Accessibility Tools

  • Content scaling 100%
  • Font size 100%
  • Line height 100%
  • Letter spacing 100%
Skip to main content
Absolutely Revolting

October 2023, no. 458

Two weeks out from the historic Voice referendum, ABR’s Indigenous issue features our strongest-ever representation of First Nations reviewers, commentators, interviews, poems, books, and themes. Lynette Russell and Melissa Castan discuss the mechanics of the Voice, Alexis Wright describes Indigenous time as interlinked and unresolved, members of the Indigenous Australian Dictionary of Biography describe their project, and Zoë Laidlaw explores university Indigenous histories. We interview Anita Heiss, Jeanine Leane reviews Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie, Mark McKenna grapples with David Marr’s Killing for Country, Tom Wright weighs a biography of Donald Horne, and Declan Fry endorses Indigenous economics. Reviews from Claire G. Coleman, Julie Janson, and Jacinta Walsh lead a stellar First Nations line-up.

Subscribe
Buy this issue
Read the facsimile edition
Michael Sexton reviews two books on Australian espionage
Free Article: No
Contents Category: History
Custom Article Title: Two books about the dangers of deception
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: Of spies and lies
Article Subtitle: Two books about the dangers of deception
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

The life of a spy is based on lies, but both these books make an attempt to separate fact from fiction in the stories of their subjects. 
Related Article Image (300px * 400px):
Alt Tag (Related Article Image): Michael Sexton reviews two books on Australian espionage
Featured Image (400px * 250px):
Alt Tag (Featured Image): Michael Sexton reviews two books on Australian espionage
Book 1 Title: The Eagle in the Mirror
Book Author: Jesse Fink
Book 1 Biblio: Viking, $34.99 pb, 352 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):
Book 2 Title: My Mother the Spy
Book 2 Author: Cindy Dobbin and Freda Marnie Nicholls
Book 2 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $34.99 pb, 320pp
Book 2 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 2 Cover (800 x 1200):
Display Review Rating: No

The life of a spy is based on lies, but both these books make an attempt to separate fact from fiction in the stories of their subjects.

The first book tells the remarkable story of how an Australian from a rather unlikely background rose almost to the top of Britain’s foreign spy service, MI6, and was later accused of being not just a double but a triple agent. Charles Howard Ellis, always known as Dick, was born in 1895 in Sydney’s inner-west suburb of Annandale. His mother died when he was four years old. Together with his father, he led an itinerant life as a child and adolescent, even working as a professional cellist in Melbourne. In June 1914, he took ship for England. Arriving just as the Great War commenced, he enlisted in the British Army. Wounded at the Somme and promoted to captain, he finished the war engaged in military intelligence operations in Persia and Russia.

Read more: Michael Sexton reviews two books on Australian espionage

Write comment (0 Comments)
Zora Simic reviews The Shrinking Nation: How we got here and what can be done about it by Graeme Turner
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Society
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: Capturing the mood
Article Subtitle: A new addition to a tricky genre
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

'State-of-the-nation’ books are a tricky genre: for every The Lucky Country (1964), Donald Horne’s bestselling indictment of 1960s Australia, there must be at least a dozen more which fall swiftly into obsolescence. Yet this common fate is not necessarily a bad thing: such books are meant to be timely, not timeless. As an intervention into the contemporary moment, such texts’ success or value resides in fresh and useful analysis which is currently lacking elsewhere; and the ability of the author to capture a mood that is, if not ‘national’, at least pervasive enough to be widely recognisable. At the same time, it helps if that mood has not yet been properly articulated. To raise the bar further, the best of them offer both vital historical perspective and a path forward, and are written in a persuasive and accessible style which stops short of polemic but resists hesitant equivocation. 
Featured Image (400px * 250px):
Alt Tag (Featured Image): Zora Simic reviews 'The Shrinking Nation: How we got here and what can be done about it' by Graeme Turner
Book 1 Title: The Shrinking Nation
Book 1 Subtitle: How we got here and what can be done about it
Book Author: Graeme Turner
Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $32.99 pb, 232 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):
Display Review Rating: No

'State-of-the-nation’ books are a tricky genre: for every The Lucky Country (1964), Donald Horne’s bestselling indictment of 1960s Australia, there must be at least a dozen more which fall swiftly into obsolescence. Yet this common fate is not necessarily a bad thing: such books are meant to be timely, not timeless. As an intervention into the contemporary moment, such texts’ success or value resides in fresh and useful analysis which is currently lacking elsewhere; and the ability of the author to capture a mood that is, if not ‘national’, at least pervasive enough to be widely recognisable. At the same time, it helps if that mood has not yet been properly articulated. To raise the bar further, the best of them offer both vital historical perspective and a path forward, and are written in a persuasive and accessible style which stops short of polemic but resists hesitant equivocation.

