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Absolutely Revolting

July 2024, no. 466

The July issue of ABR features journalist Nicole Hasham’s searing Calibre essay on the Pilbara’s pockmarked mining landscape. Historian Joan Beaumont travels to Ambon, asking whether the ever-growing number of Australian war pilgrims reflects a turn towards ‘postmemory’. Timothy J. Lynch considers America’s unending conflict with itself, Ben Wellings writes about another fractured union in the United Kingdom, and Jessica Lake examines the use of defamation in sexual assault cases. There is new poetry from John Kinsella, Julie Manning, and Andrew Sant, and we review Seamus Heaney’s letters, new poetry from Judith Bishop, fiction by Colm Tóibín, Francesca de Tores, Dylin Hardcastle, Percival Everett, theatre, music, television and more.

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Jack Nicholls reviews ‘Trans Figured: On being a transgender person in a cisgender world’ by Sophie Grace Chappell
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Contents Category: Gender
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Article Title: Trans melancholy
Article Subtitle: An unapologetic bricolage
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‘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.
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Book 1 Title: Trans Figured
Book 1 Subtitle: On being a transgender person in a cisgender world
Book Author: Sophie Grace Chappell
Book 1 Biblio: Polity, $51.95 hb, 239 pp
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‘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.

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Susan Sheridan reviews ‘A Secretive Century: Monte Punshon’s Australia’ by Tessa Morris-Suzuki
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Contents Category: History
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Article Title: ‘Unafraid to Be’
Article Subtitle: 1888 Exhibition to Expo 88
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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.
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Alt Tag (Featured Image): Susan Sheridan reviews ‘A Secretive Century: Monte Punshon’s Australia’ by Tessa Morris-Suzuki
Book 1 Title: A Secretive Century
Book 1 Subtitle: Monte Punshon’s Australia
Book Author: Tessa Morris-Suzuki
Book 1 Biblio: Melbourne University Press, $35 pb, 330 pp
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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.

Read more: Susan Sheridan reviews ‘A Secretive Century: Monte Punshon’s Australia’ by Tessa Morris-Suzuki

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Peter McPhee reviews ‘Alfred Dreyfus: The man at the center of the affair’ by Maurice Samuels
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Article Title: The dry guillotine
Article Subtitle: A scandal centred on Jewishness
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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.
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Alt Tag (Featured Image): Peter McPhee reviews ‘Alfred Dreyfus: The man at the center of the affair’ by Maurice Samuels
Book 1 Title: Alfred Dreyfus
Book 1 Subtitle: The man at the center of the affair
Book Author: Maurice Samuels
Book 1 Biblio: Yale University Press, US$26 hb, 225 pp
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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.

The young Alfred Dreyfus, born in 1859, had watched in dismay as German troops occupied his eastern town of Mulhouse in 1870. Like many other Jews from Alsace, he fled to Paris, where he progressed successfully through élite officer training schools. By the 1890s he was a handsome and wealthy officer with a brilliant career and a happy marriage.

Read more: Peter McPhee reviews ‘Alfred Dreyfus: The man at the center of the affair’ by Maurice Samuels

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Robin Prior reviews ‘Fascists in Exile: Post-war displaced persons in Australia’ by Jayne Persian
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Article Title: Importing past enemies
Article Subtitle: How Australia embraced the fascists it had fought
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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.
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Book 1 Title: Fascists in Exile
Book 1 Subtitle: Post-war displaced persons in Australia
Book Author: Jayne Persian
Book 1 Biblio: Routledge, $77.99 pb, 192 pp
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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.

Persian notes that at the end of the war in Europe there were about twelve million ‘displaced persons’ (DPs). Many were displaced because they had fled westwards ahead of the advancing Russian armies, and a considerable number of these persons did so because they had fought with or for the armies of Nazi Germany. At the same time, Australia was adopting a ‘populate or perish’ immigration policy, and the DPs were an immediate and cheap source of immigrants.

Read more: Robin Prior reviews ‘Fascists in Exile: Post-war displaced persons in Australia’ by Jayne Persian

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Adrian Walsh reviews ‘Limitarianism: The case against extreme wealth’ by Ingrid Robeyns
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Contents Category: Politics
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Article Title: Time’s up?
Article Subtitle: The prodigality of the super-rich
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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.
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Alt Tag (Featured Image): Adrian Walsh reviews ‘Limitarianism: The case against extreme wealth’ by Ingrid Robeyns
Book 1 Title: Limitarianism
Book 1 Subtitle: The case against extreme wealth
Book Author: Ingrid Robeyns
Book 1 Biblio: Allen Lane, $55 hb, 328 pp
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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.

Further, many of those in the ranks of the super-rich regularly engage in spectacular forms of conspicuous consumption that appear frivolous and wasteful – think of Jeff Bezos’s 2021 flight into space – especially when one considers the extreme forms of poverty and unmet need that exist across the globe. It is unsurprising, when confronted by these forms of extravagance, that many find such extreme forms of wealth to be morally repugnant.

Read more: Adrian Walsh reviews ‘Limitarianism: The case against extreme wealth’ by Ingrid Robeyns

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