Tag Archives: books

‘Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization’ by Ed Conway

Posted on January 5, 2026 | 1 comment
2025, 443 p. plus notes

When my son said that this was his favourite book of 2025, I took notice. When I told him that I had borrowed it from the library, he hedged a bit, saying that he didn’t know if I’d like it. He’s wrong: I loved it. I could barely put it down over the three days that I read it: sand, beach and grandchildren notwithstanding.

I’m not a particularly science-y person, but this book is far more than ‘just’ science. Like a Mark Kurlansky book (think Salt, Cod etc.) it combines science, history and travel, but it also packs quite a bit of political analysis as well. I’m writing this on 5 January 2025 as the reality of Trump’s bombing of Venezuela and imposition of US oil interests is sinking in, and Conway’s comments about autarky (i.e. the policy of being self-sufficient that underlies Trump’s ‘America First’ policy) seem particular apposite right now. Ed Conway is the economics and data editor of Sky News and a columnist for The Times (London), which are right-wing connections that do not engender my trust. However these contexts are not particularly apparent in Conway’s book, except perhaps for the ultimately optimistic viewpoint with which he ends the book. Quite apart from his politics, his journalist background equips him with the eagle eye for a good anecdote and the ability to bring the narrative back onto more general-reader territory when it threatens to wade into technologically and scientific details.

In the introduction he identifies himself as a denizen of what he calls ‘the ethereal world’:

…a rather lovely place, a world of ideas. In the ethereal world we sell services and management and administration; we build apps and websites; we transfer money from one column to another; we trade mostly in thoughts and advice, in haircuts and food delivery (p.13)

He distinguishes this from ‘The Material World’, which undergirds our everyday lives by actually making things work, often through companies whose names are unknown to us, but which are more important than the brands that use their output:

…operating stuff in the Material World….you have to dig and extract stuff and turn it into physical products…a difficult, dangerous and dirty business (p.14)

He chooses six raw materials – sand, salt, iron, copper, oil and lithium- which are not only important substances in the world, but are the primary building blocks of our world and have fuelled the prosperity of empires in the past. They are the very hardest to replace. These six materials form the basis of products several steps up the chain: sand, for instance, is the basis of silica which underpins optical fibre and the concrete and cement that makes modern high-rise cities possible. In analysing these materials, he traces back their ‘discovery’ to ancient civilizations, often by accident or through observation, before being intentionally created with processes that often form the basis of present methods. Concrete, for example, was ‘discovered’ three times: there is evidence of cement use in Neolithic ruins in Turkey that date back more than 10,000 years; the Bedouins created concrete-like structures in 6500BCE, and the Roman used a form of concrete in many of their buildings before the recipe was lost for hundreds of years following the fall of the Roman Empire. The discovery of On Architecture by Roman architect Vitruvius, and its translation into French and English, triggered the 18th and 19th century quest for new concoctions to replicate or surpass the Roman recipe (p. 75). Perhaps because he is a British journalist, he highlights deposits in the British Isles rather more than we would think of today, and both German and British ingenuity are highlighted, as well as American. Thomas Edison makes several appearances, but the complete absence of any women at all highlights the male-dominated nature of science and invention.

The structure of the book has a sense of symmetry that I find appealing: six raw materials examined in six parts, each with three chapters, an introduction to the book and a conclusion. I can’t vouch for the reliability of his information, but each time I exclaimed “Hey, did you know…?” to my much more scientifically-oriented husband, he already did know and what he knew aligned with the information in the book.

Unlike many in the media companies and publications he works for, Conrad does not deny the reality of climate change and the environmental degradation that occurs as part of the mining and extraction of his six materials. However, as he points out, the production of an environmentally harmful material was often prompted by the desire to replace an earlier, even more harmful energy source which would have brought about an even more devastating environmental impact. e.g. coal replacing wood, kerosene replacing whale oil, or polyethylene replacing gutta-percha from the rapidly disappearing Malaysian guttapercha tree. It is this pattern that contributes to his optimism about our ability to mitigate climate change in the long term, if we can overcome the short-termism of the political cycle and make financial and lifestyle sacrifices for an unborn generation- actions for which there is equivocal evidence so far.

However, he is not completely Panglossian. Australia, and Rio Tinto in particular come in for trenchant criticism over the destruction of the Juukan Gorge for the extraction of iron ore. As he points out, part of the luxury of living in the ‘Ethereal World’ is that we can shunt the environmental impacts of our lifestyle into the ‘Material World’ which often happens to be a third world country. Wealthier countries, like Chile and Australia to a lesser extent are starting to question the environmental costs when the extraction occurs in their country instead of someone else’s.

Despite the shift towards autarky promoted by Trump in particular, and turbo-charged by the world’s realization of the precariousness of supply chains during COVID, the story of these six materials is also the story of globalization. Here in Australia we see the shipping out of raw materials (especially to China), but the circulation is much broader than this, with the finished product integrating multiple processing steps from right across the globe. Such processes make the world more inter-connected than America/Australia/China first politicians might desire.

The Material World is – well, material- but it has political implications. While the rest of the world panics about China’s dominance of the battery supply chain, China panics about its reliance on the rest of the world for its raw materials- hence China’s Belt and Road strategy. Particularly in relation to the production of advanced silicon chips, security is uppermost in the attempt to prevent industrial espionage and to make sure that China does not gain this ability. Ironically, China is unlikely to develop the hyper-pure silicon from which the silicon chip ‘wafers’ are made because the crucibles to melt it are available (so far) only from a single site at Spruce Pine, in North Carolina, operated by only two companies, Sibelco (Belgium) and the Quartz Corp (Norway). This raises the unsettling question of the effects of a landslide on the road that winds to Spruce Pine, or the malicious spraying of the mines with a particular chemical. But this single source is unusual: there is usually another source or another product to take the place of a threatened material. His six materials highlight the international reach of companies based in one country, and the diversification of such companies into new processes as part of the evolution of products and materials.

