Non-fiction
Eccentric Guides: Vanessa Berry’s Mirror Sydney
Mirror Sydney appeals to the notion that people live inside worlds of their own making. This suggests both a certain comprehensiveness or completeness and a limitation: the globe is known in form but so are its borders. However, this is also a world post-globalisation: the great exhibitions of the colonial project have become abandoned variety stores and theme parks, the pathos of which comes from quaintness or the strange, instead of authority or splendour.
All The World’s A Drain
If it is the job of a phenomenologist to describe conscious experience, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology does so in a way that collapses the distinction between one’s psychic life and one’s material situation. Its author, Astrida Neimanis, challenges us to reimagine how individual human bodies—constituted of approximately 70 per cent water—are thoroughly implicated in the planetary hydrocommons.
Into the Jaws of the Monster: Fromelles and Pozières, 1916
Roger Lee’s The Battle of Fromelles and Meleah Hampton’s Attack on the Somme are part of a relatively recent shift in the focus of Australian military history: they revisit big battles on the Western Front, which few works have done since Charles Bean’s Official History (1921-42). It’s as though, inflated with myths of Gallipoli, our Great War literature has had little use for strategic reality. Perhaps it takes a century to get clear of the revulsion aroused by the killing in that war – which Bean blocked out by writing the original romance of it as heroic achievement.
The Pleasure of Hating
It is always a good idea, I think, to resist the temptation to regard the politics of one’s own time as especially awful, but recent history does seem to have provided no shortage of prima facie evidence that there is something a bit unhinged and perhaps even pathological about contemporary conflicts. As Pankaj Mishra and Kenan Malik both argue, the volatility and irrationalism of the present are expressions of widespread feelings of alienation, resentment, anger and hatred. This much, at least, seems obvious enough. The difficult question Mishra and Malik set out to answer is why this should be the case.
Trench Warfare: The Honest History Book
It seems we are living through a near perfect storm of Anzac historical consumption, with a number of factors working in concert. First, Australian historical narratives have been deeply challenged by the emergence and power of Indigenous historical perspectives, especially since the 1970s and 1980s. Australia’s ‘origin story’, once characterised by discovery, nascent democracy and workers’ rights, has been powerfully reimagined by Indigenous writers and rights activists as a narrative of invasion and dispossession.’
Origin Story: Dancing with Strangers
‘Dancing with Strangers would have an honoured place in Australian historiography by virtue of the skill, intelligence and literary brilliance of its author alone. It is the product of a lifetime spent interrogating first-encounter texts to reveal and make understandable their hidden truths. But what is most remarkable about the book is the invitation it extends to readers to learn and wonder in the company of such a brilliant historian. ‘
Reading Feminist Killjoys
‘What is a feminist book? And what are feminist books for? I pose these questions at a time when feminism is currently popular enough to yield bestsellers and when any feminist text, no matter how broadly or narrowly pitched, has to compete with a bottomless supply of high-quality feminist writing available for free on the internet. ‘
The Crime of Crimes: Genocide: A World History
Genocide is distinct from broader terms such as war crimes and crimes against humanity. In Genocide: A World History, Naimark reviews cases of genocide dating to the ancient world, working through the warrior genocides committed by the Crusaders and the Mongols, to the Spanish conquest of the Americas, to what he terms the ‘settler’ genocides that occurred in North America, Africa and Australia.’
Tending and Attending
I have paid my respects at Anne Bront√´’s grave but not at that of my own great-grandmother. Graves haven’t figured at all in my sense of myself as a person with biological progenitors, yet they’ve played a part in my attempts to connect with individuals whose artistic achievements I admire. ‘