Category Archives: Book reviews

2015, 293 p.

Spoiler alert.

Mass journalism and crime have gone together, ever since those lurid, shrieking sensation newspapers of nineteenth-century England.  Certain crimes draw attention, especially those involving children and beautiful young women and  the whole case, from arrest through courtroom to punishment, becomes a media sensation in itself.  Journalists and writers are drawn to such cases: think, for instance of Helen Garner turning up in court day after day for her book on Robert Farquarhson This House of Grief , or John Bryson’s book Evil Angels on Lindy Chamberlain which ended up a feature-length film (and one which bestowed on us Meryl Streep’s classic “a dingo took my boi-boi”).  Gideon Haigh is a prolific journalist with thirty books to his credit. Many of these relate to his great love, cricket, but several examine corporate business life as well, with books on BHP, Bankers Trust and James Hardie. With this book Certain Admissions: A Beach, a Body and a Lifetime of Secrets, he turns to the true crime genre, in a book that echoes Garners’ work, and also that of Senior Crown Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi and biographer Suzanne Falkiner with their books on Eugenia Falleni .

Spoiler

I hadn’t heard of John Bryan Kerr or the murder of Beth Williams on Albert Park Beach in December 1949.  Apparently though, the case is well-known amongst the legal profession and police and it became a trope of popular culture- Graham Kennedy, for instance, joked about it many decades later in a reference that obviously went over my head.  Twenty-four year old John Bryan Kerr- handsome, with a mellifluous voice and confident bearing- was accused of murdering the twenty-year old typist, whom he had met under the Flinders Street clocks and whose body was found dragged into the shallows of Albert Park Beach. A confession was tendered by the police, but refuted by Kerr; the case went to the courts three times; Kerr continued to maintain his innocence throughout his imprisonment where he became a poster-boy for rehabilitation, and he was dogged by notoriety for the rest of his life.

Haigh starts  his narrative on the steps of Flinders Street Station, the quintessential Melbourne meeting place.  Witness statements are able to reconstruct Beth Williams’ interactions with various people as she stood there waiting, but from that point there are two different narratives.  The first is the one produced after questioning by two old-school coppers, Bluey Adams and Cyril Cutter.  It was a  remarkably short confession statement, considering the time that it took to elicit it, and Kerr disclaimed any involvement with it from the start.  The second narrative was the one that he gave the court, three times, with barely a deviation, and the one that he maintained in the many newspaper articles and letters that were written after his release from jail.

The pictures in the middle of the book reinforced the sensational nature of the trial and its aftermath.  People crowded to get into the courthouse and newspapers ran long series publishing his letters to his parents.  Even in jail, where usually the identity of prisoners is suppressed in any publicity, he featured in stories about rehabilitation programs being introduced into the prison system.  Always handsome, he photographed well.

The story is told chronologically over fifty years, but like all good journalists, Haigh teases out complications and counter-narratives.  He looks at the accused and the victim, but also at the police and the milieu in which they operated, and the legal counsel and judges who were involved in all three cases.  As a reader you lean one way and then another (and I suspect, Haigh as an author did the same thing).  There are no footnotes- that would have made it a different sort of story- although he does give his sources at the back of the book, many of which reside at the Public Record Office.

This is very good non-fiction, but it’s not history, nor is it the cutting, reflective, literary rumination of a Helen Garner (see here her July 2015 essay on darkness and crime).  The links between sources and his assertions are not specific enough for history and the narrative rambles off into digressions and asides before returning to the main story.  He offers observations and raises broader questions about the nature of confession and celebrity, but these are not mounted into an overarching argument. Frustratingly, the book lacks the index that would mark out the bare bones of his search, and a ‘search’ is very much the way the story is framed. Increasingly as the narrative nears recent decades, he inserts himself into the story, and it comes as a jolt to recognize familiar names -Ron Iddles, Barry Beach- as the story is brought forward into the spotlight of more recent crimes, most particularly that of Jill Meagher. These are not criticisms: instead, they are the hallmarks of the journalistic approach that Haigh employs so skillfully.

