Heather Cox Richardson I’m back listening to her history podcasts on Thursdays her time. Her podcast of 10 December starts with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln and the takeover of power by Andrew Johnson, a Southern Democrat vice-president, who “fixed up” Reconstruction in a few months before Congress returned, by returning power to the southern Confederates. What an ****hole. No wonder many historians consider him the worst president in American history ( I wonder if DJT will knock him from No.1?)
Latin American History Podcasts I’m on a bit of a Mexican History quest at the moment, having enjoyed the SBS series Hernán and re-read Anna Lanyon’s Malinche’s Conquest. Max Serjeant is a travel writer and journalist, currently based in Western Australia. His podcasts are nothing flash technologically, but the narrative is well written. I’ve started off (as you might expect) with The Conquest of Mexico Part I.
It’s a Wonderful Lie We don’t seem to receive those Christmas yearly updates sent to family and friends any more. Perhaps because people like Ashley Flowers, Holly Laurent and Greg Hess make podcasts like Its a Wonderful Lie where they read between the lines and out-and-out make up stuff about these lives that are being put out there for everyone to read. There’s 12 of them, each self-contained and each going for about 20 minutes. They provide a little window into middle-class American life, and the CCPVC episode is particularly interesting. So mean. So funny. I listened to them all, laughing my head off, as I walked around the park.
The Six Degrees of Separation meme is described at Booksaremyfavouriteandbest . There is a starting book (for January 2021 it’s Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet), then you think of other books that you have read that are somehow and usually tenuously connected. In this case, I start off with Shakespeare’s son and end up with Dante Rossetti’s muse. As is often the case, I haven’t read the starting book but I have downloaded it, which is half-way to reading it (isn’t it?).
Shakespeare- such a famous surname for a writer- and so I jump to Nicholas Shakespeare, a recent immigrant to Australia, who writes about his search for two ancestors from his family tree in his book In Tasmania (2004). One was the army officer and merchant Anthony Fenn Kemp, and the other Petre Hordern, an alcoholic from a wealthy family who drags his family into poverty.
As part of his search for Kemp descendants, he visits a newly-found Kemp cousin who brings out a shell necklace supposedly owned by Truganini, supposedly “the last full-blood Aborigine” (or so we were told at school back in the 1960s). Cassandra Pybus gives a much more rounded view of Truganini, and her agency across the British colonies of Van Diemens Land and the Port Phillip District of New South Wales in Truganini: Journey through the Apocalypse. (2020)
One of my favourite books about Tasmania -indeed, one of my favourite Australian books full stop – is Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish (2001) , a beautifully illustrated and imaginative, magical realist book, based on the life of convict artist William Buelow Gould but going far beyond the historical character. I read this book before I started blogging. Flanagan has written many wonderful books since, but this is my favourite.
Speaking of fishing, Vicki Hastrich spends quite a bit of time messing about in boats in her Night Fishing (2019), a collection of essay-length memoir pieces tied together with the theme of boats and fishing, but with reflections on other things as well.
A boat – or rather a merchant schooner called ‘The Ibis’ runs through Amitov Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy starting with Sea of Poppies (2008). Within the 468 pages of this book, first we have the arrival of a boat, its provisioning and then its slow movement down the river towards the open sea, collecting characters along the way. There’s no sign of it here, but the trilogy is going to end up embroiled in the Opium Wars as part of the economic model underpinning British imperialism.
At the other end of the opium trade were the British users, although in this case the opium was marketed as laudanum. Elizabeth Siddal, model for artists from the Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood and lover of Dante Rossetti, eventually succumbed to her laudanum addiction in Lucinda Hawksley’s Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel (2004).
Well, that turned rather dark, didn’t it?- both the title characters, loved by famous writers, end up dead. On a lighter note, I’m pleased that I’ve been able to include some ‘older’ back-catalogue books, with a good sprinkling of Australian authors.
The gender divide was pretty even: four women, three men. Four fiction, three non-fiction. Four written in 2019 or 2020, three written earlier. Three of them (Mantel, Haratischwili and Warren) were door-stoppers. Perhaps in this very strange year, there was something to be said for burrowing into a very long read.
Well, actually, I finished it a while ago because I am well beyond the twenty I nominated. Anyway, here are the books alphabetically by surname that I read for the challenge this year:
Only three fiction out of 24. The dominance of non-fiction is probably because I’m conscious of keeping the ‘history’ numbers up in the AWW History, Memoir and Biography Round-Ups that I compile.