This evolution of products and materials lies at the heart of the optimism of the book. We have worked out how to turn complex products into commonplace and increasingly cheap items (for example solar panels and semiconductors). Although he has chosen six materials for his analysis, they are intertwined: batteries are just as reliant on copper as they are on the lithium inside them; steel inside concrete is a better building product than either alone. Even though we need to keep extracting materials to make the very ambitious transition to net zero, with solutions like hydrogen and wind turbines requiring huge amounts of energy, there is one major difference. In the past we used fossil fuels to burn, but now we are using them to build.

For years, people assumed that it would be impossible to make iron and steel at the scale we can today. Rediscovering the recipe for concrete seemed like a pipe dream. Scientists doubted that we would ever be able to tame extreme ultraviolet light, let alone use it to mass produce silicon chips. Will we look back in a decade or two and wonder why we ever fretted about producing enough hydrogen to back up the world’s energy grids, or why we struggled to generate copious power from the hot rocks deep beneath the earth?…If there is one lesson you should take from our trip through the Material World, it is that with enough time, effort and collaboration, these things usually happen….Humankind has, since its very first days, left a visible imprint on the earth. There is no point pretending otherwise. It is part of our story. It has allowed us to live longer, more comfortable lives than ever before. It has enabled us to fill the planet with more individuals than anyone could have imagines, with 8 billion brains and 8 billion sets of hopes and dreams. We are also capable of living far more sustainable, cleaner lives, diminishing our destruction and contamination and living in closer harmony with the planet. We will do so not by eschewing or dismissing the Material World, but by embracing it and understanding it. (p. 443)

I hope he’s right.

My rating: 9/10

Sourced from: Yarra Plenty Regional Library.

1 Comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,

‘The Dust Never Settles’ by Karina Lickorish Quinn

Posted on January 4, 2026 | 1 comment

2021, 352 p.

I don’t very often read a book just on the basis of a blurb alone, but in this case I did. Paul Lynch, the author of Prophet Song spoke highly of Quinn’s book in author interviews and his blurb describing it as ‘a mesmerising feat of imagination and a masterful debut’ graces the back cover. It’s a beautiful front cover, and the yellow butterflies evoke Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to whom this book owes quite a debt.

Anaïs Echeverría Gest has returned to her childhood home in Peru after an absence of several years in England. The family is expecting her to sign the papers authorizing the sale and inevitable demolition of her grandmother’s house, la Casa Echeverría in order to free up the inheritance. The house, which is a character in its own right, is a large yellow colonial mansion and garden overlooking the shacks and slums built by squatters on the dry plain behind the house called Los Polvos de Nadie y Nunca (the dusts of no-one and nothing) during the Agrarian Reforms of the 1960s. As soon as she steps over the threshold, she is assailed by the memories of the house- not just her life in that house, but the memories of the house itself- and the ghosts of family members and employees who had lived and worked there. Time seems to stretch and contract in the house; one minute the rooms are intact and the furniture dusted and lights illuminated, and the next minute the house is derelict and dark.

Anaïs has left her fiance Rupert Napier, a thoroughly English gentleman, in order to come home to Peru. She is curiously detached from Rupert, telling herself that she loves him but never really feeling it, and she is likewise ambivalent about her pregnancy. The future baby exists as a little pink fish in the corner of her vision, and as her pregnancy progresses the little fish changes shape until it is a huge, snapping lobster. When Rupert comes over to Peru, probably at the request of the extended family who are frustrated by Anaïs’ refusal to sign the papers, he brings with him all the Englishness of his family, an Englishness that Anaïs resented in her own English father’s refusal to acknowledge his second family in Peru, choosing instead to stay with his wife in England.

The house, built at the turn of the century, has seen multiple deaths, that are only just hinted at: a baby whose cries still echo through the house, the suicide of her Aunt Paloma and most importantly, the death of a 17 year old maid, Julia Álvarez Yupanqui who died when she fell (jumped?) from a window. As Julia falls from the window, the Earth falls away from her and is like a sheet of cloth; she sees Time “spread like an ocean, flowing this way and that, tossing up moments, driving them forwards on the crest of a wave then swallowing them again, pulling them back into the deep“. (p. 96) A disembodied presence, Julia wanders unseen through generations of the Echeverría family, right back to the Conquistadors and through centuries of dispossession, enslavement, poverty and violence. The people of Los Polvos, who saw her fall, believe that she has become a saint- and indeed, it seems that she has, as she walks unseen through history dispensing kindnesses as she passes.

It was not only the Polvorinos who saw her fall: Anaïs did too, crouched under a geranium bush. She becomes electively mute, and is seen by a succession of psychiatrists and doctors who try to make her talk. Anaïs could see the ghosts in the house and the adult Anaïs has a tenuous grasp on reality, and you are never really sure whether she is going mad.

So the story shifts back and forth between two realities: that English reality (denoted by chapters with English numerals) and the Peruvian reality in chapters with Spanish numbers. The Spanish chapters follow the disembodied Julia Álvarez Yupanqui and take us on a meandering journey through Peruvian history. There is an exhaustive list of characters in the appendix of the book, divided into the Echeverría family and a longer list of historical and imagined characters who feature in small, passing vignettes as Julia crosses the earth. These vignettes are beautifully written and draw you in just enough to feel disappointed as Julia passes by, leaving that narrative thread hanging loose. Reflecting the tragedy and complexity (and complicity) of various generations of the Echeverría family, there is a convoluted family tree that challenges the one found in One Hundred Years of Solitude with its seventeen Aureliano Buendías.

