Author: Viet Thanh Nguyen
Publisher: Corsair
Reviewer: Stephen Keim

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author: Paul Lynch
Publisher: Oneworld Publications
Reviewer: Stephen Keim

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

The second is a more obscure passage from Bertolt Brecht:

 “In the dark times

will there be singing?

Yes, there will also be singing,

About the dark times.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Glory is set in the fictional African country of Jidada.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author: David Marr
Publisher: Black Inc.
Reviewer: Stephen Keim

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

He says:

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

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

…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Author: John H Langbein
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Reviewer: Stephen Keim

A friend of mine at the bar who has, like me, represented quite a few applicants for admission as legal practitioners who had one thing or another to disclose, very kindly, presented me with The Origins of Adversary Criminal Trial (“Adversary Trial”) to mark our joint adventures in a couple of more difficult than usual examples of this genre.

Adversary Trial was published in 2003 as part of the Oxford Studies in Modern Legal History series described as aiming to publish monographs of high quality and originality on legal history covering the period from 1750 onwards. 

The General Editor of the series, the late AW Brian Simpson, points out the paradox that the substantive criminal law varies very little between common law and civil law systems while the procedure by which allegations of criminal offences are determined are very different. The contrast between the adversary criminal trial of common law jurisdictions where barristers compete to present to a jury of lay people competing versions of a narrative that flows from the evidence and the inquisitorial judicial investigation of the civil system could not be more different.

Adversary Trial seeks to explain the historical origins of these differences and demonstrate the reasons why the criminal trial in England developed in the way that it did. As Simpson points out, the understanding of this history was seriously in error because historians had drawn their understanding from the well-documented State Trials in which often high born people were prosecuted for treason. It was not understood that such trials were atypical of the multitude of criminal trials which were being conducted at the time at the Old Bailey and at assize courts around the nation.

Langbein’s magic ingredient for re-writing the development of the adversary criminal trial as we know it is a set of sources known as the Old Bailey Sessions Papers (“the Papers”). Langbein describes them as contemporaneously published pamphlet accounts of the trials at the Old Bailey. The Papers commenced as a trickle in the 1670s and were continuously published for almost two and a half centuries until the eve of World War I.

Langbein’s first experience of the Papers was a chance encounter in the Bodleian Law Library in the (northern hemisphere) Spring of 1977. One can infer that Adversary Trial is the culmination of 25 years of continuous scholarship using this new source of information and related primary and secondary sources.

Langbein describes the defining feature of criminal justice in England and other common law countries as not the availability of lawyers for defence and prosecution but the placement of responsibility for gathering and presenting evidence solely upon these parties. This is contrasted with European systems where the court and associated public officials have these responsibilities with the object of finding the truth as to what occurred. In contrast, the common law jury gets to choose between two contrasting views of reality presented, respectively, by the parties.

To take a hyper-modern view, the adversary trials with which the current generation of lawyers is familiar are not quite as oblivious to the truth as Langbein’s generalised view. The duties imposed on prosecutors to act in the public interest carries obligations which prevent a jury being presented with a wholly jaundiced view of reality by the prosecution. The requirement that the prosecution make disclosure of all relevant material held by it is also important. It ensures that the adversary trial is conducted in circumstances where the defence is aware of all of the strengths and weaknesses of the prosecution case well before the trial and can conduct the trial with all the tactical and strategic advantages that such information brings.

This qualification takes nothing from the contrast that Langbein draws. In some respects, it highlights aspects of the history in which it is suggested that some procedural and doctrinal changes were the product of perceptions that the defence were unfairly disadvantaged by the system as it existed at various times.

The starting position of Langbein’s exposition is a criminal trial (which had existed for centuries) in which the accused person was denied trial counsel; where the prosecution was conducted primarily by citizen accusers; and where the strategy behind the trial process was to gain access to the truth by forcing the accused person to give evidence on the basis that the accused person was often the only person who truly knew what had happened.

This form of altercation trial was underpinned by what was called the Marian pre-trial procedure (called thus because it followed the Marian Committal Statute of 1555, in the reign of Queen Mary). In this procedure, the local Justice of the Peace took depositions from the complainant and their witnesses and, sometimes, from the accused person (but not from witnesses for the accused) and, having done so, committed the accused to prison until the trial and bound over the complainant and the witnesses to appear at the trial on pain of punishment.

