‘A Diamond in the Dust’ by Frauke Bolten-Boshammer

Posted on December 25, 2024 | Leave a comment
2018, 400 p.

SPOILER ALERT

Is it wrong to judge a book by a cover? Sometimes, but bear in mind that the publisher chooses a cover that will attract what they perceive to be the audience. I don’t think that I’m this audience. As soon as I saw the picture of the woman in the Akubra hat against a background of the Australian outback, I thought of all those rural romances and inspirational biographies (Sara Henderson et al) that I avoid like the plague.

German-born Frauke Bolten was a reluctant migrant to Australia. She arrived at a small outback airstrip in blistering heat at Kununurra in northern Western Australia with her children, her husband Friedrich having purchased a property on the Ord River Scheme without even discussing it with her. As a woman of faith who believed in her wedding vow to “obey”, she negotiated a two-year trial of living there with her husband (which turned out to be forty years) and the company of a nanny to assist with the children. She and her husband had previously farmed in Rhodesia, before returning to Germany to establish a farm and family which she thought would establish them back home forever. This new endeavour in Western Australia, grudgingly undertaken on her part, threw up many challenges at first, largely through her husband’s pigheadedness and ill-advised innovation, then as the children left home for boarding school in the city and the financial problems mounted, Friedrich’s depression increased.

And then her husband committed suicide. Shocked and heartbroken, she found herself resisting the assumption by the families ‘back home’ that she would of course return home: the widow, the daughter, the daughter-in-law forever. Her children did not want to return to Germany either, and so they stayed. She remarried Robert Robert Boshammer, ten years her junior and of similar German heritage. From a small-scale backyard tourist venture she started selling diamonds from the nearby Argyle Diamond mine, gradually increasing the business to a large tourist enterprise in the town. Further tragedy was to come, with her son Peter committing suicide too, and the suicide of Doris, who managed the shop for her. As her children married and went on to have children, Frauke herself had to confront cancer.

The book is co-written with journalist Sue Smethurst, and I found myself wondering what Smethurst added to the book because the prose itself is very clichéd and pedestrian. Perhaps her assistance came in negotiating the narration of the suicides, a subject that needs to be treated carefully.

This is Bolten-Boshammer’s story, but it a very blinkered and shallow one. Both in Rhodesia and Kununurra, she lived in a German-centred community, seemingly oblivious to the social and political environment in which she was living. There is not a word of the bubbling tension that will emerge with independent Zimbabwe, or the edgy relationship in Kununarra between its large indigenous population and its white community, attracted by the technological hubris of the Ord River Scheme. It felt a bit like reading of the British ex-pats in Happy Valley in Kenya, with their own self-contained world that tried to re-create ‘home’ in a starkly different environment that existed in a bubble, completely independent of the country around them. Their Christmas customs, the gap year holidays back in Germany for her children where they clearly had enough German language to communicate with their family, the values she drew from her religion and from her culture- these are all German.

The writing itself was flat and banal. It felt like a series of photocopied Christmas letters, with their forced jollity, catching up with the children’s latest ventures, the marriages, the grandchildren, the celebrations. I know that English is Frauke’s second language, but there’s no idiosyncrasy of phrase here: it’s just turgid sludge.

I complained the whole way through.

My rating: 4/10

Read because: It was an Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection. I am really surprised that this book was on the program because the books are usually of much better quality than this. The presenter for the night did a wonderful job in extracting the few good points about it.

Sourced from: purchased e-book. Thank God I didn’t spend the money on trying to track down a hard copy.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 24-30 November 2024

Posted on December 16, 2024 | Leave a comment

History Hit. The Clinton Body Count to the QAnon Shaman: Conspiracy Theories in American Politics Gabriel Gatehouse, from the BBC, has a second series of The Coming Storm, which I listened to back in 2022. This episode is a bit of a rehash of the first series, which focussed on the conspiracies swirling around the Clintons, but brought up to the January 6 riot and its fall-out. He says that now conspiracies revolve more around “hidden actors”, which has an element of truth to it (says she, frustrated by the influence of lobbyists and miners on Australian politics).

The Rest is History. Episode 454 Fall of the Sioux: Death of Crazy Horse (Part 1) From their own summary: “Though the Battle of the Little Bighorn seemed for the triumphant Lakota and their allies – the largest gathering of Plains Indians ever assembled – a miraculous victory, it was for them the beginning of the end. A great council was held near the battlefield in which they made the fateful decision to split up. Meanwhile, in Washington, Custer’s death and the military defeat of the army was being politicised, and the public rallied against the Lakota. Red Cloud, their political leader through so many of their struggles, was replaced with a puppet interloper. Then, during the winter of 1877, a contingent of ruthless and fiercely effective U.S. officers, including General Crook and General Miles, chased and harried the retreating Sioux contingents through the snows, leaving them starving, beleaguered and desperate. At last, in March 1877 the once formidable war chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull found themselves cornered, and their people left with little choice but to admit defeat. What then would be their fate?Dominic and Tom … discuss the annihilation of the Plains Indians and the dissolution of their extraordinary culture and nomadic way of life, along with the tragic death and downfall of one of the most mesmerising and mysterious characters of the entire story: Crazy Horse. “

We Live Here Now (The Atlantic) Thank you for Calling President Trump The presence of their neighbours from the ‘Eagles Nest’ at the vigils outside the Washington DC jail attracted the attention of politicians, most particularly Sebastian Gorka, who took up the cause of Ashli Babbitt with enthusiasm. As part of the vigil, people would telephone in, and these calls were often broadcast out loud. President (at this stage ex-president) called in as well.

