Category Archives: Uncategorized

In the Shadows of Utopia. My son has been raving about this podcast for ages, and now I know why. It’s excellent. I didn’t particularly want to listen to another genocide podcast, and I find it frustrating that books on Cambodia seem to concentrate on either the Angkor period, or else Pol Pot as if nothing else happened between those two events. Looking through the list of episodes, it seems that my yearning for the ‘in-between’ might be met, even though the emphasis of the project as a whole might be on the 20th century. The first episode Introducing the Cambodian Nightmare starts by asking you to imagine how you would cope with the expulsion from Phnom Penh on 17 April 1975, then backtracks to 1969 and the Vietnam War. He starts with Sihanouk, who was playing both sides a bit until he was voted out in 1970 and replaced by the fervently U.S. Lon Nol who was rewarded when US were pumping $1million per day into Cambodia. But then Nixon decided to withdraw U.S. troops from Vietnam and encourage the ‘Vietnamization’ of the fighting. But the U.S. had been secretly bombing Cambodia for years, trying to get rid of the ‘sanctuaries’ where the Viet Cong could slip across the border, move south, then go back into South Vietnam. By 1973 all U.S. troops had withdrawn, and by 1975 the U.S. withdrew completely. Lon Nol fled with millions of dollars, and the fighting came to Phnom Penh. On 17 April 1975 first the Chief Monk got onto the radio and told people to calm down, then the chief of Kymer Republic army told them to lay down their arms. The Kymer Rouge troops were at first greeted as liberators, then that afternoon they evacuated Phnom Penh, ostensibly for three days, because they said that the U.S. was going to bomb them. Then followed almost four years of the Kymer Rouge nightmare until the Vietnamese Army took Phnom Penh in January 1970. Photographer Ho Van Tay was the first to see the Tuol Svay Prey High School, and to document the horror. This is an imaginative, well-told, and wide-ranging episode. I’m impressed.

The Rest is History Lord Byron: Death of a Vampire (Episode 4) Back into European exile, Byron revisited the sites he had previously visited when writing Child Harolde, comparing his current situation with Napoleon. In May 1816 he met up with Shelley and stepsisters Mary Godwin and Claire Claremont, who was pregnant with Byron’s child. They spent the summer together in Geneva where the bad weather caused by the eruption of Krakatoa forced them inside to tell vampire and horror stories- hence Frankenstein. Even though Byron had claimed that he wanted nothing to do with Claremont’s baby, when it was born it was agreed that the parents would have shared custody but Bryon was still moving around. In Ravenna he fell in love with a 19 year old married woman Theresa. He was becoming increasingly involved in British and Italian politics, and ended up getting expelled from Tuscany. Shelley drowned, and the circle of radicals broke up. By now Byron was getting bored, and became obsessed with Greece again. Greece was a cause celebre amongst many British intellectuals and society people, and he became a type of Ambassador, raising money for the cause. He went to Missalongi to raise the profile of the war, but fell ill there and died.

Embedded (NPR) This was an interesting experience. Tested is a six-part series looking at the history of sex testing in sports over the past 100 years. This controversial topic raised its head again in the recent Olympic boxing match, but this podcast series had been completed before then. As part of my own echo-chamber of media, I usually only listen to podcasts that are slightly left-leaning and which I’m generally in agreement with. However, with my somewhat ‘TERF’y views, I found this series rather challenging. (Not that I support J.R. Rowling’s very spiky and unnecessarily hostile response to the boxing match, either). Certainly the presenter of this podcast opposes to testing and hormonal management (she would call it manipulation) and it shows in her questions and approach. When women were first permitted to compete in the Olympic Games in 1928, it was feared that competitive sport would make them ‘unwomanly’, and that strenuous exercise would make you a man. The first transgender athlete was the Czech runner Zdeněk Koubek, who transitioned from female to male, prompting the issuing of a rule permitting physical examination of athletes, which by 1966 resulted in the mandatory inspection of all female athletes. In 1968 genetic testing was introduced, and tested female athletes were issued with a card testifying that they were women. By 2011 the testing focus shifted to hyperandrogenism and testosterone levels, and individual sports issued their own guidelines. In the case of athletics, the permitted testosterone level has been progressively reduced. The series focuses on two athletes: Namibian runner Christine Mboma, who took hormone drugs to reduce her testosterone level, and who has struggled to achieve her earlier results, and Kenyan sprinter Maximila Imali who refused to take drugs or undergo surgery to meet the testosterone criteria. Instead, she has taken up her cause in the courts, but a delay in the findings meant that she could not compete in the Paris Olympic Games. The issue has bounced back and forth in the courts, with competing medical claims, and accusations of Western racism against the global South (especially Africa runners) and denial of human rights. The last episode raises a number of possible scenarios for women’s sport: to continue testing; to have a special category; and to have no testing at all. I know that the last option fills me with trepidation. Interesting, but I found it a rather challenging listen.

