‘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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‘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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‘What We Can Know’ by Ian McEwan

Posted on July 19, 2026 | 1 comment
2025, 320 p.

Ian McEwan might have eighteen books under his belt, but I think that he’s right at the top of his form with his most recent book What We Can Know. It reassures me that (so far) AI could not generate a book with so many twists and so much complexity, humour and erudition. And that’s something that the characters of his book, set in 2119 would heartily agree with.

A book set in two parts, the first part is written in 2119 by literature professor and researcher Thomas Metcalfe, a scholar of the literature of 1990 to 2030, a period viewed by his undergraduate students as particularly dull. Metcalfe’s research interest and obsession is the British poet Francis Blundy, who regaled his dinner guests at a dinner party held in his country house in 2014 with a poem he had written especially for his wife Vivien. This poem, written in the form of a ‘corona’ involved fifteen sonnets on a theme, where the last line of each sonnet becomes the first line of the succeeding sonnet, linked together by a final sonnet which gathers the first lines together to make something new. It is a circular structure, gradually revealing something new, just like McEwan’s book. Only one copy of the corona had ever existed, written on vellum as a gift to Vivien, and it has disappeared. Metcalfe, like other Blundy scholars who had preceded him, has dreams of finding this corona poem, hailed as a vanished masterpiece. Instead his research is deluged by the digital sludge generated by 21st century daily life: the emails, the databases, the digital footprints that we leave without noticing. In the face of so much dross that tells so little, Metcalfe faces the dilemma of all biographers: how much to stick to the documented facts, and how much to indulge his imagination. The epigraph that McEwan has chosen for his book – reflected in the title- comes from one of my favourite biographers Richard Holmes, in his book Dr Johnson and Mr Savage. The author of many literary biographies, Holmes says of biography:

It concerns the kind of human truth, poised between fact and fiction, which a biographer can make as he tells the story of another’s life, and thereby make it both his own (like a friendship) and the public’s (like a betrayal). It asks what we can know, and what we can believe, and finally what we can love.

So Metcalfe proceeds in his research, inventing conversations and events, much to the disapproval of his fellow-academic and partner Rose, who takes a far more doctrinaire view of biographical research. The first part comprises alternating chapters when Thomas reflects in first-person narrative on his academic endeavour and progress, intersected with his own imagination-fired writing on Blundy. Blundy, in Metcalfe’s reconstruction, is a literary lion, somewhat pompous and vain, who revels in his literary fame and who subjects his dinner guests to a long recitation of the corona poem which he himself thinks “too good not to escape into the public realm one day”. Metcalfe imagines the dinner party, later characterized by literary scholars as ‘The Second Immortal Dinner’ with a nod, I think, to Mrs Dalloway as his wife Vivien prepares for the dinner party, and as the guests arrive. They all have different responses to the lengthy recitation of the poem- boredom, jealousy, bemusement- which they disguise with the clinking of glasses and raising of toasts of congratulations at Blundy’s brilliance. Vivien, on the other hand, Metcalfe sees as a brilliant woman who has subjugated her own career as an academic in order to support her husband’s, evoking shades of Anna Funder’s Wifedom or Drusilla Modjeska’s Stravinsky’s Lunch. This is her second marriage, her first having ended with the death of her husband Percy after years of dementia.

But all of this was long ago, and of only minimal interest to the undergraduate students of 2119. We learn that the world has changed much since the Second Immortal Dinner in 2014. An Intercontinental Ballistic Missile aimed at the USA exploded in the Atlantic Ocean, triggering ocean tsunamis that inundated the major cities of the world, leaving just peninsulas and islands in a flooded landscape. Networks were broken and the industrial system collapsed, resulting in a drop in population- something unforeseen in the doomsday predictions of the time. Then followed a number of wars: India against Pakistan; Saudi Arabia and Israel ranged against Iran (rather prescient, yes?) and China against the United States over Taiwan. The dust that rose from multiple nuclear explosions on several continents cooled the earth until it didn’t, as carbon emissions continued to climb. The students of 2119 have nothing but contempt for the pre-Inundation people:

Those ancients were ignorant, squalid and destructive louts. As one of the brighter students pointed out, surely they could have done something other than grow their economies and wage wars. Behind this, though never stated, is the nation that they deserved the mega-deaths they brought upon themselves.

