Category Archives: Book reviews

The full title of this book is Humanity’s Moment: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope. I find it hard to imagine that a climate scientist could have any hope. Report after report comes out, each hammering the same point – that we have to act NOW- only for it to be engulfed in the news cycle by some new event with better video footage to attract eyeballs. Australians concerned about climate change congratulated themselves for shaking off the climate inertia of the last ten years, only to see our newly minted government open up exploration licences for more fossil fuel extraction and parrot the mining companies’ “well-if-we-don’t-dig-it-up-someone-else-nasty-will” mantra. Even I with my admittedly limited scientific education was shouting at the television: so I wonder what climate scientists were thinking as they heard this?

Joëlle Gergis IS a climate scientist. She was one of about a dozen Australian lead authors working on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report that was released mid-2021. As part of Working Group 1, her task was to provide the scientific foundation for understanding the risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and avoidance of dangerous levels (p10). It was her job to review thousands of peer-reviewed scientific studies, and distill their key findings. Their draft underwent government and expert review, and they returned to their chapter to address the 51,387 technical comments they received before its release in August 2021, in the midst of the pandemic. By the time the Seventh report comes out in 2030, it may well be too late to achieve the Paris Target.

What a thought. Too late by 2030. Eight years. My eldest grandchild will be a teenager. My youngest grandchild will be in lower primary school. Ah, you say, you’re thinking with your heart and not your head. But this is exactly what Gergis does in this book: she thinks with her heart AND her head. This is not without risk. She is open about her own depression, much of which springs from being heart-sick about the implications of her work. This is still a ‘brave’ thing for a scientist to do, particularly a female scientist who would face old stereotypes of being ‘hysterical’ and ‘shrill’. But she insists that we cannot think about climate change with our head alone: we need to bring our hearts to it as well.

The book is divided into three sections on this basis: The Head, The Heart and The Whole. The first section, The Head, is facts and statistics. There was so much I didn’t know. As part of the the IPCC Sixth Assessment, five ‘shared socioeconomic pathways’ were developed, showing temperature rises under very low, low, intermediate, high and very high greenhouse gas emissions. It is discouraging that the ‘intermediate’ scenario is now seen as the most likely, with a rise in temperature of 2.0 degrees in 2040-2060 and 2.1 – 3.5 degrees between 2081 and 2100 (when my grandchildren will probably still be alive). A whole cascade of consequences will ensue: changes in weather patterns and ocean currents, sea level rise, loss of biodiversity, food insecurity, water insecurity, refugee flows… It is just overwhelming and terrifying.

Part II, The Heart, acknowledges this:

I’m sure, by now, many of you want to put this book down and stop reading. Trust me, I understand how you feel. These last few chapters have been really, really difficult for me to write….I’ve found myself overcome by tears many times and I’ve come to terms with the reality of what I’m writing, especially material that I don’t deal with directly as a climate scientist. Usually I’m working with physical variables like temperature and rainfall that can be neatly analysed and understood. But when you start to understand the reality of what the numbers actually mean for the people and places we love, you find yourself face to face with something so profoundly sad…This process has put me in touch with a sense of grief that sometimes leaves me feeling like a broken mess.

p.137

This section is written in “us” language: she, the writer, is talking to us, the reader. She speaks of fear, despair, frustration – deeply human responses- and I feel as if here I am reading the answer to my own question “what were climate scientists thinking when they heard this?”. They were crying. They were frightened. And when I hear this, I am frightened too.

Who is going to lead us out from all this? she asks in Part III. Her answer is that we are going to have to do it ourselves. This is an ‘active hope’ for her but I wish I felt as sanguine as she does. She sees hope in COP26’s agreement to phase out coal-fired electricity in the 2030s for major economies and 2040s for developing countries. She despairs at the failure of leadership that led to the watering-down of pledges, but holds onto the awareness that the 100,000 people protesting in the streets of Glasgow were part of a world-wide Global Day of Action for Climate Justice taking place in over 100 countries. It is, she says “the biggest social movement of our time. A time of true global citizenry, driven by our passion to save the one thing that sustains us all: our Earth”(p.162). She celebrates the arrival of the Teal Independents and the success of the Greens in recent Australian politics, and the election of Joe Biden with his strong emphasis on climate action, especially in comparison to Trump. She looks to books, music, films and poetry as fuel for the social movement that will bring change. She acknowledges that

no matter how many facts and figures I give people, in the end it is probably going to be a book, an artwork, a song, a photograph, a play, a performance or a film that eventually helps awaken their sense of care for other people and the natural world…. We need artists to help scientists translate the cold, hard facts into raw human emotions.

p 188,190

She talks about how change happens, looking at the domino effect when a critical threshold of society changes its minds. She cites a study by Damon Centola from the University of Pennsylvania who argues that the threshold for a social tipping point was passed when the size of a committed minority reached approximately 25 per cent of the population. Once this social tipping point was reached, between 72 and 100 per cent of people eventually adopted the new convention (p.194, 195).

