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There’s an interesting curated story on the Victorian Collections website called ‘Another Night’. Inspired by Geoffrey Blainey’s Black Kettle and Full Moon, this narrative links different objects on the Victorian Collections website related to lighting and night-time.

Victorian Collections is a repository for digital images from different museums and historical societies in Victoria. It includes both paper-based images and photographs of catalogued physical objects.

The curator, Kitty Owens, has put together a selection of postcards and photographs and images of candles and lamps.  There’s a fascinating photograph of the inside of the Richardson’s house at Harmony Vale in the Dandenongs around 1895. It’s a fairly humble house, with the family gathered around the fireplace and the light spilling in from the window.  It’s very different to the image of Villa Fortuna, an opulent mansion stuffed with furniture and objets d’art, lit by (curiously mis-matched) chandeliers. There’s photos and an artefact from a ‘switching-on’ ceremony when the electricity came through. I’m not aware of local NBN-switching on ceremonies- perhaps we’re all too jaded.

Well worth a look!

https://victoriancollections.net.au/stories/another-night

2016, 304 p.

When you see Nick Brodie’s book on a bookstore shelf along with other Australian titles, with its dominant ‘1787’ emblazoned on the front, you tend to do a bit of double-take. Did someone make a mistake? Wasn’t it 1788?  There has been a constant and increasing uneasiness with 26 January being celebrated as Australia Day (something I’ve written about several times in this blog) but in this book Brodie bumps all this debate to one side, exhorting us that “‘If we broaden our gaze, our story will get bigger”. 

There are some history books where, having read them, you know there has been a shift in your awareness.  You return to ideas and concepts that you had never questioned before, and see them anew.  I’m thinking, for example, of Bill Gammage’s The Biggest Estate in the World and to a lesser extent Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu; I’m thinking of Greg Dening’s Mr Bligh’s Bad Language,  Zoe Laidlaw’s Colonial Connections or the first of Henry Reynold’s work that you might read. Tom Griffith’s book Hunters and Collectors changed my mind about museums, and as a more distant example,  I suppose that Geoffrey Blainey’s The Tyranny of Distance would have had a similar effect at the time of publication.  To this list, now I’d have to add Nick Brodie’s  1787.  He eschews the idea of our continent sitting isolated at the bottom of the globe and instead knits Australia into  Eurasia and a trading network frontier that connected the northern and southern hemispheres. Although the book is called ‘1787’ (a curious choice given his challenge to what he calls  “the arbitrariness of epochs”) it spans the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and expands its view to the  current peripheries of Australasia, including New Zealand (have I offended?), Tasmania, New Guinea and the Torres Strait.

He does seem rather fixated on the emphasis on 1788, or rather, he keeps asserting that ‘we’ are. Certainly the Australian history I was taught did include the Dutch and the Macassans and  I suspect that his somewhat conspiratorial view of the ‘lost’ness  these ‘hidden documents’ is a little overblown.

However, what Brodie does in this book is create a narrative from the writings of Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and French mariners and contextualize those encounters into a broader Eurasian trade and Enlightenment-culture picture. He starts his book with the narrative of Don Diego de Prado y Tovar, an officer under the command of Pedro Fernandes de Quiros, who travelled the Pacific during 1606 and encountered the fringes of New Guinea. He highlights that  Islamic, European and Chinese powers converged in the islands to the north of Australia, and spends quite a bit of time on Tasman’s expedition for the VOC (Dutch East India Company). He shows that Dampier led not one, but two voyages to New Holland, and while respectful (as one must be) of Cook’s seamanship, he writes a detailed narrative of Cook’s largely unsuccessful attempts at interaction with the indigenous inhabitants . He is very aware of the constructed nature of the documents he works from.   He looks carefully at Cook’s corrections and amendments between the drafts and published copies of his journals, and considers them against Banks’ writings as well.  He cites directly from primary texts; he slows down for particular episodes; he makes pithy and stop-you-in-your-tracks observations.

