Author: Robert PeckhamPublisher: Profile BooksReviewer: Stephen Keim

A glance at the Acknowledgments section of Fear emphasises that a book on the sociological importance of the emotion of fear has been a project in the mind of Robert Peckham for some time. A working interest in anti-Stalinist Russian literature around the time of the fall of the Soviet Union hints at an interest in fear in the service of totalitarianism.

In the Preface to Fear, Peckham tells of an incident in his life that occurred, much earlier, in 1988 when, as a backpacker attending a funeral in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, of a famous world figure, Bacha Khan, Peckham had found himself in a huge crowd which had, suddenly and unexpectedly, found itself in the middle of an armed attack with explosions occurring all around. His own fear in those circumstances had been a matter of much contemplation during the ensuing years.

Peckham’s brother, Alexander, to whom the book is also dedicated, was an environmentalist and organic cider maker. Alexander died of a malignant brain tumour and Peckham wrote his obituary published in the Guardian in May 2022. In the wake, thereof, Peckham would be forgiven for experiencing the fear associated with the mere vicissitudes of life.   

Peckham was testing ideas at workshops discussing Anxieties, Fear and Panic as early as 2012 and, at that time, wrote shorter works on the subject of fear as part of a contribution to volumes of essays on related subjects.

Both in the Preface and the Acknowledgments, Peckham reveals his own thoughts on geo-political matters when he claims the works of his students and friends in engaging in democratic protests in Hong Kong as a source of inspiration for him, forever. In retrospect, I have some difficulty in understanding western government and media praise for those significantly disruptive protests when we, ourselves, jail climate change protestors for momentarily blocking road traffic.

Fear is a universal. Peckham recognises this, citing both Darwin and American psychologist, Paul Ekman. It is not surprising that, across the eras, writers have turned their minds to describing the emotion and documenting its effects and uses. Peckham does an admirable job in collecting a great many such descriptions from different writers and different periods of history.

The history of human kind is one of violence and cruelty and the exercise of power. Those who have exercised power have instilled fear in those over whom they have ruled. The extent to which the instillation of fear has been uppermost in the strategies and tactics used by rulers has varied greatly over time although even the most benign form of government will rely upon fear of the law and its operation as a means of persuading those for whom anti-social actions are attractive.

In the chapter called The Great Pestilence, Peckham identifies a series of catastrophic events in fourteenth century western Europe among which plague and pandemic are important not only for the deaths they directly caused but, also, indirectly, for the social and religious upheavals they brought in their wake chief of which was the Reformation and its resultant fracturing of Christendom.

In Theatre of Power, Peckham uses as his example of fear in the service of absolutism and the divine right of kings, the long reign of Louis XIV of France from 1643 to 1715. Monarchies like that of Louis, according to Peckham, expertly claimed ownership of fear and built its management into the heart of their political calculus.

Other historical foci of fear examined by Peckham include the horrors caused by European colonialism; the excesses of the French Revolution; the slave trade; the First World War and the horrors of life in its trenches; financial disaster as experienced in the Great Crash of 1929;[1] and modern totalitarianism in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

Fear is brilliantly researched and “the alternative history of the world” traversed in each of the chapters is full of interest.

The history is interesting in its own right whether or not conveyed with an emphasis on the extent to which the events described have given rise to terror or the extent to which the actors in those events have manipulated fear to obtain their objectives including the exercise of power and influence.

By the end, however, the reader might reasonably wonder to what extent the careful tracing of the way in which fears have been experienced over centuries yields lasting lessons about the nature of our human existence.

The emotion of fear is such a universal that, instinctively, we tend to understand it remarkably well from an early age.

[1] I read a brief article, recently, that suggested that the rise of Nazi Germany was not caused by the harsh peace of Versailles (as we were taught) but, rather, by the devastation wreaked upon the German economy by the impact of the Crash. See, for example: https://www.theholocaustexplained.org/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-nazi-rise-to-power/the-role-of-economic-instability/.

Author: Jeff SparrowPublisher: ScribeReviewer: Stephen Keim

Melbourne writer, Jeff Sparrow’s 2021 monograph, Crimes Against Nature: Capitalism and Global Heating (“Crimes”) sorts through well-forgotten histories of marketing and technology to refute the proposition that global heating and other impending environmental catastrophes are the fault of us as opposed to the minority of extremely wealthy people who possess and have access to the vast majority of the world’s resources and exercise inordinate amounts of power and influence.

Most people who care that we are on course to destroy our ability to live safely on this planet are frequently told, by those who are promoting the course to ruin, that global heating is our own fault because we own a car and we buy things at the supermarket that have been produced using fossil fuels. If we fully absorb the message, we find ourselves waiting at a bus stop in the outer suburbs for hours while those who have blamed us drive past us in their latest petrol powered SUV.

The thesis of Crimes is that most of our choices as consumers are pre-ordained for us. We might once have been content to buy most of our products at the corner store or local butcher neither of which continue to exist. We might once have been content to take our own containers to the shop to be refilled but, now, all our goods come with endless wrapping and packaging. As our local stores shut down, we are told by ubiquitous advertising that we love driving to huge shopping centres and that we love walking soulless shopping aisles collecting the goods from the shelf and acting as our own cashiers on the way out. And when we hearken back to the days that we loved shopping local, we are told that all those local shops shut down because we exercised our choice by looking for bargains at Shopping Town Central.

Crimes argues that, from the first adoption of fossil fuels to the ineffectual negotiations on reducing emissions levels, climate change has been driven not by the many but by the few. A tiny coterie has used every weapon at its disposal to coerce or persuade us to accept practices we never wanted. Whether we recycled or rode bikes or switched off unnecessary lights never made any difference. Sparrow quotes Bernie-like figures to the effect that the 26 richest billionaires own as many assets as the 3.8 billion people who comprise the poorest half of the earth’s population. The narratives that we are all guilty and all responsible for global heating are rejected by Crimes. Rather, argues Sparrow, responsibility lies with a set of social and political structures that did not exist in the past and need not exist in the future.

Three of Sparrow’s ventures into history stand out for me. The first involves the origins of the internal combustion engine driven automobile. An interesting sidelight of this narrative is that, as gas guzzlers were being born and becoming popular, they received stiff competition from electric cars. The leading electric car manufacturer experienced a financial collapse and the way was clear for petrol driven vehicles to dominate. This titbit adds a certain contingency to life as we know it, today.

Automobiles, during their emergence were owned by the rich and were unpopular with the many since they were noisy, smelly and dangerous. They disrupted the streets of towns and cities which were then multi-user centres where people walked and gossiped and children played games. All this could be shared, more or less safely, with the horse drawn vehicles that provided transport. Cars, however, were dangerous and killed and injured many people such that laws were promoted restricting the speed of self-driven vehicles for the safety of the populace and the liveability of their neighbourhoods.

  This was when the advertising industry, at the behest of the automobile and gasoline industry, showed their creative talents. The concept of the jay walker, familiar to us, today, though we may be unaware of its origins was invented. “Jay” means unsophisticated, in the nature of a country bumpkin, too unsophisticated to appreciate the beauty and the dangers of automobiles. (Surprisingly, to me, it was never some strange geometrical term describing crossing a road in an arc resembling the letter, ”J”.)

Advertising money meant that pedestrians were slandered in every available medium and blamed for their own deaths and injuries at the hands of automobile drivers. And the laws followed, no longer restricting the rights of drivers to drive at dangerous speeds but penalising pedestrians for using the streets as a communal space as had traditionally been their right.

The second historical anecdote also involves the advertising industry earning big money by flooding the airwaves and other media with a new concept aimed at shifting blame from industry to the ordinary citizen. Before the Second World War, consumers and retailers acted on the basis that drink containers were expected to be re-usable. After the war, both manufacturers of drinks and the packaging industry realised that money was to be made by making containers disposable. The only problem was that the accumulation of rubbish on roadsides, in farmlands and public places was so distressing that legislators were turning to laws that imposed an obligation to make containers re-usable, again.

