be more survivable than in the death camps in occupied Poland. The camp was supposed to hold up to 3000 prisoners.

In the last few months of the war, however, the Belsen transit camp was overtaken by the conditions that prevailed in the death camps in the East. As advancing Soviet troops approached, prisoners were evacuated westwards, typically on gruelling death marches during which many died or were murdered outright. Some prisoners and guards from Auschwitz, including its last commandant, Josef Kramer, ended up in Belsen. The overcrowded camp was inadequately supplied with food, medicine, and other necessities and, by the time it was liberated by British troops, was ravaged with typhus that had already killed thousands. The SS and the local German army authorities even negotiated with the British army a peaceful handover of the camp in an effort to quarantine the contagion.

The dramatic British takeover of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is vividly narrated in close detail in the first part of Nadia Wheatley’s new book, Strange New World: Belsen’s First Year of Freedom. The scene that confronted the British liberators of the camp earned Belsen the name of a “Horror Camp.” Newsreel footage and still photographs of thousands of emaciated, unburied corpses being thrown and even bulldozed into mass graves, with SS guards pressed into service for the task, went around the world.

The British subsequently burned down all the camp’s huts, which were rife with typhus, and moved the surviving inmates to neighbouring barracks and camp facilities. An estimated 52,000 prisoners died at Belsen, with 14,000 lives lost after liberation as a result of the typhus, malnutrition, and other conditions.

Wheatley’s Strange New World then moves to a thoroughly researched and fine-grained account of the year that followed the camp’s liberation. Her work on the book stretched over at least a decade, including her attendance at ceremonies marking the seventieth and eightieth anniversaries of the camp’s liberation, where she became acquainted with the site and with survivors (including some born after liberation in the displaced persons’ camp at Belsen). In between, she also attended the seventy-fifth anniversary commemoration, which was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Wheatley’s focus is on the Jewish survivors and how they sought first to survive and then to try to negotiate some kind of future with their British liberators turned captors, as the displaced persons, or DP, camp took shape next to the former concentration camp. (She has little to say about the fate of the Russian POWs, or about the 10,000 Polish DPs who were temporarily accommodated in the Belsen camp complex, except in so far as their actions impinged on the Jewish survivors.)

Among many other sources, the book draws on the diaries and letters of nurses, including civilian volunteers, doctors and medical students who were recruited to try to care for the camp’s survivors, and who initially had to work under catastrophic conditions. Remarkably quickly, some of the former prisoners who had trained as nurses or doctors also assisted, once they had had enough to eat and were provided with new clothing.

Wheatley quotes the ranking British Royal Army Medical Corps officer at Belsen making contemptuous comments about the prisoner nurses being untrustworthy as they stole other prisoners’ food. She argues that this only applied in the first days after liberation when all prisoners were near starvation. Soon after they were able to eat again, prisoners started to care for each other, with remarkable cases of compassion being recorded.

With evident sympathy, Wheatley describes the compassion of the volunteer nurses and British medical students who ministered to the surviving Belsen Jews. She is critical, indeed scathing, about the shortcomings of the British authorities at Belsen, starting with their underestimation of the degree of emergency medical assistance needed by tens of thousands of starving inmates in an overcrowded camp ravaged by typhus.

A failure to enforce quarantine restrictions on the newly liberated inmates resulted in typhus infections continuing to spread for days, causing a spike in deaths from the disease eighteen days after liberation. An experimental attempt to administer a protein called hydrolysate to emaciated prisoners caused some violent reactions among patients and seems to have done more harm than good.

Prisoners also reacted violently when German nurses and army doctors were pressed into service by the British army to help care for survivors. The German army doctors still wore their Wehrmacht uniforms under their white coats, and the prospect of receiving an injection from a uniformed German could cause panic among camp survivors.

One of the British army doctors who favoured the employment of German army doctors and German nurses in the Belsen DP camp was one John Norman Wheatley, who became medical superintendent in September 1945. (His appointment came after a brief appearance at Belsen by the Queensland tropical diseases specialist Raphael Cilento, who Wheatley describes — accurately — as a sympathiser with fascism and an antisemite.) Wheatley, as it happens, was the author’s father, which lends her account an unusual personal perspective.

Nadia Wheatley has already described her (non-)relationship with her father in her memoir Her Mother’s Daughter. In this book, she confines herself to noting that her father signed letters to members of his own family with the formal “J.N. Wheatley.” But she is unsparing in her account of the blind spots of the British medical and military hierarchy.

As the Jewish DPs at Belsen succeeded in establishing some semblance of a normal life as a community while waiting for the chance to leave Germany, leaders and spokespeople emerged, a community newspaper was published, and Jewish ceremonies and festivals could be observed. For a time, Belsen’s Jewish DP camp (which took on that identity against the initial resistance of the British authorities) even attracted Jewish DPs from elsewhere in Germany.

The British refused to recognise Jews as a national group, instead seeking to repatriate them to their countries of origin. But Polish Jews were unwilling to return to Poland, where some Jews who had sought to recover their prewar homes were met with pogroms (most notoriously, in Kielce in July 1946). Nor did many German-Jewish survivors wish to remain much longer in the land of the perpetrators of the Shoah.

While many Jews were attracted to the prospect of emigration to the United States, or other distant destinations like Canada or Australia, migration to Palestine increasingly offered the prospect of a safe haven for Jews and a place where Jewish communities could be rebuilt. Overwhelmingly, Belsen’s survivors became Zionists.

The commemoration of the first anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp in April 1945 coincided with the Passover festival. A German Jew, Norbert Wolheim, the deputy of the Jewish DP camp council’s leader, gave a speech in English aimed as much at the British soldiers present as at the 7000 Jewish DPs gathered there, in which he emphasised that the Jews’ liberation was still incomplete and called on the British to open the gates of Palestine. Several weeks later, British troops were deploying fire hoses to quell unrest in the camp.

Wheatley’s book is both deeply researched and acutely sensitive to the human dimension of her subject. Her account of Jewish survival and self-reassertion concludes by relating the baby boom that occurred exactly nine months after the liberation of the concentration camp. Wheatley got to know a few of the surviving “babies,” now elderly, on her anniversary commemoration visits to Belsen. The book thus ends by reasserting the agency of the Belsen survivors. The survivors were more than the passive victims they first appeared as upon their liberation. The birth of babies within sight of the former Horror Camp testified to the survivors’ determination to defy the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate a whole people. •

Strange New World: Belsen’s First Year of Freedom
By Nadia Wheatley | Monash University Publishing | $39.99 | 416 pages

The post Liberated but not yet free appeared first on Inside Story.

This is a story of ambition and vanity. It is a story of tragedy and suffering. At its heart is a man who was one of the great thrusters of Sydney town, a bombast of Botany Bay.

The era was one of famous scandals and affairs. Frederick Deeming’s murder, in Merseyside and Melbourne, of two of his wives and four of his children — his method of concealment was to bury them under the family home — had produced a frenzied public hatred, as had the Frances Knorr case: the baby farmer, as she was called, who was essentially a child-minder turned child-killer. Such scandals and affairs — so widely and sensationally reported in the press — lived on for a time as melodrama, stories in which observers believed that villains and innocents could be readily distinguished at a glance.

They were good stories for a society founded on the violence and dispossession of Indigenous people, a convenient means of avoiding the qualms and ambiguities that came from living on stolen land drenched in blood. The villains and the innocents were harder for colonists to distinguish on the frontier.

Of course, one of the most sensational of the era’s stories seemed almost ready-made for melodrama: that of the “Breelong Blacks,” as the Governor brothers were called in the newspapers. The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Thomas Keneally’s 1972 novel, would explore the ironies of a federal nation being made against the background of their axe-murdering exploits and the manhunt they provoked.

That nation-making moment also sits behind Patrick’s story of the Dean scandal, and it gives it an additional poignancy. The hint is that we are gaining a view of the national soul, not merely an unflattering portrait of a few men on the make.

Many of us encountered Richard Meagher for the first time in Cyril Pearl’s classic 1958 tale, Wild Men of Sydney. One of the most memorable of the scenes was when Meagher took to Truth proprietor John Norton in the street with a horsewhip; Norton responded by firing a revolver at him, as you do.

Will Dyson’s caricature of Meagher for the Bulletin. State Library of New South Wales

Patrick combines Pearl’s skill as a storyteller with the meticulous research of a first-class historian and biographer. His gift is to see the big themes in the individual biography or story. Who knew that one could learn so much about Australian political culture from the story of one of the country’s least successful and least liked prime ministers, William McMahon (subject of Patrick’s Tiberius with a Telephone); or that the censorship of a single Philip Roth novel, Portnoy’s Complaint (The Trials of Portnoy), could open up the 1960s and 1970s to renewed scrutiny and understanding? Here, again, Meagher’s story extends our understanding of a lot of things we half-understand but can now see all the more clearly.

To name a few: there is the uncertain place occupied by Meagher as a man of Irish-Catholic heritage in a social order where respectability and Protestantism were considered the more natural bedfellows. Your average Orangeman would have seen in Meagher’s corruption the ordinary working out of the instincts of blood and belief. This was a society in which religious sectarianism was alive and well.

There is the even more uncertain respectability of a working-class woman — Dean’s wife and victim, Mary — and her mother. These women were shadowed by the suspicion that they had somehow connived at George’s downfall, that for reasons of their own, they wanted to see him hanged. Public opinion fell in favour of the innocence of George Dean, who many considered a salt-of-the-earth Sydney ferryman. Monster meetings in support attracted thousands. Mary, on the other hand, still suffering the effects of her poisoning, received vilification, as if she were the vector of the toxin.

Patrick also provides new insights into the entanglement of law and politics. The courtroom, like the parliament and the hustings, was theatre and a man such as Meagher understood that the emotional backing he aroused as a defence barrister, supposedly fighting for justice, could be readily put to work for a political career.

Patrick is, among other things, a historian of the public emotions. In The Stained Man, these often seem easy to arouse. The majesty of the law and the rationality of politics both seem rather fragile in this account. Waves of public feeling, as in our own times, often seem to matter more. It was the era that gave us words in English such as “jingoism” and “mafficking.” Patrick revises our understanding of the political and legal cultures of those times, but his story also has insights to offer into our own — where democracy can often seem vulnerable to populist performativity and the overflow of emotion.

He is always inviting us to reconsider what we think we know about our culture. Australia as a utilitarian, practical political and legal order where materialism reigns supreme? Maybe, but not if those wild men of Sydney — and their passionate supporters — had anything to do with it. It was not the price of eggs, or the prospect of a new bridge or road, that arouses their fervour in these pages.

Meagher’s indiscretions saw him barred from the legal world, but that was no barrier to his success in democratic politics. Beginning as a Protectionist, he eventually rode the Labor wave in parliamentary politics before succumbing to the sin of conscriptionism in the first world war and therefore suffering expulsion from the party. But for some time afterwards, the idea of his readmission to the Labor Party remained alive, and nor would he let go of the law, campaigning for decades to be readmitted to practice.

Patrick narrates that long journey with skill and compassion. Eventually, parliament provides a remedy. Restored to the rolls, Meagher once again flourishes in the law. He dies a moderately wealthy man. The journey to success had been a broken one, but Australia is the land of the second chance — for some, at least. This is indeed a very Australian story, and perhaps also a very Sydney one.

Patrick is superbly equipped to tell it. You do want to know what is going to happen next. Protagonists such as Meagher, Dean, Meagher’s legal partner and fellow-politician Paddy Crick — none of these blokes are likable, but we do come to care what happens to them. As we share Meagher’s long campaign to be forgiven his sins, and to gain vindication, it’s difficult not to identify with him and his predicament, even to sympathise. “He’s not such a bad cove,” one comes to think. “There but for the grace of God go I.” We all want to be treated with compassion even in our follies. Can we each be sure that we would staunchly resist the temptation to which Meagher gave in: to get a guilty man, one facing the hangman’s noose, off a charge and then use the success to help along one’s career? Isn’t winning what barristers are supposed to do anyway?

Are you for William Windeyer — that is, on the side of the judge who found Dean guilty — or are you for Meagher and Dean? Of course, this is just another way of expressing that much larger, more potent, identity-defining Australian cultural question. Are you for Redmond Barry or Ned Kelly? (Patrick is a Barry man, I reckon, but with just a dash of Kelly.)

Of course, he is too good a historian, too sophisticated a thinker, and too skilled a writer, to pose our choices as crudely as that. He shows: he doesn’t advocate. Happily, his job is not that of a barrister, and he is rarely the judge — and never a hanging one.

He’s the historian with what Manning Clark called “the eye of pity.” He sees those little details that tell the larger story. There is a telling passage about Meagher’s marriage in a book that is so largely concerned with another man’s effort to kill his wife. Meagher was with his wife Alice, who suffered from severe rheumatism, for an official event in Daceyville. “The official party trooped easily to the top of a sandy knoll for a ribbon cutting,” Patrick reports, but behind them Alice baulked. Meagher took her arm and held her steady. Then they climbed to the top, step by step, together’.

To use a definition of the historian’s role borrowed from Iain McCalman, you can see why he is one of the best storytellers of the Australian tribe. •

The post Bombast of Botany Bay appeared first on Inside Story.

Me being a political science student, the talk had inevitably turned to the federal election campaign, which was nearing its end. He confided that while he was going to vote Liberal — he always did; “I’m a Liberal voter” — he hoped Labor would be re-elected. In these challenging economic times prime minister Bob Hawke and treasurer Paul Keating knew what they were doing, he said. Opposition leader John Howard and his erratic, untried team worried him.

It was a strange mindset, but then those were strange times, with the Labor government not greatly loved but widely seen as by far the better economic manager than the Coalition, a reputation subsequent Labor administrations have only fleetingly and modestly regained. Australia was well into the “current account crisis,” when it seemed everyone in the country knew we were living beyond our means. One of the few levers the government possessed to tackle the problem, at least in the short term, was (thanks to something called the twin deficits theory) big spending cuts.

During that gloomy time the government, and particularly the treasurer, successfully laid the blame at the feet of three decades worth of indolent predecessors, and if that meant throwing Gough Whitlam’s Labor government (1972–75) under the bus that was fine. Hawke and Keating had never thought much of that lot anyway.

This successful framing, and the force-feeding of greens down voters’ throats, had generated a huge incumbency benefit. Of course, the likelihood of more pain in their third term was not something they liked to talk about, but there was so much to say about the diabolical damage the Coalition would do to the country if it took office.

There’s a popular view that Howard would have won that election if not for the “Joh for PM” adventure — the attempt by Coalition conservatives to replace Howard with Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen — and of course we’ll never know. But the opposition’s manifesto was ambitious, and Keating in particular delighted in picking it apart. John Hewson’s Fightback! policy has gone down in history as “big target,” but Howard’s 1987 platform was no slouch: he would get rid of the capital gains tax, the fringe benefits tax and the assets test for pensioners and slash other taxes — and all would be funded by mostly unspecified spending cuts. It earned the ire of most mainstream economists and, it turned out, the electorate.

As with the other three elections at which Hawke was leader, opinion polls had greatly overstated the size of Labor’s win. But the government’s relatively slim 50.8 per cent after preferences did manage to produce a phenomenal eighty-six seats out of 148. (Eleven years later, for comparison, 50.9 per cent yielded Kim Beazley just sixty-seven.)

July 1987 happens to have also been the halfway mark of Hawke’s nine years and nine months as prime minister — the years under scrutiny in a new book, Gold Standard? Remembering the Hawke Government. Edited by Frank Bongiorno, Carolyn Holbrook and Joshua Black, it features chapters by sixteen authors, including one from each editor.

The question in the title is answered here in the affirmative — unsurprisingly, given every contributor is sympathetic, and quite a few were involved with that government in some way. Which chapters one likes will depend on taste: I particularly enjoyed Carolyn Holbrook’s one on Medicare, where I learnt of its tenuous beginnings in the face of a decidedly indifferent public. (That helps explains why the Coalition promised to demolish it at several elections before finally getting the hint. But it attained its national treasure status by the end of the decade, and retains it today despite increasingly obvious gaps and flaws.)

Hawke was an unusual character, extremely confident but thin-skinned (including about his height; hence the bouffant), a common combination among the greatly egotistical. Meghan Hopper is a good read on the prime minister’s overt masculinity intersecting with feminine strands such as public crying (the much-remembered 1984 campaign instalment perhaps deserves more interrogation in light of troubling revelations several years ago) and, perhaps less convincingly, reconciliation.

Reconciliation was one of Hawke’s three big Rs (along with recovery and reconstruction) in 1983; the Indigenous version is well-known as a disappointment to even Hawke himself. In his chapter, Peter Yu doesn’t disagree, though he believes Hawke’s genuine desire to make progress was held back by pollsters and general political timidity. In fact, a reliance on polling, and that widely used descriptor, at least in the early years, “pragmatism” (translation: “Don’t be like Whitlam”) tends to be missing from the most tales of their boldness.

Bruce Chapman filled in my knowledge of gaps in the Accord that Labor struck with the ACTU. Stronger unions sacrificed large wage increases, weaker unions got bigger ones than they could otherwise achieve, and there was moderation all round in exchange for the “social wage” — Medicare, tax cuts and government assistance. Much of those measures came in the name of combating inflation, although as every pet shop galah now reminds us (to mangle a Keatingism), anything a government does to assist Australians financially, particularly if it’s untargeted, is itself inflationary. That’s probably part of the reason Australia wasn’t as successful as comparable countries in containing 1980s inflation.

The Accord sits within the general consensus, in this book and elsewhere, that economically the Hawke government was Thatcher and Reagan (and New Zealand Labour) with a heart. Still, as Meredith Edwards’s contemporaneous 1986–87 notes show, a lot of the policy decisions were to her mind regressive.

We called it “economic rationalism” back then, which more or less equates with the twenty-first century’s “neoliberalism” but was generally expressed with less venom and glibness. (Or maybe that’s just the internet.) I must admit Chapman’s chapter got too technical for this non-economist (I skipped through the last few pages to the conclusion); Liam Byrne complements nicely on the same topic.

Gareth Evans’s retrospective, unlike his cabinet diary, Inside the Hawke–Keating Government, which was written in the mid-1980s and published in 2014, is perhaps infected by received wisdom; he identifies that government’s “narrative”, for example, but that is mostly an attribute applied in hindsight. Like everyone else in the book, Evans thinks the Hawke–Keating government was pretty terrific compared with those before and those that followed. But he really prefers Keating to Hawke, as was evident in his 1980s jottings (where he surprised himself with his admiration of and fondness for the treasurer).

Evans’s details include Hawke’s occasional petulance in cabinet when he wasn’t getting his way — a “quick to resort to school ground abuse (of the ‘You are just wanking yourself’ variety) and extremely crude misrepresentations of opposing arguments” — which nicely balances other accounts of the prime minister’s maturity and magnanimity. Evans is convincing when he contrasts the consultation and compromise that went into getting the Petroleum Resource Rent Tax up with the amateurish efforts of Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan to impose a super-profits tax on miners in 2010.

Andrew Podger reminds us of Hawke’s skilled and intelligent chairing of meetings and approach to policy in general, and Troy Bramston his extensive and broad curriculum vitae, including decades in the labour movement and a breadth of other life experience.

Michelle Grattan, who has been contributing to books like this one for decades, is one of the more self-aware press gallery journalists. Her chapter ends with the admission that “a lot got done that benefited Australia — and the media, for their part, helped get it done.” Keating in particular was famous for charming the press gallery into joining his crusades.

The Albanese government can boast a majority of its MPs are female (partly because of the unexpected 2025 landslide win, just as Howard’s 1996 victory also brought in a lot of Liberal women). But Labor wasn’t always the more women-friendly of the two sides. The Whitlam government was the first to legislate extensively in this area, but as Marian Sawer reminds us, Susan Ryan in 1983 was “the first woman to hold [a cabinet] position in a federal Labor government” (my italics). Later, Ros Kelly was the sole cabinet representative of her sex.

It was all, of course, very blokey. The 1980s were a different time. A lot of the stories told today about those political giants are overblown, but one thing they didn’t lack was self-belief. They never harked back fondly to predecessors, and they really believed they were better than all that had come before them.

There were a lot of smart, hard-working people in the Hawke governments. They seemed politically timid at the time, relying on the guidance of Rod Cameron’s pollsters at ANOP, but it turned out they were more courageous than every government that followed Keating’s 1996 defeat. The fact that they faced a much easier Senate (a one-stop shop with the consciously centrist Australian Democrats) than any government post-Howard explains a lot, but not everything.

There’s plenty of interest to be found also in the chapters not mentioned above, but it must be said that the transcript of Barrie Cassidy and Craig Emerson chatting about their times in the prime minister’s office needed serious editing: specifically the many pages dealing with Hawke’s love of a flutter on the horses, and his roping in of staff to place bets for him. One par would’ve done for this reader.

The Hawke government never did fix the current account problem, and neither did its successors. In fact, the Howard government presided over the largest deficit (as a percentage of GDP) in history. The solution turned out deceptively simple: stop worrying about it. (American president Donald Trump never got this memo.)

Today, a popular genre of economic commentary simultaneously castigates the Albanese government for a level of spending higher than any (outside Covid) since the mid-1980s, while urging it to be more like Hawke and Keating. Left implied but not stated in those spending comparisons is that it was higher in Keating’s early years as treasurer than it is today. In fact, Keating presided over the highest federal spending, outside Covid, since the second world war. Then, to avoid becoming a banana republic, he and the government cut it to its lowest level (22.9 per cent of GDP in 1989–90) since Whitlam. No government has got it that low since.

Maybe that’s a neat microcosm of judgements about those heady days of 1983 to 1991: you can pick and choose which part you look at. •

Gold Standard? Remembering the Hawke Government
Edited by Frank Bongiorno, Carolyn Holbrook and Joshua Black | NewSouth | $39.99 | 352 pages

The post Strange days appeared first on Inside Story.

John the boatman, his arms as thick as fire extinguishers, made short order of lugging fuel drums onto the boat. I carried my overnight bag and a cooler with corned beef and tomato sandwiches, beef biscuits, four cans of beer and bottled water from the local pharmacy marked “Made in China.” We whooshed away from the dock into opalescent waters.

About twenty minutes later the boat cleaved close to a coast of mangrove, rattan, nipa ferns, splayed pandanus trees and manioc. Little villages with church steeples peeked out from the clearings. We had cleared the southern tip of the mainland of Papua New Guinea and I could feel my worries — existential, writerly, born of having spent too much time wrestling with words and wondering about the point of it all — sloughing off me. Samarai Island was another hour away.

“What’s the name of that writer woman again?” John shouted over the roar of the engine, experienced enough in the way of the dim dims to know the value of feigning interest in niche topics, especially when those topics were the reason for the boat hire.

“Beatrice Grimshaw,” I replied.

A century ago, she was one of the world’s bestselling authors, her South Seas melodramas and pot-boilers with titles like Conn of the Coral Seas and When the Red Gods Call likened charitably to Conrad, Kipling and Stevenson. She exerted a grip on the imaginations of middlebrow Australian readers that is almost impossible to imagine nowadays. She dabbled in movies, writing the script for Australia’s first talking movie, The Adorable Outcast. Yet she has disappeared without trace, her name not even a whisper of a memory.

She and I came from the same part of Northern Ireland, I told John, both born with a desire to escape, both having beachcombed in the islands and ultimately settled in Australia. Born in Belfast in 1870, she moved to Dublin as a young adult, worked as a journalist, and published a first novel about unsuccessful getaways. At one parlour party she met a young W.B. Yeats, whom she found to be a “gifted young extremist.” Susan had sent me early studio shots of a young Beatrice, taken shortly after her first novel was published: a young woman with a dress of shimmering white, her hair a contraption of hair pins under a Florence Nightingale hat, mouth in a quarter-smile, eyes hard to read.

A 1913 map of Papua, with Samarai Island (just off the southwestern tip of the main island) shown in an inset. Click to enlarge. National Library of Australia

Dublin was too small for her, too cramped, its literary society too stale. She left Ireland soon after her encounter with Yeats, crossing the Atlantic and then the continental United States, setting sail from San Francisco for Fiji, paying for her passage by organising tours and writing alluring advertising puff for “in-ship” magazines about palm fronds swaying and canoes cresting waves. Their tropical orientalism didn’t read too differently in tone from in-flight magazines I read on my own journeys in the Pacific.

She wrote and wrote, publishing travelogues and pulpy adventure novels which, a Spectator reviewer whooped, were “extremely virile and will certainly not remind any reader of the work of other women novelists.” I found that quote — like so much about Beatrice — in Susan’s doctoral thesis, which I’d fished out from the bowels of the ANU library.

I had looked Susan up soon after, knowing from experience that if there’s one thing a writer on obstruse topics reliably likes, it’s unexpected fan mail.   Her phone number was attached to a hospice in North Carolina, close to the university where she had last been teaching. She was palpably nearing the end, but I enjoyed my conversations with Grimshaw’s chronicler. A month before the trip, she had mailed me what she said were all of Beatrice’s possessions remaining on earth — three portraits and a piece of sail cloth as small as a doily — because she didn’t want them to die with her. I had packed the cloth in my overnight bag.

Grimshaw’s books bought her fame, I told John, a man clearly practised in the art of affected listening. Politicians, diplomats and other worthies sought her counsel. Among them was an Australian prime minister, Alfred Deakin, who made her a proposition: would she write a travel book about the Australian portion of the island of New Guinea? His aim was to encourage settlement in this territory Britain had given Australia upon its own independence. The purpose of Grimshaw’s commission was to produce for Australia a brighter chapter, an assignment that needed someone with creative writing skills.

When Grimshaw had arrived a few years earlier, in the early 1900s, Port Moresby was a dozen corrugated iron shacks with no roads, no hospital, no telephone, no electricity, one tennis court and a drinking saloon called McCrann’s, which was little more than a tin shed on which hung the notice, “Men are requested not to sleep on the billiard table with their spurs on.” Recalled Lewis Lett, another writer, “Hard-living hard-drinking men would fight joyously at the drop of a hat.”

Grimshaw’s travels for the book took her to all the mapped parts of the territory, including Samarai, which she described as the “very prettiest place in the whole tropic world.” Paths made from crushed coral circled the island’s crimson and begonia hedges, its well-tended gardens and the seats arranged to take in the view. It was a significant transport and trading hub, a point on the Tokyo–Shanghai–Samarai–Brisbane shipping line and a day-and-night stop on the P&O cruises, which amped up the beautiful and the diabolical in its promotional material (“Come see the cannibal islands”). Lascars and porters loaded turtle shells and shark’s fins into boats bound for ports across Cathay. The supply ship that picked up the gold miners and dropped them off at isolated wooded camps was the Joseph Conrad, Susan told me, an unimprovably apposite name.

Beatrice’s book, The New New Guinea, has many stock elements of an adventure travelogue. After visiting Samarai, she engages in the slow chase of a Japanese pearling vessel and flings herself into the Coral Sea to forage for pearls. She drinks tea in china cups on a mudflat, developes saddle sores, meets a sorcerer and contrives to get herself stoned on coffee, thereafter restricting herself to twelve cups a day.

Her Australian backers approved the book’s questing tone and so did her literary agent, who suggested New Guinea’s trackless jungles and makeshift mining camps would be ideal backdrops for “good and evil” adventure novels. Living on the little island of Samarai for many years, she drew the outlines of her adventures from the roughhouse colonists who drank far too much in clammy shacks with names like the Golden Fleece and the Commercial. The more she wrote about cannibals and pots of bones, she told one admirer, the more she got paid.

A view of Samarai Island, c. 1909, from a pair of stereocards by the Rose Stereograph Company.

The commercial imperative was understandable, yet I wondered if something else was going on too. There was something gleeful about her descriptions of the “natives” as loinclothed half-devils and her grand guignol amplifications. She did more than anyone to create the image of the islands as a dangerous sinkhole. Her writing brought to mind Orwell’s essay about “Boy’s Weeklies” and the drip-drip-drip effects of popular fiction on popular attitudes.

For all her ability to turn a phrase, there was something off about the books, and about the woman who wrote them. She rarely wrote anything positive about New Guinea. What motivated her to stay? The saddest thing I found out from Susan’s thesis was that Grimshaw dedicated only one of her forty-something books to anyone — and that was to her debauched father, who had glugged the family fortune. I sensed an unhappiness that only an emigrant can truly know, self-exiled on distant shores and unable to report back that things were not going well.

Perhaps it was the allure of relevance that made her stay. She travelled extensively throughout the South Seas, cultivating the role of expert-adventurer-eccentric, acclaimed by all the newspapers of record. When she visited London in the 1920s, the police stopped traffic to let her pass. A later portrait from Susan’s collection depicted a monocled woman in middle age wearing a ballgown, a pistol beside her on the table. Her frequent travelling companion was the governor of Australian Papua, Hubert Murray. The pair never got together and I imagine, perhaps fancifully, Murray engaging in Yeatsian levels of unrequited love for Grimshaw throughout his life.

Steering us speedily past canoes, John asked if Beatrice had ever married or had children. I told him she had remained resolutely single, and described the wretchedly lonely manner of her death in Australia, where she was now living. Commissions had dried up and her bank balance had dwindled to the point that in her final months she could afford only to heat the kettle for one cup of tea each day. Afflicted by diabetes, she wore a dress of mourning black and walked the streets by night shouting obscenities. I showed him the final picture Susan sent me of Beatrice, now a puffy woman in a mourning dress with dejected eyes.

“Beatrice had no line,” John said definitively. “Lain” is a Papua New Guinean pidgin word for children, family or personal connections. Papua New Guinea runs entirely on “lines,” family networks, finely threaded relationships and contacts as well as favours owed, stored, remembered and returned. Having a strong and reliable line is fundamental to getting anything accomplished, especially in a place where the state itself rarely works as it should. Personal and professional lines had gotten me this far and connected me with John, who was anxious to tell me he was giving me a discount on the price.

John is a former soldier, the musculature of his arms explained by his visits to a gym every morning. He pointed ahead and handed me his binoculars. I saw what looked like a giant whin bush erupting from the water. Samarai beckoned and we crested towards the once administrative centre of what was then Britain’s vast empire of the South Seas, a place with a twang as evocative as a Timbuktu or a Xanadu.

My daydreaming was interrupted when John had to give me a fireman’s lift onto the dock. I already knew that the image I had in my mind for the place would be out of sync with reality: there would be no midshipmen lugging sea-chests, tourists lolling and women walking around with parasols. Still, the state of the place was shocking. The old capital was on its knees.

We wandered past paint-peeled warehouses, two busted water-tanks and closed trade stores. We had brought overnight bags to stay in the island’s last hotel, but found it shuttered. Fading too was any semblance of administration: the police were gone, the secondary school too; the little wooden hospital building was little more than a shack without medicine, the discoloured posters about wearing a condom and a tuberculosis campaign remnants of the early nineties. Clapboard churches and chapels from every denomination seemed all that endured. The sepia air was almost bottleable.

Old signs were affixed at the entrances to many of the shuttered buildings, like badges on a boy scout’s scarf. Among the insignia were palm trees and artillery from an old servicemen’s association, the long swooshing tail of the bird of paradise topped by the British crown, and a plaque to a Frank Pryke which declared “the territory owes much to this British gentleman.” A mate of Grimshaw’s, Pryke was a gold prospector, island bon vivant and penner of the most godawful doggerel who made it a condition of his will to be buried on the island to be far away from his wife in Australia.

To cap it all off, we found a memorial to Christopher Robinson, an administrator during British times whose “aim was to make New Guinea a good place for white men.” Robinson himself died tragic death, succumbing to suicide via professional despair.

I imagined the rutted path circling the island was once the coral park parade. The little hillock where Grimshaw lived was thick now with the brambling bush I’d seen from the water; Pryke would have been buried somewhere beneath.

My thoughts turned introspective. I’d met so many Grimshaw-and-Pryke types on my travels. Nowadays they are the first person liking a social media update, the nurturers of weekend whirls of social activity, top-class tittle-tattlers and bon vivants who raise their voice and abruptly change the conversation when the subject of personal life came up. I knew them well. Hell, I was well on the way to becoming one of these types myself. I’d found my footing by falling in love with an amazing Australian woman when I was in my mid-thirties. But what if I hadn’t? I had been cultivating the multiple passport-stamps of an interesting but desolating life. I thought of Susan too, another who had led an interesting life, soon to sink barely a trace.

In my imagination I had assumed Samarai to be a large island, so innumerable were its literary ghosts. Not so: it took all of fifteen minutes to arrive back at the quayside, where women were selling coconuts, papaya, and sweet potato smoked and wrapped in banana leaf. There were no seats in the market; the women were flopped under umbrellas bearing the logo of the mobile phone network whose signal extended in the most sporadic sense. For “morning tea” — one of those olde-world phrases still used in the islands — we bought from a stooped woman fresh fish fried in an orange batter. She wrapped the fish in newspapers from a few years back whose stories of government chicanery rhymed exactly with the edition I had read that morning.

“Let’s ask her if she knows Grimshaw,” suggested John, who then rattled off a rapid-fire explanation of who Beatrice was and when she was around.

“How dare you?” the woman chided him with a smile. “I’m sixty-one years old.” She told us to look for Grimshaw in the library.

The library, it turned out, was at the two-room school, a generous description of a place with a chalkboard, no chalk, a mildewed smell, and six plastic chairs lying on their sides on a bare concrete floor. It was as if the state had conceded and receded. In the corner of one room, sitting just below a curtain of thin pink material flapping in the hot, humid air, were thousands of books squeezed together and piled atop one another on sagging plywood shelves.

What we were looking at was the vast literary remains of old Samarai. Most of the publication dates ranged from turn of the century to the sixties. Titles included A History of the Polar Regions, The High Deeds of Finn McCool and a travel guide to Hanoi when it was still a French possession. Some of the classics were there, too: an Austen, a couple of Trollope’s Barchester novels, a few hardback Dickens and, most fittingly of all, a Joseph Conrad novel entitled The Outcast of the Islands. The most recent volume I could find was a 1999 in-house Australian aid magazine, a document that might be best placed on the fiction shelf if the library was organised in any discernible manner.

When I opened a few of the older books, it was as if the pages squinted in unfamiliar light. I combed the spines hoping to find some of the many books written about Samarai itself — the backdrop to a bookstall adventure novel, starting point for an anthropologist or explorer’s tale, port of call on an administrator’s rounds, exhibit for the prosecution or defence in disquisitions about the ills or wonders of colonialism. There were none. Those living here perhaps felt they knew enough. There were no Grimshaws. Feeling her neglect, I took out a few copies of her Samarai oeuvre that I had read these last few days and laid them face-out on the shelf to resemble a bookstore’s title-of-the-month promotion.

“We treated them like Gods, those dim dims. They could ask for anything, and it was theirs,” I heard John whisper as I picked my way through the collection. I hoped he was holding forth about the old denizens rather than having a swipe at me. He was talking to a woman in a green, blousy dress whom he introduced as Cecilia, the school’s teacher, who had come in to find out what two men were doing unannounced in her school.

Cecilia struck me as happy for this wild-goose author chase as a break from the day’s tedium. She hadn’t left this island for twenty years, she said; the government owed her a leave fare but there was no way of getting it. She couldn’t remember the last time anyone had come looking around.

This temporary home for the books was now twenty years old. Originally, these books sat resplendent on three high bookcases made from ship’s timber within the island’s War Memorial and Library Institute, a once-imposing green-tea-coloured building fronted with a cannon. But all the members of the institute died, the cannon fell off its joist, the walls of the building caved inwards and the collection was evacuated. I asked if anyone used the library. She shook her head. Few read for pleasure and the hardest subject to teach was English.

“They spend all their time looking for a phone signal,” she said, which our experience suggested to be a thoroughly exasperating endeavour. She picked up a Grimshaw and said she would read it. I nabbed An Outcast of the Islands and left the sailcloth in its stead.

A few days later, back in Port Moresby. I finally managed to reach Susan. I was looking out at a channel of water that separated me from the city’s yacht club, a place where Grimshaw had lived in a houseboat back in her heyday. I was in a high-end café frequented by those present day outcasts of the islands, police officers, miners, bankers and weathered consultants to the aid program.

I told Susan about Samarai and the side trip John and I had taken afterwards to Doini, the island where the cruise ships docked nowadays. Apart from a horse with flies buzzing around a sore in its right eye and the intriguing presence of a llama, the island was empty. Yet John knew the place well: he came over here once a week to flog statues, prints and trinkets to the tourists. He pointed to the room where he’d disrobe and put on loincloths and feathered headdresses as if he were a murky side character from a Grimshaw novel.

She was lucid, pleased when I told her I’d found a copy of her thesis in Port Moresby’s national library. I mentioned a sentence early in Conrad’s book that resounded almost perfectly with me: “his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effects.” The decay and decrepitude of Samarai had broken something open in me. It was as if encountering its loneliness made me more appreciative of what I had.

I told Susan I had found in the library a selection from the diaries of the Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski. He overlapped with Grimshaw on Samarai — she gave him lessons in navigational theory and signed copies of her books — and in his diaries he described himself as being in a Dostoevskian state after a few months there. How isolated Grimshaw must have been in exotic but empty abodes over those years; it might in part explain her callous tone.

“Maybe you should write a book about her?” Susan said.

Perhaps it was our shared upbringing in Ireland’s north or her quintessentially Ulsterite turns of phrase that reminded me of my grandmothers, but I had found something oddly diverting about Grimshaw’s novels. That so many of the heroes were Northern Irish always made me smile, even if other parts of them left me appalled. Unlike Hubert Murray, though, I didn’t think I wanted to spend much more time in Grimshaw’s company.

I reminded Susan of a winning line in her thesis that understanding Grimshaw’s personality was “a task that only a psychoanalyst would welcome.”

“That was a good sentence,” she said. “All right, go write something else then.” She had to go. Someone was knocking; I heard the lightly patronising and firm tones of a care nurse. It would be the last conversation we had. •

In memory of Susan Gardner 1945–2022

The post Memento mori appeared first on Inside Story.

The Liberal Party’s problems are clear enough, and have registered in opinion polls over recent months. The Newspoll quarterly analysis for 12 January to 26 March has Coalition support at a fifth of the primary vote. In South Australian, the Liberals managed about 19 per cent to One Nation’s 23 per cent, with most of the Liberals’ lost vote going to One Nation.

But One Nation also picked up votes in Labor’s northern Adelaide heartland. In Elizabeth, an area that has experienced the full blast of economic disadvantage over decades, the swing on primaries against Labor was 15.7 percentage points and One Nation won a third of vote. In neighbouring Ramsay, centred on Salisbury, the Labor primary vote was down eleven points and One Nation polled 28 per cent. The seat of Light, which incorporates Gawler, also in the outer north, saw a swing of more than twenty points against Labor and a One Nation share of 34.5 per cent.

Labor retained these seats, but they are now marginal. In each case the two candidates left standing after preferences were Labor and One Nation rather than the traditional major-party standoff. Is this a vision of the Australian political future? Labor political strategists — especially in Victoria, with its unpopular Labor government and election later this year — will be looking nervously at these results. Liberals will be apprehending them in horror.

But both sides can perhaps take a little heart. The Liberals can tell themselves the National Party didn’t run in South Australia, which may well have sent the state’s more conservative voters One Nation’s way. The SA Liberal Party has also had a torrid time, with its frequent changes of leadership — indeed, a former leader, David Speirs, who stood as an independent, was convicted of supplying drugs. The notably popular Labor premier Peter Malinauskas is scooping up support that might otherwise, and elsewhere, go to the Coalition.

Labor, meanwhile, will take heart that its own vote is holding up pretty well in seats where its main competition is the Liberal Party. It is losing support to One Nation in some traditional heartlands, but not where middle-class voters are more prominent. The SA election confirmed Labor’s strength in metropolitan Australia — a feature of the 2022 and 2025 federal elections — while pointing to a vulnerability in the outer suburbs that the Liberals have so far been unable to exploit. And when pollsters calculate a two-party preferred vote for Labor and the Coalition, they are showing Labor well ahead — a recent Morgan poll reported Labor at 56 per cent to the Coalition’s 44 per cent.

The drivers of these patterns are well known. Cost-of-living pressures and housing shortages are undermining support for the major parties, which are each seen to share responsibility for them. As the Liberal Party’s review of the 2025 federal election pointed out, voters appear to have accepted the Albanese government’s case that “responsibility for the country’s economic travails were [sic] jointly shared with the former Coalition government.” After almost four years of Labor government, that attitude might be contributing to a conviction among disaffected voters that neither party has a solution to the nation’s economic woes — a conviction that could feed the idea, pushed in One Nation propaganda, of a Lib–Lab “uniparty.”

One Nation, which doesn’t yet run the risk of being in government and therefore needing a policy to deal with inflation or housing, can simply catch the wave of discontent. The Iran war’s effect in drastically increasing petrol and diesel prices is a further boon to a party strongest in the fuel-thirsty rural, regional and outer-suburban areas.

The growing salience of immigration as an issue has also greatly assisted Pauline Hanson and her candidates, who also ride on the back of anti-Islam sentiment without the kinds of hesitations, qualifications and even occasional pushback you get from your average Coalition politician. But above all, One Nation gathers the support of those who believe the system is not working for them: things used to be better than they are now. One Nation’s is a performative politics on behalf of those who, like Hanson herself, have had a “gutful” and resent that “they” have stolen from us… what? Perhaps it is a feeling of control over the conditions of their own lives, as Guy Rundle has argued.

Can One Nation’s momentum be sustained? Critics point to the party’s poor record of solidarity in the past, the dubious quality of many of its candidates, and its silence when asked about policy — failings that would normally devastate a party that aspires to a predominant role on the political right. One Nation might flame out as it did in the late 1990s after its stellar performance in the 1998 Queensland state election, with eleven seats and 23 per cent of the vote. As it gathers greater electoral support, the profile of its electoral support and the hopes of those voters are likely to diverge from what might be expected of a party gathering a mere 6.4 per cent of the vote — as it did at the 2025 federal election.

The party also remains Pauline’s baby: it is not entirely clear what it would look like without her. One Nation has a ripe history of bitter internal division and most of Hanson’s key political relationships end up foundering on one rock or another. It remains to be seen, for instance, whether cordial relations with Barnaby Joyce will last longer than they did with Mark Latham — to name two former leaders of mainstream parties who made the jump to One Nation. It is not a party that has managed to harbour more than one big personality at a time — and only one big personality, Hanson herself, can really claim the right to be considered a permanent fixture.

Much will also depend on the response of the parties of the right competing with One Nation for support. The Liberals have so far shown little capacity to rise to the moment. Their post-2025 federal election review, conducted by Pru Goward and Nick Minchin, judged that many Liberals smarting from their humiliation in May 2025 were rather better at recognising specks in the eyes of others than logs in their own, to borrow from Matthew’s Gospel. One of those logs is the collapse of Liberal support in metropolitan areas. Another is that it can muster majorities only among the over fifty-fives. It is being shunned by women — Crosby Textor’s estimate of the gender gap was 4.7 percentage points. It has deep problems in the migrant communities. (Strangely, Australians of Chinese heritage resent being smeared as spies during an election campaign — and probably at any time.)

The Liberal Party’s post-election response to these various ailments can be briefly summarised. First, it failed to release Goward and Minchin’s report. (Anthony Albanese eventually tabled a leaked copy in the House of Representatives.) It is ramping up a campaign to oppose changes to tax breaks for property investors despite investors’ advantages being a major grievance among younger voters trying to buy a home. It chose a woman, Sussan Ley, as party leader only for her colleagues to tear her down in the space of a few months. (Its National Party colleagues initially refused even to serve with her in a coalition and then broke with her a second time earlier this year.) It continues to oppose quotas for the selection of female candidates for winnable seats — a measure adopted by Labor more than thirty years ago.

On the multicultural front, meanwhile, the Liberals have adopted a hardline immigration policy that, in a nutshell, signals to migrants they are here under sufferance. Adopt Australian values or else: and we — the Liberal Party — get to say what those values are. Yet the very same migrants are a conspicuous presence in many of the outer suburbs the Liberals have been fantasising about claiming from Labor since Peter Dutton gave his first media conference as leader in May 2022.

Armchair criticism is easy: the Liberals’ dilemma is an admittedly difficult one. In the big cities, they are being squeezed on the left not only by their traditional rival, the Labor Party, but by teal independents and even the Greens. The Liberal election review makes clear there is more than one opinion in the party about how much of its energy needs to go into winning back teal seats and how much into dealing with Labor. That is already a bad place from which to start.

On the right, the Liberal Party competes with One Nation and, in some respects, with the Nationals as well; the Coalition partners are rivals, for instance, in the forthcoming Farrer by-election. Policy designed to win back younger, female and migrant voters in the metropolitan areas will push other voters to One Nation — not that the Coalition has actually done anything much to gain the support of the groups that have turned decisively against it. Meanwhile, policies designed to stem the flow of support to One Nation, like the recent one on immigration, might make the Coalition unelectable in the metropolitan seats that need to be reclaimed from Labor, independents and the remaining Green.

All the while, party members are typically old and conservative. There is a sense that the Liberals don’t like modern Australia much more than One Nation. As an unsuccessful metropolitan Liberal candidate at the last election told Goward and Minchin: “the Liberal Party needs to understand Australia as it is and not how we would like it to be.”

“Not how we would like it to be.” What do those few words mean? They surely imply that “we” — presumably, your average Liberal — instinctively dislikes what this country has become but out of a sense of pragmatism “we” need to get over it in the interests of winning an election some time. As well-meaning as the comment might be in trying to steer the party towards a more moderate and pragmatic course, it seems to me a bad place for a mainstream political party to try doing its business — really a recipe for another Abbott-like government, in the unlikely event that it yielded an election victory in the first place.

Meanwhile, One Nation is likely to be most competitive in rural and regional seats where it will encounter Nationals as well as Liberals. The Nationals have rather smugly treated the Liberals’ poor performance as if they had no share in it. This positioning was bogus from the start and does a party with a proud history of intelligent pragmatism no credit at all.

The Coalition’s loss of support among key demographics is hardly disconnected from those same voters’ grim view of the role of the Nationals in the Coalition, especially on matters such as climate change. At the time of the 2022 election, Barnaby Joyce, then Nationals leader, was about as popular among city voters as a bowl of lentils at the Guyra Lamb and Potato Festival.

Those days of smug aloofness are almost certainly over. It is not just that Nationals seats are in danger from One Nation. If, as the polls suggest, One Nation is getting 25 per cent per cent of the national vote and 30 per cent in Queensland (as reported by Newspoll), its share in some rural and regional seats — especially in its Queensland heartland — is probably north of 40 per cent. That is a big problem for the Liberal National Party in that state.

The Nationals are hardly in rude health. They have broken the Coalition twice since the last election. They recently changed leaders for the fifth time in a decade. They have endured three federal parliamentary defections since 2023, resulting in a loss of each of those seats to the party: Andrew Gee, who left over the party’s opposition to the Indigenous Voice and retained his seat of Calare as an independent at the 2025 election; Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who defected shortly after that election from the Nationals party room to the Liberals; and Barnaby Joyce, twice party leader, who has joined Hanson in One Nation. Speculation continues over other Nationals politicians making the jump, and some ordinary members have followed suit: as in Tamworth, the ABC reported, the National Party branch “moved en masse to One Nation” last October.

That’s the picture on the Liberal Party’s right. On its left (broadly defined), it has Labor and independents — and occasionally even the Greens — swallowing its metropolitan seats, and the occasional regional one. It is unlikely to be able to win an election again without reclaiming parts of its old heartland in the cities, since that is where most Australians live and vote. Yet to do so will lead only to further alienation among conservative voters, and accusations the party is “Labor-lite,” a charge foreshadowed by Malcolm Turnbull’s fate.

The closest historical parallel I can think of is Alfred Deakin’s Liberal Protectionists, which formed governments for much of the first decade of the Australian Commonwealth. But Deakin’s party was also squeezed between parties to its right and left at elections in 1903 and 1906. On the right it was George Reid’s Free Trade Party; on the left, it was Labor. Reid increasingly appealed to anti-socialist sentiment — indeed, his party was also known as the Anti-Socialists — and it grew in numbers. Labor was growing in numbers and confidence too, and its industrial wing in the unions was flexing its muscles as Australia emerged from depression and drought.

The result: Deakin chose to join with the Free Traders in 1909 to form a single Liberal Party, giving birth to the two-party system. But Reid’s forcing of the issue over the preceding years was probably the crucial factor. At the 1910 election a Liberal government faced a Labor opposition — and Labor won.

That was really the last great realignment in Australian politics, and we have been living in its shadow ever since. When a Country Party emerged nationally at the end of the first world war, it threatened to reinstate a three-party system (and briefly did so) but by early 1923 it had joined with the other major non-Labor party, by then called the Nationalists, in a coalition government. A two-party system, or at least a system in which two sides competed for government, had re-emerged. It endures still but seems more fragile now than at any time in the past century.

The Coalition parties might eventually have to confront Deakin’s dilemma, or something like the predicament faced by the Nationalists and the Country Party in the early 1920s. Should they join with One Nation, as a “fusion” (like in 1909) or a coalition (1923), to counter the electoral predominance of the Labor Party and the further rise of the independents and Greens?

We are not there yet, but that doesn’t mean we won’t get there. The most significant electoral effect of the current fragmentation on the right is to entrench Labor’s power federally and in a majority of states and territories. We can be certain federal Labor strategists are already eyeing off further seats they might win at a future federal election.

If Jacinta Allan’s Labor government should survive the next Victorian election, we will surely have arrived at the moment when it will be impossible for the Liberals to continue as before unless they are comfortable with permanent opposition or even minority party status. •

The post Stuck in the middle appeared first on Inside Story.

Whether it’s symptomatic of the pluralisation of family forms over the past twenty-five years or a response to worsening social conditions — with friendship one of the few refuges where we can be authentically ourselves — it’s clear that friendship is back. After lying culturally dormant for much of the twentieth century, this most gentle, ephemeral and hitherto neglected of bonds is being given the recognition most of us attach to it in our everyday lives.

Writer Andrew O’Hagan’s delightful meditation On Friendship is the most recent contribution to this flourishing field. Here is a meandering, intimate, sage, witty and exquisitely written book that crafts a philosophy and poetics of friendship from a life spent collecting good friends and nourishing their bonds with literature, wine, road trips, laughter and chatter.

Those of us who know O’Hagan as a novelist and London Review of Books contributor encounter him here in enlarged form as a biographer whose empathy and gift for observation creates beguiling portraits of everyone from school besties to Seamus Heaney, as a dispenser of excellent advice on how to think through the ambivalences of friendship, and as a humanist whose meditations on amicable bonds provoke questions that strike at the heart of existence. Does every creature on earth yearn to be part of a double act? What is the secret language of friendship that exists between children and animals? Does death end a friendship or sanctify it, protecting it from human vagaries?

O’Hagan’s pompous-sounding title (surely only Susan Sontag is allowed to write “On” books?) can be forgiven: he is tapping into a rich tradition of writers and philosophers who, since the time of Cicero’s De Amicitia, have written about friendship’s meaning, definition, permutations, pleasures and perils. Like these writers, he is interested in getting to the core of friendship, divining the reasons for its gratifications, illuminating its role in our quest for human flourishing, distinguishing it from other forms of intimacy.

But unlike the philosophers, O’Hagan doesn’t declaim truths, he substantiates them in a shadow memoir. In no real chronological or thematic order, he drifts from childhood to national loyalties, to the death of friends, to friends met at work or on the internet, and friends who are animals or imagined — with each setting bringing into relief the essences, rules and nature of friendship in our time.

While he asks the reader to forgive him for universalising his own experiences, few could disagree with lines like: “A great friend can summon a new world order, and, best of all, the beginnings of a new person for you to be, tugged from the constraints of home and homily.” Or: “A friend is someone whom you repay for not wanting to possess you, and it may count among the nuances of love that we cannot extend that same consideration to those we fancy.”

Growing up in an affectionless, impoverished and poorly educated family in darkest Glasgow gave the young O’Hagan his first intimations of the emancipatory potential of friendship. Where his home was a zone of “adversities, unpaid bills, things you could never talk about, disappointments relating to the past,” with parents who worked but “didn’t enjoy working” and “didn’t seem to enjoy family life either,” friendship was “like a glass of cool water after a fever, a drink that was meant to last, quenching your worries.”

It was the eighties, a time when childhood bonds were forged in physical spaces separate to those of adults — in parks, railway yards, youth clubs and discos — and communication was via the blinks of a flashlight from one boy’s bedroom window to another: “two flashes meant: goodnight pal, three meant: see you tomorrow.” In this time before the internet, parents controlled information and a good friend was often valued for their capacity to dispense knowledge that adults were unlikely to share about records, bands, cigarettes or sex.

Against this background O’Hagan learns from his friends and in books like Charlotte’s Web that “the first great challenge of our social lives is to find the friend who might somehow match our capacity for wonder.” To make that search, he says, “felt like a creative act, a bold, differentiating effort of the soul.” Where a parent may demand that a child be “an aspect of [themselves],” a part of the family’s “group identity,” “a good friend will only require that you fulfill aspects of yourself.”

In framing friendship as a revolt against the nuclear family, O’Hagan follows in a long line of feminist and queer scholars who have mused on friendship as an alternative, more egalitarian model of relationship. Good friendships can’t tolerate what is all too often normal in romantic or marital relationships: possessiveness, gross power imbalances and a lack of reciprocity. Where romantic love is institutionalised through marriage and the family is tightly regulated by the state, friendship seems to frolic free, “outside the framework of established relationships, family and professional life, the people one sees every day,” as Michel Foucault put it.

Perhaps for this reason, it is seen as a stepping stone to maturation, to settling down to a life of suburban domestic misery with a spouse and two children. The real story, we were long told, lies in the wedding and the family, not in the riotous hens night or the close friendships that often outlast the marriage.

O’Hagan is one of a flurry of writers and thinkers turning this logic on its head. “I believe the ties of friendship are as important to the average person as every other form of romance, a set of loyalties that turn in the head like old records,” he declares early in the book, and it seems odd that this even need be argued.

Certainly, one of the many joys of O’Hagan’s book lies in eavesdropping on the conversations of his famous writer friends. Unlike actors and politicians, who O’Hagan categorically declares to be bad at friendship — the former are inconstant by profession, and the latter opportunistic — writers, he claims, have a genius for friendship. It goes with the territory. If friendship is a lesson in empathy and being humane, then so too is writing — neither works without a genuine curiosity for how it feels to be someone else.

In O’Hagan’s world writers are not “solitary as a cloud” but ensconced with friends who keep them anchored to the real (rather than the fabular worlds they often inhabit). In one of many passages that make you smile, O’Hagan writes: “I would argue that writers have a rare but not unhelpful sickness: we wish to manage time, to consort with life at the level of myth and to seek connections everywhere, which is why real camaraderie is so stabilising. Sometimes our friends are the only characters we know who are not invented, and yet, with the friend of genius, you make a leap into enchantment that also feels like home.”

Not all writerly friendships make that leap, however, and professional friendships are also valuable. Ezra Pound was woeful when it came to consoling T.S. Eliot about his marital woes but did a marvellous job of editing The Wasteland. “The job at hand was the thing they had in mind, and friendship took up a pencil,” O’Hagan writes, “Pound cutting and shaping Eliot’s masterpiece out of the common ground of their mutual respect.”

It is a testament to the joys of reading O’Hagan that one finds oneself often putting aside the book and thinking more deeply about an idea or googling a childhood friend to see what they’re up to. I also found myself remarking on the differences between O’Hagan’s universalising On Friendship and Tiffany Watt-Smith’s more unassuming history of female friendship. Like O’Hagan, Watt-Smith offers the reader a shadow memoir of her own life, but unlike O’Hagan she doesn’t pitch friends against family. Instead, she notes how being a parent meant old friends could not be given the same amount of time as before while new friendships with other parents were strikingly instrumentalist.

Rather than seeing this as a debased form of friendship, as Aristotle and Cicero would do, Watt-Smith argues that the sharing of labour and resources has always been fundamental to working women’s friendships, particularly if they are the primary carers of children. Where O’Hagan draws a sharp line between romantic relationships and friendship, Watt-Smith follows in a long tradition of feminist writers in delighting in the romantic friendships women have. At times I wondered whether O’Hagan’s book would have been better titled “On Male Friendships.”

In his least convincing chapter, O’Hagan goes for a jaunt around the British Isles with two good friends from Ireland and Scotland, who happen to be the poet Seamus Heaney and former LRB editor Karl Miller. The road trip itself is a blast: at moments you feel like you’re sitting in the car with Seamus as he muses on what makes “good company” and whether John McEnroe would be fun at a dinner party. More provocative is O’Hagan’s extrapolation from this jolly group of white male writers and editors that an innate comradely bond arises from coming from the same country: “friendship and nationhood, like freedom and whisky, go soaringly together.” Nations, he later tells us “are simply the best huddle one can make of humanity.”

He is not always so blunt, and later he tries to distinguish their friendship from that of “tribal resentment or rabble-rousing passions” by virtue of their “taste for ambiguity” and the fact that he and his friends “resist the marks of resolution.” The chapter ends in a rhapsodic key: in travelling around the “byways and seascapes of Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales” they had discovered not just the “truths” of their sense of fellow feeling but the ‘undertruths,’ the animating facts of belonging.”

Deep, chthonic and almost religious in nature, it’s hard to see the ambiguity or two-mindedness in this “undertruth,” nor any possibility of critiquing that which could only be authenticated as feeling. While Samuel Coleridge makes an excellent travelling companion for this happy huddle of pale males — and they cite from him often — I wonder whether a poet musing on the British slave trade would have been so welcome or aroused the same fellow feeling. The idea of common “undertruths” is also surely belied by the long history of violent resistance to British colonisation in Ireland, Wales and Scotland, sentiment that continues in contemporary nationalist movements,  seen recently at the time of the referendum in stickers on Scottish lampposts proclaiming “Scottish not British.”

Coming as I do from Australia, where the myth of mateship has long worked to exclude women, migrants, homosexuals and First Nations people, the celebratory conflation of friendship with nationalism obviously irks. As does O’Hagan’s use of Benedict Anderson to justify his position: “If the nation… is an imagined community” he waxes, “so then is a friendship.” This is, quite simply, wrong. Anderson’s point was that the nation, which we imagine as natural, timeless and inevitable, is in fact historically contingent, and requires great leaps of the imagination to sustain.

The imagined community of the nation mythically cuts across the very real divisions of race, class, gender, sexuality, ability and geography, to foster a sense of cohesion among people who in fact may have little in common. And in the contest over the definition of the national character, or the “undertruths” it has been the experiences of European men that have largely prevailed. The thick ties between friends, people who thrill to each other’s differences as much as their commonalities has little to do with the generalising, exclusionary smear of nationalism.

Where mateship is built on an abstract ideal, friendship is the stuff of concrete encounters and “workaday” kindnesses; if a real connection is not there then friendship simply dies away. A nation does not.

Yet O’Hagan might have a point. While reading On Friendship I was reminded of taking my ninety-four-year-old grandmother on a road trip around the lower Snowy Mountains region, where she grew up. She was — and still is — sprightly, warm and chatty and felt that to tell the story of who she really is we needed to go to where she was from.

Peering into the murky brown waters of the hydroelectric dam she told me about a lost city beneath it — Talbingo, a town she travelled through in a mail coach at the age of five. In the deserted town of Greg Greg where she had lived, she spoke of living on rabbits during the depression, of being bitten by a snake while hanging out the washing, of watching my grandad drive off in a plume of dust, thinking that he’d never come back.

Of course, like Coleridge for O’Hagan, there is a repertoire of Lawson and Patterson ballads that give sentimental weight to these memories. But is it not also true that our identities and who we are is tied to place, to where we live? Does denying the reality of these feelings leave the nation in the thrall of the “rabble rousers”? And if this is so, could friendship — a term more pluralistic than mateship, a bond that delights in difference and that demands genuine equality and choices — be a more ideal foundation for the multiple stories people from Australia tell about themselves? Is nationalism imagined as friendship a better ethical framework — one capable of embracing ambiguity, conflict and two-mindedness?

For any reader of the LRB, O’Hagan’s meditation feels a bit like attending one of Boswell’s dinners, though in place of Samuel Johnson, Joshua Reynolds and David Garrick we sit with Colm Toibin, Edna Ryan or Seamus Heaney. Lest there be any concern that he might be namedropping, he reassures us that this is in fact a feature of any good friendship: “name dropping is to friendship what manure is to roses: it smells dodgy but it helps things grow.”

It is from this wonderful coterie of companions that O’Hagan distils some truisms of friendship that are sage, warming and astute. Friendship is a workaday virtue. Everyone wants a friend who sides with you whether you’re right or not. It’s difficult to know when precisely a friendship is formed, but “as in filling a vessel drop by drop, there is at last a drop which makes it run over” (this line is from Boswell himself). “A person with new friends is never truly old, because they are forced to live in the present.” Friendship “shouldn’t rely on diaries and appointments but might flower by chance in places generally agreed to be conducive to the clinking of pewter.”

And finally: “The beginning of friendship is more than the start of your social existence: it is the test, the measure, the guarantee of your empathy, and the beginning of so much fun. Romantic love gets all the headlines, the novels the musical standards and the big cinema moments, but just as often it is strong friendship that properly describes the shape of your life.” •

On Friendship
By Andrew O’Hagan | Faber | $24.99 | 160 pages

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The motion succeeds, courtesy of votes from the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD — the first time a democratic party has relied on the far right’s support in the Bundestag. The Social Democrats move for the session to be adjourned. Heidi Reichinnek, the fast-talking thirty-six-year-old co-leader of the Linke, is the last to speak on the motion. The Linke, the successor of the East German communist party, is only a minor player in parliament, its twenty-eight seats dwarfed by the 707 held by the other parties. The most recent poll puts it at 4 per cent, one percentage point below the mandatory threshold designed to guard against political instability. They may well be on the way out.

For most of her short speech, Reichinnek directly addresses Friedrich Merz, leader of the Christian Democrats and soon to be chancellor: “I tell you, you are making yourself an accomplice. You have changed this country for the worse.” At the end, she turns to an audience outside the Bundestag: “Don’t give up, fight back, resist fascism in this country.” In conclusion, she cries: “Auf die Barrikaden!” (To the barricades!)

Her speech goes viral. Suddenly her party no longer needs to fret about surpassing the 5 per cent threshold. On election night, with 8.8 per cent of the vote, the Linke is an undisputed winner. That’s not least because of its support among young people: more than one in four voters under the age of twenty at that election. Reichinnek’s “Auf die Barrikaden!”, watched millions of times, turned the party’s fortunes around.

What did the young people moved to cast their vote for the Linke associate with Reichinnek’s call? “Auf die Barrikaden!” may have reminded some of them of a protest song that had featured at recent rallies against the AfD. In translation, its lyrics read: “Defend yourselves, resist! Against fascism in this country! To the barricades, to the barricades!”

Reichinnek’s words are also those of “¡A las Barricadas”, a Spanish adaptation of the Warszawianka, sung by Polish socialists since the late nineteenth century. “¡A las Barricadas” was the anthem of the anarcho-syndicalist National Confederation of Labour during the Spanish civil war and has remained popular within the radical left in Spain and elsewhere.

Many of last year’s Linke voters were presumably blissfully unaware of these references. But they would not have been oblivious to the broader connotations of Reichinnek’s pathos-laden words. “Auf die Barrikaden!” (which literally means “Onto the barricades!”) is more than an appeal to protest. Those issuing that call and erecting barricades are defying the state’s authority. They resort to violence to counter the violence directed at them. They don’t hide behind barricades but climb on top of them, waving flags and taunting their enemies.

Barricades are associated with the sort of violence that turns the world upside down. A feature of revolutions, their most emblematic depiction is Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 oil painting “La Liberté guidant le peuple” (“Liberty leading the people”). In it, a bare-breasted Marianne (personifying Liberty), wearing the Phrygian cap sported by the eighteenth-century revolutionaries in North America and France, strides across a barricade towards the viewer.

The German poet Heinrich Heine, who had moved to France after the revolution of July 1830, saw the painting in 1831. The flag-waving Liberty reminded him of prostitutes and poissardes, the market women who had played a key role in the events of 1789. “That she is actually meant to represent the [goddess of liberty] is not entirely clear,” he wrote. “This figure seems rather to embody untamed people’s power, which is casting off a deadly burden.”

“La Liberté guidant le peuple” was enacted for a global audience during the opening ceremony of the July 2024 Paris Olympic Games. The ceremony’s curators had good reason to assume that revolutions are central to modern French history and therefore deserved to feature in the four-hour spectacle along the banks of the Seine. France’s national day is 14 July, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille in 1789, which is sometimes considered the opening salvo of the French Revolution. It was followed by the revolutions of July 1830 (depicted by Delacroix) and February 1848 and the Paris Commune of 1871. In the twentieth century, the tumultuous events of May 1968, while not sparking a revolution, were nevertheless experienced by its participants as having the potential to turn the world upside down.

 I suspect most Germans associate revolutions and the call “Auf die Barrikaden!” with French (or Russian) rather than with their own history. They sometimes refer to the events of autumn 1989, when East Germany’s communist leaders effectively abdicated, as the “peaceful revolution.” A revolution it was not, and anyway, barricades weren’t part of the demonstrations of October and November in Leipzig and elsewhere.

The German revolutions of 1848–49 failed (though Berlin did see barricades in March 1848). The revolution of 1918–19 was not a long-lasting success either: the fragile democracy installed after the abdication of Emperor Wilhelm II fell to pieces fifteen years later when Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor.

Although revolutions arguably did not shape the course of modern German history in the way they did in France or Russia, they feature prominently in school curricula here in Germany. So too in Australia, a country whose association with revolutions does not extend much beyond the hospitality offered to a few former members of the Paris commune who in 1874 escaped from New Caledonia, then a French penal colony, to Sydney. Yet the study design for year 12 history in Victoria offers students “Revolutions” as one of three choices (the others being “Ancient History” and “Australian History”).

Given how much revolutions have captured people’s imagination, and how extensively their histories are taught in school (not just in Germany and Australia), it’s no surprise that they are a favourite subject matter for political scientists and historians. Donald Sassoon, emeritus professor of comparative European history at Queen Mary University of London and literary editor of the centre-left Political Quarterly, is the latest eminent scholar to devote a book to them.

Revolutions: A New History would disappoint readers looking for a typology — not to mention a new theory — or expecting a comprehensive survey; those wanting to learn about, say, the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) or the Cuban Revolution (1953–58) may want to turn to other books. Instead, Sassoon singles out the English civil war, and the American, French, Russian and Chinese revolutions. A sixth chapter deals, in much less convincing fashion than the others, with the European “national revolutions” of the nineteenth century.

Sassoon’s understanding of what constitutes a revolution differs from that of most other historians. Instead of focusing on momentous events and their immediate context — the beheading of Charles I on 30 January 1649, the signing of the American Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776, the storming of the Bastille, the assault on the Winter Palace on 7 November 1917 and the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China on 1 October 1949 — he writes about revolutions as long-term processes.

He begins his account of the French Revolution, for example, in August 1788 with the convening of the Estates General, and concludes it not in 1794 (the ousting of Maximilien Robespierre), nor in 1799 (Napoleon’s military coup), but after numerous twists and turns in 1879, when France finally became a republic. Rather than featuring five events, Revolutions effectively covers a century each of American and French history, and three quarters of a century of English, Russian and Chinese history respectively.

That is not the only unexpected aspect of Sassoon’s book. It’s full of surprising observations and conclusions. He has good things to say about the much-maligned Robespierre, for instance, and provides a nuanced assessment of Lenin’s role. Even Mao Zedong is recognised as “a brilliant war leader.”

Karl Marx, “who was supposed to know a thing or two about revolutions,” although he “did not provide a Marxist theory of revolution,” is cited frequently. That’s because he was a contemporary observer. Sassoon gives much space to the analyses of authors like Marx and Alexis de Tocqueville — but he also frequently quotes contemporary poets. By contrast, he largely ignores the views of other historians. That too adds to his text’s readability.

The book’s most surprising focus is on slavery and colonialism. Nowhere is Sassoon’s history of revolutions celebratory. It’s true, he writes, peace finally prevailed in England, but “elsewhere there was much blood.” “Violence was exported: to Ireland, the Australian First Nations, India, Africa, the Caribbean and China.” And the American revolution was “far less than the establishment of a society based on the idea that all are ‘created equal’” (as the 1776 Declaration of Independence had claimed), even after the conclusion of the civil war. This failure, he writes, has “reverberated for more than one hundred and fifty years.”

Not least for its novel insights and new perspectives, Revolutions is entertaining and is likely to keep readers engaged over the course of its 344 pages. They may also appreciate that Sassoon’s evident erudition allows him to get away with being opinionated.

In writing about dispossession in Australia or about transatlantic slavery, he makes us think twice about the achievements of the European and American revolutions. When detailing the violence accompanying a revolution, he also likes to put things into perspective. Violence was not specific to Russia’s twentieth-century history, he says, but “intrinsic to European history.” In the nineteenth century, the “two great civilised liberal democracies” exported it to the colonies. And in the first half of the twentieth, “violence, authoritarianism, murder and genocide plagued the whole of Europe — a historical dimension often forgotten by those who speak glibly of ‘European values’.”

More recently, I would like to add, when European values (“the successful struggle for peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights”) were recognised by the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize, the violence against irregularised migrants at the European borders has once again made a mockery of claims that Europe is somehow more civilised than other parts of the world.

Trying to put violence into perspective, Sassoon sometimes seems obsessed with casualty figures. He argues that the death toll of the Kuomintang’s massacres of between 18,000 and 28,000 of Taiwan’s indigenous inhabitants in 1947 was, proportionately speaking, higher than that for the Chinese Cultural Revolution, that China’s Great Leap Forward cost, in relative terms, fewer lives than the Irish famine of the 1840s, and that proportionately fewer demonstrators were killed on 3 and 4 June 1989 on Tiananmen Square than in May 1980 in the South Korean city of Kwangju. But does that make the Chinese figures any less horrific?

Similarly, Sassoon observes that the number of people killed during the French Revolution’s so-called reign of terror may pale into insignificance when compared with the death toll of the English crushing of the United Irishmen’s revolt of 1798. I suggest the point here could only be that the latter has not been as well remembered as the former.

In terms of its subsequent historicisation and commemoration, the uprising in Ireland — a revolt, not a revolution — was no match for the French Revolution, which has probably been written and talked about more extensively than any other event of the eighteenth or nineteenth centuries.

Sassoon’s book, published by Verso rather than by an academic press, is evidence of a widespread fascination with revolutions. It does not account for that fascination, and nor does it explain the feeling of exhilaration experienced by the revolutionaries — not by Lenin or Robespierre but by the women and men erecting barricades and risking their lives climbing onto them to wave flags and taunt soldiers or police. Much like revolutions — which, according to Sassoon, arrive “unexpectedly, catching the revolutionaries themselves by surprise” and “follow an unpredictable course” — this feeling erupts, sometimes without prior warning.

We remember pasts beyond our own lifetimes if they are part of social memory, the memory shared by the group to which we belong. It is now also widely accepted that suffering, and memories of such suffering, can be transferred across generations. The children and grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are often haunted by traumas they did not experience personally but which they inherited. It is therefore conceivable that extreme positive emotions, such as the feeling of exhilaration experienced during a revolution, are also remembered — in this case, perhaps the more so since the pathos of revolutions has been preserved in music, poetry and other works of art.

Songs such as “¡A las Barricadas” or calls like Reichinnek’s appeal to people yearning for an opportunity to make their own history, for a radically different present, for the world to be turned upside down and for a new calendar marking a new beginning. Such yearning may be informed by subterranean memories of barricades and, as Walter Benjamin reports about the Paris events of July 1830, of revolutionaries firing “simultaneously and independently” on the tower clocks as if to arrest time itself. •

Revolutions: A New History
By Donald Sassoon | Verso | $62.99 | 426 pages 

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It might seem surprising that a leader with Churchill’s responsibilities, at such a crucial time, would undertake a task usually performed by the postal service. But Jessica “Decca” Mitford (1917–96) was rather a special case.

She and her five sisters had been fixtures in the British press ever since their “debuts” in the 1920s and 1930s, celebrated for their good looks, aristocratic upbringing, and wildly divergent politics. By the time of Jessica’s meeting with Churchill, Nancy (1904–73)  was on her way to becoming a well-known novelist, Deborah (1920–2014) had become a duchess, and Pamela (1907–94) was a socialite. Diana (1910–2003), the most beautiful of the Mitfords, had famously left her first husband to marry Oswald Mosley, founding leader of the British Union of Fascists, and by 1941 was interned alongside him at Holloway Prison, regarded as a serious threat to British security.

But the most notorious of the sisters was the indomitably named Unity Valkyrie Mitford (1914–48). A glimpse of the moustachioed ranter at the 1933 Nuremberg Rally had transformed Unity into a slavish admirer of all things Nazi, to the point that she inveigled herself into a friendship with the dictator himself: “The Führer was heavenly,” she cooed in her diary after a lunch with Hitler. But the outbreak of war between her home country and “the greatest man of all time” left her distraught. She attempted suicide only to survive with permanent brain damage, and by 1941 was living in her mother’s care in Oxfordshire.

Jessica had always been closest to Unity, but her divergence from her siblings had become visible early. Alone of the sisters, Jessica had become disconcerted by the palpable differences between her cosseted existence and that of the people she spied living in the village nearby. Her family lived in palatial, well-kept surroundings; these people had small cottages smelling of years of tea and overcooked cabbage. The Mitfords were “slender, aqua-eyed, and graceful”; the women in the village were toothless, marked with cysts and goitres, and had backs bent from years of manual labour and poverty. “Could these poor creatures be people, like us?” Jessica wondered.

Her sympathy and her revulsion at the aristocratic life her parents had created for their children — no formal education, no children to play with, no modern medicine — didn’t stop her from reaching for dangerous ideas. When Unity began decorating their shared bedroom with Nazi paraphernalia, Jessica responded by drawing a chalk line down the middle and decorating her side with hammers, sickles, and photographs of Lenin.

She was searching for a way out and, in Esmond Romilly, her second cousin and nephew of Clementine Churchill, she found someone who could offer that. A handsome and rebellious young man, Esmond had been an early critic of the British upper-class fascination with fascism. He had twice been injured protesting against Moseley’s Blackshirts — including at the infamous Battle of Cable Street — and he had been among the first Englishmen to join the volunteer brigades that went to fight the fascists in Spain.

Sitting next to him at a dinner, Jessica asked if he would be going back to Spain. And if he was, would he take her with him?

Their elopement, in February 1937, caused a stir up and down the length of respectable Britain. So well-publicised were their plans that when they disembarked in Bilbao, the foreign minister of the Basque republic turned up to meet them. Jessica’s parents attempted legal action to bring her home, then brought in Scotland Yard, then appealed to friends in high places. Foreign secretary Anthony Eden ordered Britain’s consul to Spain to persuade Jessica to return home and deputised a destroyer-class warship to transport her.

Every inducement failed until that consul finally threatened to leave hundreds of Spanish refugees stranded unless Jessica acquiesced. She gave in — but only went as far as Bayonne, in southwestern France, where she and Esmond were married.

The couple finally returned to England in September, where Jessica bore a daughter, Julia, and found work as a marketer. But tragedy struck. One consequence of Jessica’s childhood isolation was that she had never been exposed to measles. She therefore had no immunity to pass onto Julia, who died in 1938 amid a measles outbreak. When supposed friends and acquaintances scoffed that she had bought it on herself, Jessica became only too ready to fall in with Esmond’s suggestion that they go and live in America.

Carla Kaplan, author of Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford, believes the decision was of a piece with Jessica’s determination to get out of the class that she detested. Rather than retreat into its comfortable safety after Julia’s death, she decided to keep moving — and to put the bereavement behind her, not to be dwelled on or talked about again.

She did something similar when Esmond died. After their somewhat itinerant life on the east coast was interrupted by the second world war, Esmond enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force and Jessica settled in Washington, giving birth to a daughter, Constancia, in February 1941. Esmond was posted to England, where he was seconded as an observer with the RAF. That November, his plane set out on a bombing raid on Homburg but failed to return. Search and rescue found no trace of him, but Jessica — by now, pregnant with a boy — refused to believe that her husband was dead. Even Churchill’s insistence at that Christmas 1941 meeting could not move her. “WAITING FOR BETTER NEWS,” she telegrammed her mother, in mid-January 1942.

When she did give into reality, Jessica fled west, to San Francisco. “Separated by six thousand miles from family in England and by three thousand miles from my nearest American acquaintances, I could be virtually reborn as an anonymous bit of human flotsam in this remote outpost,” she later wrote. “I was both excited and a bit desolate at the prospect.”

Like the Lisbon girls in Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, the Mitford sisters have been the subject of fascination that borders on the voyeuristic. They arguably encouraged it. Nancy’s most famous novel, The Pursuit of Love (1945), was a family portrait lacquered with the veneer of a fictional romantic comedy, while Jessica’s autobiography, Hons and Rebels (1960), removed the veneer of fiction entirely. In a tone leavened by self-deprecation and shadowed by knowledge of what would come, she wrote of her upbringing with an eye for the telling detail.

One reason for the fascination lies in way history cuts across the siblings. The Nazi and fascist sympathies in the family were pronounced and proved ruinous. Parents David and Sydney Mitford became estranged after war was declared: he was willing to renounce his earlier Nazi sympathies but she remained steadfast. Tom, the only son, remained so sympathetic that he refused point blank to fight Germans. Posted to Burma instead, he was shot dead in 1945 by a Japanese sniper. Diana Mosley’s unrepentant views led her to deny the Holocaust and affect a lack of interest in her own actions that was, at best, repugnant. “I can’t regret it,” she wrote, of her involvement with fascism. “It was so interesting.”

Kaplan, a biographer of Zora Neale Hurston and professor of literature at Northwestern University, is interested in how Jessica could have emerged from this. While initial chapters will be hard going for readers unacquainted with “Mitford-mania,” she gives considerable space to the intellectual and emotional makings of a Mitford sister who, in works written largely by British writers, has often been derided as an eccentric, the “red sheep” of the family. She is sympathetic in her description of the halting process by which Jessica broke free from her family, with all the pain that it aroused, while remaining in her family’s orbit. She parses the contradictions and complexities that saw Jessica estranged from her father, reconciled with her mother, estranged from Diana, and simultaneously dependent on and disenchanted with her remaining sisters.

In doing so, Kaplan adds considerable depth and understanding to the turbulent years that shaped the “queen of muckraking,” as Jessica Mitford became. As Kaplan tells it, Mitford’s flight west plunged her into a heady period in which her outlook was both validated and remade. Jessica made up for her lack of formal education by reading widely and becoming alert to the damaging effects of racism, sexism, and class-based discrimination. As an investigator with the Office of Price Administration, she learned how to find information that people wanted hidden; as a member of the Communist Party, she tested her ideals and courage by refusing to answer questions when subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Her second marriage, to civil rights lawyer Robert Treuhaft, gave her a foothold from which to witness the struggle for civil rights.

All this informed her turn to writing and her focus on investigative book-length journalism. The American Way of Death (1963) was a needle-sharp exposé of avaricious pretension and blatant lies in the American funeral industry. The lingo alone was ridiculous: graves were referred to as “internment spaces,” she discovered, and undertakers called themselves “grief therapists.” They retailed devices to make a corpse’s breasts look perky, and flogged expensive metal caskets to mourning families with the promises they would preserve loved ones from decomposition. The truth was rather different: gas build-up inside those sealed caskets increased the speed of decomposition, and explosions were not unusual.

Published by Simon & Schuster’s Robert Gottlieb, with an enormous dollar-sign funeral wreath on the cover, The American Way of Death became a bestseller, and vies with Hons & Rebels as Mitford’s most notable and best work. Her other books — on prisons, on a high-profile trial, on her experiences in the Communist Party, and on the birthing industry — never reached quite the same heights, partly because those heights were so lofty. But a steady stream of articles identifying hucksters and frauds in other industries ensured that Mitford remained the “queen” of the genre.

Her books constitute the most substantive part of Jessica Mitford’s career, a claim to fame beyond her family upbringing. It is peculiar, and somewhat unfortunate, that the half of Troublemaker that deals with this part of her life is less enthralling and more abrupt than what precedes it. Her likely rape by a stranger seems to have warranted more attention, especially given the fact that she declined to report it and embroidered her later accounts with the well-timed but fictional intervention of her husband; or the revelation, late in their marriage, that Treuhaft had carried on a prolonged affair with a mutual friend. “It was typical of Decca to say least about whatever hurt her most,” Kaplan writes.

