Books + Ideas – The Conversation

The penis evolved to be noticed – but the artful fig leaf has hidden it for centuries

2026-02-03T23:28:20Z

Wawel Royal Castle National Art Collection, Kraków/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

A new evolutionary study has found human penises are large compared with other primates: for two reasons. The first is reproduction. The second is that size works as a signal, attracting potential mates and intimidating rivals. In evolutionary terms, the penis is big because it is meant to be noticed.

That finding lands awkwardly in a world that has spent centuries hiding, shrinking, censoring or symbolically neutralising the penis whenever it becomes too visible.

A single object captures this tension between biological display and cultural embarrassment: the fig leaf.

The fig leaf’s story begins, as so many Western stories do, in Genesis. Adam and Eve eat from the tree of knowledge, realise they are naked, and stitch fig leaves together to cover themselves. Nakedness becomes linked with moral awareness, guilt and self-consciousness.

Nudity no longer neutral

Early Christian art absorbed this lesson. In late antique mosaics and medieval manuscripts, Adam and Eve clutch leaves over their groins with a mixture of alarm and regret. Nudity is no longer neutral. It signals sin, punishment, or humiliation. The only bodies shown naked are the damned.

Workshop of Giovanni della Robbia Adam and Eve Walters Front Installation. Wikimedia Commons

Then comes a sharp reversal. Ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, rediscovered in Renaissance Italy, presents the naked male body as strong, balanced, and admirable. Heroes, gods, and athletes are unclothed because they have nothing to hide. Their genitals are visible, proportioned, and unremarkable. This is not erotic display so much as confidence made stone.

Michelangelo’s David sits squarely in this tradition. Carved between 1501 and 1504, he is naked, alert and physically present. His body is not idealised into abstraction. It is specific, human, and unmistakably male. Florentines reportedly threw stones when the statue was first installed. Before long, authorities added a garland of metal fig leaves to protect public sensibilities, which remained in place until around the 16th century.

This was not an isolated decision. Over the next century, the Reformation fractured Christian Europe, giving birth to Protestantism, and the Catholic Church doubled down on moral discipline. Naked bodies in art became political liabilities. The Council of Trent’s decrees on religious imagery reflected concerns that the prominent display of naked bodies in sacred art risked drawing attention to human physicality rather than directing devotion towards God. This led to what later historians have called the “Fig Leaf Campaign”.

Across Rome and beyond, sculpted genitals were chipped away, painted over, draped, or concealed with leaves. Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the Sistine Chapel was altered after his death by Daniele da Volterra, who was hired to cover up visible genitalia with drapery. He earned the nickname “the breeches maker” for his efforts.

Classical statues in the Vatican acquired permanent marble underwear. A literal drawer of removed stone penises is rumoured to have existed. Whether or not that is true, the impulse behind it certainly was.

Strikingly, the fig leaf does not erase the penis. It points to it. The cover announces the presence of something that must not be seen. As several writers note, concealment tends to sharpen attention rather than dull it. The fig leaf becomes a visual alarm bell.

Resisting biology

This brings us back to the present. The new evolutionary research argues human penis size evolved partly because it is visible.

For most of our species’ history, before clothes, the penis was on display during daily life. It became a cue others learned to read quickly and unconsciously. Larger size was associated with attractiveness and with competitive threat.

From that perspective, centuries of fig leaves look less like moral refinement and more like cultural resistance to biology. The body insists on signalling. Society keeps trying to mute the signal.

This fig leaf was designed to cover the plaster cast of Michaelangelo’s David presented to Queen Victoria, around 1857. V&A Museum/Wikimedia, CC BY

Victorian Britain provides a late and almost comic example. When Queen Victoria was presented with a plaster cast of David, in around 1857, a detachable fig leaf was hastily produced and kept on standby for royal visits.

The leaf survives today, displayed separately in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The statue stands naked again, but the object designed to hide him has become a museum piece in its own right.

Even now, museums still debate whether to remove historic coverings. Social media platforms struggle to define what kinds of nudity are acceptable. Statues are boxed up for diplomatic visits. The anxiety persists, even if the fig leaf itself has become unfashionable.

Evolutionary biology suggests the human penis became prominent because it mattered socially – but our cultural history shows centuries of effort devoted to pretending it does not. The fig leaf sits at the centre of this contradiction: a small, awkward object carrying an enormous cultural load.

Darius von Guttner Sporzynski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

China’s new literary star had 19 jobs before ‘writer’ – including bike courier and bakery apprentice

2026-02-03T19:08:35Z

Wavie/Unsplash

Delivering parcels is just one of the 19 different jobs Hu Anyan cycles through over 20 years, as tracked in his Chinese bestseller I Deliver Parcels in Beijing. He also tries his luck working as a convenience-store clerk, a cleaner and in a bike shop, a warehouse, a vegetable market and even an anime design company – always at the very bottom of the ladder.

Review: I Deliver Parcels in Beijing – Hu Anyan (Allen Lane)

Some jobs last weeks, some days, some barely survive the training shift. Bosses disappear, wages evaporate, contracts turn out to be imaginary and rules are invented on the spot. With a blend of hope and resignation, Hu repeatedly comes to realise the true qualifications for survival in the city are a strong back, a flexible sense of dignity and a high tolerance for absurdity.

Hu Anyan. Penguin

Hu, now aged 47, grew up in Guangzhou, a major city in south China. He has worked in cities big and small, including a brief stint across the border in Vietnam.

They are “places with apparent unlimited potential for development, yet I seemed to have gotten nowhere,” he writes. They promise opportunity, then charge rent on his naivety and optimism. He seems to move through the world with a certain innocence about how it truly works, yet possesses an uncommon capacity for deep, searching reflection.

He writes with dry humour and an eye for the absurd – security guards guarding nothing, managers creating chaos and delivery algorithms ruling lives with godlike indifference. But he also writes like a field researcher issued a hard hat instead of a research grant. His prose has a forensic, documentary precision – wages counted to the cents, shifts timed, fines itemised, and injustices recorded without melodrama.

When he completed his trial as a parcel deliverer, he writes:

an assistant foreman […] told me that although the probationary period wasn’t paid, he would make it up by giving me three extra days of vacation. […] But it wasn’t even a month before the same guy had a dispute with the other foreman and quit. No one mentioned those paid days off ever again.

China’s ‘development didn’t suit me’

This reporting of everyday injustice at work is peppered with occasional philosophical reflections on human nature and the meaning of work. He calmly observes of mean and unhelpful co-workers: “Selflessness may be a noble virtue, but I suppose it isn’t fundamental to being human.”

The real charm is his tone. Even when dealing with exploitation, Hu delivers it with light-footed sarcasm, letting absurdity do the heavy lifting. Writing about heavy workload in the delivery company he works for, he simply comments “capitalists aren’t known for sympathising with workers”.

At times, he reveals his battles with social anxiety, depression and occasional bouts of illness. In one memorable scene, he describes going back and forth between hospitals, community clinics and small medical offices, carefully comparing prices before settling on where to get an IV drip to bring his fever down.

That kind of careful penny-pinching, being unable to justify spending even on one’s own health, feels painfully familiar to anyone trying to survive on very little.

Hu’s story is a personal one about structural inequality and everyday injustice. But he doesn’t sound resentful that China’s economic growth hasn’t benefited him. He just states, matter-of-factly, that China’s “development didn’t suit me”.

His personal account also functions as a practical lesson in the political economy of labour. In that sense, the lesson is not uniquely Chinese. Rather than relying on theories of profit and value, he uses his experience as a courier to show how the gig economy of late capitalism operates globally.

He meticulously calculates how the supposed average monthly pay of 7,000 yuan a month (around A$1,435) he could expect to earn translates in reality. It means working 26 days a month, 11 hours a day – to earn 30 yuan (A$6.16) an hour and 0.5 yuan (ten cents) a minute.

I had to complete a delivery every four minutes in order not to run at a loss. If that becomes unworkable, I would have to consider a change of job.

‘Oddly soothing’

For urban educated readers, both in China and elsewhere, who are crushed by emails, mortgages, childcare and performance anxiety, it can be oddly soothing to read about a life lived under more precarious conditions.

Hu’s calm endurance could work like a psychological release valve – things are hard, yes, but not this hard. The result lets middle-class readers feel ethically awake without feeling accused. This makes the book as reassuring as it is unsettling.

I Deliver Parcels in Beijing is also popular with Hu’s social peers – the urban underclasses and rural migrant workers: it shows that their struggles and small victories are worthy of being recorded and remembered.

A key, albeit implicit, theme circulating the book is unequal access to social mobility. Each of the 19 jobs Hu cycled through may look different on the surface, but rather than climbing a social ladder, he merely shuffles horizontally, stagnating on the same rung: “twelve years have passed, and with the same workload as before, my pay was somehow still lower”.

There is much musing about the meaning of freedom in the book. But freedom, for Hu, is not about the right to vote, but to choose who one wants to be, rather than what society expects one to become.

There’s no cataloguing of human rights abuses – the familiar trope of English-language coverage of China. Nor is the book a sociological exercise by an intellectual, for whom Hu’s world might be an object of study. And it certainly isn’t some diasporic Chinese writer’s rendition of China, often calibrated to the expectations of festival-going, liberal middle-class readers abroad.

Instead, the book speaks from inside the experience it describes, with no apparent desire to translate itself – at least initially – into the moral or political idioms readers might expect. That’s precisely where its quiet power lies.

It doesn’t tell you what to think about China – it shows you a life you would otherwise almost never get to see. The translation, superbly done, helps enhance this objective.

The luxury of being noticed

Like worker-poet Zheng Xiaoqiong and worker-photographer Zhan Youbing, Hu the worker-writer becomes a self-appointed “surrogate ethnographer”, patiently recording rules, rhythms, hierarchies, and survival strategies from the inside. He produces not theory, but something more valuable: reality, rendered with authenticity and credibility.

“I often sat in Jingtong Roosevelt Plaza after finishing my deliveries and watched the passers-by and the salespeople in stores, and the different delivery drivers back and forth,” he writes. “Mostly I supposed they were numb, thinking nothing at all, mechanically going about their days like I once did.”

Social researchers outside China dream of accessing the trove of evidence-based, granular, situated knowledge this book contains – but they rarely do.

Hu is one of the millions of internal labour migrants in China who struggle to survive at the bottom of the social ladder – and a rare case of a worker who became a recognised writer. He has published two books since this one.

His rise was not the result of structural change, but exceptional literary talent and sharp intellectual acuity. Meanwhile, the great majority of China’s urban underclasses and rural migrant workers remain locked in the kind of precarious, exhausting existence Hu describes – without the chance to turn their experiences into art, and without the luxury of being noticed at all.

Wanning Sun does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

I found Australian cult The Family’s left-behind library. Here’s what their books reveal

2026-02-02T19:05:39Z

Books found at The Family's abandoned Santiniketan Lodge. Caitlin Burns

For more than five decades, Australian cult The Family has sparked both fascination and controversy. Founded in the early 1960s by yoga instructor turned spiritual guru Anne Hamilton-Byrne, this New Age group – predominately based in and around Melbourne’s Dandenong Ranges – was estimated to have numbered about 200 people at its peak. Many were from educated middle-class and professional backgrounds.

Hamilton-Byrne illegally adopted 14 children, who were raised, along with roughly 14 others, by women called “aunties” at a secluded property in Victoria’s alpine region of Lake Eildon. It was raided by police in 1987. Former child members recall strict schedules marked by spiritual exercises, minimal meals, and harsh discipline.

The Family’s leader claimed to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. She taught an eclectic blend of Christianity, Eastern philosophy and mysticism. LSD use was central, used as a pathway to spiritual enlightenment. When she died in 2019, aged 98, she left behind no formal written doctrine outlining The Family’s alternative beliefs – only a handful of (privately circulated) cassette recordings.

Determined to piece together The Family’s extensive worldview, I visited the abandoned Santiniketan Lodge, once the group’s primary meeting place, shortly after it was listed for sale last year.

In a small room scattered across stained carpet lay remnants of a forgotten library: dust-riddled books on yoga and meditation, histories of medieval saints and mystics, cosmic education, life extension and biographies written via psychography (spirit writing).

With permission, I gathered a selection of these books – 18 in total. I chose titles with similar themes, those referenced in past research on The Family, and books with distinct annotations or identifying names inside their covers.

One by one, I read them. Together, they reveal telling insights into the ideas that shaped Hamilton-Byrne’s eccentric teachings and were used to justify some of The Family’s more coercive practices.

This is what I found.

The books found in Santiniketan Lodge reveal insights into Anne Hamilton-Byrne’s eccentric teachings. Caitlin Burns

Yoga and eastern philosophy

Many of the books at Santiniketan Lodge were devoted to the practice of yoga and meditation: titles like The Collected Works of Ramana Maharishi, Autobiography of a Yogi, Science of Breath, and Hatha Yoga or the Philosophy of Physical Well-Being. Most were written for a Western audience. They would have once circulated among adult members for daily practice.

Prior to establishing The Family, Anne Hamilton-Byrne was a student of Swiss national Margrit Segesman, who pioneered yoga in Australia during the 1950s. Hamilton-Byrne would later go on to instruct her own Hatha Yoga classes throughout Melbourne and Geelong. Eventually, she wove this ancient Indian practice into the core teachings within The Family.

Hatha Yoga emphasises the connection between body and mind, with asanas (postures) held for extended periods to encourage strength, discipline and awareness. Central to yoga philosophy is the belief that a healthy body and nervous system are essential for sustaining mental focus during meditation and concentration. Hamilton-Byrne taught these principles. She encouraged members to adopt a predominantly vegetarian diet and abstain from alcohol as a means of supporting one’s “spiritual energy”.

It wasn’t just the adults who were taught the benefits of yoga: the children were, too. In her 1995 memoir, Unseen Unheard Unknown, Sarah Moore (published under Sarah Hamilton-Byrne) describes the monotony of growing up. Days began with an hour of Hatha yoga, followed by listening to Hamilton-Byrne’s recorded teachings, chanting mantras, completing schoolwork, reading Hindu scriptures and Zen philosophy. Three bouts of meditation were interspersed throughout the day.

Seeking the spiritual path

Dr Raynor Carey Johnson was a renowned physicist and academic, a former master of Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne. He was fascinated by mysticism and the paranormal. In his later years, he found a guru, or master, in Hamilton-Byrne. He became a prominent member of The Family during the 1960s.

Johnson had been involved with The Family for nine years when The Spiritual Path was published in 1971. The book was intended as a guide for “spiritual seekers” hoping to find God-consciousness, or a spiritual awakening – a state of unity with God.

The text blends familiar Judeo–Christian practices of prayer and service from the West with Hindu–Buddhist concepts of meditation and reincarnation from the East. Elements of Jungian psychology, particularly individuation, are paralleled with spiritual transformation across religious traditions throughout the book.

Johnson explains that once an individual has been initiated on to the path, “a Master will often take charge of their karma”. That master will remove negative experiences, or actions from past lives, to enable spiritual progression.

This is what happened in The Family. Hamilton-Byrne employed a rather distorted version of karma as a tool of control. Members believed without devotion to her, they would continue to experience the cycle of suffering on Earth until it was resolved, delaying their ultimate unity with God.

The idea that a master can resolve one’s negative karma raises serious questions about authority and dependence. This dynamic is often evident in religious cults, where the leader (whether guru, master, or priest) is portrayed as the sole gateway to the divine (or God).

Former member Ben Shenton, raised in the cult, recalls how his mother’s unwavering devotion to Hamilton-Byrne left her vulnerable to spiritual exploitation. She believed any challenges or setbacks in her life were just lessons to be learned, due to mistakes made in previous lifetimes.

Johnson’s goal of helping others find spiritual meaning provides a valuable foundation for understanding The Family’s beliefs. Yet these idealistic teachings stand in stark contrast to Hamilton-Byrne’s real-life practices, where control and power seemed to be the priority over genuine spiritual growth.

Psychedelic exploration

As I flipped through Satsang with Baba: Questions and Answers with Swami Muktananda, one major detail stood out: underlined passages in pencil, focused on the negative use of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) during meditation.

This underlined text focuses on the negatives of LSD use.

A name was also pencilled on the inside of the book’s cover, marking it as belonging to one of the former children who grew up at Lake Eildon. To understand why a child might be interested in reading about a guru’s thoughts on hallucinogens, we first have to understand The Family’s relationship with drugs.

When LSD was legalised in Victoria during the mid-1950s, its potential benefits for treating mental disorders were promoted by a small circle of Melbourne psychiatrists, including Dr Lance Howard Whitaker, who would later become a prominent member of The Family.

Whitaker was able to get ampoules of LSD in liquid form straight from Sandoz. It quickly became the drug of choice within The Family and was administered to adult members (and children when they turned 14) during sessions known as “clearings”. It was believed the drug could help unlock unconscious memories from childhood or past lives, bringing buried traumas to the surface, where they could repent and be forgiven.

Satsang with Baba was transcribed from a spiritual discussion between Swami Muktananda and his pupils in India between 1971 and 1974. It was shared and taught among Hamilton-Byrne’s followers, especially the children, who admired the Siddha Yoga guru – possibly more than their supposed biological mother Hamilton-Byrne.

Satsang with Baba mostly addresses broad spiritual concerns from his pupils, but it’s Muktananda’s stance against the use of drugs to expand consciousness that appealed to the book’s owner (judging by the underlined passages). While it might offer a short fix, “one should be able to enter the inner world without the aid of these drugs. That is true growth.”

Traditional yogis have often dismissed drugs as a shortcut to God-consciousness. These underlined passages suggest even the children at the time may have questioned Hamilton-Byrne’s reliance on LSD, which she used as a tool for transcendence and control.

Other texts in the left-behind library included books on Christianity, Catholicism, theosophy and spirit writing – and Raynor Johnson’s personal copy of Letters from Mother: A Family Biography in Two Worlds.

The books I read helped me place Hamilton-Byrne’s teachings in a broader context. The Family’s religious framework blended elements of Eastern philosophy with familiar Christian imagery and interpretations, emerging at a time when New Age spirituality and countercultural beliefs were gaining momentum in Western society.

Its quest for transcendence often came at the expense of ethical boundaries – a pattern that would define its legacy and cause more harm than good. While this doesn’t excuse the contradictions and distortions Hamilton-Byrne later imposed on her followers, it did help me understand the appeal of both her teachings and the era that enabled them.

Caitlin Burns does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

A knock-off Pynchon without the punchline: George Saunders’ Vigil falls flat

2026-02-02T00:40:41Z

From Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith and Margaret Atwood to Barack Obama and the editors of Time magazine, it seems everyone who is anyone is lining up to sing the praises of George Saunders.

Saunders is the author of Booker Prize winning novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), a ghost story about the grief of Abraham Lincoln after losing his son, whose undead spirit becomes restless. The success of that novel has somewhat overshadowed the longer career of a talented writer who has written some of the best short fiction of the 21st century.

Does Saunders’ latest novel Vigil live up to the effusive praise? I think not.

Review: Vigil – George Saunders (Bloomsbury)

Vigil’s narrator is Jill “Doll” Blaine, a spectral guide whose duty is to console dying individuals – her deathbed “charges” – as they pass through purgatory into the afterlife. She has overseen this rite of passage hundreds of times, ever since she was accidentally blown up by a criminal seeking revenge on her husband, a police officer.

Then she is tasked with consoling the comatose oil baron K.J. Boone, who

rolled right over whatever life put in front of him. He’d worked his way up. Step by step. To the top. Very top. CEO. About as high as a guy could go. If he did say so himself. Hired and fired, restructured whole divisions, traveled the world, befriended senators, advised presidents.

Boone remains cold, proud and unrepentant about the craterous ecological footprint his business dealings have left on the world, even in his final hours on earth.

To Jill’s surprise, she is joined in her task by a spectral colleague – a Frenchman seeking redemption for his part in the climate catastrophe, having invented the combustion engine. The Frenchman has taken it upon himself to force Boone to atone. He tries to impress upon Boone the gravity of his complicity, as the CEO of an oil corporation, with the catastrophe of climate change.

None of the Frenchman’s attempts have any effect. Boone maintains global warming is a fiction and nothing can convince him otherwise. He is unmoved by visits from the apparitions the Frenchman conjures in a vain attempt to rattle him: his family members, friends and colleagues; the people, animals and natural features his business ventures have obliterated or destroyed. His devotion to oil and Mammon reigns supreme.

This troublesome case raises personal dilemmas for Jill. She is led to reflect on her former life, her view of things, her idealised relationship with her husband (who, it turns out, moved on too soon) and her murderer, who was never brought to justice. As she grapples with her difficult situation, she increasingly detours into questions of mortality and how to find the peace that comes with acceptance, even when there has been no justice.

At last, Jill sacrifices her professional impartiality to defeat and banish Boone’s lackeys, the two “Mels”, who have been waiting for him in purgatory, with the aim of reinstating him as the figurehead for their capitalist propaganda. In doing so, Jill unexpectedly saves Boone’s soul. She makes him realise that he must join with the Frenchman and use his time in purgatory to convince others that we can change course from petrocapitalism to renewable energy.

Jill realises this is merely a symbolic gesture; there are no single villains in the story of capitalism. Many despicable hands are at work, ghost-like, behind the scenes. The CEOs are merely symbolic figureheads. Behind them are other ordinary disciples spreading the gospel of capital: a lineup of Mels, wreaking havoc. Boone’s odious daughter, for example, defends her father by accusing leftists of being hypocrites because they drive to work and tweet their critiques of capitalism on the latest iPhone, as if simply opting out of capitalism were possible without there being a revolution in the mode of production.

George Saunders at the National Book Festival, Washington DC, August 12, 2023. Shawn Miller/Library of Congress Life, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Monstrous magnates

I wanted to like Vigil more than I did. The premise is timely. There are moments of humour and wildly imaginative surrealist play that feel fresh and excuse some of the hackneyed dialogue, sentimentality and moralising.

But for a novel that wants to address the perils of late capitalism and encourage the reader to imagine alternatives to the climate apocalypse we are hurtling towards, Vigil shies away from elaborating the issues. It relies heavily on insinuation. Boone’s crimes against humanity remain indistinct and unconvincing. Whether or not one agrees with the the novel’s spiritual premise, its discussion of petrocapitalism and climate catastrophe is woefully vague, even artificial and trite, in the pages where it ought to feel most acute.

The novel is bereft of the kind of background investigations that might produce genuine insights into the crises we are living through, and which make other great works of the genre – Theodore Dreiser’s The Financier (1911), Upton Sinclair’s Oil! (1927), E.L. Doctorow’s Loon Lake (1980) – so memorable and worth rereading in these times.

Boone is a character we are supposed to find enigmatic, manipulative and complex. But his background story feels underdeveloped and hackneyed. It is told piecemeal, in snippets of memories resembling a pastiche of Citizen Kane and Ebenezer Scrooge.

This is among the more compelling testaments to his power:

So they turned to him, trusted him, feared him, even. Only a handful of people in all of history had ever known that kind of power. Presidents, maybe, depending on the era; kings, sure, but their kingdoms were not worldwide; movie stars and such, but that was all superficial crap. He spoke and markets moved; called a king and the king picked up. He’d decided we were sticking with oil and, goddamn it, we’d stuck with oil and the world got twenty, thirty good years in exchange. […] You’re welcome, world.

Still, it falls flat. I found myself comparing Boone to other tycoons from well-known American novels. He pales in comparison to the heaven-and-earth-moving avarice of the union-busting petrocapitalist J. Arnold Ross in Sinclair’s Oil! and Daniel Day Lewis’ menacing reinterpretation of him as Daniel Plainview in Paul Thomas Anderson’s loosely adapted film There Will Be Blood (2007). Nor does Boone demonstrate the cunning and brilliance of Dreiser’s Frank Cowperwood (based on streetcar magnate Charles Yerkes) or Doctorow’s F.W. Bennett.

In a tradition of Cowperwoods, Bennetts and Rosses, Boone feels about as convincing a villain as Montgomery Burns from The Simpsons, without the wit. It is a particular disappointment, given the abundance of material to work with at a time when there are more vile billionaire CEOs populating our world than at any other point in history.

The unconvincing quality is not simply because Vigil is not a realist novel. Compare Boone to Pierce Inverarity, the dead millionaire in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, and he still comes up short, despite the fact we never even meet Inverarity – he is the villain pulling the strings from beyond the grave. Indeed, Vigil feels at times like a knock-off Pynchon novel without the punchline. Jill resembles Pynchon’s bewildered housewife protagonist Oedipa Maas, who must reckon with the restless spirit of Inverarity, another dead CEO who seems to be communicating with and manipulating her.