Manufacturing and packaging capital came together to head off the new laws at the pass. More than twenty organisations came together to create a new organisation called “Keep America Beautiful”, thereby, disguising and separating the purveyors of the message (who stood only to make profits) from the message which was designed to blame all of us as individuals for the accumulating rubbish in our public places. Not only did the genius advertisers manage to disguise the profit-making objectives of their paymasters behind the philanthropic concept of keeping the countryside beautiful but they also created the concept of the litter-bug to transfer moral perfidy upon all of those individuals being sold product in disposable containers. No matter that these same litter-bugs had, dutifully and contentedly, retuned the re-usable containers for generations. The laws requiring re-usability disappeared and laws aimed at individuals, the so-called litterbugs, have been the order of the day, ever since.

The tobacco industry’s scurrilous use of advertising to increase its profits at the expense of public health and the subsequent use of advertising and public relations by the fossil fuel industry to green wash its contribution to global heating are the subject of later chapters.

The third piece of historical learning from Crimes dates back to the industrial revolution. It turns out, looking back, that water wheels were as industrially efficient and much less destructive to humans and their environment than steam power derived from burning coal. But the enclosure movement had driven ordinary people off the commons land they had enjoyed for centuries and a desperately poor workforce had accumulated in the cities. So, to utilise and exploit the desperately poor, manufacturing industry turned their collective back on water power and started burning coal. The industrial revolution which resulted was, thereby, much more profitable to the industrial barons; much worse for the environment; and came at a much greater cost to the lives and well-being of ordinary workers.

The theme from each of these examples is that what is made to appear inevitable and unavoidable was, in fact, manipulated into existence by decisions of the few made for their own profits and benefit and at the expense of the many.    

Sparrow’s analysis touches upon many subjects.

A particularly interesting chapter concerns the way in which Indigenous societies in Australia and the Americas cared for their environment and existed without making destructive demands upon it. Similar observations are made of the poorer agricultural classes in European countries who preserved the commons on which they depended and led lives that were materially poor but punctuated by feasts and religious celebrations and festivals. Settler colonialism, and, in Europe, itself, enclosure, disrupted these simpler modes of living and not only wrought havoc upon the lives of the poor but also on the environments which had been previously been carefully preserved as the demands of capitalism required exploitation of the land in every possible profitable way.

A later chapter discusses the way in which the national parks movement, while indeed driven by concern at the loss of wilderness areas, was driven by the desire to preserve natural areas for big game hunters. Ironically, areas such as that which became Yellowstone National Park were still being used and looked after by Indigenous Americans living their traditional lifestyles. The “conservationists” could not tolerate this and, so, laws were passed to exclude Indigenous Americans from using their traditional country, now national park, for their traditional purposes.

Crimes is a peeling the scales from one’s eyes experience. Not surprisingly, even very recent history is buried and forgotten because it is not convenient to those who have benefitted from the events involved.

It is important that historians like Sparrow continue to remind us of crimes that we have forgotten and of some that we had never dreamed to have occurred.

Crimes is an interesting and important book, well worth the read. 

Author: Matt HaigPublisher: CanongateReviewer: Stephen Keim

Matt Haig is a purveyor of speculative fiction and The Midnight Library (“Library”) is a workof speculative fiction.

Haig was born in 1975. He has written both fiction and non-fiction and works for adults and children. A lot of Haig’s work touches on issues of mental health and this interest is acknowledged to have been inspired by a mental breakdown he, himself, experienced when he was 24 years old. Haig has published nearly 30 books, including eight novels since his first novel in 2004.

Nora Seed is 35 years of age. Conveniently for the book’s thesis, she is absurdly talented. In her mid-teens, she had the potential to compete and be successful in competitive swimming at world championship and Olympic Games levels. As a musician, she was an accomplished, self-taught piano player with an ability to perform in both modern and classical genres. She also wrote songs and performed as a vocalist in an emerging rock band.

Nora was also academically talented with a passion for philosophy including the works of Henry David Thoreau and Aristotle. She had strong humanitarian values and wanted to contribute to preventing climate change from destroying the planet’s ability to support human life.

By the time she was 35, however, at the opening of Library, Nora felt that all of this talent had been wasted; she had let the most important people in her life down; and that she was a waste of a carbon footprint on the earth. She had not even managed to escape the town of Bedford, the county seat of Bedfordshire, a matter most young people in that town might regard as sufficient reason for deep depressive episodes.

And, so, she overdosed.

Rather than running into Lucifer or Saint Peter, Nora finds herself in a Tardis-like library where time is frozen at midnight and the infinite array of shelves contain books all bearing covers of different shades of green. The one other person who shares the library with Nora is her old school librarian, Mrs Elms, who had, during Nora’s schooling, been kind to Nora, especially, in moments of tragedy and grief.

Mrs Elms explains that Nora is in a unique state of inbetweenness, between life and death, akin to a modern-day Schrodinger’s Cat. Each of the infinity of books (apart from a heavy tome documenting each and every regret that Nora had experienced during her life) represents a possible life that Nora might have lived had she made a different decision to the one she had made at a particular point in time.

Better still, Nora can choose any of those books such that, by doing so, Nora can be parachuted into a particular life at a precise moment and find out how her life might have been had she not made the decisions that led to the sorry state that led her to take an excessive and unhealthy number of sedatives but moments before. There are complications from the circumstance that Nora has no memory when she arrives from this alternative life. Her new close friends and partners and even mere workmates and acquaintances think she is a bit odd since she asks about things with which this Nora was intimately acquainted from the days or years before her parachuting in. But, in most of these lives, this is the least of her troubles.  

And, so, Nora finds out what would have happened had she not backed out of her wedding just days from that event; what her life would have been like had she not abandoned her father’s dream of her becoming a swimming champion; and what success would have been achieved had she not abandoned the rock band in which her only sibling, Joe, and his best mate, Ravi, and she were the would be stars of the future.

The terms and conditions of this arrangement were pretty favourable to Nora. If she did not like these alternative lives, she could come back to the library and try another one. If she were content, she could stay in that life and live it to the end. There was even a possibility of going back to her own life if she changed her mind and chose to go back.

As in most speculative fiction, the improbable imaginings which make up the plot in Library are justified by reference to scientific theory. Library draws on quantum mechanics and the idea of parallel universes to add internal plausibility to the plot and maintain the reader’s suspension of disbelief.

But Library, properly understood, as with many of Haig’s works, is about psychological not scientific truths. Most of the alternative lives experienced by Nora turn out to be unliveable such that she returns to the library, quick smart. It turned out to be a good decision to back out of her wedding and not such a bad decision to give up competitive swimming or the dream of rock stardom.

This experience could have led to a negative conclusion. If giving up on my most deeply held dream were a blessing, it might just be the case that I was destined for a terrible life no matter what I chose to do. So, giving up on the prospect of happiness is the only sensible choice. But abandoning regrets might have its own positives and its own unexpected consequences.

So, Nora continues to explore her alternative lives. She learns valuable lessons on the way. Eventually, she must apply those learnings and make a definitive choice.

I read Library in two days, a rarity for me. For much of the first half of the book, with a degree of detachment, I admired its clever construction and its fine use of geographical, scientific and philosophical learning. But, as the crisis was reached and the denouement unfolded, my eyelashes were wet and it became difficult to see the words on the page without repeated blinking.

My test of a good novel was met.  

Author: Bonnie GarmusPublisher: Penguin Books[1]Reviewer: Stephen Keim

I had read the blurb of Lessons in Chemistry (“Lessons”). The opening pages start in 1961. Elizabeth Zott has already resigned from her research institute and her five year old daughter, Madeline, is attending school. Elizabeth appears to be a single mother. Elizabeth is already hosting Supper at Six, the television show that purports to be about cooking but which, at the same time, delivers to its viewers the eponymous “lessons in chemistry”.

I was a little disappointed. No matter how popular Supper at Six might have been and no matter how brilliant the concept of teaching chemistry and cooking at the same time might be, a novel based on following a TV show from episode to episode was going to be a little boring. I was hoping to hear much more about the lead up that brought Elizabeth Zott and the reader to this point in time.