I had not realized that Cook went to Van Diemen’s Land, and for me the really new part of this book came in the section ‘Forward Operating Bases’ which places Van Diemen’s Land and New Zealand as the bases of repeated encounters. The usual post-1788 narrative is that both VDL and New Zealand were settled from Sydney, but his enumeration of repeated visits by English and French expeditions that deliberately sailed for Adventure Bay( 1773 and 1777) and Frederick Henry Bay (1772) in Van Diemen’s Land and Ship Cove in New Zealand (1770, 1773 -several times-1774, 1777) challenges that view.  Ships in an expedition became separated from each other; they returned to shelter in the hope that the other ship would do likewise; they deliberately let loose farm animals in the hope that they would breed and form a land-based food supply, and they tried to encourage agriculture.

None of these journeys are accidental drop-ins: instead they are a manifestation of both the trade and knowledge networks that criss-crossed the globe.  Nor were the indigenous people they encountered always completely ignorant either: knowledge spread within Australasia as well.

Brodie has an engaging, easy tone and he sustained the energy of his writing throughout.  I do wish that there had been a map beyond the  16th and 17th century reproductions he includes within the colour plates in the middle of the book.  It’s written for a general readership, with no footnotes.

There is much to admire here, but as I found when reading his earlier book Kin, there is a brashness and self-promotion in his approach that does not sit well with me. He doesn’t need to engage in the sniping at unnamed historians who have ‘duped’ their readers and colleagues by fixing only on 1788, and I find his condescension towards other historians, their readers, and anyone who has ever studied Australian history, unpleasant. ‘Dupe’ can be a noun as well as a verb, and no-one likes to be told that they have been stupidly misled.   It is a stance spelled out in the ‘not-a-prologue’ (his chapter heading, not mine),  repeated over again in opening each chapter and reiterated in the ‘not-an-epilogue’. His insistence on his contrarian, “me against the historians” argument becomes wearing after a while.  I had thought, with Kin, that it was a reflection of his young age and impatience.  Perhaps it still is.  Despite his sneering at ‘historians’, he is an academically trained and recognized historian himself, and he’s too good to engage in such blatant self-promotion.  He’s a prolific worker (with already another book in the wings), stunningly telegenetic, and good at publicity.  It amazes me that he hasn’t been snapped up for television work.

That said, this is one of those books that makes you see things differently.  By shifting the frame to Van Diemens Land and New Zealand, he shifts Australian history subtly on its axis, and he does, it’s true, reframe the whole Captain Cook/ 1788 story. That’s quite an achievement.

2015,  269 P.

One of the problems with a media-savvy author who travels the world promoting his book is that by the time you get round to reading it, you feel as if you’ve already done so.

This was the case for me with this book, which I had heard about through multiple interviews on different Radio National programs. The author, who had his own taste of being the victim of cyber-stalking, becomes fascinated by the phenomenon of shaming over the Internet as a modern manifestation of an older form of punishment and social control.  In particular, he tells the stories of Jonah Lehrer who fabricated quotes in an article on Bob Dylan, and Justine Sacco whose flippant sarcasm in a tweet about being white and the likelihood of catching AIDS went viral. Both were deluged with internet outrage and it’s no exaggeration to say that their lives were destroyed.

Ronson examines the use of shaming in formal legal settings. He discusses Judge Ted Poe who orders deliberately shaming punishments for the offenders who appeared in his court, and he fact-checks the Stanford Prison Experiment which has been offered up  as ‘evidence’ that we are all capable  of evil actions once a social-media crowd phenomenon gets started. He meets people who have started internet fire-storms, and attends a shame eradication workshop established by an enterprising psychotherapist. Finally, in a hopeful sign that there can be redemption, he meets representatives of a company which specializes in white-washing Google search results for people who have been subjected to public shaming.

Of course, through his book Ronson shames these people again by publicizing their plights anew and I found his smug voyeurism rather off-putting. Nonetheless, many of his points resonated.  I found myself thinking of Monica Lewinsky’s powerful TED talk The Price of Shame and Waleed Aly’s recent Andrew Olle lecture where he noted the rush to emote rather than to think.

The book was an easy enough read. I just felt that I’d already heard it all before.

Source: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

My rating: 7/10

2016, 180p.

