‘The Dream Hotel’ by Laila Lalami

Posted on May 4, 2026 | Leave a comment
2025, 322 p.

At the moment there’s a Senate inquiry into the new computer Integrated Assessment Tool that is being used to assess eligibility and assign funding levels for aged care service. It is completely automated, and there is no human over-ride function when the algorithm spits out an assessment that is inappropriate, insufficient or just plain wrong. At the inquiry, the first assistant secretary of the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, Robert Day, said

The no override comes from the fact that that is an objective outcome….If you have these scores from your assessment, you get this level of classification … there’s no discretionary element (Guardian, 3 April 2026)

SPOILERS

I was reminded of this when reading Laila Lalami’s The Dream Hotel. My library has designated it ‘Science Fiction’, but there’s not much science fiction about it: it’s just an extrapolation of what is already here. Set in an alternative present day and in response to moral panic about the rising crime rate, The Risk Assessment Administration has been charged with investigating suspicious individuals in order to prevent future crimes, and it can draw on myriad data sources in order to do so. American citizen Sara Hussein is pulled from the arrivals line at the airport because her risk score is too high. An archivist by training, she has been attending a conference, and she bristles and pushes back at being flagged as a risk. The risk assessment has picked up on a complaint from a fellow passenger on the plane who was off-loaded before take-off because she assisted him when he was having trouble breathing; her response that her employer paid for her flight was questioned because, technically, she had not yet submitted the receipts to recoup her expenses. But most damaging of all for her assessment was the information that the authorities could access from her Dreamsaver, a device that she -along with many other Americans- used to maximize the value from her sleep. As the mother of young twins, trying to keep her career afloat, she had turned to this device to overcome her insomnia and although she didn’t realize it, there among the terms and conditions was her permission for the data to be handed on to a third party if required by a legal enforcement authority. Her dreams revealed a propensity to violence, they claimed, and so she needed to be assessed further in Madison Retention Centre.

So started her months-long stint in an ‘retention centre’ which increasingly became prison-like with 24 hour surveillance, curtailed freedoms presented as ‘privileges’, and enforced work. The organization contracted to run the Madison retention centre, Safe-X Inc., has its own internal economy. It has contracts with outside clients like film studios to have AI generated video content assessed for its verisimilitude; it has its internal laundry and catering facilities which fall under Safe-X budgets. Communications are provided and monitored by the AI-driven PostPal; there is a commissariat where Residents could purchase goods from their own money or from funds provided by their families. She can receive visitors, but the scheduling program is capricious, cancelling her visits without any recourse. Her Dreamsaver is monitored daily, and periods of detention could be extended at whim by the Attendants. In the narrative, you (and she) are never quite sure what is dream, or increasingly nightmare, and what is real.

What seems to be a Kafka-esque and dystopian situation does come to an end- the book has an ending, after all- when she resists, using time-worn tactics of strike and solidarity. In fact, the book is almost optimistic in its ending:

…isolation is the opposite of salvation…she owes her release to the women who joined together to say not….Freedom isn’t a blank slate..[it] is teeming and complicated and, yes, risky, and it can only be written in the company of others…This is what Madison has given her, even as it has taken so much from her- the knowledge that she isn’t alone, that she doesn’t have to be. (p. 321,322)

This is a fantastic book. I only had ten pages to go to the end, and so I sat on the station as my train went past, wanting to finish it. It seems that so many articles and events are converging: I just read Anna Krein’s The screens that ate school, from The Monthly, 2020; at a recent appointment my doctor asked me if I would agree to HeidiAi Co Pilot for Modern Healthcare. Do I read the screen after screen of Terms and Conditions? Did I take the doctor’s word that the recording of my appointment wouldn’t go any further than her computer? Do parents have the courage to push back against Google and Apple programs in their schools? No, no and no. This book isn’t Science Fiction: it’s a warning.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I had read excellent reviews of it.

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Six Degrees of Separation: From Wild Dark Shore to Wild Island.

Posted on May 3, 2026 | 4 comments

It’s the start of the month again – ye Gods! in May already- so it’s Six Degrees of Separation time. This meme, hosted by Kate at Books Are My Favourite and Best involves her choosing a starting book, then you linking the titles or themes of six other books. Have I read her starting book Wild Dark Shore? Of course not.

