Journey Through TimeEpisode 27 The Trial that Made Hitler Famous Ep. 2 It wasn’t the Beer Hall Putsch that made Hitler internationally famous, but the trial held afterwards. After the coup had collapsed, Hitler and his group marched through Munich hoping that crowds would join them (they didn’t) and there was a brief shoot-out where four police were killed. Hitler fled Munich, but was arrested. Even though the putsch ended in farce, Hitler saw the trial as a platform. One of the panel of judges in particular was sympathetic to him: he was not forced to wear prison clothes, it was a 24 day trial and he was allowed to make long speeches and cross-examine witnesses himself. He pleaded guilty but nonetheless some judges wanted to acquit him. He received a five year sentence but released after 13 months. He was given special treatment in jail, but it fed his martyr-complex. Once the Nazis gained power in the 1930s, the anniversary of the putsch was celebrated, and in fact Kristallnacht was conducted on the anniversary. The two presenters, David Olusoga and Sarah Churchwell, then went on to draw parallels with the current day.
The Rest is ClassifiedEpisode 99: Putin’s Secret Army: Trump, Wagner and Russia (Ep.2) As an entrepreneurial caterer and restauranteur, Prigozhin got into P.R. where he was not beyond indulging in dirty tricks. Because of his PR skills, the Kremlin turned to him. Prigozhin was behind the Internet Research Agency, a troll factory based in Russia employing 800-900 workers. First the Internet Research Agency targetted a domestic Russian audience, particularly demonizing Alexy Navalny. In 2014 after the invasion of the Crimea, it moved its focus to the West, then it looked to the 2016 US election. The Internet Research Agency paid for Facebook ads, often pushing both sides, in order to sow division. At this stage Prigozhin became visible to the FBI, leading to a 2016 FBI indictment. He denied the connection with the Internet Research Agency, and took it to the courts. The title of Peter Pomerantsev’s book sums it up: Nothing is True and Everything is possible. Doesn’t that just describe the world we live in?
The Rest is History. I haven’t listened to my old friends Dominic and Tom for a while, so I scrolled back to 2022 and found a series that they did on Australia’s prime ministers to mark Albanese’s victory. Although Episode 187 is titled Australia’s Prime ministers from Edmund Barton to Robert Menzies, it didn’t give much attention to the early prime ministers (perhaps I was day-dreaming at that point?) and they concentrate on post-WW2 prime ministers. Now, as I found with their episode on the Tupamaros, Dom and Tom might be very good – are very good- on European, British and American history, they’re not so hot on the rest of the world, especially ‘middle powers’ like us, or the Global South. They deal respectfully with Menzies, Curtin, Chifley and Menzies again, but in Episode 188 Part 2 they become a little skittish. They point out that Harold Holt was Australia’s youngest Member of Parliament and succeeded Menzies. They laughed (as do we all) at the unfortunate naming of the Harold Holt Swimming Pool. They think that Gorton was an excellent character, almost French in personality, war hero and larrikin. They question (as do we all) Billy Macmahon’s sexuality and his propensity to steal things (really?). They see Whitlam as a patrician figure, who was brought undone by his plan to borrow petro-dollars during the oil shock. They thought that Fraser looked like the classic Australian, welcomed the Vietnamese and opposed apartheid- and he lost his trousers. By Episode 189 Part 3 they are completely silly, and admittedly, they have plenty to work with here. Hawkie held the world record for sculling a yard of ale, but was economically similar to Thatcher; Keating was impressive but a paradox; Howard was stolid; Rudd was part of a culture of spills; Gillard exemplified The Guardian newspaper in female form; Abbott exemplified the Daily Mail. Turnbull could have been a Labor P.M. ( I rather wish he was, personally) while Morrison exemplified the Man at the Garden Centre and looked like a koala. So as you can see, Dom and Tom’s powers of analysis declined over this three part series, and ended in farce. Perhaps Australia did too.
I had not had much interest in reading this book, deterred perhaps by the glamour shot on the front cover. Even though I very much enjoyed Barak Obama’s Dreams From My Father, I wasn’t particularly drawn to reading a First Lady’s life story, thank you very much. But it was a Book Group selection, and conscientious Book Grouper as I am, I resolved to read the book and I am so glad that I did. There was much more in this book that I might ever have anticipated.
The preface started with really good writing. It’s post-Presidency, and Michelle is alone in the house for almost the first time (excepting the security guards down in the garage). Her daughters are out, Barak is not at home, and she decides to make a grilled cheese sandwich. There’s no one to make it for her, no-one to say “Mrs Obama, let me get that”, no one to look askance at her desire for such homely comfort food. She sits on the back doorstep, and eats the sandwich.