The system resulted in very short trials where the (usually, unrepresented and private, prosecutor) had the advantage of proofs of evidence while the hapless accused emerged, unassisted, from their prison cell and were forced to defend themselves before the jury the best way they could.

It was the unfairness of this altercation trial that led, eventually, to changes that produced the modern adversary trial to which Langbein refers.

Particularly venomous prosecutions of treason, involving the use of perjured evidence, in the late 17^th century led to reforms of treason trials through the Treason Trials Act of 1896. An important reform was to create a right to counsel for defendants in such prosecutions. Langbein identifies a number of causes of the decision of judges in ordinary criminal trials to commence granting similar rights to defendants in those trials. These included a developing practice of prosecutors receiving the assistance of lawyers; the development of a rewards system for those who brought evidence of property crimes giving rise to a profession of thief takers whose evidence was likely to be questionable having been influenced by their need to earn the reward; and a similarly worrying practice of doing deals with persons who claimed to be accomplices who avoided prosecution by given evidence against others.

By the 1730s, these factors sufficiently worried judges hearing the cases to convince them to permit defendants in ordinary cases similar rights to counsel as applied in treason cases. Thus, the true adversary trial was born.

The same forces, also, tended, in accord with the urgings of the newly enfranchised counsel, to drive the development of the law of evidence. A strict rule requiring the corroboration of the evidence of accomplices, for example, was also apt to address the issue of perjury by a co-offender placing the blame on anyone but themselves.

The privilege against self-incrimination and the standard of proof beyond reasonable doubt descending upon the prosecution are further examples of the substantive law of evidence developing in tandem with the appearance of defence counsel in trials.

Three other matters of interest emerge from Adversary Trial. Langbein notes that the passive role of the judge as arbiter above the fray is consistent with the judge’s position in the earlier altercation trial since it was the private prosecutor assisted by the depositions from the Marian pre-trial process who brought the prosecution and presented the evidence before a similarly passive judge. Langbein also points out the influence of the draconian nature of the justice system under “the Bloody Code” when very minor offences carried the sentence of death. For those who ran the system, including judges and juries, a state of too much blood was more than enough was reached. As well as supporting the development of the adversary trial and the supporting rules of evidence, the desire to avoid capital punishment led to juries reaching compromise verdicts such as by finding the value of stolen goods to be below the amount which made the offence carry the penalty of death.

The third point of particular interest concerns Langbein’s analysis as to why the European system, with its emphasis on reaching the truth was not seen as an alternative to the judges who developed the adversary trial. Langbein’s answer is torture. Because judge ordered torture was an integral part of the European system, English judges were wary of any form of inquisitorial justice and creating the adversary trial was seen as a preferable way of instilling justice into a system which those at the heart, thereof, saw as unjustly tipped against the accused person.

Langbein’s workis a rare example of completely original legal history research being carried out in the dying decades of the twentieth century. The Papers constitute an extraordinary resource which lay unheeded in the archives of major research libraries for well over fifty years.

And Adversary Trial is a fascinating piece of writing which provides valuable context to the system in which we work as twenty-first century lawyers. It certainly merits its inclusion in the Oxford Studies in Modern Legal History series.

Now to work out a way to incorporate it into my next set of submissions at the Caboolture Magistrates Court.  

Author: Mick Herron
Publisher: Baskerville, an imprint of John Murray
Reviewer: Stephen Keim

Slow Horses was chosen as the book to read by the Blokes Book Club which is why I came to be reading it. Spy novels are not, normally, my go.

Mick Herron has an impressive collection of titles to his name and Slow Horses is his 2010 contribution to his Slough House series of spy novels.

Slough House, the omniscient narrator points out, is not in Slough but in the Borough of Finsbury, a stone’s throw from Barbican Underground Station. It is a place where spies who have failed or offended or otherwise fallen from favour with those who count at the moment are sent to perform meaningless jobs until slow reality hits them and they leave the service for meaningless jobs in private enterprise. The name comes from an obscure joke based on the concept that a banished person is so far from the corridors of power that they might as well be in Slough which is 31 kilometres west of Central London (which, in corridors of power terms, is a long way).