I must say that I find some of these tendrils of hope rather insubstantial. Teals and Greens notwithstanding, those exploration licences were still issued by the Federal Government. The fossil fuel lobby is just as powerful as ever, now cloaking itself in support for “blue” hydrogen. That number of 25% support to bring about social change, however it was reached, can go just as easily the other way. I note that 25% was pretty much the proportion of votes attained by right wing parties in Sweden, and projected for the Brothers of Italy in the upcoming Italian elections. For myself, I bristle against the ‘preachiness’ of the arts dressing themselves in the most recent issue of the month, and climate change is too important to have us rolling our eyes at being ‘told’. Let music, art, writing celebrate being human and our environment on its own terms: it is enough.

For it is her final claim on the goodness of people and the need to keep “showing up” that probably chimes closest to my own ideas.

While we all behave badly sometimes, most people are honestly doing the best that they can from day to day. Most ordinary people, deep down, really do care about the planetary crisis we are facing, but they often feel powerless and disillusioned about their ability to influence change…Instead of being someone who confirms someone’s distrust of the basic goodness in humanity, you can choose to be a light in dark places for those around us…We can choose which side of history we want to be on and make the personal choices that help make the world a better place. So many of us have lost faith in the goodness in humanity, we’ve lost touch with our inner knowing of what is true and whole in ourselves and each other. When we contact this universal place of compassion and the interconnectedness of our hearts, we experience a sense of homecoming, a deeply felt sense of our belonging to our shared humanity.

p. 226, 227

This is an important book because it connects the head and the heart. It is deeply rooted in the science- you only have to look at the bibliography to see that- but it is realistic about the political challenge. At times the writing, especially when describing nature, is a bit overwrought and self-conscious, but the passages where she talks about her response at an emotional level are raw and honest, and above all human. Because in the end, it is the recognition of being human, together, that is our best hope.

My rating: 8.5/10

Sourced from: Review copy Black Inc.

Just a little shift of perspective can bring a whole new way of seeing. When we think of “The Goths”, we tend to think of something dark, gloomy and menacing. “The Goths” are often linked with the category of “Barbarian” and they are seen as one of the main causes of the downfall of that marbled, marvellous empire of Rome. But if we shift our focus slightly, we can see the Goths as a tribal group with their own territorial, cultural and political aspirations within and alongside an arrogant culture which was happy to use their labour and bodies but with-hold any power. “The torture of our powerlessness” was how the Uluru Statement described it in Australian history, and in Douglas Boin’s biography of Alaric the Goth, we see how this powerlessness was turned against a society eaten hollow from within by compromises made to protect the wealth and interest of the powerful.

Alaric was born in around 370CE in what is now Romania. He lived close to the banks of the Danube River, a physical border which at some times was outside the Roman Empire or, at other times, was seen as a provincial part of the Empire. The designation of the border determined whether an inhabitant might be eligible to be a Roman citizen or not. In 212 Emperor Caracalla published the Antonine Declaration, which immediately gave citizenship to every free-born resident of a Roman province. However, by 275CE Rome had abandoned Dacia, along the Danube, as a Roman province, and had withdrawn its legal system and financial investment, along with its military. Had Alaric been born 150 years earlier, he would have been a Roman citizen.

As it was, by 370CE the only way he could achieve citizenship was to serve in the army for decades, and that is what he did. Goths could serve in the Roman army, but instead of marking inclusion, the presence of non-Roman soldiers was a sign of Rome’s entropy. Italian landowners did not want to pay taxes, so Rome had to keep expanding outwards to take in more tax-paying inhabitants, without actually making them citizens. Wealthy Roman families kept their best workers hidden, so that they would not be drafted into the army and so the Roman army became dependent on mercenaries from the surrounding peoples. Alaric, who had the trust of the Goth troops he led, moved up the military ranks, but the imperial government always maintained a ceiling on the aspirations of its ‘alien’ generals. After having his troops used as cannon fodder in battles, and being sidelined and retrenched once too often, Alaric rallied the Goths against Rome. His knowledge of Roman tactics and logistics empowered him to take the battle right to Rome itself, which his troops ‘sacked’ in 410CE , although even this ‘sacking’ did respect the sanctuary provided by churches, as Alaric shared the Christian faith of the Roman Empire by this time.

