‘Afrodite’s Breath by Susan Johnson

Posted on November 24, 2023 | 2 comments
2023, 338p.

Even though I have very much enjoyed Susan Johnson’s work in the past – I absolutely loved My Hundred Lovers (see my review here) and The Broken Book and enjoyed From Where I Fell (review) and Life in Seven Mistakes (review)- I wasn’t tempted by this book at first. I knew that it was about a writer taking her elderly mother to a Greek island, and I feared that it would be some sort of Eat, Pray, Love book (not that I’ve read it) or one of its many escape-the-quotidian-by-travelling-to-Europe clones.

But I was wrong on both counts. It is a memoir, rather than a novel, and it’s by Susan Johnson, so of course it’s going to be much richer than a travel memoir. I just loved it.

As a long-time journalist and successful-enough author (I think she under-rates herself) she decided to put her hand up for redundancy at the Murdoch-owned newspaper where she had worked for some years. With some back-of-the-envelope calculations she worked out that, with no need to financially support her now-adult sons, she could afford to retire if she lived carefully. She had travelled to Greece as a young woman, and one of the threads of her her novel The Broken Book involved Charmian Clift’s time on Kalymnos and Hydra. Her money would go further if she moved to Kythera, a Greek island that she had fallen in love with, and in her head it was associated with the bright sun of being a young woman with your whole life ahead of you. But she was now over sixty, the promises of her life had not been fulfilled, and as the eldest child and only daughter (as am I) she felt responsible for her now-widowed mother Barbara. She felt that she could not leave her mother, but what if her mother were to accompany her….. She asked Barbara if she went to Kythera, would she come too? And her mother said ‘yes’.

And so they went, but it did not turn out as Susan expected it would (do things ever turn out the way you think they will?) Although Susan fell in love with a house that found online and managed to lease for a full year – quite a feat in a community with a large, lucrative tourist influx ‘in season’- her mother disliked it from the start. Far from being the sunlit, balmy island of her dreams, it was cold and her Brisbane-bred mother hated the cold in a house with no heating. She didn’t like walking, and although neither of them could speak Greek (which surprised me, as Johnson’s text is sprinkled with Greek words), Barbara had no interest in learning it. They managed to break the lease, and took another house further north, which Barbara preferred although, like Johnson, I wonder if it was more that she had a choice over this house instead of her daughter organizing it ahead of time. By this time, spring had arrived and it was warmer and Susan threw herself into the life and traditions of the small village in which they lived, while Barbara participated tepidly and largely kept herself apart. Eventually it is decided that Susan will accompany Barbara to London where she will meet up with her son, and travel with him back to Queensland. While Susan missed her company (because she truly does love her mother), you can sense of sigh of relief.

And so, not really a lot happens in this book. So what kept me opening it up with relish, night after night, and my regret when it finished? Part of it was a rather perverse curiosity about what would go wrong, and when- dementia? the dreaded ‘a fall’? a passionate love affair out of left field for mother and/or daughter? But it was also Johnson’s own self awareness of the Faustian-bargain she had entered into with her publisher that helped to finance their trip: that she would finish the edits on the book that ended up as From Where I Came, and that she would write this book – her memoir of “A mother and daughter’s Greek Island adventure” as the subtitle rather forlornly ventures. How would she depict this stubborn, complaining woman, whom she adored? What if there was no “adventure” but only a grapple between mother and daughter that laid bare all the compromises, micro-aggressions and resentments of many mother/daughter relationships.

The book takes a turn at the end, as COVID makes it impossible to return home as Barbara’s health deteriorates. We all know, unless Fate is perverse, how mother/daughter stories end and so there was an inevitability about the finale, and yet there was a surprise there too. For me, I was left with a sense of a circle closed, a rich love of a daughter for her mother, the psychological integrity of both these two, separate women, and a deepening of my own reflections about mothering and daughtering, aging, travel and home.

Susan Johnson is just slightly younger than I am, and I have always found that her books speak to me, and that they seem to capture where I am at the time of reading. I do wonder how a younger woman would read this book, though. Part of me feels that it is only with age, and the sense of having moved on beyond being a child against an older, more beautiful mother, that a reader can stand outside the Susan/Barbara relationship and observe. For a ‘woman of a certain age’ as both Johnson and I am, this was a really satisfying and perceptive read.

My rating: 10/10

Read because: It was there on the library shelf, and I have enjoyed her other work. But reading about a writer, I felt a bit guilty borrowing it from a library, though (public lending rights notwithstanding). When Johnson talks about her own writing and success, I didn’t quite register how personally an author takes sales figures.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-8 November 2023