The plot centres around River Cartwright whose reason for being banished has something to do with his best friend and cohort competitor, “Spider” Webb, and a lot to do with Cartwright failing an exercise in which he was tasked with saving London from a saboteur dressed in something approaching a white tee under a blue shirt.

Discussing the plot of a spy novel in any detail is not recommended as even the most anodyne fact might, in the end, give the game away. Suffice to say that the spy industry recalls Churchill’s famous statement that, in Parliament, those across the table are the opposition and not the enemy and that the enemy sit in the seats behind your back.

And, in a crisis, the people you have written off can surprise you such that an effective team can arise from the most unlikely components.

I have hesitated to use the word, “thriller”, to this point of time in this review but Slow Horses is indeed a thriller. The suspense is maintained to the final pages and, in the second half of the novel, once the stage has been set, surprises lurk around every corner. Time and again, the reader thinks that they have worked out what was a previously unlikely situation only to have new details revealed which change the reader’s working hypothesis, dramatically.

Slow Horses is not just a who done it. How was it done and who did which bits are just as important. And to add spice and immediacy, not all the double crossing and betrayal is, necessarily, in the reader’s past as the narrator brings protagonists who are doing one another over to negotiate, make demands and clinch new deals so that new betrayals can emerge from the text before the reader’s eyes.     

I found Slow Horses entertaining and satisfying.

I may even dip into another spy novel sometime in the foreseeable future.   

Author: Katherine Rundell
Publisher: Faber
Reviewer: Stephen Keim

A friend and former colleague, now, a retired judge, came to my birthday party and brought a gift.

The gift, a copy of Katherine Rundell’s Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne (“Super-Infinite”) was very welcome since, in my high school and undergraduate days, I had been strongly impressed by Donne’s poetic cleverness. In retrospect, my reading of Donne, like the rest of my reading which I had thought to be impressively broad and deep, turns out to be extremely shallow.

Both, in reading Super-Infinite and in, subsequently, consulting an anthology of The Metaphysical Poets, I discovered that I can only claim any significant familiarity with one or two of Donne’s poems. Perhaps, I can claim some knowledge of the Song (on woman’s infidelity) commencing “Goe, and cathche a falling starre and get with childe a mandrake root” and the contrasting Song, commencing “Sweetest love, I do not goe, For weariness of thee” which suggests that true lovers are never, in truth, departed. These two poems form both the substance and limits of my familiarity with Donne’s body of work.

And I did know that no person was an island and knew not to send to ask for whom the bell tolls.

Rundell, who is a renowned author of books for children (Rooftoppers, Cartwheeling in Thunderstorms, The Girl Savage and The Explorer), completed her doctoral thesis on Donne at All Souls College, Oxford in the years after 2008. Super-Infinite was five years in the writing but was a product of over a decade of studying and thinking about Donne and his work. Her knowledge runs very deep indeed.

Rundell takes the traditional view of a two-fold Donne: Jack Donne, the youthful rake and Dr Donne, the older, wiser priest, and rejects it as failing to capture the many different ways in which Donne expressed himself during his life.

Rundell’s Donne taxonomy includes Donne as poet, lover, essayist, lawyer, pirate, recusant, preacher, satirist, politician, courtier, chaplain to the King and Dean of St Paul’s, the finest Anglican cathedral in London. Super-Infinite, as a biography in the traditional sense, follows Donne’s life and his literary output from his earliest days to his death at the age of 59. In this way, Super-Infinite follows Donne as he transforms from one life role to another hence the sub-title, The Transformations of John Donne.

The many different roles through which John Donne expressed himself during the course of his life raise questions about how Donne should be viewed when all is done and considered. Donne was raised in a Catholic family a number of whom were considered as martyrs having died by hanging and quartering for their then non-conforming faith. Donne would have known his heroic relatives and known of their ultimate sacrifice and even his brother died an ignominious death in an insanitary prison while awaiting trial for his life for giving safe haven to a priest.

Donne took a different course to that of his brother, converted to Anglicanism and sought and, eventually, gained preferment in the Royal Court with the deanship of St Paul’s the ultimate prize. The passion of Donne’s love poems may have been reflected in his relationship with Anne More whom he wed in secret, thereby, gaining the enmity of Anne’s influential family and hostility from almost everyone influential person whose support he needed to gain positions from which he could earn a living. Thus his quest for meaningful and remunerative employment was massively set back.

