The Red and the Black was published in France in 1830, some 15 years after the fall from power of Napoleon Bonaparte, Stendhal’s lifelong hero. The novel is a fierce attack on France following Napoleon’s demise, the story of a young man determined to find heroism in those vacuous days, and a lament for heroic times gone by:

‘Since the fall of Napoleon, any appearance of gallantry has been strictly banned from provincial mores … Boredom has become acute. The only pleasures are reading and agriculture.’

The hero of The Red and the Black, Julien Sorel, is a young man with a ‘mad passion for Bonaparte’. Inspired by Napoleon, Julien dreams of rising to the glorious heights of French society from his meagre peasant origins. Handsome, proud and overly sensitive, driven by passion and ambition like Napoleon, Julien is convinced a great destiny awaits him. Unlike his older brothers who work in their father’s sawmill, Julien learns to read and write. His prodigious memory and astonishing ability to quote entire passages from the New Testament in Latin secure him his first job, as tutor to the sons of the Mayor of Verrieres, an imaginary town in the foothills of the Jura Mountains where Julien grows up.

Julien soon realises that in post-Napoleonic France the surest path to success for a poor peasant boy is the priesthood, just as the military had been in Napoleon’s day: ‘All right then! he said to himself, laughing like Mephistopheles, I’ve got more intelligence than they have; I can pick the right uniform for my century. And he felt a resurgence of ambition and attachment for the robes of the priesthood.’

But the Church and its uniform are not the only weapons in Julien’s arsenal for his assault on society. He uses another equally potent one: seduction. While struggling with the demands of the priesthood, including the hypocrisy it requires, Julien plans to advance by seducing beautiful, powerful women. Just as his heroes use their intelligence, looks, passion and energy as weapons, Julien intends to do the same.

Stendhal based The Red and the Black on two contemporary court cases he read about in one of his favourite journals, which recorded daily court proceedings. The journal’s extraordinary tales of extreme crimes of passion among ordinary people convinced Stendhal that the energy, passion and imagination required for the future of France lay not in the hands of aristocrats and the bourgeoisie but in those of the workers and peasants like Julien Sorel.

At every turn on Julien’s faltering path to success, he chooses imagination over bland materialism. ‘Like Hercules he found himself with a choice – not between vice and virtue, but between the unrelieved mediocrity of guaranteed well-being, and all the heroic dreams of his youth.’ At the same time, however, Julien wonders if he has what it takes for success, worries that his need to earn a living will exhaust him before he’s achieved glory: ‘I’m not made of the stuff of great men, since I’m afraid that eight years spent earning my living may drain me of the sublime energy which gets extraordinary feats accomplished.’

As well as being a sensitive portrayal of a new kind of hero, The Red and the Black is a brilliant satirical portrait of French society. Stendhal writes fiercely of his contemporary world, the post-Napoleonic reign of the reactionary Charles X. Stendhal lived in Paris from November 1821 to November 1830, and his novel is based on first-hand experience of the corruption, hypocrisy and self-interest that prevailed. In a scene that could come from Yes, Prime Minister, the counter-revolutionary French aristocrats plot the invasion of their own nation, France:

‘Foreign kings will only listen to you when you announce the presence of twenty thousand gentlemen ready to take up arms to open the gates of France to them. Guaranteeing this support is a burden, you’ll tell me; gentlemen, our heads remain on our shoulders at this price.’

Stendhal’s social commentary is astute. He understands the power of the priesthood and perhaps too the dawning power of the press: ‘Yet men like this [priests] are the only moral teachers available to the common people, and how would the latter fare without them? Will newspapers succeed in replacing priests?’ He also diagnoses the symptom of the increasingly influential new class, the bourgeoisie, which will so nauseate Flaubert: ‘BRINGING IN MONEY: this is the key phrase which settles everything in Verrieres.’

Balzac commented that Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (1839) ‘often contains a whole book in a single page’, and so it is with The Red and the Black. Stendhal writes with such urgency, cramming his pages with such remarkable, breathtakingly unexpected events, that his novel encompasses the length and breadth of a whole society. His chatty narrator often breaks from the story to engage directly with the reader, discussing current fashions, politics, mores and modes of thought, which gives the novel a topical immediacy that was unheard of in Stendhal’s day:

‘in Paris, love is born of fiction. The young tutor and his shy mistress would have found three or four novels, and even couplets from the Theatre de Madame, clarifying their situation. The novels would have outlined for them the roles they had to play, and given them a model to imitate.’

Stendhal was born Marie-Henri Beyle in Grenoble in 1783. His beloved mother died when he was seven and he was left in the care of his domineering father, a barrister in Grenoble’s high court of justice. As soon as he could, Stendhal left Grenoble for Paris to seek his fortune and escape his father, whom he resented.

Stendhal arrived in Paris at a fateful moment: in 1799, the day after Napoleon Bonaparte took power with the coup d’etat of 18 Brumaire. Napoleon was to be the shaping force not only of the age but of Stendhal’s life and novels. Stendhal had shown an interest in literature and mathematics, and his father expected him to go to Paris’s Ecole Polytechnique. Instead, Stendhal was taken up by his father’s cousin Noel Daru and his sons Pierre and Martial, powerful members of Napoleon’s bureaucracy. Pierre and Martial educated their provincial relative in the ways of a Parisian dandy and found him a position as a clerk in Napoleon’s Ministry of War. When Napoleon decided to attack the Austrians in Italy, Stendhal was offered a commission and travelled through the Alps to join Napoleon’s army. There he discovered the pleasures of Italian culture, especially in Milan, and the hardships of military life. His dreams of a noble military career were dashed by the coarseness of soldiers and in 1802, aged 19, Stendhal returned to Paris and began to write.

In Paris Stendhal was given one of the top government positions in the empire and mixed with the cream of Parisian society, including Napoleon’s sisters, Mme de Stael, Mme Recamier, Prince Metternich and the painter Jacques-Louis David. He even had an audience with the empress, Marie-Louise, before joining Napoleon’s army on its invasion of Russia, where he witnessed the burning of Moscow.

When Napoleon was defeated in 1814, Stendhal could not bring himself to live in Restoration France, so he settled in Milan. Here he published his first books on art, music and travel, under the pseudonym ‘Alexandre Cesar Bombet’. In the climate of fear and opportunism in France at the time, spies and counterfeit activities were rife. Beyle himself adopted about 200 different names, including ‘William Crocodile’, and finally settled with ‘Stendhal’ for his novels, a name that he’d used for the first time in 1817 when he published his first travel book Rome, Naples and Florence in 1817. Stendhal, who never married, had many affairs and fell madly in love with Metilde Dembowski in Milan in 1818. His unrequited passion for her haunted him for the rest of his life.

Stendhal left Milan in 1821 and returned to Paris, where his sharp intellect and original wit were much celebrated in the salons. His first novel, Armance, was published in 1827. Three years later, aged 47, he published The Red and the Black, dedicated ‘To the Happy Few’. The ‘happy few’ were the small group of people who espoused the view of life Stendhal named ‘beylism’, those who believed in the value of passion, energy and originality, who constantly questioned the customs and codes of the day while appearing to conform to them, in order to be happy.

Following the July Revolution of 1830 and the ascendancy of ‘the bourgeois monarch’ Louis-Philippe, Stendhal was appointed French consul in the port of Civitavecchia in the Papal States. He eventually returned to Paris due to ill-health – probably syphilis – and in 1842, after dining with the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Stendhal collapsed in the street and died soon after. His self-composed epitaph was: ‘He lived, He wrote, He loved.’

Stendhal predicted that his work would not be appreciated for another fifty years. His novels, with their penetrating, ironic portraits of contemporary society, were shocking in his day and his genius was not widely appreciated until after his death. Many later writers of the 19th and 20th centuries were influenced by his vision, including Nietzsche, Proust and Camus. In his novel Vertigo (published in English in 1999), the German writer WG Sebald draws on Beyle’s recollections of his youthful military adventures in Napoleon’s army. The opening section of the novel is called ‘Beyle, or Love is a Madness Most Discreet’.

The widely documented ‘Stendhal syndrome’ is named after Stendhal’s ecstatic, hallucinatory response to the frescoes in a chapel of the church of Santa Croce in Florence, about which he wrote: ‘Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … Everything spoke so vividly to my soul.’ From the early 19th century on there have been many stories of people fainting before the beautiful art of Florence, but the syndrome was only named in 1979 by Italian psychiatrist Dr Graziella Magherini (at the time, chief of psychiatry at Florence’s Santa Maria Nuova Hospital), who saw over 100 cases of the syndrome, ranging from panic attacks to cases of madness that lasted days.

Cross-posted from bookish girl.

Now, I am a fan of Nancy Huston, and I want to get that straight off the bat before I get into a discussion of her most recent novel, Infrared. She’s had a successful career prior to its publication, and was nominated for an Orange Prize for her book Fault Lines, a fabulous work considering family history via a jumping path of ancestry going back four generations, presented in reverse chronology. Despite the unusual presentation and my typical dislike of gimmicks of this nature, Fault Lines was a triumph that intrigued, compelled, and repulsed me at various times. A history of a family, it’s also a story of politics, identity, and history itself. And despite what I found an unpromising beginning, it completely sucked me in.

