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SoutherlyVolume 79 • Number 1 • 2019

Southerly 80!

Editor Elizabeth McMahon

THE JOURNAL OF THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION, BRANDL & SCHLESINGER Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 2

SOUTHERLY The Journal of the English Association, Sydney Volume 79 • Number 1 • 2019 www.southerlyjournal.com.au EDITOR Elizabeth McMahon FICTION EDITOR Debra Adelaide POETRY EDITOR Kate Lilley REVIEWS EDITOR Oliver Wakelin EDITORIAL ADVISERS Elizabeth Webby, Bernadette Brennan, David Brooks, Vivian Smith, Helen Tiffin, G. A. Wilkes, Mabel Lee, Lionel Fogarty, Ali Cobby Eckermann ADMINISTRATIVE AND TECHNICAL ASSISTANT: Jack Stanton PRODUCTION EDITOR: Angela Rockel

Copyright of each work published in Southerly belongs to its author. No work may be used or dealt with except as permitted by law or licensed by its author. Applications may be directed to the author via the editors. Academic papers are refereed.

PUBLISHED FOR THE ENGLISH ASSOCIATION BY BRANDL & SCHLESINGER PO Box 127 Blackheath NSW 2785 • www.brandl.com.au Contributions, subscriptions, back issues — see page 228 ISSN 0038-3732 Print Post No. PP250003/0593 ISBN 978-0-6485232-5-3

School of Literature, School of the Arts and Media, Art and Media, UNSW Arts and Social Sciences Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences This publication is assisted by the Australia Council, the Australian Government’s arts advisory and support organisation, the Ministry for the Arts, the School of Arts and Media, UNSW, and the School of Literature, Art and Media, . Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 3

CONTENTS

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POETRY jenni nixon: “what is old is new again” 23 Stuart Barnes: “Pork Chops” 25 Leila Lois: “Hêv” 32 joanne burns: “wrap” 33 Brownyn Lovell: “Fucking Lucky” 46 Colleen Z. Burke: “Winners and losers” 47 Sarah Hart: “Your Name Here” 59 Beth Spencer: “Explant (caveat emptor)” 69 Gavin Yates: “Napoléon” 72 Jane Gibian: “Less golden” 82 Anne Elvey: “Grevillea Robusta” 83 Dave Drayton: “the main artefacts are very archaic” 106 Jaya Savige: “Coonowrin” 108 Jocelyn Deane: “Staying in a place/England” 117 Marie Dustmann: “A well-appointed Road” 118 Kevin Densley: “For Bad Behaviour” 150 Grace Yee: “greener” 151 Tug Dumbly: “Biology” 171

FICTION Mandy Sayer: “The Dinner Party” 34 J. M. Donellan: “Progeny” 73 H. C. Gildfind: “All of this, everything” 110 David Dick: “Being Matt Preston” 119 Jack Cameron Stanton: “Goodbye, Lawrence” 164

NON-FICTION / MEMOIR / ESSAYS Michelle Vlatkovic: “Birralii Biyuu” 13 John Stephenson: “The Man Who Would Be Auden” 27 David Brooks: “A Bell Note” 49 Hannah Fink: “Editing Daniel” 61 Richard Nile: “Desert Worlds” 84 Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 4

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Jumana Bayeh: “ and the Arab-Australian Migrant Novel” 129 Alison Hoddinott: “Poetry and Musicophobia” 152

REVIEWS Roslyn Jolly: of James Halford Requiem with Yellow Butterflies 173 Jennifer Livett: of Andrew McGahan The Rich Man’s House 178 Margaret Bradstock: of joanne burns apparently 182 Michelle Cahill: of David Brooks The Grass Library 187 Frances Devlin-Glass: of Lynda Ng (ed) Indigenous Transnationalism: ’s Carpentaria 193 Leigh Dale: of Tony Birch The White Girl 199 Carole Ferrier: of Kathleen Mary Fallon A fixed place: The long and short of story 205 Kerrie Davies: of Jessica White Hearing Maud 210 Toby Fitch: of Dave Drayton P(oe)Ms 213 Oliver Wakelin: of Luke Carman Intimate Antipathies 217

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 221

o

COVER Elizabeth Street, Sydney, 1939 by (1891–1951). Colour linocut, printed in five colours on thin white paper. Art Gallery of New South Wales. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 5

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and in the Long Paddock... Our website is http://www.southerlyjournal.com.au

POETRY Toby Fitch: “The Or Tree, Chapter 5” Beth Spencer: “cool / green” Usha Sista: “Rice Burnt” Bronwyn Lovell: “Prayer for the girl who is not a feminist” Jonathan Dunk: “L’autre rive” Gavin Yates: “Autogenic”

NON-FICTION / MEMOIR / ESSAY Emily Riches: “Resting Places” Mark Peart: “Swain’s Reappearance: Traces from the sodomitical subculture of the nineteenth century Sydney” Carole Lefevre: “The Blue Hour”

FICTION Oliver Wakelin: “Dublin” Bon-Wai Chou: “Being Sylvia” Martin Kovan: “An Island Emissary”

REVIEWS Jack Cameron Stanton of Huo Yan Dry Milk Angela Rockel of John Kinsella & Russell West-Pavlov: Temporariness: on the imperatives of place Beth Spencer: of Anne Walsh Intact

INTERVIEWS Interview with Margaret Atwood in conversation with Fiona Morrison Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 6

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EDITORIAL

Southerly has turned 80! This is a cause for great celebration: of the many, many writers whose poetry, fiction, essays and reviews have been published; of the generations of readers who have read that work; and the many who continue to access Southerly’s formidable archive from 1939 to the present. The themed content of this issue engages matters of anniversaries and commemoration, and what we might call octogenarity, to coin a term—the business of being in the decade of four score years. Hannah Fink’s essay “Editing Daniel” acclaims the life and work of “one of the greatest writers of Australian art history,” Daniel Thomas. Thomas, now 88, is “a colossus in our intellectual heritage”—and prolific. In addition to holding key curatorial and institutional roles, Fink documents that the bibliography of Thomas’s work she and Steven Miller have just compiled is 18,000 words long! Moreover, Thomas is still writing. His most recent work, published in 2019, is a “reflection on how he has been shaped by the place where he was born and now in retirement lives, on the western north coast of Tasmania near Port Sorell.” We are delighted to include an essay by the esteemed writer—and octogenarian—Alison Hoddinott, also 88, who meditates on music and literature from the perspective of a “tone deaf” reader and auditor. A great friend of , Hoddinott has written extensively on Harwood’s poetry, and records how music was a key point of difference Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 7

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between the two friends. She continues with a rollcall of self-admitted “tone deaf” writers and the implications of this mode of hearing for their work. Richard Nile’s essay “Desert Worlds” narrates the experience of 20,000 Australian soldiers bound for the Western Front in 1914, who were “dumped on bare sand” at Alexandria, “two weeks and three and a half thousand nautical miles shy of their appointed berthing at Southampton.” Nile frames this discussion with two references to the inaugural issue of Southerly published in September 1939. First is the poem by S. Musgrave titled “Australia Deserta,” whose final stanza opens: “The sand has his own / Wave and motion,” “Rages the bed / Of the stony ocean.” The second reference is to A. D. Hope, who contri - buted an essay on psychoanalysis and poetry to the first issue, and at this time had begun writing his important and controversial poem “Australia,” which also focuses on perceptions of desert aridity: “They call her a young country but they lie / She is the last of lands, the emptiest, / ... the womb within is dry.” The men had voyaged from the driest continent on earth to the sands of Egypt and Nile’s essay sets out “the dirty business of Egypt” which was effectively “sifted from the sands of memory.” In his essay, “The Man Who Would Be Auden,” John Stephenson recounts a mini-literary hoax perpetrated on Clem Christesen (1911– 2003), “a founding editor in the great story of Australia’s literary journals.” Christesen, who edited from 1940 to1974, was still “puzzling over his encounter” with “Auden” in in 1944 some 50 years later when Stephenson interviewed him. Another addition to the long line of Australian literary hoaxes, the details are compelling as are Stephenson’s speculations on the “truth.” Connected to matters editorial and “the great story of Australia’s literary journals” is “A Bell Note” by recently-retired Southerly co-editor David Brooks. David sets out the current crisis for Southerly and Australia’s culture of literary journals. As I write, at least four of these, including Southerly, are in jeopardy. He also reflects on the experience of editing Southerly for nearly 20 years: publishing work not always to Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 8

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your own taste; developing themed issues that address and welcome overlooked communities and foreground matters of natural and cultural urgency; managing literary disagreements; and finally, the experience of reading a new work that sounds the “bell note,” the “crystal chink” that very occasionally sounds in the encounter with extraordinary writing. As David writes: “If you published only works that struck this note, you’d produce very slim issues indeed.” In this view, he echoes R. G. Howarth, the founding editor whose initial editorial advocates this broad reach. Howarth writes: “The Editor ventures to claim that the present issue of Southerly, containing work by noted Australian writers, by beginners, by general practitioners—by almost every class of writer in fact—indicates the possibilities of development, if it may not show actual achievement.” Since that time, we would claim to have published much writing of “achievement” as well as “possibility,” though both continue to be valued. And who knows, another work may strike this note for a different reader. In any case, these bell notes are powerfully-felt reminders of the value of editing and producing literary journals. The issue also includes much work that that announces the distance travelled since 1939, as is fitting. In her essay “Australian Lite- rature and the Arab-Australian Migrant Novel” Jumana Bayeh opens with a scene from ’s The Aunt’s Story (1948) in which a travelling salesman, a “Syrian” visits the rural township of Meroë, whose denizens welcome the excitement of the visit but are scornful of the man himself. White depicts the ugliness of Australian racism in this scene that Bayeh identifies as “one of the few Australian novels that features an Arab male character.” Bayeh asks: “But what story could be uncovered if we were able to hear the Syrian narrate his own life and his experiences in Australia?” With this aim, the essay provides readings of two very different novels: Loubna Haikal’s Seducing Mr Maclean, published in 2002, and Michael Mohammad Ahmad’s The Lebs, published in 2018. This issue opens with the memoir “Birrali Biyuu” (“Baby Cave”) by Michelle Vlatkovic, a writer of Kamilaroi and Croatian descent, who Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 9

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weaves the interconnected experiences of family, belonging and interiority through a narrative of pregnancy, subjectivity and Dhuuwurri (nucleus; gut feeling), and environmental spirit. Vlatkovic’s memoir details in compelling narrative and description, a hard won path from radical disconnection—“[b]eing colonised disconnected my head from my heart”—to a recognition of identity in its continuum and place. The poetry and fiction in this issue is a testament to the incredible vitality of Australian writing in 2019, which has been enriched by the recognition and wider circulation of Australia’s diverse trans- nationality. As an Australian literature academic, working in the field from the 1990s, I realise that it is only now that the field begins to make sense. The culture of Australian literary research, developed in earnest from the 1970s, now has the critical frameworks that enable works to be contextualised in complex ways. Only with the flourishing of First Nations writers and the span and scope of Australia’s cultural communities is the place of Australian writing becoming coherent. We have not arrived by any stretch but there is an exciting sense of direction and purpose. Southerly is committed to these developments. The issue also includes a goodly number of reviews in both the hard copy and the Long Paddock, thanks to our new Reviews editor Oliver Wakelin. David Brooks writes of contemporary reviewing cultures in his essay “A Bell Note,” to which I refer readers, as I share his view: in summary, while Southerly welcomes candid and critical engagement with books under review, we are ever mindful and respectful of the creative and intellectual labour by which these works are produced. Southerly’s 80th birthday provides the moment to express gratitude to the trail of editors who have kept Southerly going over that period and it is fitting to include a rollcall. The journal’s founder, R. G. Howarth, was an English academic at the University of Sydney and edited Southerly from 1939 to 1955. After that time, Kenneth Slessor assumed the role and shifted both the style and content to focus on Australian content and include less formal essays. Slessor retired from the role in frustration in 1960; Angus and Robertson Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 10

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had withdrawn their support and it was a struggle to produce each issue (how well we know that story!). At that critical juncture Walter Stone, founder and publisher of Wentworth Press, came to the rescue as interim editor until 1963, when Gerry Wilkes was appointed. Wilkes, who was the foundation professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney (now also under threat), edited Southerly until 1987—24 years. Gerry Wilkes was succeeded by Elizabeth Webby, who became Chair of Australian Literature at University of Sydney in 1990. Elizabeth was editor until 1999, with Ivor Indyk as associate editor from 1989 to 1993 and then co-editor from 1993 to 1996. Ivor went on to found HEAT magazine and Giramondo publishing. Along with the many joys of editing Southerly, Elizabeth recalls the period of her editorship as fraught in terms of funding and for a time she deployed her resources as Chair of Australian Literature to keep the journal going. Elizabeth passed the baton to her colleagues David Brooks and Noel Rowe, both academics and writers: David co-edited Southerly until 2018 and his essay in this issue reflects on that experience. Noel edited Southerly until prohibited by illness in 2007. He died that year. To know Noel was to love him, to admire his deep, original intelligence and share his humour. We remember him here. I joined David as co-editor when Noel became ill and it would be fair to say we danced around each other for a while as we found our way through that grief. That we did so, the issues of the last 12 years clearly show. Since 2005, the journal has been designed and published by Brandl and Schlesinger. Andras Berkes-Brandl, the designer, is an artist and every issue is beautiful, both as an object and as a technology of reading. As our contributors know, the production process is enabled by our superb copyeditor, Angela Rockel. We are so lucky also to have the services of our Fiction Editor Debra Adelaide and our Poetry Editor Kate Lilley. Finally, it is important on this occasion to record the deaths of a number of Australian writers this year—a number who were octo- genarians themselves. First, Mudrooroo (Colin Johnson) died aged 80 on 20 January 2019. His last years were painfully overshadowed by the Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 11

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controversy of his claim to Noongar heritage raised in 1996.1 I have neither the authority nor knowledge to enter into the debate re his identity. In preparing this editorial I read extensively re Mudrooroo’s life and work and corresponded with his friend and literary executor, Tom Thompson, who is currently publishing Mudrooroo’s memoir. Southerly marks his passing and acclaims his literary output for its audacity and originality. It also acknowledges his activism. I also think it is time for a biography of Mudrooroo, perhaps a critical biography that discusses his work alongside his life. died on 29 April 2019. A monumental figure of Australian letters, many of us feel that Murray accompanied us through our school and university studies, and was integral to our understanding of poetry. This editor had cause to re-read Fredy Neptune recently; I had forgotten the full achievement of this work, which is extraordinary. Many of the Australian obituaries allude to Murray’s controversial status also: his comments about women, connections with Indigenous peoples, the proposed constitution, the disdain for “elites.” I only hope, in relation to both writers mentioned so far, that Australia (at the least) develops a better understanding of mental fragility and illness—and its connection to literary production and the often brittle armoury of identity. Australian literary academic, Laurie Hengenhan, died on 15 March 2019, aged 88. Laurie founded another important journal in Australia’s literary landscape, Australian Literary Studies, in 1963, which he edited for 40 years. Incredible. He also edited the influential Penguin New Literary (1988) and was a professor at University of where he researched and published on . Southerly was sad to hear of the death of Kerry Reed-Gilbert on 13 July 2019. Reed-Gilbert began writing in earnest in 1991. She first performed her poetry in 1993 at the “Black Women’s Voices in the Park” series at Harold Park, Sydney. Her work was much published, awarded and translated. She was elected as the Chairperson for the First Nations Australia Writers Network in 2012, a position she held until 2018. Southerly hatched a number of plans with Kerry while she was in this role—most yet to be realised and which will be pursued. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 12

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Andrew McGahan’s death on 1 February 2019, aged 52, was shocking and a great loss to Australian literature. We include a review of his last novel The Rich Man’s House in this issue that also discusses his body of work. (Spoiler alert: The Rich Man’s House is fantastic.)

Elizabeth McMahon UNSW

1 From the perspective of 2019, we can identify the period as a time when cases of identity fraud and confusion were to the fore—for example: Helen Demidenko (Helen Darville), published 1994, exposed 1995; Eddie Burrup (Elizabeth Durack), exhibited 1995, exposed 1997; Wanda Koolmatrie (Leon Carmen), published 1996, exposed 1997; Norma Khouri (Norma Bagain Toliopoulos), published 2003, exposed 2004. This list is not comprehensive nor are the cases the same in motive or implications. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 13

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MICHELLE VLATKOVIC

Birralii Biyuu

Our placenta, a little planet, had veins like river tributaries covering its surface. Its ecosystem supported me with food and antibodies. It filtered out impurities, regulated my body temperature and allowed waste disposal. And it helped my mother, producing hormones that made her glow. We grew this temporary body organ together, sharing body tissue, so that I might become inter-dependent.

*

Birth is the artery between this world and the next via our mothers. Part of an infinite spiral, it’s a turn in a coil of life cycles. I was nurtured and nourished inside my mother then delivered here. Gunnima provides in this world before the next.1 Woman as land and women as people contain Beings. Traditionally Wangali is buried on Country beneath a sapling, connecting the child to the land in ceremony.2 Child and mother may return to where their shared essence has become one with soil, part of the child’s Song Lines and the mother’s. The nurses and doctor considered my first earth clinical waste. It met Gunnima as ash, out of the hospital incinerator to then be transferred to landfill. Nonetheless, connection to Country was made, to be understood later. Where I grew up, Gunnima has been scarred with tracks. Her skin has been peeled back, excavated. The bush has become a narrow thread of green surrounded by suburban sprawl. When I was little, the bush at the back of Dartford Road and later at Black Butt Avenue, might have gone on forever. Proportions were Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 14

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different. The height of the back stairs was demanding on my short legs, I was close to the ground, so close. Before our family home and the others that were built around us, timber men and farmers found this Country belonged to the Wallumedegai Clan who lived between Thornleigh and Parramatta. I walked the ground where they had hunted for possum, goanna, wallaby and duck. Wallumedegai women stayed close to the creeks where they caught yabbies and fish. They collected lillipilli and geebungs growing in this sandstone slopes. I walked the same paths from a very young age. Those Old People looked out for me and I talked to them when I was small.3 Especially the banksia men, who on a windy day I would hear talking amongst themselves, faint voices on the breeze. A powerful owl often watched me, from the washing line My mother’s belly swelling at eye-level, the expectation of a baby sister or brother from a baby’s kick are memories—like the scratchy contact of sheoak seed pod against my finger, shoving my hand in the pocket of my corduroy overalls; the pocket warm, the pod rough. Crouching close to the ground beside the bush rocks covered with moss, I watched fire ants scurrying out of their nest. Grains of quartz in the sandy soil sparkled in the sun, but the ground was cool and damp. It was before I could read and write. I don’t remember but my mother tells me as a small child I used to draw her pictures with my point of view if we had an argument, to convince her to change her mind. Mother’s Day then was chrysanthemums, bath salts or delicate lace hankies. Now in 2019, it’s almost Mother’s Day. I decide to find a couple of photos to text Mum. One of my mother holding me in her arms on my first birthday and one taken on Mother’s Day of us having breakfast together in bed. In this black and white photo taken in my parents’ bedroom in Black Butt Avenue, the sun floods me from the east facing window that looked out over the bush. We are smiling. My mother looks pretty, fresh faced. Maybe she was pregnant under the covers. None of the photos in the album show Mum apparently pregnant. She never kept a lock of hair, either baby’s cot name card, or plastic identity bracelet or memory box. There is only one reminder—small Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 15

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red and peach bone china roses adorn the miniature wreath displayed on the bottom shelf of a glass-doored cabinet, a gift from an acquain- tance. Maternity wards are happy places. Flowers, balloons and teddies. Walking along a corridor you hear laughter, crying babies. My mother was led away from us, through swinging doors to the delivery rooms. The nurse helped her into a hospital gown. She lay on a bed waiting, counting contractions. She swallowed the tablet with water, handed to her. The nurse left then. My mother’s body felt a dif - ferent sort of pain, not a contraction pulling at her insides, a pressing down. She looked at the pill bottle. Ergot. Correctly used, ergot reduces the uterus after delivery. Mum writhed in pain for an hour until the doctor arrived. He placed his stethoscope on her belly. It was cold against her skin. He moved it to the right, to the left, further down to the bottom of her stomach. His expression was concerned. He stood up straight, lifted my mother’s hand and held it. “I’m sorry. I’m afraid we’ve lost him.” He did not let go of her hand. “We need to make you a little more comfortable. We’re taking you to theatre.” He turned to his nurses, directing them. My mother’s lips went cold. She felt herself slip out of her body, disassociate from herself, a strange sense of being foreign but present to the proceedings, trapped in an inescapable moment. She looked at the poster on the wall of a stork in flight carrying a white bundle. Then she looked at the incubator machine pushed up against the wall across from her. As a nurse, my mother knew the procedures and maybe this added to the trauma. She was aware of how women who have a stillborn become locked in that moment, in that room and carry the experience as a heavy secret. They give birth to a being they immediately relinquish, after nine months of investing all their energy and life force in nurturing. Years later, Mum says, “No baby cries. It’s the most painful silence imaginable. I heard the instruments clicking and clacking. The sound Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 16

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of the metal scale when they weighed baby Michael. The nurse wrapped the baby in a blanket. It wasn’t over until after I delivered the placenta. The Doctor covered for the nurse. He said the placenta was especially gritty.” One year later, there was Narelle... She had felt the baby push itself around, position itself over the eight and half months. It was a hot December day. My father moved bush rocks and mum was pulling up the native grass. They worked side by side for the morning. After a break, something to eat and drink, my mother felt she needed to sit down a little longer. She rested for a couple of hours, noticing there was none of the usual squirming and kicking. Easing herself up out of an armchair Mum wanted to get to the bathroom. As soon she stood properly, her pelvis gave way, there was a small puddle at her feet. The Doctor confirmed the worst saying there was a problem with the placenta and womb wall. Mum blamed herself, believing baby Narelle died from heat exhaustion. I was in my late forties when she told me what it was like losing those babies. “I told your father to take care of the arrangements, couldn’t cope... And Dartford Road. I couldn’t live there with all that grief in the house, those memories.” Weekends were spent clearing the bush block at Black Butt Avenue. I roamed next door as my father and mother stacked rocks to make garden beds. Crawling through clumps of native rosemary and bacon and egg shrub, keeping an eye out for the blue tongue lizard that lived in the hollow log, I had a sense of being watched. The banksia trees with their grey rippled and gnarly trunks had branches laden with seed pods. Their lips in bearded faces, looked over me. I pushed my way through a maze of brush and spike until I found the rock lounge. I would sit on this natural seat, made from a slab of sandstone sculptured by rain and wind. Eventually my parents would call out to me. Dartford Road and Black Butt Avenue were both perched at the top of ridges. Below, creeks, the tributaries of the Lane Cove and the Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 17

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Hawkesbury River, asserted the natural boundary of bush walks. “Stay together and no further than the creek.” At Black Butt besides the powerful owl that sometimes found its way to the clothes line just outside the back gate, kookaburras congregated on the power lines and gang–gang cockatoos liked the wattle in the Hatton’s front yard. Mr Hatton read My Brother Jack and decided to leave the bush and rocks in their front and back yard. The Hatton girls and me, we liked to sit on the rock seat, pretend at being grown-ups. Ann told Jane and me she had lots of kids and Jane asked, “How many?” Ann had thought about this. “Three girls and three boys. Like the Brady Bunch.” “I’ve got twin girls,” Jane said, rocking her dolly pram. “Chrissie and Velvet.” I said, “No babies for me. It hurts. You get sick and have to go to the hospital.” Ann looked sideways at Jane, then back at me. “But all girls grow up to be mummies.”

*

I was twenty-four, mum was fifty-one, when something snapped inside of her. “Michelle do you remember what you said to me? Do you remem - ber how you treated me after I lost those babies?” I had no idea what she was about to say. “You said to me...” And when my mother repeated my words out loud I felt something fill inside me and drain all at once. I remembered. I remembered my mother sat at the bottom of the stairs at Black Butt, rested her head in her hands sobbing. Me, feeling very annoyed inside, frustrated that she couldn’t understand why I felt so angry and disappointed that she was sad and there was no one for me to play Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 18

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with. My mother didn’t want to play with me but she had to co-exist with me. I couldn’t stand her being like this, so unavailable. I said, “You can’t even bring home live babies.” There it was, out in the open. We remembered. I reached out across the table and put my hand on hers. “I’m so sorry.” Tears streamed down our faces. “I’ve carried that such a long time. What you said hurt so much.” “I didn’t know that.” “It shouldn’t have. It got mixed up with my own guilt and shame losing those babies. I had your brother then and l tried to leave it behind, but I never forgot.”

*

For ten years, my mother and I did the best we could to give my nephew a childhood. Then he left our care. Mum no longer spent hours writing emails, documenting meetings, maintaining a paper trail of inter- actions with DOCs caseworkers, lawyers and child psychologists. Preoccupied with murrambagan, she filled an expandable folder with birth, death and marriage certificates.4 Eventually she had all the paper for the Matthews family tree. My mother was seventy years old when she met her family in Gunnedah for the first time. Now she is in her eighties and she cannot travel. I go for both of us. Mum shares the bush medicine I source for her. She is proud I’m learning our language and culture to pass it on.

*

At the parting of two tracks, one ran by the creek, the other headed east. Where these met, I sat on a log resting. A dry gum nut lay in the sand next to my left foot near dry leaves and small twigs. The sun burnt hot in the centre of a blue sky. I had the feeling of being watched. I looked up. A powerful owl was perched in a scribbly bark. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 19

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We were at the bottom of the ridge, Martin and me. The past in the present is a discontinuous structure. Experience, emotion merge with muscle memory, going over the sensory, recalling that day. Heat waves in front of us. Walking along that track, wearing too tight shoes, hot, thirsty and sweaty having clambered down after Martin. A local had told him about a large cave with rock art and midden. Looking up, along the ridge, the rocky escarpment failed to reveal the cave. The slope was not heavily wooded. Only a few grass trees, small spiky shrubs, gums and banksias alongside dark sandstone boulders, that in the distant past had broken away to roll down the hill. On the lower ground behind us the bush was denser. Clumps of tea tree met the track. We couldn’t see what was beyond, but we could hear it, a creek, water flowing over rocks. Martin was at the beginning of his career as a historian, completing his doctorate. We had known one another since our teens and now in our mid-twenties were still good friends. I moved to regional New South Wales five years earlier. Returning that summer to Sydney, having been invited by Martin to join him for the twelve days of Christmas. He was living on a property rent free, working for the owner, Barbara, as her research assistant. We made this bush walk on the first day. Martin did not have a topographical map. Back then, I knew nothing about Song Lines, or Old People. When you’re disconnected, the significance of pivotal moments may be misunderstood. You feel the force of something without comprehending what you have been shown. Now I look back on that day and recognise the concrete confir - mation of the existence of Yaliwungabaa.5 (Kamilaroi linguist Bernadette Duncan offered me this term to describe the Kamilaroi understanding of time whereby past and coexist in the present.) My Songlines go back beyond my birth and my life’s timeline connecting me to Country, this Country, this continent. The signi - ficance of that moment, my experience that day connected me to these ancient shared Song Lines. Then I had no comprehension of this truth. That afternoon with Martin, wandering around the bush for an hour, we had not found the cave with midden. I was doubtful it would Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 20

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be down near the creek. It was a big cave, Martin had told me. The massive rocks were at the top of the escarpment. A young Muslim couple walked towards us, coming along the track. I asked them. They had seen a cave. Not the cave we were looking for but they agreed to show us what they found in the bush. Not far from where we had sat the young man stepped off the track to his right. We followed single file. There was a large dark sandstone boulder, made up of two sections, the size of two small cars parked bumper to bumper. Sticks and small dry leafy branches covered the entrance. A hole really, about a metre and a half in diameter. The young man moved the branch screen aside. We got down on our hands and knees to crawl in the opening. The couple left us to it. Inside were two domed chambers, each one comfortable for three adults. The ceiling was too low to stand upright. We stooped. It was cool out of the midday summer sun. I took off my sunglasses. The honeycomb wall in the first chamber was covered with hundreds of tiny ochre hand prints. Beyond the caramel enclave the second dome, no larger than the first, was blackened. “It’s a Baby Cave!” I said. “Birthing Cave,” Martin corrected. There were the remnants of a dead camp fire on the sand floor. I sat down under the golden dome. An aliveness just outside of the immediate physical realm, invisible to the naked eye pushed back around me, the same presence I felt as a child walking in the bush. It was linked to my insides, connected to my gut. Looking closely at the hand prints, I marvelled, “Amazing. A wall of birth certificates.” “Come on. We should go,” Martin said. Thinking about it now, maybe it wasn’t Martin being dismissive as I assumed then. Martin was interested in Aboriginal culture. Perhaps he knew then, that this was a sacred space for women and a man would never enter it. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 21

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We left the cave as we found it, replacing the branches at the entrance. Martin and I did find the cave he’d wanted to find, walking up to the escarpment through the bush, off the established track.6

*

Many years have passed. Now I comprehend this experience as one that touched the core of me, a knowing in me, my dhuuwurri.7 Locked in my DNA is a Kamilaroi link to Gunnima that can be physically felt. It exists beyond Western logic, challenging the secular belief that places are inanimate and without spirit. I didn’t understand all this at the time. Being colonised disconnected my head from my heart.

*

While I can’t recall precise thoughts I had before five, emotions of sadness and confusion surface when writing about the siblings I lost. Confusion more than anything that this should happen. I’d seen with my own eyes, heard with my ears, spoken about, thought about for nine months that a baby brother or sister would arrive. The stork would deliver it, I was told. My mother restored an old rocking horse found at the tip. The nursery was painted and so was the chest of drawers and baby cot. Colourful mobiles were hung from the ceiling. Stuffed toys guarded the bunny rugs and folded nappies on the change table. When no baby arrived, I felt betrayed. No explanation was adequate. I was lonely and at odds with the care-givers. I tried to draw it for my mother when we argued. I couldn’t read or write but I drew her pictures. And my mother had her own grief, shame and guilt to contend with. She never kept my pictures. They didn’t bridge the gap between us. Because we never talked about the babies we stopped associating our conflict with the loss. A loss that shaped each of us separately and our relationship for decades—putting a distance between us. Then we had no common language to express these hurts. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 22

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* Birralii Biyuu and powerful owl might be incisions on my possum-skin cloak, if I owned one.8 As un-surreal as the photograph of my mother sitting in front of a window bathed with sunshine, holding me. A tingling sensation fills her breasts, her milk ducts become full. My small lips latch onto her nipple. My suckling relieves the pressure in her bosom. Looking out the window at an enormous gum tree, my mother feels connected to its root system. Its life force pushes up through the soles of her feet, into her pelvis, to her stomach, around her heart, finding its way to the breast milk that flows from her to me in a shared moment of perfect contentment. Lovely.

NOTES

1 Gunnima means Mother Earth. 2 Wangali means afterbirth. 3 Old People are ancestors. 4 Murrambagan means mother’s mother’s mother. 5 Yaliwungabaa literally translates as always place of, always time of. 6 Martin and I have not been in touch for twenty plus years. Separate and unrelated to my reconnection with the Matthews side of the family, Martin has written the definitive book about surveyor and amateur anthropologist R. H. Mathews. I have not read this book but I do know that in the 1890s Mathews’s studies of Kamilaroi people documented kinship, marriage, initiation, mythology and linguistics. Mathews is routinely cited in Native Title claims. Such an odd little coincidence ... worthy of a footnote ... in our curious lives. 7 Dhuuwurri means nucleus; gut feeling; everything that makes a person who they are instinctively; what is in your DNA. 8 Birralii Biyuu means Baby Cave. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 23

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JENNI NIXON

what is old is new again

either we go on as a civilization or we don’t—Greta Thunberg

1. eighty years ago when Germany invaded Poland tanks rattled into towns soldiers rounded up civilians books critical of the regime burned classical texts fuelled the fire children wore yellow stars taken by cattle trucks to death camps —an exodus of Jewish refugees escaped by boat to Palestine many were Holocaust survivors denied entry the British returned all to camps in Germany sent back before the creation of the State of Israel— Israeli settlers seize farms destroy aged fig and olive trees occupy stolen land build homes modern cities Palestinians denied citizenship are under constant surveillance political suppression indefinite incarceration snipers shoot children who throw stones

born after World War II I live a suburban life find a copy of the House of Dolls Holocaust porn (in a Nazi brothel whores in Joy Division have a lesbian boss who whips them) learn of illicit sex from a book in the linen cupboard with photos of starved people in striped pyjamas dead bodies piles of shoes hidden with Dad’s .22 rifle (a defence from possible invasion by Reds from the North) I’d like to join a kibbutz plough in one hand gun in the other

2. bombsite cities of sand homes crushed by giants millions displaced seek shelter under canvas in camps on rising seas pour into rickety boats Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 24

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a small boy’s body washes ashore on a Turkish beach his photo splashed across the news rescuers of migrants at risk in the Mediterranean face prison south of the border people flee countries the USA have helped destroy among reeds and rubbish a drowned man and infant daughter floats on the Rio Grande River activists are charged with transporting harbouring trafficking people criminalised for giving water to migrants dying in the desert President Trump calls press freedom the enemy of the people fake news émigrés animals criminals drug dealers rapists Immigration place in solitary homosexuals disabled the mentally ill in forty days sixty thousand migrant children are held in squalid camps kept in cages without family hungry no hot meals or showers clothes unwashed lights always on some sexually assaulted ill and dying manacled mothers give birth deported their babies left behind witness democracy bought by scratch my back deals racism and lies the rise of neo-Nazi thugs who share swastika-cupcakes and online hate

3. strangled cry of a white cockatoo flying by a sunny autumn morning in Sydney unseasonably warm dead leaves rustle underfoot on the driest continent on Earth dying towns toxic rivers clogged with floating dead fish Climate Emergency water is gold sold to the highest bidder a water-grab to grow cotton for mining leases burning coal from the Galilee Basin a pollution time-bomb for the planet PM portrays Manus detainees murderers child molesters rapists we have history of venal cruelty convicts banished to Port Arthur Norfolk Island Aboriginals to Cape Barron and to missions most asylum seekers arrive by plane eighty-one thousand in four years after the election a loss of hope in offshore concentrationary camps six years is enough it’s too much in one month forty-five refugees attempt suicide seventy self-harm border force sends asylum seeker boats back the boats keep coming Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 25

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STUART BARNES

Pork Chops

“You want that really crisp, that really golden crust.” Olive oil in a cast iron skillet glistens, coils, hisses. The TV superstar sears the other white meat, a new Le Creuset bastes it with garlic rosemary butter

while kids racking Lamb Chop crackle and sputter. “Silence is golden,” whistles the silvered man still able to cue the Battle of Pork Chop Hill, the damp billet, wet-behind-the-ears buds. “Stick the skillet in the oven,” hisses

the chef, “sixty degrees.” A busyness of hisses surges from one he made earlier. “Cut a piece of cake for Grandpa.” Shears click click click in the mind of that anthropomorphic sheep. The golden candle’s blown out by the three boys. A willet gilds a watercolour. “Whew,”

the octogenarian weeps—a telephone call’s long overdue— and welcomes kisses. “And before you pig out—see what I did there?—frill it with more of that gorgeous garlic rosemary butter.” The golden boy blanches his old man’s fears. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 26

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“Happy Birthday To You” not music to ears, thinking he’s a pork chop at a Jewish barbeque, the son who killed the golden goose carries on like a pork chop and hisses the audience far from his stage then mind aflutter gorges on candied millet

puffs like a Japanese teenager. Will it continue, the kitchen shears chopping pork pies. Psychosomatic stutter! It will continue like the stern observance, the ruthless kisses, the golden

handcuffs. Simple to will it, a pork chop island’s view. “Get some Pork on your fork” blears adult eyes. “Is this his clutter?” “Pork Chop’s Little Ditty” is solid gold an—

Note: “Pork Chops” is a prime sestina, my variation of the sestina in which the number of syllables in the title and in every line and in the poem (including the title) is a prime number. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 27

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JOHN STEPHENSON

The Man Who Would Be Auden

Clem Christesen, a founding editor in the great story of Australia’s literary journals, was still puzzling about the encounter in the 1990s. A man in Royal Australian Air Force officer uniform had approached him in a Brisbane park late in wartime 1944, and introduced himself as the English poet W. H. Auden, on secondment to Australia from his residence in New York—a second ment, need it be said, that no-one else had ever heard of. The officer went on to discourse con- fidently to him about Auden’s poetry Photograph: John Bede Cusack, and literature in general. courtesy Wakefield Press This odd case came up in an interview I did with Christesen, part of some Brisbane research of my own. The experience seemed to trouble him, even after so long a time. He said the officer was perfectly presentable, youngish and spoke well with what we’d probably call today an educated Australian accent. He had a stocky build. His coverage of literature, classical, contemporary and—so to speak—his own, was intelligent, pleasant and insightful. While, on the face of it, this might sound a matter of ordinary sheer lunacy, Christesen explained that he was truly puzzled rather than alarmed or bemused. In a culture much less visual than ours, the UK poet’s undeniable fame had still not always been accompanied by photo-graphs, nor would facts about his height and physical stature be necessarily well-known in Australia. Auden in fact was tall. But Christesen said the man had “something about him,” a certain air and Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 28

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impressiveness so that, at least for those whimsical minutes, the young editor was made to wonder whether this might not actually be the real Auden. Their park meeting didn’t conclude with any explanation, let alone a winking revelation by the officer that he’d been joking. He simply said goodbye and walked off. Yet it had all been so bizarre—a man in Service uniform almost certainly misrepresenting himself—that Christesen felt he had to report the matter at once to the then Com - monwealth Security Department. Interestingly those officials were not at all amused, took the case very seriously, grilled their literary editor witness for hours, and set in motion a full-bore search of the city for the probable impostor, with all other police services alerted. Though the war was to end within a year, this of course was not known and the possibility of Axis espionage or sabotage, particularly Japanese, could not be discounted. Certainly an officer behaving very oddly could not be ignored. And even less could a man who might not be a RAAF officer yet was wearing the uniform be ignored. Still, despite the paranoiac excitement of the security people, it would have been an extremely unlikely way for a genuine spy to behave. Just how the manhunt was conducted isn’t recorded. MPs inter - rogating all stocky men in RAAF officer uniform in Brisbane, to determine if they’d just pretended to be a famous poet—who they themselves had never heard of—strikes one as verging on the Inspector Clouseauish. At my interview with him in the 90s, Christesen ended his tale with: “And you know they never caught him. They never got to the bottom of it!” Christesen’s RAAF–Auden encounter was one of those things that got stranger the more one thought about it. For example, was this man making his approach indiscriminately to others in the hope of striking a literary spark in the wartime cultural drabness, or—much more likely— he knew very clearly who Christesen was and that he would be receptive to the subject matter? But Christesen himself was not well-known in our current celebrity sense. How would the man have known about him? If RAAF Auden was truly an Air Force officer, what on earth did he think he was doing? Could this conceivably have been a case of Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 29

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derangement by what was then called shell-shock, our modern PTSD? Or, if he was not a genuine airman, where did he get his uniform? Possibly, seeing that Forces personnel were billeted across Brisbane in all types of accommodation, it may not have been hard to steal one. So was he just someone who liked to dress up and fool people? Or could he have been an escaped mental patient with a plausible demeanour, adding Great English Poet to the established list of insane identifications, like Napoleon, Jesus, or Julius Caesar? Whoever he was, as Christesen said, he was never traced or heard of again in his own lifetime. Seventy-five years on, a door on this little literary mystery has opened. Through researcher Marilla North, the indefatigable chronicler of the life and work of the Australian mid-century novelist , a convincing candidate for impostor Auden has stepped out into the light, to take a vaudeville bow. Dymphna Cusack, as it happens, was the co-author with Florence James of the best-remembered and most popular novel of Australia in World War Two, . Cusack herself was a known practical joker. She had pulled pranks even on her own publishers. She enjoyed a close, warm, literary-intellectual relationship with her younger brother John Bede Cusack, who was himself as accomplished a prankster as she was. As teenagers they were forever in cahoots on japes. And in December 1944, John B. Cusack, more than three years in the RAAF and by now a Flight Lieutenant, visited Brisbane on his way home—via the USA—from a service tour with RAF Bomber Command in Britain. His appearance, as shown in photos and described at the time, neatly matches Clem Christesen’s account: a stocky build and a good-looking, even striking face, a man with a presence. Cusack had the ease of wide literary knowledge, and could have made inquiries around Brisbane to identify Christesen and his workplace. And if any policeman afterwards had questioned him, he would have had his identity papers as F/L John Cusack, RAAF, and could deny any knowledge of the matter. He may very well have refined his accent in his years away. And the motivation to hoax? This is in some way murkier, because there’s no documentary evidence, for example, to show that Christesen Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 30

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ever declined for publication a piece of writing from either sister or brother Cusack, that might have spurred an act of revenge. Rivetingly, yet possibly only a coincidence, after an air battle in which he saw a bomber crewed by good friends explode in flames, John Cusack did later suffer what was deemed a war neurosis, serious enough for him to be hospitalised in 1945. By report he masked the condition well in the following years, and eventually exorcised his horror by writing, under the pen name John Beede, the successful war account They Hosed Them Out; this alludes to the 1945 poem by the American Randall Jarrell, “The Death Of The Ball Turret Gunner.” “I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters. When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.” There’s no real reason to suspect any party-political element in the hoaxing, if this explanation is correct. Both men were of the Left, though Christesen probably more conservative within that. More pertinently, as much-admired as Christesen was and genuinely mourned at his death in 2003, a personable man, he also had a name for a certain reactiveness and provokability which flowed from his strong convictions and values. At the time he may have represented to both Cusacks the kind of touchy, forceful, wave-making young luminary who was an apt target for a spoof. One cannot help thinking here also of editor Max Harris, the fictitious poet Ern Malley, and Angry Penguins magazine in that same year of 1944. Yet why did Christesen, a man with the widest literary connected - ness over the next sixty years, never hear any whisper of a solution? The most risible of historiographical fallacies is to assign causality for an event to a person in history, and then drum up far-fetched reasons to explain why that person has never assisted one’s thesis by admitting they did it. Even so, everything does seem to hang together here. If Cusack had intended only a simple hoax and then become aware he had triggered a police manhunt, he would have every reason not to talk about it. Hospitalised the following year, with therapy to en - courage forgetting rather than remembering, he might possibly have come to interpret such a jape in a less welcome light. But a far more powerful consideration, I would think, is that as the Cold War Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 31

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developed in the later Forties, with its atmosphere of anti-Communist paranoia and distrust, and surveillance by the new ASIO spy body, the last thing a person already with a left-wing reputation would do, is breathe a word about it. Setting off a big security scare in Brisbane by masquerading as a famous figure long associated with the Far Left, no matter how amusing in certain circles, would be an agency best unclaimed. There is further evidence for the case—at least of a suggestive kind— in the fact that Cusack’s 1944 ocean voyage home to Australia came via New York, where Auden was living. Cusack stayed two months in the USA; it was noted at the time that Australian servicemen and women passing through were extremely popular in America, and seen as the best of allies. Cusack was taken up by a rich East Coast family. He certainly had the literary interest and the personal charm to seek to meet Auden, though as yet no specific record of it taking place has turned up. It is piquant to reflect that he might actually have heard Auden talk about his work. If, as it now seems, a simple yet potentially humiliating hoax attempt is the truth behind the encounter, perhaps it was better that Clem Christesen, a sensitive man, never learned the answer to his Auden mystery. But there is more to reflect on with Cusack. His view of his own deadly bombing rôle over Europe was obviously conflicted. Yet someone like this, an aviator with the courage to endure a dan - gerous tour and then suffer a PTSD, would receive in our con temporary times both esteem and a much readier understanding of his illness. One would not wish, and again only if this story is true, that his safe return from war in 1944 and placement forever on a service honour roll, as well as on the national roll of our writers, should be marked in our minds now only by a prank. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 32

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LEILA LOIS

Hêv

Pocked with personification the fossil virgin of the skies waxes and wanes “Lunar Baedeker,” Mina Loy☽

Gold rivers & tides & heavenly flow of milk are her sacred charge. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 33

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JOANNE BURNS

wrap

a rotting brocade of the heart still insists there’s more to it, in a laconic grasp a dinner set is determined to find a last pastoral moment, packed in a box under a bunch of time riddled tools; a bubble wrapped mirror concedes defeat like stacks of old orphaned books, or a set of proust—you press on the padlock with glib faith in the myth of eternal return whaddya think mircea eliade a raucous voice blasts through the firm orange door like a harley davidson tobacco rock band no tiptoe through the roses elioteers Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 34

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MANDY SAYER

The Dinner Party

It probably wasn’t the best time for her to have tried to break it off, but he’d started phoning her at home and she feared her husband would grow suspicious. In twenty-six years of marriage, she’d raised three children, had established two veterinary surgeries, and had earned an AO for her services to charity, but she’d never before broken her wedding vows. The dinner was for twenty, including herself and Graham. They’d ordered catering from Otto, because Graham was best friends of the owner and had been able to negotiate the fee. The cooks were already marinating the scallops in her large and well-appointed kitchen. The man who’d been calling her repeatedly was also attending the dinner party, along with his wife. To avoid any awkwardness, Frances was hoping she could stop it going any further by discussing it with him over the phone, before the couple arrived. She’d been arranging this fundraiser for the Wilderness Society for months. The cream of Sydney society would soon be arriving, including the Lord Mayor and her husband, the state leader of the opposition and his wife, and the chairman of Taronga Zoo. A photographer from the Sun Herald was due to arrive at 7.30. The doorbell rang. Frances rushed down the hallway and pressed the intercom button. “Delivery,” a gruff voice mumbled. “Seventh floor,” she replied, and pressed another button to admit the courier. The parquet floors breathed the scent of peppermint, as she’d requested that the cleaner infuse the steam mop with a natural disinfectant. Frances had an uncanny sense of smell, much like the dogs she treated each day. The medical term for her condition was hyperosmia, the sufferers of which experienced strong discomfort and Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 35

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even illness when exposed to certain odours. Proximity to synthetic fragrances, perfumes, and cleaning products could trigger mild to severe discomfort. Even the scent of certain shampoos could be so overwhelming to Frances that it could cause a migraine. Frances and Graham lived in a grand four-bedroom apartment in Potts Point, built in 1912, which featured recessed balconies, walnut- panelled living and dining rooms, even servants’ quarters, though once the children had moved out, and the nanny had left, Frances converted it to a library to contain her private collection of rare books on Australian fauna. Ironically, it had been Graham who’d suggested that Jack begin working in her library. Jack had a contract with a press in the United States to translate an entire collection of German short stories but, due to the construction work at the back of his building, it had been impossible for him to concentrate at home. So, three afternoons a week, Jack swotted away in Frances’s library and, whenever he was unsure about his grammar, or his sentence construction, he’d call her in from whatever she was doing—gardening, cooking, talking on the phone—and she’d sit down with him quietly and explain the nuances of nineteenth-century German vernacular. She’d cut back on her hours at the surgery and only worked mornings now. It had been in the library where Jack had leaned in to kiss her. They’d been sitting side-by-side at the table, bowed over a manuscript, as she helped him translate a Kleist short story. One moment she was writing Vergangenheitsform in the margin and next she was sensing his warm breath on her neck, his stubble against her cheek, his wet lips grazing hers. It had only been a kiss, but she still felt guilty.