I Bet It’s a January 6 case There were over 1500 arrests after January 6, and in a small jurisdiction like Washington DC, many locals were called up for jury duty in January 6 cases. And so, Lauren gets the call up and she is part of the jury that convicts Taylor Johnatakis for obstruction of an official proceeding; civil disorder’ and assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officer and a handful of misdemeanors. His sentence was more than seven years. (Trump walked away scot-free). Lauren feels bad about it, and Hanna Rosin visits his wife, Marie and after learning that he has five kids, that his wife is a sad, forgiving woman, and that they may well lose their house, then Hanna feels bad about it too.

Shadows of Utopia Episode 13 The Royal Crusade for Independence. This episode is only 1.5 hours long, and it comes three years (!!) after Lachlan Peters embarked on this project. It deals with the year 1953. By this time, the IndoChina was becoming known in France as the ‘Dirty War’. All sides- the French, the Nationalists, the Viet Minh were appallingly violent, and this violence was spreading across all three territories of Indochina. The narrative divides in half here: looking at the diverging paths of Saloth Sar (the future Pol Pot) and King Sihanouk. Saloth Sar returned to Cambodia, charged by the Communist students back in France with compiling a report about the different groups, and which group they should throw their weight behind. He wrote back to Paris saying that the Khmer Viet Minh was the only viable force, but that the Cambodians should work for independence from within the tent. He joined the Kymer Viet Minh, but found that despite the name, the group was dominated by the Vietnamese who looked down on them. Meanwhile, Sihanouk decided that he was going to get independence from the French for ‘his’ country, so he got involved with international diplomacy which was getting increasingly complex now that it was overlaid by Cold War diplomacy. In the end the French, who were domestically becoming increasingly uncomfortable with this ‘dirty war’, decided that they had to go along with Sihanouk’s proposal because of the Communist threat, so independence was declared in November 1953. But the Nationalists led by Than and his Kymer Srei and the Viet Minh did not accept Sihanouk’s takeover. So we had Sihanouk with French and US support against the Khner Viet Minh supported by Vietnam, China and Russia.

Global Roaming (ABC) I enjoy Global Roaming with Geraldine Doogue and Hamish Macdonald, two of my favourite ABC journalists. Maori vs the King: Who owns NZ? picks up on the large recent protests in New Zealand (involving both Maori and Pakeha) over the bill before their Parliament to rewrite the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi. Although there is little chance of this bill being passed, the fact that it even came before Parliament says a lot about the times we are living in. Features Taiha Molyneux, Māori News Editor Radio New Zealand .

Rear Vision (ABC) Treaty of Waitangi It might be flawed, it might be contested, and is continually being discussed and reconceptualized but I think that the attempts to ‘rewrite’ the Treaty itself are absolutely appalling. I suspect that NZ politicians were emboldened by our recent Voice referendum over the ditch. It’s interesting that two of the speakers in this episode have died so it really does take on a historical perspective. The speakers are Judith Binney, was Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Auckland. She died 15 February 2011, Claudia Orange is a historian and Director of History and Pacific Cultures at Te Papa, the national museum of New Zealand and Dr Ranginui Walker was a Māori academic and writer. He died 29 February 2016. I just had a look at the Waitangi Tribunal reports page: it’s telling that of the five ‘urgent’ reports issued there, four of them arise from this year.

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‘The Best Catholics in the World’ by Derek Scally

Posted on December 16, 2024 | 1 comment

2021,310 p.

It amazes me that, of all countries in the world, IRELAND should have voted for gay marriage and legal abortion. My impression of Ireland is that it is mired in religion and conservatism, and I don’t think that I’m alone in this perception. In this book, Derek Scally, after many years of living in Germany, returns to Ireland, the land of his childhood, and asks himself how these changes came about. It is a story both of his own personal journey from a weakly-held Catholicism into a consideration of how Ireland, as a country, can come to terms with its past.

The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, ‘The Leaning Tower of Piety’, he writes of his own Irish upbringing and his own contact through St Monica’s Church with Father Paul McGennis, who was later to plead guilty to four counts of indecent assault. In going through the church archives, he learns of the league table on donations that existed between the parishes, and through speaking to old parishioners he learns of the suspicions about Paul McGennis, and the inability of parish priest Michael Geaney to impose any authority on him. In Part I he challenges the perception that there is a special type of ‘Celtic Christianity’, suggesting that this is the result of previous centuries’ public relations, generating important political momentum, emotional comfort and offering touchstones against historical events like the Penal Laws and Protestant/English occupation. It was not enough: he suggests that Irish Catholics perceived themselves the Most-Oppressed-People-Ever. Yet, when he looks back to his own education within the Catholic system in the 1980s by revisiting the text books used at the time, he feels patronized and short-changed by the experience.

Part Two ‘Implosion’ looks at the effect of the clerical sexual abuse revelations in the 1990s. He focuses on Fr. Brendan Smyth, who was investigated in 1975 but went on to abuse children for a further sixteen years. The fallout, when it came, spread beyond his own activities: Cardinal Brady, who was involved in the 1975 investigation, was also accused of cover- up. He interviews Sean Brady, a man whom some see as a modest figure who knew which boats not to rock; while others see him as a coward and an accomplice to a predatory paedophile priest. Australian readers will see parallels with Archbishop George Pell. He goes on to explore the Magdalene laundries and the treatment of inmates in religious-run institutions. He argues that when the Catholic Church lost its monopoly on giving meaning or creating a sense of community, coupled with the sense of betrayal over the hypocrisy and intransigence of the church regarding sexual abuse, many left the church.