Emperors of Rome Episode CCXXII A Stolen Election (The Catiline Conspiracy III) In 64BCE Catiline fronted up for his third attempt to be elected Consul, and he lost yet again. Catiline was angry, but he decided to run the following year at the 63BCE elections. He ran on a plank of debt cancellation, which would have been very convenient for him, as he was heavily indebted, and he was supported by quite a few other people who had run up large debts as well. By this time, Cicero was firmly in the Optimate political grouping, even though he was strictly speaking a ‘new man’, and Catiline was in the Populares (even though he had long aristocratic family ties). He lost yet again, and by now he was broke and a social outcast. The other accusations of a ‘conspiracy’ earlier on are a bit dodgy, but this is really into conspiracy territory now as there were accusations of women riling up the slaves to rebel. Although Catiline might have been the spark, there was general discontent building up over many years since the Gracchi tried to implement land reform 60 years earlier. Perhaps now was the time!

Being Roman (BBC) Death on the Nile In this episode, historian Mary Beard takes us on Emperor Hadrian’s trip down the Nile to see the ‘singing’ Colossus of Memnon (actually, it was a statue of a Pharoah but somehow the legend had changed to link it with Greek and Roman mythology). Hadrian was an inveterate traveller, accompanied by about 5000 other people. On the way, Hadrian’s young male lover Antinous drowned in the Nile (did he jump, was he pushed, or was he just making a spectacle of himself?). Heartbroken, Hadrian continued on his journey, and the poet Julia Balbilla (a friend of Hadrian’s wife) had poetry inscribed on the bottom of the Colossus, praising Hadrian and his wife.

This is a strange book in that, by the end of it, you have experienced a nuanced and sad story and yet the first-person narrator didn’t actually tell you. The narrator in this case is sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel, who lives in East Town, a small Mennonite town in Manitoba. On the first page she tells us that both her mother and her sister have disappeared, and that she is living with her father, Ray, who is engulfed by grief at the loss of his wife. The Mennonite church and her uncle Hans, whom she nicknames ‘The Mouth’ are dominant in the town, with the school, the local doctor and the school counsellor all members of the church. Nomi and her generation are the first Mennonite cohort to grow up with English as their first language: her parents and their generation continue to speak in low German. The community world view is shaped by their heritage, and the story of Menno Simons who formed his group out of the Anabaptists during the sixteenth century, leading to waves of emigration out of Europe to countries more accepting of their religion. East Town is a tourist attraction to American and Canadian travellers, and the Mennonite community plays along with its ‘living’ Heritage museum. Yet despite the town’s apparent devoutness, the teenagers in East Town are unruly and out of control, with alcohol, drug use and premarital and underage sex all rampant. Nomi is too, just like her older sister Tash was, and her father Ray is powerless to rein her in.

At first I thought that this was going to be a mystery: what did happen to Nomi’s mother Trudie, who left suddenly and taking nothing with her? It is only gradually that we learn the back-story of Nomi’s family, with her sister Tash’s rejection by the church and her father once she escapes the community with her boyfriend. We see Nomi embark on a similar trajectory, with her father making a surprising sacrifice at the end which leaves options open for Nomi to chart her own course.

The structure of the book is intriguing. It is only at the end that we realize that the narrative is a school assignment, written for her cantankerous English teacher Mr Quiring, with whom she clashes frequently. We gradually learn that Mr Quiring has had more of an effect on Nomi’s family situation than she realizes.