When she heard the elevator stop she opened the apartment door. She’d already bathed, had done her hair and makeup, and was now standing in her Japanese robe and slippers. She directed the courier to take the box into the dining room, where the butlers were setting out plates and cutlery, and to place it on the sideboard. She’d ordered these table accessories from a novelty store in the city, the photos of which would ensure her dinner would make the social pages of the Sunday Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 36

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papers, which was another reason she had to break it off with Jack. Any hint of public impropriety could ruin her reputation, her business, and most importantly, her marriage, which she valued more than anything. When Jack had made a pass at her only three days before, she’d been startled, then quietly delirious: he’d tasted all earthy and green, his breath a sip of freshly cut grass. My God, he was so much younger than she, by about fifteen years, and what could he possibly see in her? And all sorts of sensations began wheeling through her: a swooning rush of vertigo and panic. She knew it was wrong, but she couldn’t help herself: Graham hadn’t kissed her, hadn’t touched her like that in years. In fact, no one had ever kissed her like that. She’d only had two boyfriends before she’d married Graham, and one of them had turned out to be gay. On the afternoon of the kiss, Graham had been at been at the theatre, in rehearsals for his new play, and of course had been none the wiser. But now that they were all about to have dinner together, she knew that whatever was happening could not go any further. After the thrill of being encompassed by Jack’s mouth, his sinuous and searching tongue, she’d suddenly felt grimy and full of self-loathing. It wasn’t fair on Graham, to be sure, but mostly it wasn’t fair on Lucy, whom Frances had befriended first. They had met two years before when Lucy had brought her cat into the surgery, suffering from an infected paw. Lucy was a short, naturally tanned woman with feathery blonde hair. Her pale blue eyes seemed permanently startled, as if she were astonished by everything she saw. As Frances treated the cat, they’d made small talk, and Lucy had mentioned that she and her husband, a translator, lived just around the corner from the surgery, and that she was completing an MA in contemporary Australian drama. That was when Frances smiled at the coincidence: her husband was the Australian playwright, Graham Daly, and that if Lucy ever wanted to talk to him about her thesis, she was sure that he’d oblige. The offer led to a Sunday lunch. Frances and Graham learned that in her spare time Lucy wrote short stories and was a volunteer at the Wayside Chapel. Jack currently held a translation fellowship from the Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 37

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Australian National University and was allergic to aged cheeses and fungi. Graham warmed to them both and agreed to be interviewed for Lucy’s thesis and to allow her access to his private papers. Since then, every few months, the four had dinner together at their favourite place, Tiny’s, a tapas restaurant in Darlinghurst.

As she walked down the hallway, Frances sensed an odd, gamey aroma and went to investigate. In the kitchen, steam fogged the windows and three of the four staff were frantically grinding seeds with wooden pestles. Before them on the island countertop sat a stainless-steel tray containing twenty knots of deep pink flesh, each about the size and shape of a fist. She frowned, glancing at the chef’s roman profile against the window and back again. “I thought we were having scallops for the entree.” The kitchenhands continued grinding the seeds. “Scallops are off the menu,” announced the chef. “And so is the barramundi.” She felt a pain crawl up the left side of her head. “But I specifically requested—” “Instead we are having truffle-infused pork belly,” the chef continued, “with kale, wild greens, and lemon myrtle, followed by a main of Murray cod.” Frances bristled, horrified. She could not believe the chef had not only disobeyed her requests, but also defied the entire spirit of the anniversary fundraiser by serving a near-extinct native fish. “Didn’t your husband tell you? He approved the changes only this morning.” She backed out of the room, speechless. Why had Graham changed the menu so drastically and why had he failed to mention it to her? Didn’t he know that the Murray cod was an endangered species, and that Jack was allergic to fungi? He’d been so busy in rehearsals of his new play that he was becoming increasingly detached. Only last week, he’d even forgotten their youngest daughter’s nineteenth birthday. The money had come from her side of the family. Her now elderly German parents had been lawyers, and she their only and much adored Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 38

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child. She’d grown up in Vaucluse, had attended elite private schools, and gained her veterinary qualifications from Sydney University. In her mid-twenties, she’d been a tall, shy, idealistic woman with long rust-red hair, dry and split-ended, who’d worn handmade jewellery and volunteered at animal shelters. One day she announced to her friends and family that she was marrying a man she’d known only for three weeks. If that hadn’t been bad enough, she’d declared that her husband-to-be was fifteen years her senior. While not suggesting directly that Graham might have been after her money, her girlfriends had counselled her to slow down her plans, while her parents had insisted that she draw up a pre-nuptial agreement. But in her gut, she’d sensed—no, she’d been convinced—that Graham truly loved her and that he would never leave. And over a quarter of a century later, she had proved everyone wrong. They were still married, and they would remain married, in spite of her brief transgression, which would soon be over and forgotten entirely. She walked back down the hallway and into the master bedroom. She’d already tried to call Jack twice, to tell him he could no longer work in her library, but his phone kept going to voicemail. It was now a little after 6 pm. The first of the guests would begin arriving in less than an hour, including Graham, who’d been roped into the taping of an interview on the ABC, as his new play was premiering in less than a fortnight. The built-in teak closet ran the width of the bedroom wall. She slid open the door on the far right and pulled out her beaded powder-blue gown. Lately, when she’d been dressing, she’d noticed an odd scent on her clothes, especially her lingerie. Something sweet and faintly botanical, jasmine perhaps, or even violets. Perhaps the cleaner had changed the laundry powder. Or had deodorized the closet with some kind of spray. The gown was still in a plastic sleeve, stamped with the drycleaners’ green and yellow logo. She pulled it out and slipped it on. She was about to step into her silver high heels when the doorbell rang again. Surely no guests would turn up so early? The invitation said 7 pm Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 39

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sharp. The bell rang again, this time longer and more insistent. She sighed, ran out of the bedroom and down the hall, but one of the butlers was already buzzing open the downstairs front door. He turned as she struggled with the zip. “Jack Porter,” he announced, and began walking down the hallway. Frances tried to control her expression of surprise and frustration. She’d wanted to end it before his wife and the guests arrived. Not now—not like this—in front of butlers and chefs and kitchen hands. As she continued to tug the zip she heard the elevator grind to a stop on the landing. When she opened the front door and glimpsed his wide, bloodshot eyes, his face crumpled with what looked like lack of sleep, she knew the night could only get worse. “We gotta talk,” he breathed. She smelled stale wine. Her first impulse was to slam the door in his face, but that would arouse even more suspicion. She glanced behind her: one of the butlers was arranging flowers on a stand further down the hall. She smoothed the front of her dress, and nodded in the direction of the dining room. Once inside, she closed the door and rested her back against it. Even half-drunk, he looked mesmerising, with his wild brown curly hair, his deep green eyes, his two-day growth, the way he looked at her with his head tilted sideways, like an uncomprehending dog. Behind him stood the long dining table, set with Wedgwood china, silver cutlery, crystal decanters, and floral centrepieces. Each setting had a name card before it. She’d seated Graham at one end and herself at the other. She’d placed Lucy and Jack together, in the middle of the table, near Albert Moss, the director of the Darlinghurst Funeral Home. Jack strode to the sideboard and poured himself a glass of scotch. She noticed that his fingernails were dirty and that there was a faint circle of red wine ringing his mouth. She had to get him out of here before Graham arrived. He took a gulp of his drink, looked down at the floor, and announced, “It’s over.” Frances exhaled a sigh of relief. Even though she and Jack had only shared a kiss—nothing more—she’d never really broken up with anyone Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 40

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before and was unsure about how to do it. She’d rehearsed the, “It’s not you, it’s me” routine, and the “Let’s just be friends” scenario, but now that Jack was ending it for her, well, she forgot all about those lame excuses. “Goodness.” She exhaled. “That’s a relief.” As she glanced over the table setting she realised that all she had to do now was to add the masks, ordered from the novelty shop, still packed in the box that had arrived earlier. She’d wanted to turn the party into a kind of masquerade and, on each plate, she would place the mask of an endangered Australian species, to be worn throughout the meal. Jack cleared his throat and stared at an unlit candle on the table. “So why don’t we run away together?’ Frances felt blood draining from her face. Suddenly her mouth felt dry and the pain on the left side of her skull began to throb again. “You just said, ‘It’s over.’” He frowned and a line of sweat ran into one eye. “Not us, Fran”—he wiped his face—“Lucy. Lucy and me.” Frances tossed her head. “Don’t be ridiculous.” As she walked across to the sideboard she noticed he was holding his glass tightly, as if he were about to crush it. She began opening the box from Wild Aid, nervously ripping off the tape, and pulling on the cardboard flaps. She hated the way younger people these days so casually disregarded their commitments to each other, as if marriage vows could be as conve - niently removed as an unwanted and fading tattoo. “My parents have a property in the Hunter,” he said. “We could go there.” Frances clenched her fists, her fingernails digging into her palms. “We can’t do that. Not because of. Not because of, of—” she gestured at him, at herself, her hand describing in the air something cloying and distasteful “—of this.” She pulled out a couple of the plastic masks, all with eye and mouth holes, so each wearer could still see, talk, drink, and eat. The first was of an orange-bellied parrot—she recognised the distinctive electric blue stripe above the eyeholes, the forest-green feathers. The second, with its Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 41

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flat snout, pointed ears, and ash-coloured fur, was of a northern hairy- nosed wombat. “You don’t understand,” said Jack. “It’s not about us. She doesn’t know about us.” Frances closed her eyes briefly and nodded. “I asked you, I told you to stop, to stop ringing me at night.” Hands now trembling, she pulled a few more masks from the box: a regent honeyeater, a western swamp tortoise, a mountain pygmy possum with egg-shaped ears and long dark whiskers, the only mammal of Australia to hibernate. She began distributing them around the table, face up on each dinner plate: the hairy nosed wombat for Mr Moss; the mountain pigmy possum for the Lord Mayor; the regent honeyeater for the mayor’s husband, Leonard. “It’s not that.” He put the glass on the sideboard and began topping it up. A swamp tortoise for the barrister, Alan Norman, and the orange- bellied parrot for his lovely wife, Gwen. If she could just throw the perfect dinner party, her perfect life, in her perfect home, would continue unthreatened forever. Frances returned to the sideboard and pulled the rest of the masks from the box: she recognised the southern corroboree frog, the large- tooth sawfish. At the bottom of the box, however, partly covered in Styrofoam noodles, was a bright pink mask she didn’t remember ordering. “It’s Lucy,” said Jack. Frances heard the front door slam, footsteps in the hallway. Graham was home from his interview. “It’s time for you to go,” she said. “She wants a divorce,” he added. “She’s met someone else.” Frances heard Graham’s steps slow as he passed the doorway. She leaned over and touched the final mask from the box and was surprised to realise it wasn’t one of an endangered species at all, but quite the opposite. “I’m not leaving my husband,” she said firmly. “Not for you. Not for anyone.” Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 42

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She watched his mouth twist into an angry smirk. His eyes were now so dark and narrow they seemed reptilian. “Just because you’ve enjoyed an afternoon of camping,” she added, “doesn’t mean you want to live in a tent for the rest of your life.” His face reddened, his nostrils flared, and she couldn’t predict if he would laugh the remark off or attempt to slap her. “Go home and change,” she said softly, “before it’s too late.” She glanced down at the mask that she didn’t remember ordering. It was of a pig: smooth, pink, with pointed ears, a long snout, and a silver ring piercing the septum. Jack shambled to the door and grabbed the handle. “Who the fuck cares?” he snarled. He opened the door and went to leave but turned back momentarily. “Let’s face it Fran,” he said, smirking. “You’re way too old for me.” He slammed the door behind him. Her face burned and began to itch. The insult, the sudden disgust in his voice, left her reeling. How could he have demanded that she leave her husband, her home, her life for him, and then a few minutes later dismiss her as easily as a man ignores a charity worker collecting change on the street? No wonder he and poor Lucy were having problems; his drinking, too, was getting out of hand. Frances looked down at the pig mask and fingered the silver septum ring. Pigs were a feral species introduced to the country in 1788, having been transported on the First Fleet to feed the early settlers. But by the 1880s, many had escaped and run wild, which had caused all sorts of problems in the natural world. Frances crossed the room and slid the mask onto the plate with the place card of Jack Porter in front of it. Surely, when he’d see it, he’d read it as a response to his cruel and thoughtless comment. In the bedroom, she fussed about in front of the mirror and finally managed to do up her zipper. Graham was in the ensuite, taking a shower. The door was half-open, and steam billowed into the room. As usual, he’d kicked off his shoes beside the closet, and had dropped his clothes on the bed. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 43

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“What happened to the menu?” she called over the sound of running water. “What?” came the reply. “The menu!” she cried. The shower stopped, and Graham appeared in the open doorway, rubbing his salt and pepper chest hair. “The scallops were off,” he said. “And the barra never arrived.” Frances sat on the bed and slipped on her silver pumps. “Don’t you know the Murray cod is endangered?” “Rubbish.” “It’s practically extinct!” Graham towelled his legs and butt. “Yeah, it was a few years ago. But the CSRIO saved it. They’ve begun farming them in Victoria.” He paused and playfully flicked the towel at her legs. “Some eco farm or something.” “But what about the truffle oil?” He opened his side of the closet, pulled out some underpants, and stepped into them. For a man of sixty-one he still had the physique of a much younger man: narrow hips, flat stomach, muscles twining around his shoulders. “The truffle oil was made ethically, too,” he said. “From some organic bloody farm in Tasmania.” Frances shook her head. “No, I mean. I mean, don’t you remember Jack? He’s allergic to fungi.” Graham, pulling on a white shirt, slapped his forehead. “Oh, I’ve always wanted to poison Jack. But, oh dear, you caught me first!” He continued to dress with a grin on his face, buttoning his shirt, pulling on his trousers, slipping into the same pair of black lace-up shoes he’d been wearing. He left the room in search of a cold beer. Frances buckled her shoes and stood up, smoothing her dress once again. In a few more minutes the guests would begin arriving and she would have to assume her happy party face. She leaned down and picked up Graham’s crumpled shirt to put it in the laundry basket. As she walked to the bathroom she smelled that sweet jasmine scent again, the same one that had begun to fill her closet recently. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 44

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As she greeted guests, she kept an eye on the time, wanting everyone seated by 7.30. Most mingled around the dining room table, champagne in hand, or stood on the balcony, admiring the harbour view. The press photographer arrived and began setting up lights. Trays of canapes floated in and out of the room. Graham and Mr Moss were standing near the cocktail cabinet, lost in conversation. Twenty-five minutes past seven, when Jack and Lucy still hadn’t appeared, she cursed him for his terrible timing. Why couldn’t the idiot have waited until after the party, after tonight, when there weren’t so many wit nesses? At 7.30, she tapped a knife against a wine glass, and asked that everyone be seated. The photographer adjusted his lens as the guests found their place cards and settled into their chairs, each picking up their appointed mask and laughing. As Frances took her seat, the front doorbell rang and one of the butlers strode out of the room. She looked down at her own mask—a fawn-coloured potoroo—and stroked the fine white nylon whiskers. At the other end of the table, Graham was playing with the elastic strap of his bilby and making squeaking noises. Jack and Lucy swept into the room—she muttering apologies, he clean-shaven and wearing a sharp suit, though his eyes were still watery and bloodshot. As they walked past Graham, Frances noticed Lucy’s 1950s pink cotton dress, her string of pearls, and felt a stab of guilt. They hurried to their seats and the photographer piped, “Are we ready to go?” Frances was about to nod when she heard Lucy let out a cry that was so high and strangled it sounded almost sexual. She glanced over and was horrified to see that, in their haste, the couple had mixed up their place cards and poor dear Lucy was now holding the pig mask in her hands, the one that had been intended for her bastard of a husband. “Oh, no!” she gushed, pushing back her chair and jumping to her feet. She rushed around to Lucy preparing to explain the mix up. But as she dropped a hand on her shoulder, she inhaled that unusual scent again, the jasmine one that had begun to infuse the clothes in her closet, the one, only an hour before, of which her husband’s shirt had reeked. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 45

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Now it all made sense: Graham’s absences and forgetfulness; Lucy’s intense interest in reading through his private papers here at the apartment; the strange scents in her own bedroom; Lucy’s sudden demand for a quickie divorce. Red-faced, heart hammering, she glared at her husband. He met her gaze, inhaled quickly, and suddenly looked panicked. “All ready now?” announced the photographer. When the camera flashed, Frances was blinded temporarily, and the whole room became a waterfall of reflected light, a silver flare of vanishing walls and people, a kaleidoscope of neon. Yet by Sunday morning, when she was lying alone in bed with the Sun Herald studying the photos in the social pages, she’d be able to see better than ever: her masked and smiling guests raising champagne glasses, with a barefaced Lucy glancing sideways at an equally barefaced and wide-eyed Graham. Sadly, what she didn’t see coming was that— long after her husband had moved out of their home—the scent of jasmine would linger on, in the bedroom, in the closet, and on the clothes he left behind. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 46

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BRONWYN LOVELL

Fucking Lucky

because in my worst experience of assault it was a dirty hand that stabbed its way up my vagina, not a penis or knife and because it was one man, not the gang of friends he rang and because I was dropped off alive, dizzy and livid Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 47

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COLLEEN Z. BURKE

Winners and losers

Caught in the merry-go-round of low, irregular wages, constant debt, my Mum, a domestic servant in thrall to Catholicism superstitions, and her sister, bought weekly lottery tickets waiting for their ship to come in— the only way they’d be able to have a holiday—it never did and now they’re both dead.

My daughter is committed to lottery tickets, the only way she feels her family of six can get ahead, break the debt cycle. Recently she rang me excited. Guess what? She asked. You got a job? Won the lottery? No, but someone who lives in our large country town won the lottery and purchased their ticket at the same newsagent’s I use—isn’t that amazing? Indeed it is but thought to myself that for her the odds had just reduced. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 48

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On Friday nights, pay day, Dad regularly lost his wages in card games on the way home from the factory. Mum and I walked out together to pawnshops. On Saturday arvo the sound of horse races bellowed out from our small rent-protected house. Aged ten, I placed Mum’s bets, usually a shilling each way, on horses with Irish names with Mr Li, the SP bookie, just around the corner.

Both my children gamble and although the idea leaves me cold it somehow gives them hope for the future. And maybe the odds are better than believing finding solace in god An afterlife Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 49

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DAVID BROOKS

A Bell Note

I used to daydream, over piles of manuscripts or while copy-editing an issue for what seemed the umpteenth time, that when at last I left Southerly I’d write a poem like Galway Kinnell’s “The Correspondence School Instructor Says Goodbye to his Poetry Students”:

Goodbye, lady in Bangor, who sent me snapshots of yourself, after definitely hinting you were beautiful; goodbye, Miami Beach urologist, who enclosed plain brown envelopes for the return of your very “Clinical Sonnets” ...... goodbye, you in San Quentin, who wrote, “Being German my hero is Hitler,” instead of “Sincerely yours,” at the end of long, neat-scripted letters extolling the Pre-Raphaelites:

I swear to you, it was just my way of cheering myself up, as I licked the stamped, self-addressed envelopes, the game I had of trying to guess which one of you, this time, had poisoned his glue.

Leaving aside the fact that one’s contributors are not in any way one’s students (sometimes it feels quite the opposite), no one has ever poisoned the glue on the envelopes they’ve sent me—at least not that I know of (one develops a strong stomach)—though there have been some poisonous letters, from famous Australian poets, mainly, who Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 50

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(how to put this most tactfully?) would occasionally offer me editorial advice. But writing such a poem (“Goodbye, ex-farmer in Bega...,” “Goodbye, lady on the western plains…”), cathartic as it might be, wouldn’t be a fair thing to do, to myself or to them. I’ll leave their letters to the National Library, let history decide. Southerly is turning eighty this year. Although various governments have tried to send it to dry-dock, the journal has been a flagship of new Australian writing, with a capacity to review and renew itself, for four fifths of a century. To have been its co-editor for a quarter of that time, in a succession that includes Guy Howarth, Kenneth Slessor, Gerald Wilkes, Elizabeth Webby, and, for seven years before his life was so tragically cut short, Noel Rowe, my first co-editor, has been an immense privilege, a great honour. I’m as conscious of that now as on the day I started. The most important thanks to offer, as I withdraw, are to the Australian writing and reading community, for letting me be a part of its—your—journal for so long. 1999 until 2018. It’s been a complex and deeply transitional nine- teen years. As an editor it’s sometimes seemed I was on a roller-coaster. I’m sure Liz McMahon, my esteemed co-editor for the last twelve years, has felt the same. Although it seems incredible, almost wondrous to say it, I don’t know that there’s been a period of such rapid advance in the technology of printing and editing since the discovery of the printing press. The digital age, in other words, arrived on this watch. It had been on its way for a decade already, but I think it’s safe to say that in the last twenty years literary journals have gone from a time when all submissions were still arriving in the post with carefully stamped, self-addressed envelopes and hand-written cover notes, to a time when almost every submission came by email, to where we are now, with contributors uploading their work to a website for editors to view at their leisure, if ever there is such a thing as editorial leisure. We’ve worked our way from Collins account-books in which we logged in every submission, longhand, and tracked its progress in the columns to the right, through a virtual museum of computer tech nology. Now people edit on mobile phones. Now journals are virtually paperless Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 51

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until the hard copies—if there are hard copies—arrive from the printer. Unsurprising, then, that it’s also been a time of mounting pressure to shift from hard copy to on-line formats. Southerly has gone part of this way. In some ways, earlier in the process—introducing The Long Paddock, its free on-line component, and its system of monthly bloggers—it might even have been near the vanguard, but it’s resisted the pressure to shift entirely, I think wisely since the new formats, rapidly succeeding one another as they do, have consistently proved less stable than we’ve been assured they were. The pressure, of course, is mainly economic. On-line publication is seen as much less expensive than hard copy and funding bodies, themselves under the pump, have been pushing their clients to shift— taking money away, I think, in order to force that shift—but in fact, since the principal cost is and should be payments to contributors, and I.T. maintenance isn’t cheap, the savings aren’t as great as thought. Seven or eight years ago Southerly was the flagship of the Literature Board, its cover displayed proudly on that Board’s homepage. Then the Attorney General took half the Australia Council’s funding away, to give, at his pleasure, to big-end, high-profile arts institutions such as Opera Australia, the Sydney Symphony Orchestra, etcetera. Until that point—with occasional periods when the composition of the Literature Board was not in its favour—Southerly had only to produce the one rather onerous annual application to each of its two major funding bodies. Now, to the Australia Council alone (the Literature Board having been abolished, along with the Visual Arts Board, the Music Board, etc.), Southerly has to beg for money three times a year, and has received Australia Council funding only one year in the last three (once, that is to say, in the last six to eight applications). Just a few issues ago it almost went to the wall and rumour has it that now, with its eightieth-anniversary issue, it is there again. At the time I write I note that another major Australian literary journal is bemoaning the same thing. Australian journals, it seems to me, have been put on a roster, to be funded only once every three years by the Australia Council, and, if they are lucky—read “behave”?—are Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 52

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given, that once, not much more than the amount that not so long ago they were given every year, and even then struggled to survive upon. To be fair, journals are given the opportunity to enquire as to why their grant application was denied. They are told invariably to expand their operations, to diversify, to show greater initiative in seeking funds elsewhere, to grow. They are never told how—with no funds even to pay the one employee they might have, with unpaid editors who already have, and have to have, very demanding day jobs, and manage their editing by filling every available crack in their schedules—this might be achieved. They also get the impression that the bulk of the committee who has made the funding decision knows little to nothing about the journal whose fate they are determining, let alone has ever had a copy in their hands. Funding applications for groups and organisations—the forms literary journals must present their cases upon—are now generic. There is, that’s to say, one form for visual, musical and written arts, stand- alone events and year-long programs, exhibitions, books, educational projects, theatrical and concert tours, etc., and probably applicants in most of those areas would say what I am going to say now, from the perspective of a literary journal—or, I should probably say, from that of the retiring co-editor of such a journal, a dinosaur, no doubt, burdened by actual experience, memory, and having passed, on the roundabout, the same points more than once. I.e. that the parameters of the funding applications, and the criteria by which the funding is allocated, the determinations of an application’s worthiness, are inadequate and inappropriate. For a literary journal, I think, they are particularly so. Their insis - tence upon growth, expansion, ever broader horizons (the compulsion to demonstrate, application by application, more and more visits to one’s website, more and more “Likes,” more and more Twitter fol - lowers, more and more Facebook friends) is oppressive enough—a disregard and disrespect for, and probably something close to a total misunderstanding of, the extraordinary work they already do (why must they do more? why must they do something different?). And the regime of Key Performance Indicators is even more so. For a journal Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 53

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operating with an ever-shrinking real funding base, its volunteers so stretched that funding drives themselves remain impossible dreams, the only true KPI is “to do exactly what we did—i.e. struggled to do—last year,” a statement so obvious, so witheringly honest (and, doubtless, “inappropriate”) that, in making it, one would almost certainly fall well below the bottom of the funding queue, when in fact, when you think about it, it’s a statement clearly demonstrating how much the journal needs the funding in the first place. The model by which funds are allocated, in other words, is now a business model. I don’t dispute that a journal of new writing and literary commentary can operate as a business, but the more success - fully it does so the more it subjects itself to and reflects market forces, and the less it reflects the critique of and independence from those forces that are the essence of the writer’s position. Clearly the funding philosophy—if we can speak of such a thing— has changed. Once (through the seventies, eighties, nineties, and even into the early years of this new century) the government (through the Literature Board of the Australia Council) and literary journals such as Southerly had a kind of collaborative arrangement. The government was using the journals as a means, on the one hand, of arm’s length funding of writers (through their payments to contributors), so that, at ground level, it did not have to involve itself in deciding which writers to fund, and, at another level, the journals’ decisions as to who was worthy of publishing and supporting aided the Board in its decisions concerning which writers to give individual grants to. The journals, in other words, were supported because they were a vital filter in the government’s wider program of support for Australian writing. But increasingly, in the last two decades, this ground has shifted. Literary journals continue to perform this same function, but it’s now largely for the publishing industry; to government they are supplicants, mendicants. Is this political? In a broad sense of course it is. Writers and artists have always, rightly or wrongly, been seen as leftward leaning and we don’t live in leftward times. In effect what we’re seeing is a punishment of literature, or perhaps, more specifically, any signs of literature’s Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 54

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intruding upon cultural affairs. Certainly it can’t have helped that, in the twenty years that I have been (was) a co-editor (although this built upon a firm base provided by our predecessor, Elizabeth Webby), Southerly, while always presenting it within a strong literary milieu, has moved further and further in the direction of cultural commentary. It was, for example—fifteen years ago—the first major Australian journal to produce an issue dedicated to the writing of asylum seekers. And they have been a consistent theme since. It was, ten years ago, the first to produce a full issue of Indigenous Australian writing edited by Indigenous writers themselves. It was the first to produce issues about animal abuse and against such things as live export and conservation killing. It was the first, I believe, to have produced a full issue about writing and disability, by writers of disability. Along the way, and consistent with this concern to amplify the repressed, neglected or effaced voices within our literature, it’s produced issues about the Chinese in Australian writing, about India in Australian writing, about Persia in Australian writing. And, of course, it’s produced issues directly about broken Australian dreams. But is the “political” explanation quite enough, or has there been, beneath and enabling this economic marginalisation, a broader cultural shift? How should the literary journal now see itself? Does its increasingly straitened position indicate a growing irrelevance, as government policy would seem to suggest, or is it—paradoxically, almost counterintuitively—all the more evidence of its significance? The culture has become digital. There can be no question of that. And it has itself been shifted by this shift, in a way reflected by a friend who wrote recently about another subculture’s “craven capitulation to the dictates of Mark Zuckerberg’s debauched empire of ‘Likes,’” and might have written just as incisively about the formal shift in the discourse upon which those Likes are based, away from longer, more detailed and more nuanced packagings of information that are, amongst other things, one of the specialties of the literary and the literary journal, toward the memes and catch-phrasings of Facebook and Twitter (a beast within the belly of which, however and ironically, I sense emerging a new interest in the essay). Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 55

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It may not be wise, at this point in time, for literary journals to bite the hand that feeds them, but (and wise governments will welcome rather than condemn this) they must do so anyway. Bite, and chew when necessary and possible. Southerly began in 1939. Its first seven years were wartime. It survived the forties. It survived the fifties. It survived the sixties. Australia Council support didn’t even begin until the mid-seventies. Since then, on its funding rollercoaster, it’s had some good periods and some tough ones. Times change, all this is to say, and—all and always on a shoe-string (the editors, for example, have never been paid)—Southerly has survived, the little journal that could. There’s no real reason to think it won’t continue to, and to keep performing its vital if often unacknowledged * functions, or that times won’t change again. Do I have regrets? You bet. There’s an old saw, that if you want something done, give it to someone who’s already got too much to do. A paradox deep at the heart of Southerly is that, since it is a key journal of Australian literature and new Australian writing, it needs, for its editors, people with considerable experience and contacts in both areas: people who know the history of Australian literature and Australian writing; people who have wide contacts among other people who know; people who have wide contacts among Australian writers themselves, and of all, not simply their own generations; people who, ideally, are also in some way writers themselves—people, in short, who almost certainly, on the face of it, have little or no time to take on the work in the first place. But find it anyway. From a personal perspective, I wish that the journal had not taken such vast swathes of my time, yet from an editor’s perspective I only wish I’d been able to give it more. The editor’s dilemma. I am so proud that we produced such ground- breaking issues, yet as each issue appeared—and despite the gems each issue has contained—I could only think of how short it fell from the vision I’d had of it. Time. Pat Skinner, Southerly’s editorial assistant when I came on board—of sacred memory; I think she virtually gave her life to Southerly— used not only to read every story sent in, but to write to the contributor, whether the story was accepted or not, to offer encouragement and Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 56

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suggestions. I wish we’d been able to do that, with all submissions, in the years since, but the volume of submissions has increased relentlessly and the people-power to deal with them has stayed the same. More and more of the editors’ time has been taken up by the demands, from funding bodies, for more and more applications, acquittals, reports and submissions. A situation, I always thought, we could have thought ourselves out of, if only—that constant lament—there had been more time. As to editing itself, there was a time, going from the poetry scene in Canberra in the early 1970s to the very different scene in Canada in the middle of that decade, when I realised that Poetry was a much larger and more varied thing than I’d ever imagined or been told it was, and that there wasn’t much chance I was ever going to like it all. It’s been like that. Southerly has a mandate, to represent—to present—the best of new Australian writing. If I followed my taste all the time I’d be failing that mandate. I’ve always been firm on this point. The journal’s taste must be broad. I have published a lot of work—poetry, short fiction, non-fiction, reviews—that I haven’t particularly liked, but that I’ve known was good, or very competent—that others would like, or that, perhaps, we, they, I should experience and think about and come to terms with anyway. A kind of editorial philosophy, if you like, that’s had numerous manifestations. When asked to edit the journal I agreed to do so only if I could have a co-editor, not only because I thought the work load too much for one person alone, or because it would be good to work with Noel Rowe, with whom I was already teaching, but also because I thought it important to incorporate, from the start, different points of view. Noel and I eventually extended this principle to the invitation, each year, to a third, guest editor, to do an issue with which, editorially, we would, on principle, have as little to do as we could. So too, we were encouraged by our publishers to produce themed issues. All very well—a good idea!—but if we devoted all our issues to particular themes, and insisted that all material in those issues conformed to those themes, we’d shut out a lot of potential contri- butors, and fail our mandate. One or two guest editors aside, we’ve Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 57

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tried to ensure that, while the “themed” material might occupy the rump of an issue, the rest remains open to general contribution. This principle of editorial openness has always, to my thinking, extended to the text itself of the works being published. Too much insistence upon house style can become an intrusion upon personal style; interfere too much with the grammar and you may be interfering with a grammar of thought, etc. As to reviews. There’s a vogue at the moment for tough, “honest,” no-holds-barred reviewing. And yes, of course, one should avoid at all costs a corrupt, I-scratch-your-back-you-scratch-mine literary sub- culture. But these vogues come and go, and one should also avoid arrogance, advertisement of one’s own cleverness, etcetera. A novel, a book of poetry, a volume of criticism, or a collection of stories can be the work of many years, and that labour, I think, should be respected. It’s unlikely a reviewer who’s spent a day or two on a book—even a week or two—has got much beyond its surface, and reviewers have some other, basic things to do before they get to the matter of their own opinions. I bear in mind A. D. Hope’s life-long regret that a certain poet had received, on her death-bed, his tough, “honest,” no-holds- barred (and very clever, very arch) review of her latest collection, and I’ve tried to save a reviewer or two from the possibility of some such remorse. But it goes both ways. One should also defend one’s reviewers quite firmly from any supposedly famous poets who feel those reviewers should be sacked for daring to express a reservation about some verse or opinion or another of those famous poets. One thing a lifetime’s editing has taught me is that there are bullies on both sides of the fence. But that’s not the note I want to finish on and I must finish. There’s a sound one hears—hears without hearing—as one finds oneself entering, or suddenly in, the presence of true writing. An unacceptable thing to say, in one sense—who am I to determine what’s “true” and what isn’t? and the things that catch one’s attention, that sound this note, will vary from reader to reader, editor to editor. All very well, I accept that, and the word “true” is perhaps not the best to use here, even if what I mean is only that sense in which a work may be Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 58

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true to something in itself. You can read a hundred poems—sometimes several hundred—and “hear” this note only once or twice. Or dozens of stories, dozens upon dozens of essays. I liken it to the sound of bell - birds, the distinctive, crystal chink one catches as, coming down from the Blue Mountains, one enters the Yarramundi Forest. If you published only works that struck this note, you’d produce very slim issues indeed. And, as I’ve said, one develops, anyway, a sense for other works which, though they may not strike that note for oneself, may well strike it for others. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard it as I’ve edited Southerly. A hundred? Probably not too many more than that, and not many less. And as often in work over names I don’t recognise as in work over names I do. But it lifts and centres one, that is the point. You can be exhausted, worn thin, wondering why on earth you are doing what you’re doing, and suddenly it is there, that crystal chink with its long, cool shadow, and you are straightened, awakened, know exactly why you are there, and how important it is that you do what you do. Happy birthday Southerly. Australia owes you more than it will ever know. Keep giving!

* The temptation here, to quote A. D. Hope’s response when asked what poets could do for Australia: “They can justify its existence.” Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 59

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SARAH HART

Your Name Here

In this one we’ll call you Jim and you are considering the point where the day undoes itself and how there is no name for it, but everyone you’ve ever seen in the whole world must feel it and no one stops to say hey! the earth is clear and beautiful, it is the surface of a still lake in July, no, they are wondering how to bind themselves to the moment just before.

In this one you are still Jim you walk down the street and think quietly that you’d like to fall in love at least a dozen more times, you’d like to eat all your meals fried in butter and oil, where someone sets the plate down in front of you, and you wipe your knife against your thigh between each bite. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 60

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At every moment you are Jim, you have a son, there is a plaque for him in the local park, you had thought it would all be different, and, oh, how the sun

shines despite this, every week, Jim, you carry heavy bottles of vinegar and soap, kneel down and brush away the leaves, scrub his name, no one who passes by stays to look on, which you do not notice, and after you imagine covering the shining bronze in layers of plastic to keep any of it this way, any of it. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 61

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HANNAH FINK

Editing Daniel

Daniel Thomas photographed by Robert Walker for the book Life in the Cross, 1965 (with text by Kenneth Slessor).