I must confess that it took me some time to work out that the subject of this small novella is Dimitri Shostavkovich. In the first part of the book, Shostakovich is an unnamed ‘he’, waiting by the lift outside his apartment, a small suitcase at his knee, expecting to be arrested. “All he knew was that this was the worst time.” (p. 7) His composition, Lady Macbth of Mtsensk had been denounced by Pravda, and critics who had previously praised it quickly distanced themselves from it.

They always came for you in the middle of the night. And so, rather than be dragged from the apartment in his pyjamas, or forced to dress in front of some contemptuously impassive NKVD man, he would go to bed fully clothed, lying on top of the blankets, a small case already packed on the floor beside him. He barely slept, and lay there imagining the worst things a man could imagine.  His restlessness in turn prevented Nita from sleeping.  Each would lie there, pretending; also, pretending not to hear and small the other’s terror. (p. 15)

We meet him again on a plane, returning home from a trip from America twelve years later. In front of the world’s media, he has been humiliated as a Soviet stooge. “All he knew was that this was the worst time.  One fear drives out another, as one nail drives out another.” (p. 61).

And then we meet him again, another twelve years on, in 1960, when he is being pressured to join the Communist party,  repeatedly, strongly and with the threat of violence. The violence is always suspended – for now.

All he knew was that this was the worst time of all.  The worst time was not the same as the most dangerous time.  Because the most dangerous time was not the time when you were in most danger.  This was something he hadn’t understood before. (p. 115)

We often read books of courage and resistance, but less often of extorted compliance. As the Shostakovich character reflects, anti-communist sympathizers wanted martyrs, thus themselves becoming like Power (always written with a capital letter and never specified) in that whatever he gave, more was always demanded.

Under the pressure of Power, the self cracks and splits.  The public coward lives with the private hero. Or vice versa. Or, more usually, the public coward lives with the private coward. But that was too simple: the idea of a man split into two by a dividing axe. Better: a man crushed into a hundred pieces of rubble, vainly trying to remember how they- he- had once fitted together. (p. 155)

I often tend to think that cowardice is an easier option than bravery: when I hear of acts of heroism, I often wonder if I would have it in myself to act in the same way. But if this is a book about ‘cowardice’, it’s a cowardice that has no upside. Instead it deadens and leaches the joy from life:

… But it was not easy being a coward.  Being a hero was much easier than being a coward.  To be a hero, you only had to be brave for a moment- when you took out the gun, threw the bomb, pressed the detonator, did away with the tyrant, and with yourself as well. But to be a coward was to embark on a career that lasted a lifetime.  You couldn’t ever relax. You had to anticipate the next occasion when you would have to make excuses for yourself, dither, cringe, reacquaint yourself with the taste of rubber boots and the state of your own fallen, abject character.  Being a coward required pertinacity, persistence, a refusal to change- which made it, in a way, a kind of courage. He smiled to himself and lit another cigarette. The pleasures of irony had not yet deserted him. (p 158)

This book is written in this quiet manner, in the third person, in a somewhat stilted language that only barely masks rage and frustration. The sentences are brief, as are the paragraphs, and the three sections of the book are broken up into asterisked sections.  For a book about a composer, there was little music: instead there were words, muttered and issued through clenched teeth.

After I belatedly realized that “he” was an actual figure, Shostakovich, I wondered if, in this information-rich world I should go off and google him before I proceeded. I didn’t, but I do wonder if I might have got more from the book if I had done so.  Sheila Fitzpatrick, the Australian historian of Russia, wrote an excellent and highly informed review of the book in the LRB where she demonstrates that she, at least, understood the allusions and references to other Russian composers and historical characters that flew right past me.

Instead, because of my ignorance of the real-life historical figure and his biography, I almost had to read the book as an allegory and the use of ‘he’ and capital-P ‘Power’ and the interiority of the narrative lent itself to such a reading.  Its three parts had a strong chronological structure within which flashbacks shuttled back and forth, and the recurrence of a new demand or challenge every twelve years racheted up the tension.  As such, then,  its brevity was a real strength. I don’t really now if I would have wanted it to go on for much longer.

Source: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

My rating: 8.5/10