Other stats? I read 24 Australian women writers compared with 9 Australian male writers. I read more Australian literature (33 books) compared to international fiction (28 books). Of those 28 international reads, 18 were written by women and 11 written by men.
Overall, I didn’t read as much this year as I thought that I would have given that I had 112 day lockdown. I just didn’t seem to be able to settle, and much of the year just slid away from me.
But I’m up for joining the Australian Women Writers Challenge for 2021, and perhaps this time I’ll aim for a little more fiction in my life.
Phew! What a way to finish my reading year! Originally published in 2009, this is the story of young, enslaved Jamaican woman Lilith, living on Montpelier sugar plantation in the late 18th century. She was conceived as the result of a rape on her very young mother by her white overseer father Jack Wilkins, from whom she inherits her green eyes. Fourteen years later, Lilith’s life changes when she is, in turn, threatened with rape by a johnny-jumper ( a black overseer) and she kills him. She is taken into the plantation-owner’s house, hidden by Homer, an older woman slave, through whom she meets a number of her half-sisters, who share her green eyes,. These ‘night women’ are plotting a rebellion on the plantation at a time when slave rebellions in other slave colonies have made the vastly-outnumbered white slave owners very nervous.
“Every negro walk in a circle. Take that and make of it what you will” is repeated several times through the text. The book captures well the relentless powerlessness of being enslaved, and the violence, brutality and seeming endlessness of such misery. This is an appallingly violent book- probably the most violent book I have ever read- at times, teetering of the edge of violence pornography (indeed, some commentators have labelled it as such – see Markus Nehl’s article “A Vicious Circle of Violence: Marlon James’ The Book of Night Women” available as full text here. ) Is such graphic, often sexualized, violence necessary? I wondered. But James has done his research, drawing on the descriptions of violence in Thomas Thistlewood’s diaries, the richest historical documents that survive from the period. Sickening though it is to read, to me there seems to be a dishonesty and betrayal in cloaking the brutality meted out on human bodies with evasion and avoidance.
The complexity and heterogeneity of the enslaved community, and its relationship with slaveholders, is well depicted in this book. It is embodied in Lilith, whose white paternity and her father’s half-hearted protection gave her a sense of superiority amongst other enslaved. This ‘protection’ did not extend to being able to avoid whipping and brutality, ordered by the Irish overseer Robert Quinn. Yet, when she was moved to Quinn’s house at the whim of her proprietor’s mistress, they fall in love, while not forgetting that he is “massa” and she is enslaved. While I was reading, I was constantly aware how quickly their relationship could revert to brutality, and I found myself feeling sick with dread that at the next page-turn Quinn could have turned on her, especially once she became aware of the planned rebellion. There was hostility and distrust between the ‘house’ slaves and the ‘field’ slaves. Much of the brutality was meted by the johnny-jumpers on their masters’ instructions, and rape and brutality existed amongst the enslaved themselves. The slaveholders themselves were debased by their own cruelty, not that one could hold much sympathy for them.
The story is told in a Jamaican patois, although it is not clear exactly who the narrator is until the end of the book. While some would (and do) see this as appropriation of the black female voice by a black male writer, this does not particularly concern me if there is fidelity and consistency in the narrative viewpoint – and on both these counts, James certainly delivers. The voice doesn’t falter once, and the complexity of Lilith’s feelings for Robert Quinn are convincing.
I didn’t find this an easy book to read, and at times I wondered if I could, and should, go on. But I was drawn into the tension of the story and captured by the narrative voice, and it ranks up there with the best books that I read during 2020, and one that I will remember for a long time.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library as an e-book.
Actually, I reviewed this book ages ago and forgot to post my review!
I’ll try hard not to put spoilers in this review, but …..
This is only a small book, although I hesitate to call it a novella as it covers a large amount of territory. (Whispering Gums has reflected on the qualities of a novella here) It was awarded the Booker Prize in 2011, where its brevity certainly sets it apart from the other thick books that have won it recently.
It is written in two parts. The first part is a reflection written in the first person by Tony Webster, now divorced and retired, reminiscing about his final year of school. Three, smart-alecky, academically pretentious boys were joined by a newcomer, Adrian Finn, who was smarter than all of them put together. They left school, Adrian went to Cambridge while Tony went to Bristol, and he found himself a girlfriend, Veronica. The relationship didn’t last. By now, the friendships had drifted off and other jobs and other relationships took over. Adrian and Veronica took up together and some time later Tony was jolted to learn that Adrian had killed himself.