I chose this book for our bookgroup read, but it wasn’t actually the book I meant to choose! I had intended to suggest Women Talking, also by Miriam Toews, but we enjoyed this book nonetheless.

My rating: 8/10

Read because: CAE bookgroup selection.

History Extra The Bloomsbury Group: everything you wanted to know. Good heavens, this was released in January! The Bloomsbury Group started as an ‘at home’ at 46 Gordon Square Bloomsbury, amongst people who wanted to live differently. Vanessa (Bell) and Virginia (Woolf) Stephen were at the heart of it. They then moved to Kensington, and young men from Cambridge would come for cocoa after 10.00 p.m. The group included Lytton Strachey, Toby Stephen, Duncan Grant (with the beautiful voice, who nearly everyone was in love with at some stage), J. Maynard Keynes, Clive Bell, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Roger Fry. Leonard Woolf differed from the rest in that he did not come from a privileged background. The group moved from the sitting room into public debate, although they did not share a unified political position. There were all sorts of triangles, especially revolving around the homosexual Duncan Grant, who nonetheless had a child with Vanessa Bell. The group, most definitely an elite, nonetheless moved into the centre of English life in the fields of economics, literature and art.

You’re Dead to Me (BBC) Simón Bolívar I’ve been interested in Simón Bolívar for some time, and so I was interested in this rather irreverent podcast featuring Dr Francisco Eissa-Barroso and comedian Katie Green, who really knew more about Latin American history than she let on. Simón Bolívar, or ‘The Liberator’ as he was known, was responsible for the overthrowing of Spanish colonialism in six countries, but he himself distrusted democracy. He was born in Venezuela to a very rich plantation-owning family. In 1799 he joined the militia, went to Madrid and married a woman who died of yellow fever soon after they returned to Venezuela. He visited post-Revolutionary Paris where he was both impressed and repelled by Napoleon, and he committed himself to independence from Spain. His first attempt was when Caracas declared itself independent from Spain in an attempt to avoid being taken over by Napoleonic France. Along with Miranda, who he had met in exile in London, he headed a rebellion, but an ill-timed earthquake seemed to be God’s punishment and the rebellion collapsed, Miranda fled and Bolívar was captured. His second attempt was a three month campaign, marked by atrocities on both sides, but after making himself dictator (in the Roman sense of a dictator for emergency times), he was overthrown in a counter-revolution. He was almost killed by an assassin, but the assassin killed the wrong man. and Bolívar then decided on a third attempt, planning to attack New Granada instead and invade Caracas from there. He was successful, and Peru and Bolivia became independent nations too. He drafted the Bolivian Constitution, which had some liberal elements but some pretty illiberal ones too- like being able to name his successor. He met Manuela, whom he loved but did not marry because he had sworn not to remarry after the death of his first wife. Manuela saved him from a second assassination attempt. But by 1830 everything was falling apart, the various nations seceded and went their own way, and he died. Nonetheless, he has been used as a unifying political myth, especially by Chavez.

The Rest is History Luther: The Man Who Changed the World (Part I) is the first of a five part series. Obviously Tom and Dominic are becoming fans of the long-form podcast over several episodes. But let’s face it: Luther did shake things up. But would there have been a Reformation even if there were no Martin Luther? Luther himself was born in an outpost of religious thought, the son of a pugilistic, upwardly-mobile ex-miner from a smelting plant. Martin was the pious, educated eldest son growing up in apocalyptic times, with Islam on the march. He was a brilliant student, but there was nothing to suggest the influence he would have later on. The First Reformation had occurred in the 11th century when the medieval church divided the world into two realms: the early and the Church. The clergy became professional Christians, Latin was introduced into the mass, and the scheme of indulgences was established. Huss, a precursor to Luther, had proclaimed that the Bible was the ultimate source of authority, and ended up arrested and burned in 1414.

Usually on the second Saturday of every month, I go to the cinema with my Unitarian Universalist fellowship. But this month, there weren’t any movies that seemed appealing showing at the right time, so I decided to go to a concert where one of my Unitarian friends and her husband were singing. The group is called ‘All of Us’, conducted by Stephen Sharpe and they were excellent.