The complexity of this book is both its great strength, and its greatest weakness, particularly as the book goes on. The last quarter of the book is Julia’s journey through history, and Anaïs’ story drops away. I found myself having to consult the list of characters at the back of the book, having ‘met’ these characters earlier in the book but having forgotten them in the cavalcade of ghosts passing by. I enjoyed the frequent use of Spanish, which she paraphrases in the following sentences, but I don’t know if I would have felt that way had I not been able to read Spanish.

Because this book is just as much about time, land and colonialism as it is about individual people, it reminded me of Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, which was similarly shape-shifting and which caused you to think “am I even understanding this?” In fact, I often said that out loud while I picked it up each night, enjoying the experience of reading it, but unable to hold it all in my head.

I like magical realism, but many people do not. This is a really ambitious, fearless book, and I suspect it is more memorable for its overall shape than for its details. It is flawed, but it’s very good.

My rating: 9/10

Read because: I loved Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song and I thought- if he loves this book, perhaps I will too. I did.

1 Comment

Posted in Book Reviews 2025

Tagged , , , ,

‘The Season’ by Helen Garner

Posted on December 30, 2025 | Leave a comment
2024, 208 p.

This book should have ticked all my boxes: set in Melbourne, written by a much-loved Australian author, written with a nanna’s-eye (and I do embrace my nanna-dom). But it sounded as if it would be a bit slight, and I probably wouldn’t have read it had it not been an Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection, read and discussed amongst all the other nannas.

Even Garner herself sounded a bit ambivalent about the whole project, admitting that she wrote the book because she needed something to do, but didn’t have the energy to embark on one of her investigative non-fiction books. It traces the footy season of her grandson Amby’s under-16s footy team, at the J. J. Holland reserve in Kensington. As she always does, Garner conveys a strong sense of suburban place, and in this case, the football ground she describes so closely fitted with the oval that I walk through to my volunteer job in Kensington that I actually researched the club and found that, indeed, it is the J. J. Holland reserve. She’s there for the team’s matches; she’s there for their training sessions on cold weekday nights, and she’s there for the conversations in the car driving there and back.

Although ostensibly about football, it’s even more about young men growing into masculinity, and at under-16 Amby is at that liminal stage, with signs of the little boy still visible under the swagger of adolescence. Garner’s daughter lives next door, and she has a strong and enviable relationship with her grandchildren, especially Amby. At the same time, she is aging and feeling irrelevant and frustrated by her increasing deafness. In places she veers into idealization of these young men, seeing them as warriors, and even admitting to a slightly ‘off’ recognition of their adolescent sexuality (Garner has always been, and remains, perhaps more honest than she should be).

It is the football season that gives this book its beginning and ending, and the book was more a reflection than a plot-driven story. I had feared that it would be slight, and unfortunately it was.

My rating: 6.5/10

Sourced from: purchased e-book

Read because: October 2025 selection for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle.

Leave a comment

Posted in Book Reviews 2025, Ivanhoe Reading Circle

Tagged , , , ,

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 8-15 December

Posted on December 28, 2025 | Leave a comment

The Global Story (BBC) The Death of Reading This episode was based on a recent essay by James Marriott ‘The Dawn of the Post-Literate Society’ which can be found on his Substack here. Both the essay and this discussion go back to the mid- 1700s when the spread of reading beyond the elites meant that power no longer had to be performed visually, but could be disseminated and reinforced by the written word. Marriott draws on Neil Postmans work ‘Amusing Ourselves to Death’, and argues that beyond the concern about the decline of reading in the 1990s, the spread of the smart phone from 2010 onward has led to a steep drop in educational standards. With the rise of TikTok and Instagram, we are returning to the primacy of visual display – a sort of counter-revolution in thinking and perception.

Journey Through Time Episode 48: The Paris Commune: Can the City of Light Govern Itself? After the uprising over the cannons on Montmatre, the radicals took over, but with no leader, they split almost immediately. Auguste Blanqui would have been the leader, but he was in prison (as indeed he was for whole decades of his life). Supplies were allowed in, but Paris was still lunder siege. Napoleon III’s column was pulled down, although it was later re-erected. Elections were held with 4 days to give the leaders legitimacy with the result that there was an anti-nationalist government but otherwise, the movement splintered. The new government started issuing executive orders (and don’t we know about THEM!) to separate church and state, provide rent relief and soldier pensions, provide free secular and compulsory co-education, cap salaries, and give workshops to co-ops. So far, all normal socialist fare, but also they imposed decimal time (10 day weeks, 10 hour days etc), banned night baking as a labour market reform for bakers, and banned croissants (can’t remember why). They treated legitimate and illegitimate children equally and had same and equal pay for teachers. The army was a citizen’s militia, and army discipline broke down almost immediately. 150,000 people per day fled Paris, where there was constant violence but no terror as such (in Revolutionary terms). From afar, Marx was interested but because he didn’t support the French International, he waited a while before writing about it. Women were influential in organizing, but they were not inspired by feminist or suffragist ideals. To get Auguste Blanqui released from prison, they took hostages which backfired on them. There were small mini-communes in the rural towns, but essentially Paris was on its own.

Leave a comment

Posted in Podcasts 2025

Tagged , , , ,

‘The Shortest History of the United States’ by Don Watson

Posted on December 27, 2025 | Leave a comment
2025, 266 p plus notes

I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the ‘Shortest History’ part of the title of this series of books published by Black Inc dealing with world history, many written by Australian authors. Declaring to be the shortest history seems rather definitive and pugnacious, and almost a challenge to later authors to become even shorter. The blurb for the series claims that the books can be read in an afternoon -something that I doubt, in this case – but certainly they are a work of concision and discipline on the part of the author, in being able to confidently assert a fact or event in a single paragraph instead of hedging with qualifications, nuances and debates. Of course, much is elided in such an approach, but there is also a bracing forthrightness about a sweeping history that needs to tie together so many small details into an overarching narrative.