In Part Two, life has gone on. Many years later Tony receives a letter informing him that Veronica’s mother had left him some money and a diary. Why the bequest? he wonders. There had only been one brief, quizzical conversation between them one weekend when Tony visited her family. The diary does not belong to Veronica’s mother, but instead is Adrian Finn’s. The transfer of the money goes smoothly, but Veronica resists giving him the diary. After Tony confronts her, she gives him a fragment of a letter than he had written long ago, that he had forgotten completely.
A large part of this book is devoted to a reflection on time and memory, and the stories we tell ourselves. Tony here is not so much an unreliable narrator, as an unconfident one. He alerts us to his uncertainty from the start:
We live in time- it holds us and moulds us- but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly… And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing- until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. (p. 3)
Tony read history at Bristol, but at this time of his life he is far more concerned with life-narrative and how it we construct it. He thinks back to a quote that Finn had offered in their sixth-form history class in response to their teacher’s question “What is history?” (Ah, how Carr-sian!) Finn cited a quote from a (fictional) author, Patrick Lagrange that “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation“. (p. 17)
Tony is wracking his brain to recall writing the letter which has discomfited all the recollections that he has held onto of that time. The “imperfections of memory” have met “the inadequacies of documentation”, but he finds only uncertainty.
I theorise- that something- something else- happens to the memory over time. For years you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions. I press a button marked Adrian or Veronica, the tape runs, the usual stuff spools out. The events reconfirm the emotions- resentment, a sense of injustice, relief- and vice versa. There seems no way of accessing anything else; the case is closed. Which is why you seek corroboration, even if it turns out to be a contradiction. (p. 120)
The title of the book is The Sense of an Ending, and it’s truly only a ‘sense’ that you are left with. Tony, too, thinks that he has found an ending to his story, but “there is unrest. There is great unrest.”
I thought that I had reached the end of the book, and had my own certainty that I’d finished with the story. In planning to write this post, I looked at a few other reviews in newspapers and blogs- only to find that perhaps I hadn’t finished it at all. Read this review that explains the ending, then keep on going through the comments -ye Gods, 423 of them!- and the real cleverness of the book reveals itself. It has sent me back to the start again!
[Written much later }I didn’t give it a score at the time of writing, and I have no idea now what I thought of it then. But obviously the ending passed me by completely, which can’t really be a good thing, can it?
I always enjoy it when I catch Philip Adams’ “mingle with Tingle” segment on Late Night Live. She always has a way of looking at things that brings a different perspective to the day’s news, and she ‘interprets’ more than she ‘reports’. I was a little disappointed in the last Quarterly Essay (Katherine Murphy’s The End of Certainty, which I reviewed here), which seemed to be just a lengthier extension of her every-day reporting in The Guardian. Tingle’s essay, on the other hand breaks new ground by drawing our attention to something almost unremarkable: the similarities and divergences between Australia’s political scene and that of our neighbour, New Zealand.
There are many times, especially since the ascension of Jacinda Ardern, that Australians look ‘across the ditch’ and wish that we could co-opt her too, (as well as the Finn Brothers and the odd New Zealand comedian or two). But I am old enough to remember an older New Zealand that was even more sheltered and Anglo-centric than Australia was. I went on an home-stay exchange visit to New Zealand in the early ’70s when I was about 16 and certainly the house was austere and rather cheerless. I recalled that old, protected New Zealand, when we visited Janet Frame’s hometown Oamaru in New Zealand, which seemed likewise cold and straitened. Even today, Australians are reminded of Australia’s relative advantage by the pricetags on purchases that show the Australian and inevitably-higher New Zealand prices, despite the lower wages in New Zealand.
Tingle identifies 1973, when Britain joined the Common Market as the seminal date when both Australia and New Zealand were forced to ‘grow up’ and reduce their reliance on agricultural exports to the ‘mother country’. From that date, Australia and New Zealand had to forge their own ways, sometimes acting in synchrony; other times striking out in their own.
But there were other important historical events before then. New Zealand was at first conceptualized as part of the colony of New South Wales (indeed, my very own Justice John Walpole Willis was slated to be New Zealand’s first Resident Judge in 1839-40. I wonder how that would have worked out.) The signing of the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 has allowed a completely different racial politics to emerge, especially in recent decades. Australia’s decision in 1901 to go with bicameral parliaments in most states and New Zealand’s go-it-alone single chamber, one state parliament, and more recently their almost accidental adoption of mixed-member proportional representation in 1996, has led to a different concentrations of political power.
