‘Faking It: Artificial Intelligence in a Human World’ by Toby Walsh

Posted on August 7, 2026 | Leave a comment
2023, 256 p.

In his very first sentence of the preface, Toby Walsh warns us “This book is out of date”. He’s right- it was published in 2023 and it does already feel out of date. In 2018 Walsh wrote a book called 2062, which was the year that he predicted machines would be as intelligent as humans. I wonder if he still feels that way. In reading Faking It in 2026, three years after it was written, it feels as if things are moving much more quickly than he has described them. But, also as he says in the preface

I am confident, however, that the issues raised in this book will not be out of date. Indeed, they will be even more pressing. And this book will be even more useful, as a guide and a warning.

Toby Walsh is Scientia Professor of Artificial Intelligence at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and CSIRO’s Data61. He is a scientist who embraces the potential of AI but has been warning the government of the dangers of unregulated AI for some time as, indeed, he also does in this book. I feel that he takes a balanced approach, neither warning of impending doom but neither is he cavalier about the potential dangers that it could bring.

As suggested by the title, he is adamant about the ‘fake’ nature of AI.

In understanding artificial intelligence, it is also easy to be misled by our own human intelligence. We have a very personal experience of our own human intelligence, so it is hard not to fall into the trap of thinking that artificial intelligence might be somewhat similar.

Much of this turns on how we describe intelligence.

What, then, is intelligence? Loosely speaking, intelligence is the ability to extract information, learn from experience, adapt to the environment, understand and reason about the world. So what, you should ask, is artificial intelligence? Most AI isn’t embodied and situated in the world like our human intelligence, adapting and learning from the environment. How, then, can the intelligence of machines be identified and measured when it is so fundamentally different to human intelligence?

AI researchers do not completely agree on how to define artificial intelligence. But most of us will agree that it is about getting computers to do tasks that, when humans do them, we say require intelligence. These include perceiving the world, reasoning about the world and learning from the world.

His main argument throughout the book is that the artificial intelligence we are building only simulates human intelligence, – in other words ‘faking it’.

This fakery existed right from the start. The Mechanical Turk, a chess playing automaton which debuted in 1770 and toured Europe and the Americas until its destruction in a museum fire in 1854, actually had a person concealed within its metal chest. Mephisto, another chess-playing machine from 1876, was directed from another room using an electro-mechanical connection. Even Alan Turing faked his first chess-playing program, simulating the calculations of the program with pen and paper. And when Elon Musk announced the yet-to-be built Telsa Bot in 2021, it featured a person dressed up in a white full-length bodysuit pretending to be a Tesla Bot and fooling nobody.

He identifies many situations where artificial intelligence is much less impressive than it appears, and where it is designed to deceive us. He starts by looking at the hype and false claims about artificial intelligence; then looks to how AI has tried to fake human intelligence; to create fake real people, and to emulate human creativity. He notes that the technology companies that are developing AI are often indulging in fakery themselves, often indulging in ‘ethics-washing’ that makes them sound more responsible than they are.

In describing ‘the artificial in AI’, he reminds us that psychologists distinguish between intellectual, emotional and social intelligence. AI has the first one covered, but the other two intelligences are less easily replicated. AI machines, as strictly electrical devices, do not have the biochemistry that drives our emotions. Of course, they could be programmed for a level of anger, disgust or fear but our emotional intelligence is informed by our lived experiences: we understand other people’s emotions because they are like our own. Social intelligence, he suggests, is perhaps our greatest superpower. We can empathize with other people because we share the same biology. This, too, can be programmed, but that assumes that people act rationally and in self-interested ways, ignoring the complex, often irrational and sometimes altruistic behaviours of real people.

He urges those working in the field to stop anthropomorphizing the technologies they are developing:

We talk about a chatbot ‘understanding’ a sentence, a ‘self-driving’ car, the computer-vision algorithm ‘recognizing’ the pedestrian, and the possibility of robot ‘rights’. In reality, chatbots don’t understand language. There is no self– no person, no sentient, self-aware intelligence, driving the car, even if the car is driving itself. Algorithms don’t actually recognize objects. And robots need rights about as much as your toaster does.

His final conclusion is that the human in human intelligence is perhaps the most important distinction between us and the ever more capable and artificial machines we are building. He reminds us of the COVID times, when we so much missed physically meeting people, and walking in the real world. It was the real world we craved.

This is a very convivially-written book that is packed with information, and yet it rarely feels overwhelming (with the exception of his examples from mathematics which challenged my non-mathematical human brain). His footnotes are quirky and humourous and he has a wealth of examples and anecdotes drawn from his long history in the field. He is enthusiastic about the potentials of Artificial Intelligence, but adamant that it is not the same as human intelligence and in this I think that he finds the right balance.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: I’m thinking a lot about AI and being human. And it both excites and frightens me (probably more of the latter) because I want to hold on to the human.

Sourced from: purchased Kobo book (hence the lack of page numbers to the quote- a very annoying feature of Kobo)

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Posted in Book Reviews 2026

Postscript: Life, Love and Loss in Australian Letters

Posted on August 2, 2026 | 1 comment
2026, 120 p.

I really can’t remember the last proper letter I received from a real person, as distinct from an optometrist reminding me to make an appointment or a real estate agent encouraging me to put my house on the market. It has been a very long time. For a while, the Christmas catch-up letter included with a Christmas card was popular, and I really quite liked receiving them. But as for receiving a letter from a friend for no particular reason – I haven’t received one for a long time.