Neither was the decision to marry against her parent’s wishes wonderful for Anne. She was 17 when they married and 33 when she died after 12 pregnancies the results of some of which survived into adulthood. Married life for Anne may not have quite lived up to the promises of Donne’s most famous love poetry.   

When he finally received his chance, Donne was a great success as the Dean of St Paul’s having gained the position directly as a result of having been chosen by King James I. He preached many long and popular sermons which were collected and published and form an integral part of his literary heritage along with his poetry and other prose.  

The story of Donne’s enigmatic life is fascinating and, as mentioned, leaves one with many questions about his personality and lovability. It is his writings which, ultimately, must matter to us most. Rundell suggests that Donne deliberately wrote poems that take all of one’s effort to untangle them. She uses the metaphor of cracking a safe. The effort is worth it, however, such that, in repayment for your work, Donne “reveals images that stick under your skin until you die”.

Rundell also stresses that, despite Donne’s obsessions with God and with death, it is the importance of people must be remembered. In a world so harsh and beautiful, it is from each other that we must find purpose. Suddenly, the statement that no man is an island comes into its own: “Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main … any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and, therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”.

Super-Infinite presents the life of a great poet. It places Donne in a context that may not make him appear to be the best of human beings but it brings understanding of his writing that cannot be fully grasped without that context. In an interview, Rundell suggests that Donne speaks beyond his time and that, just as his world was full of chaos and pain and teetered on the brink of itself, our world also so teeters such that Donne speaks to us about love and death and other matters of great relevance.

Author: Prudence Gibson
Publisher: New South Publishing
Reviewer: Stephen Keim

The Plant Thieves (“Plant Thieves”) is one result of a project challenging the discipline boundaries within which expertise is usually exercised.  The project, Exploring Botanic Gardens Herbarium’s Value via Environmental Aesthetics, was a collaborative effort funded by the Australian Research Council’s linkage program. It linked academics from the Universities of New South Wales and Melbourne and staff of royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust and of the Bundanon Trust.

The author of Plant Thieves, Prudence Gibson, as an author and research academic in plant studies at the School of Art and Design at the University of New South Wales, is well-qualified to bring aesthetic sensibilities to the botanical world.

Originally designed to explore the aesthetics of the National Herbarium of New South Wales’ plant collection, the project took place during and after the collection’s move to a new facility at the Australian Botanic Gardens at Mount Annan. As a result, Plant Thieves manages to document many of the challenges and revelations of a momentous moving process along with the subtleties and revelations of a digitisation process of all the information held about all the 1.4 million plants in that huge and priceless collection.

Gibson, from the beginning of Plant Thieves acknowledges the political and moral questions that surround an institution that seeks to advance knowledge and human welfare by maintaining a collection of plants but has achieved its collection and status accompanied by and part of aggressive colonialism of a continent whose Indigenous owners and inhabitants, themselves, lived extremely closely with their environment and whose purpose in life was to care for that environment in every aspect of the way in which they lived their lives.

Every visitor to the British Museum considers themselves attending in the virtuous appreciation of knowledge and history. Every such visitor must, at some time, however, face the question whether, by crossing that threshold, they make themselves a party to the theft of the Elgin Marbles and, perhaps, many other objects in the collection.

So it is with the Herbarium.

As Gibson expresses it, the Herbarium’s collection is the epitome of the colonialist fervour to collect and dominate nature. Part of the inextricable relationship between plants and colonialism is all the theft, all the death and all the control exerted over land and First Nations peoples that are a part of Australia’s history. And, while the Herbarium is a place of exquisite beauty and holds seeds and secrets of future life, it also records the violence and the damage done to the earth, the trees, the plants and to the very future it promises to secure.  

Gibson wrestles with the ugly aspects of botany in colonialist Australia and, as she also states, the Herbarium’s paradoxical role in this regard as taker and keeper is a matter of endless interest.

The project on which Gibson was engaged required her to learn about the Herbarium, its collection and the people who make it work. She also made herself familiar with the “physical matter of the archival documents”. Among the things Gibson learned is that a herbarium is more than an archive. It is a repository for stories: stories which are as much about people as they are about plants. Those stories fill the pages of Plant Thieves.