As Tingle points out, the importance of each other’s economy has often been overlooked. At times, both governments had similar economic policies. I had forgotten ‘Rogernomics’, the extremely harsh free-market reforms introduced by David Lange’s Labour government during the 1980s. Although Australia’s Labour government under Hawke and Keating introduced deregulation and the Accord (something that probably only a Labour government could do in Australia) at much the same time, it was nothing like Rogernomics. And when New Zealanders put in the Nationals in 1990, instead of repudiating Rogernomics as they promised, they turned round and gave the country more of the same.
After losing the safe assurance of a British export market, both countries have been held hostage to their largest economic successes. In Australia’s case, mineral exports have dominated our economy and spawned a single-minded mineral lobby group that dominates Australia’s climate change policy and taxation arrangements. In New Zealand, flourishing under Hobbit-tourism, director Peter Jackson turned out not to be so benign when collective bargaining rights emerged under industrial relations unrest. Different players, but the same dilemma when one industry has a dominant role in a small economy.
But there are a number of other areas where Australia and New Zealand have taken different approaches, forming a type of laboratory experiment where two very similar nations, acting under similar geographical and population constraints, have adopted different policies. The most striking is the different experiences of Maori and Australian Aboriginal politics. I have often been struck by the use of the haka and Maori language by the broader New Zealand community, in a way that would be awkward and contentious in Australia. The Treaty of Waitangi, signed under the same colonial policies emanating from the Colonial Office, even though overlooked and dismissed for many years, was the springbroad for a judicial and political reckoning – something that Mabo and more recently the Uluru Statement could be if it hadn’t been dismissed out of hand.
Then there’s foreign policy, most particularly New Zealand’s firm stance on a nuclear-free Pacific, its deliberate distancing from US adventurism, and more recently in its approach to China which – let’s face it – Australia is stuffing up big time. None of these stances seem to have done New Zealand harm, as Australia always feared by throwing its lot in with the US.
Then there’s the policy continuity that a single-house, single government constitution provides. Although, as in the pre-Common Market days, this can lead to a stultifying dominance of one party, the recent mixed-member proportional representation has made coalitions of political parties the usual way of doing politics. There does not appear to be the huge culture war divide between the parties, who adopt each other’s policies (e.g. Rogernomics) to maintain a centrist government, less beholden to the extremists on both sides. I just can’t see “kindness” ever being adopted in Australian government speech despite a brief and fleeting flirtation during the recent pandemic.
Events have aligned to give Tingle a neat narrative circle. Just as UK bumbles its way out of Brexit, the final act of the economic play which began with the 1973 Common Market decision, we have Boris Johnson floundering in an ever-heightening pandemic, while Ardern calmly and decisively has given New Zealand a COVID-free community.
For me, the best Quarterly Essays are those that bring to the forefront something that is hiding in plain sight. I don’t think that I’ve read a historical or political comparison of Australia and New Zealand written in this way, and having read it, I don’t know why it hasn’t been done before.
Dan Snow’s History HitsHow Slavery Built Modern Britain examines the way that modern industrialized Britain was reliant on the wealth and products generated in the West Indies, and enabled the planter lobby to ‘buy’ parliamentary protection.
Heather Cox Richardson. After a bit of a break, I’m back to listening to Heather Cox Richardson’s Thursday History podcasts. At the moment she’s going through the history of Reconstruction, which I must admit I know nothing about. December 4 is number one, where she mainly talks about the Civil War (which is I guess where you have to start for Reconstruction).
Rough Translation (NPR). Two Rough Translation programs this week. The first, from ‘It’s Been a Minute’ (another affiliated program) called White Supremacy and its Online Reach is about Jewish female reporter Talia Lavin who adopted a number of different online personas to infiltrate online white supremacist groups. She made an interesting link between white supremacism and anti-semitism. She pointed out that many white supremacists were disenchanted with Donald Trump who surrounded himself with Jewish advisors, to say nothing of his support for Israel.
A second program was The Loneliness of the Climate Change Christian. It seems strange to me that evangelical Christians are often climate change deniers. I would have thought that protecting God’s creation would have fitted in perfectly well with their beliefs – but that’s not the case. Instead, there is a strange emphasis on being given lordship over the earth in Genesis (so it’s OK to stuff it up) and an anti-science streak that means that environmentalism is now akin to blasphemy. The story of former evangelical lobbyist Richard Cizik shows how the evangelical church has changed its stance over recent decades.