True — but in that silence is surely something more. But for Kaplan it is Jessica Mitford’s empathy and resolve are the most astonishing things about her, and the quality that makes her important right now. “She demonstrates the difficult process through which true empathy can be learned and practised… Those who seek to become good allies can learn a great deal from Decca’s ways of change. So can anyone who would like to start a life over, anyone who would seek a do-over that goes in unanticipated, improbable directions.” •

Troublemaker: The Fierce, Unruly Life of Jessica Mitford
By Carla Kaplan | Hurst | $49.99 | 616 pages

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It is hard to imagine a policy area more emblematic of the Menzies era than housing, dealt with here by David Furse-Roberts. Under Menzies’s prime ministership, home ownership in Australia rose from around 53 per cent to around 71 per cent, with the ratio of house prices to average household earnings meanwhile holding steady at around three-to-one.

Although the family (-owned) home was a central component of Menzies’s version of the virtuous life, old Labor struggled with the transition to higher ownership rates. A Chifley government minister could deride Menzies’s proposed support for increased home ownership as a promise to turn workers into “little capitalists.”

What is clear is that Menzies’s love affair with home ownership was based on the home as a place to live rather than a component of an investment portfolio. He would surely have been surprised to learn that in 2025, of the several federal MPs recording multiple property ownerships, equal top of the list was a backbench Labor senator (seven) and equal third was a Labor government minister (five). Not so “little” capitalists.

Menzies saw home ownership as reinforcing “the conservative instincts for security, stability, continuity and loyalty to people and place.” The political pay-off was obvious. Contrasted with today, a young Menzies-era voter was more likely to be married, in their own home and responsible for several children, and the male “breadwinner” probably had a steady, well-paying job — all favourable territory for supporting the political status quo. Furse-Roberts astutely observes that only under Gough Whitlam did the Labor Party adapt its electoral pitch to the property-owning reality.

Today’s Liberal Party has struggled to adapt to this century’s fall in home ownership rates — a failure that, along with cultural and related issues, surely helps explain the reluctance of sufficient of today’s thirty-something progressive voters to commence that previously well-trodden journey to conservatism. A Liberal voter with six properties gets one vote; six young voters (sans property) get six votes. If demography is electoral destiny, the consequences are less than promising for the party.

Perhaps Menzies’s most important decision as prime minister was to commit Australian troops (including conscripts) to the Vietnam war. Lucas McLennan’s chapter on the role of anti-communists in the consequential debate seeks to make up for what he sees as an over-emphasis on the activities of the (initially unsuccessful) antiwar movement.

McLennan cites Menzies’ parliamentary announcement of the troop commitment — “the formal request of the South Vietnamese government… in collaboration with the United States” — but omits the fact that Australia and the United States had to pressure a reluctant Saigon to make the “request.” The “request” had been requested, and the failure to acknowledge that seems curious at best.

McLennan mentions the involvement in the war of members of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization but makes no reference to the absence from the battlefield of Britain, France and Pakistan. He outlines the motivations of pro-war elements in Australia, with Catholic activist B.A. Santamaria assigned a key role. The domino theory features prominently, but it is not clear how fervently this was believed by the players in question. The need to be seen as a reliable US ally seems a more convincing motivator, although the two explanations are not mutually exclusive.

McLellan will court some controversy with his assertion that Australia’s diminished commitment by 1972 means “the view that the Vietnam war played a central role in the election of the Whitlam government is not a serious position.” On balance, this is not unreasonable, but 1972 did signal an end to the vulnerability on defence and foreign affairs that had plagued Labor in the 1950s and 1960s (with its crushing defeat in 1966 the best example). The failed Vietnam intervention, along with outdated views on the Chinese “threat,” had exposed conservative fallibility in this area; since then, it can be argued, defence and foreign policy have not been a decisive factor in any of federal Labor’s election defeats.

Menzies’s supporters might claim, however, that modern Labor’s endorsement of the American alliance indicates its acceptance of the Liberal founder’s emphasis on the need for “great and powerful friends.” An enduring legacy?

Another decisive Menzies policy initiative was “state aid” for non-government schools, an issue addressed by Anne Henderson. By 1963, the stars had aligned for the resolution of the age-old conflict over appropriate government assistance for (largely religious) non-government schools. The Labor Party’s split in 1955 had carved a mostly Catholic vote away from the party to the breakaway Democratic Labor Party; traditional Catholic–Protestant mutual hostility was waning; and many postwar immigrants were Catholics seeking a religious education for their children. As a bonus for Menzies, Labor was divided on the issue.

At the 1963 election, Menzies proposed federal government science grants for all schools, although Henderson doesn’t think the initiative played a critical role in the government’s return with an increased majority. With some understatement, she observes that, “incrementally, federal governments would increase funding for non-government schools over the coming decades…” As with the US alliance, Labor members’ views of state aid would probably now vary between opposed and lukewarm; but also as with the alliance, electoral reality is seen to require funding for private schools, with debate round the edges on the “needs” criterion. Another win for the Menzies legacy?

The role of Commonwealth (university) scholarships was touched on by Andrew Norton in the third volume of the series, and this volume includes both a more detailed outline of the scheme and some revealing interviews with some of the (ageing) cohort of scholarship-holders, all of them grateful for the opportunity provided and most of them conceding that without such an award they could never have attended university. This was not Whitlam-style mass free tertiary education, but it was consistent with Menzies’s view that the best and the brightest were not only to be found in families able to afford full fees.

On universities more generally, Lyndon Megarrity (in a chapter on liberal education) notes how “Menzies’s liberal ideals influenced his ultimate generosity towards the university sector.” His consistent commitment to the humanities would render him an oddity today, both in his party and more broadly, as would his complementary view that fostering intellectual development was a defining role of universities.

On the lighter side, Selwyn Cornish’s chapter on the adoption of decimal currency suggests that while Menzies was initially inclined to support a proposal to name the new unit the “royal,” he had no qualms about siding with public opinion, which favoured the dollar. Whatever the nomenclature, post-1965 school students had much to be grateful for, liberated forever from the burden of adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing in pounds, shillings and pence (not to forget the pesky halfpenny).

A recurring theme in this and preceding volumes has been the intellectual element in Menzies’s political outlook and policy agenda. This is revisited in the final chapter by Charles Richardson, which examines leadership, factions and philosophy. One of Richardson’s several interesting points is that Menzies — party founder and longest-serving prime minister — was, like John Howard, the second-longest-serving prime minister, “forged in the fires of opposition.” Perhaps the current Liberal Party turmoil is part of a leadership training program?

All four of these volumes are beautifully put together and well-edited, but the pedant in me cites two factual errors in this final volume to confirm that those overseeing the project are human: the Dawson by-election is identified as occurring in 1967 (it was 1966) and Labor MP Les Haylen’s name is misspelt as Heylan.

Tiny blemishes aside, the series has made a significant contribution to scholarship on the Menzies era, encompassing well-known aspects and some less so. I suspect that it will be a long time before future scholars face the challenge of assessing a prime ministerial record of such longevity and consequence. •

The Menzies Legacy: Ideals, Change, Procession, 1960s and Beyond
Edited by Zachary Gorman | Melbourne University Press | $50 | 392 pages

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My father read the paper pretty thoroughly, focusing on the political and general news, the letters to the editor, the cartoons and, especially on Saturdays, the classified advertisements. Cars and real estate interested him the most, but he often glanced through the personal ads and rarely failed to find something to tickle his funny bone.

Until the internet arrived to suck newspapers dry of these “rivers of gold,” the classifieds section of any daily paper heaved with vivid little glimpses of the lives of our fellow citizens. Buying, selling, leasing, proclaiming, persuading, searching, celebrating, grieving: even the tiniest one- or two-line ad had a human story behind it.

Hilary Mantel, a dedicated reader of newspapers, ignored the news and features entirely in favour of the small ads. In a local paper in Norfolk she once saw for sale three bridesmaid’s dresses, identical, to fit sizes 24, 26 and 10. Ever since, she wrote, “I have been imagining the photographs from the original wedding, and wondering if such bridesmaids ever occurred for a second time, or if the dresses are still hanging in the closet.”

This was in a piece she wrote for the Guardian in 2009 titled “Where Do Stories Come From?” She could make a national paper last two hours, she said, after which it looked like a drunk had been making paper hats with it. She was coy about whether she worked any of this material into her fiction, though. Perhaps not, and yet how comforting for a writer to know such slivers of inspiration are right there for the taking.

I often chuckle over Mantel’s bridesmaid’s dresses, so perfectly offered up for the reader to fill in story from their own imagination. And it occurs to me that there would be plenty of material for a historian as well if only we are willing to let go of some of our habitual efficiency and purpose and instead follow Mantel’s example and read a newspaper simply to absorb the ebb and flow of life.

Such an approach runs counter to current practice now that newspaper research is so easy, at least in Australia where so many digitised newspapers can be read online for free through the National Library’s digital repository, Trove. The site’s search capability to deliver astoundingly granular results in seconds encourages what I think of as an “arthroscopic” approach to research.

What I mean is that with each of our searches, we seekers of historical evidence equip ourselves with our arthroscope (in real life a tube with a tiny camera on the end, often used by surgeons to diagnose joint problems) and insert it into our source: a newspaper. We probe deeply until we get what we came for, or what we think we came for, and we ignore everything else.

I use this keyhole technique constantly myself, usually chasing names and addresses. Anything could be significant when you research people whose lives are otherwise barely visible in the historical record, and it’s not just about who married whom, and the names they gave their children. You can trace a family’s slide into poverty by the addresses you find for them, for instance, or the number of times the father or mother appear before a magistrate.

Some of these quests have stayed with me. I once found a snippet about a twelve-year-old “sickly looking little girl” who, having been found wandering the streets in Sydney, was arrested and charged under the Destitute Children’s Act and sent to the Industrial School at Parramatta. I already knew exactly who she was — Clara Mabel Stace, an older half-sister of Arthur Stace, “Mr Eternity” — but this sad little fragment added significantly to my understanding of how this family eventually disintegrated under the weight of poverty and trauma.

I doubt this kind of outcome would have been possible in the age of analogue newspaper research. Still, as with any new research methodology, there are gains and losses.

Once, researchers relied on secondary sources and their own persistence, ingenuity and sheer stamina to scour newspapers for evidence, and you might have to scan almost an entire issue to get what you wanted. Quickly you learned how to identify the different parts of each edition — whether the classifieds would be at the front or the back, which page would feature the main news of the day and which the editorial, the social news, the weather or the sport. The eye might catch on bits and pieces not germane to the task at hand but perhaps providing enriched context or even offering whole new paths to follow.

Now, on Trove at least, an item is illuminated on the screen and the rest of the page greyed-out. It only takes a few clicks to bring up the entire page but I generally don’t, so strong is the temptation ignore the greyed-out section and click back to the next result on the list, and so on.

So this time I thought it might be fun to sit down with just one issue of a daily metropolitan newspaper and give it a slow read from beginning to end. It could be any issue from the glory days of twentieth century Australian newspapers, and yet I found myself unable to pick completely at random. I thought back to my father’s daily newspaper habit and fell to wondering if he had inherited it from his parents.

My grandparents had moved from Brisbane to Hobart in 1936 so my grandfather could take up a job with the Postmaster-General’s Department. George and Kitty had no relatives or friends in Hobart — they were starting life afresh — so surely they would turn to the local paper to help them settle into their new community? With that in mind I selected an issue of the Hobart Mercury published on Friday 11 December 1936.

I began by making myself a replica of the paper. I downloaded each page of the issue as a PDF, printed it at A3 and stapled them all together, blank pages back-to-back. The print is tiny — A3 is much smaller than the broadsheet Mercury in 1936 — but my replica does offer an approximation of the physical experience of reading the original. The issue on 11 December 1936 was twenty pages long and had eight columns. Feeling quite pleased with my little craft project, I sat down to read.

Page one: the classifieds. It seems bizarre to us that newspapers would bury the news people most wanted to read in the middle of the paper, but the longstanding assumption, dating back to the eighteenth century in the English-speaking world, was that people bought the newspaper for the advertising, and the news was incidental. Front page classifieds were also thought to distinguish a “serious” newspaper from a “sensational” one.

In Australia by the 1930s many newspapers had begun placing the news on the front page, and the Mercury started following the trend on 3 August 1939. But in 1936 the classifieds were still the first thing you saw. Top left were the announcements of births, engagements and bereavements, and many readers would run their eye down these to find out who was being “hatched, matched and dispatched,” as the saying went. Probably not my grandparents, though, because they were newcomers in Hobart and knew no one.

Instead I expect they used the classifieds as they were intended: as a source of information to help solve life’s practical problems. Having dropped her children at school and done some of her morning chores, I can imagine my grandmother sitting down at her house at 159b Main Road (now New Town Road) New Town, with a second pot of tea, pondering.

Christmas was coming and Hobart’s grocers were reminding people to think about their lunch menus. Arnolds in Liverpool urged their “numerous clients” to place orders early for English plum puddings, Christmas cakes and mince pies. My grandmother, I happen to know though I don’t remember her, was a splendid cook and taught her daughter, my aunt, to bake on a wood-burning stove, which wasn’t easy when the temperature has to be just right. Kitty was quite capable of making her own Christmas puddings and treats.

But on this day she might have paused, eyeing the stove in her new kitchen, wondering if she knew it well enough to take the risk at Christmas. Just this once, would it be easier just to buy the pudding? On the other hand, Hobart summers were very cool compared to what she was used to in Brisbane, so now would be the time to bake her heart out.

With Cyclops Toys (“They last a lifetime”) is advertising bikes and scooters, she might have made a mental note to talk to George about buying their youngest son (my father, aged seven) a new bike for Christmas. They’d had to sell many of their possessions when they moved to Hobart and having to re-acquire things like that must have been a stretch. Perhaps they could put it off until his birthday in January?

But then her eye might have fallen on the ad for Sunday morning, afternoon or day-long excursions on the SS Cartela along the Derwent river to Opossum Bay and South Arm. That would make a fine birthday treat. (I think my father must have been taken on trips like that because he loved the river and the Cartela, which had been built in Hobart in 1912.) It was still working on the river when I was growing up and we thought of it almost like an extra great-aunt: “Dear old thing, amazing how she gets about at her age!”

A few more classifieds appear on page two. Here’s one of the public announcements: “I, Henry Poynton, challenge to dance J. Dillon old-time waltz at Victoria Hall on December 16, 1936. (Signed) H. Poynton” What was that all about? Some kind of dance-off? Dancing shoes at dawn?

Most of this page is taken up by the shipping information (extremely important in this maritime community) and the weather chart, but there is a smattering of news. The vehicle road to the pinnacle of Mount Wellington, a project organised by the state government and the Hobart City Council to provide relief for Hobart’s unemployed during the Depression, was nearly complete. Here was the premier, A.G. Ogilvie KC, announcing the date of the official opening had been fixed for 23 January 1937.

Kitty and George (along with just about every other citizen of Hobart) would have been most interested in this because the mountain is an inescapable feature of life in this place. My grandparents didn’t own a car in 1936 but when my father was old enough he would join George on hikes to the pinnacle using one of the many walking tracks. The road, meanwhile, became known as “Ogilvie’s scar” — for good reason.

Page three is dominated by the results of the degree examinations held by the University of Tasmania. I showed this page to my younger son — a university student — and we studied it together. Is that everyone? It would seem so. The names of all students who passed their examinations in 1936 across all faculties could fit on one page and still leave room for large display ads by Hobart retailers advertising their Christmas wares, plus a few column inches on a series of thefts in a Hobart boarding house. The university was tiny in those days, neglected by the state government and allowed to limp along in inadequate accommodation in the city until finally, it the 1960s, it transferred to a new purpose-built campus in Sandy Bay.

Page four is dedicated to trade and finance, markets, stocks and shares. I’ve no idea if Kitty’s eyes glazed over this, but mine did. Page five is a full-page ad for Palfreyman’s, a department store in the city proclaiming itself “alive with the spirit of Christmas.” Hosiery, “haby” (haberdashery), handbags, handkerchiefs, tea sets, tablecloths, towels, toys. And “Bungalow cloths.” What are they? I have no idea.

I’ve reached pages six, seven and eight and still have not read any major overseas, national or state political news, which to me is perplexing. State parliament was sitting but was not, apparently, debating anything worth reporting. Instead, page seven has a long report on the school speech night at Launceston Church Grammar, including the headmaster’s address (reported verbatim). From Canberra comes a report on a dispute over the trademarking of the term “Mickey Mouse.” A new public golf course has just opened on a site close to New Town Bay. The Marquess of Hartington, the British parliamentary under-secretary of State for dominion affairs, was visiting Tasmania. There has been an improvement in revenue at the port of Launceston. The New Norfolk Council is in financial difficulties.

Part of what I’m seeing, I suppose, is the sheer insularity of Tasmania, which has been a theme throughout its settler history. The Mercury is, essentially, a local paper. But it also lacks the personality-driven politics we are so accustomed to, and, because I landed on a Friday and not a Saturday issue, there is no film star gossip, women’s page, gardening notes, book reviews or letters to the editor.

Then, just as I was wishing I had chosen a Saturday, my eyes fell on page nine. Here, finally, was the real news of the day, headlined across all eight columns: KING EDWARD DECIDES TO ABDICATE.

Of course. This was the year of the abdication crisis, and I happened to pick the exact day the news broke. I had to scratch about in my memory to recall the story, and the little I do know of it is partly derived from memories of a Thames Television dramatisation broadcast by the ABC when I was in high school. Edward VIII was played by Edward Fox so believably that even now, every time I see a photograph of the real Edward, my mind tries to re-arrange his features into those of the actor.

My grandmother would have had the advantage of me, if she was a daily newspaper reader as I am assuming she was, because the Mercury had been reporting on the story since early December. Just the day before, the paper declared that while there was still no finality in the King’s apparent determination to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson against the wishes of the British and Dominion prime ministers, a statement was likely that day. The “entire Empire” was awaiting his decision.

It arrived in Australia in the early hours of Friday 11 December, just before the British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, was due to inform the House of Commons. Australia’s prime minister, Joseph Lyons, had an address ready for public broadcast live on the ABC, but needed the text of the King’s abdication speech (“After long and anxious consideration I have determined to renounce the Throne…”) to add to it. The text came through from London via telephone to Parliament House in Canberra at around 1am, and was transcribed immediately by the prime minister’s staff. A photographer for the Melbourne Herald captured the moment. Lyons read the speech on the radio at 1.52 am and it appeared in print in the nation’s newspapers a few hours later.

I realise now that my grandmother probably skipped all those earlier pages and went straight to the abdication news. She and my grandfather might have read it together before George left for work, and on his commute down to the city there could have been no other topic of conversation. The Mercury’s offices were on Macquarie Street next to the GPO, where he worked, and even as he stepped off the tram journalists and printers might still have been creeping home to bed after a long, memorable night.

The Mercury dedicated five full pages to the crisis, with no ads. A Friday issue was usually fourteen or eighteen pages; on this day it was twenty. The coverage recounted the life of Edward VIII and his ten-month reign; noted events leading up the abdication; added some discreet mentions of Mrs Simpson; and speculated on what the future held for the new monarch, “King Albert I” (as it was assumed George VI would style himself). There were photographs of the new King’s wife and daughters, including Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen.

This content would have come from overseas wire services, but the paper added its own thoughts in its editorial. Reflecting the prevailing view in Australia and other Dominions, the paper chastised Edward for having been “not strong enough to place duty before personal inclination.” Never again, it predicted (accurately, as we now know), could he live in his native land, instead dwelling “in some poor splendour” with the wife for whom he had thrown away the “splendid heritage of duty.”

After all that it was hard to find the strength to turn any more the pages. But life in Hobart had to go on. Cinemas still wanted to advertise their screenings, and there were yet more ads from Christmas retailers. The back page carried a lengthy report of England’s victory over Australia at the Ashes Test in Brisbane.

For this reading of a historical source, I made myself as small as an ant crawling through grass, and just as ready as an ant to be baffled when I bumped into things I didn’t understand. Then, climbing to the top of a blade of grass, I found myself gazing with wonder at events that have had a permanent impact on the history of the world.

This was not what I was expecting. And I never did find out anything about Henry Poynton’s old-time waltz challenge to J. Dillon. That story is not for me; it awaits the eye of a novelist. •

The post My reading challenge appeared first on Inside Story.

This great-uncle was an unlikely subject for a seven-year obsession. Gaskill never met Ralph Corps (pronounced “Corr”), who died in 1980. Ralph and his wife Flo had no children, and memories of them had dimmed within the family. Their surviving relatives, principally Gaskill’s mother Audrey and her cousin Pauline, didn’t even much like the couple. Ralph and Flo, it seems, were not very nice people.

A chance conversation with Audrey in 2017 fired up Gaskill’s curiosity. Audrey had had a dream about her uncle Ralph in which he “stepped out of the shadows and held me by the arm — as if pulling me back.” Back to where she was not sure, but she and Gaskill sensed this was not random flotsam of the unconscious but more like a haunting or a visitation: the past calling on the present, as he puts it.

The little Gaskill knew about Ralph, gleaned from his grandmother, was that he had been a military policeman in North Africa who, as a POW in Italy, had punched an Italian officer, breaking his nose. He knew of a wildly improbable story that Ralph had made an escape through the floor of a train using just a knife and fork, and was later hidden in a hayloft while a local family nursed him to health.

Added to these scraps of family lore were the war comics, the old films and playground wargames Gaskill remembered from his childhood. A seed of curiosity was sown but remained dormant. As an academic historian, Gaskill made the social history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not the second world war, the focus of his career.

However, he tells us, in that field he explored inner lives and extracted emotion from the archives, and this kind of attentiveness might have been what heightened his sensitivity to his mother’s dream and sent him on a journey to learn more. The result is a very fine new book, The Glass Mountain: Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy.

Gaskill’s title is inspired by W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz. Borrowing Sebald’s image of a glass mountain as a cloudy prism, he continues:

You can know the past, the mountain promises, but only imperfectly. Nothing on the other side remains intact, and it’s up to us to find the pieces, in the dim light and in the darkness, and make from them a story that in good conscience feels real.

Gaskill won’t therefore be following Leopold von Ranke’s famous dictum that the writing of history should show the past “as it actually was.” That is impossible because history is “locked in time’s glacier, a frozen shower of distorted fragments.”

Locating and piecing together these fragments is what gives this book its very considerable narrative drive. It swings back and forth between the present and the past because discovery matters as much for Gaskill as the wartime events revealed. He finds himself “sitting in far-flung libraries and archives, hiking up rocky hillsides, splashing through autumn mud, sheltering from storms.” He visits old barracks and remote farms, and meets Italians with long memories who share their stories.

Slowly he learns that Ralph, a South Yorkshireman born in 1914 and a police officer in civilian life, was captured in Libya in one of the western desert battles of 1942 and transported to Italy, where he was imprisoned initially at Camp 65 Gravina, near the town of Altamura in southern Italy.

There he met and formed a deep friendship with a fellow prisoner, Royal Air Force pilot Charlie West. In March 1943 the pair plotted and effected an escape, only to be recaptured and returned after a few days. In May they were among a group of prisoners transferred to Camp 52 Chiavari in the north of the country, close to the coastal resort town of that name.

After Italy’s surrender to the Allies in September 1943, a cohort of Camp 52 prisoners including Ralph and Charlie were packed onto a train bound for Germany. But the indefatigable escapees had their own plans. As the train came to a halt near the town of Dolcè, twenty miles northwest of Verona, they managed to lever up the rotting floorboards of a wagon using — yes — a knife and fork. Each man dropped through the hole onto the track below and rolled down an embankment to freedom.

What “freedom” actually meant for Ralph and Charlie was twenty-one desperately dangerous months, until the war ended in May 1945, evading the German forces occupying northern Italy, assisted by Italian fascist collaborators.

Thus far, Gaskill had been guided in his research by a memoir Ralph made (which had ended up in the possession of his mother’s cousin, Pauline) describing his experiences in Camp 65 and Camp 52. He supplemented this with a thorough immersion in the published and archival sources on POWs in Italy, and these camps in particular. The result is several chapters examining the organisation, economic life, politics and psychology of the camps, and the privations, sufferings and (occasional) joys and creativity expressed by the men held in them.

The memoir peters out before Ralph and Charlie’s escape from the train, forcing Gaskill to piece together the rest of the story from myriad official and personal records held in archives in Italy, Britain and the United States. Gradually he comes to understand the web of relationships in the towns and villages around Lake Garda where Ralph and Charlie found shelter and safety during the latter part of the war.

Shortly after their escape the two men decided to go their separate ways. Charlie eventually joined bands of partisans operating further north near Monte Baldo on the eastern side of Lake Garda. Ralph, meanwhile, found himself near the village of Paitone, west of the lake. Sick, exhausted and starving, he would probably have met his end right there except for the courage and generosity of several local families who opened their doors to him. He did briefly live in a hayloft while he recovered; that part of the story also turned out to be true.

Ralph saw out the rest of the war at Paitone, shedding his identity as a British soldier and becoming “Rodolpho,” a contadino, a peasant. He wore the clothes, adopted the loping gait and, in addition to fluent Italian, learned the local dialect of the region. Here also, in relative tranquillity, he wrote his memoir of his experiences in Camp 65 and his arrival at Camp 52, using three exercise books pilfered for him by a local schoolteacher.

Malcolm Gaskill’s claim that discovery is as important as the events discovered puts him and his relationship with his great-uncle very much at the heart of this book. In essence, it follows the writer’s ardent commitment to understanding another human being. No source is left unexplored: not just traditional library and archival material but also family history sites, Google maps, Facebook, conversations with informants, anything. The prose is vivid, lit up with the warmth of Gaskill’s own personality. I enjoyed it from the first word to the last.

The friend who queried Gaskill’s obsession was Domenico (Dom) Bolognese, an Italian man living in Altamura, three miles from the site of Camp 65. Dom’s father had been a POW and he has made himself a local expert in the camp’s history. Malcolm and Dom made contact through Facebook but had to wait until Covid restrictions had lifted before they could meet. By then Gaskill was all impatience to get to Italy, to walk the ground, to feel, imagine and deploy “the archive of the feet.” Dom eventually became his guide, interpreter and companion during this and all Gaskill’s subsequent visits to Italy.

For his first visit to Camp 65, however, Gaskill needed to be alone. Stepping onto seventy acres of dusty ground, thistles and ruined buildings was like “landing on a barren planet and discovering the ruins of a failed colony.” The sun was ferocious, he was dive-bombed by insects, he had not brought enough water. (I’d like to think that no Australian historian would make this elementary mistake.) But he got what he came for — the ghostly “frisson” of the prisoners who had been there before him. Standing where Ralph and Charlie had stood made Gaskill’s spine “tingle.”

In a later expedition Malcolm and Dom visit Camp 52 in the north, although they knew that all remnants have been removed from the site. They go anyway, as eager as ever to carry their “present-centred lives into someone else’s past.” Here they admire the beauty and verdancy of the landscape compared the arid plain on which Camp 65 had been built. Even without fences and crumbling huts, at Camp 52, “phantoms” still thronged in the “thick air.”

Gaskill is extraordinarily sensitive to the “affective” power of archives, artefacts and places. “Affect” in this context refers not just to emotion, but an emotional reaction felt in the body. Many historians (and biographers especially) experience it even if some are leery of admitting it in print. Not Malcolm Gaskill. His spine tingles, the hair on his neck prickles, he gets butterflies, he longs to put his body where Ralph’s had been so he can see and feel with him. When cousin Pauline lets him borrow Ralph’s memoir, he feels its “radiant presence” on the front seat of his car on the way home and is gripped with “spooky anticipation” as to what it might reveal.

An extension of this is Gaskill’s capacity to obtain the trust of his informants: descendants, usually, of Italian families who had harboured Ralph. Instead of putting his phone in front of them and subjecting them to an “oral history” interview, they sit down for a meal together and enter into the fellowship that was once extended to Ralph. “All this,” says Dom on one occasion, looking around at the company eating and chatting. “This is what Ralph felt. Incredible.”

Was it what Ralph had felt? We can’t say, and Gaskill knows this. Even with his visceral responses to evidence of the past, he maintains his core professional objectivity with Ralph. He is strongly aware of his relatives’ dislike for Ralph and Flo, but his own duty as a historian is to contextualise their lives and understand the choices that had been available to them. He judges Ralph to have been ambitious but reserved and unemotional; a man too fond of exercising authority (when he had any) and, later in life, maintaining his status in the eyes of others, to be a good leader.

Pauline went further. Ralph and his wife Flo were a pair of cold fishes: snooty, upper-crust and fake. “You could be writing a book about a very gallant man,” she told Gaskill. “But he wasn’t one.” Furthermore, she said, the war didn’t change him. The character he was before the war was the character he came back with, she believed.

Gaskill could see beyond this to the tough, brave side of Ralph’s character that the war had brought out, and knew there was a softer, romantic side too. He knew also that Ralph had been a tender friend to Charlie and was deeply respected (if not quite loved) by his Italian saviours. “I neither liked nor disliked Ralph,” he concludes, “nor did he disappoint me.”

In the family papers kept by Pauline he found a letter from his grandmother to Flo, saying that “the boy” — Malcolm himself — was thrilled to hear about Ralph’s war. It was a heart-stopping moment for him to learn that he had always been there, right in the heart of the archive. After all his journeying, he had returned to where it all began. “Tutto torna,” as his friend Dom liked to say: everything returns to its beginning. •

The Glass Mountain: Escape and Discovery in Wartime Italy
By Malcolm Gaskill | Allen Lane | $55 | 416 pages

The post Are you obsessed or what? appeared first on Inside Story.

Rosenfeld’s history, The Age of Choice, begins with Christopher Cock, a London auctioneer of the 1720s and 1730s. Cock worked out how to sell just about anything to just about anybody. His heavily promoted auctions encouraged want rather than meeting need. His printed catalogues listed every item on offer, with every one of them laid out for prior inspection. And the auctions themselves became a form of theatre, engaging buyers and bystanders alike in “carefully choreographed choice-making behaviour.” Cock was the progenitor of Sotheby’s, Christies and countless other “auction houses,” but more important by far, he was a pioneering “choice architect.”

Choice-making didn’t spread all by itself or in a straight line, but spread it did, colouring almost every sphere of life in rich societies and then, via “the export of choice itself,” at least some fraction of lives elsewhere. Rosenfeld illustrates several centuries of complex history through five cases in point: the choosing of things, of what to believe, of a life partner, of political representatives and, via the women’s movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, of whether or not to continue a pregnancy.

Idealised by Western thinkers as a “form of aesthetic and personal fulfilment, even liberation, for the person who aspires to live and define him- or herself precisely how she wants, unimpeded by the traditional boundaries of family, class, gender, taste, race, religion, age, or local culture,” choice is, in Rosenfeld’s view, as ambiguous in its moral complexion as it is complicated in its movement.

Some have more choice than they know what to do with, while others have little or none at all; choices made by individuals for themselves — about vaccination, for example — are in fact choices made for others too; sometimes emancipatory, “choice” has promoted a vacuous way of life; experienced as freedom, it is in reality heavily shaped by capitalism’s want-manufacturers and choice engineers. Countless millions of apparently individual choices have added up to an eroded sociability and cultural commonness; a weapon that helped win the cold war has also sponsored bread and circuses at the expense of democratic politics, shifting the balance of political power from democratic institutions to private corporations and hollowing out the lofty ideal of “freedom.”

The Age of Choice could be read as yet another account of the pathologies of a collapsing social order. “Our reigning concept of freedom,” Rosenfeld says, “has lost its way.” But her hedging of that and other conclusions with exceptions, qualifications and caveats makes it difficult to be sure exactly what she intends or concludes. Her prescriptions — she insists that historians have a duty to the future as well as the past — are Delphic. “I leave you, as a reader, with… the invitation to make choice a problem to be wrestled with before it is a default solution,” she says. “Let’s start wondering… if choice as we know it is really what freedom should be all about.”

Michael Sandel published Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good just in time to see a ferocious reassertion of “merit” as a defined by and for white males, along with a takeover bid for political ownership of “the common good.” So too Rosenfeld. Her wokeish conceptual wrestling won’t make much headway against those who have done their wrestling and emerged with a very clear idea about who will make what choices for whom.

Only in America? We could take comfort from our national government’s assault on the choice for tobacco and now on that apotheosis of choice, social media. Or we could list other decisions ceded to individual choice, ranging from gambling, highly processed foods and killer utes to that great corroder of the common good, choosing a school on social, ethnic and religious grounds and conclude that the social democratic tradition that marks Australia off from the US free-for-all is no longer capable of doing more. •

The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life
By Sophia Rosenfeld | Princeton University Press | $59.99 | 480 pages

The post Spoiled for choice appeared first on Inside Story.

Nazarbayev’s guest was the Australian governor-general Bill Hayden. It was April 1994, and Hayden had arrived that day in Almaty, capital of newly independent Kazakhstan, on an official visit.

Having whispered “No notes” to diplomat Ian Parmeter, Hayden replied, “Yes, it’s a complex document, and has been controversial, but it invests my office with sweeping powers. I appoint the prime minister and ministers; I open and close the parliament; I give formal assent to legislation passed by the parliament; I am the commander-in-chief of the armed forces: as such I can call out our army and surround the federal parliament.”

This means, he added, “I could run the country by myself if I chose to.”

“So, if you have all these powers, why not use them?” responded the Kazakh autocrat.

Amid the laughter of everyone in the room except Nazarbayev, Hayden replied that there were certain conventions in Australian democracy he was obliged to follow.

News of governor-general Hayden’s planned visit to Kazakhstan had first reached the Australian embassy in Moscow ten weeks earlier. Australia’s ambassador to Russia, Cavan Hogue, was also accredited to Kazakhstan, so it was the embassy’s responsibility to obtain the Kazakh government’s agreement to the visit and negotiate appropriate arrangements. It was to prove a little more complicated than expected.

As Parmeter related recently, staff at the embassy prepared a “third person note” setting out details of the proposed visit. Hayden was described as “effectively Australia’s head of state,” with no mention made of the fact that Queen Elizabeth II was Australia’s actual head of state. Parmeter, deputy head of mission, flew to Almaty, sought an appointment with the chief of presidential protocol and presented the note.

As a landlocked state near the centre of the Eurasian land mass, Kazakhstan had been visited by very few heads of state since its recent separation from post-communist Russia. The chief of presidential protocol, apparently unfazed by the word “effectively,” became visibly excited as he read the note, and then began sketching out a possible program: Nazarbayev receiving the governor-general at the airport, accompanying him to his hotel, meeting formally the following day and then hosting an official banquet the following evening. Having secured formal agreement to the visit, Parmeter returned to Moscow and reported to Canberra.

“About a month before the visit,” Parmeter recalls, “I flew to Almaty again to check on the program. As before, I called on the chief of presidential protocol, but this time he was not as friendly. His staff had investigated the position of governors-general in Commonwealth countries, discovering that the governor-general was the representative of the British monarch and concluding that Queen Elizabeth II was actually Australia’s head of state.”

All that was true, Parmeter responded, and it was why the word “effectively” had appeared in the note. Governors-general in Commonwealth performed all the duties of heads of state entirely independently of the British monarch. As the Australian constitution set out, the British monarch had delegated the role to the governor- general, whom he or she appointed on the advice of the Australian prime minister.

The protocol chief was unimpressed. He was obviously animated by the fact that President Nazarbayev had until recently been merely the first secretary of the Kazakh Communist Party — head of a Soviet “republic” and therefore a Soviet satrap. Now, as president of an independent Kazakhstan, he was determined to be recognised internationally as a head of state. “As such,” recalled Parmeter, “he would have formal meetings only with fellow heads of state. He was not going to be sold a pup.”

As the Queen’s representative in Australia, said the chief of protocol, the governor-general sounded more like an ambassador. The president would never host a state visit for an ambassador: “Send us your Queen!”

After Parmeter again took him through the constitutional arrangements, stressing the Australian governor-general’s constitutional authority to perform all the duties of a head of state, the chief of protocol said he would consult the president.

Parmeter phoned Hogue in Moscow; Hogue flew to Almaty that night. At a meeting next day the chief of protocol said that the president, in view of the friendly relations between Kazakhstan and

Australia, had graciously agreed to host a state visit for the governor-general. The two Australians flew back to Moscow satisfied that nothing further was likely to impede the visit. How wrong they were.

Returning to Almaty four days before the governor-general’s arrival, Hogue and Parmeter immediately called on the chief of protocol, who took them through a program that was substantially as agreed. Nazarbayev would meet Hayden at the airport and accompany him to his hotel. A full meeting with officials would be held the next day, followed by a formal banquet.

But then, just a day before Hayden’s arrival, the chief of protocol called Parmeter to his office. He explained some fundamental changes to the program: the governor-general would be greeted at the airport not by Nazarbayev but by Yerik Asanbayev, occupier of the largely ceremonial vice-presidency, who would also host the talks and a dinner (not a state banquet) the following day. There would be no meeting with Nazarbayev. The chief of protocol could give no reason for the change.

Hogue sought out the British chargé d’affaires, Owen Jones, who revealed that the Kazakhs had asked him whether Hayden should be received as Australia’s heard of state. Jones had replied that, yes, Hayden should be received with all honours and courtesies due to a head of state. The Kazakhs clearly weren’t persuaded.

Hogue and Parmeter declared the proposed changes, so close to the governor-general’s arrival, to be unacceptable. The chief, clearly embarrassed, left them in his office while he called the presidential staff. The upshot was that Nazarbayev would condescend to meet Hayden with officials at his residence on the evening of his arrival, but would still not be available to participate in the program the following day.

Hayden, en route, couldn’t be advised of the change of plan. So the two men went to the airport the following day to brief him on arrival. A seasoned professional, Hogue parlayed permission to go to the control tower to speak with the captain of Hayden’s VIP jet now it was in Kazakh air space. He was able to let a member of Hayden’s staff know that the vice-president would meet the governor-general when he landed, so at least that aspect of the visit wouldn’t be too much of a surprise.

In protocol terms the Kazakhs had emasculated the visit. But Hayden knew a refusal to comply would risk irking Nazabayev, who was known to place a premium on building personal ties with the heads of those states that had been prominent in supporting Kazakhstan’s — namely his — aspirations. And the government in Canberra, lobbied by Australian firms lured by Kazakhstan’s bountiful minerals and energy resources, had sought to building a solid bilateral relationship. Significant interests needed to be protected and promoted. Such, indeed, was the goal of Hayden’s visit.

Deeply concerned by the threat of a proliferation of nuclear- powered states following the breakup of the Soviet Union, Australia’s foreign minister Gareth Evans had endorsed a measured, pragmatic approach to post-Soviet Russia and the Soviet possessions that had claimed independent statehood. The government’s aim was to balance the twin imperatives of maintaining longstanding relations with Moscow while building ties with those of the newly independent republics — especially the Baltic States, Ukraine and Kazakhstan — that mattered to Australia.

The embassy in Moscow had been instructed to build contacts in all of the new republics. “We could only take a pragmatic, flexible attitude,” recalled Parmeter. “In the present case, such pragmatism meant acquiescing in Nazarbayev’s wishes.”

Other aspects of a visit rich in piquant ironies are not to be found mentioned in Hayden’s autobiography, but were noteworthy in the view of Hayden’s staff. They began at the airport, when Hayden undertook his first duty: inspecting the guard of honour. In accordance with Russian military tradition, the members of the guard were selected for their imposing height — all were about 190cm. But the aide-de-camp pacing along behind the GG, RAAF Flight Lieutenant Crosby, was a diminutive female person, bearing an unsheathed, highly polished cavalry sabre.

Hayden and his wife Dallas had been greeted by Asanbayev, the vice president (then, as now, a largely honorary position). The governor-general and his ambassador were ferried to the Presidential Palace in a capacious ZIL, the Soviet-produced limousine designed to rival the official vehicle used by Soviet leaders.

“Your Excellency’s aide-de-camp is a woman?,” Asanbayev politely enquired during the drive.

“Yes, she is,” said Hayden. “Almost all of my staff are women — I find I can trust them.”

Early on the second day of Hayden’s visit the chief of protocol informed Hogue that Asanbayev would host the governor-general and his delegation to a dinner at a private restaurant. That evening found the vice-regal couple seated with vice-president and his wife at the head table, accompanied only by the Australian ambassador, his wife, and the Australian interpreter.

Hayden, known to be partial to a glass of red wine, was on his third glass and clearly at ease when Asanbayev invited him to savour a Kazakh national dish, қазы (kazy), a salami made from smoked horse meat. The governor-general agreed with alacrity, remarking to Asanbayev that he was aware the horse occupied a special place in Kazakh culture.

“But of course!” responded Asanbayev. “As nomadic herders and drovers of the steppes, we rely on our horses for our very existence. Quite apart from transporting us to and from seasonal pastures, we use virtually every part of the horse. It supplies the hair for our pleated ropes, sinews for sewing, its milk for food and fermented as alcohol. The list is endless! And according to an ancient tradition, if a man over sixty fathers a child, the child’s name should contain a reference to its sire’s horse.”

Hayden appeared to find this revelation intriguing: “So, according to your traditions, the vigour, the vitality of the horse is somehow invested in its rider?”

“Not really,” replied Asanbayev. “We are a down-to-earth, practical people. We see it rather that if a man over sixty continues to spend much of his time in the saddle, a certain part of his anatomy tends to remain in good, productive working order.”

Dallas Hayden, who hitherto had taken no part in the conversation, whispered to her spouse: “Bill, perhaps we should buy a horse…” Asanbayev pounced, demanding of the interpreter: “What did she say?” Within seconds the whole restaurant was convulsed by laughter. Inadvertently, the vice-regal party had won their hosts’ hearts.

Bright and early the following morning the chief of protocol appeared with yet another proposal. The Kazakhs had been pondering how to honour the governor-general.

President Nazarbayev had been most glad to have been informed that last night’s banquet had been a jolly affair, and that the governor-general had taken a particular interest in a subject dear to every Kazakh. “He has decided that Kazakhstan should confer a particular honour on His Excellency,” said the chief. “Please to be ready to depart soon, in casual dress.”

The full delegation soon found itself bouncing along rutted tracks across the semi-arid steppe to be disgorged at a corrugated-iron barn on a stud farm for the breeding of the horse prized by Kazakh and Turkmen riders, the Akhal-Teke. The stud had recently been blessed by the birth of a colt that was an outstanding representative of one of the oldest and most distinctive breeds. He would be formally entered in the annals of the breed and globally recognised. Only one thing was needed: an appropriately dignified name.

The breeders, repositories of one-thousand-years of tradition, had been directed by the president himself to ask the governor-general to name the colt. The only condition was that tradition required that the name begin with a “P.” The arcane reasons behind this stipulation baffled the interpreter.

The governor-general turned to his staff: “Right, you lot are paid to think, so give me a name.” Said staff, some perhaps dealing with the effects of a surfeit of kazy and wine, pondered, until Hayden himself broke a tense silence: “Possum!”

According to that authoritative guide, The Horse Encyclopedia, the Akhal-Teke, bred to withstand desert conditions, is said to be “rather obstinate.” As the visit concluded and the delegation set off for Mongolia, some felt that this adjective aptly described Kazakh officialdom in 1994.

Two postscripts. Five months after the visit the Canberra Times reported briefly in its “vice-regal” column that the governor-general had been admitted to hospital with a fractured leg, having fallen from a horse.

Later, in the lead-up to the Australian republic referendum in 1999, Hayden took the monarchist side. Ian Parmeter recalls seeing him in a television debate claiming that when he travelled abroad as governor-general he was always accepted as Australia’s head of state. “I felt like kicking the television screen,” said the man who had steered the rocky preparations for the 1994 visit. •

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The book’s premise is simple but powerful: colonial settlement began in the south of the continent, and this shapes assumptions about experience in northern Australia. Reynolds instead points to the very different patterns of European engagement, the violence that characterised the growth of rural industry, the multicultural settlements in the Northern Territory and Queensland. Here is a picture teaming with detail but skilfully framed. Looking from the North delivers what it promises, upending expectations.

Henry Reynolds begins with the personal — arriving in Townsville in 1965 with wife Margaret and their first child. They would stay for more than three decades, but the narrator soon disappears from the text. Even discussing controversies in which he was a key player, including the documenting of the frontier wars, Reynolds largely resists personal reflection. This seems a loss — he has so much to tell us about the north he knows. Yet we soon see the continent afresh through his reading of what matters.

Here are the stories of early contact, the settlement of northern Queensland by just a handful of pastoralists, the complex history of settlers and First Nations people, misunderstandings in the south and in distant London. Reynolds explains the role of Aboriginal peoples in the rural industries they first resisted and then made possible with capable labour and knowledge of country. He doesn’t avoid the disturbing record of the Queensland government’s Native Police, nor the massacres on the frontline. And Reynolds is keen to highlight the Asian diasporas which found a home in northern Australia until the White Australia Policy saw longstanding communities expelled and ancient trade exchanges ended.

It is an extraordinary story told gently. In an almost understated tone the text conveys distressing facts — the estimate, for example, that the Native Police killed more than 40,000 First Nations children, women and men in just over forty years, with perhaps another 20,000 deaths from vigilante groups, which suggests that as many First Nations people died cruelly in Queensland alone as the entire nation lost in the first world war.

There are also quiet corrections. The assumption that Pacific Islanders shipped into Queensland to work on the canefields experienced near slave-like conditions requires nuance. Examples can be found of exploitation by plantation owners, without doubt, but also of Pacific Islanders who returned more than once, built lives in northern towns, started businesses, and became prosperous — at least until the Commonwealth intervened. Evidence matters. Truth-telling runs quietly through the narrative.

Reynolds traces Chinese migrants attracted to goldfields as miners and suppliers of food and equipment. Their presence sparked moral panic in the south versus a quiet local recognition of how quickly these new arrivals became respected within communities. Yet such contributions didn’t win friends in the newly created Commonwealth. Reynolds devotes a chapter to the introduction of the White Australia Policy. If removing Japanese and Filipino pearlers devastated that industry, it was a price entirely acceptable to politicians living thousands of kilometres south.

Further chapters trace an important shift through the twentieth century — the imposition of whiteness across the north up to the second world war, and then a growing recognition that a migration policy based on skin colour and culture was no longer tenable following the 1963 United Nations Declaration Against All Forms of Racial Discrimination. The pariah status of apartheid-era South Africa was a sharp reminder of how Australia might be viewed if it failed to change. Courts and government alike begin to shift, and the policies of 1901 slowly faded.

Also changing the north has been the slow but consequential growth of the land rights, which have been pursued by the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement since 1959. It is a movement still gathering strength, as the most recent agreements across Cape York demonstrate, with nearly a million hectares returned to traditional owners.

First Australians are the thread running through Looking from the North. In acknowledgements to close the volume, Henry Reynolds pays tribute to the First Nations mobs which welcomed him and his family to Townsville. He celebrates the Torres Strait Islanders and the descendants of Pacific Islanders he came to call friends, and the students at James Cook University with whom he worked, shared research projects, learned with and from. Only passing reference is made to the heated history wars during which Reynolds was often attacked but also recognised as an outstanding historian who helped Australians understand uncomfortable realities of our shared history.

In reading Looking from the North I thought often of the north Queensland I knew only as a visitor from Brisbane. The Cairns that bears fleeting traces of the diverse and thriving nineteenth-century town Reynolds describes. The small ports scattered along the coast to ship coal, wool and cattle from the vast hinterland. The rich history, and sometimes troubled present, of Thursday Island. The landscape managed for generations by First Nations people, including the lookout at Grassy Hill near Cooktown where the English captain climbed often to track a path through the reefs. And the view of the coast from the grassland at the peak, beaches and hills peeling away to the south, giving a glimpse of the perspective Reynolds encourages us to ponder in this short but powerful book. •

Looking from the North: Australian History from the Top Down
By Henry Reynolds | NewSouth | $34.99 | 224 pages

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After the trip, he wrote some reflections on his Substack:

Shenzhen is such a dope city. Legit looks like the future more than any city I’ve been to… Huaqiangbei is massive. Honestly I’m thinking about doing a month-long hardware residency there so I can crash course EE by building stuff hands on.

It is crazy how much their society grinds. It’s in their DNA. The work ethic is insane. Shenzhen was dirt and mud forty years ago and now it’s the world’s example of a cyberpunk city.

Reading his words, I felt a familiar pressure — a small internal shift I had sensed accumulating for years. I left China at seventeen, in 2012, arrived in the United States, and absorbed the ambient narratives of American centrality that still held cultural authority then. I spent much of my twenties trying to construct a language that neither flattered nor demonised either country.

But seeing China through Aadil’s eyes forced me to recalibrate. I remember that afternoon by West Lake in Hangzhou, when we did not schedule any tech company visits in order to simply drink tea by the ancient water. I had  been to West Lake a few times growing up, but watching Aadil record his vlog with excitement made the lake — with the weight of all its accumulated history — feel at once familiar and alien.

His China did not arrive through the frameworks I inherited from college professors, journalists or scholars. It came through other channels: viral videos of synchronised drone shows, TikTok montages of Shenzhen’s skyline, tech bloggers’ analysis of DeepSeek’s efficiency, Cantonese rap circulating through global youth culture, hardware tutorials filmed in Hangzhou studios by Chinese tech influencers.

For Aadil, China is more than a geopolitical puzzle. China is modernity itself. It is what the future is supposed to look like. It is, to borrow Kevin Kelly’s phrase, “Cool China”: a China that produces things other people want to imitate, a place people aspire to visit and live in.

I am eight years older than Aadil, which makes me just far enough away to feel like a different generation. I grew up in a time when the United States still radiated a kind of unquestioned allure. Apple’s iPhone 4 was an object of worship in my high school. China was rising, but not yet glamorous. If you told my teenage classmates that American kids in 2025 would look to China for inspiration, they would have laughed. But something has changed. The drift is subtle but undeniable.

Kaiser Kuo captured one strand of this change in his recent essay “The Great Reckoning.” A friend of mine in London, connected to a group of China watchers, even held a reading club for this piece. Similar arguments have appeared across the United States: Rush Doshi’s “The Moment China Proved It Was America’s Equal” and Eric Schmidt and Selina Xu’s “China Is Building the Future,” among others.

Kaiser writes from the perspective of someone who arrived in China in the late eighties. He witnessed the brink of liberation in 1989, the subsequent crackdown, and the poverty and disorder that younger generations can barely register. His generation absorbed Western triumphalism almost by osmosis, and now must dismantle the frameworks that once felt self-evident.

In the piece, his call is for intellectual honesty: “American elites, stop coping. Stop the reflexive yes-but that rushes to minimise Chinese accomplishments before the evidence has even settled.” His message resonates because it names something true: the discomfort many American elites feel when confronted with a world that no longer fits their inherited mental maps.

Over the past few years, though, I have  watched versions of reckoning with China unfold across very different milieus, each shaped by a unique vantage point. For Kaiser’s generation of American intellectuals, the reckoning is slow and psychological. For younger Americans like Aadil, it is almost effortless. In Silicon Valley, it is brisk and utilitarian. And inside China’s own online subcultures, it takes a form so alien to Western discourse that it barely registers as the same phenomenon. We are drifting into parallel, sometimes incompatible, ways of seeing the same country.

For Kaiser’s generation, the reckoning is existential. It requires tearing down the intellectual scaffolding that once organised their understanding of the world. It is painful because the story of American centrality was central to their identity. The polling data he cites confirms the generational break. Younger Americans no longer see China as a rival to be contained. They see it as simply part of the landscape, a sovereign fact of their world. They came of age after the 2008 financial crisis, after Iraq, after the chaos of 6 January 2021, and in an era when American infrastructure could not build a functional train line between two major cities. American exceptionalism was never something they lived. It was something they heard older people talk about.

This is Aadil’s America and China. It is its own form of innocence. Sometimes, such innocence flattens China into a shiny image, ignores contradictions, and overlooks costs. On TikTok and Instagram, China appears as a glittering spectacle: drones forming three-dimensional shapes above Chongqing, maglev trains gliding in slow motion, factories stamping out EV components at impossible speed, street fashion from Chengdu night markets. Sinofuturism, once an art-world concept coined by Lawrence Lek, has mutated into a mass aesthetic. It is now the default visual grammar through which millions of Westerners encounter China.

Yet this admiration of China also grows out of America’s own crisis. A few months ago, at an event in London, I heard economist Daron Acemoglu explain that liberal democracies are shrinking in both number and legitimacy. Young people increasingly doubt the democratic model, and sympathy for authoritarian alternatives has moved from the fringes toward the centre. Antiliberal ideas are gathering force.

In a postindustrial economy reshaped by automation, digital technology, and globalization, America’s sense of loss has made China strangely magnetic. Princeton political scientist Rory Truex put it more starkly: America is experiencing democratic erosion. The current administration is conducting “trial-balloon repression.” The irony is pointed: Truex built his career studying Chinese authoritarianism, and now finds himself analysing similar autocratic patterns at home.

Another version of such “China reckoning” is happening in Silicon Valley. It looks almost nothing like Kaiser’s careful unlearning or Aadil’s intuitive acceptance. In Silicon Valley, the reckoning has already moved into the stage of reverse engineering.

The tech world operates on compressed timelines and instrumental logic. When you are building products or competing in markets, delusion is expensive. This is why Silicon Valley has had little trouble swallowing a bitter fact: in some domains, China has pulled ahead. The result is a growing obsession. For instance, Noah Smith  —  widely read among Silicon Valley elites — recently wrote about the “Electric Tech Stack” that undergirds drones, EVs and power electronics, arguing that China dominates this stack because it has built an industrial system that is faster, denser and more tightly coordinated than anything in the West. His question is blunt: how should the United States respond?

Venture capitalists have undergone their own version of this shift. Essays published by Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm a16z under the heading of American Dynamism read like memos from a rival civilisation studying an ascendant one. Andreessen’s partners and portfolio companies speak openly about the need for the United States to develop companies like the Chinese BYD or CATL. Ford’s chief executive recently admitted Chinese EVs were shockingly good — a confession that would have been unthinkable a decade ago.

The Progress Movement that I am part of as a writing fellow invokes China with a strange mix of envy and admiration. At the annual Progress Conference in October, China became a kind of motivational poster. The founder of California Forever argued that his plan to build a new city on farmland between the Bay Area and Sacramento could be America’s answer to Shenzhen. Naval architects and robotics entrepreneurs spoke reverently about Chinese shipbuilding and humanoid robot production lines. Even when they criticise China’s political system, they treat its industrial capacity as the baseline of what is possible.

What Silicon Valley lacks in philosophical depth, it compensates for in practical comprehension. The builders I meet are studying Chinese manufacturing processes, examining how BYD combines battery production, motor design and vehicle assembly under one roof. They quote Dan Wang’s Breakneck the way earlier generations quoted The Innovator’s Dilemma.

On top of reckoning, Silicon Valley’s China obsession runs in two contradictory directions. In one direction, geopolitical competition provides convenient justification: AI labs invoke the China threat to legitimise spending enormous sums on infrastructure and compute. In this framing, China becomes the rival racing toward artificial general intelligence — a competitor we dare not underestimate, one that must be contained. “Winning the AI race against China” becomes recast as existential necessity.

But in the other direction critics are increasingly asking whether Silicon Valley has become pathologically fixated on China. Rather than fatal competitor, China is Silicon Valley’s obsessive ideal. However, this narcissistic imagining of China as mirror and nemesis, may reveal less about China itself than about Silicon Valley’s own crisis of legitimacy and direction.

Another reckoning story is unfolding alongside the others, and it is the one that always catches outsiders off guard. While Western commentators are trying to see China more clearly through the tools of Western theory, young Chinese netizens have been busy coining vocabularies to say something different. They are learning to see China by stepping outside the Western perspective altogether.

Some of the most imaginative thinking in China today is happening not in universities or policy institutes but in the chaotic, half-serious, half-sardonic corners of the internet. Out of these keyboard politics circles (键政圈)  has emerged a whole mini-universe of homegrown concepts: the Industrial Party with its faith in engineers, ruguan theory (入关学) with its historical allegories, and, most recently, the irreverent and strangely revealing world of yingxue, or winnology (赢学).

The lineage of these ideas starts in the early 2000s, when clusters of patriotic young people on forums like Tianya and Tieba pushed back against the liberal vocabulary that dominated Chinese online debates. A few years later, this impulse hardened into something more coherent. The Industrial Party, a loose collective of engineers and technocrats, believed that the real story of modern China lay in factories, logistics chains and infrastructure, not in moral sermonising. Their heroes were not dissidents or thinkers but people who could build bridges and power grids.

Out of this soil grew something sharper. In 2019, at the height of the US–China trade war, a new idea swept across Zhihu and Weibo: ruguan, the theory of “entering the pass.” Its imagery came from the seventeenth century, when the Manchu forces broke through Shanhaiguan and replaced the Ming dynasty. Ruguan theorists used that moment as a metaphor for the present. In their telling, the United States looked like a late-Ming empire, still formidable but inwardly fraying, while China resembled the rising but still marginal forces waiting outside the frontier.

These theorists argue that China should stop trying to win approval from people who will never grant it. Build strength. Do the work. And when the power balance shifts, the same Western voices that dismiss China today will rush to explain its rise with great solemnity. A popular line captured this mood with a mix of humour and fatalism: after China enters the pass, the great scholars will write our arguments for us (“入关之后，自有大儒为我辩经”).

Winnology takes this impulse and turns it inside out. Its claim is that the difficulty many Chinese intellectuals have in acknowledging China’s successes is psychological. In this account, shaped by young internet theorists and discussed by researchers such as Yu Liang, a kind of invisible caste system has settled into the global imagination after two centuries of Western dominance. Western nations sit near the top by default, their achievements treated as natural extensions of their civilizational essence. Chinese achievements, by contrast, are received with suspicion: if China moves quickly, it must be cutting corners; if it innovates, it must have copied someone; if it wins, it must be winning wrong.

The metaphor is intentionally outrageous, but that is why it works. It names something people feel even if they cannot articulate it. It explains why some Chinese critics instinctively downplay progress at home, and why some Western commentators struggle to see Chinese accomplishments as legitimate. Winnology exaggerates, but its exaggeration has a purpose. It surfaces the hidden rules that shape how people talk about China, rules that have rarely been stated aloud.

Kaiser writes that Chinese intellectuals still hesitate to absorb what China’s success actually means. I see the same hesitation, but with a twist he only gestures at. The people who struggle most are often those who know the West best. They write and think in Western frameworks, and must constantly translate themselves into a language that will be understood abroad.

The result is a kind of double consciousness. To be legible to Western readers, they must speak in Western terms. To be honest to themselves, they must step outside those terms entirely. It is a difficult balancing act, and many fall back into the familiar comfort of Western theories even as they try to question them.

Meanwhile, on the Chinese internet, an entirely different sensibility is taking shape. Young users, unburdened by the need for international approval, play with ideas more freely. They make theories out of memes, stitch together allegories from history and science fiction, and build conceptual worlds that do not seek validation from anyone outside their own circles. Their reckoning is not a continuation of Western thought, nor a rebellion against it. It is a refusal to let Western categories set the terms of their imagination.

There is one more layer I feel compelled to add, a part of China that has never required calibration from me because it has never shifted beneath my feet. It is the China I grew up with, the one that has remained constant beneath all the reckonings I have described. If Kevin Kelly writes of a “Cool China” that Americans are obsessed with, I want to gesture toward something that sits alongside it and often underneath it, something I can only call the “real China.”

I do not mean real in any absolute or lofty sense. I mean real in the way Jia Zhangke’s films are real: the high-tech, the robots, and the glittering skylines are background scenery, while the human beings — their routines, their disappointments, their stubborn joys — occupy the centre of the frame.

This real China is made up of small town strivers and test-takers (小镇做题家), of the dense, improvised life inside urban villages, of the delivery drivers and gig workers who knit the country’s convenience together. For many of them, the cool China that dazzles Silicon Valley and TikTok barely registers.

A recently published memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, has been circulating in Western media. Its author, Hu Anyan, is one of the countless gig workers who embody this quieter, heavier, darker China. He writes about racing through Beijing during heat waves and freezing dawns, about sleeping in cramped rooms without air conditioning to save money, about the fragile economy of hopes he has built around each shift. His voice is innocent, almost childlike, yet what he describes is the most unforgiving edge of the system that produces so many of China’s spectacular surfaces.

When I think of Aadil wandering through Shenzhen in awe, I also think of my own mornings in that city. During that trip, my daily ritual was a 6 yuan latte from Luckin Coffee. That summer, China’s coffee chains were locked in a brutal price war, each company trying to out-subsidise the other. The result was absurdly cheap drinks, delivered to your doorstep. My cup arrived each morning. It came on the back of a scooter, carried by someone not unlike Hu Anyan, someone whose labour made the “cool China” visible to visitors while remaining almost invisible oneself.

If Aadil’s Shenzhen is the city seen from above, then there is also the Shenzhen seen from Hu Anyan’s perspective, built out of exhaustion, improvisation, and quiet endurance. Helen Gao’s recent New York Times piece “The China That the World Sees Is Not the One I Live In” shows such disparity. The state, she argues, presents an image of national confidence and industrial power, yet beneath that polished surface she observes something closer to fatigue: joblessness, shrinking household wealth, a pervasive unease about the future. It is a society that feels, in her words, wai qiang, zhong gan (外强中干): outwardly strong, inwardly brittle.

I nodded as I read her piece, reminded that China has always required a certain tolerance for tension, a willingness to hold several truths at once without flattening them. Perhaps the reckoning is nothing grander than that: a small but deliberate adjustment of the lens, letting a more complicated country come into focus, one that is capable of immense promise and real harm at the same time. Not choosing which China is true, but allowing that all of them are. •

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Explorers, settlers. In First Tasmanians: A Deep History, Shayne Breen’s long view puts Aboriginal experience at the centre of Tasmanian history, subverting its foundation story. But here deep history is more than an extended chronology of human–environment interactions. As Indigenous scholar Greg Lehman writes in the book’s foreword, it conveys the profound meaning of being on Country and tells the story of living in a place that we must all come to know and respect.

Breen has published widely on Tasmanian environmental, social and Indigenous history, and the depth of his scholarship and commitment to pedagogy — he helped establish Aboriginal Studies at the University of Tasmania — is evident in this ambitious book.

Breen’s long view is revealed through the book’s three sections, covering the deep past, collective Aboriginal life and the colonial period, and the recent past. Each section draws sequentially on environmental history and archaeology, cultural anthropology and history, with genocide and trauma studies informing the final section. The skill with which Breen weaves these strands together is one of the book’s accomplishments.

The title is carefully chosen, emphasising prior occupation and affiliation with a wider polity. First Tasmanians squares off, rhetorically and thematically, with Tom Haydon’s 1978 film The Last Tasmanian, featuring young ANU archaeologist Rhys Jones.

Jones interpreted data from his excavations at Rocky Cape, on Tasmania’s northwest tip, along with readings of historical sources including G.A. Robinson’s journals documenting his attempts to relocate Tasmanians to Flinders Island, to paint a picture of isolation and cultural decline. Tasmanians, Jones claimed, had a far simpler toolkit than mainland populations. Archaeological data suggested they ceased to eat scale fish about 3,500 years BP and, Jones argued, had lost the ability to make fire. Increase ceremonies did not feature in ritual life. All were markers of a fatal trajectory that began with the separation of Tasmania and the mainland and was dramatically hastened by colonisation in 1803.

The film’s opening scenes show the reburial ceremony of Trukanini (the last “full blood” Tasmanian) off Bruny Island in 1976  and includes footage of two Cape Barren Islanders saying they did not consider themselves Aboriginal. Those statements bolstered Haydon’s extinction narrative. For Breen, they revealed a lived experience of oppression and marginalisation.

He doesn’t dwell on the film, although he identifies Jones, along with N.J.B. (Brian) Plomley, editor and annotator of Robinson’s journals, as “firmly located in the evolutionist framework.”  Since the film’s release, further research — including excavations in southwest Tasmania, new understandings of environmental conditions, food resources and diet, and re-examinations of earlier archaeological evidence and written sources such as Robinson’s journal — has revealed the extent of occupation, patterns of resource management and trade, and the complexity of religious and cultural life of the first Tasmanians.

The debate over eating scale fish, Breen remarks drily, has been blown out of all proportion. To be fair, Jones and others conceded the point. Indeed, Jones participated in the important Kutikina cave dig that revealed Ice Age occupation of the southwest “wilderness.” But the damage had been done. As Indigenous Tasmanians asserted their political rights, Jones ceased to work there.

The book’s second and longest section deals with collective life, with chapters on people, country and culture. “Apart from a few short articles,” Breen notes, “there are no extended accounts of Tasmanian collective life that use methods and insights from cultural anthropology.” Reinterpreting historical British and French sources, he describes a complex, organised and culturally rich society.

Breen challenges the emphasis on Tasmanians’ isolation by drawing parallels with Indigenous populations in mainland Australia, South Africa and North America. Similar techniques of land management, such as mosaic patterns of burning, are evident in each region. He argues that burning country “produced an island-wide infrastructure of well-maintained hunting and gathering niches that were well stocked with staple foods — and a range of less common delicacies.” Colonial surveyors found country that was “cultivated and diversified.” Some parts looked like “freshly ploughed fields,” other parts exhibited “the most beautiful verdure from the sprouting of young grass and rushes.”

The Tasmanians’ landscape management was likely part of an overall pattern of ancestral design, Breen argues, fulfilling ritual obligations necessary to assure social order and fertility. The surveyors, though, were on the lookout for new territory to incorporate in the “settled region” of Van Diemen’s Land. That process involved overcoming Indigenous resistance, eliminating any threat to enlarging the sheep walk.

This process was facilitated by declaring an “open emergency” and martial law in the late 1820s, followed by the infamous Black Line manoeuvres designed to sweep the remaining Tasmanian population into the island’s southeast corner. That operation, Breen argues, is conventionally seen as a fiasco, a failed exercise in hard power replaced by Robinson’s “friendly mission” to remove the dwindling Tasmanian population from the island. Breen connects both strategies within a wider pattern of oppression.

Here, Haydon’s film is a point of flexion where a narrative of the passing race is confronted by one of resistance and revitalisation. Trukanini’s reburial campaign was a significant event for a new generation of activists, part of a wider strategy of self-determination that included repossession of ancestral remains, land rights, and language revival. A turning point was a 1971 meeting in Launceston of three communities — southern, northwest and Islander — to establish the Aboriginal Information Service. In 1977 the organisation became the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre. TAC-led protests picketed Haydon’s film in Hobart, Melbourne and Sydney, but its international distribution kept the narrative of a doomed race in circulation.

In the book’s final section, The Recent Past, Breen steps back to give voice to Tasmanian Aboriginal writers, activists and artists to tell their own story, through the lenses of invasion, resistance, trauma and revitalisation. The political and cultural significance of language is a key theme. Seeking a conceptual vocabulary to adequately describe the historical experience of colonisation, Tasmanian writers and activists began using the term genocide from the 1980s.

The term was coined by the Jewish scholar Raphael Lemkin, who fled Poland for the United States in 1941. The description of Nazi attempts to “Germanify” Polish society was later extended by Lemkin into a global history of genocide which, Breen points out, included a chapter on Tasmania. There, Lemkin drew mostly on the work of nineteenth-century historian James Bonwick, who had a better understanding of Tasmanians than most of his contemporaries.

Cultural genocide, Lemkin argued, had two phases, first imposing the occupier’s society, economy and culture on the country stolen from local owners, and second — in response to resistance by the colonised group — destroying collective life through assimilation policies and outright violence. Later scholars, seeking to rescue the term from its immediate application to the Holocaust (which, Breen argues, also enabled colonial states to avoid judgement on their actions) theorised colonial genocide, a wider historical process in which the colonial power permanently occupies Indigenous lands, enacting policies of assimilation and cultural erasure that might take centuries to unfold.

Imposing a colonial culture has, almost everywhere, involved eradication of Indigenous language. The anthropologist Wade Davis has described Indigenous languages as old growth forests of the mind, a metaphor that seems appropriate in the Tasmanian context. The reconstruction and use of palawa kani, a composite language built from historical records including Robinson’s journal and from fragments of living memory, has been central to the revitalisation of Tasmanian Indigenous culture. This patient work of several decades has produced fluent speakers and a range of palawa kani teaching resources.

Colonisation’s legacy is complex. Palawa are unable to demonstrate continuous practice of traditional laws and customs to claim rights under native title legislation. In 1995 the Tasmanian government, the first in Australia to apologise for past treatment of Indigenous people, handed back significant archaeological and cultural sites, and the Australian government has facilitated the purchase of other land parcels for agricultural enterprise and training in environmental management.

The Tasmanian government suspended the process of gazetting palawa kani place names in 2019, and Palawa experience greater disadvantage in education, housing, employment and encounters with the justice system than the wider Tasmanian population. Yet, as Breen concludes, “for a people on the edge of oblivion just 200 years ago, the revitalisation is a triumph of human resilience.”

This is a marvellous book, deeply researched and accessible. Future printings should, though, correct an error on the foreword’s first page. The Australian parliament was not opened on 1 January 1901, as stated. That day saw the proclamation of the Australian constitution in Sydney’s Centennial Park, when the colony of Tasmania, as it was renamed in 1856, became part of the new Federation. The national parliament first convened in Melbourne’s Exhibition Building on 9 May 1901. •

First Tasmanians: A Deep History
By Shayne Breen | Miegunyah Press | $49.95 | 336 pages

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I bet many readers thought I had the Australian Democrats in mind. Which would just go to show how successfully Don Chipp, the party’s first leader, promoted his party as the epitome of participatory democracy. By which he meant that policies and even parliamentary leadership positions were decided by a vote of the entire party membership.

Chipp, a former Liberal, was central to the founding of the Democrats in 1977 when he was still on the rebound from being cast out from the ministry by Malcolm Fraser following the December 1975 election. And, yes, we are now at the half-century mark of the advent of Fraser’s prime ministership, the unfashionable flipside of the Dismissal anniversary.

That Chipp and his new party proceeded to win two Senate seats at the 1977 election was a shock to the Liberals. Fraser’s ditching of the popular minister was a political misjudgement second only to his terminal mistake of calling an early election in 1983 before discovering he was facing Bob Hawke as opposition leader. The rise of Chipp’s gentle juggernaut tells us much about Australian political culture and just might provide a lesson or two for today’s struggling Liberals.

Chipp under each of Liberal prime ministers Harold Holt, John Gorton and William McMahon received far more publicity than the more typical junior minister. As customs minister overseeing the importation of some hitherto banned books he became the shining epitome of trendy liberalism, while Fraser was wrongly seen as firmly lodged in the party’s far right.

Even decades later, Fraser didn’t make clear why he expelled Chipp from his ministry. The antipathy looks to have been more personal than policy-based, not helped by Chipp having supported two Fraser enemies, Gorton and Billy Snedden. Patrick Weller noted in Malcolm Fraser PM that Fraser invariably stuck to his opinions of individuals.

It must be said that Chipp was widely admired outside his former party, and seems to have been an entirely sincere individual. Labor senator John Button thought him “a very likable larrikin.” Snedden detected a more complex mixture of “altruism, egoism and anger” motivated by “an enormous conscience.”

Chipp’s eponymous memoir Don Chipp: The Third Man (co-authored with John Larkin) is a rich source of anecdotes about other parliamentarians. He once nearly punched young Fraser for amusing himself by depositing pickled onions and ice cubes in colleagues’ jacket pockets. His book is studded with proclamations about the Democrats representing “the politics of hope” and suchlike, along with all-purpose denunciations of “greed and selfishness,” not to mention “apathy and indifference.”

Chipp’s writings also abound with references to popular seers of the ilk of Alvin Toffler, Margaret Mead, Hermann Kahn and Paul Ehrlich, to an extent that Michael Oakeshott, that great philosophic critic of rationalism in politics, would have found amusing. (Or perhaps just tiresome?) At least Chipp was even-handed, smiting both “the blue-singleted ocker” and “his more genteel counterpart.” His promise to “keep the bastards honest” — he was referring to the major parties, especially the Liberals under Fraser — became one of our most enduring political aphorisms.

Chipp’s departure didn’t amount to a split in the Liberal Party. His Democrats were instead based on dissatisfied and uncommitted voters, with an infusion of former members of other middle-of-the-road parties. He was not the sole creator of the Democrats but his exceptional public profile made him its catalyst.

Fraser’s worry was that the new party would channel votes to Labor via preferences. In the event, he won the 1977 election with ease. But there was now a viable alternative for those voters convinced he was a heartless ideologue. At the December 1980 election the Democrats won three more Senate seats, giving them the balance of power in the upper house as of the following July.

The Democrats happily followed their leader in seeing themselves as both pure and unique. They were, in fact, neither. The first was an impossible standard for any political entity to maintain, as shown by the Democrats’ very mixed history in the years following Chipp’s retirement in 1986. By 2008 they held no Senate seats at all. New parties invariably arrive on the political scene bearing an exaggerated moral vanity that is destined to slowly fizzle. Many might be puzzled to hear that the nascent Country Party was quite convinced of its own purity.

The early Democrats also showed little awareness that they were at heart the latest manifestation of Australia’s long, undistinguished and by no means unique history of producing minor parties that proudly reject major-party politics. (All roads lead to history, I say.) The Great Depression in particular generated what political historian Peter Loveday described as “anti-political political thought.” Its more extreme manifestations included the paramilitary New Guard in 1930s New South Wales and the extraordinary little gang of parliamentarians and others plotting the unilateral separation of New England from Jack Lang’s New South Wales.

The more moderate All for Australia League tasked itself merely with creating a unity of purpose among the entire citizenry that would supersede all sectoral interests. Meanwhile, the delightfully named Sane Democracy League had sufficient cred to persuade mainstream right-of-centre figures Richard Casey and Joe Lyons to address its meetings.

More seriously, when Robert Menzies and his confreres sought in 1944 to create a new anti-socialist party from the ruins of the United Australia Party they had a fine array of dissenting entities to draw on. In Victoria alone there was a Services and Citizens Party, an Australian Constitutional League, a Young Nationalist Organisation and, conveniently closer to home for Menzies, the Kooyong Citizens’ Association.

This legacy of anti-political dreaming helps explain why the Democrats did so remarkably well for a minor party that lacked a solid social or regional base. They successfully appealed to what Paul Kelly described as “a synthesis of radicals, lefties, greens, the disenchanted and the caring nice people.” They also owed much to their very mixed post-Chipp leadership having included the capable Janine Haines and Meg Lees. They peaked at a remarkable nine senators following the election of 1998 before going into a slow, painful decline. I am surprised to have discovered they still linger as an entity registered with the Australian Electoral Commission.

The Democrats’ other big achievement was unintended. They convincingly demonstrated that participatory democracy, the antithesis of Edmund Burke’s representative democracy, simply does not work. Their initial party model had ordinary members being invited to vote on policy and the leadership using mind-bogglingly complex ballot papers. The efficacy of this process was predicated on a high level of engagement that proved unforthcoming.

More positively, the Democrats helped sustain popular faith in the virtues of seeking alternatives to the major parties. Neil Brown, another former Liberal colleague of Chipp’s, spotted as early as 1993 how the Democrats “gave a new respectability to minority parties and consequently to independent members of parliament.” They encouraged the idea held by today’s Greens, One Nation and teals that they have a special moral authority to impose on majority elected governments, despite their not being responsible for the consequences of what might ensue. The teals have the convenient added advantage of not being impeded by a formal party structure.

The Chipp affair was a bit of a one-off for the Liberals. Chipp was blessed with such an unusually strong personal following that he provides only the broadest of lessons about the desirability, where possible, of corralling dissenters safely within the party tent and perhaps benefitting from their honest feedback and popular appeal. Anyone thinking of splitting off to establish a new political entity should ponder the short history of most minor parties. Such departures don’t magically banish intractable policy challenges.

Big established parties might seem decidedly unfashionable nowadays but they offer some unique advantages. These include providing the most demanding of training grounds for potential national leaders, giving voters a clear choice between comprehensive, ideologically differing programs, and, being aware they may have to bear the consequences, having every incentive to think carefully about the practicalities of what they preach.

So, please, don’t ask who I happened to vote for so wantonly the first couple of times I went to the polls. By now you should be able to tell. •

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The passionate ones survive today, but in dwindling numbers. Few who rallied for and against Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser in November 1975 could have foreseen that before the end of the century those two men — political giants and fierce enemies in the 1970s — would collaborate in support of a republic, among various causes, and even appear together at public events, as they did at Kevin Rudd’s apology to the stolen generations in 2008. But the Dismissal itself faded into a distant, blurry history — passing, as even dramatic events must, from current affairs to living history to collective memory.

The egyptologist Jan Assmann’s distinction between two types of “collective memory” — “communicative” and “cultural” — might be helpful in understanding how to think about where the Dismissal now sits in Australian life. Communicative memory is the product of everyday interactions that lead to “numerous collective self-images and memories” and is distinguished by “its limited temporal horizon.” This variety of memory might last three or four generations: say, eighty to one hundred years. “Cultural memory,” by way of contrast, is characterised by its “distance from the everyday,” as well as its role in constituting a social group’s identity. It might be seen as shading into “legend” or even “myth.”

The fiftieth anniversary of the Dismissal suggests that the event, as well as the brief, turbulent history of the Whitlam government itself, still lives within communicative memory. People will tell you where they were when it happened. They will tell you how they felt. They might tell you what the Whitlam government meant to them, and what its Dismissal signified and signifies. Such memories are held, and communicated, in and beyond families and other small groups, even allowing for Australians’ reputed reluctance to tie their identity to political history or civic life.

But I would also like to suggest that the Dismissal is moving towards what Assmann calls cultural memory, with its greater abstractions. It will continue to play a role in telling us something about who we are: but as an event capable of shaping everyday action and understanding, as a truly lived history, it is fast fading.

One test of this is how we talk about our democracy. There is now an entrenched discourse that celebrates the robustness of Australian democracy: it is there in the ABC program, Civic Duty, hosted by Annabel Crabb. It is there, too, in the use of the term “democracy sausage,” which began not much more than a decade ago and seeks to connect the Australian way of life, represented by the pleasures of the barbecue, with to the act of voting, represented as the epitome of democratic fairness.

This discourse equates democracy with voting. It ignores trade union and social movement activism. It hides the decidedly undemocratic way political parties so often operate, including the large donations they receive from vested interests that won’t be revealed until well after election day, if at all. It tells us nothing about the actual exercise of political power, the quiet lobbying and buying of access, the marginalisation and exclusion of voices politicians don’t wish to hear, the oppressions experienced by those without wealth, status, connections and power. It has nothing to say about social and economic inequality.

It also has nothing to say about the Dismissal. That would surprise the generations of 1975, those enjoined to “maintain your rage and enthusiasm” — and perhaps even those who loathed the Whitlam government and were glad to see the back of it. The nation left the Dismissal behind, tucked away in the back of the wardrobe along with safari suits, flared trousers, wide collars and other unfashionable legacies of the 1970s — to be retrieved, perhaps, for the occasional 1970s party.

Each anniversary of the Dismissal was still dutifully noticed in the media, but the idea that the events of November 1975 might carry deeper meaning for one’s judgements about the quality of Australian democracy seemed to be less in evidence as the years passed. New books came out, along with the occasional media documentary. New discoveries about the inner workings of the Dismissal were made possible by historian and Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking’s long legal fight for the release of the Palace Letters, the correspondence between governor-general Sir John Kerr and the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Martin Charteris. But the task of demonstrating the contemporary relevance of the Dismissal had become tough.

This disconnect could not easily have been imagined in November and December 1975. The generations of 1975 fought for a version of Australian democracy they believed to be under threat. They believed that vested interests had mobilised, the media had played dirty, a chief justice had betrayed his claim to neutrality, opposition parties had thrown aside propriety, and a representative of the Queen, a “colonial relic” who should confine himself to opening the occasional fete, had sacked a democratically elected government using powers most considered had fallen into disuse.

Part of the process of submerging the Dismissal was to normalise it. The Coalition parties worked that way in 1975: they framed their actions, and Kerr’s, as a working out of the democratic system, the constitution displaying its capacity to resolve a crisis. As we saw in some fiftieth-anniversary public statements by Liberal politicians, including shadow education minister Julian Leeser, and right-wing media commentators, this remains integral to their defence of the Dismissal: that it was legal, proper and, even if hardly a common event, nonetheless a normal and acceptable process.

The work I’ve been doing with James Watson, thanks to support from the Whitlam Institute, tells another story, although not via the usual means of closer study of the elite actors — Whitlam, Kerr, Fraser and chief justice Garfield Barwick — or their principal actions. Rather, we turned to social and political movements, and the engagements of citizens and activists.