As a historian who worked mainly with Colonial Office papers, it was always a bit of a thrill when you came across a personal letter as distinct from the “I remain your humble and obedient servant” type letters. It was as if, suddenly, a file has come to life and a real person has stepped out behind the platitudes. Certainly, some of those 19th century letters to and from ‘home’ in Great Britain followed a template as well, with an inordinate amount of time spent on the weather, given that the letter was going to traverse half the globe. Cross-hatched letters were infuriating, and much time was spent puzzling over a word or an abbreviation that a new pair of eyes would pick up in seconds.

Postscript is a selection of letters from the National Library’s huge collection of letters. In the introduction, Lauren Smith from the National Library explains their selection criteria:

The letters we finally selected, which span almost 200 years, are not necessarily the most famous or life-changing or emotional. What they do each contain is something human and real, something that gives us a sense of how much we have in common with those that came before, that gives us a sense of our own history. (p.v)

The letters were then taken up by present-writers, who were asked to choose one of those selected letters and, in response, write a new letter, addressed to whomever they chose, in some way inspired by the original letter from the Library’s collection. Most of the original letters are Australian- although there is a letter from Jane Austen to her sister Cassandra- and the majority of them date from the 20th century. Of course, there’s an imbalance here in that the authors of the original letter could have had no idea that their letter would survive to appear in a book decades later, whereas the current-day authors are quite consciously crafting a letter for publication. Each dyad or triad of letters has a short introduction, explaining who the authors are, and giving a little bit of context to the letter.

Several of the letters are linked by the original and present-day letter-writers sharing the same profession. Sometimes three letters writers are involved. For example, there is a to-and-fro of letters between children’s authors Mem Fox and Morris Glietzman, who are joined by winner of the Children’s Book Council of Australia (CBCA) award, Daniel Gray-Barnett who writes his own imaginary letter to a fellow CBCA award winner Andrea Rowe. Historian Frank Bongiorno writes a letter to the now-deceased Manning Clark, a prominent historian who would have been long retired from academe by the time Bongiorno embarked on his own academic career. In writing to Manning Clark, Bongiorno copied the lead of fellow historian Bill Gammage who also wrote to Manning Clark in 1984- the letter which is in the collection.

Sometimes there is a shared experience. Ranjana Srivastava, oncologist and writer whose column regularly appears in The Guardian writes an imaginary letter to the daughter of one her patients, remembering the recipient’s father and his kindness to her as his specialist. For Srivastava, the prompting letter was written by historian John Barrett, who wrote to his neighbours eight months before his death, telling them of his cancer diagnosis but encouraging them to just “tuck this knowledge away in the back of your minds”.

For me, not all of the letters were equally engaging. The ones that didn’t work for me were more intent on transferring knowledge of ‘what happened next’ to the deceased original correspondent, rather than responding to the emotion of original letter.

Sometimes the chosen recipient mirrored the relationship in the original letter. For example, Jane Austen’s letter to her sister Cassandra (which apparently the National Library holds) is mirrored by Kate Forsyth’s letter to her sister and co-writer Belinda Murray. Just as John Flynn (he of the Royal Flying Doctor Service) writes to his father as he’s about to embark on a new phase of his life, so in turn writer Michael Winkler writes to his sons about his own father.

But the letters I enjoyed most were from Sir John Monash to his 13 year old daughter Bertha where he writes a very detailed letter giving a run-down of what to expect on the railway trip from Spencer Street station to Windomal, a station over the Murray in rural New South Wales. This was matched by letters from poet Judith Wright to her husband and father after having a baby; and then by a letter from historian and author Maggie Mackellar writing to her daughter Arkie as she travels from Manchester to Doha. I’m not really sure why the Judith Wright letters are included here, but the Monash and Mackellar letters are full of the vicarious excitement and sorrow of letting a child move on to the next phase of their life.

When I first heard about this book, I was a bit ambivalent about it, thinking that it would just be a collection of letters. But I really enjoyed it: working out what the links were between the two letters chosen; quite touched by the emotion, often quite repressed, in the older letters that is more openly expressed in the current-day ones; and gaining a sneak peek into the behind-the-scenes life of a famous person. What worked best for me was that it is the perfect book for dipping into, perhaps last thing at night, when you want something to read but don’t want to embark on something lengthy that requires concentration. It’s a very human book, showing communication in an intentional but not self-conscious way in the original letters, and the imagination and emotional sensitivity of the current-day writers in responding to them.

My rating: too difficult to rate, because the letters were all so different. 7/10?

Sourced from: Review copy from NLA via Scott Eathorne, Quickmark Media

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Posted in Book Reviews 2026

Six Degrees of Separation: from ‘Land’ to…

Posted on August 2, 2026 | 4 comments

The First Saturday of the month is Six Degrees Day. This meme, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best involves her choosing a starting book, then you linking the titles or themes of six other books. This month she has chosen Maggie O’Farrell’s Land. I had borrowed this from the library, anticipating that it would be on the Booker Prize Longlist for 2026, but not so. Needless to say, I haven’t read it yet. But all of my links are related to the idea of land in some way.