The program ‘Homegrown’ reflected the fact that all of the pieces that they performed were written either by locals, choir members or friends. People are just so talented: I’m in awe of them. There were two beautiful, and complementary songs about war. In the first, ‘One of Us’ conductor Stephen Sharpe took Paul Keating and Don Watson’s words at the funeral service for the Unknown Soldier . The second, with words and music by Bruce Watson, was called ‘The War Without a Name’ and it marked the loss of life in the Frontier Wars that it has taken us so long to recognize as a war, instead of anodyne phrases like ‘dispersal’ and ‘clearing the area’. There was a song that paid tribute to the joy of owning 72 Derwent pencils as a child (I only ever had 36), and another that captured so well the ‘Ennui’ of lockdown. Bruce Watson’s other song ‘Love is’ took the words of Corinthians 13, and it was beautifully rendered by the choristers each taking a stanza in turn. The concert was beautifully accompanied by cello, violin, guitar and piano.

The concert was held at Montsalvat, the artists’ colony out at Eltham, and it felt very special to have all the composers either up there performing on the stage, or else in the audience. It was really good- and even better knowing that it was so local. What riches our community holds!

History Listen (ABC) Section 71 The Hindmarsh Island Bridge Affair Part 2 Times changed. Robert Tickner lost his seat in the 1996 election, and John Howard was now Prime Minister, voted in promising “bucketloads of extinguishment” of Native Title. In December 1996 the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Bill before Parliament specifically ruled out Doreen Kartinyeri’s cultural heritage challenge to the Hindmarsh Island Bridge proposal. The May 1998 case before the High Court challenged the power of the Federal Government to make laws using the ‘race powers’ of the Constitution against Aboriginal People. Kartinyeri’s case was not successful, with a 5-1 judgment against her. The developers of the bridge, the Chapmans, claimed $20 million compensation, and it went back to court. This time, in 2001, Justice John von Doussa of the Federal Court rejected the claims for malfeasance and was not satisfied that the restricted women’s knowledge was fabricated or that it was not part of genuine Aboriginal tradition. Since then, the panic among miners and pastoralists over Native Title has abated (although not gone away completely). In 2002 bones were found on Hindmarsh Island and a formal apology was issued by the local Alexandrina council. The bridge is still there.

Emperors of Rome Episode CIX Saturnalia. In Roman mythology, Saturn was the father of Jupiter, and he ceded his power to him. Saturnalia marked the end of the sowing time, before winter set in and was celebrated around 17 December, but the length of the celebration varied. Nonetheless, it was the longest festival that the Romans celebrated. It’s hard to tell exactly what they did as part of the celebrations. Fifth century sources tell us that there was a sacrifice at the Temple of Saturn, but other than that, it’s hard to work out. There may have been an element of topsy-turviness, with masters serving their servants- or maybe not.

History Hack and Little Atoms. I have just finished reading Sarah Churchwell’s The Wrath to Come (my review here) and so I though that I’d listen to a couple of podcasts interviews with the author. In the The History Hack podcast the author points out that Mitchell’s grandmother had seen the burning of Atlanta, and that Mitchell grew up with these stories, supplemented by a reading diet of plantation romances. GWTW is the ultimate rich-poor-rich again Cinderella story valorizing survival and resilience, with a strong female anti-hero. The Little Atoms episode covered much of the same territory, and she explains about the Lost Cause, and emphasizes that the book and the film is revisionist history.

Three Million BBC Episode 3: The F-word What really struck me about this episode is how closely it reflects what is going on in Gaza today. As with the Israeli/Western governments today, there was a real squeamishness about the word ‘famine’, and the British Government was using its wartime censorship powers to censor the letters passing between Indian soldiers and their families. In the end, even the British censor (based in India) felt very uncomfortable about the suppression of knowledge of the famine. Aware that the optics of people dying in the streets of Calcutta could be used for propaganda purposes by the Germans and Japanese, the Bengal Vagrancy Act was passed in July 1943 to get the bodies off the street. Stevens, a British journalist and editor of the English language Statesman newspaper in Calcutta, knew that any text would be censored, but he realized that there was a loophole which would allow photographs to escape censorship. So he sent out a team of photographers, and the following week was emboldened to write an editorial condemning the lack of action. By October, it was being raised in Parliament, and the BBC was drawn into conflict with the government over the “India Food Question” (they still couldn’t say ‘famine’). Then a book called ‘Hungry Bengal’ was published which showed sketches of starving Indians. Of course, it was banned, but there is one copy in the British Library and here a starving man actually gets a name. Three million didn’t.