An attempt to evoke some sense of empathy for the pre-Indudation people backfires, and Thomas and Rose’s relationship breaks up. Thomas throws himself back into his Blundy research and is on the verge of a breakthrough… then the narrative stops.

Part Two then takes up in a completely different format, written by a different voice in a different time. It took me longer than I like to admit to work out what exactly I was reading. I’m not going to spoil the book for you by explaining…read it yourself!.. and consequently, I’ll say less about the second part of book that the first even though I enjoyed them both equally. Suffice to say that we find, as Richard Holmes suggested, that “what we can know” is very limited. Events and observations are subverted by another voice, and that absent corona poem takes on a whole other meaning and purpose. There is some harrowing and all too realistic writing about dementia, and events presented in the golden glow of dinner-party candles become far more sinister.

McEwan has taken us on such a varied narrative journey: from literary mystery, a dystopian future, a reflection on history and biography, knowledge, truth and invention. I think that he’s having rather a lot of fun with the literary scene of the 2020s as well because he would know it well. His prose is so accomplished and seemingly effortless as he ranges so widely across genres and times. It reminded me of A. S. Byatt’s Possession in its intelligence, density and sheer erudition. It’s one of the best books that I’ve read in ages.

My rating: 10/10 (is it too early in the year for a 10?)

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection

Sourced from: purchased e-book.

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Posted in Book Reviews 2026, Ivanhoe Reading Circle

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 25-30 June 2026

Posted on July 16, 2026 | Leave a comment

Short History of… The East India Company. All this talk of Singapore and the East India Company drew me to this Short History episode from July 2025. When the upper class of Britain demanded the spices from East India, merchants were dependent on middlemen to procure them for them. On 31 December 1600 the East India Company received a royal charter which carried the authority of the English Crown without the Crown having to assume financial responsibility for its activities. Their charter enabled them to establish ‘factories’, comprising fortified warehouses, a residence and officer’s mess, in specific locations. In 1610 it adopted a Joint Stock structure which allowed a generalized investment, instead of funding an individual voyage. When the Dutch and English came into conflict in the East Indies, the East India Company looked to India instead as a new source of markets. They undertook a new approach with the Nawabs: at first they were defensively armed but eventually they had 250,000 Mughals under their banner. The Mughals thought that they had control over the East India Company instead of the other way around, but by the early 18th the Mughal empire was fracturing. In 1744 eighteen-year-old Robert Clive arrived in India, first as a clerk then as an army officer. He became involved in Nawab politics and battles, and in 1765 was given taxing power first in Bengal, and then later throughout the provinces as well. At its peak the East India Company controlled half of all global trade. It extended further between 1760 and 1830 and turned itself to the ‘civilizing mission’ of Anglicizing India. However, by 1772 it had to be bailed out of financial trouble and in 1773 was constrained by the Regulating Act which installed Warren Hastings as Governor General in Bengal (or was it just governor, Barry Jones?) In 1787 Hastings was impeached after a 7 year trial. In 1784 the India Act renewed the East India Company’s charter but increasingly stripped back its power. In 1824 the Company banned suttee, and in 1833 lost its tea monopoly. It lost further prestige with the Opium Wars and the 1857 Indian Mutiny when a patchwork of mutinies was repressed viciously. By now the East India Company was no longer trusted to rule and in 1859 it was overtaken by the Crown. In 1874 it was dissolved, but its intellectual framework remained.