There is one sense in which their responses to the Dismissal were indeed “normal”: we are seeking to recover the Dismissal less as a unique constitutional event than as an emblematic and supremely important example of the wider popular politics of that time. It was an era of social protest, political mobilisation and industrial militancy.

We need to recover the history of the Dismissal as part of a more expansive sense of the possibilities of democratic citizenship in the 1970s, and on a less happy note, to see in the course of the protest movement of 1975–77 a harbinger of the disarming of much of this radical hope in the later 1970s, 1980s and beyond.

A gathering crisis

When the Coalition deferred supply on 16 October, it broke a convention of parliamentary politics that many Australians felt was central to the health of their democracy. Few Australians would have believed that a government with a democratically elected majority in the lower house should be blocked by the Senate from governing, despite there being some recent precedents, at least at state level.

The Cain Labor government in Victoria had lost office in 1947 when supply was blocked in the upper house but then forced its way back into government in 1952 by denying supply to the Country Party. Similarly, the Tasmanian Legislative Council had forced an election in 1948 by refusing supply to Robert Cosgrove’s Labor government. And in 1970 Whitlam himself had defended voting against a budget in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in an effort to “destroy the government” (a quote that was often used against him by Kerr and his supporters after 1975). But it is one thing to talk in such terms in the heat of parliamentary debate and in the absence of a Senate majority, and another to actually do it.

In response to Fraser’s denial of supply, Australia’s unions organised large-scale protests. The massive, powerful and militant Amalgamated Metal Workers’ Union held “spontaneous strikes.” Sydney members of the Waterside Workers’ Federation announced a twenty-four-hour stoppage for Friday; 1000 of them marched from the union rooms to the rally addressed by Whitlam and the ACTU’s Bob Hawke, the Labor Party president, in Hyde Park.

Outside Parliament House in Canberra on the Thursday, while the budget bills were being considered by the Senate, Hawke told a crowd of 2500 that if the opposition refused to grant supply, “the Australian trade union movement may very well think about withholding supplies from them.” Was that a threat of a general strike? Probably not, given the meeting had considered and then rejected a motion for such action. Still, the National Country Party leader Doug Anthony accused Hawke of “incitement to lawlessness.”

The role of the perceived potential for social disorder in the events leading up to the Dismissal has been underestimated by historians. At the beginning of October, with the plan to block supply on the opposition’s informal agenda but not yet a reality, Liberal Movement senator Steele Hall publicly warned Fraser he would fail to build a “popular base” for his leadership if the community “contained the bitter and growing discontent of Labor supporters who believed the ballot box had lost its democratic function.” Kerr himself, writing shortly after the first rallies and strikes following the blocking of supply in mid-October, told the Queen’s private secretary: “As the money runs out many problems will arise and the reaction of the trade unions has to be considered. There are threats of protest strikes and industrial ‘war’.”

Ian Macphee, a leading Victorian Liberal moderate, wrote a couple of weeks later along similar lines: if the Coalition won an election “stemming from the present crisis we will have the outright hostility of nearly 50 per cent of the electorate.” He worried especially over the unions, which “would feel justified in destroying our government as they believe the Senate destroyed their government.” The confrontation involved, he said, was “frightening to contemplate.” The Labor senator John Wheeldon told the Senate during the budget debate on 16 October:

This government has been trying to maintain the economy of this country on an even keel, by advocating wage indexation and by restraint in public expenditure. If we are removed, will opposition members be able to convince the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union or the Miners Federation to restrain their wage demands? Why should the Amalgamated Metal Workers Union or the Miners Federation restrain their wage demands if they know that they are living in a society in which anything goes.

Fear of violence and disorder was real, even while the rallies and protests held in the immediate wake of the blocking of supply were mainly orderly and peaceful. But at a Liberal rally at Brisbane’s Festival Hall on 31 October, Liberal MP John Hughes was punched in the stomach and on the nose after he tried to snatch a placard from Labor supporters. A picture of his bloodied face appeared on the front page of the Courier Mail the next day. The ugly confrontation, although isolated and minor, exposed the danger of peaceful protest degenerating into physical violence amid an increasingly passionate politics.

The Dismissal and its aftermath

Many Australians would later remember where they were when they first heard about the Dismissal, usually reporting a sense of shock or disbelief. Some simply couldn’t believe what others told them or had heard over the radio. When the news did sink in, some were relieved and others angered, but anyone with even a basic appreciation of the country’s political culture understood they were witnessing something unusual and momentous. A young journalist, Niki Savva, described the scenes in Canberra that followed Fraser’s parliamentary announcement as “memorable, awesome and frightening.”

Demonstrators began assembling outside Parliament House — a few thousand by late afternoon — with smaller numbers going to Government House at Yarralumla where they lowered the flag to half-mast. The Canberra protests were peaceful overall, although demonstrators yelled “Sieg Heil” at Coalition politicians and invited those watching from the upper balcony of Parliament House to jump. When Fraser walked down the building’s famous steps to visit Government House for the second time that day, some protesters tried to punch him. Angry crowds also surged around his car on his return.

Good humour infused the remarkable appearance of comedian Garry McDonald, in character as Norman Gunston, who had flown from Sydney to join in the excitement. His appearance outside Parliament House delighted the crowd, to whom he made a well-received and rousing speech asking if the Dismissal was an “affront to the constitution of this country” or “just a stroke of good luck for Mr Frazier” (possibly confusing the new prime minister with the famous boxer). That people — even a leading player such as Bill Hayden, recently appointed treasurer — could find humour in these moments of high tension probably says more about the basic serenity of the country’s politics than any detailed account of the more aggressive forms of protest.

While Australia’s stock exchanges “went berserk” at the news of the Dismissal and “launched into the biggest buying spree” since the mining bubble of 1970, the events of 11 November raised the spectre of serious civil violence for the first time since the Depression. Protests occurred in the country’s capital cities over the following days, perhaps the largest and most destructive occurring in Melbourne on the 11th.

There, a pro-Whitlam protest at Liberal Party headquarters “erupted into one of the most violent demonstrations ever seen in the city” — according to the Australian — as protesters clambered over police cars and “kicks and punches were freely given.” Police were “led from the taunting crowd bleeding from head wounds and with their shirts torn.” A police wagon drove through the melee, knocking down protesters and police, while a horse used repeatedly to charge through the protesters was “battered with sticks and stones.” Glaziers refused to fix the broken windows of the party offices. “Each time they are asked to repair them, they just can’t quite seem to bring themselves to do it,” a helpful Furnishing Trades Society secretary explained.

In Sydney, about 2000 marched that day, mainly students, with scuffles but no arrests. Smaller protests were held in Adelaide and Brisbane.

Unions and the general strike

At a time when about 55 per cent of workers belonged to trade unions, by far the greatest potential for social disorder came from the possibility of mass industrial action. Sam Oldham has shown in Without Bosses: Radical Australian Trade Unionism in the 1970s that the decade was a period of significant labour movement militancy, not all of it securely under the control of union officials. Ideas of industrial democracy gained a significant foothold in many industries and contributed to shopfloor militancy. As Phil Griffiths has suggested, general accounts of the Dismissal mainly ignore the strikes that did occur and greatly underestimate the potential for mass action.

The Commonwealth Labor Advisory Committee, chaired by Bob Hawke and including the party’s federal parliamentary leaders and officers, ACTU leaders and representatives of the public service unions, met at John Curtin House in Canberra for several hours on 11 November. It passed a resolution expressing a “total dedication and determination to have the Whitlam Labor government re-elected.” Critically, there would be no support for a general strike.

Left-wing unions were most put out by what they saw as the unseemly haste of the rejection of mass strikes, the blame for which they laid squarely at the feet of Bob Hawke. The Melbourne branch of the Waterside Workers Federation, disagreeing with Hawke’s “reaction to the fascist onslaught on Australian democratic government,” urged that “industrial strength must be organised to move Fraser now.” The Federal Council of the Builders Labourers’ Federation donated a massive $20,000 to Labor’s election fund but also found “words hard to describe your [Hawke’s] gutless and cowardly statements regarding the current drive to fascism by Fraser. You have only strengthened current view that you are in the hands of the multinationals.”

The South Australian branch of the Australian Building and Construction Workers’ Federation wanted “an immediate general strike to demonstrate our disgust and complete opposition to the fascist moves of Fraser, the Governor-General and the multinationals.” It also called for “abolition of the colonial positions of Governor-General and State Governors, the expropriation without compensation of the multinationals and resolve to establish Australia as a truly Independent Republic, ruled by the working class, free of Imperialist domination.”

The Australian Railways Union rejected the “passive role” of the ACTU and called for “immediate and positive leadership.” Several unions wanted a twenty-four-hour stoppage, others forty-eight hours, but many others expressed their support for Hawke’s position, which had received subsequent endorsement by the ACTU executive.

Many unionists walked off the job on the afternoon of 11 November to attend hastily organised rallies, and hundreds of thousands went on strike in the days that followed. Seamen walked out, thereby tying up ships in the country’s ports. E.V. Elliott, veteran federal secretary of the Seamen’s Union and a communist, detected echoes of Hitler and Mussolini in Kerr’s actions and reported that many of his 5000 members had walked off the job on the 11 November, with some crews collecting as much as $1000 for the struggle ahead. Many of those at sea had radioed in their objections to Kerr’s actions.

On the 12th, hundreds of members of the union as well as some kindred maritime unions crowded into Sydney’s Trades Hall, where they pledged support for the re-election of Labor, promised at least a day’s pay and continuing political activity, and then marched through Sydney’s streets to Chifley Square. They returned to their ships on the 13th. Meanwhile, waterside workers began a twenty-four-hour strike at midnight as the 11th turned into the 12th.

Other workers — in the metal trades and railway workshops of Sydney and Newcastle, for example, and about 2000 at the Newcastle State Dockyard — spontaneously walked off the job soon after the news of the dismissal reached them. But the leaders of several large unions stood behind the ACTU’s support for the ballot box over strike action. The leaders of the Australian Workers’ Union, the Federated Ironworkers’ Union, and the Australian Postal and Telecommunications Union — all right-leaning — either opposed striking or said that any action needed to await further consultation between the political and industrial wings of the labour movement.

Among other white-collar unions, the Council of Australian Government Employee Organisations federal president, Ken Turbet, called on federal public servants to refrain from strike action. His position that “government are our employers, not political adversaries or friends, who should be served loyally and impartially” received the fullest commendation of one of its large constituent unions, the Administrative and Clerical Officers’ Association, which insisted on the political neutrality of public servants despite some pressure from the rank and file. If public servants had walked out, they could well have disrupted arrangements for the transition of the Coalition to caretaker government from 11 November and the 13 December election. Another group of public employees, ABC staff, held a four-hour stoppage on 14 November to protest against the management’s handling of reports on the crisis.

An emphasis on fundraising emerged quickly. Unions announced fundraising drives among their members and approved large donations to support Labor’s campaign, or in the case of the Teachers’ Federation to highlight the differences between the parties on education.

It is important not to see these actions through our knowledge of their ultimate fruitlessness, given the magnitude of Labor’s defeat on 13 December, because that was obviously not how matters appeared to many observers at the time. With the Whitlam government’s position improving in the opinion surveys, pollster Gary Morgan predicted a close result.

It was the maritime unions — seamen and waterside workers — who provided the strongest counterpoint to the emphasis on overturning the Dismissal at the ballot-box. They remained on strike for several days, while a walkout of Queensland meat workers closed many abattoirs. The massive Amalgamated Metal Workers’ Union required its members in the metropolitan areas to walk off the job for at least four hours on Friday 14 November, a day of nationwide protest. In Melbourne, it and other left-wing unions called out about 400,000 workers that day, contributing to the strong attendance at Defend Democracy rallies.

Isolated calls for a national strike continued, but even the left-wing unions appear to have realised that the time for any such action had passed, if indeed it had ever existed. On 25 November Pat Clancy, federal secretary of the Building Workers Industrial Union and a member of the Soviet-line Socialist Party of Australia, placed before the ACTU executive a call for a national strike during the election campaign as a last-resort response to “provocation” from the political right. But Hawke had already won the debate, and that victory would have consequences for Australian politics well beyond the election of 13 December 1975.

Grateful campaigners

The 1975 election campaign really began when a bomb blew out the right eye of Keith Macfarlane, a clerk in Queensland premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s Brisbane mailroom. On 19 November, just as the day was starting, Macfarlane called over a colleague, Garry Kross, to look at a white envelope addressed to the premier and marked “press release kit.” Inside were white wires. When Kross put the envelope down “a flash and a whoosh” blew a hole in the desk and cut his face and hand. Another envelope had been sent to Fraser the same day, but in that case an x-ray machine caught the bomb before anyone could be hurt. Two days later, a third was sent to Kerr’s office.

These acts of terrorism attracted understandable attention, but the larger story was of peaceful campaigning, drawing on the capacities for social movement mobilisation already well demonstrated in recent years and the credibility the government had built up in such quarters. On the very day of the Dismissal, 8500 women insurance workers had gained equal pay as the result of an Arbitration Commission decision creating a common salary scale in their industry. The Whitlam government had supported equal pay from the moment it came to office in December 1972 and its record of achievement for women had, in the end, exceeded the initial expectations of many feminists.

That was in no small part due to Elizabeth Reid, women’s adviser to the government — a world first at the time of her appointment in 1973. Reid had resigned on 2 October 1975, frustrated at relentlessly negative and sexist media coverage that had eroded support for her among the men advising Whitlam.

The Women’s Liberation Movement was an ambivalent campaigner in 1975, choosing to support Labor as the better alternative to a Fraser-led Coalition government. CAMP, the major pro-gay rights organisation in New South Wales, displayed a similar attitude, its executive having decided during the supply crisis in late October “to strongly urge all members” to support the Labor government at rallies and elsewhere, because compared with Coalition governments, it “has been shown to be the only instrument for reform in Australia.”

Women’s groups also rallied, with “Women for Whitlam” groups emerging around the country. In Melbourne, seventy women representing twenty-one women’s organisations resolved to support Labor and Whitlam, acknowledging that “over the last three years, and especially in International Women’s Year, women’s issues had received recognition for the first time in Australia’s history.” In the same city, Margaret Whitlam addressed a Women for Democracy rally, declaring that “[f]or the first time an Australian Government has dedicated itself to the principle that every woman has the right and should have the opportunity to choose the way of life best suited to her.”

In Adelaide, Women’s Liberation, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom formed a Women’s Action Group with Labor women and held a lunchtime rally in Rundle Mall; it also decided to door-knock “in swinging electorates.”

In Sydney, 1500 members of a People’s Action Coalition met at a Hyde Park rally where speakers represented Women’s Liberation, CAMP, the Australian Union of Students and the Italian community. Members of these organisations then marched with resident action and environmental groups to a rally in the Domain being addressed by Gough Whitlam. Stop Fraser committees were formed among Greeks, Italians and other migrant groups; at the big Sydney Domain rally addressed by Whitlam, “We want Gough” was said to have been heard in almost as many languages as there were migrant groups in Australia. Students and academics also mobilised.

There was gratitude, too, for what the government had done for First Nations peoples. Whitlam had only recently, in August, handed back land to the Gurindji people of the Northern Territory. Yolŋu artist and activist Wandjuk Marika now announced that his people, who lived on the Gove Peninsula, would give the Labor campaign $12,000 raised from the sale of their paintings “because Labor is for the people. If Labor gets in we will get land rights.”

When it came, the election result — a massive Coalition majority in the House and Senate — was a crushing blow for Labor supporters. Many felt betrayed, powerless and depressed. Guido Barrachi, whose career in radical politics stretched back to the first world war and its aftermath as a founding member of the Communist Party, had come out of retirement as an activist to hand out election material for Labor, wandering the hot streets of Penrith with a sign around his neck. Lugging his heavy sack of paper on a hot summer’s day proved too much. He collapsed and died that night, just as the political analysts were calling a victory for Fraser and the Coalition.

Memory does its work

As C.V. Wedgwood warned, history is “lived forwards, but is written in retrospect. We know the end before we consider the beginning and we can never wholly recapture what it was to know the beginning only.” We know that Australian democracy was not destroyed by the Dismissal. There was no outbreak of mass violence. There was no revolution. There was no republic. We know that the Coalition won the 13 December 1975 election in a landslide. But the major actors could not be certain of that result on 11 November. The Dismissal and 1975 election weighed heavily on Labor supporters and the left, who believed their democracy was coming undone before their eyes.

Yet it is possible to discern in the events that followed something of the political order that would take shape in the 1980s. “With passing of time I maintained the rage but its heat diminished,” Labor senator John Button explained. “I could forgive but not forget the indulgences of the Whitlam government. I was convinced that the next Labor government could not be as undisciplined as the last. It would need strategies and patience.” Many of the Labor politicians who, like Button, would do so much to reshape the country from 1983 seem to have drawn similar conclusions from the experience.

Most significantly, there was Bob Hawke. One can detect in his campaigning in November and December 1975 the first stage of his bid for the Lodge. While, as we have seen, some left-wing unions were unhappy with Hawke’s dampening of mass industrial action, there was nonetheless wider support for his position among ordinary members of the public. Hannah Sweeney, a Queenslander, wrote at 11pm on 13 December to congratulate Hawke for the way he had fought the election:

I did not vote for your party, but I admired the spirit of moderation and of true democracy which you showed in many of your public speeches, and which were dangerously lacking in the statements of some other public figures of both parties. When our country has been so deeply divided, we need responsible leaders to heal our divisions. You have helped do this.

Another Liberal voter, Robert Ellis from Melbourne, was deeply impressed by Hawke’s conduct during the election night coverage, admiring the courage with which he endured defeat and his capacity to stay cool despite “unnecessary needling” from Billy Snedden. Ellis continued:

Both the extreme Left and the extreme Right of Australian politics have the potential to threaten the Australian people and are to be feared. I believe that you can do more, by reason and persuasion, to prevent the excesses of both extremes, than can almost anyone in Australia… On Saturday, you proved, at least to me, that you are one of the people on whom the future of this country depends.

We don’t know if Hannah Sweeney or Robert Ellis voted Labor in 1983. We do know that these citizens saw in Hawke’s politics the appeal of a consensus that would form the centrepiece of his appeal to voters a little over seven years later.

For many years, certainly through the Hawke and Keating era, the manner of Whitlam’s demise and the character of his response would dominate collective memory of his government. At some point, though, probably from the mid-1990s, the Dismissal became more marginal to Whitlam’s reputation. He was no longer mainly the martyr of 1975. As he became older, he became ever more venerable, associated more with a great transformation in Australian life he had helped bring about than with the chaos of his government’s demise. The government’s legislative record, achieved in just three years, was remarkable and enviable by later standards.

Fraser’s reputation, too, improved over time as he moved leftward and reconciled with Whitlam. People associated him with his various public stands — now often against the Liberal Party under his former treasurer John Howard — and less with the Dismissal. Kerr, who died much earlier than the others in 1991, was left to carry the worst of the Dismissal’s reputation, as he does today. By displacing responsibility from Fraser to Kerr, it became easier to see the Dismissal as the handiwork of a man of poor character and judgement — possibly a drunkard — rather than the product of a flawed democracy.

Australians have made and remade the events of October to December 1975 in their national imaginary, exercising the kind of agency in evidence during the crisis itself. Today, they are more likely to note that Whitlam gave them the chance of a university education than to recall much about the events of 11 November or the weeks surrounding the dismissal. Many of them were there saying as much outside the Sydney Town Hall in 2014 at the service to celebrate Whitlam’s life and mark his death.

The people were not mere extras in a play acted out by Whitlam, Fraser, Kerr, Barwick and Hawke. Rather, they were at the centre of the drama, just as the nature and quality of their democracy was at the heart of what was in contention. But although the Dismissal remains in the living memory of many older Australians and is still conventionally regarded as the most significant single event in the country’s political history, it paradoxically seems to have very little influence on how most of us regard our democracy today. Is that just Australia’s famous complacency? Are we so easy-going, so practical and matter-of-fact as a people, that we simply decided to put it behind us and move on, letting bygones be bygones?

Yet democracy is now probably more central to Australia’s national self-image than it was in 1975. In a world where democracy is in decay, Australians have been increasingly inclined to celebrate the robustness of the Australian version, with regular and affectionate nodding to the democracy sausage as shorthand for a pride in their success in holding free and fair elections and producing governments with popular consent and legitimacy. In 1975, however, Australian democracy seemed a more fragile thing.

The basic institutional design of our system remains unchanged from those turbulent times. Much of the union protest that occurred in 1975 would today be impossible unless the leaders concerned were prepared to risk massive fines. In some ways, and certainly in that respect, our democracy is less healthy than it was as spring turned to summer in 1975. We would perhaps do well to regard it with a more critical eye, and with a more careful vigilance, than has become fashionable in the land of the democracy sausage. •

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Sorkin would no doubt say we do, and not only because he tells the tale so well. He would probably say — actually, he has been saying — that our circumstances today sufficiently resemble those preceding the great crash to warrant a reminder of how quickly boundless prosperity can tumble into a financial collapse. “We will have a crash; I just can’t tell you when, and I can’t tell you how deep” he told 60 Minutes’s Lesley Stahl recently, adhering to the well-known forecasters’ rule that it is fine to predict an event so long as you don’t specify a date or a magnitude. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has had twenty-seven selloffs of 10 per cent or more over the past forty years, so Sorkin is bound to be right.

The 1929 selloff was something else, not just in size and duration but also because it was associated with the Great Depression, an economic collapse that saw one in four workers in the United States unemployed and a decline in output of around 25 per cent between 1929 and the 1933 trough (after adjusting for the deflation of the dollar). One question about 1929  readily coming to mind is how much similarity there is between, say, 1928 or early 1929 and now. As Sorkin says, the market crash “may not have caused the business depression, but it certainly had a powerful effect.” Might we be cheerfully strolling in the same direction?

There are certainly some sharemarket resemblances. One is the vast increase in share prices in a relatively short time. The index of the US tech stockmarket, the NASDAQ, has more than doubled over the past two years. Even the Dow Jones, a wider and more plodding measure, has increased 50 per cent. The rise in US share prices in the two years before the 1929 crash was around 80 per cent, putting it betwixt and between those two contemporary US indices.

A useful signal of market giddiness is the number of years of current earnings that would equal a business’s share price today. This is the price-to-earnings ratio. The more years, the more speculative today’s share price and the more dependent on continuing good news. At the peak in 1929, the price-to-earnings ratio for the Dow Jones index, at 20, was quite elevated. Today the same ratio is 30. Many analysts favour an alternative signal, the Shiller index, which uses ten-year average real earnings instead of current earnings as the denominator. It was 33 at the peak in 1929; today it is 38. On these measures the sharemarket is more speculative today than it was in 1929, just before the crash.

Sorkin’s tale is about the events and the players leading up to the sharemarket crash in late 1929, and what followed. From its dizzy peak in September 1929 to its glum trough three years later, the US sharemarket fell by just short of 90 per cent. Hundreds of thousands of Americans who thought they were well-off were suddenly poor. If they borrowed to buy shares, as many had, they might not only have lost everything but also have debts besides. Business could no longer get cheap capital by issuing shares, a drag on business investment. The impact on confidence contributed to a wider economic slowdown.

Prefaced, like a big Russian novel, with a nine-page cast of characters, Sorkin’s story is told through the conduct of some of the market titans of the time. Most considered themselves models of rectitude and financial probity, though their immense wealth and prestige flowed from an ever-rising sharemarket. Sorkin sticks pretty much to the immediate foreground and the immediate aftermath of the crash, but even so he gets to around 130,000 words, not counting notes and index, without pausing the pace.

Charles Mitchell was the boss of what would become Citigroup, then known as National City Bank. To complete a merger that would make his bank the biggest he needed a high share price. Under his orders the Bank supported its own share price, buying far more of its own shares during the sell-off of 28 October 1929, Black Monday, than it could afford to hold. The consequences would take Mitchell through congressional hearings and the courts, and eventually destroy his reputation. Then there was Thomas Lamont, the leading partner in J.P. Morgan, who led futile attempts to restore market confidence, sustaining large losses and endangering the firm. Congressional committees took an interest in Lamont, unfavourably. Sorkin conveys these men’s perplexity, even horror, as their richly attended lives blew up.

Then there are the prominent legislators, Carter Glass and Henry Steagall, who would respond to the crash with new laws to separate commercial banks and investment banks. In the White House, Herbert Hoover struggled to remedy an economic collapse vastly more serious than he expected. His successor, Franklin Roosevelt, was more willing to try anything that might work.

Sorkin’s is a nuanced account. He emphasises, for example, that even after the 13 per cent Black Monday plunge, many investors and brokers expected the market to bounce back. Indeed, it did bounce back, and more than once. But each time the selling soon gathered force and down the market went again.

Yet by the end of 1929 the Dow was down only 17 per cent for the year, very much less than the 33 per cent fall in 1921, a year in which America came out of recession rather than went into it. And somewhat less, for that matter, than the 23 per cent it fell on one day, 19 October 1987, without a recession preceding or succeeding it. By March 1930, the market had recovered 40 per cent of its 1929 losses before the selling once again sent it much, much lower.

Nor, despite the severity of the selloff, was the connexion with the larger economy immediately evident. As Sorkin points out, there were no big corporate failures in the immediate aftermath of the 1929 crash. It was widely said that America’s prosperity would continue, and that blowing off the sharemarket froth was on the whole a good thing.

About the crash itself, there is no mystery to reveal. What cannot continue, ends. Earlier in 1929 the US Federal Reserve had increased the cash interest rate above 6 per cent to lean against what it regarded as feckless speculation. Since many investors borrowed to buy shares, the rate rise hurt. It may also have contributed to the downturn in the economy that began in mid 1929. The sharemarket topped out and then began to crumble, driven by forced selling of shares bought on margin loans, then by wariness, and finally by panic as the economic downturn deepened.

Inevitably Sorkin discusses the Great Depression, a far more serious event than the concurrent crash. He accepts, as many do, Milton Friedman’s argument that the Depression was caused by a fall in the money supply, itself the consequence of around 9000 bank failures in America. But there are more elaborate modern explanations.

We know that collapsing business investment contributed mightily to the economic downturn, and that was probably partly related to the stockmarket crash. Former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke argues that a routine economic recession became a prolonged depression because lenders became reluctant to lend at a time when borrowers had difficulty meeting their debts. The borrowers’ problems were amplified by a deflation, which meant an increase in the real value of nominal debt. At the same time, asset prices were falling, partly reflecting the crash in share prices and the market value of companies and their assets.

The downturn was further compounded by the distress of American farmers, who now faced higher tariffs in their European markets. (Forty per cent of the national population was either on farms or in rural areas.) Farmers could not service their loans; frightened depositors lined up to withdraw their money. Thousands of banks failed and bigger banks beefed up their cash reserves by slowing lending.

Sorkin makes the point that Herbert Hoover’s Republican administration didn’t stand aloof from the economic collapse, as widely supposed. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation was set up in early 1932 while Hoover was still president, a year before his Democratic successor Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated. Its mandate was to lend to sound but liquidity-strapped businesses, a technique widely deployed in the 2008 financial crisis (and led by Ben Bernanke). The Smoot–Hawley tariffs bill was signed into law by Hoover (who had many reservations) in 1930. Many nations increased tariffs at the time, including Australia.

Hoover also pressed corporations to not cut wages. He cut taxes and supported spending on public works. In principle, he was in favour of a balanced budget, but the budget went into deficit anyway. As a share of GDP, it moved from a 1 per cent surplus in 1930 to a 4.6 per cent deficit in 1932, within half a percentage point of the maximum deficit reached under FDR in the 1930s. Roosevelt beat Hoover hands down at the 1932 election, Sorkin argues, not on his economic proposals, which were vague, but on his opposition to prohibition. This is surely a stretch, given that a quarter of American workers were jobless going into the polling booth.

Nor did the Federal Reserve stand aside. It had raised the cash interest rate to 6.25 per cent in mid 1929, leaning heavily against what it regarded as a speculative bubble in stocks. A year later the rate was around 0.5 per cent. It came too late to prevent widespread failures, but during the Hoover administration congress authorised the Federal Reserve to support banks.

While these Hoover measures helped, they didn’t help much. They were too little. Though charged with lending to cash-strapped businesses like railroads, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation proved conservative. Nor, as Maynard Keynes pointed out, did low interest rates much encourage investment when confidence had vanished. What was needed was unlimited support for viable banks, more spending on jobs programs, a sharp rise in the official gold price (and therefore a devaluation of the dollar), farm price supports and  variety of other measures — some useful, some not — all of which Roosevelt provided in rapid order, along with good cheer and fireside chats. Even then the economic recovery in the United States took much longer than recovery in Britain or Australia.

This takes us back to the question hovering over Sorkin’s book. Are our circumstances today replicating the runup to the 1929 crash, and if so might there be another Great Depression on the way?

There are those very high price earnings ratios. And while the increase in the broad index of sharemarket values in the United States over the past few years is somewhat less than the rise in share prices in the two years preceding the crash in September 1929, the resemblance is closer over a longer period. In the past ten years the Dow index has very nearly trebled in value. In the past thirty-three years it has increased fourteenfold, and this includes the big selloffs in 2008 and 2020 and an eighteen-month rough patch from the end of 2021.

It is a formidable increase, and all the more pertinent because the total market value of US listed stocks is much greater compared to US GDP now than it was in 1929. In fact the value of listed shares in the US is more than double annual US GDP. In 1929 a large public sharemarket was a relatively recent innovation with far fewer listings. All up it looks like the value of listed shares was considerably less than GDP at the time.

If the value of the market is proportionally much bigger than it was ninety-six years ago, so too is the breadth of shareholding. In 1929 only a small share of the population owned shares. Today participation is much higher, not only directly but also, more importantly, indirectly though pensions schemes.

Given toppy valuations, a share-price correction — and perhaps a big one — can confidently be predicted. No doubt we will feel very glum about it when it comes. It seems to me a much deeper sharemarket crash, one like 1929, would probably need a wider economic contraction to help it along: after all, it was the 1929–33 economic slump that prolonged and deepened the sharemarket slump.

An economic downturn will usually cause or deepen a decline in share prices, while a decline in share prices need not of itself cause a significant economic contraction. This is especially so if governments and central banks stand ready to support demand and lending, as today they usually do. The 1987 share price collapse was an example. Despite the Australian Financial Review declaring a depression imminent, the economy kept going. The most spectacular collapse of recent times, the 2008 crisis, was caused by speculative trading in off-market mortgage debt rather than a frothy sharemarket.

The most commonly instanced risk is that the vast spending on data centres for AI doesn’t actually pay, causing shares in some of the high-flying data-centre builders and AI providers to tank. That is quite possible. Projections suggest AI investment, including data-centre investment by the big four American tech companies, could amount to $750 billion over two years. It is a big number, but over two years would be not much more than 1 per cent of US GDP. If it evaporated, business investment in the US would be hit hard. Depending on how it played out and what financial tangles were revealed, there could be a recession. But a prolonged business depression would by no means be certain.

A share price correction is inevitable at some point, but a prolonged economic contraction is not. So the real question hovering over Sorkin’s book is not whether a share-price fall is likely but whether a sustained global economic depression would follow. Sorkin doesn’t go there, and in this review neither will I, except to say that despite the nuttiness of the Trump administration, despite the turbulence of global and local politics, despite wars, despite US–China rivalry, despite stretched share prices, there are no convincing signs of it yet. Amazing, really. •

1929: The Inside Story of The Greatest Crash in Wall Street History
By Andrew Ross Sorkin | Allen Lane | $39.99 | 592 pages

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Free is charmingly told from the perspective of a child reared by society to venerate communism, Stalin and most of all “Uncle Enver” Hoxha, Albania’s communist dictator. Hoxha’s death in 1985 marked the beginning of the end of communist rule, and when it finally collapsed in 1990–91 teenaged Ypi was forced to reckon with shattered illusions, family truths and the onset of capitalism, all alongside the usual adolescent torments. Until then her family — and most of all, her beloved French-speaking paternal grandmother Leman, whom she calls Nini — had protected her from what was really going on.

Ypi’s award-winning memoir has since been translated into more than thirty languages and a friend who not long ago visited Albania’s capital Tirana reports that Free is prominently displayed all over town, clearly pitched at tourists as the book to help them comprehend the country they are visiting.

Inside Albania and across the Albanian diaspora, Ypi’s reputation as an authority on the country she left as a young woman is — not surprisingly — mixed. To at least one critic, she’s an apologist for communism and a denigrator of capitalism who has turned her own critique into a commodity. Here I’m paraphrasing an online response to a long-lost photograph not of Ypi, but of her grandparents Leman and Asllan. The photo came to her attention after a stranger shared it on social media.

Ypi had never seen the photo before, but from her grandmother’s stories she knew it showed the couple on their honeymoon in Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Italian Alps, where her grandmother “felt the happiest woman alive.” The year was 1941 and war was engulfing Europe. Yet this “young, glamorous couple,” the woman clad in a “long white fur coat,” are “relaxing on sun lounges in front of a luxury hotel.” A pair of skis is propped behind them.

As she tells us in the prologue of her ambitious new book Indignity: A Life Reimagined, Ypi was soon absorbed by the question of “what it meant to feel the happiest person alive in the winter of 1941.” Further unsettled by another commentator’s suggestion that Leman was “a communist spy” and “before that, a fascist collaborator,” Ypi set out to defend her late grandmother’s dignity and to find out more. Well aware that these are possibly irreconcilable motivations, Ypi presents her quest in two different registers.

In the first person, in a recognisable present-day, Ypi visits archives in Albania and Greece and ponders historical silences and archival gatekeepers. Some of her reflections are banal — for instance, as historians tell her, the “best kept secret about archives” is that “it’s more about what you don’t find rather than what you do.” Elsewhere, her frustrations are vividly presented: “I am lost in my grandmother’s files as if in a labyrinth of sophisms.”

Selected historical documents are interspersed throughout, inviting contemplation of which histories can and cannot be told through archival traces. A historical timeline commences with the Ottoman colonisation of the Balkan peninsula, which began in Albania in 1468, swiftly covers the pertinent Ottoman-related events of the nineteenth century, and devotes most attention to the twentieth century up to 1946 and the beginning of communism in Albania. The entangled histories of Turkey, Greece and Albania are foregrounded, as is Albania’s second world war, when it fell under fascist then Nazi control.

As the subtitle suggests, however, most of Indignity unfolds like a novel, with Ypi “reimagining” her grandmother’s life from her childhood in the Greek city of Salonica (now Thessaloniki), where she lived with her extended family in privileged exile. In 1936, with war threatening, Leman — the Albanian who had never been to Albania — moved there just after her eighteenth birthday. While she could easily have followed school friends to France, Italy or Austria, in the “disjuncture between what the country was called by foreigners (Albania) and how its own people referred to it (Shqipëria),” she “hoped to find the truth about herself.”

In a queue, Leman meets earnest idealist Asllan Ypi, a cousin of her best friend Cocotte, who is keen to fight fascism and distinguish himself from his hard-headed politician father, Xhafer Ypi. From here, the narrative accelerates, the couple’s lives entangled with the march of history. On Friday nights at the Café Kursal, they drink and gossip with the city’s intelligentsia, among them Enver Hoxha, an acquaintance of Asllan’s from their student days in Paris at the Lycée. Hoxha smells of onion and lavender and pours scorn on Asllan’s faith in democratic elections.

Leman and Asllan attend the bizarre wedding of Albania’s self-appointed monarch King Zog and the much younger Geraldine, a “destitute Catholic Hungarian-American countess.” Here, Ypi the first-person narrator interrupts with family lore. At the wedding — in the midst of discussing “the King’s relations with Italy and Hitler’s annexation of Austria and whether it would change Europe” and Asllan asking Leman whether she’d come across “an interesting book called The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money by John Maynard Keynes” (she hadn’t) — her grandmother proposed to her grandfather.

The honeymoon glimpsed in the photograph comes not long after Mussolini’s invasion of Albania and the violent death of Asllan’s father. Jolted by the proximity of these events to their marriage, Ypi is struck by the “apprehension on their faces” and how “Asllan looked especially sad.” She wonders who is behind the camera. Perhaps it was the French-speaking Englishman Vandeleur Robinson, who next travelled to Albania to “take part in a secret operation to support Balkan antifascist resistance.”

After an “excruciating” thirty-hour labour, as the Nazis occupation of Albania begins, Leman gives birth to her son Xhafer, or Zafo for short, who is destined to be Lea Ypi’s father. For a while “the alternative time zone of motherhood” eclipses the war outside. But when Hoxha’s Albanian Communist Party breaks away from the rest of the Albanian resistance movement and assumes power, Asllan is arrested, charged with espionage, and sentenced to twenty years in prison with hard labour.

With Indignity, Ypi once again succeeds in making Albania palpable, this time from the perspective of a fallen elite, among them her paternal grandparents. Whether or not her grandmother felt the “happiest person alive” on their honeymoon is a question she inevitably cannot answer. Once the honeymoon passes, the “life re-imagined” begins to run out of steam, despite the tragic events that unfold. The grandmother to whom she was so close while she was alive is sometimes elusive and inert on the page, despite Ypi’s admirable and rather dogged attempt to access her interiority and understand her motivations.

One of the most powerful scenes in the book is Ypi’s “reimagining” of the arrival of her family doctor Elias Levy, fatally ill, from Salonica, where he had been detained for despatching to a Nazi concentration camp. Seeking out the Jewish cemetery in present-day Thessaloniki, Ypi is guided by Dimitrios, who turns out to be Albanian, real name Denis. He reflects on the fact that “Albania was the only European country with more Jews at the end of the second world war than it had before.” When Ypi the scholar suggests it was because Albanians were mostly illiterate and did not read antisemitic literature, Denis counters with another explanation: “the old tradition of besa, the oath of hospitality.” When they stop to read the memorial plaques, their conversation tapers to silence.

As they part, Denis, undertaking a history PhD, gives Ypi some advice about the archives: don’t waste time asking about her mother specifically, instead ask about the men in her family. “I gave up researching women. Women and archives. Good luck with that. You’re better off writing a novel.”

Indignity, though, is not a novel, even when it presents as an approximation of one. It comes most alive when Ypi is writing as herself, when she opens out to contemplate what we owe the dead, and to our own shifting investments in the past. In a passage that recalls the warmth and intimacy of Free, Ypi recounts the time when her grandmother, inspired by an episode of the American soap opera The Bold and The Beautiful, asked Ypi to speak at her funeral. When Leman died in 2006, Ypi went through the grief-struck motions as requested. Twenty years later, she writes, “I am still trying to correct my mistakes, to find the right words, to mark her passing in the right way.” •

Indignity: A Life Reimagined
By Lea Ypi | Allen Lane | $36.99 | 368 pages

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The repetition by Modjeska of “firstness” strikes a rare, slightly false note in a book that otherwise sets out to challenge many assumptions of art history, not least in the “great man” version. Rather than attempting to sort and rank, Modjeska situates this young German artist, and all the other artist-women she discusses, within her own time and place, paying especially close attention to her female friendships, her wider artistic circles, and her marriage and its strains.

Modjeska’s focus is as much on social as on inner worlds — or at least she keeps both always in view. Her chapters on Modersohn-Becker are revelatory and deeply moving, illuminating in intimate and affecting ways the artist’s struggle and courage. By doing so, Modjeska contributes to the broader effort to accord Modersohn-Becker, known for her arresting self-portraits, belated recognition as a major artist of the twentieth century.

Indeed, it was an unexpected instance of delayed public acknowledge that impelled Modjeska to write this book. In February 2018, Google celebrated Modersohn-Becker’s birth by showing on its search page a doodle from a self-portrait she had created in 1906. Although Modjeska had “long known I’d write of her one day,” it was on that day that “I went home, cleared my desk and began this book.”

Google’s virtual, ephemeral and bowdlerised version of Modersohn-Becker was part of a conjunction of forces — a “synchronicity” is how Modjeska puts it — that coalesced into a determination to make for herself the space required to commence a new creative project. “Let it be. There is no other way,” she might have repeated as she cleared away whatever obstacles, literal and metaphorical, standing in her way. It’s a fabulously evocative image of a writer at a foundational moment in a project, taking a seemingly simple but deeply symbolic step that signals the commitment and courage to create. Go home. Clear the desk. Begin the book. Let it be. There is no other way.

And it is with perennial questions about how women create within patriarchal structures — with which Modjeska has long been concerned, that A Woman’s Eye, Her Art returns. Throughout her writing life she has explored how and why women live a creative life, the female friendships and wider networks that sustain them, the personal and political contexts in which they work, and the gendered social structures that shape — and limit — their public recognition.

This sustained enquiry commenced with her doctoral thesis, a feminist literary history published in 1981 as Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–45, which traced Australian writer-women of the 1930s. Her next foray was the genre-bending The Orchard, part essay, part fiction, published in 1994. Like A Woman’s Eye, Her Art, it pursued in different ways and contexts how the unrelenting proliferation and dominance of stories of (and by) men eclipse — even deny — histories of women’s creativity. In Stravinsky’s Lunch, which followed in 1999, Modjeska brought the lives and histories of Australian artists Stella Bowen and Grace Cossington-Smith into view and into dialogue with each other. A clever dual biography, it is in many ways the closest, in form and focus, to A Woman’s Eye, Her Art.

This time, the canvas is bigger: more artists, more decades, more social, political and artistic movements. Added to Modersohn-Becker are the lives and work of Dora Maar, Lee Miller and the lesser-known Claude Cahun (Lucy Schwob), as well as their circles. Particularly in the second part of the book, which focuses on surrealism, the struggle to keep the stories of men at bay proves difficult; for all her effort to critique a masculinist European art history, the likes of Picasso keep muscling in.

And that might be the point: the binary gendered framing to which Modjeska is committed is not always quite up to the analytical task. This is, to my mind, most apparent in the treatment and discussion of the non-binary, non-conforming Claude Cahun. While Modjeska’s book does a great service in introducing readers to Schwob/Cahun — and indeed to the work of the Jersey historical society that led the preservation of the artist’s archive — Cahun deserves more than the book’s overarching framing of the struggle of artist-women to transcend the “male gaze” can provide.

Modjeska appears aware of this. Returning to Google’s commemoration, she repeats the question that her friend and interlocutor Julie Rrap asked that day: “How would we have reacted if it’d been Claude Cahun on Google doodle?” Their combined, amused reply: “If it had, we said, laughing as we waved goodbye, we’d have been celebrating. For then the world might have really changed.”

Across her books, Modjeska has honed a distinctive way of writing about artist-women, here using “prosopography” as a method. This is well suited to her exploration of the entanglements between the personal and the political, the inner and the social. The result is a peopled, biographically intense, account. We learn about these artists through snippets detailing their friendships and fallings out, their wifedom (adopting Anna Funder’s term), their loyalties, infidelities and separations, as well as through the author’s succinct interpretations of their artistic works.

Indeed, the book is richly illustrated, both in the sheer number of images and in Modjeska’s writerly skills, which show her readers how to look and how to see. All this is presented against the backdrop of a world falling apart as Europe is wracked by two world wars. As a result, the book has the quality both of erudite art history, social commentary, and delicious gossip.

Suitably, then, it is presented like a written equivalent of a visual montage — or an artist’s book — with diamond icons used to signal a shift in focus. Less a sustained historical narrative or a fully resolved theoretical argument, the text reflects Modjeska’s questing and reflexive response to its central question of what it meant to live as a woman and an artist by accumulating details and observations. It is full of snippets, digressions and anecdotes into which are added thoughts and reflections derived from conversations with friends and interlocutors, mainly curators and artists, and well-chosen quotes from scholars. This correspondence between subject and approach invites readers to grapple with the contradictions, challenges and vicissitudes of women’s creative life.

The story Modjeska tells about artist-women in twentieth-century Europe shines a light on courageous individual pursuit as much as the female friendships that nourish it. Modjeska is the author, but throughout she makes clear how much it has been a collective enterprise accompanied by many friends along the way. I’ve already mentioned Julie Rrap as a significant voice in the book. Helen Mueller’s contribution is also significant: she and Modjeska worked side by side translating Modersohn-Becker’s writings not only from German to English but also from English to German to see how earlier translations had skewed their meanings. In this, the book makes a significant contribution to Modersohn-Becker scholarship.

For some of the other artist-women included, their stories are now quite familiar and the project to rehabilitate their reputations as artists “in their own right” already somewhat advanced. This is true, for instance, of Lee Miller and Dora Maar, who have recently been the subject of memoirs, films and exhibitions. Indeed, when reading the sections on Miller’s war photography it was difficult not to conjure an image of her as played by Kate Winslet in Lee (2023). Exhibitions devoted to Dora Maar have sought to release her from the prison of her reputation only as muse to Picasso.

Closer to home, the period of the book’s development and publication has coincided with major revisionist projects dealing with the place of Australian women in histories of modern art, namely the National Gallery of Australia’s Know Her Name exhibition and more recently Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940, currently at the Art Gallery of NSW. Such exhibitions have brought artist-women back into view, along with the question of how they have for so long been overlooked.

A Woman’s Art, Her Eye is a timely complement to this broader field of work. In ways different from the representational and analytical work films and exhibitions can do, Modjeska’s luscious text affords a more expansive view of the intricacies of the lives and struggles of a cohort of artist-women working in Europe across the twentieth century. Driven as it is by her curiosity about women’s creative lives, Modjeska draws us into their work and lives with unstinting generosity. •

A Woman’s Eye, Her Art: Reframing the Narrative through Art and Life
By Drusilla Modjeska | Penguin | $55 | 512 pages

The post A studio of one’s own appeared first on Inside Story.

Baker was famous during the interwar period for her role in La Revue Nègre, a revue combining jazz, the Charleston and an African aesthetic, and her scandalous “banana skirt” dance at the Folies Bergères. The gossip papers made headlines from her eccentricities — her menagerie of animals, including a pet cheetah, and her “rainbow tribe” of twelve children adopted from eight countries. After her death in 1975 she became an almost forgotten symbol of the imaginary Paris embodied in her famous song “J’ai Deux Amours… Mon Pays et Paris” (I have two loves… my country and Paris).

Yet here she was, being honoured in the Panthéon alongside Voltaire, Victor Hugo and, most recently interred, Robert Badinter, the lawyer and human right activist who campaigned successfully against the death penalty.

In her new book, Josephine Bakers’ Secret War, Hanna Diamond explains why French president Emmanuel Macron granted her the recognition due to a national hero. Focusing on the years 1939–45, Diamond, a professor of French history at Cardiff University, meticulously retraces Baker’s career as a highly effective wartime agent who used her celebrity as the perfect cover for her espionage.

Baker, who was born in St Louis, Missouri, settled in France 1925. She soon dominated the country’s cabarets with her radiant smile and sense of humour, embodying a colonial pastiche and using provocative costuming and nudity to enhance her impact. She entertained the Paris elite at a villa in Le Vésinet sufficiently vast to accommodate her menagerie.

Baker survived the 1929 financial crisis by cleverly shifting from musical hall to talking cinema and radio, becoming one of Europe’s first black international superstars. But although war was threatening in 1939, she decided to stay in France. She had obtained French citizenship in 1937 through her marriage to Jean Lion, a Jewish Paris-based broker. Wishing to “give back to France,” she sang for the troops at the front after the war began, and flatly refused to perform for Germans in Nazi-occupied Paris.

But she was keen to serve her adopted country more deeply. Soon she was contacted by Captain Jacques Abtey, a French intelligence agent who became her handler. Hiding in plain sight, she proved invaluable to the war effort.

Abtey led Baker on a solitary trajectory. Neither of them belonged to any of the official resistance organisations or networks catalogued after the war, and nor was Baker listed as an agent of the Free France Intelligence Service or, after its formation in 1942, the Central Bureau of Intelligence and Action. Diamond has had to piece together her undercover career from a range of other sources.

When the Germans marched into Paris, Baker reluctantly left the capital and took refuge in the Dordogne. She agreed to travel to Lisbon, with Abtey posing as her accompanist, to communicate crucial information to British intelligence, with whom France had lost contact since the Vichy regime took power. She then travelled to Marseille to report to the clandestine organisation led by Captain Paul Paillole.

From there, Baker was sent to Morocco during a period of heightened German presence and mounting espionage activity. Under the aegis of the secret services, she travelled from Marrakech, where she was based, to Lisbon, Madrid, Seville and Barcelona, and then round north Africa, giving concerts and attending receptions despite bouts of poor health — all the while gathering top secret information and passing it on to Allied agents.

Although the exact nature of Baker’s intelligence communications is not always known — information was often pinned to her clothes to evade suspicion — Diamond’s research suggests that it proved hugely valuable on several occasions and was sometimes critical. Diamond draws on numerous documents to narrate the story as accurately as possible, highlighting inaccuracies and errors — particularly incorrect dates and locations — in sources including Abtey’s memoirs, published as early as 1948, and Baker and Bouillon’s semi-autobiography published in 1976.

Baker proved an ideal spy for the Americans as well, becoming a key intermediary between the French, Americans and Moroccans during 1943 and 1944. Her network of contacts among influential Moroccans (including Mohammed Menehbi, the brother-in law of the powerful Pasha of Marrakech) facilitated her undercover work and her contribution to the Allied landings in 1944.

Working with the Americans gave Baker an opportunity to perform with African-American soldiers and challenge racism in the army. She helped Sidney Williams, an American civil rights pioneer with the Chicago Urban League, to set up the Liberty’s Club canteen, which organised concerts for Allied troops under the aegis of the Red Cross.

Despite her health struggles, Baker was acutely aware of the importance of entertainment for troop morale. She performed relentlessly on improvised, open-air stages, her capacity to move between different social groups placing her in an extraordinary position: “Not only did it allow her to serve her ambitions to bring people together,” writes Diamond, “but it also gave her access to intelligence.” But she remained subject to racist attacks, demonstrating remarkable self-sacrifice for the cause.

With France’s colonial authority under threat in Africa, Baker promoted public recognition of Free France leader Charles De Gaulle, who had little American support. Her devotion to the cause of the Free France was unwavering. She organised a spectacular gala in Algiers attended by De Gaulle himself, with whom she maintained a correspondence until the end of the 1960s. She toured North Africa with Menehbi, under French military orders. At the end of every performance, she displayed a huge French flag exhibiting the Cross of Lorraine, De Gaulle’s symbol, and raised benefits for the Resistance during the tour.

As noted by Diamond, “Baker was able to evoke the very essence of France and its culture among all those present, reminding them forcefully of her country’s importance and its powerful past, and to equate it directly with the Gaullist cause.”

In May 1945, Baker was officially enlisted as a second lieutenant propaganda officer in the auxiliary services of the Women’s Air Force before returning to mainland France. There, she continued to tour, and to apply what she had learned during the war, effectively harnessing her celebrity to protest against the racial segregation policies of her native country.

Diamond details the awards Baker received, and the difficulty she faced in defending her war record and receiving recognition for her war service. She was given the Resistance medal “with rosette” (in a Neuilly clinic as she was again severely ill) as early as 1946; in a personal letter, de Gaulle thanked her for her service and “the enthusiasm with which she had dedicated her talent to the cause of the Resistance.” But only in 1961 did she receive the Croix de Guerre with one Palm and the Legion of Honour for her service.

As her ten-page bibliography and thirty-four pages of referenced notes shows, Diamond has analysed the archival record thoroughly. Her book is agreeably illustrated with thirty-two photographs and two maps.

But the text can at times be challenging to follow. Readers may become lost in the internal fights between Gaullists and Giraudists and the political and diplomatic nuances of the period. There are occasional repetitions, and some biographical details remain unclear — for example the exact number of Baker’s marriages and to whom. Certain gaps in the narrative are puzzling: how could a woman who “could hardly read or write” upon her arrival in Paris publish her autobiography in 1928 at the age of twenty-one?

Diamond’ s book contributes to a movement that has slowly begun to recognise the courage of an artist who was also a feminist, a woman who actively resisted Nazi Germany while fighting against racism and antisemitism. Baker featured in the Dictionnaire des Étrangers qui ont fait la France (Dictionary of foreigners who made France), published in 2013. The same year, in an article for Le Monde, writer and philosopher Régis Debray called for her admission to the Panthéon, arguing that this American black woman, a libertarian and member of the Resistance, might “bring turbulence and sunshine into this cold crypt.” A few years later, a petition “Osez Joséphine” (Dare with Joséphine) — building on a famous song title by French singer Alain Bashung — was signed by almost 38,000 people.

Baker’s activism continues to resonate today. Having finally emerged from the shadows — and the limelight of the music-hall — she has joined the ranks of Geneviève De Gaulle-Anthonioz and Germaine Tillon, both brave heroes of the Resistance. Hanna Diamond shows how her place among France’s greatest figures is thoroughly deserved. •

Josephine Baker’s Secret War: The African American Star Who Fought for France and Freedom
By Hanna Diamond | Yale University Press | $51.95 | 352 pages

The post A spy in the Panthéon appeared first on Inside Story.

These and many more contradictions are vividly captured in Sam Tanenhaus’s doorstopper biography, Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America. The product of almost three decades of meticulous research, it is a fitting tribute to an extraordinary life, although Tanenhaus’s achievement is slightly marred by his cursory treatment of Buckley’s final decades.

Born in 1925 to wealthy Catholic parents, Buckley experienced a childhood notable for its privilege, adventure and cosmopolitanism. By the time he was seven, he had lived in Mexico, Paris and London, but home was the large family estate in Sharon, Connecticut, where young Billy and his nine siblings could indulge in horse-riding, sailing and private piano lessons.

From 1939, when Buckley’s father purchased a second estate in Camden, South Carolina, the family would split its time between North and South. Although Buckley resided in Connecticut and New York for most of his adult life (with winter skiing trips to Switzerland), this Southern connection would remain with him forever and influence some of his least attractive political views.

Though he was an isolationist — his first political act, aged fourteen, was joining the America First Committee — Buckley served in the army on the home front towards the end of the second world war. Discharged in 1946, he arrived at Yale University “determined to make something of himself.” He immediately tried out for the debating team, where he partnered successfully with L. Brent Bozell, who would become his brother-in-law, co-author and co-conspirator in a crusade to defeat American liberalism. Yale provided Buckley with his start in journalism when he was appointed as chairman of the Yale Daily News; he was also “tapped” for entry into the secret Skull and Bones society, confirming his trajectory towards membership of the highest echelons of the American elite.

In a formative experience shared by countless conservatives and reactionaries over many generations, Buckley’s university years cemented his steadfast opposition to liberal and left-wing thought of any kind. He was horrified that such a great institution as Yale was abdicating “its historic purpose of transmitting its values of Christian ideals and free-market faith” by cultivating new generations of critical thinkers.

Following his graduation, Buckley would develop that argument into his first book, God and Man at Yale (1951), which — thanks in part to a substantial advertising campaign funded by his father — became a bestseller and made his name as the voice of a new youthful conservatism. “Till the end of his life,” Tanenhaus writes, “Bill continued to think of colleges as the most important fields of battle.”

The late 1940s and early 1950s were a time of heightened cold war tensions and the second red scare, led by senator Joseph McCarthy and his increasingly deranged tirades against fictional traitors. Buckley, although generally more concerned with the scourge of liberalism than lurid conspiracies about widespread communist infiltration of American institutions, became a willing recruit to the anti-communist cause.

Along with many other Yale graduates, he was soon accepted into the CIA. His first assignment was in Mexico City, where he met and became close friends with E. Howard Hunt, who would later be convicted for his involvement in the Watergate scandal. Buckley also backed McCarthy to the hilt, co-authoring McCarthy and His Enemies (1954) with Bozell — less a defence of McCarthy’s methods than an attack on those who dared to object to them.

Buckley’s next great project was the launching of a conservative journal of ideas and commentary. With the help of Whittaker Chambers, James Burnham, Willi Schlamm and other ex-communists, National Review was founded in 1955, and is still published to this day. It was “the sharp advancing edge of an avowedly radical movement and its politics of insurgent revolt,” writes Tanenhaus.

Along with his columns — syndicated in newspapers across the entire country — National Review was where Buckley would use his considerable literary flair to fight political and cultural battles for the rest of his life. He also hosted his own television program, Firing Line, from 1966 until 1999, gave countless speeches, wrote fiction and non-fiction books, and maintained a remarkably active social life. Reading the book, one is continually astonished as to how he fitted it all in.

On the domestic front, the most important political battle of the 1950s and 1960s was fought over civil rights for African Americans, especially in the former slaveholding states of the South. Buckley was deeply sentimental about the old South from his childhood experiences in Camden, and Tanenhaus reveals for the first time that Buckley’s parents funded a local segregationist newspaper in the 1950s. In this context it is not surprising that Buckley supported the cause of white supremacy. In 1957 he made his most notorious statement on the matter, in a National Review editorial titled “Why the South Must Prevail”:

The central question that emerges… is whether the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically? The sobering answer is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

But as plain as Buckley’s racism is here, it is not the entire story. Despite other embarrassing and shameful moments — for example, losing hopelessly to James Baldwin in a Cambridge University debate in 1965, running a racially loaded campaign for mayor of New York City in the same year, and dismissing Martin Luther King as a rabble-rouser and law-breaker — Buckley could be more nuanced on race than many of his contemporaries. He welcomed Black activists on to Firing Line to share their views with his audience, and increasingly came to agree with many of their critiques of institutional racism. In his twilight years he admitted he had been wrong about segregation, though this was in the post-9/11 era, when his racial anxieties had turned sharply towards Muslim immigration.

Despite his and his wife Pat’s many close friendships with gay men, Buckley was also openly homophobic. Notoriously, he lashed out at Gore Vidal on live television during their coverage of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. After Vidal called him a “crypto-Nazi,” Buckley reacted with sincere malice: “Now listen you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in the goddamn face, and you’ll stay plastered.”

Buckley regretted the incident for the rest of his life, less because of the homophobia than the fact that he had been successfully goaded by Vidal, a man he loathed. During the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, he argued in the New York Times that those detected with the disease should be forcibly tattooed to protect others. Some gay conservatives warned him that the movement was “in danger of sinking back to an aggregation of bigotries” — Buckley was privately sympathetic but publicly refused to budge.

One of the most enduring themes of Buckley’s life to emerge from this book is his extraordinary talent for friendship, a characteristic by no means limited to those who shared his privileged background or ideological obsessions. He was a loyal friend of the powerful, including Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. When he had misgivings about their insufficient adherence to conservative principles — or their flagrantly imperial foreign policies — he kept them to himself and maintained his wholehearted public support.

Despite devoting his life to opposing what he saw as liberal hegemony, he was also a good friend to many liberals. “He drew a sharp line between his ideological commitments and his social life,” writes Tanenhaus. This led some of the more rigid conservative ideologues to distrust him as being more concerned with carving out his place within the establishment than shaking it to its foundations.

Aside from the war criminals already listed, Buckley demonstrated remarkable loyalty to some truly objectionable individuals. His book-length defence of Joe McCarthy appeared just as public opinion was turning decisively against the senator. In the 1980s, along with Donald Trump, he testified on behalf of McCarthy’s roguish lawyer, Roy Cohn, who was facing disbarment. During Watergate, he lied for and covered the legal expenses of his old friend Howard Hunt.

Perhaps most egregiously, though, Buckley campaigned for the release of death-row inmate Edgar Smith, who had been convicted of the murder of a fifteen-year-old girl. Buckley never adequately assessed the evidence, but Smith wrote well and enjoyed National Review, which was seemingly enough to convince Buckley of his innocence. Later, when Smith had secured his freedom thanks in part to Buckley’s advocacy, he abducted and stabbed a young woman, almost killing her. He also confessed to his original crime after years of obfuscation. As Buckley’s friend Murray Kempton put it, he had a “genius at friendships of the kind that passes all understanding.”

Despite its considerable length, Buckley seems to have been subjected to some quite brutal editing. Tanenhaus spends 750 pages on the first fifty years of Buckley’s life, then rushes through his final three decades in just 100 pages. Had Buckley drifted off into retirement and obscurity, this might have made sense, but the period in question (1974–2008) includes the Reagan presidency, when Buckley’s conservatism achieved the kind of political ascendancy that he might have only dreamed of as a young activist. This culmination of a project decades in the making is inexplicably skipped over. The attempt to cut the book back to a reasonable length is understandable, but it leads to a lopsidedness that could have been avoided with some more astute editing of earlier chapters.

Tanenhaus has obvious affection for his subject, but is hard on him when the evidence demands it, as with his criticisms of Buckley’s racism and homophobia. More bitingly, he repeatedly returns to a damning intellectual judgement: for all his talents as a writer, organiser and media performer, Buckley was not a deep or original thinker. Tanenhaus suggests that Buckley himself knew this, eschewing postgraduate studies and an academic career for the less intellectually strenuous — and more enjoyable — world of opinion journalism.

Buckley did attempt on several occasions to write his one “big book” of conservative philosophy, “a definitive statement on the meaning and value of an authentic American conservatism.” The working title was The Revolt of the Masses, a deliberate nod to his distaste for universal suffrage. But he never came close to finishing it — “he was an arguer, not a thinker.”

Regardless of his intellectual status, no one — least of all Tanenhaus — denies Buckley’s role in advancing and consolidating the conservative movement into a hegemonic force in American politics. Buckley was a key player in every conservative advance from Barry Goldwater to George W. Bush. (Mercifully, Tanenhaus refrains from drawing explicit connections between Buckley and Donald Trump — there are merely subtle nods, left for the reader to consider further.) That Buckley failed to write an important book of conservative philosophy is hardly important in this context.

As a rule, it is never wise to read other reviews of books before completing one’s own, but I admit to dipping into a few before getting a hold of this biography. In doing so, I came across Osita Nwanevu’s description of Buckley in the New York Review of Books as “conservatism’s baton twirler”. As a metaphor for his role — richly evoking the performative absurdity of American leadership — this is simply unimprovable. •

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution that Changed America
By Sam Tanenhaus | Random House | $79.99 | 1018 pages

The post The entertaining insurgent appeared first on Inside Story.

At the root of that year’s constitutional crisis was the power (or otherwise) of the Senate to block money bills, which are collectively referred to as “supply.” When Malcolm Fraser’s opposition parties blocked supply in the Senate in order to force an election, prime minister Gough Whitlam forcefully disputed the existence of that power, as did a range of constitutional experts. But a different range of experts supported the power, and Fraser used it in 1975 without constitutional challenge. Thus, we can probably cut to the chase and concede its legality.

But had “convention” decreed it not be used? In the fifth edition of his Australian Senate Practice, published in 1972, the clerk of the Senate, James Odgers, briefly addressed this question, asserting that “there can be no question that the Senate has the power to refuse Supply.” He didn’t concede that a convention existed against its use and — while noting it had never so far been used — viewed it as capable of being “brought out and used when circumstances warrant.”

Given his role with the Senate, it isn’t surprising that Odgers was a vigorous proponent of the upper house’s powers. But while there is an element of Mandy Rice-Davies in his position (“That’s what you’d expect him to say”), that isn’t the point. What matters is that on the eve of the election of the Whitlam government, the Senate’s most senior (non-elected) official was almost anticipating the events of 1975 and rejecting the validity of the convention argument used by Whitlam and others during the crisis.

This is not to say that conventions need universal support to exist. But some general consensus among key political players might be viewed as necessary. If someone on Whitlam’s staff had read Odgers, they might have usefully drawn the relevant content to the boss’s attention in the early days of the government.

Whitlam himself hadn’t been consistent on the Supply issue. In 1970 he had urged the Senate to reject a tax bill in order to “destroy” John Gorton’s Liberal government. And, in a little-noticed section of his new biography of Whitlam, Troy Bramston records that during a press conference after William McMahon’s accession to the prime ministership in 1971, Whitlam called for an election given the new leader’s lack of a mandate. When questioned as to whether he “would oppose supply in the Senate to force an election,” his reply was “[W]e would certainly consider this.” In each of these cases, the fact that Whitlam was unlikely to secure the crossbench numbers to achieve his goal is a somewhat lame defence if a matter of principle were genuinely involved.

Moreover, compared with his response in 1975, the Labor leader didn’t dwell on the Coalition’s breach of “convention” in 1974 when it threatened to block supply unless an election were called. Reasonably confident that he would win such an election, Whitlam promptly sought and secured a double dissolution without focusing too much on the principle involved.

Whitlam’s actions on that occasion could be said to have rendered his case more challenging the following year when he was trying to avoid an election he knew he would lose. Resisting the “abuse” of Senate power and sustaining the role of the House of Representatives as the maker of governments became a matter of great principle, and one he was obliged to defend.

Such flexibility of principle was not restricted to the Labor side. In 1968, Liberal founder Sir Robert Menzies spoke in support of a Coalition government encountering Senate frustrations. It would be “a falsification of democracy,” he declared, if government policy approved by the House of Representatives could be reversed by “the Senate representing the states and not the people.”

Alas for consistency, the great Sir Robert, possibly still recovering from the election of a Labor government in 1972, was less critical of Senate obstruction in 1975 and supported the opposition’s blocking of the budget. Nor had he been at all critical of the opposition’s practice of blocking other Whitlam government legislation in the Senate, far more extensive than the obstruction that prompted his colourful “falsification of democracy” line back in 1968.

When the Senate threatened to block supply in 1974, Whitlam (in contrast to his position in 1971) regarded the calling of an election as option, not an obligation. In doing so, he was potentially endorsing the view that denial of supply necessitated an election. While he subscribed to the principle that a government denied supply in the lower house should of necessity seek a dissolution, that too is a convention not mentioned in the constitution. Whitlam’s refusal in 1975 to advise an election that included the House of Representatives would test whether the Australian version of the convention applied to both houses.

The second convention caught up in the events of 1975 concerned the treatment of casual vacancies in the Senate. Two Senate places (both Labor) emerged in 1975, one as a result of a resignation (by Lionel Murphy, New South Wales) and one due to a death (Bert Milliner, Queensland).

Following the introduction of proportional representation for Senate elections from 1949, the states reached an agreement to replace like with like in the event of deaths or resignations. Twenty-five Senate casual vacancies arose between 1951 and 1972, and on each occasion the departing senator was replaced (on a motion of the relevant state parliament) by a member of their own political party. Significantly, on ten of these occasions, the state government in question was of a different political complexion to that of the senator being replaced: the convention was observed.

By 1975 it would therefore have been difficult to deny that a convention had been established — and essentially nobody did. But the convention was flagrantly breached that year when state governments appointed non-Labor nominees to fill the two Labor vacancies. The Queensland breach played a critical role in providing the opposition with the numbers to defer the budget. (The NSW nominee voted against the deferral.)

To fill the vacancy, Queensland’s conservative government demanded that the state Labor Party provide a list of three members from which parliament would choose. The party declined to accept, nominating just the one, Mal Colston. The government used the lack of cooperation as a reason to nominate its own replacement senator, Albert Field, a unionist and Labor branch member who harboured an intense (albeit incoherent) antipathy to the Whitlam government. (Field was stripped of his party membership after accepting the position.)

This breach of convention was widely criticised, including by some Liberals, but was not totally without (partial) precedent in Queensland. In 1962, the conservative government failed to accept Labor’s initial nominee to fill a casual vacancy but then accepted a replacement the party put forward. The principle of like for like had been maintained.

Of course, even if state Labor had nominated three party members in 1975, it is perfectly conceivable that the manically anti-Whitlam premier, Joh Bjelke-Petersen, would have categorised them as dangerous socialists (or worse) and proceeded with the Field nomination. We will never know, but we do know that replacing a deceased Labor senator with a Labor “rat” delivered the numbers the Coalition needed to block the budget in the Senate.

Soon after taking up his seat, Field’s eligibility to sit came into question under section 44 of the constitution because he had been undertaking government work at the time of his appointment. Despite his being on leave from the Senate pending resolution of that question, the opposition maintained a 30–29 majority. (Liberal Movement senator Steele Hall later remarked that Fraser’s Coalition secured power “over a dead man’s corpse,” that of Milliner.)

The breach of the Senate vacancies convention was to lead later to that rarity in Australian history — a successful constitutional referendum. In 1977 the Fraser government, having come to office with the assistance of the breach, proposed to accord constitutional status to that very convention. The law of mutual self-interest? The referendum carried all states with an overall national vote of 73 per cent. Unfortunately, under another law, that of unintended consequences, the greater ease in replacing departing senators has turned the Senate into a virtual elected/nominated hybrid.

The two conventions breached in 1975 have quite different pedigrees. The convention regarding casual Senate vacancies had been reinforced by twenty-five examples of positive action (a departed senator replaced with one of that departed senator’s own party) and, more particularly, by ten instances where state governments eschewed any partisan temptation to appoint one of their own side of politics to the vacancy.

Deferring passage of the budget — in other words, declining to act — is in a different category. For much of the time after the emergence of the party system, the government of the day (usually conservative) held a Senate majority: the question of Senate obstruction was often moot. The status of a convention might be best demonstrated by how an opposition behaved when it enjoyed a Senate majority and was confident that it could win the next election.

A case of sorts arose in 1931 during the life of the shortlived Scullin Labor government. When the United Australia Party opposition sought to curtail the length of time for which supply was granted, its Senate leader expressing a willingness to “force the ministry to an election.” Ultimately, a concession on timing from the government and reservations among some on the non-Labor side meant the opposition didn’t follow through on its threat. Scullin’s government would ultimately meet its demise on the floor of the House of Representatives.

If there was a convention that the Senate should not threaten supply, it was clear in 1931 that it didn’t enjoy universal support, although in the end, the “principle” was maintained. The next elected federal Labor government to face a hostile Senate would be Whitlam’s forty-two years later. For more than four decades, the “convention” was not tested.

For defenders of the Coalition’s actions in 1974 and 1975, past practices reflected a lack of circumstances and opportunity rather than an inviolable convention. The conservative partisan might thus contend that 1974 gave a conservative opposition the first chance to assemble the Senate numbers to force what they depicted as an incompetent and dishonest Labor government to face the people. A less biased observer would identify just two main criteria for the opposition — available means and the likelihood of electoral victory.

Regarding the latter, the Coalition was overly optimistic in 1974, but on the money in the following year. By 1975, a cynic might argue, the convention the conservatives observed was to use the upper house’s power when convenient. They had certainly done so in state parliaments.

To be fair, a small cohort of Liberal parliamentary members did express concern about the budget crisis in 1975 and claimed to support the principle that upper houses should not block money bills. And it must be remembered that the budget was not defeated in the Senate, simply deferred. Hence, the partisan pedant may claim the continued existence of a convention that supply not be “rejected.”

It is worth noting that Labor’s strategy of waiting for an opposition senator or senators to “crack” carried some irony for Whitlam. A strong supporter of a disciplined two-party system as a basis of Australian parliamentary democracy, he was effectively relying on a lack of such discipline among his opponents to allow him to prevail in the crisis. Speculation abounded, but it will never be known for certain whether any such Liberal defections were imminent. What is known is that none had emerged by 11 November.

Two conventions were at play in 1975, one with a more convincing record of observance than the other. Without Bjelke-Petersen’s breach of that casual vacancies convention (producing a “tainted” Senate), it is difficult to see how the conservatives’ upper house strategy could have been implemented.

In the fifty years since the constitutional crisis and dismissal — a period overseen by three Coalition and three Labor governments — blocking supply has been a non-issue. The most obvious explanation is the absence of the numbers in the upper house to facilitate any repeat of 1975. A combination of staggered terms, proportional representation and the weakening of the two-party system has ended for now the prospects of a government (let alone an opposition) possessing a Senate majority. A change to this state of affairs does not appear imminent. •

POSTSCRIPT, APRIL 2026

Around the middle of last year I suggested to Peter Browne that, with the fiftieth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government imminent, he might like to put together a sort of “special edition” of Inside Story featuring a group of writers revisiting the dramatic events of that year.

In his kindest manner, Peter implied that the passage of the years probably meant that my cause might be best served by a “business as usual” approach, with those interested submitting pieces on how they saw the Dismissal and related issues fifty years on.

I retreated to my study intent on ensuring that he received at least one such article. As the anniversary date neared and some of the usual suspects (on both sides) expressed their views in a wide range of media, it was apparent that the Dismissal had retained its power to stir passions and that for many, the “rage” had been well and truly maintained. The emotional investment was still there.

Seeking to reassess some of the accepted wisdom about the political conventions under stress in 1975, I was surprised to discover that things were a little more nuanced than I had previously grasped, and this is reflected in my article. •

The post 1975: the Senate’s unconventional year appeared first on Inside Story.

Her gaze is calm and direct. She will enter the University of Sydney the following year, and it’s as if she already knows what triumphs await her there. Her long brown plaits are tied at the ends with oversized bows. Perhaps that morning she had shrugged off her mother’s offer to help her with them. “There’s no need Mother, I can manage by myself.” And so she could, all through her long life.

Her father was Arthur Bache Walkom, a paleobotanist, secretary of the Linnean Society of New South Wales, and from 1940 until his retirement in 1954 the director the Australian Museum in Sydney. He met his wife, Constance McLean, when they were fellow students at the University of Sydney, she studying arts, he science.

As Mrs Arthur Walkom, Constance apparently let go of any career aspirations she might have had, but her daughter had no intention of doing the same. Gifted, determined, independent: rarely has any woman leapt out of the historical record and demanded my attention as Margaret Walkom has done. Once I began to notice her achievements I became determined not to let her story slip through my fingers.

I encountered her first while researching a piece for Inside Story on the 1939 congress of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, or ANZAAS, in Canberra. I was startled to find that its report had been edited by one “Margaret Walkom, B.A.” It was unusual at that time, surely, for a woman to edit a scientific volume?

The report yields nothing personal about Margaret, but paging through it is enough to suggest she showed exceptional early talent as an editor. It consists of papers read at the congress, minutes of the association’s meetings, membership lists, financial statements, plates, graphs, diagrams, scientific formulae and an index: some 450 pages in all. All ANZAAS congress reports were complex publications and typically the editorship went to established scientists. Margaret undertook the work with no scientific qualifications at just twenty-five years of age.

By some kind of alchemy, the mere sight of her name on the title page transforms her — for me anyway — into a living, breathing person, or at least the possibility of one. The book is an unexciting object to look at, and yet there is someone there, quivering behind the static letters on the page, waiting for her story to be released.

Who was Margaret Walkom? The answer couldn’t be discovered by a Google search. I’d have to find out for myself.

When Margaret was born in 1914, her family was living in Brisbane while her father worked at the Queensland Museum. They returned to Sydney in 1919 and settled in Killara, in the prosperous suburbs of Sydney’s north shore. Nearby was Pymble Ladies’ College, a new school establishing a reputation for quality education for girls.

Pleasingly for Arthur, Pymble was strong in his own subject, geology. It was taught there by Katie Walker, who took her students on excursions to Long Reef at Collaroy to observe rock formations and collect fossils. Decades later a former student still remembered these words, taught to generations of Pymble girls: “The coral polyp delights in the dash and spray of the waves.” Why such delight? Presumably because the waves deliver the tiny organisms the polyp consumes as food. It’s a beautiful sentence and shows that Miss Walker understood the power of words to inspire curiosity. Perhaps her coral polyps lingered in Margaret’s mind as well. There and then, perhaps, a science communicator was born.

At Sydney University, though, Margaret chose arts over science and graduated in 1936 with first class honours in English and second class in French. She also took philosophy and Latin. Like her father she was a great one for clubs and committees, and was a member (and often an office bearer) of the Student Representative Council, the Women’s Undergraduates’ Association, the Women’s Union, the Women Graduates’ Association, the Business and Professional Women’s Association, and the Pymble Ex-Students’ Association. She also joined the Australian English Association, and contributed occasional reviews to its journal, Southerly.

In one ambition, Margaret was thwarted. In April 1937 she was elected president of the SRC, having been vice-president the previous year. She was the first woman in the role, and the Daily Telegraph announced slyly to its readers: “Gentlemen, she is not a blonde.”

Uproar. A woman was “not a suitable person” to be president, it was said (although by whom it was unclear). The meeting at which she had been elected was declared unconstitutional, and the SRC met again to invite outgoing president, law graduate Kevin Ellis, to reconsider an earlier decision not to stand again (because he had insufficient time, he’d said). He agreed, and Margaret was deposed after just a week.

Still enjoying the story, the Daily Telegraph interviewed the university’s celebrated professor of philosophy, John Anderson (Margaret had probably studied under him), who declared the reasons for her ousting were “pretty thin” and predicted “righteous indignation” among women students. No doubt there was, but it made no difference.

All Margaret could do was make a gracious statement to the SRC newspaper, Honi Soit, wishing Ellis every success. Her humiliation might have been too much even for her normally indomitable spirit. She was enrolled in an MA at the time but never completed it.

Margaret was no novice editor when she took on the 1939 ANZAAS report. She had been sub-editor and, in 1936, editor of Hermes, Sydney University’s literary magazine — only the second woman since 1886 to hold the position, after Kathleen Commins (later a prominent Sydney journalist) in 1931. She was in talented company: her immediate successors as editor included James McAuley in 1937, Dorothy Auchterlonie (later Dorothy Auchterlonie Green) in 1938, and Edward Gough Whitlam in 1939. Judith Wright is thought to have published five poems pseudonymously in Hermes in the three issues Margaret edited.

Meanwhile, Arthur Walkom was introducing his daughter into scientific circles. As ANZAAS’s honorary general secretary, he took Margaret to the 1932 congress in Sydney as his “unofficial secretary.” Aged only eighteen, she already had sufficient poise to accompany her parents to the garden party held at Government House for the six hundred congress delegates. The Sydney Morning Herald spotted her among the crowd in a dress of bottle-green marcain (sometimes spelled marocain, a kind of crêpe) and matching coat. These were the days when no report of a social event was complete without a detailed account of what the women wore.

In 1934, and undoubtedly through her father’s influence, she gained a paid part-time job at ANZAAS headquarters in Sydney, and in 1938 she began editing the newly established Australian Journal of Science, issued six times a year. It was a natural step, then, to take on the editorship of the 1939 congress papers.

By a twist of fate, Arthur became ill with tonsilitis just before the congress began, and a typist was injured in an accident. Covering their jobs as well as her own, Margaret travelled to Canberra ahead of her father, in that searingly hot summer in January 1939, to work with the local organising committee finalising the last-minute arrangements.

Journalists were fascinated by dauntless efficiency with which Miss Walkom undertook the work of three people. Photographers snapped her at the congress venue, calmly dealing with paperwork and taking telephone calls. Cyril Pearl interviewed her for the Daily Telegraph and noted her enthusiasm for the congress’s star speaker, H.G. Wells. The relationship between science and society would be a theme of the congress, she told Pearl, and Wells had done much to make science understandable to everyone. For a garden party in the Senate rose garden she chose a black-and-white checked frock and a white hat.

No ANZAAS congresses were held during the war but they began again, in Melbourne, in 1946. This time Margaret went as an observer for the ABC, where she had been working since 1941. At a congress reception at the National Gallery of Victoria she was seen in “two shades of petunia under a long fur coat.” By 1949 she was working at the Radio Physics Division of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, or CSIR, and attended the ANZAAS congress in Hobart in that capacity.

What she wore to the reception that time was not recorded, but nevertheless she was noticed. And this is how I learned the most remarkable thing about Margaret Walkom: she was disabled. Beautiful and glamourous as she was, she had a disability which would have been obvious to everyone who met her and yet somehow, remarkably, she persuaded most journalists not to mention it.

One who got under her guard was Winifred Moore, writing for the Brisbane Courier Mail about the “distinguished women” attending the 1949 Hobart congress. Moore was struck by how Margaret’s “gravely sweet face bore the impress of suffering she had endured.” This was because, as a girl, Margaret had had a leg amputated after an accident. She had “triumphed” over her disability, Moore wrote, and although reliant on crutches, could drive a car and lead an “ordinary active life.”

I was far into my research on Margaret by the time I read this, and never had I detected any hint of struggle. I’d read about frocks and hats but not crutches. Always when photographed in public — which was often — she was either seated or had managed to hide her dependence on crutches. She was quite at ease with being looked at (anyone wearing “two shades of petunia” is not trying to fade into the background), except by the camera.

I’ve not located any personal records left by Margaret so I’m stitching together this story from snippets on the public record, and I acknowledge that there are gaps. I don’t know where she found her inspiration and strength, or what she did with anger, pain and frustration, or how her parents might have urged her on or held her back. I don’t even know how and when her accident occurred. Most likely it was a road or railway accident, which normally would have been reported in the press. Not this time apparently.