I need not have worried.

Because, from that point, Lessons sweeps backwards and forward in time. Much of the action dates from around 1954. One version of the start of the narrative is Elizabeth barging into the laboratory of the Hastings Research Institute’s undoubted star chemist, the arrogant Calvin Evans, to requisition beakers unneeded by Evans but essential for Eizabeth’s important but massively under resourced work and laboratory. This incident and a subsequent inconvenient bout of vomiting has unforeseen consequences, including romance.

As a romantic comedy, however, Lessons fails miserably since most of the romance occurs in the early parts of the narrative. And the romance is not without a degree of related tragedy.

Garmus was born in 1957. Lessons is her debut novel. She is, however, a proficient and practised purveyor of words, having been a copy-writer for much of her working life.

Lessons weighs in at 382 pages (without the acknowledgements). Not an extraordinarily long novel. But Lessons is, undoubtedly, a big novel. It contains big characters who will make the unlikely occur. Elizabeth Zott is on the spectrum, fearless, unfiltered and unstoppable. Madeline is created and encouraged in her own unfiltered precocity by Elizabeth. Lessons features a dog mistakenly named 6.30 who, nonetheless, manages a human vocabulary of over 900 words and possesses dog knowledge that far surpasses that minor achievement; a reverend minister who confesses to not believing in God; a scientist nominated on multiple occasions for the Nobel Prize notwithstanding that he lost his parents and then his aunt through tragedy and was then raised in an oppressive Catholic Boys Home in Iowa; a well-meaning and talented but spineless television producer; and more than one sexual predator who, eventually, misjudge and choose the wrong victim. Lessons, also, manages to introduce the sport of rowing to a whole new and previously indifferent audience.

The theme of Lessons is society’s inability to judge and treat women on their merits such that women are never taken seriously and they do not receive the opportunities that men of the same and much less talent and ability do receive, on a daily basis. In Lessons, these events are taking place in the 1950s and 60s but both the novel and Garmus’s own experience indicate that these problems are timeless.

The lessons are, ultimately, neither of chemistry nor cooking. There is an internal lesson to reject the assumptions that society seeks to impose on you as a woman. The external lesson is, notwithstanding the acknowledged difficulties and loading of the dice against you, to resist and to assert your own worth.

Thirty years ago, I read every book by John Irving on which I could lay my hands starting, of course, with The World According to Garp and working my way through The Cider House Rules, Setting Free the Bears, The Hotel New Hampshire and A Prayer for Owen Meany.  

Lessons reminds me strongly of Irving’s work. It manages a similarly complexly interwoven plot weaving its way back and forth in time with apparently incidental incidents and references receiving their full significance in the denouement. Lessons introduces the reader to characters who are thought to be both rare and unlikely in real life. We grow to understand and love these unusual people in ways that we might have considered impossible in our own lives. And Lessons, also, as in an Irving novel, through its intriguing plot and its cast of unlikely characters, deals with moral issues of great importance.

For all of these reasons, Lessons is up there with the best of Irving’s works.

Lessons has been adapted to television, starring Brie Larsen, and is available on Apple TV.

I read Lessons in about a day. That is a tribute as much to the engaging nature of the characters as to the allurement of the cleverly unfolding plot.

Lessons comes highly recommended by this reviewer.

[1] Lessons in Chemistry was first published in April 2022 by Doubleday.

Author: Simon ClearyPublisher: UQPReviewer: Stephen Keim

Everything is Water (“Water”) is Simon Cleary’s fourth published book. His earlier three books, The Comfort of Figs, Closer to Stone and The War Artist are novels. Water is non-fiction and documents Cleary’s 27 day journey from, arguably, the source of the Brisbane River to its mouth. Mainly slogging it on foot, broken only by a pleasant and speedy canoe ride, with a boat trip from the city to Moreton Bay at the end, Cleary endured a harrowing month achieving his ambition of exploring the unexpected complexity that lies beneath what is lifelong familiar.

Cleary, whose father was the Cleary of the extremely respected Toowoomba law firm, Cleary and Lee, grew up in Toowoomba; spent lost childhood hours and days playing in the creeks that cascaded eastwards off the escarpment of the Toowoomba Range; and ventured, for various reasons, into neighbouring townships such as Helidon. Each of his novels have drawn upon Cleary’s childhood environs while also venturing far afield including, in the case of Closer to Stone, to the civil war torn Western Sahara.

Water falls into that pattern, involving a journey from a creek just like his childhood play haunts and whose waters form part of the same catchment and, guided by gravity and the fates, empty into the same waters of Moreton Bay. Familiarity is also found in the urban reaches of the river in that Cleary has lived, studied and worked in Brisbane for most of his life since starting university in the eighties.

Water, then, is a travel book. Travel books are a wonderful genre of non-fiction. The problem for the travel writer, however, is that the act of travelling, no matter how exciting the concept and the act of travelling, itself, is difficult to translate, in an interesting way, into three hundred pages or so of printed words.

Eric Hansen’s A Stranger in the Forest involved Hansen’s attempt to be the first person with a European heritage to walk across the mountainous island of Borneo. His journey involved thousands of kilometres on foot and seven months in sunless rainforest. An account of seven months of such struggle has a great capacity to be even less enjoyable to read than the journey, itself. The travel writer must, therefore, find ways to make the endlessly repetitious interesting. Hansen travelled with local Indigenous Penan people as his guides. One way in which Hansen entertained his readers was to tell the story of his shyness in joining his guides in their river shitting practices.

Every morning, the guides would undergo their daily personal hygiene by standing in the river, doing what was required, chatting as they did so. Hansen was torn between respecting his guides’ local custom and his own western shyness in sharing these daily moments. Hansen’s solution was found in gradualism. He started about two hundred metres upstream of his colleagues and, day by day, moved closer so that, eventually, he felt comfortable sharing a chat while he and his colleagues made themselves more comfortable for facing whatever challenges the forthcoming day brought. What reader could not enjoy travel adventure writing when such interesting anecdotes dilute the author’s description of his otherwise unremitting struggle?

Cleary was assisted in making Water fascinating by his misfortune in conducting his journey during the May flood rains which produced the second flood event for 2022. What had been planned as mainly a relatively easy walk on the edge of a relatively narrow running stream with ample dry ground on either side and an easy ability to rock hop from one side to the other to choose the best terrain turned into a logistical nightmare.      

Cleary and his walking companions were forced by the rising waters to the high banks of the stream where they found, variously, private property, head high weeds, dense lantana, continuous mud and, on one occasion close to impenetrable scrub as day by day challenges. What might have been the challenge of consistently walking 15-20 kilometres per day in passably good walking conditions gave way to a series of true mystery stories focussed upon whether Cleary would even make it to his planned bivouac location for that day. Sometimes, the mystery involved whether it was even worth setting out, that day, in the light of the barriers presented by the downstream flooding. Some days it was not worth setting out.

One of the most discouraging barriers to progress were the junctions of flooded tributaries with the main stream. In non-flooding conditions, the encounter with a tributary would be solved merely by crossing to the opposite bank. On a number of occasions, Cleary had to backtrack up the river to cross over at the last viable fording place. On other occasions, the only solution was to follow the creek upstream until it narrowed sufficiently to avail of a crossing. On one such occasion, the crossing was successful but not without a real risk of being swept away by the waters through which the walkers waded.

Even life threatening adventures, however, are insufficient, on their own, to maintain the reader’s interest in non-fiction writing. Cleary is aware that a tale of a journey needs more than the journey, itself. Cleary, to which his three novels attest, is a meticulous researcher. Water is as much the story of the Brisbane River and the country through which it flows as it is of Cleary’s journey along its course. Cleary’s research involved many hours in the library. It also involved many hours contacting and communicating with landowners whose properties adjoin the river.

The in-person research produced permission to cross private property. It also created friendships and offers of camping spots and accommodation for the journey. It also yielded folklore and yarns including, notably, a local Brisbane Valley variation on the tales that bushranger, Dan Kelly, survived the fire and escaped to live out his days, quietly, in anonymity and freedom.   