Which is possibly why I found Infrared to be such a disappointment.

Whereas Fault Lines tells a small part of history through a single family, Infrared traces the experiences of one woman, her elderly father, and his new wife, as they travel through Florence together on what is meant to be a tour of art and history. Frequently frustrated by the slow pace of her father and stepmother (an agonising series of delays and excuses that will irritate the reader as much as the narrator), Rena indulges in frequent fantasies of her lover waiting at home, while photographing things that strike her as beautiful. Perhaps it’s the difficulty of describing visual effects in words, but while I appreciated her desire to photograph only things she could love, rather than take banal holiday snaps, Rena’s descriptions of visual arts, including her own photographs and the art she sees along the way to inspire her, falls flat. Which is a terrible pity, because much of the art is sensational, and Rena’s knowledge of it clearly runs deep.

At the same time, much of the novel deals with Rena’s sexual history, including her sexual awakening, and her teenage knowledge of an affair of her father’s that was eventually to destroy her parent’s marriage. This is clearly tied into her current relationships and perceptions of sex, and while there’s enough sensual material to interest most, I found myself unenthralled by her preoccupation with sex, including with her current young paramour Aziz. Maybe you have to be heterosexual to get the appeal, but I certainly could have done without the visuals of blowjobs, no matter how much she enjoyed giving them.

Where the novel does come into its own is in describing the mood and scene of Italy, a country that feels like it is perpetually caught in the middle ages, growing olives and grapes. It is possible to feel the languidness that seeps into one when driving the hills of Italy in the hot sun, knowing there’s the potential for a few glasses of wine and a siesta with lunch. In the final stages of the novel, there’s more consideration of this lazy holiday feeling, strongly contrasted with an awareness of growing political complications elsewhere. Honestly I would have enjoyed more focus on the laziness of Italy. The jumping back and forth in time and place, adult and childhood memory, and out loud conversations versus those Rena carries on in her head all make the novel hard work. Which is a pity, because I really wanted to love it.

Aboriginal people are far more written about than heard, more often the subject of journalistic, medical, sociological, anthropological, and fictional narratives than the author. White society has a way of asking what role Indigenous people might play in ‘our’ narrative, even when that narrative purports to be inclusive and generous. When we look for an Indigenous narrative, all too often it is written by and for whites.

Nothing could situate us better in this history of absent voices than Bruce Pascoe’s acerbic, witty essay about the missing black characters in Australian novels, ‘Rearranging the Dead Cat’, an essay arising from passionate discussion at last year’s Aboriginal Writers and Educators Conference. Pascoe exposes the embarrassing silences at the heart of some of our most treasured stories, including Cloudstreet: ‘Winton’s great get out of jail card for Australia was that all of the black characters are dead. You don’t have to deal with them, it’s sufficient to re-invent their dreams!’

There is nothing dead about the voices in this special edition of Southerly, which contribute much to the ongoing conversations about Indigenous identity.

Identity is a slippery fish, and there is no one Aboriginal voice. Last year’s case against Andrew Bolt was a victory against vilification, but also a victory for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people’s rights to carve out, create and manipulate their own identities. That site of tension is represented here by short statements from Anita Heiss and Larissa Berendt.

It may come as a shock to realise that this is the first edition of an Australian literary journal composed entirely of Indigenous authors, edited by two of Australia’s finest. While there are increasing numbers of anthologies such as the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, covering over 200 years of writing, and the NT anthology This country anytime anywhere (IAD Press) there is something in the journal format which is inherently conversational, less static; a good journal can be a subversive encounter.

Ali Cobby Eckermann, a Nunga author and rising star of Australian poetry, and Lionel Fogarty, a Murri man who has been writing and publishing for thirty years and been a long-time campaigner for social justice, are something of an editorial dream team. Given the near impossible task of representing contemporary Aboriginality, spread as it is over countries, generations, urban and regional cultures, and languages, they have erred on the side of diversity. Here we find people from twenty-five language groups, young and old, established and emerging. There are traditional stories, stories from the bush and the city. Most of the work is realist, and much of it deeply moving.

There are essays on history, culture, and trauma; Alex Bond’s reinstatement of Dali’pie the Statesman and Joy Makepeace’s reflective essay are highlights. There are narratives of loss, of mourning, and explorations of healing; Vicky Roach’s heartbreaking poem for her lost friend Jap was not the only piece which brought tears to my eyes. There are song lyrics and poetry, encounters with mental illness, prison, addiction, death and violence. There are also moments of humour and delight. An extract from Dylan Coleman’s Unaipon-award-winning book had me giggling with the Mission girls over their Christmas presents and the absurdity of belief. The representation of older writers’ voices is strong, and respect is also given to lost elders Ruby Langford Ginibi and Ruby Hunter.

What some of these voices lack in polish, they make up for in raw urgency. The overall effect is of immediacy and a diversity of language, reflecting a range of English usage from the street and the home to the university and boardroom. There are words and phrases of first or rediscovered languages too. I hope to read more work in the future translated from Indigenous languages, as those surviving languages across the country are revitalised. And there will be more Indigenous voices, here and elsewhere: Ali Cobby Eckermann and Lionel Fogarty have joined Southerly’s editorial board permanently and are continuing their work at the Aboriginal Writers Retreat, nurturing a literature that refuses to go missing.

Monday marked the fourth anniversary of the Apology to the Stolen Generations. In considering where that apology has taken us, it is easy to be disappointed. The currency of the discriminatory policies of Federal control in the NT Intervention – currently under expansion through Compulsory Income Management and the School Enrolment and Attendance Measure (SEAM) – is reflected in several pieces, not least Cobby Eckermann’s own ‘Intervention Pay Day’, a punchy, unforgiving poem about the social impacts of the policies, which subtly draws out the ripple-on effect of such policies into families and communities. This journal should wake anyone who doubts that colonisation is a contemporary process.

The apology was a rare moment of optimism in a politics characterised by belittlement and cheap enticements, but it seems that it also made promises which Labor has failed to keep. In a political language corrupted by insincerity, bullshit consultation and media-managed squabbling, the voices in this edition of Southerly ring clear and true.

From prisoners’ rights in Australia and America to African refugees in Tel Aviv, here’s my pick of some of the most interesting reads from around the web.

Adam Gopnik writes an eloquent essay in the New Yorker about the injustice of mass incarceration in the US.

While over at Right Now, Rose Carnes writes about overcrowding in Western Australia’s prisons.

Michael Hastings interviews Julian Assange for Rolling Stone.

Media Lens examines the selective outrage prevalent in the Western mainstream press.

‘There was a period when my husband and I were travelling in Egypt on business, and the whole time there Vasya kept saying it was “lost time”. I didn’t understand at all. I thought it would be interesting for a teenager to see another country, to travel. I understood only later that he felt a deep sense of his motherland, and he was homesick. Even in his young heart he felt that he had been cut off from the life of the country.’ Olesya Gerasimenko conducts revealing interviews with the parents of three convicted Russian neo-Nazis.

Zadie Smith has started a project that I’m a big admirer of called Writers Bloc. Smith gathered a team of writers from across the globe to write creative non-fiction stories about universal education, which is one of the eight aims of the Millennium Development Goal (MDG) project. There are ten stories in the Writers Bloc series, with tales coming from Palestine, Haiti, Nigeria, to name a few. 

Michelle Chen writes in the Nation about the continuing sexual violence and exploitation faced by women in Haiti, two years on since the earthquake.

Counterpunch reports on the political unrest and anti-government protests in Moscow.

Israel-based journalist Joseph Dana reports on the plight of African refugees in Tel Aviv for Monocle [audio link].

Jadaliyya has created an excellent compilation of a year in the life of Egypt’s media, starting from 25 January 2011 till now. 

The good people of an old apartment block in Mumbai have been offered a fortune to move out.  It is as if they have won Lotto.  But unless they all accept the offer, no-one can benefit.  There is a problem, however – Masterji does not want to move.  This is the starting point for Last Man in Tower which is, stylistically, a very different novel to Adiga’s prize winning The White Tiger, even if violence and corruption are central to both.  Whereas The White Tiger was a confessional novel, told in the first person by a man with a dark history, Last Man in Tower is a traditional third-person narrative where the stories are cleverly interwoven to keep you waiting and to expose the psychology of a group of people in an extraordinary situation.  The characters, even the developer Mr Shah, are well rounded, their motives both simple and complex.  Unfortunately, the women tend to be a bit shrill.  

Class is a key element of the narrative.  The people in the tower block are lower middle-class.  They had money to buy into the tower block in the first place and although they are not in a great neighbourhood and the slums are just outside, they have a respectable address.  Still, they do not have a lot of cash.  They exist on salaries and pensions and life in Mumbai is not cheap.  Well, that is to say, living is not cheap.  Life is another matter.  The nice middle-class people of Vishram Society want to move up and this money will give them mobility.  They are middle-aged or elderly and they want to buy comfort and status.  The warping effects of violence and corruption are deemed acceptable in the circumstances and Mrs Puri can even find it in her to blame Masterji for making her behave as she has done. 