The book proper is divided into three parts: Becoming Me, Becoming Us, and Becoming More. Becoming Me traces her early upbringing on the South Side of Chicago, where her remarkably hands-off parents bring her up to be an intelligent, independent young woman, super-organized and conscientious, ambitious and methodical. Becoming Us chronicles her relationship with Barak Obama, and her switch from corporate law to the non-profit sector. The ‘us’ expands to include her two daughters, born through IVF, and the tension she feels between being a professional woman, and a mother. Barak is becoming increasingly involved in politics, first as a state congressman, and then as presidential candidate, although she is often angry and resentful of the demands that politics make on their relationship. Becoming More takes us into the Obama presidency, and the weird home-life this imposes on their family. She needs to carve out her own identity as First Lady, even though this is a role that is not of her choosing, and she struggles to keep some sense of normality for her daughters.
The book is very honest. Barak comes over as a highly intelligent if selfish man, infuriating in his messiness, chronic lateness and lack of attention to detail. She for her part comes over as rather controlling and chronically insecure about whether she is good enough. The awareness of being a black woman in a predominantly white political milieu accompanies her always. She talks about the strains in their marriage as her life is subsumed into his ambitions, and her eventual decision to keep some sort of family routine of dinner and bedtime which Barak has to accommodate to, instead of the other way around. Her mother is a saint: I don’t know that I would get up at 5.00 a.m. to mind my grandchildren while my daughter went to the gym- if fact, I know that I wouldn’t (just in case any of my children get ideas).
She does not even try to hide her contempt for Donald Trump, which hardened even more when he won the Presidency. Trump’s actions in demolishing the East Wing seem even more egregious now, after reading about an engaged First Lady who opened the White House up to many people, through that very East Wing that no longer exists.
At first, I was so impressed with the writing in this book that I was rather disappointed when I learned that it had been ghost-written, or at least written with other people. Does that matter, I wonder? For me, probably yes, because I feel that her writing has been mediated through the other author, and I feel disappointed that the words are not hers. But this doesn’t detract from the honesty that pervades this book. She doesn’t once mention the word ‘feminist’ but the tensions between motherhood, professionalism and politics reflect the viewpoints of a modern, engaged intelligent woman that the world was lucky enough to have as First Lady for eight years.
My rating: A rather surprising 8.5
Read because: Reading Group Book
Sourced from: Darebin Library as part of their reading groups program.
Journey Through Time Episode 26 The Failed Nazi Coup (Episode 1) The Munich Beer Hall Putsch was the time when Hitler could have, and should have been stopped. In 1923 there were dozens of far right parties with paramilitary wings. The Treaty of Versailles had demanded the loss of lands still in German hands (much as Russia is demanding of Ukraine now). Particularly in conservative Bavaria, the German defeat was blamed on the ‘stab in the back’ from progressives and Jews. Knowing the importance of visual images, and inspired by the Italian fascists’ March on Rome, on 8 November 1923 Hitler and approximately 600 supporters marched on the beer hall Bürgerbräukeller, where Gustav Ritter von Kahr—the Minister-President of Bavaria was speaking. They surrounded the hall, and held von Kahr and other speakers at gunpoint in an adjoining room until they declared their support for the uprising . Although Hitler had the crowd in the hall eating out of his hand, the expected crowds outside did not materialize and the whole thing collapsed in farce.
In Our Time Another one from the archives. Little Women features Bridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds; Erin Forbes Senior Lecturer in African American and U.S. Literature at the University of Bristol and Tom Wright Reader in Rhetoric and Head of the Department of English Literature at the University of Sussex. The podcast starts of with Louise May Alcott’s lifestory, emphasizing her parents’ eccentricity for the time and the influence of the Transcendentalists. Alcott herself was a prolific writer, although much of it was ‘sensation literature’, mainly written under the pseudonym A. M. Barnard. She did not particularly want to write for a teenaged girl market (not that there was a concept of ‘teenager’ at that time), but she was manipulated into writing it by her publisher who promised to publish her father’s book in return. Little Women was published in two parts. The first part was modelled on Pilgrim’s Progress, with the four girls each trying to overcome their personal flaws. Part 2 follows their adult lives. She didn’t want to write this one either, so she intentionally married Jo off to the Professor, who was not likely to appeal to many readers. The panellists then go on to talk about the film depictions of Little Women over time, and the way that increasingly there has been a conflation between Jo and Alcott herself, particularly in the most recent Greta Gerwig version.