Any historian working on this era is frustrated by the partisanship and paucity of sources. There is no written record of Alaric until he emerges as an adult, and Boin has to rely heavily on Jordanes’ The Origins and Deeds of the Goths, the only Gothic history book which survives from antiquity. In this absence, Boin extrapolates and turns around the sources we do have from other perspectives to locate Alaric within the broader historical movements of the time. He is aware of the dangers and limitations of this approach, but I think that he succeeds in providing a context and a rationale for Alaric’s actions. His argument that the bombastic attitude of Roman society towards ‘outsiders’ is a strong one, which has resonances for today’s politics of the West as well. As well as fleshing out a biography for Alaric this book is, as the title suggests ‘An Outsider’s History of the Fall of Rome’ and although Boin suggests most of the same factors as other historians, by shifting the focus to the success of the Goths rather than the failure of the Romans, these factors become personalized.

Although Boin does not mention it at all, this book fits well into the recent turn to the History of Emotions. Any Roman history is incomplete without battles (particularly if it’s a biography of a general and warrior) but Boin focuses more on the individual’s experience of warfare rather than military strategies. Insult, frustration and pride – the emotions of oppression and injustice- are given full weight, and make this a very human biography. I have only come to Roman History recently, and I prefer big history on a human scale.

The book is beautifully written. Boin has a light touch, a good eye for description, and takes the reader – including readers (like me) with little knowledge of Rome, or the Goths – along with him. There are little digressions which detract him (and the reader) at times, perhaps because as a historian he could not resist the more definitive sources that did come his way. Judging by Goodreads comments, readers either tend to love it or hate the book. For me, it was a really engaging read in its own right for its exploration of an individual and the broader forces of history.

My rating: 8.5/10

Sourced from: own copy.

One of several very good things that the Labor government has done since taking power is to discontinue the case against Bernard Collaery, charged with helping his client Witness K who acted as a whistleblower over East Timor oil negotiations (I reviewed Collaery’s book here). This is not the only case that has been brought by the Australian government that is shrouded in secrecy and non-disclosure (indeed there may be others under way- how would we know?) Just recently we have learned that senior intelligence officer Witness J. was tried, sentenced and imprisoned in secret under s22 of the National Security Information (Criminal and Civil Proceedings) Act 2004. For the individuals involved, their cases might be discontinued, inquiries might be held, sentences may be commuted – but what happens afterwards?

Ric Throssell could tell you. The son of Australian writer Katharine Susannah Prichard (see review of Nathan Hobby’s biography here) and war hero Hugo Throssell, he found himself caught up in the surveillance of his openly-communist mother, was identified by Petrov as a spy, and was brought before the Royal Commission on Espionage 1954-55. He was cleared by this commission, but the allegations never went away. He had already been employed by the Department of Foreign Affairs before these accusations surfaced, and for the rest of his life he found himself passed over for promotion. The allegations continued to be promulgated by media figures and historians.

Karen Throssell, Ric’s daughter, takes up her father’s fight in this book that was shortlisted for the Dorothy Hewett Award for an Unpublished Manuscript It is very much a labour of love, as you see the adult daughter continue her father’s vigilance against repeated public accusations made by historians and commentators, balanced against her memories of a father, a familiar (in both senses of the word) presence in her life. There’s an element of the wounded child there too, as her father took his own life on the same day that her mother died.

The typesetting is very important in this book. There is a lot of white space, with a heading on each left-hand page and sometimes as little as a sentence on the right hand side. It is presented as a series of 103 “Items”, each numbered “Item #103” as a file might be. This evocation of the file is important, because Ric and his daughter’s fight was against files: files made, files with-held. The items comprise a range of genres: poetry, paragraphs, newspaper cuttings, letters, more extended writing over one or two pages.

I’m not particularly keen on a recent form of memoir where the author throws everything onto the table, leaving it to the reader to piece together a narrative (see here and, to a lesser extent, here). I’m old-fashioned enough to expect that the authors have a responsibility to structure the narrative. Throssell’s book does have a narrative, in that there is a roughly chronological order, and the book is divided into sections as the long campaign for justice moves forward. The “item” layout gives a sense of the fragmentary and disconnected.