In February 2020 The Recent Past: Writing Australian Art 1958–2020, the first collection of writings by Daniel Thomas, edited by myself and Steven Miller, will be published by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Thomas, now 88 years old, occupies a singular position in Australian letters, one of the greatest writers of Australian art history whose contribution has not been in writing the requisite heavy tome Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 62

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condensing our rag- and often achronological cultural history, but in hundreds of reviews, articles, essays and catalogue entries, and several (modest) books. The peculiarity of his reputation is that where he is regarded—with great affection—as a colossus in our intellectual heritage by those “in the know,” he is little known by the generations of the 21st century, and, indeed, by the general public whom he has spent his life serving. Thomas’s life’s work is so inimical to our cultural and institutional assumptions that the body of it exists not so much within the writing itself—millions and millions of marvellous words— but within what we take as the natural inheritance of our shared knowledge. His is the moving hand of Australian art history: trying to describe it, to pin it down, is like trying to describe the construction of a perfect garment by examining its tucks and seams and hand-rolled hems—to explain it from the inside out. Daniel says that the reason that he never wrote a global history of Australian art is because he didn’t have time, he was too busy, first as the first Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, then as founding Head of Australian Art at the National Gallery of Australia, and finally Director of the Art Gallery of South Australia. The role of a collection curator, he says, is “to look after what is neg - lected and out of fashion,” and there was urgent research to be done and survey exhibitions to be staged on important artists, hitherto ignored, nearing the end of their lives. In order to reject a canon it needs to be established—to be canonised—and it was Daniel who anointed Tony Tuckson and Weaver Hawkins and Grace Crowley and and Grace Cossington-Smith. It was he who first recognised Rosalie Gascoigne, in a group show in 1975 at Gallery A, and identified Fred Williams’s You Yangs 1, when it didn’t win the Georges Art Prize in 1963, for the definitive masterpiece that it is. Unthinkable nowadays, while the Curator of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales during the 1960s and 1970s he was also the art critic for the Sunday Telegraph and later the Sydney Morning Herald, sometimes even “reviewing” his own shows; conversely, he was once chastised by the Public Service Board for a review, titled “Even Worse Than Usual,” of the annually dreadful Archibald Prize. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 63

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From the start he was debunking clichés of interpretation. “One of the silliest of the legends about early Australian art,” he wrote in the Bulletin in 1963, “was that the colonist painters were unable to see Australia “as it really is”. That they made it look like England, that, worst of all, they could not paint a gum tree.” When he arrived as a “Professional Assistant” at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 1958, the paintings sagged on the walls in the humidity and the roof leaked; after the addition of modern galleries in 1972, the vestibule and forecourts were filled with live performances involving sand and chocolate and nudity, including a work by Yoko Ono, Cut piece, in which an audience member—Daniel—cut the clothes from Charlotte Moorman’s body. The art history that Daniel constructed as a curator and museum director was made as much through action as writing. It was from working outside the academy that he provided the material, and thinking, for the record, not only by originating historical research but by fostering the new art—feminism, ecology, performance, word art, conceptualism—that would make history. A glimpse at the 18,000-word Bibliography in the book gives a taste of the capaciousness of his interests and the intensity of his scholarship. It begins in 1949 with his first-published article, “On first reading Gertrude Stein” in Issue 1, Volume 1 of If Revived: A termly journal of the Geelong Grammar School Literary Society, edited by his classmate Rupert Murdoch. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, he observes, “is possibly more conventional than most of [her writings], for it has no entertainingly incomprehensible passages, and it has lots of commas.” Like that of a great singer, the voice is already there: so, too, the light touch that, over the decades, would belie a steely pedagogy. The Bibliography ends, in 2019, with his article “Spirit of Place,” a reflection on how he has been shaped by the place where he was born and now in retirement lives, on the western north coast of Tasmania near Port Sorell. The site was chosen for its beauty in 1828 by his great-great-great- grandfather Jocelyn Thomas, who had brought with him from England a copy of Uvedale Price’s Essays: On the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful and, on the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape (1810). But Daniel says he has been formed Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 64

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less by ideas of landscape than by geography. To one side are rolling green pastures; to the other a heath of ferny bracken stretching to the sea, where the flat tide comes in to a wide cove protected by dolerite cliffs. Once the home of the Punnilerpanner, there are rock drawings in hidden rock-shelves that Daniel’s father showed him when he was a child; his great-great-great-uncle, Bartholomew Thomas, along with an overseer, was clubbed with a waddy and pierced with tea-tree spears by three men: Colammanea, Maccame and Wanwee, near this place. Jocelyn Thomas composed the inscription on the headstone of his murdered brother: “Bart. B. Thomas / Armigeri [soldier] / Late a Captn in HIS MAGESTY’S SERVICE / Who lost his life in an / Attempt to Conciliate / The black Natives of this / ISLAND / together with a faithfull / FRIEND.” For Daniel, “Thoughts persist of somehow making a personal apology for taking land away.” He continues to publish; forthcoming articles include a dialogue with the Palawa artist Julie Gough, whose antecedents perhaps murdered Daniel’s forebear, moderated by Palawa author Gregory Lehmann. “I am before theory,” he says, and Daniel’s idiom is original and exemplary. A master of economy, he is allergic to generalisation, valuing, above all, the currency of fact. He is also master of the first sentence, always jumping right in: “He saw death coming—from tobacco-related cancer,” begins an obituary for curator Nicholas Draffin, “so there was plenty of time to plan a forceful send-off.” (Also in this article, he quotes—possibly with some licence—the eulogy given by Father Robarts at the funeral: “There are not too many hospitals where you can shut the door, chainsmoke, sit in your sarong, and drink gin. Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts ... I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts!”) Eros, both spiritual and sensual, courses like an underground source through Daniel’s writings, drawn by the thrill of art in all its forms. He compares the ink on paper in a Bea Maddock print to “the crisp bite into white flesh of russet-red apples”; Grace Cossington- Smith’s painting Interior in yellow “is a rare philosophical meditation on the unerotic bedroom, chaste but filled with psychic shimmer.” The marriage of truth and beauty is central; his advice in assessing Indigenous art applies to all art: “Always look first for the aesthetic Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 65

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charge.” Or, put another way, “Without aesthetic force, subject matter is not enough.” He is able to convey with immediacy the voltage of great art: the mature sculptures of Clement Meadmore “sometimes embody how we feel at the moment of take-off.” He is also piquant, touching, in his observations. On Hazel de Burg’s interviews with artists, conducted in the 1960s on behalf of the National Library of Australia at Daniel’s behest:

The older artists seem never to have been recorded before, nor to have seen a reel-to-reel tape recorder. “[Cuckoo clock chimes],” says the transcript. “Oh, will that be in? How nice!”, says Grace Cossington Smith ... We are reminded of the inconvenience of heavy old tape- recorders. Hazel is grateful when gallant male artists help carry the monster in and out. She is wistful when pressed by lonely old artists to stay for another glass of wine; she thereby misses appointed chauffeurs and has to stagger off with the machine into darkness and rain. Michael Kmit’s studio, ceremoniously settled-into, turns out to have no electricity and, embarrassed, they have to shift to his bedroom where the only power outlet for her recorder is behind a wardrobe.

Not all Daniel’s writing is about art. During the 1990s, in early retirement, he wrote a series of articles in the Adelaide Review for Christopher Pearson (“that dreadful person who was an excellent editor”) on mostly non-art subjects, about touch and smell and trees. Many articles about trees, including one about the South Australian explorer–artist George French Angus, “the first artist to provide a large body of precisely delicate she-oak images, and banksias and eucalyptus and grass trees—not to mention his private passion for pigface.” We could not afford to include these extraordinary pieces (perhaps in another book, a paperback), along with scores of other wonderful articles. “The Christo Backlash,” about people being accidentally killed by works of art, remains a regret. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 66

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Daniel is a great self-corrector, and any editor working with him in the days pre-email learned to expect festoons of galleys rolling out of the fax machine covered in his Cy Twombly-like scribble. As editor himself, he has underwritten or ghost-written countless publications. Indeed, in this very book the editors had the unusual experience of their introduction being corrected and in part rewritten by its subject. Accuracy for Daniel is a moral principle: he once drove from Sydney to Singleton to ask the artist Dale Frank’s mother the correct year of his birth (she couldn’t remember). Correct history also includes correct pronunciation: Grace Crowley rhymes with slowly; Piguenit is piga-nee not Pige-nay; De Maistre—de meh-stra. “Streth Creek,” said Wayne Tunnicliffe, the New Zealand-born Head of Australian Art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. “It is pronounced Straaath Creek,” said Daniel. “Von Guérard was German and misheard the Scottish word.” In the final stages of editing this collection, Daniel found the rare error or faux pas, along with a few less obvious alterations. Anticipating the inevitable proofreader’s mark, I emailed to ask the reasons for these changes, which he had helpfully highlighted in red (titles of works of art are usually all lower case with an initial cap, with capitals for proper nouns only):

Robert MacPherson Little Pictures for the Poor 1983 offset lithograph printed in red ink on pink paper, 35.5 x 25.4 cm Queensland Art Gallery I Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane

He replied:

H Noted. Cap P for heightened meanings — poetry, prayer. Specificity of unusual materials similarly essential. DT Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 67

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However, a capital S for Albers’s series Homage to the Square when queried was, in his own estimation, not descriptive but “a mistake”— “a kind of pomposity.” (At the same time, he happily agrees to the elision of annoying difficulties: “I am all for cheating!”) For Daniel, being an editor and being an historian are the same thing. As the inaugural Head of Australian Art at the Australian National Gallery, as it was named when it first opened in 1982, it was Daniel who established an authoritative museum house-style: how to relate the essence of a history in a wall label (by including the artist’s birth and death dates, and the place where the work was executed), with particular attention paid to the protocols of capitalisation and punctuation. He continues to hone the record, chiselling dates or correcting titles that he once bestowed himself, irritating present-day custodians of institutional information for whom data has become so embedded in bureaucracy it is now almost impossible to amend. In submitting his entry on Mervyn Horton to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, he added “Some Comments” to assist the series’ editors:

National Library papers. I was not able to visit Canberra to consult the Art & Australia papers there but do not think they would have altered this story. I did not attempt to seek permission to consult the closed Horton papers also there, but I now realise I should ask Library staff if there is a remote chance of them looking at the Galleria Espresso visitors’ book for the closing date, which might be 1961 not 1962. First espresso bar in Sydney? Mervyn makes this claim in 1972 in his de Berg tape, but a 31 July 1956 SMH item simply says “recently opened,” among “a crop of new coffee shops ... since Italian espresso coffee machines appeared in this country”. Also, Andrew Andersons, then an architec - ture student at University of Sydney, is pretty sure the first was the Mars Bar, with Space Age decor, in Pitt Street. (I have repeated the “May 1956” opening date for Galleria Espresso that Mervyn must have given me when I inter - Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 68

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viewed him in January 1983.) The architect Laszlo Ernst of course gets no accents in the SMH in 1956 but he might have umlauts: László. Early 1940s. I do not feel I know the full story of the nervous breakdown, and Olga Sharpe’s photography (Christopher Davis, who knew Mervyn only from 1959, says she was advertising manager at Farmers depart ment store, and Mervyn’s de Berg tape says she contributed, like Dupain, to Sydney Ure Smith’s maga zines); but maybe there’s enough. Nicknames. I have not bothered with these, Merve to quite a few close friends, Mervenko to only one or two, similarly Roey (rhyming, Roey Horton, Roey Norton, the latter a Sydney artist Rosaleen Norton). Terminology etc for Christopher Davis: “Partner,” commonly used today, is anachronistic for a 1959–c.1971 same-sex relationship; I considered “live-in lover,” but Christopher says why not try “his one true love”. I give Christopher’s birth date, following what I understand is ADB convention for a spouse. Also, when we get to the bequests I insert daughters “by his wife Ingrid” because Christopher also has a third daughter from a later unmarried relationship. I did not feel it necessary to insert the word “bisexual,” surely evident enough. (And back with Wallace Thornton opening up Mervyn to his full life, I did not feel it necessary to specify that Thornton was heterosexual.) Sue du Val or Du Val. I have followed the 1983 Horton appreciations in Art & Australia, September 1983, where it is “du Val”. Elsewhere in print it is often “Du Val”. [du Val is correct] Penallt. ADB has mother’s birthplace as “(illegible), Wales”. Please check whether the ADB document could be read as “Penallt,” the village in Monmouthshire (now Gwent), where Mervyn’s cousin Margaret Goldrick believes Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 69

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Mildred was born. The ADB documentation of course confirms that father Harry was always Harry, never Henry. Ure-Smith, Ure Smith. Note that though Sydney Ure Smith was never hyphenated, his son Sam Ure-Smith now is.

In compiling this book Steven and I did not try to create a com - prehensive history of Australian material culture (the book would have run to several volumes if we had) but rather to present Daniel’s illuminations as a way in to that history. If Daniel did not write a single encompassing account of Australian art it is because to do so would be a falsification: he lacked the disingenuity, and had the sophistication, not to do so. came to Australia belatedly, not through painting but through the clothes sold at David Jones and Art Deco cinemas and blurry black and white reproductions well after the fact. Daniel recalls Bernard Smith ringing him from Grace Cossington Smith’s house in Turramurra in the 1960s to say that he had spotted in a corner a very good painting, The sock knitter, 1915. Everything about this story is wonderful: its accidentalness, its generosity, the fact that the first great work of modernist art in Australia is a tiny painting of a woman knitting, recognised fifty years after it was made. Daniel’s history, told in a thousand crystalline parts, permits revelation through its gaps. It is a history that breathes. The walls of Daniel’s office close in with piles of journals, news - papers and books stacked against the over-full bookshelves, allowing a slim path to the computer desk at the far end; like a hoarder evacu - ated for his own safety, he moved recently to an empty guest room. Sorting his papers is the next project—they will go, with luck, to the new National Art Archive at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. For Daniel’s library, like his mind, is the book of Australian art history: a bounteous, scrupulous, open history ready to be read—and edited and written again—by the students and scholars of this century. Its facets startle and glimmer with the concentration of their author’s gaze, casting about the delight—the absolute pleasure—he has found, and shares, through his life’s work. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 70

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BETH SPENCER

Explant (caveat emptor)

Cut to the bone. My chest as flat as a new baby girl. And yet I feel as ancient as this rock in the garden that I rest my hand on.

Mostly I avoid mirrors but sometimes I am drawn to look: the fascination of the living to see what might

survive such a thing. What might walk out of the wreck.

There are more good days now and my spit no longer glistens. I savour the immense unthinkable joy of the ordinary.

I find myself deep in the savage cave that was my heart and I hold myself.

I open my hand and there is my heart where it always was (in my own keeping). Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 71

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And I put my foot into a trap and life lifted me up into the air and I am turned and tilled, pain is the soil.

I think of my chest as a map now. I close my eyes, let the wind caress the wounds,

the tributaries and paths, the welts and hollows. And I find in this map my connection to all things. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 72

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GAVIN YATES

Napoléon

You know, the street’s branches that so moved me, the intense cricket, steam from the underground. If that niggle, that religion, I confess, and the discreet pulp I arrange with one hand, and read your disposition of anxiety, caused by green beans, with the other, with specs of white paint, knocked down in cartons when we have to put a paddle to the water. Looking back, pale green with anaemia kneeling by the side of a pool, is the more pink the grapefruit the louder the cicadas the peachy the ale; then I confess, one early morning, a mob of urbane kangaroos, four billion poems in tyre tread—I thought about swallowing those small aeroplanes that launch from private airstrips, like my first taste of cognac, anachronistic moss. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 73

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J. M. DONELLAN

Progeny

It’s a curious thing, being afraid of one’s own child. I’d spent much of my life fearing the obvious things—death, rejection, failure, the inevitable collapse of an economic system predicated on infinite growth in a finite world—but I never thought I’d add this particular fear to my ever-growing inventory. Some couples awaiting the arrival of a child liked to sancti - moniously proclaim: “We’re pregnant.” I never understood this. I wasn’t pregnant with anything but expectation. Rochelle was gestating a human foetus, I was giving her foot rubs and fetching her increasingly bizarre snacks. This was not, by any rational measure, an even division of labour. Before our baby arrived I was already terrified that no matter how many foot rubs or peanut butter and Vegemite sandwiches I provided, no matter how many times I picked our kid up from school or helped with reading groups, I’d always have a heavy score against me in the parenting ledger. Rochelle, as usual, told me I was being self- involved and ridiculous. As usual, she was right, but her being right didn’t make that anxiety go away. The closer she came to the arrival date the more I worried. I have never felt so utterly, heinously nothing as when I watched Rochelle give birth. I’d been told that it would be a wondrous expe - rience, a miracle, a moment of transcendence. It was none of these things. It was nightmare granted corporeal form and an ear-shattering scream. As I watched her wail in agony I felt like nothing more than a fleshy lump of cells and carbon that could be far better employed as a shade-providing oak tree or a clew of soil-enriching worms. When at last the hurly-burly was done, I held the freshly extant creature in my arms. I felt wonder, relief and pride tinged with a subtle but undeniable sense of dread. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 74

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She arrived on Christmas Day. If I had a dollar for each time someone said to us “The best gift you could wish for!” I would have enough money to hire a hitman to kill at least one of the people who said this. For the first few weeks she didn’t have a name. Revealing this information (or lack thereof) to people produced an emotional response that would have been more appropriate for a statement such as: “She seems to enjoy the taste of human flesh.” “She doesn’t have a NAME?!? What do you call her?!?!” “Just ... ‘the baby’?” I would reply. “We only have one. There’s not really any chance of confusion?” Eventually we decided on Mary. A simple, old-fashioned name, almost aggressively traditional in comparison to our friends who appeared to be naming their children by randomly selecting Scrabble tiles. “Oh, little Dvandrey just loves playing with blocks!” “Our Shikayne has this phen-om-en-al gift for numbers!” I wondered how many hours these children would spend reciting the spelling of their names to various government and corporate phone monkeys over the course of their lives. Rochelle’s six weeks of maternity leave seemed to disappear in an instant. We bemoaned Australia’s cruelly inadequate provisions for new parents. Other countries offered twelve weeks, twenty, fifty-two! How had these miraculous, utopian nations come into being? What wise and noble leaders presided over them? And why the fuck didn’t we live there? But there was nothing to be done. Given that my freelancing was easily scaled back and mostly done from home, it made sense for me to become the primary carer. At least on paper. In reality—although I never revealed this to Rochelle—I spent most of the first week staring in utter disbelief at this tiny, terrifying creature that had emerged from inside my wife. This little girl who contained pieces of our combined DNA like a hip-hop track built from blended samples of funk songs that had been composed decades earlier. The days became a blur of nappies, lukewarm puke, and endlessly self-replicating mounds of laundry. There was also a curious— Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 75

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although clearly not unwelcome—lack of screaming. My daily exis - tence vacillated between the mundane and the surreal. One morning I’d been lost in preparing a new lasagna recipe when I turned around to find Mary cooing gleefully at something on the rug in front of her. I moved closer and saw a collection of dead ants, arranged into a precise black circle. I carried her into the bathroom and washed her hands, then put her back into her cot and returned to the living room to clean up the ants. I stared at the grotesquely perfect circle for a moment, dustpan and brush held limply in hand. I thought about the story of Giotto di Bondone who, in answer to a request that he prove his skill as an artist, drew a flawless circle. I swept up the ants and threw them out the window, deciding against reporting the incident to Rochelle. There were some other, similar, events over the next few months. But I either repressed the memory of them or came to realise they were merely hallucinations. After all, I slept so poorly these days that the delinea - tion between waking life and dreaming had become porous. When Mary slept I’d slap on my earphones (but keep the baby monitor in eyesight), blast some Caribou and bury myself in code. The way the booleans snapped together so cleanly and predictably was a welcome respite from the chaotic world of child-rearing. Rochelle and I had read all the fashionable books on parenting, and we were aware of the importance of constantly talking to Mary to help with her speech development. But even knowing this, even alone in my own home, I couldn’t help but feel like an imbecile asking her an endless series of questions with self-evident answers. “Are you playing with your toy monkey?” She’d regard me with a glare that seemed to say, “Of course I fucking am, nitwit.” After a while I gave up and started listening to audiobooks. The literature said this was less effective, but I figured it was better than nothing. One day I was listening to Blood Meridian—with its blend of profanity and archaic slang—when Rochelle burst in, examined the air as though reacting to an offensive odour, and roared, “What the effing hell is this? Mary’s right here!” “You can say fuck, Rochelle.” Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 76

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“She’s going to start talking soon, I don’t want her dropping F- bombs like a bogan teen mum.” “Don’t be so classist. And she’ll be making sounds soon, she probably won’t start forming actual words until around twelve months.” “She’s very intelligent, she might start early!” “Six months early? Maybe we should fill her fifth birthday piñata with brochures for elite high schools?” She rolled her eyes. “Don’t be a dick, I’m not in the mood. Work was an effing nightmare today. I swear to God, if Paul tries to get me to invest in his side hustle one more time I’m going to slam his face in the sandwich toaster.” “What’s he trying to start up again, a gym or something?” “Worse. A 24-hour sneaker store.” “Why would anyone need—” “If you feel like asking him, he’ll happily explain via a 78-slide PowerPoint complete with corporate hip-hop soundtrack.” She massaged her temple, snorted a derisive laugh and said, “God, I envy you. I wish I could stay in my pajamas all day.” “I haven’t been in these all day. I was wearing normal clothes but Mary threw up on them, so I had a shower and got changed. Still jealous?” “Yes. I am.” She went into the kitchen. I heard her open the fridge and take out a bottle of wine. “Didn’t you say you were trying to cut back on booze? It’s only Tuesday and you—” She leaned her head around the corner to shoot me with a pair of retinal knives. “Never mind.”

Months dissolved like the ice cubes in the whiskey that Rochelle was favouring with increasing frequency. For a short while I attended a weekly parents’ meetup group, and—despite the fact that a disturbingly large percentage of the conversation revolved around infant faeces—I mostly enjoyed myself. I was even on the verge of accomplishing the nigh-impossible task of making new friends in adulthood. One of the Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 77

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mums—a yoga instructor who’d recently arrived from France— suggested that we exchange numbers in case either of us ever needed help with anything. I jumped at the opportunity to have a potential emergency babysitter. Unfortunately, it turned out that what she needed help with was evening the score against her philandering husband. After a trickle of mildly suggestive texts followed by a torrent of highly suggestive photos I blocked her number and decided not to go back to the meetup group. I grew a beard, allowed the hair to colonise my face for the first time since uni. There were more grey patches than I would’ve liked. I asked Rochelle what she thought. She shrugged. “It hides the weird mole on your chin.” Meanwhile, Mary grew like a fairytale beanstalk. We’d buy her clothes and have to get rid of them weeks later. She was beautiful, angelic, adored. Strangers in the street would stop and begin talking to her in those cooing, coddling voices people use with babies, asking her ridiculous rhetorical questions: “Aren’t you a beautiful little baby? Yes you are! Yes you are!” Once, an elderly lady began babbling about how she could “just eat these toes right up!” and then actually parted her lips and pulled Mary’s foot toward her gaping mouth. It was horrific, like something out of an ancient Slavic myth. I watched the foot pulled towards her coffee-stained teeth. Time slowed and stumbled until I finally regained control of my senses and whipped Mary away. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” The woman glared at me and said, “I can’t be-lieve you’d use that kind of language in front of her!” She stormed off, muttering com - plaints. Sure, she’d been the one about to engage in an act of random infant cannibalism, but clearly she was the victim. I was so shaken I drove us straight back home, forgetting that we’d left the house in the first place to pick up groceries. When Rochelle came home and complained about the lack of milk, I made up a preposterous lie about the grocery store’s EFTPOS system going offline, forcing them to close for the morning. She murmured something about the existence of convenience stores somehow eluding Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 78

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me, then retired in front of the television with her Jameson in one hand and her phone in the other, scrolling through an infinite stream of digital dross. Shortly after Mary’s first birthday, we decided it would be prudent to take her to the doctor to check “everything was in order.” Mary’s eyes shone with an eerie intelligence. When we brought her puzzles she would either solve them instantly and then push them aside or gaze at them with the tired disdain of a geriatric supreme court judge. A small part of me hoped that the doctor would examine Mary with a sense of hushed awe and proclaim her to be a preternatural genius. Whether this diagnosis would confirm my gnawing sense of dread or dispel it, I couldn’t say. On the morning of the appointment, I was listening to Moby Dick, that weighty tome I’d long convinced myself all serious people should read. I reached the part where the preacher recites the infamous poem:

I saw the opening maw of hell, With endless pains and sorrows there; Which none but they that feel can tell— Oh, I was plunging to—

The bluetooth connection dropped out. I swore, dropped the baby bag I’d been filling with nappies and began fiddling with my phone. It wasn’t until I heard the voice repeating the same word over and over that I became consciously aware of it. I tried to triangulate its position and realised it was in fact being broadcast in stereo, from Mary’s room as well as the baby monitor I kept in the kitchen. I approached with the deliberate caution of a bomb squad, turning the doorknob with a slow twist. I pushed the door open and found her standing upright in her cot, her tiny finger aimed directly at me. Her eyes locked with mine as she repeated a single, impossible word: “Des-pair. Des-pair. Des-pair.”

The doctor looked at me with a blend of consumer level amusement and pharmaceutical grade disbelief. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 79

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“I’m afraid that’s impossible. It’s plausible that she’s beginning to form sounds, alongside a handful of basic, simple words—mama, dada, etcetera—but a word like “despair” is unthinkable. She won’t be able to form the “s” sound for some time yet, it’s phonemically much more difficult than “d,” for example. And as for finishing rhyming couplets? Utterly inconceivable.” “I know! I know that’s how it sounds! But it was exactly like it was in the book, I finished playing that section and she’d actually picked the correct word. She intuited how it would end, that’s crazy right? Could it be some kind of echolalia or something?” I’d always found medical professionals intimidating, and often fell into a bad habit of using medical terminology I didn’t really understand to compensate. He shook his head. “No, definitely not. You said you were listening to Moby Dick, that’s the one about the detective?” My jaw plummeted. How did someone manage to make it through a gruelling seven or eight years of tertiary education without gaining a cursory knowledge of iconic literature, which I admittedly hadn’t finished reading yet and didn’t particularly enjoy? He leaned back and continued, “You’ve been primary carer for almost a year now?” “Yes.” “How’re you finding it?” I gazed at my feet and said, “It’s a wonderful, rewarding—” His eyebrow ascended his forehead. Clearly I’d taken too long to respond. I cleared my throat and said, “Obviously, there’re times where I feel as though I’m under a lot of stress. And I’m not sure that Rochelle fully appreciates the amount of time and work it takes. I get it, she comes home from a long day of meetings and spreadsheets and there I am in my trackies playing Xbox. But that’s only after three loads of laundry, four nappy changes, picking up the dry cleaning, sorting out the leaky tap, preparing dinner—” He nodded and raised a hand gently for me to stop, then picked up his prescription pad and began writing. He tore the page off with a performative flourish and handed it to me. I squinted at the esoteric scrawls on the page, willing them into comprehensibility. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 80

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“Lexapro?” I said, more to confirm the letters in front of me then to question the medication itself. He nodded and I repeated, “Lexapro?” this time with angry disbelief. “Isn’t she a little young for...” I immediately wished I could recapture the words and shove them back into my mouth. My face burned an incandescent red. “You’re pre- scribing me anti-depressants.” “Just a low dose, to begin with. I want you to meet with a colleague of mine to determine a long-term course of treatment.” “I’m not depressed.” As I said this I glanced at myself in the mirror on the wall. My shirt was covered in food stains, concealing a stomach that had swelled considerably in the last year. My beard looked like it belonged in a mugshot, my eyes blossomed with black bags. “I realise I don’t look particularly, ah, together right now, but keeping well- groomed with a one-year-old—” “You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of. Child-rearing often leads to isolation, a sense of despondency. For men it can sometimes be even more pronounced. The societal expectation, however irrational and outmoded, is that men are usually the primary breadwinner, rather than the primary caregiver. Thus—” “Oh come on! I’m not some closeted chauvinist internalising my disdain for shifting gender norms by—” He held up his hand and I wanted to grab it and slam it in the door. “Of course, of course. But it can’t hurt to have someone to talk to now, can it?” I talked to people! I talked to people all the time. I just caught up with a bunch of our friends at Stacey’s birthday picnic ... which, come to think of it, was in September. Of last year. I hadn’t had a conver - sation with anyone outside of my immediate family in more than three months. How was that even possible? I turned to face Mary. She gazed at me with eyes that looked like they belonged to a septuagenarian dictator and gurgled a laugh.

The house felt like it was holding its breath. I let the silence sit over us, thick and weighty, and stared at the pill in my hand. The small white circle made a long litany of promises: happiness, health, normality. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 81

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Mary was staring at me. Mary was always staring at me. Not with the needy, expectant gaze of a quote normal child unquote, just quiet, calm observation. Why didn’t she ever cry, weren’t babies supposed to cry? I looked at her, pill in hand, and said, “Daddy needs to take a pill because he’s going fucking crazy, isn’t he? Yes he is! Yes he is!” She tilted her head, rubbed her fingers together like she was making calculations. “Daddy needs big pharma to help correct a neuro- chemical imbalance in his brain, doesn’t he sweetheart?” She gurgled, clapped her hands. I closed my eyes. Swallowed the pill. Chased it with water. Slammed the glass on the table. I sat down in front of Mary. She held my gaze, unblinking, stoic. “Daddy needs a little something to fight off the all-consuming—” A dog barked outside, momentarily capturing our attention. I stood up to see what had set it off. Behind me, quiet but confident, Mary uttered the word: “Des-pair.” Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 82

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JANE GIBIAN

Less golden

It was in March; no, it was April that the tug of memory came in an unexpected message,

a previous life: those parts of the past that slide, the more fixed pieces stretching erratically. Was it April

when we noticed that each year autumn is less golden? The spiders of May construct cylindrical leaf houses,

each inhabitant snug inside a perfectly rolled leaf, front legs protruding through a space into which thoughts

flow. Dank water resting in the kerbs, late summer yet to dissipate. Regret sits easily in the bark ready to peel

away, juvenile stringybarks learning to shed their skins in proud stripes, telling the same story each season

without remorse. The curled leaf spiders of May build intricate webs radiating out from their uncornered homes,

when the rapid staccato of New Holland honeyeaters fires across telephone wires, and the budding bottlebrush. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 83

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ANNE ELVEY

Grevillea Robusta i.m. Deborah Bird Rose

Spines curve. Scores of fine digits are gold in tone, tucked amid branch-work when rain draws blood from a brawny gum that stands beside three townhouses, new behind our block, with their too-neat grass laid out and watered in.

Bay beaches after storm-filled nights are closed. Hoary fish half-buried in creek’s sediment are gone. Parents watch their magpie young.

Writing still toward shimmer your days fall like salt, while children hold out for planetary kindnesses. Wind gathers

about our speaking house of tin and thud, footsteps of limbs splayed against a flue—each thing’s sprung turn toward relation

a communion that is yes, you taught, across a wound’s resolution saying what gold filigree declares to feeding birds. Come. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 84

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RICHARD NILE

Desert Worlds

In late 1914, twenty thousand mostly young Australian men ventured forth from the driest inhabited continent on earth to cross the ocean in a convoy spread over twenty-five kilometres in length and measuring twenty kilometres in width. The greatest mass exodus from the Antipodes which included a further ten thousand New Zealanders, this was the first and largest of many similar voyages over the next four years. The Australians might have considered themselves to be desert people. “The sand has his own / Wave and motion,” wrote S. Musgrove in “Australia Deserta” in the first issue of Southerly in 1939, “Rages the bed / Of the stony ocean” (14). Yet they preferred to identify as colonial sons returning to the motherland of pastoral England before heading to war. Of their own place, “They call her a young country but they lie,” wrote A. D. Hope in his much debated poem “Australia” which he began writing around the time of the publication of the inaugural issue—and to which he contributed an essay—“She is the last of lands, the emptiest, / ... the womb within is dry” (Hope). The image of Australia as an infertile crone recurs as a theme of literature and culture (Shaffer) by contrast to England’s fecundity, which the wandering exiles of 1914 so earnestly desired. Having advanced to a point of nationhood less than a decade and a half earlier in the conviction of being “fair,” “young and free,” as their national song would insist they should be, the Australians of 1914 hailed from a land considered to be too desolate for their proper birthing. Peter Stanley characterised the first enlistments as Lost Boys from a motherless Neverland, while the dry country of Jeannie Gunn’s 1909 novel We of the Never Never exists on the margins of even greater aridity that defines a third of the continent as desert. “Called the Never- Never,” the inhabitants “loved to say, because they, who have lived in Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 85

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it and loved it Never-Never voluntarily leave it,” Mrs Gunn wrote, “Others—the unfitted—will tell you that it is so called because they who succeed in getting out will Never-Never return to it” (Preface). Restless by inclination, and approximating age-old definitions of hysterics, Australia’s “nomad tribes” (Ward 11) were mythically if not typically sojourners within this expansive barren land where, the poet noted, the “rivers of water drown among inland sands” (Hope). The Australians’ passage to England was abruptly terminated at Alexandria in early December 1914, two weeks and three and a half thousand nautical miles shy of their appointed berthing at Southampton, as the normally cleansing breezes that drift across Egypt from the Mediterranean at this time of year became thick with their profanities and foul temper. Having been sustained on the high seas by assurances of being piped onto Salisbury Plains in preparation for baptism on the Western Front, they were simply livid at being “dumped on bare sand” (Gammage 36). Walter Gilchrist, a young Light Horseman in Roger McDonald’s 1979 novel 1915, had “pictured himself as a far-flung son of empire called to shield the heart of the mother country” (134), only to be redirected to this disappointing alternative and subsequently becoming a Turkish prisoner-of-war. He laments that “bastard fate” (134) had intervened to disrupt destiny by “tossing him into the realm of never-shall” (244). Bearing all the menace of cashed-up larrikins, the Australians swaggered ashore intent on an “orgy of spending” (Brugger 21). The highest earning soldiers in the Middle East, they had arrived with a month’s pay padding out their pockets, following five weeks confinement in the belly of their transports. The quickest and liveliest made short work of securing supplies of alcohol for distribution between mates. The crafty set aside enough funds to raise the devil in the bars, bazaars and brothels of Cairo’s “Wozza,” as they dubbed the Wazir district in their distinctive vernacular (Dunbar 5). Trucked in rail wagons to the main camp at Mena on the desert’s edge, a great many were already paralytic with drink. They vomited, defecated and urinated with little regard for appearances. Yet, in keeping with the propriety of the age and expectations of readers at home, memoirs like Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 86

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New Zealander Guy Thornton’s With the Anzacs in Cairo assumed a suitably sanitary tone, with accounts of good-natured chiacking. By contrast, Thornton thundered fire and brimstone at Egypt; the “basest of kingdoms” and a vile temptress (39). If the Australians’ mood was filthy, as the expression goes, the sand on which they had become marooned was barely bare. Nutrient rich “Abyssinian mud,” the propagandist and poet Oliver Hogue (“Trooper Bluegum”) called it, had built up over millennia to form a 240 kilo - metre wide delta at the confluence of one of the world’s greatest rivers and the sea (“In Egypt”). Running north for around 7,000 kilometres, from a source deep within the Ethiopian highlands, the Nile had shaped Egypt well before the Pharaohs built their wonders of the ancient world. Apart from the band of river and the coastline, much of North Africa comprises the Sahara Desert, covering more than nine million square kilometres from the Red Sea in the East to the Atlantic in the West. Derived from the Arabic Sahra, meaning desert, Sahara Desert literally translates as desert-desert. All remaining Africa is Sub- Saharan. Bridging continents, the barrens persist throughout present-day Saudi Arabia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Rajasthan, and the Punjab. “The striking thing about this desert world is its colossal dimensions,” noted Fernand Braudel in his magisterial The Medi - terranean: “The devouring landscape is like the ‘unharvested sea’ of Homer; man passes through it ‘only as a pilgrim and a sojourner’ and halts there for only a brief moment. ‘It is a waterless sea,’ vaster than the Mediterranean itself” (173). Egypt’s desert country dissects along the course of the river and its valleys and flood plains. Carrying suspended sediment at full satu - ration over the long journey, the Nile slows near the coast and, in an age-old process, siphons into tributaries that renew life on the delta before merging with the saline sea. Such regeneration contrasts with the “The Dead Heart of Australia,” as J. W. Gregory called it in 1909. Here, rivers that are little more than creeks, gullies and channels flow temporarily and bewilderingly for explorers in a contrary direction inland before becoming spent in seared earth. At the continent’s geographic low point is a dry basin named somewhat hopefully as Lake Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 87

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Eyre. It fills intermittently from the tropical wet thousands of kilo - metres to the north before drying out under the intense centralian sun and returning to its more customary state as salt-encrusted earth. Peter Weir selected the similarly dry Torrens Lake, part of a network of salt pans that extends to Lake Eyre, as the location for a scene in his film Gallipoli in which Archy and Frank become lost attempting a short cut on their way to enlist. Saved from expiring by a lone camel driver named Stumpy, Archy tells the Good Samaritan, “I’m off to the war.” Stumpy asks “What war?” and the “boys stare at him, amazed.” Archy explains: “The war against Germany ... if we don’t stop ‘em they could end up here.” Stumpy “looks around at the vast desolate countryside” and replies: “And they would be welcome to it” (Gallipoli 109). Visually, this scene establishes a potential connection between two desert countries and the boys’ subsequent training under the pyramids and in the sand dunes of Egypt before being sent as reinforcements to Gallipoli where Archy is killed. Michael Cathcart refers to Australians as Water Dreamers who have been fixated by the mirage of inland seas, artesian bores, and canals spawning life in the lifeless centre. “In 45 years I’ve been through 400 droughts,” proclaimed the federal member for Kennedy (one of Australia’s driest electorates) during a 2018 summit: “The answers are in fact very simple ... you put water on that ground, and it grows grass” (Katter). “Tell him he’s dreaming,” says Darryl Kerrigan (Castle); any solution to Australia’s aridity has proven to be elusive. Robert Drewe’s 2001 novel The Drowner centres on the construction of a “Golden Pipeline” delivering water to otherwise parched goldfields, criticism of which results in the suicide of the engineer before the first taps are turned. Evading would-be captors, Tocky hides in an empty water tank with her child during the dry in Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia where both perish. Capricornia was reviewed by H. M. Green in the inaugural Southerly. Yet it is arguably the disappearance into desert country of the explorer Ludwig Leichhardt that has haunted most of all, and famously in Laura’s concluding statement in Patrick White’s Voss: “he is there still, it is said, in the country and always will be. His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who have been Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 88

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troubled by it” (478). Gemmy Fairley answers this haunting to an extent in ’s Remembering Babylon after emerging from the interior, leading to more troubling questions: “Could you lose it? Not just language but it. It” (40). By writing “It” down, Malouf appears to suggest that Gemmy has returned transformed from the dead (heart) that had claimed both Voss and his model Leichhardt. Yet hope begets hope in Hope’s frequently cited line, “from the deserts the prophets come.” Geoffrey Serle famously appropriated the phrase for his history of Australia’s creative spirit in 1973 but discreetly removed it when a new edition appeared in 1987, before the full title was restored in 2014. Perceiving himself as a nomadic artist and intellectual, Hope was more sceptical than Serle about the potential of creativity among a people who so willingly embraced stoicism as their defining characteristic: “Whose boast is not: ‘we live’ but ‘we survive’ / A type who will inhabit the dying earth.” The invocation of a more positive alternative “Arabian desert of the human mind” might have appealed to wandering soldiers and sojourners but did not. Rather, Egypt epitomised the “Near Orient,” as Edward Said observed in his seminal work Orientalism, “defined” within Western conceptualisations by “travellers, commercial enterprises, govern - ments, military expeditions, readers of novels and accounts of exotic adventure, natural historians and pilgrims” (203). Representing a cartographic enigma of sorts, being both North African and Middle Eastern, Egypt was imaginatively resolved by being Oriental, Arabic and Islamic, and by serving as a “focal point of the relationship between Africa and Asia, between Europe and the East, between memory and actuality” (84). Almost from the moment of their arrival, the Australians began fashioning their own impressions based “upon such essential aspects of the Orient as the Oriental character, Oriental despotism, Oriental sensuality” and, like the Europeans from whom they derived, they were prone to be “racist,” “imperialist” and “almost totally ethnocentric” (204–05). Their world of imperialising white men further divided women into stereotypes of Madonnas and Whores. White women could be either, while women of colour, almost without exception, filled the latter categorisation. Among the emerging Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 89

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Commonwealth of Nations, comprising the white settler societies of Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, Australia had been established upon the dual conceits of a “workingman’s paradise” (Lane) and “new Britannia” (McQueen), as distinct from the wider Empire which was coloured and colonised. This separation was maintained well into the twentieth century and continues to be discernible within conservative and racist discourses in the twenty-first century. It followed that the Australians viewed the coloured Empire as being inferior, drawing upon their own experiences on the frontier and Anglo-Saxon hierarchies that associated whiteness with cleanliness and blackness with dirt. Inhabiting this imaginary of what was colloquially referred to as “pure merino ... to distinguish ‘white men’ from ‘wasters’” as the Queensland Figaro observed in 1913 (“Fear God”), Australia’s dominion presided over racial exclusion through the twin agencies of Terra Nullius and the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act which they proclaimed as the White Australia Policy. As “paradoxical as a platypus,” as Inky Stephensen once described (Roe 533), one of the founding fathers of federation coined the phrase “Independent Australian Britons” to describe this peculiar settler condition and anxiety (Headon iii). Such contradictory ontology was made explicable by what another federation father, Henry Parkes, whom the wits insisted was also father of half of Sydney, called the “Crimson Thread of Kinship,” an imaginary umbilical cord connecting colonial nationals to their distant motherland that served as Australia’s “most determined attachment” during wartime (Gammage 1). Typical of the maternal bond was the appearance of a plethora of patriotic verse and song such as “Hark! Is that Our Mother Calling” published in January 1915: “I’ll ask my King to let me join his / gallant rank and file / To fight with his colonial sons in / good old British style” (Matters). Logically, the Australians organised militarily into an Australian Imperial Force whose presence on the Delta enabled Britain to formally annex all of Egypt just as soon as colonial boots were on the ground. In his pioneering study of recruitment, historian Lloyd Robson noted that young Australians had been “terrifyingly willing to go to Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 90

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war” (21) in support of a British homeland that very few had experienced directly but almost all identified with culturally. Nineteen year old Australian “Natural Born British Subject” James Drummond Burns (NAA) summed up the attachment in “For England” which was written just before his enlistment in February 1915:

The bugles of England were blowing o’er the sea As they called a thousand years, calling me; They woke me from my dreaming in the dawning of the day The bugles of England— and how could I stay (Burns)

After training in Egypt, the young corporal was shipped to Gallipoli where he was killed, “shot through the head,” on 18 September 1915, just shy of his twentieth birthday (NAA). He might have been an Australian Rupert Brooke. Though he never saw England, his small plot forever Australia became the lonely and sardonically named sacred cemetery of Shrapnel Gully. Bearing a remarkable resemblance to the deceased younger man’s words, forty-six year old Scottish poet and landholder Will Ogilvie— who had spent a youthful “colonial experience” in Australian between 1889 and 1901 and boasted knowing Breaker Morant—published “The Australian” in his 1916 collection The Australian and Other Verse:

The bugles of the motherland Range ceaselessly across the sea, To call him and his lean brown band To shape imperial destiny (3).

Tribute or plagiarism, such sentiments begged the question, why should “White Australia defend Black Egypt?” This provocation is given to Private Frederick Pearson, better known as Sandy from Sandy Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 91

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Creek, in Harley Matthews’s story “The Dinkum Australian” from the collection Saints and Soldiers (81). Historian Ian Turner interpreted Sandy as meaning “particularly a Black Egypt that did its best to rob White Australia of its money in every sale of food or booze or sex” (319). Sandy’s comrades do not rise to the bait though they are similarly aggrieved—“They had uttered the same disgust many times before”—as his fulminating boils into rage, “We came here to fight, not to—,” before being abruptly cut short of completing the sentence (82). Without an enemy in cooee of the near or far dunes, the Australians could drink and fornicate as much as their soldier’s pay and inclinations permitted. Perchance becoming disoriented in the Orient, an intrepid few had contrived a ready rejoinder, “Burke and Wills,” if ever challenged by sentries, “who goes there,” while returning late to camp (Turner 320). A civilian force and militia raised in the emergency, their army developed a non-conformist attitude resembling larrikins that would be increasingly celebrated as the war progressed, and established early tactics of the standover while laying down their law and claims to territory in Cairo’s fleshpots and drinking establish - ments. Sporting battalion colours and marauding in numbers, they maintained an intimidating presence and code of silence when called to account: what happened on the Wozza stayed on the Wozza. Official correspondent C. E. W. Bean broke ranks with this unwritten law in his 1915 New Year report published in Australia by noting that a small proportion of Australian forces were “wasters” and “Not Fit to Be Soldiers” (Bean). Bearing out Russel Ward’s observation, “No epithet in his vocabulary is more completely damning than ‘scab’ unless it be ‘pimp’ in its peculiar Australasian meaning of ‘informer’” (2), Bean had been a tattletale and rather too eager to regale concerns raised in private by a “very senior” British officer who had asked “do all Australians drink quite so much?” In the eyes of his readers, the chronicler had overreached his commission: “there is in the Australian ranks a proportion of men who are uncontrolled, slovenly, and in some cases what few Australians can be accused of being—dirty” (Bean). The journalist had been especially critical of dirty older men leading astray young clean men. Without resort to the poet’s defence, outlined by Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 92

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A. D. Hope in the inaugural issue of Southerly—“to be judged not by the truth of what he says but by the success with which he can make us feel what he felt” (29)—Bean reported well but not too wisely. He had failed to take his readers with him and had written in a manner and on a subject that they emphatically did not wish to know about. When news of the report filtered back to Egypt, Bean was berated for slandering the good name of the Australians and blaspheming their secular religion of mateship. He was placed on notice that he faced excommunication and probably unspeakably worse if he repeated any similar libel. Truth thereby became a casualty of this war before the first shots were fired. While it was axiomatic for the Australians to conceptualise Egyptians as “Gyppos,” “wogs,” “niggers” and dirty on account of colour (Brugger 42), it was offensive to their every sensibility to suggest that colonial whiteness might be tainted or stained—that it was also dirty. Frank Westbrook, who would go on to see action at Gallipoli and France, composed a surly doggerel, “To Our Critic,” which was published in the English-language Egyptian Mail. The poem was reprinted in Australia and circulated among troops awaiting orders to proceed into battle:

Ain’t you got no blanky savvy, Have yer got no better use, Than to fling back home yer inky Products of yer pen’s abuse? ... Do yer thinks they likes yer better For yer tales of drink and shame? Do yer think they’ll praise yer action In defamin’ our fair name? (Westbrook).

