Isabel Allende’s father, Tomas, was a first cousin of the Chilean President, Salvador Allende, who died in the coup of 11 September 1973 led by Augusto Pinochet and sponsored by the United States government.
Isabel was born in 1942 in Lima, Peru, when her father, Tomas, was a second secretary at the Chilean embassy in Lima.
Tomas left his wife and three children, including Isabel, in 1945. After the separation, Isabel’s mother, Francisca, relocated to Santiago, Chile, and, in 1953, Francisca married another Chilean diplomat, Ramon Huidobro and Isabel’s peripatetic life as a child continued.
The title, A Long Petal of the Sea, is a description of Chile, drawing on its long skinny shape and its close relationship with the Pacific Ocean. It is taken from a reference in Pablo Neruda’s writings which is fitting since the famous Chilean poet, diplomat and statesman features a lot in this novel.
There is a video on YouTube in which Isabel Allende discusses a visit to Pablo Neruda’s home in Isla Negra in southern Chile to interview Neruda, one month before the coup. Neruda, however, refused to be interviewed, telling Isabel that she was the worst journalist in the country, she always put herself in the middle of the story and she made things up. But, he said, Neruda loved the way Isabel wrote and she should switch to literature where those characteristics were not faults but virtues.
Neruda’s house was raided on the day of the coup and he became very ill and, just 12 days after the coup, Neruda was dead. Isabel also relates in the video how Neruda’s funeral procession started as a sad and sorry and frightened affair but turned into the first popular protest against the atrocities of those who perpetrated the coup.
Isabel did not take up Neruda’s advice, immediately, and, by the time she started working on her first novel, House of the Spirits, published in 1982, she had forgotten Neruda’s words. Twenty-six best selling books, later, Isabel is the most widely read writer, writing in Spanish. Neruda’s advice was sound.
After the coup, Isabel found herself arranging safe passage from Chile for people on the coup’s death list until she, herself, was listed when she was forced to flee to Venezuela.
Pablo Neruda’s heart was broken and his life was shortened by the coup of 11 September 1973.
Thirty-seven years, earlier, Neruda was in Spain as the Chilean consul when another right wing coup deposed another elected left wing government leading to the Spanish Civil War. Neruda’s heart was broken on this occasion by the murder of Spanish playwright and poet, Federico Garcia Lorca. Garcia Lorca had worked with the Republican elected government to produce and direct plays and to take them to the country where audiences were filled with people who were poor and had never seen a play performed. In the early months of the Civil War, Garcia Lorca was murdered by Francoist forces. So passionate was Neruda’s poetic response to Garcia Lorca’s death, including the poem, I Explain Some Things that he was stripped of his post by the Chilean government.
A Long Petal of the Sea is a work of fiction but it honours a real story and the protagonists in that story. A Long Petal of the Sea links the Spanish Civil War with Pinochet’s coup and finds the common themes between the two events. A Long Petal of the Sea is a complicated love story which spans a number of love stories. And, after documenting oppression cruelty and hate, A Long Petal of the Sea concludes with the triumph of love on a number of levels.
The central historical event of the novel occurs after the end of the Spanish Civil War. Fittingly, Pablo Neruda is at the centre of this event. After urging the Chilean government to do something for the Republican Spanish refugees interned in France, Neruda was commissioned by that government to charter a ship to bring some of those refugees to Chile. Half a million refugees had fled a victorious Franco by walking through the Pyrenees to France. Two thousand people from among those of the refugees who had survived that ordeal were given passage on that ship, the Winnipeg, and, when the ship docked in their new country on the day the Second World War broke out in Europe, a new life beckoned. Some of those refugee/immigrants were still alive when Salvador Allende was elected and some lived to see the murder of Allende and the oppression which followed.
A Long Petal of the Sea tells the story of Victor Dalmau. Largely due to his status as a half-trained medical student, his three years in the bitter battles of the Spanish Civil War saw him working as an assistant to a fearless ambulance driver and, after he had brought a young soldier back to life by massaging his heart through the open wound in the young soldier’s chest, he became an assistant to doctors.
The defeat of the Republicans led to Victor arranging for the pregnant common law wife of Victor’s dead brother, Guillem, to flee through the mountains. Victor and Roser, the pregnant widow who also happened to be a brilliant musician, married in order to qualify for a berth on the Winnipeg and the family of convenience were able to start a new life in Chile where Victor became a famous doctor and supporter of Allende’s government such that, when the coup took place, his place in society and more were at risk.
A Long Petal of the Sea is focused on personal lives and loves but, at a societal level, it does manage to describe the way in which those who are favoured by society will not accept any government, democratically elected or not, that tries to make the lives of those who are not so favoured change for the better. And it describes the way in which, when the right wing oppression comes, it comes with great cruelty and viciousness. And, though it is a quirk of history that the lives of those who travelled on the Winnipeg and survived to see the rise and fall of the Allende government link the Spain of the late 1930s and Chile of the early 1970s, the parallels between the actions of Franco and Pinochet and their respective lieutenants are sufficiently striking to appear to reveal some deeper truths about how the world will always operate.
Isabel Allende is a beautiful creator of prose writing and she depicts her characters’ lives and experiences with great tenderness. Nonetheless, the denouement pages of A Long Petal of the Sea read so much in the style of a family memoir that one feels that the true story on which A Long Petal of the Sea is based is very close in many respects to the narrative of A Long Petal of the Sea, itself.
We do know that, apart from what she may have learned from her interviews of and conversations with Neruda and from conversations with members of her own family, Isabel Allende’s chief informant was Victor Pey, who died in 2018 aged 103. Victor Pey would have been born in 1915 and would have been 24 at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 and the right age, a few years earlier to be a half-trained medical student.
But Victor Pey was an engineer, not a doctor. So, we know that Ms Allende did make some effort to fictionalize the story that she was re-telling. One suspects that many of the details are, nonetheless, very close to those of the lives of the people whom her novel honours.
In any event, A Long Petal of the Sea is a beautiful novel that inspires at the same time that it moves to tears.
Author: Victor Steffensen Publisher: Hardi Grant Travel Reviewer: Stephen Keim
Victor Steffensen has a Tagalaka heritage through his mother’s connections from the Gulf Country of north Queensland. He also has a German and English heritage from his father’s side. Steffensen’s Tagalaka maternal grandmother was separated from her family and was sent to work for a white cattle farming family. She died when Steffensen was five. Steffensen grew up in Kuranda and, although taught to be proud of his Indigenous heritage, learned little detailed cultural knowledge from his immediate family.
Entry into Canberra University to study cultural heritage was not the balm it promised to be in that a combination of Canberra’s cold weather and having to learn university-level English led Steffensen to drop out of university after three months.
So it was that, in the middle of 1991, Steffensen was invited on a fishing trip to the small Tablelands town of Laura. One of his fishing trip companions had Laura connections. Steffensen was fortunate to obtain a job on the local CDEP scheme and to be invited to live with Tommy George or TG, one of two brothers who were local elders. The direction of the next three decades of Steffensen’s life, and many years yet to come, was determined by that lucky break. The next day, Steffensen was introduced to TG’s brother, George Musgrave, or Poppy. It was from these two Awu-Laya elders that Steffensen learned the intricacies of traditional culture and it was with them that Steffensen embarked upon a journey of re-establishing traditional fire management of land.
Growing up in the 1920s, TG and Poppy had escaped being removed from their families by police officers through the good offices of the owner of Musgrave Station, Fred Shepherd, who would hide the boys in mailbags in the storeroom whenever police officers visited the station looking for Indigenous kids to remove from their families. As a result, TG and Poppy had managed to learn much more traditional knowledge than many others of their generation who had been removed from their families and their traditional country by the interventions of the state.
Fire Country is Steffensen’s memoir of how he learned traditional fire skills from the two old men and his journey with Poppy and TG into reapplying those skills to country. Mabo (No 2)[1] was decided on 3 June 1992 and, earlier, the Aboriginal Land Rights Act 1991 had been passed allowing Aboriginal Australians to make claims to be recognised as owners of certain national parks and other government owned land.