The Documentary (BBC)When Christian Nationalists Came To Town The small Tennessee town of Gainesboro population 900, overwhelmingly Trump voters (80%), is disconcerted when a large parcel of land is bought up by a conservative developer with the aim of forging an “aligned” community based on shared values like “faith, family, and freedom“. It attracts young men, looking for a traditional family life and holding a particular view of the role of the church in society, and the locals don’t like it.
The Rest is ClassifiedEp.98 Putin’s Secret Army: The Rise of Prigozhin (Ep.1) Even though Prigozhin was known as ‘Putin’s chef’, he was never actually a cook: instead, he was a restaurateur, among many other things. He was born in 1961 in St Petersburg (the old Leningrad) to a middle class family, but he left school early and fell into bad company. From petty crime he escalated to a robbery with violence at the age of 18 and was sentenced to 13 years in a penal colony. He was released in 1990, as the old Soviet Union was collapsing. He started off by selling hot dogs, then moved into grocery stores, casinos, clubs and restaurants. At the same time, Putin was working his own way up in the thuggish capitalism of the 1990s. Prigozhin became Putin’s catering man, and President Putin brought the Japanese Prime Minister and G. W. Bush to Prigozhin’s restaurants when they visited. In 2011 Putin became Prime Minister, then moved back to being President. When protests broke out (and Putin hates protests), Putin turned to Prigozhin.
Cormoran Strike books, written by J. K. Rowling under the nom-de-plume Robert Galbraith, are for me a long-form type of comfort food. Very long-form, because like the Harry Potter books, these seem to be getting longer. Lethal White is the fourth in the series, and it comes in at a hefty 784 pages.
Detective stories are a genre, with recurring themes which are both part of their appeal and part of their frustration. In the case of the Cormoran Strike books, how long can Galbraith keep the unresolved sexual tension (UST) between Strike and Robin going? This book starts off with Robin’s wedding to the insipid Matthew. Surely a marriage should dampen any progress in the UST realm, but this is not to be. But how many more volumes can Galbraith keep this going? And surely if the UST becomes resolved, that will be the end of their relationship because who wants a married-couple detective agency? And on an unrelated theme, why doesn’t Comoran do something about his throbbing stump where his leg was amputated? Surely additional surgery is in order, or a new prosthesis or something! Moreover, how many more times is Robin going to end up in peril as the case draws to its close? Although, having said that, poor Nikki in ‘Silent Witness’ spends much of her time kidnapped and threatened- it seems to go with the territory that the female investigator- while her male counterparts need to work out how to ‘rescue’ her. But I guess that all these formulaic aspects are part of the genre.
Set during the London Olympic Games, Strike is approached by mentally ill man, Billy, who says that he saw a child being buried years ago. Is it true? At the same time, Strike contracted by politician Jasper Chiswell (Chizzle) to investigate blackmail for something that was not illegal years ago, but now is. As it turns out, the two cases are connected.
Meanwhile, Robin has married Matthew-and she is unhappy from the start. Strike encounters his past lover, Charlotte, who is now pregnant with twins and unhappily married too. Strike is in an uncommitted relationship with Lorelei, who wants more from the relationship than he can give.
Galbraith introduces a huge range of characters into the book, but somehow manages to keep control of them all. I like the way that the author has Comoran or Robin sit down and mentally draw the whole case together, neatly encapsulating it for this reader who can find herself completely confused. It’s like drawing a deep breath, before plunging underwater again. Within this complex ensemble, Galbraith has a number of pairs (fitting, really, for a parliamentary detective story where ‘pairing’ is part of the political scene)
Each chapter is headed by an epigraph from Henrik Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm (1886). I must admit that I don’t know the play, and Dr Beatrice Groves has done the work of drawing the links between Lethal White and Ibsen’s play. As with many of Galbraith’s books, the reason for the title is with-held until well into the book. In this case, we need to wait until Chapter 42 to learn that Lethal White is not a form of cocaine, or the nick-name of a thug, but instead is a horse disease.
I’m not normally a detective-fiction fan, but Galbraiths are different. I will keep turning to the Cormoran Strike series when I have tired of other genres or want to escape from non-fiction into a well-plotted if formulaic series that keeps me reading until far too late at night.