Matthews’s collection Soldiers and Saints takes its title from the more familiar phrase saints and sinners, which Oscar Wilde had popularised in the 1890s in A Woman of No Importance: “The only difference between the saint and the sinner is that every saint has a past and every sinner has a future” (Act 3). The future awaiting the Australians was beatification on the beaches of Gallipoli which would have the effect Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 93

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of erasing all former and presumed misdeeds, in which Bean, having heeded his censure, assumed the principal role. Soldiers and Saints is a discontinuous narrative featuring a “Band of Boisterous Boozers.” Led by “the Old Man”—the very figure Bean had targeted in 1915—they pledge fraternity upon shared bottles across Egypt, Gallipoli and on the Western Front. Published in 1918, the volume may be read as an extended warning and charm against any tendency to criticism. While the story “Higher Finance” takes issue with the sanctification of the “lean determined faces, lithe long limbs, and all the rest of it that correspondents usually affect to see,” it concedes necessity as the cost of war mounted: “There are not words for it. That is why the corres - pondents keep to the indomitable spirits, the glowing eyes, and the swing stride part of it” (75). A nod is as good as a wink, almost certainly, that was an acknowledgement of Bean who by now was the chief architect of the Anzac Legend. Later accounts suggest less circumspection about Australians’ behaviour in Egypt. “There weren’t any proper toilets on the train to Cairo,” recalled Albert Facey in his bestselling memoir, A Fortunate Life. Only a few “empty open trucks with about one foot of dry sand” permitting “eight to a dozen men” at a time to squat “with their pants down relieving themselves,” while a greater number stood to “urinate where everyone could see” (304). The “conduct” and “language” of the Australians was “terrible,” with “drunk soldiers vomiting all over the seats and out the window; some were trying to fight ... troops had to be carried off as they were so drunk they couldn’t walk” (305). Such unbecoming displays of white men purging their waste had made the teetotal twenty year old squeamish. Yet it is doubtful that he would have expressed too loudly at that time being perturbed by the spectacle and stench that accompanied the occupation of Egypt. Rather, it is more probable that he would have felt browbeaten by the boorishness and, being functionally illiterate, the etiquette of servicemen’s letters, diaries, unit histories and memoirs which inscribed Egypt as dirty and a “knock- about interlude before the serious business of war” (Brugger 11). Teetotallers are viewed suspiciously in Matthews’s title story because they do not share in the trust that drinking brings to those who drink. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 94

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Having grown accustomed to the greater sobriety and more decorous manners of the British—“English soldier good: no money. Australian soldier, laughing larrikin, but plenty money,” earning three times more—Egyptian vendors also perceived financial advantage in feigning obsequiousness (“In Egypt”). Hector Dinning in his 1920 soldier’s memoir Nile to Aleppo noted a distinctive pattern among the Australians: “it is the combination of the soldier and the Gyppo that has produced most of the Cairene humour that we love. And it is the humour of the place we shall remember.” If Cairo tickled Antipodean fancies it was “because soldiers are in it,” observed Dinning (264). What emerged was a performance of malice. Rooted in the convention of the practical joke, in which Egyptians were the butt and played bit parts as dirty wastrels, the Australians set about satisfying “themselves with acts of simple sadism” (Brugger 43). These actions were not without critics. Echoing Keats “Sonnet to the Nile”—“‘Tis ignorance that makes a barren waste of all beyond itself” (380)—one British officer berated as a Furphy the such is life “temper democratic, bias offensively Australian” (Collins) attitude of the troops, noting that the “average Australian, while apt to resent superiority in others, felt little doubt about his own claim to it” when dishing out “rough treatment” to the Egyptians (Herbert). Soon after Australians had made camp in Egypt, the Adelaide Observer carried a syndicated review of the English collection The Poetical Works of Wilfred Scawen Blunt (1914), with a focus on Blunt’s long poem “The Wind and the Whirlwind”:

Thou wentest to this Egypt for thy pleasure. Thou shall remain with her for thy sore pain. Thou hast possessed her beauty. Thou wouldst leave her. Nay. Thou shalt lie with her as thou hast lain.

Thou shall bring shame upon thy face with all men. She shall disease thee with her grief and fear. Thou shall grow sick and feeble in her ruin. Thou shalt repay her for the last sad tear. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 95

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The poem had been originally published in 1883, soon after the British established their presence in Egypt, and republished along with Blunt’s 1907 treatise Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt. Its reap - pearance in 1914 might be read as a caution against the dangers of overstaying and of yielding to the “shame of Sodom” and Cairo’s “brothels, and the winepress, and the dancers” (Poetical Works 221–35). Declarations concerning Egypt’s depravity—its filth—carried ever- ready assurances in soldiers’ letters home insisting on neither temptation nor corruption. The “natives are horribly filthy & degraded,” observed one: “I have always had a feeling of compassion towards the colored races, but it has now turned to disgust” (Smythe). Another confided to his mother that he hoped the “fair Cleopatra was cleaner than her present-day poorer class compatriots. They are the dirtiest people I have seen” (Howe). The Australians had been initially “amused” by the persistent attention “then astonished and finally angry,” recorded “Trooper Bluegum” (“In Egypt”). In 1916, C. J. Dennis published his highly popular The Moods of Ginger Mick. The Australians “grew to ‘ate all Egyp’ and its desert, and its stinks,” Mick is given to write:

On the day we come to Cairo wiv its niggers an’ its din, To fill our eyes wiv desert sand, our souls wiv Eastern sin, There wus cursin’ an’ complainin’; we wus ‘ungerin’ fer fight— Little imertation soljers full uv vanity an’ skite.

For all Mick’s bravado, “‘ungerin’ fer fight” while being “full uv vanity an’ skite,” no figure appears more dangerously corrupting of white virility than the coloured women of the Wozza: “our souls wiv Eastern sin” (45). Fulfilling their growing reputation as “six bob a day tourists” (“Wonders”) and, in one published report at least, the “syphilis army” (“Maligning”), the Australians kept a dirty secret; registering the highest rate of venereal disease among forces stationed in Egypt. Blame-shifting justifications included innocence corrupted by evil Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 96

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pimps and diseased women occupying “narrow, evil-smelling tortuous lanes.” Though interracial sex was labelled an abomination akin to interspecies sex—“foul cries of solicitation sounded in a very babel of tongues” from the streets and brothels “to rival the other in bestiality” (Thornton 56)—still the Australians came. More than ten thousand were positively tested for venereal disease by August 1916 and, at any one time, an estimated thousand were hospitalised with “gonorrhoea (the clap), syphilis (the pox), and the genital sores of chancroid” (Dunbar 6). Becoming infected was deemed to be tantamount to shirking and malingering, leading to dishonourable discharge, but as the contagion became more prevalent, threats of shaming gave way to a more expedient approach out of concern that the army was being depleted of its capabilities. Histories note that antibiotic treatments for the infected men were decades away though virtually none explore the impact of the disease on women and their communities for whom any treatment remained beyond all reach. Prophylactic bathing and sheaths were not made available and no mention was made of contraception for women who relied on often painful douching and dangerous abortions as the only means of staying at work. Visibly infected women were readily dispensed with as new shipments of sex workers arrived. On the pretext of diseased women and rumours that a soldier had been stabbed by a pimp, the Australians rioted at the Wozza in April 1915 and again in June. Brothels were looted and burned, prostitutes were violated and thrown into the streets along with their courtiers, while soldiers continued to run amok until quelled by the Lancashire Regiment which was called to restore the peace and were at the ready with bayonets drawn as the affray was disbursed. Looking back from the vantage point of 1936, a former Australian soldier recalled being present at the “Second Battle of the Wazir.” There were “many episodes better left unrecorded,” he concluded, but perhaps especially the nature of the violence of this “most inglorious battle” (“Toxites”). The media had obliged in 1915 by limiting its coverage of the Wozza to the recently released film Kismet, adapted from Edward Knoblock’s successful play of the same name which had toured Australia in 1910–11. Prostitutes in Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 97

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David Williamson’s much later screenplay Gallipoli plead, rather unconvincingly, “We clean, not dirty, we very clean” (122). The imputa- tion is that their prospective clients have not been infected though are at risk should they succumb to the solicitation. A few scenes earlier, Lieutenant Sayers addresses the men at parade:

All right, men. You are shortly to be let loose on the local inhabitants ... who you’ll be surprised to find don’t look like you ... of which they are no doubt eternally grateful. First up—beware of the local eggs, which can be dis - tinguished only by their antiquity, the local liquor which is poisonous and for those of you contemplating some horizontal refreshment ... The men—including Frank, Billy and Barney—laugh and cheer. Snowy is disgusted. ... just be warned, because those few moments of pleasure are very likely to leave you with a legacy which is horribly painful, difficult to cure and may get you sent home to face embarrassing questions from girlfriend and/or wife (117–18).

Facey recalled similar lectures, which produced in him the desired result. Admitting that he was “shy where women were concerned,” he remembered the shock of learning about the “bad women who had come to Cairo”—implying that they had been specifically shipped there to service the demand created by the Australian presence—and “what would happen if you got a dose of venereal disease.” Like Williamson’s Snowy, who also abstains from sex and alcohol, Facey “refused to have anything to do with these women” (313). Beyond noting the dangers of infection, the link between sex and disease, though sometimes implied, did not become an explicit topic of contemporaneous creative responses. To an extent, that is attri - butable to the combined influences of the War Precautions Act (1914) and the Trade and Customs Act (1901) which forbade publications deemed to be prejudicial to recruitment and those that were judged to Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 98

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be offensive, indecent or obscene. Further, there was a reluctance among the men to talk about visiting brothels outside the circles of their confidence. “Although one or two soldiers discussed their love affairs, most never wrote about sex,” observed Gammage, “to judge from venereal disease statistics, some applied taboos about sex to words but not actions” (xv). Then there was the nascent master narrative. “The ‘official’ Anzac legend, in the celebration of the manly Australian soldier, is ironically a rather asexual thing,” observed Frank Bongiorno in The Sex Lives of the Australians, “A legend created for the consumption of the entire nation may be able to incorporate a strain of larrikinism, but it could hardly be expected to celebrate sexual incontinence—and the Anzac legend did not” (127). The cumulative effect was the establishment of a literary taboo of sex and especially sex between white men and people of colour which would remain a standard of imaginative writing for decades to come. Katharine Susannah Prichard’s 1929 novel Coonardoo is the exception that proves the rule. It was severely criticised for admitting to the possibility of interracial love and sexual attraction between a white man and an Aboriginal woman. Cast out, Prichard’s eponymous Coonardoo gravitates to the port town of Broome where she works as a prostitute, becomes diseased and is presumed to have died a lonely death. It is probable that a similar fate befell those women cast out from the Wozza. Saints and Soldiers features drinking as an abiding act of masculine bonding while the volume avoids all mention of any corresponding bonding in the brothels of Cairo. Characters self-abuse to the point of becoming legless, but never search out or pay for sex. Nor do they masturbate, an activity that was associated with “nervous debility.” Further, “seminal loss” was deemed to be a waste of a vital national resource. It followed that sex with prostitutes, particularly coloured prostitutes (like masturbation), was “unpatriotic and unAustralian” (Walker 2). Self-censure on these and virtually all other sex-related topics contributed to a tendency of associating sex with dirt, disloyalty and ultimately shame. Venereal Disease had reached epidemic proportions by 1916, leading social reformer Ettie Rout to observe in Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 99

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a confidential report circulated among senior officers and forwarded to the Australian prime minister: “The streets and alleys were filthy with offal and the stenches abominable, but they are crowded with men in Khaki ... Outside notorious brothels long queues of soldiers ... going up and down—in and out ... Bedizened and lustful women thronged the streets” (Dunbar 52). The associations of a conga line of men in alleys, doorways and passages, going up and down and in and out would have been unmistakable to the observing eyes of the Rout report. Little wonder, really, that it remained confidential. Yet, even when not actually deemed to be “dirty,” sex could be a “bit messy for clean people,” observed in her 1980 novel Palomino (Gelder 166). This messiness contributed further to literary silence, which began to break down only with the formal ending of censorship in 1969. Six decades after the events it fictionalises, McDonald’s 1915 depicts an embarrassed Walter, “experiencing a wet dream” sometime after a “sexual encounter with a “dark-eyed girl of indeterminate nationality” in Alexandria” (Lee). Having been aroused in his slumber by a story he had crafted for the benefit of his mates, rather than the actual experience, Walter “woke and cursed his still pulsating semen as it stickily dammed his trousers. Frank on one side, Mick Aitcheson on the other: would they notice” (237). His visit to a brothel notwithstanding, Walter is pure merino by contrast to his mate and black sheep Billy who has a history of sexual violence and exploitation. Bean’s assertion that young men—his preference was to call them boys— had been led astray undermines their agency and ability to work things out for themselves but does assume that sex was at least a topic of camp conversation. A sexual predator and violent individual who is a crack shot with a rifle, Billy had targeted black women in Australia long before his enlistment and arrival in Egypt. A brisk trade in pornogra - phic photos and postcards further suggests shared discourse and arousal among the men. The sex lives of soldiers may have been off limits for a broader public though “self-pollution” was a “habit with a considerable Australian following” observed David Walker (2). Among the men, a night out with Mrs Palmer and her five daughters was celebrated with often violent humour when the stillness of camp at Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 100

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night was broken by loud pronouncements that the “old squire had been foully murdered” after a soldier had ejaculated by his own hand (Thomson 80). “Murder most foul,” the ghost is given to say in Hamlet; metaphorically, “this most foul, strange and unnatural” (i:iv) act of Mrs Palmer melodramatically strangling the “old squire” normalised masturbation with situational humour. Yet, like the Wozza, what happened in the camp, stayed in the camp. Such apparent lack of embarrassment had the effect of minimising any suggestion of homo- sexuality within the homosocial world of the “camp,” a term formally acknowledged by 1909 as the site of “ostentatious, exag gerated, affected, theatrical; pertaining to, characteristic of, homosexuals” (OED). Lured out of their tents by the promise of alcohol and flesh for sale—commonly the one led to the other—the Australians professed little regard for the counter attractions of archaeological mysteries and the riddle of the sphinx. Besides, Oedipus had already solved that particular paradox, though bawdy exchanges may have extended to the light horse mounted on four legs, the infantry marching on two while a three legged individual was one in possession of a rather large male appendage. The Australian quest to defend mother England possessed clear Oedipal complexity but only with the experience of wounding did it occur that the third leg might be walking aid or prosthetic attachment. For the time being, soldier poet Leon Gellert wrote in “A Military Camp in Egypt,” one of a sequence of six poems grouped under the heading “The Edge of the Desert” in Songs of a Campaign:

A drunken song is blared forth here and there. Should this be Egypt? this be Egypt’s night? The riddle of the ancient Sphynx is dead And Wisdom, head bowed, slowly creeps to bed. (30)

In an earlier sequence called “The Dreams of Mars,” Gellert features the cardinal sins of which Lust appears in two poems: “Slobbering Lust” emerges from the “black revolving depths” in “Moving from the Shades” (7) while “The pressing, ‘Flesh is this, thy needed food,’ / And ‘Flesh is warmest in its stolen blood’” appears in “The Influence of Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 101

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Lust” (17). The placement of these poems in the early section of the volume, covering the pre-embarkation period in Australia, suspends an uneasy relationship between wrath and desire—Mars being the god of war and dreams being, well ... wet—and between bordellos and the rape of Belgium. Wisdom’s “bowed head” might suggest bedside prayers, though this is undermined by reference to creeping, a quality associated with brothels and, potentially at least, what was considered to be the greater abomination of men slipping between covers to lie together. In his letters home, an Australian officer and brother of poets Hugh McCrae and Dorothy McCrae, Captain Geoff McCrae, noted among the women of the Wozza Belgian refugees who had been trafficked by white slavers to work side by side with the coloured women (9 Jan 1915). Yet, even this most perceptive of young men seemed to be oblivious to the fact that coloured women had also been trafficked through extensive sex-slave networks for the benefit of the Australians among others. In her 1912 study, The White Slave Market, Olive Malvery had observed that “traders in girls flesh, and procurers are busy scouring upper-Egypt, Arabia, the small islands washed by the Aegean Sea, and Greece” (34), while “white girls” were being pressed into service by “butcher” pimps. “There are, of course, great numbers of European women of ill-fame in Cairo, Alexandria and Port Said, but these are the soiled and diseased harlots of Europe,” observed Malvery, while “poor children” from as far afield as Russia were recruited as “handmaids” before being “broken in” to this “plague of immorality” (31). A widely distributed photograph of a barely pubescent coloured girl, Jeune Barbarine from the Barbary Coast was reproduced by the “Atelier Reiser” studio in Cairo around the time the Australians arrived with their packed wallets and voracious appetite. The photo is all that survives of the young Barbary Coast girl whose fate remains unknown (“Secrets”). On the turn of season, the prevailing sea breezes across North Africa swing to the south, signalling the onset of fierce desert storms or what the Egyptians call Khamsin, characterised by massive atmospheric clouds comprising hundreds of tons of fine particles of colloidal clay Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 102

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stripped from the sand. These copper-tinted mantles travel vast dis - tances and in 1901, in consequence of a particularly intense system, were detected on the normally pristine horizons of Scandinavia. Biblical in proportion, Khamsin was credited with establishing the “thick darkness in all the land” in the Book of Exodus (22–23) and is widely known as the “ninth plague of Egypt” as Canadian novelist Michael Ondaatje observed in 1992 (16). It is the “The plague! The plague! The plague! / Oh, the wind, Khamsin, / The scourge of the desert, blew in!” the American Clinton Scollard put it a century earlier in the poem “Khamsin” which was serialised in Australian newspapers in late 1914 (Scollard). Khamsin’s plague arrived early in 1915—soon after the Australians made camp at Mena, setting Captain McCrae’s “teeth on edge.” Following “two days continuous sands storms” on a “bleak wind,” he wrote to his family: “Everyone was coated about 1/16th inch with a fawn coloured powder it got on your clothes, on food, on bedding and upon everything that was ours” (9 Jan 1915). A spike in temperature by mid-February brought no relief, only oppressive heat, more dust and swarms of flies. “Today is as hot as Hell with a gale blowing in from the desert,” McCrae wrote: “the air is as thick as pea soup with dust everything is covered with it. My bed is covered with small sand drifts and everything is so grimy ... I have to keep blowing the dust from the paper as I write and the nib of my pen is banked up with mud” (28 Feb 1915). Even if McCrae thought nothing of the metaphorical associations of his grimy bed and banked up and soiled pen, Khamsin confirmed all notions of Egypt as a dirty place. The Australians despised it. Longing to be elsewhere, they experienced it through crude Orientalism and bodily discomfort in the alliterative phrase “sin, sand, shit and syphilis,” as Gammage observed (36), or in the truncated variant of “sun, sand and syphilis,” noted by White (49–54). As the season of dust intensified, the Australians began evacuating to the island of Lemnos in preparation for their baptism in the only maritime assault of the war—at the Dardanelles—covering up evidence of their presence in Egypt with desiccated particles that settled back to earth and onto the Wozza. When the wind shifted again as it does every year Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 103

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and began to blow once more gently from the sea, the former training camps had been substantially replaced by hospitals set up to treat the sick, the wounded and the traumatised. A strange birthing had taken place in the interim; a nativity involving young men who had immacu - lately conceived the “imperishable political entity of the nation” (Grimshaw 214), as the dirty business of Egypt was sifted from the sands of memory and accounts of what the Australians henceforth proclaimed to be the greatest story ever told.

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Anzac War Cemeteries. Anzac Portal: https://anzacportal.dva.gov.au/history/con flicts/gallipoli-and-anzacs/locations/explore-25-northern-war-cemeteries Bean, C E W. “With the Australians: Christmas in Egypt”. Advertiser. 22 January 1915: 6. Blunt, Wilfred Scawen. The Poetical Works of Wilfred Scawen Blunt. London: Macmillan, 1914. ——. Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt. Cairo: Markaz al-’Arabi lil-Buh-h wa al-Nashr Cairo 1907. Bongiorno, Frank. The Sex Lives of the Australians. Collingwood: Black Inc, 2012. Braudel, Fernand. The Mediterranean. New York: Harper and Row, 1972. Burns, James Drummond. Enlistment Record, NAA: B2455. https://recordsearch. naa.gov.au/SearchNRetrieve/Interface/ViewImage.aspx?B=317197 ——. “For England.” Snowy River Mail. 11 June 1915, 2. The Castle. Dir. Rob Sitch. Village Roadshow; Miramax, 1997. Film. Collins, Tom. Such is Life. Sydney: Bulletin, 1903. “Correspondence Maligning the Australians”. Benalla Standard. 23 April 1915: 2. Dennis, C. J. The Moods of Ginger Mick. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1916. Dinning, Hector. Nile to Aleppo: with the Light Horse in the Middle East. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1920. Drewe, Robert. The Drowner. Ringwood: Penguin, 2001. Dunbar, Raden. “Jeune Barbarine: Sexual Slavery and Prostitution in Egypt cira 1914”. Honest History. https://honesthistory.net.au/wp/jeune-barbarine-sexual- slavery-and-prostitution/ ——. The Secrets of the Anzacs: the Untold Story of Venereal Disease in the Australian Army. Brunswick: Scribe, 2014. Facey, A.B. (2005). A Fortunate Life. Ringwood: Penguin. “Fear God,” Queensland Figaro. 20 February 1913: 3. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 104

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Gammage, Bill. The Broken Years: Australian Soldiers in the Great War. Canberra: Australian National UP, 1974. Gammage, Bill, and David Williamson. The Story of Gallipoli. Ringwood: Penguin, 1981. Gelder, Ken, and Paul Salzman. The New Diversity: Australian Fiction 1970–1988. : McPhee Gribble, 1989. Gellert, Leon. Songs of a Campaign. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1917. Gilroy, Paul. There ain’t no Black in the Union Jack. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1978. Gregory, J. W. The Dead Heart of Australia. London: John Murray, 1909. Headon, David. Alfred Deakin. Canberra, Parliamentary Library, 2018. Herbert, Audrey. Mons, Anzac and Kut. London: Edward Arnold, 1919. https://guten berg.jumpandread.com/5/4/3/1/54312/54312-h/54312-h.htm Herbert, Xavier. Capricornia. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 2010 (originally pub - lished 1938). Hogue, Oliver (Trooper Bluegum). “In Egypt with the Australians”. Sydney Morning Herald. 21 April 1915: 14. ——. “The Great Charge”. Sydney Morning Herald. 8 June 1916: 6. ——. “Light Horse: The Maze of Trenches”, Sydney Morning Herald, 9 July: 8. Hope, A. D. “Australia.” Meanjin 2.1 (Autumn 1943): 42. Howe, Herbert. Letters, reprinted as “A Remarkable Experience”. Adelaide Advertiser, 5 February 1915: 8. https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/970217 Katter, Bob. Interview. Channel 7, 15 October 2018. Keats, John. “Sonnet to the Nile.” In H. W. Garrod ed. Keats Poetical Works. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1966. Lane, William. Workingman’s Paradise. Sydney: Edwards and Dunlop, 1892. Lee, Christopher. “‘Shapely Experience’ and the Limits of “Late Colonial Trans - cendentalism”: the Portrait of the Artist as a Solider in Roger McDonald’s 1915.” JASAL 11:2. McCrae, Geoff. Letters. Australian War Memorial. McDonald, Roger. 1915. St Lucia; Press, 1979. McQueen, Humphrey. A New Britannia. Ringwood: Penguin, 1970. “Maligning the Australians.” Benalla Standard. 23 April 1915, 2. Malouf, David. Remembering Babylon. London: Vintage, 1994. Malvery, Olive and W. N. Willis. The White Slave Trade. London: Stanley Paul, 1912. Matthews, Harley. Saints and Soldiers. Sydney: W. F. Floessell, 1918. Matters, W. W. “Hark! Is that our Mother Calling.” Co-operator. 7 January 1915: 5. Nicholson (Colonel) G. W. L. Canadian Expeditionary Force 1914–19: An Official History of the Canadian Army in the First World War. Ottawa: McGill-Queens UP, 2015. Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. London: Picador, 1993. Ogilvie, Will H. The Australian and Other Verses. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1916. Prichard, Katharine Susannah. Coonardoo: the Well in the Shadow. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 105

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Robson, Lloyd. The First AIF: a Study of its Recruitment 1914-1918. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1982. Roe, Jill. Stella Miles Franklin. Sydney: Fourth Estate, 2008. Said, Edward. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient. London: Penguin, 1991. Scollard, Clinton. “Khamsin.” http://www.poetry-archive.com/s/khamsin.html Shaffer, Kay. Women and the Bush. Melbourne: Cambridge UP, 1988. Smythe, Bert. Letter 3 December 1914. http://www.smythe.id.au/letters/14_7.htm Stanley, Peter. Lost Boys of Anzac: First to Join First to Fight First to Die. UNSWP, Sydney, 2014. Thomson, Alistair. Anzac Memories. Monash: Monash UP, 2013. Thornton, Guy. With the Anzacs in Cairo: the Tale of a Great Fight. London: HR Allenson, 1916. “Toxites.” “Second Battle of the Wazir.” Western Mail. 27 August 1936: 3. Turner, Ian. “1914–1918. In F K Crowley ed. A New History of Australia. Richmond: William Heinemann, 1988. Welsh, James M., and Steven Philip Kramer. “Abel Gance’s Accusation against War.” Cinema Journal, 14.3 (1975): 55–67. Westbrook, F. E. “To Our Critic,” reprinted in Daily Telegraph. 1 May 1915: 3. Walker, David. “Continence for a Nation. Seminal Loss and National Vigour.” Labour History, 48 (1985): 1–14. Ward, Russel. The Australian Legend. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1958. White, Patrick. Voss. London: Eyre and Spottiswood, 1957. White, Richard. “Sun, Sand and Syphilis: Australian Soldiers and the Orient 1915”. Australian Cultural History 9 (1990), 49–54. Wilde, Oscar. A Woman of No Importance. (1893) UK: Viking, 2019. “Wonders of Egypt.” The Mail. 18 September 1915: 7. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 106

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DAVE DRAYTON

the main artefacts are very archaic

brush the floor of Freud’s enclosure an onlooker trapped in the thermosphere of home archivers carbonise routine

arctic canvas crowded sink

arena of the matriarch of worship ambitious space refuses funerals

your kitchen your rules

homework creates the incidental schoolrooms an archfool in a documentary of pronouns

thankless supple engines idling

technological infringement on the cookbook greens partnered and athletic off the beets

fungi built need strength

the identical humiliation of atmosphere postcards thrusted bricks or baskets

molasses matching Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 107

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frail ghosts spy a clinical barbeque the paediatric earth rupturing staunch expertise bulldog building the family; a dog is as good as a sixth child and where’s the room? the food? the ducks betrothed to potency and the applicants therein

cook agitates the sauce

the orange is removable

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JAYA SAVIGE

Coonowrin (Crookneck)

Hushbound, mountchain, coiled for-kin ache revenant, calm. Warm hay be stark enigma flags, but cannot rarely be sore heart to tune and luck upon your sighin’?

Hairy seas oiled exorcise bark. Sea haw the anchorage of itch purges wretch demiurge wit sheer tragic ululae, lease of pain armfuls; ends air, scrabbled in clear offal, squinched insurgent coin, u-shape, ur-chain, rehashing is songnature.

Thief zillion ears he’s songly none the blur slob of your beak; is fluenz in its noiances, infect, and cairn de-God your heavenly mud frame the smelter of your salts. He weeds the slidest flee Göring your traipse, idylllazes your stats.

Fogged apart sat bees nice weather fled. He naïver mentor bezels low to gulp. Aye rock-ledge the whelp sums to weave downhill cloud.

Lark eyes, hey: ignoble earruck, obscening in sense you sniped inuksuk, surly you cold brook the lows of viz-aches agon imply hymn same intention.

It word mine the whorled if Euclid

torque a quark squeeze as his dreamwoke. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 109

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“Coonowrin” concerns the Indigenous dreamtime story of the in South East Queensland. During a great flood, the father (Mount) Tibrogargan grew incensed that his son, (Mount) Coonowrin, did not come to the aid of his mother (Mount Beerwah, from whose perspective the poems are spoken), so struck him, causing his neck to become dislocated. Local historian Gwen Trundle writes: “Even today Tibrogargan gazes far out to sea and never looks around at Coonowrin, who hangs his head and cries, his tears running off to sea” (qtd. in J. G. Steele, Aboriginal Pathways: in Southeast Queensland and the Richmond River. UQP 1984, p. 172). Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 110

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H. C. GILDFIND

All of this, everything

You wake to a window turned white. Instead of trees, fog—as cool and thick as milk. This is the first opaque morning of the year. Lie in bed, look out, pat the dog snoring in her under-cover cave. Could lie like this forever and ever and ever, and forget the world outside. But no. Get up. Get dressed. Get in the car: you in the front, dog in the back. Drive down the rutted lane to the road, mustering yourself for another day in hell. But first, the carrot on the stick. A run around the lake in town. Drive slowly, shoulders hunched, face close to the windscreen, searching the fog for kamikaze roos. That persistent background worry: what if one goes under the bull bar? What’s the right thing to do? Drive on, or stop to help it? But how can you help it? You could call wildlife rescue—but you know they’ll take hours to arrive and then, most likely, they’ll keep the damned thing alive even if it’s better off dead. So, should you shoot it, slash its throat, smash its skull with the axe in the tray? You’ve heard blokes down at the pub boasting about their road-kill stories. No one denies the humanity of their actions, but everyone senses their pleasure in the gore, in their power—in the mercilessness of their so-called mercy. A rumbling behind. The rear vision mirror is just a white rectangle— useless. Suddenly, and too close, headlights. Lucky it’s uphill. Probably a logging truck, towing a load from the plantations. Tonnes of high- speed steel and wood, only metres away. He tails closer, knowing there’s nothing safer on a fog-blind winding road than a car in front, taking the first hit. Try to ignore him. Try to breathe down the adrenaline shooting through you as he inches closer. Hold steady—ignore him, ignore him, ignore him—until you hit the volcanic planes. The road straightens. The fog disappears. The bastard overtakes. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 111

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Follow him onto the flat. Let him speed ahead into the diamond- cut dawn as you gaze into the paddocks starred with fluro-lit milking sheds—they’ll be heaving with peak-udder traffic. Hear the dog rise up from the back seat, this animal-full smellscape making her restless. She lays her head upon your shoulder, her cheek against yours. Ever familiar—ever strange—the warm breathing softness of this other creature who is so intensely and so particularly herself. Once in a while she licks your face, licks your ear, nibbles at its single diamond stud. Carry on, like this, towards the twinkling town. Slow down past the wood mill with its strange steaming silos and Jenga-stacks of pine planks. Look over these to the lake, revealed only by the fog that hides it. Wonder, again, at how water seeks water—at why it clutches itself to itself so closely. Skirt the town’s shaggy edges. Drive through the industrial estates and its scatter of derelict buildings: squatters and drug dens and brothels (so everyone says). Drive down the short steep road that marks a line between the bird sanctuary and the abattoir’s gleaming white eight-foot fence. Here they are: the carrot—and the stick. Sudden confusion. At the bottom of the hill, next to the cloud- shrouded lake where there’s usually a big open space to park in, there’s a double story building. It wasn’t there yesterday. Slow slow slow right down. Crawl closer. Disconcertion, cold in the vein, that old fear flickering. (Others’ warnings from long ago—from when there were others—about what is a natural, healthy, right and wrong way to live. Warnings about what solitude does to a brain.) Roll past the mysterious structure. Look closely. You’re not mad— not today. Do a u-turn and drive back. It’s just a livestock truck, parked at a funny angle. It’s just a driver pulled over, waiting for the blood- yards to open. Pull in behind him. Sit for a moment. Wonder if it’s foolish to park a white ute in a white fog behind a sleepy driver in a truck with a house- sized trailer. But this run is the only thing that gets you up in the morning. This run is what makes bad things better. You need it—that heart-pumping movement alongside silty silver water on flat-packed Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 112

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gravel with pelicans and swans and spoonbills and swallows and a sky swelling with sunrise. Get out of the car, dog on lead. Walk past the rear of the truck. Look up: three stories of sheep steaming up their own fog. Inhale it: grass, lanolin, shit, piss—warm smells, as repellent and comforting as the smells of any another living, breathing, eating, defecating thing. No bleating. No bah-bah-bahhing. Just the perpetual wordless noise of perpetual motion. Scores of lungs and mouths and noses rasping air. Scores of small hooves scuffling, stamping, trying to find footing but finding no space at all to move in. Look at them, pressed against the wooden-planked walls so that their stomachs, faces, ears and—here and there—entire legs stick out from between the slats, suspended in mid-air. You see one sheep lying on its side, trapped underhoof with a smear of shit across its soft floor-pressed muzzle. You watch another get pissed on from above. It doesn’t seem to notice, doesn’t seem to mind. You step closer and put your face up against a gap. You recoil. The shock of them: those eyes—those alien ovine ellipses—staring straight back at you. Walk along the trailer. Your dog suddenly strains forwards, sniffing wildly. You see what her nose has seen. Three narrow metal cages welded to the chassis under the truck. Two cages are closed, locked, empty. One is open, with a puddle of vomit next to it—or is it shit? Adrenaline ices your skin, your body knowing that another dog is near and that, secured or not, big or small, young or old, it’s as likely as any to go for you. A movement between the massive tyres. Your dog freezes—and so do you. A scuffling sound. And there, morphing from the shadows— and chained to an axle—a scruffy mongrel. Small. Pick-upable. A curly kind of dog. One of those cross-bred Oodles—what do they call them? Spoodles? Cavoodles? Labradoodles? One of those fashionable dogs— though this one is filthy, its white curls matted into grey dreadlocks. As it moves, you see long dark nipples tapering loose teats that swing from her saggy overstretched stomach. She slinks forwards, looking up covertly from under her curly fringe. Stops. Sniffs. Sidles closer until her chain tautens. She pauses. Sniffs and sniffs. Your dog belly-crawls towards her. Tentatively, they touch noses—then lick each other’s Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 113

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muzzles. Lick, lick, lick. Satisfied, the curly dog trots back to the tyres and keels over in the dirt between them: off to sleep. You pull your dog to heel. Look again at those cages welded beneath the chassis. See the toy dog, teddy dog, lap dog—a kid’s dog—balled up tight and being thrown about as the truck flies along the freeway with only a sliver of steel between her and the rushing road. Think of the noise. The scream of air brakes. Think of the face-cutting—eye- cutting—stone chips. Think of the tar-boil of bitumen in summer. Think of the cold and wet and mud of winter. Walk past the driver’s cabin. Its windows are open. A radio plays low. There’s no one in sight, but you can feel his presence, feel it everywhere. Try to imagine him—this man who thinks that all of this is okay. No, cannot imagine him. Cannot imagine the mind that thinks it is okay to stack sheep like sacks. That it’s okay to store a dog like luggage. That dog wool and sheep wool engrained with muck is okay, okay, okay. Cannot imagine a person who thinks that these creatures cannot think or feel or know just what it is that’s done to them. Stand back. Stare down the length of the truck. Recall the accusation of the mocked few, the accusation that has haunted you since you saw it spat at the world by someone on TV: that this here, this truck, represents nothing less than an eternal Treblinka. Hurry away. Begin to run along the water’s edge. Focus on this, the run that makes the intolerable tolerable. But you cannot see your lake at all today. Even the birds—and their busy morning chatter—have been gulped by fog. You can only hear your breath and your heart and the gravel-crunch of feet and paws falling in time to the tune of that un- asked for soundtrack. Tre-blin-ka. Tre-blin-ka. Tre-blin-ka. It’s not anger that comes. It’s nausea. It’s fear. So run harder. Suck in that cool white air. Suck it in. But the belly-gut of knowing surges up anyway—acid—searing your insides with the immutable fact that the unimaginable is real and it is everywhere. Yes, the unimaginable— all of this, everything—is real and it is everywhere all the time. Jerk the lead to hurry the dog along. She resists, making the choker slide up around her ears. Jerk it again, though you know you might hurt her. She relents, speeds up, flashes you that will-remember-this- Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 114

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later look—defiant but resigned, and oblivious to the caricature the fog has made of her soft black face: her dew-edged lashes and whiskers and goatee and ears have been transformed into cartoonish white lines. Joy rushes through you—this profound, inarticulable, unexpected love for her. Guilt chases it. And shame. You think of all the people who refuse to ponder the line between protection and possession, care and control, symbiosis and enslavement—and the consequences of convenience. You think of yourself. Your work. Your wage. Your own refusals and rationales. Creatures materialise on the footpath ahead. A cyclist, heard before seen, clatters past, nodding hello. A many-legged form appears: a man with three sausage dogs rolling underfoot. He stands to one side to let you pass. Two figures approach. Two old men talking in another lan - guage, turned towards each other, one with his hand on the other’s arm: neither looks up. Keep running. Try not to picture your white ute parked in the white fog behind a truck blinded by its own heaving backside. Undoubtedly a stupid place to park. But you were taken by surprise—didn’t, couldn’t think. You’re thinking now. You see the driver descend from his bed at the top of his cabin. See him, sleepy, turn on the ignition and casually let the truck roll back into the ute, not even hearing the crunch of metal. Run harder. Again, see the driver appear groggy in his seat. See him start the truck and, instead of rolling backwards, see him lurch forwards and gear up the hill to the blood-yards, his chained-up dog forgotten. Keep running. See him park at the abattoir. See him jump out of the cabin, look around. See him hesitate, walk a few steps then bend down by the back wheels and swear at the stupid mangled mutt for getting herself killed. Run. The loop is nearly finished and suddenly—just like that—the fog begins to lift. Within minutes, it has thinned to nothing. Magic. The lake reappears, and so does the sky, each reflecting the other—pale, turquoise, luminous. Low clouds crack open. Golden rays beam down, creating a scene as tacky and beautiful as a postcard from heaven—a scene marred only by the black blot of the sheep truck and the white- walled maze creeping up and over the hill behind it. Run towards them. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 115

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Startle at the sudden jumbo-jet descent of two pelicans: albatross- winged, fat as turkeys, they swoop in smooth and fly alongside you—in tandem with you. They splutter to a stop, then glide along with instant grace. Run faster. Nearly there. Now, you can smell the sheep. Now, you can see the white blurs of their faces through the gapped wooden slats of the trailer. Still no sign of the driver. The filthy mutt appears. Sits. Yawns. Watches you walk past. Of course, the ute is fine. Open the back door. Your dog leaps in. Get in the front and switch on the ignition. Reverse away from the truck and point the ute towards the road. Stop. Take one last look. The little dog stands and then bows, her backside up, her long-titted chest pressed to the dirt, her snout straining towards the beam-struck sky. Watch how all of her—every single filthy part of her—luxuriates in the innate bodily satisfaction of the everydog. Pull out onto the road. Drive up the hill. Turn into the open gate and pass through the corrugated walls of steel. Park the car. Let the dog out. She knows the deal. She hops into the tray. Sits on her blanket. Lets you chain her up. Awaits your offering of food and water. You give her a pat, then wander down to the change rooms. Get your gear on. Get to work. Hours later, exhausted, you finally return home. You scrub yourself raw in the shower. Then, the bed beckons. Though it’s only 4 pm, you get under the covers—just for a little while. You doze. You awaken when a big wet nose roughly nudges your face. You do as you’re told. Lift the covers. In she hops, turning around and around and around then nesting in the warm dark safety of her under-cover cave. Two animals—you sleep together. Two animals—you warm each other. You do not know what’s natural or healthy, right or wrong. You do not know anything, except that you could lie like this forever and ever and ever, and forget the world outside. But instead, you’re dozing into a daymare. Dozing into a daymare of a hulk anchored to a cloud. You’re running from a hulk full of feeling into a fog full of spectres. You’re running on a path that keeps looping back on itself, returning you again and again to that everywhere-nowhere man and the little cages and the big cage and the breeding bitch and the stories of sheep Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 116

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with their voiceless noise and their other-worldly eyes staring out at a world that does not see them. You are drifting into a daymare where you’re hosing red off white and scouring benches and sterilising knives and saws and hooks because that’s your job and it’s the only job you could get and it lets you live and you’re good at it. And who says choice has anything to do with anything? Doesn’t everyone—everyone—get paid with the same bloody money? You try to shake yourself awake but you are so damned tired. No, you cannot fight this daymare, this endless fucking nightmare: the normal—the everyday—all of this, everything. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 117

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JOCELYN DEANE

Staying in a place/England

should be getting easier/harder: Halloween ads shed deliberate as opening advent calendars—midnight Christmas decorations outside Salvos/ Oxfam, editions of The Sun fresh as shit, windows stark with porcelain, blood-faced, tiny Regency yeomen/sheriffs plus trash compactors/French building-volunteers around Brighton Pavilion, Czech graffiti in The Lanes: Ko Kdo Je Vy: the sea is small. You

mention—your white Australian friend on the porch sofa frowning—“I always now make time for accidental travel...”