Don Watson comes to the task as a historian in his own right, political speechwriter, and a commentator on current-day American society and political culture. As well as his American Journeys published in 2008 (my review here), he has been a regular contributor to the Black Inc./Schwartz stable on American politics with three Quarterly Essays: No.4 Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America (2001), No 63 Enemy Within: American Politics in the time of Trump (2016) (my review here) and most recently in 2024 with No. 95High Noon: Trump, Harris and America on the Brink, which I reviewed here. With The Shortest History…. he is writing as an outsider, and a long-term, well-informed watcher as well.

His outsider status is most apparent in the opening chapters of the book, where he makes clear that there were competing European powers – England, France, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden- that put ‘boots on the ground’ on what was to become American territory. Drawing the distinction between the 1776 establishment of the United States, and the history of ‘America’ starting in 1492, he goes even further back 20,000 years to the first peoples, and the early introduction of enslavement that followed early European ‘discovery’. In what, perhaps, might be characterized as ‘black armband history’, he continues to turn the spotlight around onto First Nations and Black experience as the narrative of United States history marches forward…always forward.

The book progresses chronologically, but the chapters are thematic. In his introduction Watson notes that:

While the history of the United States is to an uncommon degree a history of ideas, it is equally the story of men and women testing the truth of those ideas against experience: in politics, in churches, on frontiers, in cities, in industries, in battle, in homes, in schools, in Hollywood, in literature and in music. (p. xiv)

Watson places strong emphasis on ideas: on the intertwined Puritan ideas of harsh punishment and discipline set against competing ideals of individualistic self-reliance, which in turn existed alongside traditions of social justice, education, communitarianism and democracy. He notes the influence of Enlightenment philosophers and the scientific revolution in providing an intellectual framework for their grievances and the language to express it through the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and the Federalists papers. He puts his historian hat on to discuss Turner’s Frontier thesis on the ‘freedom’ of the frontier in the popular imagination and he notes the recurrent waves of religious ‘awakenings’ and the struggle between order and chaos-‘ the American id and the American superego’ (p 58). Challenging these were the ‘maniacal appetite for wealth’ whetted by the financial opportunities following the Civil War, and especially during the ‘Gilded Age’ of the 1890s which pushed aside “the restraining influences of conscience and religion, or the egalitarian principles implied in the country’s democratic creed” (p.94) The Civil War, in his telling, had a long advent of compromises on the part of the North, which was well aware of the incompatibility of slavery with the ideals espoused in the republic’s founding documents.

Although we know the political landscape in the United (huh!) States today as being Republican and Democrat, the meaning of both words has changed over time. To be ‘republican’ was to champion the idea of the American republic, and it was not necessarily democratic. The nature of the parties changed over time, with the immigrant influx between 1890 and 1920 shaping the cultural and political evolution of urban America:

The Democratic Party evolved into the party of both the burgeoning multiethnic cities and the reactionary South, while the Republicans remained the voice of white Protestant provincial America. (p. 112)

Looking at the policies of Presidents over time, particularly in the Progressive era, it is not easy to distinguish to which party the president belonged. For example Woodrow Wilson was a southerner from the Democratic Party, and a progressive as well as a segregationalist. Kennedy did not like Martin Luther King, and he had little interest in domestic politics. Nixon was mad, but he was the most liberal republican of the century excluding Teddy Roosevelt (p. 187). Some Presidents receive more attention than others. Probably because of current-day parallels, President Andrew Jackson receives more attention than he might have in a book written 30 years ago. For a former speechwriter for Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating, I was surprised that he was so critical of FDR. It seemed to me that the emphasis on presidential personality and actions received more emphasis in the latter part of the book, within the time of Watson’s own memory, I would guess. Interestingly for a historian, he ascribes ‘luck’ as an important factor that determined a President’s actions and reputation.

This is not just a political history because Watson interweaves popular culture, including music, Hollywood and literature, as well as broader social movements including Communism and anti-Communism, evangelical religion and protest movements. However, the political emphasis does mean that it is a predominantly male history, with political actors Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton receiving more attention than other women in his narrative. As the book moves on, the early emphasis on indigenous and Black history is muted and where it is mentioned it is mainly in political terms. Particularly in the post-WW2 years, he integrates conformity, consumerism and commercialization into the “American Dream”, which was very much restricted to white America:

Nothing spoke more eloquently of the American dream than the bustling heartland towns, their Main Streets lined with mom-and-pop stores, barber shops, diners, ice cream parlours, theatres and movie houses, with Fords and Chryslers and De Soto Coronados parked in rows; and, just beyond them, unlikely numbers of regularly attended churches, schools, sports stadiums and public swimming pools (p. 154)

Watson started his book in the introduction, with the attack on the Capitol building on 6 January 2021. At first, I thought that this reflected Watson’s own expertise and reputation as a commentator on American affairs, but when he returns to 6 January at the end of the book as part of his argument, it is as a historian.

The United States was born with one foot in the Christian church and the other in commerce. It might equally be said that it had a foot in the high ideals of religion and the Enlightenment and a foot in the frontier philosophy of whatever it takes. The loathing felt for the liberal elites, and for intellectuals in general, was an old one, and the failure of liberals and intellectuals to understand either the people who loathed them or the degree of their loathing was just as old. The ‘Washington swamp’ was not new [and] …the coonskin hats and the shaman’s horns in the Capitol building were as if lifted from a picture in my childhood Davy Crockett book…All these gestures to contemporary grievance connected to threads of belief and myth, and patterns of ideological dispute, that are as old as the country itself. Extraordinary, even ‘unprecedented’ as the insurrection of 6 January 2021 seemed, it occurred in the same grindhouse of uncrossable divides and undying fixations.” p. 261

I guess that only time will tell if Watson’s decision to start and finish the book with Trump was a narrative framing, or whether it is a historical analysis in its own right. Only in coming years will we know whether Trump II marks a whole new phase, or whether as Watson suggests in 2025, the Trump presidency reflects a continuity that flows across the United States’ history. By its very nature, a ‘short history’ with its abridgments and encapsulation, is probably best placed to provide an answer.