  1. How odd. Simon Winchester’s book Land has the same title as the one we are starting off with. Winchester’s book, however, is non-fiction. The subtitle of his book is ‘How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World’, and this is a global history of the mapping, ownership, division, preservation and restoration of the land. To be honest, I haven’t read this yet- but it’s on the pile.
  2. Dave Sornig’s Blue Lake is about a specific piece of land, or more properly swampland, that has been completely engulfed by Docklands and the development of what used to be the West Melbourne Swamp. Previously known as Batman’s Swamp, the North or West Melbourne Swamp, and Dudley Flats it has always been a liminal place. This book won the Judges’ Special Prize, Victorian Community History Awards, 2019. My review is here.
  3. James Boyce’s Imperial Mud: The Fight for the Fens takes us to England where he traces the unique, watery, changeable geography of the marshes of the Fens from 4000 years ago- possibly an area not unlike the swamp in Sornigs’ Blue Lake. The Fens, he explains, are not a precise location, given that the creeks and waterways that constitute them have always been an ever-changing phenomenon, and for much of their history they remained common land until they were drained in the 1950s, only to be inundated again. My review is here.
  4. Storyland by Catherine McKinnon is a series of stories set in the same geographical location: around Lake Illawarra (south of Sydney Cove and Botany Bay, near Wollongong). The stories are in a sort of pyramid structure, set in 1796, 1822, 1900, 1998 and 2033-2717 before reversing and going back again. You can read my review here.
  5. One of the most influential Australian history books I have read is Bill Gammages’s The Greatest Estate on Earth. Gammage’s argument is that, instead of being marginal hunter-gatherers, ‘people’- for that is the terminology he has chosen to distinguish aborigines from ‘newcomers’- farmed prior to 1788. They were not farmers, which is a lifestyle; but they did farm – the activity of tending and shaping landscape. They developed what he calls a ‘template’ of landscape, a mosaic comprising open pasture with few trees, strips of scrub and stubby trees, other plains, then clearly delineated forest. It is an argument that forces us to change our view of the landscape around us. The bushland that we prize as ‘native’ landscape is often not that at all- instead it is product of neglect as the custodians of the country could no longer farm it. My review is here.
  6. Where Gammage’s book talks about settler blindness to what had been wrought on the land by the First People, Debra Dank’s book We Come With This Place looks at Country from an indigenous perspective. It is a family history telling of the lives of her grandparents (and further back) and parents but she does not necessarily help the reader by giving a straight-forward chronological account. Violence and dispossession seeped through the generations, as did the love and knowledge of Country. It’s a love and knowledge that she is giving to her children, and to us too as readers. My review is here.

Even though O’Farrell’s Land is fiction set in Ireland, I seem to have branched off into non-fiction, and mainly here in Australia, which is not surprising really.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 16-23 July 2026

Posted on August 2, 2026 | Leave a comment

The History Bureau Putin and the Apartment Bombs 6: The Trial In 2003, four years after the apartment bombs, there was a trial of the suspected bombers. Mikhael Trepashkin, who believed that the ‘Chechnyan terrorists’ was a cover-up for FSB involvement , went to a journalist at the Moscow News before planning to appear at the trial to present his evidence. A few days before the trial he was arrested. The trial went ahead without him; the two ‘terrorists’ were found guilty and the case sealed for 75 years. Trepashkin was tried for possession of FSB material and two bullets (which he claims were planted on him) and sentenced to four years jail. Putin was elected for a second time with 70% of the vote. The template for Russian coverup was established: move fast; flood the media; and then seal any investigations. Ten years later Scott Anderson wrote about the bombings in an article called ‘Vladimir Putin’s Dark Rise to Power’ but GQ spiked the story and would not allow it to be published online although it did reappear later.

Short History Of… The Silk Roads (broadcast 23 Feb 2026) Note that ‘s’ in Silk RoadS because there were multiple silk roads, forming a lattice of networks over about 1000 years, spreading from the steppes in the north, Afghanistan in the south and reaching across to Persia and later the Mediterranean in the west, and China in the east. We know of the roads from 9th century BCE with trade between the Greeks and Persians, and in 4th century BCE Alexander the Great travelled along them. Coming from the opposite direction, in 2th century BCE the Han dynasty in China sent an envoy to see what was beyond the steppe horsemen who were blocking their progress, and he came home with tales of wealth and plenty. Now the Han knew that they were just one corner of a global path. Because of danger, traders would form caravans, stopping at pluralistic way-stations along the way. In the 2nd century CE there was a rare period of peace when the Romans, Parthians, Kushans and Han all wanted peace. Trade and goods moved across the Silk Roads, but so did ideas, particularly religious ideas – for example in the depiction of the Buddha. Maths, cartography, artistic systems, astrology all moved across west and east. In late antiquity (approx 550 to 1000 CE) the Sogdians from modern-day Uzbekistan and Tajikistan began operating over huge distances, instead of the small relay-like journeys that had been undertaken in the past. By 610CE the rise of Islam brought new political and social networks, as Arabic became the lingua franca and as pilgrims moved along the silk roads. By the 11thcentury CE the Crusades brought a new age of war fuelled by faith. In the 13th century the Mongols sought to impose the world’s largest contiguous empire. In 1279 Marco Polo traversed the road to meet with Kublai Khan. In the mid 14th century, the Black Death travelled along the Silk Roads. By the 15th century, under the Ottoman Empire, ships linked ports between Europe, Asia and Africa and the dominance of the Silk Roads faded. In the 19th century European explorers and archaeologists rediscovered them. Today, there are new versions of the silk roads, with trains traversing the land, and modern versions like China’s Belt and Road Initiative, or India’s Cotton Route replicating the crossing of the original Silk Roads. Features Peter Frankopan, Professor of Global History at Oxford University, and author of The Silk Roads.

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‘Wandering with Intent’ by Kim Mahood

Posted on July 31, 2026 | Leave a comment
2002, 256 p.