As a result, it was reasonable to expect that the time was ripe for official recognition and facilitation of traditional fire management. While some signs were positive, Steffensen recounts in Fire Country many encouraging developments which turned sour and many official decisions which rejected traditional knowledge in favour of government knows best approaches. The difficulties associated with these early experiences, in some ways, served Steffensen well as he learned many people managing skills which helped him to turn resistance into cooperation as the traditional fire management movement spread and acquired adherents and supporters across the country.
Fire Country, as well as being a memoir, is a technical educational book. Steffensen explains the basic concept of the benefits of a cool fire which removes fuel load; does not destroy native plants; and promotes fresh growth. He also explains the dangers of hot fires, even those conducted to prevent wildfires, and the negative effects such hot fires have on fauna, flora, the soil and the country, itself. It also explains the detrimental impact of the absence of regular fires, not only the dangers it creates of destructive wildfires but, also, the effect that the build-up of fuel loads have in stifling fresh growth, marring habitat and promoting weed growth of vegetation not naturally suited to that type of country. Sick country is the appellation that would frequently come forth from elders such as Poppy and TG but, also, from Steffensen, himself, as his knowledge and teaching skills deepened.
Fire Country descends into greater detail describing, initially, with regard to Awu-Laya country, the correct seasons and times within the seasons for lighting fires by reference to the different ecosystems and soils and the way in which the vegetation of those ecosystems indicate their readiness to be burned.
Different timings and methodologies are explained by reference to boxwood and gum-tree country; stringybark and sand-ridge country; mixed tree systems; storm burn country and no fire country. By burning different country at the times suitable to that country, the customary fire practitioner produces the familiar mosaic pattern of customary fire practices and produces the safety associated with fire prevented from spreading out of control either by neighbouring country which is not yet ready to burn or which has already been burned and now displays non-combustible fresh green growth.
Steffensen’s knowledge and advocacy of such fire management has led to his giving lectures and practical demonstrations on country in many different parts of Australia and he has both learned from and assisted elders from many different Indigenous nations. We learn from these experiences of Steffensen that, even when an experienced fire practitioner is far from the country on which they learned their art, the land continues to talk to the practitioner so that the right timing and methods of burning can be devised from the information available to the careful and knowledgeable eye.
Fire Country was published in 2020. This was in the wake of the disastrous wildfires that, in the Black Summer of 2019-20, destroyed so much property, ended directly 34 human lives and destroyed so much fauna and flora of the Australian landscape. The closing chapters of Fire Country are written with the sadness flowing from that summer of tragedy but, also, with a heartfelt plea for Indigenous fire management knowledge to be taken seriously and to be adopted and applied more widely because of its ability to cure sick country and to prevent such disastrous and tragic wildfires from occurring in the future.
Steffensen’s work of teaching and communicating continues. He has published two children’s books since Fire Country, Looking After Country with Fire and The Trees: Learning Tree Knowledge with Uncle Kuu. Steffensen’s writing is another example of the obvious fact that, if a person wants to learn about important things, there will always be someone willing to share their information and knowledge.
[1]Mabo v Queensland (No 2) [1992] HCA 23; 175 CLR 1
Tim Hollo brings a broad experience – as a musician, political adviser, political candidate, community activist, and chief executive of the Green Institute – to Living Democracy, a synthesis of political, economic and philosophical ideas, directed to revolutionising the approach of community activists to meeting the ecological crisis and transforming societal organisation and governance.
Hollo conceives of traditional forms of governance – from traditional parliamentary democracies to authoritarian forms and from socialist to the embrace of capitalism – as anti-ecological and removed from implementing the wishes of people generally, in favour of those of a narrow governing class and the desires of extractivist corporations and their lobbyists.
Hollo draws on the writings of Italian Marxist philosopher, Antonio Gramsci for a vision of the way in which prevailing (anti-ecological) norms are maintained through a network of values, myths, stories, caricatures and received common sense ideas as well as the coercive forces of state agencies. As a guide to action, Gramsci’s ideas lead to an emphasis upon the re-writing of such prevailing ideas through communication and community action as a path to changing the way society works and building new pathways to a new way of societal functioning from which the book’s title is derived, namely, a living democracy.
Hullo’s title refers not only to a different form of society but the process of creating that new order of things, namely, the practice of living democracy. Hollo draws on great systems’ theorist, Donella Matthews, for the proposition that seeking to control individual elements of an existing system will often make matters worse. The key is to change the paradigms and power structures of the system.
Hollo traces many of the myths of anti-ecological thought to the writings of John Locke and Thomas Hobbes, particularly, the latter’s view of human nature as giving rise, in the absence of strong central government, to a life that was nasty, brutish and short. A modern articulation thereof is Garrett Hardin’s 1968 essay, The Tragedy of the Commons, in which the absence of private property is said to lead to a prisoner’s dilemma in which every individual strives to maximise their individual yield, and, in doing so, depletes and destroys the common resource.
In refutation of Hardin’s simplistic thesis , Hollo points to Nobel prize winning economist Elinor Ostrom’s study of actual commons’ management in history. Ostrom’s study identifies the way in which commons have operated over historical epochs according to complex series of rules which ensure that everyone benefits and the common resource is preserved. Hollo points to the way in which economics textbooks and university courses still promote Hardin’s evidence free and refuted view of history and human nature because it reinforces the underlying view of human nature on which the prevailing defence of anti-ecological capitalism is based.
In the same way, Hollo calls out the famous 1968 Stanley Milgram psychology experiment in which participants were instructed to inflict electric shock torture on other human beings in order to induce skill learning and Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 Stanford Prison experiment and its famous production of abuse of prisoners in a fake prison environment. Hollo points out that, despite the results of both experiments having been exposed as affected by academic fraud, they continue to be promoted in academic circles, inter alia, because they support a view of human nature, convenient to adherents of strong central government, as nasty and brutish.
Hollo challenges the prevailing concept of selfish man on which much of capitalist and anti-ecological thought is based with the idea of people working together to create plenty to be shared rather than scarcity to be exploited. Much of this derives from Ostrom’s seminal study of commons’ management demonstrating that people can and do manage shared resources effectively to create better results for everyone dependent on the resource.
Hollo’s approach also draws upon modern understandings of Darwinian evolution as being more than the individualistic triumph of tooth and claw which gave rise to the crude visions of Social Darwinism. Hollo draws upon the work of turn of the twentieth century Russian political philosopher and evolutionary thinker Pyotr Kropotkin, who pointed to the way in which, in nature, groups and individuals engage in mutual assistance giving rise to patterns of co-evolution and symbiosis.
Hollo also draws upon the modern biological writings of Lyn Margulis whose work articulated the way in which even primitive mono-cellular organisms are the product of symbiotic cooperation between even more primitive organisms and how complex organisms including the human body depend on symbiotic relationships for the individual organism to survive. Where would we be without our gut bacteria? Nowhere is the simple answer.
Hollo describes the natural world as working as a series of cycles working on a series of timescales in which all elements play a role in defining how the cycle operates and evolves. He gives to these natural phenomena the name “panarchy”, reflecting that all elements play a role in the natural governance process.
Hollo also draws upon human history for a vision of alternating states between populations managing their own common resources, themselves, on the one hand, and the rise of centralised power structures by which the commons are enclosed and devoted to the enrichment of the powerful few, on the other. In this, he seizes upon the work of a number of authors including agrarian anthropologist James C Scott, who describes the rise of centralized kingdoms who sought to coerce their subjects into living cheek by jowl in cities so that they could be exploited and controlled and the periodic breakdown of these hierarchical communities by ordinary people resisting and escaping to re-establish agrarian communities ruled in cooperation by the members of the communities.
According to Hollo and his sources, human history does not indicate, despite its prevailing articulation, that centrally ruled, hierarchical societies are the necessary result of time’s arrow.
Hollo’s posited methodology for creating a living democracy is for people to create their own structures for cooperating – in defiance of capitalism’s desire to create scarcity – to create plenty by sharing resources and making their own rules for the way in which these enterprises are governed. He gives examples such as “No Buy” campaigns; city farms; suburban libraries; and cooperative recycling ventures.
As a political example, Hollo refers to the short lived and bloodily suppressed Paris Commune of 1871. Hollo also draws on more contemporary examples. Since 2015, Barcelona en Comu, a citizen’s democracy group seeking to boost an economy of social and environmental justice and to democratize institutions so that people can decide on the city they want has exercised municipal power in Barcelona including through the office of mayor, Ada Colau, who had worked for many years as a housing and anti-evictions activist.