Posted on November 16, 2023 | 1 comment

Literature and History. I’ll be doing the Christmas service at my Unitarian fellowship, and even though I know I’ll end up working on the service the night before, I have started thinking about what I’m going to do. I usually have a historical bent to my services, and this time I’m thinking of looking at the historical context into which the Nativity story was embedded. This led me to Ep.76 Judea Under Herod. (You can get the transcript here). Herod was a client king under Roman rule who reigned over the province of Judea between 37 and 4 BCE, at a time when the Republic was tearing itself apart and re-forming as an Empire. We know Herod through the story of Jesus’ birth and death (and to my shame, I thought that it was the same King Herod involved in both, but it wasn’t- they were father and son). None of the historians writing at the time, even Josephus, mention the Massacre of the Innocents, which you’d think they would, if it happened. King Herod was first appointed governor of the backwater territory of Galilee in 47BCE as a result of his father’s connections with Julius Caesar. He was not a popular choice: he was ethnically Idumean and not Jewish, his father had been embroiled in Jewish civil wars and Roman campaigns against Judea. When Herod’s father died and after aligning himself with Mark Antony and Octavian, he was appointed King of Judea, but the Jews didn’t want him, preferring a home-grown Hasmonean king instead. Herod was pretty ruthless: executing his enemies, confiscating their property and even killing family members who threatened him. Apart from that (a big qualification), he put Judea on a strong economic footing, he rebuilt the Second Temple (even though it was still standing albeit profaned by the entry of Roman troops in 63BCE so think of it as Temple 2.5) but it was destroyed by 70CE except for the Western Wall. As a client King, Herod needed to manage competing demands while being essentially powerless. He did manage to keep Judea intact instead of being swallowed into Syria. He had nine wives, and after he died, the kingdom was divided in three and ruled by three sons, one of whom was Herod Antipas, who was the one who ordered the execution of John the Baptist and did nothing to stop the execution of Jesus. It was Herod Agrippa II who ended up dealing with the Apostle Paul. All these Herods! No wonder I was confused.

History This Week Chasing Utopia tells the story of Bronson Alcott (father of Louisa May Alcott) who along with Charles Lane established Fruitlands, a Transcendentalist utopian community, in Massachusetts in 1843. It never really expanded much beyond the two families, and when the men went off to try to get new members, they left his wife Abby May and her daughters to bring in the harvest alone. She increasingly resented Lane’s domination of her husband, and in the end she wrote to her brother, telling him to stop funding the farm and threatening to leave with the children. Eventually, it was Lane who left and a few months later, Bronson and his family left too. So much for Utopia.

Emperors of Rome It’s time to go back to the Emperors of Rome podcast. I take up again at Episode XCIV A Republic Worth Fighting For After Sulla died in 78BCE, the Senate didn’t want to undo his Senate-friendly moves. There was a string of strongmen in the 70sBCE: Crassus, Pompey and then Julius Caesar. Both Crassus and Pompey came up through the military, and both of them had armies behind them. In 70BCE they were made consuls, even though officially Pompey was too young (although by this time, who needs rules?). He was seen as the ‘efficient one’, cleaning up the Slave War, Pirates and King Mithridates, the latter meaning that Pompey finally got the triumph he had been hanging out for. There were extremists in the Senate, like Cato, and the ‘new men’ coming into the Senate. Cataline came from the ‘right’ sort of family, but he was rejected as Consul and so he riled up the disaffected. The existing Consul, Cicero, found out about the plot, and summarily executed the men who were plotting but not Cataline, who escaped. This came back to bite him five years later, when he was put on trial for acting beyond his powers and was exiled.

Conspiracy Theories. (I can’t believe that I’m listening to a podcast called this) Failed Conspiracies: Cataline Conspiracy In the first century BC, there was stiff competition to be consul. Cataline was from an old family but very ambitious and strategic in his search for power. Cicero, on the other hand, was an outsider and a brilliant lawyer. There was rivalry between the two men for a Consul position but Cataline was beaten twice for the position. In 63BCE Cicero learned of a conspiracy to overthrow and assassinate him from letters that had been delivered to Crassus outlining the plot. Cicero had the ringleaders executed but Cataline escaped with his troops, who were attracted by his populist policies, especially amongst ex-military men and heavily indebted farmers. Cataline’s army was defeated and Cataline died a traitor. The presenters then indulge in a bit of ‘what-if’ history that goes too far. What if Cataline had won instead of Cicero? Well, we wouldn’t have had Cicero’s letters, which were all written after the conspiracy and rediscovered by Plutarch. The Roman empire might have turned socialist- and what would the Founding Fathers do with that, given that they modelled America on the Roman Empire. Hmm. Stop already.

By unattributed – William A. Crafts (1876) Pioneers in the settlement of America: from Florida in 1510 to California in 1849[1], Pioneers in the settlement of America: from Florida in 1510 to California in 1849. edition, Boston: Published by Samuel Walker and Company, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17689791

History Hit. To celebrate Halloween and All Saints Days, History Hit revisits The Salem Witch Trials. Europe had gone through its witchy stage in the 15th and 16th century, especially when the Protestants took up the idea, but after a wave of executions, it went out of fashion in Europe. But not in Salem though, where the Puritans (who were out of fashion themselves) were living on a hostile frontier, didn’t like women and believed in Satan- a bad combination. During the witch trials, 200 people – including some men- were accused and 20 died. Some of the accused were adolescent girls, who were given an otherwise unattainable degree of power through their accusations, and rich widows who had land. Eventually, there was pushback from the legal system when they rejected spectral evidence in 1696, and when Europeans were askance that the colonies were still looking for witchcraft, which they had discarded decades earlier.

Expanding Eyes continuing on with Books 3 and 4 of The Iliad. Episode 47 The Contest Between Paris and Menelaus to settle the issue of who gets Helen. What was Agamemnon thinking at the start of Book 3 where he told his men that he was giving up and going home? He was nearly trampled as the men rushed towards their boats, eager to go home after 9 years fighting the Trojans. He was just testing them, but they took him up on it. Perhaps Homer wrote this to show his weak leadership. Paris was the first to propose that he and Menelaus duke it out between them, but then he chickened out when Menelaus took him up on it and he had to be goaded into action by his brother Hector. When Paris was getting beaten, Aphrodite flew down, swept him up, and deposited him in Helen’s bedroom. Actually, the gods are pretty ambiguous here- no-one actually saw Aphrodite do it- and when Helen decided that she’d gone off Paris after all and wanted to go home to Menelaus, Aphrodite rounded on her and terrified her. Book 4 is mainly of fighting. Dolzani comments on the complexity of Helen: she seems quite regretful about leaving Menelaus but then she gives in and sleeps with Paris. (I don’t see any great complexity here, personally. Women do what they have to).