A collection of essays is a strange beast. In Australia’s relatively circumscribed literary/commentary scene most essays seem to orbit around a small number of journals: Griffith Review, The Monthly, Meanjin, ABR. Nine of the essays in this collection have appeared in such journals between 2007 and 2019, and this is Mahood’s third book. The first, Craft for a Dry Lake (2000) was written in the wake of her father’s death and the second Position Doubtful: Mapping Landscapes and Memories (2016) covered similar material to that found in several of these essays.

‘To essay’, as her very first sentence announces:

means to try, to endeavour, to attempt. It implies risk and failure. It is also the only way to find out whether something is possible. These essays are a sort of written equivalent of hunting and gathering with intent. They are the product of my own wandering among the conundrums and contradictions of the cross cultural world I’ve chosen to inhabit, and of my intent to understand and honour it.

She is aware of the perils of a white woman writing about her engagement with the black world.

The essays in this collection were written over a period of more than fifteen years, during which time the attitudes and sensitivities around who has the right to speak and write about Indigenous issues have become increasingly charged and complex. This has left me wondering about what the implications of cancel culture and identity politics might be for me. Some of the previously published essays would likely not make it into print in today’s cultural climate, but I have chosen not to edit out what might now cause offence and attract criticism. To do so would be disingenuous, and a betrayal of my endeavour to understand and communicate as honestly as I can, something of the unique cultural interface I’ve been enmeshed in and witness to for much of my life…. That I exercise cultural privilege when writing about desert Aboriginal people is a given. The question is whether I exercise this privilege in a way that can be justified. I have been grappling with this conundrum since I began writing, and it never gets any easier.

It this humility and honesty about her own limitations and the ‘conundrums and contradictions’ that bestows on her an authority to speak from the position she is standing on, not pretending to be more than she is. She grew up on a pastoral station in the 1960s- a situation in the pre-WalkOff days that evokes the depiction of outback pastoral life in Ann McGrath’s Born in the Cattle – and she grew up with Aboriginal children. In the essay ‘Flowers for Evelyn’ she attends the funeral of Evelyn, whose brother worked as a stockman on their station back in the 1960s. Although part of the white pastoralist’s family, for the aboriginal people gathered there, “I am family and this is something I have to do” and she is asked to speak first. The funeral, and the people attending it, are all familiar to her and yet she is on the edge as well. At another funeral, she hesitates to speak, and she can feel the waves of disapproval – another whitefella has let them down again.

For me, the stand-out essay of the collection is ‘Kardiya are like Toyotas: white workers on Australia’s cultural frontier’, an essay that ended up being included in the induction material of many indigenous organizations. She calls it straight. As she points out, a new worker heading to Antartica would undergo physical or psychological assessment of their ability to stand up to the stresses of isolation, the extreme environment and intense proximity to other people. Yet there is no criteria to weed out the “mad, bad and incompetent who prowl the grey zone of Indigenous service delivery”. Like the ubiquitous white Toyota ute provided to organizations, white workers (kardiyas) break down, are abandoned and in the fullness of time another one will be delivered to commence the cycle again.

There are many reasons why kardiya break down. Some break themselves, bringing with them baggage lugged from other lives, investing in the people they’ve come to help with qualities that are projections of their own anxieties and ideals. Eager and needy, they are prime material for white slavery, rushing to meet demands that increase in direct proportion to their willingness to respond to them. They create a legacy of expectation and dependency, coupled with one of failure and disappointment.

This is heightened by the constant and demanding interaction with Aboriginal people themselves, and fact that ‘blaming the kardiya is the lubricant that smooths the volatile frictions of community life.”

There are the good people, who are overworked and undervalued; and there are the sociopaths, the borderline criminals, the self-righteous bullies and the mentally unhinged, who gravitate to the positions that no one else wants, entrench themselves, and contribute in no small degree to the malaise that haunts Indigenous communities….The famous quip about mercenaries, missionaries and misfits has a lot of truth to it, and each type covers a spectrum, from highly functional through incompetent to downright destructive.

It’s interesting that she writes this chapter in the third person, whereas many of the other essays are written in the first person. She tells a fable of New Kardiya who is taken in hand by one or more friendly Aboriginal people, given a skin name, regaled with stories of the incompetence of the first kardiya, co-opted into becoming driver to take people hunting in the ubiquitous Toyota or troop carrier, becomes romantically involved with another worker, ends up being assaulted by a community member and finally terminated, only for another to take her place. Or the fable of Super Kardiya and his Super Nyupa, he a self-righteous bully and she a self-righteous protector of the helpless Aborigines. It’s interesting that she stands outside observing this when we often see her at the wheel of the troop-carrier, or frantically trying to appease a key player in a consultation over a project in which she is involved in ‘Trapped in the Gap’. However, when she moves into working on a project with urban community groups, she finds herself out of place and uncertain how to proceed.

She is largely sidelined from capital-letter Aboriginal Politics, beyond noting that the revelations about child sexual abuse provided an opportunity to “speak aound truths that would previously have seen the speakers branded as racist and their voices neutralized”. She criticizes the Northern Territory Invention which she claims

…exposes the government’s unerring capacity for wrong action under pressure, and its default response of coercive control

Based on Emma Kowal’s academic work in ‘Trapped in the Gap: doing good work in Indigenous Australia’, she dares to raise the tendency of ‘white anti-racists’ (i.e. white, left-wing middle-class professionals who work in indigenous affairs) to identify structural rather than cultural issues as the cause for any of the string of ‘problems’- poor health, poor education, unemployment, high crime rate domestic violence etc. etc. This sets up a dilemma for white professional health workers (although it could be extended to any of the other ‘problems’:

That Aboriginal people might not want the things that will make them healthier throws into question the purpose of the work the white professional is doing. It also raises the spectre of differences that run much deeper and are cultural rather than structural in their origins. And if the difference is cultural, and achieving better health outcomes means changing cultural attitudes, the white health professionals must participate in social engineering, which is the antithesis of what they believe in. Kowal’s protagonists are confronted with the irreconcilable contradiction that, in order for the frequently cited ‘gap’ to be closed, Aboriginal people must surrender or dilute their aboriginality, thus relinquishing or diminishing their power and their identity. This is their crippling moral dilemma: in their attempt to do good, they may in fact be doing home. In a situation desperate for resources and support, the most highly skilled and scrupulous people are paralysed by the effects of this contradiction.