Something growing new claws or wings staring at possibly Arcturus, the brightest interstellar object visible from Earth remembers the night-train—Sydney to Melbourne— repeating, Same as the Cretaceous, never not the same image of stars/light. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 118

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MARIE DUSTMANN

A well-appointed Road After François Péron’s journal account, 1802

Parramatta Road decreed, Built on the footsteps of Aborigines So three carriages could ride abreast, Cutting through a lush forest That had never seen an axe. A pleasant and shaded journey Serenaded by the chatter Of gaily-feathered paroquets. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 119

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DAVID DICK

Being Matt Preston

I check into the clinic and they assign me a cravat. I am to wear the cravat at all hours. Especially when eating—no, dining. They are very strict with this. I am led to my own room. The clinic is not cheap. I have paid extra for privacy. My room has a very wide single bed, a plain desk and a hard cover copy of Cooking With Matt. I am to study the book between food appreciation, behaviour realignment, and surgery. They tell me that this is the next most important thing to do after wearing the cravat. There is also a wardrobe filled with vibrantly coloured silk shirts and suits. They are all too big for me, but I am assured by the nurse that I will be filled out soon enough. This is all very exciting. I feel small as I go to sleep in my big bed. My cravat is nestled under my chin.

In the morning, I am allocated to a peer group. We are told to look out for one another. Our peer groups are our main support network. We are all on the same journey at the clinic. We meet in the mess hall for enunciation and gastronomic voca - bulary. I look at them expectantly. There are ten of us. Six men and four women. Like me, they are all wearing colourful, ill-fitting suits and silk shirts. And their cravats. A small—no, petite—woman in a suit of fluoro pink, spotted with golden flowers, leans over to me. “Are you nervous?” “Yes,” I say, honestly. “Oh.” The woman looks around the group. “I just finally wanted a change.” “Food is my life,” says a bald, narrow man across from me. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 120

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A man with a goatee, squeezed into a turquoise ensemble, exclaims, “I just love his sense of fashion. So iconic. Individual.” I am not sure they really understand what they are doing here. They only want to be him. A nurse comes in and announces that they will soon be serving breakfast. We are to take notes and write a reflective essay on how the breakfast reminds us of our mothers when they took us to the country to ride horses. I can already smell the hay and fresh eggs. My mother’s voice is cream.

We spend the rest of the day eating, practising the soft British accent, and taking notes on how to best describe the “experience” of food. The nursing staff watch us closely. I’m worried that my voice is too high. They let me know that vocal correction is part of my package. I am again glad that I paid extra. I have invested in this fully. The rest of my peer group may get the accent, but they will never have the low, comforting grumble. I watch some of them pick at their food. I, on the other hand, relish it. Indulge in it. As I chew, I feel the light sink through me into the soft moss hued linoleum floor under my feet, and though everything is sterile here, it does nothing to lessen the umami of the dishes. The petite woman does not understand what I mean when I try to explain this experience to her in his accent. She has spilled tomato sauce—no, napoli—on her cravat. We are sent to bed. A few others in my peer group complain that they are too full. My belly is inflated. I look more like him already. I read Cooking With Matt and make copious notes in the margins.

The next day, I have a surgery consult. The doctor is a heavy man with a beard and would almost look like him if it were not for the thick Russian accent. “I am too small,” I say. The doctor places me next to a life size cardboard cut-out. “Yes,” he agrees. “much too small. But we have procedure to correct this.” Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 121

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My suit of charcoal brown and fabulous purple is draped over me. My arms barely reach past the end of the sleeves. “And my voice?” “Will be appropriately deepened, yes.” I can hardly contain my thrill. “First, you must eat. Fill out. Practise,” commands the doctor. He hands me a personalised nutrition schedule. Lots of butter, crackling, and braised lamb. I imagine myself eating lamb tagine in Morocco like I’m sure he did. It’s me now eating that aromatic dish, describing it, taking in the sights, sounds, exotica. “Of course.”

The petite girl has had enough. She tells me this as she struggles to swallow our afternoon tea—no, repast—of white bean cassoulet. “It is too much,” she says. “I want change. This—this is too much.” “It’s a commitment,” I sternly remind her. “We are committed now.” My stomach is bubbling, coated in lamb fat from earlier. I am careful not to drip on my cravat. Most of the rest of my peer group already have stains on theirs. “I can leave if I want.” “You shouldn’t. This is important.” “You don’t have to talk like that all the time,” she says, dropping her spoon. “You don’t even sound right.” “That is why I must practise.” I lean over her and take a spoonful of her cassoulet. Peer at her thoughtfully. I raise the spoon to my lips in that delicate way he does. A savoury movement. “It’s not the food on the table, but the eyes across the table that matter,” I say. I chew precisely, looking skyward. “Reminds me of France, of old mémères who know best, the simplest things, just the lightest touches—bit of duck fat, pork sausage, beans in stock.” The narrow bald man is sitting across from us. He smiles at me and liquid dribbles from out the corner of his mouth. I note that his cravat is clean. “I remember those times in France,” he says. The nurses are watching. Some are taking notes. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 122

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I am in bed, reading Cooking With Matt. He is discussing the wonders of roast chicken on Sundays. I adore both these things: roast chicken and Sundays. A nurse comes in with the clinic phone. My friend is on the other end of the line. I finish the sentence I am on and take the phone. The nurse waits by the door. “How’s it going?” my friend asks. “Stupendous. A melange of flavours and sensations,” I say. It is quiet. I am still full of second dessert. “Why are you talking like that?” asks my friend. “Like what?” “British, but not quite.” I need more practice. “To sound like him. Perfect.” “Okay.” “It’s all a part of the process. The clinic is really very good—I mean, accomplished,” I assure my friend, though I do not know why my friend would need assurance. My friend knows who I am. “Are you still sure about this?” “Absolutely.” Silence and my eyes flicker to Cooking With Matt. He looks gigan tic on the cover in his pristine white apron and sky-blue cravat. “You know, this all came from, like—I don’t know. It was very unexpected,” says my friend. “I know who I am,” I sternly remind my friend. “Sure, sure. I guess you do. And that’s totally great. We’re totally on board, if you think you’re Matt Pr—” “Think?” I interrupt. The nurse agitates near the door. They don’t like us to get too emotional. It is not true to the clinic’s ethos. It disturbs the cravats. “But, you don’t even really like food all that mu—” “No,” I interrupt. “Because I love it. All of it. Oh, the places and people it takes us to. Such passion for food. The world is an oyster waiting to be forcefully shucked, my friend. Slurped with a long tongue, straight down the throat.” “You’ve never left Melbourne. You seemed so conte—” Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 123

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“Like slipping along the country roads of France surrounded by vineyards, centuries old. Yes, always content living my dream.” “I get you. I get you,” she stammers. “Please don’t. You know, they won’t let you—” “Culinary adventures. Sweet, sour, bitter, salty, smoke, smoke, smoke, charred skin of deceased bovine, medium to medium rare, medium to medium rare, medium burnt on coals, delicacy, dis - gusting...” pause for effect “...-ly tasty. Done us all proud, done your mother proud.” The nurse rushes over and takes the phone from me. “Shhhh,” the nurse whispers and presses a beeper on his belt. “Chocolate, yes chocolate can take us away too and I remember dipping strawberries into chocolate when I was only a wee lad visiting the Alps with my Aunty June, and I always snuck another piece when she wasn’t looking. Harrumph!” Five nurses rush into my room. One holds a syringe. They hold me down as I am thinking of going to Switzerland and eating the perfect dessert in a laneway in Melbourne. Swirls of the finest malt whisky foam and my friend she doesn’t understand what I am saying. “Now, now,” the nurses say. “We can’t have that. Matt never lets himself lose control. It’s unseemly.” Then I calm down and fall into bed. My head lolls to look to at Cooking With Matt. It is open to a chapter about having dinner parties with your friends.

I am practising food criticism with the petite woman. She looks pale and bloated. “Flavour: it’s all about the salt, or so my godmother always used to say. It adds a succulent lusciousness that elevates even the blandest produce,” I pronounce, thoughtfully licking my spoon and picturing my godmother. She is a robust, strong-willed woman brandishing sea salt in her fist. “Do you even have a godmother? Or did you just hear him say it once?” she asks. She is sweating. She looks tiny inside her enormous suit. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 124

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The bald narrow man is partnered with the man with the goatee. “Just a crack of pepper—a mere dusting—is all this needs,” he says. “Remember walking the spice trade routes of the Mediterranean as a wild teenager obsessed with punk and peppercorns?” The man with the goatee bobbles his head. “Yes. Yes, of course.” The large Russian doctor is nearby. He is conversing with a nurse. “What do you taste?” I ask the petite woman. “The wild Greek seas of your youth? Or is it lacking in tapenade?” “Greek seas?” She drops her spoon and stands up. She is blushing. Her cravat is grey and undone. “Shepparton. Yes, Shepparton, that is as far as I ever got from home. On a netball trip. I ate a cheap service station pie there. That was enough. Not a tapenade in sight.” The Russian doctor has noticed the commotion and edges closer. “Now,” he says. “You all remember your youth.” “No,” she says. “Not like this.” The Russian doctor tuts, “Of course you do.” “I don’t. It’s not there. I wanted a change—to change. Be—I don’t know. I remember high fibre white bread and peanut butter. These Greek seas, these youthful wanderings, relatives, all of it, it isn’t there. I don’t think it was ever there. Like, real. Is he real anymore?” I am offended. I stroke my cravat protectively. “Who else could pen such perfectly phrased paragraphs detailing the power of food to transport us and give to us a tactile sensation of all the experiences we’ve ever had?” I ask—I rhetorically ask. Everyone in my peer support group nods. The Russian doctor praises my British vowels. The petite blonde woman stares at me. Her mouth hangs open and there is dried sauce caking the edge of her lips. “Enough,” she says and makes for the door at a canter. I watch her run. The suit flaps and crackles irregularly with her movement. She is impeded. Her movements lack efficiency. I calmly place my own spoon down, stand, brush my cravat, and take off after her. “A denier,” I bellow in a British accent diluted by years abroad in Australia. I finally hear his—my grumble emerge from out my throat. Delicious. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 125

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The nurses intercept her before she reaches the door. She trips over her too-long pants. “Come now, love,” says one of the nurses. “You know why you’re here.” “Just a change,” says the petite woman. She is red in the face, blowing hard. Her cravat is rumpled. “Be someone else. Be him.” The nurses look at each other. The Russian doctor takes a brief note. “Love,” says one of the nurses. “You already are.” They take her out one of the doors. She is sobbing and disappearing inside her suit. I sit down and take another bite. “Perfect. But the charm of simple, big flavours is that they always are,” I say. The narrow bald man and the man with the goatee nod in agreement.

I am reading Cooking With Matt at my desk. I am inspired. My teal suit is starting to fit. There is a rough growth of facial hair under my chin. The knowledge contained within Cooking With Matt is vital. Essential. There are footsteps approaching my door. I look up to see who is there. The petite woman walks past, held steady by a nurse. Except she does not look petite any longer. She is filling out her jacket and her hair is wavy black. They stop near my door. She looks in and waves. The movement is sloppy. Her eyes are glassy in her pleasingly round face. “Snuff out any doubts, banish any nagging thoughts of failure, this challenge is hard enough without any of those distractions,” she says. Her voice rumbles. I am in awe. “I must bring my very best,” I say back. “Come along,” says the nurse. “You need some rest. That was a big operation.” They continue down the hall. I cannot wait until it is my turn. I go back to reading Cooking With Matt. He is discussing the time saving brilliance of pressure cookers. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 126

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After lunch, I am taken out of my peer group and led to reception. I am irritated at being interrupted. We had been discussing how to correctly wield cutlery. A lean grey-haired woman is waiting for me. “Darling?” she queries. “Yes?” She looks me over. “You’ve got so big.” “It’s the lamb,” I say. She tilts her head as I speak. I am not sure why I am here and who this woman is. “The lamb? You never liked lamb. Too fatty.” “But how else would there be flavour without the fat?” I ask. I have always loved lamb, particularly mid-week, leftover roast lamb stews on cold London nights. “That accent,” she mutters. Again, she looks me over. “And how you’re dressed. So loud, and so very different for ... you.” I gesture at my salmon pink suit. “This little number?” I tighten my emerald green cravat. “I need something to match my charismatic opulence. Style is a way to speak without uttering a word, or, so they say.” “My darling boy, I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” she says. I am confused. “Doing what?” “This—this, transformation and—what did you call it when you left? Experiencing.” She sounds confused. I do not mean to upset her. I do not want to. “Life was OK, wasn’t it? Very comfortable, you said, and you never seemed upset, disappointed about this. You were always loved. Unconditionally. You do know that you were always loved? Right?” she asks. “I do know that,” I say and think of my mother in London. Beauti- ful woman. A clever cook. “I always feel the adoration of my fans, readers, fellows, my splendid family, all of them. It comes with my grandeur, worldliness, eloquence. It is the perfectly balanced broth of my life atop which I float and absorb.” “That’s not real, though. I’m right here,” the woman says. “Your mum.” But she is not. I turn to the nurse. “I am done here,” I say. “I wish to taste the world.” Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 127

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“I know,” says the nurse. “Son?” begs the strange woman. I follow the nurse out of the reception. The Russian doctor is standing in the nurses’ station on the other side of the door. “I think it is time, yes. We at the clinic have been much impressed by your progress. Let us now make that suit fit a little better,” he says.

I am lying on a gurney in a waiting room. I am wearing a very loose hospital gown and my flawlessly ruffled cravat. I’m hungry. I am thinking, “Finally.” The narrow bald man is on a gurney next to mine. He is grinning. “Finally,” he whispers. He turns to me. “Excited?” he asks. “Absolutely,” I say. “You?” “Of course,” he says. “Nervous?” I find that I am not. It is like carefully slicing the gristle off steak. It isn’t about removing or changing flavour but exposing the best cut. I know this now. We lie in silence for a few moments. This is just like that time in Berlin. The wine and the drugs and the nights spent binge writing in alternate stupors of self-consciousness. And for a moment, I think of the strange woman from earlier. Her familiarity. Her voice similar in timbre to my own. Just her warm presence. The same over and again. Two nurses enter. I can only see the Berlin wall covered in graffiti, reminding me of sauerkraut and bratwurst and my distant uncle who lived there as a pork salesman. One of the nurses wheels away the narrow bald man. His cravat is ruby red. The other nurse takes a seat across from me. “Mind if I switch on the telly?” he asks. “You’re not due for another half hour or so.” I do not answer. I stare at and taste my memories. The nurse shrugs and flicks on the TV in the corner of the room. Matt Preston is hosting an afternoon talk show with two other Matt Prestons. Their suits are gold, light mossy brown and sparkling silver; their cravats are aqua, deep purple and tartan blue and red. They Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 128

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are discussing worldly affairs and their voices are heartening rumbles. The nurse changes the channel. Matt Preston, in pink silk, is a weatherman and his accent tells a story, though the tone is wrong. I’m glad I’ve paid extra. The TV flickers again onto a soap opera. Matt Preston is accusing Matt Preston of murdering their step-uncle. “I love this show,” says the nurse. The next scene is Matt Preston passionately making out with a lithe blonde woman whose intentions are clearly evil. Matt Preston in a forest green suit and rose splattered cravat, watches from afar, worried about the fate of Matt Preston at the hands of the blonde. Then Matt Preston is walking the halls of a gothic castle crying for the loss of his beloved and the ghost of his mother, Matt Preston, floats through a wall to tell him the identity of the man who poisoned his father. There is a close up of Matt Preston’s face and he is breathing hard. It cuts to a commercial. Matt Preston is flogging used Hyundais. “Take a road trip to your next dining destination,” says Matt Preston gesturing to a Hyundai. “Eat the world. Make a few more memories.” I hear the Russian doctor call out, “We’re ready,” and I am wheeled into the operating theatre. I am imposing, knowledgeable, interesting. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 129

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JUMANA BAYEH

Australian Literature and the Arab-Australian Migrant Novel

Patrick White’s The Aunt’s Story, published in 1948 and set in the 1930s, is one of the few Australian novels that features an Arab male character. His inclusion gives readers an insight into how an Arab was represented and, by extension, perceived in early- to mid-twentieth century Australia. The Arab in this case is a travelling salesman or a hawker, an occupation adopted by many early male and female migrants from what was then a region in Syria, today known as Lebanon. Hawkers traversed vast tracts of remote Australia peddling an array of wares, and their arrival to a country town or estate like Meroë in The Aunt’s Story, was met with excitement. This is evident in the scene where the hawker’s approach to Meroë is depicted, or focalised, from the perspective of the town’s residents:

Down the road from the direction of the hills the Syrian man came from time to time. He came into sight at the bend in the road, where his wheels thrashed, splashing through the brown water of the ford. From a good dis tance you could see the dirty canvas swaying and toppling about the cart, and there was time to shout a warning, to call, “The Syrian! Here comes the Syr-i-urn!” (White, 24–25)

Although the narrator states that “everyone liked to buy” or at least “touch and choose” from the hawker’s “Horiental” goods, the Syrian reportedly “sold trash” (25). He is described as “dirty” (26), with “dry and brown [skin] ... blue tattoo marks on his hands” and as possessing a largely unintelligible voice because of the foreign “language that he talked” (25). He is also nameless, referred to only as “the Syrian Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 130

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hawker” and once, in a mocking tone, as Mr Ali Baba by the forthright character Gertie Stepper. So offensive is this Syrian that Gertie chastises the central character Theodora Goodman for walking a short way with the hawker as he left: “‘That dirty Syrian man! Don’t you ever do that again!’” (26). Taking this rare and particular repre sen - tation of an early Arab migrant in an Australian novel as a unique starting point, the following essay tracks the figure of the Arab into contemporary Australian fiction at a time when Arab-Australian authors have started to tell their own stories and respond to the history of their misrepresentation. Starting with the Meroë residents’ encounter with the Syrian is relevant because it sheds light on the ambiguous place of the Arab migrant other in modern Australia, one which involves a persistent Orientalism and the enduring misrepresentation of the Arab that extends into the contemporary era of Australian multiculturalism. The Syrian’s arrival brings excitement and the items he sells, such as a silver shawl that “blew in the wind and streamed like a fall of silver water,” elicit collective gasps of “Ooooooh!” from the people of Meroë (25- 26). And yet, the text shows how this Syrian is considered a backward and uncivilised wanderer. This migrant subject, then, is othered not simply as inferior and uncultivated but is also exoticised. These seemingly conflicted and unstable characterisations of the Syrian hawker are a central aspect of racialised othering, as theorised by Edward Said in his landmark study Orientalism (1978). Said describes Orientalism as “the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient— dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it; in short [it is] a Western style for dominating ... the Orient” (3). As such the Orient is a construction of the Western imaginary imposed upon geographical spaces ranging across today’s Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (White’s Meroë bears the name of the ancient desert site of the pyramids on the Egyptian Nile), as well as the peoples and cultures from these regions. While Said did not comment widely on Orientalism in the Australian context it certainly has not gone unexamined by local critics Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 131

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working in the broad field of postcolonial studies. A key focus in Australian postcolonialism is how the representation of the “other”— notably migrants and Indigenous Australians—has emulated certain Orientalist tropes, namely the capacity to “master” and essentialise the other through knowledge and representation. This essentialism is palpably displayed even in the brief Syrian scene in White’s novel, where the hawker is both quickly shown to be inferior and a source of wonder, highlighting that fiction played a pivotal role in sustaining Orientalist depictions. As Said explains:

a very large mass of writers ... poets, novelists, philoso- phers, political theorists, economists, and imperial administrators ... accepted the basic distinction between East and West as the starting point for elaborate theories, epics, novels, social descriptions, and political accounts concerning the Orient, its people, customs, “mind,” destiny, and so on. This Orientalism can accommodate Aeschylus, say, and Victor Hugo, Dante and Karl Marx (1978, 9–10).

The Aunt’s Story, although it shows sympathy for the Syrian through Theodora’s attachment to him, was part of this Orientalism and offered a glimpse into Australia’s mid-century Orientalism and under - standing of the Oriental subject. But what story could be uncovered if we were able to hear the Syrian narrate his own life and his experiences in Australia? This essay asks us to go further than Theodora, to continue walking with the Syrian to gain insight into how he would represent his own identity, if given the opportunity. Doing so will allow us to move away from the Syrian being represented to representing himself, to becoming a central rather than marginal and marginalised figure. To do this, the essay examines how Arab-Australian writers have started to construct their own stories and used their works of fiction to respond to, complicate and to a certain extent dismantle the Orientalist tropes of exoticisation and repulsion. The Syrian’s presence and swift occultation in The Aunt’s Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 132

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Story, disappearing from Theodora’s sight as he “slipped past ... the hills” (26), acts as a provocation to pay attention to a broader Arab- Australian narrative, where its characters still grapple, much like the Syrian, with their marginalisation in modern Australia and its literary landscape. As such this essay examines Arab migrant fiction and explores how this work engages with and attempts to challenge Orientalism in its various conflicted dimensions. Doing this necessitates thinking about how aspects of Orientalism feature in the context of contemporary, multicultural Australia where othering has been articulated in a not entirely dissimilar manner. Multiculturalism is a relevant context here because Arab-Australian fiction, unlike its migrant counterparts such as the Greek or the Italian, is a very recent entry to the Australian literary scene and the two novels closely examined in this essay were published only in the last two decades.1 The first is Loubna Haikal’s Seducing Mr Maclean, published in 2002, and the second is Michael Mohammad Ahmad’s The Lebs, published in 2018. Both texts are narrated in the first person, by a nameless female narrator in Haikal’s book and by a young male, Bani Adam, in Ahmad’s. The characters are roughly the same age, though approximately two- thirds of Bani’s story takes place in his final year of secondary school while Haikal’s novel begins with the narrator starting university. Each writer has indicated that their work draws heavily on events in their own lives, suggesting a high level of autobiography. This autobiograph - ical quality is not uncommon for Arab migrant writing in debut novels, which Seducing Mr Maclean is—it is in fact Haikal’s only novel-length work. The Lebs, however, is Ahmad’s second work, but is no less shaped by the author’s life. It is part of a trilogy, which began with the publi - cation of The Tribe (2014)—a novella focused on the early childhood experiences of the central character Bani Adam—followed by The Lebs— which tracks Bani’s life from adolescence. The third instalment, yet to be released, will continue with Bani’s journey into adulthood. As such, Ahmad may be the first Arab migrant writer working in English to dedicate a fictional trilogy to unpacking his life story in intricate and, in some instances, devastating detail. The Lebs, and Bani’s teenage years, Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 133

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much like Ahmad’s adolescence, are haunted by traumatic events from the “real” world, like the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers or the 2000 gang rape trials in Sydney, and violent places, such as Punchbowl High. Haikal’s text is also a work of realism, and uses satire and parody as a way to explore the narrator’s self-Orientalisation, which works to her advantage. Its success is possible precisely because the narrator is female, but for a male Arab Muslim character like Bani there is no option to self-Orientalise, especially growing up in the culturally riven political landscape of early 2000s Australia. This impossibility under - pins the novel’s gritty realism, its use of injurious language and its portrayal of the crude Punchbowl boys, including their confronting misogyny. While their differing genders and social milieux (Haikal’s narrator is from a once middle class Christian family who migrate to escape Lebanon’s civil war; Bani Ahmad’s family are lower working class and face discrimination as Arab Muslims) produce unique responses to the racism or Orientalism each central character faces, what is common to these texts is that their protagonists are consumed by managing their dual or fragmented identities to gain acceptance in mainstream Australia. For the female narrator in Haikal’s work, this involves succumbing to the Orientalist constructions of the Arabian woman only to subvert them; for Bani his acceptance is supposedly contingent upon becoming a successful writer and artist.

Seducing Mr Maclean

Loubna Haikal’s Seducing Mr Maclean tells the story of a Lebanese migrant family who flee Lebanon’s raging civil war in the 1980s, and settle in Melbourne. The novel opens with a detailed description of a loud celebration in the restaurant of the narrator’s father. The Lebanese percussion, the derbakke, explodes into trill as guests dance, clap, cheer, whistle and even give an imitation “gun salute ... pa’ pa’ pa’ ... to the best doctor in the world” (3). The riotous party is to celebrate the narrator’s graduation from medical school, a moment which for her mother and father justifies their arduous move to a foreign country, their loss of social status and cultural capital. This Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 134

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opening scene signals to readers that this character has achieved a level of success as a migrant to Australia, and is able to celebrate the success Lebanese-style with gun salutes, derbakke drums, and Joe the Lebanese Pavarotti singing the “ascendant never ending OooooooOOF” (4) that is characteristic of Arabic music but untranslatable to Anglo-Australian ears. Although not as explicit as later seen in the novel, this opening scene references an important dimension of multiculturalism where a very Lebanese celebration can take place in 1980s Melbourne, and Australian professors and ministers mingle with Lebanese migrants, to mark a migrant’s impressive achievement. Following from this scene, which is situated in the novel’s present, the narrative moves back in time to the family’s arrival in Australia and tracks how the narrator negotiates the extent to which she belongs in Australia. This dilemma of belonging, or trying to “fit in” (28), explored primarily within the confines of the , exposes the complex and fraught relationship between multiculturalism and identity. In his assessment of Haikal’s work, Saadi Nikro has argued that Seducing Mr Maclean should be read as a multicultural novel with a migrant specificity that “foregrounds the pathology of Australian multiculturalism” (310). Nikro classifies Australian multiculturalism as pathological because, despite or perhaps as a result of its celebration of diversity, it exacerbates the tension it creates between ethnic (Lebanese) and national (Australian) identities. A further but related element of this pathology is gendered, where the female aspect of the narrator’s ethnic Lebanese identity is central to the way she negotiates her acceptance, and the way she is received by white Australia. Gender is an important dimension of multiculturalism, and highlights another aspect of identity that coexists with multiculturalism’s celebration and accommodation of cultural and ethnic diversity. The conflicted, un - stable and particular ways identities are negotiated and deployed are an advantage and liability, and in the novels by Haikal and Ahmad are reflected in the evolution of multiculturalism as a government sponsored program. To briefly explain, multiculturalism was intro- duced in Australia to redress the preceding White Australia Policy. That policy became increasingly irrelevant, not to mention illegitimate, as Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 135

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non-English-speaking migrants started to arrive in large numbers in the 1950s and 1960s. While it came to an official or legal end in 1973 with the Whitlam government, the 1950s to the 1980s can be regarded as a period of unstable transition between “a political culture structured by racialist codes of exclusivity and ... a reprocessing of difference and belonging according to a code of ethnic inclusion” (Nikro 311). A strong undercurrent of assimilation structured the White Australia period, and was especially heightened by the growing number of non-white migrants.2 It is important, though, not to confuse the end of the White Australia period as an end to a demand for if not assimilation then at least integration (Monsour 10; Nikro 311). Multiculturalism stressed a capacity for the migrant to fit in to Australian culture while maintaining their ethnic cultural background. A former identity, the ethnic identity, did not need to be erased but could coexist alongside and integrate with the Australian. This highlights two features of the multicultural system—firstly, that multiculturalism was not a revo - lutionary break with the dictates of the White Australia Policy but a more flexible system of managing cultural diversity through integra - tion; and secondly, because multiculturalism purported to celebrate diversity the migrant would always be the “other” or outsider to mainstream white Australia (Hage). That “other” status need not be negatively drawn; indeed, as the discussion of Orientalism above shows, it could contain positive or seemingly favourable depictions. In the case of Haikal’s novel, that ethnic identity is an Arab or Lebanese one which is mostly understood by the Anglo-Australian characters, like Professor Maclean and Minister Whiteside, in exotic and highly sexualised terms, rather than the violent and criminalised depictions that dominate The Lebs.3 It is worth stressing the gender specificity of the kind of Orientalism or exotic attraction that Haikal’s narrator experiences in relation to the novel’s male characters. Her university advisor Professor Maclean openly states that he is attracted to the narrator’s foreign charm, noting that she is “very different” and “very exotic”, and inappropriately questions her about the dance of the seven veils (31–32). Her boyfriend, Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 136

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Robby, makes similar statements, emphasising the narrator’s beautiful olive skin, her curvaceous body and foreign accent. More poignant is the way the minister for Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, Mr Whiteside, suggests that the narrator should represent the Lebanese community by giving a speech at an upcoming festival, where there will be TV journalists (190). Mr Whiteside tells the narrator she is a “clever ethnic” who “can do things us Aussies can’t. We have a lot to learn from you” while winking at her (189). He invites her to dinner so they can discuss the speech and how she can “help to change the image ... of the Lebanese, the war, the guerrillas” because she would “look so good on TV ... I can see that” (189–90). Intertwined in this seemingly gracious invitation is the “pathology” of multiculturalism where difference is celebrated and held in high esteem—the ethnic other can teach us—but through, and only through, its attachment to some kind of exoticism, specifically in this case an eroticised and Orientalised expression of it. What is poignant about this Orientalist-driven flir- tation is that it can only be directed at the Arab/Oriental woman. The narrator’s response to this, the way she manages such inap- propriate and racialised behaviour, is determined by the gendered Orientalism she faces. There are two responses that she attempts. The initial one involves rejecting her exotic difference by supressing and disowning her Arab or Lebanese identity. Her inner thoughts reveal a deep desire to become Australian, to change her Arabic-inflected accent, her appearance and her “brain.” “Maybe,” she thinks, “if things had worked out with Robby, I would have been able to adopt his accent and physical features just like married couples do” (150). What the narrator describes here, a desire to become fully Australian, is an opposing essentialised identity that works against the Orientalist identity attributed to her by Mr Maclean and Mr Whiteside. That this “choice” between two particular identities takes place in a multicultural milieu is apt because, as has been widely argued, one of the elements of multiculturalism is that it flattens out the complexity and inner heterogeneity of subjectivity. Or, to adapt Nikro, through its celebration of diversity, multiculturalism and its “essentializing terms of reference” holds “captive” the “various hues and stammers,” or the heterogeneous Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 137

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and complex subjectivity of, in this case, a Lebanese female migrant. The narrator and her family are at pains to explain their Lebanese identity to their Australian friends, explanations which may not be accurate and subject to their own politicisation but nonetheless capture the complexity that multiculturalism allows little room for. The family insists, for instance, that because they are Christian Lebanese, speci - fically Maronite Catholic, they should not be considered Arab, a point reinforced by their supposedly ancient Phoenician roots. Their Lebanese culture is unique because it resembles western Europe, which they demonstrate by scattering French greetings and words into their everyday conversation.4 Finally, as the narrator’s mother points out, Lebanese women are chaste, honourable, modest and guard their sexual prowess. Lebanese women, therefore, bear little resemblance to the Orientalist image propagated by Maclean and Whiteside. The second response to the gendered Orientalism the narrator faces involves accepting and manipulating it. Following her painful break-up with Robby, the narrator comes to terms with the fact that she will always be “two people, one local and one imported, that wrestled.” And in that wrestling it seems that not only would she “never be one again ... never lose [her] looks, accent and family” but that becoming Australian would remain unattainable because her “genes no matter what happened to [her] brain, would never disappear” (195). Recognising this, she reclaims her exoticism and wields it to her advantage. As Haikal explained in an interview: “I constructed the ... narrator as the foreigner, the young Lebanese girl, the new comer who brings the goods from the old culture and tries to set them up as the currency for survival in the new culture. She negotiates their worth in exchange for acceptance in a new home” (Haikal qtd in Ball, “Interview” par 2). Readers witness this as the narrator, rather than suppressing her accent, expertly rolls her Rs, emphasising her multilingual talents as fluent in Arabic and French. She also accentuates her dark features, especially her eyes, dresses so that her small waistline and rounded hips, essential for belly dancing, are well pronounced, and refrains from correcting professors and politicians when they refer to Lebanon as a place of mysticism, a land of the Arabian nights. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 138

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Some critics have suggested that this aspect of the book reinforces the very Orientalism and misogynistic stereotypes of Arab women and culture that many Arab communities in Australia work to dismantle (Ball, “Review” par 4; Griffin par 5).5 But from the narrator’s perspective, some form of success in Australia requires her to turn exoticism to her advantage. Haikal’s novel demonstrates that to transcend being held “captive” to the essentialising force of Australian multiculturalism, one must navigate a way through rather than simply resist it. By the novel’s end the evidence suggests that the narrator’s exotic recuperation has worked to her advantage—she graduates from medical school by relying partly on her foreign charms. This strategy also plays well with university professors, especially Mr Maclean with whom she shares in a mutual romantic exchange. These inevitably compromised successes however do not translate into the world inhabited by Ahmad’s central character, Bani Adam, who as a young Muslim male growing up post-9/11 cannot turn his foreignness and exoticism to his own advantage.

The Lebs

Bani’s story begins in the notorious Punchbowl High in southwest Sydney, a school known in the 1990s and early 2000s for its rowdy and violent student population. Its students are entirely male and predomi- nantly of migrant background—Pacific Islanders or “Fobs” as they are called in the novel, or Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians and Indonesians collectively known as “Lebs”—and a few working-class white Australians, the “Skips.” The “Lebs,” who present themselves as thugs, are mainly Muslim and experience life in Australia as members of a minority group. These Lebs talk in a particular way, share the same posture and gestures, espouse a certain dress code and collectively perceive white Australians or “Skips” as the dominant group against which they are racialised and to which they will never assimilate or gain acceptance (Ahmad 2006). The misogyny of the Punchbowl boys is just as pronounced as their racism. Young women are most often referred to as “bitches,” “sluts,” “hoes,” and are only pursued by the Punchbowl boys for sexual favours. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 139

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Ahmad’s narrator, Bani, does not shy away from recording in brutal, candid and unsentimental detail the racism and misogyny of his peers, all of it shown against the backdrop of the Skaf gang rape trials of 2000 and the September 11 attacks in 2001, two events that determined that the Lebs of Punchbowl High would “come of age” during a period of heightened racial tension and Islamophobia. Despite this challenging Islamophobic backdrop, Ahmad makes it virtually impossible for readers to empathise with the boys who are presented as uncultivated, ignorant and violent. The extent of their violence and savagery is reinforced in the book’s opening scene as the boys enter the school grounds, where they are searched at the gate for contraband and barricaded behind “nine-foot fences with barbed wire and cameras” (3). Bani quickly informs his readers that he is different from his class mates. Unlike them he does not embrace the thug-image and distin - guishes himself as a writer. The teachers reward him for this too: “I am at the centre of every teacher’s affection because I discuss Faulkner and Joyce and Nabokov. The teachers look to me whenever they need to be reminded that it’s the Boys of Punchbowl who are wrong, who are lesser beings” (5). This attachment to being different is expressed by Bani as a form of self-hatred: “I hate being a Lebo—I am above it. I will [not] be ... Bilal Skaf [the gang rapist], I will be a great novelist like Tolstoy and Chekov” (5). He visibly marks out his superior attitude by dressing differently, not wearing pants that drop at the crotch and are tapered around the ankles but instead, in an interesting gender play, queers his aesthetic style by wearing his sister’s flared jeans and beret. He also makes a point of speaking differently and disciplines himself to pursue his ambition to be a writer. For Bani it appears that being a writer and not being a violent savage are inextricably linked, a point that will be explored below. He gets his first break as a writer when the head of the Bankstown Multicultural Arts Centre, Mr Guy Law, comes to Punchbowl High seeking submissions for the centre’s magazine. To Bani’s delight his submitted story is published. He is grateful to Mr Law for this oppor- tunity and compliantly concludes that all “Wogs [should be] grateful when Aussies help us out” (123). Later, when Bani finishes school, Mr Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 140

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Law extends him another opportunity by introducing Bani to a group of people working on a community arts project supported by the Bankstown Theatre Company. The project involves a performance, and the project’s leader Jo explains that she needs “a Muslim fella for ... [her] research” because the “show is based on the theme of violence” (180). From his initial encounter with Jo and subsequent interactions with other members like Addison and Jessie, it is evident that Bani is wanted in the project to represent an Arab Muslim male voice. His presence will lend the creative project authenticity, creating a space, supposedly, for the marginalised voice of the male Arab Muslim within Australia’s multicultural matrix. Although Bani participates enthusiastically, and attempts to become the cultivated writer or artist he wants to be, he is, unlike the narrator in Seducing Mr Maclean, unsuccessful and the whole inter action back - fires on him. The final act of the project is for all participants to read and react to graffiti collected from Bankstown’s streets and reproduced in the theatre. In rehearsals, Bani is appalled to read “The Prophet Muhammad is a camel-----,” a word so con fronting he cannot say it, not even to the reader as “it is a great sin in Islam to tell you the rest” (228). The women in the group do shout out the phrase and Bani, desperate to fit in and gain acceptance, does not object. However, when he reads out the graffiti “Aussies are the biggest sluts,” the women react badly. They send Bani home early and reframe the final performance without his presence and input. When the final performance is staged, Bani is positioned in the centre, asked to repeat the offending words “Aussies are the biggest sluts” while the other participants respond. Their responses are highly aggressive and confuse Bani. When Jessie, for instance, reacts by asking “How about I stick this [skipping rope] up your arse?” Bani thinks “Her comment is real—it feels like she genuinely wants to hurt me” (258). Addison’s response is to scream repeatedly “Fuck me Muslim,” leading Bani to ask himself “Who is she telling to fuck her? Is she addressing the character I play, the Shaky and the Osama [two boys from Punchbowl High] and the Bilal Skaf, or is she addressing me, the real me?” (259). Bani’s disorientation, his questioning of his identity, Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 141

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the “real me,” are a direct result of what Judith Butler describes as in - jurious speech. As Butler explains, to “be injured by speech is to suffer a loss of context ... [to] not know where [or who] you are” (4). The abjection Bani endures is painfully revelatory as he finally understands his role in the creative development: “I tried so hard to be an artist, to be White, to be one of them, but all they wanted me to be—and all they saw in me—was a dirty Arab” (263). What makes this all the more painful is that unlike his Punchbowl peers, who implicitly understood the binaries of “us and them” and categorised white Australians as the “they/them” group who would never extend acceptance to an Arab, Bani, until this point, had assumed he could be embraced as an Australian, by Anglo-Australians. Ironically, the Shaky and Osama school mates that Bani depicts as ignorant and uncultivated, and is eager to leave behind when he finishes high school, appear, in this instance, to be better informed. Ultimately, despite being bought into the project to supposedly reflect Australia’s diversity, Bani is reduced to his ethnic Arab Muslim male identity, the non-white dirty Arab who is complicit, in terms of his masculinity, faith and ethnicity, in violence against Australian women. Notwithstanding the injustice Bani is left to contend with after this encounter, the harsh racism he faces and the casting of his identity as a violent Arab male, almost every review of this novel, which have been mostly favourable, have commented on its flagrant misogyny (AF; Caward; Ley; L’Estrange). The most extensive is from James Ley who suggests that the misogyny and depictions of sexual violence in the novel are not just troubling but highly insensitive (pars 12 and 13). More specifically, in reference to a sequence where fellow Punchbowl boy Shaky loses his virginity at a movie theatre to an Australian girl named Samantha, and instantly leaves her behind with his friends “revert[ing] quickly to being a sexist shit” (Ley, par 14) Ley argues that Shaky’s behaviour, as well as the Lebs more broadly, is a form of “misogynistic religious bullshit” (emphasis added). The assumption that this misogyny is tied to the boys’ Islamic religion must explain why Ley misses the significance of this sequence unfolding as Shaky, Bani and Samantha are watching American Pie, which Ley suggests “trivi - Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 142

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alises” the misogyny “by flicking the switch to sexual farce.” But for Ahmad far from trivialising sexual violence, his aim was to illustrate how a film that deals with sexual assault is one of the many cultural artefacts that schools the Lebs in misogyny, sexism and patriarchy. In his words, “I tried to show ... where they learned [this behaviour] and they didn’t learn it from the sheikh” (qtd in Hamad, par 28). Australia, Hollywood and the West, the cultures in which these boys are im - mersed, taught them their disrespect of women and encouraged their machismo, not just “religious bullshit” and their Arab community. Ley’s other concern relates to Bani’s inability to reconcile his sup- posedly conflicting identities, wanting to be both an artist and a devout Muslim (par 26). Various “nets [or traps] are flung at” Bani, especially the events that unfold in the Bankstown creative development exercise, which he cannot “fly past,” indeed becomes ensnared by because “he’s ... too full of himself” (par 26). For Ley, it is simply a character flaw of arrogance that explains Bani’s failure as an artist and his “thoroughly unimaginative [embrace of] ... religious conser vativism” (par 26), rather than the capacity of multiculturalism to restrict people’s identities, to encourage essentialisation and stereo typing, all of which happens to Bani in the performance scene. Making these nuanced points, which are somehow missing from Ley’s otherwise considered and lengthy review, does not exonerate Bani’s misogyny or hold responsible the women, as women, for their insensitivity toward Islam and Bani. As Ley rightly observes neither the novel nor Bani can lay the blame for what he is confronted by in the Bankstown theatre “at the feet of a single precious hippy” in the form of Jo or Addison or Jessie. It is noteworthy that no review mentions that the other male in the creative develop - ment group, Abu, is the first to read out “Aussies are the biggest sluts” (240) only minutes (and two pages) before Bani does (242) and only after Bani hears Addison state the offensive words about the prophet. Abu does not face the same reaction Bani does—the rehearsal merely continues. The reviews also fail to note that Jo reassures Bani, as he stands looking at the insulting line, “‘this is street art we have collected from the suburbs, it has nothing to do with what we think of you, good sir’” (228; emphasis added). That this happens as Bani is imagining “the Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 143

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White masculine hand that had woven” the words (228; emphasis added) is more than simple coincidence and demonstrates Bani is not holding women in the group responsible and is also reassured he should not because in their eyes he is detached from the offensiveness the street art implies. The journalist Ruby Hamad’s appraisal of The Lebs makes a series of important observations regarding the novel’s reception, especially the commentary on its confronting misogyny and male violence. In relation to Ahmad’s appearance on a TV program, where the host asked Ahmad to clarify that his resistance to racism would be undertaken by the pen and not the sword, Hamad wants to know “why do so many White people take all of what Arab people say so literally?” rather than see such words as “a cathartic sense of release or a sharpening of creative tools” (par 23).6 This question can be applied to Bani’s repetition of “Aussies are the biggest sluts,” which is taken literally by his fellow performers, while Abu’s use of the same words and Addison’s slur against the prophet are merely “street art.” Hamad further notes that the majority of reviewers’ failure to engage with The Lebs as an aesthetic work confused their “reading of a dramatized critique of misogyny” for “a documentary account” (par 26) and allowed them to overlooked the fact that the book, while laden with “violence, misogyny and anti-Western rhetoric,” was not “Ahmad endorsing [but] rather ... dissecting” them (par 37). There is also no attention paid to the novel’s treatment of Mr Guy Law, who is for Bani the “good White guy” to whom “wogs should be grateful” (123), but is exposed as a pseudo-colonialist master who exploits his Greek, Asian and other ethnic staff. Bani is informed of this repeatedly by his new friend, Bucky, a gay Greek-Australian male who works for Mr Law. While the political ramifications of this may be lost on Bani for most of the narrative, they are made patently clear to the reader. In other words, it is not only women who are guilty of the failures of Australian multiculturalism, of its pathological essentialising of identities or tokenising of particular ethnic individuals to lend diversity and credibility to community arts projects. A key figure of affirmative action for developing cultural diversity in the community sector, a male, is just as, if not more, Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 144

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culpable. Taking note of this complexity woven into the narrative reveals the broader challenge the novel poses to the conventional oppositions between women or white feminists and Arab Muslim males. The former must surely be seen, in the context of multicultural Australia and especially at the moment of the novel’s setting when multiculturalism was undergoing a severe crisis of legitimacy in the wake of 9/11 and the gang rapes, as possessing more power and agency than the latter. The confronting performance scene is an occasion for the reader to think beyond the racialised assumptions inherent to multiculturalism and to understand that both Arab Muslim males and white women are exploited minorities within Australia, who should resist pitting themselves against one another. In light of this, one can only argue that Bani is constrained in the way he can respond to Islamophobia and anti-Arab sentiment. Unlike the protagonist in Haikal’s work, he does not have the luxury of reap - propriating the exotic elements of his Arab identity, precisely because he is a male, a Muslim Arab male who is stereotyped as lecherous, a rapist and prone to disrespecting women. For this reason he, as a character, fails to gain the acceptance he desires. However, I would like to suggest that the novel, as distinct from the central character’s experience, does mount a challenge to the essentialised identity of the Muslim Arab male. This happens through the novel’s engagement with Bani’s ambition to become a writer. As noted earlier, Bani perceives his escape from the backwardness of the “Lebs” through writing and literature. This corre - lation extends beyond Bani’s own perceptions and is anchored in the meaning and function of literature in Arabic language and culture, as well as the meaning of Bani’s name. Adab is Arabic for literature but it also implies cultivated knowl - edge, having good character, conduct and manners. It is not unlike the dual meanings of “discipline” which signifies both fields of knowledge and good behaviour. An adib is someone who has studied literature, but it is more commonly used to connote someone who is cultured, educated, has refined tastes and sensibilities. In light of these meanings it is not hard to see why literary education was seen as the engine of modernisation during the nineteenth century in the Arab world, Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 145

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known as the nahda (renaissance) period. In Egypt, an epicentre of the nahda, Michael Allan notes that the practice of literature since the nahda came to “delimit sensibilities and critical skills” that were deemed to be “inseparable from what it means to be modern, cosmo - politan and educated” (8). These reflections on adab and adib and their association with being a modern, cultivated subject manifest themselves in The Lebs in relation to Bani Adam’s name. Bani Adam in Arabic means literally “children of Adam” but is used widely to reference the notion of “human being.” As in English, but perhaps with stronger force in Arabic, it separates the human from the non-human. The reason why there is perhaps a stronger force to its opposition to the non-human in Arabic is because a common way to register one’s good behaviour, manners or good character in Arabic is to say “he has become a human being.” This expression also suggests a sense of transformation—before he was out of control, ill-tempered and now he is a “decent human.” Ahmad has commented that he named his protagonist Bani Adam as he wanted to tell the universal story of the “everyman.” But what he has achieved is possibly quite the opposite; that is, to have written a particular story of what it means to be an Arab in contemporary multi - cultural Australia. What is distinctive to this story is the need for an Arab-Australian, and especially a male Muslim, to assert himself as a human, to insist that his humanity be recognised, precisely at moments in Australia when the Arab and Muslim is being described as the ultimate non-human.