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‘Killing for Country’ by David Marr

Posted on November 12, 2023 | 2 comments
2023, 432 p.

This is such a clever title. Subtitled “A Family Story”, the title works on several levels. “Killing“- who is killing here? Indigenous people killing families, shepherds and hutkeepers in defence of country as the waves of ‘settlers’ and ‘squatters’ sweep across the continent? Or the white officers of the Native Police who turn the other way and let their ‘boys’ of the Native Police loose killing men women and children of other tribes? Or the Native Police troopers themselves, far from ‘country’ and with no links to their victims? Or white squatters and settlers who ride alongside the Native Police, or who distribute poisoned flour and meat? “Country” as used by indigenous people as their spiritual connection? Or ‘country’ as used by white settlers as land to be used; or a political entity to be defined and defended internationally? And “a family story” – David Marr’s own family through genealogical connections of which he was unaware until relatively recently? Or ‘family’ as the protagonists sought and maintained their positions through the networks of connections which bound together the British Empire? This book is all of these and more.

I’m sometimes wary of biographies written by descendants, whose familial connection has been the impetus for the book, and whose depth of research imbues the topic with a significance that it might not necessarily have, in the big picture. In this case, though, Marr leaves the family connection largely to one side to write narrative history which is broad enough in its scope to draw on larger historiographical arguments, while maintaining its focus on his protagonists Richard Jones and the Uhr family brought into Jones’ family orbit through his wife Mary, without laboring (indeed, not even mentioning) the family link. These are important – if increasingly infamous (largely due to this book)- people in their own right, with entries in the Australian Dictionary of Biography.

Richard Jones was a merchant, who along with Alexander Riley, had a monopoly on importation to the early NSW colony, which made him for a time very wealthy and politically influential. Like other successful businessmen of the time, he invested heavily in sheep, which gave him an interest in squatter politics in the insatiable hunger for new lands, and which led to his bankruptcy during the economic downturn of the 1840s. However, with some canny land sales and disguise of his ownership in the names of his wife, brothers-in-law and children, he maintained sufficient wealth to support his inclusion in the Legislative Council of the day. There, despite his quietly spoken ways, he formed part of the conservative power-block that thwarted governors and exerted pressure on the Colonial Office to maintain the hold of the squatters on huge leased swathes of land.

It also gave him the connections to have his brothers-in-law and their families, and their sons placed in positions of authority as magistrates and, most importantly for this story, as Officers of the Queensland Native Police, as were Reg and D’Arcy Uhr, Jones’ grandsons. Instituted in 1848 on a model first established in Port Phillip, this force never numbered more than 100 at its peak, headed by 10-14 ‘gentlemen’ officers and half a dozen officer cadets. The officers would stay with the force for five years or so, where they were well inculcated into the methods and ethos of the Native Police, and were then appointed as magistrates, who drew on this knowledge in ensuring that the Native Police remained politically protected. Sometimes the Officers themselves were involved in massacres or ‘dispersals’, other times they would simply direct their troopers to chase down indigenous groups and would close their ears to the gunshots that would ring out in the bush. As a matter of policy, these indigenous troopers themselves were always sent far away from their own country, so that they would not see their victims as brothers and sisters, but as strangers.

What made them strange and dangerous to each other was being away from their own country, the country that made them who they were. Here was a deadly conundrum. While officially denying their connection to land, colonial authorities would rely on that profound attachment

p. 174

Marr does not even attempt to explain or explore the motivations of the indigenous men who joined the Native Police. As he says in his acknowledgements, this is “not my story to tell. I leave it in better hands.” (p. 415) He does say that they were often – but not always- trapped, kidnapped, threatened at gunpoint. Their desertion rate was high, and while settlers were happy to draw on their ‘services’, they were often feared and despised by white society. The legal position of the Native Police was left deliberately opaque by the colonial government and its courts: they were never issued with written instructions and euphemisms like ‘collision’ and ‘dispersal’ and ‘dealt with’ pepper the official correspondence. But it had its own inexorable, if legally dubious, logic:

…pioneer settlers are entitled to protection; blacks attack whites without reason; they grow more dangerous when left unpunished; imprisonment holds no fears for them; chastisement must be swift to be effective

p. 376

Bolstered by the political power of the squatter lobby, of which Richard Jones was a member, colonial governors did not enforce the leasehold and sale agreements that proclaimed that the indigenous people of an area retained right of access to pastoral land for hunting and sustenance. Each governor had protection of indigenous people as part of his instructions when he was sent by the Colonial Office: none of them managed to enforce it. The Colonial Office had stared down slaveholders and the slavery shipping interests elsewhere in the empire (largely through financial reparations which charged further colonial land acquisition), but they did not dare to take on the NSW squatters. There were landholders, ministers of religion and philanthropists who protested the actions of the Native Police, but they were largely ignored or silenced. The Uhr brothers, as officers of the Native Police, could draw on their family connections through their father and grandfather, and marriage connections with Premiers and politicians, to escape censure again and again and again.