In 1941 Margaret left her job with ANZAAS for a position with the Australian Broadcasting Commission, working at first in public relations, and, from 1944, as a researcher with its Talks Department. The departure of many male staff for war offered opportunities for women to gain positions and promotion, and some stepped up from office jobs to sit behind the microphone as announcers.

The Talks Department covered an enormous range of subjects, from international affairs to philosophy to gardening during wartime. Margaret worked on literary programming and would have had contact with some of the prominent thinkers and writers of the time, notably Vance and Nettie Palmer, who were regulars on the ABC then. Occasionally Margaret herself gave a broadcast of a talk, a book review or a reading. She also wrote for the ABC’s magazine, ABC Listen, and in 1946 wrote a charming recollection of lunching with H.G. Wells in Canberra in 1939.

She was still often noticed by the press. She advocated for the extension of the Rhodes scholarship to women, for a uniform basic wage payable to women as well as men, and for ex-service women studying under the Commonwealth Reconstruction Training Scheme to receive the same financial support as ex-servicemen.

In March 1946 she married Major Francis Hutley, a Sydney University economics and law graduate then serving with the Australian Army Legal Department. A social columnist calling herself “Althea,” who regularly reported “city gossip” for a newspaper in Dubbo, picked up that the wedding had taken place “quietly” the previous week at St Stephen’s church in Macquarie Street.

“Althea” also noted that the bride had lost a leg at the age of sixteen as a result of an accident. This is the only other reference to Margaret’s disability I have seen mentioned in the press. The reported age of sixteen could be wrong; “Althea” certainly had Margaret’s age wrong (she was thirty-two, not thirty).

The couple had been students together in the early 1930s; Margaret had even published a couple of Frank’s commentaries on modern poetry in Hermes. After the wedding they set up house together in Wollstonecraft but almost immediately, in April 1946, Frank was posted to the occupation force in Japan. In his absence Margaret’s life continued much as it had before. She kept her job with the ABC (somehow evading the marriage bar) and even kept her own surname.

Returning in December 1946, Frank was discharged from the army and took up a lectureship at the university’s law school. In the ensuing twelve months, Margaret and Frank’s marriage fell apart. Frank returned from a brief holiday at Mount Kosciuszko in December 1947 to find a note from Margaret saying she was leaving him. She’d told housekeeper, Mary Heap, that she was unhappy, and was driven back to Killara by her parents.

Frank wrote begging her return. He could not understand why she had left. “If it was because you feared you might have to give up work and curtail your social activities, I withdraw my objections and promise not to raise them again.” Christmas and New Year would be lonely without her, he said, adding that “the house was large place to live in with only Miss Heap.”

Margaret was having none of that. “Dear Frank,” she wrote back, “I do not want to seem stubborn and unreasonable, but my mind is quite made up. It is no good going over our differences on any particular point. Our marriage was a failure and I know now it could not have been anything else. Any further approach could only occasion bitterness, for which there is no necessity. Yours sincerely, Margaret.”

And that was that. The couple divorced in May 1949 and in July Frank married Leila Walshe, a solicitor. They had four children, a large house in Mosman and a family retreat in Mount Wilson in the Blue Mountains where Frank, appointed to the NSW Supreme Court in 1972, is said to have indulged his passion for gardening and acrimonious disputes with neighbours. If, in a moment of clarity, Margaret had perceived this kind of existence in her future, she rejected it. She had other plans.

In late 1947, during Frank’s little holiday, she had applied for a job with the Commonwealth Department of Education. She was unsuccessful, even with a glowing reference from Sir David Rivett, chairman of the CSIR, whom Margaret knew from her ANZAAS days. The renewed contact might have opened up a new opportunity for her, though, because in 1948 she took up a position with CSIR’s Division of Radio Physics in Sydney.

She didn’t stay long in the Sydney office. CSIR was transforming itself into the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO, and in 1947 an editorial and publications section was established at its headquarters, then in Melbourne. Margaret transferred there in April 1949.

She gave up her Sydney life entirely: her family, her literary friends, her committees and causes, her social life, everything. She could have stayed with the ABC and perhaps transitioned into arts journalism. Or she could have sought an academic career as a literary scholar and critic. The right opportunities might not have presented themselves at the right time, but another explanation is that Margaret needed a complete change after the breakdown of her marriage. The reaction of her family and friends might have been even harder to deal with than her own regrets. Better to make a clean break.

The “dissemination of scientific and technical knowledge” was a requirement under CSIRO’s Act and was achieved by a diverse and expanding publications program. Margaret’s job involved a return to her first career, scientific editing (and with that, perhaps, a memory of Miss Walker’s delighted coral polyps). Without scientific qualifications she couldn’t work on CSIRO’s specialist journals, so she edited publications for general readers, including monographs, annual reports, newsletters, circulars and magazines.

The editorial and publishing section was based at CSIRO’s head office at 314 Albert Street, East Melbourne, until 1963 when it moved to the sixth floor of a new office building at 372 Albert Street. (That building must have had a lift. How Margaret had managed access to the buildings she’d previously worked in is a mystery.) A printery was established in a former paint factory at 19 Rokeby Street Collingwood in 1960. In 1976 CSIRO proudly declared itself the largest publisher of scientific material in Australia.

By then Margaret was one of a team of sixteen editors. Most if not all her work was uncredited, but a title I know she worked on was Industrial Research News, an illustrated bimonthly magazine published in a heroically long run from 1957 to 1975. In its later years the magazine’s content was written by Andrew Bell, a young science writer based at CSIRO in Canberra. Andrew is the only person I have managed to locate who remembers Margaret.

Despite rarely meeting in person, the pair established a long-lasting friendship. The first time they did meet, at Margaret’s office in Albert Street, Andrew was astonished to see her emerging from behind her desk on crutches. Until then he’d had no idea she was disabled.

In 1975 CSIRO’s staff newspaper Coresearch did a short profile on Margaret noting how she achieved a “marriage between science and aesthetics” in the publications she worked on. Editing is an art-cum-science, she told the paper; it required “considerable intellectual nimbleness” to be working on publications dealing with soil analysis, botanical taxonomy and astrophysics all in the same day. Her colleagues said she was one of the few editors who managed to preserve the confidence of authors, the respect of printers and the friendship of graphic designers.

In Sydney Margaret had probably lived in households with domestic help, but in Melbourne she was on her own. (Again, I wonder how managed, especially with the heavy housework and grocery shopping.) For many years she lived in flats in East Melbourne but by 1977 she’d bought an apartment in Murphy Street, South Yarra, and lived there for the rest of her life.

After 1949 she slips from view, possibly because the newspapers and magazines I’d been chasing her through are not digitised after 1954 but also because her social circle was much reduced. Her work was useful, important (and secure, which matters for a single woman) but decidedly humdrum compared to her former life. I wonder how she felt about that? Did she keep a little cutting book of her earlier social successes, and did she page through it occasionally, remembering?

Let’s imagine she did, and that we can watch over her shoulder. There’s a photograph of her chatting to the American consul-general at a cocktail party at the Feminist Club in 1949. And there’s a report of the party she attended at the Sydney Town Hall in honour of Jessie Street in 1945. A few pages back she might pause at a clipping about the undergraduates’ ball she’d organised at the Trocadero in 1936. “Rich purple taffeta cut on simple lines and ruched over the shoulders was chosen by Miss Walkom, who fastened a spray of silver leaves and berries in her hair.”

That was the year she was vice-president of Sydney University’s SRC and Kevin Ellis was president. They had greeted guests together, she in her purple taffeta and he in his… well, dinner suit, one supposes. Purple is associated with female empowerment but little good that did her the following year when the treacherous Ellis reclaimed the presidency of the SRC.

Was it treachery? Or was he just doing what many men do, which is to accept power as their natural right? Ellis went on to practice as a solicitor in Sydney before embarking on a long career in New South Wales politics. He had a wife and two children and a home in Point Piper, enjoyed fishing and playing bowls, and in 1969 was appointed KBE and became Sir Kevin Ellis.

As she sat alone with her cutting books and photograph albums, I wonder how Margaret might have told to herself the story of her life as a single woman building a career in fields that could never bring the fortune and glory enjoyed by many of her male contemporaries. Quite possibly she had some classic texts lined up on her shelves: English writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, the Brontës, George Eliot, Virginia Woolf. She could have read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary in the original French.

By 1960s there were new feminist authors to consider: Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer, Anne Summers. Beauvoir had much to say, in The Second Sex, about women and clothing. “[Woman] dresses to display herself; she displays herself to make herself be. She thus submits herself to painful dependence.” Elegance, Beauvoir thought, is servitude.

But what of the disabled woman? Clearly, Margaret had no interest in dependence and servitude, and her disability in no way prevented her from claiming the same right as any woman to enjoy being appreciated for her clothes. She could have reasoned that few men would be sexually interested in a woman on crutches, so she might as well dress as she liked. Or she may have felt especially vulnerable to the unwanted attentions of men, and used clothing as means of asserting power. Whatever her thinking, she was surely just as desirous of emotional and sexual fulfilment as anyone else.

This is a sensitive area. It is challenging to historicise the experience of people with disabilities. In addition to getting into the mind of a person from the past, a biographer must also try to understand how their subject lived inside their bodies.

Margaret’s mother died in 1975 and her father in 1976. She retired in 1977 aged sixty-three. Ill-health was the stated reason but a financial legacy from her father might have made the decision easier. Sadly though, her sight began to fail and by 1988 she was completely blind. Still living alone in her South Yarra apartment, with no family nearby, her days must have been lonely indeed. Reading had been her life, but now that was all gone. The radio might have been her only companion during many empty hours. It was a medium she knew well.

She did have a small community of supporters: neighbours in her apartment building, a part-time cleaner-housekeeper Narda Barkas, and a longstanding colleague from CSIRO, John Lenaghan (a fellow editor), who helped her with shopping, paying bills and banking. Andrew Bell telephoned regularly from Canberra, and visited her once in South Yarra for dinner, bringing cheese, fruit and flowers. She was blind by then, but he remembers a beautifully laid table and Margaret in a pale green dress and jewellery, her hair freshly done. An enjoyable evening, he told me; just the two of them sharing time together.

Margaret died in a private hospital in October 1994. She had invested her father’s legacy and her estate was valued for probate at $2,117,000. After generous bequests to friends and two remaining relatives (a cousin and a niece), she directed that the rest of her estate be dedicated to medical research. Today the Margaret Walkom Bequest is worth more than five million dollars, and in 2024 made nearly $200,000 available in research grants.

Margaret’s life falls into two periods: Sydney until 1949, and Melbourne after that. In Sydney her life was active and vibrant; in Melbourne she seems to disappear behind the institutional walls of the CSIRO. Her isolated old age might have been the exact fate from which her parents had hoped marriage would save her.

Despite the many “perhapses” and “maybes” in her story, one thing we can say with certainty is that Margaret went her own way, always grappling with the double disadvantage of being a woman and having a disability. Even with her privileged background there was no established career trajectory for her to follow, whereas the men of her world had merely to work hard and follow the paths laid out for them. Margaret had her father’s scientific connections to get her started but after that, her only path was the one she created for herself. •

For assistance in preparing this article the author would like to thank Kate Murray (College Archivist, Pymble Ladies’ College), Dr Andrew Bell, and Kylee Nicholls (Archivist, The Women’s College, University of Sydney).

The post A mind quite made up appeared first on Inside Story.

Loveman suggests that the website also continues some less apparent traditions. Misremembering the British past. Inducing each generation to think they are finding the only true and enduring shocks in the work. Passing off a translated version of the diary as the unadulterated text Pepys composed.

In her lively, innovative analysis, Loveman ranges over all these traditions, striding steadily from 1 January 1660, when Pepys began his diary, via its posthumous deposit in Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1724, to its various editions and spin-offs up to the present day.

Throughout, she maintains that Pepys’s diary has always been “a gateway drug to history” for the English-speaking world. It has been a portal to an empirical sense of history, outlining the contours of the early Restoration period — especially the Great Plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It has provoked a philosophical approach to history, igniting debate between those who judge the past by their own values and those who (say they) do not. Finally, it has pushed readers into an evaluative or critical sense of history, generating discussions about whether the actions of kings count more or less than those of ordinary people (like Pepys).

All these modes of history are invoked in Loveman’s recounting of the traditions that have coloured the curious afterlife of one man’s six-volume private journal.

Samuel Pepys (1633–1703) was born the son of a humble tailor, though he had influential relatives. In 1655 his cousin obtained a minor clerkship for him in Oliver Cromwell’s republican government. After Cromwell died in 1658, the same cousin — a man who was instrumental in restoring the ousted Stuart monarchy to power — arranged a position for Pepys on the Navy Board. Seamlessly transforming from republican servant to loyal monarchist, Pepys eventually rose to become Secretary of the Admiralty.

Pepys kept his diary for the first nine years of Charles II’s restored reign. The commitment turned into an obsession, a vital outlet for a man gripped by a need to impose an orderly narrative onto chaos and an intense curiosity about power and sex. When he gave up the diary in 1669, believing it was damaging his eyesight, he grieved that doing so was “almost as much as to see myself go into the grave.”

No one else read the diary during Pepys’s lifetime. He knew that its revelations about the decadence of court life could get him fired, that its confessions about extramarital affairs would ruin his marriage, and that its exposés of Charles II’s debauchery might see him executed. To ensure privacy Pepys used a confusing combination of shorthand, longhand and foreign language.

He always intended for later generations to read the diary, though, primarily to secure his reputation as an efficient and effective civil servant of a burgeoning great state. Among the 3000 volumes he left to Magdalene College were not only the diary to testify to his work during the early years but also records of his administration during the rest of the old Stuart era.

Pepys’s Library, including his famous diary, left to Magdalene College, Cambridge.

Even before Pepys died, though, he must have known that his hope of posthumous admiration was uncertain. He’d not well survived the transition in 1688 from the last old Stuart king, James II, to the new constitutional order of King William III. Although he remained firmly Protestant, Pepys was associated too closely with the growing Catholicism of James II, which had prompted the transition in the first place. He was arrested twice in 1689 on charges of treason against William III. He was never convicted but he retired from all offices and spent his final years worrying about how history might recall him.

For the next century Pepys’s worries were more than justified. His legacy was mostly ignored during a period so focused on moving away from an absolutist monarchy that its first impulse was to pretend it never existed.

He fared better in the nineteenth century. As their empire began to soar, Britons became interested in reimagining the past as a process of nation building. When Pepys’s diary was finally published (heavily abridged) in 1825, though, it was deployed not as a celebration of the Restoration era but as proof of how far Britain had come. The founding Whig historian Thomas Macaulay used it extensively to condemn the excesses of the previous order. He argued that Pepys’s diary was a litany of past “crimes and follies” that should motivate readers to consolidate parliamentary reform and a strict sense of Protestant morality.

Early twentieth-century readers focused more on the events Pepys recounted than on the political scene — a sign perhaps that Macaulay’s vision had panned out so well they now assumed parliamentary government and Protestant culture were timeless aspects of the national character. Haunted by world wars, these readers sought comfort by reading about how other Britons had endured plague and fire. One reader wrote that the French novelist Honoré de Balzac is “too depressing” but Pepys keeps her “cheerful.” Another felt that only Pepys had the words to describe what it felt like to live through the Blitz.

Postwar, Pepys’s diary was re-read again. Editions by now included more (though not all) of the lewd scenes earlier omitted. The attraction became neither politics nor personal endurance but instead Pepys’s cultural world of bawdiness. A BBC drama series of the diary characterised Pepys as a roguish if competent man about town while The Benny Hill Show made him out to be a “naughty” eccentric. A few generations on, it is interesting to see the beginnings of a more inward-facing, “Little England” mentality.

For most of those years no reader was absorbing the entire text of Pepys’s diary, for a full and unabridged edition didn’t appear until 1976.

Kate Loveman is most insightful when narrating the tortuous path from Pepys’s composition to final publication. The first of the five main editions, published in 1825 in two volumes, omitted most references to Pepys’s daily life and all but one hint of sexual misconduct, publishing just a quarter of Pepys’s words. A second edition in the 1840s expanded to include around 40 per cent of the diary. The 1870s edition saw around 80 per cent published, and Henry Wheatley’s 1899 edition represented everything except “a few passages which cannot possibly be printed.” Only in 1976 did the Cambridge historian Robert Latham and the UCLA literary professor William Matthew finally produce a full scholarly edition in eleven volumes.

Why such a long haul? What couldn’t possibly be printed for so long? Loveman shows how the definition and management of what is shocking has changed over time. The 1825 editors not only censored Pepys’s sexual behaviour but also tempered the raucous actions of his colleagues and friends. The women whom Pepys called “whores,” for example, were turned into “mistresses,” and the courtiers whom Pepys had running around with “arses bare” were now “almost naked.”

The 1840s editors allowed Pepys to be slightly less socially reputable, permitting him to drink and make poor decisions. But he was still not afforded any sexual license, and in the aftermath of Charles II’s coronation, as an example of his public behaviour, he was said to “vomitt” rather than wake up “wet with my spewing.”

The 1870s editors cared measurably less about Pepys’s respectability but were still highly cautious about sex. They allowed him one of his vastly numerous affairs, though when his wife caught him they had him say that he was “embracing the girl. I was at a wonderful loss upon it, and I endeavoured to put it off.” What Pepys actually wrote was that he was found “imbracing the girl with my hand under her skirts; and endeed, I was with my hand in her cunny. I was at a wonderful loss upon it, and the girl also.” Pepys was finally granted a sexuality, but it had to be a tame one and cloaked in shame if performed outside marriage.

Even Wheatley, who published nearly everything, presented Pepys “embracing the girl… I was at a wonderful loss upon it, and the girle also.” Adding in an ellipsis (and an extra olde worlde e) told the reader a bit more about Pepys, though nothing explicit.

By the 1950s, scholars at least were fed up. The Magdalene College librarian complained that Wheatley’s addition of that ellipsis had actually made readers “put a worse construction on Pepys’s famous affair with Deb than the full account justified.” Most fellows at Magdalene, including C.S. Lewis, agreed. The sticking point now was not so much fears of readers’ meaning-making but a more prosaic fear of the law. Editors were bound by the 1857 Obscene Publications Act’s provision for a work to be destroyed if the material tended “to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.”

Eventually, in 1959, the law changed to exempt material that was for “the public good.” At length, Magdalene decided to go ahead, and the result was Latham and Matthews’s unexpurgated version.

Loveman’s tale of gradually lessening censorship is told subtly. She narrates a Britain inflexible about unrespectable and sexual behaviour gradually becoming a place more relaxed about one and then, at length, about the other. The temptation is strong to imagine that today, at the end of the tale, we have arrived at a nirvana of toleration, quietly mocking readers before us who not only had silly values but were also dumb enough to judge the past by them.

Loveman refuses this conclusion. Her last chapter provides a pretty convincing reading of Pepys as both a sexual assailant and a slave owner — two identities earlier readers seemed not even to notice but which agitate modern people very much. On assault, she provides at least six examples, including when Pepys had, with a girl under fourteen, “great pleasure [by] touching her thing with my thing and doing the orgasm” and when he “tried to do [to Mrs Bagwell] what I would, and against her will I did it.” On the issue of slaves, Loveman highlights at least two men owned by Pepys. The first of his “Black-Boys” he sold for some sherry and chocolate. Later, he was so angry with another “Negroe” for bad housekeeping that he ordered him to be “disposed” of on a ship and “kept on Hard Meat” till he arrived at a plantation.

Loveman’s point is not to advocate censoring Pepys, as past editors had, or even to cancel him, which is the modern preference to censorship. But she does wish to show that our revulsion at this evidence was probably similar to what earlier readers experienced, though the sources of dismay are different. Every reader judges the past according to values that each believes so essential they surpass history. The answer to judgement should be neither censorship nor cancellation. The best response — as I interpret Loveman to be saying anyway — is to recognise and understand changes in morality, and to realise that doing so constitutes the deepest work of philosophical history.

The final Pepys tradition parsed by Loveman concerns the readers’ sense of having an intimate and direct connection to the diarist. Commentators on pepysdiary.com know the feeling well. Almost all of them call him Sam. In 2012, when the first cycle of the diary ended, one remarked that “Sam has been truly alive for us in ‘real time.’” Another who had just experienced a bushfire observed himself “watching my neighbours’ house burn down on TV with the same surreal sense… that Sam must have felt when he saw the pigeons fall [during the Great Fire].” During the Covid-19 pandemic, several reported that reading Pepys made them “better prepared to talk about the realities of quarantine.”

It’s an experience that can be traced backwards through the entire timeline of Pepys’s diary. In 1914, for instance, a reader noted that no man “knows any of his fellows… as well as all of us know Pepys.” Sixty years before that, another insisted everyone “is taken into [Pepys’s] innermost soul.”

For sure, Pepys’s personable style accounts for much of this response. But Loveman shows that it also reflects a belief that readers have access to Pepys’s raw, unfiltered thoughts. Most assume Pepys wrote the original in code so no one else could read it, and thus also assume Pepys had no reason to polish, massage or otherwise fake his reactions. Loveman’s most original contribution is to explode this myth.

The opening page of Pepys’s coded diary.

The agreed wisdom is that the diary’s code was first broken by a Cambridge undergraduate called John Smith, who worked on the diary for three years. Smith never explained how he cracked it, leaving most to deduce it was solely from his genius. No conventional shorthand manual matched Pepys’s method. But Loveman has found that very early on in his transcription Smith was comparing Pepys’s markings with those uniquely found in Thomas Shelton’s obscure Tachygraphy (1635). Moreover, a copy of Shelton’s guide was included in the 3000 volumes Pepys left for Magdalene. Pepys did anticipate readers, but just not during his own lifetime.

Loveman further shows that the adulterations to Pepys began with Smith himself. He imposed his own punctuation and frequently omitted things he found “objectionable.” Very few people after Smith ever learned the code. This means that successive formal editors have only ever worked with Smith’s version, and we have already seen how much they imposed their views. As Loveman writes, we tend to think of Pepys’s code as “a kind of cover… which has to be removed to expose the original meaning in English. Instead, the reverse is true. The shorthand is the original text.” If anyone has direct access to Pepys (and who can say what that is if he always wrote for an audience) then it includes only the handful of people living today, including Loveman, who can understand his language.

Unfiltered or not, the diary’s personableness has nonetheless had an important effect on how readers over the centuries have evaluated what they are learning, or judging, about the past. Even in the earliest edition, slashed of most quotidian references, readers were prompted to consider what the revelations of a commoner — like them— were adding to history. Walter Scott decided they were treasures to “antiquaries” at least, if not historians proper. That is, they provided critical insight into past leisure activities, crime worlds and superstitions but perhaps not into what truly generated change over time.

Later generations, less wedded to a division between antiquarianism and history, felt that Pepys’s anecdotes of the everyday worked at least to “enliven history”: they may not constitute the real thing but they made the real thing more palatable.

By the 1940s, some readers were wondering if Pepys’s everyday world was not in fact more real than the rarefied world of high politics. These were often readers who were taking part at the same time in the nationwide Mass Observation research project of recording daily life. One said she recorded because her details “should be very interesting to posterity in the way the Samuel Pepys diary is.” Another feared that her entries were “trivial stuff” compared to Pepys’s but she still recorded for “historians who may write in the future.”

The question of authenticity in Pepys’s text is more complex than we have till now believed. But the way the diary projects a sense of authentic access has all the same moved readers to profound meditations about the role of ordinary people in creating the history of their world.

From learning about what happened in the past, to thinking through the meaning of the past, to wrestling with what or who made the past: Samuel Pepys’s famous diary has indeed always been an enticement to the biggest issues of historical practice. “And so,” as the man himself would say, may it remain into the future. •

The Strange History of Samuel Pepys’s Diary
By Kate Loveman | Cambridge University Press | $42.99 | 237 pages

The post A gateway drug to history appeared first on Inside Story.

I was less than a year old when Germany invaded Poland and the second world war began, and not quite two when in June 1940 the Wehrmacht invaded France, occupying its northern regions and soon establishing the puppet Vichy state in the south. By that time many of Hitler’s designated enemies — artists, writers and leftists, a good proportion of whom were Jewish — had sought refuge in France but now found themselves trapped there.

Across the Atlantic, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had begun his third presidential term but hesitated to extend emergency visas while American isolationist sentiment remained strong. That’s when Eleanor — FDR’s better angel — entered, and the result of her efforts was the small, modestly funded Emergency Rescue Committee, or ERC.

Uwe Wittstock’s Marseille 1940 is the fascinating account of the thousands of rescues conducted by this committee — and most particularly by its indefatigable leader, a man scarcely known today and seemingly unsuited for the task. Wittstock admits that while this group is his focus, “countless unknown persons faced the same dangers, but the traces of their lives have been lost in the chaos of war and flight.” I’d add that his story of desperate refugees has resonance for us today — an assertion I’ll return to later.

Varian Mackey Fry is a name reeking of American East Coast establishment. But, as Wittstock tells us, its owner had an “unpredictable, rebellious side” and was “not one for compromise.” Arguably the book’s hero, Fry was an early predicter of the dangers posed by Europe’s rising fascism.

In 1935, aged twenty-five, he sent the New York Times an eyewitness account of a brutal Nazi attack on a group of Berliner Jews — an attack a Nazi press officer took pains to inform him had been fomented by party provocateurs. It was the government’s firm policy to rid Germany of its Jews one way or another, the press officer hinted. This searing event preceded Kristallnacht by three years, yet until Fry’s dispatch no mainstream American news outlet had been prepared to make much of a possible European war while the United States was reeling from the severity of the Depression.

By May 1940, with Germany poised to invade France, Fry was back in Manhattan as chief editor for the Foreign Policy Association, publishing a range of political books including several by himself. It was the perfect job for him, intellectually rigorous yet well-enough funded that he didn’t need to bother about sales. Then, out of the blue, he received a phone call that would change that cushy trajectory forever. An escaped German-Jewish psychoanalyst using the pseudonym Paul Hagen, founder of the fledgling American Friends of German Freedom, told him what was happening as Germany swept across Europe:

In the wake of the advancing military, Gestapo search parties systematically comb through the country. Furnished with prepared lists, they track down Hitler’s adversaries, arrest them, deport them to concentration camps, or murder them then and there. In Poland, which Germany invaded the previous year, they have now proceeded to kill off not just the resistance fighters, but also the country’s entire elite: physicians, teachers, merchants, politicians, engineers. Only a nation of worker-slaves is meant to survive.

Fry readily understood that a generation of European cultural stars was in danger. Marc Chagall, Max Ernst, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Lionel Feuchtwanger, Anna Seghers, Alfred Döblin and Walter Mehring were among the names he and Hagen discussed. Others, such as Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, will come to readers’ minds.

Fry knew he had to act quickly, but how? By June the Gestapo had entered Paris. Unoccupied Vichy appeared the only answer. Through a network of connections, including Heinrich Mann’s brother Thomas, who was safely working in Princeton, a fundraising event was organised. More money was raised in Hollywood, Eleanor Roosevelt was conscripted, and the ERC was born.

Fry and Hagen knew they had to set up in Vichy, for as soon as word of the ERC’s existence spread through the underground the hunted would find their way to them. The Foreign Policy Association gave Fry a few weeks leave, and by mid August 1940 he was in Marseille looking for a place to house the ERC headquarters, meeting some of the people whose rescue he was to organise, and enlisting the people who could help him.

It all sounds so easy, but it was anything but. Neither, I imagine, was Wittstock’s task in putting it all together in Marseille 1940. For this is a marvel of narrative art: over the 291 pages through which he weaves his story, there’s not a page where my interest flagged, and this in a text with a veritable cavalcade of characters, each of whose stories warrants a book in itself, and in many cases actually have.

Many of those rescued had first to escape from France’s hideously barbaric detention centres before they could reach Marseille. Most were without papers. The American consul himself was notably uncooperative, even if some of his staff were accommodating.

There were only two routes for fleeing — on land through the rugged Pyrenees or by sea from Marseille, itself often blocked. Either way was dangerous, and some indeed perished; one, famously, by his own hand. And it’s more than likely that few of us would have heard of Walter Benjamin if Hannah Arendt hadn’t grabbed the precious manuscript he’d been carrying and taken it with her to America.

Arendt became a noted public intellectual in America, influential for The Origins of Totalitarianism and other publications and because of her apposite warning that if Jews were to establish a state of their own in historic Palestine it would necessarily become another Sparta. Today we are witness to the tragic accuracy of her prescience. Although the phrase “Never Again” has been the catch-cry, for Israel and its supporters the lesson of the Holocaust seems to be for Jews alone, not for the rest of humanity.

My own researches for my last novel brought me to the same conclusion, which is why a decade ago I joined a small group called the Northern Beaches Committee for Palestine with a simple task: to train two lifesavers from Gaza at Manly’s North Steyne Surf Lifesaving Club so they could establish a Nippers program at home. Israel’s periodic “mowing the lawn” had destroyed most of Gaza’s recreational facilities and some young people were drowning on its beaches.

The lifesavers went back, started up two programs, and were well on their way to building their own surf club. Then came 7 October and Israel’s illegal and wildly disproportionate retribution. Within days, two young members of the Nippers were killed, along with their families. The lifesavers and their families, forced out of Gaza’s north, were living in tents in Rafah.

Before long came the news that the father of one of our members had died from an unattended heart attack. We directed our efforts to doing what we could to get our lifesavers and their children out and bring them to Australia. With the help of our local MP and the previous immigration minister, one of the lifesavers was able to leave with his wife and three children the day before Israel closed the Rafah crossing. After being shunted hither and thither, our other lifesaver was last heard trying to buy another tent in Rafah.

It was a small operation, scarcely comparable with what Varian Fry pulled off from Vichy eighty-four years ago. Yet there are things I’ve learned from it. First, about wars being progenitors of their successors. If there hadn’t been a Holocaust, there might never have been an apartheid Israel; there might indeed have never been another genocide. Second, go with your heart and sense of justice. As an old kabbalist wrote, “the source of all evil in the world is too much head, and not enough heart.”

This is what Uwe Wittstock has done with Marseille 1940, which is not to say a lot of meticulous research hasn’t gone into writing it. As for me, the reader, it has it all — characters, stories, places, history. What happened to Varian Fry? Buy the book and see. Take my word for it: it’s the very best book I’ve read for quite a while. •

Marseille 1940: The Flight of Literature
By Uwe Wittstock | Translated by Daniel Bowles | Polity Press | $51.95 | 319 pages

The post Perilous refuge appeared first on Inside Story.

It was a boozy seaplane pilot who introduced me to the idea that the islands of the Pacific are places of escape. His name was Jake Cutter, and he was the lead character in Tales of the Gold Monkey, a television show I adored as a child. Set somewhere in the Pacific Islands before the onset of the second world war, the show is nowadays squirm inducing. Pacific Islanders themselves barely figure, and the storyline contains every conceivable stereotype of the Westerner abroad — the drunk fleeing bad debts and a failed marriage, the swashbuckler with the whisky affliction, the fortune-hunter with a dark past — every character some version of the wild rover washed in from distant shores.

Cutter’s series was an entry point for me into Somerset Maugham and James Michener, each of whom trafficked in similar but more well-rounded stories about the bluffers, beachcombers, bankrupts, buffoons, miners, traders and other flotsam lost at the tail-ends of empire.

As George Orwell observed in his essay on boys’ weeklies, the characters, sounds and impressions encountered in popular culture at an impressionable age can leave indelible impressions. In adult years, some of them were reinforced when I read the histories and memoirs of the actual men and women who made the Pacific their home — accounts as frothy as anything dreamt up by a novelist. Later, I came to Pacific writers too, like Epeli Hau’ofa, who often skewered the affectations and foibles of this expat class as well as dinging the imperfections and occasional craven obsessions of Pacific islanders themselves.

I packed some of these old stories and histories to tide away idle hours during recent work excursions into the Pacific. I lugged them from the Cook Islands in the south seas to Saipan, up on the other side of the equator in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands, and then down to Papua New Guinea. I read them in bars, coffee shops, near the pool, on planes, at a tourist show, during an achingly dull presentation on “Pacific regional architecture.”

Perhaps it was my reading diet, perhaps the clammy heat, but sometimes, when I’d look up too quickly at the present-day characters arrayed around me, I’d see similarities. The Pacific seemed still choc-a-block with old-timers. Who are they? What did they do? How did they end up there? And were they ever going to leave?

The first step on my busman’s holiday-cum-literary pilgrimage was the largest of the Cook Islands, Rarotonga. I remembered it from previous visits as languid in the extreme, yet recent headlines had been treating it as the latest frontline in the Pacific’s great game. In February, the country’s prime minister, Mark Brown, signed a package of agreements with China that set strategists’ pulses a-racing and political leaders in New Zealand, the former colonial power that retains loose oversight of the Cook Islands, into apoplexy. Would the place be different from my memory?

Not so much. The small capital, Avarua, was just as sleepy as I remembered. Tourists, mostly Kiwis, were ambling up and down the main drag eating ice cream and ducking in and out of shops offering pearls and knickknacks. Strikingly, not a Chinese person was to be seen. Unlike in many other parts of the Pacific, I saw no Chinese stores, roadworks or new buildings, and no vehicles with “Chinese aid” logos affixed. If this was a beachhead, it was a submerged one.

There were lots of foreign faces, though. In the old books and memoirs, the foreign faces were white. Most arrivals nowadays hail from other shores: Fiji, Indonesia and the Philippines, many filling jobs in tourism and construction. These were people chasing the timeless emigrant dream of a better life. Where are all the Cook Islanders? Many have made their own move, heading off for better-paid work in New Zealand and Australia. Ten times more Cook Islanders live out of the country than within.

A Fijian poured me a cold Cook Islands Lager. I was at the bar at Trader Jacks, Avarua’s archetypal expat spot, which was as just as I remembered it: the type of a place where Somerset Maugham could have written a story about how tropical lassitude wearies the soul. Its founder — long-term expatriate Jack Cooper — was no longer in residence: the New Zealander had gone to the great gin palace in the sky, his memory memorialised with a picture near the toilets that showed him in a loud shirt, cigarette jutting from his mouth, flanked by sixteen bottles of his favourite snifter.

Cooper never wrote the book he threatened, the provisional title of which was the winning Forty Years Behind Bars. But a shelf of amiable books shares the theme of the antics, affectations and foibles of Cook Islands expats. Among them is Years of the Pooh-Bah, an account of the odd assortment of characters New Zealand sent to administer the place during colonial rule, and Tales of the Papa’as, papa’ā being the name in Cook Islands Māori give to Westerners. Each papa’ā in the book is as colourful, eccentric and waggish as the one before.

Apart from one, all books about Cook Islands are either written by or about men. A fellow bookworm and consultant, Hilary Gorman, who put me onto many volumes in my Cook Islands’ collection, confirmed the profound gender disparity. After seventeen years in country, this Canadian expat academic only knew of one tale told by a woman, about a woman or from a woman’s point of view: My Kokotu of the South Seas, by a New Zealander called Helen Henry who had married into a storied Cook Islands political family.

If a pronounced gender bias is a common theme, immersion in local politics is another. Many of the papa’ā in these works forged alliances or business relationships with members of the country’s political elite — deals that invariably ended calamitously. In one case, in the 1990s, a currency scheme nearly bankrupted the country.

Some of the Cook Islands’ present-day revenue-raising schemes echo those freewheeling times. The world’s fastest-growing “flag of convenience” shipping operation is run out of a small office close to Trader Jacks, and the country has an offshore banking industry renowned as a good place for rich Americans anticipating divorce to stash money away. It’s the modern-day version of Jake Cutter’s observation that the islands aren’t a place where you ask too much about anyone’s past.

Other enterprising types are involved in deep-sea mining, a frontier venture that prior generations of papa’ā couldn’t have dreamed of. The seabed here is replete with nodules rich in cobalt; according to some estimates, as much as $10 trillions’ worth of the element lies waiting under the sea. Three exploration licenses have been issued for this very twenty-first-century form of speculation.

The local newspaper, the Cook Islands News, remains essential reading. It combines the fiddle-faddle of the parish-pump newsletter with a reminder that these islands, despite a population of just 15,000, are a place of ever more interest to outside powers. For every story about the police breathalysing Friday evening carousers, there is another about the prime minister meeting Chinese and American delegations keen to invest in deep-sea mining.

Although it may have lost some of its centrality since the arrival of smartphones and social media, the paper’s website provides a window onto this world for an annual NZ$115 (A$102) subscription. The printed version, which retails locally for NZ$2.50, is best enjoyed on a barstool at Trader Jacks, where the reader can look around to see if any of the characters mentioned in the paper are propping up the bar.

It was early June when I visited. The King’s birthday awards had recently been announced and the Cook Islands News was festooned with profiles of gong recipients. The highest honours went to two men who looked like modern-day incarnations of the papa’ās in the books I had been reading, although they had achieved markedly more success in business. One runs the airline, the other manages the country’s largest trading corporation. Each in his own way made life in the far-flung chain of islands viable by providing air links and almost everything non-human I could see in the bar, including the clothes of the patrons.

Yet, as I discovered from Hilary Gorman, many of the other long-stayers were engaged in much less visible work. What was striking was how many of those working with civil society organisations hailed originally from overseas and how many were women. They were environmental campaigners, advocates for nutrition and the importance of exercise, preservers of cultural heritage, teachers, odd job women and the occasional man who did tedious bureaucratic work to keep organisations above water. Few could be doing it for the money, observed Gorman, as each job came with long hours and small pay.

These are smell-of-an-oily-rag operations reliant on occasional goodwill from the civil society funds of countries like Australia, New Zealand and Japan. The long-timers are practitioners of politics as the art of the possible. They know when to push and lobby, and when to ease off. They are schooled in the fate of others, those who came a cropper by either trying too quickly or being too bolshie.

These unsung long-timers are playing a between-two-worlds role. ANU doctoral student and ni-Vanuatu woman Anna Naupa calls them buffers. Being outsiders gives them latitude to operate in uncomfortable or sensitive spaces. The latitude has limits, though. Rare was the long timer, no matter how extensive and storied their tenure on the islands, who could wade head-on into public opining on politics. This may explain why the supplest muscle in every long-timers body in the Cook Islands seemed to be in the neck, so often does it turn to see whether it’s safe to offer sotto voce opinions.

Pleasant as the Cook Islands is, it would take a special kind of mettle to stay too long. I loved my time there but was happy to leave; the smallness of the place closed in on me after a few weeks. It was no surprise to learn that many who arrive from overseas to work don’t last. There is little in the way of high-end living, literally; no building can be higher than the tallest coconut tree, an edict of the first prime minister, Sir Albert Henry — a man, incidentally, whose career ended in ignominy owing to one of those disastrous get-rich-quick schemes engineered by a papa’ā.

I was picked up at the airport on Saipan, the largest island in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands by an Indian man wearing an “I Love New York” t-shirt. This was my first visit, but the driver had been on Saipan twenty-eight years and — as if to pre-empt any questions I might have in these Trumpian times — was anxious to tell me he was a citizen. He moved there as a youngish man and had been sending money back to his family each month ever since.

When I told him I’d arrived from elsewhere in the Pacific, he said that the Cook Islands sounded as far away as Syria would be to an Indian: part of the same continent but that’s where the similarities mostly end. To fly from Rarotonga to Saipan takes three days via New Zealand, Australia and Japan. It is a reminder of the vastness of the Pacific Ocean and how little aviation connectivity there is in a region often glossed as being part of one big Pacific family.

I didn’t conduct a scientific survey, but it seemed that only government officials from either Saipan or Rarotonga had spent time in both places. But interest from the major powers was resulting in more meetings, more travel. Pacific officials complain about a steady diet of meetings, training, consultations and workshops that takes many away from their offices for long periods. (Though I wondered how genuine such complaints truly are: as often as not, many I’ve encountered seem happy to take up expenses-paid travel opportunities.) One fellow in Saipan told me that he was on the road three months a year attending such parleys.

Geopolitical competition is also a boon for the hoteliers and airline shareholders of the Pacific. There is a timelessness to this; Hau’ofa’s stories are set during the cold war, the last time the Pacific aroused the interest of the major powers. His characters are forever jaunting away from the office too, “riding the tidal wave of development,” as he put it. The more things change…

Like nearby Guam, the Marianas is a US territory. Its feels as distinctly American in flavour as the Cook Islands feels like New Zealand. Everything seems bigger here: the cars, the portion sizes, the waistlines. Somewhere in crossing the Pacific I had flown not only over the international dateline but also over an international rugby line into a gridiron zone.

The makeup of the Marianas long-timer is different too, owing to more restrictive visa regulations here than in other parts of the Pacific. This is a place for men and women who left the islands in their youth to serve in the US military and have returned in their golden years, or for Americans from elsewhere in the country to retire.

Some of the seniors are no-nonsense sorts; a neighbourhood watch meeting was going on in an adjacent table at a restaurant when I was having lunch one day. Yet Saipan has long had a reputation as a sunny place that has attracted people at the shadier end of the scale. It is a reminder that not all who come to the Pacific have civic-mindedness in mind.

The American apotheosis of the shady sort is Larry Hilbloom, the man who put the H in the logistics company DHL. Hilbloom lived like a monarch on a cliff-edge bungalow on Saipan; his nickname, which he devised, was King Larry, the title of a book I picked up documenting his wild life and times in the closing decades of the last century. In Saipan, he bought the local bank and telecoms outfit and inveigled himself into the justice system. He managed to have himself named a justice on the Saipanese supreme court to adjudicate on a case that involved him. A man of satyric impulses, he flew around Asia indulging illegal desires.

Then came his mysterious death. In 1995, he took off from an uninhabited island in the Marianas chain to Saipan with two companions. His plane crashed. The two other bodies were found but Hilbloom’s never was. I spoke to one of the police investigators who found the plane, a sensible man who did not strike me as prone to conspiracism. He was convinced Hilbloom faked his own death and was still likely to be carousing in one of those Asian fleshpots where law enforcement was pliable or buyable.

I walked past one of the Saipan bars in which a small model plane had been erected on a plinth as if in karmic irony and called into another for a drink. I looked at some of the paunchy and weather-battered men in loud shirts in these end-of-the-line bars staring intently at their phones and wondered what their stories were. They might well have looked up at me and surmised the same thoughts. I typed “What are they doing here? What am I doing here?” along with “This place has a dingy charm” into my phone and ordered another Bud Light.

The other obvious set of old timers in Saipan are US military veterans from wars past. These days, if you’re very lucky, you will see one visiting the American Memorial Park, which commemorates a pivotal American victory in the second world war. Such pilgrimages are more or less non-existent now, the park ranger said. People are put off both by the distance — not counting stopovers, the flight from the US west coast takes fourteen hours — and by the passage of time. A twenty-year-old who fought in the Battle of Saipan would be a hundred years old.

But their career descendants are still prominent in Saipan. A large “tabletop” wargame was going on when I was there, part of an effort to bolster America’s western-flank defences in preparation for possible war. The runway on nearby Tinian Island, from which the planes took off to drop nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, is being upgraded at the cost of US$800 million.

For all the looking over the horizon, there is a nearby reminder of a once-omnipresent Chinese presence US authorities did next to nothing about. This is a giant palatial casino resort — 3000 rooms inside, a shoal of rococo dolphins and abandoned stretch limousines outside — that once attracted Chinese high-rollers who gambled their way through US$4 billion dollars a month. The site was a suspected money-laundering venue and visitors were suspected of using Saipan as a back-door entry to the United States. The casino sits as a reminder of what can be built in plain sight on the America’s farthest shores.

The resort closed during Covid and has yet to reopen. Nearby tourist restaurants are shuttered. The few people left from the boom forlornly staff beauty parlours murmuring offers of special massages to walkers-by.

“Port Moresby? So different to here,” observed a government official in Saipan when I told her the Papua New Guinean capital was my next stop. She had been there recently for one of those ubiquitous training sessions and she wasn’t giving the place a five-star rating.

“I thought it would be like Guam,” she groaned. Her pre-departure image of a palm-fronded paradise with cheery locals was far from the hermetic reality. She spent two weeks cooped up in her five-star accommodation, bussed to the training and warned by her hosts — in kindly but not uncertain terms — that walking the streets was not recommended.

It takes two days to travel from Saipan to Port Moresby, the third point on my roughly triangular trip. I arrived via Tokyo and Brisbane, crossing from an American to a distinctly Australian habitus, sushi in between, and back into the Pacific’s rugby zone. The NFL posters in bars are replaced with the logos of NRL teams. But the Pacific’s largest, most populous country has also produced the most writing: derring-do accounts of the early British colonialists, ghostwritten hagiographies, mystery novels and one book of doggerel.

PNG was a publisher’s paradise during Australian colonial times, when expatriates were running commerce, government and the churches. Back in the early decades of the last century the Irish writer Beatrice Grimshaw bucked the entrenched misogyny of her era to rule the Papuan literary scene, her works serialised in the New York Times and acclaimed by Australian prime ministers. She wrote more than forty adventure novels and travel books with titles like The Sorcerer’s Stone and In the Strange South Seas. I picked up many of them for little more than the price of the postage on secondhand book websites. One had a little card attached thanking the recipient for “helping keep the lights on for another few days,” a reminder of the perennially tight margins in the book industry.

Nowadays, only the hardiest publisher will dare to venture here. No obvious reading culture exists except for one very particular genre. In the city’s dimly lit Vision City mall are little pop-up stores selling self-help books adorned with pictures of big-haired American evangelists and bombastic business gurus.

Particularly prominent was the literary oeuvre of one Robert Kiyosaki, author of the Rich Dad, Poor Dad series. I googled him to find out more and discovered a salutary tale. News stories had him admitting he was more than US$1billion in debt. His own advice clearly hadn’t worked; he was going to need all the help he could get if PNG’s book-buying market had become a principal income stream.

Papua, Grimshaw wrote, was a place for ambitious second sons to make their fortune. At first blush, the expat scene seems to skew older nowadays. Many men are still there but now well into the second half of their lives, working in oil and gas or behind-the-scenes helping with the paperwork of government.

Many fly in and fly out; they constitute most of the passengers on the flights up and down from Australia. The oil and gas workers would be wearing their uniformed tradie shirts emblazoned with logos displaying boosterish inscriptions like “534 days on site without an accident.” The consultant types are different: R.M. Williams shirts, chinos and boots. Many are former public servants from Australia, hired because they can write administrative English and navigate the vicissitudes of government.

Physical danger isn’t a risk — their most difficult daily safety challenges would involve navigating a scalding flat white — but it is still treacherous work navigating the bureaucratic jungle. These are occupations that reward watchfulness and where the less one advertises one’s centrality or role, the better. It’s a role I had for a spell but realise I could not do for long.

A person who does put himself out in the public square is Paul Barker. An Englishman with jack-in-the-box levels of enthusiasm, Barker manages the Institute of National Affairs, a Port Moresby outfit producing commentary and policy advice on PNG’s society and economy. Like many, he came to Papua New Guinea as a young man and never left.

When Barker arrived in 1978, the country’s present prime minister, James Marape, was in primary school. Apart from an eighteen-month stint in nearby Solomon Islands, the Englishman has stayed put. He spent a quarter century in the agriculture department and sixteen in the prime minister’s office. It was time well spent for his current role.

Barker is respected to the point where he’s no longer even considered different, a part of the Moresby fabric. Being familiar but not of the place gives him the moral legitimacy and latitude to speak out on social and economic issues buffeting the country. When I asked him about his role and how he knows when to push and when to pull back, his answer was resonant of those in the Cook Islands.

“Most Papua New Guineans respect you for saying things that many people think but many have to keep their heads below the parapet about,” he said. “Some Papua New Guineans are speaking up quite strongly on social media. But sometimes it gets sort of emotional. I’m trying to say things in a reasonably rational, calm manner. Sometimes, some Papua New Guineans say ‘You should speak more forcefully.’ And yeah, well, if you speak too forcefully, then you know you’re going to be on a one-way ticket somewhere.”

“Paul isn’t only an expat,” said the economist Maholopa Laveil. “The fact he has a Papua New Guinea family and resided this long, lends his comments weight. I’ve learned a lot from him over the years, and he has inspired a passion for speaking truth to power.” Whether a new generation of Barkers will replace him is an open question.

On my final night, I called in for a drink at the whiskey bar at my hotel, many of whose denizens could have fit into a twenty-first century reboot of Tales of the Golden Monkey. Some oil and gas types having furtive conversations with a Papua New Guinean wearing a pork-pie hat, an old consultant I knew from yesteryear pounding whiskey while pretending not to know me and a group of Aussies who had returned from doing the Kokoda trek toasting their exploits. A woman limped in on crutches and ordered a large glass of wine. Waiters sashayed around the room with crudites.

I’d been in so many of these mise en scène(s) in Port Moresby over the years. It’s a place I loved returning to; I had many friends here and I loved checking in with the intrigues, but was glad I no longer had to metabolise them or worry about losing my footing in its bureaucratic jungle.

A memory came back to me, of a conversation I had with an old-timer in a bar like this some years back, one that changed my direction. He was a burnt-out case; someone who kept coming back for work to Papua New Guinea because his wife in Melbourne liked the money he was making but didn’t like him. He was engaging in energetic sugar daddy relationships which he implied was taxing his vigour and made me hope he had comprehensive medical insurance. “I’m still not sure which of those characters I am, though,” he said. “You know, the misfit, the missionary or the mercenary.” When he asked me which archetype I was, I knew the universe was telling me not to renew my contract.

Of all the people in Paradise lounge at Port Moresby international when I flew out, the one who sticks in my mind the most was the pale man with gelled hair tottering around with a plate of cheese in one hand, a tumbler of wine in the other, the volume sloshing therein proportionate to the size of his head. The hands of the clock had just nudged past noon.

I thought of some of the people I’d met on my journeys and whether they resembled the beachcombers in the books and TV shows of old. Of course, the Pacific was different then. Except for the Kingdom of Tonga, it was one big imperial lake permeated by Australians, Americans, British, French, New Zealanders and, further back, German and Spaniards. Nowadays, the Pacific is home to fourteen independent countries alongside other places, like Cook Islands and the Marianas, that still have the imprint of empire.

The novelistic way to render the collective stories of the modern-day castaways would be in absurdist hues, to write up these middle- to late-aged men and women as modern-day beachcombers barnacled onto Pacific societies because circumstances and life choices mean that they can’t be anywhere else.

But that wouldn’t be entirely accurate or fair. Some are plainly on the islands for dubious reasons and others seem like rebooted versions of their forebears, the traders selling washing machines and blenders rather than calico cloth and looseleaf tobacco. There are still plenty of gold-diggers around: the deep-sea miners of the Cooks and the copper and gold miners of Papua New Guinea. Just as many, though, are playing roles as buffers: fixers, solvers, advocates, consciences and factotums. All forms of the human condition are here.

With the Pacific framed ever more as a tug of war between two great powers, my trip was a reminder that for all the impersonal talk of security pacts, alliances, Chinese inroads and US retreats, individuals matter as much as ever. •

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Her second and latest book, Unfinished Revolution: The Feminist Fightback, begins with shared anger, the anger that brought more than 12,000 women to protest outside Parliament House in March 2021. “Anger, frustration, indignation — women across the nation were awash with it… a hot, caustic, female furore” galvanised by “violence and sexual assault.”

When I read Wonder Woman I doubted whether her anger was justified. Reading Unfinished Revolution I have no doubt the anger that fuels it is totally appropriate to the situation in which we women find ourselves today, in what Hausseger calls our “New Now.” I share the despair she feels when she watches TV news bulletins cataloguing the loss of hard-won women’s rights internationally and, locally, “gut-wrenching stories of violence against women.” In fact I can’t bear to watch the news. And according to Haussegger that makes me part of the problem.

The problem is entrenched misogyny, global and local. The solution she urges is revolution — political and social revolution — and, as an essential condition for these, personal revolution. In telling “the story of women’s revolution and feminist fightback in Australia” Haussegger is trying to open her readers’ hearts and minds to the rush of feeling the feminists of the 1970s described as liberation: the understanding that comes with seeing “the systematic patterns of women’s oppression.” In the words of Julia Ryan: “We had no choice. Once our awareness was heightened and our consciousness raised, we had to change.”

I am part of the problem in another way too: as a feminist I have always been a reformer. I have worked inside and out of universities to change laws and regulations to give women equality with men. Haussegger insists on good authority that reform is not the solution; equality is not enough. She cites Germaine Greer: “The idea of women’s equality threatened nobody… the question of liberation was far more disturbing.” And Elizabeth Reid, telling the United Nations in 1975: “We can no longer delude ourselves with the hope that formal equality, once achieved, will eradicate sexual oppression — it could well merely legitimate it.”

Haussegger tells her story backwards. Part 1 considers “Our New Now”; part 2 steps back a few years to the March4Justice; part 3 leaps back fifty years to the birth of Women’s Liberation in Australia; and part 4 chronicles the achievements of Elizabeth Reid in Australia and internationally. I found this backward rush through time disorienting, but less historically driven readers may not be bothered. Either way, there are fascinating stories here, celebrating revolutions and revolutionaries small and large.

Haussegger has done her research thoroughly, supplementing documentary archives, memoirs and biographies with her own interviews. Some of her subjects will be well-known to most of her readers, others less so. Her account of the 2021 March4Justice foregrounds Janine Hendry, whose tweet kickstarted the movement:

Ok here’s my thought — is it possible to form a ring of people around the perimeter of Parl Hse? Then all of us extremely disgruntled women could travel to Canberra on March 8 and form a ring linking arms with our banks turned towards the parliament and stand in silent protest.

The rest is history — though the protest that erupted was far from silent.

For me the most moving section of the Unfinished Revolution is the final one, telling the story of Elizabeth Reid. The story has been told before, but this account is immediate and empathetic, drawing on personal encounters and interviews with Reid.

Haussegger follows Reid’s trajectory from her appointment as Gough Whitlam’s “Supergirl” — the press mockery was immediate and constant — through her role in scheduling the 1975 UN International Women’s Year, the massive funding of women’s projects in Australia to celebrate that year, her speech at the Mexico World Conference on Women educating UN delegates on sexism and patriarchy, the brutal press reactions back in Australia to the Women and Politics Conference, and her subsequent removal from her position as adviser to the PM.

Reid responded by retiring, and leaving the country. Trying to change the system from within was, she said, “extraordinarily destructive and extraordinarily harmful. I think the price is too high for many…”

But the Unfinished Revolution is not all anger and despair. There is joy in this book, and hope. The joy is in moments of sisterhood: a bunch of “older feminists” dancing to Helen Reddy’s “I Am Woman” at the March4Justice demonstration; Women’s Liberation Movement members discussing their abortions “in gruesome detail” when they suspected ASIO was listening in; the candidates for the job of PM’s adviser putting out a joint press release to confirm their commitment to working together whoever got the job.

The hope is in the successes Haussegger catalogues: legal and administrative reforms achieved during the Whitlam and Hawke–Keating eras; reforms to workplace practices and a huge influx of women MPs into Parliament in the wake of the March4Justice. She finds that Australian women are well-placed to fight the global anti-women backlash.

But still, she argues, reform is not enough. In her concluding chapter she declares that “until the world has eradicated all forms of sexism and misogyny… until then we will need to fight for liberation.” She cites Elizabeth Reid: “We must adopt a true revolutionary consciousness… moving past policy reform and gender equality… New challenges demand… a revolution in our heads and hearts… It’s time.”

This should be stirring stuff, and I hope this book finds readers ready to be stirred. But I confess I put it down with my heart unmoved. My head needs to know how this revolution will actually work within Australian culture and institutions. •

The post Talking about a revolution appeared first on Inside Story.

Dissident activity had begun in the years after the Russian revolution when the Soviet system was taking shape around the Marxist-Leninist “scientific worldview,” which purported to explain the past while guiding action in the present with a view to the future. Deeply ideological, the regime could not tolerate alternative interpretations of the political, economic and social world. Dissenting views were false and politically harmful by definition, and had to be suppressed. But they were never eliminated.

During the civil war after the revolutions of 1917, the Bolsheviks persecuted, sidelined and eventually eliminated alternative political parties. They never altogether outlawed religion, but its organised forms were seriously circumscribed. Then, beginning in the late 1920s, Stalin’s regime went after anybody suspected of harbouring oppositional ideas within or outside the Communist Party. But although political groups were pulverised by terror in the 1930s, their ideas continued to circulate by word of mouth and sometimes in written form, even during periods when unofficial political activity was all but impossible.

Religious worldviews, from Islam and a wide variety of Christianities to Animism and Buddhism, persisted in inspiring large sections of the population. Various nationalisms were officially endorsed only if they were “socialist in content” (though they often turned out to be anything but, and had to be condemned as “bourgeois” and repressed). The remnants of the Russian liberal tradition were reinforced by a growing knowledge of democratic practices in the outside world after the Soviet Union began to expand westward again from 1939. Anarchism and other alternative forms of revolutionary politics continued to be remembered, and the Marxist-Leninist tradition itself provided inspiration to many, often-young people confronted by the contrast between reality and the writings and the ideals embodied in the Soviet Union’s own sacred texts.

As the Soviet Union gobbled up parts of Poland and Romania and the three Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in 1939–40, it effectively imported a new crop of political opponents, both individuals and organised groups. Again, it used terror to subdue dissent. Mass shootings, the favourite tool of 1937–38, were used in Poland in 1940 and at the beginning of the war with Germany in 1941, though less frequently thereafter.

Once the war was won, a new reluctance to use lethal violence found its expression in the temporary abolition of the death penalty. Mass repression in the newly annexed regions now relied more on prisons, camps and deportations. Far from being eliminated, however, the dissent was only displaced into the Soviet hinterland, dotted as it was by gulag camps and special settlements. In this archipelago of detention, people with a wide variety of worldviews could meet in a way difficult to imagine in Soviet society more broadly.

In the old Soviet territories, meanwhile, the political police arrested group after group of young Leninists who had formed small opposition groups in universities and high schools, along with veterans returning from the war with news of democracy and the good life outside the borders of Stalin’s barracks socialism.

This landscape of political pluralism behind a facade of ideological unity was transformed after Stalin’s death in 1953: the gulag, while never dismantled, was significantly reduced in size and its practices reformed; censorship was a little less stringent at times and Stalinism subjected to a highly qualified critique, although the extent of liberalisation under Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, is often overstated; a mass housing program gave more people access to private apartments, which eased conversations among networks of friends and family; and, crucially, mass terror was replaced by what the newly formed Committee for State Security, or KGB, called “prophylaxis,” an attempt at preventive policing rather than crude repression. The result was a series of protests and disturbances and the emergence of new underground groups inspired by what the authorities saw as dangerous ideas.

Several forces interacted in this new world of political dissent. One emanated from the western borderlands — Ukraine, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia — and their longer history of national resistance to Soviet domination; many of those deported or arrested under Stalin would return in the later 1950s, reinvigorating political opposition movements in the Soviet Union’s wild west. A second dissident force was the Baptists, a religious community of long standing in the Russian heartland reinforced since the second world war by their Estonian brethren.

Third were Jews wishing to explore their identity after the trauma of the Holocaust but regarded, with the foundation of the state of Israel, as less likely to be loyal to the Soviet homeland. A growing group of Jews thus began to lobby for emigration to Israel, the ultimate insult to a regime that claimed to have built the best and fairest society on earth. The government accused them of “Zionism,” one of the cursed “bourgeois nationalisms” the Soviet Union could never get rid of. Those who had their application for exit permits refused became known as “refuseniks,” a new type of Soviet dissident.

But perhaps the biggest political movement of the post-Stalin years was made up of Crimean Tatars. Deported from their homeland by Stalin, they fought, unsuccessfully until 1989, for the right to return. Both the Crimean Tatar and the Jewish movements maintained networks across the wide geographical spaces of the Soviet Union.

Finally, there were Moscow-based intellectuals who would become famous as “the dissidents.” The latter came in three basic variants: Russian nationalist or Slavophile dissidents like the later Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (although he didn’t live in Moscow); neo-Leninists in the tradition of the anti-Stalinist youth groups of the final years of Stalinism, who would have an afterlife in the second generation of socialist dissidents in the 1970s; and “rights-defenders,” who tried to get the Soviet regime to adhere to its own laws — an evidently hopeless cause. It is this latter group Benjamin Nathans deals with in To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, a remarkable book destined to remain the standard work on the topic for the foreseeable future.

The “rights-defenders” were relatively late, quite short-lived and localised contributors to political pluralism in the Soviet Union. Having emerged in 1960s Moscow, writes Nathans, they were “all but crushed by the KGB in the early 1980s.” The national movements on the Soviet Union’s western border, the networks of Baptists, “Zionists” and “refuseniks” and the organised Crimean Tatars had much deeper histories, would survive much longer, were networked well beyond Moscow, and were also significantly larger.

The Crimean Tatars had pioneered many of the techniques the rights-defenders would later optimise: newsletters published in typescript form and distributed through networks of typewriter owners who would not just read them but also type up multiple carbon copies for further distribution. This decentralised technique soon came to be known, famously, as samizdat (self-publishing). Another part of the dissident repertoire was collective letters signed by multiple authors and directed to the authorities — also an invention of the Crimean Tatar movement. The first dissidents who had made contact with the fledgling Amnesty International — later a celebrated avenue of work for rights-defenders — were Baptists, who also have the distinction of having in 1961 formed the first known “initiative group” that used samizdat for political rather than literary ends. Crimean Tatars had also formed such groups by 1966.

Russian samizdat copies and rolls of photo negatives. Nkrita/Wikimedia Commons

The Moscow dissidents followed these predecessors in May 1969 with the formation of the Initiative Group for the Defense of Civil Rights — “the first civil rights organisation in the socialist world,” as Nathan stresses. One of its founding members was Mustafa Dzhemilev, an early Crimean Tatar activist and later the first chairman of the Mejlis of the Crimean Tatar People (1991–2013). He had formed the Union of Young Crimean Tatars in 1961 and had ample experience with Crimean Tatar “initiative groups,” which served as models for this new organisation of Moscow intellectuals.

Other key members included Peter Yakir (son of the civil war military hero and Soviet military reformer Iona, who had been executed under Stalin) and fellow gulag survivor Victor Krasin, like most of the other fifteen members both Moscovites. Only one member was resident in Leningrad (Vladimir Borisov) and two came from Ukraine (Genrikh Altunian and Leonid Pliushch).

The rights-defenders would quote the Soviet constitution repeatedly in their struggle with the authorities in the 1960s and 1970s. But the practice of citing this “most democratic” basic law to further one’s own non-Soviet political agenda was as old as the constitution itself. During the campaign promoting the new constitution in 1936, religious communities welcomed the article that stated:

In order to ensure to citizens freedom of conscience, the church in the USSR is separated from the state, and the school from the church. Freedom of religious worship and freedom of anti-religious propaganda is recognised for all citizens.

Believers in Ukraine passed resolutions referencing this article, and in Kazakhstan locals took it upon themselves to open new mosques in response. More dubiously from a legal standpoint, deported peasants cited the constitution as giving them a right to return home and “make short work… of those activists who… deported us.”

Nor were the rights-defenders a particularly large group. While a total of perhaps 1000 people signed letters penned by the Moscow-based dissidents, the Lithuanian Catholic movement managed to assemble 17,054 signatures for a 1972 petition protesting the arrest of priests, and Crimean Tatars had managed an equally astonishing 120,000 in 1966. Between the late 1950s and 1968, in fact, the total number of signatures on Tatar appeals to the authorities reached three million. Such numbers, writes Nathans, “stunned dissidents in Moscow.” One of them reflected wistfully that “we never managed to gather more than three or four hundred signatures” on any given letter.

Why focus, then, on such a relatively small group of Moscow-based intellectuals rather than the wider landscape of dissent? Nathans gives several compelling reasons for his deep dive into the small world of rights-defenders.

For one, the Moscow dissidents had the time, energy and resources to bring order into what he calls the “dissident repertoire.” Living relatively comfortably as members of the Soviet intellectual elite, they developed a language of civil rights and then, inspired by the developing international discourse, of human rights. This new language spread to other groups, as did the dissident repertoire they had systematised rather than invented: the use of collective letters, silent protests, “initiative groups” and samizdat.

Moreover, they used these techniques not just to further their own cause as the Crimean Tatars, Baptists and refuseniks did. They also championed fellow citizens:

Those who became known as rights-defenders where not the first to publicly invoke rights enshrined in the Soviet Constitution, to make use of samizdat or to organize petition campaigns and public demonstrations on behalf of victims of state repression. But they were the first to apply these techniques systematically and to people other than themselves.

Moscow based rights-defenders also served as “integrators,” to use the term coined by the late Peter Reddaway, a British-American political scientist who worked closely with the dissident movement from the early 1970s. What begins as a history of a small group of Moscow intellectuals soon becomes a description of the meeting of many dissidences — force fields with their own origins, historical development and locations — which overlapped but could not be reduced to any of the constituent parts.

This was an alternative Soviet Union, which prior to the development of the Moscow dissident subculture could only have met in the camps of the gulag:

The dissident movement fostered the mingling of individuals from different cities and towns, different nationalities, different belief systems: Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Crimean Tatars, Jews, Catholics, evangelical Christians, Russian Orthodox, atheist, neo-Leninist, social democrats, and those for whom all variants of Marxism were anathema. In certain ways, the movement replicated the staggering diversity of the Soviet Union itself.

Third, and crucially, the rights-defenders had a resource others lacked: contact with foreign journalists and other “Westerners,” including in the burgeoning international human rights movement. This was crucial: it allowed the various dissidences to mobilise support from allies in Europe, Britain, the United States, Australia and Israel. Without this support the movement for Jewish emigration, for example, would have been much less successful than it was.

The link to foreign journalists also had domestic implications. The infrastructure of the “voices” — the propaganda shortwave stations Voice of America, the BBC Russia Service, Radio Liberty and Kol Israel — allowed dissident texts to reach a much broader audience inside the Soviet Union than the personal networks supporting samizdat: typescripts would be passed on to journalists and sometimes within days the “voices” would broadcast them to anybody with a shortwave receiver in the land of the Soviets.

This transnational method reached people who were not part even of the outer reaches of the dissident networks, enabling Moscow rights-defenders to play a key role in creating the de facto pluralism of late-Soviet political opinion. Western attention, in turn, helped reinforce the dissidents’ own sense of exceptionalism and mission.

We can thus observe a process of virtual co-production by Moscow’s intellectual underground, the outside media, international activists, and cold war politicians of the myth of “the dissidents” as a Moscow-based movement rather than a much broader and more diverse all-Soviet phenomenon. With Nathans it has found its twenty-first-century chronicler and careful analyst.

His admirable book takes its title from a favourite dissident toast: To the success of our hopeless cause. And indeed drinking — along with talking and conducting sometimes complex romantic affairs within their own circles — was among the most important of dissident pastimes. In one 1972 pen portrait of this world, writes Nathans:

readers vicariously experience the sharing of samizdat, apartment searches, interrogations, arrests, vodka-inspired toasts…, interminable discussions of inner freedom and the meaning of life, and other rituals of dissident life. Most of the men are unemployed, having been fired from their jobs for signing open letters or distributing samizdat; most of the women work… Almost everyone is sleeping with someone other than their spouse.

Within this bohemian existence, the heroic moments that would bring international attention (and incarceration in prisons, camps or psychiatric hospitals) were few and far between. More important in many ways was another activity mentioned above: samizdat. The dissident movement was, first and foremost, a literary movement. And it was this unauthorised, underground literature — both fiction and non-fiction — that had the widest long-run impact and engaged the largest number of people, creating a thick layer of participation between the inner core of closely networked petitions signers and the broader underground public who listened to the “voices.”

Samizdat preceded the rights-movement proper and continued after it had been crushed. Its decentralised mode of production and distribution, in fact, was much less prone to central control and manipulation than the social media networks of our own time. The KGB never got a handle on it and it disseminated ideas of a remarkable variety of viewpoints and worldviews.

It was via the distribution of samizdat texts far beyond the dissident movement itself that the rights-defenders arguably had their greatest impact. These texts and the imprint on the minds of many Soviet citizens gave the movement for civil and human rights an afterlife that is still part of our present. As La Trobe University political scientist Robert Horvath argued two decades ago, “dissidents and their ideas influenced the course of Gorbachev’s reforms, and laid important foundations of a democratic political order.”

Nathans is somewhat reluctant to push this case too far, and he’s right to be cautious. For one, the movement’s afterlife was far from unidirectional: it did not lead neatly to more democracy and liberalism. As Melbourne Law School’s William Partlett demonstrated in his important 2024 study Why the Russian Constitution Matters, the rights-defenders did not confront the long Russian “tradition of state centralisation by proposing a new democratic Constitution that balanced power between the institutions of state or recognised plural sites of authority.” Rather, they tried to make a unified, presidentially dominated system legally accountable through law. Because it failed to see the central importance of negotiating disagreement through a system of checks and balances, this “anti-politics” of the rights movement left a deep imprint on the polity that would become Putin’s Russia.

Putin’s regime of “preventive counter-revolution” is not a lawless dictatorship. It is characterised by weak institutions but strong laws, constituting a rule by law flanked occasionally by extrajudicial killings (whose origins in the security services are always denied). We can see here an evolution of KGB tactics towards the rights-defenders. The original attempt to use formal judicial processes was a public relations disaster, as Nathans shows in detail: the rights-defenders turned the trials into spectacles demonstrating the hypocritical nature of the Soviet regime.

The KGB reacted by reaching for extrajudicial methods: intimidation, discrimination and the destruction of careers (including those of family members), forced emigration, administrative exile, or the forced incarceration in psychiatric hospitals. Their successors in Putin’s Russia — a Russia run by ex-KGBisty like the president himself — took a different path, one that promised more legitimacy and blunted the tactics of the rights-defenders: they adjusted the constitution and the entire legal structure, so it would allow repression within the boundaries set by laws. These laws, in turn, were passed by an elected parliament and constitutional change is legitimised by referendums. Despite these formal trappings of democratic governance, Russia today, according to Freedom House, is among the twenty-five least-free countries in the world.

Moreover, the dissident movement was considerably larger than the civil rights movement: it included all types of non-Soviet thought, including quasi-fascist strands of extreme Russian nationalism. This, too, was pointed out by Horvath two decades ago: his book bore the subtitle Dissidents, democratisation and radical nationalism in Russia. This aspect of Putinism, too, can be traced back to samizdat and debates in the Soviet underground.

Nathans is more positive about the legacy of the rights movement than the above sketch of its afterlives suggests. He points to the continued “invoking [of] existing laws and constitutional norms to contain the power of the state” in the “numerous protests during the first two decades of the Putin era.” One could highlight here the work of the NGO Memorial, a direct heir of the rights-defenders and a prominent victim of Putin’s legal repression of “foreign agents” in the run-up to his war against Ukraine.

Nathans is also more inclined to see Putin’s regime as “a feral state, where political opponents and those branded as traitors are as likely to be poisoned or assassinated as tried in a court of law.” Statistically speaking, that’s an over-statement: legal repression is the rule, assassination the exception. One list of “likely” government assassinations contains eighty-one people; Nathans cites some twenty thousand arrests, most of them temporary, of antiwar protesters alone by the time his book went to print. A recent count of political prisoners noted a likely number of 2000, while an independent group monitoring political repression in Russia (another heir of the dissident legacy) listed 5455 known cases since 2012, of which 3850 were current and 1656 in jail. (The database is updated daily; those figures were posted on 10 October of this year.)

This predominance of legal repression over extra-legal killings doesn’t make Putin’s regime less dictatorial, just more legalistic. But it makes less useful the tactic of acting as if the laws on the books actually apply than it was for the Soviet rights movement during its brief historical moment.

Today, the gap between legal claims and political reality are much narrower in Russia than they were during Soviet times. What does continue are the wider legacies of political solidarity with victims of the regime practised by dissidents and their supporters: providing legal defence, helping families deprived of breadwinners, publicising the abuses of the regime. Thus, we can still drink to the success of the hopeless cause of political opposition in Russia. •

To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause
By Benjamin Nathans | Princeton University Press | $69.99 | 816 pages

The post Moscow’s rights-defenders appeared first on Inside Story.

This is the Irish Famine Memorial, unveiled in 1999 as part of a late-twentieth-century wave of Famine monuments erected by Irish communities around the world. What distinguishes this memorial from many abroad (particularly in the United States) is its restraint — its refusal of pathos and spectacle. South in Williamstown, west of Melbourne, a bluestone outcrop known as Famine Rock bears a plaque to the million who died in Ireland and the tens of thousands who emigrated to Hobson’s Bay. Between them, these monuments signal how a calamity half a world away became part of Australia’s own European story.

Padraic X. Scanlan’s Rot: A History of the Irish Famine returns with moral and intellectual force to a catastrophe whose afterlives ripple across oceans, institutions and memory. His narrative is less a chronicle of blight than a diagnosis of political disease: the lethal fusion of colonial governance and ideological market logic that transformed crop failure into mass starvation. Reading him from an Australian vantage, one is struck as much by the power of his indictment as by what it leaves implicit — the Famine’s global currents, the moral limits of nineteenth-century states, and the way memory has been shaped less by suffering itself than by what later generations can, or choose to, remember.

Rot is neither academic history nor polemic but a moral narrative grounded in vivid archival fragments and lucid anger. Scanlan writes against the consoling myths — the idea that the Famine was a tragic accident, for example, or that relief efforts were earnest if inadequate — that once softened British culpability. Instead, he frames the Famine as an exposure of the empire’s governing faith in progress: a system that rendered whole populations expendable in the pursuit of moral and economic order. His prose has the clipped urgency of someone writing against evasion; his sentences sting because they are composed with the calm precision of a historian who knows the evidence and has the restraint to let it speak.

Scanlan’s book stands at an interesting crossroads in the literature on the Irish Famine. It revives the moral passion that mid-twentieth-century revisionism had sought to drain from Irish historiography. For historians such as T.W. Moody and R. Dudley Edwards (and later Roy Foster), professional detachment was the necessary antidote to nationalist grievance. Cecil Woodham-Smith’s The Great Hunger (1962) broke that decorum, restoring outrage and narrative immediacy to a history long buried under administrative prose. Like Woodham-Smith — whose indictment of British policy struck a nerve as the Troubles began to stir — Scanlan writes with ethical intensity and narrative verve, making the Famine legible to the general reader without recourse to models or statistics.

Both insist that famine was not fate but policy: a catastrophe wrought by the cold conjunction of ideology and administration. Where Woodham-Smith sought to expose the culpability of a generation of officials, Scanlan widens the frame to the system itself: the twin logics of colonial hierarchy and market rationality. His ambition links Rot to his earlier Slave Empire: How Slavery Made Modern Britain (2020), which traced another form of coerced dependence beneath the rhetoric of liberty. Both books show how Britain’s ideals of freedom and improvement were sustained by systemic unfreedom, and how moral blindness can be structural rather than personal.

Historians such as Christine Kinealy and Peter Gray have since combined empathy with analytic depth, producing accounts more humane and textured than the detached empiricism of their revisionist predecessors. Kinealy’s This Great Calamity (1994) and Gray’s The Irish Famine (1995) resist the older impulse to neutralise outrage, even as they reconstruct the bureaucratic machinery of relief. Gray, in particular, situates laissez-faire within the wider intellectual climate of the 1840s while recognising its moral bankruptcy in practice. Scanlan builds on this moral turn but pushes it outward from the island to the imperial and global.

Few serious historians today would describe the Famine as an act of deliberate genocide, though the accusation — first levelled by the transported nationalist John Mitchel (erstwhile denizen of Van Diemen’s land) and echoed by his successors — retains considerable political potency. Mitchel’s fiery handle that “the Almighty sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine” captured the outrage of his age and survives as slogan.

Scanlan’s villain is not England as such but the moral complacency and barbarity of empire and its systemic exclusions. In his account, the Famine becomes the moral x-ray of an imperial age. The problem was not simply that the potato failed, but that the imagination of the governing class failed with it. In a world where markets were treated as natural forces and providence as a form of economic law, starvation could be rationalised as self-correction.

Rot traces this reasoning with controlled fury, from the notorious memoranda of Charles Trevelyan, the Treasury official who oversaw relief and believed the Famine was “a direct stroke of an all-wise and all-merciful Providence,” to the pseudoscience of “moral improvement.” The book’s power lies in this moral lucidity, its refusal to hide behind context or bureaucratic complexity.

And yet context, including international, still matters. The Famine was both an Irish catastrophe and a European one; both a failure of policy and a symptom of mid-Victorian limits.

It remains plausible to call it the greatest humanitarian disaster of nineteenth-century Europe, at least in proportional terms: a million dead, another million forced abroad, a national population halved within a generation and an ancient culture eviscerated. But it was also the product of an age that had no state apparatus for social welfare, no coherent theory of public obligation beyond the Poor Law, and no intellectual vocabulary for systemic compassion. To demand that the British government in the 1840s act like a modern welfare state — or to imagine it could have viewed Ireland in anti-imperial terms — is to risk a different kind of distortion: one born of moral hindsight.

Judged by the standards of its own time, Britain’s response was neither uniquely callous nor straightforwardly benevolent. What distinguished it was the moral grammar through which relief and restraint were justified. The doctrine of laissez-faire, as Scanlan shows, was less an economic policy than a theology: suffering was productive, scarcity disciplinary, charity corrupting. Yet to see the Famine purely as a triumph of market dogma over mercy misses how those markets were already profoundly constricted. The poor were not destroyed by the operation of capitalism so much as by their exclusion from it.

As Amartya Sen would later observe, no substantial famine has ever occurred in a functioning democracy with a free press. Ireland lacked not only food and representation but the political mechanisms through which suffering might have compelled a response. Famine, in this view, is never merely natural or economic but rather the ultimate failure of civic inclusion. The Irish were not simply the victims of markets: they had no purchasing power, no legal security, no stake in the system said to govern them.

In that sense, the Famine was a catastrophe of non-participation as much as of ideology. As the twentieth century would show, other ideological fixities and compromised democracies — those of communism and state-controlled economies — could also result in horrific mass starvation.

In comparative perspective, Britain’s policies in Ireland were appalling but not unique in their logic. During the roughly contemporaneous Highland famine of the 1840s — much less devastating than the Irish experience — Scottish crofters were largely abandoned to the ministrations of landlords and charitable committees; when relief came, it was often tied to assisted emigration. Three decades later, in the Indian famine of 1876–78, the Raj’s administrators repeated the mistakes made in Ireland, imposing relief wages so meagre that labourers expended more calories than they could consume, producing vast mortality.

The difference is one of degree, not of kind: the same utilitarian fear of dependency, the same faith that discipline and scarcity would ultimately do good, the same sense that from catastrophe a new modernity might emerge.

If Ireland’s tragedy feels distinctive, it is because of its proximity to the heart of empire. It was the empire’s own back garden, and its failure there could not be exported or denied. It is also because the Irish diaspora that spread around the world as a result accrued enough power and influence to narrate its own catastrophe. Unlike India’s victims, Irish emigrants and their descendants belonged to the empire’s white European family: their suffering could be assimilated into imperial conscience rather than written off as the cost of dominion.

Seen from that angle, Britain’s failings in the 1840s were not merely moral but epistemic: an inability to imagine the Irish poor as citizens of the same moral universe. Yet to treat this as a peculiarly British pathology is too simple. Most European states of the mid-nineteenth century lacked a coherent language of public responsibility. France and Belgium responded to poor harvests with export bans and ad hoc municipal relief; the Russian empire tolerated recurrent regional famines that killed hundreds of thousands. What made Ireland different was the relative scale of the calamity, its intimacy with the imperial centre, and the ideological embarrassment it caused, a humanitarian failure within a polity that prided itself on civilisation.

The Famine’s reach extended far beyond Ireland’s shores. Its human debris helped populate the empire it condemned. Between 1848 and 1850, around four thousand young women — the “Orphan Girls,” mostly teenagers from Irish workhouses — were sent to Sydney, Port Phillip and Adelaide under the Earl Grey scheme. Officially, this was a humanitarian measure, rescuing them from destitution and offering new lives as domestic servants. Unofficially, they were a social experiment in transplantation, designed to redress the gender imbalance of white settlement.

Met with sectarian and anti-Irish disdain and hostility in some quarters, the young women were absorbed into colonial households and, eventually, colonial lineages. Their descendants include premiers, writers, schoolteachers and police commissioners. The program, harsh as it was, bound the catastrophe of Irish destitution to the project of settler expansion, giving the Famine an afterlife inscribed in Australian demography.