Interestingly, Adiga stresses throughout the novel that for this Mumbai, religion is not as important as class.  Although the Society was originally established for Christians over the years this has broken down and now there are Muslims and Hindus living there.  Masterji was the first non-Christian to be admitted.  At one point he realises, to his horror, that his neighbours are treating him like an Untouchable.  A Brahmin and a teacher, he derives his status more from his profession than anything else and education is another central theme.  It is noticeable that the poorest characters in the story, Mary the maid and Ram Khare, the watchman, both place more emphasis on education than the others.  Indeed, Ram Khare respects Masterji despite the fact that he has never tipped him because the teacher allowed the watchman’s lowly daughter to attend his evening ‘top up’ classes. 

Yet, Masterji’s refusal to take the money is hard to understand.  Adiga keeps us guessing.  Is he motivated by nostalgia, ill health, morality, stubbornness or a new-found faith in Hinduism?

Mumbai is an amazing place.  I visited it briefly in 1998 and I will never forget standing on the platform at Victoria Terminus (VT in the book), watching the goats chewing grass between the train tracks and listening to the local sales guys joking about making them into a good curry.  The smell of damp was everywhere and the traffic was overwhelming.  The people were great.  I really enjoyed myself.  But I was a tourist so it could only ever be a holiday snapshot.  The everyday struggle to live in such a city would require enormous strength and, in the book, the challenges are clear.  Masterji’s daughter has died in an all too common train accident, falling from the open side of a carriage.  Mary lives in fear of a slum clearance destroying her tarpaulin house by the sewer.  The streets are full of migrants and in Mumbai they have not come from overseas in a boat.  They have migrated from the villages to the cities, like the White Tiger, seeking their Lotto ticket and facing resentment from the people who feel more entitled because they have been there longer.

Rich and fascinating, there are many more reasons to read this book.  Treat yourself to a rich and satisfying novel with a social message because, although his touch is gentle and sometimes teasing, Adiga does not think that Mumbai’s relentless ‘what do you want?’ is the right question, or that violence and corruption are the answer.

Sylvia Lawson’s new book of essays is a strong example of journalism of a kind that Australian public culture does not support well, and which can often miss out on the readers who would enjoy it as result – namely an in-depth reflection, from someone outside the star chamber, on matters of public importance to Australia – so it is genuinely important that this book reach its readership.

Demanding the Impossible draws constantly on the historical moment of France’s May ’68 to reflect on moments where the response or non-response of Australian institutions and civil society in the last decade or so has made an important difference to the world around us, whether that difference be material, symbolic, or both. Thus the essays weave in and out of questions around Aboriginal reconciliation, the Northern Territory intervention, and Australia’s response to boat people, as well as East Timor, West Papua, South Africa, the Arab Spring and Chechnya, to name just some of the main examples.

The stories in this collection are disarmingly complex. Lawson decries journalistic narratives that ‘love the single trajectory, the fatal flaw; it’s alluring, the promised treasure at the end of the fast book or the feature story.’ The book’s penultimate sentence acknowledges all those who resist the petrification of stories, the civic-minded among us who ‘hold the questions open,’ instead of heading off enquiry by closing down its terms. And yet, as the next sentence concludes, it is not enough; it was never enough. That is the essential tragedy of resistance, I think, but calling it tragedy does not entail futility or folly.

Lawson-as-author is frequently Lawson-as-narrator in this collection. Her circle of Sydney friends carry personal turmoils endemic across a civil society that wants to fulfil its moral obligations in spite of Australia’s sclerotic politics – a two-headed political machine whose contempt for thoughtful and ethical engagement with the world around us only deepens as its alienation from the electorate grows. The four friends are her round table, questing through Australia’s intellectual landscape in response to the deeds of more recognisably benchmarked (i.e. slain) knights resistant: Politkovskaya, Bouazizi, Wainggai and Kwalik, East and the Balibo Five.

All these heroics are processed through a lens of modern French resistance and complicity, which forms the leading motive for Lawson’s analysis, but also for the diverse political engagements that her friends share. The eponymous resistance, the French one of the early 1940s, sets a pattern for heroes both inside and outside the benchmarked range. The business of transacting that resistance was nothing without the women-as-secretaries, women-as-domestics, women-as-caterers, women-as-washers who kept its information flows going.

Like that version of the French underground, then, this collection stamps itself as feminist space, but it overtly does not tell all blokes to get fucked. It sets itself in opposition to the dereliction that passes for professional government in Australia, especially the derelictions of human rights at home and abroad, but it does not tell all politicians to get fucked either. It comes pretty close to telling Richard Woolcott where to park his posterior — but many others have already crossed that line with passion and insight.

Instead, it builds a rich picture of the good that can be done – fragile and evanescent, perhaps, but all the more precious for that – of people working in resistance to the derelict alternatives, as they see them. Journalists like Anna Politkovskaya and Roger East, of course, but also the survivors like Jill Jolliffe and John Martinkus, researchers like Helen Hill and James Dunn, activists like Shirley Shackleton and Anne Noonan, and film makers too numerous to pick even a few illustrative examples. One suspects they will all feel an honourable mention in this collection is genuine cause for pride.

Are all Australian novels about finding a home? Discuss.
- Anna Krien after judging match one (Kate Grenville’s The Secret River vs Joan London’s Gilgamesh) in the 2011 Meanjin Tournament of Books. Tirra Lirra by the River lost out to My Brilliant Career in match three.

From the back cover: Nora Porteous has spent most of her life waiting to escape. Fleeing from her small-town family and then from her stifling marriage to a mean-spirited husband, Nora arrives finally in London where she creates a new life for herself as a successful dressmaker.

Now in her seventies, Nora returns to Queensland to settle into her childhood home. But Nora has been away a long time, and the people and events are not at all like she remembered them.

This is a well-worn literary trope: middle-aged-to-elderly person looks back on her life and finds that her memories do not mean quite what she thought they did, a scenario so clichéd as to be virtually unusable now. Except it’s not. Barnes won the Booker this year with a similar set up in The Sense of an Ending. Anne Enright’s Booker-prize winning The Gathering, John Banville’s Booker-prize winning The Sea, Peter Carey’s Illywhacker and many many other books use this device.

Why are literary authors, in particular, so fond of it?

One reason is that a central problem of the novel is not how to convey information but how to withhold it. Telling a story blow by blow from the start is often unworkable so having an older person looking back allows the author to elide the boring bits and focus only on what is significant.

Another reason is that literary fiction often relies on tension generated by questions such as ‘why is this character like this?’ and on reversals and twists not so much in what happened but in what it means.

Such novels often depend on the traumatic childhood moment revisited with adult understanding, as in The Sea and The Gathering. If Freud had never existed, modern authors would have had to invent him.

It’s possible, given I’m not usually attracted to the old-person-reminiscing scenario, that I might not have picked up Tirra Lirra by the River without the Australian Women Writers Challenge 2012. This challenge was set up by blogger Elizabeth Lhuede to help counteract the gender bias in the reviewing of Australian women’s writing. The blurb quoted above, however, is a good example of how hard it is to write a synopsis of a literary book. It sounds dull. But this book won the Miles Franklin Award in 1978 and I felt I should give it a go, especially as I’d never read anything by Jessica Anderson.

I’m glad I did. I loved this book and think it expresses brilliantly so many dilemmas of its time and place: the sense of never feeling at home pervading settler culture in Australia; the related sense that real life is always ‘elsewhere’ but that even when you arrive ‘elsewhere’ it still escapes you; the way this becomes bound up with the romantic yearnings of young women to escape, to realise the self.

This desire to realise the self was traditionally supposed to be fulfilled through a man but as the feminist project developed over the twentieth century realising the self through a woman’s own efforts became possible. Poor Nora is caught right at the junction of these alternatives, the same dilemma that bedevilled Miles Franklin’s Sybylla. No wonder Meanjin pitted these two books against each other.

Tirra Lirra by the River quotes from Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott. The Lady is cursed never to look directly upon reality but may only see reflections in her mirror and then translate those shadows of the world into her weaving. So, she is an artist but an artist who cannot bear the full glare of the Real, the Real that flashes into her mirror in a vision of masculine splendour: ‘Tirra lirra,’ by the river/Sang Sir Lancelot.

The Lady of Shalott is the perfect symbol for Nora Porteous: the glamour of European high culture, of Camelot, is unattainable, as is its male apotheosis, the shining knight with his ‘gemmy bridle’ and his ‘coal-black curls’. Nora Porteous is also an artist in textiles: she embroiders beautiful tapestries and later becomes a skilled dressmaker.

Eventually Nora does escape provincial Queensland and many reviewers have commented on how gripping the book’s central sections are which narrate Nora’s unhappy marriage and her friendships with bohemians in Potts Point in 1950s Sydney.