The dialogue and style of narration are heavy-handed in places. The characters are mostly threadbare and uninteresting, and the frequent entering into different characters’ streams of consciousness often leaves the reader with vertigo. The storyline is busy, but the narrative energy feels forced, lacking the spontaneous energy that emanates from Pynchon’s unambiguous political sincerity, which thrums beneath his verbal silliness and hijinks.

It is as if Saunders hasn’t fully decided or committed to exactly what he wants to say about the material, or how best to go about saying it. Over and over, he misses opportunities to accept the challenge of all speculative novels: to explore not only the limits but the possibilities of utopian thinking. An example is when Boone raises the compelling question of what would happen to civilisation if oil were taken out of the equation.

The ending is disappointingly hollow and deflating, encapsulated in Jill’s evasive epiphany: “Comfort, for all else is futility.” But the deepest disappointment is that Vigil fails to deliver on its promises to follow through on its ambitious political polemics. Others will have to read and decide from themselves, but in a time of rising corporate-sponsored fascism, ecoterrorism, oil-driven land grabs and warfare, the billionaire Boone’s redemption arc feels outdated, defeatist and tone deaf.

Should Vigil really be marketed as a “triumph” for how boldly it reckons with today’s biggest issues? The political commentary in Vigil remains as hollowed out as the ghosts that populate its pages; its attempts to imagine alternatives to the present stall. The political struggles that define our times are instead diluted into a self-defeating moral parable about making peace with ourselves by accepting people and situations as they are.

Tamlyn Avery receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

Dexies, doof and depth: The Paris End’s long-form journalism moves from Substack to page

2026-01-30T01:37:15Z

Nguyen Minh/unsplash , CC BY

The Paris End is a weekly Substack email newsletter featuring long-form literary journalism and Melbourne-centric content. Founded in 2023 by Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz, it was envisioned as an outlet for writing about Melbourne culture, akin to The New Yorker’s treatment of its namesake city. Even the name, The Paris End, is a reference to the eastern end of Melbourne’s Collins Street.

Review: EXCLUSIVE! Dispatches from The Paris End – Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds, Oscar Schwartz (Giramondo)

Hurst, Olds and Schwartz write and edit the essays, with Aaron Billings providing cartoons and other writers contributing to a guest column. The endeavour is all the more impressive because many of their essays require weeks of reporting, and there are no salaried positions in this type of publication. It is clearly a passion project.

The passions that appear to animate the publication’s three authors are richly varied. They are intellectual, a bit Jewish, sometimes queer, left-leaning, always quirky. They are clearly informed by their other life’s work, whether that is undertaking a PhD (Hurst), co-editing an art history publication (Hurst) or editing a collection of experimental essays (Olds), or writing poetry (Schwartz).

A new anthology, from Sydney-based publisher Giramondo, collects 19 previously published Paris End essays. The mere existence of this book suggests there is an audience for this writing far from Melbourne’s grid-like CBD and art-filled laneways. But, for non-Victorian readers, what is the appeal of these hyperlocal stories?

The strongest essays found in EXCLUSIVE! Dispatches from The Paris End combine the authors’ unique interests with unusual, Melbourne-specific cultural phenomena. It opens, for instance, with Hurst’s essay, “En Plein Doof”, about attending a suburban park rave and bumping into the proprietors of a backyard art gallery called Guzzler. Hurst is a writer and art historian, and her expertise is clearly on display – bringing a degree of gravitas to this otherwise grotty portrait of the contemporary art scene.

Like many of the most compelling essays in this collection, it inspires readers to wish they could accompany the writer on the adventure being documented. In the absence of this possibility, we might resolve to visit the relevant locations or events themselves. While two of the 19 essays in the book are dispatches from London, resolutions such as this represent precisely the value of a hyperlocal publication.

Giramondo

Hurst, Olds and Schwartz do not shy away from the darker aspects of their chosen subject matter. For example, “En Plein Doof” touches on misogyny, the rising costs of rental accommodation and the politics of commercial art galleries.

Guzzler has shut its doors since this essay was first published in March 2023, though this is not mentioned in the book. This is one of the liabilities of an anthology of journalistic essays: some of the stories date themselves. For example, Olds watches the 2024 US presidential election results at a pub in one essay and Hurst reports from the extradition trial of Julian Assange in “WikiFreaks”. (The “WikiFreaks” essay is arguably more successful than the book’s only other dispatch from London.)

The features that keep the essays interesting for readers outside of Victoria are the same ones that keep them (relatively) timeless. There is the aforementioned willingness to engage with difficult or tricky subject matter – from Jewish anti-Zionism to the housing crisis.

In “Not in Our Names”, Schwartz interviews Max Kaiser, author of the book Jewish Antifascism and the False Promise of Settler Colonialism and organiser of a Jewish presence at many pro-Palestine rallies in Melbourne. Meanwhile, The Paris End Substack has included multiple essays about the housing crisis, but for this book they selected one focused on a not-for-profit Melbourne-based developer called Nightingale, questioning its claims to an ethical and sustainable approach to development.

Not hectoring

Considering the complexity of subject matter, the essays tread an impressively fine line – offering a take that is interesting and substantial, yet not hectoring.

Another engaging aspect of nearly all these essays is their unwaveringly personal perspective. When Schwartz writes about the Melbourne open mic comedy scene, for instance, his essay concludes with a hilarious account of him performing his first-ever comedy set, a word-for-word delivery of a Jerry Seinfeld routine.

An essay about dexamphetamine or “dexies”, a stimulant commonly prescribed for ADHD, contains a strong mix of reportage and personal memoir. While the documented behaviour is legally dubious, the author is redeemed in readers’ eyes because it is clear he is attempting to educate and build empathy for others in his situation, rather than offering simple entertainment.

Even with three writers, each with their own distinctive voice, the anthology coheres around certain personality traits: all are funny, gossipy and delightfully weird. The quality of the prose is also consistently high, a prerequisite for long-form literary journalism. It is the rare Substack email newsletter that works as a book.

There is no standout writer among the three. Hurst, Olds and Schwartz all contribute highlight essays, often informed by impressively detailed reportage. However, not all of the essays are equally strong. Those that stray from the publication’s focus on Melbourne culture tend to investigate more abstract or even scholarly subjects, such as “male lesbianism”, a deep dive into author Frank Moorhouse’s archives at The University of Queensland, or watching classic films and musing on a long-distance relationship.

The book’s three authors suggest “things become important through one’s attention to them”. They continue, “We would pay attention to the ground we stood on.” This is a worthy observation.

It is a delight to reach the end of a book and realise there is already a sequel, of sorts – each week, a new email newsletter is released to Paris End subscribers.

Per Henningsgaard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

If Pope Leo joined Trump’s Board of Peace, it would compromise centuries of ‘positive neutrality’

2026-01-30T00:36:35Z

Pope Leo XIV is among the world leaders invited to join Donald Trump’s “Board of Peace”. Initially aimed at ending the conflict in Gaza, Trump says it will also resolve conflicts globally. The Vatican’s secretary of state has said the pope needs time to consider whether to take part.

Leo, the first pope from the United States, forcefully decried conditions in Gaza in a Christmas Eve address. He has told journalists the only solution to the conflict is a Palestinian state. But the Vatican has long described its foreign policy as “positive neutrality”.

Formal membership of state-sponsored commissions has usually been avoided by the Holy See, the central government of the Catholic Church – which has diplomatic relations with 184 countries, plus the European Union and the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, as well as a permanent observer status at the United Nations.

Across nearly two millennia, popes have been deeply involved in peace efforts. They have mediated disputes, facilitated negotiations, opened humanitarian corridors and applied moral pressure to restrain violence. Yet they have almost always done so from the sidelines: carefully positioned close enough to influence outcomes, but far enough away to preserve credibility with all parties.

Papal peacemaking has worked best when the pope could speak to everyone, even those who rejected the political order of the day. Neutrality is not a rhetorical posture, but a practical asset: hard won and easily lost.

Can the papacy maintain independent authority in an increasingly polarised world?

Influence without command

The Holy See has no army, no coercive economic power and no capacity to enforce compliance. What it has possessed, in varying degrees across time, is moral authority, diplomatic reach and access to networks that cross borders, ideologies and regimes.

In late antiquity, popes intervened at moments of acute danger, relying on prestige and symbolic authority rather than force. Pope Leo I’s encounter with Attila the Hun in 452, near Mantua in northern Italy, illustrates this approach. The pope’s message of peace persuaded the ruler of the Huns not to destroy Rome.

The episode captured a durable pattern. Papal influence worked through persuasion, reputation and the claim to speak in the name of a higher moral order.

Raphael’s Meeting of Leo the Great and Attila, completed under Leo X (1513-1521) Mvsei Vaticani

Between the 10th and 14th centuries, the Peace of God and Truce of God movements sought to limit who could be attacked, when fighting was permitted and how warfare should be conducted. These were not state treaties, but moral frameworks, designed to protect the vulnerable. The church established the right to asylum by proclaiming immunity from violence for those who could not defend themselves.

As medieval diplomacy matured, popes increasingly acted as mediators between rulers. Though the pope was never a neutral observer in a theological sense, he could function as a neutral broker in political terms: precisely because he was not a competing territorial power.

Mediation lowered the cost of compromise by allowing rulers to frame concessions as obedience to moral authority rather than weakness before an enemy.

Neutrality as modern strength

The early modern period expanded the ambition and limits of papal peacemaking. In 1493, Pope Alexander VI drew up boundaries for Spain and Portugal’s colonisation of non-Christian lands. Other European powers increasingly rejected the pope’s authority to allocate sovereignty beyond Christendom.

In 1518, Pope Leo X promoted a general peace among central European Christian rulers, resulting in the Treaty of London. But a century later, the region’s Thirty Years’ War was one of the longest and most destructive conflicts in European history. After it ended, European diplomacy became more overtly secular. While the pope could create peace architecture, he could not sustain it once political incentives shifted.

For 1,114 years, popes ruled as absolute monarchs over the Italian territories known as the Papal States, strategically located in central Italy. With their loss, completed in 1870, the pope gained a different kind of leverage.

In the late 19th century, the Holy See aligned itself with emerging legal approaches to peace, including arbitration and international adjudication. It endorsed mechanisms that restrained unilateral force. Neutrality was no longer a defensive posture, but an active diplomatic resource.

Moral authority in total war

The first world war tested the limits of that resource. Pope Benedict XV confronted industrialised mass conflict, in which moral appeals struggled to gain traction. His peace proposal of August 1 1917 outlined principles that would later become familiar: disarmament, arbitration, freedom of the seas and territorial restitution. Governments acknowledged the initiative, but largely rejected its premises.

Pope Benedict XV tried to intervene in World War II. War of the Nations/Wikimedia Commons

While unsuccessful, Benedict XV’s intervention reinforced a papal vision of peace grounded in law and justice, rather than domination. It entrenched the Holy See’s role as a humanitarian actor, supporting prisoners of war, refugees and civilian relief – even when diplomatic leverage was minimal.

During the second world war, Pope Pius XII adopted a similar posture. His 1939 radio appeal warned war would destroy everything peace could preserve. Throughout the conflict, the Holy See relied on discreet diplomacy and humanitarian networks. Its capacity to mediate was constrained, but its credibility as a channel of communication endured.

In the early nuclear age, successive popes increasingly addressed the ethical implications of weapons capable of annihilation. The emphasis shifted toward global norms, restraint and the need for institutions capable of preventing catastrophe.

Speaking to the world

That shift became explicit in the United Nations era. When Pope Paul VI addressed the UN General Assembly on October 4 1965, his message was not tied to any state interest. “Never again war,” he urged, framing peace as a universal moral obligation rather than a diplomatic bargain.

This has defined much modern papal diplomacy. The Holy See acts through agenda-setting, moral language and support for multilateral norms. It rarely produces treaties directly, but shapes the terms in which peace and war are debated.

‘Never again war,’ Pope Paul VI (pictured left) urged the UN General Assembly, in 1965. Picryl

At times, however, the papacy has returned to hands-on mediation. The Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile in 1978 brought the two states close to war. Both accepted papal mediation, culminating in the 1984 Treaty of Peace and Friendship. Its conditions were consent from both parties, trust in neutrality and a willingness to frame compromise as honourable rather than humiliating.

More recently, Pope Francis was involved in the restoration of diplomatic relations between the US and Cuba, announced on December 17 2014. Symbolic gestures, such as Francis kneeling before South Sudan’s rival leaders in April 2019, reinforced his role as a moral catalyst rather than a governing authority.

Why this invitation is different

Against this long history, Trump’s “Board of Peace” stands out. It is not an ad hoc mediation effort, nor a quiet facilitation role requested by all parties. It is a formally constituted, state-led body, with clear political ownership and governance ambitions. Membership would signal alignment with a specific national framework.

Accepting a seat on such a board might offer influence over humanitarian access, reconstruction priorities and the protection of civilians. It could give the Holy See a voice inside a process that will shape lives on the ground.

But the risks are equally real.

Formal participation could narrow the pope’s room to manoeuvre, making it harder to engage actors who distrust the board’s sponsor. It could blur the line between moral authority and political endorsement.

Joining a state-led board could increase short-term influence, but at the possible cost of long-term credibility. And once neutrality is perceived to be compromised, it is difficult to restore.

Friday essay: how hard is it to govern?

2026-01-29T19:11:43Z

Is governing harder in the 2020s than in earlier decades? The instinctive, and popular, answer would be “of course it is”. While that’s also a correct answer, we should insert some qualifications.

Making the right or best decisions, especially in times of actual or looming crisis, has always been difficult. Consider the choices facing decision-makers, in Australia and abroad, during the Great Depression, when there was less understanding of how financial and economic systems worked than contemporary policymakers possess.

Consider also the choices that confronted leaders in past wars. Wartime prime minister John Curtin, grappling with decisions on which hung the lives of thousands of Australian troops, paced The Lodge grounds at night. And what of the challenges facing public health authorities trying to cope with the influenza epidemic that followed the first world war, compared with responding to the COVID pandemic in a time when vaccines could be developed quickly?

While keeping history in mind, however, it is undoubtedly true that contemporary governments face extraordinary changes and complexities. These come from many sources.

More demands for the provision of services. An interconnected world but fragmented public squares. Populations in democratic countries that have lost trust in government and in many other institutions. The rise of populism and the desire for instant answers to political and economic problems that do not lend themselves to easy, if any, solutions.

Modern travel, communications and technology have facilitated governing, as well as bringing their own challenges. Easier, faster and more comfortable travel means greater opportunities for face-to-face interaction, while imposing its own burdens. Email and “virtual” meetings have transformed interactions.

The internet is a massive information hub, the scale of which was beyond imagination only decades ago. It is also a monster that disseminates misinformation and disinformation on an industrial scale, and facilitates political intimidation.

Past reforms ‘not easy at the time’

Comparing the Bob Hawke and Anthony Albanese eras, “It’s become a truism of Australian politics that important economic reform peaked in the 1980s and 1990s. Sometimes the first two terms of John Howard’s government […] are given credit as well”, John Daley, of the Grattan Institute, wrote in Gridlock: Removing barriers to policy reform, in 2021. That report looked at the fate of a plethora of reforms the institute proposed between 2009 and 2019, finding more than two thirds of them had not been adopted.

In Australia, the Hawke–Keating government is often looked upon as a sort of “gold standard” for a reforming Labor government. It is unfair to measure a first-term administration against one that lasted several terms, and especially one that has been so mythologised. All the same, some critics have argued the Albanese government in its initial term was not pitching its aspiration high enough – let alone anything like as high as that earlier government.

Leaving aspiration aside, there is the other question. Was it easier in the Hawke–Keating days for a government to get things done – in particular, really difficult things? The answer is, almost certainly. But let us not romanticise the view through the rear vision mirror. Ken Henry, a public servant and Keating staffer during those days, told the National Press Club in 2025, “these reforms of the 80s and 90s mostly enjoy broad business and political support today, but they were not easy at the time”.

Moreover, some observers see downsides. “In recent months, there’s been a lot of breathless praise for the reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. But where did some of those reforms lead?” ABC economics writer Gareth Hutchens wrote in 2025. “Some eventually led to appalling scandals that ended in royal commissions (banking, aged care, Robodebt). Changes to Australia’s labour market in that period contributed to the rise of underemployment and precarious work.”

Much momentum for Australia’s economic reforms in the 1980s, stretching into the 1990s, was imposed from outside. Australia was under pressure from external forces to open its economy to the world. This produced winners and losers, but in many cases the losers (whether from tax changes, or slashing tariffs) could, where considered necessary, be compensated. This didn’t prevent pain, but it could ameliorate some of it.

‘More pessimistic, fractious and negative’

By the time of the Albanese government, much of the big reform had been done, or tried. The public had become pain-averse; the drag of “reform fatigue” had been canvassed for years. Trust in government, declining for decades, was down again after a brief revival during the pandemic.

The more difficult territory – such as improving productivity, which had languished for years – proved to be harder to navigate than some of the landmark changes under Hawke, Keating and the early days of John Howard. With a tight budgetary situation, there wasn’t money to compensate losers – and there was less tolerance for policies where some people would lose.

By the 2020s the community had grown more pessimistic, fractious and negative, uncertain where the country was headed. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer’s Australian report highlighted the extent of “grievance”.

It found 62% of Australians had a moderate or high sense of grievance. (This was defined as a belief by the person that government and business make their lives harder and serve narrow interests, and that wealthy people benefit under the system while ordinary people struggle.)

Fewer than one in five people believed things would be better for the next generation. Nearly two thirds (64%) worried that government leaders purposely mislead by saying things they know are false or are gross exaggerations. The barometer found a “zero sum” mindset increasingly permeating Australian society:

Those Australians with high grievances are twice as likely to feel that ‘what helps people who don’t share my politics will come at a cost to me’ compared with those with low grievances.

An environment marked by distrust and grievance makes governing difficult, let alone the pursuit of reform. Moreover, the modern plethora of well-resourced interest groups will be positioned to exploit grievance – indeed that is often central to their business models. Social media is god’s gift to those fanning grievances.

On the whole, people are more trustful if they feel they have agency – the opportunity for a voice, however small. The increasing professionalisation of politics, and the thinning out of the memberships and power within the major parties have further weakened the connection between citizens and the political process.

In today’s world, for multiple reasons, fewer people are “joiners” of parties, or other organisations. At the same time, the major parties give less encouragement to the political amateurs who want to be involved.

‘Cartel parties’

As late as the 1980s and early 1990s, ALP rank-and-file members had some clout, with the party’s national conference fights over policy (for example, uranium mining and export, reform of the banking system, privatisation) carrying weight. Progressively, however, the extra-parliamentary Labor Party membership declined in importance (with the exception that it gained a 50% say in choosing the parliamentary leader).

This is in line with an international trend. John Daley and Rachel Krust write in their Institutional Reform Stocktake (2025) that “major parties around the world have increasingly become ‘cartel parties’ in which members promise each other the benefits of government patronage, part of the machinery of government operated by a professional political class”. As modern ALP national conferences became much bigger in size, they took on the nature of stage-managed rallies, losing policy teeth.

At the 2025 election, for the second time running, only about two thirds of electors voted number one for Labor or the Coalition. The loss of faith in the major parties has been accompanied by people seeking agency in part through the “community candidate” movement.

Independent candidates (“teals” but others, too) have attracted large numbers of enthusiastic followers. The number of House of Representatives crossbenchers swelled in the 2020s, compared with the preceding decades.

This fragmentation, however, does not necessarily promote reform. Crossbenchers can sometimes achieve change by advocacy on particular issues, or by using positions of power to extract concessions (for example, in the Senate). To achieve transformational change, however, may require a government with a substantial, or at least a comfortable, majority. We saw this with Howard’s GST reform, when a big majority went to near defeat.

The “localism” reflected in the community candidate movement has been matched to a degree in the big parties, which often feel the need to preselect a “local champion”, such as someone who has served as mayor, from the particular electorate, making it hard to get policy-oriented “high flyers” into seats, especially when these days fewer seats are “safe” for the party.

The electoral cycle as ‘permanent campaign’

Short federal parliamentary terms – a flexible three years – are not conducive to bringing in potentially unpopular policies. Addressing the British Labour conference in 2025, Albanese noted that in the United Kingdom, which has five-year terms, they had “the most valuable resource for any Labor Government” – time.

Both sides of politics acknowledge the handicap of short terms, but by now have accepted that terms cannot in practice be lengthened, because (on recent history) it would seem impossible to pass the required referendum.

Terms could be made fixed by legislation, however there has not been the bipartisan will for that. (After the 2025 election, the Special Minister of State, Don Farrell, did ask the parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters to examine fixed four-year terms and increasing the size of the parliament.)

But the problem is not just the short length of terms. The electoral cycle has progressively become the “permanent campaign” with the government, especially the prime minister, seemingly never off the election trail, physically or mentally. This may have become so entrenched that longer terms might not significantly change things.

The contemporary phenomenon of the “continuous campaign” is reinforced by the frequency of opinion polling, and the attention given to it. It shapes much of the media discourse, and the use of it by the parties themselves means their eyes are, much of the time, on what the “focus groups” are saying. These trends were present in the 1980s but had reached new heights by the 2020s.

Leaders ‘crucial’ in driving reform

Much of the Hawke–Keating Government’s success in achieving economic reform was that it could harness the power and co-operation of the trade unions. The formal “Accord” between the government and unions meant the government could achieve trade-offs with the union movement – wage restraint in return for “social wage” benefits (Medicare, for example, and later a national superannuation contribution scheme).

The union movement of the day covered a much larger proportion of the workforce and had some impressive leaders who were willing to sign up to the government’s often controversial reform projects.

The Albanese government delivered significantly to the unions in its first term, including support for wage rises and a raft of changes to industrial laws, but it did not get offsets. The coverage of the union movement had shrunk drastically, and its leadership was not of the 1980s–90s calibre.

It is hard to recall how different the media landscape was in the Hawke–Keating years. This was the time before social media, and when the mainstream media were more influential for a government that wanted to drive change and achieve ambitious policy outcomes.

As a reforming treasurer, Keating was able to skilfully win influential parts of the media to his causes. Keating used to say, with his typical exaggeration, “if I’ve got the top five journalists in the press gallery supporting a policy, I’ve got the country”.

In the 2020s, not only are the media splintered every which way by the growth of social media, but traditional media are also increasingly polarised and less influential, especially with younger voters who obtain their information elsewhere.

The new round-the-clock, digital media environment has brought extra pressures on governing. How to sell measures has become almost as important in formulating policy as the substance. More generally, the government feels it imperative to fill the media space, which requires deploying ministers to the extensive round of morning TV and radio programs, interviews on the news channels through the day, evening current affairs, Sunday shows, and the like.

Arguably, the extent of the media burden on ministers takes away from the time and attention they can focus on detailed policy work.

Reform in any age requires leaders who can identify what needs to be done; grasp the policy challenges; are able and willing to be bold; and can persuade the public. The centrality of leadership in driving reform is crucial. In Hawke, Labor had a leader who could draw on strong personal popularity and was willing to spend political capital (although not be profligate with it – he acted as a restraining hand on his treasurer).

Albanese in his first term was a much more cautious brand of leader, mostly unwilling to exceed what he saw as his mandate. He also had a thin majority. Effective leadership must extend beyond the leader. Keating as treasurer was willing to stretch the boundaries. Albanese’s treasurer, Jim Chalmers, began his career by studying Keating attentively, but is still to be seriously tested himself.

Importantly, the Cabinet of the Hawke–Keating era was deep in its talent and its ambition. Its expenditure review committee was exceptionally hard-working. While the dynamics of the Albanese Cabinet are more opaque, there is not the breadth of talent or common reform purpose of its predecessor.

With Labor’s massive 2025 victory, calls immediately redoubled for the government to set its sights high. Slow economic growth, flatlined productivity and an uncertain external environment added to the push.

Stakeholders dusted off their reform proposals. A roundtable on “productivity”, which the treasurer immediately branded an “Economic Reform” Roundtable, was summoned by the government. That was the easy part.

Whether Albanese’s second-term government would have the will to significantly break the reform “gridlock” will be quite another matter. The prime minister might be a restraining hand on those inclined to hasten too fast.

This is an edited extract from The First Albanese Government, edited by John Hawkins, Michelle Grattan and John Halligan (New South), published on February 1.

Michelle Grattan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

In his last book, Julian Barnes circles big ideas and reflects on his shortcomings

2026-01-28T19:09:06Z

Julian Barnes, author of 14 previous novels, ten volumes of nonfiction, and three collections of short stories under his own name, plus four crime novels under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh, has announced that his new novel, Departure(s), will be his last. The narrator – who both is and is not Barnes – tells us this directly and the information has accompanied advance notice from his publisher. This kind of framing necessarily invites the reader to judge the book as a capstone to his career.

Review: Departure(s) – Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape)

For more than four decades, in ways distinct from near contemporaries like Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, Barnes has tried to awaken the English novel from its long fantasy of isolation, reminding it of its relation to European – and particularly French – literature.