Hollo’s more extraordinary modern example is the Kurdish nation known as Rojava created in north eastern Syria, at the same time as battling ISIS, on the principles of democratic confederalism. Rojava brings together three autonomous regions based on principles articulated by jailed (by Turkey) Kurdish leader, Ocalan. Rojava describes itself as creating a model of democracy that might actually bring stability to a war-torn region as well as battling ISIS.
Dissatisfaction with different existing models of government, whether left or right in their ideological principles, is not irrational. However, the instinctive tendency, normally, is to shrug one’s shoulders, eschew the task of creating new societal models and to make the best of whatever system with which one happens to be stuck. It is now, however, nearly 35 years since James Hansen addressed a congressional committee on a hot summer’s day in Washington to warn of a coming global warming. Since, despite the passage of that 35 years, governments of all persuasion, despite their professed best intentions, are unwilling or incapable of making the necessary changes to reverse the planet’s trajectory to unlivability, the question of the best form of government to make rational decisions about the community’s best interests presents itself with renewed urgency.
For Hollo, transforming society and its governance is more rational and feasible than persuading imperfect government to do the right thing.
On our present trajectory, it is hard to argue that he is wrong.
A panel session with Rachel Franks and Nick Cowdery at the BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival at the State Library of NSW at 3.30 pm on Saturday, 10 September 2022.
Thank you to Catherin Menage and her team for putting on the festival and inviting me to be part of this session.
Thank you to Nick and Rachel for having me as part of the session.
Thank you to Rachel for producing such a wonderful book and the interesting discussion that Nick and you have already provided.
I want to say a few words about Rachel’s book. I will say quite a bit about Barry’s book. And, hopefully, I can mention the third book in the trifecta of your reading about the death penalty, a book published by Mike Richards in 2002: The Hanged Man.
So, to An Uncommon Hangman and Nosey Bob Howard.
I think it is very important that we write and read and know about the death penalty. The death penalty is cruel and inhuman and gruesome. It often results in botched killings. Even as late as 28 July, this year, prison officials in Alabama spent three hours puncturing holes in Joe Nathan James with needles and slicing him open with scalpels searching for veins into which to make the lethal injection.[1] It is easy to go into denial and gloss over the cruelty involved in the State killing a person in cold blood.
Second, it is easy to regard the past as a different country and believe that capital punishment was accepted by everybody in the olden days. Rachel writes about, in An Uncommon Hangman, some of the more prominent campaigners to abolish the death penalty in New South Wales and also identifies that, on very many occasions, there were very strong campaigns for mercy for particular persons condemned to death. The death penalty was and will always be controversial and we should never forget that.
Third, An Uncommon Hangman, in covering the life of the official hangman in NSW for over thirty years and the persons he executed over those years provides an excellent social history of NSW, during that same period. The circumstances of the victims; the circumstances of the perpetrators; the methods of investigation; the reactions of society; the campaigns for mercy; as well as the circumstances of the executions all tell us much about how life was lived in the second half of the 19th century in Australia.
Fourth, while it takes a special person to want to be an executioner, Rachel reminds us, through the perspective of Nosey Bob, that everyone in society is responsible when the State kills but everyone involved can always try to deflect the blame to others. The hangman is only carrying out the judge’s command. The judge is only giving effect to the jury’s verdict. The jury are only doing what the law and the judge requires of them. And the Executive Council, the government of the day, when they refuse mercy, are only allowing the law to take its course. We must always remember that, when the State kills, it kills in the name of all of us. We are all responsible.
Thank you again, Rachel, for your contribution to scholarship in this area.
I, now, turn to The Penalty is Death, edited by Barry Jones AC.[2] Barry turns ninety on 11 August, this year. Some of us may be too young to have spent our childhoods watching Barry perform as an absolute super quiz star on Bob and Dolly Dyer’s[3] massively popular show, Pick-a-Box. Barry has been declared a national living treasure by the National Trust.
Barry has been a lifelong campaigner against the death penalty. In the lead up to the hanging of Ronald Ryan, on 3 February 1967, Barry was secretary of the Victorian Anti-Hanging Committee and, with many other Victorians at the time, did everything he could possibly do to convince the Victorian government led by Henry Bolte to relent and spare Ryan’s life.
In the wake of Ryan’s hanging, Barry Jones carried on the campaign for abolition in Victoria. As part of this campaign, he edited a book called The Penalty is Death which was published in 1968 by Sun Books,[4] a publishing venture of three former Penguin employees, Geoffrey Dutton, Max Harris and Brian Stonier. Barry was a member of the Victorian Parliament in 1975 when abolition of the death penalty passed through both Houses and became law. His speech in that debate is one of the additions to the second coming of The Penalty is Death.
About two years ago, a friend of mine, Frank Mannix, sent me a copy of the 1968 edition of The Penalty is Death. I was transfixed. It was an amazing collection of the best writing against the death penalty ever written. Charles Dickens, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, the great American advocate, Clarence Darrow, and, among many others, the Italian philosopher, Cesare Beccaria, writing way back in 1764. Beccaria was both an economist and philosopher and his book, On Crime and Punishment, argued for a rational approach to punishment as opposed to seeing it as divine punishment. In the wake of Beccaria’s writing, Tuscany abolished capital punishment in 1786 and Austria did the same thing, a year later. Meanwhile, as Rachel’s book points out, a fleet of British prison ships were bound for Botany Bay on a mission to establish a 179 history of hanging people by the neck until they were dead.
As I worked my way through the chapters, an unusual but not surprising thing happened. The 50 year old glue gave way and the book began to go to pieces in my hands. I took to carrying it around in a rubber band to avoid losing the pages and my place in the book.
It was then that I had the idea that this book needed to see a new lease of life. It was such a valuable collection of works that it needed to be made available to a new generation of readers and students and activists. I wrote to Barry and told him I wanted to arrange for a new edition of The Penalty is Death. He was very supportive. I found out that Macmillan had swallowed up Sun Books in 1981. So, I wrote to Macmillan. After several attempts to make contact and some inquiries around the traps, I found somebody, there, who told me that there was no impediment to a new edition being produced. All the permissions and copyright vested in Barry.
I then made inquiries of typesetters. It turns out that skilled people can scan a hard copy of an old book and turn the PDF obtained into a Word document that can then be edited. I obtained quotes from printers. Best of all, I found a publishing editor who, for a very moderate fee, took all the logistical questions off my plate.
Barry Jones worked tirelessly re-writing and updating all the introductions to the chapters and his over-view chapter at the beginning. We added Barry’s speech in the Victorian Parliament and a speech by our third author, Mike Richards, made on the 50th anniversary of Ryan’s death.
I found three terrific people each to write an excellent foreword for the new edition. Michael Kirby AC CMG wrote a brilliant piece linking the movement towards abolition and the growth of international human rights. Richard Bourke, a wonderful Australian barrister from the Victorian bar who has spent the last twenty years based in Louisiana working on death penalty cases in the south of the United States, wrote about his own experiences in witnessing the execution of his client, Jackie Elliott, in Texas in 2003 and the profound, soul-deep sense of how wrong capital punishment was that he felt at the time and ever since. And Julian McMahon AC, who acted for Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran, wrote about the men that inspired him in his efforts to oppose the death penalty including Barry Jones, Michael Kirby, Richard Bourke and Jack Galbally. The latter’s great persistence saw him introduce a Bill to abolish the death penalty into the Victorian Parliament, fifteen times, between 1956 and 1974.
Capital Punishment Justice Project, the organisation of which I am chair, raised over $40,000 to pay for the costs of publishing the new edition. As you can see, Scribe agreed to badge the book and have been fantastic in arranging for distribution. I think that, wherever you live in Australia, there is a good chance that The Penalty is Death will be in your local bookshop at this moment. Barry Jones has generously donated the royalties from the sale of the book to CPJP.
The Penalty is Death was launched by Kerry O’Brien at Parliament House, Brisbane, on 1 August, this year, as part of celebrations to mark the anniversary of the abolition of capital punishment in 1922. Queensland was the first jurisdiction in the British Empire so to abolish the death penalty.
