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Absolutely Revolting

May 2022, no. 442

The May issue of ABR has arrived to keep you company while you wait in line for the next available voting booth. In our cover feature, Frank Bongiorno details how the professionalisation of politics has starved the public of leadership, while Faith Gordon makes the case for lowering the voting age. The issue casts a spotlight on secrets as difficult to face as they are to disinter – from Simon Tedeschi’s Calibre Prize-winning essay on the burden of his grandmother’s memory, to Elizabeth Tynan’s account of the atomic tests in Emu Field, to David Hill’s story of institutionalised abuse at Fairbridge Farm School. Philip Mead assesses Judith Wright’s legacy in prose, while Beejay Silcox wonders if Helen Garner has found the right rhapsodist. There’s new poetry by Michael Hofmann, Theodore Ell, and Katherine Brabon, and reviews of new fiction by Jennifer Egan, Omar Sakr, and Benjamin Stevenson. From busting crooks (political or porcine) to Buster Keaton, there’s plenty to get you through this electoral season!

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Patrick McCaughey reviews ‘A Life of Picasso: The minotaur years, 1933–1943’ by John Richardson
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Article Title: Surviving the charnel house
Article Subtitle: The end of the painter–Minotaur
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Sir John Richardson published the first volume of his monumental A Life of Picasso: The prodigy, 1881–1906, in 1991. The second volume, The painter of modern life, 1907–1917 illuminating the Cubist years, followed in 1996. The next volume, The triumphant years, 1917–1932, appeared eleven years later and gave rise to speculation as to how Richardson, then seventy-three, could complete his ambitious task with nearly thirty years of prodigious production on the artist’s part still to be covered. Now we have the fourth and final volume, The minotaur years, published posthumously – Richardson died in 2019 – with a lot of assistance. It’s the shortest, least compelling volume of the series.
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Article Hero Image Caption: Pablo Picasso (photograph via Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy)
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Book 1 Title: A Life of Picasso
Book 1 Subtitle: The minotaur years, 1933–1943
Book Author: John Richardson
Book 1 Biblio: Jonathan Cape, $75 hb, 308 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Author
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/DVmqAy
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Sir John Richardson published the first volume of his monumental A Life of Picasso: The prodigy, 1881–1906, in 1991. The second volume, The painter of modern life, 1907–1917 illuminating the Cubist years, followed in 1996. The next volume, The triumphant years, 1917–1932, appeared eleven years later and gave rise to speculation as to how Richardson, then seventy-three, could complete his ambitious task with nearly thirty years of prodigious production on the artist’s part still to be covered. Now we have the fourth and final volume, The minotaur years, published posthumously – Richardson died in 2019 – with a lot of assistance. It’s the shortest, least compelling volume of the series.

Read more: Patrick McCaughey reviews ‘A Life of Picasso: The minotaur years, 1933–1943’ by John Richardson

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Poet of the Month with Toby Fitch
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Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Sydney Spleen (Giramondo, 2021).
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Toby Fitch is poetry editor of Overland and a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney. He is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently Sydney Spleen (Giramondo, 2021).

 

Which poets have influenced you most?

At school: Coleridge, Frost, Yeats, Shakespeare. In my twenties, to avoid the notion that poems are pure, untouchable things, I read loads in translation, and still do: Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Reverdy, Lorca, Mayakovsky, Tsvetaeva, Tranströmer, Ritsos, Celan, Rilke, Radnóti, Césaire. There’s something freeing about reading the semblance of a poem. Most influential in English: Stein, Plath, Ashbery, O’Hara, Carson. More recently: Claudia Rankine, Kim Hyesoon, C.A. Conrad, Mary Ruefle. Mentors/colleagues who have had a big effect on me: Chris Edwards, Michael Farrell, Martin Harrison, A.J. Carruthers, Evelyn Araluen. My latest book Sydney Spleen was directly influenced by Baudelaire, Sean Bonney, Pam Brown, joanne burns, and John Forbes, among many others indirectly.

 

Are poems chiefly inspired or crafted?

For me, and in the spirit of such a dialectic, poems (i.e. ‘poiesis’) are constructed out of a need to make something make sense, or to make nonsense of something.