For many years, his novel Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) was a foundational work in undergraduate courses in postmodern literature. But it has always felt to me as though this obscured the importance of the intervention Barnes was making.

His close reading of French literature translated formal experiment from the continental into the late-20th century English novel. Doing so, he opened the avant-gardism of anglophone late-modernism once again to the possibilities of a more European sensibility.

Illness and memory

It is no surprise to open Departure(s) and find Barnes employing fragmentation, lists, notes and quasi-philosophical musings, while refusing almost entirely to engage with any narrative structure that might resemble a plot.

There is a story of sorts, and the narrator tells us early on that one will be coming, though it is, he says, a story with no middle. Indeed, the five-part form of Departure(s) bookends and bisects the “story”. There is a central section about Barnes himself, and meditative opening and closing sections that reflect on larger questions – not only in relation to literature, but life more broadly.

This makes sense for a writer whose life over the past 25 years has been marked by great career successes – including the Booker Prize for The Sense of an Ending (2011), after a succession of shortlistings – as well as the tragedy of his wife Pat Kavanagh’s sudden death from brain cancer in 2008 and, more recently, his own chronic illness.

In 2020, Barnes, and the semi-fictional Barnes who narrates Departure(s), learned he had a form of blood cancer. He tells us that it will be with him until the end of his life, even if it is not the disease that kills him.

Grappling with this new condition, he turns to last things: to an accounting of his own shortcomings and to memory more generally.

Here we have reflections on Proust’s madeleine-induced stream of recollection, alongside Barnes’s thinking about the phenomenon of Involuntary Autobiographical Memory, or “IAM”. Barnes notes the case of a stroke victim, who claimed that eating a piece of pie released recollections of every pie he had ever eaten in order of consumption. He is at first horrified by the prospect of experiencing such a thing, until he realises that “IAMs would certainly help with autobiography”, particularly when recalling “moral actions and inactions”.

The novel’s “story” proper, when we get to it, concerns the narrator’s role in twice bringing together a couple: Stephen and Jean. He met them when all three were students at Oxford in the 1960s, and they met again 40 years later. Their “friendship”, such as it was, lasted little more than two periods of a year and a half either side of that 40-year gap.

The Barnes character had once been Jean’s lover, and his “moral actions and inactions” come to the fore in his account of these friends, now dead, for he promised Stephen and swore to Jean on a Bible that he would never write about them. There is here a return to some of Barnes’s longstanding interests as a novelist. Gaps in characters’ knowledge of one another become points of fixation or rupture.

One of the fears besetting some novelists is that they may fall victim to their own Rumsfeldian “unknown unknowns”. We know what we know about characters, story, theme, and so on. And we think we know what we don’t know (the discernible limits of our knowledge). But there is always the risk of a work being fractured internally by a force whose presence has remained beyond thinkability. This might be as simple as a hole in a plot, or as significant as an ideological blind spot.

Tics and irritants

Though I suspect Barnes would assert that he was in total control of this book, there were moments when I wondered. For instance, odd tics create a distancing effect where they might have been intended to do the opposite. Barnes has a habit of addressing the reader with self-conscious asides (“don’t you find?”) that feel more conversational than writerly.

There is also a curious refusal to name the male anatomy by its proper terms (though not so with the female). He uses schoolboy constructions such as “bum cancer”, rather than, say, “colon” or “rectal”. This is despite his being medically precise about his actual illness, its names, and its diagnosis and treatment.

There are also a few uncomfortable moments referring to homosexuality. We have “old Muckface, who turned out gay in the end”. The narrator suggests it would have been especially disturbing to find “a collection of dildos with dried blood on them” in Stephen’s home and refers to “schoolmasters we thought dodgy”. The latter are the only examples of gay people the narrator claims to have encountered as a child.

Julian Barnes. Urszula Soltys/Penguin Random House

Barnes hastens to welcome progress that makes society more accepting, but this does not, for this reader, counterbalance the implied equation of “dodgy” character or predatory habits with homosexuality, nor his vivid and horrified amusement when imagining his friend might have a secret inclination towards anal eroticism.

In another vein, we have the narrator choosing to call Uluru by its colonial name, almost intentionally, it seems, to irritate a certain kind of reader.

These demurs might suggest significant irritation, but this is not the case. What I want from a writer of Barnes’s intelligence, however, is a handling of identity and representation worthy of his mind and talent.

I’m on Barnes’s side for much – though certainly not all – of the book. It is refreshing to open a contemporary novel in English and find that story and plot are second-order concerns, and that revealing the story in a review would not risk ruining the pleasure – and interest – of reading the book. Spoilers spoil nothing here.

But then I reach a conundrum, for Barnes offers this summary of a writer’s aims:

All writers want their words to have an effect. Novelists want to entertain, to reveal truth, to move, to provoke reverie. And beyond? Do they want their readers to act as a result of their words? It depends.

This seems to sketch the limits of Barnes’ aspirations for his art, assuming he thinks of his novels as art and not as mere entertainments. What, for me, is missing from that list is the possibility that a novelist might want to make readers think about the larger questions in more than a state of “reverie”, a word that implies the amorphousness of daydream.

Barnes appears to be placing himself in a tradition running parallel to but separate from that of British novelists-of-ideas of an earlier generation like Iris Murdoch, or his contemporary Ian McEwan, and younger writers like Zadie Smith. For all of these writers, I suspect that provoking serious thought is as important – and likely more important – than producing an emotional response (its own kind of thought, to be sure) or simply to entertain.

It is an odd final manoeuvre because Barnes is a novelist interested in thinking and thought. He has made a career of circling big ideas. But in the end, assuming this is truly the end, it is hard not to feel that he seems embarrassed to find himself so seriously interested in those larger questions, or so interesting to the readers who may continue to turn to his books for more than mere reverie.

Patrick Flanery does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Beach swimming was once banned in Australia. How did it become a treasured pastime?

2026-01-27T18:49:50Z

Sophie Peng/Unsplash

While the beach and swimming culture might feel like an intrinsic part of “Australianness”, this hasn’t always been the case. For many of us, swimming lessons, school swimming carnivals and weekends at the beach are defining childhood memories.

That deep connection to beach swimming helps explain why our responses to the Sydney region’s recent shark attacks and health concerns over South Australia’s algal bloom crisis feel like a form of collective grieving.

Swimming at the beach is seen as healing. It brings us together and connects people to the natural world. Yet our apparently intrinsic swimming identity is something that’s emerged over time. Our attitudes to swimming and beach-going have shifted according to social values and politics.

The “beach bodies” we celebrate as healthy and desirable would have been unthinkable in the 19th century, when sea bathing was a furtive, private affair for colonial Australians. Daytime public bathing was widely banned until around the early 1900s, when restrictions began to lift. And even when we did eventually hold swimming races, our first swimmers were hardly Olympic standard.

Meanwhile, a recent study by Royal Surf Lifesaving Australia warns that swimming culture might be on the retreat: fewer children are competing in swimming carnivals, or even have competence in the water. Drowning deaths increased last summer and swimming ability is falling “below minimum standards”, the report argues: 48% of Year 6 students and 84% of year 10 students are not meeting expected benchmarks for their age.

My research shows that Australia’s swimming culture didn’t evolve by accident: it was actively nurtured by swimming advocates and public education programs. A concerted public effort will be required to boost swimming skills and water safety once more.

Swimmers and paddlers at Bondi, circa 1900. State Library New South Wales

Danger, modesty and bans

While most settler-colonial Australian coast dwellers in the 19th century viewed ocean bathing as essential for hygiene, being in the water also channelled all sorts of panics.

The ocean was a place where you drowned when ships went down, got taken by sharks, or simply succumbed to its depths. The beach was perilous. It took people.

Fear of the water also had a moral element. Bathing was necessary, but done in private and with modesty.

The swimming and diving feats of First Nations men and women were frequently commented on by colonists and observers. Aboriginal people “are bold and surprisingly expert, both in swimming and diving”, wrote William Govett in the Saturday Magazine in 1836.

In 1843, the missionary James Backhouse described Aboriginal women in Lutruwita (Tasmania) diving for crayfish “often using the long stems of the kelp to enable them to reach the bottom; these they handle as dextrously as a sailor would a rope in descending”.

And in Lieutenant William Dawes’ famous Dharug wordlist from 1790-91, we get the term “bóg’i” – to bathe or swim. (It’s a word still used today: “bogey holes” are features at Bronte Beach and Newcastle, where people can safely enjoy an ocean dip.)

Aboriginal Australians spearing fish and diving for shellfish, New South Wales, ca. 1817. Joseph Lycett, National Library of Australia

But in 1810, Governor Lachlan Macquarie banned public bathing in and around Sydney Cove. The colonial bathing prohibition was extended in 1838 to all towns in New South Wales, “for the maintenance of the public peace and good order”. It was incorporated into the Colony’s Police Act:

it shall not be lawful for any person to bathe near to or within view of any public wharf quay bridge street road or other place of public resort within the limits of any of the towns aforesaid between the hours of six o'clock in the morning and eight in the evening.

To avoid prosecution, women and men discretely bathed behind privacy screens and segregated areas, away from public gaze, or at dawn and dusk, until the daytime bathing bans were lifted in the early decades of the 1900s.

Some people in the colonies could and did swim. Swimming races and demonstrations were held in places designated for segregated swimming, like Robinson’s Baths in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo Bay, or St Kilda Baths in Melbourne, during the middle decades of the 1800s.

Swimming races and demonstrations were held at places like the St Kilda Baths (pictured in 1910). State Library Victoria

Yet these carnivals were largely for entertainment and betting, rather than universal rites of passage. And mixed bathing continued to be scorned and policed until the turn of the 20th century.

During one Sydney competition in 1852, only two men entered the 100-yard race, and neither contestant swam overarm until the final few metres of the race, briefly accelerating their more sedate sidestroke.

Over the course of the 1800s, values about morality and modesty gradually shifted as views around gender, health and fitness changed – along with ideas about leisure and pleasure.

An 1860 news story about swimming matches in Port Phillip Bay touted the potential of swimming to strengthen both communities and physical bodies. “It is gratifying to see so many youngsters good swimmers,” the Melbourne Argus reported.

There was a significant racial element in all this, too, as the work of historians Marilyn Lake, Henry Reynolds and others explores. The colonies were anxious about their geographical isolation from Britain and obsessed with how their citizens might “measure up”.

At a time when ideas about bodily vigour and good health were growing, swimming was also viewed as a form of exercise acceptable for women. But swimming didn’t just promote physical fitness. Knowing how to swim was essential for public safety, especially for the Empire’s youngest subjects.

“The accidents that so often occur during the summer season would be reduced to a minimum, if women would but learn to swim,” one 1876 article from the Illustrated Sydney News insisted.

Swim safety and beach bodies

By the late 1890s, school swimming lessons had begun in Victoria and New South Wales. Amateur swimming associations were established around the country during this period. They advocated for the construction of public baths and the provision of lessons, along with that now famous rite of passage, the swimming carnival.

Bathing – once furtive and modest – was increasingly replaced with public swimming, for women and men. The more popular swimming became, the more people visited the beach.

In turn, people who visited the beach to swim, rather than stroll or splash up to their knees, further nibbled at 19th-century Victorian strictures of decorum. By the end of the 19th century, beach bodies were becoming markers of good health and virtue, rather than something to hide.

By the end of the 19th century, ‘beach bodies’ had become something to celebrate (like here, at this 1940s Bondi Beach carnival) rather than hide. State Library New South Wales

Surf life saving clubs

As the popularity of beach swimming grew, however, its physical dangers were thrown into ever sharper relief. Reports of tragic deaths were regular news right around the country.

Children were especially vulnerable. Newspapers reported stories like the drowning death of young Leslie Mitchell in December 1900. Seen wading knee-deep at St Kilda beach, he was found face down in the water only minutes later.

As accidents mounted, notes historian Caroline Ford, civic responses also grew. Many beachside communities established lifesaving clubs, like Bondi (formed in 1907), Cottesloe (in 1909) and Tweed Heads and Coolangatta (in 1911), and provided life-saving equipment like life-rings and surf-lines. There were also government inquiries into beach safety, which recommended funding for public education and surf lifesavers.

Many beachside communities, like Manly (pictured in 1900-1910) formed lifesaving clubs in the early 1900s. National Museum of Australia

The Surf Bathing Association of New South Wales, formed in 1907, soon became the Surf Life Saving Association of Australia, and quickly expanded as clubs around the country were created.

The shift from furtive bather to confident beach swimmer reflected changing social attitudes. It also occurred during a critical time of emerging national identity – and federation.

Beach bodies became idealised figures of strength: admirable and desirable, rather than something to be ashamed of. Australian swimmers like Mina Wylie, Andrew “Boy” Charlton, Fanny Durack, and Annette Kellerman, were national heroes and celebrities. They won international races, appeared in variety shows and drew enormous crowds.

Australian swimmers Fanny Durack (gold) and Mina Wylie (silver) and the UK’s Jennie Fletcher (bronze) after the 100 metres freestyle at the 1912 Olympic Games. Wikimedia Commons

While that freedom-loving, strong and capable beach figure celebrated in popular culture at the time might have been bronzed by the sun, it was invariably white. The Immigration Restriction Act was one of the first pieces of federal legislation passed by the new nation in 1901 and it enshrined the White Australia policy.

The beach was a national leveller, of sorts, but only if you were actually welcome to sit on the sand in the first place.

Throughout the 20th century, as swimming became a sign of Australian egalitarianism and physical health, it was also a site of exclusion, as the 1965 Freedom Ride and 2005 Cronulla race riots demonstrate.

Australia’s celebration of beach and swimming culture – in all its complexity – went on to become a defining feature of national identity. And significant efforts supported by governments, surf lifesaving and community groups have attempted to make the beach an inclusive, safe place for everyone.

Ensuring beach safety is an ongoing part of those efforts.

Anna Clark does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Lainie Anderson’s novels about a real pioneering policewoman invite us to play historical detective

2026-01-26T22:37:50Z

Kate Cocks and her pioneering South Australian women's police force. State Library South Australia

It’s 1917 and policewoman Fanny Kate Boadicea Cocks is patrolling the parks of Adelaide, armed with a five-foot cane. She’s there to protect women from harm by enforcing a “three foot rule” to keep amorous couples at a safe distance from each other.

When not on morality police duties, she likes to shop in the recently opened Moore’s department store on Victoria Square, with its grand marble staircase, and its piano serenading the well-heeled clientele with cheery wartime songs.

This might seem like a fanciful premise for a historical crime fiction series. But Miss Kate Cocks, as she was usually known, did in fact exist. (So did Moore’s department store, before it was gutted by fire in 1948.) Cocks was the first woman police officer in the British Empire to be paid at the same rate as her male colleagues and granted similar powers of arrest.

In fact, she was the first policewoman in South Australia, which in 1894 became the first state to grant women the vote and the right to stand for parliament. (A year after New Zealand became the first country in the world to give women the vote.)

Review: The Death of Dora Black; Murder on North Terrace – by Lainie Anderson (Hachette)

Journalist and novelist Lainie Anderson discovered Cocks while randomly scrolling through her Twitter feed during the COVID pandemic. She then applied to the University of South Australia to do a PhD on Miss Cocks, aiming to make her the protagonist in a popular crime novel. This resulted in a two-book deal.

Kate Cocks. Wakefield Press

Anderson’s (still embargoed) thesis addressed the challenge, and ethics, of turning a real woman into a fictionalised character. Whatever her concerns might have been, The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace are fine additions to feminist historical crime fiction: perhaps best exemplified by the Miss Phryne Fisher mysteries written by the late Kerry Greenwood.

Indeed, Miss Cock’s fictional offsider, the indomitable Constable Ethel Bromley, is somewhat reminiscent of Phryne. Ethel is also wealthy and beautiful. She, too, entertains a lover and practices birth control. As one of Ethel’s aunts admiringly tells her: “You are our future selves”.

It’s a clever ploy, placing the “paradoxical” real-life character of Miss Cocks, with her reverence for motherhood and perplexing opposition to birth control and abortion, in a close working relationship with a character who embraces views much more in keeping with contemporary beliefs about women’s rights. This juxtaposition effectively stages a dialogue between past and present attitudes.

“In my opinion, a mother is the nearest thing to God upon this earth, because she, too, creates,” Cocks – who, in real life, founded a refuge for babies after her retirement – told The Advertiser in 1936. “That is why I am so opposed to all the abortive practices nowadays.”

But importantly, what Kate and Ethel share is their desire to protect women.

Revealing fashion and complex characters

While women may have achieved more control over their bodies since 1917, both The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace deal with crimes involving rape and domestic violence. Sadly, the persistence of these crimes today suggests the times may not have changed as much as we might hope.

The Death of Dora Black begins with the discovery of a young woman’s body under the jetty at Glenelg beach. The only clues are two small vials of opium and an expensive art nouveau purse. This is the motivating crime that will drive the primary narrative. However, it’s the incidental characters and descriptions of Adelaide that give these books their depth and heft.

Then, we are introduced to Miss Cocks as she shops in Moore’s department store for a pair of new shoes exactly the same as her old ones, but in a different colour. At five foot six inches, Miss Cocks is taller than the average woman of the time, and as “neat as a pin” in a “light green, ankle-length silk frock with an understated ruffle at the throat and a fitted waist”. Anderson’s fashion notes are precise – and revelatory in terms of what they might tell us about the characters.

Miss Cocks appears to be a 41-year-old, straight-laced, buttoned-up spinster. However, she is also a product of both her time and social circumstances – and all the more complex for that.

Ethel, on the other hand, is 27, exuberant and prone to wearing military-inspired outfits with much higher hemlines. She has also been learning jujitsu to great effect, having flattened a “mountain of a man” at the Port Adelaide docks who was pestering her. She would like to be a detective.

Over the course of the two books, set in January and September of 1917, respectively, Miss Cocks and Ethel’s working relationship deepens. As we are told in the second book, they develop “an unspoken appreciation of one another’s strengths and a sympathetic acceptance of their weaknesses” through their shared experiences, and the challenges they face together.

Murder ‘a welcome distraction’

The two female police officers are required to work an overwhelming 60 hours a week, with one Sunday off in every six. For the most part, this work is routine and exhausting. It involves daily trips to the Adelaide Railway Station to meet unaccompanied, vulnerable young women and ensure their future safety; walking the city’s parklands to catch couples in flagrante; and patrolling the suburbs to monitor domestic disputes. The murders they become involved in are something of a welcome distraction.

In Murder on North Terrace, this involves the death of the South Australian Art Gallery’s head in front of a controversial painting he has championed. Miss Cocks, meanwhile, is facing domestic crime of a different order involving a man who locks his wife in a truck every night to prevent her entering the house.

Anderson skilfully blends truth and fiction. The controversial painting, Sowing New Seed by William Orpen, did indeed exist. It caused quite a stir at the time, as did the case of the wife padlocked in the truck. Only the murder in the gallery is a fiction.

Real – and ever present – is the backdrop of the first world war. (This is also the backdrop of Anderson’s debut novel, Long Flight Home, also based on historical research and real people.) From the pianist in Moore’s department store playing Pack Up Your Troubles on repeat, to the returned soldiers in Victoria Square, “broken men with missing limbs and lost hope”, the impact of the war on the inhabitants of Adelaide is a constant theme.

In Murder on North Terrace, the war moves centre stage. Miss Cocks and Ethel are now on duty at the Cheer-Up Hut in Elder Park, a home away from home for new recruits and 300 recently returned South Australian soldiers.

As they watch a young amputee threaten to throw himself off a balcony and into the arms of a young woman he has just met, they are once again presented with forces beyond their control: including love, lust and the notorious six o’clock swill – not to mention a predatory rapist.

At least Ethel gets to play the detective, if only briefly. She also receives a marriage proposal – which completely confounds her, since this would mean resigning from the job she loves. Ethel may be a fictional character, but there’s a hard truth here. My own mother experienced it in 1937, when she was forced to give up her job in the United Kingdom as a result of a similar marriage bar.

Given the ongoing dialogue between fact and fiction, if I have any criticism to make of The Death of Dora Black and Murder on North Terrace, it is that they should have come with a map of Adelaide in 1917. I keenly wanted to trace Miss Cocks and Ethel’s movements through the city as they went about their business of saving women and solving crime.

Publishers take note: there’s the opportunity for a crime walk here. There, readers might investigate for themselves the relationship between the real and the imaginary that Anderson so effectively blurs. At the same time, she gives us a compelling portrait of what life might have felt like in Adelaide at that time.

Such is the power of good crime fiction that touches the heart as well as the mind – while inspiring a desire to play history detective.

Sue Turnbull is Chair of the BAD Sydney Crime Writers Festival and lifetime member and ambassador for Sisters in Crime Australia

‘I saw the horrors’: how Australian journalists bore witness to the Holocaust

2026-01-26T18:53:45Z

In the dying days of World War II, startling news about “horror camps” in Germany began to emerge, as Western war correspondents accompanied British and American forces advancing towards Berlin. During the liberation of the camps, soldiers and journalists, including 15 Australian journalists and two artists, encountered thousands of dead. Some victims were in locked rail cars; others were piled in mounds or tossed into pits. Traumatised survivors wandered about the camps, while those too weak to walk remained in stifling huts as their Nazi captors fled.

International Holocaust Remembrance Day is the anniversary of the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration and Extermination Camp on January 27 1945. It is timely, as we commemorate, to reflect on what was known and believed at the time.

As living memory of the Holocaust fades, we need to continue to strive for an accurate reckoning of what took place and account for how it was reported. This obligation is perhaps all the more compelling in the wake of Israel’s relentless and remorseless destruction of Gaza in response to Hamas’ horrific attacks on October 7 2023, which has complicated and perhaps clouded cultural memory of the Holocaust.

Understanding how the press covered the Holocaust illuminates the role of journalism and its contemporary importance. It is not only about looking back.

The Australian press offers a unique dimension to our understanding of the Holocaust. It reveals things about journalism’s complicated engagement with the Nazi’s campaign of extermination, the political and cultural context of the 1930s and 1940s, the comforting myth that emerged after the war that the press “did not know”, and how the Holocaust has influenced modern journalism.

Personal stories were treated as credible. The idea of objectivity was challenged. The importance of visual evidence became widely accepted.

Study for ‘Blind Man in Belsen’ – Alan Moore (1945) Public domain/Australian War Memorial

The pre-war coverage

The Australian press coverage of the Third Reich in the 1930s is strikingly reminiscent of how authoritarian figures are characterised today. Hitler was underestimated. He was an object of press fascination and the butt of bemused ridicule.

Throughout the decade, the Australian press published accurate accounts of Hitler’s brand of racial hatred and aggression. It reported his venomous antisemitism and intimidation, the Nuremberg Laws and expropriation decrees, the exodus of Jews and their status as refugees, the infamous pogrom on November 9 and 10 1938 known as Kristallnacht, and the proliferation of concentration camps, a reality in Nazi Germany since 1933.

And yet the coverage was inconsistent, entirely dependent on the will of editors. Widespread coverage did not necessarily translate into empathy or protest.

This was the era of the Immigration Restriction Act – the “White Australia Policy”. A narrow sense of what constituted an Australian national identity informed a discriminatory immigration program predicated on exclusion. The political, cultural and racial values underpinning Australian society complicated the nation’s response to Jewish persecution.

Australia’s discriminatory legislation was hardly unique, but the ambivalent pre-war treatment of Jewish victimisation reflected entrenched anxieties about race. The dehumanising language that has infected current debates about refugees and “border control” in Australia has its antecedents in the 1930s and 1940s.

Jewish refugees were conceived as a problem and a threat. Jewish migrants, particularly those from Eastern Europe, were regarded as clannish and overly “political” (either covertly communist or innately Zionist) and simply not “white” enough. Sections of the national press staunchly defended the national immigration policy, echoing entrenched grievances and pandering to xenophobia. Other editors frequently echoed the pervasive political belief that Jewish refugees and all non-white migrants threatened social cohesion.

In response to the tumultuous events in Germany, several news editors began to campaign (with qualifications) for a relaxation of the restrictive immigration policy. But other publications continued to defend the restrictions, calling on the government to “halt unrestricted Jewish influx”.

Accounts of Nazi terror

Unlike the racial policies and persecution of the 1930s, the mass extermination of the Jews during the war was not committed openly. Despite the secrecy and military priorities, the Australian press published fragmented but frequent wire accounts of “Nazi terror”. Deportations, enforced slavery, executions, ghettos and the establishment of concentration and extermination camps all featured in the press.

The number of articles in Australian daily newspapers recording the killing of Jews increased dramatically in the second half of 1942, after the London-based Polish government-in-exile released a shocking report they had received from the Bund, the Jewish Socialist Labor Party in Warsaw. The report documented the slaughter of 700,000 Jews and stated that “mass extermination” had begun.