Meanwhile, the voracious appetite of pastoralism, and later mining, was not to be sated. Land was eaten out by sheep, so the pastoralists kept moving ever outward, coming to further ‘collisions’ with traditional owners, as they moved across the map. Marr’s book is illustrated with pen and ink drawings of individuals, but also with excellent maps that showed the traditional owners of territory, with rivers and stations marked, often with a skull to show massacre sites spreading across New South Wales, Queensland, Northern Territory and even over into Western Australia right into the twentieth century.

This is excellent narrative history, told with Marr’s deft turn of phrase. It is well researched, with references cited according to page number at the back of the book. I regretted the absence of a bibliography: it’s just too hard to comb through pages of references to find the original publication. In her blurb on the front cover, Marcia Langton notes: “If we want the truth, here it is as told by David Marr.” In his afterword, Marr writes:

The maths is indisputable: we each have sixteen great-grandparents. Reg Uhr was one of mine. I don’t believe he’s tainted my blood. I don’t believe I am responsible for his crimes. But when I learned what he had done, my sense of myself and my family shifted… We can be proud of our families for things done generations ago. We can also be ashamed. I feel no guilt for what Reg did. But I can’t argue away the shame that overcame me when I first saw that photograph of Sub-Inspector Uhr in his pompous uniform….It embarrasses me now to have been reporting race and politics in this country for so long without it ever crossing my mind that my family might have played a part in the frontier wars. My blindness was so Australian.

p. 407,408

The failure of the Voice referendum notwithstanding, truth telling continues. This “bloody family saga” is Marr’s own contribution. He suggests that one day there might be a statue in Canberra to commemorate the Native Police, who are already recognized in the Australian War Memorial Act as a military force of the crown. A statue in bronze, perhaps, of a white officer and a black trooper. And on the plinth? ‘The Native Police in the conquest of this country killed untold thousands. We remember them’.

Yes.

My rating: 9.5/10

Sourced from: review copy Blackink Books.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 23-31 October

Posted on November 4, 2023 | Leave a comment

The Rest is History. 352. Amsterdam: Kings, Canals and Coffee Houses is the second part of Tom and Dominic’s Amsterdam podcast, and yes, they’re still dragging around that Wise credit card, spruiking it at every occasion. They start by revising the first episode, pointing out the paradox that Amsterdam citizens were obsessed with privacy and domesticity and inward-looking, but also that they looked outwards to commercial expansion. They start at the elite Herengract canal, one of the three canals constructed during the expansion of the city in the 17th century. They then move to the huge Royal Palace, which was originally built as the City Hall. The Netherlands were a republic, but they brought back descendants of the House of Orange as their Stadtholder, and when William III of Orange took over power in Britain, it was the merging of two huge commercial cities, London and Amsterdam. During the French Revolution, Dutch republicans welcomed the French until 1806 when Napoleon installed his son onto the throne, and the City Hall was transformed into the Royal Palace. The King returned after the fall of Napoleon, but the building remained the Royal Palace.

Marina Wajnsztejn https://www.flickr.com/photos/mawa/6305244741/

They then stop off at the Portuguese Synagogue, built in 1675. Just as Amsterdam turned a blind eye to the Protestants, so too with Jewish emigrants, many of whom came from the Iberian peninsula when the Inquisition started up. By the 1930s, 50% of the Amsterdam population was Jewish. In February 1941 Amsterdam staged the only public protest against the Nazis, when the unions protested both against forced migration to work in German factories, but also the treatment of the Jews. The Jews in the Netherlands had the lowest survival rate in Europe. Although France and Belgium were liberated, it took until 1944 for Holland to shake off Nazism, and 1944 became the Hungry Winter. Their final stop is the Sex Palace in the Red Light district, and although this might seem incongruous, they argue that this is both a reaction against Nazism as well as another manifestation of the blind-eye liberalism that had accommodated Protestants and Jews in the past. But they suggest that this hyper-liberalism has been pushed to its limits with anxiety about drugs, antisocial Hens Night behaviour and Islamic extremism.

The Guardian Podcast Today in Focus. Although the podcasts I received through the Guardian are usually Australian, this episode from 23 October took up a program from the UK Guardian called How a contested history feeds the Israel-Palestine conflict. Although it could have started anywhere in antiquity, this episode starts with the Balfour Declaration in 1917 which supported a national homeland in Palestine for the Jewish people. During WWII there was an increase of Jewish immigration to Mandate Palestine, and following the war, Britain handed Palestine over to the United Nations. 56% of Palestine was to go to the future Jewish state, while the Palestinian majority, 66%, were to receive 44% of the territory. But the creation of Israel was contested from the start, with the UN vote recording 33 for, 13 against and 10 abstentions. War instantly followed the declaration of Independence, and Israel won increasing their borders even further by declaring nearly 78% of Palestine as Jewish, and expelling 700,000 Arabs out of Jewish areas in the Nakba. With the rise of Arafat and the PLO, the world (and they themselves) came to think of them as Palestinian rather than ‘displaced Arabs’. The Six Day War in 1967 was a huge victory for Israel, although Israel was nearly defeated (at first) during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 after which right wing parties took power. The first Intifada during 1987-1993 was violently suppressed. The Oslo Accords did not mention a separate Palestinian state, and they were rejected by a majority of the Palestinian population, and far-right Israelis. They were followed by a second Intifada during 2000-2005. By now there were three types of Palestinians: those who lived in the West Bank; those who lived in Gaza; and those who lived in Israel but did not have the vote.