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Sean Scalmer reviews Class in Australia edited by Steven Threadgold and Jessica Gerrard
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Article Title: ‘The point is to change it’
Article Subtitle: An important but incomplete map of class
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To contemplate class in Australia is to be confronted immediately by paradox. Australia has over the past forty years become much more unequal, and yet those institutions formed to contest class inequality – the trade unions and the Labor Party – have become weaker and less militant. The labour movement has largely avoided a language of class as divisive and old-fashioned, and yet right-wing propagandists have successfully deployed a rhetoric of ‘battlers’, ‘aspirationals’, and ‘élites’ to draw support and win elections. The university system has been transformed, so that its leadership is akin to a corporate class of ‘change agents’ and much of its workforce is insecurely employed. Within the halls of learning, class analysis has not for some time been an area of vigorous research; in the humanities and social sciences, the action (and the research funding) has long been elsewhere.
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Book 1 Title: Class in Australia
Book Author: Steven Threadgold and Jessica Gerrard
Book 1 Biblio: Monash University Publishing, $39.95 pb, 270 pp
Book 1 Author Type: Editor
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/9WZLWE
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To contemplate class in Australia is to be confronted immediately by paradox. Australia has over the past forty years become much more unequal, and yet those institutions formed to contest class inequality – the trade unions and the Labor Party – have become weaker and less militant. The labour movement has largely avoided a language of class as divisive and old-fashioned, and yet right-wing propagandists have successfully deployed a rhetoric of ‘battlers’, ‘aspirationals’, and ‘élites’ to draw support and win elections. The university system has been transformed, so that its leadership is akin to a corporate class of ‘change agents’ and much of its workforce is insecurely employed. Within the halls of learning, class analysis has not for some time been an area of vigorous research; in the humanities and social sciences, the action (and the research funding) has long been elsewhere.

Read more: Sean Scalmer reviews 'Class in Australia' edited by Steven Threadgold and Jessica Gerrard

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Open Page with Chloe Hooper
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Chloe Hooper is the author of The Arsonist: A mind on fire and The Tall Man: Death and life on Palm Island and two novels, A Child’s Book of True Crime and The Engagement. Her most recent book is Bedtime Story.
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Chloe Hooper is the author of The Arsonist: A mind on fire and The Tall Man: Death and life on Palm Island and two novels, A Child’s Book of True Crime and The Engagement. Her most recent book is Bedtime Story.

 

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

Antarctica. Surely visiting the South Pole would tick off all the qualities of the sublime, being of great physical, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual and – as we hasten the ice shelves’ destruction – moral interest. I need to find a way there before it melts.

 

What’s your idea of hell?

The blithe way I wrote that last sentence.

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David Ferrell reviews Facts and Other Lies: Welcome to the disinformation age by Ed Coper
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Article Title: Irreversibly complicated
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On 9 March 2022, Russian forces at war in Ukraine bombed a maternity hospital in the city of Mariupol, killing three and injuring seventeen. In a confused response to international condemnation, Russia denied responsibility, designating these denunciations ‘information terrorism’ and ‘fake news’. 
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Book 1 Title: Facts and Other Lies
Book 1 Subtitle: Welcome to the disinformation age
Book Author: Ed Coper
Book 1 Biblio: Allen & Unwin, $32.99 pb, 400 pp
Book 1 Readings Link: booktopia.kh4ffx.net/e42141
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On 9 March 2022, Russian forces at war in Ukraine bombed a maternity hospital in the city of Mariupol, killing three and injuring seventeen. In a confused response to international condemnation, Russia denied responsibility, designating these denunciations ‘information terrorism’ and ‘fake news’. 

Russia does not accept that its military incursion into Ukraine is a war. The West, according to Russia, is operating a coordinated economic and information war against it. Facing this scourge of ‘disinformation’, Russia amends its law, criminalising ‘fake news’ about the war in Ukraine under penalty of up to fifteen years in prison. On 3 March, Russia commenced mandatory national lessons for schoolchildren, teaching them to distinguish between true, Russian news, and fake news. The line between disinformation and fact is blurred.

Read more: David Ferrell reviews 'Facts and Other Lies: Welcome to the disinformation age' by Ed Coper

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