This portrait of a vanished Sydney is riveting and a great reminder of the virtues of the realist novel; what other form can capture not just the outer events but how it felt to live in this time, this place? The novel is the only time-travel device we have or are ever likely to have.

This section is even more important because through reading it we feel what it’s like to be an intelligent, creative woman forced to be dependent and passive. (Fans of current YA fiction, where it is now an ironclad rule that female characters must be active and ‘empowered’ should read this.) Nora is not allowed to work and has no money of her own. As a result she’s completely under the thumb of her husband and her mother-in-law.

London stands for the grand escape into a wider world but it is colourless compared to the Sydney sections. Nora’s life there is cramped, grey and shadowed by illness though she does achieve some professional success and independence.

Unlike some reviewers, I didn’t mind the contemporary thread of the novel, in which Nora settles back into her childhood house.

Though this strand is uneventful, Anderson’s writing is exquisite: ‘my dropped flag of ashen hair’, ‘The poetry in my head was like a jumble of broken jewellery’.

Anderson describes a miniature enchanted landscape conjured for Nora’s child self by a flaw in the window glass: ‘But it is not richly green, as it used to be in the queer drenched golden light after the January rains, when these distortions in the cheap thick glass gave me my first intimation of a country as beautiful as those in my childhood books.’

Anna Krien’s question about Australian novels in the Meanjin Tournament of Books is relevant. The interweaving of the strands shows that Nora is never truly at home: not in her Queensland childhood house, not in Sydney except for the all-too-brief idyll at Potts Point, not in the longed-for escape to London and not in the final return to the childhood house.

The book ends, true to its chosen form, in a revelation. This is the meaning of an image that has haunted the narrator her whole life: the step of a horse, the nod of a plume. For me the revelation was so moving I finished the book in tears. Anderson’s story hints that finally, our home is in other people.

Claire Corbett crewed on feature films before becoming a policy advisor in the NSW Cabinet Office. She was a senior policy adviser on water and genetically modified organisms for the Environment Protection Authority and child and family health for NSW Health.

When We Have Wings, her speculative fiction crime novel about humans genetically and surgically engineered to be able to fly, was published by Allen & Unwin in July 2011. See more of her work at clairecorbett.com

However, I’ve gotten into an argument with Keith Windschuttle. To which he replied. So I thought I’d try to briefly explain the argument.

My first article made a few basic points. Windschuttle is a very aggressive writer, who does not merely disagree with others: he insists that his ideological opponents have fabricated their claims, and his opponents amount to basically all of the relevant experts. Whitewash, for example, was basically the response of historians – the experts on the history of Indigenous-colonial conflict in Tasmania – to Windschuttle’s book sensational polemic. More recently, declaring that the issue of Stolen Generations was also marked by fabrication, Windschuttle said Robert Manne should ‘stand down from his position’ whilst an independent inquiry took place into his allegedly ‘false claims’.

So, given that each time Windschuttle claims to know the issues far better than the experts, it is very much at issue just how well informed he is when he writes his strident polemics. In his original article – which I responded to – the headline declared that ‘The Constitution is anything but racist’. As I noted, he aggressively attacked the expert panel, and the writers of an op-ed he replied to. One of them was Megan Davis, a professor of law at UNSW, the Director of the Indigenous Law Centre, whose area of expertise includes ‘Indigenous peoples and constitutional law’.

I didn’t – and don’t – claim to be an authority on the constitution. I have studied two years of law, and one subject called Federal Constitutional Law, which devoted one class to the race power. Yes, it is often called the ‘races power’ or ‘race power’, such as in the judgments by Justices Kirby and Gaudron in Kartinyeri. Windschuttle says my use of this term is my ‘own creative appendage’. Presumably, he thinks I invented the term to denigrate the judges he doesn’t like. I have included a picture of an extract from the syllabus for Fed Con. Readers can judge Mr Windschuttle’s familiarity with the subject area.

On to the substantive issues. Windschuttle talks about two sections of the Constitution. I don’t speak about one of them, section 25. I do not claim to be an expert on it. For those interested, I recommend reading George Williams, who actually is an expert on constitutional law.

I did, however, comment on what Windschuttle said about the race power (section 51(xxvi)). What he said is flagrantly wrong. To wit, he said that 1) ‘not once since federation has this section lent support to discrimination or racial abuse of Aboriginal people’ (2) Every time state and commonwealth laws in this field have been tested in the High Court, their intention has been found to be for the benefit of Aboriginal people.

On the first, I made the obvious point that until the 1967 change in the referendum, the race power said explicitly that it gave power to parliament to make laws with respect to ‘The people of any race, other than the aboriginal race in any State, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws’. Windschuttle declares that this power was never used to discriminate against Aboriginal people. I explain that it was designed to discriminate against other people – and explicitly says so.

Windschuttle ignores the point that until 1967, it was impossible for it to be used against Aboriginal people. It is startling that he seeks to claim that because a provision designed not to be used against Aboriginal people was not used against Aboriginal people, it is therefore not a racist provision. I also made the point – it was used, and intended to be used – to discriminate against other races. And this was recognised at the time. Windschuttle didn’t comment.

Let’s continue. I make the next point: Kartinyeri is the most important case on the race power, and Windschuttle not knowing about it is kind of like a historian on modern Europe not knowing about the First World War. Actually, I think it’s probably more closely analogous to an expert on fascism not knowing about Mussolini. So let me explain. The Australian Constitution is basically the set of iron-clad rules for the Australian parliament to pass legislation. If legislation is found by the High Court to breach the Constitution, it is invalid. So how the High Court interprets parts of the Constitution determine what kinds of laws can be passed.

Windschuttle claimed the ‘most recent major case’ was Kruger. I responded by pointing out that Kruger ‘barely mentions the race power’. Windschuttle claims that ‘The meaning and relevance of Section 51 xxvi was canvassed widely in the various judgments.’ In fact, disregarding footnotes, Brennan CJ mentions it once, Dawson J mentions it twice, Toohey J mentions it four times, Gaudron and McHugh JJ don’t mention it at all, and Gummow J mentions it only once. Yet, Windschuttle only quotes Dawson J’s judgment. So what does Dawson J say about the race power?

Moreover the Constitution is in many respects inconsistent with a doctrine of legal equality.

Section 51 (xxvi), as Deane J recognised in The Tasmanian Dam Case[87], “remains a general power to pass laws discriminating against or benefiting the people of any race”. Similarly, s 51(xix) enables the Commonwealth Parliament to make laws which discriminate in favour of or against aliens. Discrimination in relation to the qualification to vote in federal elections is clearly envisaged by the Constitution[88] and equality of voting power is not guaranteed[89]. And until 1967 (which is after the last alleged act of detention ended), ss 51(xxvi) and 127 excluded Aboriginals for specified purposes. It is unnecessary to provide an exhaustive list of those respects in which the Constitution does not support the suggested doctrine of equality…To recognise as much is surely to undermine any basis for asserting that the Constitution assumes a doctrine of equality.

And Windschuttle’s response? ‘Justice Dawson found the powers given by the ordinance: “were required to be exercised in the best interests of the Aboriginals concerned or of the Aboriginal population generally”.’ What they felt about the ordinance is irrelevant to how the constitution was interpreted. And, as demonstrated above, Dawson J, quoting Deane J (as I did in my article), explicitly recognised that the race power can be used to discriminate against a race.

Windschuttle doesn’t seem to understand the difference between constitutional provisions and statutes. And he doesn’t seem to understand quite how the law works. When judges casually discuss something in passing, there is a fancy term for it: obiter dicta (or just obiter). It means that something is of passing interest, but is not legally binding. Windschuttle claims that ‘Kruger was the major case undertaken by Aboriginal activists to persuade the High Court to endorse the finding of the Human Rights Commission that the policy behind the “stolen generations” amounted to genocide.’ He seems to believe its political significance makes it legally relevant. He doesn’t understand that its political significant is completely irrelevant to the question of how the race power can be interpreted by parliament. Windschuttle seeks to obscure the legal issue, or simply does not understand how the law works.

Windschuttle then says Kartinyeri is ‘far less consequential’. Why? Well, he doesn’t explain. He proceeds to gives his own interpretation of Kartinyeri – but then fails to offer his explanation of why it’s unimportant. We can argue about what Kartinyeri meant, but that’s surely secondary to the major point: that it is the major case about how the race power can be used. I said that Justice Gaudron ‘tried to narrowly confine when the race power could be used’. Windschuttle purports to disagree with me, and speaks conspiratorially of ‘a passage Brull, unsurprisingly, failed to mention’. He then claims Justice Gaudron ‘actually went the furthest of any of her colleagues in Kartinyeri to argue the whole question of the “race power” being used to disadvantage Aboriginal people was redundant in present-day Australia.’ So after his huffy introduction, he seems to accept what I said about Gaudron J’s approach. And even so, he’s still wrong. She didn’t go ‘the furthest’. Justice Kirby flatly ruled out any use of the race power to disadvantage Aboriginal people, while Justice Gaudron sought only to narrowly confine it. (Which is exactly what I said.) It is nice that Windschuttle prefers their interpretation of the Constitution – but they were both in minorities on the issue. That is to say, their opinions are nice to read but they are not legally binding.

