The Resident Judge of Port Phillip

Sometimes it seems that a work written first as a play really struggles to transcend its stage origins. This is the case with Jane Harrison’s The Visitors which imagines the response of local tribes to the arrival of the First Fleet in January 1788. The author, herself of Muruwari descent, ventures where non-Indigenous authors might hesitate to tread and Tony Birch’s blurb embraces it as “a remarkable achievement of First Nations storytelling”.

The book starts with seventeen-year old Lawrence who first notices the nowee on the horizon, its white sails billowing in the wind. His Uncles decide that Elder Gary should be notified, as it is his turn to host the next seasonal meeting of Elders. It is decided that the meeting should be held on the neighbouring Gordon’s land, which strategically overlooks the waters of Sydney Cove. The word goes out to seven mobs who send their Elders to discuss this second appearance of nowees, the first having arrived with Captain Cook eighteen years earlier. Cook departed: surely these ones will, too. Reminiscent of the interminable collection of adventurers in Lord of the Rings, the Elders are gathered in, chapter by chapter, with each given a back-story.

But these Elders, all with non-indigenous names (Lawrence, Gary, Gordon, Joseph, Nathaniel, Walter and Albert) arrive in business-suits, upending our time-frame as readers, and many of their back-stories are Oprah-esque in their relationship detail and more than a little imbued with 21st century values. The dialogue is presented in script form. The ships- eleven by now- show few signs of moving on, and the Elders joined by young Lawrence himself, need to decide how to respond. To fight or to welcome? In a Twelve Angry Men-esque scenario, Elder Walter, gradually convinces the other Elders that they cannot know why the visitors are here, and that they may bring things- like an axe that he found- that will improve their lives. We all know how this is going to end. Young Lawrence, who had disobeyed instructions to paddle out to investigate for himself, is sneezing and unwell and we know that these ‘visitors’ were here to stay.

I think that I would have preferred to see this on the stage, rather than on the page. Apparently the author did a lot of research in converting it to a novel, and the research feels very didactic at times and clags up the narrative. It’s an interesting concept of decentering the First Fleet story- and ‘what ifs’ are my guilty secret as a historian- and while playing with timespans through suits and names, it foregrounds the social complexity and agency of the watchers on the shore. I just wish that the author didn’t feel that she had to ‘educate’ me.

My rating: 6/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

I started reading this before the referendum, and then after the referendum I was too discouraged and flat to finish it. By the time that I broached it again, it was already history – and a history that I believe we will come to regret.

I thought that I was relatively well-informed about the constitution, referendums and The Voice, but I certainly learned things that I didn’t know before. Chapter 1 ‘Making the Constitution’ starts back with the 1901 constitution and the constitutional process that produced it. It explains that Section 127 about counting aboriginal natives (repealed in 1967) was inserted to stop Western Australia and Queensland from using their large Aboriginal populations to gain extra seats in Parliament and higher funding from federal tax revenue. I was aware that the Constitution is silent about many things that we assume would be constitutional e.g. electoral systems, Prime Ministers, parties- in fact, the preamble doesn’t even mention Western Australia because they weren’t sure to join in Federation! But I hadn’t realized that women’s suffrage was not part of the Constitution but was instead legislated under The Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902 (does that mean that it could be legislated away in a Handmaid’s Tale scenario, I wonder?) Although unable to vote on the Constitution except in South Australia and Western Australia, the womens suffrage movement at the time trusted the promises that female suffrage would be legislated after the Constitution had been passed. As has been pointed out since, had voters demanded the same level of detail in 1901 as they did in 2023, the federal constitution would not have been passed.

Chapter 2 ‘The 1967 Referendum’ looks more closely at the Referendum which white Australians have basked in ever since. It reminds the reader that there was a second referendum held on that day that proposed to break the numerical 2:1 nexus of members in the House of Representatives to the numbers of Senators. It was this second proposal that attracted the most debate. There was overwhelming support for the Aboriginal question, with the ‘for and against’ compulsory booklet containing only arguments for change. Federal law required the ‘against’ case to be written by the parliamentarians who had voted against the change- and not one parliamentarian did so. But the electoral question was soundly defeated; the aboriginal question passed strongly. When Prime Minister Holt left to travel overseas the following day (shades of Albanese heading off OS straight away too?), instead of celebrating the victory on the indigenous question, he labelled it a “victory for prejudice and misrepresentation”. The Sunday Herald recorded the Yes vote on Aboriginals in small type, with a huge headline ‘AUSTRALIA SAYS NO ON NEXUS’.