Gibson explores the colonisation of Australian plants through the juxtaposition of Gamileroi poet, Luke Patterson, who grew up at Kurnell on the shores of Botany Bay playing war games tossing Banksia serrata conesat his playmates and going to school where everything, even the names of the school houses, honoured Captain James Cook and his collector, Joseph Banks. Banks, who took 30,000 specimens from Australian shores continues to be revered as a pioneering botanist including through the honour of having the generic name one of Australia’s most distinctive plant groups named for him. At the same time, while Banksia species were culturally and materially important to Indigenous groups up and down the continent, hardly one Indigenous word has found its way into the official Linnaean manner of grouping and naming plants of this kind.

And as for banksias, so for most Australian plants. The process of colonialism not only dispossessed and murdered Indigenous people, its scientific language erased their existence from most botanical records.

Exploring what might be done to decolonise botany, Gibson spoke to Mbabarram man, Gerry Turpin, an ethnobiologist working in Cairns as an ethno-botanist. Turpin has a plant, a native legume named after him. Turpin is employed by the Tropical Indigenous Ethnobotany Centre to record and document traditional plant use on Cape York Peninsula. Turpin has worked to develop reconciliation action plans which include actions to protect Indigenous cultural and intellectual rights and Indigenous regeneration plans. Such plans use an approach to botany known as two way: Indigenous and Western knowledge working together. Gibson examples Indigenous fire management practice which she identifies as used widely across Australia, especially, since the tragic 2019-2020 bushfires, as a form of two way methodology.

It is encouraging to read of the progress being made in accepting Indigenous knowledge on Indigenous terms to advance the understanding and protection and conservative use of the Australian environment. The work of Turpin and others including Victor Steffensen is important in this regard. Despite such optimism, the work of decolonising environmental science in Australia, including botany, has a long way to go. There are a lot of specimens in the herbarium still bearing the names of the servants of the colonising process including, but not limited to, Joseph Banks.

Gibson’s stories of people and of specimens are well worth telling. They include herbarium librarian, Miguel Garcia, and his love of the zombie fungus, ophio-cordyceps, which sends out its mycelial threads to penetrate and take over the body of insect larvae, keeping them alive while directing the larva, through its central nervous system, to keep on behaving in a way that supports the growth and maturation of the fungus until it is a fruiting body transported conveniently by the larva to the surface to send forth its spores for a new generation of zombies to take over new generations of insect larvae for their own nefarious purposes in the great game of natural selection.

Another example of the fascinating stories of people and plants associated with the herbarium concerns the former head of science at the Herbarium, Barbara Briggs, who rose to that position after starting as a PhD candidate in 1959 but continues to be active in botany, more than six decades, later, aged 87. Briggs’ story is interesting not just for the 80 plants described and named by her but for her enduring interest in people and the world and the enjoyment she continues to obtain from the natural world’s endless variety. Among the tidbits she shared with Gibson is the story of the black wings, English moths which evolved in the 19^th century to a deeper shade of dark to ensure their improved safety in a world where pollution ruled the atmosphere.

Almost as a side project, Gibson devotes thirteen chapters and 70 pages to psychoactive plants and the collection of passing strange but fascinating people in the community who value them, grow them and who, occasionally, partake of their psychoactive properties. Some of these people live in the shadows and Gibson’s talent as a journalist who can build trust is attested to by her ability to contact and interview members of the psychoactive botanical community.

Gibson details the legal restrictions on growing and using psychoactive plants and discusses the arguments in favour of society taking a more tolerant attitude to these plants and the people who appreciate them.

Part 3 of Plant Thieves is entitled Rewilding, conservation and creative revaluing. The title suggests ninety pages of evangelism and it is the case that Gibson considers various philosophical and normative issues in part 3.

For every discussion of what might and should be done, however, Gibson produces an accompanying narrative about plants and people that fascinates as much as it instructs.