The Guardian Audio Long Read Justice for Neanderthals! What the debate about our long-dead cousins reveals about us. I have lost track of how many types of human beings there are now- half a dozen and growing. Out of the various types of hominin, Neanderthals were the dominant type between about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago (which is an incredible thought now that 65,000 years of indigenous habitation in Australia seems to be the accepted number.) The first bones were discovered in 1856 and they were named ‘Neanderthal’ in 1863 (‘neander’ was Greek for ‘new man’ ‘thal’ for ‘valley’) . They were commonly represented as slouching but in 2016 the evolutionary biologist Clive Finlayson commissioned forensic artists Kennis and Kennis to create ‘Flint’ and ‘Nana’ which gave them a far more familiar human appearance. However, this podcast argues that archaeologists are making much of very little, with no new discoveries of bones since the 1970s, although from the archaeological evidence they have deduced that neanderthals walked erect, hunted big game and knew how to control fire. DNA has shown that 600,000 Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens had a common ancestor. There has been an explosion in recent publications emphasizing our common humanity, although is this merely projection? Are they like us or different? Does the question of ‘dignity’ which engages so many current Neanderthal-promoters reveal more about us than Neanderthals?

Expanding Eyes After listening to the podcast about Achilles, I decided that I should read The Iliad. I decided to listen to it. The second chapter nearly finished me off and I was listening to a clunky copy of a CD which required me to keep jumping from track to track. So I have settled for listening to You Tube readings of the Iliad, which although not as mellifluous as the CD, are easier listening. I found this podcast where Michael Dolzani, a retired university professor who studied under Northrop Frye, examines various classical and religious texts. He has a series on Homer’s Iliad. They’re good: it’s just like attending a lecture, complete with the rustling of his notes. Episode 44 (actually, there are two Episode 44s, but that’s a mistake) Ep 44: Introduction to Homer’s Iliad starts by talking about the discovery of Troy in present-day Hisarlik Turkey in 1871 by rich amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann and Frank Calvert, who owned a nearby farm. We don’t know anything about Homer himself (except perhaps a reference to himself as a blind bard?) and we don’t even know if there was a Trojan War, nevertheless Schliemann used Homer’s book to locate where he thought Troy might be. The Iliad was written in Homeric Greek, which is different from the Attic Greek which arose later. It was an oral poem in a society that did not use writing except for business, and it was a performance rather than a text. It was probably written between 750-700 BCE, a time of decline for Greece, which adds to its elegiac tone in looking back to Greece’s better times. Book 1 starts in the middle of the action, with Helen in Troy where she had been taken by Paris ten years earlier.

Episode 46 (there is no episode 45 because episode 44 appears twice) is called The Heroic Code of Honor and the Result of the Quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon. The Iliad starts off with the word “Rage”, a contagion which spreads all the way to Mount Olympus. We start off with the crisis of a plague sent down by Apollo after nine years of fighting between the Trojans and the coaltion of forces for the Achaeans, led by Agamemnon, the king of Mycenae. Dolzani distinguishes between a ‘shame culture’, where men are driven by the need for status in their peer group, and a ‘guilt culture’, like ours that is driven by individual conscience (although societies combine elements of both). Was Achilles a sook when he lost his war-trophy wife Briseis to Agamemnon, and then got his mother the goddess and sea nymph Thesis involved? Not really. But Thesis getting Zeus to agree to let the Trojans win to sooth Achilles’ hurt feelings but Zeus in a difficult position. Amongst the gods, his wife Hera hated the Trojans because Paris didn’t choose Hera in a beauty triumph and she gave her husband Zeus a hard time when he promised Thesis that he would let the Trojans defeat the Achaeans as payback to King Agamemnon for taking Achilles’ wife. So Zeus couldn’t really let the Trojans win but he could stretch it out and let the Achaeans suffer for a while. And this is why so much of the Iliad is taken up with fighting- something that would have meant much more to Herod’s listeners (many of whom liked hearing about the exploits of their ancestors) than it does to us.

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‘The First Astronomers: How Indigenous Elders read the stars’ by Duane Hamacher with elders and knowledge holders

Posted on October 30, 2023 | 3 comments
2022, 266 p.

The very first sentence in the preface of the book puts its argument right there, up front. “The First Astronomers challenges commonly held views that Indigenous ways of knowing do not contain science” (p.1). For me, I don’t know if it achieved this aim, although as the most un-science-y person you could ever meet, I’m probably not the right person to discuss the philosophies of science, or philosophies of knowledge. I was not at all surprised that indigenous people have knowledge of the skies – that they ‘read’ (both in past tense and present tense sense of the word)- the stars,moon and climate phenomena. This is knowledge in terms of making sense of the universe and man’s place in it; of finding the rhythms of the universe, and of marking time and making predictions. But is it science? I guess it depends how you define ‘science’, and I probably lean towards the post-Enlightenment and western idea of science being replicable, falsifiable, separate from the individual, and systematic. I’m not sure that the knowledge Hamacher provides, through his indigenous informants, matches these adjectives. I find myself wondering if the question is not so much ‘Is indigenous knowledge scientific?’ but more ‘is our definition of knowledge broad enough?’