As time goes on, people ail and die; the case splutters back to life with media attention then fades again; there is in the end no definitive answer.  A lesser writer would have seen this as defeat, but Haigh takes this in his stride.  The consummate journalist, he is thorough and clear and  he admits to his limitations, making you feel as a reader that you are in the hands of a professional.  It’s a very good book.

2015, 320 p

Clever little title for a historian’s memoir, this. “ My history” in terms of background, family, early life etc and “my history” in terms of Fraser’s professional identity and published works.  I generally enjoy reading historians’ memoirs. They usually have the skills to put together a satisfying narrative arc ( or at least, you’d hope that they do). I enjoy reading about their intellectual and academic growth, and their perspectives on the writing process. I quite like the namedropping if it’s an area I’m familiar with (and read through gritted teeth if it’s not).

I’ve read quite a few Antonia Fraser books, all before I began blogging (Six Wives of Henry XVIII; The Gunpowder Plot; Marie Antoinette: The Journey). Oddly, though, I’ve never really thought of myself as a fan and I find myself recoiling a bit from the very proper and so terribly British persona she projects when I’ve seen her interviewed. However, I also read, and blogged The Perilous Question which I thought was excellent, and because it was based on a phenomenon -in this case, the 1832 Reform Act- rather than a person,  quite a different endeavour to her other books.

She was born in 1932 as Antonia Pakenham, the daughter of the 7^th Earl of Longford, named after Willa Cather’s book My Antonia and pronounces her name that way (AN-ton-ee-a). Her parents sound interesting: her mother was a Unitarian and a later convert to Catholicism, along with her husband and children. Antonia’s parents were both Socialists and both well ensconced within the gentry, a combination which I find fascinating. In many ways, she ‘grew into’ her parents as she became older. She attended Dragon School and St Mary’s School Ascot and went to Oxford University through Lady Margaret Hall. However, she describes herself as a less-than-brilliant student and went to work at the publishers Weidenfeld and Nicholson as an all-purpose assistant.

Despite this less than stellar academic career, she was always drawn to history, most particularly the story of Mary Queen of Scots. It was only when her mother, herself a historian, mooted writing a biography of Mary Queen of Scots that Antonia threw herself into what had been until then desultory research, to fend off her mother’s interest in what she saw as “her” topic. It was the first of Fraser’s books, published in 1969, followed by other biographical works with a particular focus on royalty, but she widened her scope over time. She has also written crime novels and an account of her relationship with playwright Harold Pinter, her second husband.

Lady Antonia Fraser is titled three times over: first as the daughter of the Lord of Longford; then through her first marriage to Sir Hugh Fraser, the Tory politician (to whom she says she was attracted because of his politics on the colonies), then finally as the recipient of a DBE (Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in 2011 for her services to literature.

There’s quite a bit of name-dropping in this book, and the first chapter was disconcertingly genealogically-based. Fortunately, it picked up after clambering around in the branches of family trees and I found her account of her racketty-gentry upbringing interesting (although quite foreign to this antipodean reader). At the end of the book she discusses some of the difficulties of biography-writing, most particularly the telescoping of time when the subject’s life grinds to a slow pace. Like all biographers, she speaks of the emotional experience of seeing letters written by her subject, and her love of “optical research” (i.e. touring around visiting places of significance in her subjects’ lives).

In all, a capably written memoir, as you might expect, but one that underscores that Fraser is not firmly ensconced within the world of academia. It gives an interesting perspective on a WWII gentry upbringing, and although it didn’t make me fall in love with Fraser as a biographer (as Richard Holmes’ memoirs did here and here), it did me a new respect for her biographical works.  I’m not sure if she’s still working- born in 1932 she’s getting on a bit- but she certainly has a solid body of work to her name.

2005, 406 p.

(I commenced this review in November immediately after finishing the book: I am now writing it nearly two months later, drawing mainly on the impressions that I took away from the book. I regret not writing this review earlier, because much of the nuance has escaped me.)

It was been a strange experience, reading this book in Kenya at this particular time.  The city teems with Kikuyu people whose parents (if not they themselves) would have most certainly be touched by the Mau-Mau rebellion in one way or another.  The battle for reparations from the British government now plays out in British courts  (see here and here)  and in September 2015 the British government funded the erection of a commemorative sculpture in Uhuru Park as part of reparation payments.  Most pertinently for me at the moment, the response to Mau Mau described in this book has resonances in the current political and legislative response to ISIS and religiously-inspired terrorism that we’re witnessing today.