Much of her own work in the community involved map-making. In ‘Where Words Don’t Have Edges’ she describes facilitating a writing workshop among participants many of whom were illiterate and for whom standard English was a second language. She describes a national museum exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters in which she was heavily involved, and gives a far more sexualized account of the Seven Sisters songline than I was aware of! In other projects she is drawing out traditional stories of the land, many of which map closely to multi-layered digital maps. I found some of these chapters a bit repetitive- in fact, I’m sure that some paragraphs appeared more than once- and I find myself allergic to ‘gallery catalogue’ art-speak with its tendency to complicate everything with words. As it happens, I’m reading quite a bit about AI and Large Language Models at the moment, and these chapters about indigenous ways of knowing, shorn of their ‘gallery speak’, give some hope that there is still knowledge that can’t be hoovered into a LLM because it does not exist in words. Juxtaposed against this is her chapter ‘Lost and Found in Translation’ where she discusses the literary attempts by Australian writers to capture ‘country’.

And as a bird-watcher myself, who could resist chapters on the Night Parrot?

While reading all these chapters, I was interested, but did not feel particularly emotionally invested in the author herself. It was only in the last chapters, most particularly ‘Looking for Mushrooms’ that I gained some sense of her own life-story, and that of her mother. From what I have read, it seems that this third book balances out her first one, where she looked back at her father and his story, by taking her mother’s writing and holding it up against the mother she remembered- that some mother to whom she dedicates the book. Why did she wait so long to bring her own story forward because it is her life story and experience that gives her the authority (author-ity) to write the way she does? I’ve since realized that the chapters are more or less chronological in order of publication, but I think that this is an editorial choice that mis-fired.

Nor did I do myself (or the author) any favours in reading the book through Libby, the library app for borrowed books. In this case, I needed to know how far through I was, or how long this essay was going to be, and although I could work that out, it was clunky. This forced me to read it on my tablet rather than my Kobo which I find better approximates the experience of reading a book, and hence my inability to locate any of the quotes I have used on a designated page, not altered by the size of font I have chosen. I’ve enjoyed the book even more dipping back into it while writing this review, supplemented by an excellent discussion at the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.

My rating: 8.5 (an increase, on re-reading for this review, on what I would have given it previously)

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection for July.

Sourced from: Libby via YPRL.

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Posted in Book Reviews 2026, Ivanhoe Reading Circle

‘Juice’ by Tim Winton

Posted on July 28, 2026 | Leave a comment
2025, 528p.

An unnamed man and a young girl are driving in a truck through a blighted stony landscape, surrounded by ash. When they draw into an abandoned mine site a man armed with a crossbow forces them from the truck cab and into a deep hole. The unnamed man does not trust the intentions of their captor towards the girl, and Scheherazade-like he tells his story to ‘the bowman’ both as a way of staying awake to protect the child and to gain the co-operation of his captor.

Set at some time in the future, the world has endured a horrific ratcheting-up of climate change and political breakdown. Temperatures regularly breach fifty degrees, and summer is spent underground in dark, stifling conditions, waiting out the months until winter, when it is finally safe to venture out into the open. Society seems to have broken down into small hamlets, scattered homesteads or gated armed communities. There does not appear to be any government, no religion, no music, no civic life. Cities like Perth and Sydney still exist, protected by walls, but they are fetid and dangerous.

As our unnamed narrator tells us (and the bowman), his father disappeared in a maritime accident when he was young and he was brought up by his ‘staunch’ mother – likewise unnamed- in the outback, growing vegetables in irrigated greenhouses in winter when the weather conditions are more benign. As he reaches adolescence he works salvaging parts from deserted infrastructure and taking their produce to ‘market’ where he barters for the things they need from other desperate, edgy people. It is at this market that he is approached to join the Service, a shadowy organization, that ruptures his world view completely. Brought up in an a-historical world, he learns about the phases of history that have brought the world to this point: ‘The Hundred Years of Light’, followed by the ‘Dirty World’, then the ‘Terror’. There were political choices that could have been made in the past (our present) that could have avoided this complete breakdown, and the wealthy descendants of the fossil-fuel executives, financiers and the lobby groups still shelter in enclaves surrounded by a luxury completely foreign to the depleted populations scrabbling to survive ‘outside’. The Service is committed to ‘acquittals’ – a euphemism for the assassination of whole families, including children- as vengeance for this climate collapse.

And so our narrator lives in two worlds: the spartan existence on the blighted landscape and the other world of secret missions, danger and bloodshed. He partners with Sun, and has a daughter, Esther, but spends months away, ostensibly scavenging, leaving his family on the homestead with his mother while he is called upon to embark on this campaign of murder and retribution that takes him to Utah, the Persian Gulf, and to Asia- all just ‘overseas’ places in this world without nations. The killing does not sit well with him, and each time he returns more and more disturbed, only to find that his wife and daughter have left. The Service keeps all of its operatives ignorant of each other and of the scope of their mission, and it is only as time goes on that our narrator learns that his whole life has been much more touched by the Service than he realized.

