Review

Readers familiar with Robbie Arnott’s fiction will have some expectations about the kind of book the author is likely to conjure. Dusk sits comfortably inside the thematic and narrative territories he has previously explored, particularly in The Rain Heron (2020) and the wonderful Limberlost (2022). Dusk features Arnott’s typically vivid descriptive prose and his concern with the natural world and our place within it. Dusk generates pathos with delicate expertise and mixes genres while retaining a strong semblance of realism.

John Kinsella may well be Australia’s most prolific author – of poetry, fiction, short fiction, non-fiction. His extensive body of work is renowned for its obsessive concern, its fixation even, with a single place: the Western Australian wheatbelt,  where Kinsella has spent most of his life. While psychoanalysis has fallen out of favour, Kinsella’s regionalism has the character of a repetition compulsion, a syndrome Freud related to unresolved trauma. In fact, what often underlies Kinsella’s repeated envisioning of the wheatbelt is the unresolved trauma of colonialism, as the land and all who rely on it – people but also animals and plants – suffer from the impacts of modernity. In this new short-story collection, Beam of Light, colonial ecocide provides the background for almost every story. At the foreground is a misfit, a figure certainly not unrelated to the colonial condition.

For German literary critic Walter Benjamin, translation belongs to the ‘afterlife’ of a work, by which he means the ‘transformation and a renewal of something living’. In this sense, a new translation extends this afterlife, renews and sustains it. This does not mean every new translation is worthy of the original, but it does bring it back into the light.

Though scarcely a teenager at the time, I remember clearly what I was doing when I heard the news of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. That was a seminal event for the baby-boomer generation – not only in the United States, but around a then barely globalised world. I suspect the equivalent event for young adults today is the horrifying television footage, rebroadcast countless times since, of two passenger aircraft being deliberately flown into the twin towers of New York’s World Trade Center on 11 September 2001.

The year 1939 was not so very unlike this one. The United States was being torn apart by bitter political disagreements, and the unresolved social divisions and underlying disparities that had haunted the nation from birth were increasingly laid bare. Of these, racial inequality was perhaps most shameful: African American men, women, and children were forced to live a separate existence from that of their fellow citizens, whether due to de jure segregation in the South or the no less pernicious zoning ordinances that kept black families out of middle-class neighbourhoods in the North.

People have peculiar but passionate views about referendums. A large number swear that in 1974 and 1988 the people voted against referendums on the existence of local government. To them, local government is ‘unconstitutional’, so they don’t have to pay their council rates. Members of the same cohort also proclaim that they have a constitutional right to trial by jury for state criminal offences and a right to compensation on just terms if a state compulsorily acquires their land.

Media owners and enablers, autocrats and charlatans, henchmen and underlings, midshipmen and first mates, hangers-on and frenemies populate this book. The Men Who Killed the News is about media moguls over the past 150 years, with the occasional grand-mogul and even anti-media mogul (see Silvio Berlusconi) thrown in.

The Australian Constitution contains no aspirational statements of national possibility or sweeping vision of collective virtue, but the founders did not intend the Constitution’s meaning to remain fixed. It was to function as a prism of our national self-understanding, and its elaboration and development should aim, in the words of Alfred Deakin, to ‘enable the past to join the future, without undue collision and strife in the present’.

Greg Craven, professor of Government and Constitutional Law at Curtin University, attempts to steer a delicate course: to rescue Australia’s founding document from irrelevance and scorn; and to preserve it from the impatient hands of reformists. Although he is more interested in demonstrating the Constitution’s resilience than in exploring in detail the contours of our constitutional democracy, Craven raises important questions about the legitimate roles of the judiciary and parliament, the future of federalism and the prospects for an Australian republic. He writes with zeal and obvious enthusiasm, and, while his rhetorical extravagance is often distracting, his discussion is never dull.

He wakes in a city, briefly unsure which one. Already adrift. They have all begun to look alike, possessing the same anonymous modern functionality. Characterless, sleek. Architectural Esperanto, he calls it, ‘anonymous, with nothing to exclaim but their speed of construction and size’. His day is business: Asian multinationals, large sums of money. A curious vagueness to proceedings – the bigger the sums, the more abstract the work. He is little more than an intermediary. Home is an interchangeable hotel room on a high floor, but there’s always some trust-fund entrepreneur or high-powered businessman to remind him of his place. Night is drinking, piano bars, women of the night. Time itself is a kind of fluid construct, landing nowhere in particular. (‘No tense. Like the airports, what was is and will be.’) Only one place of possible return matters to him, and one courtesan there. Saigon. Tien. He is nameless and will remain so beyond the novel’s final page.