  1. Come Inside by G. L. Osborne. I gather that Wild Dark Shore is about a shipwreck, and so is Come Inside, set in Western Australia. A young girl is rescued by a young man after being swept ashore as the only survivor after a shipwreck in 1887. She is unable to remember her earlier life, and her story becomes part of the local folklore, heavily mined by the press at the time, a series of oral histories in the 1940s and then centenary publications a hundred years later. You can read my review here.
  2. The Company by Arabella Edge is a novel based on the shipwreck of the Batavia, which also foundered on the West Australian coast. It is told in the present tense voice of Jeronimus Corneliz, one of the men who took charge after the senior officers left the shipwrecked passengers ashore while they went off in search of water. Rather gruesome.
  3. That Deadman Dance by Kim Scott is also set in Western Australia, and it tells the fictionalized story of first contact between the Noongar peopole. We learn early in the book that Bobby Wabalanginy , the main character, will end up a dishevelled busker-type, entertaining tourists with a patter that combines history, pathos and showmanship. The book opens in 1833-5 with Bobby already ensconced in among the whalers and early settlers on the Western Australian coast. It then backtracks to 1826-30 with first contact, a spearing, accommodation and wariness, and the actions of Dr Cross – a good man who trod carefully in this strange and old land, remembered kindly by the Noongah people who knew him, and claimed and acclaimed as a venerable ‘old pioneer’ by subsequent white settlers who did not. Then forward again to 1836-8 in Part III, followed by 1841-44 in Part IV. There’s an increasing sense of foreboding as the book unfolds. You can read my review here.
  4. Dancing With Strangers by my favourite historian Inga Clendinnen. It’s a contact story too, this time set in Sydney Cove with the arrival of the first fleet, and even though it’s on the other side of the country, it’s as if first contact is following a tragic script.
  5. Truganina by Cassandra Pybus follows that tragic script too, although it is set in Van Diemen’s Land rather than the mainland. In Pybus’ Truganini – as distinct from the ‘last Tasmanian aborigine’ Truganini- we have a flesh-and-blood woman who swims and dives, who struggles through harsh landscapes and complains of having to walk instead of taking the boat, has friendships, loves children, uses her body and her sexuality to get what she wants, and resists being corralled into Chief Protector Robinson’s vision of a compliant, dying race. You can read my review here.
  6. And in a nice bit of symmetry, I end up with Wild Island by Jennifer Livett. It’s set in Van Diemens Land as well, and it’s a riff on Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The opening pages have two lists of characters: the first a list of historical characters drawn from the real-life inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land in the late 1830s and early 1840s; and the second a list of fictional characters, some of whom have been taken from Jane Eyre, others created to mingle with the real-life Hobartians.  The research for this book is exhaustive- and exhausting.  In her acknowledgments at the rear of the book, the author mentions that this book has been forty years in gestation, and I believe it. You can read my review here.

I seem to have spent a lot of time on beaches and shipwrecks in Colonial Australia. But I’m rather pleased with myself being able to link the opening and closing books so well, even if I had to contort myself somewhat to do so!

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 16-23 April 2026

Posted on May 2, 2026 | Leave a comment

Foundling. Episodes 1-3 This is a six-part series, presented by journalist Lucy Greenwell and I binge-listened to the first three episodes. Greenwell remembered a story about a baby that was found on the verge in a deserted lane in her village in October 1987. The mother was never found and the baby, Jess, was placed for adoption. So, some 40 years later, Greenwell goes in search of Jess, and when she finds her, Jess is already wondering about her own origins. Jess does a DNA test, and she and Greenwell go back to the village to talk to people who were living there at the time, and one of the villagers suggests that she look at the young women who were working there as nannies at the time. When Jess receives the DNA results, Greenwell realizes that, as a child, she actually knew Jess’ mother who was acting as a nanny in a neighbouring house. Jess finds a half-sister and discovers her mother, but it is a complex relationship that doesn’t turn out as she thought it would.

The Rest is History Episode 644 The Fall of the Incas: Empire of Gold (Part 1) I must confess that I’m not absolutely clear about the Aztecs and the Incas, and I find from this episode that many historians and chroniclers of the time weren’t either, as similar themes and events occur in both of them. Somehow 167 men overcame 24 million Incans. The conquest of the Aztecs was the model. Christopher Columbus’ monopoly was abolished, and now anyone could go to Hispaniola if they shared the proceeds with the Crown. There were rival, feuding networks of Conquistadors, hopping from island to island. The Incas were what is now known as Peru, Western Ecuador, a bit of Colombia and Chile, and they were completely geographically isolated, and unaware of the conquest of the Aztecs. The leader of the expedition, Pizarro, was illiterate, strong and austere, compared with Cortez. In 1524 Pizarro and Diego de Almagro set off exploring, but they were unsuccessful and then in 1526 they set off again. His pilot Bartolomé Ruiz went further south, where he encountered a raft, laden with jewels for inter-tribal trade, so they knew that there was great wealth in the country. Pizarro was recalled to Panama but he refused to go, and only 12 men stayed with him. In 1529 Pizarro went back to see King Charles V and was given a franchise, but not for Almagro (which was to cause problems later). In 1530 Pizarro returned with 200 recruits, including his brothers and six Dominican friars. He promised Almagro the country of Chile, and Almagro stayed behind in Panama. Then Hernando de Soto arrived with more men and importantly, the horses, that struck such fear into the Incas. They crossed into modern-day Peru where they learned of the Inca empire that the Incas themselves called ‘The Realms of Four Parts’. They did not have writing, horses or wheels; it was a totalitarian slave-based society with no private property. There had been a recent civil war in 1532 between brothers Atahualpa and Huáscar which devastated the countryside and splintered the elites. This was the environment into which Pizarro and his men appeared.

How Did We Get Here Episode 3: From the Nineteenth Century to World War I In the 1800s there was still no ‘Palestine’ as such. The Ottomans saw their holdings as provinces, with no territorial identities. Jerusalem itself may have had only 2000 inhabitants. The province was Arabic speaking, with some Turks, Frankish merchants, migrants and pilgrims and travellers. Jews constituted about 5% of the population and they mainly lived in scholarly centres. The European powers each had ‘their’ group to support. The French championed the Maronites, the Russians the Orthodox Christians and Britain the Jews. In 1882 Russian persecution saw the sponsorship of Jewish families to move to what was to become Israel by rich families like the Rothschilds and Montefiores. At this point, Hertzel began talking of a ‘Jewish state’ but there was no sustained ‘Palestinian’ resistance at this stage (the term ‘Palestinian’ was coined by the Ottomans in about 1850). It was still a farming community, and large Arab families sold some land to Jewish purchasers. World War I saw the area become strategically interesting to the European powers. The Sykes-Picot agreement envisaged an internationalized Palestine, with defined spheres of influence for the British, French and Russians. Mark Sykes, the British Middle East expert, later distanced himself from the agreement that bore his name. Episode features Hugh Kennedy, Professor of Arabic at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University, and historian Simon Sebag Montefiore.