However, the ordering of the book seems strange to me, although this possibly says as much about me as a reader as it does about the book. There is a system behind the typography, but you only discover the ‘key’ if you turn to the notes at the back of the book. There you learn that the white type on black boxes are Ric Throssell’s own writings, as distinct from Karen’s. Bold format within quotes denotes words written by the author. I would have appreciated this information at the start, because the white on black boxes particularly puzzled me – who is writing this? is this fictional or not? While I acknowledge that this confusion can be interpreted as a meta-comment about truth/allegation and the file as artifact, it did not contribute to my reading at the time.

The book finishes with an essay by historian Phillip Deery which gives the historical context to ASIO, the Royal Commission and the Venona Project but I felt that this would have been much better placed at the beginning. In fact, I’m a little surprised that the author didn’t want to have the last word, instead of turning it over to someone else- after all, the “last word” is what her father had fought for all his adult life.

And, as long as ‘secrecy’ trumps ‘justice’, he won’t be the last to do so.

My rating: 6.5

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

There are many reasons why a reader might pick up Elizabeth Finch. After all, Julian Barnes is one of UK’s notable writers; each of his books tends to be quite different from the others; and he displays wit and erudition in his works. I’ve read quite a few of his books after being stunned by History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and Flaubert’s Parrot (both read before I started blogging), and all up I have read eight of his books.

But the real reason that I read this book was because, nestled between Parts I and Part III is an essay on Julian the Apostate. I should imagine that for many readers, this section on Julian was an obscure and boring distraction – after all, who has an essay in the middle of a novel, especially about a long-dead Roman emperor? But if you follow this blog, you’ll know that for the last 18 months I have been listening to Mike Duncan’s ‘History of Rome‘ podcast- a mighty 189-episode performance. I was fascinated by Julian, later designated ‘the Apostate’, who was the last non-Christian ruler of the Roman Empire and who tried to undo his uncle Constantine’s tolerance for -and indeed encouragement of- Christianity. I know that ‘good’ historians shouldn’t indulge in ‘what-if?’ history but -oh- alternative scenarios just unroll before your eyes when considering the suppression or withering away of Christianity before it really got started: no churches; no Popes; a whole range of gods to choose from. Perhaps. But ‘what if’ Julian didn’t die at just 31 years of age, but instead lived to become more intolerant and repressive and ended up ‘Julian the Cruel’ instead? This is one of the threads in the 48-page essay about Julian the Apostate in Part II of this book, an essay which may have led me to choose this book, but probably repelled many more readers than it attracted.

Parts I and III of the book return to the eponymous Elizabeth Finch, a quietly-spoken, demure lecturer in a Culture and Civilisation course for adult students. The narrator, Neil, is one of the older students in the class, and while he shares the fascination of his fellow students for this inscrutable, rather insipid, teacher, Part I is almost a love-letter to her and her effect on transforming his ‘paltry thoughtlets into something of fuller interest’ (p.15). The course completed – even though Neil didn’t get round to writing the required essay on a topic of his choice- he and Elizabeth (abbreviated to E. F.) continued to meet for lunch for the next twenty years. Pasta, one glass of white wine, coffee: she always paid and the meal always lasted seventy-five minutes. When she died, she left to him all her books and papers, although her only sibling Christopher was the executor of the rest of her estate. It was while going through her papers that Neil realized that E.F. (like me!) had been drawn to Emperor Julian, and it was now- 20 years later- that Neil wrote the essay that he had failed to write at the end of the course- and it is this essay that makes up Part II of the book. In Part III we return to Neil, who is by now trawling through E. F.’s life, trying to make small snippets fit, and recalling what Neil came to think of The Shaming, when a small public lecture for the London Review of Books given by E.F. blew up into a small but ultimately inconsequential controversy. Neil is making a dogged attempt to reconstruct her biography, but the pieces don’t fit. Her rather dull brother Christopher knows only ‘Liz’, his fellow students have had their own interactions with her, of which he was completely oblivious, and have made their own judgements. The hero-worship of Part I gives way in Part III to a rather bleak acknowledgment of the unknowability of any other person and the unrecoverability of the past.

I must say that I am rather puzzled by this book. It reminded me of J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello in more ways than one. Barnes’ choice of title evokes Coetzee’s book, and both are about the research passions of middle-aged academic women (both written by middle-aged academic-type men).