The scholarly research finds its way into Water in many different ways. The full title, Everything is Water is taken from Thales of Miletus and recalls a phase in Western philosophy in which answers to the nature of the universe question were being expressed in terms of underlying realities from which all matter was formed. Cleary, also, links his vision and finding of meaning of his river and other great rivers to the inspiration of Langston Hughes’ The Negro Speaks of Rivers. Cleary recognises with specificity the Indigenous owners of the land through which he walks and the river flows as well as recognising the colonial settler pioneers whose labour forged a means of living for the generations who followed them. Cleary notes the dispossession and dispersion of those same Indigenous owners by the colonial settler process and the massacres which were part and parcel of this process although, necessarily, Cleary’s treatment is less detailed than that found in David Marr’s Killing for Country, a text covering much of the same land traversed by Cleary’s journey.

Cleary also manages to relate the connections between John Clements Wickham (whose name is memorialised in a number of Brisbane Streets), Charles Darwin (whose name is memorialised in a northern Australian city) and the Galapagos tortoise who finally lived out its days at Australia Zoo. Wickham and Darwin were shipmates on the Beagle and it was Wickham who, as captain of that famous ship, on a later voyage in September, 1839, named Port Darwin for his former companion. The tortoise featured in a later interaction between the two men when Wickham had retired from the British Navy and had been appointed Police Magistrate of the Moreton Bay District.

As well as the struggles of getting from one spot to another, the many rich gems of the history of the land and people and Cleary’s observations of birds and mammals and plants, Water contains many of Cleary’s thoughts and speculations of the kind that four weeks of physical demands and limited human company are wont to produce. These are flagged early in a short statement by Cleary’s older son, Dominic, one of his early walking companions. Dominic said words to the effect that his father knew stuff and he should not be loath to share it with wider audiences. This was a bit unkind to a father who had already shared three well-researched and beautifully written novels with the wider world but family will always be family.

As if on cue, Cleary shares many of such stuff in Water, putatively, at least, in the form of his thoughts along the journey. What emerges in bits and pieces across the 320 pages is a philosophy of sorts. Cleary expresses wonderment at the workings of nature and the distances of space and time. He ponders the massive changes wrought by natural forces against a background of apparent unchanging fixity. Cleary admires the human capacity to love and be kind while, at the same time, he is saddened by humankind’s capacity for cruelty, rapine, murder and plunder. The despoliation of nature is an equal source of sadness revealed as it is in the evidence observed by Cleary at every point on the journey.

Cleary resists, however, a holier than thou stance of casting blame on others, recognising that many of the drastic changes to the river have been the source of benefits to him and his family as they live their suburban lives.

One lesson of Water is that we need journeys and time to ponder because finding a viable philosophy for life is neither an easy task nor ever a completed project.              

Author: Viet Thanh NguyenPublisher: CorsairReviewer: Stephen Keim

The Sympathizer is framed as a confession of a prisoner addressed to the commandant of the prison in which he is detained. The narrator, who is the sympathizer of the title, is never identified by name, even as the sympathizer of the title. The identity of the commandant is one of the great plot twists of the book, indeed, one of the great plot twists in literature.

The circumstances of the narrator – past and present – are revealed by the confession. Indeed, the confession is much criticised by commandant and his assistant, the commissar, for its rambling nature, more like a novel than a confession.

The Sympathizer is a response to American and, more generally, western coverage of the Vietnam war. Vietnamese people are invisible in most such coverage except as objects against which American heroes vaunt their heroism.

Nguyen constructs his first person narrator as the perfect vehicle through which a more nuanced and less monolithic portrayal may be achieved. The opening two sentences of The Sympathizer reads: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces. Perhaps, not surprisingly, I am also a man of two minds.”

At the beginning of the novel, the narrator is a captain in the Vietnamese army. He is assigned to the counter-espionage section of the Republic of Vietnam’s police force. As a result, he is expected to interrogate and torture suspected Viet Cong spies and operatives. He is the trusted aide-de-camp of the general in charge of that section of the police force.

The narrator has a mentor and handler, Claude, who is a CIA officer responsible for assisting the counter-espionage work of the RVN. Claude is a very charming and likeable figure who carries more than a passing resemblance to the eponymous Quiet American of Graham Greene’s novel set two decades earlier in a similar part of Indochina. Claude saw the latent talent of the narrator when the narrator was just nine years old and had mentored him and assisted his education and career development since that time. The education had included time in an American college which the narrator had used well to develop proficiency in understanding American culture and an ability to understand and to communicate with Americans.

It is Claude who carefully taught the narrator and the fellow members of his cohort in the sophisticated techniques of psychological torture used by the CIA and expected of those recruits in their important work. It is Claude who, approvingly, supervises the narrator’s work when he is called to exercise his techniques upon suspects who are fellow Viet Cong. He must, of course, do such work with appropriate skill and intensity so as not to blow the cover of his important placement at the heart of the enemy’s intelligence apparatus.

The narrator is one of a trio of blood brothers who, as teenagers, had cut their respective wrists and merged their actual blood promising eternal loyalty to one another. The other two are Bon and Man. This loyalty and love have been maintained despite Bon’s enthusiastic membership of the RVN military and his love of killing in the interests of his cause. And this loyalty has persisted despite, unbeknownst to Bon, both Man and the narrator being devoted spies for the Viet Cong. Indeed, Man is higher in the organisation and operates as the narrator’s handler receiving his information and directing his spying activities.  

The Sympathizer opens in the final days of the surrender of Saigon. The narrator is organising, in liaison with, and receiving assistance from, Claude, the escape of his general and his family and his hangers on in one of the last planes to depart the capital. Both the general and Man make the decision that the narrator should leave on the plane. In consultation with the general, the narrator gets to make most of the decisions as to who will be on that plane and who will miss out. As part of his devotion to Bon, he makes sure there are places for Bon and his wife and child.

The action moves forward to the new life in America with the narrator still acting as the general’s right-hand man, assisting the general and his family with coping with the new life in an unwelcoming country which makes little allowance for the important positions they once held in a country treated as one of America’s most important allies and strategic assets. He is also required to assist with the general’s grandiose plans to re-conquer his former home in a guerilla infiltration across the Laotian border via Thailand. When the general, in his paranoia, decides that one of his former majors may be a spy whom the narrator must arrange to assassinate, Bon’s love of killing is of great assistance to the narrator.

As the action goes forward, the confession also goes back, giving important background to the narrator’s position. The narrator is the product of a liaison between a French Catholic priest and one of his devoted practitioners. These familial origins make the narrator a perpetual outsider, looked down upon by his Vietnamese peers and regarded as Asian by westerners, whether European or American. The Catholic priest father is neither remorseful nor conscious of any fatherly duty and seems to go out of his way to make the narrator’s childhood as poor and unpleasant as possible. The narrator more than hints that his inability to truly belong, or his corresponding ability to belong everywhere, assist him in the double lives he must live as a spy.    

The Sympathizer is a satire in which no one is spared, especially not the narrator himself. In the narrator’s case, his love life after the return to America is a source of much humour. In addition, American cruelty and hypocrisy comes through strongly in the actions and personality of Claude. Nor are the Vietnamese supporters of the RVN or the Viet Cong spared criticism.

The Sympathizer, because of its satire and despite the suffering it portrays, is extremely funny. Comparisons with Catch 22 are not misplaced. Craziness and disorder infect every aspect of the action.

In his new life in America, the narrator gets to engage with the maker of a proposed new film on the Vietnam war. Reluctantly at first but, later, with apparent conviction, the filmmaker hires the narrator as a consultant for the making of the film in the Philippines in order to ensure that the Vietnamese people are fairly portrayed in the film. He becomes a wrangler of the actors hired to play Vietnamese characters, and not much more. His presence provides PR cover for the filmmaker’s unaltered intentions to make the most American of American films, projecting the country’s centuries long belief in its manifest destiny as God’s special country.

This setup allows The Sympathizer to satirise United States filmmaking, especially, when it seeks to portray other cultures and, especially, when the subject matter is war. The most obviously likely target of the satire is Apocalypse Now, but the lesson applies equally to most genres, including the western and its portrayal of native Americans.