That is my story and the story of the Book. I want to share with you a few gems from some of the famous writers whose work is collected in The Penalty is Death.
In his foreword, Richard Bourke quotes Reinhold Niebuhr for a phrase that becomes more and more relevant as I grow older: “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore, we must have hope”.[5]
Sir Ernest Gowers chaired the Royal Commission into the Death Penalty in the UK from 1949-1953. He explains why he has come to the conclusion that, in a consideration of any discussion of the death penalty, the onus must be on retentionists to justify their position on utilitarian grounds. After setting out a number of very good arguments, he says:
“Perhaps, the turning point was when I learned what a large number of applications there were for the post of hangman. Any State institution, I thought, that inspires ambitions of that sort in its citizens and satisfies some of them …surely does need to justify itself on utilitarian grounds.”[6]
George Orwell wrote an essay about a hanging he witnessed as a member of the Imperial Police in Burma. He describes the image of the prisoner walking in front of him the forty metres to the gallows. And then he says:
“And, once, in spite of the men who gripped him by each shoulder, he stepped slightly aside to avoid a puddle on the path.
“It was curious, but till that moment I had never realised what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we are alive … He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.”[7]
That is a very powerful passage in a very powerful essay. There is a further passage towards the end of the essay that undermines the impression that one can get from some descriptions of some executions. Everybody, including the prisoner, tries to act in a dignified manner. The result of those efforts should not be allowed to detract in any way from the torture involved in every second a condemned prisoner spends on death row. Orwell writes, as he describes the party returning to the main part of the prison from the gallows:
“The Eurasian boy who was walking beside me nodded towards the way we had come, with a knowing smile: ‘Do you know, sir, our friend (he meant the dead man) when he heard that his appeal had been dismissed, he pissed on the floor of his cell. From fright …”[8]
I hope you will take the opportunity to read The Penalty is Death. It will provide you with many insights about an issue that remains of huge practical relevance to Australians as we found out in 2015 with the executions of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. Australians travel a lot and, when we go to countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Myanmar, India, China, Taiwan, Japan and Pakistan, to name just a few, we are in jurisdictions where the domestic law imposes the death penalty. When we look at countries which are abolitionist or have long term moratoria in place, we feel encouraged that the death penalty is coming to an end. But, when we look at the countries which retain and implement the death penalty, we realise that much more than half the world’s population live under the threat of being sentenced to death. But it is not just that capital punishment might affect a fellow Australian or even someone near and dear to us. Capital punishment is a moral challenge to all of us. While any one person remains threatened by the death penalty, a deep wrong remains upon the earth and we are challenged as to what we can and will do about it. The death penalty is wrong at all times and in all places.
In the time left, I wanted to speak a little about another amazing book, The Hanged Man, by Dr Mike Richards. Mike did his PhD on Ronald Ryan’s 1967 execution. He focussed on the machinery of law and government and researched and wrote about every step in the process that led to Ryan’s death at the hands of the law. The results of this research are amazing. The reader gets to see Justice John Starke, before and after he imposes the sentence of death, and to hear His Honour’s reflections on whether he could have done more to save Ryan’s life when he spoke to Cabinet. The reader gets to see into the heart of the protest movement taking every legal and political step to change the government’s mind or to prevent that mind from having its way. The reader gets to follow the debate in Cabinet as Sir Henry Bolte guides the process to its inevitable result and to obtain his much-desired object of an execution on his watch. One gets to hear what the governor of the prison said to the staff at Pentridge about how to treat the prisoners in the hours following Ryan’s execution.
Having obtained his PhD, Mike realised that the most important person was missing from his thesis. So, he embarked on another exhaustive (and, no doubt, exhausting) research project to find out everything he could about the hanged man, Ronald Ryan.
The Hanged Man starts with Ryan writing his last letter to his wife and daughters on a roll of toilet paper and it ends, nearly four hundred pages later, with his execution. In the intervening pages, however, we still receive the detailed documentation of the legal processes that brought Ryan to his death. But we also get to read about his childhood; his wardship with the Department of Children’s Welfare; his early adulthood working in the timber industry and competing in cycling road races and running the amateur club that ran those races; his early crimes as an adult; his rehabilitation in prison; his courtship; his marriage; his role as a father; his career as a serious break and enter operative and addicted gambler; his escape; his time on the run; his capture; his trial; and the manner in which he faced his death.
The execution of Ronald Ryan says a lot about our history including about the places from where we have come as Rachel’s book, indeed, spells out for us. It tells us the dangers of populist politics. It should remind us that we are just one atrocity away from an ugly debate about restoration. The Hanged Man is the definitive account of how that execution came to pass. I think we should all try to read it.
These are three amazing books. I feel privileged to have said a few words about each of them. Despite my best efforts, I doubt I have done them justice.
[6] TPID, page 82: Earlier, at page 72, Sir Ernest reveals that the evidence at the Royal Commission indicated that the number of applications averaged five per week.
Author: Ian Cobain Publisher: Portobello Books[1] Reviewer: Stephen Keim
The subtitle of The History Thieves is Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation. It is a history of the obscene lengths to which the British State has gone to ensure that the public is denied transparency concerning the actions of the government, both domestically and in its overseas operations. The History Thieves is also a history of the wrongdoing which the lack of transparency has managed to hide from the British public and from the work of historians.
“The History Thieves has much astounding material to put before the reader. It is both a history of secrecy in the United Kingdom but, also, a history of shameful things that were withheld from the public but which have been since revealed”
The obsession for secrecy was able to be satisfied prior to the second half of the nineteenth century without need for legislative restriction because the number of public servants was limited; they came from a restricted range of backgrounds; and the system of patronage by which officers were employed meant that it was simply not the done thing to talk out of term.
However, as the need grew for a larger public service, officers were recruited from a larger range of backgrounds who were not bound by the class loyalty that had enforced secrecy in the past. The need for more formal controls led to the passing of the first Official Secrets Act in 1899 and even more restrictive legislation in 1911. Section 2 of the 1911 Official Secrets Act prohibited the unauthorized disclosure or receipt of any official information. Fittingly, the passing of the Act, in each case, was accompanied by misleading statements by the responsible ministers in the House of Commons and very little publicity. Nothing to see here, the public was assured.
The opening pages of the introduction to The History Thieves describes two British government intelligence officials arriving at the offices of the Guardian newspaper in London to oversee the destruction of several of the Guardian’s computers. The computers held thousands of documents which detailed how a British agency, Government Communications Headquarters, and its US counterpart, the National Security Agency, had conspired to, and largely succeeded, capture every digital communication that was being sent or received by anyone at any time.
This destruction was both pointless and illustrative of the deep logic that underlies the British government’s centuries-old thirst for secrecy. It was pointless because the officials and the government knew that the same information was held in other computers in the United States and could be published without reference to the Guardian. Nonetheless, the officials and the government knew that secrecy allowed governments to get away with things that would not be tolerated if they were conducted openly. And the officials and the government knew that no punitive action, however petty, was wasted in communicating the message that breaking down the walls that kept things secret would never be tolerated.
“There is also a paradox to the revelations contained in a book on what government secrecy attempted to hide from us. While the revelations astound us, there may always be more and worse matters which we have not yet discovered”
Cobain’s title, The History Thieves, makes the important point that government secrecy, not only, allows governments to do things that they would not dare to do openly but that it also prevents both professional historians and the public from constructing a full picture of the country’s history. Even where the wars and atrocities conducted by the British government, eventually, become known, often by chance, the revelation of such atrocities, years after the fact, falls far short of their being publicly known at the time the events took place. Even the careful documentation by books like The History Thieves or the coverage of the revelations in the mass media for a few days when the revelations occur fails to make such events, withheld for so long, enter the public mind and become part of the public’s consciousness. The image we have of a country’s past actions is carefully built up by repeated experience and frequent retelling by our parents, our friends, by ourselves and by countless reflections published in newspapers, books and visual media. Few such articles will focus on the British contribution to starting the Vietnam war or British officers, literally, holding Kenyan subjects’ feet to the flame. Many more will remember the much more favourable images of a young Queen’s grace in the years after her coronation or British support for and participation in the Nuremberg Trials, thereby, establishing new principles of international law, in each case, occupying a similar period of history.