He uses ‘indigenous’ broadly supplementing the Torres Strait knowledge which he gathered as part of his own academic career, with indigenous knowledge drawn from cultures across the globe and history. Again, not surprisingly, there are similarities in the stories that pre-modern cultures world wide have developed and read into the star patterns- for example the ‘dark emu’ formed by the dark nebulae clouds of the Milky Way amongst Australian indigenous people is mirrored by the celestial rea (a bird similar to an emu) amongst the Tupi people of the Brazilian Amazon and the Moquit people in Argentina.

The book is simply written, which I appreciated in the more technical parts, although even then my eyes tended to glaze over. However, this simplicity also contributed a flatness to the narrative which, although broken up at times with Hamacher’s own anecdotes (e.g. losing his bearings in the outback despite being quite close to his base camp), felt rather prosaic and far removed from the splendour above that was inspiring his work.

The work is valuable in terms of presenting a breadth of knowledge that has been largely discounted as ‘myth’, and the exploration of the same phenomena explained by different stories across the globe highlighted our common humanity. But I feel as if he was trying too hard on proving its scientific (in the formal, academic sense of the word) credentials, instead of perhaps exploring whether the term ‘scientific’ is broad enough to capture the nature of knowledge more generally.

My rating: 6/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection for September 2023. Their open meeting featured Duane Hamacher himself, attracting a large audience.

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I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 16-23 October

Posted on October 30, 2023 | Leave a comment

The Rest is History Episode 369 The History Behind Hogwarts: Ancient Schools and Revolting Students looks at the history public (i.e. private) school in England. it’s ‘public’ because they are open to anyone who can pay, and this differentiates them from ‘private’ tuition at home, apparently. It’s a follow up from the earlier episode about Harry Potter. Originally public schools were conducted by charitable trusts. William of Wickham, himself the son of the peasants who ended up in the court of Edward III, started the first one. During 14th century they taught reading, writing and Latin and they were set up as cathedral schools. During the Black Death, when maybe 1/2 of the English population died, William of Wickham was worried that there were not going to be enough priests so he established New College, Oxford, and Winchester. These schools provided an ascetic, monastic environment. They were intended for poor, but clever, students but “special friends” of the school were accommodated as well (i.e. they paid). A century later Royal Patronage was extended to Our Ladye of Eton, and Merchant Taylors School, established in 1561 offered a more rounded education including sports. There were no few girls’ schools, and those that did exist were closed during the Reformation. By 1700s public schools were corrupt, violent and offered a poor quality of education. Drawing on a sense of Tory libertarianism, students rioted, killed animals, hazed newcomers and the system of fagging was a form of abuse. Many of the boys from this environment went on to be ‘Empire Men’ in positions of authority throughout the Empire – who knows what they took with them from their schooling. The episode draws a lot on David Turner’s book The Old Boys: The Decline and Rise of the Public School which sounds interesting (available online SLV).

History Extra: One Day in the British Empire. This new book sounds fantastic- it’s by Matthew Parker and it’s called One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink. He takes 29 September 1923, the day when Britain took over the Palestinian mandate, which made it the day on which the British Empire was the largest that it would ever be (things started to fall apart pretty soon afterwards). He takes the British Empire as a whole, and by consulting newspapers, Colonial Office correspondence received and sent on that day, and novels from right across the empire, he illustrates the diversity and complexity of Empire. What a brilliant idea- I hope that he executed it well. (And I might just have to read it to find out if he did).

BBC Global News Podcast. This is my go-to listening when I wake up in the middle of the night. I don’t usually include it here because the podcast is, as you might expect, too topical and by the time I post this summary, things have moved on. But they had an excellent segment called Gaza Special: Your Questions Answered and it is well worth listening to, even if it’s not the middle of the night.

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‘Together’ by Julie Cohen

Posted on October 27, 2023 | 1 comment
2018, 352 p.

The book starts in Maine in 2016 with a death: that of eighty-year old Robbie, who awakes, untangles his limbs from those of his sleeping wife of decades, Emily, gets dressed, writes her a farewell note, then goes down to the ocean to die. He is a retired boat builder, father and grandfather, and his memory is failing him. He is confusing generations, losing things, feeling as if he is in a fog that descends without warning, obscuring all familiarities and, he fears, loosening secrets that he and Emily have held tight for years.

The book then goes backwards to 1990, when Emily’s mother dies and, despite years of rejection from her family, Emily returns to her native England for the funeral. Nothing has changed: the anger and hurt that has alienated her from her family still remains. While she is away, Robbie’s estranged, alcoholic son William returns, much to the delight of his younger teenaged half-brother Adam, who barely knew of his brother’s existence.

Another jump- this time to 1975-77 where the childless Emily and Robbie adopt Adam as a four-week old baby. Robbie has lost contact with his son William, from an earlier marriage, and as an obstetrician/gynecologist, Emily is heartbroken that they have no children. When an opportunity comes to circumvent the bureaucracy and waiting lists, they jump at it – only to find out that perhaps it is not what it seemed.

Back three years to 1972 when Emily and her first husband Christopher return from a stint of medical work in Bolivia, joining her family on a holiday in Florida. Suddenly she encounters Robbie, after nearly ten years separation and they are instantly drawn to each other, prompting huge changes in everyone’s lives.

And finally, back to 1962 where they meet for the first time and fall in love. It is an instant, overwhelming attraction that is to last for fifty years.