Conclusion

Completing or developing the story of the silent Syrian hawker in White’s The Aunt’s Story requires contemporary literary studies to engage with the expanding field of Arab-Australian writing. As the discussion of Haikal’s Seducing Mr Maclean and Ahmad’s The Lebs shows, the Arab other in Australia is still, much like the hawker, circum - scribed by Orientalist, racist and essentialised depictions that cast their identity in unfavourable and seemingly favourable terms. This has, Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 146

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ironically, only been exacerbated by the limitations of Australian multiculturalism that purports to celebrate difference but also insists on a controlled level of difference and diversity, which it manages through a regime of integration. These limitations are well expressed by Haikal in her decision to craft a female character who must play up to Orientalist tropes of the sensual Arab woman to gain acceptance, and by Ahmad in his highlighting of how an appropriation of such stereotypes is not available to Arab Muslim men. In a wider sense, readers confronted by these novels, especially the violence and miso - gyny of The Lebs must ask, as Ahmad does in his interview with Hamad: “Why has Australia created such a negative image of the Lebanese [or Arab] Australian Other? And to what extent is that the responsibility of the Lebanese [and Arab] communities that live here and to what extent is that part of the culture of Islamophobia and xenophobia that begins with colonisation?” (Ahmad qtd in Hamad, par 38).

NOTES

1 David Malouf has not been widely regarded as an Arab-Australian writer especially given that his fiction does not reference Arab characters or issues related to Arab migration. Only Saadi Nikro (2013) has suggested that Malouf can possibly retroactively be incorporated into the growing field of Arab- Australian writing but at best only tangentially. 2 For further information on sociopolitical dimensions of Australia’s multi - culturalism see Ghassan Hage, White Nation: of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Nation; Jock Collins, Greg Noble, Scott Poynting and Paul Tabar, Kebabs, Kids, Cops and Crime: Youth, Ethnicity and Crime, and Scott Poynting, Greg Noble, Paul Tabar and Jock Collins, Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other. See also Anne Monsour’s “Tell Me My Story: The Contribution of Historical Research to an Understanding of the Australian Lebanese Expe rience” for an historical overview of the Lebanese in Australia and Jumana Bayeh’s “Arab-Australian Fiction: National Stories, Transnational Connec tions” for a more comparative examination of the relationship between multiculturalism and Arab literature. 3 In an interview (Ball 2003) Haikal implies that ethnicity is not an identity that migrants are aware they possessed but through the process of migration and resettlement to Australia, migrants are made acutely aware of their ethnic Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 147

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identity. Thus while, from the perspective of multiculturalism, an ethnic identity might precede migration, for migrants or members of the diaspora themselves it is an identity that is born because of migration. 4 This particular depiction of Lebanese culture, with its rejection of Arab culture and language, is common among the Lebanese Maronite Christians like the narrator’s family in Haikal’s novel. Although this version of history that ties Maronite culture and identity to the ancient Phoenicians has been refuted, it is not without a strong following. In this formulation, evident in the scholarship of Matti Moosa and Walid Phares, Maronites are the descendants of the ancient Phoenician civilisation, making them non-Arab. 5 None of these reviewers offers strong criticism of the protagonist’s use of seduction to manage her life in Australia. They instead suggest that the novel’s self-Orientalising is a function of satire and parody, and is a way to manage “the kind of problems everyone faces as they grow up ... compounded by the difficulties of learning [an] unfamiliar set of social and cultural skills” (Dooley, par 4). 6 On the Australian Broadcasting Commission’s TV program, Q&A, in an ex - tended discussion on racism Ahmad stated that he no longer cared to reassure certain White people not to be afraid of him because “if you're a racist, if you’re a White supremacist, an imperialist, a colonialist, an Orientalist, and Islamo - phobe and a xenophobe, you SHOULD be afraid of me, because I stand in solidarity with the majority of the people on this planet, who will say no to you, and we are going to stop this bigotry and hatred that you're spreading.” The host Tony Jones immediately asked “Let’s be clear ... Mohammed, in your case, you’re talking about with your pen or your typewriter, correct?” An alarmed Ahmad could only respond: “Um ... Because you’re worried that I’m im plicating some kind of violent action?”

WORKS CITED

AF, “Michael Mohammed Ahmad, The Lebs.” Saturday Paper 3 March 2018. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/2018/03/31/the-lebs/15199956005884 Ahmad, Michael Mohammad. The Lebs. Sydney: Hachette, 2018. ——.“Lebs and Punchbowl Prison.” Sydney Review of Books 29 November 2016. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/lebs-and-punchbowl-prison/ ——. The Tribe. Sydney: Giramondo, 2014. Allan, Michael. In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2016. Ball, Magdalena. “Interview with Loubna Haikal, author of Seducing Mr Maclean.” The Compulsive Reader 24 March 2003. http://www.compulsivereader.com/ 2003/03/24/interview-with-loubna-haikal-author-of-seducing-mr-maclean/ Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 148

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——.“A Review of Seducing Mr Maclean by Loubna Haikal.” The Compulsive Reader 24 March 2003. http://www.compulsivereader.com/2003/03/24/a-review-of-seduc ing-mr-maclean-by-loubna-haikal/ Bayeh, Jumana. “Arab-Australian Fiction: National Stories, Transnational Connections.” Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies 4.2 (2017): 66–96. https://lebanesestudies.ojs.chass.ncsu. edu/index.php/mashriq/article/view/138 Butler, Judith. Excitable Speech: The Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge, 1997. Caward, Clinton. “The Lebs review: Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s Edgy Novel about Muslim Youth.” Sydney Morning Herald 8 March 2018. https://www.smh.com.au /entertainment/books/the-lebs-review-michael-mohammed-ahmads-edgy-nov el-about-muslim-youth-20180307-h0x600.html Collins, Jock, Greg Noble, Scott Poynting and Paul Tabar. Kebabs, Kids, Cops and Crime: Youth, Ethnicity and Crime. Annandale: Pluto Press, 2000. Dooley, Gillian. Writers’ Radio. Radio Adelaide 8 July 2002. https://dspace.flinders. edu.au/xmlui/bitstream/handle/2328/445/SeducingMrMaclean.pdf?sequence =1 Griffin, Michelle. “A Serve of Lebanese.” Age 6 October 2002. http://www.theage. com.au/articles/2002/10/05/1033538810742.html. Hage, Ghassan. White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Nation. New York: Routledge, 2000. Haikal, Loubna. Seducing Mr Maclean. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2008. Hamad, Ruby. “The Meaning of The Lebs.” Meanjin Autumn 2019. https://mean jin.com.au/essays/the-meaning-of-the-lebs/ L’Estrange, Sarah. “Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s novel The Lebs.” The Book Show 19 January 2019. https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/the-book- show/michael-mohammed-ahmad/10495558 Ley, James. “I’m with Stupid: The Lebs by Michael Mohammad Ahmad.” Sydney Review of Books 25 May 2018. https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/the-lebs- michael-mohammed-ahmad/ Monsour, Anne. “Tell Me My Story: The Contribution of Historical Research to an Understanding of the Australian Lebanese Experience.” Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies 4.2 (2017): 9–39. https:// lebanesestudies.ojs.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/mashriq/article/view/136 Moosa, Matti. The Maronites in History. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1986. Nikro, Saadi. “The Arab-Australian Novel: Situating Diasporic and Multicultural Literature.” In Nouri Gana ed. The Edinburgh Companion to the Arabic Novel in English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2013. Phares, Walid. Lebanese Christian Nationalism: The Rise and Fall of an Ethnic Resistance. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1995. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 149

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Poynting, Scott, Greg Noble, Paul Tabar, and Jock Collins. Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other. Sydney: Sydney Institute of Criminology, 2004. Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. “Stranger than Fiction.” Q&A. Australian Broadcasting Commission, 20 August 2018. https://www.abc.net.au/qanda/stranger-than-fiction/10648460 White, Patrick. The Aunt’s Story. 1948; Sydney: Random House, 2008. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 150

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KEVIN DENSLEY

For Bad Behaviour Harry Densley recounting an incident from his childhood. Ballan Times, Victoria, “Early Ballan. No. 5,” by Jas. H. Walsh, 1 January 1917

Van Diemen’s Land, about 1848: my four times great-grandfather, Thomas, gave one of his sons, Harry (younger brother of my three times great-grandfather, James), a belting, because he wagged school to attend a triple public hanging outside the Launceston Gaol. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 151

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GRACE YEE

greener

you are bony as a flagpole. when I wrap my arms around you I can feel you flying half-mast. your mother is black. your father is grey. your siblings, all of them navy. traffic horns play dirges here, and women behind counters suck tongues of stainless steel. the borders are terrifying: all those loaded bullets chafing under the shade of bloated bread dough bellies. once a man with a padlocked face barked: go home. there’s not enough water here. after they let me in they thrust a cicada between my legs: it clicks and whirrs when I’m out on the street and the men whose myocardia possess a remarkable refrigerating quality circle. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 152

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ALISON HODDINOTT

Poetry and Musicophobia

Tone deafness, or to use its more technical term, “congenital amusia,” is not an illusion, though some teachers of singing have optimistically claimed that it is. It is true that most people can sing and that some people who sing badly nevertheless hear music very well. The Collins Concise Dictionary (Australian edition) gives as the definition of tone deafness: “unable to distinguish subtle differences in musical pitch.” A scientific study in the Science Daily (August 2007) has estimated that about one in twenty of the population has this condition, which should not be confused with ordinary deafness or progressive loss of hearing like that which affected the Australian poets and writers, Henry Lawson and . Henry Lawson had completely lost his hearing by the age of fourteen as the result of a childhood ear infection and Judith Wright progressively lost her hearing as an adult and became totally deaf in her seventies. Like the composer Beethoven, who continued to compose after losing his hearing, their perception of musical pitch was unaffected. Amusics, or those with tone deafness, have a perceptual problem. They are unable to distinguish differences in pitch or even in some cases to follow the simplest musical tunes. It is my contention that, while many, perhaps most, poets are drawn to poetry through an initial love of music or song, some of the greatest are deaf to musical pitch and are drawn primarily through the musi - cality of language. It is here that I confess to being tone deaf. I prefer silence to music and dislike hearing poetry read to an accompaniment, particularly when the music drowns out or competes with the spoken words. It is a condition I share with many members of my family. Some of my sib- lings and their cousins were instructed in school singing performances to move their lips in time with the words, but never to make a sound. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 153

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My friend, the poet Gwen Harwood, came to poetry through a love of music. Before her marriage, she taught music in Brisbane and, at one stage, her ambition was to become a concert pianist. The introductory poem in her first published collection (Poems 1963), and in all her subsequent selections, is “Alter Ego,” which expresses the way in which music moves forward in time, but allows the listener to transcend the particular moment and defy “time’s desolating drift.” Twenty-five years later, in “Divertimento” the series of poems dedicated to Jan Sedivka on his retirement as Director of the Tasmanian Conservatorium of Music, she maintained in the final lines of the concluding poem, “Listening to Bach,” that “our familiar world is of one substance / with music rightly written, nobly played.” She repeatedly asserts the supreme importance of music and in this she is in agreement with the Victorian critic, Walter Pater, who claimed that all art aspires to the condition of music. Her academic scientist, Professor Eisenbart, is shaken out of his self-satisfied complacency (“Prize-Giving,” Poems 1963) by the music of Mozart, played by a red-haired schoolgirl, who surely represents Gwen Harwood herself. And the drunken pianist, Professor Kröte, about whose exploits she wrote from Poems 1968 to The Lion’s Bride (1981), claims that music is the source of his joy and his guarantee of God’s existence. She wrote the words for libretti for composers like Larry Sitsky and James Penberthy and, in her “Memoirs of a Dutiful Librettist” she claimed that, by themselves the words had no particular power, but that “wedded to the music, they become part of the magic that, in opera, is quite beyond the sum of all its parts.” An accepted part of our friendship was that I did not share Gwen’s love of music and there was therefore no point in talking to me about it. In November 1962 she wrote to me in Armidale, urging me to come to Hobart for my sister’s wedding and stay with the Harwoods. She promised me that she would “put away the Bach for the duration” (Idle Talk 2015). I have often felt that my lack of musicality was a distinct barrier to a full appreciation of poetry. I have recently come to reassess this feeling by discovering how many of the poets I love were also deaf to music. In many cases they seem to have transferred their perceptions of musicality to language—to the potential of rhythm, onomatopoeia, assonance and Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 154

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alliteration and, in some cases, to the patterns of colour and shape in painting. Famed neurologist Oliver Sacks (1933–2015) wrote extensively about the relationship between the brain and the mind. In one of his last publications, Musicophilia, published in 2007 but revised and ex - tended by postscripts to chapters and by numerous footnotes the following year, he speculates about the human relationship to music. In his preface, he writes: “Music remains fundamental and central in every culture... We humans are a musical species no less than a linguistic one.” Yet, while language serves evolutionary development, communication and survival, music can be seen to serve no obviously useful purpose other than the aesthetic and emotional one. In Chapter 8, “Things Fall Apart: Amusia and Dysharmonia,” Sacks deals with several cases in which the inability to recognise different tones in music is accompanied by no impairment of response to rhythm or speech. In a footnote (6), he speculates: “The fact that most people with congenital amusia are virtually normal in their speech perceptions and patterns, while profoundly disabled in musical perception, is very startling. Can speech and music be that tonally different?” In a further footnote (7), Sachs draws attention to the case of the great essayist Charles Lamb (1775–1834) who was obsessed with language and its vagaries but nevertheless deaf to music. In his 1823 Essays of Elia, “A Chapter on Ear,” he self-deprecatingly describes his own inability to respond to music:

I even think that sentimentally I am disposed to harmony. But organically I am incapable of a tune. ... Scientifically I could never be made to understand (yet I have taken some pains) what a note in music is, or how one note should differ from another. Much less in voices can I distinguish a soprano from a tenor. ... Above all, those insufferable concertos, and pieces of music, as they are called, do plague and embitter my apprehension—Words are something, but to be exposed to an endless battery of mere sound... Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 155

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Sir Thomas Talfourd (1795–1854), Lamb’s biographer, confirms this:

Lamb was entirely destitute of what is commonly called “a taste for music.” A few old tunes ran in his head; now and then the expression of a sentiment, though never of song, touched him with rare and exquisite delight ... But usually music only confused him, and an opera ... was to him a maze of sound in which he almost lost his wits.

In his last year, Lamb wrote a poem for a friend, who had achieved a degree of musical success, deploring his own inability to respond to music. The poem was published in the Athenaeum of 26/7/1834:

The Gods have made me most unmusical, With feelings that respond not to the call Of stringed harp, or voice—obtuse and mute To hautboy, sackbut, dulcimer and flute; King David’s lyre, that made the madness flee From Saul, had been but a jew’s-harp to me: Theorbos, violins, French horns, guitars, Leave in my wounded ears inflicted scars. I hate those trills, and shakes, and sounds that float Upon the captive air; I know no note Nor ever shall, whatever folks may say, Of the strange mysteries of Sol and Fa; I sit at oratories like a fish, Incapable of sound, and only wish The thing was over. ...

Compare Gwen Harwood’s 1990 poem “To Music” which, in similar terms and in a similar metre, expresses the universal human appeal of music, which fits itself “to any language” and is “at home with love and death and revolution.” Tennyson, too, had no real appreciation or understanding of music and disliked having his poems set to musical accompaniment. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 156

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Listening to the playing of Joseph Joachim, arguably the greatest violin player of the period, Tennyson said that he liked the poetry of the bowing and that it gave him “the sensation of a rushing torrent and flashes of light.” He was moderately successful as a visual artist and the manuscripts of his later poems are often accompanied by ana- tomical or architectural sketches. Tennyson frequently pointed out the contrast between himself and Robert Browning as poets. Browning loved music and was very knowledgeable about it. However, while Browning’s poetry had little music, Tennyson’s was full of it, parti - cularly evident in his use of rhythm and the musicality of language. In reading their own poetry, Tennyson emphasised the metrical structure and pauses, while Browning paid less attention to the poem as a metrical whole, stressing rather the dramatic situation and the psychological development of character. As Robert Martin has noted in his biography of Tennyson:

The fragmentary recordings of Tennyson’s readings made at the end of his life demonstrate his emphasis on metre and the lyrical qualities of his poems at the expense of discursiveness (Ch. 25)

Oscar Wilde, playwright, poet and prose writer and brilliant wit and conversationalist, was another who was ignorant of music, but be - sotted by the magical possibilities of language. E.F. Benson observes in his iconic memoir of the Victorian Age, As We Were (1930): “Oddly enough, though he (Wilde) had so keen and just a sense of the music in spoken or written words, he had absolutely no sense of music itself, being practically unable to distinguish one tune from another” (Ch. 10). This did not prevent him from publicly claiming a love of music, which, Benson opines, “presents the most insidious traps for those who regard the appreciation of it as a social accomplishment.” He illustrates this point by several anecdotes about Wilde:

... as the apostle of beauty in all its forms, he was bound to profess an appreciation of music, and his total Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 157

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ignorance of it did not prevent him from speaking of the “passionate, curiously coloured fantasies of Dvórák”: the phrase pleased him, for Dvórák seemed a likely person to write curiously coloured music and he embodied it in one of his dialogues. Again he wrote of those to whom life wears a changed aspect because they have listened to one of Chopin’s nocturnes, or, having heard some one speak of the deferred resolutions of Chopin, he would refer, not very felicitously, to the “deferred resolutions of Beethoven,” which does not make very good sense.

A fellow Irishman born a decade later, W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) is the ultimate example of a great poet who was unable to distinguish musical pitch. Many writers have commented on his deafness to music. Playwright Padraic Colum records:

In the room across from us, the music room, Lady Gregory’s nieces sometimes played. I discovered that Yeats who was so varied in the music of his verse was absolutely tone deaf. I had heard him say that he liked a harp because it looked well-shaped. Now as we heard the music from outside the drawing-room, he said to me, “What are they playing? Fiddle of piano?” (The Yeats We Knew)

In his biography of Yeats, Joseph Hone records that Yeats frequently used music to accompany his performances, but he insisted that no words be spoken through the music and that it should never be loud enough to drown out the attention of the ear to the words. Hone reports that Yeats “had no ear for music as it is understood in Western Europe. He could not hum a tune and his notion of pitch was wildly inaccurate ... On the other hand, his ear for the sound of speech was so sensitive that it outran comprehension. ... he noticed nuances which we could hardly hear.” Thomas Macdonagh, who dedicated his first volume of poetry, Through the Ivory Gates, to Yeats, and who was executed by the British after the Easter Rising of 1916, said that Yeats Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 158

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would declare that some poets “speak certain kinds of poetry to distinct and simple tunes, though the speakers may be, perhaps generally are, deaf to ordinary music, even what we call tone deaf” (quoted in Suchard). Yeats himself often said that he had a poor sense of pitch, but a perfect sense of rhythm and he made a distinction between being “tone deaf”—that is, deaf to music—and being “tune deaf”—that is, deaf to rhythm. Of his friend George Russell, who published plays and poetry under the name A. E., he wrote “like myself, he knew nothing of music,” and Russell himself confirmed this, saying “I am like Willie in not knowing one note from another.” The Irish delight in language—in its multiple meanings, sounds and rhythms— may well be linked to a deafness to the abstractions of musical pitch. The American poet Ezra Pound (1886–1972), a generation younger than Yeats, nevertheless became his good friend and was in fact best man at Yeats’s wedding in 1917 to Georgie Hyde-Lees. According to Yeats, they disagreed about almost everything, but agreed that they were both deaf to musical pitch. Pound, in spite of describing himself as “tone deaf,” had no hesitation in saying that he was a “poet and composer.” Like Oscar Wilde, he prided himself publicly on his musical abilities. He attempted to sing, to learn to play the piano and the bassoon, and even wrote violin music and an opera. These musical excursions horrified his literary friends. Yeats said of him, “He can’t sing as he has no voice. It is like something on a very bad phonograph.” William Carlos Williams said of his piano playing, “Everything, you might say, resulted except music” and commented, “Pound write an opera? Why he doesn’t know one note from another.” Ernest Hemingway was appalled to recall Ezra learning to play the bassoon, which Pound had confidently described as “good for the lungs” (John Woolrich, Music, AEST broadcast 31 May 2003). Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977) is one of Oliver Sacks’s most striking examples of a writer of wide-ranging linguistic skills who suffered from amusia or unresponsiveness to music. Born in Russia to a wealthy, landowning, liberally inclined family, Nabokov was familiar in childhood with many European languages, and wrote poems, short stories and novels in his first language. Later, he became an academic Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 159

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and a renowned writer of novels in English, of which the most famous, Lolita (1959), was one of Gwen Harwood’s favourite novels. The nar - rator, Humbert Humbert, like his author, is a connoisseur of words and the variabilities of verbal syntax and towards the end, with murder and the possibility of execution imminent, he reflects coolly, to a woman who has spoken to him of a recent death in Korea, about the difference between French and English in their capacity to describe recent happenings: “I said didn’t she think ‘vient de’ with the infinitive expressed recent events so much more neatly than the English ‘just’ with the past? But I had to be trotting off, I said.” Nabokov was not only linguistically accomplished but also visually aware. In Chapter Two of his revised autobiography (Speak Memory 2000), he writes of his mother’s encouragement of his sensitiveness to visual stimulation. He describes himself as a “synesthete.” In his case, he associated numbers and letters of the alphabet with particular colours, and in his novels and in his autobiography events are depicted in striking visual detail and colour. However, despite being exposed in childhood to numerous operas, Nabokov remained unresponsive to tune, and, as his son Dmitri confirms, he remained unable to recognise any music. In his autobiography, Nabokov writes, in terms which recall the words of Charles Lamb: “Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds. Under certain emotional circumstances I can stand the spasms of a rich violin, but the concert piano and all wind instruments bore me in small doses and flay me in larger ones.” He regrets the “melodious gene” that missed him while passing from his father and brother to his son. A comparable Australian example of a writer who was engrossed by words but completely indifferent to music, was Hal Porter (1911–1984). In the second volume of his memoir The Paper Chase (1966) Porter speaks of the way in which “words have especially fascinated [him] from boyhood.” Writing to his friend and fellow writer, Alan Marshall, in 1938 he said, “Alas—I’m obsessed with words. I have always been” (quoted in Lord). He was also a good illustrator, and some of his books are accompanied by his own illustrations “in a style as idiosyncratic as his prose writing.” The sketches he drew to accompany his short story Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 160

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collection The Actors (1968), for instance, comment satirically on the contrast between the old and the new Japan. He was, nevertheless, completely unmusical. To her friend, Tony Riddell, Gwen Harwood wrote, “Hal is quite insensitive to music” and, later, she described him to Tony as “an odd, odd creature; he wrote to me last week about my having a piano: ‘A piano would be less use to me than a concrete gnome; I don’t know what music is’” (11 July 1959). One particular anecdote in Mary Lord’s biography of Porter shows how his total ignorance of music was evident to others. In 1949, the Viennese conductor Walter Stiasny stopped off in Hobart on his way to take up an appointment in New Zealand. He was persuaded to lengthen his visit to conduct The Mikado, for which he was to be the musical director and Hal Porter the director of staging, costume and set design. “According to Stiasny ... he immediately recognised that Porter was an amateur in the theatre, that he was completely non-musical and quite out of his depth. From the outset, Porter and Stiasny were at war and rehearsals were a nightmare.” Like Nabokov and Hal Porter, the American poet Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) found inspiration in visual art rather than music. Like Porter, she was an accomplished artist and many of her letters and poems are illustrated by her sketches and paintings. She described herself as “tone deaf” and claimed to have learned a delight in language, in the changing patterns of assonance and consonance, from Yeats. She said she was “very excited” when she discovered the technical aspects of language. Her first biographer, Edward Butscher, comments on her inability to respond to music and her corresponding delight in painting. He refers to an informal reading and interview which took place in 1958 in Springfield, Massachusetts, and which was recorded for the Library of Congress:

After reading several other poems, Sylvia was asked a question which touched upon her inability, despite the piano lessons supplied by her mother, really to appreciate or hear music. Years later, Elizabeth Sigmund would describe Sylvia’s piano playing as “terrible” and record her Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 161

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dismay because she was so “tone deaf.” Sylvia was asked, “Do you hear the music or do you get the image?” She replied: “It’s very funny because I haven’t an ear for music, but I hear the music in the rhythm, which somehow I don’t think about. ... I have a visual imagination. For instance, my inspiration is painting, not music, when I go to some other art form. (Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness)

Her visual imagination is particularly evident in the use of colour— green, blue, red, black and white—in the symbolic imagery of her poetry, and in the number of poems in which the titles and subject matter are drawn directly from paintings. The 1957 poem “The Disquieting Muses” is based on the Giorgio de Chirico (1888–1978) painting of the same name. In the fifth stanza, Plath describes herself as musically “unteachable”:

Mother, you sent me to piano lessons And praised my arabesques and trills Although each teacher found my touch Oddly wooden in spite of scales And the hours of practicing, my ear Tone-deaf and yes, unteachable I learned, I learned, I learned elsewhere, From muses unhired by you, dear mother.

The final stanza describes these alternative muses, “who stand their vigil in gowns of stone” as the surrealistic and threatening figures in de Chirico’s painting. Other poems, inspired by paintings by Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), like “Snakecharmer” and “Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies” respond strongly to colour and movement and the links between creativity in poetry and painting. My final example—and there may be many more—of a writer who derives his sense of musicality primarily from the rhythms and structures of language is the Australian poet Kevin Hart (b. 1953). In an interview with Paul Mitchell in 2001, which was subsequently Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 162

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published in the Cordite Poetry Review, Kevin Hart responded to the question “Do you have, as the pop song goes, ‘the music in you’?” by saying, “I think the music of words is always in me, almost to the exclusion of any other sort of music, and perhaps necessarily so for me. I almost never play music at home—I like to work in silence and I’m completely uneducated in music.” Although he started learning the guitar when he was about nine and, as a teenager, played rhythm guitar in a group, he usually had to get another guitarist to tune the instrument for him. Significantly, his own job was to write most of the lyrics for the group. He admits to embarrassment at having won the Music Prize in the first year of High School, despite the fact that he was “smart enough to know that (he) couldn’t carry a tune.” And he dis - misses Walter Pater’s claim that all art aspires to the condition of music as being “quite daft”: “In a poem, language and meaning, rhythm and feeling, work together.” Describing his own method of composition, he stresses the attention he pays to the music of the lines:

the metre, the pacing, the alliteration, the consonance, the assonance ... I read a new poem aloud to myself many times, and get it by heart; and so, after having completed a new poem, I can say it to myself silently. Sometimes that leads me to change a syllable, fiddle with the punctu - ation, or even rewrite a line or two.

In the introduction to his edition of Walter Pater’s Selected Works (1948), Richard Aldington agrees that Pater’s assertion that music is the highest form of art is “abstractionism.” It is a remarkable fact that so many poets who have been obsessed with language and its oddities have been described by themselves and others as “tone deaf” or deaf to the mere abstractionism of music. Whether this prioritising of language over music is genetically determined or whether it is influenced by early education remains debatable. But the writing of literature, particularly of poetry, is influenced not only by the meanings of the words, but also by their sounds and the musicality of their arrangement. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 163

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WORKS CITED

Bernard, Martin Robert. Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart. New York: Clarendon Press, 1980. Butscher, Edward. Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness. New York: Seabury Press, 1976. Hart, Kevin. “Q & A with Kevin Hart.” Interview with Paul Mitchell. Cordite Poetry Review 21 Sept 2001. Hone, Joseph. W. B. Yeats, 1865–1939. New York: Macmillan, 1943. Lord, Mary. Hal Porter: Man of Many Parts. Sydney: Random House, 1993. Talfourd, Thomas Noon. The Letters of Charles Lamb, with a Sketch of His Life. London: Edward Moxon, 1837. MacManus, Francis, ed. The Yeats We Knew. Cork: Cork UP, 1965. Macdonagh, Thomas. Through the Ivory Gates. Dublin: Sealy, Bryers and Walker, 1903. Schuchard, Ronald. The Last Minstrels: Yeats and the Revival of the Bardic Arts. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Nabokov, Vladimir. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Penguin Modern Classics 2000. Porter, Hal. The Paper Chase. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1966. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 164

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JACK CAMERON STANTON

Goodbye, Lawrence

The late morning was dark as evening when Harry arrived outside the Priest House in Kirribilli. Soft, glycerine raindrops fell against the car’s windscreen. He turned off the radio before pulling the Volkswagen Golf to the curb outside the house, squinting to see if he was at the right one. A timber plaque with brass letters GONZAGA hung beside the letterbox. He had been asked by the school to collect the college priest and drive through the Sunday traffic to his parents’ house, for a lunch they were hosting to celebrate him becoming school captain. By now, the catering from Punchbowl would be taking over the kitchen, meaning his Lebanese aunt and uncle, Odette and Najib. He could just see them yelling across the island bench, disagreeing on how to best skewer kafta, pound lahem, whether to hollow out zucchinis or pota- toes for the mahshi kousa. Waiting, also, would be twenty or so school prefects and their parents, keen to congratulate Harry for his success. He wondered whether Markus, the vice captain, and his parents, would see the lunch as gloating. The same could be said for Elle and Vishnu, who weren’t considered for school captaincy at all, awarded Captain of Chess and Prefect of Year 7 respectively. Most of his peers he didn’t mind: they were harmless, pleasant, even sycophantic, those in pre- fectural roles, the sports captains, schoolboys proficient at tennis or water polo or conversation or mathematics, normies with a predilection for responsibility that they were assured would Take Them Far. He could even converse with the Four Unit English kids, Oscar and Jeremiah, both neo-Beat poets who had grown their hair beyond the requisite collar-line and spent lunchtime writing songs on the music floor in the spirit of The Tallest Man on Earth, because he had spent the summer holidays reading William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, Gabriel García Márquez. He could tolerate these young men; it was the Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 165

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good old meatheads genetically predisposed to have already developed the broad shoulders of men that he dreaded being with, especially in his backyard. He could just see them now, underneath a blue tarp pulled between back verandah and the garage, clumping together kafta with torn up pieces of manoosh. He wondered whether to ring the priest, or get out of the car and knock. But before he could decide, the tall man emerged from the front door, dressed in Dracula-style robes. He stood for a moment, exa- mining the rain, then lifted a small umbrella and made his way to the car with his usual light tread. Harry leant across the passenger seat and opened the door. Inside, the light above his head turned on. In the car’s halogen lights, Father Devaux’s face seemed pruned, like a thumb that had spent too long underwater. The priest smiled and reached a hand across the gearbox. “You’re very kind to pick me up from home,” he said. “Means I can have a drink.” After they shook hands, Harry fixed the car into gear. He had earned his license two weeks ago after failing the test twice: the first because he had driven straight through a STOP sign; the second be- cause it was belting with rain and he forgot to turn on the windscreen wipers until he’d driven out of the car park, where the instructor pulled the handbrake, looked up from his clipboard, and recommended that he flip on the wipers and make a u-turn when it was safe, and head back to the driving school, if he’d please. A month into his learner’s license, he had crashed his mother’s Mercedes-Benz. What happened was he had driven around the T-intersection one block away from his parents’ house, and when he turned onto Elysium Lane had steered too far to the right; the car had mounted the curb and knocked over a parking sign. The bottom half of the bonnet had fallen away from the rest of the car. In the passenger seat, his mother breathed heavily. Many days later, after the shock of the crash subsided, she began blaming herself for what had happened, telling Harry’s father that she had reached across and grabbed the steering wheel because she was trying to prevent the very collision she had caused. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 166

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The street slouched toward the water, so Harry revved the engine with the handbrake engaged. Once he felt the wheels slip, he released it. The car lurched forward, kangaroo hopped, then the engine cut, throwing both of them toward the windscreen before the seatbelts pulled them back into their seats. The car rolled about a metre toward the harbour, but halted when the priest pulled the hand-brake. Harry flicked the keys in the ignition and restarted the car. “Sorry, not sure what’s causing the car to—” “Try putting it in first, son.” Seeing the gear in third, Harry shook his head. He turned the car west, toward his house. Halfway home, wary of a tailgater in a Range Rover, he slowed the car even more as they passed through a roundabout. They carried on along Falcon Street past a green service station and then a ramen den with its usual midday line outside. A mist descended upon the city streets like a great big cumulonimbus, like a second world looming above them. Rain converged with the wavy headlines, obscuring roads and street signs so much that Harry kept poking his index finger against his glasses, hardly aware that he was doing so, his vision so poor he kept wondering whether he’d forgotten them. “If it’s not too much trouble, Father, could I give you my speech to read?” he asked. The priest cleared his throat, his hands resting on each knee. “Have you already written it?” Harry nodded. “Just last night, after you rang me and gave the news. It’s all a bit raw and emotional, I think. Lawrence and I knew each other pretty well.” “Didn’t know you were close,” he said, not unkindly. “I’m sorry what was meant to be a celebration of your school captaincy is now the announcement of his death. Like I said last night, I’m happy to do it—announce it, I mean—if you’re not comfortable.” Harry felt as though he was being examined by the priest, and hoped he hadn’t noticed the finger under his glasses, rubbing the skin beneath his eyes. “It’s difficult to read all the way through. But I want to do it. We caught the ferry to school together sometimes.” Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 167

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“Is that so? Have you heard about how they found him?” “My mum spoke to his mum. Heard they found him in Melbourne in a hotel room that had been booked under her name. He’d been missing for three weeks. His mum, Margot, was beside herself. Showed up at our place without ringing ahead. One day I came home from school and found her asleep in the vegetable patch, yesterday’s make- up streaked across her face.” They stopped at lights. Harry took his hands off the steering wheel and rubbed the sweat onto his shorts, staring ahead at the red traffic lights. “Do you know how he died?” “I’ve heard rumours of needles.” “Hanged himself in the bathroom with a belt.” Father Devaux shook his head. “It’s just no way for a good Catholic boy to go.” They did not have much further to drive but the traffic was meandering. Cars protruded from driveways and side streets and others sat abroad in a conga of blinking right-side indicators. “Best not to mention that,” the priest said. “I understand.” He couched his hands in his lap, then laid them over each other. The robe’s cuff fell away and a glint of his silver watch caught Harry’s eyes—he took them off the road. “Makes you realise how close we all are to it,” he said. “To what?” “Death,” Harry said. “Watch where you’re going, son.” They braked hard and stopped centimetres from the zebra crossing. The car’s front wheels mounted the crossing’s slope. Two people lit by the headlights stood beneath the one umbrella in the middle of the street, the woman with her hands pressed against her chest, the bloke facing the car, squinting through the windscreen. “You should mention a memory you have of him, an anecdote. As a way of celebrating his life.” That made Harry think. What could he really remember about Lawrence? Before he had any ambitions of becoming school captain Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 168

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he would leave school during recess and lunch, sometimes during studies of religion with Father Francesco, to smoke cigarettes with Lawrence at the stairs near the wharf. They would buy them from a convenience store attached to the station, from a bored Asian fellow who wore gloves and sold them Double Happiness Reds for $7.50, even when they were in uniform. He would never forget the one time they finished a cigarette down by the wharf and Lawrence took his deo - dorant can and sprayed it into his mouth. Can you smell it? he had asked, eyes salty red. The precaution was excessive. For a second time, Lawrence grimaced when the mixture whooshed down his throat. He could already imagine the presumptions striking the faces of his peers, one by one, as he told stories of Lawrence’s youth. He couldn’t recount the day after Lawrence had been expelled, either, although there it was, distracting him from the road. He had visited his house after school and found him reading the Koran and taking furious notes, stopping only to consult a Bible with a peacock tail of Post-It notes protruding from many pages. He had changed his ADHD medication to dexamphetamine, he told Harry. It meant he could read for hours without tiring. Later that evening, they got stoned and went for a swim in his pool, a twenty-five metre lap pool with cerulean tiles that ran between the house and the fence. It was, he remembered, nearly summer. Lawrence had lifted his lanky body out of the water then pulled off his blue goggles, placing them on his forehead. That was when Harry asked him why he had been ex-pelled. Lawrence grinned, sliding back into the pool. For turning up stoned, he said. Harry knew, because his mother had heard it from Margot, that Lawrence was being bullied, and that he had cried to Ms Rasmussan. “My father doesn’t even know my name,” he had sobbed, in the sound-proof room behind the theatre, where he had been caught smoking out of a Gatorade bong. “He doesn’t even know which letter it begins with.” They approached a different set of lights at an intersection that branched into many directions in that rhizomatic, unplanned Sydney way. He peered timidly around the corner at the hole in the nature Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 169

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strip, where months earlier the street sign he’s dislodged with the Mercedes-Benz lay on the side of the road, reminding him each time he came home, of the crash. He indicated left and waited for the green. “He wasn’t the best student,” the priest said. “But he was a good kid, deep down.” “With respect, sir, I don’t really know how true that is. I mean, I liked him perfectly fine, in fact I considered him my friend, but he did some wicked things. He shot kids coming up the stairwell with a fire extinguisher, threw mandarins into the ceiling fan to spray the class with its juice. He was the one who wrapped Mr D’Angelo’s Alfa Romeo with Glad Wrap and tagged all the bathroom mirrors with the word Lancer.” They were outside the house. Harry stopped talking and concen- trated on parking closer to the curb. The priest chuckled. Harry was aghast at how hollow, how humourless it sounded. “Would you like me to tell them the news?” the priest asked. “No, I can do it. I want to do it.” “Well, show us the speech and I’ll skim over it now.” Harry retrieved a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket. The words were handwritten on a page ripped out of an exercise book. They sat in silence as the priest read. “Do you have a pen?” After feeling his pockets, Harry opened the armrest between them and found one inside the compartment. Father Devaux put a line through two paragraphs, explaining what he had heard about Lawrence’s death. “Better not speculate on how he died. Apart from that, it’s a touch- ing requiem. Remember to mention that the school will hold a memorial service this time next week in the chapel on campus. You should encourage the boys to come.” He handed the speech back to Harry and they exited the car. The priest opened his umbrella above the door. While they walked along the garden path around the side of the house Harry thought about that word “encourage,” as though the priest was doubtful anyone Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 170

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would attend of their own accord. He thought about his peers, waiting just beyond his side gate—could indeed hear their voices above his dad’s favourite Chet Baker record playing from the outdoor speakers, and wondered if anything he said could change how they would feel when he told them, if their judgement would wane by the funeral, if any would come at all. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 171

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TUG DUMBLY

Biology

Soupy afternoon, and a film from the Department of Education reliquary snickers through the ratchet— amoebas and protozoans split the scene, cells bubble to frog jizz fractals. The picture stutters and flares and something microbiological in the old stock itself as it apes its subject matter with the accrued glitch of a thousand un-reelings— dust squiggles and pubeish imps boing in sprung rhythm across the pond of the screen, frogkick through the flagellates.