There is also a paradox to the revelations contained in a book on what government secrecy attempted to hide from us. While the revelations astound us, there may always be more and worse matters which we have not yet discovered.
That said, The History Thieves has much astounding material to put before the reader. It is both a history of secrecy in the United Kingdom but, also, a history of shameful things that were withheld from the public but which have been since revealed. And it does set out examples of incidents where the full story has not been revealed: where many of the most important documents were systematically destroyed or remain in the vaults of intelligence agencies still too damaging to the country’s reputation to reveal.
Reading The History Thieves yields a totally different history of the UK in the period since the end of the Second World War to that passed off as the whole truth during the period to which the history relates.
I mention, briefly below, three aspects of that history which were deliberately withheld from the eyes of the public and which are narrated in the pages of The History Thieves. The examples reveal how effective the attempts to maintain secrecy were. They also reveal atrocities that could not have been committed if the public had been aware of what had happened.
Soon after the end of that war, still in 1945, the British armed forces started what became, eventually, the Vietnam War and which continued until the capture of Saigon on 30 April 1975. The British not only committed its own weary troops but re-armed forces of the Vichy France and Japan, who were not only erstwhile enemies but many of whom may have been war criminals for whom Australia was engaged in setting up courts to hear such allegations. To ensure that France did not lose its colonies in Indochina, the British government started a war against the nationalist forces of Vietnam, the Viet Minh.
The nature of the way in which the war was conducted may be judged from the orders given which included instructions to use the maximum force available to ensure wiping out any hostilities we may meet. If we use too much force, no harm is done. As Cobain observes, this displayed ruthless disregard for civilians.
“The story of attempts of British government lawyers and their clients to hide the truth from coming out during the litigation is almost as lurid”
From the mid-sixties to the mid-seventies, Britain fought a totally secret war in Oman against the mainly nomadic Jebelis people of the Dhofari Highlands in the south of Oman. Putatively, the UK was acting in support of the Sultan of Oman against his own subjects but, clearly, the war was to maintain the UK’s own interests including its access to valuable oil supplies and export markets. As part of their tactics in suppressing a rebellion, the British poisoned wells, torched villages, destroyed crops and shot livestock. They developed new torture techniques for use in interrogation which included the infliction of noise which became part of the interrogation techniques used later in Northern Ireland. Areas occupied by civilians were turned into free-fire zones. No journalist was allowed to visit Oman after 1962. No official ever mentioned the war in a way in which it could be reported. As Cobain observes, no wonder the British wanted to keep this war secret.
The discovery of systematic British atrocities in Kenya is, itself, a fascinating story which began with British lawyers engaged in acting for Kenyans who had suffered injuries from previously unexploded ordnance left over from the struggle against the Mau Mau insurgency prior to independence in December 1963.
But, when the lawyers spoke to their clients about encounters with unexploded bombs, they also heard repeated stories from elderly Kenyan citizens about well organised atrocities committed by British forces occurring on a previously unimagined scale. Amazingly, this information had remained secret from the British public until the lawyers started taking statements in 2001.
The stories told by the plaintiffs were lurid. Jane Muthoni Mara was 15 years old when two men held her down and a third raped her with a heated bottle. Paul Nizili said that, while he was in British captivity, a colonial official known as Luvai castrated him with a large pair of pliers. Wambagu Wa Nyingi had never joined the Mau Mau but was imprisoned for nine years. He recalled being knocked unconscious in an incident where nine prisoners were clubbed to death.
The story of attempts of British government lawyers and their clients to hide the truth from coming out during the litigation is almost as lurid. Every attempt was made to have the action dismissed on technical grounds such as an argument that the UK could not be responsible for what the Empire did in Kenya because Kenya is now a different country.
Affidavits were sworn arguing that every document had been handed over. It was only when the few documents that had been provided were shown by expert historian witnesses to reveal the existence of large numbers of other documents did the government begin to come clean.
Eventually, the action was settled favourably to the elderly Kenyan plaintiffs but disclosure of the files led to a hunt for other hidden files concerning other parts of the Empire and has revealed further systemic suppression of the truth about British actions in its colonial domains.
The History Thieves is a fascinating read. More importantly, it is a story that needs to be told and remembered.
Author: Elaine Pearson Publisher: Scribner[1] Reviewer: Stephen Keim
Elaine Pearson was born in Sydney but grew up in Perth. In November 1998, she completed her law degree at Murdoch University.
A graduate job with a leading law firm on the Esplanade or St George’s Terrace was not for Pearson. She found and applied for a volunteer job – funded by the Australian government – with a small anti-human trafficking NGO based in Bangkok, Global Alliance Against Traffic in Women (GAATW). She was successful but part of the deal turned out to be that, if she could pay her own way to Geneva, she could take part in an activists’ side meeting being held at a United Nations conference taking place in Geneva at the same time.
So, Pearson’s first real day at work was not working on document disclosure for a huge piece of litigation but, rather, to listen, transfixed, to activists debating the correct approach to human trafficking, namely, whether all sex work is bad and should be prevented (including, if necessary, restricting the rights of trafficked women) or whether solutions should be addressed from the perspective of the trafficked woman including respect for her right to remain in sex work if she so chooses.
So began Pearson’s, by no means finished, career as an international human rights activist. Chasing Wrongs and Rights follows Pearson’s career for the next two decades. The book has merits as a personal memoir, and a story of adventure, punctuated with her experiencing arrests and other personal dangers. However, it is also a study of the international human issues on which Pearson has worked over those years; the difficulties in overcoming human rights abuses; the long time spans over which work must be done to achieve success; and the careful approach to methodology, a human rights worker must use, to avoid making bad situations worse. And it teaches how important it is to treasure the victories when they happen.
Chasing Wrongs and Rights also pays homage to very many admirable men and women with whom Pearson has worked. These people include her colleagues in various organisations but, also, include victims of human rights abuses who have been sufficiently brave to stand up and fight for their own rights; the rights of their families; and the rights of others.
After two years with GAATW, Pearson obtained a position with a larger (and much older) organisation, Anti-Slavery International. While still working on human trafficking and slavery issues, Pearson got to investigate the problems, firsthand. Her work involved conducting interviews in Africa and Europe looking at the problems, in the places from which women are trafficked with false promises of opportunities for good jobs and good pay, and at the destinations at which these women arrived where their passports were taken from them and they had no choice about where they lived or the work they did.
The world of international human rights abuses continued to expand for Pearson. In 2007, she was appointed Asia Deputy Director at Human Rights Watch (HRW) working out of New York.
Many of the issues on which Pearson worked at HRW are issues which have concerned and fascinated me over the last decade and a half. Pearson charts her work on human rights abuses in Sri Lanka, occurring both before and at the end of the civil war. She, particularly, focuses on the Sri Lankan government’s actions in citizen disappearance. Pearson, poignantly, relates her conversations with mothers of the disappeared, who continue to protest every day for accountability and justice.
Pearson discusses HRW’s work in the Philippines documenting and reporting upon now-former President Duterte’s extra-judicial murders in that country. Pearson describes Duterte, up close, but her most personal writing is reserved for the courageous Leila De Lima, one of the few politicians to oppose Duterte. The amazing and fearless de Lima continued to issue press releases and campaign from her place of pre-trial detention on trumped-up charges. And Pearson paints an amazing word picture of the equally brave Clarita Alia, of Davao City, who lost four sons to Duterte’s killing squads in that city. Pearson, herself, gave evidence against Duterte in a hearing in the southern Philippines.
Pearson also deals with her visits to Manus Island and her conversations with Kurdish writer and refugee, Behrouz Boochani. She discusses her research into the failure to provide proper care and support for mentally ill prisoners in Queensland and Western Australia.
One of the most fascinating chapters deals with Pearson’s work to save Bahraini soccer player, Australian permanent resident and political refugee, Hakeem al-Araibi. He faced extradition by the Thai government to Bahrain to face imprisonment. The incident involved the Australian Federal Police, acting on an extant Interpol red notice issued by Bahrain, [2] notifying Thai authorities of Hakeem’s travel to Bangkok (with his wife for their honeymoon).