In Part Three ‘Among the Ruins’ he talks about the reformulated religion that transformed Famine-era faith into an earnest, Rome-focussed Sacred Heart Catholicism. He draws on his experience of living in Germany to wonder if Ireland does not need some form of national reckoning, as a form of healing and reconciliation. He considers the roles of museum and memorials in this process. At the end of the book he writes:

This journey has taken me from apathy to ambivalence, then anger to acceptance…[For] whatever anger I harbour towards the Irish Church, echoing the anger of those whose lives were ruined by its institutional inhumanity, I see remnants of its noble aspirations through the many ordinary Irish people who tried- and try- to lead better, Christian lives. No one can draw a line under the past, or airbrush away their role in it, but- for perhaps the first time ever- Irish people can approach their history on their own terms. That is, if they want to. (p. 307)

I’m not quite sure how to rate this book, and my reading was interrupted by a two-week holiday and so I did not read it as a continuous whole. I was happy enough to pick it up again, but I don’t know if I really grasped his argument well. In fact, summarizing it here gives me a better shape of the argument than the actual experience of reading the book did.

My rating: 7?

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 16-23 November 2024

Posted on December 11, 2024 | Leave a comment

Autocracy in America. This really is a very good series. Episode 5 Join the Kleptocracy In a kleptocracy, those in authority are united by the need to undermine the rule of law and to suppress the people in order to steal. A financial elite emerges slowly, hiding its money. From the shownotes: “Since the earliest days of the republic, America’s international friendships have shaped domestic politics. And some of those friendships helped America strengthen its democratic principles. So what happens if America’s new friends are autocrats? John Bolton, former national security adviser for President Donald Trump, and Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island argue that if America no longer leads the democratic world and instead imports secrecy and kleptocracy from the autocratic world, American citizens will feel even more powerless, apathetic, disengaged, and cynical.” They particularly discuss the nexus between Venezuela, China, Russia, Iran and Cuba. Within America itself, we have the emergence of SuperPACs, and the baleful influence of Elon Musk (I just can’t believe how much like a cartoon villain he is). They look at Ukraine, where the present government came to power as a rejection of strategic corruption- and look where it got them. The U.S. is vulnerable.

Episode 6 Politicize Freedom From the shownotes: “Freedom in the United States is a word that has had more than one meaning. It has meant freedom for some people and the repression of others. In a democracy, freedom also means the right to take part in politics. So how can that freedom best be secured? ” Apparently all America is united by an attachment to ‘freedom’, but I must admit that I’m always suspicious of it, especially in its American form. There is freedom in democracy but also the freedom to act in defiance of government. It’s a paradox that often those who demand ‘freedom’ most vehemently want to control the government so that they can transform the central power into their own vision. Is everything hopeless? (especially since this series was broadcast prior to Trump’s victory?) They turn to the Suffragettes, who managed to make sufficiently strong alliances with people whose politics were opposite to theirs, in order to make a common cause over the thing most important to them.


The Rest is History Episode 451: Custer’s Last Stand: The Charge of the 7th Cavalry. Do you know, I am so ignorant of ‘Cowboys and Indians’ that I don’t even know who won the Battle of Little Bighorn? From the shownotes: “The U.S. was cast into a spiralling panic following the economic depression of 1873, and waves of paramilitary violence swept through the south as the debates surrounding Reconstruction swirled on. Amidst this uncertainty, the government, under the leadership of Ulysses S. Grant and his chief advisors, began drawing up a cold blooded plan to strike into the heart of Montana and settle the issue of the Plains Indians once and for all. Meanwhile, the drumbeats of war were sounding amongst the newly united Lakota and Cheyenne themselves, spearheaded by their war chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, as the pressures of white settlers and the railroads increased. Their numbers swelled in the wake of a failed winter campaign lead by General Crook, as swarms of refugees accumulated into Sitting Bull’s village – the largest assembly of Lakota ever seen on the Plains. The stage seemed set for a mighty reckoning in the summer of 1876, as the Federal government geared up for another assault. Much to his delight George Custer, spared from the brink of disaster by his reckless impetuosity, was recruited to the 7th Cavalry marching on one of the armies closing in on the Lakota encampment near the Little Bighorn River…the Battle of the Rosebud that followed would see a six hour struggle of monumental violence.”

Spoiler alert: Custer is going to die. Tom and Dominic sheet quite a bit of blame to Benteen, but there was ambiguity in Custer’s instructions to him to come quickly and bring firearms (even though this would cause delay). It was a gruesome battle, although Custer wasn’t as mutilated as he might have been, as the Native Americans probably didn’t recognize him. News of the defeat reached New York on the 5th July, the day after America celebrated its centenary. New Yorkers read a 40,000 word report of the battle, which took the reporter 22 hours to dictate). Custer was described a slight, but vivid, figure in history.

We Live Here Now (The Atlantic). Sneaky Atlantic- it played this episode at the end of ‘Autocracy in America’ and I was hooked. It features Lauren Ober and Hanna Rosin, journalists and partners in Washington DC whose liberal and progressive neighbourhood was jarred by the arrival of a black SUV plastered with January 6 decals.

Episode 1 “We’re Allowed to Live Here’ sets the scene as Lauren and Hanna realize that their new neighbours in the house called ‘The Eagle’s Nest’ (shades of Hitler, anyone) are supporters of the January 6 rioters, and that one of them is in fact Micki Witthoeft, the mother of Ashli Babbitt, the only person shot by a Capitol Police officer that day, after she climbed through a broken glass panel.

In Episode 2 “You’ve Got to Get Your Militias Straight” they visit their new neighbours, and one of them accompanies Micki to the nightly vigil that she holds outside the ‘DC gulag’ where the January 6 insurrectionists are either incarcerated or awaiting jail. There they see how January 6 is mythologized, and see how the story has been changed over time.