The Sympathizer is an engaging and enjoyable read. While the comparisons with Catch 22 and The Quiet American should not be pushed too far, the reader’s enjoyment and desire to read just one more chapter, before midnight strikes and the light must definitely be turned off, is no less than with those two classics.

Just as importantly, The Sympathizer does succeed in presenting a nuanced view of the conflict it portrays. Even when satire is most scorching in its treatment of an individual, a movement, an organisation or a culture, empathy is present at the same time and the reader understands what is seeking to be achieved and through what cultural prisms the world is being perceived.      

Viet Thanh Nguyen is a massive talent. The Sympathizer creates a genre of its own and Nguyen is an active writer continuing to publish new works which are likely to challenge our expectations of what a writer can achieve. The Sympathizer was published in 2015. His treasure trove of subsequent books can be found here.

Author: Paul LynchPublisher: Oneworld PublicationsReviewer: Stephen Keim

Two quotations form the epigraph of Prophet Song. The first is that famous passage from Ecclesiastes: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done; and there is no new thing under the sun.

The second is a more obscure passage from Bertolt Brecht:

 “In the dark times

will there be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing,

About the dark times.”

One should not judge a novel by its epigraph. One might infer, however, that the passage from Ecclesiastes signals a claim by Lynch that the fictional events that he traverses in Prophet Song are both common place and universal. The Brecht quote, although more obscure, suggests that the need for all forms of art is even greater in societies that are suffering conflict and oppression.

For Lynch, for whom Prophet Song is his fifth novel and whose writing is acclaimed for the poetic and lyrical nature of the prose he produces, the title appears to be a claim both to be providing a song about the dark times and to be satisfying that need for societies that are experiencing such suffering.

It seems inapposite, despite Ireland’s centuries long history of colonial oppression by its neighbouring empire and the sectarian violence that is the enduring legacy of that oppression, that Ireland would be the setting for a country which has elected a populist government and is sliding into a state of merciless authoritarianism. Especially, for Australian readers, so many of whom carry some Irish heritage with them, whether this is reflected in our current family names or not, Ireland seems too fun loving, too compassionate and too down to earth for extremism to flourish sufficiently to seize the reins of government power.

The unlikely nature of Ireland as a setting adds power to the warning that the reader discerns from every page of Prophet Song.

Eilish Stack is a mother of three children, the youngest of whom is little more than a toddler and two of whom are of school age. Her husband, Larry, is a full-time official of the Teachers’ Union. Larry is still at work as the novel opens. As darkness rapidly falls among the cherry trees in the backyard of their Dublin home, Eilish’s evening is disrupted by a knock on the door by two officers of the Garda National Service Bureau, the political wing of the new government’s police force. They are polite and ask for Larry and, in his absence, leave a card for him to contact them.

Things have obviously changed since the recent election of a populist government and the parliament has enacted emergency powers including the ability to suspend protections in the Constitution. Eilish and Larry are stressed by developments (including the invitation to attend for an interview at the Garda offices) but also carry a sense of disbelief that things have progressed as far as the evidence, otherwise, suggests.

Larry’s visit to the Garda reveals to him a file containing a series of outrageous allegations (the contents of which the reader is left to infer). This only increases Larry’s sense of disbelief. “Wait until the general secretary hears about this” is his response.

Larry and Eilish’s discussions centre about a planned strike by teachers and a planned march by the strikers. Eilish flirts with advising caution but, before Larry leaves for work, gives him the go ahead to give the union and the teachers the go-ahead. In the light of future events, Eilish questions her action in giving such advice. One senses that her instincts were for caution but, ultimately, Eilish felt that it was not her place to hold her husband back from following the beliefs that had perfused his whole life’s actions.

Larry disappears and Eilish finds herself possessing a new status among the families of the disappeared.

Prophet Song is one family’s experience of a country’s slide into totalitarianism. Even more so, it is one woman, Eilish’s, experience of such events. She continues to work at her own job outside the family. She continues to look after her family. As time passes, the normal friction associated with children growing up and obtaining their own attitudes and worldview operates in this new everchanging society. Eilish seeks to protect and reassure her children but her sometimes Candide like expressions of optimism that things will get better rather than worse fail to convince, at least, her two older children, Bailey and Molly.

At work, some colleagues sport the badges of the governing party and their influence grows in the running of the organisation. The pressure to come on board or leave increases as well.

An armed resistance emerges. A civil war ensues. Every event impacts upon Eilish and her children. Nothing continues to be heard of Larry’s location or even his continuing existence. This notwithstanding, Eilish continues in her head to discuss the events of the day with and seek advice from her absent husband.   

The unremitting darkness of Eilish’s existence is reinforced by the layout of the typesetting. Paragraphs are absent. There are no inverted commas. Everything is observed through Eilish’s experience. Sections of narrative run for pages at a time. A section break occur after those several pages. Each section is like a mini-chapter and the next section commences with a slight break in time or location so that a new narrative commences. The chapters, themselves, do commence, each on a new page, but they carry only numbers.

Despite the bleakness, reinforced in this way by the layout and structure of the novel, the prose that Lynch produces is beautiful and, indeed, lyrical. Prophet Song does feel to the reader like a song notwithstanding that it is, indeed, a song about the dark times.

In an interview with PBS News Hour’s Geoffrey Brown, Lynch references a passage in Prophet Song in which Eilish has the realisation that the end of the world is local. Lynch says that the end of the world is always happening and, sometimes, it comes to our neighbourhood. During and since the writing of Prophet Song, Lynch has had in mind events in Syria, in Ukraine and Russia, and in Palestine.

This truth that the end of the world can find us, wherever we live, even in mundane Ireland and even in our own neighbourhoods, is, perhaps, the prophecy of which Prophet Song is made. “Of arms and the woman”, he sings.

Author: Noviolet BulawayoPublisher: Vintage (part of Penguin Random House)Reviewer: Stephen Keim

Glory is set in the fictional African country of Jidada.

The action opens with a rally of the governing party in support of the Father of the Nation who has been President of Jidada for forty years and who shows no sign of retiring or resigning. The attendees of the rally know what is expected of them to support the personality cult of their president and wear Jidada Party regalia suitably embossed with the face of the president.

The members of the Seat of Power Inner Circle are in attendance at the rally and occupy chairs within the white tent set up to protect them from the broiling sun. Among the Inner Circle sat the president’s female partner, Doctor Sweet Mother of the nation. The title reflected Sweet Mother’s award of a Ph. D. awarded, as the reader finds out later, in response to a phonecall demanding to know why the university had not already offered the degree in recognition of the caller’s eminent position in the nation.

The Sweet Mother, along with the Father of the Nation and the Vice-President and others, get to address the rally. She uses her speech to castigate the vice-president as a forever traitor to the revolution and the nation. This augurs badly for the vice-president since attacks by Dr Sweet Mother on other heroes of the party and the nation have led, in short order, to their removal from the inner circle and other severe detriments.

The history of Jidada echoes that of many African countries. The country had been a long term colony of a European power. A bitter war of independence had been necessary to end the imperial control of the country. Soon after the leaders of the rebellion had assumed power and commenced to rebuild the shattered former colony, a faction had unleashed a savage repression in order to seize total control of the country. Those who suffered in that repression and the massacres and the cruelties it entailed were largely of different tribal heritages to the faction which seized power. The repression did not spare those who had fought bravely in the war to end imperial control. Indeed, because of the prestige provided by their actions in the war, it was considered necessary to target and to eliminate them and many of their families and to do so with the greatest cruelty.

It is a feature of Glory that all of the characters are animals. Father of the Nation and his vice-president are horses. Dr Sweet Mother is a donkey. The security police, known as the Jidada Defenders are dogs of the most vicious kind. The obvious comparison is with George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Bulawayo has said that the comparison with Orwell’s fictional revolution was the product of conversations among the general public in the wake of the 2017 removal of Robert Mugabe as president of Zimbabwe. The resulting governance of Zimbabwe fell well short of expectations such that people began to say that Zimbabwe was like Animal Farm.