Journey Through Time. I decided to journey through time myself, and went back to the first episode hosted by David Olusoga and Sarah Churchwell in April 2025. The Attack That Shook America: German Spies in New York tells the story of the huge explosion on Black Tom Island, an island in New York Harbor next to Liberty Island, since infilled and annexed to Jersey City. The United States was officially neutral, with Germany still operating an Embassy in New York,but the munitions that were stored on the island were mainly exported to the Allies. Von Pappen, who was to reappear on the world stage some 20 years later was working in the German Embassy, and he set up the War Intelligence Centre gathering information in Manhatten. In 1914 Berlin ordered him to sabotage shipping of munitions between US and Europe, and 200 bombings were carried out. Wilson refused to believe that spies were at work, preferring diplomacy. The sinking of the Lusitania caused strong anti-German feeling in US, and Von Pappen was expelled from the US in 1916. Black Tom Island was an obvious target, but no-one tended to take it seriously.

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‘The Elegance of the Hedgehog’ by Muriel Barbery

Posted on April 28, 2026 | Leave a comment
2006/2008 320 p.

Translated from the French by Alison Anderson

I know that this book was on the best seller list for ages several years ago, but somehow or other I missed out on reading it. I think that I had it mixed up with Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes -both European animals, I guess- and I was surprised to find that it wasn’t a WW2 Jewish family story at all. Instead it is set at some undetermined time -1990s?- in a luxurious Parisian apartment block. Reneé Michel is the concierge there, a job that she she took over from her late husband Lucien after his death.

SPOILERS AHEAD

Outwardly Reneé appears to be a working class menial worker, largely invisible to the residents of the apartment block who see her as little more than one of the amenities of the building, like the elevator. But she is much more than this. A precocious child from a poor family, who was forced to leave school early and marry young, she has a thirst for knowledge of the most esoteric and philosophical kind but she hides her abilities from everyone. Her best and only friend is Manuela, who works as a cleaner in the building. Manuela does not share Reneé’s interests at all, but she is quick, observant, generous with her limited resources and a loyal friend. She also provides cover for Reneé, giving the appearance of two equally humble and uneducated women friends- which of course we know Reneé is not. An equally precocious child lives several floors up, twelve year old Paloma Josse who is a mixture of intellectual superciliousness, ennui and determination to subvert the bourgeois future that awaits her by planning to commit suicide on her thirteenth birthday.

The book is told alternately from the first person perspective of Reneé and Paloma. The author distinguishes the two voices through different fonts, but the narrative voice is strong enough in both of them that there is no need for the visual cues. Both of them are exploring big philosophical questions- Reneé at a more abstract level; Paloma by observing the behaviour of people around her and gradually distancing herself from her avowed intention to set fire to the apartment buildings and kill herself at the same time.

I’ll confess that I found some of the philosophical chapters rather tedious- a long chapter about phenomenology, for example- and until halfway through the book I was wondering whether it was going to go anywhere. But then one of the residents of the apartment block died, and his apartment was purchased and renovated by the wealthy Japanese Kakuro Ozu. A man of refined and simple tastes, and an observer of beauty, he recognizes through small clues that both Reneé and Paloma are intelligent, philosophical women, both hiding their intelligence behind a surface of gruffness and ignorance, in Reneés case or adolescent moodiness and self-centredness in the case of Paloma. Manuela, Reneé, Paloma and Kakuro form a bond to which the apartment residents are completely oblivious.

Kakuro asks Reneé on a date, and with endearing awkwardness she procures a dress through Manuela’s help and goes to the hairdresser for the first time in many years. But she is increasingly uncomfortable at his attention, telling herself that such a cultured and wealthy man could not be interested in a lowly concierge. This, however, is all a defence mechanism, and we learn from her family story that her sister Lisette had died after giving birth to the child of the wealthy employer she had left home for. Shaken by her sister’s death, “Don’t fraternize with rich people if you don’t want to die” had become her watchword, but it was countered by Kakuro’s response “You are not your sister, we can be friends”. Indeed, possibly even more than friends.

I won’t divulge the ending, but it came quickly and out of left field. All of my reservations about the lack of movement and philosophical pretension in the first half of the book were dispelled. It left me in tears, wishing that I could stop the ending and just hold on to the characters for a bit longer.

I am rather mystified by the title though. Paloma watches Reneé and observes:

Madame Michel has the elegance of the hedgehog: on the outside, she’s covered with quills, a real fortress, but my gut feeling is that on the inside, she has the same simple refinement as the hedgehog: a deceptively indolent little creature, fiercely solitary- and terribly elegant. (p.139)

I’m no expert on hedgehogs: indeed, I don’t know if I’ve ever seen one. I must say, though, that ‘elegant’ is not a word I would readily associate with them. Certainly Madame Michele is prickly, solitary, combative and self-contained but elegant?

My rating: 8/10

Read because: Rosanna Readers bookgroup (i.e. ex-CAE) selection through YPRL.