It’s the slow whip beat of a galley ship to this slumped bench of the Third Form, chained to the alter of the Bunsen. They half sleep on sweaty arms, or smudge a heart with a pen on a salt wrist, or etch a swastika in a desk with a compass, as the parkinsoned ceiling fans slowly wobble round, and the downed blinds lazily clack like wooden teeth Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 172

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in the hot sirocco seeping through the windows, and that melting Dali clock above the board yawns and mocks, tocks backwards, away from Three, to the primeval dawn of the day. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 173

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ROSLYN JOLLY

James Halford, Requiem with Yellow Butterflies University of Publishing 2019, 264 pp, pb ISBN 9781760800130, RRP $26.99

In the 1870s, the American novelist Henry James invented the “inter - national novel” as a kind of storytelling in which he played the manners of one nationality against those of another and recorded the result. In 2010, the Japan-born English novelist Kazuo Ishiguro asserted: “I am a writer who wishes to write international novels. What is an ‘international’ novel? I believe it to be one, quite simply, that contains a vision of life that is of importance to people of varied backgrounds around the world” (Ishiguro n.p.). How did things get so much less interesting? Questions of universality versus regional specificity are central to James Halford’s fascinating essay collection Requiem with Yellow Butterflies (2019). This assemblage of fifteen nonfiction pieces, which combines travel writing and literary criticism with a coming-of-age narrative, begins with the death in 2014 of the Columbian-Mexican novelist Gabriel García Márquez. The account of Halford’s personal reaction to the Nobel Prize winner’s passing quickly moves to the question of “how García Márquez came to be celebrated as a ‘universal’ writer” (8). Historical materialism provides some convincing answers to that question. The appearance of Márquez’s breakthrough work, One Hundred Years of Solitude, coincided with the globalisation of the publishing industry (12). Cold War “geopolitics” required the United States to make friends and influence people in Latin America; turning their top writers into international superstars helped with that (13). And even to the critically alert, the gravitational pull of universalism is strong: Halford notes how the proudly regional Márquez lapsed into generalisations about “man” and “humanity” in his Nobel Prize accep- tance speech (16). Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 174

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In the parts of the book devoted to personal reminiscence, Halford guards against such illusions of frictionless internationalism. He recalls how, while working at a private college teaching English to newly arrived immigrants in Australia, he tried to connect with young refugees through sport:

Sometimes, kicking a football under the fig trees by the Brisbane River with those taciturn, unsmiling boys from Sudan, Eritrea, Burundi and the Congo, it was possible to imagine we’d arrived at a place beyond history. But in the classroom shattering stories came out at unexpected moments, not just from the Africans, but also from the Iraqis and Afghanis, who’d fled lands Australia had recently helped invade and was still occupying. (103)

Those shocking classroom moments remind him that there is no “place beyond history”—and there is no place beyond place either. And yet, how we Australians long to escape our provincialism and attain “world” recognition. Near the end of a long essay about the mid- twentieth-century Australian poet Judith Wright, Halford notes with satisfaction that “we are coming to recognise Wright as a world poet rather than one who merely explains Australia to itself” (236). I take issue with that “merely,” which seems at odds with the attention to regional specificity that is the animating principle of much of this volume. To be seen as a “world poet” seems to me a relatively small achievement in proportion to the gargantuan but necessary task of helping to explain our beautiful, terrible, conflicted country to its present inhabitants. The question of whether, and how much, common ground exists between distinct national cultures crops up again in relation to another of the volume’s main thematic concerns, the concept of “the global South” (156). The idea that countries of the southern hemisphere may share defining cultural and economic characteristics, despite vast differences of history, language, race and land size, has attracted the attention of political theorists and literary critics over the past two Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 175

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decades. The practice of contrasting a rich and powerful North to a poorer and weaker South provides an interesting alternative to older ways of mapping global inequality, such as the West versus the Orient or first world versus third world. But the new model only works if convincing commonalities can be established between apparently disparate southern lands. For Halford, the search for South–South connections is made personally meaningful by his extensive travels within Latin America, his love of its literature, and his strong relation- ships with people from the region. Requiem with Yellow Butterflies is animated by the desire to realise the “natural fellowship” that Australian writer Mary Gilmore posited 85 years ago between her homeland and its “sister continent” of South America (83). But how viable is the model of the global South, really? After attending a seminar series on “Literatures of the South” directed by J. M. Coetzee at the Universidad Nacional de San Martín in Buenos Aires, Halford notes both what is productive and what is problematic about the project of finding common ground between the literatures of Australia, South Africa and Argentina:

Australia, a wealthy peripheral nation of the Southern Hemisphere, in some ways unsettles the North–South binary, revealing its basis in economics not geography. Yet Australian literature, no less than those of Argentina and South Africa, has struggled to free itself from a sense of cultural dependency and inferiority, on the one hand, and from nationalist exceptionalism on the other. (158–59)

Certainly, but isn’t that true of almost every former colony, especially those that are settler societies, whether they lie in the southern hemisphere or not? Halford writes more interestingly about South–South connections when he derives them from personal knowledge of landscape or bases them on specific historical forms of economic organisation. After a long conversation with an old outback drifter called Jack during a train journey through country Queensland, he finds a reflection of Jack’s Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 176

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world as he reads the nineteenth-century Argentinian epic Martín Fierro,

... pushing past the strangeness—the archaisms, the rhyming eight-syllable lines—to a perfectly familiar mythology: poor white men tending rich white men’s cattle on stolen land. At the end of part one, Martín Fierro and his accomplice Cruz flee as fugitives to survive on the pampa with the Mapuche. I pictured them as Jack and [his mate] Jo Jo, riding out from Port Hedland ... (80).

Exploring his “home latitudes” (166) on another continent also ex - poses identities of scenery and atmosphere that alter his sense of coming from a unique place of origin. Of Brisbane, he writes: With its shabby, outmoded skyscrapers and jacarandas in bloom beside the slow-moving brown water, my hometown now reminded me of subtropical towns I’d visited in northern Argentina, like Rosario and Posadas. (98) Yet some of Halford’s travel experiences in South America remain utterly and gloriously foreign, like eating barbecue on a night of torrential rain at a stand across the street from a magnificent Belle Epoque opera house, to strains of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries”, in “Manaus, the jungle metropolis: 2.5 million people at the centre of the largest forest on earth” (67). Or a five-day boat journey through that same forest:

We chugged upriver at about 5 knots aboard the Dois Irmaos, a three-storey passenger ferry shaped like a giant wedding cake. From our hammocks on the middle deck, Valentina and I watched dense vege-tation slide by for hours. It sometimes seemed we had dreamed our entire lives and had awoken for the first time. At remote riverside settlements, children ran from their thatched huts down to the muddy bank, waving as our boat Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 177

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passed. Maybe they were dreaming us, those kids, and all the outside world? (147)

When one’s very existence seems to dissolve under the force of a new environment, travel has done its most powerful work. At such moments, theories of “the South” melt away, as does any concept of the universal: what remains is a profound personal encounter with a geo-graphic specificity that cannot be translated into anything other than itself.

WORKS CITED

Ishiguro, Kazuo. https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/kazuo-ishiguro Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 178

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JENNIFER LIVETT

Andrew McGahan, The Rich Man’s House Allen & Unwin 2019, 608 pp, pb, ISBN 9781760529826, RRP $32.99

Andrew McGahan was finishing and editing The Rich Man’s House during the illness that led to his distressingly early death on 1 February this year, but the novel shows no sign of diminished power. The writing is as compelling as ever, the ideas as large-scale, the narrative surges along at the cracking pace of a great thriller. Ever since Last Drinks (which won the Ned Kelly Award in 2000), McGahan’s novels have been strongly experimental, investigating ways of combining the literary novel with popular fast-action genres—crime, thriller, , dystopia, science-fiction—as though he feels that only these block-busting styles can do justice to the times we live in. The results have been highly successful in terms of awards—The White Earth (2004) won an impressive list of prizes including the Miles Franklin (2005)—but they have not always pleased his many ardent admirers. Wonders of a Godless World (2009) gave rise to particularly divided reactions. Although it won the 2009 Award for best , there were some (I was one) for whom it seemed to be giving free play to arcane metaphysical ideas and dazzling inventiveness, at the expense of the grounding in social realism which makes Last Orders so relevant to our times. If The Rich Man’s House sounds rather like Wonders at first, it’s because both are set on islands, and the main character is again a woman who has psychic powers—but there is a great difference between the two novels. The element of social realism has returned in The Rich Man’s House, and the genre-mix is now vastly more effective. The themes are a clearly focused iteration of concerns McGahan has been probing for nearly two decades: environmental and political matters, especially in terms of the relationship between the landscape of Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 179

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Australia and its white settlers, the limits of science and human power, and the human striving which all too easily becomes corruption, addiction, obsession, madness. He has now brought these under the control of a classical epic form, producing a strong cohesion. Like many epics this is essentially the story of a titanic battle, and here, as in that most modern example of the genre, Moby Dick, the struggle is Man against Nature. McGahan, evoking the particular hubris of the twenty-first century, expands it into Mankind, aided by the infernal triumvirate of scientific rationalism, capitalism and technology, versus Nature and Planet Earth. In place of a white leviathan McGahan has a monolithic red mountain, the Wheel, this name arising from a printer’s error for an earlier one, The Red Wall. The host of connotations is deliberate, of course, from “the breaking wheel,” the medieval torture machine the characters discuss, to Ixion, Under the Volcano, political opposition to the west, and far beyond into Gothic cinema and steam-punk. The Wheel’s opponent is the American billionaire businessman and mountaineer, Thomas Richman. “Antagonist”? Perhaps, but the term would imply a more settled moral alignment than McGahan wants to allow us. The question of where our human allegiances lie remains troubled almost to the end. The Wheel is twenty-five thousand metres high, twice the height of Everest, and stands on a curved island in the wild oceans between Tasmania and Antarctica. In the bay of its curve lies Theodolite Island with its own smaller mountain, the Mount. Richman, using money and influence and leaving at least one toppled government in his wake, has virtually bought the Mount, this “Australian landmark,” although it is a National Park and “protected.” He has used it as a base from which to “conquer” the Wheel, and later, as the site for his colossal house. By devious means he has become the only man ever to reach the summit of the Wheel and enter the cave that lies in the palm of the “Hand of God,” the curious rock formation at the very top. What lies inside the cave? Richman will not speak of what he found, and nefariously again, has made sure no other climber will ever reach so high. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 180

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We enter in medias res, in accordance with classical precept, as Richman is preparing to celebrate the completion of the house, called the Observatory. Built into the top of the Mount, accessible only by helicopter or a two and a half kilometre lift-shaft in the core, it is a tour de force. Rita Gausse (another name to conjure with) is not merely invited, but urged and lured to join the guests, the six professionals (the crew, significantly an international group) responsible for the gargantuan project; interior designer, builder, major-domo, IT guy, security officer and architect. The architect was Richard Gausse, Rita’s father, and she is ostensibly there in his place; he has recently died in the house in circumstances no one will fully explain. As Rita is introduced to the house by Richman’s personal assistant and major-domo, Clara Lang, she begins to see that this is a post - modern Gothic castle, a secular cathedral. But who is the God it houses and worships—the Wheel or Richman? Is it an act of homage or sacrilege? On every side is sumptuous elegance, soaring weather proof glass to provide security from the ferocious sub-zero weather and 180 degree views of the Wheel. But Rita soon discovers that behind the vaulted lightness of the main rooms lies a terrifying labyrinth of dark service tunnels that hide the mechanisms controlling the house. They will also, of course, hide anything else needing concealment. The house is almost unimaginable. McGahan does, superbly, imagine and describe it. The party settles in and we learn of mysterious deaths during construction. And now they begin again, each more macabre, grotesque, Gothic, bizarre than the last, with the survivors forced to witness them as a kind of spectacle, a revenge for the spectacle Richman has made of the Wheel. Shades of a country house mystery perhaps, but not cosy Christie, far more deeply allied to Poe, Lovecraft, M.R. James or Le Fanu. Rita begins to feel the return of the psychic powers she had when she worked as a kind of healing exorcist, placating the “presences” in landscapes ravaged by human earthworks. But she has long put this life behind her, mainly because of the drink and drug excesses central to it, which drove away her beloved partner Ann. Personal relationships have a minimal place in many of McGahan’s novels, and he has been criticised for this, but here it seems a salient Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 181

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part of his commentary. These characters are not a family, not even really friends, they are employees, the upper servants of a system which leaves little time or energy for anything else—except gym workouts! (McGahan’s sardonic humour still flashes throughout, small ironies abound.) Against the Gothic tumult unfolding in the main narrative, McGahan sets, provocatively, the dispassionate voice of science, thus positioning humanity between rational and irrational (extra-rational?) responses to Nature. He does this, with echoes again of both Moby Dick and Wonders, by interleaving chapters of non-fiction commentary (both genuine and fictional). Newspaper articles, a lecture on architecture by Richard Gausse, the physiological connections between mountain climbing and Neil Armstrong’s moon landing, meteorology, geology, biography. These are the authoritative discourses which serve and shape the public context of our responses to Nature. The Wheel is “a landscape closer to the surface of Mars than to earth. Hence NASA’s eagerness to be involved ... climbing the Wheel [is] a perfect rehearsal for a future Mars landing.” In two brief epilogues, McGahan extends the narrative to the year 2120, putting this particular battle into a perspective longer than a human lifetime. One minor puzzle is why he alters the story of Sir Edmund Hillary’s and Tensing Norgay’s Everest climb and instead makes Boudillon first to the summit. Perhaps to remind us that how- ever convincing these historical and scientific authorities are, they cannot always be trusted? From 1991 when Praise won The Australian/Vogel Literary Award, McGahan’s irreverent energies have enlivened Australian writing. He has never hesitated to take risks to enlarge the scope of his work, and in doing so, has enriched our reading and writing community. It is profoundly sad that he did not live to enjoy the success of this novel— and that there will be no more. Vale Andrew McGahan. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 182

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MARGARET BRADSTOCK

joanne burns, apparently Giramondo Press, 2019, 72 pp, pb ISBN 9781925336993 RRP $24

Joanne Burns is regarded as Australia’s pre-eminent satirical poet, known for humour and wordplay in her confrontation with modern society and its clichés. apparently is her 17th collection, no less quizzi - cal and hard-hitting than its predecessors. At the same time, it goes deeper, interrogating the creative principle and the provenance of individual poems. The book’s title is expressive of the nature of its contents, which “appear like visions, intensely experienced but barely real.” Burns divides these experiences into four distinct sections. The opening section, titled “planchettes,” may recall the nine - teenth-century board with vertical pencil used for automatic writing and in séances, said to trace letters without conscious direction. We’re told the poems in this section “springboard from the clues and solutions to crossword puzzles.” As one addicted to cryptic crosswords, I found myself on tantalising ground. In the poem “planchette,” the reader is treated to a variety of oxymoronic clues: “the anarchy of sober (soba?) noodles,” “lava citadels,” “the swanky / ambiguity of matador pants,” “the blackholes / of juvenilia cosy as irish moss.” And in the following poem, “prospectical,” we’re advised to “tenderise that cold / shoulder” before “wispering (?whispering) ballerinas frieze (?freeze) / along your cortex like graceful / vermin.” The solution?: “time to fumigate the thesaurus / exhume the algebraic from the bottom / of the well.” In “tipsy,” crustacean and fishy clues abound: “it’s hard to shake claws / in a salt-reduced diplomacy / crunching the numbers ill / advised ... and no / dreams of schmoozing st. augustine.” As Burns’s trademark, word-play and unexpected similes add wry humour and satiric comment: “cracked / wedgewood keens in the scullery”; “a quartet of / cartographers flown in like sympathy/ cards.” Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 183

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In the second section, “apparently,” prose poems or micro-fictions detail dream sequences which might well be the creative genesis of a poem. (Think here of the Old English “Dream of the Rood,” the Middle English “The Pearl” or Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”) As the dreamer says in “detail,” “it seemed like something to remember when i woke up.” Sometimes, dreams test us or reveal feelings of inadequacy, “perhaps templates for a consideration of the underestimated soul” (“glyph”). In “hush,” the dream of an afterlife is rejected for the here- and-now:

this must be jesus, the christ, but was he alive or dead. i considered the simple option—a small platter of pumpernickel, caraway rye bread, hummus and olives. then i needed a glass of water and left quite suddenly, preferring the archaeology of my own bed, its familiar comforts. (18)

Through dream scenarios, further rejections occur. In “para-graphic,” it’s of the “ordinary,” the conventional, “the sequestered territory.” In “prima vera,” it’s the current obsession with the “mind-expanding” value of travel:

the hostess was wearing a wimple, she offered me a flute of mead and a unicorn snack pack. detour travel was tattooed on her forearms, the hessian seat was starting to annoy my bikini. (20)

Finally, “wheel: a documentary” rejects the significance of dreams which may themselves be clichés:

i made it my business to smother my responses to this visitation beneath a thick wad of dreams, this inheritance that had overestimated its capacity. (25) Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 184

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The micro-fictions “prop” and “purchase” go further. Starting with “macbeth,” the former offers us a variety of TV crime shows—“silent witness” and its ilk—culminating in the shower-scene from “Psycho.” “purchase” deconstructs the dream evocation:

this tableau might well be a document of someone’s trauma. the floorboards don’t creak but the air shifts in almost imperceptible winnowings. the vertical turns concave, when ‘trauma’ from the greek arrived in the english lexicon around 1650 it referred to a physical wound. it has become so much more than its original denotation. a word of intradermal suffering, damage. there is something compelling about the word, so close in spelling and utterance to ‘thauma’: a wonder, a marvel, such propinquity, perhaps it is language itself that is the deceiver, the agent of unease. (24)

“Dial,” the third and longest section of the book, brings us back to the everyday world albeit with trenchant social criticism, often couched in grammatical terminology as though the poet-persona is searching for a language: “holidays were full of conjunctions / forget the piles of prepositions”; “hungry children squat / in the concrete dust stare / into numb verbs of a lens...”; “do we need a term like / heteronorma - tive sounds / like a revamped incarnation / of milk.” Topics that fall victim to Burns’s satire here are vacations, holidaying in poverty- stricken countries, cruise ships (“the cruise / ship cancels the view of a shore line’s history”), wealth-accumulation, city high-rise, invasion (“backdropped by all the smug / and lavish houses that recede / as you sit and sense the place / long before the tall ships came”), politics and elections (“or is there a better time to vote”), the movies, take-away food, clichéd restaurants, Kings Cross, leaf blowers, and crime fiction (vs true crime):

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…………………………………… downstairs along the greasy mile bashings stabbings screeches and screams cheap deals of powders and pellets mashed evidence in the gutters dreary dull unframed you reach for another novel & douse your mouth with mango (54)

Also included is “watch tower a reconnaissance,” about ways of catching a huntsman spider. As an arachnophobe who’s pursued such intruders with vacuum cleaners (to release them outside, slightly stunned), I related deeply to this poem. Armed with a broom and torch, the persona tracks the huntsman: “ah there it is—up on the highest / bookshelf sprawling across the crime fiction ... settled right above ‘the silence of the lambs.’” The “furtive traveller” moves on to the bath- room:

now exploring toiletries—syrian soap st luke’s powder for prickly heat its trademark icon of an upright cobra with an arrow through its head ...... then sudden as a bird or a quick breath it’s out the window stillness spreads like gel of cool voltaren no living creature has been harmed in the writing of this poem except perhaps the poet (56)

Neologisms abound (my spell-check refuses to believe). This section is vintage Burns, possibly more accessible and familiar to readers in its critique of our existential world.

The final section, “the random couch,” described as the presentation of “a number of drifting poems,” completes the poet’s exploration of the deep-seated beginnings and development of poetic inspiration. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 186

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“mercy” returns us to the supposedly mind-broadening scenario of travel:

an hour glass hip hops in the southern dunes late for the late train luggage lost somewhere between here and returnity fly with the high risers, their feral surprises ...... self rescue on the somnambulance express (67)

In “crunch”:

fulfilling those dreams with cornflakes wasn’t as easy as it smelt faux crunch of the necromancer ankle wrinkles don’t disappear with a spray and wipe ...... you grab at the walls of next week’s hallways it all seems so familiar (72)

This is quite depressing, though only to be expected. The penultimate poem, “entrée,” sums it up: “a mind is a curious / thing where did lucy in the sky with diamonds / go—” expressing the disappointment felt by poets hoping their poems would soar, in keeping with the creative notions that inspired them. However, the success of apparently in docu - menting this process, suggests that “winged sandals” may still make it so. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 187

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MICHELLE CAHILL

Some personal reflections

David Brooks, The Grass Library Brandl & Schlesinger 2019, 221 pp, pb and epub ISBN 9780648202646 RRP $26.95

Recently, it was my honour to launch The Grass Library by David Brooks, a writer and poet, whose work I have the utmost respect for. David had persuaded me to write my first essay on race and Australian literary culture. That was in 2013, when my intent was to write fiction, but he insisted that it was important. David had anti- cipated some of the activist thinking in literary culture. He edited a special edition of Southerly dedicated to refugee writing; two issues to animal rights, and an issue to Aboriginal writing. He commissioned Australian authors such as myself, Ouyang Yu, and Ali Alizadeh to write about the discrepancies in our literary culture. I think he was right to do this because the boundaries of narrative and criticism are blurred. Criticism privileges some narratives over others, and it has the power to distort, reduce, even erase others. David was among the first editors to invite entry for intersectional writers, opening gates that have kept some out of the paddock. There is a clarity of thought, feeling and being in The Grass Library, as in much of David’s writing that wears its achievement lightly. The title of the book is quietly appealing. How do we read this three-word text? It is metaphoric, of course, and figurative, but it is also politically surreal and radical. It suggests that the anarchic and the ordered can be in dialogue, engaged deeply in pursuit not of meaning but of undoing meaning. It promises an anti-epistemology, an investigation of what knowledge is beyond the paradigms of the human-centred industries of organised structure, elaborately wrought frames and Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 188

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productions which at their basis rely so heavily on the exploitation of non-human elements. Such as the environment that we have managed to spectacularly destroy, animals whom we have dominated, harvested, objectified, slaughtered for our own selfish purposes; committing their destinies to ecological crises. We’re familiar with the word “anthropocene,” an era in which human domination over life forms has prevailed to permanently alter the world’s geology. What does it mean? It means there are techno fossils and genetically engineered bones accumulating along with plastic debris in the earth’s strata. We feel overwhelmed when every day there is news of a climate change disturbance throwing another city, another community into chaos. This is an age when the broiler chicken outnumbers any other avian or vertebrate species and cannot live beyond the age of three months due to its large size, unnaturally modified for the chick to gain weight with rapid production. The Grass Library begins at a time in the narrator’s life when his partner T. declares “I can’t do this anymore.” T., of course, is referring to the eating of meat, a culturally established ritual of absenting ani - mals as dead produce. Brooks describes this moment as epiphanic. He writes: “something clanged into place, like a great door shutting, or opening. I felt cruel suddenly, exposed, deeply wrong. I suppose that’s what had just happened to her.” This is a catalyst not merely for dietary lifestyle change or animal rights activism but for discoveries, of a deep and radical nature, which Brooks describes as “the beginning of a beginning.” I came to this book also with a beginner’s mind and it took me back to an early Buddhist experience, to a memory of finding myself in a monastery in Thailand following the practice of the spiritually graced Ajahn Chah. I carried the burden of my earned privilege, a cachet steeped in the rationality of Western empiricism. With other travellers, I waited in the sala, as a line of monks walked to their positions. A long silence followed, which became a stillness which was at last broken by the words of a monk whom I later perceived to be enlightened at that time, in the true sense. He said: “You have come here because you wish to be free from suffering.” I had to hold back tears. How did this monk Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 189

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know the distress that was at very core of my being, something com- plex; something that I did not know myself, and have spent some years considering? It strikes me that in Western civilisation, we have gone beyond insensitivity to the exploitation we have inflicted on the bodies of animals and on those who are othered, because of gates, because of hierarchies and oppressions that are all too frequently normalised. Globalisation and right-wing populism have prevailed to endorse and commodify these acts of violence. We have been trained to encounter others with the assumption of a biological and cultural superiority. The feminist Carol Adams writes of the practice of eating meat as one which absents the animal:

While the cultural meanings of meat and meat eating shift historically, one essential part of meat’s meaning is static: one does not eat meat without the death of an animal. Live animals are thus the absent referents in the concept of meat. The absent referent permits us to forget about the animal as an independent entity; it also enables us to resist efforts to make animals present.

The Thai wat was situated in a jungle and it was a precept not to eat meat, not to harm the snakes or kill the mosquitoes. If you learn something with clarity, the understanding remains with you. Still to this day, I am uncomfortable to swat a mosquito or to bait a cockroach. But I am anxious when it comes to snakes and there were lots of grass snakes in the field. As my mind became less encroached, I began to spot them from a distance glistening in the wet grass, slithering away rather than confronting me. A warning had been issued that there were cobras who sought refuge, especially during in the rains. Thankfully, I did not encounter one in my room. I overcame the kind of fear that Brooks writes about in his essay. Fear was just what it was; a transient state of mind. Everywhere, small signs reminded us of the Buddha’s teachings: “May all beings be free from suffering.” Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 190

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The suffering of animals was also something I had witnessed in the study of physiology at university. It was like a stab to the soul; this entire lack of respect. After one six-hour practical I had used a biometric graph to make a spontaneous, if ineffectual, protest against the callousness we were expected to perform in the laboratory. I was young at the time, and I had not put together all the pieces of a puzzle as to why I was suffering, when my education was privileged and predicated on the achievement of material goals. Violence in its material and predatorial form is considered by Brooks, not so much theoretically, in this particular book, though I think that Derrida’s Breakfast might be considered a companion book. This, I think, is a beautiful thing, for a writer to engage in a subject through the language of different genres. In The Grass Library, Brooks’s ethology is anecdotal, and incidental. It arises from and informs obser- vations about the experiences of Charlie, a rescue dog, Orpheus Pumpkin, an orphan lamb that he and T. raise, through stories about the panoply of rodents, birds, Eastern brown snakes, his own intent to protect the crops he grows with traps, through equivocating on the ethics of vivisection in the pharmaceutical industry research on chemotherapy when someone he loves has a cancer scare, through references to Nietzsche, Kafka and Derrida, to the violence of nomen - clature and classifications. An ethology underlies the manifestations and behaviours provoking the animals—Charlie’s fluctuating anxieties for instance, or the way in which Henry, Jonathan and Orpheus Pumpkin defy the imposition of fences and other boundaries as they navigate the paddocks and house with an awareness of human presences in a shared place. Brooks observes and records theses traces of response and reactions, ranging from shivering to bleeding, from annoyance to play, alongside the hovering of unease and doubt he feels in writing about animals. In “Dusk Anxiety” an essay I’ve returned to read a few times, he writes: “As I wrote the previous paragraph, for instance, it was accusing me, yet again of anthropomorphism.” Here, he subtly demonstrates how the idea of anthropomorphism might reduce our capacity to acknowledge or to realise animal feelings. In another essay, “The Art of Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 191

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Fencing,” he writes of how naming animals might signal that there is no intention to harm them or use them for our benefit. At the same time, he observes other kinds of inter-species dominance:

Charlie, he jokes, thinks he is a sheep and Henry thinks he’s a dog. But no. There is a species barrier (barrier, fence), and they are working at it, And she sits, T., reading, thinking, working at that barrier too, while I avoiding writing (for it does seem sometimes a threatening place, a hard terrain) tighten mesh, bolt posts onto posts to increase the height of fences, learn mysteries and secrets and tricks of star pickets, wood and post-hole drills and rapid-set concrete; or she moves a temporary fence, rethinks a barrier, avoiding reading, while I write or try to. Knowing that a sentence too is a fence, an essay is a fence, an argument is a fence, and the arts of making them (clear, tight) and un-making them, are also the arts of fencing.

The recognition that this unease, this doubling is situated within the very act of writing is in tension with a different intuition that meaning is negotiated in the writing act, rather than being argued by its premise or its conclusions. Somehow this enables us as readers to participate, to experience a relationality rather than being ourselves dominated by a hierarchy of the text, or the position statement of the author. Brooks’s approach to the subject of violence is lucid; it is narrative and dialectical but at such times he disrupts logocentricity, briefly disturbing the empirical gaze, which is also the Orphic gaze. In another essay, “The Laocoön,” Brooks describes an episode of watching as a bystander when Charlie is brutally attacked by another dog, mistakenly thought to be friendly, and that dog’s owner intervenes. The grisly, interlocking conflict leaves him feeling helpless. The mythological Laocoön of Virgil’s Aeneid was a Trojan priest who tried to warn his people that the Greeks’ wooden horse was a trick. He was blinded by Athena, and since he persisted in his cautioning, Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 192

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Athena also sent sea snakes to strangle him and his two sons. Brooks references this powerful evocation of a deeply symbolic violence that escapes language. He describes this as “wordless agony,” and “a painful and perpetual struggle when it all might be so different.” The Grass Library is also a book about home and intimacy, about life changes and love, about the relationships we share with non-human animals by honouring their presence in our lives; the relationship of wildness to domesticity, the pastoral to the metropole, the margins to the centre, language to instinct. Like John Berger, Brooks explores the parallel lives that animals offer as companions, and he shows us how this is different from human exchange. A hybrid book then, a poetics of memoir and animal studies, almost diarised in its attention to the everyday, yet sophisticated and complex in its imagination and its negotiation of language, reasoning and ethics. I think it argues for an ethics in which animals participate as vivid, though not exotic, presences. Reading this book is a joy and a revelation, perhaps because it is attuned to suffering. This narrator asks questions we need to ask ourselves if we are to make peace with ourselves and the world. What I admire most about The Grass Library is the pursuit not only of new companionships with animals or the new solitudes described, but the pursuit of courage that it takes to find a language for the questions the book raises: for example, what does it mean: “To work in a broader, more flexible ethical field”? How courage and language as human elements might be used in restorative ways when it comes to animals and other oppressed beings in this world, is the gift of The Grass Library. So, I urge you to read it and to tell other readers about it, and I’m deeply appreciative to David for writing it.

WORKS CITED

Adams, Carol J. “The rape of animals, the butchering of women.” Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (2003): 209–15. Brooks, David. The Grass Library. Sydney: Brandl & Schlesinger, 2019. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 193

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FRANCES DEVLIN-GLASS

Lynda Ng (ed.), Indigenous Transnationalism: Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria Giramondo 2018, 240 pp ISBN 9781925336429, RRP $39.99

When it first appeared in 2006, Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria was an astonishment. Her apprentice novel, Plains of Promise, had not prepared the world for the more ambitious second novel, which requires two very different kinds of cultural capital of its readers. First, it draws in a detailed way on the cosmology and cosmogony of a particularly remote Indigenous Country, Waanyi, on the escarpment of the southern edge of the Gulf of Carpentaria, and its history of colonisation and industrial exploitation; secondly, it comes freighted with Alexis Wright’s lifetime of reading the liberation narratives of many cultures. She herself provides many examples: Keri Hulme from New Zealand, South Americans Gabriel García Márquez, Eduardo Galeano, Pablo Neruda, and from India, Salman Rushdie, in addition to James Joyce and Seamus Heaney from Ireland, and black African Americans like James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker, to name just some. The list, truncated as it is, is indeed impressive. Some Australianists, if they know some Indigenous cosmology and anthropology, have a hope of grappling with Carpentaria’s cosmology, but the second kind of reader— widely literate in third world postcolonial resistance literature—is perhaps even rarer. This volume of essays, with its commitment to transnational conversations, goes a little of the way to providing some intriguing comparative (but not intertextual) studies, and is a baro - meter of how well this richly layered and complex text is travelling beyond Australian shores. And, excitingly, it points the way to conver- sations yet to be had about the novel’s global literary correlates. Too often Australian literary critics live in an (Australian) continental bubble; this book challenges that insularity. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 194

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As a Joycean, I’m fascinated by the parallel with Ulysses: like Joyce’s reworking of Dublin, Wright uses the Gulf of Carpentaria as the stage for building a not too dissimilar finely etched psycho-social and mythic geography, and as well reaches out into a world of stories/literature that are essentially transnational, (largely but not exclusively) non-European, and resistant to mainstream western ways of thinking. There is also in the novel a fecundity of inventiveness around style and register that is reminiscent of Joyce’s masterpiece. I wait with interest for the scholar who can illuminate Carpentaria in the light of that second realm—the third world dimension—which is almost invisible to most of us trained up for English, American or Australian literature. One essay in this collection, Nic Birns’s “The Notions of Permanence: Autochthony, Indigeneity, Locality in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria,” gives due weight to the situatedness of Wright’s narrative, and in particular the tensions that exist in many Aboriginal communities between those who “do” and preserve culture, and those who more explicitly and mili - tantly engage in resistance. Aboriginal culture needs both kinds of culture warriors, but these are precisely the divisions that can be ex - ploited by white power-wielders. Like other writers in this collection, Birns celebrates the optimism of Alexis Wright’s vision: its resistance of “anthropology-as-elegy” (69), and demonstration, through its comedy, of the “perseverance and resilience” that mark her people as resisting the “extinction” scenario. Similarly, Lars Jensen (“Polarized Postcolonial Indigeneities: Carpentaria and Heart of Light”) is impressed by the novel’s epic scope and inventiveness and its commitment to “constructing a new reality based on Indigenous premises” (84), “interweaving the colonial violence plane ... with an epic, spirituality-based narrative whose gran - deur is such that it far surpasses anything that may happen in a conventional notion of reality” (86). For comparisons, Jensen turns not so much to Greenlandic literature, his nominal cultural correlate, but in a footnote that might have been better advised to be promoted to the main text, and that certainly promises more, to Latin American Litera - ture. Russell West-Pavlov takes a very different course, and gives a new and provocative spin to Alexis Wright’s “our country is a very big story” Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 195

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(Carpentaria 411) by focusing not simply on the local (which is deliberately eclipsed in this collection of essays) but on this novel as “deterritorialising” and extending “story tracks beyond the contours of the continent” (Indigenous Transnationalism 24). He sees it as a significant contribution, indeed “a pioneer text of an emergent Indigenous world literature”(24). This is, I suggest, a bold call, and one he makes in full knowledge of how inaccessible the novel can be for non-Indigenous readers. He is fully aware of how it may stump even sophisticated readers like the reviewer of the Times Literary Supplement, Tom Aitken, who was open to its difference but confounded by the reorganisation of epistemologies it entails. I concur with West-Pavlov’s conviction about its pioneering nature, but I’d add that it is first and foremost also an open invitation to engage emotionally and intellectually with the cultural perspectives of Australian Indigenous cosmology, inhabiting as it does that consciousness and expressing it in relation to both the quotidian reality and to the grand architecture of the cosmos and its forces. One small point to be made in relation to West-Pavlov’s notion of the way in which the novel explores “deterritorialisation” is that recent (successful) land-claims in the Gulf are to land under the water, the sea beds—a phenomenon that points not as far back in time as the separation of Gondwanaland, but certainly to the last Ice Age when the land took a very different form. Tens of thousands of years of settlement in this continent make for extraordinarily deep ecological knowledge. This is relevant in two ways in the novel: it makes more sense of Norm’s reclaiming of his identity as a saltwater man (at the point when he buries Elias at sea) and it also gives form and substance to Indigenous fears about mining near rivers which carry immense amounts of water in the wet season. Wright passionately argues that Indigenous “scientify” (Carpentaria 99) knowledge should inform mining, at the very least, because the cost of poisoning whole eco- systems is very real, as recent developments in the McArthur River, another great Gulf river, make clear. By dramatising Indigenous cosmology in the consciousnesses of its main characters, Norm and Will, this novel poetically evokes an urgent earthed politics. At the Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 196

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same time, the novel is not a polemical tract. Far from it: it makes its point aesthetically, humorously, in ways that can engage hearts. It is a “big story,” and one that cannot be said simply. That Wright’s novel does engage hearts and lead to reflections on the interconnectivity of all global citizens (and not just Australians black and white), is demonstrated by Sei Kosugi’s polemical essay on the links between uranium mining in Australia and the collapse of the Fukushima nuclear plant in the tsunami. Hers is a Japanese-inflected reading of the novel: she refers to the risks of nuclear disasters both in Japan and at Maralinga; and she also sees similarities between Wright’s Rainbow Serpent and Yamata-no-Orochi, a gigantic serpent associated with the Hii River, capable of reacting violently to human incursions on the landscape. As does Kosugi, Lynda Ng and Peter Minter write compellingly and self-consciously as eco-critics on the literal/symbolic function of waste and dumps in the novel, and all three read them, and argue that Wright invites such a reading, as life-sustaining and regenerative. This is, of course, to take a counter-cultural, lateral approach to an issue most green commentators would see as heralding the doom of the planet, and to refigure the meaning of waste. Lynda Ng invokes a long history which explains the historical Australian anxiety about what waste means in a symbolic sense by referring to the origins of Australian settler culture as a waste-dumping exercise whereby the abject and politically unacceptable of England and Ireland were evacuated and dumped, literally. She argues that white settlers, in an act of projection, reconstructed themselves as “an idealized White Australian society” with no place for the first peoples of this country (167) and resorted to the myth of the “dying race.” In this reading, the island of junk which gives Will the place and interregnum to rethink what he knows of his own culture, becomes a powerful symbol of rebirth and metamorphosis, and a symbol of a natural world that has awesome powers of recuperation. Peter Minter’s essay on tropes of pollution in the novel takes a parallel course to Ng’s and one that amplifies and complements her argument, and draws attention to the sacred and simultaneously profane dimensions of Angel Day’s use of junk. The statue of the Virgin she so memorably reconfigures as an Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 197

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Aboriginal Mary has elements of cargo-cult, but Angel’s understanding of it is represented as transformative: the seagulls that frequent the dump become “angelic avian cantors” (see Carpentaria p. 23 for the basis of Minter’s analysis, p. 197 Indigenous Transnationalism). Minter sees Ch 2 (focused on Angel Day’s Dump) and the penultimate chapter (Will’s junk island) as architectural bookends of the novel, and although Day functions as an exemplar of pollution and is “purged from the narrative” (201), Will’s island of junk serves to reconnect him with his traditions. Finally, he must leave the island because life as a solitary practitioner is counter-cultural in Aboriginal communities and he needs to reconnect with his family. Several essays in this collection either foreground the author’s national investment in Indigenous literature or make pungent com - parisons with artefacts from other Indigenous communities. Estelle Castro-Kosby’s essay, “The Poetics of Relation in Carpentaria,” is of the first kind. It gives an account of the novel’s acceptance in Francophone circles. It was translated into French as early as 2009 by Pierre Furlan for Actes Sud, “a major publishing house based in Arles, Provence” (119). It sold 1400 copies by 2013, a record for this niche publishing venture. As well as being valued for its poetry, the novel’s comedy and irony are the focus of this article. Anne Heith, who works on Sámi and Tornadalian postcolonial literatures, performs a comparative analysis of Carpentaria and a Sámi text by Nils-Aslak Valkeapää, The Sun, My Father. She is aware of the performative nature of ethnic identity formation, and is critical, on the grounds of essentialism, of Alison Ravenscroft’s (2012) mis- placed anxiety about reading the world-view of an Other, pointing out that “the ideal Indigenous reader is a theoretical construct” (99). She is puzzled by Ravenscroft’s insistence on “the absolute necessity for ‘white’ readers to construct the novel as enigmatic, inaccessible, and strange in their readings simply because it has been authored by a person of Indigenous descent” (104). Heith sees the Sami novel and Carpentaria as functioning as “forms of decolonization” (110), which, presumably, depend on being read to be effective as such. Interestingly, she sees Mozzie Fishman as “the shaman figure” (108); he undoubtedly does mediate between “disparate worlds,” but so too do Norm and Will Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 198

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Phantom, whose trajectory in the action of the novel is to be called back to shamanic roles in their own society. Just how shamanism among the Sámi and cultural power in an Australian Indigenous community are similar and different would make an interesting future study. The edition is structured in three sections which start strongly and build and is rounded off with an essay by Alexis Wright which first appeared in Heat in 2010. Wright has increasingly revealed more about herself and her writing practice and influences since the publication of Carpentaria in 2006, when very little was known. As the climax of the collection, coming after a fellow writer from Wiradjuri country, Jeanine Leane’s Afterword which echoes much in the volume about Carpen- taria’s “boundary-less-ness of the voice” (211), it is powerfully placed to stand as testimonial to her practice. It interestingly refers to the novel as “a narration ... to our ancestral land” [emphasis is the current writer’s]. This is significant given her physical separation from Country for the first two decades of her life, but also testament to the power of her grandmother’s stories, and those of people like Clarence Waldon who helped reconnect her with it. Despite the assurance of Carpentaria, Alexis Wright talks of the self-doubt that plagued her as she struggled to tell the story of a people simultaneously ancient and modern, where time violates notions of progress and linearity. As a manifesto, this reflexive essay is powerful and the writers gathered in this book are proof that Wright’s exploration of “the possibilities of other worlds,” where “the [Indigenous] cultural mind [is] sovereign and in control” (221), and “written like a long song, following an ancient tradition,” has resonances well beyond the shores of Australia. Carpentaria’s trans - national voyaging is epic, and resonant for many other traditions.

WORKS CITED

Ravenscroft, A. The Postcolonial Eye: White Australian Desire and the Visual Field of Race. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. Wright, A. Carpentaria. Artarmon: Giramondo Publishing Company, 2006. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 199

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LEIGH DALE

Tony Birch, The White Girl University of Queensland Press 2019, 272 pp, pb ISBN 9780702260384, $29.95

Tony Birch is usually identified as an accomplished writer of literary fiction as well as a leading intellectual. His most recent book, The White Girl, has been found wanting by at least one reader, who complains of its “uncommon moral simplicity.” Notwithstanding his praise for Birch’s “limpid grace as a prose writer,” Geordie Williamson finds that the book offers “a rainbow parade of contemporary merits.” The review appeared first in the Australian (which has a paywall). The full review was then posted on a literary reviews , by Williamson himself, after parts had been quoted and criticised by a blogger. Williamson is strongest in his condemnation when he accuses Birch of crudely differentiating his characters:

Note how starkly black and white is delineated here. It almost begs some “what ifs.” What if Sergeant Lowe spoke not as a monster—what if his cold authoritarianism came out of a sincere if misplaced belief that what he was doing was kind? What if Millie Kahn were not a statue of rectitude but a woman who had internalised some guilt or uncertainty in relation to these same “young girls”? It is possible, as a reader, to thrill to righteousness while feeling aesthetically short-changed: and this, for all its virtues, can sometimes be the experience when reading The White Girl. The characters are shunted to their allotted places like sheep being run through a drafting race. (ANZ)

Having drafted sheep I can say that shunting them to their allotted places can be harder than Williamson implies, but more pertinently, Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 200

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what is at issue here is Williamson’s preference that the policy of taking Aboriginal children from their families be presented as reflecting good intentions. This debate about historical perception is a key element of the book, and of Williamson’s review, and I’ll discuss them in a moment. But first, I want to consider that preference for moral ambiguity. This was inculcated in university-based literary studies during its cultural ascendancy in the sixties, seventies and eighties of the twentieth cen - tury. There was a concurrent and related change in the hierarchies of literary genres: the novel was elevated above poetry and drama. That preference for fiction is evident today in the relative status of literary prizes. Educated readers of literary fiction tend to prefer complexity in their characters, but plausibility in setting, behaviour and plot. In consequence, the discussions we have about books tend to focus on competing assessments of the actions of characters as real people, rather than, say, questions of genre, or cultural context, or style. This discussion relies on a radical individualism, that is, it rests on the belief that we determine our own . As a reading process, it enshrines three forms of individualism: an authorial genius, a prota - gonist of stature, and a discerning reader. (Perhaps such reading is a form of wishful thinking, into a world in which we see others con - trolling what in our own lives we cannot.) The aesthetic preference for realist fiction, for characters who act from plausible but complex motives that allow of competing interpretation, allows for the depiction of suffering. Contrastingly, repeated depiction of suffering under a system that can be called racist, against which a protagonist struggles repeatedly, would be viewed as “clumsy” or “crude.” The reader of The White Girl, might, in Williamson’s words, feel that they are “aesthetically short-changed.” It is an interesting metaphor, one that acknowledges the economics underpinning reviewing (should you buy this book? should you spend your time reading it?) whilst posi tioning the reader as someone with the right to expect literary texts to conform to their preferences. Tony Birch’s book seems to me to be interested in the individual, but also in the forces that overwhelm them. There are scenes of tragedy, Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 201

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but there is also a quiet heroism to the protagonist, who is introduced in the opening sentences:

Odette Brown rose with the sun, as she did each morning. She eased out of the single bed she shared with her twelve-year-old granddaughter, Cecily-Anne, who went by the name of Sissy. Wrapping herself in a heavy dressing gown to guard against the cold, Odette closed the bed- room door behind her and went into the kitchen.