My rating: 8/10

Sourced from: review copy from Black Inc.

Leave a comment

Posted in Book Reviews 2025

Tagged , , , ,

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-7 December 2025

Posted on December 26, 2025 | Leave a comment

The Rest is History Episode 580: The Irish Civil War: The Assassination of Sir Henry Wilson (Part 1) In this week’s episode, Tom and Dominic are joined by historian Ronan McGreevy, to discuss the pivotal assassination of Sir Henry Wilson, whose death launched the tumultuous Irish Civil War. Sir Henry Wilson was the MP for Northern Ireland, and an Irish Unionist. He had served in the British Army, and as a leading figure in the British Army he urged the British government to crack down on the IRA, a group which he saw as a military problem, rather than a political problem. On 22 June 1922 he was scheduled to open a memorial at Liverpool St station, which he did. On his return home, three men waited for him and shot him six times on his own doorstep. The gunmen escaped by taxi, but were surrounded by a mob. Two of the assassins were ex-soldiers themselves and part of the Irish diaspora. Meanwhile an election held in Ireland led to acceptance of the Treaty, but the anti-Treaty dissidents took over the Four Courts, where they were issued with an ultimatum by the (Irish) government to remove themselves. Among the dissidents, the issue was not so much partition, but the Oath that parliamentarians would have to pledge, not in words but in the level of independence that an Irish parliament would have. The IRA itself split, but the majority was anti-Treaty. Sectarian violence increased in Northern Ireland, and Wilson became the public face of the Unionist stance. So who ordered the assassination? Historian Ronan McGreevy, the guest on the podcast, has argued that it was the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret oath organization from 1858), headed by Michael Collins. The two assassins were hanged after a 1-day trial and the anti-Treaty dissidents were removed from the Four Courts. The Civil War had started.

Journey Through Time The Paris Commune: The City that ate its Zoo (Episode 2) With the so-called Government of National Defence negotiating with the Prussians, Paris now saw itself as the defender of France. One of the first things to be done was to hold an election, to affirm the legitimacy of the leaders. And who should be elected as Mayor of Montmartre but Georges Clemenceau, who was to end up as Prime Minister of France. Perhaps his anti-German sentiments during and after WWI sprang from this early experience with the Prussians. However, despite the stance taken by the Parisians, in the rural villages people wanted peace at any price so a divide sprang up between Paris and its surrounds. As the Prussians increased the siege, people ate first their horses, then their pets, rats and the zoo animals excluding the hippopotamus (too hard to kill and cut up) and the monkeys (too much like us). As with Gaza today, there was disease and incessant shelling, and eventually in January 1871 the Government of National Defence capitulated. Ruinous reparations were imposed on France as part of the surrender, and the Prussians would continue to occupy until the reparations were paid. Meanwhile the German Empire settled in at Versailles, just to rub salt into the wounds, and their insistence on parading through the streets angered the Parisians even more. Elections were held, and the rural/Paris split continued. The 300,000 armed guardsmen in Paris refused to surrender so the National Government at Versailles decided to confiscate their weapons. The Guardsmen and the parisian crowds moved the cannons onto Montmatre (the Sacre Coeur church wasn’t there then- it was a very poor neighbourhood) and in March 1871 the women rushed to Montmatre to stop the seizure of the cannons by the National Guard troops.

The Rest is Politics US edition I listen to this podcast every week, but there’s no point documenting it because things change so quickly. But Episode 132 The Mistakes that led to Trump is more historical, looking at the economic decisions that led to the populism that brought us The Orange One. (Just to ensure that I will never be admitted to US). The 1944 Bretton Woods agreement emphasized stability in the post-WW2 international economy, but in August 1971 Nixon took the US dollar off the gold standard, which at that time was a lowly $31 per ounce! The globalization and off-shoring mantra was that a rising tide lifts all boats, and China was admitted to the World Trade Organization as an emerging market, something that Donald J Trump opposed even then.

The Economist The Weekly Intelligence: Operation Midas. Wow. This podcast really got me thinking. It involves the corruption scandal in Ukraine, which led to the dismissal of President Zelensky’s Chief of Staff, Andrei Yermak. The police force in Ukraine is so corrupt that an alternate corruption watchdog structure was established, comprising the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine (NABU) and the Specialized Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office (SAPO). These were the two bodies that Zelensky was trying to get rid of, until such huge public and Western government pressure forced him to leave them alone. NABU and SAPO uncovered a huge corruption crisis where officials skimmed off millions from the state nuclear energy commission with scant regard to the effects of decaying and damaged infrastructure on the population. Why? Zelensky claimed that it was to get rid of Russian influence, but was it just to protect himself. I’d thought of Zelensky as one of the ‘good guys’ but perhaps there are no ‘good guys’ here. I’m sure that this destabilization is just what Russia wants, but is there a real and continuing problem of corruption in Ukraine?

Leave a comment

Posted in Podcasts 2025

Tagged , , ,

‘Any Ordinary Day’ by Leigh Sales

Posted on December 22, 2025 | 1 comment
2019, 272 p.

