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.
[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 17th 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 19th 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.
[1] Uncles
[2] Aunts
Author: Isabel Allende
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Reviewer: Stephen Keim
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 was interested in recording and communicating the lessons he received from elders from the very beginning and his painstaking work has led to his becoming a respected filmmaker and sought after public speaker and communicator on Indigenous fire management of land as well as cultural knowledge, more generally. His work is supported by organisations like Firesticks and the National Indigenous Fire Workshops.
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