Things Fell Apart Episode 7 You’ll Own Nothing and You’ll Be Happy The theory of ‘The Great Reset’ which has been protested by people caught up in the sovereign citizen movement was centred on the idea that the World Economic Forum had plans for a radical reordering of society, expunging private property and restricting people’s movement to a small geographical area. It drew on several individually innocuous proposals: a suggestion of bus lanes; a business of ‘sleep pods’, and especially a thought experiment piece presented to the World Economic Forum speculating on the implications of products being turned into services (I guess, in the way that DVDs and CDs which we used to own are now streaming services). These ideas became weaponized, and their proponents demonized in a way that they never anticipated.

I’m trying to resist the temptation to think that this book was written to order: ” This’ll attract sales -how about a book about aging women that book groups can discuss!?” It certainly felt as if it were aimed at an educated, older female audience of readers. Aging, women’s friendships, betrayal… all set in a beachside setting over the Christmas weekend on the central coast of NSW.

Jude, Wendy and Adele, all in their seventies, have been going to Silvie’s beachside house for Christmas for years, and they head there again. But this time it is different: Silvie has died, and they have come to clean out the house for sale. The 1970s house has seen better days despite its ocean views, with its creaking inclinator (i.e. lift) obviating the need to scramble up the steep cliffside driveway, and it is full of the greasy, musty, scurf and accumulated detritus of a long residence. Jude, successful restaurant manager, has arrived to work; widowed public intellectual Wendy has brought her sick, old, mangy dog Finn, and washed-up actress Adele has come as an escape from her female partner who has been quite insistent that their relationship is at an end. They are all well aware that this phase of their life and friendship has come to an end.

They have been friends for over forty years, and I guess that in that time you could accumulate a long list of slights and peeves. They are judgmental of each other and hold secrets and deceptions from each other. Jude is the long-term mistress of the married Daniel, with whom she spends a week a year at the beach-house after the other women have gone home. Rather implausibly, these long-term friends have never met Daniel, although they are aware of his existence. Wendy is in the final stages of her academic career, but she feels that she still has one final book in her. She had two children, now adults, with her husband Lance, and after his death her friend Sylvie brought her the puppy Finn, who by now is a blind, deaf, incontinent and confused dog, who should have been put down long before. Adele has not worked for some time, but still dresses in skin-tight tops to reveal her cleavage and takes pride in her athleticism. However, years of sporadic theatre work have left her financially distressed and she has not worked in a long time, even though some other actresses her age have continued to do so.

The story is set over just a couple of days, and it felt rather like a play. I read this immediately after reading Demon Copperhead, which was such an exhilarating experience that this felt particularly jejune in comparison. It was a particularly ‘interior’ book, with lots of backstory and cogitation, revolving around relationships and choices and responses to aging and loss. She did capture the setting well: I could ‘see’ the house, and even the characters, in my mind’s eye, and there was a veracity in the complexity and ambivalence in their relationship together. I was surprised that Wood herself is ‘only’ 58 because she wrote well about aging women’s bodies and the indignities that they subject us to. But I can’t help feeling that she was writing to a particular audience- me- and perhaps the stereotypes she held up were just a little bit too close to home.

My rating: 7/10

Read because: CAE bookgroup

There seemed to be a spate of books a few years back with a noun, followed by a subtitle that made a claim to greatness (“a world history” or “the fish that changed the world”). Nicholas Crane, who presented documentaries like ‘Coast’ or ‘Great British Journeys’, takes a similar approach in the title to his book. In this case, though, there is an element of truth, as the significance of latitude is that it does tell us the shape of the world, and in the 1700’s that was a big question. They knew that the earth wasn’t a perfect sphere, but was it stretched at the poles, or as Isaac Newton suggested, did it bulge out in the middle? To answer the question, the French government dispatched two expeditions, one to the Arctic Circle led by Maupertuis in 1735, and another to South America that same year, in order to compare results. Latitude is the story of the South American expedition.