The frequency of such articles revealed an editorial willingness to focus on the Jewish plight, despite the fierce competition for news space as the war against the Japanese intensified. Some news outlets, including small regional mastheads, diligently published extensive and accurate coverage of the persecution of Jews throughout the war.

Other publications, however, failed to maintain continuous coverage, despite the agonising enormity of events. Relying for the most part on wire accounts rather than journalists’ eyewitness reports, the news did not always generate sustained interest.

Godfrey Blunden, an Australian war correspondent accredited with Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, was based in the Soviet Union for 16 months. He insisted that his reports on the murder of the Jews in Russia be read and believed.

Blunden suspected there was a resistance to acknowledging what was happening, within the newspaper industry and the wider public. But if the Australian public in Sydney and Melbourne paid close attention, the evidence of the Jewish fate was unambiguous.

Liberation reports

On 22 July 1944, Soviet forces reached Majdanek near Lublin, Poland. The Soviets had invited a phalanx of journalists and photographers, including James Aldridge, a journalist with the Melbourne Herald, to witness the liberation. It was another six months before Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated.

It is striking that, while the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau has taken on an epochal significance, the event was not regarded as especially significant at the time. The absence of Western journalists and the resistance to acknowledging the Soviet role in the liberation meant that most major newspapers provided only vague details. Many reports were buried in the inner recesses of newspapers or not published at all, suggesting to the public that the revelations were not of central significance and possibly unreliable.

By late April 1945, however, the revelations of the “Final Solution” were no longer deemed secondary by Australian news organisations. Western war correspondents and photographers descended on the newly liberated concentration camps and the newspapers published their harrowing dispatches. The News in Adelaide published Ronald Monson’s searing report under the headline “I saw the Horrors of Belsen camp”.

What can the reporting of the liberation of the camps tell us about the Australian press? The overwhelming preoccupation in the eyewitness accounts was the insistence that the testimony had to be both believed and remembered, and that their role provided moral clarity. It was also apparent that these first-hand accounts by Western journalists were privileged and accepted.

Historians have tended to focus on the impact and representational ramifications of the visual coverage of the concentration camp horrors. But the textual reports were crucial and would have a lasting influence. In Australia, it ushered a new style of journalism: personal and intimate, subjective and emotional. Journalists did not just relate news of the camps; they became central to the story as first-person narrators, eyewitnesses to a vast and terrible crime against humanity.

War correspondent Osmar White witnessed the suffering at Buchenwald. Australian War Memorial/Public domain

Another dimension of the reports was the journalists’ self-awareness in recognising the limitations of their professional craft. Although they were cognisant of the Nazi extermination campaign, most had not viewed the physical evidence. They were forced to process their trauma as they gathered information. Reporting difficulties were compounded by a male-dominated work culture that extolled stoicism and emotional detachment.

Objectivity, the cherished principle of reporting practice, was challenged by the camps. Here is the noted war reporter Osmar White (best known for his vivid rendering of Australia’s military campaign in New Guinea), after visiting Buchenwald and moving among its “living dead”:

I cannot now, or ever will be able to write objectively about what I have seen. One cannot observe war for three and a half years as a newspaperman and remain either a sentimentalist or be super sensitive of spectacles of human suffering. Yet what I saw today moved me to physical illness.

Journalists accepted and at times embraced the Australian brand of journalistic swagger. But their humbling experience of the camps encouraged a gentler, more empathetic form of reporting, one that allowed the survivors’ humanity to emerge.

Other accounts, however, seemed to revel in the horror and reduce the victims to anonymous caricatures. The immense linguistic and representational challenge of communicating a crime as big as the Holocaust was one thing; the tendency to minimise, distort and even deny the known facts was another.

In Australia, there is evidence that some news outlets recognised the camps as the terrible consummation of an incremental anti-Jewish policy. Yet doubts about the revelations of the Nazis’ extermination campaign persisted. Brian Penton, the editor of the Daily Telegraph, was moved to issue a damning editorial in April 1945, headlined “You Must Believe It Now!”. Significantly, some newspapers presented the graphic concentration camp photographs as the ultimate proof of the Nazi atrocity, though photographs of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau would not be published in Australian newspapers until the Nuremberg trials began in November 1945.

For all the prejudices and insecurities that infiltrated the national reckoning with the Holocaust, the Australian coverage compares favourably to that of the British and American press. In Australia, there was not a pervasive tendency to universalise or conflate the Jewish plight with other populations – a tendency that negated the fact that Jews were systematically targeted.

Prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau during liberation by the Soviet Red Army (January 1945). Photographs of the extermination camp did not appear in Australian newspapers until the Nuremberg trials (November 1945-October 1946). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Postwar coverage

Australian coverage of the Holocaust was marked by numerous examples of tenacious reporting and courageous editorial commitment to publishing the truth. But it was also marred by degrees of editorial indifference, denial and disbelief, and the selective and self-serving exercise of memory.

The most disturbing example was the myth, propagated by some Australian newspapers at the time, that the annihilation of European Jewry was something of a surprise. The press were inconsistent for most of the war in their treatment of the genocide. Arguably a greater failure was the coverage of the victims after their liberation from the camps.

The treatment of the revelations in Australia varied according to the editors. Some, like Brian Penton, published frequent accounts on the brutalities committed against Jews. Others treated these as isolated incidents, burying such reports or, worse still, omitting the Jewish experience entirely. The evidence and memories were distorted in the postwar debates in Australia about Jewish migration.

Jewish persecution did not cease with the end of the war, nor did the survivors’ suffering end with their liberation. Unfortunately, the robustness of the Australian coverage of the long ordeal did not extend to its aftermath. The documented atrocities quickly faded from public consciousness. The survivors’ stories and faces seemed paradoxically to be confined to the moment of their liberation.

The sensational war trials refocused attention on the Jewish plight, but were quickly forgotten and overtaken by other events. News practices and priorities, which relegated the Holocaust to old news, diminished the Jewish fate and diluted public sympathy.

This, in turn, influenced attitudes to Jewish refugees at the very time the federal Labor government was launching Australia’s postwar immigration program. The partial obfuscation of Jews as the key targets of the Nazi regime was useful to those who sought to exclude Jewish migrants. Widespread resistance to acknowledging the extent of their mistreatment led to the revival of antisemitic tropes and stereotypes, uncomfortably redolent of Nazi sentiment.

Access and reporting

Nonetheless, as the years passed, the liberation of the concentration camps became one of the defining memories of the war for the journalists themselves. Holocaust consciousness and the journalists’ pride in their role as witnesses to the truly calamitous events had taken hold by the 1970s. There was also a growing acknowledgement of the Jewish people’s immense contribution to Australia.

Tragically, International Holocaust Remembrance Day this year will be marked in Australia in the wake of the horrifying Bondi Beach massacre, and amid increased and emboldened antisemitism and online disinformation.

The Holocaust had a profound influence on Australian journalism and, more specifically, the coverage of genocide. But in one way, it did not change reporting. The representation of crisis and conflict in the media continues to be determined by who does the seeing and who does the telling. More importantly, it is shaped by the political agendas of editors and media owners, and by politics itself.

If journalists are silenced or denied access, and if press organisations refuse to cover a story (or if they provide a skewed rendering), humanitarian crises become a secondary story at best. This is seen most recently and starkly in Gaza today, with Israel’s tight control of the conflict’s narrative by limiting entry into Gaza itself, preventing independent journalism and regaling journalists with carefully curated versions of events.

Fay Anderson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Australia once enshrined white superiority. These 10 trailblazers helped shift our attitudes to race

2026-01-25T18:42:38Z

Wikimedia, National Library of Australia, National Archives of Australia, State Library of New South Wales, The Conversation

In early 20th century Australia, Indigenous people were denied citizenship and the nation had a racially exclusive immigration policy. Most people not only accepted the “White Australia” policy but openly identified with its assumption of white supremacy. Popular culture was replete with overtly racist terms and images.

Even after World War II, as Australians began to focus on their region and nearby colonies threw off their imperial rulers, acceptance of “White Australia” continued for many.

Yet from the late 1940s, some Australians began to question the racial inequality on which colonialism relied. By 1975, when the Whitlam government passed the Racial Discrimination Act, racially exclusive immigration had been jettisoned and First Nations people had legal equality, albeit not parity.

Such a profound shift in popular consensus did not occur spontaneously. Here are ten key Australians who prodded the country to question its own thinking on race.

1. H.V. ‘Doc’ Evatt

In early 1945, as Minister for External Affairs and Attorney-General, Dr H.V. Evatt (1894–1965) co-led the Australian deputation to the United Nations’ founding conference. He helped to shape the UN Charter dealing with colonies, requiring their development towards independence.

As president of the third session of the UN General Assembly, on 10 December 1948, Evatt presided over the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

His niece, lawyer and jurist Elizabeth Evatt, recalled that her Uncle Bert held the idea of human rights close to his heart and saw the declaration as the first step in a process. She also pointed to Australia’s role in formulating Chapter XI of the UN Charter, calling it a stimulus to decolonisation.

As a supporter of White Australia, Evatt was inconsistent as a critic of colonialism. But his role in the adoption of the declaration, which is so often invoked in support of human rights and equality, should be a matter of pride in this country.

2. Jessie Street

Jessie Street (1889–1970) was a leading feminist in the 1940s and the only woman on the Australian delegation to the 1945 UN conference. Street helped to insert the phrase “the equal rights of men and women” in the preamble of the UN Charter. She also pushed for a commission to be established to deal with the status of women.

Street and other women delegates fought to include the word “sex” in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights statement. Respect for human rights was to be without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion.

She knew Evatt and praised his influential work at the early UN. But unlike Evatt, she had no reservations about condemning colonialism. In the mid–1950s, Street investigated the conditions of Indigenous Australians for the London Anti-Slavery Society, writing an important report and working with Indigenous activists such as Pearl Gibbs.

Jessie Street at the United Nations. National Library of Australia

In 1964, Street visited Ghana, then led by socialist President Kwame Nkrumah. It wasn’t only his socialist program she admired, nor his commitment to gender equality. She also applauded his vision of redressing the historical wrongs of imperialism, slavery and exploitation, and praised his “burning resentment against race discrimination and other aspects of the old colonial regime”.

3. Pearl Gibbs

Pearl Gambanyi Gibbs (1901-1983), whose maternal ancestry was Ngemba or Muruwari, helped to organise the Aborigines Progressive Association, the 1938 Day of Mourning protest, the Australian Aborigines’ League, the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, and the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

She played a vital role in the movement leading to the 1967 Referendum, which would include Indigenous people in the census and empower the Commonwealth government to legislate for them. Gibbs was an advocate for workers, one of Australia’s leading human rights activists and a link between the women’s and Aboriginal rights movements.

Pearl Gibbs pictured in 1955. State Library of New South Wales

Gibbs saw and articulated the structural nature of colonial oppression within Australia. In 1941, she gave a radio address, arranged by the Theosophical Society of Sydney. Identifying proudly as “a quarter-caste Aborigine”, she condemned “153 years of the white man’s and white woman’s cruelty and injustice and unchristian treatment”.

She pointed to segregation in picture halls, churches and elsewhere, urging: “When I say that we are Australia’s untouchables you must agree with me”.

4. Faith Bandler

Faith Bandler’s father was from Ambrym (in what is now Vanuatu), brought to work on the Queensland sugar plantations. Her mother was half-Indian and half-Scottish. While not Indigenous, Bandler (1918–2015) knew racism all too well.

Faith Bandler, oil painting by Elsa Russell ca. 1957, ML1175. Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales and courtesy Louise Havekes

After serving in the Women’s Land Army, in the postwar years she joined politically progressive circles in bohemian Sydney. She became a prominent advocate for racial equality.

By 1956, Gibbs and Bandler had begun the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship, an organisation dedicated to campaigning for Indigenous rights. Bandler became general secretary of its successor. She played a key role in the 1967 Referendum and, as her biographer Marilyn Lake contends, the meaningful achievement of equal citizenship for Aboriginal people.

In an interview, Bandler explained that her activism was influenced by her childhood experiences of racism, and knowledge of its global, structural dimensions:

[T]he stories my father told me of his treatment, being kidnapped from the islands and working on the canefields as a slave, did influence my thinking […] I knew about the slave trade, and we always sang the slave songs in the evenings […] So I knew, even as a very young kid, that black people somehow had their place, and it was in the place of serving white people.

5. Charles Duguid

Dr Charles Duguid (1884-1986) was a prominent campaigner for Aboriginal rights from the 1930s onwards. Duguid founded Ernabella mission, for the Pitjantjatjara people in northwest South Australia in 1937. This mission was regarded as extraordinarily progressive in its cultural sensitivity and efforts to preserve language and customs.

Charles Duguid, circa 1936. National Library of Australia

Duguid advocated publicly for the significance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, quoting from its preamble: “Disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of humankind”. He then observed: “From 1788 to 1900 this happened all too often in Australia.”

Duguid often drew comparisons between Australia and South Africa. More than once, Duguid finished an address with the ominous remark: “Asia is looking on”. The statement called into question Australia’s regional standing among both its colonised and newly independent neighbours.

6. Kylie Tennant

Kylie Tennant (1912–1988), one of Australia’s most prominent writers in the mid-20th century, was known especially for her socialist realist portrayals of the hardships of the working class and unemployed – occasionally referred to as Australia’s John Steinbeck.

Kylie Tennant. Wikimedia Commons

Tennant was hailed by the Times Literary Supplement and won praise from George Orwell. In the late 1950s, she used her public platform to draw attention to the terrible consequences of colonialism for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in the far north. Her books Speak You So Gently and All the Proud Tribesmen sold well nationally and internationally.

Tennant’s determined use of humour as a vehicle to show all of her characters – Indigenous and settler – as individuals with personalities was undergirded by her awareness of racism, not least on the part of some government officials and mining company prospectors. Condemning discrimination and abysmal living conditions, Tennant evoked the richness of Indigenous cultures and community life.

Her travel writing and fiction brought First Nations people in the north to metropolitan attention – as she had done in the 1930s and early 1940s with the unemployed and the very poor.

7. Don Dunstan

Don Dunstan in 1968. Wikimedia Commons

Don Dunstan (1926-1999) was a democratic socialist South Australian Labor MP, a national political figure and cultural celebrity. As Premier of SA from 1967–68 and 1970–79, Dunstan pioneered legislative and policy reform establishing Aboriginal land rights and prohibiting discrimination.

In 1957, he gained international attention as an outspoken critic of British colonialism in Cyprus. In 1960–61, Dunstan served as president of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders. In 1965, he played a key role in the removal of the White Australia policy from the federal ALP platform. In June 1969, he said, as reported in the Tribune:

Australia cannot continue to be lumped in most people’s minds with South Africa as a country basing its policies on racial discrimination […] Outside Australia, people who have heard of us for the most part don’t know much about our country but there is one thing they all know – the White Australia Policy.

In the late 80s and the 90s, he was president of the Mandela Foundation of Australia and presided over the Australian branch of the Movement for Democracy in Fiji, while being a leading voice for Australia to become a republic.

8. Oodgeroo Noonuccal

Studio portrait of Lance Corporal Kathleen Walker (Oodgeroo Noonuccal) taken in 1942. Wikimedia Commons

Oodgeroo Noonuccal (Kath Walker) (1920–1993) was a poet and Indigenous rights activist. Noonuccal grew up on Minjerribah/North Stradbroke Island. She became a domestic servant before joining the Australian Women’s Army Service in World War II. A player and advocate for women’s cricket, she worked as a stenographer and house cleaner.

Her political skills were first honed in the Communist Party, which she left before becoming a writer. From the 1960s, Walker/Noonuccal was celebrated for her powerfully evocative poetry and as an internationally prominent political figure fighting for Aboriginal rights.

In 1969, Walker told the Journalists’ Club in Sydney that missionaries

have convinced themselves they are Christianising the Aboriginal but in truth they continue to brutalise the black man by trying to turn him into a black white man.

The old government policy of assimilation had done nothing to help Aboriginal people, and the new policy of integration was merely a word change: “At present, Aboriginals are given the rights to live upon the rubbish dumps of the white society”.

Noonuccal received many awards and accolades, and was recognised for founding her Indigenous learning centre Moongalba on Minjerribah.

9. Charles Perkins

Charles Perkins (1936–2000) was born on an Aboriginal reserve near Mparntwe/Alice Springs. His strongest memory was

the fact that we just weren’t allowed into Alice Springs, which was only 2 miles away. Often we used to go for walks towards Alice Springs and look over the hills […] and the white people for us, well, they were like moon-men I suppose.

Charles Perkins. Image courtesy of the National Archives of Australia. NAA: A6135, K29/1/82/35.

Later he was sent to an institution for Aboriginal boys in Adelaide for schooling. He worked as a fitter and turner, prior to becoming a professional soccer player, a career that took him to England.

His activism began in the mid-1950s as a young man in Adelaide. While studying at University of Sydney, he hit national headlines in 1965 when he led the Freedom Ride student protest against segregation and discrimination in New South Wales country towns.

Perkins’ path-breaking career as a public servant culminated as secretary of the Department of Aboriginal Affairs. The photo above, of Perkins speaking at the Tent Embassy while he was secretary, captures his ability to balance activism and senior administration. Long a powerful national voice on Aboriginal rights, in the 1990s he served on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission.

10. Roberta Sykes

Roberta Sykes (1943-2010) was the daughter of an Australian mother and African–American father. Of her childhood in Townsville in the 1940s-50s, Sykes would recall:

As children, we were overwhelmed with the history, images and successes of white people to the extent that we could not have been blamed for doubting our own existence and worth and the existence and worth of all, and any, other Black people.

Roberta Sykes (detail from image of Sykes being interviewed on the TV show GTK, 1973). National Archives of Australia. National Archives of Australia.

Forced out of school early by racism, she became a nurse, before working as a journalist. She helped to found the Aboriginal Medical Service in Redfern, and the Aboriginal Tent Embassy, among many other entities. In the early 1970s, as a prominent activist for Aboriginal rights, Sykes was invited to speak on racism, rights and colonialism in countries including the UK, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea.

She earned her PhD at Harvard University, held positions in academia and as a consultant, and was awarded the 1994 Australian Human Rights Medal. In 1986, in her Australia Day address to the National Press Club, she condemned the fact that “Australian Aborigines were still living under siege almost 200 years after white people arrived on their land”.

These ten Australians collaborated on many fronts. Evatt and Street worked together at the UN from 1945 to 1949. Tennant wrote the first biography of Evatt. Street connected with Gibbs and Bandler to ignite the movement for constitutional change that resulted in the 1967 referendum.

Duguid and Dunstan worked in the 1959 campaign against the death penalty conviction of Arrernte man Rupert Maxwell Stewart. Dunstan — who was something of a mentor to Perkins — and Noonuccal were both invited delegates to a historically important convention on racism held by the World Council of Churches in London in 1969.

Noonuccal and Sykes, while different generations, bonded as Black women from Queensland, both poets and activists. The ten’s connections were links in vital intellectual and political networks, whose webs spread outwards and crossed the country.

Of course, the work of this cohort alone did not change Australia, and many other individuals could – and perhaps should – be added to such a list. But these ten each made singular contributions to the formidable task of changing a nation’s mind.

Research for my essay was supported by an Australian Research Council Discovery grant.

Writers Victoria has been defunded – but writers’ centres are ‘fundamental’ to literary culture

2026-01-23T02:57:14Z

Start Up Stock Photos/Pexels

Writers Victoria, one of a national network of centres providing crucial support and employment to writers, has lost its funding – putting its “very survival” at risk. Its loss would make Victoria (whose capital, Melbourne, is a UNESCO City of Literature) the only mainland state without a state government-funded peak organisation for writers.

Creative Victoria has provided emergency funding for the first six months of 2026. But it is not enough to cover existing contractual obligations to authors, staff salaries and a rental lease, Writers Victoria chair Janice Gobey told the Australian. She has launched a petition to the Parliament of Victoria to restore state funding. So far, it has garnered about 2,000 signatures.

Why does it matter if we lose Writers Victoria? What do these state and territory writers’ centres do? We’ve had them since South Australia opened the first one in 1985, roughly 40 years ago. Now, they “play a fundamental role in our literary ecosystem,” Jennifer Mills, chair of the Australian Society of Authors and Miles Franklin shortlisted author, told The Conversation.

Toni Jordan says Writers Victoria was ‘instrumental’ in her success. Hachette

Novelist Toni Jordan told us Writers Victoria was “instrumental” in the creation and success of her Miles Franklin longlisted debut novel, Addition, released as a feature film this week. “Writers Victoria workshops helped me write it, and I met my publisher at an ‘ask the publishers’ event run by Writers Victoria.” Mills met her first publisher at a similar writers’ centre event, run by NT Writers’ Centre.

Jordan described the organisation, which she became a patron of this month, as an “incubator for new generations of writing talent every year”. She worries about the established writers who might not reach this career stage in five or ten years without it.

While Mills praised writers’ centres’ role in helping new writers connect with community and professional opportunities, she also emphasised their role in supporting established ones. “Writers’ centres pay,” she said. “They directly employ authors and usually pay fair rates for appearances, workshops and mentoring.”

Not just a ‘Melbourne problem’

Writers Victoria received about A$150,000 per year from 2022 to 2025. The 37-year-old organisation is “now exploring alternative funding pathways, partnerships, and philanthropic solutions” for beyond June.

CEO Jill Brown told me the organisation “hasn’t bounced back” since 2020. She called this “a Melbourne problem”, related to the ongoing impact of the city’s long lockdowns.

This – along with cost-of-living pressures – manifested in a membership decline. In Writers Victoria’s last (2024) annual report, membership was 1,833 – a significant drop from 2,990 in the last pre-COVID report. Facing a budget deficit in 2025, the centre restructured in order to break even.

Gobey said over the past year, a new board and volunteers with financial expertise had “managed to get the business back on track and […] into the black” – after it had been “heading towards insolvency”.

This follows a scare for Writing NSW back in 2020, when Create NSW didn’t renew its multi-year funding. Late last year, the organisation was told it would be returning to multi-year Create NSW funding for 2026–2028. But at A$100,000 per year, CEO Sophie Groom told The Conversation, that funding is now exactly half the level of the previous two years.

Meanwhile, Tasmania’s writers’ centre, TasWriters, confirmed to The Conversation that it “has not received any organisational funding from the Tasmanian government for quite a number of years”. “In order to continue, we no longer have any paid staff.” The board now runs the organisation, with the help of additional volunteers.

Writing NSW has just regained its multi-year funding, after losing it in 2020. Writing NSW

What are writers’ centres for?

Brown contrasted the place of state and territory writers’ centres with writers festivals. “Writers festivals are not necessarily for writers,” she said. “They don’t teach writers how to write.” The Emerging Writers’ Festival is an exception in some ways, with its focus on developing new literary talent – but of course, most of its impact and public activity falls within its festival dates.

The core functions of writers’ centres include creative writing courses, workshops and manuscript assessments. They also support writers’ groups and run mentorships, competitions and residencies. But they also deliver bigger projects and sometimes advocate on behalf of writers. In 2020, for example, the ACT Writers Centre, since renamed Marion, wrote an open letter to the Canberra Writers Festival, criticising the lack of diversity in that year’s line-up.

The reach of writers’ centres goes well beyond their collective nationwide membership of approximately 10,000 people. The general public can attend the workshops and events they run – and often use their services, too (at higher prices).

There’s a subtle distinction here in what we mean by “writers”. In some settings, this word carries a sense of “professional” or “career” writer – someone who at least sometimes writes for a living (like most writers festival guests). But a writer is, after all, simply someone who writes – or, in Brown’s words, “someone who feels passionately about writing and words”.

Before the small minority of professional writers reach that point in their writing lives, they must learn such a thing is possible, and develop the skills to go about it.

Festivals, journals, workshops

Writers’ centres’ community aspect can radiate outwards into the broader literary sphere. Writers SA will reportedly be the “nexus point” of a planned “guerrilla” literary festival, to run in place of this year’s cancelled Adelaide Writers’ Week. CEO Claire Hicks told Adelaide’s InDaily it will “run the infrastructure for the event, including setting up an online portal, a ticketing system, establishing an advisory subcommittee and being responsible for any funds”.

The NT Writers Festival, founded in 1999 and alternating each year between Garramilla/Darwin (where the 2026 festival will be held) and Mparntwe/Alice Springs, is run by the Northern Territory Writers’ Centre. Writers Victoria’s Writeability program, which supports the professional development of disabled writers, received an accolade at the Victorian Disability Awards for its work.

NT Writers Festival. The NT Writers Festival, run by the NT Writers Centre, is just one of the valuable contributions Australia's writers centres make.