Relief also flowed in the other direction. In 1847, public subscriptions in New South Wales raised about £5000 for Irish relief, a sum impressive for a small colony. Melbourne and Adelaide held their own fundraising drives, while Irish migrants in Van Diemen’s Land sent money and goods through church networks. These gestures of solidarity, modest in scale, reflected not only humanitarian feeling but also a wish to remain connected to the homeland. If the Famine revealed the brittleness of imperial benevolence, it also generated a new form of diasporic responsibility: the belief that the Irish abroad might redeem what Britain had destroyed.

The emigrants’ dispersal turned Ireland’s local catastrophe into a global moral narrative. Across the nineteenth century, survivors and their children carried its memory into the politics of their adopted lands: into the urban Catholicism of New York, the agrarian radicalism of the American Midwest, the sectarian divides of colonial Australia that endured until the 1970s. They transformed private grief into public identity.

Yet that identity was unequally legible within empire. The Irish poor could be sentimentalised in ways Indian peasants could not. Whiteness and Christianity offered entry into imperial compassion, a seat at the table of shared suffering. The Famine became mournable because its victims could be imagined as kin.

Scanlan, to his credit, is alert to these diasporic currents. Rot ranges far beyond the parochial history of landlordism or poor relief to trace how the Famine shaped global capitalism, how migration, remittance and memory fed back into the moral economy of empire. Yet his canvas, for all its breadth, remains largely Atlantic, admittedly the major destination of Famine refugees, along with Britain. Australia appears only glancingly, as a distant beneficiary of Britain’s “surplus” poor. That absence is symptomatic of a wider pattern in Famine historiography: a tendency to treat the Irish diaspora as a transatlantic phenomenon, overlooking the colonial peripheries that absorbed its displaced.

Reading from here, one feels the gap keenly. The Famine orphans who arrived in Sydney and Port Phillip were as much imperial exports as the convict labour that preceded them. They remind us that Famine relief and settler colonisation were twin projects — one humanised the empire, the other extended it.

What Rot captures superbly is the texture of bureaucratic cruelty: the memoranda, the statistical abstractions, the polite horror of officials confronted with human ruin. At times, however, Scanlan’s insistence on ideology — the idea that capitalism and colonialism explain the catastrophe — risks flattening the very complexity he evokes. We must also recognise the strictures of a past that formed those blinkered men who thought themselves rational, or the bureaucrats who confused obedience with duty, if we are to recognise our own systemic strictures.

That tension — between moral clarity and historical pity — has defined much of the Famine’s representation since. One of the challenges for any writer on the Famine is that the event overwhelms expression. It resists adequate representation. A million deaths, another million exiled, villages emptied, language lost. The apocalypse behind these figures defies conceptualisation. The writers and artists who have tried to convey it, from William Carleton to Seamus Heaney, have stumbled on the same problem: famine leaves a silence at its centre. Scanlan acknowledges this difficulty obliquely, through the spareness of his style. His sentences refuse ornament, as if wary that beauty itself might be indecent. In that restraint lies part of the book’s power.

The proliferation of Famine memorials in the 1990s — Sydney, Williamstown, Boston, New York, Toronto — reflects both the endurance of that silence and our need to fill it. Their language of commemoration borrows from the idiom of trauma, a discourse that came to prominence in those same years. Suffering became a credential of belonging; historical wounds a means of claiming moral visibility.

In the United States, Irish-American organisations campaigned to have the Famine taught alongside the Holocaust, sometimes invoking the language of genocide to assert parity of pain. In Australia, the monuments are quieter, more ambivalent, conscious perhaps that Irish tragedy unfolded on land already scarred by another dispossession. The Williamstown plaque, unusually, acknowledges both the Famine dead and the First Nations peoples displaced by colonial expansion — a rare memorial willing to admit that victims can also be colonial settlers.

Rot arrives, then, at a moment when the Famine has moved from nationalist grievance to global parable. Scanlan’s book invites us to see in the Irish catastrophe a pattern that recurs whenever ideology outruns empathy — whether in the Raj of the 1870s or in the austerities and food insecurities of our own century. If the lesson sometimes feels overstated, that is because it bears repeating. The moral question the Famine posed — how societies rationalise suffering in the name of order — remains unsolved.

Reading Rot from Australia sharpens that question. The Famine’s emigrants helped build the settler colonies whose prosperity rested on other forms of dispossession. The Irish poor were both victims and beneficiaries of empire. Their hunger propelled them into lands where others would be made hungry. Scanlan hints at this contradiction but leaves it largely unexplored. It is a reminder that moral history, too, has its blind spots.

No single book can capture the totality of the Great Famine. Its horror exceeds comprehension; its meanings shift with each generation. What Rot offers is not closure but clarity: a narrative that restores urgency to an event too often neutralised by statistics or sentimentality. If Scanlan writes with anger, it is an anger earned by evidence.

Yet the Famine’s truth finally lies beyond ideology — in the stubborn fact of human suffering and in the inadequacy of any system, economic or moral, that seeks to justify it. Near the Hyde Park Barracks, that angled table and empty shelf of potatoes remain: a reminder that memory is at its most eloquent when it declines to console. •

Rot: A History of the Irish Famine
By Padraic X. Scanlan | Robinson | $34.99 | 349 pages

The post Hunger’s legacy appeared first on Inside Story.

Out of these conversations grew an organisation they called Dastaan — “story” — and a digital project aiming to recover elements of the old stories, record the stories themselves and visit localities to film how places and people looked seventy years on.

For most scholars and professionals, those goals would have been enough. But among the group was a not-so-ordinary young scholar. Sam Dalrymple grew up between India and Britain and learned Hindi and Urdu as a child in Delhi. At Oxford, he did a degree in Persian and Sanskrit. He is the son of William Dalrymple, the immensely popular historian of India, and Olivia Fraser, a distinguished painter of Indian themes.

Sam Dalrymple acknowledges that his new book “would not exist without my co-founders at Dastaan” and the cooperation of dozens of keen interviewees. Nevertheless, at twenty-eight he is the one who pulled it all together to produce an engaging 520-page perspective on the British exit from “east of Suez.”

Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia could have been a straightforward administrative history of how the British shed their “Indian empire.” But the Dastaan team wanted more than that: they wanted to capture the horror and humanity of the times, record experiences and visit sites their elders had to abandon.

The subtitle’s reference to “five partitions” and “making modern Asia” imbues the book with contemporary urgency. The narrative also presents readers with a hypothetical question: what would have happened if the British had left “India” with a single government, which is the way they ruled it up to the 1930s? There would be no Pakistan and no Bangladesh; Myanmar would be just another Indian state like Kerala or Rajasthan; and every sheikhdom along the Arabian south coast from Aden to Kuwait would be subject to New Delhi. The “direct report” for British officials in these places was to the governor-general in New Delhi, who in turn was responsible to London.

Dalrymple’s “five partitions” involve a great many place names (the book has twenty maps) and the “five partitions” themselves warrant dot-points to keep them straight:

• the creation of Muslim-majority Pakistan and Hindu-majority (but secular) India in 1947;

• the separation of Burma (today’s Myanmar) from the Indian empire, begun in 1937;

• the absorption of the Indian princely states, mostly into India, in 1947–48;

• the emergence of Bangladesh in 1971;

• Britain’s exit from the Gulf states and the founding of United Arab Emirates in 1971.

The “five partitions” also provide the skewer that holds these stories together, though for some readers it may seem to put a heavy burden on the meaning of “partition.”

The administrative side of the story begins in 1937 with the hiving off of Burma from the government of India. With sketchy boundaries in the northwest, Burma was made a separate entity under the colonial office, rather than the India office, in London.

Within five years, Burma was invaded by the Japanese and its substantial Indian population flooded towards India as refugees. In the mountainous jungles of the country’s northwest, local people were mobilised to fight for the Japanese, the British or — in the case of Aung San (father of Aung San Suu Kyi) — both. By 1948, when it became a sovereign state, Burma was one of the most militarised regions of the old empire.

The Aden-to-Kuwait story was similarly complicated. Like Burma, Aden had been detached from India in 1937, but it continued to use Indian currency until 1951, as did the other coastal enclaves. Substantial Indian populations, which had followed British control in pursut of commerce and used Indian rupees, began to return to India as the British withdrawal progressed towards the final departure in 1971.

Timing was important. Today, India’s Mukesh Ambani is the richest man in Asia. He was born in Aden in 1957 shortly before his father Dhirubhai wisely decided it was time to return to India after ten years of making the family’s initial fortune in Aden.

Shattered Lands cleverly weaves such individual stories into the political narrative. They are at their most affecting when they involve members of the Dastaan group. Sparsh Ahuja, a key collaborator, is central to one of the book’s most moving stories, which involves the creation of the sovereign states of Pakistan and India.

Ahuja’s grandfather grew up in a quiet village in the west of “Punjab province” of British India. The partition boundary was to split the province in half. His grandfather’s village was made up of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. Trouble came on a fateful day in summer 1947: Hindu and Sikh houses were looted and occupants killed. Ahuja’s family hid from the carnage. At nightfall, the village headman, a Muslim, brought the family to his house and hid them. An army contingent, presumably part of the woefully inadequate Punjab Boundary Force, arrived the next day and escorted them across the newly drawn border between Pakistan and India.

The Ahuja family story doesn’t end there. Ahuja and Dalrymple determined to visit the village to discover what it looks like today. It was still off the beaten track in the countryside of Pakistani Punjab. They found the current headman and told him how Ahuja’s family had been saved in 1947. “The man went quiet, before whispering, ‘You are talking about my father.’” Tears and embraces all round.

Given Shattered Lands’s broad sweep, historians of India are bound to find things to disagree with. There is, for example, a tendency to over-egg the pudding and stress possibilities that were never more than longshots.

Dalrymple suggests, for example, that independence might have been possible for some of the princely states. It’s true that the British puffed up the princes’ dignity with various ceremonies and decorations. But the “doctrine of paramountcy,” the convenient fiction that fitted the princes into the imperial pecking order, decreed that the princes were in “subsidiary alliance” with the “paramount power” and, in any dispute, “the paramount power will be paramount.” In gangland terms, the princes were buying protection.

With the British departure, “paramountcy” was deemed to lapse, and there was a scramble to get the princes to sign on with a new boss — either India or Pakistan. But the possibility of some of the princely territories — even the vast landlocked state of Hyderabad or the coastal trading state of Travancore — achieving sovereign status was remote. Democratic enthusiasm was too strong, and the power and resolve of the new India and Pakistan too great.

But such discussions are for seminars and solemn book clubs. Shattered Lands is an ambitious, lively and skilfully constructed book — just the thing to read on a flight from Australia to Dubai or Doha, as the plane passes over the Indian Ocean and crosses the southern tip of India, where on a clear day you might catch sight of the erstwhile princely state of Travancore, now long and happily (more or less) a segment of the Indian state of Kerala. •

Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia
By Sam Dalrymple | William Collins | $39.99 | 520 pages

The post Ship me somewhere east of Suez… appeared first on Inside Story.

There are millions who have stories like mine. Many are more dramatic and just as worthy of exploration, but most remain untold. As a writer, I have had the privilege of being able to explore my story, and I share it to shed some light on the impact that political decisions wreak on the emotional lives of those they affect.

I was born in the United States but grew up with my sisters in a beautiful house in the south of England. It was set on acres of its own woods and gardens. The entrance was by one of two long drives, each of which bore the signs “Keep out. Trespassers will be prosecuted.” I was the eldest of three girls and we were surrounded by material plenty but lived in what as an adult I now know to be emotional deficit.

Our parents occupied the formal side of the house while my siblings and I had our own zone. We rattled around in our large quarters, haunted by the absence of meaningful connection with our parents. We ate meals in front of the television in the playroom. The walls were decorated with somewhat bleak quotes that my father had encouraged us to write out in calligraphy, and they provided the emotional backdrop for our youth.

There are two in particular that I remember. The first is from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra:

O, withered is the garland of the war;
The soldier’s pole is fall’n; young boys and girls
Are level now with men. The odds is gone,
And there is nothing left remarkable
Beneath the visiting moon.

And the second from my father’s favourite poem, Yeats’s “The Second Coming”:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Despite, or maybe because of, those prophecies of doom, I buried myself under my covers, listening to love songs on pirate radio at night and finding comfort in the now horribly dated Enid Blyton novels, full of clichéd and loving English families. I don’t remember being hugged, complimented or affirmed as a child. How reliable that memory is I don’t know, but I do know I longed for affection.

I can remember one day begging my father to tell my mother that he loved her. He refused. “There’s no such thing as love,” he explained with the tone of contempt that he reserved for anything he classified as idiotic.

One of the few games I can remember playing with him was “broken chair.” We would sit on his knee, not knowing at which moment his legs would separate, leaving us crashing to the floor. The thrill of being close to him was enough to ensure that no number of falls would make us lose interest in the brief intimacy it offered.

I worshipped my father and longed to be close to him. When I was brave enough, I would creep out of the playroom, through the living room and to the entrance of his large book-lined office, where he’d sit typing on one of his two typewriters. A thick velvet curtain hung across his door. We weren’t allowed into his study, nor to ask for entry. But the tap of his fingers on the keyboard was a welcome song, reassuring me he was there.

He was an academic, a historian who had taught at Harvard and Princeton and was working on his magnus opus — on the history of the philosophy of history, especially as articulated by Lord Bolingbroke. He also was editing the academic journal he’d begun while a student in the States. History and Theory was (and is) a prestigious journal that numbered luminaries like Ernst Gombrich and Isaiah Berlin among its board. As well, my mother would emphasise to us that my father was an English country gentleman.

It was a childhood with many rules. Obviously, we should be seen and not heard — this was England, after all. But most important was that we did not ask questions. Questions were considered the height of rudeness. For years into our adulthood my sisters and I would struggle to make conversation with outsiders. Without being able to ask questions, having a normal healthy dialogue with another human can be hard.

Of course, as children we wanted to know about our parents, and when we were brave enough we would beg our father to tell us about when he was little. His answer was always the same: “Well, when I was a little GIRL…” And he’d then spin a wonderful fairytale about his female childhood. He was a gifted storyteller and of course we longed for his tales, but more than that, we longed for the truth. He would not budge from his narrative, and when we professed disbelief that he’d ever been a girl he’d show us pictures of himself as a toddler in an elaborate lace christening robe that looked like a dress, which he claimed as proof.

Even his name was a mystery to us. We knew that in addition to being our Papa, he was called George H. Nadel. But what did the H. stand for? “Feet,” he’d tell us in a deadpan voice. It was only years later that we discovered the joke: his middle name was in fact Hans — definitely not a typical name for an English country gentleman.

In addition to questions being forbidden, we were not allowed to tell strangers anything about ourselves or our family. Strangers included the staff who helped raise us. There was one thing only that we were allowed to tell people we met in the village: that the three large Alsatians my father kept were trained to kill. “I only need to make one sound,” he’d tell us, “and they will pin someone to the ground and finish them off.” We dutifully told all our friends this, which could possibly be why playdates were few and far between.

There were other clues that all was not as it seemed in our outwardly “perfect” childhood. There were moments of what I would now call cruelty, though at the time I simply experienced these as painful and confusing events that illustrated something lacking in me. One time, on a walk with my father, I asked him if it was safe for me to balance on top of a thin bar at the top of a metal fence. “Of course,” he replied. So, I clambered up to try to impress him. The pole was thin, about the same width as a rope, and balancing impossible. Within seconds I’d fallen and cut my chin on the metal. My father laughed. How could I have been so idiotic as to even attempt such an impossible thing?

My father kept guns, which he used to shoot the rabbits and squirrels that threatened the plants on his grounds. I considered this to be murder. If I saw him leaving the house with his shotgun, I would run ahead of him, shouting to try to scare his prey away. He also used traps and would bring the unfortunate creatures he’d caught to his workshop, where he’d transformed a large plastic dustbin into a makeshift killing chamber. He’d put chloroform on cotton wool at the bottom, and would then push the animal in through a homemade hatch at the top. He would tell me he was putting them to sleep and it was for their own good. Later, I would be allowed to bury the corpses. Indeed, I had a small graveyard.

In the children’s section of the house there were murmurings among the staff. They frequently alluded to the existence of secrets: things we’d be horrified about if we knew, but ultimately were never told. Despite that, the nannies and cleaning ladies were warm, doing their best to make up for the absence of affection from our parents. I felt loved in their presence and I couldn’t fathom the hierarchies that kept their material circumstances so different from mine. I credit those early relationships for the socialist beliefs that have driven my adult life, and for giving me the strength, at the age of eleven, to refuse to be sent to boarding school, which would have been the norm for someone of my background.

By the time I reached my teens and had developed the courage and will to force questions on my father about his past and his childhood, he’d developed Parkinson’s disease. Plying him with unwelcome questions felt cruel when he was in obvious physical discomfort. Before long, it was too late: for the last decade or so of his life he was rendered largely incapable of speech. The glorious home we’d grown up in was sold and we lived in more humble circumstances, with a shared living room, close at last to our now dying father but still unable to reach him.

When I was eighteen, I travelled to Australia. While there I stayed with a college friend of my father’s, the economist Murray Kemp. He showed me a book my father had written as a doctoral student on the colonial culture of Australia. “It was so good it was used as a standard text for many years,” Murray explained. For the first time I realised that my father had had a past life in Australia. Before that, I had only a vague notion that he’d studied there before winning a scholarship to Harvard to complete his PhD, where he’d met and married my mother.

It was just before he died that I gained my first hard evidence that my father had a hidden past. Once discovered, it began to make some sense of his emotionally withdrawn nature, his fear and his insistence on privacy. And also, to some extent, of the flashes of macabre cruelty that I had occasionally witnessed.

By this time, my father was so sick that he’d been moved to a nursing home. There were only two words he managed to communicate, through a lengthy process of guiding a felt-tip pen on a pad of paper. These were “die” and “exit.” Before he’d become completely debilitated, he’d joined the voluntary euthanasia organisation EXIT. These contorted notes left us in no doubt that he did not want to live but, in 1980s England, decades before Dignitas and debates about assisted dying, we felt trapped by the law and utterly powerless to help.

As he was unable to talk, I got into the habit of reading to him. I was never sure whether he was following, but it helped to pass the time and we hoped it helped to distract him. Shortly before his death, I found a book by his bed in the nursing home. Publishers had continued to send him books for review, and my mother delivered these books and copies of journals to the nursing home, even though there was no possibility of his ever opening or reading them. This book, The Dunera Scandal, was written by Cyril Pearl and featured a twist of barbed wire on its cover. As the book explained, the Dunera was a transport ship commandeered during the war to carry “enemy aliens” from Britain to Australia. The episode had become a British national scandal because of the brutality with which the “enemy aliens” were treated.

The majority of the men on the ship were not enemies of the British state, but Jewish refugees who had fled Hitler’s regime to what they’d thought was safety in Britain. They then found themselves herded up, incarcerated and transported to an unknown destination alongside fascists and Nazi sympathisers. The British guards threw overboard many of the possessions the internees had brought with them, though not before pocketing valuables.

The book fell open on a page about a third of the way through, and I started to read to my father. It described how inmates on the Dunera were forced at gunpoint to run barefoot over broken glass. With his shaking, crippled hand he reached out to my arm to stop me from reading. He pointed first at the book and then at himself and I was sure I could see his lips forming the words, “That was me.”

It wasn’t until his death, when we went through his filing cabinet, that we found a second clue: an envelope marked “Destroy on my death.” We didn’t. It contained only a few documents, but enough to reveal a past our father had not disclosed. Born in Vienna, he was Jewish and had fled alone to Britain in March 1939 on a Kindertransport. He’d been a child refugee.

Over the years that followed, I was unable to find out more. This is ironic given that I had become a journalist, as had one of my sisters. Despite growing up in a household that forbade questions, we had both built our lives on careers that demanded we do so. However, it felt impossible to turn our journalistic skills towards our father. If my father had wanted me to know about his past, I reasoned, he would have told me. Out of respect I didn’t want to transgress his clear instruction not to know. I also felt frightened. What if he’d hidden his Jewish heritage to keep us safe in case it happened again? One of his most repeated historical quotes was George Santayana’s: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Maybe he deliberately buried his personal history to avoid it repeating for his daughters.

It was to be another twenty-five years before I had the courage to overcome that cocktail of fear and guilt. It was the British general election of 2015. I had turned from television journalism to politics, and was standing as a Green Party parliamentary candidate at the election. Antisemitism was on the rise. I didn’t feel I could talk publicly about the issue while hiding my own Jewish heritage, whatever that might mean. As I changed my biographical description to include my father’s heritage, I felt fear, but also a sense of liberation. It was as if I were beginning to reclaim one part of my family’s unknown past. The genie was out of the bottle. Now that I had “come out,” I wanted to know more.

By this point I had been through years of intense therapy, with various therapists suggesting I displayed the symptoms of someone suffering second-generation trauma. But trauma because of what? It wasn’t that mystery that bothered me so much as my never having had the chance to really “know” my father. That was coupled with what was, if anything, a still more painful fact: my father, who had overcome so much in his life (or at least the limited bits of his life I knew about), had died as emaciated and skeletal as those liberated from the concentration camps.

Parkinson’s disease had done what the Nazis had failed to. He had spent his final years incarcerated in a rundown nursing home, trapped in his own pain-ridden body, unable to speak and unable, most poignantly to me as a writer, to finish the book that he’d spent much of his life working on, alongside his editorship of History and Theory.

It left me feeling unbearably bleak and fed my own existential struggle with meaninglessness. That my father could have escaped the Holocaust to have died what felt like an equivalent death was unbearable. His book unfinished, he had failed to make his mark on the world. To top it all, my mother had decided, out of respect for his atheism, that he shouldn’t have a grave. So, there was literally nothing tangible left to mark his existence, not even somewhere to grieve. He had been erased.

Since standing for parliament, and despite being dogged by depression, I was doing anything but staying silent. In 2018, spurred on by pictures of refugees drowning at sea while trying to reach safety in Europe, I set up Compassion in Politics, an NGO that would campaign for a more compassionate response to human suffering. I was thrilled that the celebrated British parliamentarian Lord Alf Dubs, who had himself come to the Britain on a Kindertransport, agreed to be our patron.

I became more desperate to know about my father. I did what online research I could and discovered that, when he arrived in England as a fifteen-year-old in March 1939, he was alone. He’d spent a year living with a family in Midhurst in Sussex, before at sixteen being arrested, along with thousands of other refugees, many of them Jewish, as an “enemy alien.” In May 1941, Churchill had instructed British authorities to “collar the lot,” in other words to round up those with a German or an Austrian passport. My father went from being a child refugee at fifteen to an enemy at sixteen. He was interned in a camp on the Isle of Man and then deported on the prison ship the HMT Dunera.

A few years later, in 2019, I was invited to speak in Australia at a conference about compassion. It reawakened my old longing to connect with my father’s past. I couldn’t resist the idea that maybe there was someone still alive in Australia who had known him from his Dunera days. At the last minute, I looked online and found an article about the Dunera by a historian called Seumas Spark. I dropped him an email and caught my flight.

When I arrived in Melbourne, my host — in an attempt to keep me awake and stave off the jetlag — took me on a series of museum visits. The first stop was the Jewish Museum of Australia. I asked the curator if she had anything on the Dunera. She went to a bookshelf and retuned triumphantly with a large academic tome entitled Dunera Lives. There was a whole page of information about my father and a photo of him at Queen’s College, University of Melbourne. The author was the very same Seumas Spark whom I had emailed before leaving.

Seumas and I met the next day. Over coffee and Viennese cookies, he told me how excited he was to get my email. Working alongside the historian Ken Inglis and others, Seumas had devoted much time to researching the Dunera and the lives of the men it brought to Australia. “We’ve been looking for George’s descendants for a decade,” he explained, “but kept drawing blanks.” My father’s privacy had resulted in his having covered his tracks so well that even contacting History and Theory hadn’t yielded an address for Seumas to find us.

A friendship quickly developed. I learnt that when the men had finally arrived in Sydney, in September 1940, many emaciated and sick from months at sea, they were interned by the Australian government, as instructed by the British, in detention camps. Their mistreatment was eventually publicly acknowledged and, later, they became widely known in Australia as the “Dunera Boys.”

When Seumas came to England to research the artwork of another Dunera Boy, Georg Teltscher (George Adams), I went with him to meet George’s widow, Sara. From her I got a clear account of what life in the camp had been like: how the inmates, many of them intellectuals and artists, had organised themselves and created their own “university” within the camp, with lectures, seminars, art workshops and concerts. They’d put on plays and even designed and printed their own currency.

Sara also had her late husband’s collection of drawings and paintings from that time and so I was given a visual insight, too. I saw a clutch of huts, surrounded by barbed wire, in the middle of a barren and remote patch of Australia. Seumas took me on other Dunera-related expeditions in London too, including to the British Museum print rooms to see its collection of Dunera art. The night before Seumas left to go back to Australia he handed me a manila folder, similar to the ones I’d seen stacked on my father’s desk as a child. “This is all I have,” he said. “It’s our research file on your father.”

I left it on my desk for some months. Again, I was inhibited by the old feeling that I was breaking my father’s cardinal rule. When my curiosity finally got the better of me, I found a wealth of anecdotes and accolades about my father’s academic work, including the frequent observation that his work was continuing to have an influence on academic thinking to this day. After years of despair about my father’s wasted life, it turned out that he had left a very visible trace. His work continues to be researched, studied, discussed and built upon. And even more to the point, there was a historian actually researching his life and publishing papers that featured him.

However, while those interviewed by Seumas had much to say about my father’s professional life, there was nothing about his personal one. Indeed, many of them commented on the air of mystery that surrounded him. Because he had not been willing to talk about his background or personal affairs, rumours abounded. There were snide comments, which Seumas kindly attributed to professional jealousy, but which, to some extent, rang true to me from my childhood.

I had one other possible lead. The academic who had taken on the editorship of History and Theory was living in London. Full of fear and burdened by the knowledge that my father would have hated my making contact, I arranged to meet the former editor, Richard Vann. He and his wife invited me to tea in their Kensington flat.

They were familiar figures from my childhood, having visited us in Sussex regularly through the years. It was strange to re-meet them as an adult. Strange also to see them living and breathing so many years after my father had passed away. They had laid out a formal tea, perhaps remembering the formality with which they’d been treated whenever they visited us in Sussex.

Before I’d even had a chance to sit down, Dick burst out, “We are so glad you’ve come. Now you can tell us about your father.” Dick explained that although he’d worked with him for forty years, he knew nothing of his private life and family background. My hopes were dashed; the man I’d come to for answers had even more questions than I did. I’d drawn a very definite blank; at least I wasn’t the only one.

It was interesting how much came to be projected on to my father’s life in the absence of the normal biographical knowledge that most of us have about each other, especially in this digital age. A number of articles online said that he had married a Rockefeller. Not true. Another took a prank he had played at university and interpreted it as evidence of something untoward. My father had rigged up a dummy in his study to make it look as if he were working all night, when in fact he was out — I hope having a good time. This was lifted straight from Sherlock Holmes, but to the historian who wrote about my father it became something sinister.

I met an academic from Sydney who said he was fascinated by my father because of his “missing years.” “I could find nothing about him online from 1990 onwards,” he said. “I mean, what was he doing? Why did he just disappear?” I told him that he’d got a little overexcited. My father’s “disappearance” wasn’t due to some mysterious clandestine mission, but because he’d died.

My sisters and I may not have known about my father’s past, but we nevertheless absorbed its emotional impact, which has played out in our lives. Of his three daughters, two of us have suffered from severe depression, which started in our mid-teens (at about the age our father fled Vienna). This depression was accompanied by excessively high levels of fear and insecurity, and a belief that we “didn’t belong,” that we would get found out at any moment. We have both felt that we have spent our lives studying how to appear normal, endeavouring to do this or that, and often failing. We have felt there was something shameful about us, but what exactly we couldn’t quite identify.

I have lived with an excessive fear of impending catastrophe. In my twenties, I was fortunate to go out with a wonderful and kind young art dealer who worked for his father’s business. He had the sort of financial security most of us can only dream of; they had vaults of priceless artworks, including by the Italian painter Canaletto and well-known impressionists. The sale of any one of these could have provided comfortably for a lifetime, and yet I was riddled with fear that we weren’t secure enough.

I became preoccupied that he didn’t have a second career to fall back on: “What happens if we have to flee Britain and you have no more art?” I would beg him to qualify as a teacher so that he’d have a skill to his name, utterly unable to see the reality of his situation, or to see how my father’s unnamed experience was subconsciously driving my fear.

There are other coincidences. As a broadcast journalist, I devoted myself, both on television and in print, to the task of trying to free people who had been wrongly imprisoned. Again, I wonder if my father’s own story played out untold in my concerns. And in my children, too. My oldest son, who can be alarmingly like my father, has struggled with the same depression as my sister and me, beginning at roughly the same age that my father’s journey began.

Another coincidence that amuses me is that my journalist sister chose a decade or so ago to get a house in the country. She chose to live in a beautiful town called Midhurst, the very same Sussex town, it transpired, where my father had found initial safety when he fled Austria.

I can hear my father’s voice dismissing these “coincidences” as unscientific but, for me, perhaps one of the biggest pieces of experiential proof I have of their truth is this: over the recent past, since I began to reclaim my father’s story, my own depression has abated. I have gained an increased sense of comfort. A sense that it is okay to be me and that I no longer have to pretend or work hard to camouflage myself to fit into everyday society. By bringing the unknown from my subconscious into my conscious, a real and liberating shift has occurred.

Despite the healing I have found, however, a deeper political concern continues to trouble me. If my father were fleeing persecution now and trying to reach Britain, I doubt he would be permitted entry. The dogwhistle racism in Britain ushered in by Brexit, the brutality of Trump, and a British government that thought deporting traumatised refugees to Rwanda was decent policy spell a dangerous shift in attitudes towards refugees, in Europe, Australia and across the globe.

Our collective memories are short. And individualistic neo-liberal ideologies have left too many of us divorced from the values that create a caring, cohesive society. As mass migration brought about by climate catastrophe threatens to dwarf the current global refugee crisis, we are at a dangerous point. War has flared once again in Europe, and the Middle East is ablaze.

I find myself in my political work haunted by the quotes my father had me transcribe as a child; often I use them in speeches. Increasingly it feels that “mere anarchy” is being “loosed upon the world” and that the “odds” are indeed “gone.”

As I look out across today’s bleak political landscape, with its rising levels of hate and its failure to prevent injustice, I remember my father’s preoccupation with Santayana’s remark, which now seems more prescient than ever. My hope is that we will remember and learn from the history of the last century before it’s too late, so that we and the generations to come are not doomed to relive it. •

This is an extract from Fault Lines: Australia’s Unequal Past, edited by Seumas Spark and Christina Twomey, published this week by Monash University Publishing.

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What’s more, the agency I had landed in still harboured fond memories of having been the fiefdom of the former Country Party leader John “Black Jack” McEwen. As trade minister, this much-feared figure was postwar Australia’s high priest of protectionism as bulwark of the nation’s manufacturing base. “Under McEwen you either shared the minister’s opinion or had none at all,” a departmental veteran told me.

The department was dedicated to opening up markets for Australian exports, but my decrying of Australia’s own trade barriers was considered a mere youthful indiscretion. In the early 1980s, after the nation had been governed for most of the past thirty years by a Coalition headed by a Liberal Party supposedly committed to economic liberalism, these barriers seemed as unassailable as ever. How did the Liberals and the Country Party keep the proverbial lid on what could have been as great a cause of mutual strain as net zero today?

In the late nineteenth century the trade issue defined the discordant political cultures of the two main Australian colonies, Victoria being the home of arch protectionists David Syme and his acolyte Alfred Deakin while footloose New South Wales was committed to free trade. It constituted the greatest policy choice facing a still formative Australia as the twentieth century approached. As an obstacle to Federation, it had potential to be a nation breaker.

Even after Federation was finally achieved in 1901 there remained a fundamental question of whether the new nation would try to compete boldly on international markets or withdraw into cosseting domestically oriented infant industries. Unsurprisingly, the young Commonwealth trended towards the easy option of protection against imports, only partly made up for by the abolition of trade barriers between the states. Their borders are still dotted by now quaint colonial-era customs houses. Any lingering doubt as to where Australia was headed was ended by the Massy–Greene tariff of 1921, which embedded tariff policy by — among other things — creating the Tariff Board to assess industry requests for protection.

But surely the formation of an earlier coalition in 1923 between the urban based Nationalist Party of Stanley Bruce and Earle Page’s Country Party would have changed things? One of the Country Party’s foundational gripes — long before Black Jack took the leadership — was that tariffs and other trade barriers imposed unfair costs on primary producers, and Page and his rural confreres now had nearly half the spots in cabinet, with Page himself as treasurer.

Well, no, the Bruce–Page government didn’t make much difference. One fundamental reason is that the costs of protection are spread so thinly as to be less than obvious, while its benefits are highly concentrated on the fortunate few. Continuing to rip off great numbers of consumers has always been far easier than exposing inefficient manufacturers to international competition.

Also, the Country Party in government discovered the joys of what became known as protection all round: if you can’t get rid of tariffs then you compensate for the costs they impose by building up a smorgasbord of schemes to subsidise primary producers. This nice little earner of a strategy became a staple of Country Party policy. Page and co also found that remaining in government was necessary to keep directing funds to (mostly much-needed) rural services and infrastructure.

Hence the Bruce–Page government resisted the not infrequent tariff tantrums of rural radicals from the Country Party’s outer fringes. Bruce persuaded himself that tariffs actually built up the home market for primary goods but, as one of our few prime ministers with a commercial background, harboured a disconcerting soft spot for business efficiency. Just before losing office in 1929 his government moved to inquire more closely into its own tariff regime. Its hapless Labor successor, headed by James Scullin, raised tariffs to unprecedented levels in a vain effort to cope with the Great Depression.

Postwar, the Liberals’ lack of economic nous let McEwen dominate trade and industry policy. So much so that he became one of the very few Australian political leaders to give his name to an economic strategy. “McEwenism” was more than just a cynical exercise in expanding the Country Party’s rural support base by encompassing manufacturers. McEwen held that a prosperous Australia needed to build its ability to defend itself by expanding its population, and that only a manufacturing sector protected by tariffs, quotas and suchlike could provide the mass employment required to sustain this. Subsidies, meanwhile, would keep primary producers happy.

The end result was that “the whole of the Australian economy is protected,” McEwen proudly proclaimed. His conviction that Australian manufacturing would grow overlooked the limitations of internationally uncompetitive industries limited to a small domestic market while encased in a business culture cosily attuned to government assistance.

McEwen’s considerable personal standing didn’t help. Menzies considered him to be the Coalition’s most capable minister, and even the acerbic Paul Hasluck respected his commitment to the national interest — even if he otherwise treated politics as “a contest for advantage, not a matter of doctrines or principles.” There were occasional suggestions — and not just from within the Country Party — that McEwen would make an excellent prime minister. It took until the early 1960s for his economic doctrine to finally attract serious criticism from within his party’s coalition partner.

Many early public attacks on the excesses of McEwenism emanated from a self-styled “modest member” from South Australia, one Bert Kelly. This Liberal backbencher correctly argued that the tariff wall constricted the national economy by propping up industries for which we had no natural advantage, just as “you can, with the expenditure of immense effort, grow bananas at the South Pole.” Yet the Country Party remained under McEwen’s domination, while both the Liberals and Labor bathed in a “pleasant pool of apathy.” Kelly did, at least, give his fellow Liberals due credit for tolerating his seemingly quixotic fixation.

More serious for McEwen was criticism starting to emanate from the Tariff Board under its chair Leslie Melville and his successor Alf Rattigan. By the mid-1960s a graziers’ organisation called the Basic Industries Group and a particularly rambunctious economics journalist, Max Newton, were campaigning with a vigour that Black Jack found decidedly irksome. They were almost as annoying as one of his fellow ministers — an ambitious little guy from Sydney with big ears and a sing-song voice.

Billy McMahon is not normally cast as a political hero. Whatever personality flaws he bore, he was a serious student of economic policy. Zachary Gorman, historian of Australian liberalism, called him a “deeply philosophical classical liberal” for his efforts to uphold individualism and oppose the concentration of power. This, and his emergence under prime minister Harold Holt as a capable treasurer, helps explain the seeming mystery of why he eventually became Liberal leader.

McMahon was McEwen’s most serious Liberal challenger. They clashed not just over industry protection but also over creation of an Industry Development Corporation to lend to and invest in industry, and McMahon’s refusal to devalue the dollar to match Britain’s own devaluation in 1967. McEwen accused him of encouraging the Basic Industries Group, and of leaking information to Newton.

So it was not a total surprise that when McMahon moved to contest the party leadership in the wake of Holt’s untimely death, Black Jack decreed that a McMahon prime ministership would end the Coalition. In doing so he produced one of the best-known Australian political remarks: “Bill, I will not serve under you because I don’t trust you.” Whether McMahon would have otherwise won the party-room ballot remains doubtful: there was no groundswell of support for him before or after McEwen’s veto. Nor was there any need to attribute McEwen’s hard line to the quite false rumour that McMahon was gay, to use the parlance of a later era. I lost count of the number of times I had been assured of the contrary.

The remarkable thing here is that the McEwen–McMahon clash was the only time in the twenty-three years from 1949 to 1972 that protectionism became a major public issue between the Country Party and a senior Liberal. McEwen eventually lifted his veto shortly after John Gorton nearly lost the 1969 election.

Whitlam’s sudden twenty-five per cent across the board tariff cut of 1973 was soon written off as a political blunder. It took until the early 1980s for things to really begin to change. Bafflement over the stagflation that followed the two oil shocks and a growing fear that the Australian economy was facing irreversible decline encouraged the emergence of the Dries in the Liberal party room, not to mention such robustly economically rational Labor figures as Bill Hayden and Peter Walsh.

In the end it was those great (no sarcasm intended) economic reformers Bob Hawke and Paul Keating who belatedly led the way towards modernising and internationalising a moribund Australian economy, crucially supported by opposition leaders Hewson, Downer, and Howard.

Now, I am no climate change expert: nor am I confident that net zero is a great goal for Australia to aspire to. But I will make a few admittedly broad-brush observations on how the Liberals might relate to their Coalition partner on such a tough issue, drawing on the sorry saga of their predecessors’ acquiescence with McEwenism.

Lesson one is to develop a strong internal capacity for developing robust policy. If you don’t have a well thought out position in which you have intellectual faith, how can you even begin to stand up to the McEwens of this world? Nurture ideas, tolerate debate, read worthwhile books, and conduct research. Too many Liberal MPs of the 1950s simply didn’t do enough in this department.

Second, value the Coalition as a ready-made basis for hammering out a balanced policy package. It’s far better to negotiate as joined at the hip partners than to resort to public spatting that leaves both sides fearful of being seen as having backed down. The Coalition has been more or less functional for most of the past century, so it must have something to offer. It worked for Bruce and Page, so why can’t it for their political descendants? And remember also how the Nationals largely went along with economic reform under Howard.

It’s up to the Liberals here as the senior Coalition partner (well, those of them who favour net zero) to balance National demands with a wider view of what is good for Australia. Don’t condemn the Nats for protecting their regional constituency — it’s what they do, and might even generate a few good ideas for a balanced policy package that addresses net zero’s manifest costs.

Third, be patient about policy change. Plant an idea and encourage it to grow as changing circumstances make its merits more obvious. Good ideas are the ultimate vehicles of power, they just take time to achieve majority favour. Bert Kelly was seen as an obsessive, and McMahon as a boat rocker, but ultimately their ideas won out.

Fourth, one slightly “out there” thought. Don’t always dismiss the seeming crank: stay alert to the near inevitability that in today’s ever-growing oceans of dottiness there swim a few Kellys who have done their policy homework and are truly brave, not merely obsessive. Stanley Bruce said wisely of his rather manic deputy that “if you had the patience to listen to Page, he’d come up with a helluva good idea now and then.”

Finally, remember that no major issue is ever permanently resolved, so never rest on your laurels. Those trade department sages were oh-so wrong to assure me that protectionism would last forever. And now even such a manifestly bad idea as protectionism is coming back. Who would have thought that a prominent Liberal would be calling for the revival of the Australian car industry? History doesn’t go in circles, but nor does it ever cease.

Incidentally, I didn’t last long in the trade department. I’ve no idea why. •

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Briggs crammed careers into his life like so many cats in a sack. He was a brilliant student who simultaneously studied for degrees in history and economics at Cambridge and the University of London. He worked at Bletchley Park as part of the Intelligence Corps during the second world war and was the youngest warrant officer in the British army. He proofread and advised on Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples (1956–58). He was a precociously young fellow at Worcester College, Oxford, an energetic history professor at Leeds and Sussex Universities, a pioneering university administrator (including stints as provost of Worcester College, vice-chancellor of Sussex University and chancellor of the Open University), a British peer, and a tireless advocate for education.

His books, meanwhile — particularly Victorian People (1954), The Age of Improvement (1959) and Victorian Cities (1963) — enjoyed credibility in the academy and popularity with the public. He produced a wide range of commissioned histories, most notably a five-volume history of broadcasting in Britain (1961–95), and he was a mover and shaker in all manner of British cultural institutions and societies throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.

For a biographer, cramming such a life into a book of manageable length is a challenge; recovering its details, too, requires vast reservoirs of energy. It is for this reason that the appellation biographer Adam Sisman gives to Briggs — “indefatigable” — must surely also apply to Sisman himself. He has traversed Briggs’s corpus, trawled the three voluminous collections of Briggs’s papers, and quarried from a range of other sources — books, periodicals, interviews — the materials needed to recount this man’s ceaseless, bustling life in his relatively succinct new book, The Indefatigable Asa Briggs.

Born in Keighley, Yorkshire, to a lower-middle-class family, Briggs showed himself early to be a voracious reader with a seemingly bottomless appetite for learning. Scholarships and prizes piled up quickly, as did signs of his brilliance. At fourteen he was sitting the exams his peers took when they were sixteen and writing essays on topics that would flummox an undergraduate: “Analysing Chaucer’s prose style, for example,” Sisman writes, “or examining the evidence that Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays.”

Sisman gives close attention to the Yorkshire milieu that shaped Briggs, especially its history since the Industrial Revolution, and to his family. In the first, he detects the origins of Briggs’s famous interest in the Victorian age; in the latter, he identifies how personality and class intersected with the imperatives of business throughout his life.

His father was a former fitter whose family thought themselves “superior” people and retail trading “absurd.” Willie Briggs had become a grocer with considerable reluctance, was uninterested in the business, and when the store failed through his inattentiveness he turned to the bottle. The family thus moved from their hitherto relatively secure existence, on the edge of the slums in Keighley, to far more precarious and straitened circumstances, with young Asa having to sleep in the attic and the family reliant on a loan from an in-law.

Against this background, it was by no means certain that Briggs would head off to university.  His father was certainly unconvinced — no one else in the family had gone, after all — and a local schoolmaster thought the youngster should go into catering. Thankfully, a more perceptive and accomplished colleague convinced Briggs’s father otherwise, and in 1937 he sat for a scholarship examination for Cambridge. Though he was just sixteen, he was urged to be speedy by the history fellow who interviewed him: “Briggs, you are only a baby, but there is going to be a war and I would like you to take your degree before you go into uniform.”

That sense of urgency appears never to have left Briggs. Thus the two simultaneous degrees; thus the book he co-authored on the postwar peace after-hours at Bletchley. Once the war ended, Oxford and Cambridge began fighting for his talents and a great stream of work began to flow. By then a tubby and genial young man with pebble-thick glasses, he was on the up. He swiftly built a reputation, writing the second volume of a two-volume history of Birmingham, doing regular broadcasts on the BBC, reviewing books for newspapers.

He began rubbing shoulders with the eminent, the established and the emerging. He was “moral tutor” to a young Rupert Murdoch (!) at Oxford and a lodestar to a swooning Iris Murdoch. A pensive J. Robert Oppenheimer asked him what to do about students protesting against nuclear weapons; Albert Einstein took a taxi with him; Clement Atlee told him that Churchill was right about Gallipoli.

Briggs’s greatest period was at Sussex. Established in 1961 as part of the British government’s efforts to expand higher education, it was one of the first “plate-glass” universities. As an early recruit and inaugural pro vice-chancellor, Briggs was instrumental in its adoption of multidisciplinary teaching. Having chafed at more conservative course structures at Oxford and Leeds, he wanted students to have a balance between a general education and a specialised one, enabling them to understand the connections and benefits of bridging the humanities and sciences. In its early years, as the campus was being built, the small student body and the frisson of creating a new institution was infectious. “Life is hectic here,” Briggs wrote to a friend, “but exciting.”

As vice-chancellor from 1967–76, Briggs had more to contend with than campus works. Student protests and faculty politics — particularly turf wars — would sour some of Sussex’s early promise. But for him this was still a high point. He was writing, publishing, hobnobbing. He was greeting royalty as easily as student protestors. When the Queen came to open the library, she stayed in a house nearby and “recruited Asa in rearranging the chairs in the sitting room after dinner,” writes Sisman. “Asa seemed completely at ease when talking to her. He had come a long way.”

With biographies of A.J.P. Taylor and Hugh Trevor-Roper, most pertinently, to his name, Sisman is practised at writing about historians and tracing the heady currents of experience and scholarship that surround them. He moves lightly through terrain that might otherwise have bogged him down and maintains a focus on why Briggs’s life and work may be worth reading about.

As he points out, the work of most historians is, ultimately, of passing significance. It is built on, at best; demolished, at worst; and often simply built over. Subsequent generations find new evidence, ask divergent questions, take up different perspectives. Works lauded and applauded in one decade may become outdated and unread in the next.

Briggs never liked that idea. “I believe that my books will be thought of as definitive in years to come, and not simply as interpretative,” he wrote. Sisman is not altogether convinced, but he is clear about why Briggs and his work are important. “He was a pioneer, who ventured into previously unexplored areas of study…,” he writes. “When others followed him into such new territories, he would move on, rather than claiming them for his own and colonising them, as others did… The terra incognita he had first explored would subsequently be developed in greater detail by others.”

For Australian readers, this point is evident in Briggs’s influence on Australian historiography and historians, which originated in the six months he spent as a visiting fellow at the ANU in the latter half of 1960, right before he joined Sussex University.

As part of his duties, Briggs went round Australia, lecturing, researching and engaging with scholars: responding to their concerns, paying attention to their ideas, taking part in their debates. The results were diffuse and catalysing. He was influential in the formation of the Australian Society for the Study of Labour History; he encouraged emerging work in urban studies, foreshadowing the creation of the Urban Research Unit at the ANU in 1965.

Beyond this visit, moreover, Briggs’s own books were talismanic examples to emulate and build on. His former student Ken Inglis’s This is the ABC (1983) and Whose ABC? (2006) are indebted to Briggs’s history of British broadcasting; Graeme Davison’s Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne (1978) seems to answer the ideas and suggestions Briggs made in Victorian Cities.

As Frank Bongiorno has argued, Briggs’s work was a “catalyst, a provocation, and a reassurance.”

For the first half of The Indefatigable Asa Briggs, the tone is one of optimism. When he took up the post at Sussex, Briggs’s life seemed to be one of constant ascension. He was always writing (1500 words a day), publishing new books, taking up lofty appointments, going on tours, being solicited for profiles and attention. Everything was coming his way. Nothing could go wrong. The mood is of energy, happiness, confidence and buoyancy.

But the more sombre notes Sisman strikes, with increasing frequency, begin to unsettle that impression. The pace never slows. New achievements and high appointments become so frequent as to seem insignificant. Books, children, new homes, new friends, new opportunities, pile up. The result is a flattening — as though Briggs has become mired.

In a sense, he had. Instead of casting off the demands of old roles as he moved into new ones, he seemed determined to maintain all. The result was endless delays in his delivery of manuscripts and a decline in the quality of that (still often very good) work. Commissions for which Briggs had accepted money, book proposals for which he had signed contracts, promises he had made: everything was made to revolve around him and his needs. Students needing to speak with Briggs would accompany him on the train to Gatwick to hear him say, “Yes, yes, yes,” as they told him what they had done. Publishers drumming their fingers for a long-overdue manuscript would write admonishing letters and then revise their catalogues. Even books that were finished could be haphazardly done: “Just put page 50,” he told his assistant when she queried incomplete footnotes.

The results were books that were insubstantial, marred by errors, outdated, lumbering and even stillborn. He delivered his history of Longmans three decades after the original seven-year commission; his history of British broadcasting, originally two volumes taking seven years, took five volumes and thirty-seven years.

Briggs’s heyday ended well before his life. Margaret Thatcher might have seemed to pay him a compliment when she suggested her government was reclaiming Victorian values, but the Gradgrind-turn of British politics that followed in the 1980s suggests otherwise. Causes that Briggs had espoused and championed — particularly in education — were out of favour. Publication of a festschrift titled Age of Asa, in 2014, implicitly acknowledged that the titular age had passed.

Sisman is judicious in explaining all this. He ventures, convincingly, that Briggs’s determination to succeed, and his willingness to take on paid commissions even when he could not meet them, was a response to the indignities he witnessed in boyhood when his father’s shop failed. He acknowledges too that class may have been an influence, pointing out that colleagues who called Briggs “greedy” may not have ever worried, as Briggs had, about money and security. “The childhood scars remained,” Sisman writes.

But there is also a mounting sense that Briggs’s relentlessness, his constant activity, was also a diversion from something deeper and more elusive. Briggs once wrote in a journal of a desire “not to reveal too much about myself,” and in lieu of doing so he seems to have loaded himself up with tasks. “My labours are far from finished,” he wrote when he was in his eighties, at a point when most people are putting their feet up. It is a declaration that pushes Sisman to conclude that Briggs’s habit of constant activity “had become a compulsion, perhaps even a raison d’être.”

For Briggs, there was always something to do. Ian McEwan had seen this, in 1970, during his final year at Sussex. Briggs was giving a lecture to commemorate the centenary of the first national Education Act. Student protestors arrived to disrupt the event, but Briggs told them if they waited until the lecture was over he would talk to them, properly. They waited. And so, at the end, as the audience began to disperse, Briggs took off his jacket to address the next item on the list. He announced: “And now, down to business.” •

The Indefatigable Asa Briggs
Adam Sisman | William Collins | $59.99 | 480 pages

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In the case of Playtime this might be true only for older readers — Gallagher begins her study in 1890 and ends in 1939. But as she makes clear, children’s play is always conservative as well as changing, and I think most Australian readers will share my delighted recognition. Thomson — Fathering is jointly authored, but Alistair Thomson was its anchor and driver — gives us the history of Australian fathering from 1919 to now. The historical changes and continuities it describes are deliberately grounded in individual life stories, and again readers will find resonances with their own memories and experience.

Gallagher writes with an elegant assurance. Children, she says, have not been treated as historical subjects; rather “they have appeared as accessories to a larger story; a colourful thread of a neatly spun tapestry of adult lives. This book complicates that tapestry.” It does this by taking “children seriously as the authors of their own lives.”

People told Gallagher that the sources for the story she wanted to write — children’s own documentary records — did not exist, but she nevertheless set out to find them. She discovered more than a hundred collections, in state libraries and local collections, encompassing everything from farm sheds to school museums “and even private doll collections, my research keenly appraised by hundreds of unblinking eyes.” There were treasures in the bush, but her richest source was more conventional, what she calls “youth journalism”: letters, poems and stories published in school papers, official and unofficial, and in the children’s pages of city newspapers. These contributions, naive and sophisticated, candid and shy, power her analysis throughout.

Her account is organised into what she calls “common imaginative worlds.” In roughly chronological order, these worlds involve bird-watching, playing at war, dolls and home-making, dreaming about the future, and monsters and fairies. In all these worlds, even playing at war, Gallagher finds children joyfully reimagining themselves as heroes, independent of adults and shaping adult worlds to their own purposes.

Gallagher recognises some the social constraints on these imaginings. Gender is a constant. Boys play as soldiers and girls as nurses, and girls banish boys from their cubbyhouses because the boys destroy their dolls — perhaps, writes Gallagher, foreshadowing “the violence that some girls would experience in their own homes as married women.”

She is also alert to her subjects’ constraints as the children of colonialism. Their imaginings of “birdland” — a land inhabited by anthropomorphic birds — follow adult imaginings in celebrating their own connection to country, and at the same time erase Indigenous people from the landscape. The settler myth framing the children’s stories is unquestionned, though some stories protest the murder of birds by egg collectors and farmers.

Few sources document the imaginings of Indigenous children, but we glimpse them in a collection of drawings by children on the Hermannsburg mission in Western Arrarnta country. Rather than the bush landscapes, “largely unmarked by modernity,” painted by Arrarnta man Albert Namatjira and his followers, the children’s landscape is populated with gums and kangaroos together with cars and aeroplanes:

Black emus sprinting along the red earth; camels lounging among pine trees and porcupine grass; ghostly gums standing solemnly alongside modest buildings; and aeroplanes gliding through the sky like great birds.

In these drawings aeroplanes are not depicted “as a vehicle to another world.” Gallagher explains — perhaps over-explains — that while both settler and Indigenous children placed the aeroplane in their futures, the Western Arrarnta, unlike the utopian worlds imagined by settler children, “anchored it to the ‘everywhen’ of Country.”

There is another constraint which to my mind Gallagher could have explored more — the frame of middle-class culture. In discussing the sources available for a history of childhood she insists that the records of working-class children, while elusive, can be recovered, but she does not do this here. Nor does she acknowledge how far the records she draws on are class-bound. The youth-journalists whose stories are the backbone of Playtime display levels of self-confidence and schooling readily found only in a family with middle-class aspirations. Gallagher’s aim in writing this history, to take “children seriously as the authors of their own lives,” may itself be essentially middle-class.

But I doubt this is a constraint that will bother many readers. Like this reviewer they will delight in the stories of fairies triumphant and monsters overcome, of brave and adventurous children taking hold of power for themselves.

Fathering begins with a story about working-class childhoods in the 1930s and the 1960s. In an oral history interview Patrick Doran was asked what his father Tom, an unskilled labourer working for the Board of Works, was like as a parent. In words that reproduce all the idiosyncracies of his speech, he remembered:

There was a cheap library up in Elsternwick and we use to all walk up there to get these cheap books where they rent it out a penny a week, I think, to get the books out, and walk all the way back. Like my father use to take us and bring us home and sort out the books we wanted and get everything paid for… I did the same with our kids.

The authors of Fathering don’t wonder what books these working-class kids chose; that is not their remit. Their aim is “to explore the forces that have shaped family life and fathering since the early twentieth century, and how men have responded to those forces and managed the roles and responsibilities of fatherhood.”

They tell the story of Tom and Patrick and the library visits as a “muted expression” of a father caring about his children, muted both in its telling in the interview that is its source, and in its historical happening. “Expressive intimacy or even play… were not significant aspects” of Tom’s and Patrick’s relations with their children, they write.

Difficulties with what is not said are a recurring theme in Fathering. This is partly because the research draws on pre-existing oral history interviews in which fathering was not a central concern. More crucially, when interviewees — especially older men — were asked directly about the role of fathering they had little to say. Patrick Doran’s response was typical of working men of his generation: “It’s just being around, and be taken for granted. I can’t see a big deal in a role for a father, but just be there.”

Fathering draws on some 1250 oral history interviews from four different collections, plus memoirs by Indigenous Australians, submissions to the mid-1970s Royal Commission on Human Relationships, and letters to and from servicemen during the second world war. These life-histories represent a wide swathe of Australian society: respectable and unrespectable poor, skilled workers, aspiring and well-established middle-class families, newly arrived migrants and their children, and Indigenous families both destroyed and surviving. They are set in the context of reflective chapters organised in five chronological sections: Fathering Between the Wars, Fathering in WWII and Post-War Reconstruction, Fathering in Prosperous Times, Fathering in Turbulent Times, and Fathering into the Twenty-first Century.

The voices of its subjects speak directly from every page of Fathering; they are its greatest strength. They are heard most clearly in the Portrait chapters scattered through the book; fifteen in all, chosen for their relevance to the themes pursued in the different sections and featuring all kinds of Australian fathers, including the good, the violent and the absent. Let me bring you just two examples.

As a baby born during the second world war, I was drawn to the chapter Dear Dad: The Johnson and MacFarlane Families at War. John Johnson was a farmer’s son trained as a carpenter. Ken MacFarlane, educated at Scotch College, was an optometrist and the son of an optometrist. The Portrait is based on letters exchanged by these parents and their children during the war. Johnson wrote from Tobruk: “How is my Sylvia Rose and my Josie Jacqueline. Not forgetting all my men. I’m expecting a letter from John any time and hope he is well and happy.” Muted affection is overcome here by necessity.

Both dads used their correspondence to maintain affectionate bonds with their children, the more literate MacFarlane more readily. It was painful to learn at the end of this chapter that John Johnson was killed by a sniper’s bullet in 1941, before his last letter reached home.

The story of Jack Brooks is subtitled Becoming an Aboriginal Dad. Based on an interview in 2012, it tells how he grew up in a country town with a strong, supportive Aboriginal community. After his family life was shattered by violence Brooks tried various jobs in country New South Wales and then Sydney. In Sydney he fathered five children in three different relationships that all failed; he saw the children only sporadically. His sixth child was different. His wife was the main wage-earner, and Brooks chose to stay at home with his son.

When asked what times in his life he had most enjoyed, Brooks replied: “bringing up [my son]… actually spending every day with [him] has been really amazing.” He was taking care of his son’s Aboriginal identity, “to make sure that he’s around community as well, and knowing who his uncles and aunties are, and cousins and brothers and sisters. And he’s always asking questions and talking about the Dreamtime… [E]verything that I’ve learned over the years, I’m trying to pass on to him… I really enjoy life now. I enjoy life a lot.”

Brooks’s joy is not typical of the men whose experience shapes Fathering. The book is dominated by the difficulties of being the kind of father who takes equal responsibility for, and gives equal time to, the rearing of his children. This is the model of fathering valourised by the authors of this book, the model they believe will give fathers the greatest satisfaction and children the greatest benefit. They show how versions of this “New Fatherhood” have come to be accepted as an ideal over the last four decades, despite ideological challenges.

Fathers from across Australian society have embraced that ideal, yet all but a very few struggle to achieve it. The problem is identified as being entrenched in the workplace, in the reality that most husbands continue to earn more than most wives, and in the stubborn belief that men are the natural breadwinners. Fathering concludes that until this changes, fathers “will continue to be the secondary parent.”

Different readers will find different rewards in Playtime and Fathering. Some will be happily reminded of daydreams in which they mapped heroic futures for themselves. Others will find historic context for current uncertainties about their future as parents or grandparents. All will find histories that are deeply personal. •

Playtime: A History of Australian Childhood
By Emily Gallagher | La Trobe University Press | $36.99 | 320 pages

Fathering: An Australian History
Alistair Thomson, John Murphy, Kate Murphy and Johnny Bell, with Jill Barnard | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 432 pages

The post Authors of their own lives? appeared first on Inside Story.

Much of the second part is devoted to Toklas, who outlived Stein by close to three decades, and much of it recounts the use made by previous scholars of the materials held in the archive. Here, Wade takes the opportunity to reflect on the ethical dilemmas facing the biographer when she encounters unpublished papers that contain private, sometimes intimate, information.

This book tells its stories simply and engagingly, bearing the weight of its considerable scholarship lightly, without undue polemical material. In one episode, however, Wade debates with Barbara Will’s 2011 book, Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (reviewed by Sarah Dowse for Inside Story in 2011). Will sought to explain why Gertrude Stein undertook translations of the speeches of Philippe Pétain, chief of the collaborationist Vichy state during Germany’s occupation of France. Wade takes issue with her assessment.

Where Wade’s story of Stein’s life includes stories about the full range of her acquaintances — friends and professional associates — Will’s is a forensic investigation of her relationship with a single person: Bernard Faÿ, whom Toklas described as Stein’s dearest friend from the mid-1920s onwards. Faÿ was professor of American history at the Collège de France, a senior official in the Vichy administration, director of the Bibliothèque Nationale following the dismissal and internment of his Jewish predecessor Julien Cain, and thereafter charged with heading the Vichy anti-Masonic operations.

Will’s book is composed in alternating chapters focused on these two friends. It is a compositional strategy that lends itself to the implication of guilt by association: as Wade writes, this implication was taken as fact in the reception for Will’s argument, with the result that “articles in the mainstream press” began to refer to Stein’s “collaborationist activities” and place her alongside notorious collaborators such as L.-F. Céline.

In rebutting these conclusions Wade addresses her objections not to Will but to Will’s readers. Yet it needs to be said that Will leaves herself open to this representation by referring to Stein’s “vocal Pétainism”: Stein “chose,” she writes, “to commit her writing and her name to the service of the Vichy regime. She chose it out of conviction and out of hope.” And again, citing examples, “Stein referred to herself as a propagandist for France.” In two long chapters Stein’s political leanings are represented as “converging” with Faÿ’s increasingly hardline arguments against the policies of Léon Blum’s Popular Front and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, both of which he considered to be comparable (confusingly, as Will writes) to both fascism and communism.

Wade, by contrast, represents Stein’s political ideas as consistently inconsistent, and stresses that it is “difficult to assess [them] coherently.” We are told that “throughout the war, Stein’s work was sought out by some of the leaders of the intellectual resistance,” that in the early parts of the German occupation she was published by some anti-fascist outlets, and that she privately admired the young men of the maquis ­­­— the rural Resistance fighters — in her region. Wade finds further evidence for her views in Stein’s wartime books Paris France and Wars I have Seen. To read Wade and Will together, therefore, is to read something like a prosecution of the charge of Vichy sympathies and a defence of a “radical” author potentially victim of the regime she purportedly supported.

I don’t intend to arbitrate between Will and Wade, but instead to tease out what is at stake in their disagreement. The fact of Stein’s Vichy translations is not in contention: it is what they actually mean that is at issue. Wade is inclined to excuse them because, “apart from his decision to sign the Armistice, Stein never praised Pétain’s actions or policies” and because “her attachment to Pétain was primarily iconographic.” For Will, by contrast, Stein’s support for the Vichy regime was unambiguous, and her title (Unlikely Collaboration) suggests that Stein was not only “nostalgic,” as Wade puts it, for a “return” to a traditional France following the Armistice but also, more damningly, that she was that most reviled of wartime figures, a “collaborator.”

The dispute between Wade and Will carries echoes of the far more ruthless dispute that took place in France in the immediate postwar period. At that time, people thought to have been collaborators were subject to summary punishment if not execution at the hands of the Resistance. De Gaulle put a stop to these purges by instituting official trials in which the question was clear: did the accused commit treason by collaboration?

In both the extra-legal and the legal prosecutions there lies a tacit assumption that the Resistance represented loyalty to France, that the majority of the population was loyal in this sense — loyal, presumably, to a “certain idea of France” — and that the betrayals were committed by a few bad apples. This assumption was propounded by De Gaulle in his negotiations with the Allies to ensure that France was counted among them. It was thereafter adopted as the official history. France’s civil war took the form of a dispute over control of the narrative. And that is what we have between Wade and Will.

Was Gertrude Stein loyal to her adopted country? She would have thought of herself as loyal to an ideal of France grounded in nostalgia for an agrarian, pre-revolutionary past, and she thought of Pétain as incarnating this ideal. In this respect, Will makes her case persuasively. She is also persuasive in her account of the sway exerted on Stein by Bernard Faÿ’s politics, which took this ideal in the direction of his own Catholic, royalist views. These views explain his rabid anti-Masonic activities. There is no indication that Stein took any interest in his opinions on this matter, and she appears to have been very careful to avoid the issue of anti-Semitism, this being what made her vulnerable to Pétainist persecution.

But the question of loyalty does arise in relation to an astonishing postscript to the story of her translations of Pétain’s speeches. It is thought likely that Faÿ encouraged this project; he certainly spoke directly to Pétain about it, as he did to Ménétrel, Pétain’s personal physician and confidant, and appears to have obtained official approval for it. The project remained incomplete and unpublished.

Faÿ, meanwhile, lost some of his influence when Pierre Laval took over decision-making powers from Pétain, but was still in a position where — alerted to the impending danger by Stein’s friend Picasso — he could intervene to save the Stein art collection from requisition by the Gestapo.

Nevertheless, after the war, he was tried, convicted, imprisoned and stripped of his citizenship, along with Pétain and other senior officials. Stein wrote to the court in his defence, claiming that he was “a consummate patriot,” but with no effect, and she died shortly after. So there is no sense in which she was an active participant in what happened next. In order to help Faÿ escape from prison, his friends asked Alice Toklas for funds. Unbeknownst to the other executors or legatees of Stein’s will, she sold two paintings, using the proceeds to enable Faÿ’s cause. The escape was successful, and Faÿ lived out the rest of his life in Switzerland. Toklas believed that she had fulfilled “a sacred trust,” that was “entwined” with the publication of the manuscripts” as “Gertrude’s last wishes.”

Of what was Gertrude Stein guilty? Will condemns her for her close friendship with Faÿ and for what she calls a “propaganda project in support of Vichy France,” referencing as evidence of that project her translations of Pétain’s speeches. In order to understand that project, we need to bear in mind that her intended audience was American. It was not an intervention in the internal politics of a divided France, despite Will’s claim that she “willingly [participated] in the Vichy propaganda machine.” Its aim most certainly was to persuade the Americans that the France of Vichy should be supported when America was quietly having a bet each way. She hoped to present Pétain’s “national revolution” “as a cause worthy of both support and emulation” — this on behalf not of France’s present so much as of America’s future.

Yet it is clear that Stein was “out of her depth” in matters political and ideological, and ignorant of the consequences of adopting a Fascist programme for reform. In view of this, Jean Wahl’s assessment of Stein’s views as unbelievably naive seems both pointed and understated.

Speaking as a communist — though no doubt fondly, since their friendship remained undiminished — Picasso relied on a familiar ideologically driven binary opposition between two sharply delineated “sides”: “Gertrude was a real fascist. She always had a weakness for Franco. Imagine! For Pétain, too. You know she wrote speeches for Pétain. Can you imagine it? An American, a Jewess, what’s more.” This is hardly accurate, but it shows how support for the right in the Nazi era could lead seamlessly to the angry response to Will’s book reported by Wade. There too we read that Stein was accused of “pro-Fascist ideology.” Stein became in this reception a “collaborationist” monster. Perhaps a more accurate answer to our question, of what was she guilty, is simply that she has disappointed her readers. From a queer hero, a feminist icon, or a triumphantly experimental writer, Stein is discovered to be flawed.

This disappointment is evident in both books: in Will’s initial motivation for investigating Stein’s politics — “[Stein] seemed the least likely person to write propaganda in support of an authoritarian regime” — as well as in Wade’s claims of Stein’s Resistance sympathies. It is also evident in Wade’s equivocation concerning the fact that the translations were not completed or published: did she “actively decide” not to publish them  (this would indicate her late change of heart) or did the project “falter” because of Pétain’s fall (indicating that she might otherwise have pursued the project)?

I too was shocked when I first read Will’s book, but it made me reflect on the many instances of reactionary modernism we know of. This category includes a broad spectrum, from outright support of Nazi policies and actions (Céline, Ezra Pound) to moderate views opposing progressive politics. The story of that range of modernist art practice is not adequately told through recourse to an individual’s psychology or her friendships. In Wade’s intelligent and more nuanced reading, Gertrude Stein takes her (shifting) place somewhere on this spectrum, certainly not at either of the extremes.

Affective attachment or abreaction: these may be the risks of biography, for both writer and reader. I came to dislike Gertrude Stein in the course of reading Francesca Wade’s book: it is, I am sure, the very precision, the thoroughness of her research and the readability of her stories that allow the personality to emerge. It is certainly better to read a good book about her than to have tangled with her vanity and self-absorption, and certainly better to engage intellectually with the challenges of her writing. But this kind of personal dislike is rather different from the condemnation of her politics that Simone Weil would have characterised as self-righteous.

A telling contrast between the epilogues to the two books clarifies the source of these responses. In her epilogue, Francesca Wade adopts the biographer’s trope of following in the footsteps of her subject; she “marvel[s] at the reach of Stein’s legacy and the passion she inspired in her admirers,” and reports bringing Stein to life again in her pilgrimage. It is sentimental writing, testament to the bond that so often arises from the commitment of a biographer to her subject. Barbara Will had written a previous book on Stein’s aesthetics, and I surmise that Unlikely Collaboration comes from the place of love betrayed. Her epilogue is devoted to Bernard Faÿ’s life in exile: her book performs the act of rejecting Stein. •

Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
By Francesca Wade | Faber | $39.99 | 480 pages

The post Certain ideas of France appeared first on Inside Story.

When you consider distance and population size, that relative ignorance is puzzling. It’s 1500 kilometres from Tasmania to New Zealand’s South Island, ten times the distance between Cape York and the New Guinea mainland. If it weren’t for crocodiles and sharks, an experienced swimmer would be able to cover the less than four kilometres from there to the closest inhabited Australian island, Sabai in the Torres Strait. Today, New Zealand has just over five million inhabitants, about as many as Queensland, while household surveys and satellite imagery put PNG’s estimated population in 2021 at close to twelve million, almost half the size of Australia’s.

Yes, lots of New Zealanders live in Australia. But in Cairns and other Northern Queensland towns the presence of Papua New Guineans is hard to ignore. And who knows, someday many more might come. PNG is a volatile country and its southern border is “porous,” as former Liberal senator Ian Macdonald once aptly put it.

But it’s because of its twentieth-century history that Australians may want to show a more lively interest in PNG. Early in that century, in 1906, Australia formally took over British Papua, the British colony established at the urging of Queensland twenty-two years earlier. When the first world war broke out, Australia seized German New Guinea; after the war, that former German colony was administered, separately from Papua, by Australia under a League of Nations mandate. Then, following the second world war, Papua and what had become the UN Trust Territory of New Guinea were combined under Australian rule, though it wasn’t until 1971 that the entity was renamed Papua New Guinea. In 1973, the colony became self-governing; two years later it was independent.

PNG is not entirely ignored in Australia — at least not now. In the lead-up to the fiftieth anniversary of the day of independence, 16 September 1975, Australian media coverage about PNG has been extensive. And some of it has been very good. But the history of Australian rule, which in one part of PNG lasted for more than ninety years, has barely featured.

Of course, it makes sense to celebrate PNG’s achievements over the past half century, explore the young nation’s manifold challenges and try to predict its future. But such a focus allows Australians to hold on to powerful myths: that Australian colonialism was incidental and benevolent, that the inhabitants of Australia’s colony were treated far better than Indigenous Australians, and that Australia gave independence to Papua New Guineans.

Under the headline “At 50, Papua New Guinea Deserves a More Complete Story,” the Lowy Institute recently published a post by Peter Raynes, the Fred Hollows Foundation NZ program director responsible for the NGO’s activities in the Pacific, who has worked in PNG on and off since the 1990s. Raynes’s narrative of how the Australian colony became an independent nation is fairly typical. “After the war, the global tide turned toward decolonisation,” he writes, making the process appear inevitable and unrelated to the specific circumstances in PNG.

Under growing international pressure in the 1960s, Australia began preparing Papua New Guinea for independence. But the timeline was short, and the adoption of a centralised Westminster-style parliamentary system proved ill-suited to the country’s traditional bigman leadership structures and its extraordinary regional and cultural diversity… A local House of Assembly was established in 1964, followed by formal self-government in 1972. Full independence was achieved on 16 September 1975 — bringing us to this year’s 50th anniversary.

The only named actor in this extract is Australia; the passive voice in the last two sentences suggests that Papua New Guineans played little part in how independence came about. That narrative has an obvious corrective: a small group of local leaders — the politicians Michael Somare, Albert Maori Kiki, Julius Chan, Iambakey Okuk and John Guise among them — played instrumental roles in the immediate lead-up to independence. But that corrective often implies that an indigenous elite existed only because Australia had invested in education, including creating the University of Papua New Guinea in 1966.

In reality, the momentum for independence was also influenced by Papua New Guineans who objected strongly to Australian colonial rule. People living around Port Moresby, on Manus and on Bougainville, and Tolai on the Gazelle Peninsula in New Britain were prominent among them. In 1969 the latter formed the Mataungan Association, which fought for economic and political autonomy. When opposition leader Gough Whitlam addressed thousands of Mataungan supporters in their stronghold, Matupit, in January 1970, he considered it “one of the most moving experiences of our lives” and “the biggest election rally we have ever seen.” His encounter with militant Tolai helped to convince him that self-rule and independence couldn’t come soon enough.

Tolai living on the Gazelle Peninsula first encountered European traders and missionaries as early as the 1870s. Before other Papua New Guineans, they gained access to Western education. The Methodist missionaries used the Tolai language as a lingua franca to spread the gospel in other parts of the New Guinea islands.

The Tolai’s location helps explain why they played a prominent role in colonial New Guinea. They lived in villages near the colony’s administrative capitals: Herbertshöhe (Kokopo) from 1899 until 1910, and Rabaul until 1937. Rabaul’s port continued to sustain its economic importance after the second world war.

Tolai sometimes established amicable relationships with missionaries, traders, planters and the colonial administration. But they also had a long history of being a thorn in the colonisers’ side. In 1893 and again in 1902 the Germans were able to put down large-scale rebellions of Tolai only with the help of plantation labourers and Tolai from other districts. In each instance, the rebels suffered heavy casualties.

The leaders of the 1902 uprising, ToVagira and ToKilang, were killed by police patrols after a bounty had been put on their heads. According to his grandson, the colonial official in charge of the counterinsurgency kept a photo of their severed heads. An old Tolai woman I interviewed in the 1980s remembered ToVagira’s head being affixed to the wall of the German government offices at Kokopo. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe the story is merely a suitable image of the violence with which German colonial rule was associated.

By the time the Australians took over the German colony in 1914, the Tolai’s armed resistance had ended. But some Tolai kept protesting and rebelling against colonial rule. In August 1958, the Australian administration’s heavy-handed response to a protest on the Gazelle Peninsula even made it into the New York Times: “Two natives opposed to civilization in general and census-taking and taxes in particular gave their lives today in defense of their freedom,” the paper reported from Rabaul. “They were shot to death in a clash with Administration officers and police over a census in the nearby village of Navuneram.”

A commission of inquiry found the “view that the natives had planned to make an attack on the Administration forces” to have been “based on a reconstruction of the matter in the light of subsequent events and a preconceived idea,” which the commissioner considered to be incorrect. The commissioner also established that the two victims, ToVurete and ToVatuna, were shot in the back. No officials were ever prosecuted for their deaths, but Tolai remembered the name of the official who had fired the first two shots; he was murdered by Tolai in an unrelated dispute thirteen years later.

The conflicts between Tolai and their various colonisers — first the Germans, then the Australians, then the Japanese, followed again by the Australians — are remarkable not for Tolai violence but for the colonisers’ retribution.

The Gazelle Peninsula was home not only to Tolai and Europeans but also to many labour migrants from other parts of the country, most of whom lived either in Rabaul or on plantations. These labourers were involved in one of the most spectacular incidents of anti-colonial defiance in 1929, when thousands of them went on strike for better pay. In the year PNG gained independence, Australian historian Bill Gammage, then a young lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea, published an article about that strike that is still worth reading. His findings were based on archival sources and, importantly, oral testimonies of participants in the strike.

The strike collapsed almost immediately. Gammage provides an excellent account of how it began and how it ended, which I won’t rehash. But two other aspects of the history he recounted have stayed with me.

First, the Europeans were completely taken by surprise — not so much because the preparations were kept secret but because planters, missionaries and government officials couldn’t imagine Papua New Guineans disobeying orders and objecting to being treated badly. When they went on strike, many Europeans assumed, incorrectly as it turned out, that the instigator was an Australian missionary.

The other part of the story concerns the aftermath of the strike. Although no one came to harm and almost all strikers returned to work within hours, the retribution was merciless. “Some strikers were flogged and then sacked or taken to court and charged with desertion,” Gammage writes. “Beating natives was illegal, but apart from issuing warnings… no government official dared or cared to enforce the law.”

In fact, some European residents considered the Australian administration too lenient. “Why, the only thing a native understands is a beating,” an Australian woman wrote in private letter published in the Sydney Morning Herald. “Too much is tolerated and too little done, and, as everyone says, we are too small a community of whites to let the blacks get the upper hand.”

But the official response was also extremely harsh. Twenty-one men were sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. Because the Native Labour Ordinance didn’t allow for either the charges or the sentences, Gammage explains, the court used “the Queensland Criminal Code of 1899, adopted in New Guinea in 1921, a section of which laid down a penalty of up to three years’ imprisonment for any conspiracy to commit an offence in Queensland.”

The labour migrants who went on strike in 1929 objected to their paltry wages. Most Tolai, meanwhile, were subsistence farmers, and some of them sold copra to European traders. But Tolai too resented colonial rule. At about the time of the Rabaul strike, men in Vunamami, a coastal village near Kokopo, formed an organisation they called kivung na pidik, or secret association. “Let us collect a bit of money and see what happens,” the initiator, Enos Teve, is reported to have said. Later that money was used to finance a copra drier. Tolai men in other villages formed similar kivung after 1945.

When I enquired about the kivung na pidik in the 1980s, I learned that those involved were unhappy about having to observe a 9pm to 6am curfew and being prohibited from wearing shirts. (The Native Administration Regulations stipulated that men not wear clothes on the upper part of their bodies.) They also resented the fact that they were barred from drinking alcohol.

“Whoever was caught drinking — off they went to jail for six months,” Polos ToPultima, who worked as a government clerk in interwar Rabaul, told me. “Six months in jail for every single time you were caught drinking. Enos saw all this, and he thought of the council, actually not yet the council, of the kivung. A kivung to collect money to have a say, so that a government would materialise and we would govern ourselves.”

Independence was not just the result of Australian tutelage, or of the leadership of people like Somare. A colonial dress code may seem to be a trivial matter, but the resentment it created, particularly among grown men, mattered. And the sense of injustice and humiliation lingered long after it had been consigned to the dust bin.

It’s up to Papua New Guineans whether they want to remember colonial injustice. Australians may want to be aware that such injustice was widespread and that it mattered a lot to Papua New Guineans, at least before 1975. They would also do well to remember that in the 1920s and 1930s, when New Guinean men were not allowed to wear shirts, Australians working in the colony saw nothing amiss. In fact, some of them would have been convinced that allowing “the natives” to dress like Europeans would spell the end of the colonial order. After all, the last thing they wanted was “to let the blacks get the upper hand.” •

The post Australia’s forgotten colonial history appeared first on Inside Story.

Under the leadership of Bob Greenwood QC and the Australian Federal Police’s Graham Blewitt, the SIU gathered an impressive team of police investigators, most of whom might have heard only vaguely about the Holocaust and never have left Australia. They worked alongside historians, archaeologists, translators, researchers and lawyers to uncover the forensic history of the “Holocaust by bullets,” the mass extermination of Jews in mass graves across a region that encompassed the Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland and ex-Yugoslavia. The newly released Nazis in Australia, compiled by Blewitt and edited by Aarons, is a deeply reflective account by some of the key players involved in the SIU during its five-year history.

We are accustomed to thinking of that history as a failure. Of the 841 cases of suspected war criminals opened by the SIU, only three were committed to trial and none were punished. The unit was abruptly closed down just when it was about to submit its biggest mass murderer to the Commonwealth director of public prosecutions. Its final report was quietly buried by a Keating government unwilling to alert the public to its decision to abandon the search for justice.

But the SIU was in many ways groundbreaking. Bob Greenwood QC secured a mutual assistance treaty with the Soviet war crimes procurator — the formidable Natalia Kolesnikova, infamous for her unbending attitude to Western investigators — that gave his investigators access to archives, eyewitnesses and the hidden crime scenes of the second world war. It was a cold war precedent that neither the Washington-based Office of Special Investigations nor the Canadian war crimes unit had been able to achieve, and facilitated a rare moment of cooperation between Australians, Ukrainians and Soviet officials. It also gave Australian researchers access to archives never before visited by Western historians.

The SIU also set a precedent in Australian criminal legal history, establishing for the first time the ability of a jury trial to prosecute international war crimes. In further firsts, mass graves were located and excavated, bodies exhumed and victims finally given a decent burial. Eyewitnesses were finally able to speak about atrocities they had seen unfold, or even participated in, forty-five years earlier. Some left their villages for the first time to travel halfway across the world to give their testimony in a Western courtroom: also a world first. Interpreters and translators rewrote the rule book for assisting in war crimes trials off the back of these events.

Perhaps most importantly, though, the SIU showed it was possible to investigate war criminals for crimes committed outside Australia in conflicts without Australian involvement. This entailed amending the War Crimes Act, originally legislated in 1945 to prosecute Japanese war criminals, and inserting a new section that mandated a fair trial, a requirement missing from the original legislation.