We learn a lot, quickly. The family is poor (the shared single bed, no heating); Odette is kind (she closes the door so as not to wake the sleeping girl); she is a creature of habit, who is connected with her environment. This compact style continues: “She put a lit match to the wood chips and strips of old newspaper in the stove.” Given the technology we are probably back a few decades, with a multi-genera - tional family whose poverty, dignity, and desire for respectability (rising early) have been sketched. While speaking of style, at times I felt some dialogue was a little stilted, although it might be that Birch was wanting to capture the false formality of a bureaucratic temperament that refuses to use contractions—“I will” rather than “I’ll, for example— and the ways that victims of that formality respond in kind. In the second paragraph, the angle of view widens. The house or hut we have been inside is “on the other side of the dry riverbed” from “the town of Deane.” Dry riverbeds? Australia. Deane? Doesn’t exist, and Birch is careful not to name “the state capital” when describing a life-changing journey to the city. Yet all this is very precisely anchored in a colonial history and a modern demography that position Indi- genous Australians on the edges of towns. Odette and Sissy are cut off socially, economically, and politically from much that is seen in such communities as essential or fun, like schools, the main street, the cinema and the doctor’s surgery. Odette might be spoken to each morning by the black kite (a bird of prey), but she gets no regular greetings from human residents other than the junk man. Birch spells out the marginalisation when he refers to “Deane’s Line,” “a narrow Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 202

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red dirt track skirting the western boundary of the town” that divides Indigenous residents from non-Indigenous. There is a subtle evocation of the deep south in the names given to the characters: Odette and Sissy are not common Australian names, and we are told that “Miss Sissy” “sounds like Mississippi” (47). The focus on domestic and material detail that Williamson attributes to Birch’s intuition I find characteristic of a style that aims to catalogue details of material objects, speech patterns, cultural beliefs and social settings. It is used in books like Toni Morrison’s early novel Sula, or Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. It is an explicatory mode, and the success of these books shows that historical and cultural difference, if explained, can widen the audience for a book. But far more importantly, its use strengthens the culture described by making it legible, in literary language, to its own members. It is a style that dignifies and enhances lives that are not generally front-page news. So, some readers will remember lives like these or have heard family stories about them, and welcome a powerfully concise rendition, whose pleasures lie in recognition. Others who remember similar lives—my mother likewise rose early every morning to have the stove well hot for breakfast tea, toast, and porridge—but by virtue of skin colour have been able to take our existence for granted might be intrigued by the mix of recognition and dissonance the book prompts. And then there might be those for whom all this seems a bit quaint. Whichever it might be, I would argue that the concerns raised by The White Girl are con - temporary. On the day I am writing, a story appears in the Guardian newspaper about a commemoration of Aboriginal resistance to coloni- sation, held in the regional city of Toowoomba, that drew several hundred people, but not a single mention in the local paper (Marr). The struggle to render Indigenous lives visible in their own terms, to acknowledge histories of exclusion, is conducted daily in this country. Birch does not seem to me to starkly differentiate his characters on the basis of race above and beyond the separations that are historically valid. And as for moral ambiguity, the Indigenous characters are far from angelic. The plot rests on the fact that Odette’s daughter, Lila, has abandoned her child. And that alibi of benignity that Williamson Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 203

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suggests Birch should have included is everywhere in the novel. Reverend Holman does not allow parents to attend their children’s funerals on OH&S grounds (20); the Reverend O’Brien limits parental visits to once a month (88) for their own good; an unnamed nun tells a mother that her daughter has been taken because “This is best for you” (90). Sergeant Lowe himself is repeatedly shown as justifying his actions in terms of good intention: “She is a smart young lady, your granddaughter. I would not want to see a girl with such potential slip back. It is my duty to children such as Cecily and I will not fail her” (68). What Birch does do is show that such claims are usually self- serving. Notwithstanding this, the Indigenous protagonist maintains her optimism for she “had never quite given up” on white people. It is “a belief she’d inherited from her father, who liked to express the view that there was some good in all,” albeit that “If there was good in men such as Lowe and Joe Kane, it was deeply buried” (120). And kindness that she appreciates is shown by a range of non-Indigenous characters, friends and strangers. Birch manages to be positive, creating characters who are (sometimes but not always) able to show ingenuity, as in the yarn of How Odette’s Family Got Their Bathtub (28–31). That bathtub, by the way, is a central motif, a physical object that signifies a profound connection between Odette and Sissy. There is even the odd moment of humour. Asked for her “tribal” name by the retailer of her artwork, Odette “looked over to the honey jar sitting on the bread board and read the label to herself. It sounded tribal enough. ‘We’re the Bilga people,’ she explained” (38). The novel’s core is the legal, logistical and emotional complexities that arise because Odette discovers that the person she loves most, Sissy, is the child of the man she hates most, Joe Kane. The White Girl wrestles with the impossibility of starkly delineating black and white. The dilemma is encapsulated in the title. This title is ironic. It is tragic. It is a lie. It is a useful lie. But it is a lie that Sissy literally cannot live with. So, the book implicitly asks readers to reflect on what kinds of identities are formed and broken when lies about who belongs to whom are the foundation of families and communities. How to think Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 204

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and feel when the determination of identity is outsourced to bureau - cracies, and survival demands compromise. The White Girl is a legible text, in the sense that it seems transparent in its meanings; but it seems to me also a highly teachable text, in the sense that it offers many points for discussion. When Birch writes, “Deane carried the blood of so many Aboriginal people on his hands it could never be scrubbed away, not from the man himself or the town that carried his name” (2), he might seem to have “failed” that “ambi - guity” test that demands the author delegate the task of moral judgement to the reader. Or, he might be asking us to think about the specificities of places and people, to see our own lives as worthy of literature and to demand close reading. As in many works of literary fiction there is a “scene of reading,” a parable about artistic pro- duction, that models how we are to engage with the book we have in our hands (or ears). Odette explains to Sissy why she always paints the postcards she sells from life: “I don’t need them in front of me, Sis. But, as each tree is different, so is each branch and leaf and flower. What I’m painting this afternoon can’t be painted again” (39). Art is a form of memory, and its creation a form of paying attention. Birch asks us to see the social and the natural worlds in fine detail.

WORKS CITED

ANZLitLovers LitBlog. https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/07/08/the-white-girl-by- tony-birch/ Marr, David. “Battle of One Tree Hill: remembering an Indigenous victory, and a warrior who routed the whites.” Guardian 15 Sept. 2019: https://www.theguar dian.com/australia-news/2019/sep/15/battle-of-one-tree-hill-cutting-through- silence-to-remember-a-warrior-who-routed-the-whites Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 205

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CAROLE FERRIER

Kathleen Mary Fallon, A Fixed Place: The Long and Short of Story University of Western Australia Publishing 2019, 250 pp, pb, epub ISBN 9781760800284, $24.99

I mean by extreme writing/finding the limit—trying to find rat holes of possibility, how not to have an absent other, how not to allow the Other in myself to be absent from me. (Fallon, Outskirts)

In 1989, Kathleen Mary Fallon published with Sybylla Press her novel Working Hot, described by Fiona McGregor as “a novel about dykes in Sydney, written with an experimental verve that still dazzles today” (“The Hot Desk”). Fallon was claimed by Marion May Campbell to be “the first explicitly sex-positive queer female writer in Australia” (Textual Intercourse). Working Hot was an instant hit with many second wave feminists interested in radical, subversive writing. It was also variously designated as “urban grunge” and as having affinities with the writing of Americans, Kathy Acker and Pat Califia (now Patrick Califia-Rice). Working Hot has a cover from a painting called The Fall, by the artist Cernak. For A Fixed Place, the cover has been taken over by Fallon’s own artwork: Dear Kathleen, Take the Bull by the Horns (An Outsider’s Art: Paintings by KM Fallon, Polar Bear 2014). This shows a figure with breasts that appear targeted for a surgeon’s knife; it is bleeding from both its severed arms, or maybe it is the wings sitting below that have been cut off. A cloak, or a skirt, of aquarelle taffeta is draped over the lower part of their body; on their head is what appears to be wing feathers, rising up in a shape that looks like a witch’s hat, but also like quill feathers. A plate with a head on it, chopped off at the edge, is held up by a snake and alongside is a female figurine of African or Eastern Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 206

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appearance that is quite likely a handbell. The images reference tropes in the writing inside. Fallon describes herself, in some of her most recent analytical writing, as “seeking the limits of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in language, trying for language as discourse—from discarrere to run about, range widely, run off course—in search of conversation, com munication, the constellation of intersubjective becomings...” (Outskirts). Jumping over, or burrowing under the prescribed binary boundaries socially prevailing in, let’s say, Australia (though Fallon is in no way a merely national writer), those boundaries imposed by Border Force(s) against “outsiders” is a characteristic feature of the writing published from 1988 to 2017 that Fallon has collected in A Fixed Place, along with some new pieces. They range widely over the diversities of class, race and ethnicities, sexualities and conventional gendering. This is done in Fallon’s writing, as Campbell suggests, through “a heteroglossic play of register and voices” (Textual Intercourse). It is also habitually done with a sharp satire, as well as an ironic critique produced through a linguistic virtuosity that has affinities with the diction of the New Zealand author, Janet Frame. One instance of this is the double meaning of the “loco motive” in “Fact Sheet from the Staff of Life” (first published, 1995). Fallon’s Tres Bien character in this story lived as a child close to a “sugarcane mill” (74). “A little loco motive would carry the cane through the cane fields and into the mill, stop and drop it into agaping black cakehole in the ground where Gargantua’s silver bladearms ... slashed it to pulp” (74–75). With a wry reference to authors avoiding what critics may read as memoir, the narrative continues: “When her biographer asked her why she had so rarely used autobiographical material in her work and why her output had been so relatively small...” Tres Bien replied that she knew that “the silver bladearms, her mind - writing,” could “pulp her life, loves, memories, beliefs to mush if she let them get too close to the edge, let them get into the machinery” (75), relating this back to her memories of the cane-crusher. One of the more analytic (but also allegorical) pieces in the collection is “Not Unlike the Peeling of Many Bells” (first published 1995). Its monologue, in prose and poetry, begins with a speaker living in a caravan Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 207

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“between the dead wetlands and the polluted sea, between an illumi - nated Industrial Disneyland, and a Crude and Refined Oil Container Terminal” and, in the distance, “a grey steel Near Necropolis” (39)—to which she no longer catches any ferry. It laments the loss of her romance with a girl called Caroline whom she met when giving a school lecture on “The Use of the Archive Repository in Music Re search” (44–45). The narrator, Michelle (though only 26 at that time) has some similarities to Elizabeth Jolley’s Miss Peabody, or to the, until recently, secret life of the young schoolteacher, Simone de Beauvoir: Michelle ironises herself then as, “a decent, clean-living spinster, librarian, harpsichordist by day, a lesbian child molester by night” (46). These were the days long before same-sex marriage, and in the small town where they lived, the narrator’s mother, after expressing outrage about lesbians existing, eventually sweeps the matter under the carpet: “I promise we will never mention that word in this house again” (51). The romance can only turn out badly given the increasing visibility of their differences over the centrality of art or political organising in the lovers’ two lives.:

She said she couldn’t play the works of male composers because that was serving the patriarchy. I said, “Isn’t that squandering your talent doing that?” She said, “Personal is political.” I said, “It’s possible to become a parody of yourself. Personal can be pitiful.” I said, “Well, why don’t you write your own music?” “I intend to,” she said, “after the revolution.” (54)

When she follows Caroline to her radical feminist household in a bigger town, Michelle finds Caroline has been experimenting with s & m sex but that that makes Michelle feel broken too. She escapes to memories, “right next to me / on the pillow where her head used to be / ... she took my breath away / and this breath / is all that’s left” (40– 41), and to dreams of Caroline returning

To finish the job her feet walking across the sand of my body. Pressing down and smothering the many cockle Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 208

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mouths. Stopping them up with sand and weed and debris. ... Sa(n)dsm(o)othered softid(i)ed over and cross-feeted by the web of gulls’ feet foraging. (66)

Fallon’s creative work and research for most of the twenty-first century has had as a central part, writing about Torres Strait Islander and South Sea Islander people. This includes the play, Buyback (2006); the novel, Paydirt (2007) and the feature film, Call Me Mum. In “It’s a Tree, Stupid” she mentions the driving she did up and down the Bruce Highway while doing field work with the South Sea Islander com - munities on sites of historical significance, including “memorials, graves and roadside shrines” (110). This political and empathic engage - ment relates also to Fallon’s own experience of being a white foster mother to a Torres Strait Islander foster son. In “Goat Song” (placed as the final item in the collection, though originally published in 2015 in Mothers and Others), is “a story some would say shouldn’t be told, but I’m a witness, more than a witness ... some would say I haven’t the right to tell but I will tell this one. I am his mother, well, foster mother as I’ve always described myself ... Was it some right or wrong acknowledgement of some invidious, complex, interracial, colonial situation?” (182). Levinasian thinking was all the vogue in the earlier twenty-first century with its centrality of the idea of responsibility to the Other being called for by the gaze of others’ faces. It is likely being invoked in Fallon’s comment with which I began this essay. I have always found Levinas more than a tad pompous and totally lacking a sense of humour or irony, but a human aspiration to fidelity to the processing of what seems to one to be true, especially for artists, is articulated with feeling at several points in A Fixed Place, as here:

There are lots of little lies and one big one. I find the little ones but never come face to face with the big one so that I can put my fist through. I’m afraid it’s my own face. (65) Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 209

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This also raises the issue of the implied author, and their loco motive— that has to withstand the vicissitudes of living their own life in order to continue to be an artist but also, in Fallon’s worldview, to be capable of many empathies without losing their own nurtured, critical, decon- structive subjectivity.

WORKS CITED

Fallon, Kathleen Mary. “Writing at, writing to, the lover, the other and the possi - bility of conversation.” Outskirts 40 (2019) http://www.outskirts.arts.uwa.edu. au/volumes/volume-40/kathleen-mary-fallon Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 210

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KERRIE DAVIES

Jessica White, Hearing Maud University of Western Australia Publishing 2019, 271 pp, pb ISBN 9781760800383, RRP $27.99

Despairing about the proliferation of memoirs, New York Times re - viewer Neil Genzlinger once pleaded for a “moment of silence please, for the lost art of shutting up.” Perhaps Genzlinger would be more open to the “hybrid memoir” that leans more overtly into the idea of memoir as a reflection of the self in the crossroads of place, culture and time; less about “me” and more about “us.” In Hearing Maud the “us” is memoirist Jessica White, and Rosa Praed’s daughter, Maud, who share lived experience of deafness. Publisher UWAP describes the book as a hybrid as well as a “fusion of memoir, biography and deaf studies” in a testimonial by author of The Art of Being Deaf, Donna McDonald (2014). Like the auto / biographical slash that Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (2001) use to theoretically define the hybrid memoir that includes a biography, White signals the dual narrative with her chapter title Be/Longing. But the slash can also be read as the acute separation that White and, she discovers, Maud also felt in their early years from their peers. White recounts how at age four, she contracted meningitis and the huge doses of antibiotics damaged her cochlear nerves. White describes, “My life came to be defined by what the Ancient Greeks termed a pharmakon, that which is a poison and a cure” (xiv). She retreated into reading and writing—another cure—that led her to a scholarship in London. There, she discovers Rosa Praed and feels a “frisson of connection” (61) through the shared experience of be - coming a writer in London, and that both White and Praed have writers in their families as inspiration; Rosa has the poets Thomas Harper, Emily Barton and her stepmother’s nephew Banjo Paterson, while White is related to a certain Patrick. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 211

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However, the connection that White finds with Maud is much more profound and lasting than the tenuous writer’s gene. Through ex - ploring Maud whilst disclosing her own experience of deafness, White illuminates not only the absent Maud in Rosa’s history, but reaches across time to examine the contemporary parallels that she and Maud share to understand the emotional and cultural complexities of living in a world that privileges hearing and speaking. White writes:

Through them [Rosa and Maud] I learned that I had been assi milated into the world of hearing people and that the deaf part of myself had been ghosted, to the point where no one knew I was deaf until I told them, to the point where I barely even knew it myself (xv).

Given there is more than a century between Maud and White’s lived experiences, the management of time is a structural challenge. Rather than separate her and Maud’s stories through parts or distinct chapters, White wades into Maud’s story foreshadowed by her stories of feeling isolated by her deafness growing up in country Australia, then her struggles in London where she studies Rosa, who leads her to Maud. White then explores Maud’s life at a school for the deaf in London which focused on oralism—a more subtle structural arrangement that allows the “us” moments to have more impact instead of a constant connection of narrative dots. White’s elegant mini history on how signing was historically discouraged would be effective in a singular memoir but it is amplified by her joining with Maud, who was also encouraged to speak rather than sign in the 19th century as oral evangelists (77) ascended. White reflects, “Listening, lip-reading and the anxiety of responding correctly leave me permanently exhausted. I have no doubt that it was hard for Maud too” (77). The focus on Maud and oralism history here also allows White to highlight the irony of Alexander Bell being inspired to invent the telephone that further privileged hearing, from his efforts to help deaf children learn to understand speech via vibrations in the air, at Maud’s school run by Susannah Hull, whom White describes as the leading Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 212

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evangelist for speech assimilation. Drawing historical socio-political parallels enabled by the hybrid memoir, White later reflects upon auditory engineers as the new oralists: “While technologies for FM systems, hearing aids and cochlear implants have revolutionalised life for deaf people, at their heart lies conformity” (166). The other challenge for hybrid memoirists with a historical biographic subject is voice, as interviewing is not possible, as much as Rosa Praed invoked the spirits with mediums. An epistolary strategy drawn from archival letters can help illuminate a voice from history, and let’s hope email and messaging app communication is donated and preserved for future biographical scholars. White finds Maud’s early letters, a journal, and a later 22-page letter written from the Holloway Sanitorium where Maud was institutionalised, as well as Maud’s drawings. Yet while Maud’s voice emerges in these epistolary extracts, White largely tells Maud’s story, rather than Maud emerging as a distinct narrative voice as well. Thinking about it, Rosa’s voice is more dominant than Maud’s, which emphasises her as a mother with agency over Maud’s life. In effect, Hearing Maud becomes an inter - twined triptych narrative of White, Rosa and Maud, rather than a hybrid. To fill historical gaps of knowledge around Maud, White relies on their shared experience of deafness and signals to the reader that she is imagining. Write writes, “I imagine Maud walking to the museum ... her companion would have held her hand as they crossed the road so Maud wouldn’t be hit by a horse and carriage as she couldn’t hear” (86). White vividly envisions Maud in the asylum: “I see Maud sitting alone beside an asylum window ... waking screaming in a dark room, alert for the vibrations from the floorboards that meant a nurse was coming” (178). The subtle signal maintains the authenticity required by both White as biographer of Maud and memoirist yet still allows White to have scenic creativity to more fully realise Maud’s life. Whether these two, or three, strands existing together “works” is in the eye of the reader. David Marr bristles at the appearance of an “I” in a biography, arguing readers don’t care about the behind the scenes details of dusty discoveries in libraries or treks to significant locales. He has a point, just like Genzlinger does when despairing about the lost Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 213

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art of shutting up. White’s story alone would have been powerful as she places her lived experience in a hearing world. But in capturing the us rather than the I, hybrid memoirs like Hearing Maud illuminate the historical parallels still present in the crossroads. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 214

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TOBY FITCH

Dave Drayton, P(oe)Ms Rabbit Poets Series 2017, 59 pp, pb ISBN 9780995390126, RRP $17.00

Dave Drayton’s debut book-length collection of poems is named P(oe)Ms. In short it’s PMs, or, to extrapolate, it’s “PM knick-knacks- cum-bric-a-brac,” as Melbourne launcher and famed crossword-setter David Astle—or “dastardly DA,” as my mother calls him—put it. What I mean to say is that names and naming (right down to their very letters) are key to this work. I was once told by a lapsed poet-turned-academic that poets are either nounal, verbal or adjectival poets. I like to think I sit/stand/walk as a verb kind of poet—allegorical, metaphorical, conspiratorial—while other poets might be far more descriptive, pictorial, grounded in the additional and informative language of the adjectival, and others still might have a penchant for naming, neologisms, metonyms and the like. These categories are porous things, but Drayton is quite literally nounal, in this collection, casting his poetic self as an onomast—one who studies proper names, especially personal names. P(oe)Ms, then, becomes a very neat title that introduces readers to an onomastic and lettristic poetics: each of the 29 poems within is written using only the letters of the names of each of Australia’s 28 white male, plus 1 female, PMs, its prime ministers. This genre of poem has a name too: a beau present (or beautiful inlaw), and each is addressed to, is about, or is in the voice of, the PM of its title. It’s a project book, obsessive and excessive in its use of anagram, but it’s also playful and funny, aspects augmented by a lightness of touch in Drayton’s conceptual manoeuvring of language, sound and form. All the 29 PMs are in chronological order, and if you need to brush up on your Oz politics for trivia, this would be a handy reference, as Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 215

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you can avail yourself of Harold Holt’s disappearance at sea (“He had held a towel”); of the mysterious night Malcolm Fraser spent in a Memphis hotel with his pants around his ankles; of John Curtin’s deathbed stream of consciousness, “an ambush on the arteries”; and of the housewife who repeatedly misdialed the local butcher, only to find Ben Chifley on the other line, who was gentlemanly enough to place her orders with the butcher himself. You can even learn of such factoids as: both Malcolm Turnbull and his mother Coral Lansbury wrote poems that won the Henry Lawson Poetry Prize, in 1974 and 1948 respectively. Go figure. There are extensive notes to the poems at the back of the book, which detail the odd historical footnotes drawn upon, as well as the poetic forms and constraints, traditional and non- traditional, that Drayton applied to each poem beyond the overall anagramming approach. Herein you’ll find a haibun, a lipogram, a dialogue, a sonnet, a mock menu, an erasure of a rondel, a sestina, an epithalamium calligram in the shape of a heart, a cricket score card. There’s also a 23-word poem for John McEwen’s 23-day term in parliament, a list poem of 17 fictitious names for a Rugby League team in honour of Billy Hughes’ patronage of the Glebe Rugby League club, complete with reserves, an air à boire or drinking song for Bob Hawke, and, operating on the level of the pun, a “villainelle” for many people’s (least) favourite villain Tony Abbott, plus a pantoum for the great pantsuit-wearing prime minister Julia Gillard. I don’t know if Drayton realised the latter of these punning formal stunts (more pantoums should be about pantsuits), but there you go. Freudian slips can occur at the level of form, not just word. Which of course begs the question: Who’s wearing the pants in poetry—the poet or the poem? Or in this case, the poet or the prime minister? As to the biographical element of the poems, it’s uncanny how certain at first nonsensical lines, made only from the letters in each PMs name, can come to comment pointedly on their life, or on their life and legacy as we’ve come to know them. Edmond Barton, the first prime minister, whose name we can’t remember, is described in one line as “a random ramrod.” In a rude homage to Edward Gough Whitlam’s Caesar-like heralding of indoor plumbing to the suburbs of Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 216

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Australia, we get, in these short lines, a sense of his larger legacy and purpose: “our water / will hurdle / toward / the new / we all / are awarded / our right.” And Anthony “Tony” Abbott’s heartless “Turn back the boats” mantra, which history will remember him for, is neatly critiqued in the line: “A boat, not a bathtoy.” There are many interrelations, or “interbred dimensions,” as the Menzies poem puts it, between the P(oe)Ms. In Paul John Keating’s poem, Drayton dons Keating’s voice to lambast Tony Abbott:

“All pollination no petal; all plant no plan “An agglutination to glue the keeling nation together again “He put the ‘ant’ in poignant took out the O, the N He kept the P, the I, the G ...

For Drayton, Australia’s prime ministers’ names are essentially ready - mades—as with Duchamp’s urinal, they are ripe for the plucking, plagiarising, pissed on for the sake of a piss-take. The language of poetry is everywhere and anywhere, as we’ve learnt many times over, but even in the names of our maligned and so-called leaders. What Drayton has reaffirmed is that any language of power, of naming and owning, can be repurposed to undermine the power that a language of naming and owning holds. It can be reinvented or cut to shreds and a “rude Rudd remark delivered hence.” P(oe)Ms attempts to straddle the two end-points of conceptual writing, as Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman describe them, i.e. 1) pure conceptualism/uncreative writing, which negates the need to read the work and instead places the emphasis on the idea of the work; and 2) impure conceptualism/the baroque, which exaggerates reading in the traditional textual sense. The readymade qualities of the poems simultaneously mirror, refuse, and capitulate to the easy con sumption/generation of text and the devaluation of reading in the larger culture. In other words, these poems try to complicate this dichotomy—they gain value from devaluing themselves as art objects at the same time as placing a high value on the semantics Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 217

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and formal qualities of their text, and I think that’s an interesting complication. Each PM is illustrated by Drayton in hand-drawn caricatures that are delightful on one level, in that their style reflects the haphazard, speedy, sketchy play with language, lineation, rhythm and sound in the poems. On another level, the illustrations are utterly creepy, and it took me a while to work out why: pretty much all of the drawn PMs lack pupils and irises, so they come across as monstrous, zombified. In the future, there will be more prime ministers of Australia who’ll need to be critiqued, and perhaps Drayton’s playful zombifying project will continue with a new beau present every 3–4 years (or less—he has already written one for Scott Morrison). And, as much as I don’t want to look forward to the reality of more zombies leading the country (as they wait in the wings for their moment to strike with a knife), I can imagine that Drayton would conjure a ripper of a beau present take- down of Peter Craig Dutton, a name that contains “corrupt,” “potato” and “cunt,” should he ever have to write such a thing.

Note: This review is adapted and expanded from a launch speech given at the Hollywood Hotel, Sydney, on 27 July 2017. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 218

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OLIVER WAKELIN

Luke Carman, Intimate Antipathies Giramondo Publishing, 2019, 240 pp, pb ISBN 9781925818123, RRP $24.95

The essay collection Intimate Antipathies is Carman’s first full length work since his short story collection An Elegant Young Man won the NSW Premier’s New Writing Award in 2014. His first publication also led to him being named a SMH Best Young Novelist. This latest offering is composed of eleven essays, including his now in/famous jeremiad “Getting Square in a Jerking Circle.” He identifies the genesis of the collection as the moment he was asked by a literary journal if he had any thoughts on the life of the writer, and notes that the work grew out of his uncertainty about what to do with his new-found fame. There’s a strong undercurrent of mythmaking throughout, as Carman attempts to control the public narrative of his own life, firmly positioning himself as a writer from Mount Pritchard in Sydney’s west, and continuously bringing us back to his desk in Bankstown. We are presented with the sympathetic portrait of a somewhat baffled twenty- first century writer who struggles with mental health difficulties as he strives to be a good father and earn a living. One of the highlights of the collection is to be found in the fruits of the confessional register: he takes the reader into the sacred spaces of the literary elite, and helpfully charts a path out of a period of poor mental health. Carman writes what he knows, leading us to (inter alia) writers’ festivals, residencies, militant writers’ groups, and book tours. He recounts a conversation between two authors, one a Miles Franklin Literary Award winner and the other shortlisted for the Booker Prize, who both refer to writers’ festivals as self-indulgent.

... if two writers from the upper echelons of Australian letters were uncertain about the point of writers’ festivals, Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 219

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then there was perhaps no clear and present point to such events at all.

A recurrent note is the pointlessness, the vacuity of the minutiae that make up the lives of the writers depicted; with plenty of humour in the absurd. His earnest tone attempts to convince that he isn’t making use of poetic license; that his burden is rather to chip away at the nature of things, searching for undiscovered truths that will one day transfigure his quotidian anguish. I found his accounts fascinating not because he was depicting the world as it really is, but perhaps as he really expe - riences it (if we accept the persona as a reliable narrator). Carman takes us through an account of a period, following the termination of his marriage, in which “I lost my plot completely and became a raving loon.” He became convinced a malevolent actor was pursuing him and his loved ones, and that the only way to save his family from this figure was to take his own life. We follow this journey right to the cliff’s edge. To have such an experience documented by a writer of Carman’s power and unflinching acuity is undoubtedly a valuable resource. He recounts his journey out of this state and wraps it up, with a nod to the male ingenu persona he is cultivating, by recommending a particular psychiatrist in Sydney. Stylistically, Carman’s descriptive passages are arguably not searching for the beauty in the world. Rather, he generates an enthralling vividness by virtue of his fidelity to the notion of verisimilitude; he’s holding up the mirror. Carman’s relentless attention to detail convinces that every moment described is true to his perception of life. At times it’s forensic, sterile; a little like an autopsy. His evenings and skies are like the patient etherised upon a table. He could almost be filing a police report, or detailing the events of his life to a court. It’s gripping reading for a host of reasons: chiefly, he’s very funny. He begins by recounting his father’s disappointment that, as a writer, he’s missing his true calling as a K-mart catalogue model. Lots of the comedy is to be found in the jarring effect he generates as he shifts gears from wandering innocent flâneur to hyper aware and exceptionally well Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 220

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read man of letters. He lulls the reader with the sense that he hasn’t got a clue what’s going on around him, then bursts these oneiric bubbles with wickedly sharp intertextual observations.

But it is the duty of every decent son to frustrate his father’s wishes, and as art and literature seek to teach us, homeopathic parricide is the path to self-discovery.

It’s also gripping because ascension into the literary heavens often goes hand in hand with an ability to say the politic thing at the appropriate moment; whereas Carman appears to delight in airing any laundry that has blown across his path. In prose that echoes the rhythms of Orwell’s Animal Farm, Carman shows us the power dynamics of a western Sydney writers’ movement from which he was eventually expelled.

It was decided at a meeting of our senior members that there would be one leader, self-appointed, and all other loyal members would be given the subordinate rank of associates.

Carman has retained the “nothing to lose and everything to gain” fire of the outsider attempting the literary impossible. A central source of the tension in these essays, one that renders the author a tight-rope walker soaring carelessly above the staid attitudes of his peers while extolling more matter with less art(s administration), is that he now has everything to lose; he is the insider. How is it possible to operate in Australia’s comparatively small literary scene while lambasting everyone that strays within inking distance? I kept turning the pages to find out: he gives plenty of indications that it hasn’t been easy.

Power-players in the so-called “scene” had come to my little office in Bankstown to assure me that blacklistings had been put in place to keep precisely these kinds of offers and invites to me permanently off the table. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 221

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As in An Elegant Young Man, this collection contains Carman’s trade - mark binaries: innocence and omniscience, sweetness and vitriol, jocularity and despair, the beautiful and the sublime. He may claim to have never been sure of “anything more complicated than my phone number,” but this collection conveys the impression of a sharp mind, constantly questioning and self-reflexive, bending literary genres to suit his ends: the personal essay may offer a rewarding window into a private world, but frequently simultaneously operates as propaganda. This crucible’s brew of honesty, humour and originality makes it com - pelling to the last. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 222

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Stuart Barnes’s first book Glasshouses (UQP) won the Thomas Shapcott Poetry Prize, was commended for the Anne Elder Award and shortlisted for the Dame Mary Gilmore Award. He’s working on his second collection, Form & Function, and a novel. @StuartABarnes

Jumana Bayeh is Senior Lecturer at . Her work straddles the fields of literary studies and politics, with a focus on the Middle Eastern diaspora. Her current projects include an examination of representations of the nation-state in Arab diaspora writing over the last century, and a collabo - rative ARC-funded Discovery Project on “Rioting and the Literary Archive.”

Margaret Bradstock has eight published collections of poetry, including The Pomelo Tree (winner of the Wesley Michel Wright Prize) and Barnacle Rock (winner of the Woollahra Festival Award, 2014). Editor of Antipodes (2011) and Caring for Country (2017), Margaret won the Banjo Paterson Poetry Award in 2014, 2015 and 2017. Her latest collection, from Puncher & Wattmann, is Brief Garden (2019).

David Brooks is a novelist, poet and essayist and retired academic. He was so-editor of Southerly for 20 years until 2018. His most recent book The Grass Library (Brandl & Schlesinger 2019) is reviewed in this issue.

Colleen Z. Burke’s twelfth book of poetry, Sculpting a Landscape, was published in 2019. She has also published a biography, Doherty’s Corner, of Australian poet Marie E. J. Pitt, and is co- editor of The Turning Wave: Poems and Songs of Irish Australia. Her two volumes of memoir: The Waves Turn and The Human Heart Is a Bold Traveller were published in 2016 and 2017. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 223

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joanne burns is a Sydney poet. Her most recent book is apparently published by Giramondo Poetry in 2019.

Michelle Cahill’s collection of short stories, Letter to Pessoa, was awarded the UTS Award for New Writing in the NSW Premier’s Literary Award and shortlisted in the Steele Rudd Award. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Kenyon Review and the Best Australian Poems series.

Leigh Dale is the author of The Enchantment of English: Professing Literature in Australian Universities (Sydney UP, 2012) and Responses to Self Harm (McFarland, 2015), as well as essays on Australian literature and higher education. She is currently Chair of the judging panel for the Colin Roderick Award, administered by the Foundation for Australian Literature at University of North Queensland.

Kerrie Davies is a media lecturer at UNSW and author of A Wife’s Heart, an auto / biography of Henry Lawson’s wife Bertha and divorce. Her research interests are literary jour nalism, biography and memoir.

Jocelyn Deane Jocelyn/Josie Deane (they/them) was born in the UK, in 1993, and moved to Australia in 2001. They study linguistics at Unimelb and work as a disability representative at the student union. Their work has appeared in Cordite, Voiceworks and Seizure mag, among others.

Kevin Densley’s poetry has appeared in Australian, English and American journals. Densley’s latest poetry collection, his third, Orpheus in the Undershirt, was published by Ginninderra Press in early 2018.

Honorary Associate Professor Frances Devlin-Glass, Deakin University, has worked with Yanyuwa people in the Gulf of Carpentaria (a culture that shares narrative traditions and ceremony with Waanyi people), and has written about representations of their mythic narratives. She is an editor (with Bill Ashcroft and Lyn McCredden) of Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature, and an editor of Joseph Furphy’s novels. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 224

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David Dick is a Melbourne based writer, critic, and poet. He has been published in the Australian Book Review, Cordite, and otoliths.

J. M. Donellan is an author/poet who has performed at Sydney Writers’ Festival, TEDxBrisbane (twice), the , Brisbane Festival and some very prestigious basements. His works include the poetry collection Stendhal Syndrome, Kirkus Prize-nominated novel Killing Adonis, series Six Cold Feet, and the spoken word/dance collaboration Inter. Dave Drayton was an amateur banjo player, Kanganoulipian, founding member of the Atterton Academy, and the author of E, UIO, A (Container), P(oe)Ms (Rabbit), A Pet Per Ably-Faced Kid (Stale Objects dePress), and Haiturograms (Stale Objects dePress).

Tug Dumbly is a poet, satirist and performer who has per - formed his poems, songs and monologues on national radio (as a regular on both Triple J and the ABC Local Network), and in schools, venues and festivals, both in Australia and abroad. His work has appeared in Veranda, Offset, Blue Pepper, 4W, Shortfuse (a global anthology of Fusion Poetry), the Neigh - bourhood Paper, Canberra Times and The Poet’s Republic. A poem of his appears in the spoken word anthology Solid Air (through UQP). His first collection of poems, Son Songs, came out through Flying Islands Press in December 2018.

Marie Dustmann is a Sydney writer who has had short stories published in the Australian literary journals Going Down Swinging, Refractory Girl, Voices, Union Issues and Siblings, an anthology of short stories. She has had two Varuna Writers’ Centre fellowships.

Anne Elvey is author of White on White (Cordite Books 2018), Kin (Five Islands Press 2014) and This Flesh That You Know (Leaf Press 2015), and with Massimo D’Arcangelo and Helen Moore co-author of Intatto-Intact (La Vita Felice, 2017). She is editor of hope for whole: poets speak up to Adani (Rosslyn Avenue Produc - tions, 2018), and managing editor of Plumwood Mountain: An Australian Journal of Ecopoetry and Ecopoetics. Her latest collection is titled On arrivals of breath (Poetica Christi Press October 2019). Anne lives on Boonwurrung Country in Seaford, Victoria, and holds honorary appointments at Monash University and University of Divinity. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 225

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Carole Ferrier is an Emeritus Professor in the School of Com - munication and Arts at the University of Queensland, Brisbane. She is Editor of Hecate and the Australian Women’s Book Review, author or editor of a dozen books and 150 articles and book chapters in the areas of Literature, Political Theory, Culture and Gender Studies.

Hannah Fink is the editor, with Steven Miller, of The Recent Past: Writing Australian Art by Daniel Thomas, Art Gallery of New South Wales, 2020. She is the author of Strange Things: Bronwyn Oliver (Piper Press, 2017).

Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland, and a lecturer in crea - tive writing at the University of Sydney. His most recent books of poetry include ILL LIT POP (Flying Islands 2018), Where Only the Sky had Hung Before (Vagabond Press 2019), and Object Permanence: Selected Calligrammes (Penteract Press 2019).

Jane Gibian is a poet and librarian whose work has been anthologised in Contemporary Australian Poetry (Puncher and Wattman) and Contemporary Australian Feminist Poetry (Hunter). Her publications include tidemark (Vagabond Press Rare Object series) and Ardent (Giramondo).

H.C. Gildfind (hcgildfind.com) is the author of the short story collection, The Worry Front, published by Margaret River Press.

Sarah Hart lives in Melbourne, Australia. Her poems can be found in Rattle, Grist, American Chordata and elsewhere.

Alison Hoddinott was born in Tasmania and educated at the Universities of Tasmania and Oxford. Her many publications include Women, Oxford and Novels of Crime (2018), Gwen Harwood: Idle Talk—Letters 1960–1964 (2015) and Gwen Harwood: The Real and the Imagined World (1991). Her first publication was an essay for Southerly in 1981: “Gwen Harwood and the Philosophers” (41.3).

Roslyn Jolly is a scholar and travel writer who lives in Sydney. She is an Honorary Research Associate in the School of the Arts and Media at UNSW, and has written books on Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 226

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Jennifer Livett is a Tasmanian writer and former academic, now living in Sydney. She is the author of Wild Island (Allen and Unwin 2016) and is presently working on her second novel.

Leila Lois is a woman of Kurdish and Celtic heritage who has lived most of her life in Aotearoa. Her Kurdish ancestors fled oppression in Iraq in the seventies and her parents moved from London to Aotearoa soon after she was born. She has been living on Kulin land / Melbourne since 2018, working as a dance educator during the day and practising choreography and writing in her free time. Leila has read and written poetry from a young age, loving the way landscape, emotion and memory is distilled in so few words. In her poems, Leila explores a personal sense of origin that, like the ocean, binds several landscapes and times, coming back to the idea that a timeless, boundless love pervades the land.

Bronwyn Lovell is an Adelaide-based writer. Her poetry has featured in Best Australian Poems, Meanjin, Cordite, Antipodes, Verity La, Strange Horizons and other journals. She has won the Val Vallis Award, the Adrien Abbott Poetry Prize, and been shortlisted for the Judith Wright, Fair Australia, Newcastle, Bridport, and Montreal prize.

Richard Nile is Professor and Academic Head, Humanities and Creative Arts, James Cook University.

jenni nixon is a sydney writer—readings at diverse venues include sydney town hall, writers festivals, pubs and book - shops—published swimming underground (Ginninderra Press 2015) café boogie (Interactive Press 2004)—widely in literary journals: spineless wonders, writing to the wire, southerly, cordite, etc.

Jaya Savige was born in Sydney, grew up in South East Queens - land and lives in London. He is the author of Latecomers and Surface to Air. His next collection, Mean Time Between Failures, will be published by UQP in 2020.

The author of fourteen books, Mandy Sayer is an award-win - ning memoirist, novelist, and short story writer. Her most recent work is Misfits & Me: Collected Non-Fiction. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 227

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Beth Spencer’s books include Vagabondage (UWAP), How to Conceive of a Girl (Random House) and most recently, Never Too Late (PressPress). She writes fiction, poetry, essays and also for radio and performance. She has won a number of awards, including the Carmel Bird Digital Literary Award in 2018 for her short fiction collection The Age of Fibs, now a Spineless Wonders ebook. She lives on the Central Coast NSW.

Jack Cameron Stanton is a writer and critic based in Sydney. His work has appeared in Sydney Review of Books, Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Overland, Mascara Literary Review, Southerly, Seizure, Neighbourhood Paper among others. He teaches at UTS.

John Stephenson’s most recent novel is The Baker’s Alchemy (Brandl & Schlesinger 2017). He has made a study of Australian– American relations in World War II Brisbane.

Michelle Vlatkovic is of Kamilaroi and Croatian descent. Her writing has been published by Verity La, Overland, Review of Australian Fiction, Gargouille and the Age Newspaper. Michelle is also a First Nations broadcaster with 4ZZZ and PhD candidate at Griffith University.

Oliver Wakelin is Southerly Reviews Editor, and a fiction reader at Overland. He is a USYD law grad, and a PhD candidate at UNSW. His reviews have appeared in ArtsHub, Audrey Journal, Southerly, and elsewhere. Short stories in Seizure, Southerly, and TEXT. A couple of his plays have been read at Sport For Jove Theatre Company. His novel Aos Sí was selected for the longlist of the Kill Your Darlings Unpublished Manuscript Award.

Gavin Yates is a researcher and writer from Melbourne. His poetry has been published in many literary journals, including Cordite Poetry Review, Flash Cove, Foam:e, Inverted Syntax, Otoliths, and Westerly.

Grace Yee writes poetry, short fiction and essays. Her work has recently appeared in Meanjin and Rabbit, and is forthcoming in Overland. She is currently a Creative Fellow at the State Library of Victoria. Southerly 79-1 text.qxp_Layout 1 8/11/19 10:06 Page 228

NOTICE TO CONTRIBUTORS

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