Review

‘I am an advocate of transgender people because we’re people [who] deserve to have a voice ... and by and large we don’t have a voice. By and large, our experience is squeezed out – by trans-exclusionary ideology.’ On the face of it, this justification by Sophie Grace Chappell for her new book, Trans Figured, is rather puzzling. In recent years, publishers have been falling over themselves to publish transgender memoir, with Chappell’s own publisher, Polity, mining this genre with books supporting both sides of the gender ‘debate’. Far from being squeezed out, transgender voices have become profitable commodities in the literary world.

In 1888, Melbourne hosted a grand Centennial International Exhibition to mark a century of British occupation of the continent. There, a six-year-old girl called Ethel Punshon was excited to see that she had won a prize of two guineas for her needle-work – an embroidered red felt newspaper holder. Almost one hundred years later, as Brisbane prepared to mark the bicentennial with a modern ‘Expo 88’, Ethel – now known as Monte Punshon – was invited to become Expo’s roving ambassador, as perhaps the only person alive who remembered its predecessor.

This important and arresting book chronicles the way in which Australia, from 1947 to 1952, imported some 170,000 displaced persons from Europe, a reasonable number of whom were fascists. The striking thing that Jayne Persian (a historian at the University of Southern Queensland) lays bare is the insouciance with which this policy was adopted and the way in which all political parties fell over themselves with enthusiasm for it, though all the main actors were well aware of the influence of fascism among this cohort.

Jews are central to narratives of the history of modern France. One narrative thread concerns a story of civic emancipation from the time when Jews were first granted equal rights during the French Revolution until the present, when Prime Minister Gabriel Attal is not only France’s youngest postwar prime minister but also, like his predecessor Élisabeth Borne, of Jewish ancestry. The other narrative thread is of continuing anti-Semitism, most obvious in the Vichy government’s active participation in the deportation of Jews during World War II and still evident in the hundreds of anti-Semitic incidents reported in France every year. The Dreyfus Affair is pivotal to both narratives.

Can people have too much wealth? Does extreme wealth have negative consequences? Over the past thirty years, there has been a remarkable rise in the number of billionaires whose annual earnings are so large that they are often difficult to comprehend. To take but one example, it was estimated in 2022 by Forbes magazine that Elon Musk’s personal assets were worth $219 billion and that, if he worked for forty-five years, his lifetime hourly rate from these assets was in the order of US$1,871,794.

‘Australia has been a great experience,’ declares Seamus Heaney in a letter to Tom Paulin from Launceston, Tasmania, in October 1994. As well as visiting Melbourne, Brisbane, and Sydney, delivering poetry readings along the way, Heaney gave a lecture in Hobart on Oscar Wilde and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, ‘saying it was as much part of the protest literature of the Irish diaspora as “The Wild Colonial Boy” or the ballad of “Van Diemen’s Land”’. What he most enjoyed in Queensland was a drive through the country – ‘red earth and white-barked gum trees’ – to the town of Nambour, close to where his Uncle Charlie (his father’s twin brother) had lived in the 1920s. Heaney’s letters are a vivid interweaving of travelogue, literary allusion, poetic imagery, and personal history. Sharing pleasure in the power of words is fundamental, even when letter writing becomes a thing of duty, rather than beauty, and the unanswered mail piles up around him.

In Poetry’s Knowing Ignorance, Joseph Acquisto borrows a definition of poetry from Phillipe Jaccottet: ‘that key that you must always keep on losing’. Attempting to know its subject, poetry reveals that there is always more to know. But the French poet’s metaphor, for Acquisto, does not mean ‘simple contingency’. It suggests ‘a complex play of certainty and doubt … that actively resists coming to a conclusion’. We might say that poetry expresses the friction in human experience between time and permanence.

In her fifth full-length poetry collection, Tossed up by the Beak of a Cormorant, Nandi Chinna continues to write about her engagement with the natural world. Authored in collaboration with Wagaba Nyikina Warrwa Elder, Anne Poelina, this book sees her move north and west into the Kimberley. This is where the Martuwarra (Fitzroy River) runs through Bunuba, Gooniyandi, Nyikina, Walmajarri, and Wangkatjungka Country. It is a place that poetry readers will recognise from the geographically proximate classic Reading the Country (1984) by Paddy Roe, Stephen Muecke, and Krim Bentarrak, Ngarla Songs (2003) by Alexander Brown and Brian Geytenbeek, and the ethnopoetic George Dyungayan’s Bulu Line (2014), edited by Stuart Cooke. With that in mind, Chinna’s Kimberley is a place that is remote for many readers, but not entirely unknown.

Stories That Want To Be Told is an oddly flat title for this stimulating anthology. Most of its contents are stories that need to be told. Even those that do not quite succeed in becoming more than their authors’ ‘passion projects’ are likely to leave readers better informed and more curious about little-known facets of today’s world.

In E.L. Doctorow’s The Waterworks (his 1994 novel of post-civil war America), the narrator McIlvaine addresses the reader: ‘We did not conduct ourselves as if we were preparatory to your time. There is nothing quaint or colourful about us.’ Doctorow reminds the reader that our sense of modernity is an illusion. As Delia Falconer has eloquently noted apropos Doctorow’s novel, the contemporary historical novelist has a valuable role to play: