tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/friday-essay-22955/articles
Friday essay – The Conversation
2024-03-21T19:07:26Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/224261
2024-03-21T19:07:26Z
2024-03-21T19:07:26Z
Friday essay: ‘A prisoner on the rack’ – how 19th-century Australian women wrote about marital rape
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582671/original/file-20240318-26-1ttfu0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Edgar Degas, Interior, 1868 or 1869.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edgar_Degas_-_Interior_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In late 19th-century Australia, a husband could legally rape his wife. Officially, he was still allowed to do so, in some Australian jurisdictions, until as late as 1994. Legal traditions inherited from the British Empire included <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/coverture">coverture</a>, the notion that a wife lost her legal identity upon marriage – and thus her ability to consent to sex.</p>
<p>Yet over a century before <a href="https://www.auswhn.com.au/blog/marital-rape/#:%7E:text=Queensland%20was%20the%20last%20state,and%20every%20act%20of%20sex.">it was criminalised</a>, two key groups of women – colonial writers and suffrage agitators – began to criticise a husband’s legal right to rape his wife.</p>
<p>These criticisms took many different forms, ranging from self-published feminist journals to novels, short stories, serial fiction and poetry. <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/cambridge-ada-3145">Ada Cambridge</a>’s poem, A Wife’s Protest, was one such example, with lines such as:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I lay me down upon my bed,<br>
A prisoner on the rack,<br>
And suffer dumbly, as I must,<br>
Till the kind day comes back<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>This poem was published in Cambridge’s 1887 poetry collection <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?printsec=frontcover&vid=ISBN0731700481&redir_esc=y">Unspoken Thoughts</a>. The title was a misnomer, for such thoughts weren’t unspoken. In fact, they formed part of a wider discussion about marital rape, consent, domestic violence and women’s bodily autonomy taking place in the pages of colonial women’s writings.</p>
<p>Feminist writers such as Cambridge, the wife of a clergyman in regional Victoria, <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/lawson-louisa-7121">Louisa Lawson</a>, an inventor, poet, and newspaper proprietor, and Queensland-born <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/praed-rosa-caroline-8095">Rosa Praed</a>, linked marital rape to other forms of domestic violence, such as physical violence, <a href="https://theconversation.com/revealed-the-hidden-problem-of-economic-abuse-in-australia-73764">economic abuse</a>, and what we would now term <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-its-so-hard-to-prosecute-cases-of-coercive-or-controlling-behaviour-66108">coercive control</a>. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582708/original/file-20240319-24-l27c9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A black and white photo of Ada Cambridge" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582708/original/file-20240319-24-l27c9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582708/original/file-20240319-24-l27c9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582708/original/file-20240319-24-l27c9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582708/original/file-20240319-24-l27c9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=793&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582708/original/file-20240319-24-l27c9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582708/original/file-20240319-24-l27c9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582708/original/file-20240319-24-l27c9e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Ada Cambridge, date unknown.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Cambridge#/media/File:Ada-Cambridge.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
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<p>For Cambridge and Lawson, exploiting the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gothic_fiction">Gothic genre</a> in their writings allowed them to depict marital rape, while avoiding censorship from their publishers. Horror-inducing imagery and references to torture and torture devices (such as “the rack”) enabled them to paint marital rape in a graphic light, capitalising on public appetites for Gothic stories.</p>
<p>In Cambridge’s novel <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Sisters.html?id=woP-tjLsGqcC&redir_esc=y">Sisters</a> (1904), for example, one of the four titular sisters, Mary Pennycuick, attempts to drown herself after receiving a marriage proposal, perceiving marriage itself as “a means to commit suicide without violating the law”.</p>
<p>She is “saved” by the village parson, who uses his chivalrous act as a bargaining tool to coerce Mary into marrying him instead. In an explicitly Gothic moment, “the white frock which she had tried to drown herself” in is “dried and ironed to make her bridal robe”. </p>
<p>On her wedding night, as she is led to the marital bedchamber by her husband, Mary shrinks “back from it with a shriek”, clinging to her sister-in-law: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>‘Save me! Save me!’ was what the desperate clutch meant, but what the paralysed tongue could not articulate. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>After the wedding, Mary is described as “a prisoner for life, bound hand and foot, more pitiable than she would have been as a dead body fished out of the dam”. With this sentence, Cambridge implies that, throughout the course of the marriage, Mary endures marital rape.</p>
<p>In Cambridge’s earlier serialised newspaper story <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/143017958?searchTerm=dinah">Dinah</a> (1880), the character of Dinah remarks after her husband’s death “now she will have a little peace”. The “wretchedness she had” with him had left her in bed many times, “prostrate […] with slow tears trickling down her cheeks”. </p>
<p>Widely-read serials, such as Dinah, made Cambridge a household name before she burst onto the international market in the 1890s. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-long-history-of-gender-violence-in-australia-and-why-it-matters-today-119927">The long history of gender violence in Australia, and why it matters today</a>
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<p>For Lawson, who ran The Dawn, <a href="https://dangerouswomenproject.org/2017/03/06/louisa-lawson/">the longest running feminist journal in Australia</a>, marital rape was a constant focus of her writing. Her outspokenness – partly facilitated by her ability to self-publish her journal – made her an outlier among her suffragist sisters.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582709/original/file-20240319-20-luz8ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582709/original/file-20240319-20-luz8ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582709/original/file-20240319-20-luz8ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582709/original/file-20240319-20-luz8ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582709/original/file-20240319-20-luz8ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=599&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582709/original/file-20240319-20-luz8ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582709/original/file-20240319-20-luz8ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582709/original/file-20240319-20-luz8ly.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=753&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Portrait of Louisa Lawson, ca. 1885, gelatin silver print, State Library of New South Wales.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisa_Lawson#/media/File:Louisa_Lawson_V1-FL3303627.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
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<p>In a July 1890 article titled <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/76420124?searchTerm=the%20legal%20link">The Legal Link</a>, Lawson criticised the laws permitting husbands to commit “abominations known to women but which must not here be named”. </p>
<p>Her frankest description of marital rape appeared in one of her <a href="https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/page/7541911">editorials earlier that year</a>, in which she advocated for divorce law reform, drawing on the experiences of the “sad-eyed women who used to come in and tell tales of violent husbands and dreary homes”. In the article, she described how a husband could approach “his lawful wife’s chamber” and “proceed to make the night hideous for her”. Marital rape was a “horrid ordeal” that wives were “expected to endure nightly”.</p>
<p>Lawson represented marital rape as wives’ inescapable “fate” under marriage laws that denied them bodily autonomy. She never used the word “rape” to describe this act. But her use of Gothic tropes, describing the marital bedroom as a “chamber of horrors”, made her meaning unmistakable.</p>
<p>It is difficult to quantify how widespread martial rape was at this time – there is minimal historical research on the subject – but the fact that these women wrote about it widely suggests it was commonplace.</p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-gothic-from-hanging-rock-to-nick-cave-and-kylie-this-genre-explores-our-dark-side-111742">Australian Gothic: from Hanging Rock to Nick Cave and Kylie, this genre explores our dark side</a>
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<h2>Censoring criticisms</h2>
<p>Rosa Praed, who became something of a literary celebrity when she moved to London, wrote in the romance and domestic realist genres, and was known for her depictions of the brutalities of marriage.</p>
<p>In her stories <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/An_Australian_Heroine.html?id=5XfPAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">An Australian Heroine</a> (1880), which some have described as semi-autobiographical, and <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/December_Roses.html?id=9aE4AQAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">December Roses</a> (1892), Praed framed marital rape in moral terms. She differentiated between physical violence and “immoral” violence – the latter being coded language used to convey the idea of sexual violence while escaping her publishers’ censorship. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582720/original/file-20240319-30-xv7v5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582720/original/file-20240319-30-xv7v5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582720/original/file-20240319-30-xv7v5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582720/original/file-20240319-30-xv7v5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582720/original/file-20240319-30-xv7v5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582720/original/file-20240319-30-xv7v5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582720/original/file-20240319-30-xv7v5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582720/original/file-20240319-30-xv7v5j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=996&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rosa Praed.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Campbell_Praed">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
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<p>In An Australian Heroine, the antagonist George Brand justifies his sexual abuse of his wife Esther by telling her: “you are mine now, remember, and I may do what I like with you”. </p>
<p>Esther subsequently understands her marriage as “nothing but a degrading prostitution from which she could not escape”, which has “upon her the effect of a slow moral suicide”.</p>
<p>Unlike Cambridge or Lawson, Praed’s depictions of marital rape attracted criticism and censorship. Her 1881 novel <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Policy_and_Passion.html?id=1a50PwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Policy and Passion</a> originally featured a chapter in which a fiancé attempts to rape his soon-to-be wife. Although Praed wanted to call “a spade a spade” and depict this sexual coercion and violence, her publishers declared it “too realistic” and “repugnant”. She was <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08164649.2024.2318750?src=exp-la">told</a> to “tone down” and avoid “the suggestion of any undignified scuffle or of any actual brutality”.</p>
<p>Not only did her publishers object to any discussion of marital rape, they particularly objected to these discussions coming from a female author. They told her: “One has to remember that it has your name on the title page, and that you cannot so well say what [a] Mr Praed may”. </p>
<p>In the end, the chapter was cut entirely, and replaced with a short scene where the fiancé merely attempts to kiss his wife-to-be, which she manages to avoid. </p>
<h2>Citizenship versus consent</h2>
<p>Other women discussing marital rape – namely suffrage agitators such as <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/scott-rose-8370">Rose Scott</a> and <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/anderson-maybanke-susannah-5018">Maybanke Anderson</a> – thought about the problem in a completely different way. </p>
<p>To achieve their goals of suffrage and political citizenship for women, they evoked women’s rights as mothers rather than as individuals. For these women, a wife’s ability to choose whether or not she had children and the consequences of her lack of choice for the children themselves were the problem, not the lack of consent. </p>
<p>Cambridge’s poem An Answer, for instance, featured a wife railing against “the yoke of servitude” and complaining about surrendering “soul and flesh that should be mine, and free” to her husband. But in Scott’s annotated copy of the book containing An Answer, she wrote in the margin: “this poem is the one [I am] sorry is in this book”.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582721/original/file-20240319-24-f82h1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582721/original/file-20240319-24-f82h1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582721/original/file-20240319-24-f82h1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582721/original/file-20240319-24-f82h1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582721/original/file-20240319-24-f82h1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=766&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582721/original/file-20240319-24-f82h1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582721/original/file-20240319-24-f82h1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582721/original/file-20240319-24-f82h1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=963&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Maybanke Anderson circa 1893.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maybanke_Anderson#/media/File:Maybanke_Anderson_c.1893.png">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
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<p>Sydney-based Anderson, a foundational member and later president of the Womanhood Suffrage League, established her own feminist journal Woman’s Voice in opposition to The Dawn. She framed her criticism of marital rape around its effects on wives’ and children’s health, calling for women to realise “the dangers that beset them”.</p>
<p>Some of the discussion of marital rape in Woman’s Voice was concerned with wives’ bodily autonomy (or lack thereof). One article criticised the “laws [which] do not recognise the right of the wife to her own body”. The focus always returned to what Anderson described as “the mother’s right to choose”.</p>
<p>These concerns around marital rape and the “animal nature” of husbands, framed around concerns for both mother and child, were graphic. As Anderson wrote in one editorial:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is by no means the exception, but rather the rule, that during pregnancy the wife must yield to the demand of the husband’s lust, not occasionally but constantly – as often as there are nights in the month; and not unfrequently must she give herself up to this awful harlotry before her baby is two weeks old.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In their desire to fulfil the role of wife, women’s “ruin [was] practically compulsory”. </p>
<h2>Domestic violence</h2>
<p>For suffrage agitators, not only was marital rape an entirely separate issue to that of domestic violence, but domestic violence was not deemed worthy of their focus. In a letter to the editor published in Woman’s Voice in 1895, Mary Sanger Evans, a prominent member of the Womanhood Suffrage League in Sydney, went so far as to declare: “The reign of brute force is rapidly on the wane”.</p>
<p>Both Evans and Anderson had benefited from the recently amended NSW divorce act, which enabled them to divorce their husbands on the grounds of physical violence/cruelty and economic violence/desertion respectively.</p>
<p>For Cambridge, Lawson and Praed, however, marital rape could not be disentangled from other forms of domestic violence. The husband who turns the marital bedroom into a “chamber of horrors” in Lawson’s editorial, also bruises his wife’s flesh “and perhaps breaks her bones”. </p>
<p>In Cambridge’s Dinah, the husband subjects his wife to a regime of humiliation, economic control and psychological abuse, while in another of her serialised stories, Against the Rules, marital rape is paired with physical abuse. Cambridge depicts marital rape as the worst form of a broader system of domestic violence that ensnared colonial women. “There were worse things than blows”, the wife declares in this story.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582710/original/file-20240319-30-l27c9e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582710/original/file-20240319-30-l27c9e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/582710/original/file-20240319-30-l27c9e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582710/original/file-20240319-30-l27c9e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582710/original/file-20240319-30-l27c9e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582710/original/file-20240319-30-l27c9e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1179&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582710/original/file-20240319-30-l27c9e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1179&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/582710/original/file-20240319-30-l27c9e.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1179&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>Cambridge and Praed continued to address marital rape in their fiction up until the start of the first world war, when both women began to wind up their literary careers. Throughout the mid-20th century, other female writers would tackle the topic, including Eleanor Dark, in her novel <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=mvlMAAAAIAAJ&source=gbs_book_other_versions">Waterway</a> (1938), Katherine Susannah Prichard in <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Roaring_Nineties.html?id=rzE3AAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">The Roaring Nineties</a> (1946) and Ruth Park in <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Witch_s_Thorn.html?id=ZxF3OwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">The Witch’s Thorn</a> (1951). </p>
<p>Yet despite this continued literary attention, social, cultural and legal attitudes towards marital rape were <a href="https://www.auswhn.com.au/blog/marital-rape/">inconsistent</a> for many decades.</p>
<p>Not that Cambridge, Lawson and Praed were preaching to an empty choir. From the 1890s, in the wake of these women’s writings, some women used their divorce petitions to assert their right to consent. They described their husbands’ sexual cruelty as rape – “against their will” and “against their consent” – revealing a burgeoning feminist consciousness among wives.</p>
<p>In making this sexual violence public, such women laid the foundation for those who would finally be freed nearly a century later, when, in the 1970s, South Australia began to lead the charge in criminalising marital rape.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/224261/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zoe Smith receives funding from an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Domestic Scholarship.</span></em></p>
At a time when women had limited rights, writers found ways to raise the issues of coercion and control.