I don’t usually read detective stories, but this is the second story I have read by Richard Crompton featuring Detective Mollel, of Maasi origin who works with the Kenyan CID. I read Crompton’s first book, The Honey Guide after visiting Nairobi for the first time and I’m surprised that I didn’t review it on this blog, because I enjoyed it. The Honey Guide was set in Nairobi, in the midst of the violence that broke out in Nairobi after the elections in 2007. Visiting Nairobi in 2014, I found it hard to imagine the bloodshed that occurred just streets from where we were living, and to realize that the locals we met had experienced (and possibly participated?) in the violence.
The author is a British journalist who has lived in Nairobi since 2005, having previously worked at the BBC. He captures Nairobi really well, and he does the same thing again with the Lake Naivasha setting of Hell’s Gate. Again, we had visited Lake Naivasha in 2014 and stayed on the lake edge, and the kids visited the Hell’s Gate National Park for which this book is named. It’s a strenuous walk amongst volcanic outcrops and I bailed out, I confess. So, even if I’m not a great fan of detective novels, it’s the Kenyan setting that draws me in – and lets face it, how many Kenyan detective stories have you read?
As with all good detective stories, there are disappearances, and there is a loner detective. In Mollel’s case, he is Masaai amongst a police force made up of Kikuyus and Luos, working in a police force notorious for its corruption. His wife had died several years earlier in the 1998 bombing of the American embassy in Nairobi, leaving him to bring up their son. This book starts with a jolt as Mollel is thrown into jail – not a place anyone (let alone a policeman) would want to be -and then backtracks a week to explain how he got there. The plot is set against the cut-flower industry that dominates Naivasha with its huge plastic tunnels, and the Chinese influence that we noticed through the thermal activity infrastructure just up from the lodge in which we stayed. The Kenya Wildlife Service gets a look-in as well, in this tourist-dominated town that has many different agendas running against each other.
The huge plastic ‘glasshouses’ where flowers are grown for the European flower markets. There are hundreds of these plastic tunnels with associated worker housing all around Lake Naivasha.
I really don’t do detective films, series or books very well because I usually end up wondering whether I ‘got’ it. It always seems that there are so many false leads that when the crime is on the point of being solved, everything happens at once. This happens in Hell’s Gate as well, as your perception of ‘goodies’ and ‘baddies’ gets completely tangled. Do I know who did it and why? I think so, but that’s not why I read it. I read it for the Nairobi setting and the flashes of recognition from several visits.
My rating: I don’t really know quite how to rate it as it’s not a genre I usually read, and that’s not why I read it. 7?
Sourced from: my own bookshelves, given to me by my son an embarrassing number of years ago. I shouldn’t have waited so long.
99% Invisible. Do you remember when you first used the Internet? I don’t. I do remember using Netscape on a little rectangular block Apple computer, but I don’t think that I actually realized that it was the Internet. I can remember using bulletin boards, and I was bemused by all this talk of Internet 2.0. The episode The Lost Cities of Geo looks at Geocities, a site that used the spatial metaphor of a neighbourhood, with streets and blocks and addresses, as a way of conceptualizing the internet for new users. By 1998 it was the third most visited site on the internet but by 2009 Geocities was about to be wiped out. Except that a number of volunteer internet archivists tried to rescue as much as they could.
Background Briefing (ABC) Melbourne has only recently come out of a 112 day lockdown. There were certainly failures especially with the hotel quarantine system where the whole disaster started, and also with contract tracing. But with contract tracing, you are dealing with human beings who, for any number of reasons, may not be completely truthful. How Contract Tracers Confront Lies on the COVID frontline looks at the changes that have been made to the contract tracing system. At least positions weren’t so locked-in and egos so fragile that changes couldn’t be made.
The History Listen (ABC) Silence at the Sugar Mill is a family history story about Granny Ninnes, a small, dark, affectionate, card-loving grandmother whose family origins in Samoa were denied by her children, and remained largely unknown to her later North Queensland family.
In Our Time (BBC). Hah! Poor old Melvyn Bragg, having only women on the panel this week! I had never heard of Melisende, Queen of Jerusalem. After the first crusade, the mainly Frankish (i.e. French) invaders decided to create a kingdom in the European vein, and arranged amongst themselves who the King was to be. Melisende’s father came to the kingship in rather suspicious circumstances, and was determined that his eldest daughter would be Queen after him (only because he had no sons). When Melisende married Fulk from Anjou, she then had to resist his attempts to take over completely, and after her husband Fulk died, she then had to battle her son. I had no idea about any of this. There’s so much I don’t know.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 