Returning to the second issue above. Windschuttle says every time ‘laws in this field have been tested in the High Court’, they’ve been found to be for the benefit of Aboriginal people. Well, the races power wasn’t used for Kruger, so it’s flatly irrelevant. In Kartinyeri, the court approved a law which was to the detriment of Aboriginal people.

Interestingly, Windschuttle now says that ‘For a law to be genuinely racist, it must obviously apply to all members of a race, not just selectively to some.’ So perhaps if a bar said ‘no blacks allowed’, that wouldn’t be racist, because it wouldn’t be applied to all black people. Or perhaps if it allowed in rich people with black skin, it’s not racist because it’s selective.

The fact is, in Kartinyeri a law was used under the race power – that is, a law with respect to a people of a certain race – and against their interests.

To take up one last legal point. The plaintiffs argued that the law they were challenging in Kartinyeri didn’t have support under the races power ‘because, whilst the Ngarrindjeri people are members of the Aboriginal race, they do not constitute the entirety of that race, and s 51(xxvi) requires a law to answer the description “with respect to … [t]he people of any race”, not with respect to some only of the people of any race.’ This argument was rejected by Gummow and Hayne JJ. They wrote:

The legislative power is to be construed with all the generality of which the phrase “the people of any race” admits[87]. That being so, why should the phrase “the people …” be read as if limited to “all the people”, rather than as including within the reach of the power any members of that class identified by the expression “the people of” the race in question?

So while the plaintiffs said the race power should not be allowed to be used against sections of a race, this was rejected by Gummow and Hayne JJ. Windschuttle appears to believe that the judges only allowed for selective discrimination against part of a race – not against all of them. As shown, they said it made no difference, and were happy to support the Bridge Act, recognising that it ‘imposes a disadvantage’. That it happened to impose a disadvantage on a group within a race is thus irrelevant.

Of course, there is more to be said, but this is already long. The relevant point is as follows. When it comes to, say, philosophy or politics, virtually anyone can speak with insight, and they often do not need to do much reading to become well informed. However, the law is complicated, and expertise actually really does make a difference.

Windschuttle claims I said ‘that because [Windschuttle is] not an authority on constitutional law [he has] no right to publicly discuss the subject.’ What I actually said was ‘to have an honest conversation about the merits of constitutional change, media outlets like the Australian should try to make sure their contributors have some vague idea of what they’re talking about.’

Anyone can discuss the merits of banning racial discrimination in the constitution. However, when it comes to discussing what the constitution actually allows for, there is such a thing as an expert opinion. I don’t claim to be an expert on constitutional law. What I said – and what I stand by – is that anyone with the vaguest knowledge of the race power will know that Kartinyeri is the most important case on the race power. The High Court tells us what limits the Constitution places on how laws can be made, and Kartinyeri discussed the limits of the race power. When Windschuttle wrote that Kruger was important on the subject of the races power, he shows that he just doesn’t understand how the Constitution works. When he said the meaning and relevance of the race power was ‘canvassed widely’ in Kruger, besides being factually dubious, it shows that he doesn’t understand how the law works.

What initially drew me to reviewing historian Maria Tumarkin’s memoir, Otherland, was my interest in its themes. Maria left her birthplace, the Soviet Union, in 1989 as part of the Jewish emigration to Australia before the Berlin wall fell. The premise of Otherland is to tell the story of Maria’s trip back to her motherland with her teengage daughter, Billie. I haven’t read any of Maria’s other books and so I took on the project with a high level of enthusiasm – there are too few migrant stories by Australian authors and I am all for promoting them. But anyone who is familiar with my writing knows that I can be no less than honest and so apologies, in advance, to Maria (and Billie) for what I’m about to say because I feel like I have got to know them, on some level, through the narrative. There have been several discussions here on the blog about the state of the reviewing process but I am hoping that people understand this is just the opinion of one reader, which is entirely subjective.

The blurb of Otherland promises an exciting, emotional journey:

I left too early, before tanks rolled into Moscow in 1991, and before Gorbacev was put under house arrest in a failed coup. I left before Russia and Ukraine became separate countries…I left too early, I missed the whole point…Otherland is the story of a six-week trip transversing three generations, three lifetimes and three profoundly interconnected relationships between mothers and daughters.

From the first few passages of Otherland I felt as if I was in the hands of a master. The language was tight and some of the imagery was superb:

The boy I was in love with was, in turn, in love with another girl infinitely better looking and talented, who, for her part, was in love with another boy better looking and arguably more talented than the object of my unrequited and poorly concealed affection. In this love pyramid, I was at the very bottom, flattened beyond recognition.

But not too far into the book I was niggled by a few passages where Maria ‘tells’ the reader what Billie, her daughter, is like. A little further and Maria is referring to a Greek born, French novelist to highlight the similarities between her story as a migrant and his when what I was really yearning for was a scene from Maria’s own life, flashes of her own experiences, to show us this. On from this Maria discloses she has a son but mentions nothing of who is caring for him and at that point I was lost and I wasn’t sure what time period I was in, what Maria’s situation is (married, divorced?) or how many times Billie had been back to the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the initial train journey at the beginning of the book where they are asked to vacate because they didn’t have the appropriate visas is abandoned (till much later on) and another scene picked up, and the tenses jar which leads to further confusion.

Otherland is divided up into locations and time periods but the narrative is jumpy. One minute Maria is referring to the now, then she is back in Australia, then she is referring to what this novelist said, or this poet said, what this historian said. Maria touches on interesting concepts and ideas relating to migrants but they are disorganised and aren’t explored to their full potential. The narrative doesn’t flow from one scene into the next and so this leaves the reader feeling disconnected and frustrated. The references to other historical figures yank the reader out of the narrative, preventing them from going on the emotional journey. They stop the reader from getting to know the characters on a deeper level, to feel their pain and joy. The dialogue is forced and there is a lot of telling about how the characters are instead of showing us how they are. Because of this I didn’t feel I connected with any of the characters and felt distant from Billie and Maria when I really wanted to get to know them on a more intimate level.

There is no doubt that Maria is an intelligent writer and historian, and I credit her for this, but the biggest downfall of Otherland is that it promises an emotional journey (from the cover, blurb and initial pages) then delivers an intellectual one. No doubt fans of political or historical literature will enjoy Maria’s observations and clever references, but readers wanting an emotional journey (me!) will be disappointed. I wanted to know more about Maria’s life in Australia, what happened in her life to warrant her to take this trip other than to show Billie. What happened in the years before she left and the years between her immigration to Australia and this trip? I wanted family scenes and dynamics, struggles, character relationships. But I felt as if Maria was trying hard to protect her privacy which she has every right to, but that meant that the narrative suffered as a consequence. Maybe Maria covered all this in her previous books but Otherland is not a sequel and so it needs to stand alone as a story. I felt that Otherland was packaged as creative non-fiction when it actually leans more towards a historical analysis. Readers looking for this kind of read will not be disappointed.

Overland put a callout for an Occupy issue last year. Since then, the movement’s circumstances have changed considerably – Occupy Melbourne no longer resides in City Square, Occupy Sydney has no permanent camp. Can the movement continue now that many of the occupations no longer have a demarcated physical space?

Across the world, the police response to various occupations has been extreme; just over the weekend Occupy Oakland took to the streets in another confrontation with police.

In the wake of economic crises, political atomisation and an increase in militarised policing, what does the Occupy movement mean?

And what of Europe? How is the economic crisis there influencing a world caught in the throes of protest?

There is much to debate. The special online edition of Overland is intended as a contribution to the discussion.

Occupy – Features

Sean Scalmer – ‘The world of all of us’
Occupying history

Elizabeth Humphrys – From Global Justice to Occupy Everywhere
The antecedents to a new movement

Jude McCulloch and David Vakalis – Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue
Militarised policing and Occupy Melbourne

Ali Alizadeh – The revolution to come?
Revolutions past and present

Occupy – The view from Europe

Giovanni Tiso – Europe’s Perfect Ruins
The crisis on the continent

The protests were sparked by comments made by the Opposition Leader Tony Abbott that those at the Tent Embassy ‘move on’ after celebrating its 40th anniversary. Some 200 activists from the Embassy traveled to a nearby ceremony honouring emergency service workers, which was attended by both Abbott and Prime Minister Gillard. After several minutes of chants and window banging, the Prime Minister’s security team decide to bundle both Gillard and Abbott out of the ceremony, where Gillard tripped and lost a shoe in the drama. Both leaders were put into cars, allowing for their departure.