Historically, the ‘state-of-the-nation’ book has been a masculinist genre, dependent on a notable degree of established cultural authority, though there have been feminist challenges or alternatives, and notable exceptions and shifts (Julianne Schultz’s widely praised publication The Idea of Australia: A search for the soul of the nation [2022] springs to mind). Relatedly, the authors are typically invested in something called the ‘nation’, however critical they may be of its present manifestation. In Horne’s case, it was a nascent sense of what the nation could be or was slowly becoming, as it unshackled itself from decades of complacent parochialism, epitomised by the White Australia policy, then still in effect, but under increasing public scrutiny as well as political reform.

Read more: Zora Simic reviews 'The Shrinking Nation: How we got here and what can be done about it' by Graeme...

Write comment (0 Comments)
Rafqa Touma reviews three débuts on new homelands
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Fiction
Custom Article Title: Three débuts on new homelands
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: When home is not fixed
Article Subtitle: Three débuts on new homelands
Online Only: Yes
Custom Highlight Text:

The migrant’s story is defined by a push and pull between homelands left and new ones found – past and present, tradition and modernity, family and fragmentation are constantly at odds with each other. The migrant’s child’s story enters a new space of liminality, belonging to two cultures, yet being outside both, creating a potential crisis of identity as profound as a crisis of home. The migrant’s grandchild continues the narrative, unearthing intergenerational fractures.
Related Article Image (300px * 400px):
Alt Tag (Related Article Image): Rafqa Touma reviews three débuts on new homelands
Featured Image (400px * 250px):
Alt Tag (Featured Image): Rafqa Touma reviews three débuts on new homelands
Book 1 Title: Untethered
Book Author: Ayesha Inoon
Book 1 Biblio: HQ Fiction, $32.99 pb, 306 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):
Book 2 Title: The Scope of Permissibility
Book 2 Author: Zeynab Gamieldien
Book 2 Biblio: Ultimo Press, $34.99 pb, 311 pp
Book 2 Author Type: Author
Book 2 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 2 Cover (800 x 1200):
Book 3 Title: Once A Stranger
Book 3 Author: Zoya Patel
Book 3 Biblio: Hachette, $32.99 pb, 306 pp
Book 3 Author Type: Author
Book 3 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 3 Cover (800 x 1200):
Display Review Rating: No

The migrant’s story is defined by a push and pull between homelands left and new ones found – past and present, tradition and modernity, family and fragmentation are constantly at odds with each other. The migrant’s child’s story enters a new space of liminality, belonging to two cultures, yet being outside both, creating a potential crisis of identity as profound as a crisis of home. The migrant’s grandchild continues the narrative, unearthing intergenerational fractures.

Where academic research and news media coverage often neglect the migrant as an individual, novelists resist simplistic framing. They can blur the barriers between fiction, memoir, historical investigation, and cultural myth. International classics like Michael Ondaatje’s Running In The Family (1982), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s short story collection, The Thing Around Your Neck (2009), have long told of identity stretched across place in this way.

Now, full of nuance, three Australian débuts construct a mosaic of intersecting identities: the migrant, the Muslim, and the woman.

Read more: Rafqa Touma reviews three débuts on new homelands

Write comment (0 Comments)
Tom Wright reviews Donald Horne: A life in the lucky country by Ryan Cropp
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Biography
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: Lucky Donald
Article Subtitle: Australia ‘spellbound in boredom’
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

Here we are again, luck ringing over the land. Ryan Cropp’s new examination of the life and work of Donald Horne (1921–2005) comes out as we resume unpicking the gordian knot of what exactly is Australia. As Cropp observes, it has become impossible to describe this nation without the word luck, as if a continent rolls dice. It is the language of gamblers, of the complacent. It wasn’t introduced by Horne – any survey of the country’s newspapers will find Australia panegyrised or dismissed for riding its luck, but with the publication of The Lucky Country in 1964 Horne caught a truth in a sentence: ‘Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck.’ It was Horne’s personal stroke of luck, changing him as it changed his country. In later years, when Horne became one of those people who ran the place, had Donald joined the second-raters, sharing the spoils of chance? 
Article Hero Image (920px wide):
Article Hero Image Caption: Donald and Myfanwy Horne in Europe in the late 1970s (courtesy of Julia and Nick Horne)
Featured Image (400px * 250px):
Alt Tag (Featured Image): Tom Wright reviews 'Donald Horne: A life in the lucky country' by Ryan Cropp
Book 1 Title: Donald Horne
Book 1 Subtitle: A life in the lucky country
Book Author: Ryan Cropp
Book 1 Biblio: La Trobe University Press, $37.99 pb, 383 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):
Display Review Rating: No