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I hear with my little ear: 8-15 April 2026

Posted on April 26, 2026 | Leave a comment

The Rest is History We were watching The Irish Civil War 3-part series on SBS before it disappeared, I realized that I hadn’t finished listening to the Rest is History series on the Irish Civil War. Episode 581 The Irish Civil War: The Killing of Michael Collins (Part 2) features historian and friend of the podcast Ronan McGreevy. The fighting in Four Courts lasted three days, culminating in the Public Record Office being blown up, thus destroying records going back centuries. The fight moved into the streets outside the GPO. There were more anti-Treaty supporters than Free-State supporters in the IRA, but the Free State had the support and the weaponry of the British government. At the June election in 1922 the anti-Treatys only got 20% of the votes. People just wanted peace. The National army began recruiting heavily, and the Irregulars (i.e. the anti-Treaty IRA) were beaten, so they decided to embark on a guerilla campaign. Collins travelled to Cork, his home county, and visited friends and his brother and spent some time at the pub. Returning back from the pub, they traversed the same route – something you never do in a guerilla war. Did it matter that Michael Collins was killed? He was young, and would have brought dynamism to the Free State. Now it turns nasty with tit-for-tat killings, the expulsion of Protestants, and the sacking of the Big Houses. The Irish Civil War only lasted 11 months and 1400 were killed- and was less damaging that the other civil wars in Europe at the time. It the end, it just petered out, but the IRA didn’t go away- as we know.

How Did We Get Here? (BBC) Israel and the Palestinians 1: From Earliest Times to the Romans This is a 10 part series presented by Jonny Dymond. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor in Ancient History at Cardiff University, and historian and author Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’. I was expecting rather more divergence between them, but they tended to agree. The first five books of the Old Testament were set in the Bronze Age around 3000 BCE. ‘The Land’ comprised Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, west of the River Jordan, up to Egypt. They were a People, rather than a Place, and there were other Semitic people there too. The first five books do contain history, but the history serves a theological purpose. By the time we reach the Iron Age, history and archaeology are coming together. King David ruled in 1000 BCE, but there is little archaelogical evidence of a huge temple. There were mixed tribes there, but there was no stark difference between the Jews and others. The Biblical texts talking about Yahweh having a wife were expunged. During Roman times, the right to rule over ‘the land’ was farmed out to client Kings e.g. Herod. In 66CE there was a Jewish riot, and Jerusalem was besieged. In 70CE Titus invaded and destroyed the temple and enslaved the Jewish people. The Siege of Masada in 72 and 73CE was the last gasp of the first Jewish-Roman wars. Now that there was no temple, the Torah became a type of portable temple, and by now they were ‘Jews’ rather ‘Judeans’ (i.e. a geographical identity). However, the early Christians escaped and the Christian community split into two streams, the first headed by James and dominated by Jesus’ family, and the second headed by Paul. In 130-135 CE there was another rebellion against Hadrian, and Judea was renamed Palestine.

Israel and the Palestinians 2: From the Muslim Conquest to the Nineteenth Century. This episode spans the 7th-19th centuries, with historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of ‘Jerusalem: The Biography’, and Eugene Rogan, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at Oxford University. By 7th century and the spread of Christendom , Jerusalem had become a pilgrimage site by Christian tourists. Early Islam turned to Jerusalem (in fact, during prayer they literally turned to Jerusalem rather than Mecca) and Muhammed was said to have ascended from the Temple Mount, but actually he never physically went there. Jerusalem fell to the Arabs in 638 and they were welcomed by both Jews and Christians as they brought relief from the taxation and oppression of the Byzantium rulers. There was no sense of contradiction in embracing the Arabs, because the Arabs did not attempt to suppress the Jewish or Christian religions. Meanwhile, back in Europe, in 1095 Pope Ruban believed that the Christian shrines were in danger. 100,000 men answered the call and although Muslims were the target, there was a massacre of ‘infidels’ including Jews. The Crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 and killed everyone, but by this time there were only 12,000 crusaders. Saladin fought back and established rule over Greater Syria. The Jews always wanted to return to Zion, but they were in no position to do so because of persecution in Christian countries. In 1517 Selim the Grim conquered the Mamluk Sultanate. Originally Selim was going after the Persians, but then he changed direction and went for the Mamluks instead. There was no sense of ‘Palestine’ at the moment – clan, or city, or religious identity- but not a nation. The Ottomans saw Palestine as being part of Syria, and the ‘Holy Land’ contained Jews and different Christian sects. Suleiman the Magnificent specified that the Jews had to pray in a specified area, and this became the ‘Wall’.

Rear Vision (ABC) Pete Hegseth- war monger or true believer? (broadcast 28 March 2026) Almost as bad as seeing Donald Trump on the war is to see his Secretary of Defence, Pete Hegseth. I refuse to call him ‘Secretary of War’ because only Congress can change the name of a department. Hegseth was raised in Minnesota and attended Princeton university where he signed up for the Reserve Officers Training Corp. After graduating he worked briefly on Wall Street, before being deployed by the National Guard to Cuba, then Iraq. He was highly critical of the army and the ‘restrictions’ that were imposed on them in both deployments. He returned to New York, and feeling disoriented and lost, he began working with veterans’ organizations: Vets for Freedom and later Concerned Veterans for America, but in both positions there were reports of bullying, rorting and drunkenness. He then worked for Fox News. But then he found God and joined an extreme evangelical group the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches – I’m not sure which is worse really. The guests on this program include Dave Philipps, Military reporter for the New York Times; Jane Mayer, investigative journalist at The New Yorker Magazine; Missy Ryan, Staff Writer at The Atlantic covering national security, foreign policy and defence and Logan Davis, investigative journalist who grew up in the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches.