Zoe Smith, PhD Candidate, School of History, Australian National University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/218800
2024-03-14T19:24:53Z
2024-03-14T19:24:53Z
Friday essay: from political bees to talking pigs – how ancient thinkers saw the human-animal divide
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581424/original/file-20240312-18-f7g0up.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=24%2C8%2C5467%2C3655&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>What makes us human? What (if anything) sets us apart from all other creatures? Ever since Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, the answer to these questions has pointed us back to our own animal nature.</p>
<p>Yet the idea that, in one way or another, our humanity is entangled with the non-human has a much longer and more venerable history. In the West, it goes all the way back to Classical antiquity – to Greek and Roman views about humans and animals. </p>
<p>The Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322) first argued the human stands out from all other animals through the presence of <em>logos</em> (“speech” but also “reason”). Numerous Greek and Roman thinkers engaged in similar attempts to name what, exactly, sets humans apart. </p>
<p>Who or what is man? The arguments these philosophers came up with verged from the obscure to the outright bizarre: The human alone has the capacity to have sex at all seasons and well into old age; the human alone can sit comfortably on his hip bones; the human alone has hands that can build altars to the gods and craft divine statues. No observation seemed too far-fetched or outlandish. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581448/original/file-20240312-28-9lkgw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A painting of a bearded man, Aristotle." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581448/original/file-20240312-28-9lkgw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581448/original/file-20240312-28-9lkgw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=851&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581448/original/file-20240312-28-9lkgw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=851&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581448/original/file-20240312-28-9lkgw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=851&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581448/original/file-20240312-28-9lkgw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1070&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581448/original/file-20240312-28-9lkgw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1070&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581448/original/file-20240312-28-9lkgw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1070&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Aristotle, as painted by Raphael.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
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<p>And yet, above all, the argument that animals lack logos continued to resonate. In classical antiquity it became powerful enough to coin the very word for animals in ancient Greek: <em>ta aloga</em> – “those without logos”. </p>
<p>This position was taken up by the philosophical school of the Stoics and from there came to influence Christianity, with its view of man made in the image of God. </p>
<p>The idea of an insurmountable gap between humans and other animals soon became the dominant paradigm, informing, for instance, the 18th century naturalist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Carolus-Linnaeus">Carl Linnaeus’s</a> influential classification of the human as <em>homo sapiens</em> (literally: the “wise”, or “rational man”). </p>
<p>The practical implications of this idea cannot be underestimated. What has been termed “<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-animal/">the moral status of animals</a>” – the question of whether they should be included in considerations of justice – has traditionally been linked to the question of whether they have logos. Because animals differ from humans in lacking both speech and reason (so this line of argument goes) they cannot themselves formulate moral positions. Therefore, they do not warrant inclusion in our moral considerations, or at least not in the same way as humans. </p>
<p>Increasingly, of course, as many contemporary philosophers have pointed out, this idea seems too simple. </p>
<p>New research in the behavioural sciences illustrates the at times astonishing capacities of certain animals: crows and otters using tools to crack open nuts or shells to make their contents available for consumption; octopuses lifting the lids to their tanks and successfully escaping to the ocean through pipes; bees optimising their flight path on repeated trips to a food source.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581188/original/file-20240312-24-3u7e8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A pink octopus in a tank." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581188/original/file-20240312-24-3u7e8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581188/original/file-20240312-24-3u7e8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581188/original/file-20240312-24-3u7e8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581188/original/file-20240312-24-3u7e8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581188/original/file-20240312-24-3u7e8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581188/original/file-20240312-24-3u7e8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581188/original/file-20240312-24-3u7e8f.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Octopus have lifted the lids of their tanks and escaped.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/dofleins-octopus-latin-enteroctopus-dofleini-tentacles-2278086727">Victor1153/shutterstock</a></span>
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<p>But there is, in fact, a considerable body of evidence from the ancient Greek and Roman worlds showcasing the complex behaviours of different kinds of animals.</p>
<p>Ancient authors like <a href="https://www.livius.org/articles/person/pliny-the-elder/">Pliny</a>, <a href="https://www.livius.org/sources/content/plutarch/">Plutarch</a>, <a href="https://oxfordre.com/classics/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199381135.001.0001/acrefore-9780199381135-e-4570">Oppian</a>, <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095353490">Aelian</a>,<a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/porphyry/"> Porphyry</a>, <a href="https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095431452">Athenaeus </a>and others have dedicated whole books or treatises to this topic, pushing back on the notion of animals as merely “dumb beasts”. </p>
<p>Their views anticipated the modern debate by attributing animals not only with forms of reason; they also highlighted their capacity to suffer, to feel pain and to feel empathy towards each other and, occasionally, even towards members of the human species. </p>
<p>Then there are the human-animal hybrid creatures of the Greek and Roman myths (more on this later) – the Sirens, the Sphinx, the Minotaur. All combine the body parts of human and animal. Individually and collectively they thus raise a fundamental yet potentially disturbing question: what if we are really, in part at least, animal?</p>
<h2>Ancient animal-smarts</h2>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581189/original/file-20240312-26-17ijsr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581189/original/file-20240312-26-17ijsr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581189/original/file-20240312-26-17ijsr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581189/original/file-20240312-26-17ijsr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581189/original/file-20240312-26-17ijsr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1080&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581189/original/file-20240312-26-17ijsr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1080&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581189/original/file-20240312-26-17ijsr.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1080&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<p>In <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11879565">On the Nature of Animals</a> (late second/early third century CE), Aelian, a Roman author writing in Greek, described fish that helped their unfortunate mates when caught at sea, setting their backs against the trapped creature and “pushing with all their might to try to stop him from being hauled in”. </p>
<p>He wrote, too, of dolphins that helped fisher-folk, pressing the fish in “on all sides” so they couldn’t escape. In return, they were rewarded for their labours by a share of the catch.</p>
<p>He celebrated the clever design of beehives, observing:</p>
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<p>The first thing that they construct are the chambers of their kings, and they are spacious and above all the rest. Round them they put a barrier, as it were a wall or fence, thereby also enhancing their importance of the royal dwelling. </p>
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<p>By parading animal-smarts in action these examples – of which there are hundreds - astonish, inform, and entertain at the same time – similar perhaps to the ubiquitous reels showing animals doing amazing things circulating in modern social media.</p>
<p>Modern ethological studies variously observe animal behaviours which reverberate with Aelian’s examples.</p>
<p>Pairs of <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150925085344.htm">rabbit fish</a> have been shown to cooperate, with one partner standing on guard protecting the other one while feeding. Honeybees indeed build bigger cells for their queen that are set apart at the bottom of the hive separated by thicker walls. And <a href="https://www.pnas.org/post/podcast/cooperative-fishing-between-humans-and-dolphins">bottlenose dolphins</a> have been found to cooperate with humans in their efforts to capture fish. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581193/original/file-20240312-16-rsj49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Dolphins swimming over seagrass." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581193/original/file-20240312-16-rsj49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581193/original/file-20240312-16-rsj49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581193/original/file-20240312-16-rsj49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581193/original/file-20240312-16-rsj49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581193/original/file-20240312-16-rsj49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581193/original/file-20240312-16-rsj49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581193/original/file-20240312-16-rsj49.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Bottlenose dolphins have been seen cooperating with humans while fishing.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Anita Kainrath/shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>While not all of the ancient anecdotal evidence is confirmed by modern research, the overall thrust is clear: it deserves to be taken seriously and is part of the ancient conversation of what makes us human. </p>
<h2>The power of storytelling</h2>
<p>Some Greek and Roman thinkers resorted to the medium of storytelling to articulate views that are essentially philosophical in nature. The Greek philosopher Plutarch’s treatise <a href="https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Moralia/Gryllus*.html">Beasts are Rational</a> draws on the famous story from Homer’s Odyssey in which some of Odysseus’ comrades are turned into pigs by the sorceress Circe. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-homers-odyssey-82911">Guide to the Classics: Homer's Odyssey</a>
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<p>Odysseus is eventually able to convince the sorceress to turn them back into human beings. In Plutarch’s rendering of the story he returns to Circe’s island to check whether there are any other Greeks turned animal – and finds a pig named Gryllus (“Grunter”).</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581192/original/file-20240312-26-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A painting of men with animal heads." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581192/original/file-20240312-26-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581192/original/file-20240312-26-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581192/original/file-20240312-26-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581192/original/file-20240312-26-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581192/original/file-20240312-26-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581192/original/file-20240312-26-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581192/original/file-20240312-26-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Detail of a wine cup (kylix) depicting scenes from The Odyssey including men turned into animals, circa 560-550 BCE.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Detail_view_-_Odysseus_men_turned_into_animals_by_Circe_receive_antidote_photo_by_Lucas_ancientartpodcast_flickr_cca2.0_8705662763_02d64d713e_o.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
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<p>Things take a turn for the unexpected when Grunter declines Odysseus’ offer of help. The reason? He prefers his animal to his human existence.</p>
<p>Grunter sets out to make an impassioned, highly rational case, arguing all animals in one form or another, have reason. Individual species differ from each other merely in the extent of and kind of reason. And, yes, this includes even those animals that have come to serve as the epitome of dumbness: sheep and the ass. </p>
<p>“Please note,” he adds, “that cases of dullness and stupidity in some animals are demonstrated by the cleverness and sharpness of others – as when you compare an ass and a sheep with a fox or a wolf or a bee.”</p>
<p>Grunter is not afraid to push things even further: Don’t individual humans, too, differ from each other in cleverness and wit? Long before the arrival of evolutionary theory, the pig here points towards a gradual view of how certain features, skills, and capacities map onto a continuum of all living creatures (the human included). The implied conclusion: there is no insurmountable gap between the human and other animals.</p>
<p>Grunter’s views are supported by others such as the speaking rooster of Lucian’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/11879565">The Dream or the Cock</a> (second century CE). Claiming to be the latest in a long line of previous incarnations that include (brace yourself) – the philosopher Pythagoras, the Cynic philosopher Crates, the Trojan hero Euphorbus, the Greek courtesan Aspasia, and several animals – this rooster-philosopher, too, prefers his animal to his human existence. </p>
<p>Animals, the rooster argues, are content with the basics; humans, by contrast, over-complicate things because they can’t get enough and greedily strive for ever more. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-darwins-the-descent-of-man-150-years-on-sex-race-and-our-lowly-ape-ancestry-155305">Guide to the classics: Darwin's The Descent of Man 150 years on — sex, race and our 'lowly' ape ancestry</a>
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<h2>Myths and hybrid monsters</h2>
<p>Myth is arguably the most influential genre of ancient storytelling. A set of malleable tales of great age and importance, myth constitutes a world apart, a medium just far enough removed from the intricacies (and banalities) of everyday life to allow for the exploration of fundamental questions concerning the human condition. And Greek myths often explore human entanglements with non-human animals in ways that reference the philosophical debate.</p>
<p>The mythical figure of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Minotaur">the Minotaur</a> for example – a hybrid creature sporting the head of a bull and the body of a human male – does not seem to adhere to the norms and conventions applying to either of his composite identities. </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580856/original/file-20240310-28-ykqvft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A painting of a minotaur." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580856/original/file-20240310-28-ykqvft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/580856/original/file-20240310-28-ykqvft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580856/original/file-20240310-28-ykqvft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580856/original/file-20240310-28-ykqvft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580856/original/file-20240310-28-ykqvft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580856/original/file-20240310-28-ykqvft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/580856/original/file-20240310-28-ykqvft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Tondo of a Minotaur, circa 515 BC.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tondo_Minotaur_London_E4_MAN.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
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<p>His insatiable appetite for young humans sets him apart from accepted behaviour for both humans and cattle alike, identifying him as monstrous. </p>
<p>But what are monsters for?</p>
<p>This question also applies to another famous hybrid beast of the ancient world: the Theban sphinx. Perched high outside the gates of the city of Thebes, in the region of Boeotia in central Greece, this creature (half woman, half lion, often endowed with an extra set of wings) challenges all wishing to enter with the following riddle: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>What is that which has one voice and yet becomes four-footed and two-footed and three-footed?</p>
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<p>Many try and fail to name the right answer, paying for it with their lives. Until Oedipus comes along. He gives the correct answer and thus busts the beast, which dutifully throws itself to death. </p>