Splinter, a newly established South Australian literary journal, is run by Writers SA. And among Queensland Writers Centre’s projects are GenreCon, Australia’s leading conference for genre fiction writers, Adaptable, which takes writers to pitch to screen industry professionals, and substantial youth programming.

Even from its precarious position, TasWriters continues its suite of programs. Among them are free workshops for young writers (funded by a project grant) and last year’s (unfunded) spring MiniFest in Hobart, which “was packed out for every session”, even making a profit.

‘A critical part of the pipeline’

State and territory writers’ centres began emerging 40 years ago, amid calls from local writers for more support.

In 2010, the Australia Council (now Creative Australia) attempted to merge state and territory writers’ centres, but this fell through.

Hannah Kent’s Burial Rites won the inaugural Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award. Pan Macmillan

Interestingly, the short-lived national body, comprising five writers’ centres, helped discover Hannah Kent and her internationally bestselling novel Burial Rites, when it won the inaugural Writing Australia Unpublished Manuscript Award (which only ran twice). This led to Kent securing an agent and publishers around the world.

Today, Australia’s state and territory writers’ centres connect through the National Writers’ Centre Network, while maintaining specific local ways of working.

“It’s heartening to see Australia’s major writers festivals receiving additional support over recent years, and they play an important role in the sector,” Groom said. “At the same time, there’s a strong case to be made that writers’ centres are a critical part of the pipeline, providing year-round development, professional support and pathways for emerging writers. Without sustained investment in that early and mid-career space, it becomes much harder to ensure a healthy future for Australian writing.”

Without ‘sustained investment’ in the development space writers’ centres fill, ‘it becomes much harder to ensure a healthy future for Australian writing’, says Writing NSW CEO Sophie Groom. Writing NSW

For writers’ centres, state and territory government grants are a significant part of what keeps them operating. As Brown put it, now “there’s more arts organisations looking for less funding”.

But state and territory writers’ centres are not all struggling in this moment. Arts Queensland recently announced an annual funding increase of A$120,000 per year to the Queensland Writers Centre.

The centre’s membership has nearly doubled in the past five years. It began making many of its courses available for live streaming just before COVID, in 2019, to make its workshops more accessible to the regional and remote writers who comprise around 40% of its membership.

Beneath individual stories of success and struggle lies a broader systemic issue – what Brown called a “silent effect” of wider declines in Australian reading culture. “Writers’ centres are under siege, in a way, because the broader culture is shifting towards more screen-based and solitary activities,” Brown said.

“Today’s broad access to online information and free writing resources has rendered the old model of ‘community access’ that underpinned traditional writers’ centres obsolete,” Meg Wilson, then CEO of ACT’s Marion, told Books+Publishing in 2022, when the organisation rebranded, explicitly differentiating it from other centres.

‘We need somewhere to come together’

As founding coordinator of Writing NSW Adele May once wrote:

The general perception of the lonely writer hammering away long night hours over the word processor or typewriter is slightly off beam. Idealistic and romantically clichéd as it may seem […] we need somewhere to come together – a place to commiserate, share our knowledge and ideas, to enjoy and celebrate our world of words.

Brown imagines a typical member as “in her sixties, writing a memoir, buying lots of books”, but without necessarily a clear pathway (or desire) to monetise or professionalise her literary pursuits. (Writers Victoria’s membership skews towards women.)

As creative writing researcher Julienne van Loon often argues, value in the writing world can be measured by more than economic success.

With this firmly in mind, Brown and her colleagues are on the search for alternative pathways for Writers Victoria’s future. “For the time being, we’re keeping the doors open,” she said. “We’re not giving up, and we’re not winding down at the moment.”

I have been a previous member and volunteer with Writers Victoria and Queensland Writers Centre, and I currently work for Books+Publishing.

Friday essay: weirdly old-fashioned and wildly uneven – David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest at 30

2026-01-22T19:06:41Z

Thirty years ago, living in Cambridge, England, I wandered into Heffers Bookshop and picked up a monstrous new novel on the display table. It had a title out of Hamlet, a Simpsons-sky dustjacket, hundreds of endnotes, and ran to almost 1,100 pages. Infinite Jest occupied much of that cold February and March, and to this day I remember finishing it with a sensation of frustrated exhaustion.

It seemed then (as it does now) a wildly uneven book held together by something new in American fiction of the postmodern age: a white-hot purity of moral purpose that made it seem weirdly old-fashioned, despite all the bells and whistles of its cumbersome near-future satire about a nation amusing itself to death.

It was, undoubtedly, a major achievement, though it was also clear that something was not quite right with its writer, David Foster Wallace. Aesthetic misjudgements had led to so many wincing misfires, lapses of taste and tedious longueurs that it all seemed indicative of a deeper subjective disequilibrium.

In that sense, the book was “true” in a way the author’s journalism (to which one turned with curiosity) was not. In those snappy features, written for Esquire, Rolling Stone, Première and other glossy magazines, the ardent moral vision is worn as a winning professional mask. It speaks in a voice mixed of pedantry, whimsy and stern judgement.

Smart, alert, observant, mordantly funny, the Wallace of the non-fiction also came across as a bit of an asshole. And an asshole, it turned out, he was. But more of that later.

Literature of exhaustion

Twelve years later in 2008, Wallace was dead at age 46. That suicide has subsequently woven something of a halo over the bandanaed-average-Joe-nice-rural-Midwest-boy image cultivated by the author while alive. Posthumous books, a film and a veritable industry of critical approbation have only contributed to his cult status.

Today, Wallace lives online as a saintly, almost Buddhist YouTuber, dropping bromides and sallies of wisdom, looking always earnest and sincere, if not clean-cut. It is a sad fate for a writer who, at one point, was the great hope of American letters.

What are Wallace’s claims to our attention today? And what of Infinite Jest itself, the work by which he will and should be judged, on which he worked on and off for a decade? What have 30 years done to that achievement?

In part, his place in literary history is defined by his generational position. Wallace was young enough to be the child of those postmodern giants who defined the age of his youth and at whose feet he sat: Don DeLillo, John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon. He could play the ardent freshman to the decadent sophomore Brat Pack who had carved out the early-1990s American scene: Bret Easton Ellis, Tama Janowitz, Jay McInerney.

This rivalry rears its head in Infinite Jest, where Ellis appears in a rollcall of authors of “depressing books”. What was wrong with this second generation of postmodernists for Wallace was they took it all too far. They wallowed in unearned metafictional irony, drug-addled blankness, disaffection and spoiled anomie, while outside the real world just got worse. They proved that postmodern fiction – what Barth called the “literature of exhaustion” – was itself exhausted. Something had to be done.

Infinite Jest was that something. But it was so in a deeply conflicted way. The best way to consider it is as a kind of geological cross-section of a writer and a literary culture at a moment of major upheaval.

The outermost layers are still flashily “postmodern”, but as we work our way deeper into the book, another mood emerges. What would be called the “new sincerity” gestates in the womb of Infinite Jest and emerges fully fledged by the end; its legacies are very much with us today.

Fancy and imagination

No self-respecting literary Wunderkind of the mid-1990s looking to unleash a mega-novel could help but vie with Pynchon, Barth, William Gaddis and Robert Coover, while nodding to DeLillo. And so, Infinite Jest comes with all sorts of postmodern ingenuities and hyper-connectivities, recursive mediated mise-en-abymes and madcap political conspiracies.

As in Wallace’s first novel, The Broom of the System, this dimension of his major work has always felt strained, insincere and unconvincing. Alongside the churning unease of DeLillo’s Libra, Wallace’s conspiracy of Quebecois wheelchair militants reads like boilerplate bestseller trash. His pastiche of Pynchon is so jejune he steals the Goethean Brocken Spectre phenomenon from Gravity’s Rainbow. Any reader of serious science fiction turns away in embarrassment from Wallace’s O.N.A.N., the Great Concavity, sponsored years, and all the other features of his thinly imagined near-future.

So much for the postmodern genuflection. Or not quite. Because this plot business bears more of a structural load than first appears.

Infinite Jest is offered in a formally disjointed, radically broken-up manner, both chronologically and in relation to its heterogeneous subject matters. Given that the two dominant strands of the book are resistant to plot – indeed, they turn programmatically against it – all the higher-order organisational responsibilities fall to the political conspiracy and its MacGuffin, the “Entertainment”. Stripping the latter away would remove the book’s skeleton and leave it to the fate of a beached whale.

Peeking ahead, we might say that Wallace’s unfinished novel about the US Internal Revenue Service (IRS), The Pale King, was unfinishable precisely because it made no concession to the cynical need for a plot. My feeling is that Wallace was essentially a short-story writer – a feeling vindicated in his fine collection Oblivion – and that plot was a labour for which he had no real talent.

I have come to think of this in terms of Coleridge’s distinction between Fancy and Imagination. Fancy is the mechanically associative energy that weaves collages out of existent materials; Imagination the creative power that disassembles and reintegrates reality into new and powerful unities.

There are few writers with a more prodigious Fancy than David Foster Wallace, who suffered from a weak and synthetic Imagination.

The ‘Substance’

The heart of this mammoth book is in the structural oscillation between two adjacent institutions in eastern Massachusetts: the Enfield Tennis Academy and the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House. The staff and boarders at these two facilities, their respective backgrounds, organisation, funding, operations and missions, are vastly detailed over hundreds (and hundreds) of pages.

Two characters emerge as dominant: Hal Incandenza, the tennis prodigy and academic genius, and Don Gately, a lovable break-and-enter lowlife and recovering addict. They never meet. Relations between their respective institutional homes remain implicit throughout.

The bulk of the novel sits with Hal. And who is Hal? Shakespeare’s young prince? Kubrick’s onboard computer? Really, he’s a bit of both. Hal is a familiar figure in the annals of American literature, the subject of a bildungsroman that somehow fails to gel, that fizzles out around the protagonist’s inability to do anything at all: Holden Caulfield for Gen X.

Hal is the subject of great promise, of almost infinite potential (a handsome intellectual jock), who, when faced with the prospect of actually becoming an adult, coils up inside himself and withdraws from any meaningful engagement. The young prince become an automaton, a loose string of glitchy coded responses.

The centrality of Hal Incandenza is a problem for the novel. Not only because so much of it seems like poorly reprocessed autobiography (Wallace was himself a tennis prodigy), but because this paralysingly self-conscious, troubled, solipsistic, narcissistic character acts as a kind of black hole in the text. Hal sucks in heat and light, but refuses to emit any.

This white male member of the WASP ascendancy in northeast America, from a wealthy family, well connected with the power elite, certainly suffers, and his suffering is emblematic of much deeper and wider problems in the culture. But he is in many ways not worthy of the exhaustive attention, something the text knows well and struggles to find a formal solution for.

His transformation into an affectless, asexual starfish is one moment of Wallace’s answer. The other is Don Gately and Ennet House. The components of the novel that treat of the facility’s lengthy Alcoholics and Narcotics Anonymous sessions, confessions, feelings of attraction and repulsion, loosely assembling all the novel’s absurd plot complications, are its most ambitious and enduring achievement.

The existential, psychological, and emotional costs of dealing with addiction – with the “Substance”, in all its motley forms – are detailed with immense, painstaking care, in what sometimes feels like a documentary, fly-on-the-wall, round-eyed stare into the abyss. It is here that the figure of Don Gately swells into prominence as the counterweight to Hal’s adolescent black hole. He is a big, loving, imperfect bear of a man, emitting care and empathy, opening himself to loss and rejection.

The ‘Entertainment’

The “Entertainment”, the book’s implausible MacGuffin, is a film so compulsively watchable that it effectively transforms anyone who sees it into a drooling vegetable. It is the epitome of the various substances – chemical, commercial and cultural – with which the novel’s hundreds of addicts contend.

That it is produced by the founder of the tennis academy, sought after by the wheelchair terrorists as a super-weapon, and acted-in by one of the chief characters, makes it too hot to handle, a radioactive Grail element in the text.

What does it allegorise? Wallace’s thesis is as follows: American consumer capitalism doth make fools and addicts of us all. Hooked on the lowest common denominator and the dopamine hits of celebrity and fame, not to mention actual drugs, Americans are fast degenerating from their postwar high.

On the one hand, this leads to bad citizens, failing in their civic responsibilities and duties to protect the republic against internal decay. On the other, it leads to unhappy subjects, miserably disappointed and seeking the next escapist high. Corporate elites, oligarchs and tech bros are scooping up the financial rewards of this abject dejection. Government has fallen into the hands of advertisers and lobbyists.

If there is any resistance to this conspiracy of addiction-culture, it is through individual detoxification. By learning to be bored again, to sit lonely in rooms, care for the self through reflection and art, we undertake the tedious, unpleasurable task of rehabilitation. Becoming bureaucrats of the soul, we contribute to an overall lifting of the level of culture and filter our pleasures back through the social contract.

A rehab clinic serves as the most fitting allegory for the kind of collective work we need to do; the “Entertainment” is its sworn enemy.

David Foster Wallace in 2006. Steve Rhodes, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

The fixed terms

“We all suffer alone in the real world,” Wallace once said; “true empathy’s impossible.” These are the fixed terms of his art, and of the “new sincerity” itself.

The postmodern offended him because it seemed to have capitulated in advance to the wickedest tendencies of the culture. What we needed was a literature that could fashion a plausible enough verisimilitude of empathy, sufficient to keep its hope alive in the howling snowstorms of contemporary nihilism.

Wallace was an old-fashioned American conservative. He voted for Reagan’s second term and venerated Republicans like John McCain. He had no sense of politics as a passionate collective struggle over resources and values. The values were already consecrated in the US Constitution; it was bad actors who were gobbling up too many of the resources – not a class enemy.

Like Cormac McCarthy, Wallace was a serious moralist with zero political vision: witness the cynical collapsing of Left and Right in Infinite Jest and the witlessly two-dimensional image it presents of collective commitments beyond a functioning bureaucracy.

Wallace’s interest rests with the individuals who suffer the consequences of a rapid dismantling of the hard-won cultural consensus of the postwar pax Americana. Their misery, their exploitation by interests that care nothing for psychic cohesion, real personal choice or emotional fulfilment, is his only true concern.

At Wallace’s funeral, DeLillo said: “He wanted to be equal to the vast, babbling, spin-out sweep of contemporary culture.” But did he? He seemed blind to the gathering forces of much that has been inspiring about that culture since: Black Lives Matter, antifa, queer and trans activism, and of course feminism.

Wallace’s women are, well, a problem. Like Salinger, McCarthy and Updike before him, he knew how to do men, especially younger ones, but his women are lamentable. Avatars of the polymorphously perverse and brilliant women of Pynchon, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow are sketched in, but with woeful incompetence. You get the sense that if he’d ever read any Adrienne Rich or Audre Lorde, it might have killed him.

There is an interview with Charlie Rose (remember him?) where Wallace casually observes that, unforgivably, “females” just don’t like Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven. “Females.” What’s with them?

The lethal Entertainment, it turns out, features one such “female”, an impossibly attractive one in a white gown, leaning into a crib and mouthing the words “I’m so sorry” – as if the most blissful thing imaginable were a female’s apology for the crime of having given you birth, separated from you, and then cock-teasing you for the rest of your life, before killing you off.

The woman playing this Madonna says of herself: “I’m perfect. I’m so beautiful I drive anybody with a nervous system out of their fucking mind!” She wears a veil as a favour to the world of men whom she would otherwise disable by virtue of being “perfect”, whatever that means.

The uninterrogated assumptions at work here amount to a kind of “incel” misogyny. As for the rest, Megan Garber has observed, “women’s stories get treated as one of Wallace’s trademark footnotes might be: decorative, dexterous, whimsical, trivial. Pretty afterthoughts. Optional.”

The #MeToo revelations by ex-girlfriend Mary Karr that Wallace was obsessively predatory, violently combustible, a stalker and a serial disposer of young groupies, have rocked his reputation to the extent that Yale professor Amy Hungerford posted a withering article about “not reading Infinite Jest” and the Guardian published a story that claimed “reading the ultimately heartless and intellectually empty Infinite Jest was the biggest waste of a summer I ever spent”.

Is that right? It is always best to make literary judgements on the basis of reading.

I’ve slogged through Infinite Jest twice (so you don’t have to!) and my critical sense that it is not a good book has only been confirmed. There are good things in it, but they are drowned out by noise, a truly exasperating authorial style, ridiculous plot elements unworthy of serious fiction, and an ambient misogyny. One finally wishes for a violently edited, 250-page collection of short stories that focused on the addicts of Ennet House.

A year later in 1997, I returned to Heffers to buy a copy of the long-awaited Mason & Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. Here, it seemed to me then and has seemed to me every day since, was a novel so incandescently great, so towering and substantial, so rich with imagined worlds and teeming with political implication, that Infinite Jest must disappear forever in its shadow. Yet Infinite Jest is the book that has exerted by far the greater influence over the course of literature since, for better or for worse.

Julian Murphet does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Trump wants to send troops into Mexico. The land grab of the Mexican-American War makes this ‘politically untenable’

2026-01-21T01:41:31Z

After the United States government celebrated the capture of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, President Donald Trump issued warnings about what might come next. “Something will have to be done about Mexico,” he said. “American dominance in the Western hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

The US government has subsequently pushed for US forces to accompany their Mexican counterparts in operations targeting fentanyl production. But the history of US military intervention in Mexico makes the presence of foreign troops, under any pretext, politically untenable.

The arrival of US troops in the past has signalled political instability, suffering for ordinary people, and in the most extreme case, massive loss of territory. Before the one-sided Mexican-American war of 1846–48, most of what is today the states of California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona and New Mexico had been part of the newly independent Mexican republic.

The second Trump government’s realignment of security policies includes an aggressive reboot of the 19th-century “Monroe Doctrine”, which projected influence across the western hemisphere. Trump likes to call the updated version the “Donroe Doctrine”, and it dispenses with any pretense of hemispheric solidarity.

The embrace of this doctrine has people and governments throughout the western hemisphere on edge. Even during so-called isolationist periods in US history, parts of Latin America have faced frequent US military interventions.

Gunboat isolationism

The “Monroe Doctrine” started not with a bold declaration to the world, but with a routine address by President James Monroe to the US Congress in 1823. Throughout the Americas, newly independent states were emerging from European rule. The doctrine stated that any attempt to oppress or otherwise control newly independent states would be viewed as “the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States”.

Trump has updated the Monroe Doctrine with the ‘Donroe Doctrine’. Louis Dalrymple/Wikipedia

This doctrine is often seen as an expression of US isolationism. Suspicious of the European powers, the US sought autonomy to develop on its own. It would keep out of European affairs (which it was already largely doing), but wanted the same from European imperial powers – some of which were already in decline.

The Monroe Doctrine was aspirational at best. The US lacked the political appetite or military capacity to actively protect its regional neighbours. Two years after Monroe initiated the policy, French warships returned to the capital of independent Haiti, coercing the government into agreeing to pay massive reparations to the former colonial power. The US did not intervene.

When French warships blockaded and then raided the Mexican port of Veracruz in 1838 – seeking exorbitant reparations for losses incurred by French citizens – the US did not intervene. The US did, however, send a ship to police the gulf waters and prevent smugglers from circumventing the French blockade.

Despite the “unfriendly disposition” shown by European gunboat diplomacy, the Monroe Doctrine showed little indication of delivering on its stated hemispheric commitments.

As its territorial ambition and military capacity grew, the US assumed a more active role within the hemisphere. This regional intervention looked a lot like the gunboat diplomacy practised by former colonial powers.

The one-sided Mexican–American War

When Monroe announced his doctrine, the US was made up of just 24 states, plus large expanses of unincorporated territory.

By the 1840s, the US was eager to push westward and acquire new territories. James Polk won the presidency in 1844. The following year, he made good on his pledge to annex Texas, which already claimed independence from Mexico.

He also made diplomatic moves to acquire territories further west by negotiation. He offered US$5 million for New Mexico (which included what today is Utah, Nevada and parts of other states) and $25 million for California. He also prepared land and naval forces, in case he needed to take the territories by force.

The young Mexican state, first established in 1821, was in the midst of political tumult. The government at any particular time faced weak domestic authority, but clear nationalistic demands to preserve the territory and honour of the young country.

When Mexico would not negotiate on Polk’s terms, US troops moved into the coveted territories of New Mexico and then California. Mexican state presence in these areas was weak at best; there was little sustained opposition to the US occupation.

General Scott’s entrance into Mexico in the Mexican–American War. Adolphe Jean-Baptiste Bayot/Wikipdia

The question of how to formalise these conquests brought the war into the very heart of Mexico. US forces landed at the port of Veracruz (as French forces had done ten years earlier). From there, the invading force fought a series of battles, eventually occupying Mexico City, the political and symbolic centre of the Mexico, in 1847.

The occupation of Mexico brought further negotiations on very different terms. The US acquired the entire claimed territory. It paid US$15 million in compensation (equivalent to almost US$500 million today) – roughly half the amount offered before the war.

Mexico lost 55% of its total territory.

A new threat of US military intervention

While Venezuela has long been one of the main US antagonists in the region, Mexico and the US enjoy a much closer and more productive relationship. The US and Mexican economies are tightly integrated.

In 2025, Mexico became the largest export market for the US. The two governments cooperate across a wide range of issues and later this year, Mexico and the US, along with Canada, will co-host the FIFA World Cup. In the nativist world view of Trump and his close advisors, however, Venezuela and Mexico are seen as two sources of the same core issues: migration and illicit drugs.

President of Mexico Claudia Sheinbaum has so far dealt with pressure from the Trump government by demonstrating that Mexico can handle illicit drug trafficking on its own. Her government has ramped up policing and intelligence operations, and touts its successes – in terms of decreasing homicides, and increasing arrests and drug seizures.

Trump and his advisors, however, are committed to military solutions – from the raid in Venezuela to sharing videos of illegal strikes on civilian boats – in part as a way of projecting dominance in the region.

This is entirely the wrong approach. Successive Mexican governments used the military to target illicit drug trafficking – backed by US funding, US military training and US military hardware – without any real success. Violence worsened, but illicit drug trafficking continued.

The US government is, for now, committed to its “Donroe Doctrine”. The violence and militarism of this approach might seem new, but it is little more than the Monroe Doctrine stripped of the veneer of isolationism.

The original doctrine only ever spelled isolation from Europe. For the people of Mexico and much of the Americas, it was always a doctrine of US self-interest and military intervention.

Philip Johnson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Ruled by engineers: how China gets things done, leaving the US in the dust

2026-01-20T19:15:27Z

In modern times, the world’s most powerful and influential states have also had the largest economies. When the United States overtook Britain in the early 20th century, it was only a question of time before it assumed international political leadership too. Indeed, the failure to assume this role is widely thought to explain the duration of the Great Depression and the turmoil of the period between the two world wars.

At a time when American hegemony seems to be in terminal decline and China might overtake the US economically, plausible and original explanations of their relative fates are welcome.

Dan Wang’s Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, succeeds on both counts. At the heart of this very readable book is Wang’s argument that there is a profound difference between the two rivals: the US is run by lawyers and China is ruled by engineers.

Review: Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future – Dan Wang (Allen Lane)

Wang is perfectly placed to unpack this deceptively simple idea, having been born in China and spent large chunks of his relatively short life there and in the US. He is a keen and shrewd observer of both societies, and the book is sprinkled with personal anecdotes and illustrations of his key claims. Consequently, it’s not a conventional “academic” account, but that may come as a relief to many prospective readers.

Lawyers versus engineers

The biggest difference between China and the US today, according to Wang, is not the sort of ideological differences that distinguished America’s competition with the Soviet Union, but their respective abilities to get things done.

“The greatest trick that the Communist Party ever pulled off is masquerading as leftist,” Wang argues. “China is an engineering state, which can’t stop itself from building, facing off against America’s lawyerly society, which blocks everything it can.”

There is currently a major debate in the US about quite why it has failed to fulfil its potential and achieve “abundance”. America certainly has an abundance of lawyers, and they are part of the explanation, because they create legal obstacles to development. This results in Americans living in what Wang calls “the ruins of an industrial civilization, whose infrastructure is just barely maintained and rarely expanded”.

This is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much, especially when compared to China’s developmental mania. In part, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) enthusiasm for building provides a sort of performance legitimacy, in which “socialism with Chinese characteristics, is set up to give people one main thing: material improvements, mostly through public works”.

There are lots of examples of the two countries’ comparative ability to deliver infrastructure. One of the most notorious is California’s failure to build a rail line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, while China has built a truly astounding amount for a fraction of the cost. Such contrasts are commonplace these days, but Wang’s analysis highlights why and how China has rapidly caught up to, and is possibly poised to overtake, the US in the most dynamic and lucrative forms of economic activity.

Anyone who has been to Shenzhen will have been astounded by its dazzling modernity, which has seemingly appeared overnight. But Wang argues that the city’s less visible role as a centre of innovation is its real strength and achievement. He puts this down to

its spectacular capacity for learning by doing and consistently improving things […] The value of these communities of engineering practise is greater than any single company or engineer. Rather, they have to be understood as ecosystems of technology.

In some ways, these are familiar debates and claims. The idea that “manufacturing matters” has been around for decades. It still informs Trump’s justification for trying to bring manufacturing back to the US. That train that really has left the station, though. Deindustrialisation looks set to continue, Wang thinks, unless America “recover[s] its ethos of building”.

Shenzhen has become a city of dazzling modernity. Robert Bye/Unsplash

A spanner in the works

Impressive and unparalleled as China’s achievements undoubtedly are, all is not well in the People’s Republic, and mainly because the engineers are in charge. Wang cites two sobering examples of what can happen when technocrats and scientists make decisions about social policy: the one-child policy and China’s response to the Covid pandemic.

The one-child policy was instigated to address what was seen, at the time, as a looming crisis of overpopulation. In Wang’s reading it

is one of the most searing indictments of the engineering state. It represents what can go wrong when a country views members of its population as aggregates that can be manipulated rather than individuals who have desires, goals, or rights.

Perhaps so, but it’s also worth pointing out that, without it, China’s current population of 1.4 billion might be closer to two billion. Its environmental problems – and the world’s – might be even more serious than they already are.

Either way, Wang is probably right to claim that the policy “could only have been formulated by the engineering state”. As he mournfully notes, “the female body is now a fixation of the Politburo’s all-male political gaze”. Consequently, it is still “hard to be a woman in China today”, a reality reflected in the complete absence of women at senior levels in the ruling elite.

If there had been some, perhaps the draconian lockdowns that distinguished China’s response to Covid might have been less brutal. The policy of locking people in their apartments for months on end culminated in an avoidable tragedy when (at least) ten people died because their tower block caught fire and they were unable to escape.

As it was, Wang suggests, “China’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic embodies all of the engineering state’s merits and madnesses”.

The great theoretical advantage of lawyerly societies, by contrast, is that there are institutionalised norms and practices that potentially act as a brake on overweening state power – although that proposition is currently being put to the test by a Trump administration with little time for legal niceties.

In China, there isn’t much pretence about the all-consuming role of the state, because it “doesn’t have a robust system for political contestation”. As Wang puts it, “engineers will simply follow the science until it leads to social immiseration”.

This is precisely what happened during the Covid crackdown, which convinced many of China’s brightest and best, like Wang, to flee overseas.

A clash of civilisations?

Surprisingly, given that China and America represent very different models of civilisation and views of the good life, there is no mention of Samuel Huntington’s controversial “clash of civilisations” thesis.

Whatever one thinks about Huntington’s claims about the inevitability of clashing social values and traditions, such ideas are not irrelevant. After all, the emergence of Silicon Valley as the epicentre of the latest technological revolution owes something to underlying social values and networks.

It’s worth remembering that the first technological revolution happened in Britain and not in China, because British society was more adaptable to industrial possibilities. It created institutions to facilitate capitalist development.

This time around, Wang claims, “China learned so well from the United States that it started to beat America at its own game: capitalism, industry, and harnessing its people’s restless ambitions”.

While China’s leaders may not like being described as having led a successful capitalist revolution, it is not inaccurate. They have, however, prevented what many China-watchers in the US expected to be the consequence of such a structural transformation: the inevitable rise of individualism and the concomitant demand for democratic reform.

What China has managed instead is a “mixture of permitting free enterprise while building big infrastructure”. This is, Wang argues, “part of the reason that the Communist Party has held onto consent of the governed”.

There is plainly something in this. Many Chinese can remember when even food was scarce, let alone the consumer durables its largely urban population now takes for granted. Materialism isn’t everything, but it’s not nothing either.

What’s next?

The key question for many outside observers is what China’s leaders do next. Having largely solved many of the country’s most fundamental problems at “breakneck” speed, how can the CCP continue to justify a role that seeks “to maximise the discretion of the state and minimise the rights of individuals”?

One answer may be to emphasise threats to China and prepare for possible conflict, something Wang argues is happening under President Xi’s leadership.

All of which raises another interesting question. “If China and the United States ever come to blows,” Wang writes, “they would be entering a conflagration with different strengths. Which would you rather have: software or hardware?”

That’s a bit simplistic, and it is far from an either/or question, but it does highlight another widely held belief among influential analysts of international relations who believe that conflict between rising and declining great powers is more likely than not.

But as China’s leaders like to remind us, they have more historical examples to draw on than anyone else and thus far, at least, they have been remarkably circumspect about throwing around their increasing weight, unlike their counterparts in the US.

Let’s hope engineers are as temperamentally averse to destroying things as they are enthusiastic about building them.

Mark Beeson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Would you use AI to break writer’s block? We asked 5 experts

2026-01-19T17:14:40Z

Pexels, The Conversation, CC BY-NC

The founder and chief executive of Bloomsbury Publishing, responsible for blockbuster romantasy author Sarah J. Maas and literary heavyweights like George Saunders, has suggested AI “will probably help creativity” – including by helping authors defeat writer’s block.

“AI gets them going and writes the first paragraph, or first chapter, and gets them back in the zone,” he said.

We asked five creative writing experts, including authors who’ve published memoirs, novels and short stories, what they think. Would they use AI to break writer’s block?

Their answers – which ranged from “a hard no” to innovative reasons for “yes” – were illuminating, complicated and often surprising.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

3 Australian poets explore sites of memory and history – with a degree of play

2026-01-18T23:34:27Z

Thuy On, Grace Yee and Luke Johnson UWA Publishing/Giramondo/Puncher & Wattmann

It was the French historian Pierre Nora who coined the term lieux de mémoire – “sites of memory”. He meant to suggest that places and objects can embody or contain personal and collective memories, and that such memories can also obtain in the intangible – in a scent or a colour, for instance. “Even an apparently purely material site, like an archive,” Nora wrote,

becomes a lieu de mémoire only if the imagination invests it with a symbolic aura […] Lieux de mémoire are created by a play of memory and history […] To begin with, there must be a will to remember.

This seems a reasonable starting point with the collections under review, for it seems to me that poems might arise from sites of memory, and can also be them. Each of these collections brings imagination to bear on material objects and places, on works of art, documents and archives. Each invokes a degree of play, and even contestation, between memory and history.

Review: Joss: A History – Grace Yee (Giramondo); Essence – Thuy On (UWA Publishing); Kangaroo Unbound – Luke Johnson (Puncher & Wattmann)

Joss: A History

Of the three, Grace Yee’s Joss: A History concerns itself most explicitly with writing back to history and the historical record, acknowledging those who have been left out, misrepresented and maligned, or excised from official accounts. The history in question is that of early Chinese settlers in Australia and New Zealand.

Yee’s method might be described as documentary or archival poetics, a method also employed by other contemporary Australian poets, Natalie Harkin most obviously.

The majority of the poems in Joss: A History incorporate verbatim or adapt lines and sentences from a range of sources (poems, newspapers, novels, etc.). As explained in the book’s notes, of which there are eight pages, three of the poems – The March, The Work, and History of Botany Bay – “are composed from extracts from The Bulletin: Anti-Chinaman Special Number. 14 Apr 1888”.

These poems emerge from a process of erasure and the results are striking. I cannot replicate the layout – the visual appearance of each erasure poem is part of its effect – but isolated words connect to become evocative phrases, such as this, from The Work:

foreigners
surrender to
everlasting
white planet history.

And this, from History of Botany Bay:

little verses
dangled from the gallows
the plaintiff’s labour
wide illustrious
free.

As well as drawing on a range of sources, Joss: A History also presents a variety of poetic forms, including many prose poems, or poems that, while lineated, may as well be prose.

There is a six-page list poem, Non-European Ancestry, which consists of the honour roll of Chinese Australians born in Victoria who enlisted in World War II. I confess to finding this work difficult to categorise as a poem, though I have returned to it on several occasions. Most recently, I found myself counting the number of Goons (11) and Hoes (5) and Kees (17), and noting their places of residence (Ballarat, Castlemaine, Daylesford, East Melbourne, etc.).

How many of these men and women were of the same family? How many were acquainted with each other? How many returned from the war – which is also to ask, how many did not?

Perhaps a more conventional poem would focus on an exemplary individual. Perhaps the book’s more conventional poems, then, such as the fabulous Greener, require these contrasting forms to provide the historical backdrop against which they might stand in sharper relief.

That has been my reading of the book – that is how I have learned to read it – and I am grateful for the lesson.

Essence

Thuy On’s Essence is also concerned with memory. The second part of the collection is titled Heart. Ostensibly, it is about the rise and fall of a relationship, and from within its ashes the setting alight of a new love. The poems are seemingly personal, but at the same time metaphysical.

Here is Saturday, quoted in full:

There will be nothing
outside this room
beyond this bed

the moat around us
can be ringed with fire
let the world burn

there is only skin
osmotic in feeling
rippling in tune

so tell me of the labyrinth
coiled inside you
in the shrouded light

your eyelashes alone
their rapid beckoning
will turn tides in me

we can wax and wane
cortex flooded with
moonshine and wine.

I find this poem quite beautiful, the second half especially. It feels good in the mouth and in the ear. The stanza about the labyrinth is striking and lovely to read, to subvocalise. On’s best poems exhibit these qualities. Tulip, originally published in Meanjin, is a case in point. It is worth the effort to track down, and to read more than once.

Saturday is beautiful in another sense too. It suggests that romantic love needs only its protagonists – “let the world burn” the speaker says – and such an avowal represents a rejection of busyness and interference. It is all about the lovers and their feelings, their bodies, their skin. They are at the centre of the universe.

On’s Saturday remembers John Donne’s poem The Sun Rising and maintains a conversation with it. As Donne would have it, addressing his “unruly sun”:

This bed thy centre is, these walls, thy sphere.

On, I think, wishes to remind us that we are deluded by love, made delusional by it; delusion is constitutive, necessary. Isn’t that the point? To hope – actually, to believe – that love’s incipience may last forever. Each time is the first, irrespective of the last. Is this a suppression of memory, of wisdom, or a momentary overcoming? Answers on a postcard please.

On’s allusion to Donne – “there will be nothing / outside this room” – is the admittance of poetry and art into “this room”, this stanza, this poem. Poems, too, are “osmotic of feeling”. They are permeable. They ravel and unravel us, and each other, as we unravel them.

On is not interested only in poetry. The first part of Essence is all about art and artists, from Miss Saigon to Paul Verlaine’s poem Clair de Lune, from Kylie Minogue to Jeffrey Smart. The poems in this section are inventive and sometimes even fun.

Here are Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as they appear in Twelve Classic Texts in Haiku:

Single white female
seeks witty bachie with cash
soz, no vicars please!

[…]

Quilt of living parts
goes monstering the village
just looking for love.

These are both haikus – three lines of five, seven, five syllables – but the second is more original and therefore more interesting.

Perhaps this points to the difficulty of humour in poetry, and the challenge of mimicking for artistic purposes the informal speech we find online, particularly on social media. Several of On’s other poems, such as Coding and CasE SenSITivE, invoke more successfully the weft and warp of the digital sphere.

Kangaroo Unbound

Luke Johnson’s debut collection, Kangaroo Unbound, opens with a funny poem about a poetry reading.

Funny poems about poetry readings are something of a subgenre (perhaps someone is working on an anthology?). Johnson’s poem, The Arrival, features a poet who arrives late to his own reading and proceeds to read a series of poems

such as the one
about the obscure thing
no one’s ever heard of
and the one
about the thing
everyone’s heard of
but cannot make sense of
within the context
of the poem
and at long last
the one that finishes
with a rhyming couplet
that makes everyone laugh
and clap
with relief…

Johnson incriminates himself in a rhyming couplet, when he asks, referring to the poet’s parents,

through how much more of this shit
was he expecting them to, er, sit.

It’s funny, but also quite familiar – we know these readings, and some of us (sorry mum, sorry dad) have given them.

Kangaroo Unbound includes other funny poems, none better than The Visitors. Encountering it makes me hope that Johnson will soon give a poetry reading in Sydney, though he needn’t bring his relatives. Among 33 other crimes mentioned in the poem, which together render them unrelatable, the visitors “leave tea-bags on the sink for reuse at a time that never arrives”.

Self-deprecation only goes so far. It’s important to stress that Johnson has other modes. Kangaroo Unbound takes its inspiration from Garry Shead’s D.H. Lawrence series of paintings. Shead, in turn, was inspired by Lawrence’s time in Australia, a large portion of which was spent on the south coast of NSW. Lawrence’s 1923 novel, Kangaroo, was drafted during his stay.

Johnson is, by turns, tightly bound to the paintings, narrativising or critiquing them, and then much looser, taking a title of Shead’s for a spin, or traversing and traducing modern day Thirroul. In Railway Station, for instance, the speaker tells us that,

I was not there
to greet the Lawrences
when they disembarked
the 2pm train
from Central Station
at Thirroul on
the 29th of May 1922
though I’d like
to think the mood
was much the same
that day as it was
today when waiting
on the same platform.

The notion here is that mood and place are concomitant, and that poets and writers and artists (Johnson, Lawrence, Shead) might observe or sense this connection and interrogate it in their work.

This raises a broader and more important matter, addressed also by Yee and On, as to the mood of this place, Australia. How and by whom might it variously be defined and divined? In Railway Station, when the speaker witnesses

a schoolboy
pretend to throw himself
in front of a screaming
southbound freight train

the mood is

reckless albeit not
totally incomprehensible.

Something degenerate is being foregrounded, freighted, as in Lawrence’s Kangaroo. Degeneracy is not the place’s fault, but perhaps it issues from the conditions of one’s relation to it – which returns us to Nora’s lieux de mémoire and a “play of memory and history”.

As with Yee and On, Johnson is unafraid to employ a variety of forms. Again there are prose poems, but also visual poems, and even a poem written in the form of a film review. His line-breaks can seem arbitrary, as in the example quoted above, but perhaps I just need to spend more time with them, which is another thing poems are for.

I am the Reviews Editor for Southerly. Luke Johnson is the incoming Fiction Editor.

Like Jane Eyre, I’ve been seen as unconventional and abnormal. I’m autistic – is she too?

2026-01-18T19:08:22Z

Mia Wasikowska in Jane Eyre (2011). Focus Features/IMDB

Nearly 200 years since Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre, her unconventional orphan Jane – with her intense emotions and sense of injustice – continues to captivate and intrigue readers.

It’s the story of a girl who rises above her social station by becoming the governess (later, wife) to her wealthy Byronic master, Edward Fairfax Rochester. Brontë’s heroine “horrified the Victorians” with her “hunger, rebellion, and rage”. Today, she is hailed as a feminist icon for those same qualities.

As an autistic woman*, I have long felt a particular affinity to the character of Jane Eyre. Like Jane, I have been perceived as unconventional and abnormal. I, too, experienced a childhood of unintentional error, in which “I dared commit no fault: I strove to fulfil every duty”.

But despite my efforts, I frequently found myself getting into trouble. I would speak directly and honestly, causing offence without intention. I would ask clarifying questions which were perceived as personal attacks. I, too, was perceived as “naughty and tiresome”. I often felt I was “not like other girls”.

As an adult, writing my master’s thesis on Jane Eyre, I was haunted by my undiagnosed autism. It threatened to escape at any moment – much like Bertha, Rochester’s mad wife imprisoned in the attic. A family secret. Through a lifetime of learning to mask – to conceal my “externally noticeable” autistic traits – I built a kind of attic within myself. Inside it, my autism, like Bertha, fought against its incarceration, threatening to reveal itself.

After I received my diagnoses of autism and ADHD in 2022, I began to see Brontë’s novel in a different light. Then, I discovered that reading Jane Eyre as autistic is not new.

Jane Eyre, autism, and madness

In 2008, literary studies scholar Julia Miele Rodas first showed how Jane Eyre can be interpreted as autistic. Specialising in disability studies and Victorian fiction, Rodas later wrote that Charlotte Brontë’s narrative voice “resonates with autism”.

Charlotte Brontë’s biographer Claire Harman has suggested various members of the Brontë family, including Charlotte’s sister Emily (author of Wuthering Heights) and their father Patrick, might have been autistic.

In addition to autism, other forms of “neurodivergence” have been explored in the novel, from ADHD to complex trauma, mental illness and disability. (Although “neurodivergence” is commonly associated with autism and ADHD, the term’s true meaning is much broader.) Feminist disability studies scholar Elizabeth Donaldson pioneered interpreting Bertha’s madness as a form of mental illness and disability. Drawing from Rodas, disability and literary studies scholar Jill Marie Treftz interprets Jane’s childhood friend Helen Burns as having ADHD.

Opening up new ways of reading the text, the autistic Jane Eyre also transforms older interpretations, particularly of madness and gender. Most famously, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s essay A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane’s Progress (published in their collection of feminist literary criticism, The Madwoman in the Attic).

Gilbert and Gubar interpret Jane Eyre as the story of a woman who learns “to govern her anger” to survive Victorian patriarchal standards of femininity. In the process, Jane is “haunted” by her own repressed “hunger, rebellion, and rage”, represented through the literal haunting of Bertha, the “madwoman in the attic”.

This reading is transformed when Jane herself is interpreted as another kind of neurodivergent: autistic. Read this way, her story becomes more than that of a woman who learns to “govern” and eventually “kill” her unfeminine anger. It becomes the story of an autistic woman, learning to mask and stifle her autism to survive patriarchy’s ableist standards of womanhood. These standards are at odds with autism’s very nature.

Jane Eyre has been interpreted as autistic by some scholars for nearly 20 years.

Autism and gender

Autism and related conditions like ADHD are seen as masculine conditions. This perception is in part due to autism research’s heavy focus on boys and men.

But even more, it stems from the ways feminine gender stereotypes “stand in stark contrast” against “typically recognized autistic traits”. Autistic violence and justice researcher Jessica Fox and autism researcher Jessica Penwell Barnett have found gender-based discrimination towards autistic women regularly targets their autistic characteristics as not adhering to feminine gender norms.

The autistic Jane Eyre’s struggle to adhere to Victorian standards of femininity requires a constant suppression of her uniquely intense emotions. According to Gilbert and Gubar, none of the other women in the novel have “anything like” Jane’s “problem” of “her constitutional ire”, as the intensity of her anger and distress is rendered abnormal.

Jane’s emotions (especially negative emotions like anger) are more heightened and intense, a common characteristic of autism.

A lifetime of learning to mask

Jane first learns to mask her autism and suppress her intense emotions with a traumatic episode in her childhood at Gateshead.

Aged ten, Jane is punished for her violent retaliation to the bullying of her older cousin John. She is incarcerated in the “red room” – the bedchamber of her deceased uncle. Overwhelmed by anger at the injustice, she experiences a “species of fit”, which bears striking resemblance to an autistic meltdown.

Following this fit, Jane is sent to the boarding school Lowood to be “trained in conformity to her position and prospects”. In other words, to be “normalised” through processes of correcting and controlling her behaviour.

Lowood is the place that “offers” Jane the “chance to learn to govern her anger”, write Gilbert and Gubar. This process begins through her friendship with fellow orphan Helen Burns. A few years older than Jane, Helen acts as an older sister and mentor, encouraging Jane to harbour her intense anger and seek Christian salvation for her flaws.

When Helen is interpreted as having ADHD, the nature of Helen’s mentorship changes. As a fellow neurodivergent figure, Helen’s role shifts from simply teaching feminine emotional restraint to encouraging Jane to mask her autism.

Unable to mask her own neurodivergence, Helen urges Jane to “forget” her “passionate emotions”. She encourages Jane to “endure patiently a smart which nobody feels but [her]self” and warns her of the “evil consequences” of acting on her emotions, especially anger.

By the time Jane leaves Lowood, she has learned to uphold an appearance of normalcy: “I believed I was content: to the eyes of others, usually even to my own, I appeared a disciplined and subdued character.”

When Jane finally assumes her role as a governess at Thornfield Hall, she demonstrates “extreme self-control” over her emotions. Rodas characterises this as masking.

This reserved behaviour is observed by Jane’s employer Rochester. As her love interest, he perceives her passions as stifled. Rochester compares her to a caged bird: “a vivid, restless, resolute captive […] were it but free, it would soar cloud-high”.

Jane also shows high regard for the “extreme self-control” displayed by others, especially women. This is particularly shown in Jane’s observations of Miss Mary Ingram, a potential suitor to Rochester and romantic competitor to Jane.

Jane regards the masterful way Miss Ingram navigates conversations and social interactions, comparing her “self-consciousness” to “genius”.

The threat of unmasking

While taking pains to mask at Thornfield, Jane is “haunted” by the presence of madness. For Gilbert and Gubar, Bertha is “Jane’s truest and darkest double”, representing Jane’s imprisoned “hunger, rebellion, and rage”.

Charlotte Bronte. Charlotte Bronte, painted by her brother Patrick Bramwell

But if Jane is also neurodivergent, Bertha’s role as Jane’s “secret self” goes much deeper. Through her persistent “haunting”, Bertha enacts the psychological torment that comes with masking – the constant fight to suppress one’s natural characteristics.

If Jane is autistic, the neurodivergent “madwoman” Bertha is a physical reminder of the real “secret self” Jane represses behind her masking. She represents a plausible alternative life Jane might have lived had she not been able to mask, acting as a cautionary tale of the dangers of unmasking.

Bertha is incarcerated because she has been unable to conceal her neurodivergence and heightened emotional distress. Her only escape from imprisonment is through death – a fate shared by the other neurodivergent figure in the text, Helen Burns, also unable to mask. For Helen Burns, this fate is even welcomed, as she believes her life would have been one of “great sufferings” with her being “continuously at fault”.

Literary scholar Marta Caminero-Santangelo, author of The Madwoman Can’t Speak, argues “to achieve happiness, Jane must learn to separate herself in all ways from Bertha”. She must “stifle and finally kill the Bertha in her”.

It is not enough for the autistic Jane to conceal her neurodivergence. She must somehow destroy it. Not only is this impossible: it embodies the harmful idea that autism is something that can and should be “cured”.

Leaving behind the mask

It is hard to know if Charlotte Brontë believed this “secret self” should be killed.

Brontë was notorious for disrupting the “status quo”, yet was never “consciously” able “to define the full meaning of achieved freedom”, write Gilbert and Gubar. They suggest this may be because neither Brontë, nor her contemporaries, “could adequately describe” such “a society so drastically altered” from their own.

It would seem, in order to rescue Bertha from the attic – to liberate the “secret self” in a way other than death – a different world must first be made. One where neurodivergence can be accepted. Visible. Unmasked.

This world may be beyond the imagination of a mid-19th century writer, even a Brontë. But it is more conceivable in a world where neuro-affirming spaces have begun to emerge, along with the growth of a strengthening Autistic community.

Jane Eyre continues to speak to a shared experience among neurodivergent women: the collective struggle to survive a patriarchy that weaponises ableism against us.

Widely read as the story of a woman learning to “govern” and eventually “kill” her passionate, angry, “secret self”, Jane Eyre can be interpreted more strongly – more accurately, I believe – as an autistic woman’s story.

Note: My pronouns are they/she. I use the term “woman” loosely to describe my experience as someone who has encountered womanhood, rather than a (completely) accurate descriptor of my gender.

Chloe Riley receives funding from the Australian Government Research Training Program.

Friday essay: in our age of AI and constant crisis, real-life community is powerful and precious

2026-01-15T18:42:43Z

So much is deeply wrong with the world right now, but when it comes to the sphere of life that is within my own influence – my home, my heart and my place within my community – I am the happiest I have ever been.

At 37, with children aged from newborn to teenagers, as I put my apron on, cook hearty meals from scratch, wipe down our long kitchen table and pick up toys from the floor, I feel deep gratitude for my life.

Parenting is not for everyone, but it is for me. And I love opening our home to family and community, taking herbs from our neighbours’ gardens, sharing eggs from our backyard chickens and gathering to eat meals while a collection of kids run around our home, squealing and sometimes squabbling.

I am sure for some, reading this has sent a ripple of dread through you. Have I been scooped up and put in the alt-right pipeline? Has marriage and too much time on social media converted me into a tradwife? But since when are essentially radical acts – connecting, sharing, holding space for children and being active within our communities – conservative?

Ancient practices of loving and sharing

Both colonialism and capitalism work to break down communities and reduce collectivism to individualism, with success marked by how you produce for colonial and capitalist systems. The more isolated you are in this world, the more products you consume, the more services you need to pay for and the less empowered you feel when it comes to creating change.

Amy Thunig-McGregor.

Loving and sharing within your community, with your neighbours, being kind to and respecting children, creating relationships which are reciprocal, and consciously gathering with your people are ancient practices that predate capitalism and any religion you might name.