History Hit The Golden Age of the Country House. I need to get away from all this American stuff. What better than a good old British Country House? This episode features Adrian Tinniswood, the author of The Power and the Glory: The Country House Before the Great War (Vintage, 2024) His book spans 1870 to 1914. He points out that there is no ‘typical’ owner of a Country House: there were traditional owners, nouveau riche, industrialists and Americans (like Astor, Carnegie and Rothschild) and outsiders (like Sikh princes). This tolerant upper class milieu reflected Edward 7th (the former Prince of Wales) who was tolerant of ‘new’ people. Quite a few of these people built their country houses from new, often reflecting medieval, chivalric ideals. A religious presence in the village through attendance at church services and philanthropy was important in cementing the owners’ place in the community. Despite the Downton Abbey scenario, most domestic servants (who by this time were almost all women) shifted jobs quite often, and only had a ‘career’ in domestic service of about 12 years. Country houses did have their share of murders and ghosts. The Country House phenomenon continued after WWI, but by then it had lost its confidence.

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‘We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir’ by Raja Shehadeh

Posted on December 8, 2024 | 2 comments
2022, 152 p

As we get older, we approach the ‘senior’ category that covers adults from 60-100, a forty-year age range. It would be unthinkable to conflate, say, a 10 year old and a 50 year old, but somehow after 60 all ‘old people’ are lumped in together. I wouldn’t be the first person, I’d wager, to regret that there were conversations that I didn’t have with my parents as a ‘senior’ myself, and questions that I didn’t ask about their earlier lives..

Palestinian Human rights lawyer and author Raja Shehadeh has even more regrets. When his 73-year-old father was assassinated outside his own home by a disaffected litigant in 1985, Raja was 34 years old and working in his father’s law firm. The murderer was a squatter on land belonging to the Anglican Church, and his father was handling the case for his eviction. The Israeli police closed the case, assuring the family that they were doing everything they could to find the murderer, but they knew who the murderer was and did not want to charge him. (p. 13) After his mother nagged him into going and collecting his father’s papers, Raja ended up with a cabinet of papers, which he stored on the bookshelf. He opened them, and found everything meticulously arranged, but felt overwhelmed by it all. The last case they worked together on involved plans for roads to be constructed throughout the West Bank. His father directed him to the documents he should consult, but showed only moderate enthusiasm for the case, which he left mainly in his son’s hands. Still smarting from this rejection, for many years he viewed the documents as nothing more than “a source of years of hardship and trouble”. (p. 17)

It was only when a friend brought him a photocopy of the Palestinian telephone directory for Jaffa-Tel Aviv dated January 1944, a city to which his father could not return after 1948, that his father’s long history of activism became real to him.

When I began reading, I realised with what impressive clarity my father had set forth his thoughts, and how his pioneering ideas were deliberately distorted by Israel, the Arab states and even some Palestinians. For so long his written attempts at setting the record straight had met with failure. I felt guilty that all these years had passed before I could spare the time to study the files in the cabinet and finally do what I had failed to do during his life: understand and appreciate his life’s work. (p. 17)

This book, then, is the story that was revealed through those documents. It is a history of the years immediately surrounding the Nakba. It illustrates the perfidy of Great Britain and Jordan in the establishment of Israel, the intransigence of the PLO and the whole generational cycle of Palestinian history that existed before the author’s birth. His father and other Palestinians at the time, rejected the creation of UNRWA (which is currently in the news now because Israel wants to outlaw it) because it made the Palestinian cause one of humanitarian response rather than justice.

His father took up the cause of Palestinian savings, which were frozen by the banks leaving Palestinian refugees unable to exchange their Palestinian pounds into pounds sterling or any other Arab currency. In February 1949 the Israeli government ordered that Barclays Bank in Britain and the Ottoman Bank formally transfer all ‘frozen’ Palestinian funds to the Custodian of Absentee Property, which after a while proceeded to liquidate the assets as if they belonged to the State. His father mounted a legal challenge against Barclays Bank at the District Court in Jerusalem, which was part of Jordan at the time. He won.

He decided to run as a candidate in the Jordanian parliament, but found himself arrested instead. He proposed the establishment of a Palestinian state next to Israel along the 1947 partition borders, with its capital in the Arab section of Jerusalem. This put him at odds with the PLO, which wanted a secular democratic state over the whole of Palestine, not a Palestinian state alongside Israel. His father was clear-eyed about Israel’s deceptions over various peace initiatives, and always believed that it was preferable for the Palestinians themselves negotiate with Israel, rather than have Arab states negotiate on their behalf ( as occurred during the Trump-inspired Abraham Accords, and is still occurring over any possible ceasefire in Gaza).

Too late, there was so much that the Raja of today could have discussed with his father, had he lived. It’s revealing that, despite their shared interests and objectives, the emotional tenor of the father/son relationship overpowered their intellectual one. He was intimidated by his father and he resented his dependence on him in the office.

For years I lived as a son whose world was ruled by a fundamentally benevolent father with whom I was temporarily fighting. I was sure that we were moving, always moving, towards the ultimate happy family and that one day we would all live in harmony. When he died before this could happen, I had to wake up from my fantasy, had to face the godlessness of my world and the fact that it is time-bound. There was not enough time for the rebellion and the dream. The rebellion had consumed all the available time. I turned around to ask my stage manager when the second act would start and found that there was none. I was alone. There was no second act and no stage manager. What hadn’t happened in the first act would never happen. Life moves in real time. (p. 12)

The language in this book is a little stilted, but any adult child can feel this same remorse for lost opportunities, and the jolt of being alone on the stage, once one’s parents have died. This book gave me a good sense of the generational injustice that is still being fought out in Gaza and the West Bank today, and the pettiness and duplicity of many of the main actors. Colonialism up-close, and without the patina of centennial celebrations and ‘age-old’ traditions is an ugly, ugly thing.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

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‘Walk the Blue Fields’ by Claire Keegan

Posted on December 4, 2024 | 1 comment
2008, 181 p.

