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Absolutely Revolting

July 2021, no. 433

Welcome to the July issue! This month we celebrate the awarding of the Calibre Prize to Theodore Ell, whose essay, ‘Façades of Lebanon’, provides a powerful eye-witness account of the Beirut explosion. The issue also explores current crises in humanitarianism with an aid worker’s frontline report from Syria and Maria O’Sullivan’s review of Alexander Betts’ book on international asylum seeker policies. And turning our attention to the racial cleavages in contemporary Australia are Paul Muldoon’s essay on the risks and rewards of Victoria’s Yoo-rrook Justice Commission and Mindy Gill’s review of an anthology of stories from Western Sydney. There are also reviews of new novels by Larissa Behrendt, Stephen Orr, and Laura Elizabeth Woollett, new poetry by Eunice Andrada, Judith Bishop, and Peter Goldsworthy – and much more!

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Open Page with Larissa Behrendt
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Larissa Behrendt is the author of three novels: Home, which won the 2002 David Unaipon Award and the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book; Legacy, which won the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and After Story (2021). She has published numerous books on Indigenous legal issues; her most recent non-fiction book is Finding Eliza: Power and colonial storytelling. She was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year award and 2011 NSW Australian of the Year. She is Distinguished Professor at the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.
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Larissa Behrendt is the author of three novels: Home, which won the 2002 David Unaipon Award and the regional Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for Best First Book; Legacy, which won the 2010 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Indigenous Writing; and After Story (2021). She has published numerous books on Indigenous legal issues; her most recent non-fiction book is Finding Eliza: Power and colonial storytelling. She was awarded the 2009 NAIDOC Person of the Year award and 2011 NSW Australian of the Year. She is Distinguished Professor at the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

 

If you could go anywhere tomorrow, where would it be, and why?

The more I travel, the more I appreciate being home. But I often dream of Paris …

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Janna Thompson reviews George Berkeley: A philosophical life by Tom Jones
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Article Title: Radical immaterialism
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George Berkeley (1685–1753) proposed a radical solution to the conundrums of modern philosophy. By denying the existence of matter, he dismissed the problem of how we can know a world outside our minds. Only minds and their ideas are real. The problem of understanding how mind and matter interact is dissolved by Berkeley’s immaterialism, and so is the difficulty of explaining how causation works. The source of all that we perceive, he believed, is God. Few philosophers have ever accepted this position. But the brilliance of his arguments for it earned him a place in the Western philosophical canon.
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Book 1 Title: George Berkeley
Book 1 Subtitle: A philosophical life
Book Author: Tom Jones
Book 1 Biblio: Princeton University Press, US$35 hb, 643 pp
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George Berkeley (1685–1753) proposed a radical solution to the conundrums of modern philosophy. By denying the existence of matter, he dismissed the problem of how we can know a world outside our minds. Only minds and their ideas are real. The problem of understanding how mind and matter interact is dissolved by Berkeley’s immaterialism, and so is the difficulty of explaining how causation works. The source of all that we perceive, he believed, is God. Few philosophers have ever accepted this position. But the brilliance of his arguments for it earned him a place in the Western philosophical canon.

Read more: Janna Thompson reviews 'George Berkeley: A philosophical life' by Tom Jones

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Paul Giles reviews Messing About in Boats by Michael Hofmann
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Article Title: Virtues of displacement
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Michael Hofmann’s Messing About in Boats is based on his 2019 Clarendon Lectures at Oxford. This series, rather like the Clark Lectures at Cambridge or the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, offers a distinguished literary practitioner the opportunity to address a particular theme in a short sequence of interlinked lectures. Given that the form of oral delivery tends to preclude extensive or detailed critical analysis, the most effective of these sequences usually promote a few challenging ideas in a compact form that lends itself readily to crystallisation. For example, Toni Morrison’s book The Origin of Others (2017), which links racism to constructions of ‘Otherness’, was based on her Norton Lectures at Harvard the previous year.
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Michael Hofmann’s Messing About in Boats is based on his 2019 Clarendon Lectures at Oxford. This series, rather like the Clark Lectures at Cambridge or the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, offers a distinguished literary practitioner the opportunity to address a particular theme in a short sequence of interlinked lectures. Given that the form of oral delivery tends to preclude extensive or detailed critical analysis, the most effective of these sequences usually promote a few challenging ideas in a compact form that lends itself readily to crystallisation. For example, Toni Morrison’s book The Origin of Others (2017), which links racism to constructions of ‘Otherness’, was based on her Norton Lectures at Harvard the previous year.