<p>The creature in the riddle is, of course, the human: man first crawls on four legs, then walks on two, until in old age when a walking stick may serve as a third “leg”. And yet despite his clever wit, Oedipus is ultimately unable to use reason to his and the city’s advantage (a situation explored in depth in <a href="https://classics.mit.edu/Sophocles/oedipus.html">Sophocles’ famous tragedy Oedipus the King</a>).</p>
<p>What is the point of the riddle of the Sphinx? This story poses the human as a question but also illustrates the limits of logos in gaining self-understanding. Oedipus can solve the beast’s riddle; yet the riddle of his own humanity remains unresolved until it is too late. Here, the monstrous figure holds up a mirror for the human to recognise himself. </p>
<h2>Speaking animals</h2>
<p>Logos (in the sense of speech) also features prominently in the intervention of another iconic creature from classical antiquity: Xanthus, Achilles’ speaking horse. </p>
<p>On the battlefields of Troy (featured in Homer’s Iliad) Xanthus reminds Achilles of his imminent death. In this way the horse seems to tease all those thinkers (ancient and modern) who have argued the human stands out from all other animals in his capacity to speak in complex sentences.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-homers-iliad-80968">Guide to the classics: Homer's Iliad</a>
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</em>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581226/original/file-20240312-30-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A painting of a Greek god with two horses." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581226/original/file-20240312-30-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581226/original/file-20240312-30-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581226/original/file-20240312-30-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581226/original/file-20240312-30-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=570&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581226/original/file-20240312-30-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581226/original/file-20240312-30-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581226/original/file-20240312-30-tn9od0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=716&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Automedon with the Horses of Achilles, painting by Henri Regnault, 1868.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>Xanthus’s voice resonates with that of numerous other speaking animals populating Greek and Roman literature, including the gnat of <a href="http://virgil.org/appendix/culex.htm">Pseudo-Virgil’s Culex</a>, the speaking eel in Oppian’s didactic poem <a href="https://www.loebclassics.com/view/oppian-halieutica_fishing/1928/pb_LCL219.279.xml">On Fishing</a>, and the whole chorus of animals speaking to us in ancient fables. </p>
<p>Individually and as a group they raise a question: what if animals could speak to us in human language? What would they have to say to those humans prepared to listen? </p>
<p>As it turns out in these stories, often nothing too flattering. In classical antiquity, speaking animals often use their special position to question or examine the human condition.</p>
<p>Xanthus is a case in point. By reminding Achilles he is fated to die at Troy, the speaking horse reminds the Greek hero of an important aspect of the human condition: his own mortality and the fact that he, too, is ultimately subject to powers beyond human control.</p>
<h2>The political bee</h2>
<p>In Greek and Roman accounts of honeybee politics we find a peculiar human habit with a surprisingly long history: the attribution of political qualities to honeybees. </p>
<p>When we distinguish a “queen bee” from “workers” we are continuing a tradition that goes back to the ancient world (and possibly beyond). Aristotle names honeybees among the <em>zoa politika</em> (the “political animals”) – a category that includes wasps, ants, cranes, and, above all, the human.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581201/original/file-20240312-24-r54i0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581201/original/file-20240312-24-r54i0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581201/original/file-20240312-24-r54i0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581201/original/file-20240312-24-r54i0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581201/original/file-20240312-24-r54i0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581201/original/file-20240312-24-r54i0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581201/original/file-20240312-24-r54i0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581201/original/file-20240312-24-r54i0o.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Day_85_-_Sweat_Bee_-_Lasioglossum_species,_Leesylvania_State_Park,_Woodbridge,_Virginia.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
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</figure>
<p>He and others then set out to explore the intricacies of honeybee society. The ancient Greeks and Romans traditionally considered honeybees to inhabit a monarchy. In line with the gender realities of the ancient world, they imagined this monarchy to be led by a king or male leader. </p>
<p>Does the bee monarch have a stinger? If not, how does he assert his power and leadership? And what does the presence of the obviously unproductive drones in the hive say about the distribution of labour in a community? These are the kind of questions that resonated among Greek and Roman thinkers.</p>
<p>Honeybee society thus provided a perfect microcosm to study a set of questions that concerned human politics and society. The Roman philosopher Seneca, for instance, asserted that the bee monarch leads by <em>clementia</em> (mercy or mildness) - a form of leadership he found woefully lacking in contemporary Roman society. </p>
<h2>Meat and man</h2>
<p>So far we have seen animals mostly playing a symbolic role in Graeco-Roman storytelling. There is also a very real way in which human and animal bodies come to merge: through the human consumption of meat.</p>
<p>The ancient Greeks and Romans were ardent meat-eaters. Indeed meat-eating became a status symbol closely linked to the articulation of masculine identities. </p>
<p>In classical Greece the male citizen received his equal share of meat after communal religious sacrifices carried out by the <em>polis</em> (“city-state”). Meat eating also features prominently in several anecdotes about successful ancient Greek athletes who toned their extraordinary bodies through the consumption of ridiculous amounts of meat.</p>
<p>One of them – a boxer named Theagenes – even claimed to have gobbled up an entire oxen in one sitting. Another one – Milo of Croton – apparently gained his extraordinary strength by carrying a heifer on his back as a young man until both he and the heifer had grown up. </p>
<p>Meanwhile at Rome, the elites sought to outdo each other by hosting ever more lavish dinner parties typically featuring one or several meat dishes. More often than not this involved attempts to serve a bigger or larger quantity of boar than their peers. <a href="https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Sumtuariae_Leges.html">Roman sumptuary laws</a> eventually sought to control the worst excesses – albeit with limited success. </p>
<h2>The shearwaters of Diomedea</h2>
<p>The real also blends into the imaginary in the story of a special kind of bird. The Scopoli Shearwater (<em>Calonectris Diomedea</em>) is a species common to the Adriatic and other parts of the Mediterranean Sea. One of its outstanding features is that its cries resemble that of a wailing baby. These birds feed on small fish, crustaceans, squid, and zooplankton and are both migratory and pelagic. </p>
<p>The stories told about these birds by several ancient authors bring us to what is perhaps the most momentous way of exploring the human-animal boundary: the idea that in the realm of myth, at least, some humans, under certain conditions, could turn into animals and back again (metamorphosis). </p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581199/original/file-20240312-28-mfz55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A shearwater in the sea." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581199/original/file-20240312-28-mfz55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581199/original/file-20240312-28-mfz55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581199/original/file-20240312-28-mfz55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581199/original/file-20240312-28-mfz55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581199/original/file-20240312-28-mfz55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581199/original/file-20240312-28-mfz55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581199/original/file-20240312-28-mfz55.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">A scopoli shearwater.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">D.serra1/shutterstock</span></span>
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<p>According to <a href="https://www.loebclassics.com/view/aelian-characteristics_animals/1958/pb_LCL446.15.xml">Aelian</a>, some shearwaters residing on a rocky, otherwise uninhabited island in the Mediterranean Sea showed puzzling behaviour. They duly ignored all non-Greeks arriving on their island. Yet if Greek people reached their shores they welcomed them with stretched wings, even settling down on their laps as if for a joint meal. </p>
<p>What motivated this curious behaviour? </p>
<p>The backstory explains that the birds were once human. They were the comrades of Diomedes, king of Argos, one of the Greeks fighting at Troy, who is said to have died on the same island now inhabited by the birds. Apparently, upon his death, his friends grieved so heavily the goddess Aphrodite turned them into birds – their cries forever bemoaning the passing of their comrade. </p>
<p>On the face of it this story is merely another example of a myth explaining an outstanding feature in nature (the birds’ endearing <a href="https://www.birdlife.org/news/2021/05/31/seabird-month-corys-shearwater-calonectris-borealis/">human-like cry</a>). Yet there is more to the birds’ curious behaviour than meets the eye. In discriminating between Greeks and non-Greeks the birds seem to recall not only their former humanity but specifically their Greekness; they even seem to engage in the central Greek practice of extending friendship to guests (<em>xenia</em>) and the sharing of food. </p>
<p>In doing so they illustrate a central point of ancient (and many modern) tales of metamorphosis: even though the body may turn animal, the mind remains human. As the seat of logos it contains our humanity while the body adds little, if anything, of substance.</p>
<p>As such, rather than imagining what the world looks like from the point of view of a non-human creature, tales of metamorphosis ultimately come to reaffirm the view that the human stands apart from all other animals. </p>
<h2>And so?</h2>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581186/original/file-20240312-26-wyc3p2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The Trojan Horse and other stories: book cover" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581186/original/file-20240312-26-wyc3p2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/581186/original/file-20240312-26-wyc3p2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581186/original/file-20240312-26-wyc3p2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581186/original/file-20240312-26-wyc3p2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=908&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581186/original/file-20240312-26-wyc3p2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581186/original/file-20240312-26-wyc3p2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/581186/original/file-20240312-26-wyc3p2.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1141&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Cambridge University Press</span></span>
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<p>In the myth of the Minotaur, the Greek hero Theseus eventually enters the labyrinth in which the Minotaur is confined, tracking him down, and slaying him. With the help of a thread given to him by Ariadne, he finds his way back out to tell the tale.</p>
<p>But trying to make sense of the Minotaur and other iconic creatures from the ancient world leads us down a rabbit hole into a place of blurred boundaries: where the human emerges as a contested figure somewhere in the space between mind and body, human and animal parts.</p>
<p>In the end, then, there is no hard and fast boundary separating us from all other creatures – notwithstanding all efforts to dress ourselves up as different.
Rather, it is the <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/trojan-horse-and-other-stories/6DD8408FDBA4C5C6604536F6EC7406D5">negotiations between different facets of our identity</a> which make us human</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218800/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Julia Kindt received funding from the Australian Research Council (ARC) and is a member of the Sydney Environment Institute.</span></em></p>
What makes us human? Greek and Roman thinkers were preoccupied with this question. And some of their observations of animals foreshadowed recent findings in the behavioural sciences.
Julia Kindt, Professor, Department of Classics and Ancient History, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/222888
2024-02-29T19:07:10Z
2024-02-29T19:07:10Z
Friday essay: amnesia, time loops, a divided world – how TV messes with our heads in seriously interesting ways
<p>With the success of Netflix and its imitators, the long-form drama of the fictional screen serial has moved decisively from broadcast television to on-demand streaming. The dizzying range of shows filling the streaming services are now curated by an algorithm that is a mixture of your own personal preferences and those of people whose preferences you share.</p>
<p>The kinds of shows available on streaming services have largely followed genres we can recognise from classic television and cinema: murder mysteries, romantic comedies, legal procedurals, situation comedies, science fiction epics, and so on. </p>
<p>Yet some shows involve a decisive break from our reality, displaying situations we could not conceive of in our world. </p>
<p>We regard a show as realist if it stays within the parameters of daily life, obeying the rules of rationality. (Crime shows, which often deal with quite baroque situations of violence, nevertheless generally remain situated in a shared reality).</p>
<p>These other shows, involving worlds and people being <a href="https://uwap.uwa.edu.au/collections/vignettes/products/netflicks-conceptual-television-in-the-streaming-era">split by a conceptual premise</a> – amnesia, time loop, a divided world – reveal that television is not always, as is sometimes imagined, escapist. At least it is not escapist in the conventional sense of offering anodyne fantasies that keep the complexities of life at arm’s length.</p>
<p>In these shows, televisual drama functions as a form of serious thought, introducing and acting out experiments that directly address fundamental contradictions within – or limits to – the realism of our world.</p>
<h2>Split selves</h2>
<p>In the show <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4643084/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0_tt_8_nm_0_q_Counterp">Counterpart</a> (2017–19), for instance, a physicist in 1980s East Berlin conducts an experiment that accidentally duplicates the universe. He wanders through a tunnel formed in his basement laboratory and finds, to his amazement, his own self walking towards him from the other side. </p>
<p>The action of the story takes place several decades after this radical event. The matter has been kept a closely guarded secret to the populations of both worlds – “Earth Alpha” and “Earth Prime” – but a clandestine crossing point has been maintained.</p>
<p>In the show, the two worlds relate to another like superpowers in a cold war, with agents from both sides trying to steal secrets and sabotage the aims of the other. The uncanny moments occur when an agent meets themselves. They look identical but their characters are different, sometimes subtly, but occasionally diametrically opposite.</p>
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<p>In <a href="https://tv.apple.com/au/show/severance/umc.cmc.1srk2goyh2q2zdxcx605w8vtx?mttn3pid=Google%20AdWords&mttnagencyid=a5e&mttncc=AU&mttnsiteid=143238&mttnsubad=OAU2019927_1-593076090890-c&mttnsubkw=135370895994__LnxkyDhH_&mttnsubplmnt=_adext_">Severance</a> (2022– ) there is another version of this “split world” premise. In this case, a corporation has developed a cybernetic procedure to deal with the problem of what we call, in contemporary HR parlance, work-life balance. The solution involves having a chip inserted into your brain, which functions as a switch. At home you remain yourself, in touch with all your memories and involved in the shared reality of everyday life.</p>
<p>But, when you travel to work, you enter a specially modified elevator. Arriving at your floor, all memory of your former life is erased. A second you, devoted only to the tasks of your employment, now takes over. At the end of the day, as you descend back down the lift, all memory of work disappears and your former memories – those connected to the world outside work – are restored.</p>
<p>In this way, the show replicates the conditions of Counterpart, but without needing to double the universe. Simply introducing a distinction in which two versions of the self remain mutually unaware of each other is enough.</p>
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<p>A split in the self corresponds to a split world. In the case of Severance, the workers are made aware of their situation, but are only able to accept this with a certain infantile resignation. They refer to themselves as “innies” and to their invisible outside persona – the one who has instituted their existence – as “outies”. </p>