So what was the Mau Mau rebellion, or uprising or revolt or Kenya Emergency (which ever term you want to use?) It was a military conflict that took place in Kenya between 1952 and 1960. As David Anderson, the author of this book explained in a short article for History Today:

Anderson commences his account by contextualizing it within the politics of empire and colonialism generally. World War II had given a huge boost to the settler economy, and capital was flowing into White Highland farm mechanization, boosting the confidence of white settlers to contemplate forcing Kikuyu squatters from what had been their traditional lands, thereby triggering the Mau Mau rebellions. He points out that in the 1950s Britain was moving towards independence generally for the former colonies, but that in both Rhodesia and South Africa, the white minority had managed to entrench its power and it seemed likely that a similar phenomenon would occur in Kenya as well.

Anderson draws upon court reports, both from the Supreme Court and the Special Emergency Assize Courts in order to populate his book with individuals, on all sides.  This emphasis on the individual, instead of the ‘mob’ is important, as it always is when fear of the ‘other’ is being evoked and whipped up.  The names of the Mau Mau generals are well known, but through the meticulously detailed court records, he finds the  shadowy and nameless “subalterns of the movement”: the food carriers, the oath administrators and the ordinary foot soldiers in the forest.

In Anderson’s focus on court records and processes, I found resonances with my own work looking at colonial courts during the 1830s-40s.  In Kenya in the 1950s, as in colonial courtrooms more than a century earlier, the court became the site in which the different political impulses of society were aired, but often shut down just as quickly to ensure that the political dimension of unrest was ignored. As in the 1830s slave colonies, Governors had to use legislation and special tribunals to circumvent settler (or in the case of the slave colonies, planter) dominance of the bench, and a small number of  judges sometimes raised their voices, albeit futilely, against legislative and political overreach. Many other judges, however, acted as the ultimate manifestation of systemic injustice  and repression, and became the state-legitimated enforcers of settler power.  In a foreshadowing of the emphasis of many governments today to ensure that punishments for terrorist offences are not ‘complicated’ by legal ‘niceties’ in the conventional legal system, the Special Emergency Assize Courts were promulgated in Kenya to ensure swift, uncompromising, consistent sentencing intended to quash Mau Mau action.

Local white settlers saw Mau Mau as a savage, depraved tribal cult. Certainly, this was intimate, close-up violence. However, in a foreshadowing of our current conceptualization of Islamic radicalization as an ‘evil’ that can be ‘cured’, Louis Leakey and other ethnographers advised the local and British governments instead that Mau Mau was an illness, innate to the African in transition. Emphasis was laid on confession and rehabilitation, which led in turn, to large-scale detention camps- a prospect not entirely impossible today in our present-day quest to stamp out extremism. The outlines of Abu Ghraib are detectable in the detention camps that swallowed up huge numbers of the population.

As Anderson presents it, there was violence on all sides, including within the Kikuyi themselves . It was, as he says “a story of atrocity and excess on both sides, a dirty war from which no one emerged with much pride, and certainly no glory.” p. 2  He questions the role of Jomo Kenyatta in the rebellion, and notes his influence in shutting down any discussion of Mau Mau in the years immediately following. Anderson is obviously ambivalent about the recent memorialization of Mau Mau as an expression of political liberation.

Anderson’s work in this book, as well as that Caroline Elkins in her book Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, are part of the ongoing debate about the nature and scope of  the Mau Mau rebellion. I read this book as an outsider, unfamiliar with the field, and I found Anderson’s writing engaging and easily accessible.  I know too little to assess his arguments, but I very much enjoyed his emphasis on the individual and the myriad influences that led all sides to act as they did. It strikes me as a balanced, nuanced appraisal, grounded in primary documents, with an eye to providing an informed and sober contribution to  current politics.

Bernard Porter has written a detailed review of both Anderson and Elkins’ work in the LRB that is far more erudite and detailed than anything I could hope to write.  There’s also an excellent podcast on Mau Mau at http://www.radiolab.org/story/mau-mau/