Here we are again, luck ringing over the land. Ryan Cropp’s new examination of the life and work of Donald Horne (1921–2005) comes out as we resume unpicking the gordian knot of what exactly is Australia. As Cropp observes, it has become impossible to describe this nation without the word luck, as if a continent rolls dice. It is the language of gamblers, of the complacent. It wasn’t introduced by Horne – any survey of the country’s newspapers will find Australia panegyrised or dismissed for riding its luck, but with the publication of The Lucky Country in 1964 Horne caught a truth in a sentence: ‘Australia is a lucky country run by second-rate people who share its luck.’ It was Horne’s personal stroke of luck, changing him as it changed his country. In later years, when Horne became one of those people who ran the place, had Donald joined the second-raters, sharing the spoils of chance?

Antithetical to ‘luck’ is the idea of planning – preparation, work, systems, structurally leading to just sustainability. Cropp paints a young Horne bridling at the perfectionist rhetoric of centralised government; an anti-communist ideologue, something of a prig. John Anderson (professor of philosophy at Sydney) and Brian Penton (of the Sydney Daily Telegraph) loom like Gog and Magog as he ingratiates himself, impressing and annoying in equal measure, destined to become a Canberra mandarin. A young man easy to admire but hard to like, who falls into journalism, copies of Dickens, Tolstoy and Waugh under arm.

But what book is this? Is it another Great Expectations, where the wise reader waits for the protagonist to abandon erroneous beliefs? Is it a War and Peace, where a Cold War brawler shows his soft belly in times of plenty? Is it a Brideshead Revisited, wistful reassessment of a bygone time?

Read more: Tom Wright reviews 'Donald Horne: A life in the lucky country' by Ryan Cropp

Write comment (0 Comments)
J.R. Burgmann reviews Prophet by Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché
Free Article: No
Contents Category: Fiction
Review Article: Yes
Show Author Link: Yes
Show Byline: Yes
Article Title: The perils of nostalgia
Article Subtitle: Helen MacDonald’s surprising new book
Online Only: No
Custom Highlight Text:

For those familiar with Helen MacDonald’s popular nature memoir H is for Hawk (2014), her latest work will come as a surprise. Prophet is many things, most of which bear little resemblance to any of MacDonald’s previous work. To begin with, Prophet is a co-authored work of fiction, a rare feature in the world of novelists, in which co-authors are often compelled to conceal such paratextual detail, as in Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s The Expanse series, published under the pen name James S. A. Corey. Where other narrative arts enjoy the cachet of collaboration, literature – in particular literary fiction – prefers the toil of the sole creator. It is only right, then, that Prophet is a bona-fide page turner made of equal parts spy thriller, science fiction, and romance. Germinated in collaborative back and forth over Zoom at the height of the pandemic, friends MacDonald and Sin Blaché have produced an action novel that, while carrying the troubling traces of the time, leans into the comforting diet of cultural nostalgia millions embraced during the binge-filled days of lockdown.
Featured Image (400px * 250px):
Alt Tag (Featured Image): J.R. Burgmann reviews 'Prophet' by Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché
Book 1 Title: Prophet
Book Author: Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché
Book 1 Biblio: Jonathan Cape, $34.99 pb, 480 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Cover Small (400 x 600):
Book 1 Cover (800 x 1200):
Display Review Rating: No

For those familiar with Helen MacDonald’s popular nature memoir H is for Hawk (2014), her latest work will come as a surprise. Prophet is many things, most of which bear little resemblance to any of MacDonald’s previous work. To begin with, Prophet is a co-authored work of fiction, a rare feature in the world of novelists, in which co-authors are often compelled to conceal such paratextual detail, as in Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck’s The Expanse series, published under the pen name James S. A. Corey. Where other narrative arts enjoy the cachet of collaboration, literature – in particular literary fiction – prefers the toil of the sole creator. It is only right, then, that Prophet is a bona-fide page turner made of equal parts spy thriller, science fiction, and romance. Germinated in collaborative back and forth over Zoom at the height of the pandemic, friends MacDonald and Sin Blaché have produced an action novel that, while carrying the troubling traces of the time, leans into the comforting diet of cultural nostalgia millions embraced during the binge-filled days of lockdown.

Prophet begins with the sudden and distinctly X-Files-like appearance of an American diner near a NATO airbase in Suffolk. Lit up and decked out in full postwar American glory, the ersatz diner has no foundations, plumbing, or source of electricity. Meanwhile, elsewhere on the base other curios appear out of nowhere – a Cabbage Patch doll, a Scrabble box, a Pac-Man arcade machine, and so on – around the same time as an airman’s self-immolation and death in a bonfire.

Read more: J.R. Burgmann reviews 'Prophet' by Helen MacDonald and Sin Blaché

Write comment (0 Comments)

More Articles ...