The incident is also notable for the contribution of former Socceroo, Craig Foster, saving Hakeem’s freedom and, possibly, his life. Foster travelled to Bangkok and then to Europe to raise the alarm with football fans and football authorities across the world. Pearson credits Foster’s contribution [3] as pivotal and none would doubt that it was. Foster’s continuing work for human rights[4] must have him well on the way to becoming a living national treasure.[5]
Chasing Wrongs and Rights is a book for our times. In a world where so many bad things happen, empathy fatigue is a constant threat. It is important to remember that things can be done and that people, like Pearson and the many people discussed in Chasing Wrongs and Rights, are doing things. We can help a little where we choose. Indeed, as Pearson’s life and writings show us, there may even be a lifelong career in it. It may mean spurning those long sought after offers from our most admired law firms but – as Chasing Wrongs and Rights and Pearson’s experience shows – taking the path less travelled can, sometimes, lead you a long way.
Author: Terri Janke Publisher: NewSouth Books Reviewer: Stephen Keim
In the early nineties, Terri Janke found herself studying law in Sydney at the University of New South Wales. She had been born, and grew up, in Cairns in far north Queensland. She was not a perfect law student and dropped out during her third year. Dropping out of university is not always the worst thing that can happen to a person. Janke ended up working at the Australia Council for the Arts for its Aboriginal Arts Board. In this role, Janke found her abiding interest in intellectual property and what it could and could not do to protect First Nations culture in Australia. ln this way, when she returned a few years later to complete her degree, Janke escaped the expectations that weigh heavily upon many an Indigenous Law Student that they will serve their social purpose in life by becoming criminal lawyers.
Janke’s heritage is complex befitting Australia’s mix of Indigenous and immigrant cultures. Janke has both Meriam and Wuthathi (among others) strands to her Indigenous heritage along with Malay and Philippines origins.
Having discovered the law of intellectual property at the Australia Council, Janke’s social purpose in life has turned out to involve understanding more deeply the inadequacies of intellectual property law, particularly, to meet the needs of Indigenous Australians and to work to overcome those adequacies in every possible way.
Janke graduated in 1995; started her own law firm in 2001; and completed her doctoral thesis in Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (“ICIP”) at the Australian National University in 2019. True Tracks is Dr Janke’s doctoral thesis adapted for the general reader.
The title of the book, True Tracks, is taken from a set of principles intended to lay down best practice for ethical engagement with Indigenous people, particularly, when dealing with Indigenous culture and Indigenous information and knowledge.
The name for the set of principles has a more interesting origin. Janke recounts how she addressed a seminar in her home town of Cairns and found her image and her story and the cultural descriptor, cultural crusader, on the front page of the next day’s edition of the local newspaper, the Cairns Post. On an ensuing flight to the Torres Strait, a Torres Strait woman recognised Janke from the newspaper and began a conversation. Fearing condemnation for being too big for her boots, Janke was surprised and gratified to receive only praise from the Auntie who told Janke to stay on track; to listen to her heart; and that she would, in her work, lay down true tracks for the future. Janke has obtained inspiration and security of heart in the words of the Auntie.
There are ten True Tracks principles but they have, as the Auntie predicted, provided the basis for other sets of protocols developed by Janke, working for different organisations and agencies, to guide the ethical engagement with Indigenous persons and their cultural property across many different fields of endeavour.
The principles are relatively short and accessible but the moral imperatives they carry are clear to the reader. They comprise the need for respect; self-determination and empowerment; free, prior and informed consent which is dependent on ongoing consultation and engagement; maintaining the integrity of the cultural property; ensuring secrecy and privacy where that is appropriate and necessary; proper attribution; built in benefit sharing; the maintenance and strengthening of Indigenous culture; and the recognition and protection of ICIP rights.
Janke lists different aspects of Indigenous cultural heritage or ICIP as falling within the fields of artistic works; literature; performance; languages; knowledge; cultural property (including objects held in museums); human remains; immovable cultural property such as sites and places; and documentation of Indigenous people and culture.
Janke having explained the concept of ICIP and the content of the True Tracks principles in the opening chapter, each subsequent chapter of the book involves a case study of the state of protection for Indigenous cultural heritage in a different field of endeavour. Chapter 2 deals with property in Indigenous languages; chapter 3 with the visual arts; and chapter 4 with Indigenous architecture and Industrial design.
Each chapter pursues a similar methodology. The operation of intellectual property protections within the existing law, to the extent they are relevant to the particular field of endeavour, is carefully explained. The deficiencies of the existing legal protections are also explained. Generally, the elements of Indigenous cultural heritage are not protected. In many areas, this is because, under the existing law, no one owns the heritage or the knowledge. Despite the importance of Indigenous languages to the communities who traditionally have spoken them, no intellectual property exists in the language or the individual words of the language. So anyone can take an Indigenous word and appropriate it to their commercial or other use without permission or even consultation. In many areas, the valuable community knowledge is unprotected but the act of stealing the heritage creates things which are protected by the law. Thus, the performance of a traditional dance may not be an artistic work capable of protection but the filming of a performance creates property in the resulting film protected by the law which can not only be exploited by the film-maker but which can exclude the original dancers and the community who preserved the dance over many generations even from accessing that film.
Each study then looks at the way in which the law’s deficiencies have expressed themselves in the particular field. In many cases, the issues go back to the beginnings of the colonising of the Australian continent. Aboriginal objects, and even human remains, have been collected and removed to museums, in Australia and overseas. Aboriginal words have been collected in notebooks by anthropologists who now have exclusive rights to the contents of the notebooks. Aboriginal stories have been collected and republished in books the copyright of which now belongs to the collecting author. On many occasions, the expropriation has been, and is still being, done without any compliance with the True Tracks principles, that is, without respect, consent, consultation, attribution or any sharing of the benefit.
In each of the fields, however, Janke documents the steps taken to supplement the law with agreements and protocols based on the True Tracks principles. In each field of endeavour, Janke, not only, documents shameful incidents of cultural theft but, also, recounts examples where activists have confronted those who would act, exploitively, and brought them to heel. There are also many stories of individuals and organisations who have consulted Janke and other Indigenous lawyers for guidance and who have, willingly, developed their own best practice guidance implementing the True Tracks principles. Consultation carried out over time with the communities to whom the cultural knowledge belongs has led to the deficiencies of the underlying law being supplemented by agreements which have protected the interests of the communities while allowing for mutually beneficial use of various forms of knowledge and information and creative endeavour.
The surprising thing for the reader is that True Tracks becomes much more than a study of the deficiencies of the law and the ways in which those deficiencies may be addressed. It becomes a series of narratives of heroic endeavour in which a new beneficial paradigm has been created and of the positive benefits which have flowed therefrom. But it has also become a guide to the rich field of creative work being carried out by Indigenous Australians in the fields of painting; craft; education; architecture; linguistics; music, dance, environmental management and regeneration; cooking and gastronomy and business and many more.
The reader comes away with a list of Indigenous authors that one must read and a list of Aboriginal performers to whom one must listen and whose videos one must watch, as well as a number of arts and craft exhibitions that one must simply not miss.
Thus, in the chapter on Indigenous languages, not only has Wiradjuri woman and author, Tara June Winch, written a highly decorated novel called The Yield, she has promoted aspects of the Wiradjuri language in her book in a way that respected the community to whom the language belongs. Her respect and consultation for the owners of the language has led to a strengthening of the community’s pride in itself and its sense of well-being. A different less respectful approach is likely to have had very different impacts both for Winch and the Wiradjuri people, everywhere. Other Indigenous writers include Dr Jared Thomas: Calypso Summer and Songs That Sound Like Blood and Anita Heiss: Yirra and her Deadly Dog Demon and River of Dreams.
A heart warming story of struggle involves the copyright to all of Albert Namatjira’s artworks. In what seems to have been a thoughtless act, in 1983, the Public Trustee of the Northern Territory sold those rights to a private publisher for $8,500. A large number of people and institutions, including lawyers and filmmakers, ran a campaign that led to that copyright being, voluntarily, returned in October 2007 to a trust created to benefit Namatjira’s family. A careless wrong of the past had been righted by persuasion.