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My ANZAC Day reading 2026

Posted on April 25, 2026 | 3 comments

I don’t attend ANZAC Day ceremonies. I was burned by last ANZAC Day ceremony I attended in the early 2000s on the Gold Coast, where I took my adolescent children to a ceremony for the first time, hoping that we would be able to mark the futility of war, an honouring of sacrifice and a commitment to peace. In a big white marquee the local RSL dignitaries berated anyone who opposed Australia’s involvement in one of America’s wars- can’t remember if it was Iraq or Afghanistan- and we left, quietly but with determination never to attend another ANZAC ceremony again. Over the years I have, however, read a fair bit about ANZAC, particularly during the centenary ‘celebrations’, and I usually read an article or two about Gallipoli and ANZAC on the day itself.

This year has been no exception. I read Inside Story’s re-print of Mark Baker’s 2020 piece “My God, it would have been easier than I thought” which argues that Gallipoli was not the pointless disaster that has been portrayed, and that in fact, the Turkish troops were far more vulnerable than is usually acknowledged.

Then I started thinking about Anzac Day in my suburb in 1926, Heidelberg, by which time local Anzac Day commemorations had moved out of the churches, where they had largely been held since the first commemorations in 1916, to public ceremonies around war memorials and in the largest auditoriums available in 1926 – the picture theatres. Although no longer conducted in churches, the 1926 local commemorations still had religious overtones, with all of the Protestant ministers in attendance and taking an active part. But were there Catholic commemorations? What about the Catholic returned soldiers?

And this led me to a M.A. thesis written by Monica Van Gend in 2022 “That all may Justice Share: Sydney Catholics in the interwar years 1919-1929. In this thesis, she challenges Michael McKernan’s assertion that Australian churches became less relevant to Australian society after the war by looking at the Catholic Church (which she refers to as ‘the Church’) in Sydney and its response both during and in the decade following the war.

The shift in universities to imbue theses with beautiful and creative writing has been a slow one, and this thesis has the usual trappings of literature review, theoretical underpinnings etc. Nonetheless, it was easy to read, and I found quite a few things of interest, and several parallels to the current discussion of ‘just war’ and the US government’s pushback to Pope Leo’s warning that God doesn’t listen to the prayers of those who wage war.

I was interested to read that the sectarianism which split Australian society for the following fifty-odd years (and which of course was present right from the start of British settlement) was less potent on the battlefield than I imagined. Notwithstanding Archbishop Mannix’s anti-war stance, there were Catholic chaplains appointed to the battalions in a ratio representing Australian society: 2 Anglican, 1 Catholic, and one other Protestant chaplain. Because of Catholicism’s emphasis on the importance of the sacraments, Catholic chaplains tended to stay close to the troops, where they could hear confession and say Mass prior to a battle or administer the last rites. They gained respect, both from the men and from other chaplains. Sectarian prejudices were far more hard-line on the homefront than on the battlefront itself.

This was reflected in the Protestant response to Pope Benedict XV’s Peace Proposal, issued on August 1, 1917 and blithely ignored by everyone. The Sydney Morning Herald, echoing the view of local Protestants, argued on 17 October 1917 that “On the one side were ranged the champions of human right and liberty, and on the other the lawless henchmen of medieval dynastic despotism” (and you can guess who the lawless henchmen were….) Papal interventions in times of war, and the pushback from some quarters, are obviously nothing new.

And neither was fake news. In August 1914 a pamphlet was circulated around the Forbes NSW area purporting to reproduce an oath by the American catholic group The Knights of Columbus where adherents swore to “denounce and disown any allegiance as due to any heretical king, prince or State, named Protestant or Liberal, or obedience to any of their laws, magistrates or officers”. It was spurious, but it shows that we’re not the only generation exposed to fake news.

Particularly interesting to me was the move within the Catholic church and its organizations, both during the war and after, to promote an Australian patriotism as something worth fighting for, rather than for Empire, especially given the rise of the Irish Free State and the Irish Civil War. To that end, Catholic commemorations of the war did not display the Union Jack, or start or end with the National Anthem, which was then ‘God Save the King’, but with what they called the ‘Australian Anthem’. Sung to our present dirge ‘Advance Australia Fair’, the words are quite different:

1. Australia’s sons! Let us rejoice

For we are strong and free

Defenders of our glorious faith

We guard its liberty.

Our standard high, across the sky,

In Beauty shining there,

Points out the way, wherein we may

Advance Australia Fair

2. Beneath our radiant Southern Cross,

In knighthood’s bond we stand,

To help the weak, to right the wrong,

That truth may rule the land.

For conscience’ sake and Freedom’s cause

That all may justice share,

This is our aim when we acclaim

Advance, Australia Fair!

This is our aim when we acclaim

Advance, Australia Fair!

[Souvenir of the First Annual Communion of the Catholic Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Association of NSW 11 Nov 1928, cited p. 74]

You might recognize the allusion to ‘Knights of the Southern Cross’, a secret society formed after the war to counter the lure of Freemasonry amongst young Catholic men, and the anti-Catholic sentiment fostered by some Masons in their employment practices where it was reported that ‘Catholics need not apply’ for positions. In her footnotes, Van Gend mentions her difficulty in obtaining sources on the Knights of the Southern Cross while writing her thesis because it was a secret society after all, there had been a fire in their offices, and because she was not able to gain access to their archives.

There was a similar impetus for equitable treatment behind the formation of the Catholic Returned Sailors’ and Soldiers’ Association (CRSSA). The mainstream RSL (then Returned Sailors and Soldiers Imperial League of Australia) threw itself behind the Empire – as denoted by its erstwhile title- and their ANZAC Day ceremonies had a strong religious- and particularly Protestant- element. Catholics were forbidden from attending any kind of non-Catholic religious ceremony, and particularly after 1919 ANZAC commemorations were increasingly Protestant in nature. Rather ironically, to promote unity between Protestants and Catholics, the CRSSA was formed to promote a national sentiment that transcended sectarianism. It didn’t work, obviously.