<p>This pattern bears a close resemblance to another, and more venerable premise: the amnesia plot. This plot, where a character suddenly loses all memory of their former life, was already a feature of Hollywood cinema in the silent era and was the premise for famous films like Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound (1945), Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000), David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). In the streaming era, the amnesia plot can be seen in celebrated shows like Homecoming (2018–20) and I May Destroy You (2020).</p>
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<p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-great-movie-scenes-eternal-sunshine-of-the-spotless-mind-74166">The great movie scenes: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind</a>
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<h2>Memory and repetition</h2>
<p>In <a href="https://www.primevideo.com/detail/Homecoming/0JP2LF83DMAYFDREZ20GAG2DAR/">Homecoming</a>, returning war veterans are offered treatment at the Homecoming Transitional Support Centre, which promises to help them adjust to daily life. However, unbeknown to them, they are being administered an experimental medicine designed to remove their traumatic war memories. The object of this program, which is being funded by the military, is not to return the men to daily life but to return them to the front as soon as possible.</p>
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<p>In <a href="https://binge.com.au/shows/show-i-may-destroy-you!7651">I May Destroy You</a>, the amnesia is more specific and closer to common experience. A young woman is slipped a sedative at a bar and is sexually assaulted. But, because she can remember nothing of the evening, the police are unable to take the matter very far. The woman is a writer and is struggling to produce her second novel. </p>
<p>Outwardly, she shrugs off her assault and insists that her main priority is finishing her novel, having all but spent the advance she has been given. Yet it soon becomes clear that so long as she cannot remember (the traumatic event), she can neither create nor live her life. In both Homecoming and I May Destroy You, seemingly such different shows, amnesia creates — or makes visible — a split in the central characters that becomes the defining impasse of the plot.</p>
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<p>The amnesia plot is also related to another distinctive premise we see in film and television: the time loop. In this plot, made famous by the film Groundhog Day (1993), a character finds themselves endlessly repeating the same day. Even if, in desperation, they take their own lives, they simply reawaken in the very same morning that they always do. </p>
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<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-pleasure-and-pain-of-cinephilia-what-happened-when-i-watched-groundhog-day-every-day-for-a-year-198668">The pleasure and pain of cinephilia: what happened when I watched Groundhog Day every day for a year</a>
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<p>In the time loop plot, amnesia is experienced not by the central character, but by everybody else. In effect, everyone forgets everything that happened the day before … except the protagonist. This plot outlines a relationship that exists between memory and repetition – a relationship in which only memory can arrest repetition.</p>
<p>The time loop premise has been prominent in recent films, such as the romantic comedy Palm Springs (2020) and science fiction thrillers like Source Code (2011), Edge of Tomorrow (2014) and Doctor Strange (2016). Within streamed serials, the most prominent example is probably <a href="https://www.netflix.com/au/title/80211627">Russian Doll</a> (2019–22), in which a woman living in bohemian New York is forced to endlessly repeat a single day. What becomes clear in this show, as indeed was the case in Groundhog Day, is that the repetition is trying to teach the hero something.</p>
<p>In both, Russian Doll and Groundhog Day, the heroes are approaching middle age, but are strangely infantile in their self-absorption and failure to understand their implication in the world. They treat life and the concerns of those around them with cynical indifference. The time loop challenges their cynicism by forcing them to experience, again and again, the grain of a single day.</p>
<p>A variation on the time loop plot can be seen in the show <a href="https://binge.com.au/shows/show-the-rehearsal!16797">The Rehearsal</a> (2022). The premise of this show is that a man named Nathan (played by the show’s creator, Nathan Fielder) has created a service designed to help people deal with an encounter they anticipate will be difficult. </p>
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<p>The service allows them to “rehearse” the event in advance, so that when the real situation arrives they will be prepared. While filmed in the style of a documentary, and seemingly realist in its texture, the show quickly reaches outlandish proportions. </p>
<p>In the first episode, a man has to come clean with a friend to whom he has lied about his level of education, (saying he had an MA when in fact he only had a BA). Because this encounter will take place in a pub, Nathan builds a life-sized replica of this pub in a warehouse and hires a team of extras to play the staff and patrons.</p>
<p>He also hires an actress to covertly study the friend in question, so that the client can rehearse his confession with someone who will mimic her reactions and mannerisms. In this case, repetition is not brought about by a break in reality, but held (however ridiculously) in the frame of reality through the concept of “rehearsal”.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/nathan-fielders-new-comedy-the-rehearsal-will-be-familiar-to-anyone-with-autism-188071">Nathan Fielder's new comedy The Rehearsal will be familiar to anyone with autism</a>
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<h2>Knowing thyself</h2>
<p>Is this kind of conceptual television something that arises with streaming? Or, does conceptual television simply continue a function that was previously undertaken by classic cinema and classic television, or indeed even older art forms such as prose, poetry, drama and the visual arts? Certainly, each of the premises canvased here precedes the digital age. </p>
<p>The split world premise can be traced, for instance, to the theme of the double (doppelgänger), made famous in 19th-century novels like Dostoyevsky’s The Double (1846), Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The amnesia plot was a staple of Hollywood cinema. The time loop plot has been in place since at least the 1990s.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/jekyll-and-hyde-a-tale-of-doubles-disguises-and-our-warring-desires-187173">Jekyll and Hyde: a tale of doubles, disguises, and our warring desires</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Even so, the digital age has seen these plots gain new and sharper inflexions. The split world premise now has a direct correlate in the split that exists between online and offline living. </p>
<p>Amnesia, insofar as it is premised on the loss of memory, now closely echoes the image of memory we know of in computer systems, which can be stored, deleted, transferred and corrupted. The amnesia plot in Homecoming, for instance, is premised on the idea that the experimental drug can locate, select and delete traumatic memories, as if they were independent files.</p>
<p>Repetition is also distinctive of the grammar of the digital age. Looping and sampling is now central to popular music. Even in a more common genre like dystopia we can see the digital age inflecting these plots through the process of gamification. The logic of the game underpins hit dystopian shows like Squid Game (2021) or the zombie drama The Last of Us (2023), which is adapted from a popular videogame of the same name.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/this-freaky-slime-mould-from-hbos-the-last-of-us-isnt-a-fungus-at-all-but-it-is-a-brainless-predator-200271">This freaky slime mould from HBO's The Last of Us isn't a fungus at all – but it is a brainless predator</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Another continuity contemporary streamed content shares with television in the broadcast era is its pedagogical orientation. Broadcast television instructs its viewers in the rules of living. This is most obvious in the lifestyle programming (gardening, renovation, cooking, dancing, travel) that remains a staple of current television.</p>
<p>A little surprisingly, however, the conceptual shows discussed here also involve an element of education. The heroes have all reached a point of arrest or crisis because there is something that they need to learn but cannot. </p>
<p>In the 18th and 19th century, the novel incorporated education as an important element in its structure. Jane Austen’s Emma must learn that life is not a game to be watched, but one she must actually play. The mild scorn and amusement she held for those around her are substituted finally for an acceptance of her social role, which in her world was to marry.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-jane-austens-emma-at-200-51022">Friday essay: Jane Austen's Emma at 200</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574846/original/file-20240212-16-owls0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574846/original/file-20240212-16-owls0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/574846/original/file-20240212-16-owls0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574846/original/file-20240212-16-owls0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574846/original/file-20240212-16-owls0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574846/original/file-20240212-16-owls0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574846/original/file-20240212-16-owls0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/574846/original/file-20240212-16-owls0v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">UWAP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The novel of personal development (the <em>bildungsroman</em>, or coming-of-age novel) finds its continuation in cinema and television. However, what seems to have changed in recent times is that faith has been lost in the possibility of incremental education. Education now comes up against a traumatic impasse or irremediable split. </p>
<p>In conceptual television, this gets mobilised in the premise itself – a split in the world, radical memory loss, entrapment in blind repetition. More hopefully, however, these extreme situations reveal themselves to be new solutions to the ancient injunction to know thyself. </p>
<p>The doubled world offers the hero the chance to meet their other self. The amnesiac finds their excluded memory is the key to their integration, that they must own their trauma. The time loop patiently schools its student in the niceties of living, reiterating their day for them until they get it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222888/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tony Hughes-d'Aeth is the Chair of the UWA Publishing Board and a co-editor of the 'Vignettes' series in which the book Netflicks: Conceptual Television in the Streaming appears.</span></em></p>
From Russian Doll to Severance, a spate of conceptual TV series are rehearsing thought experiments challenging our assumptions about the world.
Tony Hughes-d'Aeth, Professor, Chair of Australian Literature, The University of Western Australia
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/222262
2024-02-22T19:19:08Z
2024-02-22T19:19:08Z
Friday essay: neither a monster nor a saint … Sir Samuel Griffith, Queensland’s violent frontier and the rigours of truth-telling
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576652/original/file-20240220-18-hovvkz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4000%2C2000&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">The Conversation, Pexels, The State Library of Queensland/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>First Nations readers please be advised this article speaks of racially discriminating moments in history, including the distress and death of First Nations people.</em></p>
<p>Social historians – among whom I am happily one – are those utter nuisances of people who adamantly insist on reminding others of all the things they are trying so desperately to forget.</p>
<p>Australian historian Manning Clark, channelling Tolstoy, <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/speaking-out-of-turn-electronic-book-text">once compared them</a> to deaf people who continually keep answering questions that no-one is asking.</p>
<p>Before this new breed of professional troublemaker appeared in the 1960s, Australian History for the majority was a much simpler and more comforting affair. The stray bits of it I picked up at school in the 1950s told of a strictly peaceful, happy land, peppered with heroic pioneers, doughty diggers and colourful swaggies; and overflowing with sheep and sparkling golden nuggets.</p>
<p>Aboriginal peoples, if they were mentioned at all, were way off on the margins somewhere, throwing boomerangs, going walkabout and eating grubs and snakes. In the <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/2014575">most studied Australian history book of this era</a>, edited by Gordon Greenwood, First Nation Peoples literally disappear. They are not in the index, and we are even told by one contributor: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The country was empty […] empty grazing country awaiting occupation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The principal shock here is not just that this was published without intervention but that no-one who reviewed it pulled anyone up for spreading this academic gas-lighting.</p>
<p>Many older readers can perhaps recall that balmy time, so reassuring for white Australians. I know it has never entirely left my consciousness. It was the only world about which we were “publicly instructed”. But it is a far distant place from the one where we are heading in this essay.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/can-more-ethical-histories-be-written-about-early-colonial-expeditions-a-new-project-seeks-to-do-just-that-221974">Can more ethical histories be written about early colonial expeditions? A new project seeks to do just that</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Explanatory lodestars</h2>
<p>The present modish word for the seemingly recent realisation that the Australian story is not all cosy and blameless is <em>truth-telling</em>. In some quarters, this gets presented as a very sudden epiphany. Yet it has a long pedigree. Even while the tortuous frontier process was unfolding in the 19th century, there were always these brave, lone whistle-blowers valiantly attempting to get the truth out and being slammed and shunned for doing so.</p>
<p>With Federation in 1901 and its sense of ebullient nationalism, such voices were gradually stilled and abolished. But then, in the 1960s, with the global burgeoning of decolonisation, desegregation and the diminution of scientific racism following the Holocaust, such voices re-emerged. Even here, in distant, sunny Australia, a small number of us began clearing our throats. Truth-telling was cautiously back on the agenda.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-great-australian-silence-50-years-on-100737">Friday essay: the 'great Australian silence' 50 years on</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>It is hard now to convey how much in the dark we then were on the subject of race. In 1965, I produced for my history honours thesis probably the first extended academic account of an Australian mainland frontier. Every day spent poring over official documents, private manuscripts and old newspapers was startlingly revelatory to me. Virtually everything I was discovering seemed to be so new and beyond the historical pale. It left me feeling exposed and nervous rather than confidently assertive.</p>
<p>At the same time, race relations historian Henry Reynolds was hearing for the first time about Australian frontier struggle, not from within his own land and culture, but as a young teacher, out of Tasmania, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/why-werent-we-told-9780140278422">listening in astonishment to an African public speaker in Hyde Park, London</a>.</p>
<p>So truth-telling stutters and meanders its unstable and episodic course through our past. It encounters the blank stare of denialism especially on subjects to which a tinge of shame is attached. And Queensland in particular, with arguably the most forbidding frontier experience and the most severe convict penal station, is a ripe candidate for such evasion.</p>
<p>In his recent volume, <a href="https://www.newsouthbooks.com.au/books/truth-telling/">Truth-Telling. History, Sovereignty and the Uluru Statement</a>, Reynolds states:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Truth-telling is now more important than ever. What has been a personal choice is now a national imperative […] Denialism is no longer a viable option. A wall of scholarship built by many hands over the last fifty years stands in the way.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, in building the case for “truth-telling”, Reynolds expands on its “critical importance”. It will “weave new stories and make old ones richer and more complex”. These involve the travails of those who became “victims of great wrong”. Complexity, he writes, will have to replace “simple sagas of heroic achievement”, even if this involves a degree of painful iconoclasm. It will likely produce controversy as “the coals of dormant culture wars are fanned back into life”, fundamental reassessments are made, “reputations are called into question” and “status is re-assigned”.</p>
<p>To this tall order of realigning the consensual interpretive framework, I would add, as a professional historian, that, in the process, we should not forget the often slippery and elusive nature of historical truth itself. For, as every working historian knows, historical accuracy is pursued via vigorous empirical attention to detail in extant, relevant documentation. Fact-finding and truth-seeking need to precede any stern truth-telling.</p>
<p>Dependable analysis also entails a careful awareness of the tensions discovered in texts – a difficult grafting process of measuring opposing knowledges. All this, we hope, will lead us closer to a clearer sense of accuracy, balance and probability in grasping the past.</p>
<p>As historians, we are thus more in the business of producing explanation than in issuing clarion calls for action, doling out blame or pursuing the singular advocacy of a pressing cause. We do know that the past’s “other countries” once had definite and ascertainable structures that both constrained and enabled human beliefs, actions and agency. So, we try to seek these out and explain them in the present. But we cannot re-enter and relive them, and thus fully know them.</p>
<p>“We can’t return. We can only look behind from where we came,” <a href="https://www.discogs.com/release/1317681-Joni-Mitchell-Ladies-Of-The-Canyon">as the song goes</a>. This involves caution, as our hindsight vision is necessarily blurred and shifting, as we speculate continuously upon this elusiveness.</p>
<p>History’s truths are never fixed, total and absolute, but remain in a degree of flux, as they get worried over by researchers, especially as new data and ways of seeing come to light. Thus, truth-telling should embody the caution that history’s truths are specifically contingent and incremental ones, always prone to adjustment. They are like explanatory lodestars, leading us along while keeping us out of the swamps of pure fantasy.</p>
<p>It seems helpful to conclude that such research and writing requires balance between a certain degree of commitment and a modicum of discretion. For even as we try to keep going along this road of attempting truth, any single-minded political crusade or victorious forward march should invite some intellectual circumspection, for the bases of historical truth are invariably constructed on quick or shifting sands.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-truth-telling-so-important-our-research-shows-meaningful-reconciliation-cannot-occur-without-it-197685">Why is truth-telling so important? Our research shows meaningful reconciliation cannot occur without it</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Much to agree on</h2>
<p>With this in mind, let us focus once more on the 2021 volume of Reynolds’ Truth-Telling. My own copy’s text is heavily underscored. The margins are peppered with supportive ticks and asterisks and even the occasional “Good!”. Based upon decades of immersion in racial studies myself, I already know that Reynolds and I have much to agree upon.</p>
<p>We both independently began unfolding the dispossession/resistance model of frontier studies in the early 1970s. We have written on similar themes and reviewed each other’s published work, mostly positively, since that time. From the late 1990s, we occupied the same trench against the <a href="https://quadrant.org.au/">Quadrant</a> marauders throughout the farcical, media-driven <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/the-history-wars-paperback-softback">History Wars</a>.</p>
<p>Both bodies of our numerous writings have dealt with the ongoing partnership between excessive race violence and tight-lipped denial of it. Reynolds asks:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] why did the country’s leading post-war historians not notice [frontier violence] at all? Was it oversight or deliberate evasion? How could they think that Australians had been remarkably slow to kill each other, that frontiersmen rarely had to go armed into the outback and [that] we had an inimitably peaceful history … ?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In similar vein, <a href="https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/data/UQ_203563/DU120_G6E83_1999.pdf?Expires=1707198277&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJKNBJ4MJBJNC6NLQ&Signature=FERZMoHT24ScUpPhOicE%7EUrs7U2-VRYdHrjTn3XRpHEk-qrHQNCOj6pT7sioqAvkcjmK3ISMstpHghMCEDa6EizIsK-LuAYCENZBWwgJGskKbHYNyOvc9954UPGIfvbJXimFqGWRgI92mpXYU7tTb8HmFMuUBH8lcw5pIQFKzSVbb0VMod5quZzIYpa9CCnvtOL20hP0b-J6SfXhadbZM7cJeJcwwD-8VeL2ARTxqg1Vmw%7EESCXxSAlNZuxrQKzivDnqIqyuzlxCYttHh7TtsNZPZdYbxiPxwCAX0lB2SkiAP7iUnBCHQjT4%7ErBcj3iBttKCZa6orXyACAdEobtybg__">I wrote</a> in 1999 of finding a “glaring dissonance” between the startling documents I was reading and the published preoccupations of Australia’s premier historians such as Douglas Pike in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13724454-australia">The Quiet Continent</a> or <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/ward-russel-braddock-29606">Russell Ward’s</a> outback of congenial mateship. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It was all […] very much like ‘another country’.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, as I perused Truth-Telling, I was on board with almost everything Reynolds has to say. Especially between pages 184 and 191, where he favourably addresses the statistical accounting of frontier casualties compiled recently <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003015550-6/pale-death-around-footprints-springs-1-assessing-violent-mortality-queensland-frontier-state-private-exterminatory-practices-raymond-evans-robert-%C3%B8rsted-jensen">by Robert Ørsted-Jensen and myself</a>.</p>
<p>This work nullifies prior estimates suggested by Reynolds by a wide margin: that is, our tabulation of over 65,000 Aboriginal frontier mortalities in Queensland opposing Reynolds’ earlier guestimate of 20,000 dead, Australia-wide over a longer timeframe. </p>
<p>Nevertheless, he is good enough to write that our calculations:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] have to be taken very seriously indeed. Once they are widely accepted as they should be, Australian history will never be the same again. It will no longer be possible to hide the bodies or skirt around the violence.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, one can no doubt appreciate how much I am enjoying this book. Even when the focus of blame for horrific slaughter in Queensland begins to descend rather exclusively onto the shoulders of Samuel Griffith, arguably Australia’s premier legal mind and pre-eminent statesman, I remain in interpretive accord, adding my approving marginalia to the text.</p>
<p>Allow me now to zero in more intimately upon Sir Samuel; as I need to explain the process by which my position on his degree of culpability for frontier violence began to change.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/henry-reynolds-australia-was-founded-on-a-hypocrisy-that-haunts-us-to-this-day-101679">Henry Reynolds: Australia was founded on a hypocrisy that haunts us to this day</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘Hands stained with blood?’</h2>
<p>In August 2020, I had been asked by Justice Peter Applegarth to contribute to a <a href="https://www.sclqld.org.au/collections/explore-the-law/past-lectures/2020-selden-society-australia-lecture-program">group Webinar</a> at the Queensland Supreme Court on the <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/griffith-sir-samuel-walker-445">“great man”</a> (twice Queensland Premier, architect of the Australian Constitution and first Chief Justice of the High Court).</p>
<p>This invitation was based not only on my record as a historian but also because both Griffith and I were born in Merthyr Tydfil, South Wales. So, initially my talk was constructed as a bit of a romp, accompanying Griffith back to his hometown in April 1887, with “massed choirs”, a big brass band and a mock-Tudor castle.</p>
<p>Matters grew more serious when Ashley Hay, the then editor of Griffith Review, asked me to broaden that talk into a <a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/griffiths-welsh-odyssey/">more encompassing essay</a> that eventually appeared in their Acts of Reckoning edition of 2022. In undertaking this, I began to think more comprehensively about Griffith in that 1880s era and the class and ethnic dimensions of both Wales and Queensland as colonial entities.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=745&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576428/original/file-20240219-21-42nfsl.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=936&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sir Samuel Griffith circa 1890.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Queensland_State_Archives_3064_Portrait_of_The_Honourable_Sir_Samuel_Walker_Griffith_Premier_of_Queensland_c_1890.png">Queensland State Archives/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Griffith did not emerge looking too splendidly from that original research foray. His 1888 election campaign had helped excite extreme anti-Chinese agitation, though not as vehemently as his successful opponent, Thomas McIlwraith. Several years later, as premier, he helped engineer a crushing of the great Shearers’ Strike of 1891. </p>
<p>Also in 1891, he had not acquitted himself well when ambushed by a Melbourne journalist on the matter of racial outrages in North Queensland.</p>
<p>Two Presbyterian scholars touring the North had returned with a damning report of race relations there. As stated by one of the investigators, Professor Rintoul, it “threw a ghastly light upon […] deeds of lust, reprisal and doom”.</p>
<p>Apparently caught unawares, Griffith had ducked and parried in a less than convincing manner by trying to claim that such yarns were more than 20 years old.</p>
<p>In a stinging and detailed reply letter, Rintoul rebuked Griffith – who, he said, was someone he had regarded in high “esteem” for his vital interest “in the cause of the kanaka and aborigines and of all oppressed people” – for the dismissive sarcasm of his response. He challenged Griffith to further public debate – but Griffith did not respond.</p>
<p>So, I thought: Here we have Rintoul’s contemporary broadside of 1891 alongside Reynolds’ 2021 charges that Griffith must be “guilty of what, after 1945, came to be known as crimes against humanity”.</p>
<p>Furthermore, in the same 2022 issue of Griffith Review that contained my essay, Reynolds <a href="https://www.griffithreview.com/articles/on-the-queensland-frontier/">had sharpened his attack</a> by declaring rhetorically that Sir Samuel’s “neatly manicured lawyers’ hands were deeply stained with the blood of murdered men, women and children”.</p>
<p>This set me wondering … There must be actual evidence in the primary sources that would enhance this damning case, rendering it not only supportable but probably cementing it. As a troublesome social historian, my bloodhound instincts for deeper empirical research were now aroused. Just how guilty was Griffith among his contemporaries of frontier violence? What body of imprecating evidence could be amassed?</p>
<p>At this point, I felt particularly scathing towards something Griffith had said to the Melbourne Daily Telegraph reporter in January 1891. When challenged over what was he “doing about the blacks”, he had shot back: “What I should be doing”, quickly adding “at all events, few had taken more interest in the welfare of the native population than I have”.</p>
<p>Influenced by Rintoul and Reynolds, I mentally scoffed at this defensive self-assessment. I was intent on finding all the historical data that would nail him. But, as indicated above, historical truth can be shifting and slippery. It does not always take you where you expect it should go.</p>
<p>Truth-telling requires careful truth-finding to precede it. And for such truth-seeking to work, the evidence should lead the way, with the researcher in train – not yet quite knowing the outcome. For one should not start research certain of a destination – one ideally begins in ignorance and curiosity. </p>
<p>If the opposite is the case, one is simply satisfying a confirmation bias – the contrived endorsement of a preconception.</p>
<h2>An absence</h2>
<p>I began the research odyssey conventionally enough, with a scan of all the secondary Queensland frontier histories for any evidence of Griffith as pre-eminent culprit. To my surprise, he was absent from virtually all the indexes. </p>
<p>It reminded me of Greenwood’s volume and the invisible Aborigines. Not only did Griffith receive no condemnatory mentions – but he also largely received no mentions at all. In the published literature, he didn’t appear to play much of a role.</p>
<p>Throughout my own published writings on Aboriginal dispossession, Griffith does not figure until 2022. And in the most comprehensive recent overviews on frontier violence by <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Timothy-Bottoms-Conspiracy-of-Silence-9781743313824">Timothy Bottoms</a>, <a href="https://boolarongpress.com.au/product/queenslands-frontier-wars/">Jack Drake</a> and <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/3288918">Tony Roberts</a>, who together give the reader the story in startling and comprehensive detail (over 1,100 pages of text) they find no need to provide him with a single mention. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576429/original/file-20240219-18-khsyt.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Allen & Unwin</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Since my essay was written, David Marr’s massive biographical journey, Killing for Country and Wal Walker’s richly documented study of pastoral occupation, <a href="https://www.squattersgrab.com.au/">The Squatters’ Grab</a> similarly have nothing to say about Griffith either.</p>
<p>This also applies to Reynolds’ own voluminous frontier work. In over a score of texts produced across many decades, Griffith is mentioned just once, uttering a <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1791303">single enigmatic sentence</a> he will repeat in Truth-Telling, while being confusingly cast as a “young Brisbane lawyer” in 1880. It is the only time Griffith receives a speaking part in his recent, general indictment.</p>
<p>So … curiouser and curiouser, I thought … </p>
<p>Especially as the three texts that do give some significant mentions to Griffith and the frontier tend to cast him in a positive rather than a negative light. These volumes are Noel Loos’ highly referenced <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/28747">Invasion and Resistance</a>, Gordon Reid’s expansive <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/3584281">That Unhappy Race</a> and Robert Ørsted-Jensen’s closely argued <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/5778269">Frontier History Revisited</a>. </p>
<p>Most recently, in 2023, <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1031461X.2023.2208585">historians Mark Finnane and Jonathan Richards have contributed more case studies</a>, demonstrating Griffith’s belief that “violence against Aboriginal British subjects was not acceptable and should be dealt with [with] severity”.</p>
<p>By all these researchers, he is shown as intent on pursuing progressive reform and legal balance in face of a colonial society, mainly calling for “blood and yet more blood” – a culture insisting furiously that whites should never be punished for harming or killing non-whites. For this was the nature of the socio-cultural order that anyone considering mitigative reform was up against.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/i-cant-argue-away-the-shame-frontier-violence-and-family-history-converge-in-david-marrs-harrowing-and-important-new-book-215050">'I can't argue away the shame': frontier violence and family history converge in David Marr's harrowing and important new book</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The documentary records</h2>
<p>So, did Griffith pursue frontier reform? Did he rather plot and perpetuate “crimes against humanity” – or even, as lawyer Tony McAvoy, <a href="https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/the-palgrave-handbook-on-rethinking-colonial-commemorations">has recently claimed</a>, “war crimes”? – or, at best, did he do nothing to stop them? The hard data, however, was now starting to pull me in the opposite direction, especially as the bumpy research ride moved up a gear <a href="https://researchers.mq.edu.au/en/publications/reason-and-reckoning-provocations-and-conversations-about-re-imag">into the documentary records</a>.</p>
<p>The logical starting point here were the primary sources of the Colonial Secretary’s Office, for this mega-department was directly responsible for the operations of the Queensland Native Police – the main frontier destroyers. </p>
<p>From 1859 until 1897, there were 18 local politicians ostensibly running the Native Police force as Colonial Secretaries across 22 terms of office. A dozen – or two-thirds – of these men were also leading pastoralists in whose immediate economic interests the force operated.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/our-mapping-project-shows-how-extensive-frontier-violence-was-in-queensland-this-is-why-truth-telling-matters-216726">Our mapping project shows how extensive frontier violence was in Queensland. This is why truth-telling matters</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/5AIqN_-1Dpk?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>Serving as Colonial Secretary for around two years and four months between November 1883 and April 1886, Griffith had the sixth longest incumbency in the role. Prior to this, the two most enduring Colonial Secretaries, Robert Herbert and Arthur Palmer, had overseen 15 years’ service, from the early 1860s to the early 1880s, when racial violence was at its height. They both had large squatting interests and were <a href="https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/1890325/Samuel-Griffith-Essay-Dec2024.pdf">the force’s greatest apologists</a>.</p>
<p>Griffith held the office when the frontier was radically contracting into the far northern Cape and the outlying lands of the Gulf of Carpentaria. These remote places were both scenes of acutely continuing frontier violence; and Griffith, while Colonial Secretary, officially oversaw all of this – at least nominally.</p>
<p>I suggest “nominally” here, for, as archaeologist and historian Michael Slack points out, regarding the Gulf Country, it was local pastoralists, acting privately, then more formally as Justices of the Peace, who “influenced and ultimately controlled the agenda” of the distant Native Police rather than “a centralised government” in faraway Brisbane. As he argues:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The vast distance separating Western Burke and the […] government in Brisbane, although immense in terms of physical distance, was even greater in terms of authority […] the frontier territory was run on a largely autonomous basis, firstly by the pastoralists and then by their own bureaucratic constructions [ie the JPs, meting out racial ‘justice’]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The same, more or less, might be said of far Cape York. As Queensland reached its fullest dimensions by the 1880s – around two-thirds the size of Europe – its unwieldy size made it increasingly difficult to oversee, service and control administratively. A tendency towards regional excess in <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/3796249">the process of land seizure prevailed</a>.</p>
<p>Yet, if we closed off the analysis at this point, we leave Griffith, as Colonial Secretary, politically responsible for frontier warfare during mainly 1884 and 1885. Reynolds <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/56883944">writes that</a> while in office he did “little” or “nothing” to assuage the bloodshed and “took no action to protect Aboriginal rights […]”</p>
<p>This led me to ask: Did he really do “nothing”? Or if, rather, he only did “little”, what exactly does “little” mean? Is this to be seen in hindsight, employing modern expectations and looking back with judgmental frowns … Or is “little” to be weighed in the context of his time and place – in comparison and contrast with his contemporary political officeholders? How does one therefore quantify “little” within its immediate historical circumstances?</p>
<h2>‘Altogether averse to the Native Police’</h2>
<p>So, I started examining Griffith’s procedures in that office as forensically as the records would allow. The results continued to surprise me, as they may now surprise you. The specifics of this are presented in some detail in <a href="https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/1890325/Samuel-Griffith-Essay-Dec2024.pdf">my recent pamphlet, Samuel Griffith and Queensland’s “War of Extermination”</a>. I shall merely summarise them here. </p>
<p>Basically, contingent with Griffith’s considerable raft of reforms over the oppressive Melanesian labour trade in the 1880s, he was attempting to forward local remedies in domestic “native policy”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=423&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576643/original/file-20240220-27-e33uox.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=532&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kanaka workers photographed on a sugarcane plantation with the overseer at the back of the group. ca. 1890. Cairns.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackbirding#/media/File:Groupe_de_Kanakas_dans_une_exploitation_de_canne_%C3%A0_sucre_du_Queensland.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-slave-state-how-blackbirding-in-colonial-australia-created-a-legacy-of-racism-187782">Friday essay: a slave state - how blackbirding in colonial Australia created a legacy of racism</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This begins soon after he became Colonial Secretary in late 1883 with moves to prosecute individual white employers of Aboriginal labour in the shameful frontier maritime industries. </p>
<p>This was followed in July 1884 with “the first attempt” to introduce protective legislation for Aboriginal workers, then exploited as quasi-slaves – The Native Labourers Protection Act. Though passed into law, the Bill was <a href="https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/1890325/Samuel-Griffith-Essay-Dec2024.pdf">emasculated by the pastoral and planter lobby</a> in the Legislative Council.</p>
<p>Concurrently, The Oaths Act Amendment Act was forwarded, allowing First Nation peoples, for virtually the first time, the right to present their evidence in a colonial court of law. Queensland was the last Australian colony to concede this; and Griffith here completed a process he had set in train while Attorney General in 1876. This reduced Aboriginal people’s vulnerability at law, though it did not, of course, obliterate it.</p>
<p>Then, following a much-publicised massacre of fringe-dwelling Aborigines at Irvinebank, inland from Herberton, in October 1884, Griffith began tentative moves against the existing Native Police system. Murder trials were instituted against the white commanding officer, Sub-Inspector William Nichols and the seven implicated Aboriginal troopers.</p>
<p>To Griffith’s disappointment and anger, the vagaries of local white “justice” thwarted the initiative. As a prosecuting attorney, however, he was by now used to this outcome. While Attorney General in the 1870’s, he had unsuccessfully tried to pursue four other cases of serious criminal intent against Native Police officers. He was the first such Queensland official to attempt this. </p>
<p>Such forays in 1875-76 and 1884 were the only efforts to bring a balanced sense of justice to bear upon the Native Police. As a result, officers and troopers were dismissed, though not convicted.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-unearthing-queenslands-native-police-camps-gives-us-a-window-onto-colonial-violence-100814">How unearthing Queensland's 'native police' camps gives us a window onto colonial violence</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Following the failed Irvinebank trials of October-November 1884, Griffith terminated the responsible Native Police camp (at – excuse the name – Nigger Creek), replacing it with a conventional police station. This led on, during 1885, to a new policy, developed by Griffith in coordination with his Police Commissioner: a measured implementation of what was termed “complete substitution”.</p>
<p>It would have been tactically fatal to eliminate the Native Police in one fell swoop. Several years earlier, while in Opposition in 1880, Griffith had played a leading role – alongside John Douglas, the Parliamentary Opposition Leader – in pushing for a Royal Commission into the force. This had failed in Parliament on the votes by a considerable margin. In 1885, the outcry and backlash against sudden termination would probably have outshouted the furore in 1884 when Griffith tried to have two convicted white murderers executed for killing Pacific Islanders.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, by mid-1885, Griffith was asserting, both privately and publicly, that he was “altogether averse to the Native Police” and telling Parliament he wanted “to abolish [them] […] altogether”. As I acknowledge <a href="https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0028/1890325/Samuel-Griffith-Essay-Dec2024.pdf">in my essay</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is crucial to recognise that […] Griffith was not simply uttering vague phrases, regretting frontier behaviour without any accompanying action. Reynolds is simply mistaken on this. Being tactically astute is not the same as doing [“little” or] “nothing”. Given the clearly exterminatory cast of much of Queensland society […] it would have been politically futile and probably suicidal to have faced colonial electors with the force’s sudden, immediate abolition.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576431/original/file-20240219-16-s9jkjb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Drawing by Aboriginal boy Oscar of Native Police operation circa 1897 near Camooweal.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oscarnativepolice.jpg">National Library of Australia/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>So, between them, Griffith and Police Commissioner David Seymour advanced a more gradual policy. This envisaged that by replacing Native Police encampments with conventional police stations and substituting the illegal, quasi-military armed white officer/native trooper detachments with regular police sergeants, senior constables and one or two unarmed Aboriginal trackers, the original force could be progressively phased out. The process began at Irvinebank, Watsonville and Herberton during 1885.</p>
<p>By the end of the 1880s, there had been around a 65% reduction in Native Police detachments, replaced by some 19 regular bush police stations over much of the North. As historian, Noel Loos observes, Commissioner Seymour, “with Griffith’s instructions and no alternatives” carried the policy of gradualism forward, despite protests from local whites.</p>
<p>In late September 1885, Griffith told Parliament:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The practice of black police making raids through the country as in times past would not be allowed any longer […] It would be intended to assimilate the system as nearly as possible to that of the white police.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To my reading, this is clear evidence of significant policy change. Though Griffith did not succeed in abolishing the force outright, neither did anyone else. It simply faded away by gradual attrition and the frayed endings of the long frontier process. The last camp at Coen was not terminated until 1929.</p>
<p>Furthermore, from around 1883 (sometimes due to local initiatives) ration distribution centres were slowly established, often adjacent to some of the new police stations. The authorities were now observing that many Aboriginal raids were motivated by acute tribal starvation. So, ration stations, where bullocks were killed for meat, and tea, flour, tobacco and sugar sometimes provided, were opened first at Thornborough, Union Camp, Mitchell River, Northcote and Atherton.</p>
<p>Simultaneously, the Griffith regime began encouraging missionary enterprise from 1885 across Cape York, first by Lutherans and later by Presbyterians and Anglicans. These provided sanctuary against frontier excesses and doubtlessly saved lives. As historian, Jasper Ludewig concludes, it was the Griffith ministry:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>[…] which gazetted Aboriginal reserves and provided support for missionary measures, including […] access, cash subsidies, rations and limited building supplies. The State’s administration of missionary work fell to the Colonial Secretary’s Department, which received and processed all […] correspondence.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Within several years, he finds, “Christian missions were fast becoming the solution of choice”. By Federation, “close to thirty mission stations had been opened throughout Cape York and the Torres Strait”.</p>
<h2>On the side of reform</h2>
<p>In sum, what does this demonstrate? It hardly seems to equate with the actions of a leader, singled out from the rest, as pre-eminently guilty of “crimes against humanity” – his hands awash with blood. “Is any other conclusion possible?” Truth-Telling rhetorically asks. Well yes, I think there is.</p>
<p>Indeed, we might cautiously conclude that this tranche of changes represents unique and piecemeal, though progressive and expanding, policy measures. The primary research task discloses:</p>
<ul>
<li>A radical attrition of Native Police services</li>
<li>Implementation of normalised policing</li>
<li>Novel introduction of Aboriginal court testimony</li>
<li>An attempted initiative to rein in the frontier “black-birding” of Aboriginal workers</li>
<li>Prosecution of white frontier crimes inflicted on First Nation peoples</li>
<li>The burgeoning of missionary enterprise across the North</li>
</ul>
<p>So deeper primary investigation, to my increasing surprise, had altered my initial conceptualisation. Official efforts from 1883-86 add up to more than rhetorical virtue-signalling. They mark a degree of reformation from <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/4058607">outright exterminatory policies</a> employing Snider and Martini-Henry rifles. Has a well-oiled blame crusade simply trampled over all this in a rush towards a sensational, disparaging verdict?</p>
<p>However bad things were in this era – and they were definitely atrocious – liability cannot be laid on any one individual’s shoulders, whomever he may be. Griffith’s reform attempts confronted an implacable socio-cultural order in Northern and Western Queensland – and the challenge often outstripped the response. </p>
<p>A travelling press reporter there in 1880 found one colonist after another, including “highly educated persons […] openly professing the doctrine of extermination”. They look upon “any talk of humanity [or] philanthropy”, he wrote, “as the mere sentimental language of those who do not know what it is to live” there.</p>
<p>The remainder of Queensland society was not much different. A former Minister of Justice, John Malbon Thompson despairingly told Scottish Catholic missionary, Duncan McNab that year that, “Nineteen-twentieths of the population care nothing about [the Blacks] and the other twentieth regard them as a nuisance to be got rid of”.</p>
<p>Outspoken frontier journalist, Carl Feilberg concurrently agreed that while a certain minority “acted with barbarity”, the vast majority did nothing, as a small minority actively protested.</p>
<p>That majority of enablers were as guilty as the frontier killers, Feilberg reasoned: “[They] condone and share the crime”.</p>
<h2>A culture of genocidal intent</h2>
<p>What we observe here is a culture of genocidal intent and anyone hoping to confront it was certainly going to have his hands full. Frontier reform was never mentioned at election time – it was a political minefield. So, Queensland electorates had to be slowly cajoled into accepting any redemptive moves. Reform attempts needed to proceed with extreme caution, in an incremental and almost unobserved fashion.</p>
<p>Thus, positive initiatives by Griffith, during his relatively short tenure in the key office of Colonial Secretary, were arguably <em>bold</em> ones in the context of their time and place:</p>
<p>What modern hindsight may condemn as doing “little” or “nothing” may equally be conceived as doing rather <em>much</em> within what was effectively operating as a genocidal culture, where widespread extra-judicial killing was a permissible norm.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-killed-by-natives-the-stories-and-violent-reprisals-behind-some-of-australias-settler-memorials-198981">Friday essay: 'killed by Natives'. The stories – and violent reprisals – behind some of Australia's settler memorials</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>So, by this point, I had dramatically flipped interpretively and was now asking: Was it in any way fair or reasonable to single out Griffith as principal miscreant and hold him – perhaps due to his enviable accomplishments and gifted, tall poppy status – as a scapegoat, made accountable for the crimes and excesses of an entire society, and thereby isolated for blame?</p>
<p>As Charlie Campbell states in his study, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/12538648">Scapegoat. A History of Blaming Others</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The public is most easily appeased by the creation of a scapegoat. As always, the more serious the crisis, the more important the fall guy […] The urge to blame is sometimes incited in us […] The notion of collective responsibility is one that we prefer not to engage with […]</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So, “collective responsibility” is the much harder pill to swallow. Pointing the finger at Griffith, Reynolds, in Truth-Telling declares:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>He did little to stop the killing. How then should history remember him? Will his high reputation survive the rigours of truth-telling? Perhaps, more to the point, should it survive?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet rigorous truth-seeking shows us that among almost a score of Colonial Secretaries and a dozen or so attorney generals, Griffith appears to be the only one ever attempting anything practically mitigative while holding office. </p>
<p>While I had originally scoffed at Griffith’s defensive claim in 1891 that few had “taken more interest in the welfare of the native population” than himself, I was now beginning to realise he was probably right. He had done more on the side of reform. It is not, of course, a broad claim to make, given that virtually all his Queensland political and legal contemporaries had either done nothing positive for Aboriginal welfare or made the situation worse.</p>
<h2>Frontier perpetrators</h2>
<p>Griffith appears alone among those directly responsible for the Native Police as well as all those overseeing the law in attempting anything even mildly reformative in the face of chronic frontier ruination and disorder – as well as the widespread public approval of it. </p>
<p>So, must he be singled out as some pre-eminent culprit, allegedly with “blood on his hands” for perpetuating “crimes against humanity” by doing so “little”? Is it helpful to trash a high-level historical reputation in this way in order to watch how spectacularly and far a tall “fall guy” might fall?</p>
<p>Feilberg wrote in 1880 that it was Queensland’s hands, in general, that were “foully bestrained [sic] with blood” – and it is clear there was blood on so many hands in the colony. Over many decades it had been a virtual free-for-all, with no effective legal redress. </p>
<p>A register of the known names of frontier perpetrators, and those in politics and law who had abetted them, as well as all those in whose direct economic interest the brutality and killing had occurred, would be an extremely long one.</p>
<p>There are many such names. Here are some thumb-nail sketches of just a few who might precede Griffith in any compilation of indictments:</p>
<p><strong>William Forster</strong>, <a href="https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/forster-william-3553">Premier of New South Wales in 1859</a> who bequeathed the Native Police to the new colony. Historian, Wal Walker typifies him as “a most […] vindictive hater of Indigenous Australians”. </p>
<p>As a squatter in the Burnett district from 1848, he had taken up 64,000 acres of Aboriginal lands. In 1849 and 1850, he led reprisal raids against Taribiland and Gurang peoples near Bingara and at Paddy’s Island, heading settler armies of up to 100 mounted whites, allegedly killing hundreds of Aboriginal men, women and children.</p>