Chapter 3 ‘A New Era?’ is a rather depressing rundown of events after the high point of the 1967 referendum, and the string of bodies that have been created by governments to consider a treaty or legislation for national land rights. The ‘decade of reconciliation’ commenced in 1991 but after the Native Title Act of 1993, the Indigenous Land Corporation and a Social Justice package created by the Keating government in the wake of Mabo, things stalled. The Howard Government responded to the Wik Decision by the Native Title Amendment Act of 1998 that would pour ‘bucket-loads of extinguishment’ on native title while the Hindmarsh Island Bridge Act 1997 ruled that the Heritage Protection Act applied everywhere except the Hindmarsh Island bridge area- the area in contention. The chapter reproduces the Howard/Les Murray preamble to the Constitution, then the second version written with Democrats Senator Aden Ridgeway that was eventually put a referendum in 1999. The preamble was prefaced by a clause that it had no legal effect, and both versions avoided the term ‘custodianship’ that Indigenous groups wanted. The referendum result was worse for the preamble than for the republic.

Chapter 4 ‘The Journey to Recognition’ looks at the apology, and new attempts to have a preamble – something that indigenous people did not want. Gillard established an Expert Panel to report on options for Indigenous constitutional recognition which made recommendations and wordings but which was put on the backburner because by early 2012 the political environment was not conducive to bipartisan support, and it was feared that a referendum might fail due to low levels of community awareness. At the 2013 federal election, each of the major parties expressed strong support for recognizing Aboriginal people in the Constitution, but when the Indigenous Affairs Strategy led to cuts and disestablishment of programs and activities, there was a backlash to the ‘Recognize’ campaign that specifically rejected a minimalist approach of preambular recognition alone. From the Kirribilli meeting with the Prime Minister and the Opposition leader in July 2015 it was made clear that any reform must involve substantive changes to the Australian constitution and that a preamble would not go far enough and would not be acceptable.

This was reinforced by the Referendum Council, established by Turnbull in late 2015 which asked the question “what is meaningful recognition to you?” The answer, from 12 Regional Dialogues was a constitutionally protected Voice to Parliament. Chapter 5 ‘The Referendum Council and Uluru process’ goes through in detail the consultation carried out, and the resulting Uluru statement. Turnbull’s rapid rejection on receiving the Uluru statement rehearsed the arguments that would later be used in the ‘No’ case (although he himself championed Yes by the time the Referendum came around).

Chapter 6 ‘Voice, Treaty, Truth’ goes through the reasons for the sequence. I must say that I have wondered why Truth-telling came last (although I am less optimistic now that it would make any difference to many white Australians anyway). This chapter points out that there was concern that the energy for grasping the opportunity of constitutional power might be exhausted by a truth-telling process, and that there is no treaty process in the world that required a truth-telling process first. Many communities wanted truth-telling at their pace, at the local level, rather than being compelled to tell your stories without any guarantee of good faith from the listeners.

The chapter ‘The Voice’ brings us up to the election of Anthony Albanese, and his commitment to the Uluru Statement in full (something that I suspect is shakier now). It goes through the Referendum Working Group proposal, which already had the ‘detail’ that the No side called for. The chapter then goes through the myths and misconceptions promulgated by the No case.

The final chapter ‘The Voice Referendum’ has an optimistic tone that – as we now know- was misplaced. It includes a list of the 44 referendums brought before the Australian people and their results. With a final national Yes vote of 39.9% the Voice ended up being one of the least supported proposals ever put forward (although there were 8 that were even less successful). Interestingly, the rejection of the preamble which recognized Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as “the nation’s first people” in 1999 with 39.3% was very close to the Voice result of 39.9%. Does this reflect the hard-baked resistance of white Australia? To be honest, I can’t remember how I voted in that referendum: I suspect that because the preamble was a Howard proposal, I would have opposed it. Nor can I remember how I voted in relation to the Republic: I suspect ‘Yes’ (and today I would even more strongly support the Parliamentary-selected model that was proposed then).

My response to this book was strongly influenced by my sadness at the final result and the misplaced hope that it reflects. Co-written by constitutional experts Megan Davis and George Williams, both were active participants in the campaign, and it needs to be read with that in mind. It is a very clearly written, informative book that gives a clear narrative of the road to the Voice referendum. If only the final destination had been different.