So, an idle speculation about Catholic commemorations in Heidelberg on ANZAC Day led to me sitting down and reading a thesis- not quite how I envisaged spending the day. But definitely worthwhile, nonetheless.

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‘Flashlight’ by Susan Choi

Posted on April 21, 2026 | Leave a comment
2025, 445 p.

It’s ironic that often the books that impress me the most are the ones that I delay writing about. I want the story to percolate for a while, and to really craft my response to it – and then by the time I get round to writing a blog post, it has all faded and I can’t remember enough details. However, in this case, the details (and even the plot) don’t really matter because I wouldn’t tell you about them anyway. For me, one of the real joys of this book was that I really didn’t know where it was going to take me next and by the time I got to the end, I felt as if I had been on a very long journey that crossed time and national boundaries. It’s a mystery, domestic fiction, historical fiction all rolled into one. I really enjoyed it but it really is impossible to talk about it in detail without spoiling it for you.

Suffice to say that it spans the years 1945 to 2008 across Korea, Japan and the United States, with a cast of inscrutable characters. It is based around a family: American born Louisa; her Korean-born father Serk who had been raised in Japan before emigrating to America; her mother Anne, estranged from her family and Anne’s illegitimate son Tobias who re-enters his mother’s life as an adult. There’s defiance and stubbornness, coldness and detachment, as well as a suffocating over-solicitousness and emotional games between the adults of the family. But if you’re someone who feels that you have to like a character, you’re going to be challenged because none of them are particularly likeable.

There are so many themes that come through here: secrecy and shame; language and communication; nationality; belonging; family; identity. They are never once mentioned as themes, but they emerge through the narrative and plot.

The title ‘Flashlight’ is well chosen, not just for the ‘ray of light’ motif that appears throughout the narrative, but also for the writing style. The omniscient third-person narrator moves from one character to another, but unlike many recent books that I have read that barely alight on one character before bouncing off onto the next one, this book stayed with each character for long enough that you felt you knew them, and at least can understand their perspective, even if you don’t share it. In fact, as readers, we know the characters better than the characters know each other, or than the characters even know themselves. Although there are connections between each character and the others, the emphasis is on one character at a time, in the same way that a flashlight can only illuminate one thing in isolation.

It is a long book- 445 pages- but I didn’t feel that it dragged. But perhaps that’s because I’m interested in Korean history: I know that other people in the Reading Circle did feel that it was far too long. It’s ambitious; it has a big story; the writer is control throughout and she takes responsibility for her story, instead of expecting the reader to put the bits together.

If there’s any disappointment here, it’s with myself. I know that I haven’t done justice to this book, because the surprises in the plot are the real strength of the narrative. All I can say is, read it for yourself.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: March selection for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 April 2026

Posted on April 20, 2026 | Leave a comment

The Book Club Episode 2 Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro: Cloning, Free Will, and Soulmates I read this book many years ago, and absolutely loved it, and so too did Dominic Sandbrook and Tabitha Syrett in this episode. They comment on Cathy’s flat narrative voice, and her not quite understanding her own story: a feature of many of Ishiguro’s other books. I’d forgotten that it is a story in three parts: their schooling at Hailsham, their post-schooling hiatus in the Cottages, a type of half-way house, and then their adulthood where they are either Carers or Donors. Dominic and Tabitha do not divulge the central heartbreak of the book until after the first break in the podcast, and they give plenty of warning that it is coming. Nonetheless, I’d avoid listening to this podcast until you’d read the book, even though they advertise their podcast as one where you can listen and then pretend that you’ve read the book. Dominic gives it a score of 10/10, while Tabitha gives it 9.

The Rest is History Episode 408 The Nazis in Power: Hitler’s Dream (Part 5) Tom Holland takes the running on this episode (mercifully, he doesn’t introduce it with a song) where he looks at Hitler’s ideology. Were the Nazis idealists? Were they even aware that they are the baddies? They embraced the concept of ‘true law’, a song in the blood of the Nordic race, encompassing the Greeks, Romans and Aryans – including the Indians and Chinese. They framed life in biological terms, with the need to ‘preserve the race’ in the face of collapse caused by miscegenation, especially with Jews. They were not religious: they were particularly critical of St Paul, and rejected the egalitarianism of Christianity. However, Tom warns, the language of ‘race’ was everywhere at this stage in US, Britain and France. There was a fear that Germany would disappear, hence the disapproval of homosexuality which did not produce children. As part of race hygiene, there was widespread compulsory and involuntary sterilization, and then later euthanasia, all presented as part of science and health. The churches began to distance themselves from the Nazis, but doctors and the medical profession remained on-side.

The Rest is Classified Episode 124 Kim Philby: Britain’s Most Notorious Traitor (Episode 4) This is the final in this series of episodes which look at the rise of Kim Philby- they’ll deal with the fall of Kim Philby in later episodes (I hope). 1944 and the end of the war was the most dangerous time on the tightrope for Philby, especially when people began defecting because they might have implicated him. Igor Gouzenko defected in Canada in 1945 and Konstantin Volkov threatened to defect in Istanbul, offering up a huge list of names in exchange for 50,000 pounds. Philby warned the Russians that Volkov was likely to defect, and Volkov was duly ‘disappeared’, tortured and executed. Philby married his long-term mistress Aileen and they went together to Istanbul, but she was desperately lonely and began self-harming. And of course, Philby embarked on yet another affair. By now the Cold War was starting, and there was a new UK policy of sending exiled dissident agents into Soviet area. Philby got his hands dirty by killing two young men who were about to be sent into Georgia and ironically ended up getting promoted to MI6 branch in Washington where he liaised with the CIA- all this “success” at only 37 years of age.

