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Absolutely Revolting

November 2024, no. 470

In November, ABR surveys some of Australia’s most stimulating thinkers on Australia-US relations, asking whether our almost compulsive fascination with the US election is good for Australian democracy. Elsewhere, Josh Bornstein shows how corporations feed the social-media beast, and Ruth Balint cautions against mob politics in reporting. Paul Giles praises Tim Winton’s new novel and its ‘colloquial brevity’, and our reviewers consider new works by Michelle de Kretser, Alex Miller, Rachel Kushner, and Alan Hollinghurst. We examine life writing on Nancy Pelosi and Race Matthews, and books on film, theatre, law, heritage, robot tales, medicine, information networks, and much, much more.

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Lyndon Megarrity reviews ‘The Assassination of Neville Wran’ by Milton Cockburn
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Article Title: Nifty Nev
Article Subtitle: A comprehensive demolition job
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Neville Wran (1926-2014) was a great Australian success story. His early childhood was spent in the Sydney suburb of Balmain, long before it was gentrified. He won a scholarship to study at the selective Fort Street Boys’ High School and then completed a law degree at Sydney University. Wran subsequently enjoyed a lucrative career as a Sydney lawyer, ultimately becoming a Queen’s Counsel (1968).
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Book 1 Title: The Assassination of Neville Wran
Book Author: Milton Cockburn
Book 1 Biblio: Connor Court Publishing $29.95pb, 246 pp
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Neville Wran (1926-2014) was a great Australian success story. His early childhood was spent in the Sydney suburb of Balmain, long before it was gentrified. He won a scholarship to study at the selective Fort Street Boys’ High School and then completed a law degree at Sydney University. Wran subsequently enjoyed a lucrative career as a Sydney lawyer, ultimately becoming a Queen’s Counsel (1968).

Increasingly active within the Australian Labor Party (ALP), Wran entered the New South Wales Parliament in 1970 and by 1976 had led the ALP to electoral victory after many years of Liberal rule. Presumably conscious of the recently deposed Gough Whitlam’s reputation for doing ‘too much, too soon’, Wran’s ten-year premiership was comparatively cautious and incremental, yet the Wran era boasted many achievements: generous support for national parks; increased funding for heritage and arts institutions such as regional galleries; social reforms such as the decriminalisation of homosexuality; and improvements in essential services such as health and transport.

Read more: Lyndon Megarrity reviews ‘The Assassination of Neville Wran’ by Milton Cockburn

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Dave Witty reviews ‘Voyagers: Our journey into the Anthropocene’ by Lauren Fuge
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Article Title: Now, voyager
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It is rare to encounter spacecraft in nature writing. Indeed, most definitions of nature confine it to Earth’s boundaries. A few pages into Lauren Fuge’s book, we are treated to the image of two Voyager space probes, more than sixteen billion kilometres from the Earth and ‘driven by the most ecstatic imaginings of human exploration’. This is a mark of Fuge’s ambition. She is as comfortable crossing the frontiers of interstellar space as she is describing oystercatchers pattering feather-light in the sand.
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Book 1 Title: Voyagers
Book 1 Subtitle: Our journey into the Anthropocene
Book Author: Lauren Fuge
Book 1 Biblio: Text Publishing, $36.99 pb, 293 pp
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It is rare to encounter spacecraft in nature writing. Indeed, most definitions of nature confine it to Earth’s boundaries. A few pages into Lauren Fuge’s book, we are treated to the image of two Voyager space probes, more than sixteen billion kilometres from the Earth and ‘driven by the most ecstatic imaginings of human exploration’. This is a mark of Fuge’s ambition. She is as comfortable crossing the frontiers of interstellar space as she is describing oystercatchers pattering feather-light in the sand.

This has been a promising year for nature writing, with James Bradley’s Deep Water showing the genre’s potential to reach back through millennia rather than through hundreds of years. Voyagers follows the slipstream of Bradley’s thought although, like the titular space probes, Fuge is quite capable of steering her own course.

Fuge has been a science writer for more than ten years, but this is her first book-length work, other than Young Adult fiction. Her 2022 essay, ‘Point of View’ (most of which is reproduced in Chapter Seven) won the Bragg Prize for Science Journalism. It also brought her international recognition when she became the first Australian writer to receive Gold at the American Association for the Advancement of Science Awards.