When it came to finding justice for their victims, however, the SIU’s record is more complicated. Of the hundreds of names it investigated, only three cases were formally recommended for prosecution, Ivan Polyukovich, Heinrich Wagner, and Mikolay Berezowsky, each of whom was alleged to have committed atrocities in the Ukraine.

Polyukhovich, a forest warden working for the Germans in a village called Serniki, deep in the Ukrainian marshes, was alleged to have been intimately involved in the murder of between 553 and 850 Jewish locals. “As the bodies were exposed,” Australian archaeologist Richard Wright writes, “it was clear the murdered Jews were made to lie down like sardines in a tin before being shot.”

Wagner, a member of the local gendarmerie in a village called Ustinovka, allegedly organised the digging of a mass grave, participated in the killing of adult Jews into the pit, and then ordered all the children of Jewish descent in the village to be rounded up and thrown on top of the adults, where they were shot.

Berezowsky, head of the local police in Gnivan (now Hnivan), near Vinnytsia, was allegedly involved in the mass murder of the Jewish population of Gnivan, mainly women, children and the elderly, between March and July 1942. One eyewitness claimed he had rifle-butted a baby to death in its mother’s arms.

These three men, and other alleged war criminals discussed in this book, all arrived in Australia as part of the mass postwar immigration scheme designed by Ben Chifley’s Labor government to help fill the shortfall in manpower required for Australia’s postwar reconstruction program and counteract what appeared to be a declining birthrate. Between 1947 and 1952, more than 170,000 people came to Australia via the “displaced persons,” or DP, camps of postwar Germany. There, around one and a half million Eastern Europeans remained under Allied care after refusing to return to their countries of origin now under Communist rule. Many had been victims of the Nazis, but others had slipped into the camps after retreating with the Germans from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and then lied about their past activities.

Before being accepted for immigration to Australia, DPs were required to pass security and medical screenings by the Allied-run International Refugee Organization and then by Australian officials. Germans, war criminals and Nazi collaborators were ineligible for DP status under IRO rules, but in reality plenty were able to slip through the net, claiming to have lost their identity papers, for example, and lying about their whereabouts during the war.

Moreover, Australian selection officers were less interested in candidates’ recent pasts than whether they were a suitable “type” of migrant. Equipped with a strong sense of national responsibility but a vague knowledge of European politics, European languages and complicated European geography, officers relied heavily on the IRO’s security screenings, flawed foreign intelligence and doubtful interview techniques.

Most of the Australian migration selection officers had military backgrounds and received little if any training before arriving in Europe. Australian ex-serviceman Mort Barwick was among them. “There were no specific instructions as to what type of person we should take,” he recalled, “provided they were of reasonable standard and in your opinion could assimilate into your community, then it was a question of, if you were satisfied, select them.”

The emphasis was on those who, on the face of it, wouldn’t threaten the White Australia demographic. Those from the Baltic nations (Lithuanians, Estonians and Latvians), along with Ukrainians (a dubious category at the time), were considered most desirable. Jews were placed at the bottom, with Poles somewhere in between.

By the late 1940s, the deepening cold war was shifting the priorities of the Allies away from punishing West Germany to encouraging its peacetime reconstruction. It was also redefining the category of refugee. By the end of the decade, a professed fear of communism weighed more in a DP’s favour than proof of actual persecution under the Nazis. Those who may once have been condemned on the grounds of Nazi collaboration, for example, could now find themselves reassessed as heroic freedom fighters against communist tyranny.

Australian migration officers were encouraged to participate in this wilful revisioning of history. As historians have correctly observed, most recently Jayne Persian in her excellent book on the topic, Fascists in Exile, security screening was notoriously lax. Australian selection teams focused on admitting preferred racial types (fair-skinned) with the correct anti-communist views. Consequently, a number of fascists, war criminals and Nazi collaborators were able to come to Australia as DPs without fear of prosecution. Most did not even bother to change their names.

Combined with political inertia, it was this kind of wilful ignorance that determined attitudes to alleged war criminals. During the 1950s, allegations mainly from the Jewish community that Nazis who had participated in mass killings were living in Australia largely fell on deaf ears. In 1961, when the Soviet government requested the extradition of an Estonian man for war crimes, attorney-general Garfield Barwick called for an amnesty, telling the Australian parliament “the time has come to close the chapters on war crimes.”

Yet the shift that eventually led to the creation of the SIU was already in train. Accusations from overseas about Australia’s harbouring of alleged war criminals were becoming harder to ignore. The Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the publication of Raul Hilberg’s groundbreaking The Destruction of the Jews and other new histories, and a generational shift in the 1960s and seventies were all increasing the pressure. By the mid 1980s, when Aarons broadcast his explosive five-part series on ABC radio, Australia was starting to look like an outlier among Western nations that were already acting to bring war criminals to account. Hawke commissioned an official inquiry in 1986 under Andrew Menzies; the SIU was established following the release of its report, which found seventy suspects who warranted further investigation.

Of the three men eventually recommended to the director of public prosecutions, only Polyukhovich made it to trial. Heinrich Wagner suffered a heart attack during the committal hearing, and his case was dismissed on the grounds that, according to the trial judge, “the risk of Mr Wagner dying in the course of his trial is, in my opinion, too great.” A disappointed John Ralston, the lead investigator in Wagner’s case, believed the proper route would have been a temporary stay of proceedings to see whether Wagner could recover to stand trial. Mikolay Berezowsky’s case was dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence, another disappointment discussed in a chapter by Graham Blewitt.

Ivan Polyukhovich’s case is perhaps most revealing of why Australia appeared unable to provide just outcomes. A lot appeared to go wrong. For a start, only two of the original thirteen charges were allowed to proceed. The judge severely limited the evidence that could be shown to the jury and, worse, restricted the matters on which the historical experts could opine. The Ukrainian witnesses, who had travelled to Adelaide to participate in the trial, were bewildered by the process, contradicting their own statements in court and confused by the cross-examination. But perhaps most damaging to the prosecution was the summing up by Justice Cox, who all but prejudiced jury members against a guilty verdict, openly telling them it would be dangerous to convict after all these years.

Blewitt is perhaps the bluntest in his account of the judge’s conduct. “I thought we didn’t get a fair deal at the trial,” he has stated. In prosecutor Grant Niemann’s words, Cox “summed up to the jury for an acquittal, and that is what they did.” In the space of an hour, the jury found Polyukhovich not guilty on both counts. He was free to go.

Niemann and other contributors to Nazis in Australia believe the problem was larger than Cox. A jury trial, Niemann writes, was an unsuitable vehicle for a Nazi war crimes trial. “No matter how egregious Hitler’s ‘final solution’ was, it might be difficult for an Adelaide jury to relate to something that happened in German-occupied Ukraine nearly fifty years earlier,” he argues, “during the course of a war only remotely connected to them, and in a theatre of war in which Australia played no part.” Instead, the jury saw a sick, old man.

As Jürgen Matthäus, an expert historian, writes, “the media-driven image of agile Nazi perpetrators in black uniforms and animated by murderous fervour clashed with the portrayal of alleged war criminals as elderly, polite and inconspicuous neighbours whose normal postwar life made their association with Hitler’s mass murderers seem dubious.”

Indeed, it was these attitudes that drove the hostility of the media towards the trial — then, and since. Twenty years after the SIU was shut down, I investigated the case of Károly Zentai, an Australian man wanted for extradition for war crimes in his country of origin, Hungary. I found that the general attitude of the Australian media and the public was of sympathy for Zentai, portrayed as frail and elderly, who had led a largely blameless life in Australia and was being pursued for something that may or may not have happened a long time ago. As I wrote in Inside Story, the links that were forged in the postwar era between Australia and Eastern Europe via its mass migration schemes were also bonds of complicity in the project of forgetting and denial that has governed the politics of justice.

An investigation of a Latvian man called Karl Ozols was almost complete when Paul Keating decided to end the work of the SIU in 1992. Ozols was perhaps the most serious war criminal investigated by the SIU, and his was the case that might have come closest to a guilty verdict. He was a commander of a particularly murderous Latvian SS unit believed responsible for around 30,000 deaths. Another alleged war criminal, Argods Fricsons, head of Riga’s Kurzeme District Latvian Political Police, was accused of directly participating in the murder of 40,000 people in Liepāja. Both men were allowed to live out their lives without seeing the inside of a courtroom. Ozols died at eighty-eight in 2001, Fricsons at seventy-five in 1990.

There is a sense that this book has been a long time coming — that the time has come to break the silence about what the SIU experienced at the hands of a hostile media and judiciary, and about the short-sighted politics that led to the unit’s closure. Although careful in their accounts, the participants’ disappointment is palpable. Yet all remain convinced that it was the right thing to do. The work was clearly life-changing for all involved, deeply affecting both professionally and personally. Some went on to  work for the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia: Blewitt became its deputy prosecutor.

Australia has still not developed the legal framework or the investigatory resources needed to find and prosecute people who have committed war crimes in any conflict overseas. In a report for the Lowy Institute, former diplomat Fergus Hansen noted that this country “has inadvertently become a safe haven for war criminals.” This is certainly the impression Australia has been giving the world, and presumably its war criminals, for quite some time. •

Nazis in Australia: The Special Investigations Unit, 1987–1994
Complied by Graham Blewitt, edited by Mark Aarons | Black Inc. | $39.99 | 320 pages

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“Comfort women” is a euphemism for women who were prostituted by the Japanese army during the war. Across Asia, hundreds of thousands of them were taken from their homes or workplaces and press-ganged into service in “comfort stations” attached to Japanese garrisons or military supply stations. Dutch-Australian Jan Ruff-O’Herne was among the victims and in later life was prominent among activists pressing the Japanese government to accept legal responsibility for the system.

The plaits on this statue differentiate it from its Korean counterpart, which has bobbed hair. There are two Korean comfort women statues in Australia, one in the Sydney suburb of Ashfield, the other in the grounds of the Korean Society of Victoria building in Oakleigh. Worldwide, more than seventy such statues provide evidence of an unresolved trauma in Korean history and — despite some significant bilateral agreements — an enduring problem in Korean–Japanese relations. The first of them was erected in Seoul, opposite the Japanese embassy.

A girl with plaits or a bob offers a very different image from a soldier with a gun. She doesn’t say “Look what we can do to you” but rather “Look what you did to us.” For Australians, it is as if a statue depicting the skeletal figure of a survivor of a Japanese POW camp were to be erected somewhere — perhaps in front of the Japanese Embassy in Canberra. But Korean- and Chinese-Australians are of course Australians themselves. The comfort woman statues are a reminder that new generations of migrants bring to this country different legacies of war.

This is especially true of migrants from the People’s Republic of China. Unknown but certainly large numbers of Chinese women were pressed into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. The survivors carried a significant legacy of trauma into the postwar years, their health and often their lives altogether ruined. Yet after the creation of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, memories of the war years came close to being obliterated by the sound and fury of mass campaigns targeting domestic “enemies of the revolution.” “Remembering the bitter past” was a collective activity focused on Chinese landlords or capitalists. It was only in the 1980s that this sort of memory work began to be reoriented towards Japan.

Once given their heads, historians in China had plenty of material to work with. The Anti-Japanese War was much longer than the Pacific War and entailed Japan’s occupation of a vast swathe of Chinese territory. The Nanjing massacre of 1937 was the largest single atrocity committed by Japanese forces anywhere. Oral histories, the creation of the Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum, the publication in translation of The Rape of Nanjing by Chinese-American Iris Chang, movies, television series, and now an annual day of mourning — all these have together generated a collective memory of wartime atrocities that feeds into anti-Japanese nationalism in China.

Like the war itself, the comfort women system was deemed a proper subject for historical research in China only decades after the communist takeover in 1949. Ironically, it was exposure to Japanese research on the topic, along with direct action by South Korean victims, that inspired China’s leading historian of the comfort women system, Su Zhiliang. China now has two museums dedicated to the comfort women, one in Nanjing and one at Su Zhiliang’s home institution, Shanghai Normal University.

In South Korea, democratisation meant space for freewheeling social movements, including feminist movements, capable of pursuing human rights issues independently of positions taken by the government. China has no such space. Entry to the museums is restricted, and in recent years the Chinese government has withdrawn support from an international movement to have the Voices of Comfort Women placed on the UNESCO “Memory of the World Register.”

Outside China, this is a free-floating issue that can easily find fertile soil in diasporic communities. But it has been taken up by other interest groups, too. In Berlin, the installation of a Korean comfort woman statue was supported by a coalition of civic groups of mixed ethnic and national origins with shared interests in crimes of sexual violence, particularly but not only in the context of war. As Japanese demands for the statue’s removal show, however, commemorations invariably have a geopolitical context. The transnational, universalist meanings attached to the peace statues do not exclude their particular, nationalist meanings.

Why such a statue in Melbourne? And why now? The formation of the Chinese-Australians for Peace Association, apparently for the purpose of sponsoring the “peace statue” (heping tongxiang), implies the existence or threat of war, possibly the remembered war that ended in 1945 but also, again possibly, the war that may yet happen if China decides to take Taiwan. The threat is not imminent, but since Russia’s assault on Ukraine it has become a constant in Australian discussions about security in the Pacific.

The founder of the Peace Association is Jimmy Li (Li Jianmin). Li is a good citizen: president of the Chinese Community Council of Australia (Victorian chapter) and a member of the Monash Multicultural Advisory Committee. He supported recognition of an Indigenous Voice to Parliament. He promotes Chinese ethnic engagement in local society and politics. His organisation is not like the Australian Council for the Peaceful Reunification, which has been listed by the Australian government as a body exercising foreign influence. It looks more like a community expression of hope that history will not repeat itself and that a war in Europe will not again have a parallel in Asia.

Yet, corresponding as it does with this week’s huge military parade in Beijing marking the eightieth anniversary of the end of the war, the unveiling of the Oakleigh statue can also read as aligning Chinese-Australian interests with China’s. Koreans in Victoria understand the optics. Their representative society, the Korean Society of Victoria, has given permission for the use of their premises for the ceremony on Saturday so that the Chinese and the Korean statues can sit side by side for the day. But they have refused permission for the Chinese statue to be installed there permanently. In this, says KSV president Chang Suk Lee, they are “influenced in part by the prevailing political landscape.”

To the extent that he means the geopolitical landscape, this statement reflects awareness of the difficult relations between South Korea and China in recent years and also of the realities of a regional order in which South Korea is aligned not only with Australia but also with Japan. In anti-Japanese sentiment, South Korea has long outranked China, but in his Liberation Day speech this year South Korean president Lee Jae Myung made reference to Japan as “our neighbour” and our “partner in our economic development.”

Is it possible to disentangle awareness of this difficult history from nationalist sentiments? Searching for a space separate from the spheres controlled by the state in China, ANU researcher Yujie Zhu has emphasised the relative independence of the research and historical memory work undertaken by Su Zhiliang. But the fact that Su’s research wasn’t conducted at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t rule out nationalist readings.

Among Su’s findings are that Chinese victims of the comfort women system numbered no less than 200,000, accounting for half of all comfort women across Asia. These huge numbers, varying greatly from all other scholarly estimates, are characteristic of patriotic history in China. Comparably, in a statement redacted in the English-language version of the ABC report, Chinese-American documentary film-maker Leo Shi Young states: “Comfort women were not just Koreans; there were even more Chinese.

Unsurprisingly, comments by local visitors to the comfort women museum in Shanghai show that the exhibits reinforce the Chinese nationalist narrative and anti-Japanese feeling. There is a risk that the Chinese Australian for Peace Association’s statue will stir up tensions within Australian communities with links to the region.

There is one other noteworthy thing about Chinese comfort women: the consistency with which men figure in reports about documentation, exhibitions and commemorations.

This is not the case elsewhere. In South Korea, the first name to come to mind (apart from any of the many victim activists) is probably Yun Chung-ok, an English literature professor at Ewha Women’s University, who in 1990 did much to educate the public about the comfort women system through a series of newspaper articles on the subject. In Japan, it is Yayori Matsui, daughter of a Christian pacifist, inspiration for the Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace in Tokyo, and an early adviser to Yun Chung-ok.

In China, however, the obvious name is that of male historian Su Zhiliang. Close on his heels is the filmmaker redacted from the ABC report, Leo Shi Young, who is in the forefront of efforts to create Chinese statues to accompany Korean ones. In Australia, Jimmy Li is following in Young’s footsteps.

A movement for recognition of war crimes perpetrated against women, driven by women, necessarily changes character when it’s led by men. With the best will in the world, male activists cannot avoid lending a different aura to the movement. After Fadime Şahindal, a Swedish national of Kurdish origin, died at the hands of her father in a so-called “honour killing” in 2002, she was carried to her grave by women. As Swedish MP Nalin Pekgul, herself of Kurih origin, remarked, “The most important thing was that it was not her male relatives who laid her to rest.”

Pekgul’s point was that the male relatives unavoidably personified the system that resulted in Şahindal’s death. It would overstate the case to claim that the men who have taken the lead in propagating knowledge of China’s comfort women in themselves embody the state-based system of national rivalry that underpins war and war crimes. Nonetheless, once it was felt necessary — by Young — to create a Chinese statue as well as a Korean one, the Korean statue lost something of its universal symbolism as a monument to the sufferings of women through rape in war. Once Young emphatically stated that there were more Chinese victims than Korean, the comfort women issue seemed in danger of being hijacked by competitive narratives of victimhood. It might now be difficult for the Chinese Australians for Peace Association to avoid their no doubt heartfelt gesture of commemoration becoming hostage to these narratives.

The tensions over the installation of peace statues are sometimes represented as a case of right-wing Japanese nationalists versus transnational feminist and human rights activists. But Japan has a strong tradition of activism around the comfort women system, which had its Japanese victims too. The Women’s Active Museum of War and Peace in Tokyo is a fine example of commemorative activity, asking visitors to reflect on the past and on Japan’s responsibility for the system. It’s the sort of internal critique that is hardly possible in today’s China. •

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I confess that I may have a greater orientation towards friendship than many. But I am not alone in drawing on friendship bonds, in all their multitudinous incarnations, for spiritual nourishment, the sharing of resources, mutual psychological interrogation and political solidarity. As philosophers have argued since the classical period, friendship is essential to human flourishing. In Nicomachean Ethics Aristotle declared it to be “an indispensable component of the good life.” Nobody, he said, “would choose to live without friends, even if he had all the other goods.”

Novelists have also long exalted its virtues — from Charlotte’s Web (“It’s not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer. Charlotte was both”) to E.M. Forster (“If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country”). More recently, academics have urged its importance in the context of a growing loneliness epidemic. As one sociologist remarked in 2009: “In truth, friendship has a bigger impact on our psychological wellbeing than family relationships.”

Compared to family or professional relationships, though, friendship exists almost entirely in the absence of institutional support and largely bereft of research. Where the status of a spouse is significant in tax law, and where family members or colleagues have various duties and privileges in criminal law, the friend sits shivering and alone, holding a status rarely seen by law as significant — and in many instances, such as wills and donations or employment law, treated as suspect.

Carer’s leave for a family member is an obvious right, as are visitation privileges, but for a friend they require negotiation. At no point was this bias more blatant than during Covid, when people were initially permitted to form bubbles with romantic partners but not friends. And while there are whole sections of the library devoted to studies of marriage and the family, friendship is largely neglected. What’s more, those studies that do exist tend to focus on representations of friendship in literary or philosophical records, which means the scholarship is overwhelmingly slanted towards elite pale males.

Prescriptive literature from across the centuries — from etiquette and conduct manuals to philosophy and glossy magazines — tells us a lot about what friendship should look like but very little about how it’s experienced in all its improvised messiness. Very few poor or marginalised people left behind diaries or letters revealing how they conducted their friendships, and those who did now have them hidden inside family papers: a form of archival cataloguing that speaks volumes about the cultural priority we afford the nuclear family unit. (One of my fantasy research projects is to develop an archive and library of friendship.)

It is for these reasons, and so many more, that Tiffany Watt Smith’s dazzlingly brilliant, wise and joyous book Bad Friend: A Century of Revolutionary Friendships is so welcome, in scholarly, feminist and wider societal senses. Watt Smith is a rare kind of scholar — someone able to move seamlessly between pop culture, television series, films, her own friendships, psychology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology and her expertise in the history of the emotions since medieval times. This book has the kind of erudition and voluptuous prose of Peter Gay, the personal honesty and irreverence of Vivian Gornick, the methodological experimentation and political acuity of Saidiya Hartman and the sage and witty life advice of a good friend.

Bad Friend tells the history of modern female friendship in Britain and the United States from the early 1900s through to the present day, focusing on its most morally ambiguous and emotionally vexed dimensions. If women today are sold friendship in brightly lit, saccharine and uncomplicated forms, Watt Smith reveals a more nuanced and culturally contingent reality.

Moving chronologically across the twentieth century, she begin with the passionate entanglements of youth and efforts to control female friendships from the early 1900s to the 1940s. Then, spanning the 1940s to the 1980s, she explores the friendship negotiations of midlife, when children and marriage might, for some, demand priority. She concludes in the period from the 1980s to today by examining how we call on friends as we age together, exploring friendship pacts and cooperative living among women.

Drawing on archives from “boarding schools, prisons, factories and film sets, suburban streets and urban ghettoes, protests and… hospital wards… communities of women ageing together and… internet chat rooms,” Bad Friend is a more inclusive, expansive and multilayered history of friendship than any other written to date. If the archives are patchy and incomplete, or written from the perspective of authorities, as they tend to be for racial minorities, Watt Smith turns to ethnography or speculative biography to ensure that all her characters have equally rich stories.

This is also a remarkably tender history, partly because of Watt Smith’s brave decision to structure the book around the friendships that have defined the key stages of her life. Challenging the objective, omniscient narrator of traditional history, this method creates an exquisite intimacy with the reader and avoids naturalising her own conventional life trajectory: intense female friendships in her twenties; babies, marriage and a career in her thirties and forties; the reinvigoration of friendship in her fifties and beyond. It also adds a therapeutic dimension to the book.

Watt Smith was prompted to research friendship because of her own history of broken friendships: her feeling that, as a “bad friend,” she had failed in “an essential element of feminine and feminist life.” In the course of the book we come to see how most women can’t help but fail at friendship, given the very exacting standards to which female friendship is held and the fantasy of a complete merger with one’s friend that results in feelings of betrayal when one or the other decides to change. Readers will leave this book with an understanding both of how friendship was modernised in the twentieth century and of how to be a kinder and more generous friend.

So how did female friendship become subject to such suffocatingly high standards? This is a question best answered by an historian of the emotions like Watt Smith, someone who can show how feelings we imagine to be spontaneous, voluntary and private are shaped by changing political and social forces. As these public structures shift so too do the rules that govern our private relationships.

For at least two thousand years, as Watt Smith explains, Western philosophers considered women to be incapable of true friendships. At most, they might form attachments based on utility or pleasure rather than deep loyalties and intersubjective knowledge. From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, as the separation between home and work and public and private hardened with the beginning of the industrial revolution, bourgeois women were increasingly sequestered into the private realm of domesticity, family, emotion, spirituality and femininity, and a corresponding revolution occurred in women’s friendships. Once derided as being incapable of true friendship, women were now celebrated as having the most tender, selfless, elevated and heartfelt bonds.

In dominant discourses, these intense, romantic relationships between women could train them for their future roles as wives and mothers, though an emerging countervailing feminist literature saw them as a superior substitute. Unmarried women, according to Anglo-Irish writer Frances Power Cobbe, did not need to fear a “solitary age as the bachelor must… [as] she will find a woman ready to share it.” As Watt Smith puts it, “romantic female friendship was no longer only a symbol of female domesticity, it was also the key to female liberation.”

How elite white women in the early twentieth century — more educated, more autonomous and more enfranchised than their eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors — inherited these ideas is wonderfully explored in a chapter on romantic friendships focusing on girls’ boarding schools and sentimental stories. Popular literature in the late nineteenth century was filled with stories of romantic friendships between girls: Beatrice and Alice, for example, who in one story “loved each other dearly and with their arms about each other would sit under the deep shadow of the trees listening for the cuckoos’ notes.” Moving from public narratives to private experiences, Watt Smith mines the archives of boarding schools to find school records tallying which of the girls were “gone” on other girls. Female students, she notes, would be seen “performing earnest acts of service for their beloved, filling her hot water bottle, turning down her bed, preparing gifts of dried flowers, saving biscuits from tea to press, soggily, into her hand.”

Teachers were also often targets for young girls’ affections: “I have caught the contagion: I have fallen in love,” wrote one student at Mount Holyoke college in New England to her sister in 1893. “With Dr Lowell [a female professor] of course… [T]he girls tease me unmercifully about it…I am not exactly crushed only I like her very much… [H]alf the girls are in love with her and the other half almost hate her.”

By the second decade of the twentieth century these same relationships were seen as pathological and in need of regulation. Women’s magazines like Harper’s Bazaar asked parents if their daughters were  likely to fall victim to “crushitis.” Love letters between girls published in student magazines were replaced by warnings to not “get a crush” on other women, as the 1913 Smith College Handbook cautioned, while principals told girls that romantic friendships were a form of “mental instability” that “catches hold of you and is a roaring fire all in a minute.”

As Watt Smith notes, it would give you whiplash to see how quickly the norms changed — a panic she ascribes primarily to the homophobia that accompanied the rise of psychology and sexology in the early twentieth century. And at around the same time that romantic friendships were being designated a sign of sexual inversion by Havelock Ellis and Freud, eugenicist discourses warned about “race suicide.” If white women opted for female friendships over being wives and mothers then whites, it was feared, would be swamped by black people.

Watt Smith’s ability, seen in this chapter, to bring prescriptive literature, popular culture and everyday practice into dialogue continues throughout the book, providing the empirical scaffolding through which she identifies the peculiarly modern aspects of twentieth century female friendship: “the promise of liberation, self-invention, freedom and choice” as well as the invention of the “bad friend” to police new norms. Her prose is so lucid and engaging that it’s easy to lose sight of the significant scholarly interventions she makes into feminist history, social history and the history of the emotions.

She is certainly not the first to note the existence of romantic friendships in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, for example, but she is the first for some years now to insist on them as friendships. In the wake of queer theory in the 90s and 2000s, scholars rushed in to read romantic friendships as evidence of secret queer or lesbian intimacies — a thesis Watt Smith doesn’t deny, though she refuses to relinquish their importance as forms of friendship. It is not that these intimacies had no obvious erotic elements but that the division between the sexual and the “purely” amicable is ultimately unhelpful.

Similar important scholarly interventions are seen in her chapters on the various utilitarian dimensions of female friendships. Most historians, following sociologist Allan Silver’s groundbreaking research, accept that the mid-eighteenth century witnessed a separation of friendship from calculation, or intimacy from instrumentalism. Prior to the nineteenth century, in a world that ran on patronage, anyone from your accountant, your trading partner, your kin or your marital partner could be referred to as a friend. In the absence of banks and transparent state bureaucracy, friendship networks stretching across the British empire were used to fill employment posts, borrow money, invest in capital, woo partners and divulge secrets. As state and financial infrastructure developed, commerce became separated from friendship and friendship, Silver argues, returning to its original Aristotelian meaning as a private, authentic, virtuous bond separate from economic concerns.

Although she doesn’t explicitly make the case, Watt Smith’s book does a brilliant job of showing just how male-centric and class-based this argument is. In fact, the poor or those burdened by a sick dependent had no choice but to rely on reciprocal exchanges of food, childcare and neighbourly services. That friendship has always had an instrumentalist element is illuminated by case studies of cooperative childcare arrangements in working-class British suburbs and in poor African American areas such as The Flats. In these places, says Watt Smith, friendship was built up “not only because of their history or because they loved one another, but because each was able to trust the other would offer a fair exchange” — a notion Aristotle would sniff at and that we supposedly outgrew in our freer, modern world.

My only cause for consternation in this otherwise marvellous book came from a tendency to overstate the case, which was probably encouraged by a publisher keen for a wide, popular audience. Having examined friendship in the eighteenth century, I’m unconvinced by Watt Smith’s claim that at no point in history has friendship mattered so much as now. While it’s true that the rise in singledom means that more people will rely on friends than possibly ever before, there is also an argument to be made for the extraordinary importance of friendship in societies that run on trust and promise-keeping, such as we see in the eighteenth century. Definitive universalising claims tend to provoke searches for counter-examples: is it not more interesting to simply chart the shifting forms and rules governing friendship as society changes?

The notion that the “bad friend” was invented in the twentieth century also left me cold. What about the reams of advice literature or epistolary novels on the problem of “false friends” in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Writers spilled vast amount of ink, just as they do today, explaining how to distinguish a flatterer from a friend or how to keep “Pecksniffian interlopers,” in Dickens’s terms, out of your home. Indeed, in the early Australian colony the term seduction was used to excoriate and even incriminate the female “bad influences” who lured other servant girls away from domesticity and work towards the devilish delights of autonomy.

But these are the kinds of criticisms that only another historian of friendship is likely to offer. For anybody else, this book will likely be one of the best things you’ve read all year. •

Bad Friend: A Century of Revolutionary Friendships
By Tiffany Watt Smith | Faber & Faber | $34.99 | 336 pages

The post Friends like these appeared first on Inside Story.

McCrae’s forebears amassed a large fortune from slavery and then benefited again when the British government “compensated” estate owners for the abolition of slave labour in 1833. Farquhar, a former medical officer with the 6th Dragoon Guards, married into another slave-owning family, the Morisons. His sister, who accompanied him to Victoria, also married a Jamaican plantation owner.

These are the themes — intermarriage among slave-traders and slave-owning families; the imperialist assumption that “crown land” could be bought and sold by settlers; the links to military expeditions; the embrace of racist ideology to justify the exploitation of Indigenous people — that dominate Dan Hicks’s passionately argued new book, Every Monument Will Fall. The museums, statues, place names, ideologies and institutions that memorialise or glorify imperialism and colonisation are the targets of what is both a rallying cry and a prediction.

Hicks would undoubtedly approve of the obliteration of “Moreland.” Names are crucial elements of colonial history, he stresses, because they signify the disparity between the colonisers, who are named, and the colonised, who are not. Although he has much to say about Augustus Pitt Rivers, the founder of the famous Oxford University anthropological museum, he eschews the notion of biography, preferring the term “necrography… a history of loss, of death, of dispossession.” His book is a salvo in the culture wars, a history of colonial museology and an intense scrutiny of the racism and violence that characterised both acquisition and display.

Hicks opens with a highly charged description of a skull-cup — a silver goblet made from the top of a human cranium — that was in regular use at the high table of Oxford’s Worcester College until 2015. This macabre object was bought by Pitt Rivers at an auction in 1884 and donated to the college in 1946 by his grandson, George Pitt Rivers, a fascist and eugenicist. The family name is engraved on the silver rim; the name of the person whose “thoughts, knowledge, understanding, perceptions and memories once pulsed inside this skull” remains unknown. The cup reappears throughout the book, an image and leitmotif that encapsulates the violence of museum “acquisitions” and the dehumanisation of colonised people.

Dan Hicks, a professor of archaeology at Oxford University, is a curator at that very same Pitt Rivers Museum. His disdain for its founder is clear in its early pages, where he summarises Pitt Rivers’s biographical details but pointedly avoids using his name. Instead, he variously calls him the General, the Grandfather, the Collector and Fox, the most consistent of which, Fox, appears designed to reduce his status by depriving him of his double-barrels and his baronetcy.

Pitt Rivers, born Augustus Lane Fox, inherited his peerage from a second cousin, assuming his surname — or, as Hicks insists, his necronym — with the title in 1880. The Pitt Rivers fortune had been amassed and consolidated in the preceding century by intermarriages among landed gentry, mercantile families and aristocrats whose wealth derived not just from their English estates but also from slave trading and slave labour on Caribbean plantations.

Hicks tells us that Pitt Rivers was Britain’s first inspector of ancient monuments and, as an archaeologist, developed excavation techniques that avoided damaging artefacts and facilitated refined analytical processing. During a distinguished military career, he became major-general in the Grenadier Guards, his system of firearms training giving the British technological advantage in the Crimean War.

He also held positions of authority and influence in the Royal Society and other learned societies. He collected a vast number of significant archaeological and anthropological items from all over the world. He founded two eponymous museums — the other was in London — to house his collections. Influenced by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, he emphasised the cultural developments and technological change that he believed illustrated the superiority of white people.

As General, Collector and Grandfather, in Hicks’s telling, Pitt Rivers embodies every moral failing of British imperialism. He is presented as a fractured persona, his life and occupations providing the context for Hicks’s insistence on the need to decolonise museums, monuments, university curricula and every vestige of the memorialisation of Britain’s colonial past.

Paradoxically, though, Hicks’s “un-naming” seems to me to let the perpetrators off the hook. He recounts, for example, the horrors of the massacre following the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica in 1865, in which several thousand Black Jamaicans were killed. “Let’s not give this chapter of the story his name,” he begins “Call him the future governor if you like.” That governor was Edward John Eyre, the explorer and ethnologist who, early in his career, described aspects of Indigenous life in South Australia. Rendering him anonymous is unintentionally exculpatory: he becomes a mere cipher of British military domination.

While Hicks’s commitment to decolonisation is proclaimed on every page, it remains unclear just what he proposes to do with museums. Toppling statues of colonial heroes is relatively simple; shutting down museums is complicated. On the one hand, there are problems of restitution and reparation; on the other, there is the fact (unacknowledged by Hicks) that not all museums are crammed with “stuff the British stole.”

As I was reading this book the New York Times reported on a deputation to the Pitt Rivers Museum by a group of Naga people negotiating the return of ancestral remains — bones, skin and hair — collected during the nineteenth century. Nagaland is no longer a nation and its people, now mostly Christian thanks to the missionaries who accompanied the British colonial administrators, are spread across several northern Indian states and into Myanmar. Some of them are ambivalent about how to deal with repatriated remains; although they acknowledge that they would be considered sacred, they recognise that appropriate rituals are either forgotten or no longer valued.

The Naga remains were once in a section of the Pitt Rivers Museum labelled “Treatment of Dead Enemies.” As Hicks explains, that theme was of critical concern to the museum’s founder, who believed cultural evolution and technical advancement occurred in the context of violent conflict. According to this view, human evolution is essentially driven by male competitiveness: men’s war-making and conquest accounts for the technological progress essential to imperial projects, from the Roman to the British empires.

Shrunken heads and decorated battle trophies, including scalps with hair, held a peculiar fascination for Pitt Rivers and his contemporaries because they also served as evidence of “primitive barbarity.” They provided the excuse for colonial “pacification” by British troops, who then ransacked and pillaged.

Hicks is outraged that museum holdings still reflect their colonial origins and proposes that this continuity should be recognised as “a movement that normalised dehumanisation” and “mainstreamed debasement.” He believes too that the process of collecting and displaying objects should be named “militarist realism.” This term baffles me, particularly as he draws attention to alternative terms that are in no way similar and perhaps more apposite.

This section of the book is overwritten, full of purple passages and sentences so long their subject is lost. Much of it is written as if he is addressing his colleague, mentor and friend, the late Mary Beaudry, professor of historical archaeology at Boston University. This device works well when he recalls conversations and uses the artifice of memory to elucidate his argument. But often the dialogue is either forced or inconsequential. So, for example, in justifying his terminology he invokes Beaudry: “You could call it Gothic brutalism, you tell me, or magical futurism, White constructivism, or accelerationist materialism; speculative monumentalism perhaps, or nihilist nostalgism. All of these could work, I reply, but how about we name it simply militarist realism?”

Beaudry’s comments almost always reinforce the author’s stance. For instance, Hicks describes at length the formation and activities of “The Cannibal Club,” a dining circle comprising a select group of the men who had formed the Anthropological Society of London. Established to promote polygenist theories, which excluded Africans from the species Homo Sapiens in opposition to Charles Darwin’s monogenism, the society “operated as an exclusive male pseudoscientific debauched space for the comparative discussion of sex, sexuality, sexual organs and related bodily practices, and also, according to some accounts, for sadomasochism and the exchange of colonialist pornography.” Hicks’s description of the prurient sadism of its mainstay, the soldier and explorer Richard Burton, provokes a response from Beaudry: “Sick bastards, you replied. White men in their thirties, mostly, you added, who wore tweed jackets, hand-made shoes and wax in their hair.”

Perhaps Hicks wanted to convey something of the processes of research and writing and how ideas are thrashed out in conversations with colleagues. Or, given her recent death and the fact that the book is dedicated to her, he might have wanted to convey something of his easy intellectual intimacy with Beaudry. But these tangential remarks tend to distract from the flow of his argument.

These sections of the book sit oddly with Hicks’s more academic engagement with writings on racism and the necessity of decolonisation. He offers telling criticisms of some recent trends in anthropology and archaeology, deploring the influence of writers such as Arjun Appadurai and Bruno Latour, whose theoretical notions of the “agency of objects” blur distinctions between subjects and objects. He sees this move as a resurrection of colonial-era constructs that objectified other human beings and erased human responsibility for the enslavement and deaths of thousands of people.

From the outset, Hicks attacks those who advocate a more nuanced decolonisation of monuments — new plaques with historical contextualisation, for example — than their destruction. He was among those who called for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oxford’s Oriel College and attributes the failure of the “Rhodes Must Fall” campaign to “a combination of denial, anxiety, obviation, paralysis, weakness, whataboutism, wherewillitendism, excuses, bullying, threats, lies, and above all meek deference to unseen and possibly nonexistent authorities.”

He is right to see Pitt Rivers and Rhodes as deplorably racist individuals, and I wouldn’t oppose the removal of their statues. But I think he overestimates the significance of these grandiose monuments. Drawing attention to these men as exemplars of colonial values can also be a way of reminding people of past wrongs. New explanatory plaques and documentation, or juxtapositions of contemporary art works with these monuments, can give the lie to their heroism. History can be reimagined and told by other, hitherto suppressed, voices.

Hicks suggests that a gap, a fallen statue, can be instructional, and describes the effect of observing the place where a statue of Louis Agassiz once stood on the campus of Stanford University. But he fails to recognise that this gap has meaning only for those who come to it knowing that the statue was removed in 2020 because of Agassiz’s ideas about racial polygenism. For those who know nothing about Agassiz, no meaning can attach to a gap.

Toppling statues can be symbolically powerful, of course. Images of the felling of monuments to Stalin or Saddam Hussein were dramatic testament to the fates of their cruel and repressive regimes. But they are moments, and meaningful only if the histories of their regimes are known. The point of decolonisation is to intervene and expose the myths of colonialism, replacing them with truths about the experiences of the colonised and their survival.

Certainly the repatriation of human remains and objects valued by the descendants of colonised people is a start. But far more instructive are moves to enable Indigenous or colonised people to curate exhibitions and retell the stories of colonisation.

Yiwarra Kuju: The Canning Stock Route, an exhibition that toured Australia in 2010, documented of the effect of pastoralism on Australia’s Indigenous people and their country through artefacts and artworks. Pacific artists including Yuki Kihara, whose exhibition Paradise Camp was shown at the Venice Biennale in 2022, and Lisa Reihana, whose He Tautoko presentation in 2006 provided a contemporary Māori response to items in the collection at the Cambridge Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, have produced biting critiques of colonial representations of Samoan, Tahitian and Māori culture.

The current exhibition at the University of Melbourne’s Potter Museum, 65000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art, includes a gallery on “Scientific Racism” that exposes the racist eugenics that motivated collections of skeletal remains of Indigenous Australians. It also refutes the claim that such collections are important research repositories: no research was ever undertaken on the Indigenous skeletal remains held by the university.

At the end of Every Monument Will Fall, Dan Hicks backtracks a little, suggesting that “all monuments will fall” of their own account, as people render them irrelevant, or insist on changes to the form and functions of museums. He suggests that museums will change simply because “it’s impossible to hold onto everything” and people will “reimagine ideas of tradition, benefaction and heritage, dismantle structures that have no place in our times, find new ways of inheriting and remembering.”

This process, which he sees as a “culture war,” is perhaps more advanced in former colonies in the Pacific region than in Britain, where the legacies of colonialism are different and triumphalist fantasies of an imperial past continue to have some purchase. Certainly here in Merri-Bek the controversary over the new name died down quickly. It is now generally perceived as a gesture of reconciliation and an acknowledgement of Indigenous heritage.

Every Monument Will Fall: A Story of Remembering and Forgetting
By Dan Hicks | Hutchinson Heinemann | $36.99

POSTSCRIPT, APRIL 2026

Several of the books I’ve reviewed for Inside Story told sad stories with unsatisfactory endings. Given that contemporary anthropology almost invariably grapples with colonial legacies, miserable endings are entirely predictable. Sometimes the conclusions were intrinsically sad; on other occasions I felt dejected because the authors had compromised their arguments with false optimism.

Carrie Lowry Schuettpelz’s book The Indian Card: Who Gets to be Native in America, for example, was provocative and disheartening in equal measure. It prompted me to read several scholarly works on Native American tribes and the historical trajectories of their contemporary legal identities. While Schuettpelz had documented many of the contradictions and absurdities of inclusion and recognition, I realised that the system of calculating “blood quantum” was much more concerned with exclusion. The various legal definitions of indigeneity were all cynical ploys to sequester land and enable white settlement.

Schuettpelz’s account of the cruel, deceitful tactics of successive American governments stripping Native Americans of their rights, their land and their property is feisty and combative. But ultimately she capitulates and decides to proceed with the bureaucratic business of registering her child as a member of her Lumbee Tribe. Refusing to do so might have been consistent with her critique of the “blood quantum” system and her rage at the injustices. But principled defiance would effectively mean that yet another Native American’s identity would be erased and a voice silenced.

Dan Hicks’s Every Monument Will Fall, the subject of this review, presented me with even more perplexing misery. Here was an account of a famous museum — a museum of which Hicks is the current curator — that houses hundreds of human remains. For many years these were displayed as illustrative of the savagery and inferiority of colonised people. The stories of objects in the Pitt Rivers collection in Oxford are both shocking and tragic. But while I endorsed Hicks’s argument about the need to scrutinise the origins of artefacts in museums, the root-and-branch demolition he proposed seemed excessive.

Hicks’s moral outrage filled every page, to the point where it struck me as somehow self-aggrandising. My irritation was explicit in the review I submitted to Inside Story’s editor, Peter Browne, who wisely (in his words) “throttled it back,” ensuring that the book’s valuable arguments were given the acknowledgement they deserved. The photo he chose to illustrate the review provided the poignant commentary that saddened me. It shows the group of Naga representatives who were in England to negotiate the repatriation of shrunken heads and other items pillaged from Nagaland in the nineteenth century. Nagaland is now a much-diminished state in India, and the majority of Nagas are now Christian. Although they wanted the items returned, their meanings had been lost and even disparaged by contemporary Nagas who considered them shameful remnants of a pagan past. •

The post Must all monuments fall? appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s not that it was necessarily wrong for the streaming giant to ferret out what’s arguably the best intellectual property Italy has on offer — after all, there’s a limit to how many adaptations of Pinocchio audiences can tolerate. Nor should The Leopard purists object to the addition of new material that fleshes out elements glossed over or not explored in the novel. That’s all par for the Netflix course.

What Sicilians would be entitled to resent is the mischaracterisation the main character: don Fabrizio Corbera, Prince of Salina. The novel is built around Salina’s worldview; if you get that wrong, nothing else makes much sense in the story’s world.

Despite the novel’s famous and often misunderstood refrain, “If we want everything to remain as it is, everything has to change,” Lampedusa’s Salina has already come to terms with the unstoppable rise of the new mafia-tinged middle class that now holds the money and, with it, the power. He has already surrendered to history. As the Italian expression goes, he’s pulled the oars back on the boat. He’s allowing the current to take him wherever it wants. He has given up.

In the six-part Netflix series, which includes both a padded-out version of the novel’s events and an imagined sequel, Salina is a tough guy desperate to push back. We seem him humiliating the local mafia middleman for stealing baskets of fruit from his properties and then making him an offer he can’t refuse. He appears surprised to discover that power has shifted towards don Calogero Sedara, the corrupt mayor of Donnafugata, the location of the Salinas’ summer estate.

Even the prince’s strong-arm tactics in dealing with the invading garibaldini — the red-shirted soldiers sent by the Turin-based Kingdom of Sardinia to unify Italy — appear to misunderstand the book’s key theme. Lampedusa made clear that Salina saw the unification of Italy simply as political theatre in which Sicilians would know how to play their part. It’s for that reason that Salina doesn’t feel the need to reschedule when the soldiers are advancing on Palermo: his regular visit to the prostitute Mariannina goes ahead.

The message is clear: despite the histrionics of the northern forces, this isn’t a real invasion. The unification of Italy is merely the replacement of one foreign ruler, the Naples-based Bourbon King Francis II, with another, the Piedmontese Victor Emmanuel II. There’s no way Sicily’s nobility would have its routines interrupted while the stagehands change the backdrop.

The Salina of the novel would be the last to know if his employees were pilfering fruit. He’s a man of letters and science, usually holed up in his observatory talking astronomy with his sparring partner, Father Pirrone. He’s already reconciled to the fact that he’s bleeding money to cashed-up commoners, and he has decided not to fight back. As the prince explains, the very sensuality that Sicilians take pride in is nothing but a desire for oblivion — a long, macabre dance with death.

Lampedusa’s Salina tells the reader that the descendants of his Norman ancestors may have been around for centuries but now the game is over. What money they have will be lost within a few generations — namely, the very generation of the book’s author, who preferred to watch his family home crumble around him during the mid twentieth century than suffer the indignity of getting a real job. You can’t write books sipping coffee in Palermo’s Bar Mazzara, around the corner from the magnificent Teatro Massimo, if you need a nine-to-five just to pay for the kids’ tennis lessons.

In the Netflix universe, though, Salina is resisting the nobility’s fading into oblivion. He finds himself wrangling with the new Italian administration for a permit that would let his family spend the summer in Donnafugata. He acts like a bigshot throwing a tantrum rather than a man of letters presiding over his family’s descent into penury. In the horse-trading with the new administration his final and successful gambit is to allow an Italian administrator to get to know his daughter Concetta in return for a pass allowing the family to leave Palermo. The vulgarity of Salina pimping out a family member is unworthy of Lampedusa’s literary creation.

It’s not just that all of this makes little sense. It’s also a profound misreading of what is arguably the most significant Italian novel of the last century.

Another bold Netflix decision is to depict Tancredi, the beloved nephew of Salina, as somehow at odds with his uncle over how to manage the family’s move to history’s next act. In the novel, however, they both know they’ll need a lot more money to maintain their status in the Italian state than Salina can offer. The entire household may be appalled by Tancredi’s marriage to Sedara’s beautiful daughter Angelica, whose maternal grandfather had been so poor he was known in town simply as Pepe Shit, but Salina and Tancredi are on the same page.

For his part, Sedara needs the Salina name as a veneer of respectability, to enable him to continue to acquire land, money and power and become another puppet master in the new Italian state. Yet there’s never any doubt that this is how things must play out. For the first time since their Norman ancestors invaded Sicily in the year 1000, the Salina family is opening its doors to a commoner.

Netflix also offers a backstory for Concetta, a relatively minor character in the novel, and develops her relationship with Tancredi. Readers of the novel know that Concetta’s feelings for Tancredi were never reciprocated — probably not a bad thing, considering they were first cousins. On the small screen, it’s a full-blown story of unrequited love, in which Tancredi opts for Angelica over Concetta out of expedience rather than love.

You can’t blame the writers for wanting to add a modern, feminist twist to the story. They turn the novel’s petulant, plain Concetta into an attractive, erudite and smart on-screen character — the message being that, in a less sexist era and place, she is the only one who could whip the failing family business into shape. Nor should we worry too much when Tancredi’s marriage to Angelica starts to unravel after they head to Turin, the capital of the new Italy, where Salina’s nephew will take on a role in the new administration. We had got a sense of where things were heading in the novel: “A year of passion and thirty years of ashes.”

The series gives the same treatment to Mariannina, the prince’s go-to Palermo prostitute (the title of “prince” is just a noble honorific like any other — it doesn’t suggest Salina is the heir to a throne). In the novel, Mariannina utters just a single word: principone! (“big prince!”). In the Netflix universe, we get her backstory and follow what appears to be a conversion — although it’s hard to imagine a worse fate than the nunnery she appears set to join.

Again, if you’re going to build stories on the margins of the Leopard universe, it may as well be these two characters. The problem is that it’s all a bit clunky and obvious — what the Italians would call telefonato. There’s none of the book’s subtlety. When don Calogero Sedara has had enough of Salina’s condescension, Lampedusa subtly implies the tension; in the series we get an angry confrontation. When Sedara wears black-tie to a function where a dinner suit was required, it’s noted in the novel but not commented on; in the series the prince sends him home to change.

And, of course, Salina in the novel isn’t referred to as “the Leopard.” It’s not a nickname. The title of the book, Il Gattopardo, is a reference to the serval, or leopard, of the family’s coat of arms, and the animal is name-checked in one of the prince’s most famous interior monologues. “We were the leopards, the lions; those who’ll take our place will be little jackals, hyenas; and all of us — leopards, jackals and sheep — we’ll all go on thinking ourselves the salt of the earth.” In the series, everyone refers to Salina as “the leopard,” like he was a bejewelled rapper with an aka.

In fairness to the screenplay’s writers, the novel’s subtlety is a hard one problem to solve. Most of the prince’s outlook is delivered through interior monologue, which on screen needs to somehow be put into spoken words. Luchino Visconti’s much-admired 1963 film adaptation had the same problem, with the prince — the American actor Burt Lancaster dubbed with a thick Sicilian accent — having to ham it up to hammer home the novel’s main themes.

When don Calogero Sedara, the prince’s soon-to-be in-law, tells the novel’s Salina that he has “authenticated papers in the drawer” proving he too has noble origins, the prince takes it all in with “repressed laughter.” In Visconti’s film, there’s nothing repressed about the prince’s response — how else could you express to the audience the contempt he has for the suggestion that Salina’s origins could be anything other than that of a peasant. Where the depth of the prince’s social compromise in allowing his nephew to marry a commoner is dealt with in his internal monologue, those having to put the story on the screen need big gestures to explain.

All of this is understandable. Bringing a book so culturally specific to a broader audience requires some fancy footwork and the Netflix series does what’s needed to get the viewer from A to B. But there can be no compromise on the Lampedusa’s broader and far more controversial, almost mystical, vision of Sicily. For him, this is a land impervious to change, ruled by the mafia and other power structures that date back to before the Norman conquest. To skimp on this theme of the novel or, even worse, to counteract it with Salina’s aggressive drive to shape his family’s position in the nascent Italian state, forces us to suspend the disbelief that’s key to understanding and enjoying Lampedusa’s fictional account of one of his ancestors.

The mystical view of Sicily that underpins the novel is also what has made it so controversial. Leonardo Sciascia, whose writing has come to define the island, argued that The Leopard’s description of a society immobilised by its inability to accept change fails to grapple with the real impact of the Risorgimento — the political movement that brought about the unification of Italy.

Today, there’s no shortage of Sicilian writers and thinkers who would agree with that assessment of The Leopard’s deep conservatism. They argue that there’s nothing cultural about, say, the proliferation of organised crime in Sicily, and there’s no genetic predisposition that causes Sicilians to reject change. What the island has lacked, they say, is the presence of strong institutions, adequate law enforcement and economic policies required to draw it in to a modern Italian state. Sicily’s challenges are based in governance shortcomings, not culture.

But to believe this is to reject the very premise of The Leopard, which can only be read as a depiction of a society in which no ruler and no state authority can bring about change. And this is where the Netflix series falters. It’s fine to develop minor characters and examine Concetta’s love life. Even a sequel in which the prince visits Turin doesn’t inherently conflict with the material. What’s truly challenging is to juggle a story based on a premise that nothing changes with a format that requires plot development and characters with their own narrative arcs.

In fact, you could argue that Netflix deserves kudos for giving it a go. Lampedusa’s The Leopard may well be a novel that simply can’t be adapted to the small screen. •

The post How The Leopard changed its spots appeared first on Inside Story.

Indigenous Chamorro in the Marianas Islands have bitter family memories of the wartime fight between Japan and the United States to control their islands. The clash of imperial powers in the 1940s has echoes today in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, or CNMI — of which Tinian is one of three principal islands — at a time of strategic competition between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.

Tinian’s crucial role is often ignored in commemorations of the atomic bombings in 1945. Fighting their way across the Pacific, US marines defeated Japanese forces on the island in July 1944. They soon transformed the island into an airbase for striking targets in Japan, 2400 kilometres away. The refurbished North Field airstrip was the largest in the world at the time, with four 8500-foot runways and facilities to support more than 40,000 personnel.

The island served as the key base for the incendiary bombing of Japanese cities by the 313th Bombardment Wing, including the firebombing of Tokyo on 9 March 1945. An estimated 100,000 people died in that one attack, after more than 300 US aircraft bombed civilian housing. In Operation Starvation, the same force mined Japanese shipping lanes to reduce civilian access to already limited food supplies.

Months before atomic bombs were ready for use, the US high command proposed using airbases on Guam for a nuclear attack on Japanese cities. But an air force memo to the Manhattan Project in late February 1945 advised it now saw Tinian as “the most desirable island to base the 509th Composite Group.” In July, following the first successful detonation of an atomic device, known as the Trinity test, the US military prepared an arsenal of nuclear weapons to attack Japan. The initial target list included Kyoto, Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata and Nagasaki.

In the early hours of 6 August 1945, a B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, took off from Tinian for Hiroshima. At 8.15am, Captain Paul Tibbets ordered the release of an atomic bomb, codenamed “Little Boy,” over the Japanese city. The city of Kokura was scheduled for the next attack, but when bad weather intervened on 9 August the Bockscar flew instead from Tinian to Nagasaki, which was destroyed by the “Fat Man” bomb.

Most of the people killed in these two attacks were civilian non-combatants. By year’s end, an estimated 140,000 people had died in Hiroshima and 74,000 in Nagasaki. An estimated 38,000 of the dead were children.

A month after the attacks, General Leslie Groves, the head of America’s Manhattan project, misled Congress by declaring there was “no radioactive residue” in the two devastated cities. Contradicting evidence gathered in Japan by his own staff, Groves said that people exposed to radiation from the atomic blasts would not face “undue suffering. In fact, they say it is a very pleasant way to die.”

In reality, many nuclear survivors, known as hibakusha, lived on for decades, stricken by cancer, leukemia and other diseases caused by exposure to ionising radiation.

After the war, the United States administered these and surrounding islands in the northern Pacific as the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, the only strategic trusteeship created by the United Nations. Micronesia was still recovering from the wartime damage from US Marines fighting their way across scattered atolls and the US forces bombarding Japanese installations, with islanders trapped between the two imperial powers.

In 1946, soon after the Japanese surrender, the US military began to test nuclear weapons, with sixty-seven atomic and hydrogen bomb tests in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958. Following Britain’s hydrogen bomb tests on Christmas (Kiritimati) Island in the British Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, the United States conducted another twenty-four nuclear tests on the island in 1962, using the old British airstrip and military base.

Eighty years after planes from flew Tinian to bomb Japan, the United States still administers some of these Micronesian islands as a colonial power. In the south of the Marianas archipelago, the US Indo-Pacific Command controls more than a quarter of Guahan (Guam). The US territory hosts key American military bases, including Apra Harbour Naval Station, Andersen Air Force Base and Camp Blaz, a new US Marine Corps base. Further north in the archipelago are Tinian, Saipan and Rota, the three largest of thirteen islands in the CNMI, an unincorporated territory of the United States created in 1975.

These bases are central to US plans to contain China in the western Pacific. Because Guam is within range of North Korean and Chinese missiles, the Obama, Biden and Trump administrations have spent billions of dollars upgrading airfields and dispersing fuel and ammunition supplies to neighbouring Micronesian nations.

Washington’s ambitions in the region aren’t going unopposed. Among the groups challenging the dominant narrative of the Micronesian islands as “the tip of the spear” for the US military in the western Pacific is Our Commonwealth 670.

“Our group is linking what we see as increased militarisation in CNMI to the ongoing militarisation of Guam, the desecration of indigenous lands and denial of indigenous rights,” Saipan-born educator and activist Theresa “Isa” Arriola, a member of Our Commonwealth and a leading voice questioning the military build-up in the islands.

“We formed because we wanted to educate the community and bring awareness to the narratives that so often surround the islands — that we are strategic locations. There’s a kind of geographic determinism that follows that logic, which says ‘you must be used for war in this broader war machine.’ So we want to push back on that, and link militarisation with demilitarisation, indigenous sovereignty and indigenous rights.”

For Chamorro people, the growing militarisation of Tinian reopens mental and physical scars. “The presence of World War Two is still very much a part of our community’s collective consciousness,” says Arriola. “Our grandparents talk about their experiences with the war. We also see it in the physical landscape: there’s unexploded ordnance still left on Tinian from World War Two. When they’re refurbishing the runway or other military projects, they find that old ordnance.”

As a child, Arriola found scraps of bombs on the beaches of Saipan. Today, unexploded ordnance, or UXO, remains a hazard in most wartime battlegrounds across the Pacific Islands. People are still being killed or maimed when they disturb ageing US and Japanese bombs, grenades and ammunition in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia and CNMI.

On Tinian, a US navy team disposes of UXO on land leased by the US Defence Department. But UXO outside these military leases is the responsibility of the local CNMI government. It must seek grants from the US Environment Protection Agency Brownfields program or finance under the US Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which provides grants for disposal of hazardous materials. These programs have been gutted as the Trump administration reduces funding to the EPA and other environmental agencies.

Under a program known as Agile Combat Employment, the US government has begun to refurbish second world war airbases in CNMI, the Federated States of Micronesia and Palau. In April last year, the US Air Force announced a US$409 million contract for Texan construction firm Fluor to refurbish and extend the old North Field airfield on Tinian. The Guam-based construction company Black Micro was also awarded a US$220 million contract to extend a cargo pad, taxiway extension, fuel tanks, roads and maintenance facilities on the island.

The US Defence Department has recently released environmental impact statements seeking public comment on further military expansion in Tinian, which would include live-fire ranges, a base camp, communications infrastructure and a biosecurity facility.

It’s a decade since the US military announced plans to use the CNMI island of Pagan for weapons testing, causing uproar in the community. In 2015, a draft EIS received more than 30,000 public comments in opposition. In response, the US defence department halted proposed military activity on Pagan and withdrew proposals for artillery, rocket and mortar exercises on Tinian.

The Pagan campaign linked community elders with younger activists, says Theresa Arriola, who are now opposing renewed plans for a military build-up on Saipan and Tinian. As the US military releases new EIS for public comment, community groups like Our Commonwealth, Marianas for Palestine and Prutehi Guahan are mounting community education programs but also demonstrating again militarisation of the islands.

“Right now on Tinian, they’re reconstructing the same runway they used in 1945 and there is the concurrent release of two major environmental impact statements,” Arriola says. “One is the CNMI Joint Military Training EIS, that outlines a lot of major changes on the island of Tinian, including live-fire training, public access restrictions and other hazards.”

In June, activists interrupted a public meeting on the proposed military training expansion in Tinian, chanting “No build-up!,” “No war!” and “Free, free, Palestine!” Chamorro activist Anufat Pangelinan told the Marianas Press: “We don’t want to be part of a war we don’t support. The Marianas shouldn’t be a tip of the spear — we should be a bridge for peace.”

Community groups questioned military plans to build a fuel pipeline over Tinian’s aquifer, the only potable source of water on the island. They raised potential hazards to fishing boats travelling between Saipan and Tinian during live-fire exercises. US Marine Corps Forces Pacific executive director Mark Hashimoto acknowledged that “the top five concerns that the community still has include water resources, solid waste, noise, the impact on police, fire, and medical capabilities, and also access to the military lease area.”

For Arriola, the EIS process doesn’t provide sufficient evidence for decision-makers, and downplays concerns over indigenous land and culture. “That’s what everybody is talking about — the land, and the health of the land for future generations and the ability to maintain indigenous sovereignty,” she says.

“Our community is suffering,” Arriola adds, “but most people aren’t reading through these extremely tedious, very cumbersome Environmental Impact Statements. It’s really complicated, and an undue burden that’s consistently placed on us, especially when multiple EIS are released. They don’t address a lot of our questions, they don’t have proper baseline data, they don’t have proper mitigation plans in place. We have a long history of seeing the skirting of environmental regulation or not properly implementing the EPA process.”

The challenge for community activists is the strong military culture across Guam and CNMI, and a long tradition of Micronesians joining the US armed forces to obtain training and economic opportunity.

The significant US presence means communities are economically linked to the military, says Arriola. “So it’s hard to say ‘I’m an activist and I disagree with someone joining the military.’ There are so many people amongst our friends and our family that are already in the military. It’s so much a part of the fabric of our everyday lives. So it’s not about faulting people for joining the military, but it is about critiquing the military-industrial complex that is keeping us so closely tied to the military as a form of survival.”

The upgrading of the wartime airstrip and other military plans for Tinian are often presented as a bonanza for local businesses. With hundreds of US contractors already on the island, cafe owner Marie Rose Bunao told local media that “business is mostly driven by department of defence projects. The military money goes into the community. Whatever they spend stays here.”

These resources can help replace reduced tourism since the Covid pandemic, amid scandals surrounding the collapse of a hotel and casino operation in Saipan. (An exclusive gambling license was issued in 2014 to Hong Kong–based Imperial Pacific International, which was soon embroiled in disputes over corruption, delayed construction and abuse of workers’ rights.)

Although the CNMI government is still owed US$160 million in back taxes from the casino fiasco, supporters of US military construction predict a new bonanza of investment. Tinian mayor Edwin Aldan says the current military expansion could bring over a billion dollars in investment over the next fifteen to twenty years.

“We are in a very tight economic situation right now,” Arriola acknowledges. “Civilian and military infrastructure are becoming so interlinked that you can’t uncouple them. But around the dinner table, you’re not talking about geopolitics,” she stressed. “You’re asking: Will we be disrupted by the noise with the planes flying overhead? Can I farm on my land? Should we worry about the water being contaminated? People worry about fishing access, and whether they’ll be able to access certain places in the water during training exercises. Will the ordnance disrupt the health of the environment and the water around us?”

The debate in Tinian has echoed across Micronesia since the Pentagon announced a new Guam-based military taskforce to coordinate defence operations in the northern Pacific.

As US media spruik the China threat, Ken Gofigan Kuper, co-founder of the Pacific Center on Island Security on Guam, says that his think tank aims to ensure that islanders themselves have a voice “amongst the cacophony that is geopolitical posturing.”

“Island security is very different from using islands for your security,” Kuper says. “We are trying to open up debate about what is considered islands security and believe much of the security conversation should be coming from islanders themselves, without having the terms dictated by Washington DC, by Beijing, by Australia.”

For Theresa Arriola, “it’s about re-framing the narratives about our islands. When you hear the word ‘strategic,’ let’s break that down. What does that mean? Do we want to engage with this level of military training because we’re being framed as strategic? What is that going to do to our environment and our culture in the long-term?  These are all questions we’re grappling with.” •

The post Tip of the spear appeared first on Inside Story.

Johnston is often remembered today, for the decade he and Charmian Clift spent at the centre of a colony of expatriated writers and artists on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1950s and 60s. This notable example of postwar bohemianism preceded Johnston’s triumphant return to Australia in 1964 amid the success of his widely admired novel, My Brother Jack. It was the first instalment of the autobiographical Meredith Trilogy that cemented his place among Australia’s great mid-century writers.

Johnston had first attracted attention after being appointed a war correspondent with the rank of captain in 1941. He built his reputation with action-filled accounts filed from the frontlines of New Guinea, and then spent time in the United States, the Middle East, Europe, India and finally China, from where he covered the second Sino-Japanese and Pacific wars.

From the moment he arrived in mid-1944, Johnston was fascinated by China. A quick learner with excellent journalistic instincts, he rapidly acquired the knowledge of Chinese history, politics and culture reflected in his dispatches. He was also well-placed to report on the epoch-defining conclusion of the Pacific war following the cataclysmic destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — or he would have been if he hadn’t embarked on an intrepid personal quest through Tibet’s high mountains in search of the fabled monastery of Shangri-La.

Johnston’s adventure was driven by a need to replenish his war-damaged spirit. Although China enthralled him it also delivered the most confronting experience of his war service. In a personally devastating episode in late 1944 he had followed refugees fleeing the southwest city of Kweilin through famine-stricken country ahead of a Japanese advance. Tens of thousands died in fields and on roadsides. This encounter with massive civilian death left him burnt out and soul-sick.

Johnston hoped for recovery in neighbouring Tibet, whose mysteries fascinated the inquisitive journalist. In early 1945 he reported that wartime reconnaissance was discovering “unsuspected geographical features… where China and Tibet come together in a Disney phantasy of incredible mountains and untrodden gorges.” Tibet crystallised in Johnston’s imagination as a sanctuary, the place “least touched by all the years of the war.”

Feng Liu-lu, Johnston and Minya Konka (Gongga Shan), July 1945.

Another factor was also driving Johnston’s fascination. He had read James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon, arguably the most influential utopian novel of the twentieth century. Lost Horizon featured the imagined Shangri-La lamasery, a monastery for Buddhist lamas. Hilton described Shangri-La and its surrounding valley as a beautiful, fertile, immaculate place with kindly, gracious, long-lived and peace-loving people uninterested in worldly goods. Crucially, he claimed that Shangri-La could heal Westerners damaged by modernity — a last-chance utopia in a world benighted by war.

Rumours had reached Johnston that Hilton’s Shangri-La was based on the lamasery of Konka Gomba. At an altitude of 13,000 feet, Konka Gomba had for eight centuries clung to the flanks of Minya Konka (known in China as Gongga Shan), at 24,000 feet the highest peak on the Tibetan plateau. If he could find a way into Tibet, Johnston resolved, he would go in search of Shangri-La.

He soon found a means to realise his plan. The American army’s Sino-American Horse Purchasing Bureau was acquiring Tibetan mountain horses and overlanding them to China, where they were desperately needed as remounts. Drawing on information from fellow correspondent James Burke, a Shanghai-born son of American missionaries, he submitted a story about the Bureau in June 1945.

Burke was fluent in Mandarin, was attached to the US Office of War Information, and had previously accompanied one of the Bureau’s Tibetan rotations — all of them skills and experience vital to Johnston’s plan. With his support Johnston was invited to “come along” by the colonel overseeing the Bureau’s next rotation. Improbably, the trip had an Australian angle: the Bureau was exchanging a cargo of slouch hats — much sought after in Tibet — for the all-important horses.

Like Johnston, Burke was entranced by mountainous Tibet, so the pieces fell into place. In mid-July the two men were flown into Ying Kwan Chai, probably the highest airfield in the world at the time but an unpromising starting point for a search for utopia. The place was infested with rats, blowflies and “prowling village mongrels,” the streets “an awful treacly mass of mud and manure.” The pair stayed long enough to acquire riding and pack horses and a local guide, Feng Liu-lu, who spoke Mandarin and Tibetan.

Johnston and Burke encountered a land that was beautiful and enthralling but also demanding and dangerous. They were tested by long days in the saddle, ice-cold streams to be forded, freezing nights, squalls that left them miserably cold and wet, and the danger of vicious Tibetan mastiffs.

The human element was also challenging. Banditry was rife, and while Johnston recorded with interest the Buddhist rituals he observed, he also became contemptuous of avaricious, pestering lamas. Scarce places to sleep were found only in damp, overcrowded inns offering distasteful food amid the odour of rancid butter. Even an apparently idyllic valley turned out to be controlled by farmers who refused them shelter.

But the compensations were enormous. As Johnston and Burke trekked upward, crossing a mountain pass at 18,000 feet, they were overwhelmed by magnificent landscapes of broad, green flower-studded valleys over which loomed pristine glaciers and the mighty, glistening peak of Minya Konka. They were enchanted by “the tinkling of bells and the chuckling laughter of mountain streams.”

James Burke crosses a mountain stream.

The travellers’ mood also improved when they were welcomed by poor nomadic herders summering cattle in the highest valleys. Although Johnston noted that these hosts “smelled prodigiously” he admired their generosity and dignity as they shared their yurts and food with the unexpected passers-by. In this unlikely place, he found a reassuring normality where “so much was as familiar as the everyday scenes on an Australian farm.”

Johnston and Burke had another encouraging encounter when they were invited to meet a Living Buddha (the revered teachers who have reached Tibetan Buddhism’s highest form of enlightenment), Kama Cheuh-ji-sing kai, who had camped nearby with his impressive cavalcade. From having met the Buddha on his previous trip, Burke was aware that his proudest possession was a phonograph on which he had nothing to play but a Noël Coward recording, so he was carrying a “hot jazz” record in case they met again.

After approving this new disc, the Buddha and his guests settled into a lengthy conversation about the basics of reincarnation, diet, prayer and the differences between Buddhism and Christianity. Despite Johnston’s lack of interest in organised religion, he had long been fascinated by other cultures, and he and Burke eagerly maintained a conversation experienced by few Westerners.

Johnston with Kama Cheuh-ji-sing kai (Ninth Gangkar Rinpoché) and lamas.

After nearly a fortnight, a final twelve-hour day of riding took the men and their guide within reach of Konka Gomba, where they faced final challenges from aggressive yaks, the threat of wolves, ever-steeper gradients and unexpectedly thick forests. In surroundings Johnston described as “dreary, dismal and eerie,” the portals of Konka Gomba were suddenly upon them: “Feng stiffened in his saddle, pointed ahead dramatically. ‘There,’ he shouted, exultantly. ‘Konka Gomba!’ Ahead was the real Shangri-la.”

Johnston and Burke’s first impressions of the much-anticipated endpoint of their gruelling yet exhilarating journey were disappointing. The drab, brown, stone buildings and dirty, uninspiring monks were very unlike the gleaming white palace of Johnston’s dreams. The destination was saved only by the drama of its stupendous setting beneath a broad glacier spilling from Minya Konka. Seemingly undaunted, Johnston declared, “That night we slept in Shangri-la.”

After staying several days, however, the travellers despaired of finding Hilton’s utopia. To Johnston the monastery seemed filthy and disorganised and the lamas, while hospitable, covetous and uninspiring. Preparing to leave disenchanted, he and Burke took a desultory final tour of the lamas’ cells.

Johnston and lamas at the Konka Gomba Monastery.

What followed was a meeting Johnston later said he had hesitated to report in case it was “construed as a newspaperman’s invention.” But, he asserted, it “really happened.”

A guide, recognising the visitors’ waning interest, paused before opening a closed door. Then they entered an immaculately clean room containing a solitary figure deep in meditation. In a fairy-tale-like awakening, the figure slowly raised its head, opened its eyes, and removed a hat and spectacles, revealing a beautiful Chinese woman who presented herself as Shen Shu-wen from Peking, also known as Hsueh Shan Chu Shih — “The Snow Mountain’s Resident Scholar.”

Replying to eager questions Shen recounted how she had been a guerrilla fighter resisting the Japanese invasion. Severely wounded, needing to recuperate but unable to return to occupied Peking, she was led by her interest in Buddhism to find refuge in Konka Gomba. Here she had been confined to her room for three years, fasting and meditating under the influence of Minya Konka and the tutelage of Kama Cheuh-ji-sing kai.

Having discussed the progress of her Buddhist learning, including her struggle to understand her reincarnations, Shen enquired about the progress of the European and Asian wars. The men shared the news that Hitler was dead and Germany defeated, but Japan was fighting on.

Johnston and Burke were deeply impressed by this devout warrior-scholar who fused Tibetan spirituality with their own fragile, war-effected condition. And while Shen’s presence was troubling — evidence the war had indeed reached this seemingly untouched place — they saw in her prayerful meditation and meticulous cleanliness someone quite unlike Konka Gombas’s listless lamas.

Reinvigorated by meeting this brave and intelligent woman, Johnston’s faith in Hilton’s utopia was restored. The disappointing lamasery was once more “this fantastic Shangri-La.” After that, “everything was inclined to be anticlimactic.”

The men’s return journey came, however, with its own startling climax. Burke was stricken with a kidney infection and fell into a life-threatening fever. Johnston and Feng kept him sedated and upright in his saddle, but progress was painful and slow. As the desperate trio entered the valley of Ying Kwan Chai they saw a dismantled airfield, and to their dismay, what was a final US flight taxiing for departure. Fate intervened when one of the plane’s engines stalled. With Johnston frantically firing a pistol to gain attention, they were saved from what he believed would have been certain death in the coming winter. (As far as we’re aware, details of Feng’s subsequent life haven’t been recorded.)

From the aircrew Johnston learnt that he was returning to a world that had changed dramatically while he had been imbibing “a thousand years of mysticism.” It was August 14th and the Pacific War was over, with Japan capitulating after the annihilation of two of its major cities.

As Burke recuperated, Johnston flung himself back into his work, submitting rapid-fire articles covering the war’s end. He was rewarded with a privileged invitation to accompany Allied representatives to Japan, where he attended the formal surrender onboard the USS Missouri and visited “the heat-fused nightmare of Hiroshima.” The disparity between visiting the uplands of Minya Konka and the wastelands of the Japanese holocaust would have been wrenching.

Johnston returned to Australia in October 1945 with his Tibetan adventure still front of mind. Within days he published a long article describing his encounter with Kama Cheuh-ji-sing kai, and soon after another featuring the meeting with Shen Shu-wen accompanied by an illustration of Shen greeting her visitors.

Shen Shu-wen as depicted in the Australasian, 10 November 1945.

Johnston’s 1947 war memoir, Journey Through Tomorrow described his search for Shangri-La and again reported the two memorable meetings. There Johnston’s Tibetan interlude might have remained — except that he revived the story a final time, a quarter of a century later.

Before reaching that point, however, Johnston’s public profile continued to grow, though not always in a way he would have welcomed. His return to civilian life became tumultuous when he began the office affair with Clift that ended his first marriage and caused the pair to be dismissed by Melbourne’s Argus. They departed for Sydney, where they co-authored High Valley, a novel that relied heavily on Johnston’s experience in Tibet.

After Johnston and Clift moved to London in 1951, Johnston took an editorial position on Fleet Street and he and Clift co-authored a second novel, The Big Chariot, this time drawing on Johnston’s knowledge of China. In late 1954, driven by mounting literary ambition and romantic yearning, Johnston and Clift moved on again, this time to the Greek islands. When they arrived on Hydra in mid-1955 they were the only foreigners, but others soon followed. In short time they emerged as the guiding spirits of a proto-hippy community attracting participants disillusioned by postwar optimism’s morphing into cold war reality.

Johnston and Clift’s own reality unfolded as a vexing battle with disappointing literary progress, marital problems, poverty and alcohol. It was a welcome relief when in 1960 Johnston again crossed paths with James Burke.

Postwar, Burke had turned to photojournalism and constantly sought opportunities to work in his beloved Himalayas. Success came his way in 1953 when he was the first newsman to interview Tenzing Norgay after he and Edmund Hilary descended from Everest, and in 1959 he covered the Dalai Lama’s arrival in India after fleeing Tibet.

In 1960 Burke was working for LIFE magazine and found himself posted to Athens. From there he saw the opportunity for a photo-essay based on Johnston and Clift’s pivotal role in Hydra’s bohemian enclave. He started by producing more than 1500 photographs depicting the Johnstons surrounded by a young, off-beat, international cohort that notably featured Canadian writer Leonard Cohen and his partner Norwegian Marianne Ihlen.

But Burke’s photos, after initial acceptance, weren’t published at the time and were instead consigned to the LIFE archive. They only began to circulate more than five decades later when, aided by the internet, they were immediately recognised as a tantalising glimpse of significant lives and a potent picturing of the postwar Aegean on the cusp of transformation.

Burke’s Hydra visit may have also induced Johnston to revisit his own war experience in fiction. He was soon at work on The Far Side of the Moon, a novel dealing with a remote Himalayan airfield and Allied crews flying the “hump” route between northern India and China. This was written simultaneously with The Far Road, in which Johnston recounted his traumatising experience among the fields of Kweilin in 1944. In the same period he also completed another novel, I Was the Only War Correspondent, which remains unpublished.

It was, however, My Brother Jack — the concluding sections of which expose war correspondent David Meredith’s guilt-riddled examination of his non-combatant war service — that brought Johnston the longed-for popular and critical success that allowed him to return to Australia. His fortunes were temporarily buoyed but he remained troubled by unresolved personal and health issues. Clift’s suicide in July 1969 added to his woes and focused his preparation for his own demise. He responded by embarking on A Cartload of Clay, the final instalment of his life-spanning trilogy.

In that novel Meredith mirrors Johnston’s real-life battle to come to terms with his wife’s suicide and make sense of his own life before he too dies. In preparing for death Johnston creates a book deeply engaged with pressing question about “life” — the life one has led, the lives one might have led. Johnston (and Meredith) confronts myriad missteps made while playing the “absurd game of going from the cradle to the grave” and the inadequate means individuals have to shape their destiny amid the disarrayed forces of character, opportunity, fate and chance.

Meredith’s contemplation of these matters is compressed into a single day — a day that involves another uphill journey with a religious destination, his local church. But his capacities are depleted by tuberculosis and emphysema, and the short walk requires rest. He finds a bus stop, sits and dozes. His mind wanders restlessly over the contours of the lives of those with whom he has “shared the oars,” and the deaths of those who have preceded him to the grave.

In particular, Meredith returns to the war years and to 1945 and his Tibetan journey with “Jim” Burke. But it is no longer a trek in search of a fabled lamasery or punctuated by meeting a Living Buddha and a cloistered warrior woman. It is now recalled as a time of existential transformation triggered by the staggering landscape. The two men ride “wherever the whim took them [through] long verdant valleys” amid the “Wagnerian drama of tremendous evening blizzards spawned out of the glittering cold womb of the mighty and sacred peak of Minya Konka.” It’s an “exhilarating bizarre experience” by which he and Burke were changed, perhaps for the last time in their lives.

This time the journey is resolved by a more complete account of Burke’s near death and the rescue of the two men in 1945, followed by his actual death in 1964. Meredith recalls learning how his friend slipped and fell while photographing in the Himalayas, his body spiralling into a crevice and beyond retrieval. This was “a precisely right sort of death” for Burke — who had remained driven by his singular passion for the mountains. Meredith, however — reflecting Johnston’s tendency to see purpose and success in others and little in himself — reviews his own postwar progress from Sydney to London to Hydra and back to Sydney, and finds only disappointment, diversion and an unfulfilled “quest for meaning and self-recognition.”

A Cartload of Clay remained unfinished when Johnston died in July 1970 and was published incomplete. It is clear, however, that the Tibetan journey was to be the narrative’s pivot point — the before-and-after, end-of-war moment beyond which the contrasting but linked fates of Meredith and Burke were sealed.

The end of the war was also a watershed for others. Unknown to Johnston, it allowed Kama Cheuh-ji-sing kai and Shen Shu-wen to descend from Minya Konka. Kama Cheuh-ji-sing kai — whose name is now usually rendered as Karma Chokyi Senge and who is widely revered as the ninth Gangkar Rinpoché — toured extensively through China teaching the fundamentals of Tibetan Buddhism. His impact established the religion as an important (and repressed) component of Tibetan cultural survival within China, with Rinpoché as its recognised founder and guiding spirit.

The war’s end also allowed Shen to return to China, where she continued to follow and promote Rinpoché’s teaching. After his death in 1957 she moved to Taiwan and established the influential Dharma centres that made her a critical force in promoting Tibetan Buddhism on the island. She died at ninety-four in 1997 and is now revered as Gongga Laoren.

The details of the crucial teacher–student relationship between Rinpoché and Shen had for decades been impervious to scholars of Tibetan Buddhism. They found no evidence to support Shen’s claims that she spent the war at Konka Gomba as Rinpoche’s disciple. It is only the recent rediscovery of Johnston’s accounts of his Tibetan journey, particularly the reports of his conversations with Burke and Shen, that confirmed she was indeed the legitimate inheritor of Rinpoché’s religious teachings.

Johnston remembered his Tibetan journey for its exhilarating, if temporary, effect on his own wellbeing. It is testimony to Johnston and Burke’s insatiable curiosity about people, their lands and their cultures that Johnston’s words (like Burke’s Hydra photographs) endured, were rediscovered, and were eventually comprehended in a very different context. Nearly eight decades later, Johnston’s story of war-effected lives colliding in an unforgettable location amid the devastating conclusion to a near-global war has found its full significance. •

We are grateful to the family of James Cobb Burke for their assistance and permission to use the above photographs; and to Professor Yunfei Bai, Lingnan University, Hong Kong, for sharing his knowledge of the ninth Gangkar Rinpoché and Gongga Laoren.

