Thucydides once said, ‘In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.’ Chris Wallace is not inclined to agree with the Greek historian, particularly when dissecting the Labor Party’s shock federal election loss in 2019. In her latest book, How to Win an Election, Wallace nominates the ten things that Labor must get right to succeed at the next federal election, and self-pity is nowhere among them. This approach appears simplistic, even tongue-in-cheek at times, but she has captured the key elements of electoral success and makes a strong case that Australia cannot afford another ALP loss.

Wallace’s previous publications have mostly been biographies, including a life of the former Liberal leader John Hewson (1993). This is no ordinary electoral post-mortem; Wallace brings her historian’s eye for detail and an impressive ability to link the past to the present and the future.

i.
Look, said the sonographer, your sister says hello!
A black photo
where the future rival sucks a thumb-to-be.
Never in all history
was such a portent visible
without a guiding star.

ii.
Algorithms tinker at the corners of my life.
One tells me what I need to know.
One tells me what I want.
No, I say, not furniture, not the nearest death.
I sense that they are holding back.
Turn around, slowly: I want to see your hands.

iii.
Once I slept in a caravan
and heard the breathing ocean.
Dreams were the province of a dandelion curtain.
Now come the frail parasols,
drifting on a screen;
now come the waves,
rolling my hearing into guttural caves.
I have opened
the case for convenient sleep.
The child I was listens,
laughs and weeps.

The ‘land of smiles’ was what they called Prague under German occupation during World War II – at least the Germans did. Few locals. Fresh vegetables and meat were available (to Germans) in quantities unknown back in Germany. Until close to the end, there were more than a hundred cinemas operating in the city, as well as theatres, concert halls, and numerous other places of entertainment. After all, Goebbels was not only passionate about culture in general, but keen, he said, to initiate a ‘lively cultural exchange’ with Czechoslovakia in particular.

A posting to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia was what Obersturmführer Robert Griesinger, formerly of the Stuttgart Gestapo but now just the SS, had been dreaming of since the war began. When he finally got there in 1943, he found his work at the Ministry of Economics and Labour, organising the transport of Jews to extermination camps and forced labour in Germany, demanding but a promising springboard for a postwar career. Griesinger was a ‘desk perpetrator’: tens of thousands of Czechs, Roma, and Jews died as a result of the orders he signed, but he didn’t shoot anyone himself.

Judith Bishop’s second collection, Interval (UQP, 2018), won the 2019 Kenneth Slessor Prize and was shortlisted for the 2018 Melbourne Prize for Literature’s Best Writing Award. Her poems have inspired many artworks, including music. Most recently, she has contributed a lyric to Andrew Ford’s Red Dirt Hymns project. She has a new poem, 'Portraits of the Future'.

Which poets have most influenced you?

My teachers, direct and indirect: Sylvia Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, Emily Dickinson, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Yves Bonnefoy, Robert Frost, D.H. Lawrence, Edwin Muir, Carl Phillips, Rainer Maria Rilke. Quite a number are men; but attunement isn’t a conscious choice.

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

All the craft I know won’t bring a poem to life if inspiration is lacking. There has to be a moment of perception buried in it like a seed. Growing that seed, and discovering what kind of organism it will be, requires all the skill (craft, in both senses) I can muster.