I can’t really say much about this book because of spoilers, but the backward trajectory of the narrative gave you an opportunity to get to know Robbie and Emily, from their old age forward, so that ‘the secret’, when it is revealed, needs to be held up against everything else that we have learned about their life together. I thought that she captured Robbie’s dementia well, and the powerful attraction that they exerted on each other, right from the start, is well described. It is a bit Mills-and-Boonsy – how could it be otherwise?- but I think that Cohen showed real skill in controlling the backward plotting which is such an important part of the book.

My rating: 6.5 / 10

Read because: CAE bookgroup.

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‘The Restless Republic: Britain Without a Crown’ by Anna Keay

Posted on October 23, 2023 | Leave a comment
2022, 362 p & notes

I think that my undergraduate degree was wasted on the 21-year-old that I was then. I know that I did a half-unit about the religious sects that emerged during the English Civil War, but I can remember virtually nothing about it, and I don’t know if even then I knew what happened after the Civil War. I wish that I could go back for a few hours now, and sit in on a lecture to see what it was that I was studying.

With all the ceremony surrounding King Charles’ coronation and its reference to antiquity and continuity, it is easy for forget that for eleven years, Britain chose to be a republic, without a King or Queen. It had a revolution one hundred years before the French Revolution; it had a republican government long before the American government, and it was what Australia struggles to be after two hundred years- a republic without a hereditary head of state.

What an amazing, frightening, disorienting time to have been alive! This book captures well the disruption of certainties, the knife-edge of political allegiance, the dangers of an army, the contingency of events and personality, and the instability of florid evangelicalism channelled into politics (something that is apposite today). It starts with the execution of Charles I in 1649, and ends with the restoration of Charles II in 1660, seen through the eyes of nine individuals – not necessarily in their words, but from their perspectives. The book starts with John Bradshaw, who oversaw the trial that led to Charles I’s execution and later became President of the first Commonwealth Council of State; it moves to religious visionary Anna Trapnel whose ‘gift’ of prophesy spurred the Fifth Monarchists and the radical religious fringes of society, and spends time with Charlotte Stanley, born Charlotte de la Trémoille who, as Lady Derby, headed a Royalist family with ancestral land on the Isle of Man, when her husband Lord Derby was executed by the Commonwealth. Then we have the L’Estrange family in Norfolk, who along with other noble families that prized their land and family property above all else, kept out of the fray as much as possible, anxious not to commit to one side or the other. Even here, though, we see brother against brother as the politics splits a family down the middle. The gadfly journalist, Machamont Nedham, played both sides and managed to pick the losing side every time in his editorial allegiances, while William Petty, famous for having ‘resuscitated’ a young woman who was hanged for infanticide, introduced surveying techniques in Ireland using Army surveyors that facilitated the dispossession of Catholic landholders to the West and the influx of Protestant, English families to Ireland. Cromwell – both Oliver and Henry- feature here, but Oliver is depicted as a man who measured God’s approval of his actions by success on the battlefield both in the United Kingdom and in Hispaniola in the Caribbean as part of the ‘Western design’. Henry, sent as Major General in Ireland, seemed to steer a middle path that neither his father nor brother Richard could find, setting up an intriguing what-if scenario had he succeeded his father instead of Richard. Then there is General Monck, and his low-born and possibly bigamist wife Anne, who as his closest confidante was sought by people who wished to get the ear of General as he charted his own course, betraying both sides in turn, in seeking the way through the politics, as many other people sought to do as well.

It is not a chronological history as such, and yet it moves forward chronologically, weaving together these networks of influence and connection, involving both men and women, in a time when the extremes at both political ends were unpalatable. I actually found it un-put-downable in the closing pages because, although I knew the eventual outcome, it was not clear how it was going to be reached. At a time in our own politics where the certainties of liberal democracy are shakier, when religious Dominionism beats out its own agenda, when the influence of drug gangs, coups and private militias makes states ungovernable, I found many resonances in events of four hundred years ago. This is a very readable history for a reader who knows little about the period, human in its scope, and a damned good read.

My rating: 10/10

Read because: the author was on a The Rest is History episode.

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Podcasts 8- 15 October 2023

Posted on October 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

Back again after a little podcast-less sojourn in Cambodia. With that chaotic traffic, there was no way that I was going to walk around the streets with earbuds in! Now I’m back to walking the safe footpaths of Macleod and the tranquil surroundings of Rosanna Parklands and so I can listen to podcasts again.

History Extra The Huxleys: How one family shaped our view of nature. I wasn’t sure listening to this whether it was “our” (i.e. Australia’s) Alison Bashford being interviewed about her book An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family (Penguin, 2023)– but it is. You might straight away think of Aldous Huxley, but this interview focuses on Thomas Huxley, known as ‘Darwin’s Bulldog and his grandson, Julian Huxley who like David Attenborough, was important in bringing natural history into the popular media. She says in this podcast that she essentially came to think of grandfather and grandson as one man, who spanned the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The Rest is History Episode 351 Amsterdam: Miracles, Money and Mud. In this episode Tom and Dominic head off to Amsterdam, sponsored (as they tell you a hundred times)by Wise credit card. Talk about selling your soul- their spruiking really detracted from the podcast! However, it was fitting that it should be an episode about Amsterdam, which profoundly shaped capitalist history. They follow Dan Snow’s technique of wandering around Amsterdam, stopping at various places, to explain the connection of the place with their narrative of the city’s development. They started off in Dam Square to talk about the construction of dykes and dams in 1250-1275 to mitigate flooding after disastrous floods one hundred years earlier. Their second site was the rather twee Amsterdam Dungeon which was the site of an earlier chapel commemorate the 1345 Mirakel van Amsterdam, where a dying man received communion but vomitted up the host, and unsure what to do with it, they tried to burn it, but it wouldn’t burn. The chapel was a site of Catholic pilgrimage, at a time when the city fathers turned a blind eye to the Calvinist refugees who flooded in during the Reformation. With “The Alteration Act” in 1578 Amsterdam decided to become Protestant- just like that. The next site was the The Begijnhof, a women’s refuge, run by Catholic nuns, who hid their catholicism in plain sight. The fifth site was the headquarters of the United East India Company, built in 1606. Amsterdam decided to follow Portugal’s example i.e. in ships, shipbuilding and money. But unlike the Portuguese, they sold shares in the company itself, not in the expedition- and the Amsterdam citizens were inveterate gamblers on anything- like tulips!