For many years the idea of having convict descendants was something to be ashamed of, but not anymore. ‘A convict in the family’ is now almost a badge of pride, although as the Founders and Survivors project on Van Diemen’s Land convict records has shown, the life histories of people transported to Tasmania were not necessarily the optimistic stories of redemption and upward progress that we might like to imagine. Annette Higgs’ book On a Bright Hillside in Paradise, set in 1874 takes a more clear-eyed view of Tasmanian rural life, where ‘collisions’ with the indigenous people and the ‘convict stain’ were still within living memory. Based on her own family history, this is the story of three generations of the Hatton family, eking out a precarious living on a small land holding on the west coast of Tasmania, in a place rather ironically called ‘Paradise’.

Into this ‘Paradise’ come two Christian Brethren preachers, a trope more familiar in American rural stories than Australian ones, who convert members of the Hatton family to varying degrees, along with many others from the Paradise community, in a mixture of faith, curiosity, lack of other excitement and life disappointment.

The story is told from five different perspectives. It starts with Grandmother Eliza whose convict father married her off to a fellow convict who was violent to her and fathered multiple children upon her. She now sits in the corner of her adult daughter’s house, watching the family, and she is full of stories and secrets from the past. We move to the oldest son, Jack, who is converted by the preachers, and stays on the family farm. Susannah is Eliza’s daughter and Jack’s mother, drained by her many children and too much sadness and death. Her son Jack’s brother Eddie, takes up the story, but he is the one who strikes out on his own, after falling out with his brother. Their sister Echo rounds out the book, sharing her brother Jack’s faith but still close to her brother Eddie.

Not much actually happens in the book. There is an ongoing rivalry with the Dunstan boys; the indigenous Coleman boys hold knowledge of older ways; there is a tragic accident and subsequent guilt; there are births and deaths. Small things are part of big things. The same events are told in each section, adding a little more detail each time, widening out each time and through another perspective to have other significances. These are the stories that are handed on through families, shaping later generations’ sense of family history.

Higgs captured well the sameness and the precariousness of farming life, and the narrowness of vision under the wide expanse of sky, mountain and bush. She has obviously done her research well, and it rings true. I did keep expecting something to happen more suddenly and randomly, but instead this is a slow unspooling of small events into a bigger meaning, with individuals placed against a wider backdrop of ‘history’. It is beautifully written, with a slow, even pace but I found myself anticipating a jolt that never came.

My rating: 7.5/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library

As I was visiting Cambodia, I wanted a short survey history of the country and this book, part of a series of ‘Short History of Asia’ series fitted the bill. John Tully was a professor at Victoria University (now retired), and as well as writing labour history, he also has written on Indo-China generally and Cambodia in particular. It’s a very accessible book, without footnotes but a reading list at the back. It was good start for a reader who wanted the whole sweep of Cambodian history, not just the Pol Pot era which tends to define our idea of Cambodia. He covers 2000 years, from the state of Funan, which predated Angkor right up to 2005, when the book was published.

Chapter 1 ‘The People and their Environment’ starts off with a geographical description of Cambodia, emphasizing its flatness in the middle and the huge Lake Tonlé Sap, the largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia, and the Mekong River which breaks up into tributaries at Phnom Penh before flowing into the Mekong Delta in Vietnam.

I found Chapter 2 ‘Cambodia before Angkor’ fascinating. There was settlement of hunter-gatherers from the Stone Age onwards, and the Kymer-Mon people settled around 3000 BCE after migrating from the north. By the first century CE there was the Funan civilization, a literate, Indianized society which relied on the trade routes stretching from Persia to China. It was followed by the rise of Chenla, which may have been two principalities- Chenla-of-the-Land and Chenla-of-the-Water. The people spoke an archaic form of the Cambodian language, and they were the ancestors of the modern Kymers. It was king Jayavarman II who decided to shift his centre of power from the Mekong up to the Siem Reap region north of Lake Tonlé Sap.

Chapter 3 goes through the shift to Angkor, and the monumental legacy at Angkor Wat. He discusses how the temples were built, and the sheer manpower that it must have taken to construct them. He goes on to discuss what we know about the common people of Angkor from the inscriptions on the monuments, which detail punishments and provide information about the social structure, clothing and slavery. I thought that he did a really good job here in making Angkor a living, vibrant, populated culture, something which can be forgotten when you’re looking at ruins. He enters into the debate over water, and the contribution of ecological factors to the decision to move back to the Mekong quatre-bras region, although as he points out Angkor Wat was not abandoned as such. He emphasizes the arrival of Teravada Buddhism, displacing the earlier Sivaism and Mahayana Buddhism.

