Non-fiction

Australia has an obsession with and an expertise in creative accounting. Governments have for years declared that we’re too small a nation to contribute significantly to climate change, while crowing about our status as the world’s number one coal exporter. (Being both the world’s smallest continent and the world’s largest island might have given us the world’s largest chip on the shoulder.) We send our coal overseas and claim that we’re no longer responsible for what happens to it. The logic is flawed, but it’s also embedded in us. We’ve ended up at a point where nation states make agreements about emissions targets and behaviours as though the atmosphere can read our maps.

Fathoms presents itself as a sensorium – a study in synaesthesia. Its style is in fact a collision between two modes of expression, representing distinct ways of understanding the world. There is the intoxicated, subjective, extravagantly metaphorical mode in which Giggs conveys her thoughts and impressions. And there is the sober, objectifying mode of scientific and scholarly writing – which, of course, comes with its own elaborate technical lexicons and formal tics. Fathoms moves between the two, sometimes holding them apart, sometimes seeking to combine them. Ultimately, it wants to reconcile them.

Science thrives when it is open to anyone who has the talent for it, and the taste for the hard work involved. And society thrives when our institutions are seen to be fair. But my argument is that the case for diversity is epistemic as well as moral. I’ve never heard a scientist say, Yeah, it’s really great that the feminists pointed this out because once we understood the epistemic benefits of diversity, we realized that we could do better science.” My goal is that, in the future, scientists will say that.

Poetry, I had surmised, could do so many amazing things for nonfiction – technically, stylistically, spatially. Why couldn’t it be recognised as a valuable mode to challenge and expand nonfiction?

‘On a formal level, the book tells a story about writing as professional work, and how it can (or at least once could) happen in Australia with some success. It also wonders, both explicitly and through its form, what it means for literary writing to survive after what has, always unsatisfyingly, been called postmodernism.’

Lou never got to help physically rebuild his personal world after the peak of the AIDS crisis in the US, but in many ways he helped to rebuild the worlds of countless people who came after him. Early on in his diaries, Lou says, ‘My problem is that I can’t accept life for what it is…like it is presented to me. I feel there is something deep and wonderful underneath it that no one has found.’ I wonder what messages the dead have for us now.

Savage spends the entire collection telling us she’s playing at being an intellectual – that it’s a ruse, yet another trick – and all the while the book provides an object lesson in the many ways that’s simply not true. The un-small line of her vision, the intricacy of her argumentation, the richness of her sources, the cultivation of her contradictory style, pitched between brashness and eloquence, and the pleasures of her experimentation: Blueberries testifies against its author.

Long before the Stella Prize, there was Stella herself, but also Ada, various Marys, Catherines and Elizabeths, Tasma, Rosa and so on.

‘What’s the use?’ is an irresistible refrain when living under the illegitimate jurisdiction of so-called Australia. It is difficult to break the patterns of non-consent, policing, and harm when the poor and marginalised have to constantly fight for their survival, and prove their utility-value to the state.

I started composing this review during the peak of the bushfires in January. I returned to complete it as the coronavirus pandemic settled into its critical phase. The globalising, unifying elements of such crises are palpable, and resonate with Hägglund’s focus on fragility as an ineliminable element of political effort, just as it is for life as such. And yet his universal philosophy betrays a startling parochialism in the way it apportions which routes of anti-capitalism are viable and which aren’t.