History Hit Achilles featuring Professor Alastair Blanshard from the University of Queensland (doesn’t sound very Australian!). You know, I’ve never read The Iliad of Homer. It starts with a reading by Lucy Davidson, which tells the story of Achilles’ refusal to fight. This episode looks at Achilles’ relationship with Patroclus and asks whether they were gay, or is just that we lack a term for their relationship. It’s fairly explicit in placesAnd how did it inspire one of the greatest military generals in history: Alexander of Macedon? I’ve been inspired too- and I’ve started listening to The Iliad.

New York Times. There’s no end of podcasts recently about Hamas and the Gaza Strip, but I was interested in Israel’s Plan to Destroy Hamas which features Steven Erlanger, the chief diplomatic correspondent in Europe for The New York Times. He’s not particularly optimistic about the outcome.

New Books Network Latin American The House on G Street. In this episode the interviewer’s voice is very scratchy, but fortunately the interviewee is not- which is just as well. She is interviewing historian Lisandro Pérez, who has recently released his memoir The House on G Street which integrates his family history with a broader history of Cuba, which he left as a child in 1960. He was not able to return until 1979, and he was fascinated by the places that he remembered from a nostalgia-hazed childhood. He says that he didn’t want to write a family history but it certainly sounded that way in this interview, which is full of ‘my great-grandfather’ etc. as he tries to keep all sides of his family tree under narrative control. I usually like it when historians write family history, because they have the span to identity the exceptional from the mundane, but I don’t know if he represented the book very well in this interview.

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‘The Sixteen Trees of the Somme’ by Lars Mytting

Posted on October 17, 2023 | 1 comment
2018, 403 p.

Translated from the Norwegian by Paul Russell Garrett

“Oh, a WW I book. Mud, blood and trenches,” I thought when I saw that this was on the reading list for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle. But it’s not at all. The events mainly take place in the early 1990s as twenty-something Edvard Hirifjell buries his grandfather Sverre. Grandson and grandfather had been potato farmers in rural Norway, living together since 1971 when at the age of three, Edvard’s parents had been killed. Their deaths were shrouded in mystery: they died of apparent gas poisoning from unexploded ordnance from WWI in a copse of trees on a former battlefield on the Somme. Edvard had been there too, but has no memory of what occurred: all he knows is that he turned up four days later over 120 kilometres away. As he begins to arrange his grandfather’s funeral with the local priest, he gathers snippets of knowledge of his family: that there was an estranged great-uncle Einar who fought with the French Resistance in WW2 while his grandfather Sverre served with the Germans on the Eastern Front; that his mother was born in Ravensbruck concentration camp; and most intruigingly, that his great-uncle Einar, a skilled timber craftsman, might not have been executed during WW2 as he thought, but may have instead having been living in the Shetland Islands until the 1970s. He had sent a beautifully crafted wooden coffin to Sverre in the small village of Saksum back in 1979 and when it is finally delivered to Edvard for his grand-father’s body over ten years later, it triggers in him an urge to make sense of his memories and his family history.

And so, his grand-father dead, and much to the frustration of his ex-girlfriend Hanne, Edvard travels to the Shetland Islands, and later to the village of Authuille in France, where his parents died, in his search for the past. On the peninsula of Unst, in the Shetland Islands, he finds strong traces of its Norwegian heritage and meets an enigmatic woman Gwen, who claims to be the caretaker for the nearby ‘big house’ Quercus Hall. Quercus indeed, the Latin name for the genus which includes oak and beech trees, because wood and trees play an integral role in the plot, both as a form of craftsmanship and as a motivation for deception and greed.

The book ends up in the Somme, but instead of focussing on World War I, it illustrates the legacy of war across succeeding generations. War on a global scale, but also war between erstwhile-business associates, and war between brothers.

In many ways, this book conforms with the conventions of the mystery novel. There are lots of name changes: Therese Maurel/Nicol Daireaux; Einer Hirifjell/Oscar Ribaut; Gwen Leask/Gwen Winterfinch. There is the big house. There are clues dropped, false leads and evasiveness on all sides. True to form, there is a cliff-hanger ending, which was rather too melodramatic for my liking. It’s a very cinematic novel. The only image I have in my mind of the Shetland Islands is that of the television series Shetland where the Scots influence predominates, but this is much more a European novel, despite the bleak, windy bluestone of the islands. It was not at all what I expected it to be, and it was probably the better for that.

My rating: 8.5/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle. Purchased from Readings.

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