Indigenous recording artists working closely with communities include Shellie Morris and Jessie Lloyd. Dance companies such as Bangarra Dance Theatre and NAISDA College are, of course, well-known for performing and developing traditional dances with the support and permission of traditional communities.
True Tracks also provides the names and websites of artisans, tourism operators and bush food producers who are working in their respective fields producing authentic product respecting the cultural property on which they draw and applying the True Tracks principles of respect, consultation, prior informed consent and sharing of benefits.
Something deeper and more pervading also emerges. The reader, gradually, learns that the concept of ethical dealing with First Nations people is not only something for the filmmaker about to journey into the Outback to shoot a documentary or the music producer about to sign up a talented group from Cherbourg. And, gradually, the reader learns that acknowledgement of traditional owners is not something merely for formal occasions. And, gradually, the reader learns that being a Wuthathi man or a Turrbul or Quandamooka woman is not something for show but rather goes to the very heart of a person’s sense of self. We should acknowledge country and its traditional ownership, every day. We can remind ourselves to do this by incorporating it in our signature blocks and on our home pages. We can be interested in whose country we are on when we travel and very conscious of whose country we tread upon when we are at home or at work.
I am indebted to Dr Janke. True Tracks has taught me much: many things of which I am now aware and other things that I will perceive more clearly with time and reflection. True Tracks is a fascinating read as well as a scholarly work. I recommend it, highly.
Author: Ignazio Silone Publisher: Signet Classics (1986) Reviewer: Stephen Keim
I have a friend who works in North Queensland at a community legal centre. He is about my age and we go back a long way. This friend shares my passion for left wing causes and, in particular, my opposition to the death penalty, anywhere, at any time, for any reason. We share tidbits in which we think the other may be interested. Silone’s classic 1936 novel, Bread and Wine, something much more than a tidbit was shared with me by my friend, almost a year ago.
In a recent period of unexpected free time, I found the book lying on a nearby shelf and I am very glad that I took the opportunity to read it, almost then and there.
Bread and Wine was first published in 1936 in Switzerland in the German language with the German title, Brot und Wein. The novel is set in the poor region of the Abruzzi in southern Italy and was very successful, when first published, as a revealing portrait of the injustices being perpetrated by the Mussolini’s fascist regime. It centres around the experiences of Pietro Spina, a socialist activist, who has returned, without permission of the authorities, from exile and has been given the task by the Party to organise the poor peasants of his home region in the service of the Revolution.
The reader meets a very ill Spina in an early chapter being hidden by a supporter, Cardile, in his barn. Cardile summons, with a degree of deception, the local doctor, Nunzio, an old school friend of Spina to provide treatment and medicines. Nunzio is reluctant, at first, having abandoned any expression of radical ideas as a necessity for professional advancement and self-preservation. But, for a time, Nunzio, inspired by Spina’s words and example, provides the necessary treatment and, with Cardile, devises the plan that Spina will disguise himself as a priest, Don Paolo Spada, while he recuperates in the extremely poor hillside village of Pietrasecca.
The result is that, for the course of the novel, at least, the main protagonist is a reluctant priest attempting to preach rudimentary ideas of socialist revolution to an utterly sceptical group of old poor peasants. Irving Howe in his introduction to the 1986 Signet edition, characterises those parts of Bread and Wine where the action occurs in a rural setting (which is almost the whole of the novel) as having a feel and style of allegory. I would go further and suggest that Don Paolo Spada’s efforts at avoiding any priestly duties while raising visions of a better more just future with his rural audience carries a feel of Moliere’s, Le Médecin Malgre Lui, and is within touching distance of farce on many occasions.
Howe identifies the central themes of Bread and Wine when he describes Silone’s work as portraying the competing visions of the socialist promise of socialist liberation and the Christian promise of spiritual transcendence. Howe describes Silone’s choice as a writer as seeking to pursue both visions despite the tension which exists between them.
While this may be the central tension in Bread and Wine, Silone manages to give expression to many different visions of reality. The peasants, when challenged, articulate a reasoned acceptance of their reality which has persisted for generations. What is the point of struggling to change a fixed reality, they say. When a disappointed Spina reflects upon their responses to his provoking questions, he finds it hard to fault the peasants’ logic.
Many characters debate the choice between conformity and resistance in the context of an unjust and repressive regime. Spina, as Don Paolo, is a voice in favour of action as is his old and respected, but generally sidelined, teacher, Don Benedetto. But there are many voices for conformity among the townspeople whose positions also carry persuasion.
There are ironies flitting back and forth between Silone’s own life and the action in Bread and Wine. Spica, in the novel, is raised by his grandmother because his parents died in the earthquake which struck the region in 1915. Silone’s father died in 1911 but his mother was killed in the earthquake.
Don Paolo, as progressive priest, comforts and restores a young activist, Luigi Murica, who had, after severe beatings at the hands of the regime’s police force, been seduced into becoming a police informer against his socialist comrades. Don Paolo assures Murica that he is forgiven and that he trusts him by telling Murica that he is not a real priest. Strangely, it was revealed by research in the 1990’s that Silone, himself, had been a police informer in the 1920s and that he broke with the police when his younger brother died as a result of torture and beatings at the hand of the carabinieri. In forgiving Murica, was Silone forgiving himself for his own actions?
Spica speaks a number of times in the novel concerning the matters that compelled him to return from exile despite the risks that carried for both his safety and his freedom. Remaining outside his country and outside the struggle was pointless, says the character. Silone, on the other hand, remained in exile and, no doubt, by writing and publishing Bread and Wine, was a much more effective opponent of the fascist regime than if he had returned.
There is no doubt that both the author and the main character had become disillusioned with Soviet communism and the Italian communist party’s slavish devotion to the latest directive of the Soviets which same devotion it demanded from its members. When Spica receives some policy papers arguing approval of the great purge and show trials then being set up in Moscow, he glances at them and puts them in the fireplace. When pressed by his party leader in Rome, Spica declines to grant his approval. His argument, in support of his refusal, is one of a need for plurality of thought and critical judgment, even in the course of a socialist revolution. None of this dulls Spica’s own passion to resist the government and to work and organise for the betterment of the conditions experienced by the ordinary people even at risk to his safety and his life.
The position of the Church is characterised by its complete surrender to the fascist party in power and the support it gives to that government by turning up to key public events and in other ways. For this, it is condemned. But Spica’s experience as a fake priest gives him an insight into the comfort that ordinary people demand and, even despite his best efforts to refuse to cooperate, take from their clergy. As Don Paolo, Spica comforts and inspires people, especially, young people and women, in ways he could never achieve as a socialist organiser, alone. He changes people’s lives, positively, for the good and he receives devotion, even love, from many including the two young women, Christina and Bianchina, both of whose lives he has dramatically touched. And when Spica sees a real priest in action, Don Girasole, he is impressed by how much good a poor hard working priest does for his community including in areas for which the government has responsibility but fails to act with compassion or empathy.
It is 25 years since the Signet edition was published and 75 years since the first edition of Bread and Wine was published, albeit, in German. In some respects, it has become quaint and, no longer, relevant (although every avowed socialist who broke with Stalinism in the 1930s will always have huge Brownie points from me). In other respects, Bread and Wine retains a timeless quality. For me, Bread and Wine was not about the competing visions of the socialist promise of socialist liberation and the Christian promise of spiritual transcendence identified by Howe. It was more about the luxury of principles when we do not have to put them into action and the varied human responses of those who have to live through some kind of challenge or repression. When our beliefs have the potential to cost us dearly, or even a little, there will be no right answer and everyone will respond in their own way. For some, preserving professional advancement or the safety of oneself and one’s family will take precedence. Others may choose their principles and, perhaps, even martyrdom, whether Christian or socialist or both. And all, hopefully, will learn something along the way, perhaps, even from those who hold different views and make different choices to ourselves.
Author: Max Porter Publisher: Faber and Faber Reviewer: Stephen Keim
I have a friend who, for no good reason except that she knows that I like to read, drops off four excellent new books at my chambers. I have no obligation to repay my friend except by reading the books and enjoying them. With Lanny, I have done something to expiate my growing moral indebtedness.