Tocqueville Road Trip. Unfortunately only two episodes of this series seem to be available, but I’m enjoying it so far. It’s presented by The Economist, where the Economist’s US editor John Prideaux uses Alexis De Tocqueville’s book Democracy in America as a guidebook as he travels around Trump’s America. ADT (my initials for Alexis De Tocqueville) was in America for 9 months in 1831 where he visited 17 of the 24 states, filling 14 notebooks with his observations. At this time, America was the first modern society without an arisocracy, and ADT writes about the “idea” of America, where democracy was a social phenomenon rather than a political one, underpinned by the equality of conditions. In Episode 1 Game of Chance Prideaux follows De Tocqueville to New York where he, like ADT was hosted by New York’s elite. ADT met President Andrew Jackson – Trump’s favourite president (ADT was not impressed) but Prideaux had to settle for a function at the Lincoln Centre attended by New York arts luminaries. He speaks with two very wealth New Yorkers: Babara Tober, Philanthropist and former Editor of Brides magazine and John Catsimatidis, CEO of Red Apple Group. The latter in particular has become very Trumpist. Prideaux observes that most Americans say that they would rather live in the past, and a majority of people view their fellow citizens as morally bad. Objectively the United States is more equal than in ADT’s time so why have so many Americans lost faith in it?

How Did We Get Here? Israel and the Palestinians Episode 9: From the Second Intifada to Netanyahu’s Re-election. This episode features two journalists who have reported from Israel and the Occupied Territories: journalist and film-maker Jane Corbin, who has been reporting from the region for more than 30 years, and by the BBC’s International Editor Jeremy Bowen. The second Palestinian intifada, or uprising – bloodier than the first – began on the West Bank and in Gaza in 2000 and lasted till 2005. It resulted in the deaths of over 4000 Palestinians about 1500 Israelis (this 3:1 ratio is much lower than the death ratio that we’ve seen in Gaza recently). It was triggered by the visit of Likud’s Ariel Sharon to the Al Aqsa mosque, but was grounded in the failure of the Oslo Accords. At first the Palestinian protests were unarmed, but when met with a heavy Israeli response, the violence increased. By 2001 Sharon was Prime Minister, replaced Labor’s Ehud Barak. Suicide bombings in Israel led to a heavy response in the West Bank, and the erection of a wall, not on the Green Line but jutting into Palestinian land. Arafat found himself isolated in Ramullah before his death in 2004, leading to the rise of new groups. In 2005 Sharon ordered disengagement in Gaza- somewhat surprising given that he was from Likud, but he was aware of the demographic timebomb in Gaza and thought it best to withdraw. Hamas arose in 2004, at first providing social services, and in 2006 it won elections in Gaza. There was a brief civil war in 2007 between Hamas and Fatah. The US, Israel and the ‘Quartet’ (United States, European Union, Russia, and United Nations) all opposed Hamas. In 2009 Netanyahu became Prime Minister for the second time. He had always been opposed to a two-state solution, but he has waxed and waned in his approach and at first he saw Hamas as a counter to Fatah. He has always been confident of US support, to the extent of disregarding Barak Obama’s request not to address Congress.

War Games Grey Zone Episode 4 Cyber Power (Part I) Cyber Pearl Harbour. The National Cyber Security Centre has identified three types of cyber threats: 1. Theft of money or data 2. Attacks for strategic advantage e.g. the theft of a huge cache of US data on public servants, including fingerprints, by China; or the planting of spyware. 3. Cyber destruction to cause physical harm. So far this hasn’t happened, although there are signs of it with the Russian cyber attacks on Ukraine’s infrastructure. It’s unlikely that there will be a huge, one-off event like Cyber Pearl Harbour or Cyber 9/11: instead it’s more likely that there will be a drip, drip. They then go on to talk about the May 2017 WannaCry attack, blamed on North Korea, which seriously impacted the UK’s NHS because they were using old computers. They also speak with Marcus Hutchins, a young hacker employed by a computer company, who was able to reverse engineer WannaCry.

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Posted in Podcasts 2026

‘The Mushroom Tapes’ Helen Garner, Chloe Hooper and Sarah Krasnostein

Posted on July 7, 2026 | 2 comments
2025, 256 p.