<p><strong>George Bowen</strong>, Queensland’s first Governor, ignoring official instructions that Aborigines were British subjects, under protection of the Crown, while <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/the-secret-war-a-true-history-of-queenslands-native-police">re-defining his official role</a> as extending “border warfare […] carried out under some control on the part of the government” against “hostile savages’ as his proud "contribution towards the general defence of the Empire”.</p>
<p><strong>Robert Herbert</strong>: The first and longest continually serving Colonial Secretary, known as the Native Police’s staunchest friend. He wrote of Aborigines officially as “criminals”, “cannibals” and “very dangerous savages, deficient in intellect”. </p>
<p>He looked forward to their inevitable extinction. He used Native Police to secure Gugu Badhun territory with violence for his investment syndicate, seizing these lands in the Valley of Lagoons, inland from Cardwell.</p>
<p><strong>David Seymour</strong>: Police Commissioner for 32 years across 16 colonial governments, directly supervising the Native Police and suppressing evidence of their massacres, as he advanced his substantial financial speculations in gold and tin mining, pastoral landholding and timber-getting across the colony.</p>
<p><strong>Robert Ramsey MacKenzie</strong>: Premier and Colonial Secretary in 1866-67. Established a white-washing enquiry in the Native Police while Treasurer in 1861, stacking the board with squatters holding over 3.5 million acres of Aboriginal lands. Himself a mega-pastoralist, leasing 52 runs – later made a baronet. </p>
<p>Before entering the northern regions in 1840, he was involved, along with his brother, in a <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/155840417">mass poisoning</a> of Gringai people at Wattenbahk Station, north-west of Newcastle.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=801&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576439/original/file-20240219-26-4gxcmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Boyd Morehead in 1888.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=Boyd+Morehead+&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image">Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>Boyd Morehead</strong>: <a href="https://adb.anu.edu/biography/morehead-boyd-dunlop-4240/text6845;">Colonial Secretary, 1888 to 1890</a>. His family virtually ran the Scottish Australian investment Company, one of the largest speculators in Queensland pastoral holdings. </p>
<p>He stated in Parliament in 1880 that: “If there were no Aboriginals it would be a very good thing”. “There was not a member in the House”, he claimed, “who did not feel they had to be got out of the way”. This “wretched, mean race […] had to go and go they must […] They mainly got only what they richly deserved”.</p>
<p><strong>Anderson Dawson</strong>: Queensland leader of the short-lived first Labour Government in the world in 1899. He boasted to the Brisbane Worker, as part of his CV as a sterling white man, that in 1886 at the Kimberley gold-rush, he had played his part in what the paper termed a “nigger massacre”. </p>
<p>Historical research claims between 40 and 100 Kitja people were killed. Dawson subsequently became Minister of Defence in the first Federal Labor Government in 1904.</p>
<h2>Beyond individual blame</h2>
<p>I could continue with this listing, but this is probably enough to make the point. I think it is true to say that most readers would not have even heard many of these names before – yet Griffith, the outstanding historical personage, is well known – a big scalp, so to speak, and thus readily targeted.</p>
<p>Like him, however, most of these people have streets, suburbs, towns, districts, electorates, rivers or mountain ranges named after them. Unlike Griffith, though, most of them held wide-scale pastoral interests – interests that the Native Police were defending over extended time-frames against very determined Aboriginal resistance.</p>
<p>So, it would seem that a class/communal explanation for the remorseless dispossession might be a better way to determine causation, motivation and responsibility – in short, a pursuit of a systems analysis of colonialism as a more constructive way of grasping the fundamentals of this history. This can establish the driving rationale and structural underpinnings of occupation, rather than pursuing a singular crusade of individual blame for the manifest theft and violence.</p>
<p>This explanation is at first class-based because it is clearly a dominant minority class sector of, predominantly, pastoralists – but also plantation and mine owners – who were the principal land-takers, dependent initially on Native Police sorties and violent raids by their employees to secure the purloined landed wealth.</p>
<p>Using the excellent compilation work of the late Queensland historian, Bill Thorpe, we find there were over 3000 pastoral run-holders in 1876, contracting to little more than 1000 by Federation. These represented only 1.8% of the colonial or migrant population in the 1870s, down to only 0.2% by the 1900s.</p>
<p>But this tiny sector accounted for most of the privately held landholding in Queensland. Furthermore, in the latter stages, it was mostly foreign owned by corporations and banks operating outside of the colony and State.</p>
<p>These people and organisations – often also at centres of political power – were the direct beneficiaries of profit from the captured lands. The various genocidal processes adopted, publicly and privately, to achieve this were in such people’s immediate material interests.</p>
<p>Communally, most of the white colonial population cooperated, in one way or another, with the seizure and displacement process; and a minority of frontier actors took a leading part in inflicting and perpetuating it, thinking they were “advancing civilization” or “extending the margins of Empire” in so doing. Thus, we might conclude, the colonial takeover was class-based in its ultimate economic interest and communally driven in its comprehensive, destructive thrust.</p>
<p>As David Marr puts it in his recent <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/155840417">Killing for Country</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Australia was fought for in an endless war of little cruel battles […] Nowhere would the occupation […] prove bloodier than here [in Queensland] and no instrument of state [was] as culpable as the Native Police. Slaughter was bricked into the foundations of Queensland.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In mid-1880, a reporter for the Sydney Morning Herald, travelling around North Queensland, wrote these prophetic words:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Those who consent to such things and those who approve of them must look well as to how they will stand in future times with posterity, when the early history of this country comes to be written.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576641/original/file-20240220-30-p3ks18.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Killing for Country cover." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576641/original/file-20240220-30-p3ks18.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/576641/original/file-20240220-30-p3ks18.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576641/original/file-20240220-30-p3ks18.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576641/original/file-20240220-30-p3ks18.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=931&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576641/original/file-20240220-30-p3ks18.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576641/original/file-20240220-30-p3ks18.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/576641/original/file-20240220-30-p3ks18.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1170&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We people here and now are that “posterity” – and it is imperative that any truth-telling we engage in should be well-targeted, balanced and comprehensive. Truth-telling, as Reynolds advises us, is “complex” – and with that I would agree.</p>
<p>Yet my research indicates that Samuel Griffith did not “consent to such things” nor “approve of them”, although he is neither the untarnished hero of this story nor its exceptional villain. And he was not, as Reynolds’ accounts claim, “especially culpable”. Available primary evidence does not appear to bear this out. “That is”, as John Lennon once famously sang, “I think I disagree”.</p>
<p>Griffith is part of and party to – among so many others – the British Imperial/colonial venture that created, for good or ill, present-day Queensland society. As a socio-economic formation and a culture, we have been very slow to accept how utterly that land-taking venture was steeped in bloodshed – and our collective responsibility, historically speaking, for this. </p>
<p>Yet, is it not ironic that the lone public figure who apparently attempted, however inadequately, to challenge the mayhem should now be freighted with the principal blame for it?</p>
<p>Griffith was neither a monster nor a saint. In determining his specific role, it is probably best not to be too certain in mounting clamorous, angry calls for redress, bearing in mind that truth-telling, where history is concerned, can be multi-layered, elusively structured, endlessly surprising and perhaps at times chimerical.</p>
<p>For, even after the rigorous application of exhaustive research, history remains mercurial and subject to change – within reach without falling into one’s final definitive grasp. The “rigours of truth-telling” warn us never to be too sure of the outcome.</p>
<p><em>This article is an edited version of a lecture given last night to the Selden Society for the Supreme Court of Queensland and Griffith University.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/222262/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Raymond Evans has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council. </span></em></p>
Many argue Samuel Griffith, twice Queensland premier and our first chief justice, is guilty of colonial war crimes. Raymond Evans searched for the evidence to nail him but found a different story.
Raymond Evans, Adjunct Professor, Griffith University, Griffith University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/219806
2023-12-21T19:07:42Z
2023-12-21T19:07:42Z
Friday essay: ‘what else should I lose to survive?’ The young writers living – and dying – in Gaza
<blockquote>
<p>Please note that all our dreams are vanished.<br>
I lost my house.<br>
I lost 33 of my family members.<br>
And I’m about to lose Palestine.<br>
What else should I lose to survive?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These are messages sent to me via Facebook Messenger from a 24-year-old Palestinian writer, Abdallah Aljazzar, who, along with more than 2 million other Gazans, is spending his days just trying to survive. </p>
<p>While Gaza is under attack from Israel, Abdallah spends most days trying to secure food for the rest of his family, 30 of whom are living together under the same roof in the southern city of Rafah.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566736/original/file-20231219-27-e1wyi7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A young man hugs his brothers and sisters." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566736/original/file-20231219-27-e1wyi7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566736/original/file-20231219-27-e1wyi7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566736/original/file-20231219-27-e1wyi7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566736/original/file-20231219-27-e1wyi7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566736/original/file-20231219-27-e1wyi7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566736/original/file-20231219-27-e1wyi7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566736/original/file-20231219-27-e1wyi7.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Abdallah with his siblings during this war.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Abdallah Aljazzar</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Abdallah and I were paired together through <a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/">We Are Not Numbers</a>, an online platform that celebrates and sheds light on Palestinian stories by linking mentors around the world with a new generation of Palestinian writers from Gaza, the West Bank and the diaspora. </p>
<p>We Are Not Numbers was founded in 2015 by the American journalist, Pam Bailey, who I met when we both travelled to Gaza in March 2009 with the US feminist grassroots peace organisation, CODEPINK.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-gaza-strip-why-the-history-of-the-densely-populated-enclave-is-key-to-understanding-the-current-conflict-215306">The Gaza Strip − why the history of the densely populated enclave is key to understanding the current conflict</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Bailey enlisted the help of Dr Ramy Abdu, chairman of the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor, (who also provided office space), Refaat Alareer, professor of English literature at Gaza’s Islamic University, (who helped train the students), and Ahmed Alnaouq, a journalist and human rights worker, <a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/ayman_to_israel_a_target_to_me_my_best_friend_and_brother/">whose story</a> about the death of his brother, Ayman, in the 2014 war inspired the project. </p>
<p>To resist the erasure of Palestinian lives, they believed, a more nuanced and personal view of everyday life was needed. It needed to be told by Palestinians in their own words.</p>
<p>After eight years, the project has published more than 1100 stories by 350 contributors with the assistance of 150 mentors. These stories traverse joy and humour, rage and sorrow, covering topics such as everyday life and love under Israeli occupation; loss, grief, and recovery from war; the return of Palestinian prisoners; individual aspirations to become journalists, doctors, astronomers, or musicians, and so much more. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566501/original/file-20231219-25-4ygs6p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566501/original/file-20231219-25-4ygs6p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566501/original/file-20231219-25-4ygs6p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566501/original/file-20231219-25-4ygs6p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566501/original/file-20231219-25-4ygs6p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566501/original/file-20231219-25-4ygs6p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566501/original/file-20231219-25-4ygs6p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566501/original/file-20231219-25-4ygs6p.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Refaat Alareer.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">We are Not Numbers</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Even now, during the current conflict, writers in Gaza are continuing to tell their stories, despite their very real fear that they might die. </p>
<p>In early December, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/dec/08/palestinian-poet-refaat-alareer-killed-in-gaza">one of the project’s founders, Refaat Alareer</a>, was killed in <a href="https://euromedmonitor.org/en/article/6014/Israeli-Strike-on-Refaat-al-Areer-Apparently-Deliberate">an Israeli attack</a>. An acclaimed poet, he died in Gaza City, along with his brother and sister and four of her children.</p>
<h2>‘If I must die’</h2>
<p>Refaat had posted a <a href="https://twitter.com/itranslate123/status/1719701312990830934/photo/1">poem</a> on his X social media account, titled “If I must die” on November 2. Since his death, this poem has been shared thousands of times around the world. He wrote, in part: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>If I must die, <br>
you must live <br>
to tell my story <br></p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BMpk2vynJiQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>I recently watched a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsbEjldJjOw">video of Refaat</a>, a father of six children, speaking to a Ted X audience in Shujaiya, Gaza, about the power of storytelling, about the power of words. He said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I spend most of my time with my children, telling them stories; about them when they were kids, about myself, my mother, my grandmother. And sometimes we make up stories. I invite them to tell the story and to re-tell the story. Sometimes on purpose I start a story while one of the kids is absent, so that I can watch them re-tell the stories to each other, and the results are always amazing.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/YsbEjldJjOw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Refaat, a <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Refaat-Alareer">professor of comparative literature</a>, had published his own writing in places such The New York Times, and edited Gaza Writes Back (2014), an anthology of short stories by young Palestinian writers and co-edited Gaza Unsilenced (2015), a collection of essays, reportage, images, and poetry.</p>
<p>Heartbreakingly, four We are Not Numbers writers have been killed in Gaza during this conflict, so far. According to Israeli officials, around 1,200 Israeli and foreign nationals have been killed in Israel as a result of the Hamas-led attacks on October 7, and according to Palestinian health officials, 20,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza by Israeli forces, and around 300 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank.</p>