In 1735 South America was part of Spain’s colonial holdings. The Wars of Independence would not occur for another 90-odd years and South America had not been divided up into the countries that we know today. After a voyage that took them to Martinique, Saint-Domingue (now the benighted Haiti), Cartegena de Indias and Panama, they finally made land at Guayaquil and headed towards Quito in what is now Ecuador. There were ten men in the French Geodesic Mission to the Equator, attended by four servants. They were headed by three members of the French Academy: Bouger, La Condamine and Godin. They were supported by Jean-Joseph Verguin, the principal surveyor, Jean-Louis de Morainville, an artist, a clockmaker technician, Theodore Hugo (whose role became increasingly important as their equipment faltered) and Joseph de Jussieu, doctor and botanist. The three final men in the French contingent were “a mixed bag of mates and favours” (p.11) – cousins, nephews of friends, a surgeon. However, having a French expedition on Spanish land was diplomatically tricky so, in order to encourage Spain’s co-operation, the French government offered services in measuring the longitude and latitude of key locations on the coast of Peru and the inclusion of “two intelligent Spaniards”. They were Jorge Juan y Santacilia and Antonio de Ulloa and de la Torre-Guiral, both graduates of the Academy of Navy Guards and trained in mathematics, astronomy, navigation, trigonometry, cartography and firearms. (p. 17)

There were lots of egos in amongst this group, and several of them were curious scientists who were perfectly happy to go off on frolics of their own to undertake their own experiments. The expedition split up, came together, split up again as personalities grated and egos clashed. Their main purpose was to undertake a geodesic survey which, despite Crane’s best efforts, I never really quite understood (don’t bother explaining it to me- I really don’t care). I gather that it involved the placement of triangles on high peaks with a clear sight line between them, measuring, then lots of computation. This tied in with astronomical surveys as well, undertaken using a zenith sector which required the observer to lie on the floor beneath the eyepiece of an immensely long, precisely aligned telescope erected in an observatory with a hole in the roof and a pendulum clock on the wall. There were also experiments about the speed of sound which I didn’t quite understand.

The trouble was that these high peaks were the Andes, with all the attendant perils of altitude sickness, frostbite, avalanche etc. There was a lot of scaling mountains, completely dependent on indigenous porters (as colonial mountain-expeditions always are )and the scientists were typically boorish in their dismissal of local knowledge about safe altitude levels. The triangles could be erected, then knocked down by wind or snow, requiring them to be put in place again. They took readings, but found discrepancies and so would repeat the measurements again, adding year after year to their expedition. Meanwhile they continually ran out of money, got involved in a brawl that led to murder, and they seriously insulted the Spanish contingent.

And what did they have to show for it, ten years later? Well, not all the men returned, but those who did not only proved Newton right, but they also undertook ground-breaking research on rubber and malaria, completed the first detailed survey of an Inca site, described platinum, took thousands of measurements and made thousands of botanical observations. But, as the final chapter which wraps up ‘what happened next’, several of them seemed infected by travel-restlessness (a pre-existing condition which had probably prompted them to go on the expedition in the first place), while others returned to France to die of amoebic dysentery, experimental hernia surgery (always the scientist), falling from scaffolding repairing a church or just old age.

This book is told in a rollicking narrative style, and the different characters are well-differentiated. What I couldn’t understand though, is why a book about geography, written by a geographer, had only two maps with minuscule writing located at the front of the book. I was flipping back and forth constantly, squinting trying to read the writing on the map. If only there had been legible maps tracing their journey placed appropriately within the text, I am sure that I would have followed their voyage more easily. Nonetheless, it was an enjoyable read which demonstrates both men’s (because they were all men) endurance and determination, and their selfishness, self-aggrandizement and inability to work together for ten whole years.

My rating: 7.5

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library. And why?- a beautiful cover and it looked interesting.

Any travel book written in 1951 will have aged, and this book is no exception. Indeed, the author Norman Lewis was well-aware that he was writing in the midst of history, noting in his preface that the stalemate in Indo-China had broken after four years, and that as the proofs of his book were being corrected in January 1951, the Viet-Minh were closing in on Hanoi.