He tells all this to the Bowman, who he later learns has also been a Service man. Despite their common experiences, they are not the same. Our narrator’s life was saved by ‘sims’, hybrid simulacra who can withstand the heat and deprivation, but the Bowman believes that all sims should have been annihilated while they could be. Our narrator distrusts the Bowman with good reason, and even when I reached the last sentence of the book, I wasn’t sure quite what it meant.

Juice is similar to Cormac McCarthy’s The Road but the Scheherazade structure of the novel, alternating between the telling of the story at the bottom of a tunnel, and the story itself, means that it does not have the same grim relentlessness of McCarthy’s book. As a committed environmentalist, Winton does not pull his punches, naming the present-day fossil-fuel companies that the Service holds responsible for the climate collapse. In just one part of the novel, his religious faith and love of nature surfaces as well, when our narrator meets with one of the operatives who initially trained him. In what our narrator later says was the most interesting conversation of his life – just one- the operative says:

My mother used to tell me that when Nature dies, God dies along with Her… I guess what my mother meant is that without clean, wild, healthy things that can regenerate and renew themselves, the idea of God is impossible to imagine. (p. 346)

Does it matter if fiction is the vehicle for a political treatise? Not for me, as long as there’s enough depth to the characters to make them something more than mere mouthpieces. I don’t know whether Winton completely succeeded in this, but I wonder if his choice to keep his main characters nameless is not a way of intentionally distancing us as readers. I’m not sure that the introduction of the sims half-way through the book worked either, although it does raise questions about the sentience of artificially-created simulacra, and whether humanity’s only hope is co-existence with them, with the nature of the relation between human and sim left unexplored. There is much that he does not explain but to do so would detract from the earnest howl of despair at our present obtuseness that underpins the novel. He does not explain history, or the remnant technology, but this sparseness reflects the blighted nature of this world where there is no past and no future, just the survival of the season.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Rosanna Readers Bookgroup selection

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 8-15 July 2026

Posted on July 26, 2026 | Leave a comment

How Did We Get Here? Episode 10 From 2010 to the Present Day This final episode of the series was recorded in February 2026, and it does not include the prsent Iran-US war. In Israel,Tel Aviv developed as a high-tech society, while Gaza was embedding a tunnel economy. Israel did not see Hamas as a military threat. In the West Bank was undergoing (still is) a huge expansion of settler communities. With the rise of ISIS, the pivot to China and the Arab Spring, American eyes were elsewhere. The 2016 Abraham accords ignored the Palestinians, and constituted a big prize for Israel, especially bringing Saudi Arabia on-side. There has been such polarization on both sides, that journalist Jane Corbin and Jeremy Bowen both view a two-state solution as impossible now.

Stuff Matters What a fascinating program. In this episode Ed Conway looks at airpods, or more specifically the satisfying snap when you put them back into their case. They snap shut because of neodymium magnets. Early experimentation with what we now can ‘rare’ earths started in Ytterby in Sweden in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They discovered Yttrium (Y), ytterbium (Yb), terbium (Tb) and erbium (Er) but there was no commercial use for them. But the discovery that Neodymium makes magnets more powerful has had huge implications for electronics and speakers (hence the airpod). Despite the name ‘rare’ earths, they are not rare but separating them out was difficult until China perfected a way of processing them so that it just took one ‘take’ to process the raw material instead of needing to process separately for each different compound. Deng Xiaoping became a champion of the process and announced that China would become a world leader in the field and he was right: China now processes 90% of the ‘critical minerals’ (a more accurate term than ‘rare earths’). In 2010 there was a conflict between China and Japan over maritime territory and China imposed an embargo on Japan, which reinforced to China just how powerful their leverage was. China used critical minerals in response to Trump’s tariffs, leading to a trade stand-off between the two countries. Western countries are happy to offshore critical mineral production and its attendant pollution to China, until there is a choke-point and then nations start clamouring for domestic production again (until the pressure is off, and then they’re happy to let China have it- and the attendant pollution again.)

The Book Club Episode 7: Frankenstein: Horror, Humanity and Hubris I must confess that I have never read Frankenstein. I didn’t realise that it was an epistolary novel, ostensibly written by Captain Walton, a young and ambitious North Pole-bound explorer, who rescued the crazed Victor Frankenstein. Dominic and Tabitha discuss Mary Shelley and the writing of the novel and the circumstances under which is written, before going on to talk about the book itself. Despite misconceptions that the monster is called ‘Frankenstein’, that is actually the name of the doctor who created him. The book itself does not depict The Creature coming to life. Dr Frankenstein thought that it would be beautiful, but instead he was repulsed by it. In the first chapters the Creature tells his story, revealing a gentle, articulate creature with a moral compass who feels that he is human. He is child-like but springs to violence. There is no physical description of Victor Frankenstein, but we see him as an ambitious, heedless man with a saviour-complex, who takes no responsibility for what he has done. Tabby gave it 7/10, tiring of the relentless self-flagellation, and characters who were representative of a philosophical stance than characters in their own right. Dominic gave it 8/10 as the foundational book of the popular canon.

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‘The Good Thief’ by Hannah Tinti

Posted on July 25, 2026 | Leave a comment
2008, 340 p.

