Review

The colloquial term ‘robodebt’ had emerged online by early 2017. It is now used to refer to several iterations of mostly automated compliance programs targeting former and current social security recipients, overseen by the then federal Department of Human Services, which pursued alleged overpayments of social security moneys.

A book written by an English author and published by an English academic press with first-page references to New Labour, Conservative austerity, and Brexit might seem, at first glance, of little interest to or relevance for Australian readers. Yet anyone concerned with or about the state of the arts in this country and further afield will find much stimulus, provocation, and food for thought in the latest work of a prolific academic-activist entrepreneur who has occupied posts in three Australian universities since 2008, besides presenting at conferences and consulting widely with UN agencies and local and national governments throughout Asia, Europe, and the Pacific.

It is dreadful to lose one’s voice. Most of us can mime our way through an episode of laryngitis or the anaesthetised numbness that follows dental surgery, confident that normalcy will return. But imagine knowing that normalcy was gone for good. As Flora Willson recently put it, there is an ‘intimate connection between voice and identity’. We are the sounds we make.

You can imagine the question popping up on one of those television quiz shows. What connects Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Bill Evans? Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of jazz would have hand on buzzer in a flash. Answer: Kind of Blue. There is an altogether darker, and equally correct, answer: heroin.

Max Dupain’s photographs are well known to Australian audiences. The monumentally cast upper body of his friend Harold Savage, prostrate on the sand is, as Helen Ennis notes in her new biography of Dupain, the ‘most reproduced photograph in Australian history’. The Sunbaker’s ubiquity has seen it configured, well beyond Dupain’s intention, as ‘an ideal of Australian masculinity’. More recently, it is a photograph that has been restaged by artists as a form of creative and cultural critique.

From bountiful feasts on collective farms to choreographed parades in Red Square, Soviet Socialist Realism painted a world of triumphant spectacle. In the eyes of Western critics, however, these images were as bland as they were removed from Soviet reality. As a result, Socialist Realism hovered on the margins of art history almost until the end of the twentieth century, when a series of studies in the early 1990s moved away from the reductive assessment of the movement as vulgar propaganda, revealing a complex and intriguing aesthetic reasoning within its production. A subsequent wave of further research would foreground the influence of this artistic production outside the Soviet Union. With Soviet Socialist Realism and Art in the Asia-Pacific, Alison Carroll aligns with efforts to examine the impact of the movement in a global context, placing focus on a region that certainly merits greater attention.

This is a brave book, for it is the biography of a phantom. Archives hold ample evidence of the many professional achievements of the surveyor Thomas Scott Townsend, but of him personally almost nothing is known. Townsend left little trace of his passions, frustrations, or loves, the substance that animates biographies. A letter that Townsend wrote to his brother in 1839 is the only item of his private correspondence known to exist. And yet somehow the book works, and brilliantly so. Peter Crowley has written a compelling account of a remarkable figure in Australian history.

In September 2023, ancient Rome became the focus of a viral social media trend. Women were encouraged to ask men how often they thought about the Roman Empire. The results were emphatic. It became apparent that many men thought about the Roman Empire frequently. The enduring fascination with the Romans should not be surprising; they continue to have an impact on our lives every day.

Robert Fisk was one of a few journalists who could rightly be described as a legend in his lifetime. Anyone with a passing interest in the Middle East over the past fifty years will certainly know his name and will probably have come across some of his reporting. Serious students of the region will have read his books. British-born, Fisk was mostly based in Beirut from 1976 until his death in 2020, during which time he covered all the wars – and horrors – of the greater Middle East. What he witnessed infuriated him; seething anger permeated his writing.

The English Soul is a history of Christianity in England from the Venerable Bede to the present, a period of roughly 1,400 years. Its enthralling journey leads us from the medieval mystics, including Julian of Norwich, through the torments of the English Reformation and the exhilarating spread of revivalist and evangelical movements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to the charismatic Christian movements of more recent times. If the narrative that emerges is principally that of the Established Church and the creation of its High and Low denominations, it is also one that encounters a shocking array of sects and seekers, doubters and dissenters, ranters and ravers, along the way.