This life, this season I am in right now, is the sum of all the seasons which came before it. Connecting in real-world settings and gathering together, whether as host or as guest, requires ongoing energy and intention, and I fear that my generation and those that are coming after me are not only losing the art of gathering and the ability to function reciprocally in community, but it is being stolen from them.

Advocating, engaging in difficult work, turning up, speaking up and challenging the status quo all take bravery – but in the long term, it also takes community.

I grew up impoverished, within a criminalised family. I’ve experienced homelessness, abuse, violence, discrimination and more. The difficult circumstances of my own childhood and adolescence fill my first book, Tell Me Again (2022). And yet I have beaten the statistics and become a formally educated, well-adjusted, employed, grown person. I have three degrees, carry the title of “Dr”, and I credit much of my success to being part of my community.

I was able to grow beyond the limitations and violence I experienced as a child, because I was buoyed into bravery and action by my community. Community as an organising principle is under threat, and I believe we need to be intentional about reclaiming and rebuilding it in our lives.

Community in a cost of living crisis

The intense cost of living crisis Australians are facing has meant for many it is not possible to survive on just one job. This affects time as well as finances.

Many people cannot afford to buy their own home and so they are forced to move regularly as they’re confronted with the whims of landlords. How can you be in a community, how are you supposed to flourish and grow fruit, while being denied the opportunity to actually put down roots?

Community, in the true sense of the word, requires belonging, being known. To be in community requires more than just observation.

The rapid erosion of housing and location stability is happening at the same time as the rise in digital connection. The sting of losing community has been seemingly lessened because we can message each other across endless platforms that all live in our pockets, on phones, watches, laptops and even on the fancier fridges.

Generations are not only losing the art of gathering, but it is being stolen from them. Askar Abayev/Pexels

As an autistic person who lives semi-regionally, I appreciate the ways the internet has allowed for connection. However, I also recognise that our social worlds and communities coming to “live” on these apps means that our communication and interactions are now subject to commodification, being fed through algorithms, turned into data, used to sell to us, train new technologies such as artificial intelligence, and are a tool law enforcement uses.

Do we really want to hand over community connection and our ways of being and knowing one another to tech-bro billionaires? To oligarchs?

Tools which were initially marketed as convenient and accessible have become increasingly paywalled. These digital spaces exclude many older members of our communities. They uplift both valid criticism and trolling onto a level playing field, without the weight and accountability that would accompany each in a real-world environment.

With the Australian government having just implemented a social media ban for people under 16, the youngest in our society are about to be locked out completely.

I had all of this in mind while I was spiralling over the state of politics, my role as a mother raising children in this world, the rise of fascism, the emboldening of self-proclaimed Nazis, and the ways in which my communities as an Indigenous and queer person are under constant attack.

I want to do work that matters and still rest; I want to support the work of those who are in a season of leadership, but don’t know where to start. I was feeling disempowered and exhausted.

Being a researcher and person who is soothed by a sense of action, I decided to look at what has been effective against such forces historically. The answer, put simply, is community. But finding ways to meet up was an intimidating first step.

Building community requires bravery

My family is friends with some of the busiest and most brilliant people this country has to offer, but living where we do means no one is within a 30-minute drive. To invite people over when it is not for celebration, collaboration or something more than just gathering together felt scary at first.

What if everyone said no? How embarrassing. Why should they want to come here for the evening? How intimidating. But I want my own children to be brave, I want them to take healthy risks and have good critical thinking skills, and I want them to be known by and to know these people we call friends.

We cannot physically get to every protest and my academic work will not be the most important or substantial in every season of my life, but by hosting these intentional gatherings, my children would see the machinations of community planning and action, while eating and running around with their little mates.

We’d be in a position to nourish our friends, to hear them out as they make plans. Everyone we invited said “yes”.

Several dinners over several months later and it’s brought much joy to our home. In this season we have the capacity to host, and pushing past our own tiredness and prioritising holding space, we role model for our children that community is more than just something to observe and critique; friendships and relationships require work – that of putting on and that of showing up.

Sometimes the bravest and most important thing you can do is cook dinner and gather with the people you love. The answer to many of the world’s problems is community, and building community requires bravery.

Building your community, knowing your neighbours, regular in-person gatherings so that you can support, call in, buoy up, sustain and help one another; these are powerful tools and resources in the serious fights for human rights.

But having this realisation is what led to our family deciding and prioritising, as tired and busy as we are, to create a regular, scheduled, family-style community dinner at our home.

This is an extract of Amy Thunig-McGregor’s essay Bravery at Home, in A Time for Bravery (Australia Institute Press).

Amy Thunig-McGregor does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Guide to the classics: death-haunted masterpiece The Blind Owl shadows the decline of modern Iran

2026-01-14T01:25:05Z

Sadeq Hedayat (1903-1951) abandoned his training in dentistry and, later, engineering in France and Belgium, to study old Persian and Iranian mythology. He would become one of the first modernist fiction writers in Iran. He published stories, essays and plays, but The Blind Owl, a short enigmatic novel, has been celebrated as his masterpiece.

Hedayat was a nationalist who lived during one of the most turbulent periods of modern Iranian history. Major events in his lifetime included the Constitutional Revolution (1905-1911), which aimed to limit royal power and modernise the state; the rise of the moderniser and authoritarian Reza Shah (1925-1941); and the second world war, when Iran was occupied by British and Soviet forces (1941-1945).

Hedayat seemed burdened by Iran’s downfall from its glorious past and its decline into social inequality and political repression. He felt the tension between the nation’s transplanted modernity and its dogmatic traditions, which he mocked for being riddled with superstition and empty rituals.

The dire social and political landscape of his time contributed to the existential despair and pessimism that is prominent in his writing.

The Blind Owl unravels like a nightmare. It opens with one of the most famous lines in modern Persian literature: “There are wounds in life, that like leprosy, gnaw at the soul in solitude.”

The novel walks us through the hallucinations of a bedridden man who is plagued by paranoia and fear of death, and it culminates in a murder – or rather the lustful dream of a murder. Hedayat’s unnamed narrator is tired of the world and its people, whom he calls “scumbags”. He only writes for his “shadow”, afraid to die without getting to know himself.

The story starts with him speaking to his “shadow”. Through his confessions, we learn about his obsession with an “ether woman”, his sexual desires, the murders he commits, and his ambivalent attitude towards death. We also see him lust after his wife, who does not share his bed. He thinks she is unfaithful and pregnant with another man’s child.

Children of death

Like most literary masterpieces, The Blind Owl does not lend itself to one simple interpretation. But central to the story are the concepts of death, shame and attaining self-awareness. The latter is expressed in the author’s dialogues with his shadow, which evoke Carl Jung’s idea of shadows as the suppressed, unknown and guilt-ridden parts of our psyche.

The protagonist speaks to his shadow in an attempt to know himself, perhaps in an attempt to accept himself completely, something Jung described as “the most terrifying thing”.

Sadeq Hedayat c.1928. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

At the end of The Blind Owl, the shadow on the wall morphs into an owl. In different cultures and at different times, an owl can have different meanings. It can be interpreted as a bad omen promising death and ruin, or as a symbol of wisdom.

In Hedayat’s story, the owl can be associated with both. The novel implies that it is only through understanding our dark side that true wisdom might be possible. Without truly understanding his mortality, Hedayat’s narrator cannot grasp the truth behind his life and his motives. As he says: “Only death never lies!”

As the title suggests, however, the owl is blind. This is more than an aesthetic move to make something ominous sound more forbidding. Would our shadow, the blind owl, gain sight as we come to terms with it, accept it, and by doing so accept ourselves completely?

“We are children of death,” the narrator writes. And like all children, we are, to a large extent, formed by our parents. Isn’t everything we do – creating art, acquiring knowledge, reproducing, even our futile attempts at collecting resources and controlling everything and everyone – driven by death, by our knowledge of death, and our fear of it?

The narrator’s psyche is haunted by death to such an extent that even a door left open looks like “the mouth of the dead”. Clouds hang over his head “yellow and deathly”. His bed is “colder and darker than a grave”.

Yet his attitude towards death is ambivalent. He calls death a “bitter truth”. Its fear does not leave him, but the thought of death comforts him, as he says: “Death … Death … Where are you?” It seems that fear of death is too much to bear, yet only death can end his unbearable fear and bring him peace.

Thanatos and Eros

The protagonist’s “true wish” to be “annihilated” brings to mind the Freudian concept of Thanatos, or the death drive. His desire to return to a state of non-existence is explicitly expressed:

The one thing that made me feel better was the annihilation after death. The thought of another life after death made me feel afraid and tired.

Thanatos, associated with aggression and repetition, dominates the novel. Time is always measured in units of two and four: two months and four days, or two years and four months. The narrator always has two qerans and one shahi (Iranian currencies used before the modern rial) in his pocket. The characters are also repetitions of each other, as if recycled, as if the world described in the novel is not capable of creating anyone new, so the same people reappear over and over.

Even the painful love he is experiencing, he comes to realise, is the same as the love experienced by another artist a thousand years ago.

According to Freud, life is a constant struggle between Thanatos and Eros, the life instinct. For Hedayat’s protagonist, Thanatos has become the dominant force, manifested in his self-destructive behaviour and his excessive use of opium and alcohol.

All his actions, even those usually driven by Eros, are tainted by death. His pen-case paintings are repetitive: a cypress tree, with an old man resembling an Indian yogi squatting underneath, and a girl in a long black dress (the ether woman) offering him a lili.

His love is obsessive, his desires are shameful, and his only physical intimacy with his wife ends in murder.

The ideal and the real

Shame follows the narrator throughout the story, linked to his sexual desires. The first time he kisses the woman who later becomes his wife, his future father-in-law walks past and his “repulsive ominous laughter” makes the narrator wish he was dead.

The exact same thing happens when he kisses his teenage brother-in-law, who reminds him of his wife. In a book full of strange moments, this might be one of the strangest and most unexpected. Is it a reflection of the lonely protagonist’s struggle with his sexual identity? Or another attempt to replace the unrealistic, unattainable love he seeks in the ether woman with a worldly love, similar to his failed love for his wife?

The narrator ends up killing both the ether woman and the wife he calls “the whore”. Describing the ether woman, he mentions how familiar she looks and concludes that in his previous life in Alam al-mithal – the world of perfect forms – his soul must have been her neighbour, made from the same elements and destined for union.

He sees the ether woman for the first time through a gap in the wall, which later disappears. His search for her – a woman whose one glance would be enough to solve all his philosophical and theological riddles – proves fruitless until one night, coming from one of his strolls in search of her, the ether woman appears at his door.

He opens the door, she enters, and he follows. She lies on his bed without a word. He pours some wine in her mouth through her clenched teeth. Later, we learn that the wine is mixed with a serpent’s poison. She dies and he tries to bring her back to life by sleeping with her.

Towards the end of the novel, the narrator eventually sleeps with his wife. When she bites his lips, he stabs her with a knife.

He kills both the ideal and the real. His psyche collapses, unable to reconcile his opposing desires for the sacred and the worldly.

Death’s peace

Hedayat’s narrator says everyone around him is part of his own shadow. Killing the ether woman and his wife can thus be seen as destroying the feminine parts of his psyche – his anima in Jungian terms. Their deaths push him closer to self-annihilation.

As parts of his shadow, every character in The Blind Owl represents a fragment of the narrator’s dark side. All the people he despises, he does so because they show him a side of himself that he does not want to face. He further writes that his shadow is more real than him, having realised that he is driven mainly by his unconscious desires.

The last page of an edition of The Blind Owl, published in Mumbai in 1937, featuring Hedayat’s handwriting and drawing. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As a nationalist, Hedayat glorified ancient Iran and was highly critical of what he perceived as Iran’s social and political decay. In his satirical work Haji Aqa, he depicts Iranian politicians and leading figures as hypocritical, greedy, amoral and opportunistic.

Bearing this in mind, if we look at The Blind Owl from the perspective of Hedayat’s nationalism, it admits other possible interpretations.

Is the stagnant, nightmarish world of the novel a representation of how Hedayat saw his society? Is the love-hate relationship between the narrator and his wife a reflection of Hedayat’s feelings towards the country he loved, while being simultaneously embarrassed by its centuries-long decay?

Does the ether woman represent the Iran he wished for and his wife the real one? Is that why, after killing the ether woman, he buries the corpse in the ancient city of Rey, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in Iran? Is that why he sees his love for his wife as accompanied by filth and death?

Hedayat attempted suicide by throwing himself in the Seine while living in Paris in his twenties, but was rescued. The temptation of peace promised by death never completely left him. He took his own life at the age of 48.

Hossein Asgari does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

What’s cooler than sex, drugs and pashing models? I found out from 3 rock memoirs

2026-01-13T19:07:16Z

At the height of his success, Evan Dando was notorious for his good looks, heavy drug use and flaky personality. As his memoir, Rumours of My Demise, effectively attests, the Lemonheads frontman was also a shameless rock’n’roll caricature whose addictions and puerile hedonism repeatedly sabotaged his friendships and relationships, along with his career.

In 1992, on the way to a recording studio in Los Angeles, he took acid at the airport and subsequently tried to open the emergency exit mid-flight. A year later, he missed his band’s first appearance at Glastonbury festival because he was holed up in a hotel with a couple of women and had to endure being bottled and booed throughout a rescheduled acoustic set.

Arising from Boston’s white, wealthy, college rock scene, The Lemonheads morphed from their punk origins into a melodic indie band who broke into the mainstream with their fifth album, It’s a Shame About Ray.

Review: Rumours of My Demise by Evan Dando (Faber); The Uncool by Cameron Crowe (Fourth Estate); Rebel Girl by Kathleen Hanna (HarperCollins)

Dando’s book, co-authored with ghost writer Jim Ruland, chronicles their chequered journey, capturing the last raw, pre-internet era of the music industry. It also charts the singer’s misadventures with heroin, and ridiculously indulgent lifestyle.

Such tales of rock’n’roll excess are hardly original but Dando’s repetitive and disjointed accounts of drugs, drugs and more drugs, and his incoherent narrative style make the memoir frustrating – and at times, boring – to read. Recalling events through a piecemeal string of anecdotes, he often struggles to maintain a consistent perspective.

He says he tried to make the most of being a rock star but never wanted to be famous. He claims he did heroin because he was sad and angry, but also that partying and doing drugs meant being true to himself – and, besides, everyone else did them too. He believes the music press punished him for not being “mysterious and edgy”, but he was happy to regale journalists with drug stories and to get his kit off and gaze dreamily at the camera.

As a music writer in the 90s, I remember him being regarded as a pretty “pick-me” boy who flopped around a lot, trying to be cool. Frankly, we all thought he was a bit of a buffoon.

For perspective, it’s worth considering Dando’s book alongside two other recent music memoirs. One is The Uncool by Cameron Crowe, which recounts the author’s career as a teenage Rolling Stone journalist, originally dramatised in his 2000 film, Almost Famous. The other is punk singer and feminist activist Kathleen Hanna’s whip-smart memoir, Rebel Girl (published last year).

Both books take an intimate look at the realities of life for performing artists, whether on the road or behind the scenes, but swap out the drug jumble for more meaningful context. This gives their stories a wider depth and purpose than the age-old, entitled white boy meanderings of supposed rock’n’roll rebellion.

It’s a shame about Evan

To be fair, Dando’s book has its moments of insight. The singer’s thoughts on the structural injustice of the music industry are perceptive and astute, revealing a healthy combination of pragmatism and integrity.

He’s also brave enough to paint an unflattering image of “chaos agent” Courtney Love, who he says desperately tried to seduce him on tour, and who upset her husband, Kurt Cobain, by spreading rumours she and Dando were having an affair. Worse, shortly after Cobain died, Dando claims that Love persuaded him to kiss her while lying on a bed for a photograph which ended up in the New York Post.

Having met and interviewed Love in the 90s, I can fully endorse Dando’s portrayal of her from that time, though it’s hard not to wonder about his complicity. Maybe it was all down to the drugs, like everything else.

When it comes to other women, Dando’s book is lazy and unthinking. He lists a handful of lovers by name, including singer-songwriter and occasional Lemonhead, Juliana Hatfield and novelist Tatiana de Rosnay. Both, he insists, featured him in their work.

He misinterprets Kathleen Hanna’s fanzine, My Life With Evan Dando as a form of personal obsession, instead of a smart, acerbic, humorous critique of sexism, the male gaze, and the media. And while he makes these embarrassing brags, he omits all emotional context or meaningful detail for anyone other than his first wife, the English model Elizabeth Moses, and even this is minimal.

In 1993, The Lemonheads’ management team decided to turn Dando into an indie cover boy, much to his apparent annoyance. “I wasn’t an actor or a model. I was a musician. How I looked shouldn’t matter,” he writes. Yet although Dando says he felt humiliated and objectified, he fails to acknowledge that this experience was commonplace for female artists.

Despite his protestations at being embroiled in what he calls the “Dippy Dando” narrative, he was clearly happy to pose with seaweed on his head, pinching his nipples for Interview magazine, to make out with actors Angelina Jolie and Amy Smart for a video shoot, and to strip off and French kiss another actor, the late Adrienne Shelly, for the cover of Spin.

By the end of the book, it’s hard to know how Dando sees himself or how he wishes to be perceived. His attempts at self reflection resemble little peaks of self-interest, while his take on life sounds worryingly adolescent.

“I’m not that different to how I was as a teenager, but I’m not as impulsive as I used to be,” he writes, as if he were 23. “Wherever I go, you’ll find me playing guitar or cruising around on my skateboard, taking it easy.”

Ho hum.

According to a recent interview with The Guardian, at 58, Dando still takes mushrooms, weed and acid, which probably doesn’t help.

Forget Ray. If you ask me, it’s a shame about Evan.

Uncool misfit or privileged insider?

By complete contrast, although he was a teenage rock journalist in the 1970s, Cameron Crowe was behaving like a sensible grown-up. A fully fledged, self-confessed nerd, his sole vice was the occasional joint.

As the title of his funny, upbeat memoir, The Uncool, suggests, Crowe felt like an absolute misfit in the burgeoning rock scene of California, mainly because although he was writing lead features for Rolling Stone magazine, at 15 he was still, basically, a child.

Always the youngest person in the room, the underage Crowe was continually thrown out of music venues, issued warnings from bar staff and resented by his older colleagues. Understandably, this made him insecure about his age, but eventually he found inspiration from the confident musicians he was interviewing, including The Eagles’ Glenn Frey, who was an early role model.

Given the way rock stars opened up to him, Crowe’s age was arguably an advantage. A young, naive teenager would have been an entirely unthreatening prospect for a rock star with a fragile, possibly drug-damaged ego and a weirdly insulated lifestyle.

With his clear-eyed enthusiasm and willingness to listen, Crowe appeared like an impressionable little brother among a sea of cool heavyweights. No wonder these guys poured their hearts out to him.

And for all his uncertainty, within the heavily male-dominated environment of ‘70s rock, the privilege of inclusion was always within reach of Crowe, even as a teenager: because he was male.

To his credit, Crowe writes of losing his virginity at 17 “in a blizzard of scarves” to the infamous “Band-Aide”, Pennie Lane and two of her Flying Garter Girls, with a refreshing lack of braggadocio. “I was one step above sleep in terms of options,” he recalls. “I think I was only partially on their minds while they were watching television and showing affection to each other.”

Yet although the women he encountered in the industry, including writers, management, publicists and record label staff, appeared to take things in their stride, he doesn’t explore or examine their experiences, which leaves the question open.

Given some of my own encounters as a female rock journalist a full 15 years later, I can’t help but wonder about the reality of their situations.

Trading adolescence for a backstage pass

What is certain is that Crowe was on the frontline of an incredible era for music. His passion for acts like The Eagles, the Allman Brothers Band, Gram Parsons, Fleetwood Mac, Lynyrd Skynyrd and Todd Rundgren powered him into a glittering writing career at a time when money flowed freely within the music industry, and bands had far fewer boundaries with the press.

Often with renowned photographer Neal Preston, Crowe got up close and personal with all manner of rock icons at pivotal moments. “We were living in the moment,” he writes of their working partnership. “But we were also storing all these one-of-a-kind memories for later, when we’d bring them out and polish them like cat’s eye marbles.”

Crowe’s assignments were legendary.

He moved in with The Eagles for a profile piece; spent ten days on the road with Led Zeppelin trying to coax Jimmy Page into an interview; confronted a moody, grieving Gregg Allman in the wake of his brother’s death; captured the Rumours drama with Fleetwood Mac; and followed David Bowie for a full 18 months, chronicling the Thin White Duke era.

The most time I ever spent on tour with a band was four nights in the States, with Alice in Chains and Screaming Trees, but in the current age of Zoom and corporate press junkets, even this kind of trip seems unlikely now.

By 1978, Crowe’s time at Rolling Stone was coming to an end. The magazine had stopped printing his name on the cover, and had begun to replace his stories of classic rock icons with Chuck Young’s reports from the punk scene.

A failed attempt to move to New York with his older girlfriend added to Crowe’s predicament. Back in the San Diego family home, feeling all washed up at 21, he confronted the cost of swapping his carefree youth for the serious business of rock journalism.

“I’d jumped into the ocean of adulthood and ultimately got caught in a riptide,” he says. “I skipped adolescence. I’d traded it for a backstage pass.”

This sense of loss prompted Crowe to relive his senior year by going undercover for a book about high school students. Before publication, the story was optioned for a film with Crowe in charge of the screenplay, and despite its mixed reception, Fast Times at Ridgemont High established his new movie career.

Later, Crowe would draw on his encounters with musicians such as Gregg Allman and Jimmy Page for the award-winning Almost Famous, having cemented his role as writer-director with Jerry Maguire. Singles, Vanilla Sky and Aloha were to follow, among others.

Like Dando’s book, Crowe’s memoir is largely lighthearted, snippety and full of anecdotes. But apart from the hilarious tale of bringing Bob Marley’s marijuana seeds back from Jamaica, drug tales are mercifully not a feature.

Instead, Crowe’s family, particularly his mother, Alice, looms large throughout, upending the traditional rock'n'roll myth with a more heartfelt subtext. This includes the suicide of his 19-year-old sister, Cathy, to whom the book is dedicated.

Peppered with cheerleading messages from Alice, the book ends with a tender vignette of Crowe’s father that reinforces the reminder taped to a wall in the family home, beneath a photo of a hippy couple: “You Are Loved.”

If that’s not cool, I don’t know what is.

Punk rock and processing trauma

In her memoir, Rebel Girl: My Life as a Feminist Punk, singer and feminist activist Kathleen Hanna, exemplifies cool by never even touching on it. Instead, she foregrounds political issues along with her personal story, in a book that demonstrates the cultural value of integrating collective and individual concerns into creative practice.

She also faces down some pretty terrifying demons from her past. Hanna had none of the middle-class privileges afforded to Crowe and Dando. She grew up in the suburbs of first Maryland, then Oregon with her mother, her violent, creepily transgressive stepfather and her troubled older sister, known throughout the book as Goodtimes.

A smart, sassy child who developed a passion for singing at the age of ten, Hanna went to Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, where she established the roots of her career. Prompted by the traumatic ordeal of a friend, she volunteered at a rape relief and domestic violence centre, opened an art gallery with five other women, and found her way into the heart of the city’s thriving punk scene.

In 1990, inspired by all-girl trio Babes in Toyland, and her friend Kurt Cobain’s band Nirvana, Hanna joined forces with Tobi Vail, Kathi Wilson and Billy Karren to form feminist punk band, Bikini Kill. As the frontwoman, Hanna challenged the misogyny in the mosh pit by yelling, “Girls to the front!”, discussed feminist issues on stage, chased off hostile and aggressive intruders, and counselled victims of abuse after shows.

Kathleen Hanna was a pioneer of the Riot Grrrl movement. Paul Hudson/Wikipedia, CC BY

Before long, Bikini Kill’s activism exploded into the Riot Grrrl movement, a loose, independent scene where girls empowered each other through music, bands and conversation. But sadly, most of the media was hellbent on a lurid misrepresention of Riot Grrrl, with male journalists trying to muscle in.

I know this from experience: at the time, I managed to gain the trust of some key Riot Grrrl players in the UK, to write a major two-part feature on the movement for the NME, then an influential music paper.

A male freelancer attempted to hijack my feature, my editor castigated me for not revealing the location of a secret Grrrl gig, and when my live review of British band Huggy Bear was published, my comments were ridiculed elsewhere in the paper.

This wasn’t the first time male colleagues had caused me to doubt the quality of my work, so when Hanna refused to deal with the press, I understood.

Eventually, a pernicious takeover from within the movement caused Hanna to cut ties with Riot Grrrl. An intense young woman called Susan was running Riot Grrrl Press with her friend, and the pair began demanding money from Bikini Kill for distributing the band’s donated zines, while creating increasingly sanctimonious material of their own.