Chapter 4 ‘From Angkor’s End to the French Protectorate’ sees 1431, and the Siamese sacking and burning of Angkor, as a turning point. The Siamese in Thailand to the west (The Tiger) and the Vietnamese to the east (the Crocodile) both threatened to absorb the weakened kingdom completely. By the late 18th century, a Dark Age had descended on the country. The time of grand monument building was over. The road and canal system fell into disrepair, and village life predominated. Siam and Vietnam didn’t want to confront each other directly, so they used Cambodia as a buffer. Although there was a period of relative peace under King Ang Duang who set up his palace at Udong, increasing rivalry between the French (who had colonies in Vietnam) and the British (who had influence in Thailand) saw Duang’s oldest son, Prince Norodom, turn to the French for support in 1863.

The French protectorate lasted between 1863 and 1953 (Chapter 5). The treaty signed by Prince Norodom on 11 August 1863 gave France the right to station warships at the Quatre Bras (Phnom Penh), gave privileges to the Catholic Church, and granted free trade to the French throughout the region. The French embarked on a program of reform including the creation of private property in land, the abolition of slavery, cuts to royal spending, and legal and administrative restructure. I hadn’t really thought about the implications of the fall of France to Germany in 1940. The French Indochina Governor-General Admiral Jean Decoux supported Vichy and set up concentration camps, introduced the fascist salute and the goose-step and ritualized chanting of Petain’s name. He readily agreed to Japanese requests to station troops throughout IndoChina. Norodom Sihanouk came to the throne in 1941 as a baby-faced 19 year old. After the war, France granted some autonomy to Cambodia, but still maintained control over the military and foreign relations, finance and communications. There were elections and the start of political parties, and a constitution was ratified in May 1947. There was a coup in 1952, probably fomented by Sihanouk – Tully really doesn’t like Sihanouk- who assumed power directly and dissolved the democratically elected government.

Chapter 6 ‘Sihanouk, Star of the Cambodian Stage 1953-1970’ looks at Sihanouk more closely. Sihanouk likened Cambodia to an ant under the feet of two fighting elephants- the U.S. and the Soviet Union. He maintained neutrality- or perhaps it was more a matter of playing on both sides- and needed to maintain his own position at home while preserving the integrity of his borders. In 1955 he abdicated in favour of his father, and became more directly involved in politics. He introduced the idea of the Sangkum, a merger of political parties, into a one-party state which set the tone for politics for the next 15 years (and perhaps is still visible in Cambodia’s politics today too). When his father died, he allowed himself to be ‘persuaded’ to become head of state, introducing a form of ‘totalitarian democracy’. He spent heavily on education and health, introduced a series of 5-year plans and state construction. Although he tried to repress the Cambodian communists, his foreign policy moved sharply to the Left, moving away from U.S. support and towards China and Russia.

A brief five years as a republic, in Ch. 7 ‘The Doomed Republic 1970-1975’ saw a coup against Sihanouk, probably tacitly supported by the CIA. Sihanouk joined hands with his former Kymer Rouge enemies to removed the ‘usurpers’. Prime Minister Lon Nol was crooked and second-rate, but he served at various times as both prime minister and president (and later Field Marshall as well). By this time, Nixon had initiated an invasion under Operation Shoemaker, which included massive bombing, napalm and atrocities against civilians particularly (but not exclusively) by Vietnamese troops. Fighting continued, and the Kymers Rouges (Tully uses both in the plural) guerillas took Phnom Penh.

Then followed ‘Pol Pot’s Savage Utopia’ between 1975-1979 (Chapter 8). What I like about Tully’s book is that this four-year period, which so dominates our perception of Cambodia, is just part -albeit a horrific one- of Cambodia’s history. By highlighting the war and disruption prior to 1975, Tully goes some way to explaining why the Kymers Rouges were able to take power: the society and economy had been traumatized by five years of war. Prince Sihanouk became the figurehead of the new regime, although it was made clear to him that he was only a figurehead. The chapter is only 30 pages in length, but Tully captures well the madness and cruelty of the regime. The irony is that it was Vietnam, the traditional enemy, that put an end to ‘Democratic Kampuchea’, rescuing Cambodia from the nightmare.

Chapter 9 ‘Painful Transition: The People’s Republic of Kampuchea’ looks at politics since 1979. Here Sihanouk’s fear of being an ant under elephant feet was realized. The West had such a fear of Vietnam and China, that they continued to recognize the Pol Pot government despite knowledge of what had occurred during their regime. Over time, attitudes towards China thawed, and Vietnam was no longer seen as an expansionary communist regime. How slippery is Sihanouk! Now that Pol Pot was no longer embraced by the West, he started distancing himself from him. We see in this chapter the increasing presence of Hun Sen.