Unholy. Unholy is a podcast hosted by Yonit Levi of Israel’s Channel 12 and Jonathan Freedland of The Guardian, so it has a strong Jewish emphasis. Why History Explains Everything Happening Right Now. You can see this as a YouTube video, but it’s actually just talking heads. He points out that Judaism as we know it today is a post-Temple concept. The Romans assumed that if you got rid of the cult temple, you’d get rid of the people- after all, it had worked with other peoples. But it didn’t work with the Jews because they had texts and so they were were able to reinvent themselves. He argues that you cannot deny a link between the Jews and Israel, but they are not ‘indigenous’ as such. However, the scriptures do link the Jews with specific lands, and there is nothing else comparable to this. In relation to Iran, in 538 BCE Cyrus saved the Jews, and Holland is impressed by the continuity that is now on the Iranian national stage which still retains its pre-Islam identity. He suggests that America is haunted by the rise/fall/decline trajectory of the Roman Empire, which they have chosen as a model. He then talks about the West and secularism, arguing that the West’s rise coincided with the withdrawal from religion by the elites e.g. the influence of Darwinism, and philosophers like Nietzsche. The notion of a secular/religious divide is a Western perspective, compared with Judaism and Islam where religion is seen as part of the polity.

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‘I You We Them’ by Dan Gretton

Posted on April 18, 2026 | Leave a comment
2021, 1120 p.

Has anyone ever complained so much about reading a book? At 1.6kg, I found it too heavy to hold up while reading it in bed and having recently sprained my knee, I was not keen on ‘tenting’ my knees to lean the book against. At over 1000 pages long, it took two renewals at the library to complete, and even now as I write this review, it is overdue.

So why did I so willingly heft it off the floor each night, to keep reading? Quite simply, because I enjoyed the company of the author and once I gave up any idea of following an argument, I just floated along on his observations – a little bit like reading Proust, really.

The lengthy subtitle of the book is “Journeys Beyond Evil: The Desk Killers in History and Today” and this is the overall theme of the book, but it is intermingled with reminiscence, nostalgia, regret and curiosity as he travels around Europe researching his topic. It could just as easily be a travel book. Attracted to maps from childhood, he maps out the sites of concentration camps of Europe and their accompanying industrial infrastructure, he follows forced marches and places himself in massacre sites, forming his own mental and physical maps. And it could just as easily be an ecological/environmental diary of landscape. For him, the environment in which he holes up to immerse himself in his writing – the Suffolk Coast for Book One in winter; Pembrokeshire in spring in Book Two- becomes part of the narrative as well, particularly when he writes about a hurricane that buffets the cottage in which he is sheltering when the power goes out in the house he has rented.

Gretton himself is an activist as well as author and teacher. In 1983 he co-founded the political arts organization Platform, which describes itself on its website as bringing together workers and communities “to create new, liberatory systems that tackle injustice and climate breakdown”. In particular, it confronts the power of transnational corporations. You can see this emphasis coming through in this book in its focus on corporations; especially that of the German manufacturing, banking and insurance companies that still exist powerfully today, which had flourished in Nazi Germany through its contacts and contracts with the government. He also targets Shell and its influence in Nigeria that looked the other way during the execution of Ken Saro-Wiwa, the activist who died trying to save his land and people from the destruction of Shell’s oil conglomerate. The “desk killers’ that he focuses on here are the managing directors of wealthy, multinational corporations, many of whom he interviewed after they have retired, and the often invisible bureaucrats and office workers who followed the procedures and timetables and the accountants in charge of the financial accounts that made genocide an anonymized, abstraction. There are no innocents here.

Although his focus is on corporations, he also hones in on individuals – most particularly Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect, whose own biography and the work of Gitta Sereny has thrown up so many questions about culpability and redemption. He also spends quite a bit of time on the Wannsee Conference of 20th January 1942, which pulled together as many agencies as possible to discuss the implementation of ‘the Final Solution of the Jewish question’. Of the 15 attendees (there were actually 16, counting the unnamed stenographer), seven held PhDs in law. We only know this because just one copy survived of the thirty copies made at the time. He parallels this with a discussion of the two Washington lawyers, who prepared memos for the Bush administration discussing the legalities and grey areas of torture and ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’.

Then there are the individuals who survived: Primo Levi, Jan Karski, Elie Wiesel. Some of the testimony in these books kept me awake at night, after turning off the light.

He concentrates predominantly on Nazi Germany, and on Nigeria to a lesser degree. But he also turns back to history to take up Gunther Grass’ question about how young people grow up in Britain and know so little about the long history of crimes during the colonial period. He looks at the East India Company and the Opium Wars, the slave trade, the Irish Famine, and what he claims as “the genocide” and the “extermination” of the Tasmanian Aboriginals (a contested question here in Australia, where there is a continuing Tasmanian First Peoples community today)[As an aside, if you’re looking a desk killers, I would have focused more on later bureaucrats and Protectors in the late 19th-early 20th century Australia whose arbitrary and desk-bound decisions did just as much as outright massacres to distort indigenous families and expunge language and culture]. He spends quite a bit of time on Namibia (former German South West Africa) where the systematic killing, detention and forced labour of the Nama and Herero people was a forerunner to actions undertaken by the Nazi government. He looks at the French massacre of between 120 and 200 Algerian demonstrators by the French government on 17 October 1961.