The effect of adopting animalification of people in Glory is a little different. Orwell characterised the tendency, in the wake of a hard fought evolution, to authoritarianism by making the pigs the new ruling faction. It was also the pigs who invented the propaganda to justify the new tendencies giving rise to such enduring terminology such as “newspeak”. Apart from the dogs’ aptitude for violence in the creation of governing order, the actions and personalities of actors in the novel is not generally attributable to what species of animal they are. Indeed, even the tribalism which leads to factionalism is not species based.

The action in Glory is not precisely dated. Past events are however described as occurring in specific years. The political rally with which the novel opens may be seen, by reference to those past events, as occurring in about 2020 or a little earlier. This gives a curious feel to things. Animal Farm, published in 1945, now feels a very old book. A new Animal Farm, set in contemporary times, seems a little askew, in that even Jidadan animals have access to the internet and are strong fans of every kind of social media. One could never imagine Orwell’s animals living in the age of the internet.

Glory is written with a Zimbabwean creole flavour to the English. Frequently, the narration interpolates “tholokuthi” into a phrase or sentence. The context suggests that the word works as a kind of exclamation indicator. Other reviews suggest that its meaning is “only to discover”. “Jidada” is frequently referred to as “Jidada with a da and another da” as if to emphathise the wonderful uniqueness of this country.  On occasion, happenings will be disclosed by the narration with the introduction that even the stones and sticks were aware of the particular fact being disclosed. The wonderful complexly African names of every character involved also gives a very localised flavour to the language of the novel.

The opening description of the rally and its protagonists reveals to the reader the sorry pass to which Jidada has come. Soon, however, Dr Sweet Mother is revealed to have overplayed her cards and a palace coup is effected to remove the president and the first femal as is Dr Sweet Mother’s other title. The coup is effected by the dogs who are the Generals who lead and control the Defenders. The vice president is made the acting president, one suspects, as a figurehead, and he is marketed by a new personality cult as the Saviour of the Nation. It is the former Sweet Mother who is portrayed as the chief animal from whom the nation needed to be saved.

The coup is marketed as the New Dispensation and the world at large and the people of Jidada are given to believe that a new liberality, an end to corruption and free, fair and credible elections are about to occur.

At this point, the focus of the third person omniscient narration turns from the national stage and the world through powerful people to a young female goat who is returning to her home village after a self-imposed exile. This is Destiny and the past and the present and the emerging future tend to be observed through the eyes of Destiny, her mother, their neighbours and the animals of the village and the ordinary animals of Jidada. These include cats, ducks, geese, cows and, as we know from Destiny’s presence in the action, goats. At times, the narration turns into the second person plural as if the whole village and the animals of Jidada are confessing what they should have known or should have done differently in the past.     

With the focus on the animals of the village and on Destiny and her family, in particular, the reader’s empathy is engaged as one is forced to endure the horror and trauma and violence of the oppression that occurred forty years before and which has been repeated, numerous times in Jidada’s history since then.

The New Dispensation, of course, turns out to be a fraud and the free, fair and credible elections, against all belief, tholokuthi, return the Saviour of the Nation and the Jidada Party to power.

The restraint shown by the government while it was selling its new image and, at the same time, stealing the election, is not necessary anymore and a new round of oppressive violence is unleashed.

This is the age of the internet, however, and dissent continues to circulate, online. This is described in the text as Jidada being two countries: that which existed on the internet and the Country Country in which one acted much more circumspectly. Despite the dangers posed by the Defenders, the online discussions begin to leak into the other Jidada.

While these events are unfolding, Destiny is finding out who she is and the history of her family of whom she, previously, had no knowledge. She and her mother, also, bridge the gaps in knowledge and experience which had prevented them from communicating in any meaningful way. And she is prepared and empowered to take part in the events which are unfolding.

Glory is about Zimbabwe. The author acknowledges as much. The proposition is supported by Destiny’s visit to the abandoned village in which, forty years earlier, most of her family had been murdered which is named Bulawayo although this village is said to be distinct from the city of the same name of which it forms part.   

But Glory is about much more than one country. It is about the emergence of authoritarianism and oppression in all countries. It is about why revolutions lose their ideals and fail and have to continue as a parody of what they promised to deliver. It is also about what can make revolutions succeed when all power and the ability to use force seems to be centred in one group of animals. It highlights the ultimate fact that even the most powerful and ruthless animals depend on the cooperation of other animals and that ruling others by force, at the end of the day, requires a modicum of consent by those who are ruled.

For these reasons, the novel is worthy of Animal Farm. Just as with Animal Farm, Glory is not about a single set of events. Just as with Animal Farm, the lessons of Glory are universal, not particular.

Authors: Marcia Langton & Aaron CornPublisher: Thames & Hudson Australia[1]Reviewer: Stephen Keim

Law: the Way of the Ancestors (“Law”), published in 2023, is the sixth volume in the First Knowledges series. The preceding volumes have addressed the topics of Songlines, Design, Country, Astronomy, and Plants. Three further volumes have followed it: Innovation, Medicine and Seasons.

The First Knowledges series is edited by Margo Neale, Senior Indigenous Curator and Principal Advisor to the Director at the Australian Museum. Neale, in an introduction to Law, describes the books in the series as showing how traditional knowledge, beliefs, systems and practices inform contemporary life for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and, indeed, for all people who have the will and knowledge to take them on, to listen and to learn. Neale adds that this kind of respectful engagement could be the path to true belonging in Australia.

Neale is of Aboriginal and Irish descent, from the Kulin nation with Gumbayngirr clan connections.

Each book in the series is co-authored. Neale explains that co-authorship offers a broader range of perspectives and knowledge from different cultural backgrounds, lived experience and research. Neale refers to the expertise of knowledge holders from Aboriginal and Western disciplines and the power that comes from such collaborations.

The idea of different backgrounds and experience is developed in the first chapter of Law which follows Neale’s introduction.

First, Marcia Langton, and, then, Aaron Corn, writing separately in this chapter, set out aspects of their life journey towards an understanding of Indigenous knowledge.

Marcia Langton has a Yiman and Bidjara heritage. Her distinguished career as a writer and academic has resulted in her appointments as a Redmond Barry Distinguished Professor and Associate Provost at Melbourne University.

Langton states that, as a child living in south-west Queensland in a native camp on the edge of town, she did not realise that the special rules for Aboriginal life such as not walking in front of adults or speaking while adults were speaking were laws. She was, however, fascinated by the rituals of adults in her life such as when they were treating sickness or worrying about spirits.

In contrast, Langton’s experience of teachings in school about “savages” who had no idea about law, property and property law were so alien to her experience of the people she knew that she experienced such teachings as an elaborate lie.

Langton, then thirty years old, listened to Eddie Mabo speaking at a conference in Townsville in August 1981. Mabo was the first person that Langton met who clearly articulated that Indigenous Laws existed.

Langton credits the great anthropologist, WEH Stanner, with recognition of the importance of the rules that underlie ceremony and describes her excitement at witnessing a makarrata ceremony at the Yuendumu Sports Carnival similar to that described by Stanner in the 1930s. Langton’s fascination with and desire to write about the laws that govern the intricacies of Aboriginal life led to her writing her doctoral thesis on the subject.

Langton concludes her explanation of her personal perspective by stating that both her personal experiences in everyday life and in public contexts, and her academic training and work, have provided her with some skills for describing the resonating presence of Aboriginal laws in Australian society despite the grand failure of that society to recognise them. Langton hopes that she has done justice to the ways of the ancestors.  

Aaron Corn is Professor and Inaugural Director of the Indigenous Knowledge Institute and convenor of the PH D in Indigenous Knowledge course at Melbourne University. Corn grew up on the Gold Coast of Queensland in the 1970s and 80s. Despite an absence of meaningful exposure to Indigenous perspectives, Corn was fascinated by the topic of Indigenous history from the age of 7 triggered in part by the location of the Jebribillum Bora Park on his daily journey to primary school.