Hofmann is a well-known poet who currently teaches creative writing and translation at the University of Florida. Though educated in the most traditional English manner at Winchester College, a famous public school, and then at Cambridge, he was born in West Germany; his father was the German novelist Gert Hofmann.

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Alan Dilnot reviews Dickens and the Bible: What providence meant by Jennifer Gribble
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Article Title: ‘By a backward light’
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It is well known that Charles Dickens draws an analogy between the novelist as creator and the Creator of the cosmos: ‘I think the business of art is to lay all [the] ground carefully, but with the care that conceals itself – to show, by a backward light, what everything has been working to – but only to suggest, until the fulfilment comes. These are the ways of Providence, of which ways, all art is but a little imitation.’ However, it is not generally recognised that Dickens supported this analogy with a deep knowledge of the Bible. Instead, the thinking that permeates his works is often seen as a facet of secular humanism. John Ruskin, for example, commented that for Dickens Christmas meant no more than ‘mistletoe and pudding – neither resurrection from the dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds’.
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It is well known that Charles Dickens draws an analogy between the novelist as creator and the Creator of the cosmos: ‘I think the business of art is to lay all [the] ground carefully, but with the care that conceals itself – to show, by a backward light, what everything has been working to – but only to suggest, until the fulfilment comes. These are the ways of Providence, of which ways, all art is but a little imitation.’ However, it is not generally recognised that Dickens supported this analogy with a deep knowledge of the Bible. Instead, the thinking that permeates his works is often seen as a facet of secular humanism. John Ruskin, for example, commented that for Dickens Christmas meant no more than ‘mistletoe and pudding – neither resurrection from the dead, nor rising of new stars, nor teaching of wise men, nor shepherds’.

Read more: Alan Dilnot reviews 'Dickens and the Bible: "What providence meant"' by Jennifer Gribble

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Susan Lever reviews A Paper Inheritance: The passionate literary lives of Leslie Rees and Coralie Clarke Rees by Dymphna Stella Rees
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Article Title: Fully documented lives
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Coralie Clarke Rees and Leslie Rees are not remembered among the glamour couples of twentieth-century Australian literary life. Unlike George Johnston and Charmian Clift, Vance and Nettie Palmer, or their friends Darcy Niland and Ruth Park, neither of them wrote novels and they both spread their work across a range of genres. Critics, journalists, travel writers, children’s writers, playwrights, they devoted themselves to supporting the broad artistic culture of Australia rather than claiming its attention. Their lives were spent in juggling their literary interests with the need to make a living at a time when Australian society was even less supportive of writers than it is now. They made compromises to suburban life and the need to care for their two daughters, without ever abandoning their determination to live by the pen.
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Book 1 Subtitle: The passionate literary lives of Leslie Rees and Coralie Clarke Rees
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Book 1 Biblio: University of Queensland Press, $32.99 pb, 296 pp
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Coralie Clarke Rees and Leslie Rees are not remembered among the glamour couples of twentieth-century Australian literary life. Unlike George Johnston and Charmian Clift, Vance and Nettie Palmer, or their friends Darcy Niland and Ruth Park, neither of them wrote novels and they both spread their work across a range of genres. Critics, journalists, travel writers, children’s writers, playwrights, they devoted themselves to supporting the broad artistic culture of Australia rather than claiming its attention. Their lives were spent in juggling their literary interests with the need to make a living at a time when Australian society was even less supportive of writers than it is now. They made compromises to suburban life and the need to care for their two daughters, without ever abandoning their determination to live by the pen.

Read more: Susan Lever reviews 'A Paper Inheritance: The passionate literary lives of Leslie Rees and Coralie...

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