If you’re after a good 19th century Dickensian romp, then this is your book! It has it all: a gloomy orphanage, grave robbers, kindly landladies, a bluestone hospital surrounded by a high fence, a ‘dwarf’ and dark satanic mills (or rather, mousetrap factories). But it wasn’t written in the 1850s: instead it is Hannah Tinti’s debut novel, written in 2008, leaning heavily and gleefully into the Dickensian serialized novel genre.

Set in 19th century New England, Ren is an orphan with only one hand who has lived his whole life in St Anthony’s orphanage, run by Catholic brothers. It is a meagre and colourless childhood, marked by want and cruelty, and the only forlorn hope is that somebody might adopt a boy before he is drafted into the army and used as cannon fodder. He knows nothing of his parents beyond the small collar of the clothes in which he is left with the hand-sewn letter ‘R-E-N’ which he carries as a talisman. With only one hand, the other having been amputated as a baby, there is little chance that Ren will be adopted.

So it comes as a surprise to him when a handsome young man, Benjamin Nab arrives one day, claiming to be Ren’s brother, with a lurid story of murder and scalping of their parents by Indians. Benjamin takes Ren with him, and is delighted to learn that despite Ren’s Catholic upbringing, he is a light-fingered young fellow who, along with the pathos engendered by his missing hand, can assist Benjamin in the crime spree on which he embarks, young Ren in tow. Along with Ben’s accomplice, the alcoholic schoolteacher Tom, they steal a horse and strike a deal with a hospital surgeon at the small town of North Umbridge to provide bodies for dissection, disinterred from deserted graveyards. Benjamin spins ever more lurid tales to explain their journey and Ren’s absence of a hand, to the hard-of-hearing but good-hearted Mrs Sands WHO SPEAKS ONLY IN CAPITAL LETTERS. Mrs Sands accepts them into her boarding house, largely out of sympathy for Ren, and they share the house with the ‘mousetrap girls’ who work at McGinty’s mousetrap factory and Mrs Sands’ brother, a dwarf, who moves back and forth from his rooftop lair via the chimney. The mismatched group accumulate more and more people- a not-quite-dead assassin, twin escapees from St Anthony’s who were Ren’s only friends- and find themselves pursued by the ‘hat men’, hit-men employed by Silas McGinty, the mousetrap entrepreneur, who has tracked both Benjamin and Ren in order to extract information from them.

In good serialized fashion, each chapter ends on a cliff-hanger, and people who appear dead somehow come back to life, and appearances are deceptive. As a person with a cleft lip and palate herself, I found the designation of a young woman as ‘The Harelip’ confronting, but along with its depiction of dwarfism, authentic enough for the genre Tinti is reproducing. The book is tightly if rather fantastically plotted, and has just the sort of Victorian conclusion that one might expect. Actually, I couldn’t put it down.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: a friend.

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‘My Story: Tales from a Pioneer of Montsalvat’ by Sonia Skipper

Posted on July 24, 2026 | Leave a comment
2005, 186 p.

There have been two artists’ colonies in Melbourne that have really fired the imagination of writers, participants and curious neighbours for years. One of these was at Heide, in what is now suburban Bulleen where John and Sunday Reed curated a circle of artists including Joy Hester, Sidney Nolan, John Perceval and Albert Tucker (among others). The other was at Montsalvat in what is increasingly becoming suburban Eltham, overseen by Justus Jorgensen and later his son Sigmund. Both are now open to the public. But in staid Melbourne of the 1950s and 1960s there seemed to be something exotic and rather salacious about these artists’ communes.

I confess that I read this book not so much to learn about Montsalvat or Eltham, but because the opening chapters deal with Heidelberg and Eaglemont, which is of far more interest to me given my own connection with the Heidelberg Historical Society. Sonia Skipper was the middle child of author and theatre critic Mervyn Skipper and his wife Lena and she spent much of her childhood at Heidelberg, living in a house designed by Walter Burley Griffin that is now known as Skipper House.

Skipper House Outlook Drive Eaglemont

She attended Coreen, a small private school run by the daughters of a local minister and then Heidelberg State School (my own alma mater!). She was not happy at school and always had problems with spelling. As she herself admits, she did not inherit her father’s talent for writing, and this is reflected in the rather unadorned narrative voice that comes through the book. However, for my own purposes, she portrays Eaglemont in the late 1920s and 1930s well. She began attending art classes with Justus Jorgensen, and the family- parents Mervyn, Lena, and their children Helen, Sonia and son Matcham – became increasingly enmeshed with the Jorgensen circle- indeed Mervyn Skipper substantially funded it.

In 1934 Jorgensen became interested in a block of land in Eltham, 17 miles from Melbourne and still rural. ‘Jorgy’ and his wife Lily purchased the land, with Mervyn Skipper’s financial assistance and began building on the land using windows, doors and architectural features from properties being demolished in Melbourne by Whelan the Wrecker and drawing on the weekend labour of his art students. Sonia enjoyed this physical outlet for her energies, and as well as attending art classes in the city, spent much time at Eltham constructing the first buildings. The students’ quarters (later the dining room) and sleeping cubicles for the students were completed, and she seems to have spent a lot of time cooking for the groups of people who descended each weekend. Her elder sister, Helen, became Justus’ lover, and Sonia and her partner Arthur Munday moved there permanently.

However, she chafed under the patriarchal attitudes expressed particularly by Jorgy and the older male artists. This particularly came to the fore when she fell pregnant to Arthur when she was 20 years old. Arthur’s immediate response was “Oh, you will have to get rid of it”.