Corn was musically talented and he obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in music at the Queensland Conservatorium, including an Honours year. Corn’s Master’s research, in the 1990s, was into musical instruments held by the Queensland Museum. These included instruments from around the world as well as many Indigenous instruments from across Australia. Working with the curators of the instruments including Indigenous curators, Corn learned much from them although his dominant realisation was how little his previous years of education had taught him about Indigenous culture.

Having completed his Master’s Degree, Corn started Ph D studies at Melbourne University. He was interested in the music of Yothu Yindi. He was particularly interested in the way the music of that band blended Indigenous traditional song styles with Western popular music band styles. As he dug deeper, Corn realised that Yothu Yindi’s work drew on Indigenous lived experience, traditional knowledge and beliefs and Indigenous political aspirations at that period drawing on the desire to conclude a treaty recognising Indigenous sovereignty in accord with the 1988 Barunga Statement which had been presented to the Australian Parliament as part of the Bicentenary celebrations of that year. Corn’s PH D studies were focused on understanding this emerging Indigenous music and the influences that were driving it.

As a result, Corn came to know and collaborate with Mandawuy Yunupingu on a series of projects combining music and culture. Corn has, since, collaborated with and learned from a number of other Indigenous leaders including Yolngu elder, Joe Neparna Gumbula and Warlpiri leader, Steven Wantarri Jumpijinpa Pawu.

Corn has worked at Adelaide, Sydney and Melbourne Universities as well as the Australian National University. Corn was and remains Inaugural Director of the Indigenous Knowledge Institute at the University of Melbourne.

The chapter titles in Law, apart from Personal Perspectives, are: First Law, Everything is Related; Respect and Responsibility; Family Business; Gendered Business; Wisdom and Leadership; and The Gift of Law.     

Of these, a fundamental message concerning Indigenous Law is conveyed by the phrase, “Everything is Related”. Not only does Indigenous Law cover all aspects of human activity (which, at some level of generality, is true of all legal systems) but Indigenous knowledge is integrated such that music, dance and visual art all are influenced by law and, in their turn, reflect and evidence Indigenous law.

As part of illustrating this, Langton and Corn refer to the Michael Nelson Jagamara painting, Possum and Wallaby Dreaming. Possum and Wallaby Dreamingis reproduced as a mural located in the front of Parliament House in Canberra. Langton and Corn explain the composition of the painting and the meaning contained in the symbols used as part of the work. They also explain the way in which the painting, taken as a whole, represents a form of community decision making in which the community members as a whole have a part to play, albeit, with the community elders playing leadership roles.

Possum and Wallaby Dreaming is not, however, just somebody’s idea of how a community might make decisions. It is a means of visually representing the law as it provides for decision making of Jagamara’s community, the Warlpiri People. Just as Indigenous art seeks to represent aspects of the law of the community, Indigenous knowledge and law is reflected in traditional dance and song. Indeed, the long years of work and study required to become accepted as a leader includes the gaining of knowledge of the community’s dance and song ceremonies and the principles they express and embody. Neither is it coincidental that song and dance and painting reflect country and myths and relationship with country. All of these are part of the law and all are connected and learning about one’s place in the universe and the community is assisted by the ceremonial events which go on around you and in which you learn to take part.       

 Langton and Corn illustrate many of their general points about the nature of Aboriginal law by reference to specific knowledge drawn from the traditions of the Warlpiri people or the Yolngu people. I suspect that this is partially because both authors’ lifelong studies have given them more detailed knowledge of the traditions of those two groups. I also suspect that the traditions of the Warlpiri and Yolngu peoples have survived the two hundred years of dispersion and dispossession in a more intact state than the traditions of many other groups.  

Langton and Corn convey the way in which the lives of an Aboriginal Australian are affected by the traditional laws in a great deal of ways. Despite the detail, the rules and the underlying logic of the rules are conveyed in an accessible manner. There is a great deal of complexity about how one is born into sub-groupings of the whole group that are dependent upon but different to the sub-group to which one’s parents and grandparents, respectively, belong. One’s sub-group will determine many aspects of one’s life not the least the sub-grouping of the person to whom one may marry and the sorts of bush foods which one may be prohibited from eating.

To the uninformed eye, such rules appear arbitrary and without purpose. Langton and Corn point out, however, that the rules serve the purpose of ensuring ethical decision making, particularly, among the elders of the group. While different elders may come from different sub-groups, each person involved in making decisions has loyalties not only to members of his or her own sub-group but, also, through their parents and siblings and grandparents share sympathies with the interest of the members of many other sub-groups. In this way, the apparently arbitrary rules have an underlying logic which seeks to ensure that communal decision making will seek consensus and work to advance the interests of everyone in the group and not to prefer sectional or factional interests.

While this is an important example, Law provides many other examples of the way in which traditional laws work to ensure the well-being of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. For the same reason, Law is not a mere list of rules about behaviour. It manages to explain why those rules exist and the way in which they operate for the welfare of everyone to whom they apply.

Law is a relatively slim volume of slightly less than 200 pages. It comes with an informative and useful set of end notes and a comprehensive index. It is a thoroughly rewarding read.

In the concluding two pages, Langton and Corn set out a set of rules to follow as a means of embracing Indigenous law. The rules provide a guide to living a good and

useful life. The authors conclude with the following words: “Indigenous law – the way of the ancestors – is a gift to all Australians and the entire world. Instead of looking to our colonial past, Australia’s origin story can be found here, in its own deep history.” This reflects Neale’s thesis that traditional knowledge, beliefs, systems and practices not only inform contemporary life for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples but, also, can do so for people who have the will and knowledge to take them on, to listen and to learn.

[1] Law is published in conjunction with the National Museum of Australia and its publication was supported by the Australia Council for the Arts.

Author: David MarrPublisher: Black Inc.Reviewer: Stephen Keim

David Marr explains everything about Killing for Country in a note that occupies no more than one page and immediately follows the Contents page.

He says:

“I remember my great-grandmother. She had a crumpled face and faded away when I was too young to notice. She was a blank. Stories weren’t told about her. In 2019, an ancient uncle of mine asked me to find what I could about Maud. He knew so little. I dug out some books. It wasn’t long before I was looking at a photograph of her father in the uniform of the Native Police.

I was appalled and curious. I have been writing about the politics of race all my career. I know what side I’m on. Yet that afternoon I found in the lower branches of my family tree Sub-Inspector Reginald Uhr, a professional killer of Aborigines. Then I discovered his brother D’Arcy was also in the massacre business. Writing is my trade. I knew at once that I had to tell the story of my family’s bloody business with the Aboriginal people. That led me, step by step, into the history of the Native Police.

…”

The family story nature of Killing for Country is reflected in the three parts into which the book is divided: “Mr Jones”, “Edmund B. Uhr” and “Reg & D’Arcy”.

Richard Jones was a leading Sydney merchant who came to Sydney as a clerk in a merchant house in 1809. Jones returned to London in 1818 and conducted his various Australian enterprises from afar. In 1922, Jones married Mary Peterson. Jones was 36. Mary had five younger half-brothers named Uhr.

Marr describes the union between the pair, Jones and Peterson, as “unlikely” and the text does not explain how it came about. The effect was, however, that Edmund Uhr was “plucked from a poor street by the Thames” to drive and run expensive Saxony sheep for Jones, his half brother-in-law, initially, in the area of the Liverpool Plains.

In focussing the three parts of Killing for Country on individuals from, effectively, three generations, Marr covers a wide swathe of Australian history both in time and geography. Killing for Country is always about how the settler colonists killed the Indigenous people of Australia with great cruelty and in extraordinary numbers. It went on for a long time because pastoralists, in particular, were continually broadening their horizons by stealing new land and Jones and the two generations of Uhrs played very significant roles in that killing.