It didn’t take long for the moral panic to begin. The protests were ‘violent’ and a ‘shame’ on the Nation, lead by an ‘angry mob’. Countless column inches were taken up with estimates of how far the protests had sent back the cause of reconciliation. Was it five years? Ten years? Twenty years? Some went even further. David Penberthy called for the closure of the Tent Embassy, as did Menzies House, apparently seeing no conflict between that and their defence of the free speech rights of Andrew Bolt last year. Speaking of Bolt, he saw fit to use the protests as an excuse to call an end to reconciliation altogether. As Amber Jamieson noted in Crikey almost every major paper led with the image of a clearly frightened Gillard in the arms of personal security accompanied by headlines like ‘Prime Threat’ or the offensive appropriation ‘Sorry Day’ (I’ll come back to that). Laurie Oakes seized on a handful of vile comments to label all those involved in the Tent Embassy as ‘morons’. Bob Carr had my favourite piece, seemingly having a brain haemorrhage and going on a bizarre red-baiting rant:

Anyway here we have again the bankruptcy of the old Leftist approach: throw a demo. Every time some respectable body does this – the ACTU or Unions NSW or a pro-refugee group – the same thing happens: on the street the extremists take over. The Trots love a blue, “the worse things are the better they are” and by radicalizing everyone and breaking heads it all hastens the World October, onto revolution, comrades.

Must have been pretty bad right? The black hordes attacking our first female Prime Minister like a scene out of The Birth Of A Nation, right?

Well eyewitness accounts come across quite different to those of the commentariat. Melbourne based writer Wil Wallace was able to interview Embassy activist Sam Castro, who gave a very different account of the days events:

The morning started with speeches being made at the Tent Embassy on a range of subjects until one person stood up and explained to the crowd that Tony Abbott had remarked to the media that he believed the Tent Embassy was no longer relevant and should be packed up and moved on; information had just come through that Tony Abbott was at The Lobby, a restaurant near the Old Parliament House, and the suggestion was made that the group should go there and ask Abbott to talk to the crowd and explain himself.

A contingent of about 100 protesters made their way up the road to The Lobby and surrounded it. Though they were loud and noisy they were non-violent. Security blocked the protesters from getting close to the restaurant for a while but it didn’t take long for a few protesters to break the line and soon the rest had gotten close up against the restaurant’s walls. As the walls of The Lobby are made of glass the protesters could look in and see Mr Abbott and the others pretending not to hear them and, after about ten or fifteen minutes Julia Gillard’s white jacket was recognised and the protesters realised that she was in there along with Mr Abbott.

The conduct of the police and security team is also notably different in Castro’s account:

As more protesters made their way to the restaurant, the riot police charged out the doors, practically dragging Ms Gillard along, while the onlookers began to shout “where are you going?” and “why won’t you talk to us?” As the cars drove off, some people threw plastic water bottles and water at the cars.

At this point things began to get fairly nasty; one protester was knocked into the rose bushes and one gigantic cop started brandishing a can of tear gas or capsicum spray (reports differ on this point) in people’s faces and shoved Sam, another girl and a female photo-journalist in the head. When Sam told him to calm down he reportedly bared his teeth and grinned so widely his eyes nearly popped out of his head; to many on site it was fairly clear that the officer was barely under control.

This account is supported by-and-large by other Embassy attendees like journalist Amy McQuire and organiser Mark McMurtie. Writing in New Matilda, Ben Eltham noted that 3AW’s reporter on the scene, Michael Pachi, reported that the ‘violence’ was in fact mostly loud chanting, whilst participants again reiterated that they only wanted Abbott to make a speech to the crowd. While these claims are obviously subjective, the authors at least have the benefit of actually having been there, something not shared by Penberthy, Bolt, Oakes or Carr.

On top of these accounts is the video of the event. Judging by footage provide by NineMSN, it’s pretty obvious that no protestor ever came close to either leader, and that the only civilians that did were those involved in the media.

Whilst protestors were banging on the restaurant windows, this video shows that it was still far short of anything violent. Indeed, the only video evidence of physical violence is that committed by the police, as was claimed by the eyewitnesses mentioned above. Footage shows police inciting and threatening demonstrators and the media, punching protestors and repeatedly ignoring complaints of abuse.

Considering all of this, it’s difficult to see how the protestors formed a credible threat to either Gillard or Abbott. After all, not a single person was arrested at the protest, and as of yet, no one has been charged with any crime. That says a lot about the nature of the demonstration, especially when you consider twenty people were arrested during the crackdown on Occupy Melbourne, which was nowhere near any National leader.

The reaction to the Tent Embassy protest, by Gillard, Abbott, the police and the media provides a uniquely raw glimpse at how the powerful view and treat Aboriginal Australians. Firstly, serious questions have to be asked about why neither Gillard nor Abbott made any attempt to address the crowd. After all, that’s what Anthony Albanese did when a 500-strong crowd (i.e. well over twice the size of the Tent Embassy protest) confronted him outside his Marrackville office in September 2011 over his comments about the Convoy of No Confidence.

Then there is the question of whether the actions of police and security were even necessary. It is difficult to claim the protestors represented any clear physical threat to either Gillard or Abbott. The threat was at least no greater then the aforementioned Albanese protest, or another recent action against Immigration Minister Chris Bowen by Refugee advocates. Neither protest attracted any where near the amount of police attention as did the Tent Embassy action.

But then again, it’s not like the police have the best relationship with the Aboriginal people. Earlier this month saw the death of Terrance Daniel Briscoe, a 28-year-old Aboriginal man, within police custody in an Alice Springs gaol. The official reason given by the police, that Briscoe had sustained a head injury prior to being locked up, amounts to little more than gross negligence on the part of the police. Sadly, Briscoe is just one of almost 300 Aboriginal persons who have died in custody since the deaths-in-custody Royal Commission in 1991. As Igna Ting has reported in Crikey, deaths in custody have risen by 50% since 1991 despite some $400 million dollars being allocated to implementing (some) recommendations of the Royal Commission. Between 2000 and 2009, Indigenous incarceration rates increased by 50%, whilst non-Indigenous rates increased by 5%. The proportion of Indigenous people in prison system has nearly doubled since 1991, going from 14% to 26%, whilst remaining just 3% of the population. Indeed, based on the raw statistics, Australia imprisons Aboriginal men at five times the rate Apartheid South Africa gaoled black men.

And this brings me to my main point. In almost all the coverage of the Tent Embassy protest, there has been a deafening silence about the social context it undeniably exists in. The fact is that the Aboriginal people have faced historical and systematic racism that continues to have consequences and is still well and truly alive. Is it really a surprised that this occurred on Australia Day? Despite the best efforts of nationalistic apologists, it still marks the day of the initial invasion of the Aboriginal people, sparking well over a century of attempted genocide and assimilation, all for the cause of starting a massive penal state. That might just be a little offensive.
Similarly, little was said about the present day attacks on the Aboriginal people, the clearest example being the bipartisan Northern Territory Intervention. Started in 2007, the Intervention consists of a serious of policies implemented in 73 remote Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory. There is little evidence to suggest these policy have helped these communities at all, but are more likely to have driven the people further in poverty and stigma.

Efforts to build housing have been notoriously slow, with up to half the funds eaten up by administration. Even with the program beginning to get on track, it is unlikely the government will meet is occupancy rate (9.3 people per dwelling) without massive waste.

Social funding is being concentrated into ‘growth hubs’, effectively forcing people off their land despite the known health and social benefits of living on one’s homeland. School enrolments and attendance rates have decreased in prescribed areas due to poor facilities, job cuts and the abolition of bilingual education, and despite the use of punitive welfare measures.

On top of these failures comes income quarantine. Those receiving welfare payments automatically have 50% of their income withheld and placed onto a ‘BasicsCard’, which can be used to purchase necessities at selected stores. The evidence suggests that the BasicsCard has had no effect on consumption patterns of food, soft drink or cigarettes. The cards can only be used in major supermarkets, hence many locally owned small shops have gone bust, whilst forcing people to travel long distances at great costs to shop in the larger towns. There is also evidence to suggest that people are pressured and humiliated into accepting the BasicsCard when they no longer have to. A study of Aboriginal women using the BasicsCard found people were generally confused about why they had been put under income quarantine, that they felt a loss of ‘respect and dignity’, that they believed Centrelink staff often had paternalist views of Aboriginal People and that many women had stopped reporting abuse out of fear of further quarantining. Income quarantine also uses massive amounts of funds that could be used for social services, with estimates that its administration costs almost nine times the amount spent on aiding the unemployed find a job.

The NT Intervention has sparked serious and significant declines in the living standards of the prescribed Aboriginal communities. Under the intervention suicide and self harm, incarceration and child removal have all increased. Is it any wonder that the Intervention is opposed by Elders across the Northern Territory as well as officials within the United Nations. Yet despite all of the failures associated with the Intervention and the stigma it breeds, the government is committed to see it last for at least another decade under the ‘Stronger Futures‘ name. Indeed, income quarantining is planned to be rolled out around the country.

I mention these things because they must be acknowledged to understand what happened on Australia Day. The Aboriginal community continues to suffer the consequences from historical dispossession. Dispossession from the land, their culture, their wages and their families. Hence we have ‘the gap’, the massive disparity that exists between Indigenous and non-Indigenous persons in terms of wealth, education and health.