Whenever I drive past the flashing lights of ambulances and police at a road accident, I think of the couple of minutes before that collision: the conversation that would have been abruptly cut short, the reason the occupants were in the car, how they would have got up that morning oblivious to how their lives were going to change in the next 12 hours.

This is pretty much the same impulse that led Leigh Sales to write this book. As a journalist, she had been on the media side of many interviews and stories about people whose lives changed dramatically. She had also had her own brush with death when a placental abruption in what had been a normal pregnancy led suddenly to a life-threatening situation, and fears for both her baby’s life and her own. Shaken by the experience, she came to believe that we are all vulnerable to sudden, unexpected change and yet we do not live that way. Why?

Her book revolves around the case studies of various people, some of who became caught up in ‘newsworthy’ events, others who experienced the death of a loved one (something that we all face) or had suffered a catastrophic injury or illness. The chapters are re-tellings of her interviews, interwoven with some ‘easy to digest’ research which veers at times into pop-psychology, and her own reflections of how she would have responded in similar circumstances.

Some of the people and the events described are well-known: Louise Hope, who as well as suffering from MS, was also one of the hostages in the Lindt Cafe siege in Sydney in September 2002; Walter Mikac who lost his wife and two daughters in the Port Arthur killings; James Scott, the ‘Mars Bar’ man who disappeared in Nepal and Stuart Diver, who survived the Thredbo landslide but his wife did not. Others are less well-known, Matt Richell, who died in a surfing accident, Juliet Darling whose husband was killed by her psychotic step-son and Michael Spence, the vice chancellor of the University of Sydney, whose wife died within 3 weeks of her cancer diagnosis, leaving him with five children.

As it happens, the first two case studies are both of people with deep Christian faith. In the case of Michael Spence, it was precisely because of his religious faith that she interviewed him, even though Sales herself is not a believer. As a former-believer myself, I found myself dreading that the book was going to become religious tract. It didn’t, but I still found it strange that she was to organize her case studies in this way, giving such prominence to faith and a belief in a higher purpose for suffering.

She locates herself as a journalist in these retellings, having presented many of the news stories herself. She tells us that she often becomes tearful during her interviews, perhaps as a counter to the perception of the sang-froid of the television presenter. The intensity of media scrutiny led several of her interviewees to engage a publicity agent to manage media appearances. This did not always work out well: you glimpse the newshound in her when she talks about James Scott, dubbed ‘Mars Bar Man’. He was advised by his agent not to name the chocolate that was his only food, in the hope that he could secure a sponsorship deal later. It wasn’t actually a Mars Bar, but instead a Cadbury’s chocolate, but when he fudged (terrible pun) the brand of the chocolate in an interview, the interviewee (Richard Carleton) sensed obfuscation and toughened his questions. Although Carleton came in for criticism for the ferocity of his questioning, Sales admitted that she would have done the same thing once she sensed evasiveness.

She returns several times to the idea that, having had one dreadful thing happen to you, you were inoculated against further trauma. Statistically, this is not logical even though emotionally, it is. She seems to feel that Louise Hope’s MS should have been enough, without the Lindt siege, and she spends some time on the idea of the ‘jinx’ on the women that Stuart Diver (Thredbo) has married, his second wife having died with breast cancer. Diver speaks of being a ‘memory locker’- capturing and keeping happy times for when the bad times come – but Sales seems somewhat resistant to such a stoic and clinical response to pain.

She devotes several chapters to people who helped: Detective Norris who accompanies a grieving wife to the morgue; counsellors Jane Howell and Wendy Liu at the morgue; Mary Jerram at the coroner’s office; pastor Father Steve who has a strong belief that families should see the body.

All of this is told in an intimate, rather confidential tone of voice. I used to listen to Chat 10 Looks 3, the podcast she made with political commentator Annabelle Crabb (still going, I see) and this book had much the same sort of feel to it. Interesting, personal but something that you could listen to (read) without much effort or challenge.

My rating: 7/10

Read because: Bookgroup Ladies selection. Now that the CAE has wound up, we have no identity!

Sourced from: Darebin Libraries Book Group collection.

1 Comment

Posted in Book Reviews 2025, The ladies who say ooooh

Tagged , , , ,

‘Prophet Song’ by Paul Lynch

Posted on December 15, 2025 | 1 comment
2024, 320 p.

SPOILER ALERT

I am writing some weeks after I finished reading this book, and I really regret that I didn’t sit down and write it immediately afterwards. My response to it has dulled with time, but I do remember slamming it shut and announcing “Fantastic!!” I read it for the Ivanhoe Reading Circle immediately after finishing Sally Carson’s Crooked Cross (review here) and the two books complement each other beautifully. In fact, I think I will always link them mentally because they seemed to be a similar response to an uneasy, suffocating situation, separated by nearly ninety years.

The book is set in Dublin, at some unspecified time, two years after the National Alliance Party has passed the Emergency Powers Act, which gives expanded powers to the Garda National Services Bureau, (GNSB) a new secret police force. Eilish, the mother of four teenaged children, the last only a baby, answers the door to two policemen seeking her husband Larry, a teacher and trade union organizer. Within the first chapter, her husband disappears after a peaceful union march, and her attempts to find where he has been taken fail. Eilish is a mother, daughter, wife, scientist and a long-time resident of Dublin. For much of the book, and as the world becomes a sharper place, she concentrates on the mundane, the quotidian, trying to keep routines together. She holds on to the life that she had before, that she thought was immutable, too afraid to look beyond her house, her community, her family. Catching sight of herself in the mirror in the hallway