It seems certain that before the book appears further important changes will have taken place.

He wasn’t wrong. One of the poignancies of this book is our knowledge, seventy years on, that the world he describes here was about to be obliterated. In the preface to the 1982 version of his book, Lewis writes:

…the greatest holocaust ever to be visited on the East…consumed not only the present, but the past; an obliteration of cultures and values as much as physical things. From the ashes that remained no phoenix would ever rise. Not enough survive even to recreate the memory of what the world had lost.

1982 preface

This meandering book is the story of Lewis’ travels through Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. By 1951, France had offered independence to its former colonies, but although nominally independent, France still controlled foreign policy, and the French army was stationed throughout. Lewis was not there under the aegis of any press company, and after consulting with the French authorities, he was reliant on their goodwill to enable him to hitch rides under French protection across the three countries. The French Army at the time was at war with the Viet Minh, and so his whole narrative is permeated by a sense of oppression and coercion.

As a British writer, he has internalized much of the colonizers’ racism that sees people as a certain ‘type’. He spends considerable time with different tribes, the Mois, the Meos and the Rhades,distinguishing them from other tribal groups, and there is an elegiac sense that these groups will not survive. He is particularly critical of missionaries and their blithe confidence that they are doing good, and he castigates the planters and their cosy relationship with the French occupiers.

He is reliant on the army to get him from one place to another and he speaks only French and English. There is a lot of waiting around, angling for his next ride. As a result, he interacts mainly with French administrators and residents and those local officials that the French government have been willing to leave in place. He gains access to high places, but always with the permission and imprimatur of the French colonizers. It was almost with surprise that he found a young Cambodian boy who could speak “passable” French, which enabled him to understand more of a local dance performance than he would otherwise. It was only in the last chapter that he gains access to the Viet Minh, through the agency of Dinh, who he met in a doctor’s waiting room. Here he witnesses the influence of China and the Soviet Union in supporting the independence struggle against the French.

It is very much a book of its time in its Eurocentric classifications and descriptions of people and groups. For example, here’s his description of Dinh, his contact with the Viet Minh:

He introduced himself as Dinh- an assumed name, he assured me with a wry smile. I was interested to notice, in support of a theory I was beginning to form, that for a Vietnamese he was very ‘unmongolian’ in appearnce. He was thin-lipped and cadaverous and there was an unusual narrowness across the cheekbones. If not a Frenchman he could certainly have passed for a Slav. There had been many Caucasian characteristics about the other Vietnamese intellectually and revolutionaries I had met, and I was wondering whether whatever physical mutation it was that produced this decrease in mongolian peculiarities encouraged at the same time the emergence of certain well-known Western traits, such as a restless aggressiveness, an impatience with mere contemplation, and a taste for action.

Ch. 20

So what was the appeal for me in reading this racist, 70 year old text? For me, it was his descriptions of landscape. Take, for example, his description of Ta Phrom temple in Siem Reap:

Ta Prohm is an arrested cataclysm. In its invasion, the forest has not broken through it, but poured over the top, and the many courtyards have become cavities and holes in the forest’s false bottom. In places the cloisters are quite dark, where the windows have been covered with subsidences of earth, humus and trees. Otherwise they are illuminated with an aquarium light, filtered through screens of roots and green lianas.

Entering the courtyards, one comes into a new kind of vegetable world; not the one of branches and leaves with which one is familiar, but that of roots. Ta Prohm is an exhibition of the mysterious subterranean life of plants, of which it offers an infinite variety of cross-sections. Huge trees have seeded themselves on the roots of the squat towers and their soaring trunks are obscured from sight; but here one can study in comfort the drama of those secret and conspiratorial activities that labour to support their titanic growth.