As far as Elizabeth Finch is concerned, I don’t really know what it’s for. I wasn’t particularly convinced by Elizabeth Finch’s brilliance, I found Neil’s adoration rather mawkish and his attempts to trawl through her life intrusive, and his essay -his act of devotion- on Julian rather uninspiring. I don’t know whether to be disappointed or to wonder whether there was something I missed.

My rating: 6.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Other reviews: Lisa at ANZLitLovers reviewed it and discovered that the front cover has been carefully designed to highlight the fragmentary nature of our knowledge of other people – something that was completely lost on me, because my library book had been covered in plastic! (E-book readers will miss it too)

I must admit that I have not watched the video of the full 9 minutes and 29 seconds that it took George Floyd to die under Derek Chauvin’s knee as he was being arrested. I wonder how many people have: after all, nine minutes and 29 seconds doesn’t fit well into a half-hour news broadcast. But in that time a giant of a man, pinned down by a little, cocky man oblivious to the entreaties of George himself and the remonstrations of a small crowd of onlookers, exemplified what the Uluru Statement here in Australia identified as “the torment of our powerlessness”. Since his death on Memorial Day 25 May 2020, George Floyd’s image has been painted on walls, printed onto t-shirts, and the demand to ‘Say His Name’ echoed around the world, spawning protests across the world sparked by, but not restricted to, his death. This book, subtitled ‘One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice’ looks at George Floyd as a person, but also the whole web of history, economics and politics that brought that knee down on his neck.

The book is based on more than 400 interviews with the people who were close to George Floyd. It is interwoven with explanations that knot together the specifics of Floyd’s life and wider historical movements. What this book lays out is the way that structural racism, built gradually by historical events both large and small, government policies and their intended and unintended consequences, and spoken and unspoken assumptions have constructed a web that held George Floyd under, just as surely as that knee did.

Although some of the interviewees, who knew him as Perry rather than George, imbue him with a posthumous sanctity that might not have been commented on while he was alive (a not uncommon phenomenon), there is no attempt here to hide the fact that George Floyd was struggling with poverty and addiction. A big man, he was very much aware that people were frightened of him. He had been a football and basketball player at school and college, in an educational sporting environment that prizes sporting prowess over educational achievement in a lottery of sporting contracts with little preparation for anything else. A string of eight minor crimes led to him accepting a plea bargain for a crime which he probably did not commit, and he spent four years in prison. He left Houston Texas and his extended family to go to Minneapolis, where he tried to start again but was drawn back into addiction.

But there’s a political and social background to all this. Turning back to Reconstruction after the Civil War, there was a deliberate policy of ‘take down’ as black families worked hard and some became successful, only to lose their properties through tax defaults and bureaucratic hurdles imposed on people who, when enslaved, were not permitted to learn how to read. Housing policies and red-lining saw neighbourhoods rise and fall economically; the state of Texas refused outright to desegregate their schools leading to a two-track education system; the plea-bargain system balances the possibilities of long and short sentences in a form of judicial gambling; employment possibilities narrowed once a prison sentence was served; State policies over health and welfare support acted as push factor (away from Texas) and pull factor (towards Minnesota) factors; the opioid epidemic linked the medical system and the street scene; the over-policing of his neighbourhood meant that a disputed $20.00 note ended up in death.

The authors are journalists, and certainly this book flows well. The backgrounding chapters give clear, historical information showing the almost inevitable conjunction of George’s death and the wider forces that had shaped his life. Although there are no footnotes as such, the page-number references at the back of the book give their sources, most with a web reference attached.

The book does not end optimistically. The Rev. Al Sharpton warned George’s brother Philonise that for every action there is a reaction, and this has proven to be true. The conservative uproar about Critical Race Theory and the ‘White Lives Matter’ rhetoric is a pushback and an attempt to silence. But I don’t think that you could finish reading this book without having a better grasp of the sequence of small events that constitutes structural racism, and its almost inevitable aftermath.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

I must confess that I was initially attracted to this book by its striking cover, but when I dipped into the preface by Hermione Lee, I thought that I would enjoy it.