[f]or an instant she sees the past held in the open gaze of the mirror as though
the mirror contains all it has seen seeing herself sleepwalking before the glass the
mindless comings and goings throughout the years watching herself usher the
children out of the car and they’re all ages before her and Mark has lost another
shoe and Molly is refusing to wear a coat and Larry is asking if they’ve had their
schoolbags and she sees how happiness hides in the humdrum how it abides in
the everyday toing and froing as though happiness were a thing that should
not be seen as though it were a note that cannot be heard until it sounds from
the past seeing her own countless reflections vain and satisfied before the glass (p.43)

Her friend Carole, whose husband has also disappeared, urges her to resist and to look at what is going on around her as people in her street beginning hanging National Alliance Party flags from their windows, and as her house and car is vandalized. People stop talking:

…the brilliance of the act they take something from you and replace it
with silence and you’re confronted by that silence every waking moment and cannot
live you cease to be yourself and become a thing before this silence a thing waiting
for the silence to end a thing on your knees begging and whispering to it all night and
day a thing waiting for what was taken to be returned and only then can you resume
your life but silence doesn’t end you see they leave open the possibility that what you
want will be returned someday and so you remain reduced paralysed dollars an old
knife and the silence doesn’t end because the silence is the source of their power that
is its secret meaning silence is permanent. (p.165)

Eilish’s father Simon is living alone and subsiding into dementia, but he still has flashes of clarity which pierce through the domestic cotton-wool that Eilish is trying to cocoon herself within.

…if you change ownership of the institutions then you can
change ownership of the facts you can alter the structure of belief what is agreed
upon that is what they’re doing Eilish it’s really quite simple the NAP is trying to
change what you and I call reality. If you say one thing is another thing and you say it
enough times, then it must be so and if you keep saying it over and over people
accept it as true this is an old idea of course it’s really nothing you but you’re
watching it happen in your own time not in a book. (p 20)

Her sister Aine in Canada is urging her to leave while she can, but Eilish feels rooted to Dublin, still hoping that her husband Larry will return. She tries to protect her eldest son Mark by sending him away; and it is only when her thirteen year old son Bailey is killed -and she finds his body in the morgue, tortured- that she finds the strength to act. And here we come to Lynch’s purpose in writing the book. As the world hardened against refugees, he asks us to engage in ‘radical empathy’ by seeing the leaving and flight from a repressive regime from the perspective that it could happen to us, just as it has with Eilish, just as it has again and again throughout history:

…it is vanity to think that the world will end during your lifetime in some sudden event, that what ends is your life and only your life, that what is sung by the prophets is but the same song sung across time, the coming of the sword, the world devoured by fire, the sun gone down into the earth at noon and the world cast in darkness, the fury of some god incarnate in the mouth of the prophet ranging at the wickedness that will be cast out of sight and the prophet sings not of the end of the world but of what has been done and what will be done and what is being done to some but not others, that the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house, and becomes to other but some distant warning, a brief report on the news, an echo of events that has passed into folklore… p. 304

There is only one perspective in this book- that of Eilish- and as you can tell from the quotes, it is told in a breathless, relentless suffocating urgency with no punctuation and few paragraphs. Yet, it was not hard to read once you relaxed into it- just as the people of Dublin relaxed into autocracy and violence, I guess. I can think of few books that frightened me as much as this one did. Absolutely fantastic.

My rating: 10/10

Read because: Ivanhoe Reading Circle selection

Sourced from: own copy

1 Comment

Posted in Book Reviews 2025, Ivanhoe Reading Circle

Tagged , , , ,

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 9-16 November 2025

Posted on December 4, 2025 | Leave a comment

The Rest is History Episode 578 The Irish War of Independence – Bloody Sunday (Part 3) As with the previous two episodes, Dominic and Tom are joined by Irish historian Paul Rouse. I knew about the 1972 Bloody Sunday, but not about the Bloody Sunday that took place on 21 November 1920. It started with the IRA targetting about 19 men in Dublin, shooting 15 dead in 8 locations. It was personally ordered by Michael Collins himself. Not all the victims were intelligence officers, and not all were English. That afternoon there was a football match at Croke Park. The football authorities were warned to cancel it, but they decided to go ahead because the park was already half-full. At 3.30 trucks, and 15 minutes after the game began, trucks arrived. Shooting began from the outside (this is important because the British claimed that the shooting began from inside), and there was a stampede and crush. There was blowback in England with acts of violence, followed by reprisals against the IRA, who found it hard to get arms. Finally a ceasefire and truce was announced, and negotiations began.

The Human Subject (BBC) This is the final episode in the series. If the second-last episode about deep-brain stimulation seemed a bit ho-hum, this one certainly made me angry. The Trauma Victims and their Blood tells the story of Martha Milete, who was shot in 2006 when masked men invaded her house. Without ever giving consent, she found herself part of an experiment into Polyhaem, a form artificial blood which would certainly be a boon to emergency medicine, but which initially caused heart attacks in all of the first ten subjects, with two of them dying. These terrible results caused the product to be shelved but in 1996 a change in the FDA regulations meant that there was no need for individual consent from trauma patients- which is how Milete found herself part of the experiment. Instead, Polyhaem had to gain ‘community consent’, which they interpreted as giving a Powerpoint presentation at the hospital, and the initial provision of blue bracelets that had to be worn 24 hrs a day opting out (they soon ran out and it took a year to replenish them). Appalling.

Witness History (BBC) I love this program. Ten minutes- enough time for a walk home from the station- and really interesting. Orson Welles Broadcasts War of the World has interviews from various people who were involved on the radio program broadcast on the night before Halloween in 1938. I’d forgotten that H.G. Well’s short story ‘The War of the Worlds’ was set in England. When Howard Koch wrote the radio play, to be performed as part of a weekly program, it was a very boring show. So it was decided to set it in a real location in New Jersey, and to present it as a live broadcast which had interrupted the programming for the night. Up to six million people tuned in, unaware that they were listening to a radio play, and it prompted mass panic. There’s an interview with Orson Welles himself, as well as with the script writer and the producer John Houseman. Really good.