Read more: Dave Witty reviews ‘Voyagers: Our journey into the Anthropocene’ by Lauren Fuge

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Danielle Clode reviews ‘Every Living Thing: The great and deadly race to know all life’ by Jason Roberts
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Article Title: Flashes of insight
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There is something intrinsically appealing about patterns and order. Give a child a tin of buttons and they will immediately organise them by colour, size, or shape. Collect a bucket of shells from the beach and most people do the same thing. Some might choose the prettiest, largest, and most striking representatives of each type and display them prominently; others might cluster them by species and grade them in their variations from smallest to largest, darkest to lightest. Few will give much thought to the creatures that once inhabited them, the environments they came from, or how they lived.
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Alt Tag (Featured Image): Danielle Clode review ‘Every Living Thing: The great and deadly race to know all life’ by Jason Roberts
Book 1 Title: Every Living Thing
Book 1 Subtitle: The great and deadly race to know all life
Book Author: Jason Roberts
Book 1 Biblio: Riverrun, $36.99 pb, 419 pp
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There is something intrinsically appealing about patterns and order. Give a child a tin of buttons and they will immediately organise them by colour, size, or shape. Collect a bucket of shells from the beach and most people do the same thing. Some might choose the prettiest, largest, and most striking representatives of each type and display them prominently; others might cluster them by species and grade them in their variations from smallest to largest, darkest to lightest. Few will give much thought to the creatures that once inhabited them, the environments they came from, or how they lived.

How we organise such collections tells us much about how we think about the natural world and the mental structures we use to do so. A great many of these concepts, particularly that of species, have their foundations in the work of two famous men: Carl Linnaeus (1707-78) and Georges-Louis de Buffon (1707-88). All students of biology have heard of Linnaeus and his conception of binomial classification, but fewer will be familiar with the contribution of the great naturalist Buffon, who dominated eighteenth-century natural science in France. In Every Living Thing, Jason Roberts rectifies this imbalance, weaving a compelling and engaging narrative of these two men who never met and yet whose intertwined work laid the foundations for the study of life itself.

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Jonathan Ricketson reviews ‘Dark City: True stories of crimes, cock-ups, crooks and cops’ by John Silvester
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In 2020, John Silvester posed for a portrait by the artist Mica Pillemer. The picture is an arresting one: Silvester, in business attire, posing as a boxer. Behind him, the walls are plastered with newspapers and posters, a testament to his more than four decades of experience as a Melbourne crime reporter. His fists are raised, his dark eyes hold the viewer’s, his mouth is upturned with the faintest crook of a smile.
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Book 1 Title: Dark City
Book 1 Subtitle: True stories of crimes, cock-ups, crooks and cops
Book Author: John Silvester
Book 1 Biblio: Pan Macmillan, $36.99 pb, 352 pp
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In 2020, John Silvester posed for a portrait by the artist Mica Pillemer. The picture is an arresting one: Silvester, in business attire, posing as a boxer. Behind him, the walls are plastered with newspapers and posters, a testament to his more than four decades of experience as a Melbourne crime reporter. His fists are raised, his dark eyes hold the viewer’s, his mouth is upturned with the faintest crook of a smile.

Silvester is the godfather of Australian true crime. As a reporter for The Sun and The Age, in his work on the ‘Naked City’ column and its associated podcast, Silvester has written some five million words on the subject of crime. In Dark City, which follows Naked City (2023), Silvester has trawled through this ocean of ink to present a collection of his choicest columns, arranged thematically in sections with titles such as ‘Crooks (and the not-so-crooked)’. Naked City was prefaced with appraisals of Silvester from ‘critics’ such as Tony Mokbel (‘bald-headed alien’) and Christopher Dean Binse (‘gutter lowlife rodent’). The journalist Nick McKenzie, more generous in his assessment, notes Silvester’s ‘fair and scrupulous’ journalism, his extensive network of contacts, and his longstanding commitment to advocating for justice for the victims of crime.

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Gillian Dooley reviews ‘Iris Murdoch and the Political’ by Gary Browning
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Article Title: Mind on the border
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In a letter to her friend Raymond Queneau in 1946, the twenty-seven-year-old Iris Murdoch asked, ‘Can I really exploit the advantages (instead of suffering the disadvantages) of having a mind on the border of philosophy, literature and politics?’ Well known as a philosopher and a novelist, Murdoch is less likely to be thought of as a political writer, though Gary Browning claims it to be the ‘simple truth’.
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Book 1 Title: Iris Murdoch and the Political
Book Author: Gary Browning
Book 1 Biblio: Oxford University Press, £76 hb, 247 pp
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In a letter to her friend Raymond Queneau in 1946, the twenty-seven-year-old Iris Murdoch asked, ‘Can I really exploit the advantages (instead of suffering the disadvantages) of having a mind on the border of philosophy, literature and politics?’ Well known as a philosopher and a novelist, Murdoch is less likely to be thought of as a political writer, though Gary Browning claims it to be the ‘simple truth’.

Browning is the ideal person to investigate this question, as a noted Murdoch scholar, admirer of her literary and philosophical writings, and political scientist. He states from the outset that politics, for Murdoch, ‘is not a dispensable discrete interest, but is an integral aspect of experience’. She was an inveterate crosser of borders, interested in all the arts, in philosophy, and certainly in politics. How she expressed these interests depended largely on whether she was writing fiction, poetry, plays, essays, philosophy, or letters.

Read more: Gillian Dooley reviews ‘Iris Murdoch and the Political’ by Gary Browning

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