Lanny is also a source of brownie points for me on the home front. Lanny is a novel and I, famously, never read novels and, oh so unfairly, suffer moral ignominy for my narrow (non-fiction) choices when it comes to discretionary reading.
The action in Lanny takes place in an ancient village, come commuter town, an hour out of London.
Lanny of the title is an unusual child. His mother writes murder mysteries. His father works in the city and exhibits many of the undesirable personality traits of men who work in the city.
Lanny’s Dad’s line manager refers to Lanny as mad as a March hare which annoys Lanny’s Dad who realises, nonetheless, that it is he who has transmitted such perceptions to his boss. Lanny’s unusual qualities are such that words can only hint at them. The school report says that Lanny has an innate gift for social cohesion and will calm a fraught classroom with a single well-timed joke or song.
Lanny is calm and unhurried and comes in with the sound of a song on his creaturely breath, stinking of pine trees and other nice things. Lanny is, no doubt, smart for one so young but his knowledge is as much attributable to connections and understanding of the deeper magic as it is to intelligence and learning.
Pete is a once, and still, famous avant garde artist from decades earlier who applies his trade, quietly, in the village. Pete and Lanny’s mother appreciate one another and Pete, at first reluctantly, agrees to give Lanny some art lessons. And a deep bond is formed between the old artist and the knowing child.
Peggy is the old mad witch of the village. She understands, better than anybody, Lanny’s unusual ability to connect.
The narrative of Lanny is told in the voices of the characters. We don’t hear about the characters. We hear from each of the characters. We hear what they think including about one another.
Befitting an ancient village, the town has its own haunting, its own local god or saint in the form of a shape shifting, mood changing Dead Papa Toothwort. As Toothwort moves around and through the village, he overhears the townspeople speaking and, like the pub closing scene in part II of The Waste Land, the ordinary voices of the town scatter across the page and catches of tawdry temporary dramas of daily life are glimpsed before fading and giving way to the next.
Porter, born in High Wycombe, was formerly a book seller and an editor having been editorial director at Granta and Portobello Books until 2019. His debut novel, Grief is a Thing with Feathers, was a huge success in 2015 and he published The Death of Francis Bacon in 2021. Lanny was released in 2019. Lanny is described as a book about a family who lives in a village peopled by the living and the dead. In this respect, it resembles Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Padramo. It may equally be said that every town and every locality is haunted by what has taken place there. We rely on novels like Lanny to remind us of this deeper truth.
The lyrical music of the competing voices telling their respective points of view becomes stretched and frantic as mystery descends upon Lanny’s village; relationships fray and are tested; and tragedy beckons. What does the deeper magic allow the living? What has Toothwort done? Do the ancient verities offer any mercy?
Lanny is a beautiful novel and comes highly recommended by this reviewer.
Stephen Keim
Clayfield
25 May 2022
Author: Nicholas Cowdery (with Rachael Jane Chin) Publisher: NewSouth Publishing[1]
Nick Cowdery was appointed Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) for the State of New South Wales in 1994. At the time of Cowdery’s appointment, the Premier of New South Wales was John Fahey and his Attorney-General was John Hannaford. Cowdery would grace the office for 17 years until 2011. His decision to resign was, effectively, forced by the ire of the then government,[2] with legislation passed and deliberately retained which would have deprived Cowdery of most of his pension if he had stayed in the role beyond his sixty-fifth birthday.
Cowdery’s career as a lawyer has covered most available roles. He worked as a public defender in Papua New Guinea in his first year of practice in 1971. He served as an acting judge from 1988 to 1990. He had an extensive practice at the private bar practising particularly in the areas of criminal law, administrative law and commercial law taking silk in 1987 and then served as DPP for 17 years.
Cowdery has written extensively on matters of law reform and legal policy including the earlier monograph, Getting Justice Wrong: myths, media and crime in 2001. Since 2011, Cowdery has continued working including by teaching prosecutors in developing countries around the world the principles and processes which align the role of public prosecution with the values of the rule of law.
Frank and Fearless, at one level, is the story of a number of interesting cases that crossed the desk of the DPP during the 17 years during which Cowdery was appointed to that office. At another level, Frank and Fearless is a story of the role of the DPP and the implications that it has for any person who is appointed to fulfil that role. In his introduction, Cowdery states that he knew that every decision he made would make somebody unhappy. If he decided to prosecute or appeal, the accused or the prisoner would feel aggrieved. But, if he exercised his discretion against taking action, victims and the supporters of punishment would, in turn, feel aggrieved. Cowdery also explains that, despite his normal human reactions to vexed situations that came before him, he was bound to make decisions, professionally, in accordance with the available evidence and the law.
So, at another level, Frank and Fearless, is about the dilemmas and the problems facing the criminal law. The interesting cases which feature illustrate those dilemmas in all their acuteness. The perspectives of victims and their families; the strengths and fallibility of expert evidence; the different light arising from circumstantial evidence; and the hard cases of assisted dying are workshopped by the cases featured. Cowdery manages to convey both the human and the responsible prosecutor’s perceptions of the facts at each point in the telling. He is also able to convey the perspectives of others, accused persons and victims, at all points in the narrative.
The title, Frank and Fearless, is well chosen. Frankness and fearlessness are required of all advisers and all decision makers. They are essential to those who provide legal advice or make legal decisions. They are essential to any person performing the role of DPP. Cowdery is probably the person most famous for displaying those qualities in the role of DPP for most of the readers of this book. He was a controversial DPP because he exercised the guaranteed independence of his office to make fearless decisions and he articulated the lessons he learned in the office to inform the public as to ways in which the laws could be improved. Cowdery understood the emotions of the families of victims but he never let public criticism deter him from honestly exercising the role of the office or from making the correct decision on his assessment of the evidence and law.
Frank and Fearless is, therefore, an insider’s account of a turbulent period in law and politics. Cowdery explains his decisions and his actions and there is no doubting that the book justifies his actions and condemns many of those politicians and journalists who chose to attack him and to obstruct his work. Cowdery, however, eschews anger. His account of his time in the office and his work carries with it a sense of calmness and a feeling that, however strongly the author may disagree with others’ actions and words, he can still empathise with those others and understand the emotions that cause them to take a particular course.
Among the cases studied, the prosecution of those responsible for the death of Michael Marslew highlights the need for the interests of victims and their families to be properly recognised in the prosecution process but also highlights the pressures placed on prosecutors and the Courts by victims and relatives airing their frustrations in public media campaigns.
Several cases involving different examples of assisted dying highlight the complexities of using the existing law to achieve a humane result but also the need for careful law reform in the area.
The principle that no one is above the law is showcased in the prosecution of Patrick Power SC, Cowdery’s deputy director at the time of his arrest, for possession of child pornography, and the prosecution of Minister of the Crown, Milton Orkopoulis, for child sex offences. The case studies, however, also show the pressures that come from many directions when a high profile person is suspected of having committed criminal offences.
The ultimately unsuccessful prosecution of Gordon Woods for the murder of his girlfriend, Caroline Byrne, raises the dangers of over zealousness on the part of a Crown Prosecutor.
Cowdery’s co-writer, Rachel Jane Chin, is a lawyer and a journalist as well as a documentary writer having published a book in 2011 on one of the cases discussed in Frank and Fearless, the successful prosecution of fringe national water polo player, Keli Lane, for the death of her missing baby, Tegan.
As an outsider, the reader will have little opportunity to discern exactly what the co-writer has contributed to the work. One might suspect, however, that the professional author, Chin, may have assisted with the structure of the book in which a topic is dealt with in a chapter, apparently, to a settled conclusion with the suspect either convicted or not pursued only to have the same case emerge afresh in a new chapter when an appeal or a fresh evidence discovery has thrown a new light on the case and re-awakened the narrative and re-focussed the issues to which the case gives rise.
In one sense, Frank and Fearless is a must read book because its principal author has made a great contribution to public life in Australia and his perspectives are very valuable. But, between them, Cowdery and Chin have produced a fascinating narrative in which important lessons are woven without diminishing for a moment, indeed, enhancing the entertainment value of the work.
Frank and Fearless comes highly recommended from this reviewer.
[1] Imprint of University of New South Wales Press Ltd [2] The Attorney-General of that government was John Hatzistergos, now a judge of the NSW District Court. The premier was Kristina Keneally.