Killing for Country is, however, more than a family memoir. That tends to happen when the family story is told by one of Australia’s greatest documentary writers. Marr manages to tell the story of the four individuals.  In covering those four lives, however, Marr also manages to tell a much broader story of the social and political context in which they lived. Jones’ early time in Sydney coincides with Macquarie’s governorship. The land being newly occupied by squatters and the resultant conflict with the Indigenous owners of the land and the resulting killing of those owners had moved beyond the immediate environs of Sydney but not by a huge distance. By the time the patchy careers of Reg and D’Arcy were coming to an end, the far north of Queensland and the top end of the Northern Territory had long been the subject of dispersion, a euphemism for killing, and dispossession, the whole point of the exercise. Killing had become industrialised for many years by then, primarily, through the use of the Native Police in which both Reg and D’Arcy had served as white officers.  

In between, Jones and Edmund Uhr and others had shifted their focus to the Brisbane Valley, the Darling Downs, and coastal areas of Queensland such as Gympie and Maryborough.

The politics of dispossession were much fought over during the whole period covered by Killing for Country. Just as in modern settler colonial states, there was never any question that the settlers might not dispossess those to whom the land belonged. There was, however, even among the squatter class, the illusion of shades of opinion, a battle between moderates and radicals when it came to the killing. Some argued that the Indigenous former occupants should not be excluded from the new pastoral holdings but should be allowed to conduct aspects of their former lives and should be utilised as cheap and extremely competent labour on the holdings. Only the guilty, those who stole or attacked whites, these moderates argued, should be punished by being murdered.

Radical proponents of murder, however, argued that allowing any Indigenous person near towns or holdings was naïve and asking for trouble and would result in attacks on white people. Where crimes were committed, Indigenous people could only understand severe punishment and the best lessons involved massacres of whole communities including women, children and old people. If the alleged perpetrators of crimes were not part of the communities massacred, it mattered little since the lesson would be broadly learned and understood, in any event. And who, after the event, could say that the right people had not been killed?

These shades of opinion were reflected across the broader settler society. Governors tried, in accordance with their instructions from the colonial secretaries, to restrain the worst conduct of the squatters but tried not very hard. In any event, the rich merchants and squatters of which Jones was a member of both categories were, generally, at war with the governors, and had connections back in London with the use of whom they could conduct those wars. And colonial secretaries of a Whig persuasion tended to huff and puff about looking after the welfare of those whose land was being stolen but did so, ineffectively. Colonial secretaries of a Tory persuasion tended not to do much at all about the native question.  

Marr’s treatment of the politics at the level of governors and colonial secretaries is assisted by his quoting of passages from their communications. My generation learned about the early governors of New South Wales in social studies in primary school. It was an important focus of the curriculum. What I learned, however, was little more than a list of names and a shorter list of bare facts. Killing for Country, in contrast, conveys a much deeper understanding of the early settler politics of New South Wales and Queensland than I have previously enjoyed. Marr manages to do this despite the narrow thematic focus of his subject.

In the same way, my primary and secondary education gave me a sense of the history of settler Australia that contained a huge black hole from the gold rushes of 1851 to federation in 1901. In covering the establishment of the Queensland Native Police and the conduct of that body over subsequent decades and the freelance killing conducted by squatters during the same period, Marr has also succeeded in conveying a vision of parliamentary politics and the personalities and styles of early Queensland politicians including a number of premiers.  

Despite the failings of my schooling, in recent years, the efforts of historians and journalists like Marr had made me aware that the administration of justice had achieved something brave and wonderful in making murderers accountable for the slaughter of 22 Kamilaroi people at Myall Creek in the New England area in northern New South Wales. In reading Killing for Country, one is impressed both by how late and how early the Myall Creek events took place. The massacre occurred in June of 1838. For half a century, Indigenous people had been murdered in numbers before any settler was made accountable for such killing. Notwithstanding the convictions, another half a century and more of killing was to pass with Myall Creek becoming not the signifier of an era of even handed justice but, rather, the great anomaly of Australian history. The killing went on. The accountability died its own death.

The Myall Creek story recalls Marr’s dedication to those who told the truth. A station hand who alerted his supervisor; a squatter who alerted a police magistrate and then went on to Sydney to raise the alarm; that police magistrate who travelled to the site and actively investigated the crime and its perpetrators; and a Kamilaroi boy called Davy who hid behind the tree and witnessed the murders formed part of that crew. Davy’s evidence could not be received by the court because the law then stated that heathens, who had no fear of the eternal damnation promised by a Christian God, were not competent to testify in legal proceedings.

The success, and even the fact, of the prosecution was due in large part to the Irish lawyer, John Hubert Plunkett, who had, by this time, acceded to the post of Attorney-General of the colony of New South Wales. Plunkett with the support of the new governor, George Gipps, marshalled the available evidence into a powerful case for conviction. When, despite the quality and quantity of the evidence, the jury returned a not guilty verdict, Plunkett, forthwith, recharged 11 of the defendants with the death of four children who had also been killed in the massacre but were not the subject of the first set of charges. The result of the second trial was that seven of the perpetrators were convicted and, ultimately, hanged for the crimes.

But Myall Creek, despite Plunkett’s best efforts, was also flawed. A Gwydir squatter, John Fleming, had recruited twenty stockmen to ride on an expedition to find blacks to kill. The crime was particularly egregious because the group of Kamilaroi victims lived peaceably on another squatter’s property and had had nothing to do with any active resistance to the stealing of Kamilaroi land. They were killed, nonetheless.

Despite his organising and directing role in the slaughter, admissible evidence against Fleming was not available. He was not charged. Those who were on trial were successfully marshalled such that no one accepted the offered incentives to give evidence against Fleming and, thereby, save their own lives. Fleming was never made accountable. In the wake of Myall Creek, settlement continued to expand and, as the later chapters of Killing for Country graphically record, the killing only accelerated.        

The acknowledgements section of most books I read are of much interest. They constitute a short-form version of the making of the Book. Killing for Country is a great work that was six years in the making. Its acknowledgements are particularly interesting.

At the front of the book, Marr’s dedication is “To those who told the truth”.  On the following page, Marr writes: “I did not work alone. This book is the result of a deep collaboration over four years with my partner, Sebastian Tesoriero.” The story of the collaboration is told in more detail in the acknowledgements. In March 2020, Covid shut down the archives. It was at that point that Marr turned to Tesoriero, asking him to hunt for material online. Marr goes on: “[Tesoriero] has a lawyer’s mind and a hunger for facts. I knew he was a skilled internet sleuth. Trove opened its riches to him. As the year went by, we began working closely together and continued doing so until the end. He proved a fine-at times, savage-editor.”

Marr reveals the extraordinary amount of work done on the subject of the killing for country that took place in Australia. He, particularly, acknowledges Henry Reynolds and his 1981 work, The Other Side of the Frontier. Marr also mentions the wonderful poet, Judith Wright, as being the first person to make sense of this history through family memoir. The depth of research and search for understanding is illustrated by Marr’s heartfelt tribute to a series of local historical societies and local historians in the various parts of Australia covered by Killing for Country.

It would be remiss of me to conclude a review of Killing for Country or, indeed, any piece of writing by Marr without acknowledging the beautiful prose with which he delivers his narrative. Despite the meticulous research that has been undertaken by Marr, the learning and the references never get in the way of the narrative. The endnotes evidence the sources and verify the facts but one almost has to tear oneself away from the unfolding story to pursue one’s interest in a particular source.

Marr, as has been seen above, explains his family connection to the subject of Killing for Country and the questions it has raised for him as an active writer in the field of Australia’s colonial past and present. He then disappears from the page into the identity of the omniscient one. Marr returns to the page as the story reaches its conclusion and his precise connection with the protagonists is described.

The point is that nothing gets in the way of the story being told. The events are set out. The actors are introduced. They play the role in the events. The reader gets to know a lot about each person as their actions are unveiled. Personal foibles and shameful actions are acknowledged as they are conveyed. No time or space is wasted, however, on an excess of condemnation. For the plot is still unfolding and the rest of the story is still being told.

One approaches Killing for Country with caution. The reader knows that horrific events happened and those horrific events will be related without any lily being gilded or any sensibility being spared. Notwithstanding the horrific nature of the events, the reading of Killing for Country is a pleasure. The beauty of the prose and the fascinating quality of the narration ensures that that occurs.