The post George Johnston’s odyssey of war and peace appeared first on Inside Story.

“An Irish Ballad” had been sung already by Mr Lehrer in a television program shown in Adelaide. The Sunday Mail now sent naughty bits from two of the other banned songs into most South Australian homes. “The ban,” said the News, “(as always is the case with bans) has also had the effect of creating much wider attention for Mr Lehrer’s songs than they would otherwise have received.”

It was too much for even the Advertiser, which interviewed Mr Lehrer before the concert, reviewed it sympathetically, reported on Mary Armitage’s page what the ladies wore (“HOT NIGHT AT TOWN HALL”), conducted a street quiz of young people (“AGAINST BAN ON SONGS”), printed three letters against the ban and one for it, and made it the subject of an editorial. “Not everyone can appreciate Tom Lehrer’s brand of humour. But it is a sad soul who cannot get a laugh out of the fact that he has been forbidden to sing some of his best-known songs in Adelaide.” The Advertiser thought that “Be Prepared” was “most unfair to a fine movement,” but that the chief secretary had “made us look slightly ridiculous.”

Leaders of local theatre groups wrote in protest to the News. “Mick,” of Largs, wrote to that paper: “The restrictions placed on Tom Lehrer justify SA’s reputation as a wowser state, but also indirectly reflect on Princess Margaret, who enjoyed his show.” A lady from Toorak Gardens implied in the Advertiser, however, that some royals are more royal than others: “Although he boasts of singing before royalty, I am sure our much-loved Queen would not listen to those which have been banned.”

On the day parliament opened, [the premier] Sir Thomas Playford said that the ban was proper. “I notice,” he said, “that similar action was taken in Queensland, so this action was not peculiar to SA.” This was untrue; in Queensland action was threatened by the police commissioner if Mr Lehrer sang “Be Prepared.” He sang it, and nothing happened. Nowhere else in the world, Mr Lehrer says, had a performance of his been censored.

One pleasant effect of the decision was to give a kind of imprimatur from the chief secretary (who is also our chief Scot) to the material that remained. So, with the approval of Sir Lyell McEwin and in the presence of an inspector and two research assistants from the Vice Squad, Mr Lehrer treated a young and crowded audience to a song about Oedipus and his mother (“the most offensive of the lot,” in the author’s view, “but the censors never object because it goes right over their heads”); to the “Masochism Tango (in which one of the milder passage, is: “Go put on your cleats and come and trample me”); and to the “Old Dope Peddler.” Just before interval he swung into the first bar or two of “Be Prepared,” stopped suddenly, and explained that he just wanted to keep the Vice Squad men on their toes. He plugged his record, which he said was banned in Adelaide but on sale at a joint, just past the fourth church down, which had illicit wine tastings. When he sang, in “Merry Little Minuet,”

There’s rioting in Africa,
They’re starving in Spain,
There’s censorship in Adelaide…

the audience clapped, as it were, their hands off.

The last song, which Mr Lehrer called a survivalist hymn, was a sardonic rhymed tract about nuclear disaster, which on this night ended:

When the world is one big ruin
You and I and Lyell McEwin
We will all go together
Wherever we go.

Then came the most popular item of all, a lecture. He hoped this had been “a fitting anti-climax to the Festival of Arts.” It did seem to him that there was a lot of immorality in this town under our very noses. “My Home Town,” he thought, was not as shocking as a newspaper published in our home town, “called, for reasons that escape me, Truth.” A quick content- analysis of the current issue followed. (The next issue of “Truth,” whose poster said GIRL, 12, POSED IN NUDE,” had no reference at all to Mr Lehrer.) From what he had heard about two intimate revues put on during the Festival, the songs in them made “When You Are Old and Grey” sound like “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” He was puzzled that a song about a severed hand should be forbidden, while [opera singer] Joan Hammond could not only sing to a severed head, but carry it around the stage, and do a dance clearly intended to arouse illicit passions. Not that he wished to be unfair to our community: “South Australia,” he allowed, “has one of the finest governments of the eighteenth century.”

In a television interview Mr Lehrer said that these days “it’s very difficult to do anything but laugh, if you’re really bothered…” The remark is a clue to his whole act and to the demand for it. The audience in Adelaide would have laughed anyway, but the censors made them laugh all the more. They savoured Mr Lehrer and took part in a joyful demonstration against the sour and mindless Puritanism of their rulers. •

First published in Nation on 9 April 1960

The post Hot night at Town Hall appeared first on Inside Story.

The two men had come to Canberra to declaim the injustices they had endured all their lives. The following day, 10 May, prominent citizens were paraded before the Duke and Duchess as they stood atop the steps of Parliament House. Nangar was among those who passed before them. As the Argus reported, “An ancient Aborigine, who calls himself King Billy and who claims sovereign rights to the Federal Territory, walked slowly forward alone, and saluted the Duke and Duchess.” The photograph of Nangar appeared under the headline “Demanded His Rights.”

Until recently, Nangar and Ooloogan appeared in Australian history as a brief, defiant cameo in the otherwise triumphant march of Australian democracy. But in 2024, the Australian Dictionary of Biography, or ADB, published Wiradjuri historian Laurie Bamblett’s article on “Nangar (1848–1927).” Now, for the first time, we could understand Nangar’s life in its full context — Family. Nation. Country. Bamblett, a descendant of Nangar’s aunt Nellie Hamilton, explained Nangar’s cultural responsibilities as a walamira talmai — “a distinguished holder of ancient knowledge passed on by his forebears” — and his life-long role as an esteemed ambassador for his people. In the space of little more than 1200 words, Bamblett’s ADB entry finally gave Nangar’s life the dignity it deserved.

The same could be said for more than a hundred Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander biographies recently added to the ADB. This project, which is supported by the John T. Reid Charitable Trusts, is led by Indigenous members of the ADB board and guided by a national working party of distinguished Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander scholars who believe in the ADB and want to ensure their peoples are properly represented in the nation’s biographical dictionary.

A book of Indigenous Lives, edited by Shino Konishi, a Yawuru historian working with the ADB, will be published next year and several hundred more portraits are being commissioned. Because the subjects of these biographies are nominated by communities and many of the entries are written by Indigenous authors, there is a growing sense of Indigenous ownership of the ADB and pride in its work.

And yet the Australian National University has recently proposed drastic funding cuts that threaten this vital biographical project, and, indeed, the very survival of the ADB itself.

Since its first volume appeared in 1966, the ADB has published nearly 14,000 Australian biographies — all of them now freely available online. The ADB’s volunteers in every state and territory are constantly researching and writing new lives, with each providing a unique portal to Australia’s culture and history. As well as expanding the number of Indigenous lives represented in the dictionary, the ADB has launched projects to increase the number of women, convicts and working-class people and is advancing the urgent task of revising biographical entries written decades ago. Like Britain’s Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the American National Biography, the ADB is an ongoing project of profound national significance.

When Australians look for engaging, thoroughly researched and trustworthy biographies of their countrymen and women from every walk of life, there is no more reliable source than the ADB. At a time when dependable, human, evidence-based information becomes more elusive by the minute, institutions like the ADB matter more than ever before. All the more reason, then, that the ANU’s recent announcement to slash three full time positions at the ADB, and “disestablish” the Australian National Dictionary, another priceless project which has tracked the changes in Australian English from colonial times to the present, represent cultural vandalism on a breathtaking scale.

The proposed cuts threaten ANU’s unique mission laid down in its founding charter of 1946. In the “Organisational Change Proposal” released this month by the dean of the College of Arts and Social Sciences, Bronwyn Parry, there is an extraordinary omission. No mention is made of the National Institutes Grant that ANU receives from the federal government for research “supporting the development of Australia’s national unity and identity, including by improving Australia’s understanding of itself and the history and culture of its Indigenous peoples, its Asia-Pacific neighbours, and its place in the international community.” ANU receives this specially targeted federal funding to support national projects such as the ADB and the Australian National Dictionary.

As former ANU chancellor Gareth Evans has argued, there is probably no finer or more enduring expression of ANU’s nation-building charter than the ADB. It has been celebrated by previous vice-chancellors as “the jewel in the crown of the ANU.” The ADB coordinates volunteer working parties in every state and territory of the Commonwealth, and from almost every university, and thus enacts a very unusual federal scholarly collaboration that only a national university can make possible.

With its relatively small budget, the ADB mobilises a vast army of eminent unpaid scholars who do this work for the public good. This is exactly what ANU was founded to do in the postwar period, and the celebrated historian Sir Keith Hancock recognised that opportunity in establishing in 1958 what has now become the largest collaborative research enterprise in the humanities and social sciences in Australia. To diminish such an achievement is an astonishing act of self-harm by ANU. The changes, if realised, will destroy the very thing that makes the university distinctive.

Professor Parry has defended the Change Proposals by stating that the ADB could easily have been cut altogether. She appears to regard the ADB as an academic unit within the gift of the dean rather than as a collaborative national institution established by the ANU council with an independent board and supported by extensive volunteer labour. She insists that the ADB is not financially self-sustaining. But such an assessment places no value on the generous gift of scholarship to ANU from Indigenous and other Australians. It deems as worthless the goodwill of “the state universities” in a highly competitive tertiary education sector. And it turns its back on the national mission and international reputation of the ANU.

ANU’s assault on the ADB and the Australian National Dictionary is taking place in the context of a sustained attack on the humanities in Australia. The Albanese government has so far failed to reverse the Morrison government’s decision to introduce a fee regime that punishes students who choose to study the humanities and social sciences. At the same time as the government has established a new national literature body, Writing Australia, to support the development of Australian literature, and inaugurated an Australian “poet laureate,” it continues to undermine younger generations’ capacity to learn the critical analytical skills that underpin a civil society.

What do we, as Australians, value? Who else will nurture and defend the languages, cultures and histories of this continent, who else will tell the life stories of this place, who else will cultivate our capacity to share a common reference point of understanding such as has been generated by the ADB? These are the potentially nation-defining questions the ANU administration has failed to ask. The stature, respect and authority of the ADB has been built up meticulously and lovingly by tens of thousands of minds over seven decades, yet it seems it can be dismissed with the wave of a hand.

We believe this is a moment that requires urgent action — not only to stop the proposed cuts to the ADB and the plan to abolish the Australian National Dictionary, but to reverse the assault on the humanities and recognise that our history and cultural life are vital to Australia’s civic intelligence and national identity. •

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The cherry on top, if I may mix the food metaphors, was my discovery of the accompanying photograph of Parliament House (now Old Parliament House) in the collection of the National Library of Australia. Someone has obviously had a very merry time hand-colouring it, and I was hoping that the hyper-real result would signal to readers that they should expect the unexpected in the essay as well.

I did want to land some important points: that, as the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science’s prominence has faded in recent decades, its role in the history of Australian science has slipped from view; that its embrace of disciplines other than science has received insufficient attention; and that the role of women within the organization is poorly understood.

It’s no surprise that women would be severely underrepresented in the formal proceedings at an ANZAAS congress, but what thoroughly intrigued me was that so many women were closely involved as organisers and attendees. This is abundantly evident in the congress programs and from the names (and addresses, incidentally) of ANZAAS members, including hundreds of women, printed at the back of each congress report.

Associate or annual memberships seem to have been open to anyone — teachers, public servants, members of learned societies, amateur scientists — and obviously included the families of delegates and officials. Membership gave access to the congress’s many social events and excursions, and it was the social aspect of ANZAAS congresses that interested me especially. It’s easy to miss if you take an entirely top-down approach to the history of an organisation.

The opportunities for further research are extraordinarily rich. Taken together, the membership lists of ANZAAS congresses over many decades reveal an entire ecosystem of Australian and New Zealand science and culture waiting to be sliced and diced in any way you like. To demonstrate that potential I took the 1939 congress as an example, and women’s participation as the slice. The slice approach means that the involvement of all women could be relevant, even waitresses and kitchen hands (although these are never named of course).

Does the fact of being female unite women across professional and class boundaries? Not always but sometimes, I think, given the right circumstances. I decided that the 1939 congress, held under the smoky haze of the bushfire-threatened capital, could provide those circumstances. Then, because I am a crime fiction addict, it was only a small step to flip my little case study into a scenario for a novel referencing the golden age of crime writing. The setting — always critical in these things — is perfect,

Some readers might notice that my plot device is inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s essay “Men Explain Things To Me.” In 2003, she and a friend attended a party at a luxury cabin above Aspen, Colorado. Their wealthy male host kept them chatting after the other guests had left, and when Solnit mentioned her latest book, the man cut her off to tell her about a book on the same subject that had just been published. It was, of course, Solnit’s own.

Her friend Sallie had to interrupt three or four times to convince “Mr Very Important” — holding forth as he was “with his eyes fixed on the far horizon of his own authority” — that the author was sitting directly in front of him. Finally they made their escape. “Being women, we were politely out of earshot before we started laughing, and we’ve never really stopped.”

Solnit’s essay was published online in 2008 and again in 2012, and then in print in 2014 with a postscript by the author. It went viral, and the term “mansplaining” was born. “Mansplaining” was one of the New York Times’s words of the year in 2010 although Solnit did not coin it herself and mostly avoids using it because, as she says quite plainly — twice — not all men do this. Some men.

Anyway, I thought, if being lectured at about one’s own work could happen to Rebecca Solnit in 2003 it could happen to Dorothy Hill in 1939, and indeed any woman at any place and time. It happened to me. Without exception, all the men of my acquaintance who read “Keen as Mustard” complimented me on it but pointed out that women condescend to men, and men to one another. One man explained this to me at such considerable length that the only way to make it end was to fall silent myself, which is what I did. What women do.

It’s true that condescension isn’t always inflected by gender but, overwhelmingly, it is. Solnit remarks: “Every woman knows what I’m talking about.” Surely I need hardly say (do I?) that what distinguishes men explaining things to women is the power differential. And that what might seem like mere social awkwardness has the effect, time and again, of silencing women, and indicating to them “the way harassment on the street does, that this is not their world.” (Solnit again.)

Those looks exchanged between my characters, Dorothy and Kathleen, at the garden party, when both were trapped by leering men? A young woman friend and colleague of mine, who’d read my essay, sat in my office one day and performed them for me, verbalising the silent exchange: “Are you okay? You sure? Yup, well, I’m right here…” Every woman knows what I’m talking about.

Of course it is my risk that by allowing my essay to turn into a humorous romp, I undermine the moral seriousness of what I’m saying. I admit that I found the idea of Rebecca Solnit meeting Agatha Christie irresistible. Laughter is a legitimate response though. Men explain things to women, and women laugh right back. •

KEEN AS MUSTARD

If you are old enough to remember ANZAAS congresses, you might be wondering what happened to them. The last one was held in Adelaide in 1997, though ANZAAS itself lives on, still promoting communication and interaction between scientists in different disciplines and fostering public interest in science. But it is nothing like the organisation it once was. With the gradual creation of breakaway specialist societies and, from 1954, the Australian Academy of Science, ANZAAS has declined.

Originally known as the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, it was founded and held its first congress in Sydney in 1888. New Zealand was always a part of it, but NZ wasn’t included in the name until 1930. Congresses were held every two or three years (though not during the first and second world wars), rotating through all colonial/state capitals, and some regional cities, in both countries.

Sixty-four congresses were held between 1888 and 1997, and the sheer complexity and prestige of these events is impossible to overstate. They attracted hundreds, often thousands, of delegates, the largest being the Canberra-hosted gathering in 1963, with 3860 delegates. Each congress consisted of concurrent meetings of various “sections” of the organisation, each led by a section “president” who was always a leading academic in that field. A congress president led the entire proceedings and was usually (but not always) an eminent scientist.

Sections were added to and rearranged over the years, but essentially they covered the various physical and life sciences, as well as anthropology, economics, psychology, philosophy, geography and history, the latter elevated to the ranks of research-based sciences  in 1911. Not until 1973 did the historians break away to establish their own society, the Australian Historical Association.

Congresses became increasingly elaborate with the addition of medal presentations, special lectures and symposia, exhibitions, films and meetings of ancillary learned societies. Excursions were arranged to various sites of interest in the host city and its surrounds, and a busy round of receptions, luncheons, parties and other activities was organised for “ladies.”

Delegates would arrive at the appointed city, trailing wives and daughters, and would be handed a copy of the bulky program and a “handbook” describing the history, geography and cultural and scientific features of that city. Journalists from the local and interstate dailies would also assemble. A local committee, assisted by several satellite sub-committees, would have spent the preceding two or three years preparing for the great occasion. It was like an Olympics, only for boffins.

There is a history of ANZAAS, a multi-authored work edited by historian of science Roy MacLeod and published in 1988 to mark the organisation’s centenary. At the core of the book are chapters on the major scientific disciplines, using ANZAAS as a lens to “magnify and clarify” (MacLeod’s words) the traditions in each one. Several other chapters discuss ANZAAS’s role in fostering relations between science and society. Unsurprisingly, the book reflects the traditional lines of power and authority established by ANZAAS itself.

My interest began accidentally. Writing about Australian historiography, as I occasionally do, I sometimes bump up against ANZAAS because so many historians gave papers at its congresses. For my recent essay on University of Melbourne historian Kathleen Fitzpatrick, I learned that she was president of the history section at the 1949 congress in Hobart, and from there I began to notice how remarkable ANZAAS congresses really were, socially as well as intellectually.

It seems weird but good that the historians had to jog along with the geologists and oceanographers and so forth. They all had their separate sessions to attend, but often the most useful exchanges at conferences are during the breaks. So, if a historian is interested in how physical environments have shaped social interactions (and why wouldn’t they be?), there would be plenty to discuss as they all queued up for tea and biscuits.

An alternative way of understanding ANZAAS might be to set aside the top-down approach and instead give due weight to the informal as well as the formal aspects of ANZAAS congresses. Extending that thought: what if we interrogate them as observances of a ritual?

Congresses had ritual characteristics. They were repetitive and structured, featured symbolic elements, and accorded status and prestige to leading members of the group. Everyone involved — presidents, delegates, wives, taxi drivers and hotel maids — had assigned roles to play. A significant variant was of course the host city, but even then there was regularity and predictability in the rotation.

This approach would accommodate lateral and bottom-up modes of analysis alongside top-down. Any ANZAAS congress would do as a case study, but the one held in Canberra in 1939 seems as good as any because it falls at about the halfway mark of the congresses. Why not crack that one open to see what might fall out?

It ran from Wednesday 11 January to Wednesday 18 January and was held at Telopea Park School (empty of students for the holidays), probably because that was the only venue that could accommodate all the parallel sessions. Major addresses were held in Albert Hall, on Commonwealth Avenue.

Canberra’s population then was only about 11,500. Some 1200 people registered for the congress, 800 from interstate, so in the days preceding the congress the baby capital was bracing for impact. Every available room in every hotel, government hostel and guest house in Canberra and Queanbeyan was booked. Hundreds of visitors were billeted in private houses and the rest accommodated in tents and cars in a little encampment of eggheads next to the Molonglo river. The development of Lake Burley Griffin was far in the future.

Parliament House had opened in 1927, flanked by a few austere office blocks for the small cadre of public servants who had been persuaded to move from Melbourne. These folk lived either in government hostels or in suburbs of boxy little houses. A few institutions of culture and learning had been established, including the Australian Institute of Anatomy at Acton, and the Commonwealth National Library in a building (long since demolished) on King’s Avenue. No university yet except the Canberra University College. The Australian War Memorial was still two years away from its official opening.

The ANZAAS grandees that year included the governor-general of Australia, Lord Gowrie, and the governor-general of New Zealand, Lord Galway, as the congress’s co-patrons. Sir David Rivett (chemistry) was outgoing president, and Sir Ernest Scott (history) incoming president. Sir Hubert Murray, lieutenant-governor of the territory of Papua, and Sir Douglas Mawson (geology) were vice-presidents.

Dozens of other prominent academics and thinkers were on the program, including R.M. Crawford (history), F.E. Williams (anthropology), H.C. Coombs (economics), Sir Kerr Grant (physics), Frank Macfarlane Burnet (immunology) and industrialist Russell Grimwade.  Star guest speaker was H.G. Wells, the English novelist and public figure, visiting Australia for a lecture tour.

What of women’s participation? Women were strongly present in Australian science from the late nineteenth century until the end of the second world war. Jane Carey, in her book Taking to the Field: a history of Australian Women in Science, surprised even herself with this finding, for she was expecting a story of marginalisation and exclusion. After the war, however, the valued contribution science had made to the war effort enhanced its prestige and led to a masculinisation of the field. Women’s representation in science didn’t reach 1930s levels again until the 1970s.

Within ANZAAS, women’s fortunes were mixed. From its inception women were admitted as members, and the first woman to give a paper at a congress gave it in Sydney in 1888. (It was Flora Campbell speaking on “The Diseases of Plants.”) Overall, however, it has been a male-dominated organisation. No woman was ever elected president of a congress, and very few have received its medals or given any of its prestigious lectures. Roy MacLeod’s history offers no particular focus on the role of women and only two of his sixteen authors were women.

Only twenty of the 288 formal papers, or about seven percent, were given by women at the 1939 congress. Academically, zoologist Georgina Sweet was the most senior woman, she having been appointed associate professor at the University of Melbourne in 1919. In anthropology there were Margaret Mead, Olive Pink and Camilla Wedgwood. Three women gave papers in geology — Irene Crespin, Dorothy Hill and Germaine Joplin. Dora Lush gave a paper in a session on viruses, and young historian Kathleen Fitzpatrick was there to give her first major academic paper.

Probably the most memorable aspect of this congress for its participants was the weather. In January 1939 much of eastern and southern Australia was gripped by a heatwave. Even as the Victorian delegates disembarked at Canberra railway station, enormous areas of their state were burning. On the Friday of the congress, 13 January, thirty-six people died in Victoria on what became known as Black Friday, one of the worst fire events in Australian post-colonial history. Fires were also burning in NSW and the ACT that week.

On opening day, Wednesday 11 January, the mercury in Canberra touched 108.4F (42.5C) at 3pm, the highest recorded in the capital to that point. For the rest of the congress the temperatures never dipped below 100. Small wonder the Canberra Times delighted to note that some professors took the liberty of loosening or even removing their ties.

By Friday, delegates’ enthusiasm had begun to wilt and attendance at the sessions was down. An eerie yellow light was enveloping Canberra from bushfires burning to the west. Out-of-town excursions were abandoned but some delegates made an excursion of their own to join the fire-fighting effort at Weetangera (now part of suburban Canberra). Douglas Mawson, Douglas Copland (economics) and James Darling (headmaster of Geelong Grammar) were among the delegates who fought alongside locals to prevent the fire entering the capital. Burnt leaves from a fire at Uriarra were seen falling on Parliament House at 11 am on Saturday morning.

In my absorption in these singular events I seem to have drifted from the idea ANZAAS congresses as rituals; ANZAAS Canberra 1939 is just far too interesting an event in itself. Then it occurred to me: wouldn’t this make an ideal plot for a murder mystery? Yes! A whodunnit.

Think of like this: the tiny population of the remote capital explodes when ANZAAS rolls into town. Searing days and sweaty nights. Smoke from encroaching fires. Everyone is sleep deprived but doing their best to put on their best bib and tucker each day. Scientific rivalries; anxieties over the worsening international situation. And with so many interesting, easy-to-research places and people, a novelist would be spoiled for choice. This wouldn’t be serious crime fiction, just a romp, and the best fun would be to sideline the men to make the women the heroes of the story.

I’m not a novelist, but I thought I’d test out my idea with a little scenario. My leading characters are all women, but not all are scientists; they are drawn from the wider pool of women present. Women are made visible and their knowledge is the key to the mystery. The murder would be incidental to the real violence of the novel, which would be the knife it would take to the scientific patriarchy.

How excited and nervous those women scientists must have been in 1939, those seven percenters. How very, very keen. Keen as mustard.

The murder occurs on the first formal day of the congress, that day of 42.5C heat. A party is held at 3.30pm in the gardens of Parliament House. Marquees are set up among the young trees and beds of roses. Australian flags and Union Jacks are draped about to offer a patriotic backdrop to the welcome extended by parliament to the congress delegates.

At the congress that morning, Queensland weather forecaster Inigo Jones had predicted the heatwave to break that afternoon, but a brief thunderstorm just before 4pm did little other than turn conditions from dry to sultry.

Having grown up in Brisbane, geologist Dorothy Hill was not especially bothered by heat, but the baking northerly wind that had been blowing across Canberra all day was setting even her nerves on edge. It’s hard to manage a plate of sandwiches and a cup of tea while the wind tugs at your hat and flaps the skirt against your legs.

Other women were similarly challenged. Most were wives and daughters, Dorothy decided, noticing how they tended to stay close to their menfolk. But here and there were little clusters of university women, delegates like herself, preparing to give papers. Dorothy had been chatting with her own little party of Queensland friends until she turned back to the tea tent for a glass of water.

“Actually, I wrote it myself”: an undated photograph of Dorothy Hill in academic robes. Fryer Library, University of Queensland

Suddenly a man next to her addresses Dorothy with some hearty remarks about the heat. Now she’s trapped. Nonplussed when Dorothy mentions her specialism (he’d picked her out as a wife or daughter), the man recovers and begins a long description of an article on the structure of rugose corals he’d read recently.

Yes, says Dorothy when he pauses for a bite of his sandwich, I know that paper; actually, I wrote it myself. Munching away happily, the man doesn’t hear. He carries on with his exposition of Dorothy’s own article, although he’d obviously read no further than the abstract. Well, you know, I collected that data and wrote it up myself, she says. He doesn’t listen. Or doesn’t believe her. It’s incomprehensible to him that a woman could be a geologist.

Darn, I can’t just walk away, Dorothy thinks, it would be too rude. Her eyes wander, and then, with the man still droning in her ear about her own subject, she notices on the other side of a rose bed a young woman in precisely the same predicament as herself. She too has been trapped by a man who could bore for Australia, he also munching on a sandwich. Dorothy watches. What pretty shoes that woman is wearing. She glances ruefully at her own practical lace-ups.

Ah, that must be Kathleen Fitzpatrick: historian, University of Melbourne. Dorothy had heard a little about her. Apparently she is divorced. Mr Fitzpatrick was some kind of radical journalist, apparently, and a drinker. Kathleen was far better off without him, Dorothy is certain. It must take guts to rebuild your life after a divorce — as Kathleen obviously had done, or else she wouldn’t be here. Dorothy admires guts above all things, much more than pretty shoes.

Now Kathleen’s interlocutor is leering down at her, sweating profusely in an ill-fitting suit. Trapped as she is next to a bed of crimson Étoile de Hollandes, she cannot escape without snagging her frock. Wildly she looks around and her eyes lock with Dorothy’s. Instant understanding. What should I do? Wait, I’m coming.

Suddenly Kathleen’s man turns purple. He gasps, he chokes. Drops his sandwich. He collapses at her feet, writhing. Kathleen backs away, horrified. Dorothy is with her now, clutching her arm. Conversation around them stops. Everyone is frozen with surprise, staring at the man. Then, shouts for help. Surely in that crowd, there must be a medical doctor?

There is. He dashes forward and loosens the man’s tie. The pair is quickly surrounded by onlookers and Dorothy draws Kathleen away. They are both trembling. The doctor is talking about heatstroke, but the two women know it’s not that. They were closest and had seen what happened. The man is not suffering from heatstroke. He’s dead.

The thunderstorm breaks. In the ensuing confusion the victim is whisked away and the half-eaten sandwich disappears. Guests forget the incident as they scurry for shelter. No one seems to know anything about the man. He was there by himself and no one recognises him.

But there is someone present even more observant than the average scientist. Ann McEwen, wife of interior minister John McEwen, is chairwoman of the congress’s ladies’ committee (this is true, she was) and chief organiser of all its social events. She too had noticed Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s discomfort and was hurrying over to intervene. (There’ll be none of that kind of thing at any of my parties, she thinks.)

She cuts through the group (all of them including the “doctor” are in on the murder plot) who cluster around the motionless figure on the grass, and she sees in an instant that he is dead.

She sweeps Kathleen and Dorothy through a side door into Parliament House. What happened? He just dropped, says Kathleen, after he took a bite of his sandwich. What kind of sandwich? Mustard and cress, Kathleen thinks. Mustard? That can’t be. Ann has given strict orders that mustard cannot be served at any of the congress’s parties. Professor Sir Ernest Scott, congress president, is allergic to it, and his wife, Mabel Scott, has written ahead to beg for a mustard-free congress. (I’m making this up, of course, I have no idea of Scott’s reactions to mustard.)

Ann McEwen turns on her heel and heads for the parliamentary kitchens. She knows the way because she’s been there earlier in the afternoon to check on the arrangements. Dorothy and Kathleen run after her.

No madam, says the head chef, we did not serve mustard this afternoon. We had your instructions. Absolutely no mustard. Have there been any strangers in the kitchen this afternoon? Well, madam, extra staff have been taken on for this event of course. Anyone acting oddly? Anything out of the ordinary? No madam, certainly not.

A timid voice pipes up. Excuse me, madam. It’s Joan, one of the kitchen hands. I saw a man. A man? What man? A stranger he was, with a plate of sandwiches. The head chef tries to cut her off. Silly girl, don’t listen to her. But Joan persists. The plate wasn’t one of our plates, that’s how I remember. What was this man like? He didn’t seem to know what he was doing, Joan thinks. Not actually a real waiter. How could she tell? The head chef is glaring at her. Don’t believe her, madam, she’s always making up stories.

But the three do women listen to Joan, and they do believe her.

So that’s my murder scenario. The poison, of course, is disguised in the mustard.

Who is the victim? That’s always critical in any whodunnit, naturally. Their death is the key to understanding the relationships and the society with which the novel is concerned. Probably he is engaged in research connected with the coming war: something to do with sunspots, or radio waves, or biological warfare. He is clever but not brilliant, garrulous and susceptible to women. He talks too much and certain people want him out of the way.

The conspirators could be rival scientists, perhaps with an industrialist thrown in for extra interest. Or perhaps our man is spying for foreign power that has decided he is surplus to requirements. A proper novelist (not me) would have to work all that out. In keeping with the scientific theme, the climactic scene of the novel, where the conspiracy unravels and the murderers are revealed, would be at the Commonwealth Solar Observatory on Mount Stromlo. Of course, the whole incident must be hushed up. For the security of the nation, everyone is sworn to secrecy.

Dorothy Hill would make an admirable sleuth. After gaining first class honours in geology at the University of Queensland she won a scholarship to take her to Cambridge where she graduated with a PhD in palaeontology in 1932. She loved sport and in her undergraduate days played hockey for Queensland. In Cambridge she gained a pilot’s license, apparently for no other reason than that it was an outlet for her adventurous spirit (that’s true, I’m not making that bit up).

Her more decorous associate, Kathleen Fitpatrick, is initially reluctant to be drawn into the drama, but her sense of justice prevails. It is she who apprehends the chief murderer on that hot afternoon on Mount Stromlo by squirting perfume in his eyes at the critical moment. Her involvement with the case doesn’t hold back her career: in 1948 she will become the first woman to be appointed associate professor in a non-scientific field.

Joan the kitchen hand is taken on by Ann McEwen as Ann’s personal assistant. The four women keep in touch. Twenty years later, in 1959, they reunite to celebrate Dorothy’s appointment as the first woman professor in any field in an Australian university. Ann is too unwell to travel from Melbourne so Dorothy flies her plane down, and they all gather in the Hopetoun Tearooms for mustard and cress sandwiches. On the table they place Kathleen’s perfume bottle and a vase of crimson Étoile de Hollandes. •

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Hirst might have found the idea that anyone was likely to agree with everything that anyone else said as amusing as his sudden prominence on social media. He would certainly have found the implication that anyone could agree with everything he had to say a most peculiar one. For Hirst prided himself on his resistance to the current of fashionable opinion, and he was above all else a fiercely independent intellectual.

I’ve thought long and hard about why Hirst evoked this kind of response. He evoked it in me, too, and in many others I know. Apart from his personal generosity and kindness, I think it was because he wasn’t afraid to argue a case — historical or political — from a set of premises he knew to be debatable. Even if you could not accept those premises — for instance, that border protection was not thoroughly entangled in Australia’s distinctive and resilient politics of race — it was hard not to admire the passion, the fluency and the consistency with which Hirst would then prosecute his argument. The value was really in the case itself which, in his hands, would take flight with wings of its own.

Hirst was not really a historian of the “look at this startling new document I found today” type, although he was certainly no slouch among the dusty archive boxes. He ranged widely but I believe was at his best in writing about colonial Australia — the sharpest of his historical articles and essays on the nineteenth century disclose a raw intellectual power decades after they were first published. He never seemed quite as comfortable when venturing far into the twentieth century.

A South Australian by birth and education, his doctoral research culminated in a fine study, Adelaide and the Country, 1870–1917: Their Social and Political Relationship (1973), that remains the standard work on its subject. But it was the appearance of his Convict Society and Its Enemies a decade later that announced the arrival of a historian of real originality.

In effect, Hirst founded a school of historical writing about convict Australia that is usually — if somewhat simplistically — referred to as the “normalisers.” The convict system, he argued, had suffered bad press in being presented as a form of slavery. Those who had wanted to end transportation had portrayed it as a brutal system dominated by chains and floggings, one that debased master and convict alike. He argued that this was essentially political rhetoric put about by enemies of the convict system; it did not correspond with a more prosaic reality. Colonial New South Wales, he said, “was not a society which had to become free; its freedoms were well established from the earliest times.” Even Robert Hughes, who would later write a bestseller indebted to the very image of convict society Hirst had tried to overturn, could not but admire the persuasiveness of his argument.

Hirst was not afraid to take up some of the big controversies and puzzles in Australian historical writing — as in Australian History in 7 Questions (2014) — or to challenge the orthodoxies created by the profession’s biggest names. So Geoffrey Blainey thought distance shaped Australia? Hirst was doubtful, and he outlined his case to his colleagues with characteristic eloquence in their premier professional journal, Historical Studies, in 1975. Russel Ward reckoned that the noble bushman, the pastoral worker, was the typical Australian? What about the pioneer, asked Hirst in the same journal in 1978; the conservative and patriotic small farmer who was also widely noticed and frequently celebrated? The federation of the Australian colonies was a mere business deal? Hirst wrote a whole book, and a very good one, The Sentimental Nation: The Making of the Australian Commonwealth (2000), putting that one to rest, presenting it instead as the fruit of nationalist idealism.

Hirst understood that nationalist idealism particularly well because he felt it so strongly himself. But I also sensed disappointment here; Australia never quite lived up to his ambitions for it. In these matters, he sometimes seemed like a talented bowler stuck on a pitch — his home turf, no less — offering precious little encouragement.

Hirst did not shy away from the fundamentally political and contemporary nature of historical writing, including his own. But his politics were much harder to pin down than the predictable 2016 headline in the Australian proclaiming him a “culture warrior” might lead one to imagine. He was an active and principled supporter of public education but became a critic of what he regarded as some of the sloppier, levelling versions of progressive pedagogy. He believed in economic redistribution but came to worry about welfare dependence. He thought Australia’s immigration program a great success but was a sceptic about some versions of multicultural ideology. He was a Labor voter by instinct and practice — he had been greatly angered by the dismissal of the Whitlam government — but increasingly presented as a disappointed Labor man. At one point during the Howard era he declared in an op­ed piece that he was a social democrat and therefore a supporter of John Howard!

He was out of sympathy with the libertarianism of the 1970s, a period that coincided with his work on Convict Society and Its Enemies; by his own account, working on that book changed his “bedrock assumptions about the world.” Hirst often found himself sympathising not with the convicts — which would have been a familiar enough stand for someone of the left — but with the masters and others in authority. His understanding, he recalled, was influenced by dealing with a “very rebellious teenager” at home: “I was under siege myself as I watched masters trying to control convicts”: an unusual insight into the relationship between this — or perhaps any — private man and public historian.

Other distinguished books followed: in 1988, the year of the Bicentenary, there was The Strange Birth of Colonial Democracy: New South Wales 1848–1884; perhaps less successful than the startling Convict Society and Its Enemies but all the same an important contribution to our understanding of the development of Australian political culture and one I still use in my own teaching and research. Hirst puzzled over how democracy seemed to have come into being “almost without a struggle” — a claim that has been hotly contested by others in the years since he wrote — and somewhat in the manner of E.M. Forster he seemed to want to offer only two cheers for the results. “But why should we care what [democracy] was like?,” Hirst asked at the beginning of the book, then answering his own question: “because in many fundamentals this is the political world we still inhabit.”

Hirst did not jump on and off bandwagons. A republican out of historical expertise and political conviction, he threw himself into the cause with passion and energy. He served as the Australian Republican Movement’s first Victorian convener and was also appointed by the Keating government to its Republic Advisory Committee. He did not commit himself to republicanism because it was flavour of the month, but rather out of a belief that Australian democracy would be incomplete for as long as its people owed allegiance to the British monarchy.

As he made clear in A Republican Manifesto (1994), Hirst did not see a republican Australia as a break with our British past but rather as completing a decolonising and democratising process he had traced through his major works of Australian history since the 1970s. The Republican Movement’s weakness for glitzy celebrities, however, ensured that the country’s leading republican intellectual would have no place at the table when a convention finally met in Canberra to devise a model for a referendum. The occasion and the nation were the poorer for it.

There were perhaps some complex issues on which he might have been well advised not to tread — the area of family law and fathers’ rights springs to mind — but it was hard not to see the usual Hirst traits in this business; his compassion for a student in distress; the embrace of a cause and a case he considered right; his concern with political and legal authority; his belief that historians should be public intellectuals grappling with difficult things that mattered. He was a frequent contributor to newspaper opinion pages not because he particularly enjoyed the limelight — I never sensed any desire for fame — but because it was part of his ideal of engaged citizenship. He set a high bar for himself in such matters. There was a fierce intensity to many of his contributions to the media. These were invariably delivered in his spare but compelling prose.

The public saw a creative historian capable of engaging a wide audience, as well as a public intellectual who delighted, infuriated and provoked. Hirst’s colleagues in academia knew this John Hirst, but also a generous colleague and decent man. He spent a long career at La Trobe University in Melbourne, contributing to making its history program one of the strongest in the country. He was a committed teacher as well as a highly successful supervisor of postgraduate theses on a bewildering array of topics. Several of his students are now successful history professors in their own right, often with historical interests and political opinions diametrically opposed to Hirst’s, yet grateful for the guidance and support he offered them as young scholars. He also edited Historical Studies (now Australian Historical Studies) for a time.

And the large number of tributes that appeared on the web in the weeks following Hirst’s passing attest to the boards and committees on which Hirst served, even during a busy retirement. Governments from both sides of politics felt able to call on his skills, judgment and expertise. After his work for the Keating government, the Howard government asked him to chair the Civics Education Group and advise on a history curriculum. Meanwhile, a new generation of postgraduate history students at the University of Sydney learned from him the craft of historical writing, just as new readers of his work in several countries can enjoy his bestselling The Shortest History of Europe, published like most of Hirst’s later work by Black Inc., which was a surprising late season fruit of his teaching at La Trobe. It was translated into Chinese, something about which he was justly proud when I last saw him.

I cannot claim to have known John well but our acquaintanceship went back over twenty years, and he was a generous supporter of my career at critical junctures. In later years, I visited him at his home in Coburg occasionally, where we would have a coffee either in a nearby shop or in his and Christine’s front room. I always enjoyed these brief moments in his company.

We last exchanged emails just a few weeks before his death: he wrote to congratulate me on my book on the 1980s, which he’d just read. Having encountered a passage in it on Nick Cave’s “The Mercy Seat,” he had looked up YouTube to see what all the fuss was about. Couldn’t hear a word of it, John reported, but it spoke of his intellectual openness that he had bothered looking. I suggested he try the Johnny Cash cover version. •

This is Frank Bongiorno’s introduction to John Hirst: Selected Writings, published this month by La Trobe University Press. For a $7 discount on the cover price, order here using the code JOHNHIRST at checkout.

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Kehlmann depicts choices made in the grimmest of circumstances, sometimes in the name of art. His central figure is G.W. (Georg Wilhelm) Pabst, the Austrian-born filmmaker probably best known for Pandora’s Box, the remarkable 1929 silent movie starring Louise Brooks as a wilful object of desire who brings chaos and destruction in her wake.

Pabst was an innovator and artist with a particular gift for working with actors. Kehlmann’s focus is a disconcerting trajectory in the life of a filmmaker — once known as “Red Pabst” because of his approach to social issues — who left Germany because of Hitler’s rise. Yet he returned just before the outbreak of war and ended up making films funded by the Reich. What happened?

When Kehlmann introduces Pabst he is adrift in 1930s Hollywood, hampered by his limited grasp of English. He is overlooked or patronised, constantly confused with other German directors and their films, congratulated on having made Lang’s Metropolis or Murnau’s Nosferatu. His only job in the United States had been directing a circus drama, A Modern Hero (1934), and it was a miserable experience. He had no real control over the creative process, and the film was a critical and commercial failure.

Kehlmann allows himself a few liberties. In a note at the end of the book he says that “although this novel is largely inspired by the life stories of the historical G.W. Pabst and his family, it is a work of fiction.” He notes that he invented the character of Pabst’s adolescent son, Jakob (although Pabst had two sons, born in 1924 and 1941).

Pabst returned to Austria in 1939 ostensibly for family reasons. Then, unable to leave, he tried initially to resist suggestions that he put his talents to work for the state. Kehlmann depicts a gradual process of accommodation, an accumulation of quotidian compromises. At first, there is a degree of awkward self-awareness in Pabst’s perception of what is happening around him. “Three times he saw parades: drums and brown uniforms and sharp marching in lockstep. Passersby stopped and raised their right hand, and Pabst, not wanting to attract attention, hesitantly did the same — just for a second, with a jerk of his shoulder, after which he felt soiled to the core.”

He is hardly alone. With bleak clarity, The Director shows how every part of society is implicated in one way or another. Sometimes there is enthusiastic cooperation: the caretaker at Pabst’s family home in Austria is an early convert to Nazi values; the adolescent Jakob is enrolled in a high school that eagerly embraces every aspect of Nazi ideology.

In a chapter called “German Literature” Pabst’s hapless wife, Trude, joins a reading group, hoping for some social contact. Its members, mostly wives of influential men, turn out to be cheerleaders for a Reich-approved author called Alfred Karrasch, and they have a ruthless attitude towards dissent or difference. Trude, who has a better grasp than her husband of their situation, soon realises that she must conceal her true opinion of the author’s latest (to her mind insipid) work. A woman is abruptly booted from the group because she can’t help mentioning incidents and people the others would prefer to forget.

The narrative of The Director is mostly in the third person. It is framed, however, by two first-person sequences that take place much later. A befuddled elderly man is transported from a sanatorium for a television interview about working with filmmakers like Pabst. His denial of the existence of a particular work sets the scene, intriguingly, for much of what it is to come. It becomes apparent in the final chapter that he holds the key to a central mystery of the film, even if he is unable or doesn’t wish to remember it.

Another first-person sequence is narrated by an unnamed figure who can only be the author P.G. Wodehouse. Once again, Kehlmann imaginatively engages with real events. Wodehouse, creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, was living in France when Germany invaded in 1940. He was moved from one internment camp to another, then put up in a five-star hotel and asked to do radio broadcasts about his time in the Reich. He agreed, seemingly oblivious to the implications of his actions. It is through his eyes that we see the premiere of the second feature Pabst makes under the aegis of the state.

Wodehouse is one of many secondary characters or supporting cast-members effortlessly and entertainingly woven or projected into the narrative. Often they are real-life figures, sometimes they are imaginative creations. Among them are Louise Brooks and Greta Garbo: although Pabst played a vital part in their careers, both reject him in their different, distinctive ways when he appeals for their help.

An unnamed Goebbels makes an unnervingly over-the-top appearance to threaten and flatter the filmmaker, and Leni Riefenstahl turns up on a couple of occasions. Pabst had already worked with Riefenstahl as an actress on a silent film he co-directed; by the time they meet again, she has made Triumph of the Will and established her credentials with the Reich. She prevails on Pabst to assist her with her first fiction feature, Lowlands, a work she directs and stars in. It is an unsettling experience for him, but it also foreshadows a decision he makes about a film of his own.

Kehlmann brings to his subject particular insights from his own experience. His father, a director of film and television, was a school student during the second world war and spent several months in a labour camp. His mother was an actor. And recently Kehlmann himself has been a screenwriter for film and television. He is able to create convincing, entertaining accounts of the filmmaking process; he can also imbue certain passages with cinematic qualities and reference points.

The most sustained imaginative engagement in The Director concerns the making of a film called The Molander Case, based on a novel by Karrasch, the author espoused by Trude’s reading group. It is a genuine Pabst work, shot in Prague in 1945, under chaotic circumstances and now regarded as missing. Its production and fate lend themselves to speculation, and Kehlmann does a great deal with this. The movie becomes, in his account, a distillation of all the absurdities, compromises and haunting questions around Pabst and his activities at a time when he was seemingly given the creative control Hollywood would not allow him. The director thinks he can work against the grain, perhaps even create a masterpiece.

Kehlmann has already shown us Pabst’s habit of viewing the world as if setting up a shot, or imagining life in cinematic terms as an unfolding of scenes he can direct. With The Molander Case, it is as if Pabst believes that his creative powers can transcend not only the banality of the source material but also the circumstances of its creation.

The production marks Pabst’s most grim capitulation, but its fate is also the stuff of comedy and irony, with a succession of twists and turns. In its exploration of self-deception, complicity and surrender, The Director is a heady mixture of the compassionate and the unsparing, the tightly organised and the expansively imagined. •

The Director
By Daniel Kehlmann | Translated by Ross Benjamin | Quercus | $34.99 | 333 pagesFunding from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

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Stamps were first issued in England, and as the first country to do so, Britain still acts on the principle that, unlike Johnny-come-latelies, it need not identify itself as the country of origin. (In fact a small Queen’s head is usually found in a corner.) But the tie with the Crown has been more substantial than that.

In England stamp designs have always been shown to the King, for final approval. The conservatism of George V — he preferred the most fustian of design options — meant that he was against commemorative stamps. He seemed to prefer portraits of himself — most reassuring, as he spent three afternoons a week looking at his collection: the empire in miniature. Colonial views began to appear on stamps towards the end of his reign, but his portrait was still there as a medallion, a realisation of Kipling’s “Dominion over palm and pine.” Indeed stamps were very much agents of Empire. Canada, at the height of popular imperialism (1898), issued a stamp with a map of the world, the British Empire coloured red, and the inscription, “We hold a vaster empire than has been.”

Stamps may come to be seen as the characteristic ikon of the British Empire. They first appeared in England in 1840 — and their widespread collection dropped dramatically in the 1960s and then the seventies, just as Britain was unscrambling itself from Africa. When Ghana replaced the Queen’s head on pictorial stamps with that of Kwame Nkrumah, it was regarded by some Brits as a singular act of impertinence.

Most boys (in particular) would have a stamp album, and many collected “British Empire only.” ( Stamp collecting was imperialism in lowest gear.) There were stamp dealers with shops in the CBD; Myers had a philatelic department. A tag of the time described stamp-collecting as “The King of Hobbies, and the Hobby of Kings.”

Many early issues were produced by companies who also engraved and printed banknotes. There was a palpable association with power — “prestige” was a word beloved of stamp collectors. A new issue from a remote colony like Basutoland would score a paragraph in the Times. Particularly prized in Australia were stamps overprinted “O S,” meaning on official (government) service. But apart from their coming from exotic places — overseas travel was uncommon in Australia before the second world war — there was the fact that they were colourful. (A novel by Robert Graves centred on stamp collection was simply called Antigua, Penny, Puce.) We tend to overlook this now, but until the 1950s coloured photographic prints were scarce, and in the cinema most films were black-and-white.

The fall-off in interest is implicit in the above, but a contributing factor has been the way some small countries began to produce stamps not for use, but for collectors. (South Africa went the other way, removing the price of the stamp altogether, so that the service  you bought remained, even if the price subsequently went up.) A number of countries began to issue stamps featuring topics such as Cinderella, rocket science, flying saucers and pop stars. But the young had found other ways of getting their kicks.

Australia was slow off the mark in adopting this approach: in 1955, it produced just nine stamps. But Australia Post has made up for that since. While its services have led to the old term  “post haste” being replaced with “snail mail,” its issues have expanded almost threefold —if one includes the Territories, whose stamps are not sold to penguins but to the public at post shops across the country. Australia Post has become so geared to the market that it now produces albums containing all the year’s issues. The tail has come to wag the dog: since the album had to be produced to catch the Christmas market, the stamps issued for the 150th anniversary of the skirmish at Eureka were brought forward (from 3 December) to November. A morbid symptom of philatulence.

It’s a strange hobby. Imperfections are prized, whether they are flaws in the printed design, or a pair of joined stamps with one upside down… and that’s without going into the mechanics of watermarks, perforations, colour variations and the like. At least postmarks, perhaps more popular than they were, speak of some reality. One of the great enticements of philately is the possibly of completeness: but as remarked by a number of people quoted in the book, a complete collection (of anything) is in some ways a corpse.

Meanwhile stamp collectors, in Britain at least, still follow the tracks laid down by the firm Stanley Gibbons & Co. in London, founded in 1856 by a man who also collected wives. (He had five.) Their famous catalogues lead Irwin to describe it as “the Vatican City of philately.” And, ridiculous though it sounds, St Gabriel the Archangel is regarded as the patron saint of philately and postal services.

People will collect anything — bottle-tops, train tickets and spinning-tops were included in a list by Italo Calvino. The critic Walter Benjamin, while despising  the mechanical reproduction of art objects, could not resist collecting stamps himself. George V was not the only monarch who did so. (On the other hand, rather than seeing them as buttressing his authority, an Italian king had ordered special horseshoe postmarks made, so that the royal image would not be obliterated).

There are real surprises among the list of other famous people who collected stamps: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Edward Said, Freddie Mercury, Prince Albert (Queen Victoria’s husband), John Lennon, Warren Buffet, Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Kinsey. (Lawrence of Arabia was directly involved in the design and production of stamps for Hejaz.) Female collectors have been far less numerous, but they include Ayn Rand and the intrepid aviatrix, Amelia Earhart.

Irwin shows how stamp collecting is sometimes present in twentieth-century novels, usually as prop or plot mechanism. Collections are fought over, particularly at the moment of inheritance, or are present as a kind of security blanket, as in novels by Philip Roth and Graham Greene. In The  Heart of the Matter, Greene has a man about to commit suicide write, underneath a cherished stamp, “I Love You.” The Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and even Samuel Beckett also include references to stamps, but they figure more prominently — as would be expected — in crime and mystery novels.

The Madman’s Guide is exhaustive in its breadth and depth: there are scams and forgeries, people designing stamps of their own, and a passing parade of resourceful eccentrics. Adult stamp collectors have been dismissed as anal retentives, but there is often a desire to save objects, to salvage and value them. The collection created develops its own logic and order, becoming in a way timeless. It is also escapist, a private controllable world, as well as a projection of things past. Interestingly, Irwin points to the way a number of men in their forties return to the stamp collection of their boyhood, and take up philately once again.  As the book closes, he hints that he just might do so himself.

In all, the book is a fascinating potpourri on the culture of stamp-collecting. Irwin sees himself in part as a compiler, and that explains why the discussion of stamp-collecting in literature goes on for a bit too long. But it does reflect the past pervasiveness of stamps. All gone now… though not quite. Classic stamps are still valued, and for some time now have been included in choice investment portfolios. •

The Madman’s Guide to Stamp Collecting
By Robert Irwin | Pushkin Press | $36.99 | 237 pages

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This is not an expedition for the time traveller keen on cultural immersion. But Garland’s tour does offer the armchair adventurer plenty of instagrammable sights and enlightening historical anecdotes. This sightseer was interested to discover that most pre-Christian people didn’t think much about life after death. Many ancient peoples believed the dead inhabited a realm that was “morally neutral” and “punishment-free” but “unrelievedly dreary.” The Mesopotamians imagined a dismal underground world where the dead ate clay and dust. The Greeks’ Hades was generally envisaged as a dark, draughty, cold place where, according to Homer, the dead lost their strength and wits, and Aristophanes (in his play Frogs) suggested you would find “everlasting shit.”

In a notable exception, the ancient Egyptians posited that if the god Osiris acquitted a person of wrongdoing, they entered Sekhet-Aaru, the Field of Reeds, and enjoyed an idealised version of their earthly life. But this option appears to have been limited to royalty and the wealthy. (It isn’t clear, for example, what, if any, role slaves played.) When something akin to the notion of heaven (the “Elysian Fields” or “Elysian Plain”) entered the Graeco-Roman imagination, it too was reserved for the elite rather than the just.

In contrast, a cornerstone of the new Christian faith was that heaven was a place for all righteous believers — and, in particular, “provided otherworldly compensation” for the poor, suffering and oppressed. According to Garland, in an era before ideas of eternal damnation and hell had become a central part of church teachings, the notion of divine union in the afterlife could appear so enticing it prompted some to contemplate “engineer[ing] an early exit.” St Paul wrote:

If I am to live in the flesh, that means productive labour for me, but I do not know which I prefer. I am caught between the two. What I desire is to depart and be with Christ, because that is far better, but what is more necessary for you [i.e. the growing Christian community] is that I remain in the flesh.

The Church worked hard to counter such thinking and “prevent a wave of suicides.” In 452 the Council of Arles declared self-murder the work of the Devil and, a century later, the Council of Braga deemed that suicides would be denied Christian burial.

While he makes forays into the practices and beliefs of other cultures, Garland’s tour of death in the ancient world is dominated by Egyptian and Graeco-Roman sights. (His discussion of Islamic and Hindu death cultures is particularly sketchy.) In part, he is following his expertise as predominantly a scholar of ancient Greece, but also, he suggests, his quest is limited by the available evidence. He draws on rich scholarship in ancient archaeology, funeral inscriptions, literature and art.

It’s thought the so-called “coffin texts” found written inside Egyptian coffins from 2100 BC were intended to help guide the dead through the challenging final journey to the afterlife. A Roman tomb built to include an oven, stone benches and a dining table is suggestive of the ritual of the living feasting with dead family. A Roman law (ca. 450 BC) prohibiting the women laying out the dead from tearing their cheeks hints at rituals of grieving quite different from our own.

Various artefacts found buried with the dead — from crockery, beds and weapons to chariots, cosmetics and mummified animals — are indicative of the sort of thing it was believed might be needed in the afterlife. More than 5000 artefacts have been documented from the excavation of King Tut’s tomb alone. Contemplating the plethora of items buried with the wealthy, Garland reflects “How did people expect to survive without slaves in the next world?”

One grisly finding suggests some didn’t. A Sumerian grave site excavated in the early twentieth century found an unidentified royal individual buried with the remains of sixty-eight women and six men, all arranged in neat rows. More recent archaeological research seems to confirm early suppositions that they volunteered or were coerced into accompanying their master or mistress to the afterlife.

But for all the rich variations in approaches to dying and death Garland canvases, a central purpose of What to Expect When You’re Dead is to underline “the essential uniformity of the human response to death.” Certainly, this thematic, integrative approach draws out similarities across cultures and (sometimes vast stretches of) time.

For instance, in a couple of paragraphs a discussion of festivals of the dead moves from the Roman Parentalia, a nine-day festival held in honour of their ancestral dead, and the Zoroastrians of the ancient world welcoming the fravashi (good dead) on the last night of the year, to contemporary Mexico’s Dia de los Muertos and Chinese companies using AI to create digital clones of the dead for family reunions. The downside of such a panoramic survey is that it can leave the reader feeling rather disoriented. It also tends to obscure the alterity of the past and the peculiarity of the present.

Take one peculiarity. Many of us in Western societies today are preoccupied with the pain of the dying process in a way the ancients — and even our immediate forebears — would find difficult to comprehend. Of ancient Greece, Garland notes: “I know of no accounts of a dying person’s last days.” As Christianity evolved, however, the last days and moments of a person’s life came to be considered so significant that guides were developed to help the dying, their relatives and the clergy respond to them.

Ars moriendi (art of dying) literature, which emerged in the mediaeval period and continued to be influential well into the nineteenth century, gave people a sense of what to expect as death approached and prescribed prayers, attitudes and actions intended to help guide the dying person towards salvation. This response to death was shaped by an overwhelming focus on the afterlife: on the prospect of ascending to heaven or being condemned to the post-mortem agonies of hell, understood for centuries as a place of physical as well as spiritual torment (which lent the need to save souls, particularly those of the young, a real urgency).

All this changed in the late nineteenth century. Paradoxically, as doctors began to tend to the dying and understand and effectively administer pain-relieving drugs for the first time, people — including the devout — became less anxious about the pain that might follow death and more fearful of that which might precede it. One clear and consequential product of this shift was the emergence of the notion of medically assisted dying, a concept that now profoundly shapes public and policy discussion of death in many Western societies. (As I write, the British parliament has just voted in favour of a bill to legalise assisted dying.)

It’s hard to imagine what our ancient ancestors would have made of such developments. Neither the pain of dying nor methods of pain relief (let alone medically assisted dying) rate a mention in Garland’s trip through death in antiquity. As far as we can tell, these issues simply did not preoccupy people in the ancient world. In a roundabout way this brings us to what Garland believes the ancients can “tell us about death and dying and about facing up to the challenge of both.”

It appears that people in antiquity were ultimately pretty sanguine about the whole business. This sentiment is reflected in gravestones found inscribed with the letters NF F NS NC, which stand for Non Fui. Fui. Non Sum. Non Curo. As Garland explains: “[T]hat is, ‘I didn’t exist. I existed. I don’t exist. I don’t care,’ though Non Curo can also mean, ‘I don’t have a care’ or even ‘I don’t give a damn,’ or, in the contemporary phrasing, ‘Whatever.’”

For Garland, “what the ancient world teaches us first and foremost is to respect and relish life to the full.” The lesson is: don’t get hung up thinking about dying, death or the afterlife, seize life and live it up! In this spirit, Tiberius Claudius Secundus observed: “Baths, wine and women bring about life’s decline. Yet what is life without baths, wine and women?” Or, as the Roman poet Horace put it:

Since life is short, act wisely, strain the wine and cut back on hopes for the distant future. Even while we’ve been speaking, envious time has sped. Carpe diem! Seize the day! Put as little hope into tomorrow as you can.

Garland’s emphasis on the uniformity of the human response to death risks obfuscating the remarkable novelty of such sentiments in this day and age. At a time when Western societies are voting to enable people to “choose” death and experts instruct us to think and talk more about dying, it strikes me that the ancients had a startlingly different take on the end of life. These days we are much more likely to be told we are part of a death-denying society and sombrely enjoined to remember that media vita in morte suma (in the midst of life we are in death) than blithely told to carpe diem. As this book amply demonstrates, the ancients did death differently. Only time will tell whether we profit from their lessons. •

What to Expect When You’re Dead: An Ancient Tour of Death and the Afterlife
By Robert Garland | Princeton University Press | $49.99 | 344 pages

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At this point we might ask fruitful for whom, but we’d be jumping ahead of ourselves. The obstacle at that first encounter was Gabriële’s passion to become a composer. She’d secured a place dedicated to avant-garde music in the Schola Cantorum, and progressed from there to Berlin, where she played in bistros and orchestras to earn her keep while she drank in the pleasures of the city and unleashed the creativity of her mind.

She enrolled in courses conducted by one of the city’s modernist composers, who urged his students to “explore abstract sonorities” while paying due attention to aesthetic developments in other artforms. Gabriële was a staunch modernist and Francis, whose imitative, Sisley-inspired, neo-Impressionist canvasses were being shown in all the top Parisian galleries, seemed to have little to recommend him.

For Gabriële Buffet was the classic bluestocking. The future she had mapped for herself precluded marriage and motherhood, and at twenty-seven she was still happily a virgin. Nor was she what a casual observer might call fetching.

“There’s nothing sweet about Gabriële Buffet’s face,” write Anne Berest and Claire Berest in Gabriële. “Her chin, especially, is too large. Her forehead, too. Her eyes are narrowed in perpetual thought, like two coal-black slits beneath strongly marked brows that obscure the colour of her irises.” Yet, they continue, “This woman, neither beautiful nor ugly, is something else.”

And Francis Picabia? “Small, slim” with “smouldering dark eyes,” even then he was a notorious womaniser known for the huge amounts of money he wasted on cars. I’d venture that their improbable union was the attraction of opposites, yet to do so is to make a travesty of that truism. But whatever it was, their story, as the Bisset sisters craft it, raises all kinds of questions. What do we really know about sex, love, ego, parenthood, feminism — and, not the least of it, art?

As it happened, Gabriële and Francis did spend that night together. But it was not the easy sexual adventure Picabia had expected. Instead, they spent the hours talking. He, the authors’ great-grandfather, had never come across a woman like their great-grandmother. He had reached an impasse in his art, he confided to her, but was tied down by exhibitions and contracts. To this she replied: “What you paint should be purely a creation of the mind conceptualising it.” It was the bold remark that gave him the courage he needed.

Gabriële’s intelligence thrilled him more than any sexual conquest could. “Encirclement” is what the Bisset sisters call it. From that moment, her mind became both his inspiration and his treasure. She gave up music to embrace, “without apparent frustration, a career as a maieutic, that is, a sort of muse for the creative processes of others.”

This most madcap of madcap unions was possible, it should be said, by their both being beneficiaries of family fortunes. Picabia sold off his old canvasses and exhibited new ones inspired by Gabriële. Then they dashed off to Spain, where “capricious fate knits [them] together.” As Gabriële herself wrote, “I note these details of our time in Spain… because once we’d returned to Paris, they served for years to inspire the themes of compositions by Picabia that were nonetheless entirely abstract.”

Back home, Picabia threw himself into painting, his fading eyesight propelling him further into the new aesthetic. His breakthrough was Rubber, a completely non-representative canvas:

With Rubber, the fruit of Gabriële’s musician’s mind, Francis Picabia paints one of the very first “abstract” paintings — if not, according to some historians, “the first abstract work in the history of art.” Without knowing it, and certainly without ever claiming it, Gabriële has established herself as a “figure at the forefront of the artistic movement.”

Picabia’s reputation was consolidated in 1913 at New York’s groundbreaking Armory exhibition, which introduced America to Cubism. Revelling in the newfound fame, he stayed on for most of the war years. Fuelled by opium, addictive sex and what today would be diagnosed as bipolar disorder, his output was as enormous as his prodigality. Gabriële, meanwhile, gave birth to the first of their four children. The youngest, Vincent (conceived just before their divorce in 1930, and dead by his own hand at just twenty-seven), was the grandfather the Bissets never knew.

Such was the Picabia–Buffet partnership that divorce never entirely succeeded in breaking their hold on each other. If the mind, as has been said, is the most powerful sexual organ, it could hardly be more so than in this coupling.

The book their great-grand-daughters have given us encompasses their contributions to twentieth-century art and includes a cast of equally intriguing characters, Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire, Jean Arp, Tristan Tzara and Pablo Picasso among them. They both lived long lives, Picabia to seventy-four and Gabriële to 104.

As well as her copious writing on art and her intellectual midwifery to so many artists, Gabriële played a documented part in the French Resistance. There was so much to this woman, it is scarcely possible to touch on it in the space I have here. So it’s not at all surprising to learn that the Bisset sisters will be bringing out another volume to cover the latter years of their truly remarkable forebear.

But there’s something else to consider. Like its eponymous subject, a novel written by two sisters is, in its way, groundbreaking. But is it really a novel? When I started writing them, novels were prescribed as long, linear, fictional works portraying the intertwined stories of a set of imagined characters. Now, thankfully, we have novels that blithely dismantle that narrative arc. There are novels as well about historical figures, and some that mix real people with imagined ones.

In Gabriële, though, the authors also break into their story to tell the readers the difficulties they’ve had in writing it. And if all the characters, including the authors, are real, isn’t this more a biography than a novel, especially with a long bibliography at the end? And does any of this matter if the story engages us? To the French anyway, Gabriële is a roman vrai.

Claire Berest has published five other novels, including Rien n’est Noir, which featured the artist Frida Kahlo. Anne Berest’s widely acclaimed sixth book, La Carte Postale, published in English as The Postcard, is based on the sisters’ Jewish grandmother, the daughter of the fourth child of Gabriële and Francis Picaria. Both The Postcard and Gabriële were inspired by the authors’ search for their origins, The Postcard’s protagonist being their grandmother Myriam Rabinovitiz, a Holocaust survivor.

Part of my interest in these works comes from my own impulse in writing two novels based on what I could learn about my mother’s family. The second also involved the arrival of a mysterious postcard. Encountering the same difficulties as the Berest sisters have, I chose to call that book a novel, changing my relatives’ names and inventing a host of other characters. But again — what does any of this matter? What matters are the stories, and in Gabriële Buffet-Picaria’s case, what a richly rewarding story it is.

For all that, what her great-granddaughters have told me so far about Gabriële Buffet’s life has left me wondering. How could a woman with such gifts and dedication to her art give up everything to foster the career of an exasperating wastrel, however handsome and charming? Just toss it away — not even in her case in a fog of hormones — to a talent arguably far less than hers?

To pose the question might simply mean I’m overlooking the impact misogyny had in her day, even on a spirit such as hers. Or am I guilty of minimising the contribution she made in using her prodigious intellect to formulate in words what the arts have in common, how they fertilise each other and, in the last analysis, their tremendous gift of depth and meaning to so many of our lives. •

Gabriële
By Anne Berest and Claire Berest | Translated by Tina Kover | Europa Editions | $34.99 | 350 pages

The post Something else appeared first on Inside Story.

As they had done elsewhere, the rebels initiated negotiations with their adversaries. “We proclaim Jesus Christ,” they wrote to the princes. “We are not here to harm anyone (John 2) but to maintain godly justice. We are also not here to shed blood. If you will do the same, we will do nothing to you.” They had been emboldened by a portent. A rainbow resembling the one on some of their banners had appeared: according to the Book of Genesis, “the token of the covenant” between God and His people.

While the insurgents waited for a reply, the princes attacked them with canons and cavalry. Possibly 6000 rebels were killed, and half of the 600 who were taken prisoner were beheaded the next day.

These events are referred to in Germany as the Schlacht bei Frankenhausen (“Battle of Frankenhausen”), which is surely a misnomer for such a one-sided affair. But perhaps Schlacht in this context echoes the pre-sixteenth-century Middle High German term slaht, which has been preserved in the English “slaughter.” The forces of the peasants were no match for armies of trained soldiers, some of them mounted, all of them supported by artillery.

The “battle” site is still called Schlachtberg, or Battle Mountain. The steeply descending path to Frankenhausen — the route along which those who survived the slaughter tried to escape — is known as Blutrinne (Blood Gully). Standing on the hill, I imagine the insurgents watching the enemy troops approaching, being taken by surprise when the artillery opened fire, panicking and fleeing towards the nearby town, and being massacred by their pursuers. From my vantage point on Schlachtberg, the 500-year distance from the historical event has suddenly shrunk.

From afar, the Schlachtberg is easily recognised by the large cylindrical gasometer-like building at its summit, which houses a panoramic oil painting, 14 by 123 metres, which tourist brochures advertise as the “Sixtina of the North.” Commissioned by the German Democratic Republic’s culture ministry in 1976, this vast artwork is actually more than three times the size of Michelangelo’s frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

The East German authorities wanted the Schlacht depicted in the style of the battle panoramas popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Prominent surviving examples include Michael Zeno Diemer’s monumental depiction of the 1809 Battles of Bergisel in Austria and Louis Dumoulin’s 1912 painting of the Battle of Waterloo in Belgium. The authorities were particularly fond of Franz Roubaud’s 1911 painting of the Battle of Borodino, which is housed in Moscow’s Panorama Museum.

The ministry approached well-known Leipzig artist Werner Tübke, who accepted the commission but warned he would want to do more than merely depict an historical event, and definitely wouldn’t try to emulate Roubaud’s work. He also stipulated that the ministry not interfere in his decision-making as an artist. Between 1979 and 1981, he completed a 1:10 scale model on five wooden panels, which was approved despite some reservations. But tensions remained: at one stage, the ministry arranged for artists from the Soviet Union to complete the job, at another Tübke threatened to leave the GDR for West Germany.

Tübke’s war: the artist (left) showing his scale model to the East German leadership in October 1982. Klaus Franke/Bundesarchiv Bild via Wikimedia

With the help of a small team of collaborators and around 90,000 tubes of paint, Tübke completed the painting in 1987. It was eventually unveiled in September 1989, less than two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The most apparent trace of the East German leaders’ intentions is the painting’s title, Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany. The Soviet Union’s main contribution was the canvas, which had been woven in one piece at a factory in Russia.

Tübke’s painting is by no means socialist-realist. Inspired by the iconography of late medieval and early modern Germany, it also contains allegorical and surrealist elements; tellingly, Tübke considered Giorgio de Chirico, co-founder of the scuola metafisica movement, to be the most important artist of the twentieth century. Tübke also travelled to the Vatican in 1985 to study Michelangelo’s frescoes in order to “add fresh blood to the whole thing,” as he put it at the time.

Many of the panorama’s 3000-plus figures are based on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century paintings, drawings, engravings, woodcuts or sculptures, some of them anonymous illustrations in pamphlets, others the works of well-known artists such as Albrecht Dürer, Pieter Bruegel, Hieronymus Bosch and Lucas Cranach the Elder. While the painting depicts some recognisable historical figures — Martin Luther, Charles V, Erasmus of Rotterdam and Tilman Riemenschneider among them — most of the women and men are unidentifiable. Particularly prominent are the “fools” who appear in several of the scenes.

Two years before the painting’s completion, Tübke said its “intellectual and emotional richness” would reveal itself to viewers if they were prepared not to think of it as a didactic depiction of history. Not unlike the Sistine Chapel frescoes, this monumental painting invites us to let our eyes and minds wander from scene to scene. And yes, the painting does depict the violence of the Battle of Frankenhausen, but that event is embedded in a magical representation of the universe of early sixteenth-century women and men.

Arguably the first harbinger of the 1525 conflict appeared half a century earlier in Niklashausen in Germany’s south. There, a vision of the Virgin Mary told a shepherd that Jesus wanted all “tolls, levies, forced labour, exactions, payments and aids required of the prelates, princes and nobles” immediately abolished. Thousands flocked to hear the man who came to be known as the “Drummer of Niklashausen” talk about his vision. When the local bishop had him arrested, a crowd of some 16,000 people tried to force his release. Soldiers opened fire, killing many of them. The shepherd was burnt as a heretic.

Revolts broke out in other parts of southern Germany in the 1490s and early 1500s. These “Bundschuh rebellions” were named after the boot typically worn by peasants, which was depicted on the rebels’ banner. One of their leaders, Joß Fritz, managed to evade the authorities and initiate revolts in different places over a long period. But it was not until early 1525 that armed unrest engulfed most of southern and central Germany.

The German Peasants’ War wasn’t the result of a worsening economic situation. By and large, the peasantry was better off than in the century before, although they may have begged to differ. True, they had good reason to complain about the lords’ excessive demands on their labour and produce. But the transformation of complaints and legal challenges into armed rebellion has more to do with people’s changing outlook on the world.

The war was not least a result of the Protestant Reformation. In 1517, Luther had published his Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, later known as the Ninety-five Theses, in which he denounced the Catholic clergy’s sale of indulgences to raise funds for the construction of St Peter’s in Rome. Three years later, in On the Freedom of a Christian, he proclaimed: “A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none. A Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.” The following year Luther was summoned to appear before the Diet in Worms, where he refused to recant. News of his steadfast criticism of the Papacy, and seemingly of serfdom, circulated widely, made possible by Johannes Gutenberg’s invention in the 1450s of a printing press using movable type.

A widespread expectation of impending doom added to a collective sense of nervous excitement. A Great Conjunction — the coming together of Saturn and Jupiter in the night sky — occurred on 30 January 1524, and Venus, Mercury, Mars, Saturn and Jupiter were all in the sign of Pisces between 13 and 19 February. Astrologers’ claims that these unusual celestial phenomena foretold wars, poor harvests and floods, circulated widely in pamphlets.

Piscean prophecy: title page illustration for Leonhard Reymann’s Practica on the Great and Middling Conjunction of the Planets, published in Nuremberg in 1523. Erhard Schön/Wikimedia

When the peasants rose up in different parts of Germany in the spring of 1525, it seemed like a concerted attack on the existing order. Though similar, their complaints also reflected local circumstances. They nearly always demanded the right to appoint their own pastors, the abolition or reduction of tithes, levies and taxes, and the freedom to hunt and fish. Many but not all of the rebels were serfs whose bodies were owned by their lords. Some were comparatively wealthy, others were poor day-labourers. In some regions, villagers were supported by townspeople; in Tyrol, peasants and miners formed an alliance. Even some nobles — including Götz von Berlichingen, the main protagonist of the eponymous 1773 play that made Johann Wolfgang von Goethe famous — sided with the peasants.

Even in the spring and summer of 1525, when hostilities peaked, there was not one war, but many bloody local or regional conflicts in which the peasants targeted particular monasteries and castles and challenged the authority of abbots, bishops and princes. This fragmentation also reflected political divisions within Germany. From 1519, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, head of the House of Habsburg, reigned over the German lands (as well as much of Italy, the Low Countries, Spain and other parts of Central Europe). But while the Habsburgs had possessions in Austria and southwestern Germany, elsewhere Charles’s German empire was a patchwork of territories ruled by princes, bishops and cities, each of them in pursuit of their own interests.

The complex and sometimes confusing history of the German Peasants’ War is magnificently told in Australian historian Lyndal Roper’s recently published Summer of Fire and Blood. Her previous books have dealt with women in sixteenth-century Germany, witchcraft and, in an acclaimed biography, Martin Luther. Roper is not only exceptionally knowledgeable about early modern Germany’s cultural history, she is also a terrific storyteller. The further I delved into her book, the harder I found it to put it down.

Historians writing about 1525 have to grapple with a lack of historical sources to help flesh out the insurgents’ perspective. Peasants didn’t leave behind first-hand accounts — in fact, nearly all of them were illiterate. Much of what we know about their motivations has been gleaned from their enemies’ words or from statements they made when interrogated, often while being tortured. The sources produced by victors and rulers can be read against the grain, but only within obvious limits.

In his 1992 book about the Drummer of Niklashausen, the American historian Richard Wunderli employed fictional elements — always clearly signposted — to make up for the lack of primary sources and draw attention to the inadequacy of the historical record. Roper takes a different path, highlighting the biases of the written accounts, drawing heavily on contemporary visual sources, and focusing less on individual actions than on collective mentalities, emotions and worldviews. She also relies on her readers’ ability to imagine ordinary people as historical actors, and it is this that makes her book so exciting. Without claiming to do justice to her extraordinarily rich account, I will highlight those of Roper’s insights I found particularly fascinating.

Significantly, the rebels swore oaths that turned them into brothers. “Once sworn, that bond of fraternity was lived out in drinking, eating, sleeping, and marching together,” Roper writes. Peasants from a local area or region formed a Haufen, which Roper translates as “band.” The German term, which literally means “heap” or “pile,” conveys a sense of disorderliness, but the various Haufen usually followed a democratically elected leader. They were also remarkably disciplined: Roper found no evidence that they committed rapes.

The movement of these Haufen of previously unrelated “brothers” through unfamiliar terrain brought the men together. “The thrill of it must itself have helped drive them on,” Roper observes. “They felt what it was to be ‘free.’” Brotherhood was offered to — and sometimes accepted gratefully or grudgingly by — miners, townsfolk and even lords and monks. “It was also an emotional appeal, an attempt to lance the potential aggression by offering kinship and love,” Roper explains. “Brotherly love was about creating a Christian world where there would be no division, class or enmity, and where injustice would be overturned by the affective bond of fraternity.”

Roper’s attention to gender issues subverts a romantic reading of the rebels’ fraternity. She goes to great lengths to shed light on the role women might have played in the war, without unduly focusing on a handful of prominent individuals, such as Ottilie von Gersen or Margareta Renner, as some of the current exhibitions to mark the quincentenary do.

Roper emphasises the role of emotions, which she claims have too often been ignored in accounts of the conflict. Thus the peasants’ preparedness to keep going, even after the first reports of the revenge exacted by the lords had reached them, may have partly reflected the elation they were experiencing.

“We know with hindsight that their actions were doomed to fail, but they did not know that,” Roper writes. The dubious benefit of hindsight has persuaded many historians to focus on the defeat and ignore how, at least for a few months, the peasants were remarkably successful, taking control of large swathes of southern and central Germany and beginning to “put plans for a new future into action.” Roper shows how the pillaging of monasteries meant that the peasants gained access to significant resources and were thus able to provision Haufen of several thousand men. To ignore that success would be to ignore how it came about.

Roper debunks the claim, promoted in a couple of the exhibitions I’ve seen in recent months, that the peasants attacked armies of heavily armed and experienced soldiers with nothing more than pitchforks. They had some artillery, they were joined by men who had worked as mercenaries, their military strategies often worked, they were skilful negotiators, and they knew how to get what they wanted through intimidation alone.

Summer of Fire and Blood is a rehabilitation of early modern peasants as smart and thoughtful historical actors. As Roper writes, they are “the heroes” of her book.

Was the German Peasants’ War historically significant? Roper certainly thinks so. She argues that the war altered the course of the Reformation, suppressing its potential to bring about profound social change. Luther, who had seemed sympathetic at first, turned against the peasants and insisted that the traditional order and the authority of state and church be upheld. He also justified the slaughter by calling on his readers to “smite, slay and stab” the rebels and proclaiming such killings godly work. I doubt whether the readiness with which the Lutheran clergy in Germany, with few exceptions, embraced first the authoritarianism of Wilhelmine Germany, and then fascism, could be explained without going back to the 1520s.

Roper also shows how the war weakened monasticism. Hundreds of monasteries and convents were ransacked and some of them burnt to the ground. Then, after the war, Protestant rulers exploited the monastic orders’ weakness and secularised some of those that had survived.

The conflict’s demographic impact was profound. As many as 100,000 peasants were killed. In the areas directly affected by the war, perhaps 15 per cent of the men capable of bearing arms — those in the best position to do the hard physical labour on which rural communities relied — lost their lives.

According to Roper, some of the ideas developed by the insurgents lingered beyond their comprehensive defeat. She is particularly interested in a 1525 pamphlet, To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry, whose anonymous author “supplies a potted history of the tyrants of Roman history.” Subsequently, she observes, the “concept of tyranny found its way from radical religion and political utopianism into nascent republicanism.”

She believes that “the peasant conception of freedom” and their “utopian vision” is still relevant. “It encompassed the environment and the obligations of care we owe to others, our mutual dependence… They did not think in terms of individual rights.”

Roper suggests the German Peasants’ War ought to be termed a “revolution” because of the transformations it wrought and the number of people it affected. I wish she had elaborated, if only because the question of which historical events and processes in German history amounted to a revolution often comes up in public debate. Could it be that the Peasants’ War — “the most radical fact of German history” (Karl Marx) — was the only revolution Germany ever had?

In postwar West Germany, the Peasants’ War has been considered historically significant mainly because of the Twelve Articles, a list of demands formulated in March 1525 by the furrier Sebastian Lotzer in the southern German town of Memmingen. Based on numerous lists of local complaints, Lotzer’s articles “allowed everyone to recognise their own concerns: peasants free and unfree, townsfolk… and miners,” Roper writes. “Written in rhythmic, memorable prose, the demands sounded biblical, and there were twelve of them, like the Twelve Apostles; indeed the document reads at points almost like a devotional creed.”

The Twelve Articles were reproduced repeatedly and distributed widely; many of the 25,000 printed copies would have been read out publicly and discussed in villages and towns. Although similar texts appeared, only the Twelve Articles became known all over central and southern Germany, thereby helping to turn numerous local conflicts into the Peasants’ War.

Contested inheritance: an anonymous artist’s woodcut on the title page of one of numerous editions of the Twelve Articles published in spring 1525. Wikimedia

In March this year, speaking on the Twelve Articles’ quincentenary, German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier insisted that they “were not a footnote in Germany history” but “triggered a movement for freedom that spread like wildfire throughout southern and central Germany.” Memmingen, he claimed, “was the starting point of a mass uprising for freedom and justice.” Maybe Roper’s German publisher agrees, because the German edition of her book, published months before the English original, includes the original text of the Twelve Articles and a rendering into today’s German.