I often find that there is a sort of brittle formality about books written in early-mid twentieth-century Australia, echoing the slightly-British, self-conscious tone of newsreaders and documentary narrators that you hear in black-and-white footage from the 50s and 60s.This book, first published in 1966, and reissued by Text in 2012 starts off in a similar way. The scenario of two sisters, Laura and Clare, being brought into the headmistress’s office to hear of their father’s death and their removal from school evoked children’s books of the past (Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess, anyone?) The focus at first is on sixteen-year old Laura, who had had aspirations to be a doctor like her father, and she is more conscious of the economic and social fall in their circumstances when their fey and selfish mother turns to Laura to be the breadwinner of the family. At this stage, neither Clare nor her mother are particularly well-rounded characters, Clare (seven years younger than Laura) being merely childish and her mother Stella a languorous, demanding presence who decides to sail back ‘home’ to England, leaving the girls to fend for themselves.
Instead of a medical degree at university, Laura finds herself packed off to business college and a secretarial job at a box factory, owned by Felix Shaw. Although she feels no great attraction to him, when Felix Shaw proposes to her – largely as an economic arrangement – she accepts, seeing it as a means of financial security for herself and her younger sister Clare. Felix offers to support Clare to go to university- a dream that Laura had had for herself- but this promise is soon broken once Laura and Felix are married. I can’t really decide whether Felix is a complex character or a caricature. He almost willfully makes unwise financial business decisions, selling off mildly successful companies to spivs and incompetents, while expecting Laura to pick up a heavier work burden as a result. They are not poor: they live in a large house overlooking Sydney Harbour, and he enjoys driving luxury cars dangerously while abusing everyone else on the road. He sells the house – the one thing that Laura loved- from under her to underline her financial impotence in this dependent relationship.
Harrower skillfully juxtaposes the glittering sunshine of the Harbour, with the darkness of their house. It is as if a shadow lies over this beautiful home and its extensive gardens. The book is set in the 1940’s and 50’s, and although neighbours are aware of the arguments next door, nothing is done to help them. In fact, in spite of living in the midst of other houses and working with other women, Laura and Clare are socially isolated, with Felix’s happiness their main concern.
The term ‘coercive control’ did not exist when Harrower wrote this book, but all the signs are there: the emotional blackmail over the prospect, later withdrawn, of Clare’s university education; the changeability of mood; the oscillation between extravagant generosity and meanness; the rigidity in expectations for the women in his life compared with his own recklessness. Felix is physically violent towards Laura, and the possibility of sexual violence towards her sister Clare lurks in the shadows.
Most insidious of all is Laura’s own coercion of Clare to remain in the family home as a peacemaker and mediator, and her adoption of Felix’s own sense of victimhood as a reason to make her stay. Felix has made his own wife the enforcer. At times Laura dreams of an escape, but faced with the consequences, she represses her own will and becomes an extension of Felix.
Meanwhile, as the novel progresses, Clare becomes the main focus when she resists the narrowing of her own horizons and as all of the colour leaches out of Laura. The arrival of Bernard, a young refugee, to stay in the house to convalesce breaks the spell, even though for a while it seems that he, too, is going to be lured into Felix’s orbit by the promise of academic support, similar to that offered to Clare. In fact, there is a latent thread of repressed homosexuality in most of Felix’s relationships with other men, be they fellow entrepreneurs or employees.
The threat of violence runs through this book and it is clearly felt by Laura and Clare as they scramble to meet Felix’s standards and demands. Knowing, as we do, the physical danger to women at the point where they finally decide to leave a coercive partner, as readers we feel unsafe as Laura, and increasingly, Clare contemplate an escape
The title ‘The Watch Tower’ is interesting, because it can be interpreted in many ways. It has connotations of punishment and incarceration, which the beautiful house on the Harbour becomes. But it also suggests a lookout as well, and as the book progresses Clare is increasingly looking out, to a wider world, even while Laura becomes more deeply entombed in her relationship with Felix.
So, for a book which I thought was going to be rather insipid and old-fashioned, I found a book that in many ways predates Jess Hill’s See What You Made Me Do (my review here). I read this as part of the Ivanhoe Reading Circle’s program, and one of the questions raised was whether we know of another Australian book of similar vintage that deals with the issue of what we now recognize and name as ‘coercive control’. I haven’t read it, but I suspect that Elizabeth von Arnim’s Vera treads similar ground (The Pastor’s Wife (my review here) does too, to a lesser extent. I can see why Michael Heyward at Text Publishing re-published this book. Unfortunately, it reads just as true today – possibly even more true now – as it would have sixty years ago.
My rating: 9/10
Sourced from: Brotherhood Books
Read because: November book selection for Ivanhoe Reading Circle.
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 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 ofProphet 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.
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.
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.
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.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 