But the social context goes further than that. What the Northern Territory Intervention shows is that attempts to assimilate the Aboriginal people continues until this day. As a consequence, the racist and paternalist attitudes that justify policy responses like the Intervention are legitimised, strengthened and reproduced. This is especially the case when elements of the media are so explicitly racist. Take Mark Knight’s cartoon in the Herald Sun the day after the Tent Embassy protest, which uses genocide as a punchline. Or the aforementioned ‘Sorry Day’ headlines; because losing your shoe is apparently on par with remembering the thousands of children stolen from their families. Both things are fine if you think the suffering of people based on their race is so insignificant that it can be laughed at or dismissed entirely.

The harsh truth is that those in power, be they the police, the media, or politicians, have consistently and actively disadvantaged the Aboriginal people ever since ‘settlement’ in 1788. That’s why the Tent Embassy still exists. It’s also why Tony Abbott’s comments were so offensive and able to arouse such fury so easily, because 40 years after the first Tent Embassy, governments (and their megaphones in the media) are content with rolling out policies that do so much damage to Aboriginal communities.

In such a context, is it any wonder that the protestors would be so angry and maybe, sorta, kinda actually didn’t at all harm our Nation’s leading politicians? The fact that an action where protestors attacked no one and caused no property damage yet can still be labelled as violent displays a distinct authoritarian political outlook on the world. While the commentariat cries crocodile tears for the state of the Nation’s political dialogue and the ‘dignity of the Office’, we should remember that these same centres of power have shown little to no respect for the Aboriginal people.

Cross-posted from Zen’s Arcade.

Today is the 40th anniversary of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. I spent the morning reading about it and watching archival footage like that included below. It is Australia’s longest running continuous protest, one that has occupied Parliament lawn for four decades despite police intimidation, perpetual harassment and being legislated against. It began when four young Aboriginal men from Australia’s Black Power movement pitched an umbrella in response to William McMahon’s announcement that there would be ‘no Aboriginal title’ to Australian land.

Here’s some footage from Ningla A-Na (1972), a film documenting Black activism in Australia in the 1970s:

Green Left Weekly has a great backgrounder on the Embassy, including reflections from Lara Pullin, Sam Watson and Michael Anderson.

And then there’s this day beyond the Tent Embassy:

The seventy-one-year-old literary journal Meanjin is looking elegant and rejuvenated since Sally Heath took over as editor in 2011. This is the third edition she has edited and the second to enjoy the new design makeover. White paper stock and clear typeface, use of blank space at the head of each pages (used for notes in red where necessary) and elegant cover design are all welcome improvements.

As for the content, the editorial choices are not significantly changed. An imprint of Melbourne University Press, Meanjin still feels scholarly. The preferred genre is the essay, dealing not just with literature but with broader social, political and cultural issues. The first 130 pages of the 200-page journal are devoted to essays, punctuated by the occasional poem. This is followed by a selection of memoir; a fascinating text/image collaboration between a poet and a photographer; three pieces of fiction; and finally an interview between Heath and Simon Crean, Minister for the Arts.

Heath’s editorial does not clearly indicate any theme for this edition, just a challenge to the reader ‘to imagine alterative view points and perspectives’ as a lead into Marcia Langton’s essay on recognising Aboriginal Australians in the constitution. This starts out as a personal point of view but soon becomes submerged in an analysis of the constitution that reads remarkably like a government report. Instructive for those involved in the debate, but too academic for the rest of us.

Heath is one of several editors who have had to grapple with the problem of how to preserve Meanjin in the digital age. I am coming late to this debate on the fate of our literary journals – Ali Alizadeh and Peter Craven are worth looking at on this subject – but my immediate response on reading this journal is that a clever correlation between the print issue and the online version will guarantee Meanjin’s survival, and its intellectual clout. The print version needs to attract subscribers and bookshop buyers and may need culling in the essay section, with the extra material available online. Heath’s background in journalism will be valuable when sorting out how to allocate the essay material to each version of the journal.

In the current issue, the essayists seem to have the freedom to expound their viewpoints without being restricted to a word limit or edited for clarity. This gives a fine platform for academics who want to publish their papers to the wider world, but is bound to alienate more general readers who come to Meanjin for its literary content. Heath states on the Meanjin website that Meanjin ‘can, and should, communicate with as wide an interested public as it can, by as many means as possible, be they print, text on the internet, video or live events.’ Hopefully this can be achieved without reserving the most academic texts for the print version.

It is usual for readers of such journals to be selective about the pieces they read, but there is little editorial guidance for the reader to make such a selection. Each ‘story’, whether it be non-fiction or fiction, is preceded by a title and an author but lacks any other kind of introduction, not even a one-liner. A case in point is the extended essay ‘My Hero’ by Dean Ashenden, where the title gives little away. However, it soon becomes apparent that the ‘hero’ is WEH Stanner and his work in Aboriginal studies. The essay devotes a disproportionate amount of words to appraising Stanner’s slim (63-page) volume After the Dreaming, which, ironically, Ashenden describes as ‘so dense, evocative, and moving as to be a kind of prose poem’. After wending its way through myriad methodologies, the essay ends predictably with a paradox.

Artists Christopher Hodges and Tom Carment have a more fluent writing style. Hodges’ history of the Aboriginal group, Papunya Tula Artists, has particular relevance in its link to their exhibition at NGV, although that closes in early February. Carment’s rhythmic account of the artist’s modus operandi and his fine paintings, well reproduced on this paper stock, is a little oasis in the journal.

Like Marcia Langton, Helen Camakaris starts her essay ‘The Poisoned Chalice’ on genetics by looking at Darwin’s relevance to our environmental problems, before obfuscating this topical issue with references to cultural studies and anthropological publications. Along the way, Camakaris makes intriguing references to related topics such as game theory and the concept of fairness. One of these topics could have made a stronger focus for the essay. The switch to examining climate change does in fact rekindle the argument and leads to a clear call to action.

The most engaging essay is Ivor Indyk’s ‘The Book and Its Time’. With so much written about the imminent demise of the book, this essay has new insights, launching off with a colourful account of a bricks-and-mortar bookshop in a novel by Arnold Bennett: Riceyman Steps. The essay is timely, appearing after the recent death of George Whitman of Shakespeare and Company, that warren of books on the banks of the Seine. Indyk is a skilled essayist, moving smoothly from the personal to the general, from literary allusion to his own library, from history to current issues, never losing sight of his reader and her needs.

Richard King’s well-researched essay ‘Offence Goes Viral’ is an astute up-to-the-minute examination of the latest invidious strains of political correctness, centred on the use of the word ‘offence’. King’s writing is a model of good style, mixing colourful language with abstract vocabulary to craft a lucid and compelling plea for freedom of speech and intellectual rigour, where feelings should not dominate – or worse, silence – debate.

Juliana Engberg continues the theme of political correctness and its effect on freedom of expression in her light-hearted satirical account of censorship, using the Sistine Chapel as a case study. Other essays that are refreshing in their approach are Peter Pierce’s, in which he posits our era as a ‘silver age of Australian fiction’, and Alex Miller’s intimate account of how he came to write Autumn Laing.

The peppering of poems between essays gives a welcome change of pace. Fine lyrical pieces by Nathan Curnow and Mark Tredinnick bookend the anthology, and Adrian Wiggins boldly and playfully brings the sonnet into the twenty-first century.

The memoir section begins with a refreshing voice. Sonya Voumard’s journalistic style with its rhythmic sentences and vivid imagery takes us into the heart of her experience as a reporter reviewing her coverage of Queensland in 1989. It’s the inside story on journalism, its motivations, quandaries and eye-openers.

In ‘The Road’ Rachel Buchanan examines the daily commute, dismantling the romance of the road and exposing the price we pay for our mobility. This excellent memoir is a compassionate look at the compromises and conflicts of modern life, as well as an ode to the Ring Road and its democratic nature, where we all have to wait. ‘And wait. And wait.’

Patrick McCaughey’s memoir about his home in Connecticut seems out of place and parochial in Meanjin, and may owe its inclusion to the fact that McCaughey has some connection with Melbourne, particularly as director of the Festivals of Ideas in 2009 and 2010. It would have benefitted from a link to his Australian experience, not just a rather laboured reference to the Yarra. And an editorial note would have helped give the piece some context.

Arriving, after reading so much non-fiction, at the final section of the journal devoted to fiction, it becomes apparent how persuasive fiction can be. With no need to argue a case, fiction writers can present us with all the facets of human experience and help us learn from our own. In Josephine Rowe’s harrowing and brief story ‘Hotels’, it is the aggressive and passive aspects of an abusive relationship, reminiscent of Lolita, that is under the spotlight, and our own lies that are unearthed. Brooke Dunnell’s short story about the personal dramas in a local cricket club is a delicious tale full of surprises and vivid sensual detail, with a gentle satirical probing of the little man with a big ego, his nemesis and his revenge.