These three noted authors – all of whom had written about criminal trials previously- were not the only ones transfixed by the Erin Patterson trial. Just as had occurred with Lindy Chamberlain 40 years earlier, it seemed that everyone in Australia had a view over whether 49-year old Erin Patterson had deliberately poisoned her former in-laws and their relatives using deathcap mushrooms or whether it was an inadvertent and tragic accident. Beef Wellington and mushrooms became a running, if somewhat uneasy joke, and reports of the trial went around the world.

And who better to look at it than these three women? Helen Garner, who after a noted career in fiction-writing turned to courtroom reporting with Joe Cinque’s Consolation (my review here) and This House of Grief (my review here), approaches a trial with her own moral weighing-scales in hand, interrogating not only what she is hearing but what she thinks she would do in similar circumstances. Chloe Hooper was the author of two books centering on court cases: The Tall Man about the death of indigenous man Mulrunji while in police custody in 2004, and the trial of Chris Hurley, the police officer accused of Muylrunji’s death in custody (my review here) and The Arsonist, the police case and resultant trial of Brendan Sokaluk, the man found guilty of intentionally lighting the Churchill fires on Black Saturday 2009 (my review here). Sarah Krasnostein is probably better known for her book The Trauma Cleaner (my review here) which does not have a legal focus, but I have recently read, and been very impressed by Krasnostein’s lengthy essay in November 2023 in the Monthly “Peace in the Home: The Trial of Malka Leifer”, about child abuser Malka Leifer. This essay earned her a Walkley Prize.

The subtitle of the book is ‘Conversations on a triple murder trial’ and this is exactly what it is: a series of conversations recorded in the car to and from Morwell to sit in on the trial. As the trial goes on and all three can no longer attend together, telephone conversations take place from motel rooms to the others in Melbourne. Their conversations reflect the personality and authorial concerns of each of the writers: Chloe Hooper conceptualizes the trial in terms of fairystories and archetypes reflecting her first book A Child’s Book of True Crime, while Sarah Krasnostein brings her lawyer’s mind to what she is witnessing. Helen Garner, who has admitted that, with age, the idea of writing a whole book is beyond her, contributes her own reflections on moral culpability interspersed with some rather odd, off-centre observations of things around her. I confess at times to feeling that they were like a Greek chorus, or dare I even say, Macbeth’s witches (!!), commenting from a distance and without personal ramifications. Apparently, there were plans, since abandoned, for it to form the basis for a podcast and in the days of True Crime podcasts where the narrator becomes part of the action, they are operating in a crowded field. The book does have the fingerprints of haste as well – having to get ahead of the deluge of books that will no doubt follow the trial- but it gave you the feeling of sitting in the back seat of the car, talking things over, trying to make sense of a crime so strange and unbelievable.

I’m not sure that this book will stand the test of time: its approach is probably too immediate and its appeal too wrapped up in the current-day reputations of the authors. But for us now, having read the newspaper articles and seen the television interviews and reports of the trial, it’s like having a good gossip with friends.

My rating: 8.5/10

Read because: curiosity. What else?

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Posted in Book Reviews 2026

Movie: The Captive (El Cautivo)

Posted on July 6, 2026 | Leave a comment

It’s true that the writer Miguel de Cervantes was kidnapped and held for ramson in Algiers in 1575 by Muslims. Despite the hopes of his kidnappers, his family could not afford to pay the ransom and so he remained in captivity for five years. During this time he discovered his skill for storytelling, a skill that not only amused his fellow captives but also brought him into contact with the bored and lascivious Hassan Baja, regent (or Bey) of Algiers from 1577 to 1580 and from 1582 to 1587. The whole movie is suffused with homoeroticism, which I’m not really sure was reflected in de Cervantes’ real life- a bit of 21 century mischief there, I suspect. I knew absolutely nothing about de Cervantes, and have never read or seen Don Quixote, so it was all new to me.

I saw it as part of the Spanish Film Festival.

My rating: 4/5

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Posted in Movies 2026