The writing of lives often involves writing about houses. Bringing a house to life through observation, familiarity, memory or excavation can be a vital part of narrating the life of an individual, a family, or a group: life-work as house work. A house can embody a person’s childhood, the story of a marriage, an inherited way of life, or a national history. The constructing of a house can be the fulcrum of dreams, ambitions, illusions and pretensions. How a house is lived in can tell you everything you need to know about people, whether it’s the choice of a wall paper, the mess in the kitchen, the silence or shouting over meals, doors left open or closed, a fire burning in the hearth. the loss of a house can be a turning point that shapes the rest of a life.

p.xiii

If I had read a little further into the preface, I would have seen that the collection of essays in this book emerged from a 2017 conference titled ‘The Lives of Houses’ held at the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing at Wolfson College, Oxford. My ambivalence about the book probably springs from the conference-paper genre from which it emerges. This conference brought together scholars from different disciplines and professions, with an emphasis on British, Irish, American and European houses. As with all conferences, the speakers (particularly the ‘big names’) would have been known to each other, their areas of interest already known, and their contributions would have been rather standardized in length. And ‘big names’ there are: Hermione Lee, Margaret Macmillan, David Cannadine, Jenny Uglow, Julian Barnes. Although there were papers that broke the mould, the overwhelming impression that I took away from the book was of 19th century British writers and a peculiarly British form of being ‘the writer’ in a mixture of eccentricity and domesticity.

The first two essays suggested a less biographically-oriented approach. Alexandra Harris’ chapter ‘Moving House’ pointed out that ‘moving day’ was a common annual or biannual spectacle across Europe and America from the Middle Ages to the early 20th century. Leases ran from one quarter-day to the next, and so expired in tandem, so Whitsun (25 May) in Scotland or Lady Day (6 April) in England was ‘moving day’, with another round at Michaelmas and Martinmas (11 November). Susan Walker’s chapter ‘Built on Memory’ examined the House of Venus in Morocco, a Roman house constructed in the late 1st century CE in what was at that time the edge of empire, extended and changed over the centuries, and finally abandoned in the early 5th Century CE until its excavation in the last years and aftermath of WWII. But with the exception of Canadian historian Margaret Macmillan’s reminiscences of her childhood home in Ontario, the majority of essays are about British writers, composers and politicians: Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Coleridge, Tennyson, Lear, Benjamin Britten, W. H. Auden, Samuel Johnson, H. G. Wells and politicians Churchill and Disraeli.

This wasn’t quite what I expected, and so I enjoyed shaking off all this writerly clutter with the chapters that were not about houses. Alexander Masters’ chapter ‘The Fear of Houses’ was an examination of homelessness, and interviews with homeless people about houses (as distinct from homes) and house-less-ness. Elleke Boehmer’s chapter ‘When There is No House to Visit: a Migrant Writers’ sites’ traced the Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera as he moved around Oxford in 1976, moving later to London where he slept rough on park benches and squats, hanging out with other African writers at the Africa Centre in Covent Garden. ‘A Place One Can Go Mad In’, by Kate Kennedy, followed the WWI survivor Igor Gurney as he was committed to Barnwood House in Gloucester, and later the City of London Mental Hospital near Dartford, where he died in 1937.

In her chapter Hermione Lee writes about the ‘pilgrimage’ that devotees, descendants, friends or biographers, make to a writer’s house .

Why do millions of people visit Shakespeare’s “birthplace”? To see if something will rub off on them? To try to get the key to the vanished genius? It is a strong but muddled impulse, a mixture of awe, longing, desire for inwardness, and intrusive curiosity. Expectations are always high for such pilgrimages, and disappointment can be correspondingly sharp. The famous writer’s house you long to see may have vanished, but the urge to go to the site still remains.

p.33

When I thought about it, most of my ‘pilgrimages’ have been to houses overseas, rather than in Australia. We visited the Jane Austen Centre in Bath (a rather tenuous connection with Austen); we stood outside a house in Stratford on Avon; and William Morris’ house in Bexleyheath, London. I visited Pablo Neruda’s house in Santiago, I went into a bar where Hemingway wrote in Havana, and Lorca’s house in Granada. We visited Karen Blixen’s house in Nairobi. I had to think harder about Australian/NZ houses: Henry Handel Richardson in Chiltern, Adam Lindsay Gordon’s cottage in Ballarat and Janet Frame in Oamaru. Are there more? I can’t think of any.

For me, visiting a writer’s house is an act of homage, I suppose, and perhaps a bit of pretension that I know who these authors were. Highlighting the connection between biography, writing and ‘the house’, and its afterlife as a tourist attraction, and extrapolating it beyond the rather cosy coterie of 19th/early 20th century writers and their biographers in this book, has prompted me to think about my own response to The Writers House and what draws me to visit- something I hadn’t thought about before.

My rating: 7/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.