Review

Jorge Luis Borges thought the appearance of a major new author or creative work should prompt a realignment of literature’s family tree. Fresh genealogies of influence suddenly manifested, while old antecedents could find themselves pruned to a nub. Borges knew that actions in the present can remake our sense of past and future both.

Intertextual spins on Peter Carey’s 1988 novel Oscar and Lucinda may yet be finding new reading congregations. Carey’s progenitive postcolonial novel refuted landscapes empty of First Nations peoples, less jewel horizon than abject mire and macadam, along which the failed preacher Oscar and his party moved the components of a glass church overland and upriver to Edenic rural Bellingen. A metaphor of failed settler hopes and dreams, the fabulist glass church leitmotif is symbolic of white intrusion, as an omniscient Aboriginal narrator observes in the chapter savagely and simply entitled ‘Glass Cuts’.

Rachel Spence’s Battle for the Museum reflects a growing movement to redefine the art museum as a site of activism   and social change that has gained momentum in the United States and Britain around issues of race, equity, and diversity. Advocating the need for radical transformation, Spence paints an insistently bleak picture of art museums, recording their multiple failings on social, ethical, and political fronts. Forty pages in, this reader was already battle-weary, worn down by Spence’s thudding compendium of sins. That’s not to dismiss the validity of Spence’s arguments. The sector’s expansionist, exploitative, discriminatory, and profit-hungry urges warrant interrogation.

As its title tells us, this book focuses on one month of World War II: November 1942. Swedish author and historian Peter Englund argues that this month was the turning point of the war. In North Africa, the Germans were on the retreat after the Allied victory at El Alamein. American forces began their land operations against the Axis powers by invading French Morocco and Algeria. In the Pacific war, the battle of Guadalcanal reached its decisive climax, while Australian troops recaptured Kokoda after pushing the Japanese back along the Kokoda Track. Most importantly, on the Eastern front, the Red Army launched an attack that surrounded the German 6th Army in Stalingrad. Two months later, the 91,000 German troops still alive in the ruins of the city surrendered. Almost all of them perished in captivity.

It was no surprise, in the end, when the October 2023 referendum on the constitutional enshrinement of an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice was comprehensively defeated, given the concerted opposition of the Liberal-National Coalition. The history of Australian referendums is clear: bipartisan support is a necessary precondition for constitutional change.

It is easy to imagine book-buyers nodding with approval at the subtitle of this biography: ‘The making of a larrikin’. With ‘larrikin’ today applied to knockabout young men who are irreverent and mischievous but genuinely good-hearted, Bob Hawke seems a quintessential example. Yes, the myth goes, he used slipshod language now and then, and was quite a sight when he was in his cups, but generally Hawkie was a top bloke, a man who would call a spade a spade, a mate who could sup with princes and paupers but never forget who he was.

In an exquisite, braided narrative, Catherine McKinnon’s To Sing of War reanimates World War II in a paean to the environment. Set between December 1944 and August 1945, the narrators experience the ways ‘Violence is malleable, it is everywhere’, but find healing and resilience in ‘the heart of the earth’. Importantly, Virgil’s epic poem, The Aeneid, is the key intertext and provides the central conceit and structure for the novel. Where The Aeneid concerns the building of Rome after the destruction of Troy, closely linking the fates of the two cities, To Sing of War grapples with rebuilding lives in a post-atomic world.

Loïc Wacquant has documented the migration of the term ‘underclass’ from its original structural meaning (as coined by Gunnar Myrdal) to contemporary usage, classifying those who exbibit a cluster of behaviours provoking anxiety or disgust from mainstream society. Australian publishing is, belatedly, providing opportunities for diverse voices across gender, sexuality, and race, but the underclass Wacquant delineated remains largely mute.

On the second page of this book are startling facts about Malawi. In the 1980s and 1990s, this country of around ten million people sheltered more than a million refugees, many of them having fled civil war in Mozambique. Malawians, already suffering the crippling effects of poverty and poor health, provided safe haven to waves of displaced and desperate people coming across their border. Perhaps this succour was not always offered happily, but what mattered is that it was offered. Melinda Ham’s placing of this example so early in her book is surely deliberate. With thoughts of Malawian tolerance and generosity echoing through the text, she forces the reader into making unsettling comparisons with recent Australian responses to refugees.