Down, then, come the roots, pale, swelling and muscular. There is a grossness in the sight; a recollection of sagging ropes of lava, a parody of the bulging limbs of circus freaks, shamefully revealed. The approach is exploratory. The roots follow the outlines of the masonry; duplicating pilasters and pillars; never seeking to bridge a gap and always preserving a smooth living contact with the stone surfaces; burlesquing in their ropy bulk the architectural [motifs] which they cover. It is only long after the hold has been secured that the deadly wrestling bout begins. As the roots swell their grip contracts. Whole blocks of masonry are torn out, and brandished in mid-air. A section of wall is cracked, disjoint/ed and held in suspension like a gibbeted corpse; prevented by the roots’ embrace from disintegration. There are roots which appear suddenly, bursting through the flagstones to wander twenty yards like huge boa constrictors, before plunging through the upended stones to earth again.

Ch. 15

Absolutely brilliant writing. I found myself rethinking my perceptions -“grossness”- yes, that was the unease that I felt while I was there. Even though many of the villages and landscapes he describes may have disappeared, there is enough remaining that you think “Ah, yes, that’s how it was!” Although I’m not a great aficionado of travel narratives, I think that this is what good travel writing does best: it puts on paper something that you felt, or detected, and it captures it, just right, in words that you wish you thought of yourself.

My rating: 8/10 (taking it on its own terms)

Read because: I was travelling in Cambodia.

If nothing else, having to prepare talks for my Unitarian fellowship makes me read things I might not have read otherwise. On Doubt, by journalist Leigh Sales is part of the ‘On…’ series published by Hachette, and like the other books in the series, it is only short: in this case only 128 pages.

As a journalist, Sales has had plenty of experience with politicians who come onto her program, pumped up full of talking points and bombast. Her exploration of ‘doubt’ is largely through a political lens, but in Part I she starts by talking personally about her own curiosity and rebelliousness as a child. She rarely accepted anything as a given, and although converting to evangelical Christianity as a teenager, she soon rejected the ‘truths’ of religion that had to be accepted on faith, as well.

In Part 2 she turns to politics, struck by the certainty of Sarah Palin who boasted that she “didn’t blink” when asked to be George W. Bush’s vice president, despite her complete lack of experience. She notes that much of our media today is comprised of commentary rather than research or reporting, marked by point-scoring and moral certitude. This is most manifest in the US television that we receive here in Australia but she reports a similar unedifying spectacle between Gerard Henderson from the Sydney Institute and Robert Manne, who often writes for the Schwartz stable of publications. In the part of the book that was most useful to me, she quotes Pierre Abelard from the 11th century who wrote that the path to truth lies in the systematic application of doubt, and that those who have sought the truth begin from a premise of doubt, not certainty.

However, the expression of self-doubt is not seen as a virtue in politics. She was stunned when former Treasurer Wayne Swan revealed that he (and he assumed, most other people) had times of self-doubt. She compares this with George W. Bush who relied on his gut-feelings, bolstered by his religious faith, to the extent that even the people who surrounded him became uneasy. She talks about gut-feeling, citing Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink which asserts that people who are expert in their field (and that’s probably a very important qualification) use ‘thin slicing’ to instantly identify patterns in current situations, enabling them to make decision in the blink of an eye. But she also recognizes ‘the yips’ that assail someone who is very competent when they start to overthink something that they are already expert in- like playing the piano (for her maybe! Oh, to be good enough to get the yips!)

In Part IV she talk about people like her father, who leave nothing to chance, citing his mantra “Preparation and planning prevent piss-poor performance”. While bridling against the certainty and inflexibility that this approach guarantees, she observes that her own “what if” thinking, shot through with doubt, can lead to anxiety and a lack of all-consuming passion.

She finishes off in Part V with a post-script written in 2017, eight years after the original book. In those eight years, she suggests, we have become accustomed to distortion through social media, and we accept with equanimity the shrugs of corporate bosses and the misrepresentations of politicians. While refusing to divulge her own political leanings, she decries the idea of ‘balance’ which gives equal time to both sides.

As you can see, this book is a bit of a grab-bag of observations, not all of which are closely tied to the theme of ‘doubt’. It could almost do with another post-script, given the rise of deep fakes and AI which frighten me for the way that they undercut even what we have seen (or think we have seen). However, it’s an easy enough read- not unlike a long-form article that remains at a largely surface level and with its main interest in the political realm.

My rating: 6.5/10

Sourced from: borrowed e-book from Yarra Plenty Regional Library.