Anecdote, interest, engagement and fascination are the hallmarks of every page of Plant Thieves. For the reader who has always claimed an interest in plants and botany, Plant Thieves is a pleasant way of continuing that interest and expanding one’s knowledge. Plant Thieves is more than just a collection of plant stories. Along with the anecdotes and the science, accessibly presented, every page also raises questions for the reader that survey deeper issues and challenge us to question deeply held but unconsidered beliefs such as our unthinking hero worship of the Joseph Bankses of our growing years without a thought for the people from whose land they were gathering their specimens.

Author: Eda Gunaydin
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Reviewer: Stephen Keim

Eda Gunaydin’s essays are of and from her experience. Gunaydin is that incredibly smart child, now in her late twenties, with a Turkish Australian heritage who grew up in the disadvantaged suburbs of western Sydney.

Her essays plumb that experience but range much more widely. A quote from one of the book’s essays self-describes Gunaydin as an argumentative person who is frequently convinced that she is right. And, since such delusional self-belief is not rewarded in many other spheres of social life, Gunaydin writes essays.

Such self-deprecating humour is charming in any writer. In Gunaydin’s case, one can accept that her opinions are strongly held. They are, however, clearly argued and the product of deep thought upon a kaleidoscope of subjects and provide the reader with insights that provoke further trains of thought as, indeed, all essay writing should.

The beauty of Gunaydin’s writing is evident from the first lines of the first essay, A Rock Is A Hard Place: “Mum wants to eat Turkish food. She always wants to eat Turkish food”. With an economy of words, in the space of a few lines, the reader is ensconced in a family dynamic with a Turkish Australian vibe, taking place in the only one of the eight kebab shops on Blacktown’s Main Street that is actually run by Turks and not Lebanese or Afghans. You have the scene arrange itself, as it will seem to do, with freeloading amcas[1] and yenges[2] making themselves cups of tea for which they will never pay and the proprietor, maybe, having accused Gunaydin of dressing like a slut depending on whether you believe Gunaydin’s mother who may have merely invented the insult for reasons which Gunaydin, herself, finds difficult to plumb.   

The family dynamic is complex. Gunaydin’s mum is neurotic, to say the least, and conflict simmers between mother and daughter. Gunaydin and her father have a much easier relationship. Her father has worked on building sites all over western Sydney and, on car journeys throughout Gunaydin’s childhood, proudly pointed out those parts of Sydney which he had constructed.

Gunaydin’s father’s family heritage involved following the minority Alevi strain of Islam and growing up in the poorer more left wing suburbs on the edges of Turkish cities. Her mother came from a family that was both richer and much more violently right wing in their politics. Maybe, the family dynamics were fated to be complex.

Root & Branch, however, is not a family memoir. Its subject matter ranges much more broadly. Gunaydin has inherited her father’s left wing politics and much of Root & Branch is a Marxist analysis of the rampant inequality of opportunity in modern Australian society. Gunaydin has, at her fingertips,  the western Sydney in which she grew up to provide many examples of this inequality through its malfunctioning hospitals; its crumbling road surfaces; and the disadvantage in the labour market experienced by any job seeker who nominates to a prospective employer a western Sydney home address, circumstances experienced by Gunaydin or, in the case of the latter, avoided by subterfuge.

Gunaydin’s essays obtain much of their appeal from their broad range and their free ranging structure. One moment, an incident will be discussed. It may be an encounter with an unsavoury male stranger while waiting outside McDonald’s for a friend to come back with a burger. It may be her father’s childhood move from the country to the fringes of a Turkish city. It may be a trip to hospital with resulting incompetent treatment. Then, incident may gain perspective from a completely different incident, perhaps, reading Chomsky’s works as part of the privilege of embarking upon a PhD or, perhaps, the story of Gunaydin’s first published essay and the literary prizes it garnered. Then, Gunaydin may draw on her extraordinary learning to give context to whatever phenomenon has occupied the preceding pages.

Only an extraordinarily entertaining writer and an extraordinarily talented intellect could manage to construct essays of such fluidity and movement and make them work. Gunaydin does more than make them work. The reader desires to follow the writer along every step of the journey and wants to anticipate the switches and turns of a narrative that enlightens as it entertains.Root & Branch is informative and insight filled. The essays are important discussions of Australia and its recent history through the eyes of a brilliant young literary practitioner who fearlessly shares her experiences, her insecurities and her learning.

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[1] Uncles

[2] Aunts