Rear Vision (ABC) America’s Radical Left Part I and Part 2 looks at the history of the left in America. Part I looks at the religiously-driven radicalism of early America and the failure to create a dedicated ‘labour’ party in United State. This failure was tied up with other competing ideas about colour and ethnic identity, and the Republican and Democratic parties were canny enough to co-opt some of the Left’s ideas- enough to undermine support for a minority party which might not gain power. Part 2 looks at the effect of the Soviet Union on Left politics, McCarthyism and the rapid re-emergence of Left ideas under the Black Power movement. The election of Zohran Mamdani to New York mayor and the persistence of Bernie Sanders shows that the Left isn’t dead yet.

Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged , , ,

I hear with my little ear: Podcasts 1-8 November 2025

Posted on November 19, 2025 | Leave a comment

Let’s just jump ahead, shall we? I have been listening to podcasts between September and November, but many of them have been current affairs podcasts, which just come and go.

The Human Subject (BBC) The Gay Man and the Pleasure Shocks From the website:

This is the story of patient B-19, a 24-year old who, in 1970, walks into a hospital in Louisiana troubled by the fact that the drugs he’s been abusing for the past three years are no longer having the desired effect. He claims he is “bored by everything” and is no longer getting a “kick” out of sex. To Dr Robert Heath’s intrigue, B-19 has “never in his life experienced heterosexual relationships of any kind”. Somewhere along the way, during the consultations, the conclusion is drawn that B-19 would be happier if he wasn’t gay. And so they set about a process that involves having lots of wires sticking out of his brain. Julia and Adam hear from science journalist and author, Lone Frank, author of The Pleasure Shock: The Rise of Deep Brain Stimulation and Its Forgotten Inventor.

Actually, I wasn’t particularly shocked by this episode. It was the 1970s after all, time of ‘Clockwork Orange’, and brain stimulation and operant conditioning was all the go. While most of us wouldn’t see being gay as something that had to be ‘cured’, I do wonder if truly deviant behaviour that would otherwise see a person incarcerated for life (an inveterate child abuser?) might not still turn to methods like this?

The Rest is History Episode 606: Enoch Powell Rivers of Blood With Nigel Farage on the loose, it seems appropriate to go back to revisit Enoch Powell and his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. As Dominic and Tom point out, Enoch Powell is better remembered than a lot of Prime Ministers are, and he influenced Thatcher and inspired the Brexiteers. He was born in Birmingham in 1912 and was a precocious child who seemed destined to be a classics scholar. He had no interest in women, but he was obsessed by Nietzsche. He was a Professor of Greek at Sydney University by the age of 25 (I didn’t know that!), but he really wanted to be the Viceroy of India (as one does). He fought in WW2 but not in a combat role. He was a Tory, but he was often critical of the party, and championed English nationalism in Parliament in his hypnotic droning voice. He decriminalized homosexuality, was anti-Vietnam, anti-US but economically very dry. Despite the influx of Windrush and British/Pakistani immigrants in the late 1940s, immigration was seen more as a regrettable necessity rather than a national issue. At first Powell did nothing about the reported ‘white flight’ from areas like his electorate of Wolverhampton, but by 1964 it was recognized that immigration had to be controlled to avoid the ‘colour question’, a question supercharged by television of unrest in Montgomery and Alabama in the US. Why did Powell change? He argued that he was representing the views of his electorate, and he held up an ideal of the English people and became more radical as a way of distinguishing himself from Heath. In 1967 there was an influx of Indians from Kenya after Kenyatta expelled them and an Act was passed to restrict immigration. The Labour government introduced a Racial Relations Bill in 1968 which prohibited racial discrimination in areas like housing. When the Tories decided to quibble over the details but accepted the principle of the bill, Powell was furious and this was the impetus for the ‘Rivers of Blood Speech’, which was publicized beforehand, so television crews were there to record it. He was sacked as Minister for Defence, but he had strong support on the streets. He never distanced himself from violence, but he was wrong- there were no rivers of blood. And until now Tories wouldn’t touch the issue again.

The Rest is History Episode 577: The Irish War of Independence: The Violence Begins (Part 2) After their largely ceremonial electoral victory in 1917, Sinn Fein established an alternative shadow government which had cabinet positions, courts and issues a Declaration of Independence. It wanted to attend the Paris Peace Conference, but it didn’t get a seat at the table. The IRA was recruiting heavily, but the majority were more involved with logistics and protection rather than firing guns. The conflict hotted up in the early 1920s when the IRA began attacking police barracks and courts. There was a mass resignation of police, and they were replaced by ex-army soldiers, the notorious ‘black and tans’ and auxiliaries. In 1921 the Flying Columns and IRA intelligence ramped up, with localized violence. But this violence was not necessarily a sectarian war, but it certainly had sectarian aspects.

In Our Time (BBC). Apparently Melvyn Bragg is stepping down from In Our Time after 26 years. He is 85, after all, and he was starting to sound a bit quavery. So, they’re dipping back into the archives and they replayed an episode on Hannah Arendt from 2017. She was born to a non-observant Jewish family in Hanover in 1906, a family that was so non-observant that she was surprised when she found herself singled out as being Jewish. She had an affair with Heidegger, but then he became a Nazi. She was a classicist, and she maintained this interest throughout her life. She escaped to America in 1941 as a refugee, where she developed English as her third language. In her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, she warned of a new sort of atomized evil, like a fungus, and she saw Eichmann as thoughtless, rather than evil. Actually, I hadn’t realized that she was anything other than a political writer: she was just as focussed on the human condition as politics.

Leave a comment

Posted in Podcasts 2025, Uncategorized

Tagged , , , ,