I was astounded. did he mean I should have an abortion? Well, I wasn’t going to be in that. When I said so he tried telling me all sorts of women had done it. It was simple, no harm done. I was most confused because it seemed to me the very opposite of what I understood the philosophy of the free life had been all about- that people had to take the consequences of their behaviour and be responsible for what came from it…He [Arthur] finally saw Jorgy and told him, and one morning Jorgy gave a long talk about the effect this happening would have on his, Jorgy’s reputation. He talked away for ages, and as far as I could make of it, it had nothing to do with my problem, nobody bothered to ask me what I thought or felt, apparently that didn’t count. Some of the arguments were for abortion, others for kicking me out, or for marriage, all reasoning was related to how Jorgy would be accepted by society, because I was one of his pupils. But what about Arthur? It wouldn’t make any difference to his acceptance. Very little of these arguments made any sense to me. It had to be a bloody comprehensible argument after that, or I didn’t believe those old men of the tribe sitting at the end of the table. They had so much to say about everything; but their only concerns, it seemed to me, were their own needs. (p.81)

She later found that her sister Helen, with whom she always had a conflicted relationship, was also pregnant- to Jorgy himself. Somehow now the fears of society’s censure were put to one side: instead it was now seen as a calculated idea, and now Jorgy said that:

Society would see how, with responsibility and forethought, a man in his situation with an invalid wife and a mistress, with their children, could live in a reasonable way, devoting their energies to the furthering of his work yet living a fulfilling life themselves. (p. 81)

The two cousins, Sonia’s Saskia and Helen’s Sebastian were born within days of each other, followed a few years later by Sigmund (all these children’s names starting with S seems a bit creepy to me). They were brought up at Montsalvat, where Lil (Jorgy’s wife) also lived with Max, her son by Jorgy. Sonia continued to work at Montsalvat, building and stone-carving and painting, while providing food for up to 25 people sitting around the dining room table.

With time, she felt that she needed to escape, and as a reader you sense how suffocating Jorgy had been:

It seemed to me that if I was ever going to be a fully functioning adult I needed to leave the safety of the family and establish my own independence. Had I learnt anything the outside world might need? What could I do to earn a living? This was a problem because Jorgy delighted in telling us we wouldn’t know how to get on in the outside world. Why should he be delighted, was it because he had such dominance over us that we couldn’t escape? Was this something that a teacher should be pleased with? I don’t think so. (p.157)

She did escape, eventually. She moved outside Montsalvat and worked locally with Alistair Knox on the mudbrick houses that Eltham is famous for. She fell in love with Joe Hannan, had a child with him, and bought a house in Research, before moving to Renmark in South Australia, where the asthma that had plagued her since a child improved. She continued to paint and work on her sculptures, and had exhibitions of her work- something that Jorgy always discouraged. Joe died in 2000, and presumably Sonia must have written this memoir prior to that because she speaks of “a romance that lasted for 48 years” (p. 169) and does not mention his death.

This is very much the memoir of an older woman. The copyright date is 2005, and she died in 2008 at the age of ninety. Enough time to carve out a life beyond Montsalvat, and to look back at the Monsalvat experience and its influence on her family and life with a mixture of resentment, pride and nostalgia.

Do I know what’s true about my life at Montsalvat? It has been somewhat sandpapered by time, so what is the reality I’m trying to arrive at, what events have I overlooked? The events that I thought important then, are they the ones I should concentrate on now? The ideas have become part of the person I am now. Just exactly what were Jorgy’s teachings or the added experience of living at Montsalvat I do not know. I’m not an ideas person after all, I am more of a “doer”. (p. 157)

My rating: 7/10 (not for the writing because it’s pretty ordinary, but because I found the subject matter fascinating)

Sourced from: Brotherhood Books.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 July 2026

Posted on July 22, 2026 | Leave a comment

Past Present Future I’ve only just started listening to this program, which is hosted by English academic David Runciman, which explores the history of ideas from politics to philosophy, culture to technology. I’m not quite sure why, but I found myself listening to Live Film Special: Never Let Me Go with Adam Rutherford. The episode was recorded in front of a live audience at the Regent Street Cinema in London where David talks to the geneticist and science writer Adam Rutherford about Mark Romanek’s 2010 film of Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. This is the second podcast I’ve heard about Never Let Me Go (the earlier one was in Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett’s The Book Club podcast) and it certainly seems that the book is standing the test of time well, given that it was written 20 years ago.

The History of Singapore Episode 4: A New Hope There were waves of decolonization. In the New World, starting with United States independence in the 1770s, the fall-out from the French revolution and the spread of independence through the Spanish colonies, especially in South America. Britain stood to benefit from this. In the Old World the rise of nationalism arose as ‘imagined communities’ because people believed in their sense of nation. After World War I empires collapsed, leading to ethnic diasporas. However, as P. J. Thum warns us (repeatedly) in this podcast, decolonization always leads to new repression.He suggests that new nations become oppressive themselves for those who do not fit into the new, independent nation, and that democracy is the only way to stop becoming an empire.

The Philosophers Zone I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about AI in preparation for a talk I’m giving at my Unitarian fellowship. Sentience (8 November 2024) features Jonathan Birch, Professor of Philosophy and  Principal Investigator on the Foundations of Animal Sentience project, London School of Economics. He distinguishes between sentience and consciousness. Sentience he sees as the capacity to have experiences with a positive or negative quality (e.g. pain, frustration, pleasure). Consciousness he defines more in terms of the immediate raw experience of the present moment, with more sophisticated reflection and conscious thoughts about experience; understanding oneself as a being that exists in time and has a future. He does not believe that AI is sentient yet, but he does not discount the possibility that it might be in the future. He pities AI if it does become sentient, because humans don’t have a good track record for treating sentient beings ell.

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