If I have singled out literary rather than cultural items for praise, it is not just personal preference or that I value style over content. Neither is it a question of dumbing down. It’s more a plea for good writing. It is not enough to lighten up an essay with a personal anecdote at the beginning. The reader needs to be kept in mind throughout. The edition of Meanjin is packed with information, opinion and insight, but needs an editorial torch to illuminate the way.

The highly regarded RMIT TAFE Diploma of Professional Writing & Editing (RMIT PWE) program is no more. The program will be offered as an associate degree this year charging $5648 a year in fees.

An associate degree is exactly the same as an advanced diploma but is considered a higher degree qualification so you pay more.

I ran RMIT PWE from 1997–2000 and was its program director until 2004. When I left, it cost $500 to study full time at RMIT PWE. The new fees are an increase of 1000 percent. Over the previous 20 years its fees had risen by $100.00.

In the last 22 years, RMIT PWE has produced more than 50 novelists, countless playwrights and screenwriters, editors and writers of all forms. Most of the students lived in the inner suburbs of North Melbourne, Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood and St Kilda.

Real estate marketers did to these suburbs in the 1980s what RMIT and the state government has done to RMIT PWE over the last six years.

They have driven down creativity to its lowest common denominator and driven out those who gave those suburbs panache in the first place – writers, painters and musicians.

When I taught in RMIT PWE I had students who were heroin addicts, schizophrenics, homeless kids, sex addicts, depressives, alcoholics, princesses, know-it-alls, psychiatrists, doctors, kids who had done jail-time, house wives, bullshit artists – you name it, they rolled up to study at RMIT PWE in Carlton. Many earned that brief title ‘writer’.

The students not only got published, they got jobs as magazine writers, editors, copywriters, journalists, travel writers, web builders and much more. For those of you who don’t know the joy of getting paid for writing, it makes it worth getting up in the morning.

I would not have sacrificed one of them on the altar of expediency.

So what has happened? Greed and cowardice. The incompetent Brumby Government revamped the training system in 2009 that effectively destroyed TAFE art programs by raising fees to astronomical heights. Baillieu is carrying on Brumby’s anti-TAFE mission but in slow motion.

RMIT turned the thumbscrews by appointing statisticians and accountants to run PWE in the mid 2000s and many of the senior staff simply let it happen. Even though the program made a profit of $200,000 per year, they wanted more. Much more.

So they created an associate degree in the hope that the same people will ante up $5648 per year in fees. It’s the same kind of low-level bastardry you get when you open up your power or phone bill.

I can guarantee you that when Tim Winton studied creative writing at Curtin University in Perth, he was not paying $5648 a year in fees.

The bean counters have destroyed not only PWE but also its unique student market, created by word-of-mouth over 22 years. Inch by inch they lowered the standards, withheld resources, and sacked staff yet asked for more and more money.

Most of you won’t know Judy Duffy. She was RMIT PWE’s leader in the early 90s. She made the program famous. She was feisty to the point of aggressive but she was a soft touch. Irish heritage bristled beneath her skin. She was passionate about writing and writers.

Duffy realised that if text-based creativity was to boom in Victoria, it needed a combination of mature aged and young students who would ‘kill’ to get published – who would ransom their own grandmother for a job as an editor or multimedia writer.

Judy died in 2001. She would be rolling over in her grave is she saw what has befallen her beloved program.

It extraordinary that RMIT is raising the price of education when the Federal Government and a whole raft of educational agencies is exhorting young people to go to TAFE.

But if you’re an accountant or statistician, your eye is on the bottom line and not on the future.

Vocational education has a proud history in Victoria. It’s first ‘TAFE’ was the Sandhurst Mechanics Institute, built in 1856 on the goldfields of Bendigo. This was just two years after the Eureka Stockade.

We need the spirit of Judy Duffy and Peter Lalor to stop the accountants from killing off a Victorian icon.

Malcolm King is the former program director, RMIT Creative Writing.

What is the Australian identity? This question is posed every three years during a Federal election, with each party claiming to be more ‘Australian’ than the other. The simple truth of the matter is that the Australian identity is a combination of all identities, all nations combining into one giant multicultural casserole pot; at the time of the 2006 Census, 43 percent of all Australians were born overseas or had at least one parent who was born overseas.

This issue of Southerly, the Journal of the Department of English at the University of Sydney, focuses on the dislocation and complex affiliations of people at home in Australia, while maintaining strong attachments elsewhere. As the back page blurb explains this ‘issue asks how this feature of late modernity dismantles and re-creates notions of identity, home, family, nation and literature. What is the role of writing in this circulation and how does it shape the dynamic mapping of Australia.’

Bill Ashcroft opens his essay ‘Australian Transnation’: ‘the world is more mobile than it has ever been and in many different fields, most notably literary studies, it has led to a growing, and now well established interest in cultural and ethnic mobility, diaspora, transnational and cosmopolitan interactions.’ Ashcroft considers the Australian identity, from the Union Jack in the corner of our flag , through Ernst Bloch’s definition of heimat, Bloch’s word for a utopian home. Heimat was appropriated by the Nazis to represent Germany as the Aryan homeland. In response, Bloch, a Jewish Marxist philosopher, made a distinction between the political soil and the utopian aura of heimat. This distinction is central to Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell, where Miller interprets the Aboriginal connection to land, ‘“this is our soil” his uncle said – as if he said, this is your soul’. Ashcroft continues with an analysis of Arnold Zable’s Café Scheherazade, discussing the theme of the novel, a direct account of the diasporic memory of immigrants who meet in a café named after the storyteller in One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, appropriate as the namesake relied on stories to keep herself alive.

Ashcroft’s essay highlights the ethereal nature of place, a consideration of ‘not where you are but who you are’.

This issue is heavy in poetry, something we don’t see enough of in literary journals (☺). There are standout standalone poems from A S Patric, John Carey, two from π.o. and ‘Absurdity’ by Shu Cai as translated by Ouyang Yu.

Poetry also features as central to four of the prose pieces in the journal, namely; Kit Kelen’s ‘A Transnational Apprenticeship for Poets’, Meg Tasker’s ‘“When London Calls” and Fleet Street beckons’, George Kouvaros’s ‘The Generation of the Photograph’ and Glen Phillips’s ‘An Aspect of the Valtellinese Diaspora’.

Kit Kelen teaches Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Macau where he assists in the production of anthologies of contemporary Australian poems translated into Chinese. Kelen’s essay discusses the issues around translations of poetry, a poem can have multiple interpretations, the translator suffers an intense apprenticeship as the end product should not merely be an imitation and single interpretation but rather a poem worth reading in its own right. Kelen describes the relationship that has to develop between the Australian poet and the Macanese translator, including discussions of grammatical experimentation and compromises of definitions.

Meg Tasker analyses Victor Daley’s ‘When London Calls’, a poem that has as much resonance today as when it was first published in the Bulletin on 8 December 1900. The poem (printed in its entirety within the issue) opens:

	They leave us – artists, singers, all –
		When London calls aloud,
	Commanding to her Festival
	The gifted crowd.

The poem is somewhat of sour grapes, Daley having penned the poem after reading the English reviews of his first collection At Dawn and Dusk, Daley believed that his work would sell better in England than in Australia ‘for the simple reason that most of my verse is not distinctly Australian at all. There is a sad lack of dingoes and wombats, gidya-gidya, spinifex, wattle, mulga etc., in it, which I deplore but see no means of remedying.’ The collection sold poorly in England as the English reviewers interpreted the absence of bush imagery as an attempt by Daley to elevate himself above his ‘position’ as a colonial. Tasker expands in the essay on the futile efforts of Australian writers’ to impress the English market and the perception that literary merit could only be judged by mother England, delving into the lack of identity suffered by writers, such as Daley, Henry Lawson, Louise Mack etc.

George Kouvaros’s essay ‘The Generation of the Photograph, or, Those Left Behind’ opens with ‘The City’ by C P Cavafy

You said, “I will go to another place, to another shore.
	Another city can be found that’s better than this.

The poem explains the desperation of someone seeking happiness, dissatisfied and blaming the present place for all ills, but, as the poem explores, place is but a state of mind. Kouvaros describes the walls of his grandmother’s house lined with photographs of current Australian family members, Cypriot ancestors and a younger image of the grandmother walking a South African street during her ill-fated first marriage. This take on transnationalism looks at bringing the distance and the past into the here and now as an old lady holds on to her stories.

Glen Phillips studied the Valtellinesi diaspora for his poem ‘The Entombed Miner, Easter 1907’, in particular, immigrant Modesto Varischetti who, like most of the immigrants from the Lombardy region of Italy around the start of the twentieth century, came to the Australian goldfields seeking a better life. The poem, as Phillips explains in his seven-page explanatory notes leading in to the poem, symbolises the hopes and dreams of the immigrants and the dangers faced; Varischetti having been trapped in a floodwater filled mineshaft for nine days until deep sea divers Frank Hughes and Thomas Hearn could reach him to rescue.

The issue collects essays, stories and poems that are definitively Australian in that they are borderless, highlighting the fact that the Australian identity is held within the collective of its people rather than the borders of its land.