I’m not usually a fan of short stories, but I have read and enjoyed a couple of Claire Keegan’s novellas, and I thought that I’d like to read some of her other writing. I think I’ve finally worked out the best way for me to read short stories, too: just one at a sitting, then put the book away until I find time to read another. And what’s more, I think I’ve finally worked out the best way to write about them too: to acknowledge that some of them will slip by without making an impression, and just hold on to the ones that do.

For me, there were two really strong stories in this collection. The first, ‘The Parting Gift’ is an absolute masterpiece in concise, measured writing and I am in awe of her skill in packing so much backstory and nuance into just 14 pages. It’s written in the second person, present tense – not a narrative style that I’m attracted to, I must admit

In her bedroom your mother is moving things around, opening and closing doors. You wonder what it will be like for her when you leave. Part of you doesn’t care.

Our narrator is packing to leave for New York, and her brother Eugene is to take her to the airport. Her mother orders the narrator to go upstairs to say goodbye to her father, who is in bed (presumably ill). She doesn’t want to: there have been years of sexual abuse, tacitly accepted by her mother. Her mother expects that her husband will give her some money as a parting gift, but he does not. Her brother, who has done his best to protect her from her father, vows that he will leave home too, but she knows that he will not.

The second story that I really enjoyed was ‘Night of the Quicken Trees’ about a wild, unkempt woman, Margaret Flusk who moves into a detached cottage on the outskirts of a rural Irish village. The house was left to her by her cousin, a priest, with whom she fell in love and eventually ended up bearing his child, who later died. She is superstitious and independent, but she gradually yields to the equally independent man in the adjoining cottage, Stack, who lives in filth and sleeps with his goat Josephine. When her periods return, she has the urge to have a child and so they knock a hole between the two cottages, until Margaret leaves him, taking the child with her. The story is told like a fairy-tale, full of portent and warning.

The other stories are mainly set in Ireland, except for ‘Close to the Waters Edge’, which is set in America where a young man celebrates his 21st birthday with his mother and his arrogant, aggressive millionaire step-father. He is gay, but cannot tell his mother and step-father, and so he returns to Harvard, without having told them. With its American setting, this story doesn’t seem to fit in with the others. There’s a unity to the other stories with the sexual indiscretions with priests, the claustrophobia of the small village and many eyes and tongues, and the flat depression of unfulfilled lives.

I’m mystified as to why she (or the publisher) chose ‘Walk the Blue Fields’ as the title. In that story, a priest has just conducted a wedding service where the bride seems unhappy, and there is tension between the groom and his brother, the best man. We learn that in the past the priest had had sex with the bride- the second story in this collection where there is sex between priest and parishioner. But if by choosing one story over another for the title suggests that it is the strongest one in the collection, I beg to differ. For me ‘The Parting Gift’ is the absolute stand-out story, and one that I will remember.

Rating: I never know how to rate short stories.

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 8-15 November 2024

Posted on December 3, 2024 | Leave a comment

Autocracy in America Episode 3: Consolidate Power This episode looks back to Depression-era Louisiana Governor Huey Long, who sought to take over the apparatus of government in his state, just as illiberal leaders have done in other countries. They interview Richard D. White, who wrote his biography of Long called Kingfish back in 2006. Like someone else we know, Long’s political approach was to present himself as entertainer and salesman, although he did deliver on his promises at first. He survived impeachment, but then embarked on revenge by capturing the legislature, manipulating supposedly independent bodies, packing the courts, intimidating the media and embarking on violence. He was not a politician: he was a demagogue.

The Rest is History Episode 452 Custer’s Last Stand: The Battle of the Little Bighorn I must say that I’ve been a bit uncomfortable about how flippant Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook are when telling this story. Perhaps it’s that they’re star-struck from their Saturday Afternoon Matinee memories of Custer and Sitting Bull, but perhaps there’s also a thread of racism running through this as well. At one stage they pull themselves up, noting that if they were talking about the Titanic, they would be talking about incredible bravery instead of treating it so flippantly. From their website: “The Battle of The Little Bighorn is one of the totemic moments of American frontier history. However, it is also mysterious, with the exact events of that blood-soaked day difficult to trace. On the 22nd of June, George Custer marched out with vague orders to drive the vast gathering of the Lakota and their allies, under the leadership of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, towards General Terry’s force, advancing from the South. Custer, keen as ever for a charge, was hoping to score a considerable defeat over the Native Americans in time for the 4th of July centenary. Then, on the evening of the 24th of June, Crow scouts reported that the Lakota’s trail had been found, and Custer launched into action. Marching his men through the night, they arrived at the encampment the following morning, shocked to discover a camp of thousands. At 3pm, the first force attacked, and the Battle of the Little Bighorn, in all its horror and gore, had begun…”

In Our Time (BBC) Rupert Graves 1895-1985 I really only know Rupert Graves through his I Claudius (which I watched but didn’t finish reading -must do so someday) and I was aware of him as a World War I poet with some connection with the other British poets on the front. He was born in 1895 to a distinguished Anglo-Irish family, and his mother was part of the Von Ranke family (most famous for Leopold Von Ranke, the father of source-based history). As with other boys of his social class, he went to Charterhouse where he excelled in classics and sports. He lived most of his childhood in Spain, but he enlisted with the British army as soon as war broke out, and on account of his public school education, he was immediately given a commission. There he met Siegfried Sassoon, with whom he had a homoerotic but probably chaste relationship, and Nancy Nicholson, a nurse, whom he married. He wrote Goodbye to all That in 1926 to make money in the midst of his marital breakup, which was triggered when he fell in love with Laura Riding, after earlier forming a consenual menage a trois with her while still with his wife. He later married Beryl Hodge. He wrote over 140 books and 1000 poems, The White Goddess and a number of retellings of classical myths. The panel on this episode comprises Paul O’Prey, Emeritus Professor of Modern Literature at the University of Roehampton, London; Fran Brearton
Professor of Modern Poetry at Queen’s University, Belfast and Bob Davis. Professor of Religious and Cultural Education at the University of Glasgow.