According to Steinmeier, the ideas first formulated in the Twelve Articles were taken up another three times: during the 1848 Revolution, by the drafters of the West German constitution, and in 1989 when the “brave women and men in Plauen, Leipzig, East-Berlin and many other places fought for freedom.” “Remembering the places, actors, ideas and events in our history of freedom is more important than ever in these turbulent times,” Steinmeier said. “[L]iberal democracy is being threatened and attacked — both internally and externally, and with a force many of us would never have imagined.”

In a thinly veiled reference to the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD, the president warned: “At the same time, we are witnessing that those who invoke historical freedom movements are precisely those who incite hatred against democratic institutions and want to allow freedom to apply only to themselves and their peers.” Leaders of the AfD have indeed tried to style themselves as the legitimate heirs of the March revolutionaries of 1848 (and demanded that 18 March, the day soldiers opened fire on demonstrators in Berlin, be declared a national day of remembrance). They have also embraced the failed Hitler assassin Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and have claimed to act in the tradition of the demonstrators who brought about the fall of the East German regime.

Twelve Articles for today: German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier speaking in Memmingen’s St Martin’s Church on 15 March at a commemoration of the quincentenary of the Twelve Articles. Stefan Puchner/dpa via Alamy

The Social Democrat Steinmeier is not the first German head of state to commemorate the publication of the Twelve Articles in Memmingen. In 2000, Johannes Rau, another Social Democrat, marked the 475th anniversary by insisting that the authors of the Twelve Articles are part of a tradition stretching from Amos to Martin Luther King and from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to the East Timorese bishop Carlos Belo. In 2009, Rau’s immediate successor, Christian Democrat Horst Köhler, referred to the Twelve Articles in a speech lauding the writer and former East German dissident Reiner Kunze, recipient of the Memmingen Freedom Prize 1525. Köhler, too, referred to the eighth-century BC prophet Amos, and like Steinmeier and Rau declared the Twelve Articles to be a kind of human rights charter.

Köhler drew another historical parallel: the sixteenth-century peasants who fought for freedom were “persecuted, imprisoned, and killed,” much like members of the resistance in Nazi Germany and “those who fought for freedom in the first workers’ and peasants’ state on German soil,” using the German Democratic Republic’s official designation.

Comparisons and parallels, often questionable, are also a feature of exhibitions marking the quincentenary. The Württemberg State Museum in Stuttgart currently hosts an exhibition, “Protest! From Rage to Movement,” ostensibly commemorating the Peasants’ War. The curators have drawn a line from the protests of 1525 to those of 2020, when tens of thousands of people in Stuttgart demonstrated against the measures designed to stop the spreading of Covid-19, and invite visitors to vent their own fury by taking a baseball bat to a car.

In 1525, insurgents looted Kloster Veßra, a Premonstratensian abbey in the south of Thuringia. Unlike other monasteries, it was not destroyed then, but burned down accidentally in 1939. Today it is an open-air museum. An exhibition mounted this year features video footage of protests by German farmers in the winter of 2023–24 prompted by the federal government’s decision to cut fuel subsidies, as if the expectation that farmers pay more for their diesel is comparable with the rapacious demands made of sixteenth-century serfs.

Lyndal Roper is not the first to call the Peasants’ War a revolution. “Both at home and abroad no one has ever paid enough attention to the fact that there was once a German revolution,” wrote Hugo Ball, founder of the Dada movement, in his 1919 Critique of the German Intelligentsia with reference to the Peasants’ War. That’s still true. Yet Germans readily apply the term to the protests of March 1848 and September–October 1989, and the abdication of Wilhelm II in November 1918.

The attention the conflict has received has also been very selective. Steinmeier celebrated the Twelve Articles in Memmingen in March but didn’t visit Bad Frankenhausen on 15 May this year, nor any other site where thousands of insurgents were massacred 500 years ago. The quincentenary has prompted commemorations only locally, particularly in Thuringia and Baden-Württemberg.

The lack of national attention becomes particularly obvious when the quincentenary of the Peasants’ War is contrasted with the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. Between 2008 and 2017, Germany marked the latter with the Luther Decade, a ten-year long celebration of Martin Luther’s role in German history. More than a thousand events commemorated the birth of Protestantism during the Reformationsjubiläum, the year-long jubilee held in 2016–17. The thirty-first of October 2017, the anniversary of the day Martin Luther reputedly nailed a copy of his Ninety-five Theses to the doors of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, was declared a national holiday.

Afterwards, the state parliaments of the North German (and predominantly Protestant) states of Hamburg, Bremen, Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein made 31 October a permanent public holiday, thereby emulating the five East German states that had instituted a Reformation Day public holiday in the early 1990s.

I can’t recall learning about the Peasants’ War in high school, but I distinctly remember the attention our history teacher paid to Luther’s achievements and the Protestant armies’ fortunes in the Thirty Years’ War of 1618–48. West German friends of my age all report that they found out about the peasants’ uprising only after finishing school.

But when I dug out my old history textbook, published in 1966, it turned out my suspicion that the Peasants’ War is not mentioned was unfounded. Maybe we just took too long to get through the eleven pages devoted to Luther and had to skip the four pages on “Unrest in Germany.” (Half of that text, by the way, is concerned with Luther’s role in the war. It is illustrated with two woodcuts depicting insurgent peasants, and portraits of two knights, Ulrich von Hutten and Franz von Sickingen, and of Luther’s collaborator Philip Melanchthon.)

The early modern rebels I first came across were not the peasants of 1525, but Joß Fritz and the Bundschuh. That was in the second half of the 1970s, in the early days of the anti-nuclear movement, when opponents of a planned nuclear power station at Whyl in the southwest of Germany (and, a few years later, of a Mercedes test circuit) publicly identified with the Bundschuh and flew its flag.

My old textbook’s chapter on the 1525 “unrest” includes the lines: “In Thuringia, a revolutionary movement emerged under Pastor Thomas Müntzer. He wanted Christianity without the Church, a state without authority. Thus, the Kingdom of God was to be established on earth.” That’s the only reference to Müntzer. There is no image of him, yet Luther is pictured three times.

In the historiography of the Peasants’ War, Thomas Müntzer (sometimes also spelled Münzer) — radical theologian and charismatic preacher, dreamer and firebrand, bête noire of Luther and the princes — is usually considered a key protagonist. But assessments of his role and impact have differed widely.

If I had attended school in the German Democratic Republic I would have learned about Müntzer. I would even have thought I knew his face, because it was depicted on the East German five-mark note. But Müntzer might not have looked anything like that image; his earliest known depiction is a copperplate engraving from much later, in the early seventeenth century.

If I had grown up in East Germany, I might also have associated Müntzer’s face with that of Wolfgang Stumpf, the actor cast as Müntzer in Martin Hellberg’s film Thomas Müntzer, produced in 1956 by the state-owned DEFA. The film was frequently shown in East Germany but reached West German audiences only after 1990.

Among the East German representations of Müntzer, Tübke’s is the odd one out. Müntzer appears twice in his painting, once as a preacher and once in the scenes of the Battle of Frankenhausen that are reproduced at the beginning of this essay. There he cuts a forlorn figure: not leading the charge against the princes’ armies but resigned, indifferent to the drummer next to him, a Bundschuh banner lying at his feet.

Refracted by history: members of the Freunde von Anno Dazumal association in May this year reenacting the 1525 march of 300 Mühlhausen townsfolk, led by Thomas Müntzer, to join the rebels encamped outside Frankenhausen. dpa picture alliance/Alamy

West German interpretations of the past came to dominate representations of the Peasants’ War in reunified Germany. Of the three presidents commemorating the Peasants’ War after 1990, only Rau mentioned Müntzer — and only when he talked about the East German regime’s abuse of history. The exhibitions I visited in Thuringia in recent weeks give the impression that their curators wanted to avoid drawing attention to Müntzer’s role.

Roper doesn’t seem to think much of Müntzer. His theology, she finds, “was at once majestic in its apocalypticism and modest in scope,” his rhetoric “a flood of bloodthirsty, violent language with barely a pause for breath.” But she also acknowledges that most of what we know about him is “refracted through the lenses of his opponents or of those who desperately tried later to distance themselves from him.” She also makes the important point that “peasant theology,” of which her book provides valuable glimpses, was very different from Müntzer’s (or from Luther’s for that matter).

Two towns in East German Saxony-Anhalt carry Luther’s name: Lutherstadt Wittenberg (since 1938), where he published his Ninety-five Theses and translated the Bible, and Lutherstadt Eisleben (since 1946), where he was born and died. Mühlhausen, where Müntzer worked as a preacher and was executed, was awarded the title Thomas-Müntzer-Stadt in 1975; Stolberg, where he was born, was named after him in 1989. In the case of the latter two towns, which are also in East Germany, the additional names were dropped after 1990.

No town is named after events or protagonists in the Peasants’ War. Frankenhausen, where the “battle” of 15 May 1525 was fought, is officially known as Bad Frankenhausen/Kyffhäuser. The town was registered as a spa (Bad) in 1927; it is one of fourteen certified spa towns in Thuringia. “Kyffhäuser” refers to the nearby mountains and helps to distinguish the town from other Frankenhausens, such as a village in Hesse. But for many visitors Kyffhäuser signifies the Kyffhäuser monument rather than the mountains.

Legend has it that a medieval emperor — initially Frederick II (1194–1250), but from the nineteenth century his grandfather Frederick I (1122–1190), known as Barbarossa in Germany — is asleep in a cave deep inside the Kyffhäuser mountains, biding his time until the ravens stop circling the mountains, when he will rise and lead a united Germany back to its erstwhile glory. In 1816, the Grimm brothers published the legend of Frederick Red Beard in their compilation of German legends. The following year, the German poet Friedrich Rückert identified the historical figure of Barbarossa as the subject of the legend in a well-known poem: “The splendour of the Empire / He took with him away; / And back to earth will bring it / When dawns the promised day.”

Waiting for the ravens to stop circling: Barbarossa at the base of the Kyffhäuser monument. Klaus Neumann

After the unification of Germany in 1871, the Hohenzollern emperor tried to position himself as the legitimate heir or reincarnation of the Hohenstaufen Barbarossa. In 1896, an eighty-one-metre-high monument with a statue of Wilhelm I at the top, funded entirely through donations mainly from veterans of the 1870–71 Franco-German war, was erected in the ruins of a medieval castle, Reichsburg Kyffhausen, in the northeast of the mountains.

After the first world war, the monument was used to invoke the revanchist “Kyffhäuser spirit” and continued to be a rallying point for the veterans’ associations. It survived the second world war and the forty years of the German Democratic Republic. In 1964, the East German authorities even added to a dome-like room inside the monument a bronze relief that depicts scenes from German history.

But that was a rather half-hearted attempt at repurposing the Kyffhäuser monument. The East German leadership’s response to a monument proclaiming a line of descent from medieval Barbarossa to the nineteenth-century Hohenzollern emperors was to commission Tübke to create an image suitable for a counter-genealogy.

The Kyffhäuser monument is only a two-and-a-half-hour walk from Schlachtberg. When I visited last month, it seemed to be a more popular destination than the panorama museum. But tourist numbers are no longer as high as in 1990, when West Germans were first able to freely visit the East. Much like earlier generations, they were attracted by the monument’s purported role as a symbol of the German nation, rather than by its scenic location.

Between 2015 and 2019, members of the most extremist faction of the far-right AfD, led by Thuringia’s Björn Höcke, chose the myth-laden Kyffhäuser mountains for their annual gatherings. Höcke himself is convinced that “Germans’ longing for a historical figure to heal the nation’s wounds, overcome its divisions and set things straight, is deeply embedded in [their] soul.”

The Kyffhäuser myth resonates with the AfD and its followers because it sees the present as deficient and anticipates the return to a past where those deficiencies will be overcome. Frederick I is also a suitable foil because he died in the Middle East while leading an army in the Third Crusade; after all, the AfD, too, has embarked on its very own crusade against people of the Muslim faith.

The panorama museum never played the role envisaged by East Germany’s communist leaders, partly because of Tübke’s peculiar interpretation of his commission and partly because the regime collapsed within weeks of the museum’s opening. So far, reunified Germany’s political leaders don’t appear to be interested in embracing the building on top of Schlachtenberg in order to neutralise the nearby relic of Wilhelmine militarism.

It wasn’t the German Democratic Republic that discovered Thomas Müntzer. He had already played a prominent role in Wilhelm Zimmermann’s three-volume history of the Peasants’ War, which was published in the early 1840s and informed Friedrich Engels’s 1850 text about the war. Hugo Ball, who lamented Germans’ lack of attention to the Peasants’ War, called Müntzer a “philosopher, prophet and rebel” and considered him the “leader of the German peasants’ revolution.”

In notes dated 18 November 1917, and later published in his book Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary, Ball wrote: “I am now often meeting with a utopian friend, E.B., who prompts me to read [Thomas] Morus and [Tommaso] Campanella, while he in turn is studying Münzer.” The friend was the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, later an inspiration for sections of the student movement of the late 1960s, and best known outside Germany for his The Principle of Hope.

Bloch published the fruits of his studies in Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution (1921) and it was there that I first encountered the sixteenth-century theologian. When I came across it as an undergraduate student, the book was a revelation — and an antidote to the tedious history seminars and lectures I attended.

Rereading the book several decades later, I wonder how much of the text’s expressionist prose I comprehended at the time. Now I am critical of Bloch’s interpretation of the Peasants’ War and his elevation of Müntzer as its key protagonist. He makes the peasants’ self-interest, naiveté and political fragmentation responsible for their defeat and seems to think that the outcome would have been different if only the miners had joined the fight. Although his historical materialism is far more sophisticated than that of Marx and Engels, the book’s historical account now strikes me as doctrinaire. I don’t hold it against Roper that she didn’t include Bloch’s book in her bibliography.

But there are parts of his text that I still cherish. He insists that the 1525 insurgents and Müntzer speak to us. That’s not because we are able to drink Bauernbräu, a craft beer created to commemorate the Peasants’ War, or experience the “atmosphere and excitement” of a reenactment of the slaughter on Schlachtberg. It’s not because we ought to be reminded of them when we think about the drafting of the West German Constitution, Swabian Covid-19 conspiracy theorists or farmers protesting against the cutting of fuel subsidies. It’s because their dreams and deeds constitute a promise yet to be fulfilled.

Historians tend to privilege pasts that can be regarded as antecedents of the present and dismiss the presumed cul-de-sacs of history. The dreams and deeds of hundreds of thousands of early modern peasants constitute such a cul-de-sac. True, some of their ideas lived on, for example among sixteenth-century Anabaptists. But the survival of dreams and deeds should not be needed to justify learning about them. Perhaps Lyndal Roper, too, had in mind dreams and deeds cut short when she referred to “this freighted history” and the “paths that were not taken.”

What’s lacking these days in many Western political cultures is the ability to dream radically, to develop visions for a tomorrow that is more than an extension of today. Pasts that are, in William Faulkner’s words, not even past yet, and past injustices that are not abgeschlossen (done with) in Walter Benjamin’s sense, could animate such visions, particularly when the just world envisaged by a previous generation has not yet been realised.

On 27 May, exactly 500 years after Müntzer’s death, “Am jüngsten Tag – eine Abrechnung” (On Judgement Day – A Settling of Accounts) by Vicki Spindler premiered in the Frankenhausen panorama museum. In this remarkable play, Müntzer, his wife Ottilie von Gersen and Luther meet in 2025. While Luther is pleased about today’s world, Müntzer insists that the quincentenary commemorates a 500-year nightmare. To truly achieve freedom and justice, Spindler lets him say, people need to become each other’s and the world’s friends and guardians; everything would be possible if only they stopped being egotistical.

Bloch and, a few years later, Benjamin called the attention to the unfinished business of the past: Eingedenken. The term is usually translated as “remembrance” or “recollection” (as neologisms work not nearly as well in English as in German, I leave it at that). Eingedenken is keenly interested in the redemption of buried promises, but it is the exact opposite of the far-right Kyffhäuser pilgrims’ regressive turning back, their longing for a return to the authoritarianism of Wilhelmine Germany or to the crusading days of medieval Europe.

In fact, in the quincentennial year, Eingedenken could be a response prompted by attempts either to resurrect the dream of a thousand-year Reich, or to paper over an unresolved injustice by claiming, as Spindler’s Luther does, that all is well.

Müntzer’s millenarian fervour struck a chord with Bloch. He emphatically denied looking back. “The dead come back,” he wrote in the introduction of his book, and he would enable them to continue where they left off. Müntzer was Bloch’s personal drummer, urging him on, the events of 1525 the revolution’s “underground history” that needed to be reanimated. Eingedenken in this sense means seizing the past by the scruff of its neck.

But Eingedenken is also contemplation — in this case, of a defeat that could hardly have been more devastating. The author of the pamphlet To the Assembly of the Common Peasantry had warned: “Listen dear brothers, you have embittered the hearts of your lords so greatly with an excess of gall that they will never be sweetened again… There will be less pity shown you than any evildoer or murderer.” He was right. Tens of thousands were slaughtered by the princes’ soldiers. Those taken prisoners were sometimes tortured before being killed. The executions were horrific spectacles to intimidate the survivors. Some of those whose lives had been spared were branded or blinded or had their fingers chopped off.

Müntzer too met a horrible end. He escaped to Frankenhausen only to be tracked down, tortured for several days and then beheaded. His head was put on a spike and, like the rest of his body, left to rot.

To publicly remember the vanquished — not as heroes, but as men and women who deserved so much better — is one way of doing justice to them. No contemporary memorials honoured the defeated rebels in sixteenth-century Germany. But a design of such a memorial survived. Albrecht Dürer, the most famous German artist of that time, sketched a monument that features a sad-looking peasant who resembles the angel in Dürer’s 1514 engraving Melencolia I, but is sitting atop a pillar, a sword stuck in his back.

Unperturbed? Timm Kregel’s Dürer-inspired sculpture in Mühlhausen. Eckart Wetzel

In 1986, Canadian artist Jeff Wall produced a work he named The Thinker. The title is a reference to Auguste Rodin but the figure pictured by Wall with the sword in his back is inspired by Dürer’s sketch. Two recent memorials in Germany also attempt to realise Dürer’s design: Peter Brauchle’s 2002 bronze sculpture at Nußdorf, which recreates only the figure atop Dürer’s column, and an arresting seven-metre high bronze sculpture by Timm Kregel in Mühlhausen, unveiled in April — without any input from the German head of state.

Kregel’s sculpture commemorates the peasants’ defeat. But the figure atop the column seems unperturbed by the sword — as if to say: “I’m not done yet.” •

Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War
By Lyndal Roper | John Murray | $75 | 527 pages

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Eight of the first ten women elected to federal parliament were Liberal Party members, with one of the remainder being the Independent Labor MP for the Victorian seat of Bourke, Doris Blackburn. Likewise, almost every woman to achieve the honour of being the first elected to each of our nation’s state parliaments sat on the centre-right of the political divide. The sole exception was a Tasmanian, Margaret McIntyre, who was elected to the Legislative Council in May 1948 as a true independent, only to be tragically killed in a plane crash less than four months later.

But, as Wendy Michaels shows in A Battle-Axe in the Bear Pit, her new biography of the NSW record-holder Millicent Preston Stanley, these conservative trailblazers hardly received the consistent support of their male colleagues. That support was even less forthcoming and reliable a century ago — when “Miss” Preston Stanley became one of the members for the multiseat Eastern Suburbs electorate in 1925 — than it is today.

A full-length biography of Millicent, as the author refers to her subject throughout, is long overdue. Not only did she crash through the gender barrier in our oldest parliament and most populous state; as founder of the Australian Women’s Movement Against Socialisation, or AWMAS, she also led a national campaign that may well have tipped the scales towards Robert Menzies at the watershed federal election of 1949 — and thus altered the course of Australian political history. That Millicent did so by deliberately keeping her organisation separate from the newly formed Liberal Party tells you all you need to know about her experience of dealing with patriarchal party machines.

Standalone conservative women’s organisations have a storied history across Australia. Often predating or outliving their male counterparts, groups like the Australian Women’s National League in Victoria and the Women’s Liberal League in New South Wales played an essential role in the broader story of Australian liberalism. It was in the latter that Millicent would receive her initial political mentorship from prominent Swedish-born suffragette Hilma Molyneux Parkes, after whom Hilma’s Network, an organisation designed to lobby for increased women’s representation in the Liberal Party, has recently been named.

But despite the depth of this history and all that has been written about it, Michaels doesn’t establish exactly why Millicent was attracted to the Liberal side of politics, beyond the fact that her single mother somehow managed to move her family “from their various domiciles in the working-class suburbs of Surry Hills and Redfern to a flat in the middle class suburb of Darling Point.” That aspirational journey might be interpreted as an example of the social mobility on which contemporary Liberal leaders like Joseph Cook pinned much of their ideology.

Michaels implies that Millicent’s anti-socialism came from being around the Women’s Liberal League. But it didn’t inspire her to join that organisation, and throughout the book Michaels is clearly more comfortable talking about her subject as a feminist pioneer than as a Liberal partisan by conviction. Indeed, Millicent oversaw a split in the Feminist Club whereby the more progressive members left and formed their own organisation. She even had a physical altercation with radical feminist “Red Jessie” Street when the latter gatecrashed an AWMAS rally.

Michaels’s less-than-full understanding of her subject’s political perspective reaches a climax at the end, when she suggests that Millicent would have applauded Julia Gillard’s famous misogyny speech, ignoring the fact that it came in response to criticism of her government’s appointment to the parliamentary speakership of Peter Slipper, who was revealed to have sent misogynist messages, and was therefore interpreted by many conservative women as compromising the very principles it was supposed to be championing.

But any failure to appreciate Millicent’s broader political philosophy is more than made up for by the fact that her story as feminist pioneer is a remarkable and fascinating one. Despite Millicent’s limited personal papers, Michaels has succeeded in reconstructing that story by drawing heavily on the National Library’s Trove newspaper database.

Most important is Michaels’s reconstruction of Millicent’s childhood backstory, which she appears to have deliberately obscured. Millicent’s father was an abusive drunkard who ultimately abandoned the family, chased an unearned fortune in the West Australian goldfields and met an ignoble end. But Millicent never revealed the arduous divorce proceedings her mother went through, instead insisting that her father had simply died. The divorce did have the unexpected bonus of leaving her with the double-barrelled surname that gave her an aristocratic air valuable in some conservative circles.

This early experience shaped Millicent’s choices and political career. She notably eschewed marriage until she was well beyond childbearing age, a fact her opponents attempted to use against her by claiming she couldn’t accurately speak of a typical woman’s experiences. She nevertheless became a fierce advocate of investments in maternal and child health, inspired perhaps by the loss of an infant sibling who had died of dehydration after two weeks of diarrhoea and vomiting.

Her father’s behaviour also inspired her fervent belief in the temperance cause, an issue that led many women to her side of politics at the turn of the twentieth century. She was a vocal proponent of the early closing referendum of 1916, which created the infamous six o’clock swill, and her decision to join the Women’s Liberal League notably coincided with NSW Liberal leader Joseph Carruthers’s endorsement of “local option” prohibition polls in each electorate. (Carruthers later admitted that the scheme only ended up restricting the liquor trade in suburbs where it had scarcely been an issue in the first place.)

As Michaels documents, Millicent even had an unfortunate flirtation with eugenics at around the time this still-mainstream idea was advertised at the Panama–Pacific International Exposition that she attended in San Francisco in 1915. Her hope was that it might alleviate some of the human misery associated with what many women endured in domestic life.

But arguably the most important manner in which a broken home inspired Millicent to take action was over child custody. This was a time when NSW law still upheld the “father right” principle, under which a man could only be denied custody of children if he had demonstrably rendered himself unfit for “paternal control.” As with modern debates over whether courts have gone too far the other way in preferencing mothers, this issue evoked the deepest of political passions.

The passion was especially evident after a NSW court granted custody of the daughter of English actress Emélie Ellis to her clearly inadequate husband, partly on the assumption that Ellis’s career was not conducive to the commitment required for motherhood. Millicent used this case as the casus belli in her fourteen-year crusade to have the law changed, first through petition, then in parliament, and finally in highlighting the case’s absurdity in a melodramatic play whose opening-night audience included the governor, the prime minister and premier.

Michaels’s description of Millicent’s repeated efforts to have private member’s bills debated to rectify this and other issues is a highlight of A Battle-Axe in the Bear Pit. As readers, we witness her anguish as she must turn down a Labor minister who tried to bribe her with a promise that he would take action in exchange for her vote when Jack Lang’s Labor government held an extremely slim parliamentary majority. Michaels conveys Millicent’s ever-building frustration as she makes attempt after failed attempt to bring about change.

Although Michaels lacked evidence of Millicent’s inner thoughts, Trove allows her to quote myriad other opinions of her subject and her campaigns. In fact, the sheer quantity of views might be taken as a meta-commentary on how female politicians are often bombarded with greater scrutiny than their male counterparts.

Ironically, it was by writing, directing and starring in Whose Child?, and thereby embracing the attention and superficial judgements, that Millicent was ultimately able to win the legislative change that her parliamentary efforts could not. Although justice minister Lewis Martin’s “spontaneous” change of heart while watching the play was clearly stage managed, the publicity given to the show is sure to have been a telling factor weighing on his mind.

Similarly with the mass rallies of the AWMAS and her regular women’s section for the Daily Telegraph, it was often outside the Legislative Assembly that Millicent was able to make her greatest impact. She only served one term; and while the Nationalists did preselect her for the new single-member seat of Bondi, they not only allowed an Independent Nationalist candidate to defeat her but also rewarded him with admission to the party room. Her later attempts to win preselection for the Senate were unsuccessful.

But for all the indifferent colleagues and the general isolation (she was given an office in a parliamentary annex away from where the vast majority of MPs went about their business) there were exceptions that made Millicent’s endeavour more endurable. These included long-time supporter and former prime minister Billy Hughes, campaign manager Reginald Weaver (who would go on to become the first leader of the modern NSW Liberal Party) and of course the women whose cause Millicent felt she was championing.

At a time when the payment of members was a relatively new, involvement in politics was still thought of as an act of public service. For Millicent, it was a true vocation that consumed a lifetime, bringing with it many joys and privileges, but also sorrows and exasperations. We are lucky to have this new record of some of the personal sacrifices that were required to bring us to our present state of relative equality and opportunity, and some indication of the sacrifices that will be required to more adequately achieve the ideals — both liberal and feminist — for which people like Millicent strived. •

A Battle-Axe in the Bear Pit: Millicent Preston Stanley MP
By Wendy Michaels | Connor Court | $29.99 | 250 pages

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When Dunstan’s league enjoyed a brief revival in 2007, the Victorian Football League had become a national competition, but the island state — the source of so many footballing greats — was left off the map. Instead, media deals beamed AFL games into Tasmanian homes, the state government guaranteed funding for Melbourne clubs Hawthorn and St Kilda to play home games at York Park and for North Melbourne to play at Hobart’s Bellerive ground, and local footy languished.

Dunstan once boasted that his organisation had more members than the Collingwood Football Club. Now, with uncertainty over an agreement to licence a Tasmanian team if the state underwrites a new stadium in Hobart, Dunstan’s call to “kick the footy habit” and join his AFL might seem to have renewed appeal.

The new Tasmania Devils team, though, boasts a foundation membership of more than 200,000, almost half of the island’s population. I’m one of that number. But three features of the plan — the AFL’s strongarm tactics, the prospect of spending in excess of $1 billion dollars on a venue marginally bigger than the Bellerive oval across the Derwent River from the proposed Macquarie Point site, and the state government’s determination to bypass established planning processes — have alarmed many Tasmanians, football fans or not.

The stadium proposal wasn’t mentioned in Labor opposition leader Dean Winter’s successful no-confidence motion against premier Jeremy Rockliff in Tasmanian parliament last week. Indeed, Labor’s position appears to have shifted, from outright opposition to the stadium under then leader (and now federal member) Rebecca White to support for an alternative stadium plan, at Regatta Point on the Derwent foreshore, under Winter.

Winter cited three reasons for toppling Rockliff: budget mismanagement, plans to privatise state assets, and an inability to deliver major projects. Winter had his sights on the botched procurement of new Bass Strait ferries, currently berthed in Scotland following the discovery that their Devonport wharf requires extension to accommodate them. For many Tasmanians, though, the issues highlighted by Winter crystallise around the stadium.

Opposition has been led by the high-profile No New Stadium group convened by Hobart lawyer Roland Browne. Objections focus on virtually every aspect of the plan: location and design, planning, finance and governance.

Macquarie Point, the site of Hobart’s former railyards and location of Dark Park during MONA’s Dark Mofo festival, is the city’s last available large riverine position. Future development requires significant site remediation, including relocation of an existing sewerage works. The stadium plan squeezes the structure into a corner of the nine-hectare site, bordered on the northern side by Hobart’s main arterial road and on the city side — looking towards Mount Wellington — by the low-rise sandstone warehouses of the Old Wharf, dating from the early 1820s. A good example of adaptive re-use, the Old Wharf precinct offers a glimpse of the mixed-use possibilities No New Stadium and other commentators see as a better pathway for the entire site.

The warehouses of Hobart’s Old Wharf were built where vessels disembarked many of the 67,000 convicts transported to Van Diemen’s Land from Britain, Ireland and other parts of the British Empire. Michael McShane, my third great grandfather, landed there with his brother Hugh in 1818. The few years prior had been especially tough for the two Derry farm labourers and their flax-weaving families. The demand for flax had collapsed with the end of the Napoleonic wars and advances in cotton-loom technology.

More dramatically, though, the northward drift of ash and sulphur clouds from the enormous eruption of Mt Tambora, on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, had resulted in crop failures, livestock deaths and famine across Europe and North America. Eighteen-sixteen came to be known as the year without summer. The following year, the McShane brothers burgled a house, stealing food and a pistol. Their sentence to hang was commuted, and they were exiled as “lifers” in Van Diemen’s Land.

Such stories illuminate the global historical and cultural significance of this site. But we gain little appreciation of this in stadium planning documents, despite the commissioning of heritage impact assessments. The precinct is overshadowed in every sense by the fifty-four-metre-high stadium. For context, the highest span of Hobart’s Tasman Bridge is forty-six metres. Melbourne’s Marvel Stadium — another AFL-adjacent urban-regeneration project — is thirty-eight metres. Architectural renderings of the structure show how shockingly misplaced and insensitive the proposal is.

Badged as a multi-purpose structure, the stadium would likely involve unquantified cost- and burden-shifting onto the Hobart City Council, which could bear ultimate responsibility for the public safety, traffic management and urban amenity issues that will arise from the stadium’s scale and siting. Like politics, all urban infrastructure is local. The Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, perhaps Tasmania’s premier cultural organisation, has also been vocal in raising concerns about the siting of such an impactful public venue just 170 metres from the Federation Concert Hall and recording studio.

Objections to the proposed location of the stadium also need to be seen in a statewide context. Tasmanian senator Jacquie Lambie and the new independent member of the Tasmanian lower house, Craig Garland, both from the state’s northwest, have energetically supported locating the Devil’s home ground at the existing facility in Launceston. Might this be seen as yet another example of Tasmanian parochialism? Statewide football has been dogged by regional affiliations. In one famous episode, supporters of the northwest-coast team Wynyard removed goal posts at the end of the 1967 state premiership final to prevent North Hobart’s champion David “Dicky” Collins kicking the winning goal.

But the demographic and economic arguments for Launceston are compelling. Almost two-thirds of the state’s population live outside metropolitan Hobart, and Lambie, especially, has repeatedly drawn attention to the cost and road safety risks of attending live games in the south.

All these concerns about governance and decision-making deficiencies call up a history of corporate interests trumping democratic processes in the state. For many Tasmanians, the AFL now joins the salmon industry, Gunn’s forest industries and the Federal Group gambling and hospitality enterprise as political actors, with this recent private-sector influence overlaying earlier state capture by the Hydro-Electric Commission. The state government’s overriding of established planning processes ignores criticism by the Tasmanian Planning Commission and independent analysis of the state’s finances by economist Saul Eslake, and confirms for many a pattern of cosy relationships. As Lambie characterises it, this was an agreement made over a few frothies.

Since the project was first mooted, the cost of the stadium, and the Tasmanian government’s contribution, have risen significantly. They seem likely to spiral further, fuelled by rising construction costs and design changes. Projections of the state’s budget deficit alarm many, but more tangible evidence of misplaced priorities is evident now in the failing public health system, struggling to service the oldest and poorest population of the Australian states.

Indeed, one alternative use for the Macquarie Point site was a new public hospital, as part of redevelopment plans for the ageing Royal Hobart Hospital in the city centre. Development of affordable housing, too, has been suggested, against the backdrop of Hobart’s severe problem with affordable housing supply. It is more likely, though, that the stadium will be accompanied by high-end residences with a promise of magnificent views over the Derwent estuary.

Speaking after the no-confidence motion was carried by the Speaker’s casting vote, premier Jeremy Rockliff suggested that if you couldn’t build the stadium on what he described as a waste industrial site, you couldn’t build it anywhere. Reflecting on the deal struck for the stadium’s construction, many Tasmanians might flip that statement: if you can build the stadium on this site, you can build anything anywhere. •

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Tony Abbott famously vowed to shirtfront president Vladimir Putin in 2014 after Australians were murdered when flight MH17 was shot down over Ukraine and intelligence identified Russia as the perpetrator. The episode of prime ministerial bombast hardly brought justice for the dead but it was a reminder of the longstanding tensions between the two countries and especially their intelligence services, ASIO and the KGB.

Little wonder, then, that after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine the Albanese government moved to reclaim land leased to the Russian Federation since 2008 for its proposed new embassy just 300 metres from Parliament House in Canberra.

Hardly surprising, either, that the furious Russians tried to injunct the move, with a lonely diplomat staging a sit-in until the failed legal bid forced him offsite and back to their old digs three suburbs away.

Equally, it should astonish no one that a country which ignores the world’s outrage at its brutal expansionist behaviour was not willing to leave it at that. Russia is again taking Australia to the High Court. Having paid $2.75 million for a ninety-nine-year lease over the land seventeen years ago, with a peppercorn rent of 0.5 cents a year, it wants the land back or at least compensation.

Russia has hired Australia’s highest profile constitutional barrister, Bret Walker SC, and quietly filed submissions in April, while the federal election campaign was dominating political and media attention.

The Commonwealth filed its response late last week. There isn’t a hearing date yet. But it’s going to be a fascinating case.

This is not the first time the matter has been before a court. Attempts to evict Russia from the site began in 2022 just months after the Ukraine invasion, though the federal government argued that had nothing to do with them. The National Capital Authority moved to terminate the lease, citing a failure to build within three years. Planning approval had been granted in 2011 but construction encountered repeated delays. After Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, it faced international sanctions. Four years on, it complained that the restrictions, including on bringing in Russian construction workers, were causing more delays.

But it wasn’t until August 2022 that the NCA moved to take the land back. Russia went first to the Federal Court, citing the fact that the lease granted “quiet enjoyment of the Land without interruption by the Commonwealth” provided it paid all rates and charges — including the peppercorn rent, within one month of any Commonwealth demand for it — and abided by other stipulations.

On 31 May 2023, the court found in its favour, ruling the termination and attempted eviction invalid.

Two weeks later, prime minister Anthony Albanese announced the government was again terminating the lease, this time on the basis that having a new Russian embassy so close to Parliament House posed a national security threat. Albanese unveiled specially drafted legislation to repossess the land, rushing it through parliament with the opposition’s support.

This legislation is the subject of the new legal case. Russia argues the Home Affairs Act 2023 is unconstitutional. In this, there are potentially uncomfortable echoes of cases past.

Postwar suspicion and hostility between Australia and Russia go back to 1951, when prime minister Robert Menzies tried to ban the Communist Party. Menzies drafted and passed special legislation that faced High Court scrutiny after the Communist Party, its members, and a slew of unions challenged its validity. In what Albanese doubtless hopes doesn’t prove to be a precedent, the court upheld their arguments and threw out the law.

Menzies then went to a referendum, seeking to amend the constitution to give parliament power to make such laws when national security was at stake. The Labor opposition campaigned against the proposal on civil liberties grounds. Menzies lost.

Three years later, in 1954, the issue of Communist influence in Australia flared again with the dramatic defection of then Soviet diplomat spy Vladimir Petrov and his wife, Evdokia. Amid claims Soviet spy rings were operating in Australia, fuelled by the cache of documents Vladimir Petrov handed to ASIO as the price of his protection, Menzies established a judicial inquiry.

The royal commission on espionage opened just ahead of the 1954 election, holding its first hearings less than two weeks before polling day. Labor won an overall majority of the vote but Menzies’s Liberal-Country Party Coalition won more seats and was returned.

The royal commission ran for ten months and heard evidence that Petrov’s papers had named three of Labor leader H.H. “Doc” Evatt’s staff as Soviet sources. Enraged, Evatt accused Menzies of organising the Petrov defections and planting the documents for political gain. The whole sequence led to the Labor split of 1955 and the formation of the breakaway Democratic Labor Party. Capitalising on the chaos, Menzies called an early election the same year. The DLP directed preferences to the Coalition, which was again returned to office — where it would stay through five more elections for another seventeen years.

The consequences of the Petrov affair reached beyond domestic politics. Australia’s 1954 refusal to relinquish Petrov to his former masters prompted the Soviet Union to recall its embassy staff and expel Australia’s diplomats in Moscow, severing ties for what would become five years. By the time Soviet diplomats returned to Australia in 1959, ASIO had bugged their longstanding and heavily fortified embassy premises on Canberra Avenue in the suburb of Griffith.

The listening devices didn’t elicit much — it seems the Russians were onto them — so ASIO rented a room above the funeral parlour across the road and undertook surveillance from there. Having had the same tired old compound for decades, and with that kind of welcome back, it’s understandable the Russians eventually began looking to move.

Deliberations over possible new embassy sites went on for years, with both governments vetoing proposed locations, presumably motivated to maximise their own surveillance interests and kybosh others’. In 2008, they finally settled on the site in Yarralumla, close to Parliament House, and Russia got an ancillary building up but not the embassy itself. Then things soured again.

When Albanese’s eviction legislation passed in June 2023, Russia asked the High Court to put the repossession on hold until it could rule on the legislation’s validity. Justice Jayne Jagot rejected that bid. In 2024, it won leave to have the question of the legislation’s validity referred to the Full Court.

Its core argument is that the government’s legislation lacks the necessary constitutional head of power to make it a valid law.

In her 2023 ruling, Justice Jagot pointed to section 122 — the power to make laws with respect to territories — and s51 (xxix) — the external affairs power — as likely supporting the validity of the Home Affairs Act. She also pointed to s51 (xxxi), which lets the Commonwealth acquire property for “any purpose” over which it has law-making power, provided the acquisition is “on just terms,” meaning there must be appropriate compensation.

In its submissions to the Full Court, Russia argues Jagot was wrong about the application of powers. Among its citations are the 1951 Communist Party case and the recent case in which the Yunupingu family, on behalf of the Gumatj people of Arnhem Land, won the right to compensation for land acquired for mining.

Russia argues the external affairs power doesn’t apply because the government isn’t terminating Russia’s presence in Australia, only its access to that piece of land, and it “cannot seriously be suggested” that this affects Australia’s international relations, notwithstanding the litigation it has generated.

It says the government has presented no evidence either to parliament or the court that Russia was planning “an internal attack” which might justify a national security concern. It also argues the land is surrounded by other countries’ diplomatic missions and such concerns can’t be engaged simply because it’s near Parliament House.

Russia says the s122 territories power can’t apply because there’s an insufficient link to the Australian Capital Territory, given the law doesn’t relate to governing the ACT and isn’t an ACT statute. It says if the court disagrees, and s122 applies, then so must the provision for “just terms.” In other words, either the Act is invalid, in which case the lease stands, or it’s covered by a head of power, in which case compensation is payable.

But it also notes the constitution stipulates that property acquisition must be for “some purpose” and the government isn’t planning to use the land for anything else. It’s still designated for an embassy — it just doesn’t want Russia as the occupant.

In response, the Commonwealth insists the legislation is covered by “at least” the external affairs and territories powers.

It argues the direct connection to the ACT is that the land is located there. “It is hard to see how the connection with the Territory could be any clearer,” it says.

The Commonwealth argues that the legislation’s bespoke relevance to the Russian embassy site and the fact it overrides any conflicting state, territory or federal law gives it “sufficient connection with Australia’s foreign relations” with Russia to enliven the external affairs power.

The Commonwealth agrees it isn’t planning some other purpose for the land, as s51 describes. Though it offers different reasons, it also agrees the acquisition provision doesn’t apply and says therefore compensation isn’t payable. It argues it would be “incongruous” to compensate Russia for steps taken to stop it posing a threat to Australia.

Although the legislation itself doesn’t mention national security, the government emphasises its explanatory memorandum, which says it aims to “protect Australia’s national security interests with regard to land within the area adjacent to Parliament House.”

The Commonwealth won’t disclose the “highly classified” ASIO information on which its concern is based, insisting that revealing it would “be expected to cause serious damage to the national interest.” It says the court can infer the information’s importance from the fact it came from ASIO and parliament made a whole new law in response.

The Commonwealth said the legislation’s urgency was due to “immediate national security risks” if Russia were allowed to exercise its interests over that specific block. Albanese said at the time that Russia could engage in “potential interference” with activity occurring at Parliament House.

“Parliament’s power is at its zenith when it legislates to protect its own security, because if parliament cannot ensure the security of the very place where it meets then it cannot ensure a practical precondition to the exercise of Commonwealth legislative power,” the Commonwealth’s submissions say.

There are still a few steps before the judges hear the case. Any intervenors on the Commonwealth’s side have until 13 June to serve submissions and Russia has until 27 June to reply to what the Commonwealth has said, with legislative references to be filed in early July.

Then it will be up to their honours.

With the court’s politically cataclysmic 2023 ruling — the one that invalidated indefinite immigration detention — still a fresh trauma, the Albanese government will very much be hoping for victory this time.

Imagine handing back the keys to Russia to set up effectively across the road from the PM’s office, or forking out compo for a real estate dispute when Putin won’t even acknowledge his country’s role in the murder of Australians, far less offer any kind of restitution.

The Commonwealth really can’t afford to lose. No doubt the parliamentary drafters are working on a revised, 2025 version of the Home Affairs Act, just in case. •

Funding from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund is gratefully acknowledged.

The post Labor’s Russian embassy headache returns to court appeared first on Inside Story.

After he returned from his nocturnal rambles, the man skinned the creatures he had killed. Then, to the amazement of onlookers, he stuffed the empty skins with padding and sewed them up. The late David Minyimak was one of several elders who spoke with authority about the stranger. After all, he had paddled him around in a dugout canoe. For Minyimak, the ability of the American to alter the dead was branded in memory. They “looked like they were alive,” he said of the stuffed animals. In the words of another old man, it was “like they had a real body.”

At the time of the stranger’s visit, the Iwaidja-speaking people had not yet moved to Minjilang, as the mission on Croker Island is known. In those days, they still lived on or near their ancestral estates on the mainland. Information about the man did not circulate outside the community until the first decade of the present century when it was recorded on video as part of a cross-cultural research project. Close collaboration between Bruce Birch, a linguist, and several Iwaidja speakers resulted in the English translation quoted here.

For David Minyimak, Charlie Mangulda, Khaki Marrala, Archie Brown, and others who recounted this important episode in their local history, the passage of time was seldom measured by numbers or dates. Instead, they used broad temporal signposts, recognised by the entire community. There is, for example, “Macassan time,” the era when voyagers from the port of Makassar on the Indonesian island of South Sulawesi used to come annually, trading and gathering the sea slug known as trepang, which would eventually be taken to China where it is considered a delicacy. Other well-known epochs include “wartime” (the second world war), “mission time” (the time of the missionaries) and “Whitlam time” (the era in the early 1970s when the prime ministership of Gough Whitlam introduced pro-Aboriginal policies that changed their lives).

Map of base camps and other locations visited by the 1948 American–Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. National Geographic, December 1949

Everyone agrees that the visit of the American scientist occurred “after wartime.” In those days, many of the northwest Arnhem Landers were living at Jamarldinki on the tip of Cobourg Peninsula. The maps made by Balanda — the white Europeans — refer to the place as “Cape Don.” After a lighthouse was constructed there in 1917, Aboriginal people began to camp nearby, forming a semi-permanent settlement.

It was there at Jamarldinki that they first encountered the American. He was so different from the men who ran the lighthouse and from all the Balanda they had previously met. For that reason, they observed him with special attention. A small but well-remembered detail is that when he returned from his night-time activities, he had scarcely a mark on his pale outfits. This struck the Aboriginal witnesses as strange because the scrub and grasslands were heavily charred as a result of the seasonal burning. Another strange thing about the visitor was the manner of his departure.

When he left the community at the lighthouse, he walked eastwards along the peninsula and then south to Oenpelli, where Anglicans oversaw a mission station. Although the distance exceeds 200 kilometres, he is said to have walked it in just two days.

The more fantastical elements of the story suggest that the local mob were at something of a loss in trying to understand this peculiar individual. In their efforts to make sense of him, they did what most of us do when confronted with the inexplicable: we try to bring it into focus by reading it through our own cultural lens. When they did this, the people at Jamarldinki came to the conclusion that the scientist was a marrkijbu. This is an Iwaidja term that translates as “shaman,” “clever man” or “man of high degree.”

The marrkijbu is said to possess “a heightened ability to manipulate aspects of both the natural and the supernatural realms.” He has a “special power” to “heal, or equally, to harm another.” A figure of heightened wisdom and judgement, his “clever” attributes can include the ability to foresee future events. For Aboriginal people of that era to identify an affinity between scientists and clever men is anything but far-fetched. In their respective cultures, both types of expert are reputed to have refined knowledge of, or control over, their natural environments.

A 1955 issue of National Geographic gives insight into the origins of the story about the American clever man. That year, the Geographic ran an article titled “The Incredible Kangaroo” by David Horn Johnson, a PhD in mammalogy who worked as a curator at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. In this capacity, he was sent to Australia in early 1948 as a member of the American–Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. While the article is about kangaroos and says very little about the places and people that Johnson encountered as an expeditionary scientist, an earlier National Geographic article by Australian photographer, amateur anthropologist and expedition leader Charles Mountford describes how Johnson visited the Cobourg Peninsula where he made a “lonely walk through the ‘Never Never.’” Along the way, he collected and pres        erved zoological specimens for the Smithsonian’s natural history collection.

Monitored and analysed: David Johnson performing taxidermy during the Arnhem Land Expedition. Charles Mountford/Mountford–Sheard Collection, State Library of South Australia

There are so many affinities between Johnson and the Clever Man that there is no real doubt the story was inspired by Johnson’s visit in 1948. While in Arnhem Land, Johnson carried out a survey of mammals, concentrating on marsupials. His time in northwest Arnhem Land began at Cape Don, which he reached by boat. Like the man remembered in the story, he travelled entirely on foot. He did walk the full length of Cobourg Peninsula and onwards to Oenpelli — something that no white man had done in living memory. However, in contrast to the ultra-marathon attributed to the Clever Man, Johnson took twelve days to complete the journey.

The Aboriginal and Balanda sources agree on several fundamental points. The scientist was a highly competent backwoodsman and he wore pale safari outfits. His own colleagues were struck at how he kept himself so clean. Johnson, like the Clever Man, was an ace marksman and highly adept at tracking wildlife. Most significantly, he travelled with surgical instruments, chemicals, needles and a supply of thread that enabled him to taxidermically preserve specimens as he collected them.

Johnson’s scientific report on the expedition makes only brief mention of his time on the peninsula, although it does praise the hospitality of the chief lighthouse keeper and acknowledge “a great debt of gratitude to many aborigines, some never learned by name, who for little or no reward collected specimens, showed me where to look for different species, guided me on walkabout trips, and tried earnestly to impart some of their profound knowledge of animal life.”

It is disappointing that Johnson did not say more about these interactions, but compared to the reports compiled by some of his colleagues, he is generous in his acknowledgement of the traditional knowledge that informed his fieldwork. There is no evidence that he had any idea of how closely he was being monitored and analysed by the locals. Johnson died in the United States in 1996 and never heard the story inspired by his visit to the peninsula.

The Smithsonian mammalogist appears briefly in a documentary film, produced by the National Geographic Society. There is even a scene in which Johnson performs his taxidermic “magic” for the camera. This sequence seems to have been shot on the mission at Oenpelli, where the meaty spectacle of carcasses being stripped of fur again aroused interest, and not only from a human audience. The local dogs, ubiquitous in Aboriginal camps, milled around the visitor, as did great swarms of flies, harassing him while he worked.

Sixty-two years after the film was shot, the late Joy Williams, the traditional owner of the Adjamarduku homeland on Croker, invited me to visit the island with a videographer and sound recordist. Enabled by Bruce Birch, who interpreted the Iwaidja for us Anglophones, we camped on Joy’s ancestral country and studied the American clever man narrative in further detail. In the process, we showed the historic film to the key tellers of the story. They scrutinised it knowingly and everyone agreed that this was the American scientist of whom they had spoken many times. Indeed, a few seemed to regard it as something of a “told you so” to those naysayers in their own community who had doubted the validity of the story.

Important as they are, the consistencies between the oral account and the textual evidence are less revealing than the divergences, which take us into the most controversial parts of the narrative. A more sinister face of the Clever Man became apparent when he visited a forested area on the peninsula called Madirrala. This is near Port Essington, a fabled site in the history of Australian exploration, for the British garrison that was stationed there for a few years was the end point of Ludwig Leichhardt’s first expedition in the 1840s. These days, it is an evocative ruin. For the local people, Madirrala is a site of extreme danger because it is occupied by a type of hostile spirit known as a yumbarrbarr — a giant creature that eats human flesh. A yumbarrbarr lives inside a tree that is never far from the physical remains of people it has eaten.

Ordinary folk are understandably terrified of these homicidal tree spirits. Not so the clever men of the area who “have the ability to “tame” yumbarrbarr, and to use them as an extension of their own power.” David Minyimak was with the American at Madirrala when the scientist told him that he had seen a “big man” near a tamarind tree and that he “would have liked to have captured him,” but decided not to because of his size. Minyimak and his kinsmen inferred that the scientist had seen a yumbarrbarr. Merely to suggest that he could capture such a foe was deemed extraordinary, and it provided further confirmation that the visitor had supernatural powers.

The towering David Johnson (right) inspects a stuffed wombat being held by a museum official in Melbourne prior to the expedition. On the left is the expedition botanist Raymond Specht. Charles Mountford/Mountford–Sheard Collection, State Library of South Australia

Like several other Clever Man episodes, this part of the story is less easily reconciled with a “factual” account of Dave Johnson’s tour. It does, however, say a great deal about the way ideas and knowledge transit between cultures in a process that is so often pitted with invention and misunderstanding. That said, the story has its own deep logic, being founded on close observation and analysis. The association between the scientist and the yumbarrbarr was undoubtedly reinforced by the fact that Johnson himself was extremely tall.

In his examination of the story, Bruce Birch points out that the Cobourg Peninsula has long been inhabited by sambar deer, introduced from Asia. He asks whether Johnson, who had encyclopedic knowledge of animal taxonomy, could at some stage have suggested to Minyimak or other people camped at the lighthouse that he shoot one for food. Johnson’s scientific report does mention “Indian sambar deer” (Rusa unicolor) in a discussion of introduced mammals. So it is possible that he used the term when speaking to the people he encountered. Was “Indian sambar deer” in an American accent misheard as “yumbarrbarr”?

While that question, like so many issues raised by the story, must remain unanswered, the suggestion in the narrative that the scientist derived both power and authority from killing, manipulating and arresting the decay of the bodies of his prey is highly salient. In the eyes of the beholders, his taxidermy blurred the accepted boundaries between the living and the dead. This led them to draw parallels between his empowerment as a scientist and the powers claimed by local shamans. As an assessment of Johnson, a man of knowledge and erudition within his own society, the story is shrewd.

The business with the yumbarrbarr presages the darkest of all the deeds attributed to the American clever man. No local man or woman would have dreamed of doing what the scientist is alleged to have done during his long walk to Oenpelli. The locality where this occurred was Dilkbany, another site of ancestral power, in this instance resulting from the presence of human ghosts. Their concentration at the site requires some explanation.

The traditional mortuary rites of western Arnhem Land are long and complex, sometimes lasting several years. The body of the deceased is subject to various forms of ceremonial treatment and is likely to be shifted on a number of occasions. In the last phase of these observances, the dry and fleshless bones are painted with ochre, wrapped in paperbark, and interred in a rock shelter located within the ancestral estate of the deceased. This final act involves much more than the physical placement of the bones. As well as being a formalised expression of grief, it is about emplacing and orientating the deceased so that he or she is secure in the process of becoming a dead person within their home territory. In death as in life, people inhabit the country they were born to.

While spirits are not exactly tethered to the physical remains of their living selves, they remain closely connected with them. The bones are tangible evidence of the ancestor, perceptible to both the living and the dead. Despite the turn towards Christian burial, encouraged and at times enforced by missionaries, traditional mortuary rites were performed for at least some individuals until well into the twentieth century, especially if the deceased were considered to have been exceptionally “strong” in their culture. The extended history of these practices means that certain caves and fissures in the rock have, over centuries, become large storehouses of the dead. Dilkbany is one such location.

The narrator of the Dilkbany section of the Clever Man story was Archie Brown, whose own grandfather was at the centre of the sad events recounted. As Brown told it, at this stage of his southward journey the American was walking along a well-defined trail, resulting from activity associated with a nearby sawmill. Archie Brown’s maternal grandfather, a member of the Alarrju clan, had died some years earlier. His name was Marrarna and according to custom, his bones were placed in a rock shelter at Dilkbany. The story recounts that when the Clever Man approached this place, he noticed the opening in the rock where the bones were housed. Marrarna (which is to say his spirit) happened to be standing outside the cave at that moment. Then, as the stranger approached, he slipped inside. The American must have glimpsed Marrarna for he immediately picked up a rock and threw it inside the cave, forcing the dead man to come out. As soon as he did so, the American grabbed him and put him in a bag.

“He carried him off,” said Archie. “It was his spirit that he took. It seemed like a spirit, but it must have been the actual body itself. They headed off. He put him in the bag and they headed for Gunbalanya.”

At Gunbalanya, as Oenpelli is more often known to the local people, the American met with his Balanda friends who were staying there. But he never told them about Marrarna, who remained imprisoned in the bag. The American then left Arnhem Land, travelling first to Darwin and then to his home in a city in America, where he was reunited with the people who Archie Brown referred to as his “bosses” or the “ones who sent him here.” Only then did he remove his captive from the bag. The bosses or other American people who were present took “lots of photos” at this moment. As they did so, they documented an astounding transformation.

A staged photograph of the expedition camp at Gunbalanya. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

“At that point,” said Archie, “my grandfather had already undergone a change. He’d assumed the body of a living man. He no longer resembled the bundle of human remains, the way we put them there. He stood there as a living person… He spoke to all of them. ‘It’s me. It’s me. I’m the one you captured. You took me.’ He identified himself. ‘I’m Marrarna.’”

Then, in a sort of incantation, Marrarna uttered the names of his children and close relatives, as well as that of Paddy Compass Namadbara, the famed bark painter, widely regarded as the last great shaman of the region. That Marrarna should mention him is not surprising since Namadbara, while not his biological relative, was the adoptive or “classificatory” son of Marrarna according to the local kinship system. Brown recalled that the bosses in America were well pleased with the work of the American scientist and they paid him handsomely. He made “lots of money” from the capture of Marrarna.

The Clever Man story draws a connection between the scientist’s ability to make dead animals look lifelike and the rejuvenation of Marrarna. In so doing, it points to the range and limit of the scientist’s powers. There is, after all, a huge contrast between the stuffed animals the scientist tried to reanimate and the vital life force who leaps from captivity to assert his name, his kin relations, and thus his very existence. “It’s me… I’m Marrarna.”

Although displaced from his country (a horrific prospect for Arnhem Landers), Marrarna exerts power at this moment. Indeed, we could rightly think of it as a display of cleverness, for it transpires that in life Marrarna was himself a clever man, or marrkijbu.

An esteemed painter, Paddy Compass Namadbara was widely regarded as the last great clever man of west Arnhem Land. Namadbara and his wife Rhoda were photographed at Mountnorris Bay in the 1970s by the rock art scholar George Chaloupka. Courtesy of Ian White

The Clever Man story perceptively links the gathering of zoological specimens and the scientific collecting of human remains. In its artful and incisive way, the story fills the gap between the mysterious visit of the scientist and the appalling discovery at some later date that Marrarna’s bones had been stolen from their final resting place.

The belief that the American visitor purloined the bones is understandable, and it cannot be eliminated from the realm of possibility since his route went close to the mortuary site. Moreover, Johnson worked for the Smithsonian, an organisation that notoriously — although unbeknownst to Arnhem Landers at that time — had an enormous osteological collection that included the remains of thousands of First Nations people from around the world.

That said, the literal accuracy of the story on this point is far from certain. The acquisition of a human skeleton was well outside Johnson’s remit as a collector of marsupials, which is why he was sent to Australia. There is no evidence that he strayed so far from his area of specialisation, especially at a time when he was already laden with many animal specimens collected on the peninsula. A further and critical factor is that one of Johnson’s colleagues from the Smithsonian, an anthropologist-cum-archaeologist named Frank Maryl Setzler, collected human bones for much of the Arnhem Land Expedition. He would be the prime suspect for the bone theft in the story were it not that he had an alibi. Written evidence shows he never went anywhere near Dilkbany.

While the identity of the robber of Marrarna’s bones remains unresolved (they might have been taken by someone unconnected with the expedition), the Clever Man story again converges with the archival record when it describes the place to which the bones were headed. Setzler dispatched the human remains he stole to the United States, where they arrived in early 1949 as part of a larger consignment ambiguously described as “Natural History Specimens” in the shipping documents.

Something that makes the Clever Man story both clever and cheeky is the way it compresses the expeditionary party into the figure of a single, nameless scientist — as if to remind us of the thousands of Indigenous people who guided, or carried, or collected specimens, or made objects for trade, or shared songs and stories, or, in a myriad of other ways, assisted expeditions down through the centuries, but whose names were not recorded. When the Clever Man story finally gives us the name of a person it is that of Marrarna. Here again, a world of difference between the named and the unnamed is underscored. In contrast to Marrarna’s assertion of power through the declaration of his own name, the skeletons, stolen from grave sites by the Arnhem Land Expedition, were given numerical identifiers when they arrived at their new “home,” the Smithsonian’s United States National Museum. The imposition of those numbers, which were etched into the very surface of the bones, encapsulates their transition from human subjects — known and cared for by kith and kin — into objects in a museum collection.

The need to understand how these mid-twentieth-century bone thefts were tolerated and even valorised has driven my account of an expedition that turned out to be a most quarrelsome affair. Beneath the propagandist blather about good-neighbour policies and scientific mutualism, the project was riven with internal conflicts that were only heightened by a chaotic lack of organisation. Competition between the expedition’s three anthropological collectors, all of whom wanted the best possible “specimens” for the museums they represented, resulted in intra-expeditionary hatreds that would last a lifetime. The gathering of human remains from traditional mortuary sites was enabled by these conditions of conflict, competition and lack of executive authority. Conducted behind the backs of the traditional custodians, the bone thefts showed an extraordinary contempt for the Arnhem Landers who, for the most part, received the visitors with friendliness and good grace.

In order to understand holistically the origins and ramifications of these events, the book reaches far beyond the crowded year of 1948. The timespan covers a little more than a century, beginning with the intellectual formation of Charles Mountford, the originator of the expedition as well as its leader, and ending in the early twenty-first century when some restitution for the bone thefts was finally achieved. In accord with the basic principle, impressed upon me by so many Arnhem Landers, that land, sea, and the relationships among all living entities are our cardinal teacher, I have sought to communicate the social, cultural, and political ecology that created an environment that permitted this expedition to go forth and do what it did.

The great friction at work throughout the history of the 1948 expedition, and so constant through the twentieth century as a whole, is the old and suspicious dance between those who claim to be “modern” and those who the “moderns” classify as “primitive.” The alleged “primitives” are the people who, despite (or indeed because of) that classification, the “moderns” never manage to leave alone. Colouring that relationship between those two peoples is an argument about cleverness: a trait that the Iwaidja storytellers attributed to the visiting American, albeit with a certain irony. When the rejuvenated Marrarna leaps from the bag and loudly proclaims his name and identity, the hapless scientist who thought he had bagged nothing but bones does not look terribly smart. Maintaining “cleverness” in the face of science has long been a strategy for cultural survival on the part of people deemed technologically inferior.

Like other things that are usually hidden, bones are a focus for competing claims about knowledge and thinking. The bones that give structure to our bodies are among the parts of ourselves we don’t directly see. To view a skeleton, we must look at a person who is dead and decayed. Or that was the case until certain forms of technology were invented.

When Arnhem Landers began to go to hospital in Darwin, X-ray machines became the subject of animated discussion. Some people compared them unfavourably with the diagnostic techniques of clever men like Paddy Compass Namadbara, a renowned healer. Namadbara would examine his patients at the end of the day, illuminated by the last rays of the sun. In these conditions he said he could see inside the person and identify the illness. Western doctors were deemed inferior to clever men because they required elaborate equipment to perform this basic task.

To be clever is to see beyond the surface, to know the difference between the shallows and the depths. The concept is famously expressed in the rock art that is especially prolific in the west of Arnhem Land and across the border into Kakadu National Park. There you will find the unique “X-ray” paintings that the 1948 expedition helped make internationally famous in its publications. Such paintings show both the inside and the outside of the person or animal represented. Bones, especially the vertebrae, and sometimes the internal organs are clearly painted. The scientists on the expedition spent a lot of time looking at these paintings. They photographed them and copied them into their notebooks and they collected many examples, painted on bark by local artists. But for all the clever things they did in acquiring and exploiting this knowledge, it seems that the deeper truths inherent in the paintings eluded them.

Who were the clever ones?

That is the question that haunts the record of this expedition. •

This is an extract from Martin Thomas’s Clever Men: How Worlds Collided on the Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land of 1948, published today by Allen & Unwin.

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To anyone interested in Antarctic history and geopolitics, these islands — especially Heard Island with its massive 2745-metre volcano, Big Ben — are well-known Australian territories. Those keeping up with ocean conservation news would have some idea of the Albanese government’s moves last year to expand the size of the marine protected areas surrounding the islands. But most of us, I hazard to say, have scant knowledge or awareness of these small islands in the Southern Ocean. They are dominated by tempestuous winds, glaciers, penguins and seals and have no permanent human inhabitants. Surely they possess no manufacturing plants to which some rapacious multinational had offshored American jobs?

Most likely, some poorly informed political appointee mistakenly believed that the toothfish caught in these Southern Ocean waters is sold into the United States by companies  headquartered on the remote islands. Naturally, the meme factories of the internet (thankfully unhindered by tariffs) went into rapid production. AI-generated images of penguins torching Teslas proliferated, highlighting the absurdity of the announcement.

But is it any more absurd that the Commonwealth of Australia should possess these distant islands as external territories? Heard Island was most likely first discovered by a sealer from the United States in 1853, and American sealers were its most frequent early visitors, although some Australians ventured there too. Britain asserted control in 1910 in legally dubious circumstances and did nothing to occupy the island. When the Chifley government decided to annex Heard Island in 1947 as part of its larger push to occupy the Australian Antarctic Territory, the British government assented despite its legally tenuous title.

For understanding why Australia has territories in Antarctica and the Southern Ocean, Howitt’s book is essential reading. Using a range of public texts — especially newspaper articles — he narrates and analyses the development of Australian ideas and actions in relation to the Antarctic from the late 1830s to the late 1930s. A key year is 1933, for that was when Australia, following exploration and discoveries by Douglas Mawson and other representatives of the British Empire, claimed territorial sovereignty over the Australian Antarctic Territory.

The Southern Frontier carefully considers the ideologies, utterances and contexts of a constellation of political, scientific, commercial and geographical figures. While some have famous names — Mawson, for example, and the great geologist Edgeworth David — the sheer number of less well-known players shows the extent of Antarctic interest in the colonies and, later, the young Federation. For most of the book, this is a bottom-up exercise, not the grand plan of any Australian government.

While Howitt touches only very briefly on Heard Island’s history, he greatly illuminates the larger trajectories and themes of Australia’s preoccupation with and occupation of the Southern Ocean world. This is the first book in generations looking at the development of Australia’s Antarctic obsession in its formative period. Although there is now a rich Antarctic historiography, only R.A. Swan’s Australia in the Antarctic of 1961 has attempted what Howitt does. Swan’s book, like Howitt’s, emerged at an important geopolitical moment: the former, just after the Antarctic Treaty was signed, with a new internationalist era for the continent beckoning; the latter, amid increasing geopolitical tensions and uncertainties.

The Southern Frontier offers a big argument: Australians, the product of the United Kingdom’s imperial project, had their own colonial and imperial projects in surrounding seas. As Howitt puts it, “‘Australia’ is radically larger than the familiar, continental map,” for it includes “two continents,” “three oceans and four seas,” and “a sprawling network of island territories stretching from the Antarctic coastline to just shy of the equator.” This makes his book as much an intervention into Australian historiography as a detailed narrative about Antarctica. Howitt suggests a new cartography of Australian historiography, recognising “a vast Australian archipelago… stretching from Christmas Island, New Guinea and Nauru in the north to Antarctica itself in the south, and from Norfolk and Macquarie islands in the east to Enderby Land and the Heard and McDonald islands in the west.”

Australians have rather forgotten that this country had colonial possessions and has naturalised those external territories it still possesses as merely ordinary parts of the country. While earlier generations were more aware of this — especially in the period when Papua New Guinea was under Australian rule — both public awareness and historiographic appreciation has rather diminished. The language of “settler colonialism” has increasingly suffused public discourse and historiography, but some might imagine that it ends at the Australian continent’s coast. As Howitt strongly argues, “What becomes clear when Australian history is viewed from the south is that the expansion of settler Australia was a long-term, outward-looking, extra-continental project as much as it was an internal one.”

The Southern Frontier begins in the years between 1839 and 1841 with the visits of the great navigators who were, among other things, searching for the south magnetic pole. The colonial denizens of Hobart and Sydney were electrified by their encounters with the American Charles Wilkes, the Frenchman Dumont d’Urville and the Briton James Clark Ross and their crews before and after their forays into the icy south, sharing new knowledge and feeding Australia’s geographical imagination. While others have interpreted the following three or four decades as a period of low interest, Howitt skilfully shows the small eruptions of awareness and discussions in the colonies, whether in response to new whaling opportunities or among the growing scientific communities of the colonies, which searched for new knowledge that might legitimise their colonial intellectual world in the eyes of metropolitan Europe.

During James Clark Ross’ second stay in Hobart in 1841, the Royal Victoria Theatre staged a “new nautical drama,” South Polar Expedition. Victoria and Albert Museum

A more active Australian interest in the Antarctic resumed in the 1880s. In Melbourne, the new Antarctic Exploration Committee gathered prominent citizens and members of the geographical society, holding large public meetings in the hope of generating interest, and therefore funds, to send an Australian expedition. Had it succeeded, it would have been the first major expedition to the icy continent, yet its ambitions were thwarted by an inability to raise sufficient money because, Howitt suggests, of a confusion of scientific and commercial aims. What Howitt illuminates in this story, however, is the language of imperialism evident in calls not only for an Australian “empire of the southern seas” but also for a “Monroe Doctrine” for Australia. This period saw the growth of not only of federalism but also, simultaneously and intimately connected with it, of Australian imperialism.

It was in the 1890s that the first Australians visited Antarctica. The Norwegian-born duo Henrik Bull and Carsten Borchgrevink, who’d both settled in the Australian colonies in the 1880s, were part of the first party to step onto Antarctica in 1895. Howitt’s narrative emphasises how the usual description of these men as Norwegians overshadows the fact that their Antarctic trajectories were shaped in Australia.

And yet, in the first years of the Federation — the very moment when Australia seemed finally to have begun to physically connect with the continent of ice — there came an intriguing and ironic lull in activity and interest. Although an early public discussion in the young Federation was the question of annexing the Kerguelen islands, a French possession in the Southern Ocean, Australian activities took a back seat to the more prominent British undertakings of the Royal Geographical Society. Robert Scott’s Discovery Expedition (1901–04) claimed the attention and resources of the British world, although Howitt shows how Australians claimed this imperial effort.

But Australians weren’t only supportive of Scott; they were, in Howitt’s original observations, highly supportive of all exploration of Antarctica, enthusiastically welcoming the Japanese expedition of Nobu Shirase and the Norwegian expedition of Roald Amundsen — the latter of which had infamously, at least to British eyes, stolen the achievement of the South Pole from Scott in 1911.

In the final parts of the book, Howitt brings us to the fruition of all the communal interest in a south polar empire. Between 1929 and 1931, under Douglas Mawson, the British Australian New Zealand Antarctic Research Expedition was commissioned by the Commonwealth government to discover and claim land. The ungainly name obscured the essential Australianness of the endeavour. Mawson’s proclamations along the coast formed the basis of what would become the Australian Antarctic Territory in 1933.

Across the century Howitt observes three major shifts in discourse about the Australian relationship with the region to its south. The first was the development of a language of “interests.” There were commercial opportunities, principally the exploitation of various animal populations, which Australians had proximity to and could enrich themselves on. The second shift, from around the 1880s, was to insist on Australia’s “rights.” This was an intensification of interests, for it implied that others could not and should not have interests overlapping with Australia’s.

The third shift in the 1910s and 1920s was Australia’s assumption of “responsibilities” for Antarctica. Here Howitt has an incisive take on events. In his telling, these responsibilities were closely tied to explorers in peril and the string of rescues that Australia felt entangled in. The death of Scott in 1912, the challenges of Shackleton’s Trans-Antarctic Expedition in 1916, even the apparent loss of the blundering American aviator Lincoln Ellsworth in 1935 — all generated sentiments of rescue, safety and, eventually, responsibility over this region.

“Responsibilities” remains a potent part of international Antarctic discourse, embodied in various statements and assertions of the Antarctic Treaty parties since the 1970s. Howitt’s careful and critical reading of Australian public discourse of the early twentieth century offers an intriguing precedent to the later uses of the term.

A turning point in the history of Antarctic cartography, this map, published by the Commonwealth government in 1939, attested to the sense of responsibility Australia had for knowing and governing the icy south. National Library of Australia

While Howitt generally frames his book in terms of ideas and ideologies, it is also highly evocative of the material presence of Antarctica in Australia. Antarctica was more than an abstract realm for Australians; it was a world brought to them physically, most often embodied in explorers. Howitt gives a vibrant sense of Hobartians and Sydneysiders jostling to meet with great Antarctic visitors, from Wilkes, Ross and d’Urville to Ernest Shackleton, the Japanese Nobu Shirase and Australia’s own Edgeworth David and Douglas Mawson. He also retrieves fascinating and rather forgotten remembrances of these visits: people who had met and worked with Ross during his Hobart visit remained active for the Antarctic cause in the 1880s and 1890s.

Australians also grabbed souvenirs of Antarctica from the navigators and explorers. When Shackleton’s Nimrod sailed into Sydney in April 1909, one of the expedition crew noted that “every scrap of spare wood and rope was disposed of; every scrap of penguin skin or sealskin; every penguin and skua egg; every small piece of erratic rock, found their way into the pockets of enthusiastic sightseers.” Even puppies born in Antarctica were given to prominent Australian supporters. These Antarctic fragments must surely still be sitting on family mantlepieces or (perhaps more likely) languishing forgotten in cupboards around the country.

Southern Frontier is a compelling book. Some of the personalities, events and developments will be known to those with any interest in Antarctica or the history of exploration. Yet Howitt puts them into fresh perspective, carefully drawing out a world of ideas and ideologies, forgotten and marginal figures, and making new connections between events previously viewed in isolation.

While Australia’s contemporary approach to Antarctica seems benevolent and positive — see the Australian government’s aim that Antarctica be “valued, protected and understood” — Howitt’s book might make many see it in a different light. In 1936 Melbourne’s Argus newspaper asserted that Australia had a “mandate of empire to supervise and explore the land and water stretching away to the south.” How much of that attitude do we retain today? •

The Southern Frontier: Australia, Antarctica and Empire in the Southern Ocean World 1815-1947
By Rohan Howitt | Melbourne University Press | $39.99 | 288 pages

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In his campaign review at the National Press Club last Wednesday, Erickson recalled how “overreach” by Ben Chifley’s Labor government in the late 1940s had “let the Liberal Party back in.”  The electoral lesson for Anthony Albanese — seated right there in the Press Club audience — could not have been more explicit: stay grounded, stay focused, and deliver the agenda you’ve been elected on; don’t lose sight of the people who put you there.

One of the finest aspects of the Labor Party is its historical memory: the way it understands contemporary challenges through the prism of the past — especially past traumas, of which Labor has had plenty (splits, betrayals, wipeouts, destructive ambition, a dismissal). Chifley’s “overreach” — his 1947 plan to nationalise the private banks and bring retail financial services under full public ownership — provides an important chapter in the party’s Handbook of Historical Lessons.

For Bob Crawshaw, reappraising this epic event in his new book, Battle of the Banks, Chifley’s plan shows “how governments can overestimate the openness Australians have for grand ideas, how bold plans need big efforts to communicate them, and that wealthy and threatened institutions always find ways to rally for survival.”

Indeed. Labor must have felt confident — with the successful management of the war behind it, and an economically literate prime minister in charge; with a majority in both houses of parliament and no election due for two years — that it could put in place what Chifley regarded as a critical plank of postwar reconstruction.

The Labor movement, trade unions and (ahem) the Communist Party were exuberant that the party of the workers was at last acting on its platform commitment to state intervention and punishing the banks for their credit-starving, profit-maximising prolongation of the Great Depression.

But the banks responded furiously, unleashing a mass mobilisation of their employees, swamping parliament with petitions, fighting a legal case all the way to the Privy Council, launching a huge advertising campaign and, eagerly supported every step of the way by Bob Menzies’s Liberal opposition, carrying the message right up to the ballot boxes in the 1949 federal election.

Labor failed to listen, ignored the warning signs, stayed the course and went down in a screaming heap; the Liberals held government for the next twenty-three years; the private banks continued their profitable dominance of the Australian economy.

Crawshaw’s account leaves little doubt that Chifley and his attorney-general Bert Evatt must take most of the blame. How else to explain Chifley’s terse, one-sentence press release announcing that cabinet had authorised him and Evatt to prepare legislation “for the nationalisation of banking, other than State banks, with proper protection for shareholders, depositors, borrowers and staff of private banks.”

The announcement landed without warning and without further elaboration. There was no public inquiry, no industry liaison, no departmental advice, no media briefing, no opinion polling and no draft legislation. Critical parts of the plan — how and in what order nationalisation would take place, for example, and how the “proper protection” would actually protect people — were entirely absent.

For comparable shock value, think Scott Morrison’s unilateral unveiling of AUKUS. For comparable overreach, think John Howard’s determination to push Work Choices through the House and Senate. And just as Howard overlooked the trade union movement, so Chifley had not counted on the wrath, or the organising ability, of the banks.

Crawshaw’s account takes the reader back to an era when those impressive Victorian piles lining Martin Place and Collins Street — now repurposed as restaurants and clothing outlets — actually contained banks. Their architectural splendour embodied the banks’ institutional solidity, financial depth and social respectability.

Ten private banks were slated for nationalisation in Chifley’s scheme. In Sydney, the Bank of New South Wales and the Commercial Banking Company, and in Melbourne the National Bank and Commercial Bank of Australia, were the four largest. Four smaller banks operated in Adelaide, Brisbane and Ballarat. Three more were controlled from London: the English Scottish and Australian (ES&A) bank and the Union Bank, which was just then swallowing the Bank of Australasia. Banks owned by state governments, including the State Savings Bank (Victoria) and Rural Bank (New South Wales), were of course beyond the Commonwealth’s grasp.

Together the private banks operated 2500 branches, managed £650 million in savings on behalf of 1.5 million customers, paid dividends to 70,000 shareholders and employed 20,000 people, predominantly male. (Today, Australian banks claim 188,000 employees, twenty million customers and 3.3 million shareholders)

Within days of Chifley’s gnomic press release, eight of the banks’ general managers met in the boardroom of the National Bank and faced their existential crisis. They decided to fight. Aiming to force Labor to abandon nationalisation, call a referendum or suffer the electoral consequences, they retained silk for a High Court challenge, hired media and advertising advisers for a lengthy advertising and publicity campaign, and recruited their own staff, customers and shareholders into the mission of arguing for their jobs, deposits and reliable dividend streams.

The banks carved up the nation into operational areas of responsibility and, as noted by Liberal bigwig Richard Casey, also divided the propaganda work on geographical lines. The Sydney banks opted to stay in the background talking about “impersonal long-range stuff” like totalitarianism and constitutionalism, while the Melbourne banks would take on more immediate and visible campaigning about the threat to jobs, families and farmers. It was a nice early manifestation of the Emerald City/Bleak City divide.

Smarting from defeat in the 1946 elections, opposition leader Bob Menzies grasped the campaign like a drowning man. No longer the gently modulated “Forgotten People” broadcaster, Menzies framed nationalisation as a stark contest between dictatorship and freedom. If it succeeded, he told a crowd in Melbourne, it would be as if Hitler had captured London and hoisted a swastika over Westminster.

If Chifley gambled on having two years up his sleeve before the next federal election, he seriously overlooked the more immediate knock-on effects in other jurisdictions. Barely three months after Chifley’s press release, Victoria’s Labor premier John Cain was caught in the riptide. The Legislative Council blocked supply on the grounds that Labor had failed to protect the state from industrial anarchy and the destruction of private banking. Implausible perhaps, but then again council president Sir Frank Clarke was, unsurprisingly, also vice-chair of the board of the National Bank. (Arthur Calwell nicknamed him “Sir Bank Clarke,” as Crawshaw has it, though surely it was “Sir Bank Clerk”?) Forced to call an election, Cain and Labor were routed.

In New South Wales, Labor struggled to hold a safe rural seat in a by-election, and then lost two more in Sydney in mid-1948; bank staff were prominent in both campaigns. Then there was a referendum! With the High Court still hearing the banks case, federal Labor went ahead with its long-planned referendum on prices and rent control. “No” carried every state. And then Chifley himself lost reelection to his local shire council in Bathurst, which he had served on for years. While such defeats had many specific causes, bank nationalisation loomed over them all like a gallows as the Liberals hammered their theme of socialism versus freedom.

As the federal election campaign approached, the Liberals intensified their effort, with more radio and print advertising and a national speaking tour by Menzies. These were novel in both scale and expense, and Casey worked the boardrooms relentlessly in Australia and London to raise the unprecedented sums the party needed. Crawshaw notes the possibility, but does not conclusively explore it, that the Liberal Party set aside its scruples about corporate donations influencing policy.

Labor’s war chest was “lilliputian” in comparison, with branches urged to organise picnics and bingo nights, and unionists encouraged to “donate” a shilling a week by buying “Chifley stamps” from their shop steward. (The stamps seem to have disappeared from the record and presumably would be highly collectable now.)

Bob Crawshaw is not the first to summarise this epic battle. Indeed, in writing his Battle of the Banks he acknowledges his debt to A.L. May’s authoritative 1968 account The Battle for the Banks. The different prepositions in the two titles point perhaps to Crawshaw’s access to more recent archives, particularly on the banks’ campaign organisation, on which he provides much valuable detail.

But this reader wishes he had gone beyond historical description to explain, discuss, or even speculate about, why readers today need another account of these events. In my view, there are at least three big contemporary questions that could be illuminated by the bank nationalisation saga:

• How can Labor best achieve structural economic reform — without such efforts being shot down as “overreach”?

• How can corporate Australia be involved in electoral politics, in the emerging era of increased market intervention, to protect its legitimate interests — without corrupting voters and parties with the sheer weight of its money?

• And how can the conservative parties contribute to reform in the national interest — opposing, without succumbing to denialism or hyperbole?

On the last point, Labor’s Paul Erickson did offer a history lesson for the Coalition as well as for Labor.

With an admirably erudite reference to the recent Zachary Gorman–edited multi-volume study of Menzies, Erickson said the Liberals under their most electorally successful leader had been fortunate in one respect: they were able to operate without being exposed to an “echo chamber on the right.” The “absence of a populist noise machine” largely insulated Menzies from the electoral risks of populist overreach.

The message for the Coalition, whether fractured or glued back together, is that overreach is not just a phenomenon of ambitious reform governments of the left. •

Battle of the Banks: How Ad Men, Barristers and Bankers Ended Ben Chifley’s Boldest Plan
By Bob Crawshaw | Australian Scholarly Press | $49.99 | 242 pages

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