The final chapter ‘Towards an Uncertain Future’ starts with the 1993 elections, overseen by the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia. Sihanouk tried to put himself as the head of a coalition government, acting of president of a council of ministers and commander-in-chief of the armed forces. However, he had to settle for returning to the throne as King Sihanouk, playing a ceremonial role in a regime dominated by Hun Sen, who had emerged as the undisputed strongman.. At the time of writing (2005) 50% of Cambodia’s budget came from overseas aid, corruption was rife, there was an AIDS/HIV pandemic, and a burgeoning ecological crisis. Although wanting to avoid being a Cassandra or an oracle, his conclusion was not particularly hopeful:

Looking back over the past quarter of a century (let alone the earlier Dark Age that beset Cambodia in the first half of the 19th century) it is difficult to imagine that anything worse could befall the Khmers. Cambodia has staggered from crisis to crisis since 1970 and in the absence of a developed civil society there is little check on the arrogance of government and the corruption of the administration. With entrenched rulers primarily interested in their own power and wealth, there seems little prospect of change in the future.

End of chapter 10 – (e-book)

I found this book really useful. It gave me the wide span of history that I wanted, and it was pitched at the right level for someone unfamiliar with the history. It had maps, and a list of acronyms, and it managed the balance between international and internal politics, and the day-to-day experience.

My rating: 8.5

Sourced from: purchased e-book

This unsettling novel is based on a true story. Set in Stockholm in 1930, Lina Dahlstrom is dying of tuberculosis and despite her sister’s misgivings, is drawn into the sphere of an eccentric doctor, Carl Dance, who claims that he can cure her. When she dies, his obsession with her grows stronger, and he embarks on a repugnant and criminal scheme to keep her as his own for ever.

I knew, from reviews that I had read of the book, that it was based on a true story, although there is only a single phrase “based on true events” on the back cover. I do wonder how that shaped my response to the novel, because its plot line is so visceral and distasteful that I would have otherwise put it aside as a form of torture porn. The knowledge it was “based on true events” meant that the plot could not be dismissed so neatly.

The story is told in four narratives, each roughly approximate in length, that move the story along chronologically. Part I is told by Greta, a young tobacco factory worker, who is frantic to get medical assistance for her sister Lina, who is floating through tuberculosis, rather indifferent to her fate – apparently one of the emotional manifestations of tuberculosis. With few resources, Greta urges her sister to accept the offer of help by Dr. Dance, even though she feels uneasy around him. Part II is told by Dr Dance as he becomes increasingly unhinged in his obsession with Greta’s corpse, and it is here that my scoffing at the implausability needs to be tempered by my remembrance that there is a kernel of truth here. I think that this is probably the most disturbing, and the best written part of the book. Part III is told by Lina’s corpse – hard narrative trick to speak on behalf of a corpse, but others have done it too- as the sheer perversion of Dr Dance’s actions are perpetrated on her. Pericic gives her a wry humour that is not apparent in the first section, through her sister’s eyes, but perhaps a sensibility that is more 21st century than 20th century. The final Part IV is told from the perspective of Dance’s wife Doris, as she is pressured both by Dance and his friends, into maintaining a veneer of support for Dance when he appears in court. Indirectly, we see another side of Dance here, as he wheedles and manipulates Doris, who is another of his victims.

Apparently ‘Exquisite Corpse’ is a form of drawing game- something that I only learned when looking up reviews of the book. It’s where players each draw a part of an animal on a sheet of paper, unaware of what the other players have drawn beforehand, leading to the creation of a weird, implausible monster-animal. In a way, the four part structure of the book replicates that, with each of the narrators unaware of what the others have said before them. It’s an interesting approach, but one that I don’t think Pericic carried off particularly successfully. Greta and Lina were both working-class girls, but I couldn’t hear their voices. Dance, although his actual profession is opaque in the book, is American and obviously possessed of a strong self-belief, but that does not come through particularly clearly. His wife Doris was presumably of a ‘better’ class and education than Greta and Lina, but that was not apparent.

I must admit, though, that despite the stomach-churning nature of the subject matter, I was drawn in by the book through a mixture of prurience and fascination. It reminded me a bit of Ebershoff’s The Danish Girl both in its time and setting, and also as a glimpse of something intimate that is so dissonant with the surrounding world.

My rating: 7.5 (hard to say)

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library, and read because I was fascinated by some reviews.