All of which would be pretty grim, continuing for over 1000 pages, if this were all that this book contains. But it’s not. There’s beautiful writing about his father and a wistful recounting of his own torrid, passionate affair with a younger man. There’s information dumps at time, as if you’re reading someone’s research notes. Interwoven are his own childhood memories, his political stances, travel-journey type entries.

It’s big; it’s untidy; it’s completely indulgent but it’s also thought-provoking and very easy to read. My complaints about weight and heft not withstanding, I missed hearing Dan Gretton’s voice when I finished. But perhaps there’s more: apparently this 1000+ pager is just Volume 1 of a two-volume publication. Hopefully the next volume will have an index, which I really missed in a book of this size. Will I read Volume II when it comes out: most probably, if I still have the strength to hold a 1.6 kg book!

My rating: Hard to say. 9?

Read because: I read or heard someone raving about it- can’t remember who.

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‘Find Me at the Jaffa Gate’ by Micaela Sahhar

Posted on April 15, 2026 | Leave a comment

2025, 265 p. & notes etc.

I feel a bit naive. As part of the standard Christmas schlock, there’s usually a TV report from Bethlehem where brief mention is made of the Christian congregations that celebrate Christmas, often supplemented by Christian pilgrims from other countries, most particularly the United States. It has never occurred to me to think about the status of Christian Palestinians who continue to live there beyond Christmas, and how the Israeli/Palestinian conflict affects them. I have become so accustomed to linking Palestinian with Muslim, that I’ve forgotten that Palestinians can be of any religion.

And so ‘Find Me at the Jaffa Gate’ is a brisk corrective to this ignorance. The author, Micaela Sahhar, comes from a Christian family: at first an Orthodox family, then later some family members were born again into a more evangelical brand of Christianity. Following the Nakba her extended family has splinters: some come to Australia and settle in Newport and Williamstown, many others emigrate to America, and some stay. Michaela herself was born in Australia, and does not subscribe to any particular faith. Her father is Palestinian but was born in Jordan, because he was born within days of his family fleeing Jerusalem in the wake of the bombing of the Semiaris Hotel by Jewish terrorists, the Haganah, as part of the ‘de-Arabization’ of West Jerusalem. Just as important in this book are her grandparents, particular Pa and Ellen, who emigrated to Australia as part of the family shift. She has grown up with the stories of her grandparents, aunts and uncles, and great-grandparents, and the photos that testify that – yes- the family lived in Jerusalem, no matter how much their presence and identity as Christian Palestinians has been denied.

This book is a piecing together of the stories of the different generations of her family, with stories and photographs interwoven. She travels to America to meet branches of the family, and returns to Jerusalem and Jaffa to locate the places where they lived, and to find that her family is still remembered by the people who stayed. Palestinians- Christian and Muslim- face the same appropriation (theft) of land and livelihood, and they are subjected to the same surveillance and humiliation by the Israeli military forces. This is a personal, family pilgrimage, but it also part of her academic identity, explored through a Ph D, and so bolstered by subtly placed quotations of historians and activists. I particularly enjoyed the chapter on ‘Mr Settler Colonialism’ where she writes about her friendship with the late Patrick Wolfe, who I also knew, and who died far too young but whose influence is still powerful- if anything, with the destruction of Gaza it is even more plangent.

There’s a beautiful piece of writing at the close of the book where she dreams of returning to Jerusalem, standing in her Pa’s garden and speak to her grandparents:

I would like to say to my Pa and to Ellen that nothing is truly gone if you know how to look, to say, look here, I have built our beautiful home out of words, a house Pa built twice in his life already, first in Jerusalem and then with the shape of his key in the eye of his mind. One day I will…[shout] I am I. And I am here. And when I do, I know that Ellen and Pa will be with me too.

I will shout this at the intersection of Mamillah, and on the balcony of the house my Pa built, and I will give what voice I have to the most joyous euphonia of the Palestinians returning to our once and future home, with the dead on our shoulders and the living in our arms. We will burst through the gates of the Old City and roam the New Jerusalem from the Greek Colony to Talbiyeh, from Qatamon to Baq’a, sweeping south to Gaza and north to the Galilee, and to all the places we are indivisibly from and that are ours. And as I cross the threshold of my grandfather’s house, I will lay my burden down.

And if it should not be me, then it will be another, when I will be an ancestor and those that I have loved will all be stars. (p. 263)

But this really strong, affecting and ultimately defiant and hopeful ending is not enough to overcome my other qualms with the book. The subtitle of the book is ‘An Encyclopedia of a Palestinian Family’, and it does reflect the fragmentary, all-embracing nature of an encyclopedia. But few of us would read an encyclopedia by choice, and this does not have the genre-structure of an encyclopedia: it is not alphabetical, there is no index. There are 48 chapters, between 5-10 pages in length. The chronology and setting skip about, and right up to the end of the book I found myself having to refer to the family tree at the back of the book to work out who this person was because there were just so many, and only a few were fleshed out to be instantly recognizable.

I know that I’ve been complaining about these short, almost kaleidescopic mosaic books that seem to be so popular at the moment, and here I am doing so again. Any one of these chapters, except the last one, could have been placed anywhere, and with each one it felt like a carefully polished piece of discrete writing, almost more like a journal article or the product of a writing workshop rather than of an overarching structure. Perhaps I’m showing my age, but it all feels so filmic and the product and fodder of a short attention span. Perhaps I’m too old for all this and need something more 19th or 20th century in structure, staying well away from anything that has ‘fragmentary’ ‘gaps’ or ‘blank spaces’ in its description.

My rating:7.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

Read because: I saw that it won the non-fiction category of the Victorian Premiers Literary Awards.

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