In the end, Hanna feared Susan had become “an extreme example of identity politics gone wild”, but was careful not to scapegoat anyone for Riot Grrrl’s mounting issues. Instead, she examined her own contribution to the problems within the scene, in particular white privilege, and focused on learning more from the Black, Indigenous, and people of colour feminist community.

Despite internal difficulties and the media fiasco, Riot Grrrl remains a significant, if short-lived, chapter of female rock culture that inspires girls and women to this day. And Hanna’s political and ethical stance has continued to underpin her output with more recent projects, The Julie Ruin and Le Tigre.

Honesty, humour and humility are cool

Throughout her memoir, Hanna maintains a razor-sharp narrative tone. She is unafraid to delve into the more painful aspects of her life, including her own sexual assaults, the trauma of Cobain’s suicide, the time she was punched in the face by a jealous Courtney Love, the harsh judgment she endured for working as a stripper, and her excruciating battle with Lyme disease.

Kathleen Hanna with husband Adam Horowitz. Andrew Gombert/AAP

She is also extremely funny, particularly when remembering her early passion for the Beastie Boys’ Adam Horovitz, now her husband, and becoming a mother to their son Julius.

But what really elevates Hanna’s book is the level of consciousness and self-awareness she employs towards both herself and others, especially when critiquing the overtly white bias of feminism, punk rock and Riot Grrrl.

Compared to the unquestioning white male privilege at the heart of rock'n'roll narratives such as Dando’s druggy ramblings and even Crowe’s tender, more vulnerable perspective, Hanna’s story of striving towards personal and cultural evolution is a clear and courageous winner. Hands down.

So what does it take to be cool? A lot more than drugs, rock'n'roll and pashing models in cars, for sure. It takes honesty, humour, consideration for others, humility and genuine self-awareness – and dare I say it, a semblance of maturity.

Being cool means earning your place at the front, and knowing who else deserves to be there with you.

Liz Evans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

‘Masterclass in poor governance’: what was the board’s role in the end of Adelaide Writers’ Week?

2026-01-13T06:38:30Z

Kristoffer Paulsen, Macquarie University, Wikimedia, CC BY-NC

This afternoon, Adelaide Writers Week was cancelled for 2026 – less than a week after Palestinian-Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah was disinvited by the Adelaide Festival board. This came despite the “strongest opposition” from Writers Week director Louise Adler, who resigned this morning. The board has announced its remaining members will step down today, too. (One exception is the Adelaide City Council representative, who will stay on until their term expires on February 2.)

Adler calls the cancellation “no surprise”. She told the Guardian “I am so sorry that this masterclass in poor governance has landed us in this position”.

Last week, the board claimed it “would not be culturally sensitive” to program Abdel-Fattah so soon after the Bondi attacks, due to unspecified “past statements” – though “we do not suggest in any way that Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah’s [sic] or her writings have any connection”. One “statement” being cited now is Abdel-Fattah’s social media comment (which she has confirmed) that Zionists “have no claim or right to cultural safety”.

Today, the board apologised to Abdel-Fattah, who was programmed to discuss her 2025 novel, Discipline, “for how the decision was represented”. It said “this is not about identity or dissent but rather a continuing rapid shift in the national discourse around the breadth of freedom of expression in our nation following Australia’s worst terror attack in history”.

Shows why we need artists in leadership

Over the weekend, three board members resigned. On Sunday, Marque Lawyers, acting on behalf of Abdel-Fattah, wrote to Adelaide Festival board chair Tracey Whiting AM, requesting all pertinent information used in the board’s decision for potential litigation purposes. By Monday, Whiting had tendered her resignation as well.

Overall, “more than 180” presenters withdrew from the festival. They included international drawcards Zadie Smith, former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, M Gessen and Yanis Varoufakis – as well as prominent Australian authors Helen Garner, Hannah Kent and Trent Dalton.

The board’s statement today, sent to festival participants, said the resignation of its remaining members will “allow for an orderly transition to a new Board to secure the success of the 2026 Adelaide Festival and beyond”.

There were no artists or writers on the Adelaide Festival board.

“This whole debacle is an object lesson in why representation from artists and writers in leadership positions is essential,” Miles Franklin shortlisted author Jennifer Mills, chair of the Australian Society of Authors, told The Conversation. She declared she was “furious”.

Who’s in charge - the director or board?

In an arts organisation, the board’s role is one of governance, not management. The board sets the conditions for success and accountability, but it is the staff and artistic leaders who deliver the work. A board should provide strategic stewardship, financial and risk oversight. Importantly, their role is to be guardians of artistic purpose.

Increasingly, arts boards are weighing up artistic purpose against perceived organisational risk. This is often putting them at odds with those tasked with executing these decisions. We saw this last year, when Creative Australia backflipped in their appointment of the Venice Biennale artistic team artist Khaled Sabsabi and curator Michael Dagostino.

Boards are usually made up of a range of members, who bring essential skills to the governance role. This generally means a balance of expertise, networks and lived experience.

Many would expect arts organisations to have artists or those with strong arts knowledge on their boards.

Over the past 30 years, however, there has been a strong push towards corporatisation of arts boards. Arts organisations have adopted private-sector style governance models, with organisations seen as “enterprises” rather than cultural institutions. Board appointees are more likely to come from financial, legal or marketing backgrounds than to be artists or arts workers.

Political involvement?

The Australian arts sector operates on an “arms length principle”, where organisational and funding decisions are protected from political interference.

Questions have been raised, however, about political involvement in the Abdel-Fattah case. Australian author and journalist Walter Marsh cited South Australia Premier Peter Malinauskas’ intense media activity around the decision, among other things.

Malinauskas – who faces a state election on March 21 – says he didn’t pressure Adelaide Festival to drop Abdel-Fattah and that decisions were made by the board. “If Writers’ Week seeks my views on things, and I certainly offered them, it’s up to them whether or not what decisions they make and they get held account for them accordingly,” he said.

South Australian Greens MLC Robert Simms has called for “an independent review, with involvement from the arts community to look at all of the things that have gone on here […] and to look at the independence of the board”.

The resignation of the Adelaide Festival board and today’s statement led to speculation as to what has occurred within the boardroom. Mills questions the decision-making process and its subsequent impact on the arts community.

“I’m not clear on how and where these decisions were actually made, and that’s part of the problem,” she said. “It’s become clear to me that we need to democratise our arts institutions, not just in terms of changing who sits on boards, but in terms of their entire structure, to ensure there is some accountability and transparency in future.”

The events that unfolded this week are the most recent in a long line of controversies, cancellations and conflicts between boards, staff, artists and the communities they engage with.

The State Library of Victoria, Bendigo Writers Festival and Creative Australia have all, over the past year, faced scrutiny when decisions made by boards have raised questions around artistic independence and freedom of speech.

Call to recognise ‘dreamers and visionaries’

Artists and arts leaders are calling for a renewed recognition of arts expertise, to recognise the “dreamers and visionaries” who show us what we can be. This means our arts organisations should be governed by artists and those who deeply understand the sector.

As Adler wrote:

In my view, boards composed of individuals with little experience in the arts, and blind to the moral implications of abandoning the principle of freedom of expression, have been unnerved by the pressure exerted by politicians calculating their electoral prospects and relentless, coordinated letter-writing campaigns.

Others say changing board make-up is not enough. Kate Larsen, a prominent arts writer and consultant, told me, “It’s clear we need more and deeper artistic and sector knowledge informing our organisational decision-making.” But it’s not as easy as appointing skills-based boards. She believes we “need to radically rethink our unfit and outdated not-for-profit governance models – including the idea of having ‘boards’ at all”.

For now, the Adelaide Festival board, like those that have faced similar situations, have recognised the need to reengage with their stakeholders, community and audience. Let’s see what happens next.

Kim Goodwin is affiliated with Save Our Arts as a board member.

It takes many ghosts to make a story: how Maggie O'Farrell’s Hamnet takes from – and mistakes – Shakespeare

2026-01-12T19:08:14Z

Jessie Buckey as Agnes and Paul Mescal as Shakespeare in the film adaptation of Maggie O'Farrell's Hamnet. Universal Pictures Australia

In her eighth novel Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell imagines the short life and tragic death of Shakespeare’s only son, aged 11, in 1596. Although it is not known how Hamnet died, O’Farrell attributes his death to the plague. She creates a visceral and affecting portrait of his swift decline and the powerlessness of those around him, particularly his mother, to save him.

A critical and commercial success, the novel’s popularity was aided by its connection with Shakespeare, whose enduring reputation as a literary genius ensures that, as the scholar John Sutherland once asserted, “where there’s a Will there’s a payday”.

The death of Hamnet is one creative trigger for this bestselling novel, but is it the main source? And was Hamnet’s death really the source for Shakespeare’s Hamlet? With the film adaptation, co-authored by O’Farrell and director Chloé Zhao, arriving in Australian cinemas this month, it is timely to consider the broader influences on O’Farrell’s novel and Shakespeare’s play.

The inspirations are not singular in either case. Shakespeare was influenced by clear creative precursors, while O’Farrell’s depiction of maternal grief is haunted by her personal experience.

A rescued wife?

O’Farrell has repeatedly stated in interviews that she had two motivations for writing Hamnet: to “rescue” Shakespeare’s wife Anne Hathaway from negative representations in biographies of Shakespeare, and to “correct” what she perceives as the lack of acknowledgement of the significance of Hamnet’s death to Shakespeare’s art.

Her former concern manifests in her representation of Anne as a quietly wilful character, who engineers her husband’s escape from his overbearing father in Stratford to London, where his career can take flight. The novel’s third-person narrative is increasingly filtered through Anne’s perspective as the story progresses, placing her grief centre stage.

In a pointed intervention, O’Farrell names her “Agnes”. This is the name she is given in her father Richard Hathaway’s will, though the assertion that Agnes is her “true” name is problematic, due to a lack of other documentary sources and because spelling was variable at the time.

Renaming Anne is indicative of O’Farrell’s desire to offer a fresh vision, but this in itself is not a new project. Carol Anne Duffy’s poem Anne Hathaway (1999) and Germaine Greer’s speculative biography Shakespeare’s Wife (2007) are two of many earlier revisionist treatments. Katherine West Schiel’s Imagining Shakespeare’s Wife: The Afterlife of Anne Hathaway (2018) tracks the long history of this inventive impulse.

O’Farrell explicitly encourages readers to connect Hamnet and Hamlet through two historical notes at the front of the book. The first informs us that Hamlet was staged only four years after Hamnet’s death; the second cites Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s claim that Hamlet and Hamnet were interchangeable names in Stratford in the period.

These selective facts serve O’Farrell’s fiction well. But the view that Hamlet memorialises Hamnet is, as scholar James Shapiro argues, a myth. While the novel’s promise to deliver the “backstage” story of the creation of Hamlet is alluring, its imputation that Hamnet’s death was the primary inspiration for the writing of the play is countered by the historical evidence and the play itself.

Does Shakespeare’s son haunt Hamlet?

The opening of Hamnet echoes that of Hamlet. In the novel’s first scene, Hamnet explores an empty house. O’Farrell gives him an exquisitely physical existence: he jumps from the third step and hurts his knees, he notices the orange embers and spiralling smoke in the fireplace. He calls out, “Where is everyone?”

His reality is unstable, palpable and yet spectral, as though he were already dead. This impression is advanced when he spooks his grandfather, whose sight is ailing:

“Who’s there?” he cries. “Who is that?”
“It’s me.”
“Who?”
“Me.” Hamnet steps towards the narrow shaft of light slanting through the window. “Hamnet.”

The beginning of Shakespeare’s Hamlet is similarly disorienting:

BARNARDO: Who’s there?
FRANCISCO: Nay answer me. Stand and unfold yourself.

We taste the fearful vigilance of the guards on the battlements of Elsinore castle. About eighteen lines later, we find out why everyone is so jumpy. The newly arrived guard asks: “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?”

As in O’Farrell’s novel, we enter a destabilised reality, in which physical sensation, here the “bitter cold”, amplifies the existential dread caused, in this case, by the repeated appearance of a ghost.

The biographical connection between Hamnet and Hamlet is clinched in the novel’s closing scene through Agnes’s response to a performance of Hamlet. Seeing her husband acting on stage as the ghost of Hamlet’s father (who is also named Hamlet), Agnes believes that Shakespeare

in writing this, in taking the role of the ghost, has changed places with his son […] he has put himself in death’s clutches, resurrecting the boy in his place.

As he exits, the ghost – Shakespeare – turns toward Agnes and “speaks his final words: ‘Remember me’.”

These words provide a poetic resolution for O’Farrell’s novel, but they are only the beginning of the tragedy for Hamlet. Readers familiar with the play may find it amusing that Agnes’s interest in the character bearing her dead son’s name evaporates before the end of Act I.

Grief is certainly a shared thread between the two stories, but if we take the drama on its own terms, “remember me”, as spoken by the Ghost, is unlikely to work as a salve for Agnes’s grief. In fact, as the next four acts bear out, the course of Hamlet’s grief for his father’s death is tortured. What torments him and results in many deaths, including his own, is not the loss of a beloved father, but regicidal corruption in the state and a personal commission to revenge “a foul and most unnatural murder”.

“Remember me” burdens Hamlet rather than frees him, making the play an ill-fitting memorial for Shakespeare’s lost son. By contrast, consider Constance’s lament in King John:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;
Then, have I reason to be fond of grief?

When Shakespeare wanted to portray the grief of a parent for a lost child, he knew how.

Hamlet is unlikely to have been a tribute to little Hamnet, but there are several imaginative sources. Hamlet bears more resemblance to the 12th-century Danish legend of Amleth than it does to Shakespeare’s life: a king is murdered by his brother, who subsequently marries the king’s wife; the son acts mad to protect himself from his uncle; an eavesdropper is killed; Amleth berates his mother Gerutha.

But there were even more immediate creative precursors. A play, now lost, called Hamlet is recorded in the diary of the theatre manager Philip Henslowe as being performed in London in 1594, at least five years before Shakespeare’s. What if, rather than pouring out his heart’s grief over his son, Shakespeare was adapting a recent hit?

In addition, Shakespeare was cashing in on the popularity of a play by Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy (1592), in which a father revenges the murder of his son, Horatio, using a play to do so.

Reading Hamlet through the prism of biographical speculation impoverishes our understanding of the play and its relationship with stories in circulation during the Renaissance period. Shakespeare used matter other than his own experience as creative springboards for his imagination – just as O’Farrell, in crafting Hamnet, borrows some material from Shakespeare’s life and work, and much from her own.

Scene from Hamnet, directed by Chloé Zhao. Universal Pictures Australia

A well of maternal grief

Reading Hamnet primarily in relation to Anne Hathaway, or Shakespeare, or his play Hamlet, is limiting. On the other hand, O’Farrell’s biography yields some illuminating links with her novel’s depiction of maternal grief.

In her memoir I Am, I Am, I Am (2017), O’Farrell writes about her experiences of pregnancy loss and her powerlessness in the face of her elder daughter’s life-threatening medical condition. In the mid-2000s, following the traumatic birth of her first child, a son, O'Farrell experienced multiple miscarriages.

She eventually conceived a daughter through IVF. This daughter lives with an immunological disorder, which leaves her vulnerable to ordinary illnesses, such as the common cold, and prone to anaphylaxis triggered by exposure to a variety of everyday substances. Consequently, O’Farrell and her family live “in a state of high alert”.

O’Farrell describes how the lack of vocabulary and rituals around miscarriage compounded her grief. She laments that children lost before they are born are “so invisible, so evanescent” that “our language doesn’t even have a word for them”. She also admonishes the “school of thought […] that expects women to get over a miscarriage as if nothing has happened, to metabolise it quickly and get on with life”.

In Hamnet, the absent presence of lost children is vividly portrayed. The novel evokes a matrix of loss that goes beyond Hamnet’s death. It references Shakespeare’s siblings who died in childhood, including his sisters Anne and the renamed “Eliza” (Joan). In the novel, one of Shakespeare’s surviving sisters is also called Eliza, a living memorial to her dead sibling.

In her own life, O’Farrell has been deprived of the opportunity to name and mourn, but she has meticulously populated Hamnet with lost children who continue to demand the attention of the living.

In O'Farrell’s memoir, death stalks the child who has lived when many before her did not. O'Farrell and her family must be always prepared for her daughter’s anaphylaxis. They must never leave the house without an emergency kit; they must weigh up the risks posed by a simple walk in the park or a play date. Then, when the world strikes, “you are reduced to a crystalline point, to a single purpose: to keep your child alive, to ensnare her in the world of the living, to hang on to her and never let her go”.

O’Farrell describes an attack in disturbing detail: hives leads to swelling of the airways, which, without emergency treatment, can be followed by cardiac arrest. Meanwhile, the victim is “clawing at their throat, hoarse with panic and fear,” and feels cold to the touch as their blood pressure drops.

There is more than a shade of this terror in the novel’s descriptions of Hamnet’s decline. As the fever takes hold, he is transported to a snowy landscape “he doesn’t recognise”, which tempts him to “surrender himself, to stretch out in this glistening, thick white blanket: what relief it would give him”.

One cannot fail to think of O’Farrell’s efforts to keep her daughter alive as Agnes watches Hamnet in his death throes, pleading with him not to go.

As a beautifully affecting portrait of grief, Hamnet achieves what Hamlet never set out to do: it inscribes the memory of children taken too soon and testifies to the necessity of mourning and remembrance. As readers, playgoers or film fans, it makes for a richer experience to weigh each work by its own merits, because it takes many different kinds of ghosts to make a story.

An Antarctic ‘polar thriller’ and a neurodivergent novel imagine a climate changed future

2026-01-12T00:50:16Z

Two new Australian novels imagine how we might live in a climate‑changed future. Bri Lee’s Seed explores antinatalism in an Antarctic seed vault. And Rose Michael’s Else follows a mother and daughter improvising survival on Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula.

Together, these novels ask what we owe future generations – and what forms of care remain possible when the planet itself becomes precarious.

Antinatalism is the view that bringing new humans into the world is morally suspect because life entails unavoidable harm. It has become increasingly visible alongside escalating climate anxiety. In fiction, the question tends to crystallise around the figure of “the child as future”: should we burden the planet with more lives, and burden those lives with the planet we have made?

Review: Seed – Bri Lee (Summit); Else – Rose Michael (Spineless Wonders)

Alice Robinson’s 2024 novel If You Go pushed that question into speculative territory. In it, a mother wakes a century after being cryogenically suspended, and must reckon with the failure to prepare her children for a world remade by climate and social collapse.

Lee’s Seed and Michael’s Else approach the matter of future generations from opposite directions. Seed situates its enquiry inside an ambitious thriller: a secret Antarctic seed bank, a month‑long mission and communications failures.

Else is a lyrical, experimental novella charting seasonal adaptation as a mother (Leisl) and daughter (Else) move down the “Ninch” – local slang for the Mornington Peninsula – as floods and fires reconfigure their world.

Bri Lee’s novel, Seed, explores antinatalism in an Antarctic seed vault. Allen & Unwin

Both books are recognisably climate fiction, but they part ways on what climate ethics look like in practice. Lee’s novel sits alongside Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore, published earlier this year, in its use of a seed vault as a narrative device – a high‑stakes backdrop where questions of what we choose to save, and what we sacrifice, become urgent.

McConaghy frames those choices through family bonds and a plea for climate action; Seed filters them through the lens of antinatalism. Seed formalises refusal through the narrator’s principled insistence on not reproducing, while Else imagines care as improvisation: a family learning to read Country and attune to non‑human signals in a context of uncertainty.

Antarctica as ethical sanctuary

Lee’s narrator, Mitch, is a biologist and outspoken antinatalist. His sixth stint on “Anarctos”, a secret Antarctic seed vault, becomes a study in paranoia.

Mitch reveres the ice for its “lavish indifference to human life” and treats Antarctica like an ethical sanctuary, a place where the apathy of the landscape might absolve him of human entanglements. That posture is tested by small anomalies: a cat that shouldn’t be there, radios that don’t behave and penguins appearing where they shouldn’t be.

The book’s most provocative move is to conflate antinatalism with cynicism, while poking holes in both. Mitch’s contempt for “breeders” is inseparable from his private grief; his ex‑wife is pregnant, and he can neither accept her decision nor resist the residual hope something between them might yet be salvaged.

Formally, the novel borrows from outpost paranoia and polar horror, like bestselling science-fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson’s 1997 eco-fiction, Antarctica, and Melbourne author Riley James’ The Chilling, a 2024 thriller set on an isolated Antarctic research station.

Seed’s rhythm feels circular. The daily routines – waking, working, meals, sex – recur so often that the tension they’re meant to build sometimes flattens. I found the polemic heavy-handed at points, and when the narrative ramps up, several ethical questions raised earlier remain hanging.

The closing chapters shift the book’s moral centre, but not in a way that fully resolves. Mitch’s antinatalism and conviction to “sav[e] the planet from people” often reads less like an argued position than a shield; a way to moralise detachment while punishing intimacy, particularly with women.

The Antarctic setting is exploitable for atmosphere, yet the novel’s ethical engine sometimes stalls in self regard.

Else: neurodivergence and hyper attention

By contrast, Else imagines continuance. Michael’s novella, structured around Indigenous seasonal knowledge and written in dense, fragmented prose, follows Leisl and Else as they leave the city for a derelict family house, then gradually move down the coast in search of safer ground.

The novel’s focus is on the mother‑daughter duo: Else is neurodivergent and communicates through humming, stimming and ingenious wordplay; Leisl is hyper attentive to the living world and a walking catalogue of species, constantly articulating the flux of climate and coastlines.

The result is a climate novel about language and attention.

Rose Michael’s climate novel is about language and attention. Holly Campbell

Michael plays with dialogue as “trade”: one that is learned. The novel’s recurring irony is that human language is not the dominant language on Earth. In a world that is “more sea, now”, bioluminescent communication becomes the planet’s primary speech. This suggests humans are guests in a more‑than‑human conversation. The novel advocates a practice: adapt; listen; tune your body to animal signs; accept that “progress” isn’t inevitably positive. And keep asking: “what right do we have to feel at home?”

While Seed is largely interior, experienced through Mitch’s self‑justifying voice, Else distributes attention outward: to seasons, shorelines, currents and the phenomenology of weather. Its ethics are ecological rather than abstract. Children are not only the burden of future harm; they are the learners who might help families survive by noticing differently.

Comparatively, the books articulate two answers to the future‑child problem. In Seed, the child is a moral focal point adult certainty breaks against. Mitch’s ex‑wife’s pregnancy sharpens every antinatalist claim, exposes contradictions in his care for a non‑human “orphan” and forces a reckoning with what he is willing to betray to keep his position intact. The Antarctic vault literalises the fantasy of preservation without people – seeds saved from us, not for us.

In Else, the child is not an emblem, but a collaborator. Else’s neurodivergent ways of seeing and speaking are not problems to be fixed; they are survival literacies. As climate events stack up, the family’s capacity to interpret animal and oceanic signals becomes their ethics: they are neither heroic nor despairing, but sustained. What is preserved is seasonal knowledge and the habit of noticing.

This divergence matters because climate ethics can drift toward abstraction. Antinatalism often positions itself as a clean solution: fewer people, less harm. But fiction reminds us solutions are lived by specific bodies in messy quarters.

Seed is strongest when it reveals the gap between Mitch’s theory and his embodied care (for animals, for his ex‑wife, for a colleague with different stakes). Else is strongest when it makes care operational: month‑by‑month decisions, imperfect communication and a practice of belonging that refuses simple optimism.

Making ethical bets

Neither novel offers neat closure. The point is not certainty, but how we proceed. Do we make ethical bets under uncertainty, or do we rehearse attention until it becomes habit? In an era when we are asked to sit with contradiction, I find Else’s ethic more generative: it imagines care that can continue without perfect confidence.

Australian climate fiction increasingly wrestles with responsibility and the politics of care. Seed and Else join works that publicly situate private decisions. Seed contributes a sharp character study of antinatalism under pressure. Else deepens the imaginative repertoire for adaptation – especially through neurodivergence and embodied, place‑based knowledge.

Climate futures will likely need both technological preservation and social adaptation – but these novels suggest ethics without care cannot hold, and care without attention cannot survive.

Seed’s ideas are arresting and its Antarctic setting and outpost paranoia deliver genuine momentum, but its ethical inquiry sometimes hardens into a posture that constrains the book’s capacities for care.

Else feels modest but quietly radical: a mother–daughter story that listens, names debts to Country and imagines hope as something practised. Its fragmented syntax, unusual punctuation and shifts in voice demand patience.

Read together, these novels clarify a live question: not simply whether to have children, but how to remain responsible to future humans – and the more-than-human – as the climate shifts around us.

Caitlin Macdonald works at St Andrew's College within the University of Sydney and has recently completed her PhD at the University of Sydney.