Shadows of Utopia Episode 12 Pol Pot in Paris Part II (YouTube with images) Yet another marathon episode of 2.5 hours – that’s just too long for a podcast. This episode covers 1947-1953. He starts off by returning to Vietnam, where the Viet Minh guerillas had scattered into the rural areas. The French troops were spread too thinly, and massacres in villages (for example in My Trach) were to be repeated during the Vietnam war decades later. As part of the cold war, the Sino/Soviet pact saw both Russia and China recognizing Ho Chi Minh, but Vietnam needed both Laos and Cambodia to be independent so that their own position was safe. The Communist Parties in both those parties were dominated by Vietnam, and there was no proletariat.

A nationalist movement was emerging in Cambodia, but it was sometimes at odds with Vietnam, their old enemy. The Cambodian Issarak, despite its many factions, was active in Cambodia. It joined the more intellectual student movement, but of course there was a split between those who looked to the return of the exiled Son Ngoc Thanh (then under house arrest in Paris) and those who looked to the Vietnamese Communists. The student movement in Paris approached Thanh and invited them to join them in armed struggle, but he refused because he was angling to return to Cambodia, which he did in October 1951 where he was greeted by huge crowds. By 1952 he started another magazine, which was shut down within 6 months. In 1952 he joined with Issarak (did he intend that all along?) which enraged King Sihanouk. The King and the French moved against the Democratic Party, dismissed the government and Sihanouk declared himself Prime Minister, promising independence from the French within 3 years.

Meanwhile Saloth Sar, the young Pol Pot, was still in Paris. Student study groups had formed, and Saloth Sar was invited even though his ideas did not exactly align with the unstated Communism of the student groups. At this time, French Communism was at a high point (at the French election, it gained 25% of the vote), but so too was the cult of Stalinism. Into this came the influence of Mao’s thought, with its two-step revolutionary progression, and its affirmation of its nationalist nature rather than a formula imposed from outside. So, for Saloth Sar, we had the combination of influences: Lenin, Stalin, Mao and the French Revolution itself (where the Terror was interpreted as a way of ‘saving’ the Revolution). By the end of 1952, a lot of the students in Paris were having their scholarships withdrawn by the King, and although they were talking a lot about Cambodia, they didn’t really know what was going on there. So in December 1952 Saloth Sar volunteered to return to Cambodia to check out the situation. Just as he arrived, Sihanouk abolished the National Assembly.

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‘Wifedom’ by Anna Funder

Posted on November 30, 2024 | 1 comment
2023, 384 p.

Sometimes a writer takes on a task, knowing that it is risky. Funder did, and in a way, Orwell himself made her do it. After the age of 30, he writes, people almost abandon the sense of being individuals at all, and live for others or are smothered under drudgery. Not writers, however, who belong to a minority class of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end. Was this true of Funder herself? An award-winning Australian writer and historian, she knew that despite intending to share the responsibilities of life and parenthood with her husband Craig, she had been doing the lion’s share. As a writer and a wife, she found herself envying the titantic male writers for the

…unpaid, invisible work of a woman [to create] the time and -neat, warmed and cushion-plumped- space for their work….To benefit from the work of someone who is invisible and unpaid and whom it is not necessary to thank because it is their inescapable purpose in life to attend to you, is to be able to imagine that you accomplished what you did alone and unaided…Invisible workers require no pay or gratitude, beyond perhaps an entire, heartfelt sentence in a preface, thanking ‘my wife’. ..As a writer, the unseen work of a great writer’s wife fascinates me, as I say- out of envy. I would like a wife like Eileen, I think, and then I realise that to think like a writer is to think like a man…But as a woman and a wife her life terrifies me. (p. 53, p.55)

When she read a piece that Orwell had written in his private notebook, close to his final illness, she recoiled from the misogyny and repugnance that he showed towards his wife: that same wife who had made his writing possible. She turned her attention from Orwell to his wife Eileen. She had thought of fictionalizing her picture of their marriage, but the publication of Sylvia Topp’s Eileen: The Making of George Orwell in 2005 and the recent discovery of six letters from Eileen to her friend Norah caused her to change her mind. Eileen’s voice had been suppressed for so long, and she didn’t want these six, so rare, letters to be swallowed up into the maw of source material. And so she writes this book as a ‘counter-fiction’, marking out Eileen’s words in italics so that they keep their own integrity and distinctiveness, but fictionalizing the context in which they are written as she traces their marriage from 1935 and their first meeting through to Orwell’s death in January 1950.

A long-time admirer of George Orwell’s work, Anna Funder had immersed herself in Orwell scholarship, reveling in his essays, combing through his six biographies, doing the Orwell Pilgrimage to Catalonia and Jura, and revisiting his books. She is aware of the risk she is running, in these ‘cancel culture’ times

…Orwell’s work is precious to me. I didn’t want to take it, or him, down in any way. I worried he might risk being ‘cancelled’ by the story I’m telling. Though she, of course, has been cancelled already- by patriarchy. I needed to find a way to hold them all- work, man and wife- in a constellation in my mind, each part keeping the other in place. (p. 23)

There is a lot going on in this book. She mounts a feminist attack against patriarchy; she reflects on the writing process and the needs of writers; she combines Orwell’s biography and her own autobiography; she trails Orwell and Eileen through their marriage chronologically, and she takes Orwell’s other (male) biographers to task for their unthinking acceptance of the minor role of “my wife”. Is there too much going on here? Perhaps, although by drawing on her own reflections on the writing process and the role of her partner in a prize-winning, internationally recognized writing career is to provide a new perspective on this other writing career of a largely-ignored writer nearly one hundred years ago.

As it happens, I read this book immediately after reading Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. I had been disconcerted by Orwell’s erasure of Eileen through the sparing references to “my wife”, but having now read Funder’s account of their time in Spain, I feel angry that his account stands unchallenged. All those passive sentences of how urgently-needed supplies miraculously appeared or arrangements were made, suddenly made sense. Even the scene in which Eileen appears in the hotel lobby to warn Blair that he was in danger elides completely the fact that she had been waiting literally days for him and downplays the very real peril that Eileen herself was facing. That self-deprecating humour and false humility is all a charade.

Like Funder, I am angered too by the manipulation of quotes and shuffling of facts by his earlier biographers in lionizing the man and expunging Eileen. Funder has obviously read these biographies with one finger holding open the footnotes page, and she has followed up each one.

From a 21st century perspective, in the light of ‘me too’ and awareness of ‘coercive control’, Orwell does not come out of her analysis well. As his late-life reflection on the “incorrigible dirtiness” and “terrible, devouring sexuality” of women (p.11) shows, he had a deeply embedded repugnance for women. He was constantly unfaithful, and by immuring themselves away in a dishevelled cottage in the country – at his insistence- far from the city, he separated her from her friends and their milieu. He thought nothing of going off to follow his own desires and interests: over to Spain to report on the Civil War, off to Europe while Eileen is dying, absent again when she was facing court to gain custody of their adopted son. She was his typist, his editor, his sounding board; she cooked, she gave up her comforts for his. She pandered to his ‘bronchitis’ while he largely ignored her pain from cancer. He was jealous of their friend Georges’ infatuation with her, yet he revelled in the ‘permission’ she granted for him to have affairs – a permission harangued and co-erced from her, or freely given? He pursues her friends (because they are her friends?) and “pounces” on women, after her death, in order replace her and the day-to-day burdens she had carried, as quickly as possible.

But without wanting to excuse him- who knows what goes on in a marriage? The story goes that Orwell instantly declared on meeting her “Eileen O’Shaughnessy is the girl I want to marry”. Conversely, Eileen told her friend “I told myself that when I was thirty, I would accept the first man who asked me to marry him.” What was her attraction to him? She had won a scholarship to Oxford where she read English alongside Auden, Spender and MacNeice, but failed to get a first (no women were given firsts in 1927, the year she graduated), and she relinquished her own writing. She was undertaking a Master Of Psychology at University College London, but this too was sublimated to Orwell’s demands for quiet, food, the country lifestyle. She seemed heedless to her own safety during the Blitz, and opted for the cheapest treatment of her cancer, a treatment that killed her. People and relationships are complex.

I enjoyed this book a great deal. I appreciated Funder’s rigour in interrogating Orwell’s biographies and biographers, I liked the respect with which she treated Eileen’s own words in the letters. Once you move beyond a slavish chronology, all biographies are an argument, and Funder’s argument is right there on the cover with the title “Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life”. I could have had a little less of Funder’s 21st century writerly angst, but it comes from a place of knowledge and identification. Reading it immediately after Homage to Catalonia convinced me completely of Funder’s thesis: that “my wife” was a real, living, intelligent woman who was a fundamental, and completely obscured, part of one of the most lionized literary marriages.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle September selection. It was an open meeting, and the paper presented by Meredith Churchyard was excellent.

Sourced from: purchased.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 November 2024

Posted on November 26, 2024 | 1 comment

Shadows of Utopia Episode 11: Khmer Issarak/ Pot Pot in Paris I This episode covers the period 1945 – 1950. Just like an abusive partner promising to reform after a stint in jail, after the Japanese capitulation the French government returned, promising to be better. They had plans for a Colonial Federation of the states under their control (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). This triggered the French/Vietnam war, which was a matter of prestige for the French, and a matter of nationalism for the Vietnamese who had claimed their own independence during the war. As far as Cambodia was concerned, in 1946 there was a Cambodian/French modus vivendi which returned to Cambodia the territory in the west that had gone to Thailand, and provided a new constitution (albeit under French oversight). The King and the National Assembly would be voted by universal male suffrage, and three political parties, each led by Princes, emerged. Although Than had been sidelined, the Democratic Party became the heir of the early Khmer nationalists, and won 50 out of 67 seats at the first election. Outside of official channels Khmer Isserak became more prominent. In 1946 they seized Siem Reap in a guerilla action that united monks, criminals, warlords, and Thai-influenced communists, as well as freedom fighters and independence supporters. But when the Prince heading the Democratic Party died, the democrats fractured. Meanwhile, in October 1949 the future Pol Pot, Saloth Sar, arrived in Paris after gaining a scholarship to a trade school to study radio technology, possibly through his royal connections. The Communist Party was strong in France at this time. He went to work in Yugoslavia as part of a labour force during his holidays (shades of what was to come in Cambodia), and was introduced to communist ideology and Marxist-inspired politics in Paris through a group of students including Ieng Sary, Thioun Mumm, Keng Vannsak.

The Rest is History Custer’s Last Stand: The Charge of the 7th Cavalry (Part 6) Again, from their website: “The U.S. was cast into a spiralling panic following the economic depression of 1873, and waves of paramilitary violence swept through the south as the debates surrounding Reconstruction swirled on. Amidst this uncertainty, the government, under the leadership of Ulysses S. Grant and his chief advisors, began drawing up a cold blooded plan to strike into the heart of Montana and settle the issue of the Plains Indians once and for all. Meanwhile, the drumbeats of war were sounding amongst the newly united Lakota and Cheyenne themselves, spearheaded by their war chiefs Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, as the pressures of white settlers and the railroads increased. Their numbers swelled in the wake of a failed winter campaign lead by General Crook, as swarms of refugees accumulated into Sitting Bull’s village – the largest assembly of Lakota ever seen on the Plains. The stage seemed set for a mighty reckoning in the summer of 1876, as the Federal government geared up for another assault. Much to his delight George Custer, spared from the brink of disaster by his reckless impetuosity, was recruited to the 7th Cavalry marching on one of the armies closing in on the Lakota encampment near the Little Bighorn River…the Battle of the Rosebud that followed would see a six hour struggle of monumental violence.

Autocracy in America. Bear in mind that I was listening to all this before the American election, when I was still cautiously hopeful that Harris would win. Or more to the point, Trump winning was just too frightening to contemplate- especially after listening to this podcast. It features historian Anne Applebaum (who I have a lot of time for- see my review of Twilight of Democracy here) and Peter Pomerantsev. It’s produced by The Atlantic. Episode 1 Start with a Lie argues that the lie is the litmus test of loyalty – and haven’t we seen plenty of those coming from Donald Trump’s mouth? Evidence is irrelevant, and truth becomes a subset of power. They speak with Steven Richter, the county recorder in Maricopa county who was accused by Trump and his acolytes of ridiculous vote tampering in 2020 (e.g. shredding the Republican votes, feeding them to chickens and then burning the chickens) but the sheer absurdity of the lie is part of the test. They speak of belief in the lie as being part of belonging, rather than an intellectual choice. Episode 2 Capture the Courts In an authoritarian state, the public has no real access to justice. This episode features Renée DiResta, a scholar who researches online information campaigns. After putting out a report ‘The Long Fuse’, she struggled to counter false accusations leveled against her after a series of courts accepted them without investigation. They then go on to discuss Justice Cannon’s ruling on presidential immunity, and the distinction between rule BY law and rule OF law.

The Money (ABC) Yet another pre-election podcast. Oh to be able to return to that still-hopeful time! This episode was As America goes to the polls, the economy is doing well, but people aren’t feeling it. There were three speakers, but I was most interested in the last one, who I think is Christopher Rugaber. Who ever it was, they spent a day at the King of Prussia shopping mall in Pennsylvania. He made four observations. First, that people are quick to blame the government when things go wrong, but when they get a new job or a raise etc. they attribute it to their own individual effort. Second, that despite years of predicting the demise of the department store, they are actually booming with the car parks filled with workers’ cars long before the stores open. This is the flip side of deficit spending: that people DO actually spend the money they are given. Third, after paying $10.00 for an ice-cream that would have cost $7.00 last year, he realized that this is what people remember- not tax reductions, not extra childcare payments, not reduction in inflation, but the $10.00 ice-cream. Finally, that people (like himself) continued to buy brands like Levi, no matter how much they put up the price. They would complain about the price-rise but it was not enough to make them change brands. Interesting.

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‘The Erratics’ by Vicki Laveau-Harvie

Posted on November 19, 2024 | Leave a comment
2019, 224 p.

I confess that I started this book warily. “Mad as a Meat Axe” write two daughters on their mother’s medical chart at the end of the bed, sniggering at the thought that the initials MMA might prompt some medical profession to treat their mother for MMA and kill her. The two daughters, who are never named, are visiting their mother in rehab for a broken hip, even though their mother denies their existence, and has had nothing to do with them for eighteen years. I would not want these daughters.

Obviously much has gone on in this family, but we are never told. Our narrator tells us that, for her:

My past is not merely faded, or camouflaged under the dust of years. It’s not there, and I know a blessing in disguise when I see one. I have managed to shake free and flee to far-flung places where I feel reasonably safe because I do not carry a lot of my past. (p.140)

And yet, after 18 years, this Canadian academic returns home to see her father, whom her mother has announced “doesn’t have long”, and her mother whose hip has disintegrated. Along with her sister, who has remained in Canada despite the 18 long years of estrangement from her parents, they arrange (conspire?) for their mother to be moved into some form of care, so that their father can escape from her clutches. Her mother has long since given power of attorney to someone else, and she announces that her daughters are only after her money. Are they? Who is mad as a meat axe here?

It took a while for me to shake my suspicion of the narrator. I wonder if this book is some sort of Rorschach test: I have been the child left (albeit in a completely different situation) and so perhaps I read it differently. As older sister, the narrator has fled to Australia and established a marriage and career there, while her younger sister, just by virtue of being in Canada, carries the memories, the hurt and responsibility. The narrator knows this, but this does not change her actions:

…However different we are and however badly she judges me, whatever gulf already separates us, she is my sister. I do not want the gulf to fill with the seething resentment she will feel because she is doing it all, but I know this will happen. I am telling her that I know this will happen. I know she will feel violent annoyance with me when I suggest something because I’m not there and I don’t know, and I’m not the one doing it and I, on my far away island continent, will sit quietly, gnawed by guilt. (p. 157)

We never learn what has happened in this marriage and family. We have little back-story for her parents, beyond the fact that her father made money through the oil industry and that he fought in WWII. We have no images of a courtship, a marriage or a family life with young children. Everything is refracted through the narrator’s rage- which oddly enough, she deflects onto her sister.

No, I see rage here. A rage expressed by staying on the other side of the world, and by allowing her younger sister to carry this burden. A justified rage, from the snippets that we received, but rage nonetheless, despite protestations of guilt.

This is a memoir, and as such the author has ultimate freedom and responsibility to shape the narrative however she wishes. The memoir starts with a preface, describing the Erratics, huge boulders deposited by the Cordilleran Ice Sheet as it moved through Alberta and Montana. The Erratic that sits in the Canadian town of Okotoks, where the memoir is set, has cracked and fallen in on itself, posing danger to anyone approaching it. On the final pages, we revisit this image of the Okotoks Erratic with the spirit of her mother sitting atop it, beside Napi the Trickster.

To be honest, I’m still not sure who the Erratic is here: mother or daughter. But either way, it feels as if there is some sort of space here for release.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: purchased e-book

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