<p>On November 24, just before the temporary ceasefire began, <a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/tributes-to-mohammed-zaher-hamo-killed-nov-24-2023/">Mohammed Zaher Hamo</a>, an aspiring journalist, was killed in an Israeli airstrike, along with his father and brothers. In an article published in July, Mohammed described writing the script for, and acting in, a play at the Islamic University in Gaza, and the joy of bringing his family to see his work. The performance was interrupted by an Israeli bombing nearby. He wrote: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>In the blink of an eye, our lives had been turned upside down again […] fears and tears occupy the stage at this time — not art and laughter, as I had hoped.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566497/original/file-20231219-25-ppm00w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566497/original/file-20231219-25-ppm00w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566497/original/file-20231219-25-ppm00w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=341&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566497/original/file-20231219-25-ppm00w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=341&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566497/original/file-20231219-25-ppm00w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=341&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566497/original/file-20231219-25-ppm00w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566497/original/file-20231219-25-ppm00w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566497/original/file-20231219-25-ppm00w.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=428&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Screenshot of a tribute to Mohammed Zaher Hamo on the project website.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">We are Not Numbers.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/yousef-maher-dawas-killed-oct-14-2023/">Yousef Maher Dawas</a>, a student of psychoanalysis, was killed on October 14. Yousef wrote a moving article earlier this year describing how the trees in his family’s orchard – “trees that used to bear the fruit of olives, oranges, clementines, loquat, guavas, lemons and pomegranates” – were destroyed by an Israeli bombing in 2022.</p>
<p><a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/tributes-to-mahmoud-alnaouq-killed-oct-20-2023/">Mahmoud Alnaouq</a>, another brother of the project’s co-founder Ahmed Alnaouq, was killed on October 20th. A talented writer, Mahmoud worked as an outreach officer at the think-tank <a href="https://www.euromesco.net/institute/pal-think-for-strategic-studies/">Pal-Think for Strategic Studies</a>. He had just been given a masters scholarship to study in Australia.</p>
<p>In a <a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/hashem_aljarousha_gazavison_eurovision/">2019 article published on We are Not Numbers</a>, Mahmoud wrote about an aspiring Gazan singer, Hashem. Gaza, said Hashem, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>is not just wars, death and ruin. In Gaza, there are singers, actors, painters and more who want to show you their talents and tell you their stories.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/tributes-to-huda-al-sosi-killed-oct-23-2023/">Huda Al-Sosi</a>, a mother of two and part of the newest cohort of writers in the project, was dedicated to learning the art and craft of writing and studied it passionately. In a tribute to her published on the project website, Huda is described as having “boundless compassion and selflessness [that] left a lasting impact on everyone fortunate enough to cross her path.” </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/10-books-to-help-you-understand-israel-and-palestine-recommended-by-experts-217783">10 books to help you understand Israel and Palestine, recommended by experts</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>White, silver or gold?</h2>
<p>I am an artist who uses expanded documentary techniques – video, photography, sound and writing – to address social and environmental justice issues, such as climate change and the legacy of nuclear testing programs. I have always believed in the capacity of art to reach people in ways that other forms of information may not. </p>
<p>I travelled in and out of Gaza three times in 2009 and had always imagined going back. I had made long-lasting friendships with people there, most of whom have now left to pursue their dreams abroad.</p>
<p>I first got involved in We Are Not Numbers in 2021 and have worked with six different writers as a mentor. I help them shape their stories through spelling, grammar, and structure, but mostly I just support them to document and tell their stories in the ways they know best. </p>
<p>During this conflict, I have been in contact with three writers involved in the project: <a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/contributors/abdallah_al-jazzar/">Abdallah Aljazzar</a>, who grew up in Rafah and studied English language and literature at al-Azhar University. <a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/contributors/habiba-masoud/">Habiba Masood</a>, a medical student from Jabaliya, and <a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/contributors/aya_alghazzawi/">Aya Alghazzawi</a>, an English language teacher for the Palestinian Ministry of Education in Gaza. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566499/original/file-20231219-23-9idy5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566499/original/file-20231219-23-9idy5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566499/original/file-20231219-23-9idy5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566499/original/file-20231219-23-9idy5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566499/original/file-20231219-23-9idy5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=634&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566499/original/file-20231219-23-9idy5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566499/original/file-20231219-23-9idy5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566499/original/file-20231219-23-9idy5l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=796&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Habiba Masood.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">We are Not Numbers</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Last week, Habiba – who is currently sheltering with 26 other people in a small house in Deir Al-Balah, central Gaza – told me, “I feel helpless. I keep thinking about what I could be doing now if I was in my home, in my bed.” </p>
<p>Would it help, I asked her, to imagine a normal day of life if this wasn’t going on?</p>
<p>She responded in a voice message on WhatsApp: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>So, it’s Wednesday and it’s a rainy day in my normal life. I would think about skipping my class, my 8am class, and staying in my bed. My mum would be making she'reya, which is like sweet noodles. It keeps us warm and it’s sweet. I would be lying in my bed with my cat, Taymoor, next to me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Unable to stay in the impossible imagination, Habiba broke into the reality of the situation. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t know what happened to him. We left him in Jabaliya. My fiancé went to our home, and he couldn’t find Taymoor, so I don’t actually know if he is dead or alive, if he’s eating or if he’s hungry. But you can’t feel sad about a cat, when all those humans are being killed.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Habiba described having arguments with her fiancé about what colour they should make their new kitchen: white, silver, or gold. “We won’t have to choose now about the rest of the decorations and the furniture of the house,” she said. </p>
<p>Then she went back to the story: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>After eating she'reya in my bed, I would be so lazy, and my mum would scream at me to go and wash the dishes and help her in tidying up the rest of the house. That’s just a morning in a normal life in Gaza. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Habiba ended by saying: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There is nothing that we look forward to after the war. We just want to live. We don’t know how to live after the war.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>“I am not a number’</h2>
<p>My most recent conversations with Abdallah over the past couple of weeks have been about how he and his family are preparing to resettle – either back in their bombed neighbourhood in Rafah, or through forced exile in the Sinai desert, (<a href="https://www.newarab.com/news/egypts-former-vp-warns-israeli-plan-displace-gazans">many have claimed </a> the Israeli Government is considering the latter move). </p>
<p>In a piece that Abdallah wrote for We are Not Numbers called <a href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/packing-for-exile/">"Packing for exile”</a> he said </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It has been 62 days trying to cope with the war situation. I feel betrayed every time I lose a relative of mine — and so far, 32 members of the Aljazarr family have been killed. I feel that the world does not care about us and that my turn is near.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566495/original/file-20231219-17-ulqzhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A portrait of a young man." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566495/original/file-20231219-17-ulqzhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/566495/original/file-20231219-17-ulqzhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566495/original/file-20231219-17-ulqzhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566495/original/file-20231219-17-ulqzhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566495/original/file-20231219-17-ulqzhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566495/original/file-20231219-17-ulqzhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/566495/original/file-20231219-17-ulqzhm.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Abdallah Aljazzar.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://wearenotnumbers.org/contributors/">We Are Not Numbers</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Aya, meanwhile, dreams of getting a master’s degree.“ I don’t want to die now,” she says. “I am not a number.”</p>
<p>Aya is sheltering in the south, as instructed by Israel. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2081-frames-of-war">Frames of War</a>, American scholar, Judith Butler, asks a central question “who counts as human? Whose lives count as lives? And, finally, what makes for a grievable life?”</p>
<p>How is what is happening now framing some lives as grievable and others as not?</p>
<p>A poem by one of the We Are Not Numbers writers Shahd Safi, called “October 6”, powerfully describes the loss of daily life, the joy of studying literature and the yearning to return to it. It was published on December 3, 2023.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I yearn for a past life,<br>
before the world turned dark.<br></p>
<p>I ache for mornings<br>
when I walked to class,<br>
my book bag hanging<br>
from my shoulder in Al Aqsa University.<br></p>
<p>I mourn the bus ride<br>
from Rafah to Gaza,<br></p>
<p>where my university stood.<br>
I fear it is rubble now.<br>
On the bus, I listened to music,<br>
felt the breeze on my cheeks as I stepped off,<br>
ready to learn again.<br> </p>
<p>I listen for the lectures,<br>
the poetry classes,<br>
the stories by Dr. Ghannam<br>
about Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, all those<br>
who molded the world with words.<br></p>
<p>I try to capture again<br>
the spark in Dr. Junina’s eyes<br>
as he unraveled the mysteries of syntax and grammar<br>
among words that shape me.<br></p>
<p>Among voices along the street,<br>
I hear Dr. Eid’s voice, resonating with the pain of Palestine, his words carrying generations of struggle and resistance.<br></p>
<p>I glimpse again his steady eyes<br>
when he spoke of the Nakba and Naksa, and hope<br>
for a free Palestine.<br></p>
<p>I grieve for the breaks between lectures,<br>
when I wandered the Gaza beach.<br>
Will I feel the sand<br>
under my feet again?<br></p>
<p>I yearn for the car-ride home through the streets of Salah El Deen.<br></p>
<p>I still catch the spark<br>
in my mother’s eyes<br>
that welcomed me home<br>
in Al Jawwazat, a warm hug at the door and lunch on the table.<br></p>
<p>I want the exhaustion<br>
of long hours studying,<br>
not this trudging down shattered streets and standing in line.<br></p>
<p>Can I fall now into a nap,<br>
dive once more<br>
into another world,<br>
and dream, then awaken,<br>
feeling intoxicated and comforted, ready for a new day of work?<br></p>
<p>Where is the fire in my soul
for the worlds within books, the wisdom and solace
and passion I found in them.</p>
<p>I long for dreams of graduating,
of reaching to take a diploma in my hands, not this piece of bread.</p>
<p>Standing on hills of rubble,
I mourn for the person I used to be.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p><em>Correction: This article has been amended to clarify the source of the estimates of the death toll from the October 7 Hamas attack.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/219806/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jesse is a volunteer mentor with We Are Not Numbers. They are a media advisor with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.</span></em></p>
An innovative project pairs young Palestinian writers with overseas mentors. Even now, writers in Gaza are continuing to tell their stories, despite their very real fear that they might die.
Jesse Boylan, Lecturer and PhD student, RMIT University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/213887
2023-11-30T19:03:23Z
2023-11-30T19:03:23Z
Friday essay: can marriage be feminist? – a ‘hopeless romantic’ says no, but a same-sex newlywed says yes
<p>Early in my career as a gender studies scholar, I was asked to give some “expert” commentary on whether it was possible to have a <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/the-rise-of-the-feminist-wedding-20130918-2ty18.html">“feminist” wedding</a>. Without any specific research or personal expertise – never a real barrier in dial-a-quote land – I insisted of course it was possible. I provided a handy list of ways a feminist bride could subvert the dominant wedding paradigm.</p>
<p>Since then, I have been contacted by the media to discuss marriage more than any other topic. This is not surprising: marriage is one of those perennial hot-button topics and guaranteed click bait. </p>
<p>However, apart from <a href="https://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/social-affairs/married-first-sight-can-feminist-be-fan#:%7E:text=Zora%20Simic%3A%20I%20don't,which%20involves%20serious%20couch%20time.">sharing my thoughts</a> on my ambivalent love of the reality television show <a href="https://theconversation.com/married-at-first-sight-a-social-experiment-all-but-guaranteeing-relationship-failure-114070">Married at First Sight</a>, I’ve mostly declined these requests. I just don’t have anything new or interesting to say about marriage – including as a feminist.</p>
<p>I’ve never been married, nor particularly wanted to, apart from some idle daydreaming in the early days of new romance. Even then, the fantasy usually involves eloping. Nor, as the eldest daughter of first-generation European migrants, have I ever been pressured to marry. </p>
<p>My parents tied the knot in a registry office, stopping by a photography studio on the way home, to mark the occasion with a serious photograph in which neither smiled. We were too poor to attend the lavish weddings of friends and relatives in the Balkan community, where nothing less than a brand-new white good was acceptable as a gift.</p>
<p>Among my cohort of Generation X friends, hardly anyone got married – unless it was to help secure a visa for international study and travel. The few weddings I attended in my twenties (what should have been my peak period) were usually conducted in a spirit of semi-irony. (It was the 1990s.) </p>
<p>This is not to say my friends were averse to “settling down”. Most of them have had long relationships – some of them very happy ones – with children and houses and shared assets, the whole shebang. </p>
<p>Since marriage equality was achieved in Australia, I’ve had the great pleasure to attend several queer weddings, each one uniquely delightful and moving. There is perhaps no more generative place to discuss marriage as a social institution than at the wedding reception for two people who grew up believing they would never have access to legal marriage. </p>
<p>For every declaration of “love is love”, another guest matches it with a reflection on homonormativity. The historian in me has wished I could have recorded these conversations, but at the time my priority was getting back to the dancefloor.</p>
<p>At these lovely queer weddings, I am sometimes identified as some kind of spokesperson for feminism. What do I think? Is marriage irredeemably loaded with hetero-patriarchal baggage?</p>
<p>Maybe the champagne is to blame, but what pops into my mind at those moments are more trivial episodes in the long history of “feminism and marriage” – like the intense <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2000/09/07/feminisms-unblushing-bride/a0d72dc5-1c83-4045-ab52-e1e01e1846fb/">media interest</a> following feminist icon <a href="https://theconversation.com/setting-the-record-straight-gloria-steinem-reflects-on-her-legacy-in-my-life-on-the-road-50204">Gloria Steinem</a>’s getting married for the first time at the age of 66, back at the turn of the century. </p>
<p>More recently, we saw former Australian prime minister Julia Gillard retrofit her opposition to marriage equality while in power as some kind of <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-05-16/julia-gillard-same-sex-marriage-feminism-debate/102290962">feminist act</a>, rather than the political manoeuvre it clearly was.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-jilted-lovers-could-once-sue-for-breach-of-promise-did-we-lose-something-in-abolishing-this-law-214840">Friday essay: jilted lovers could once sue for breach of promise – did we lose something in abolishing this law?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Feminism and marriage</h2>
<p>There is, of course, a far deeper and more complex history of feminist thought and activism around marriage, including campaigns for women to acquire or retain their rights to property, paid work and their nationality after getting married. </p>
<p>Some of this history is canvassed in two new books by feminists on marriage. Clementine Ford is avowedly against it, while British feminist Rachael Lennon recently married her now-wife. </p>
<p>Their respective books, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Clementine-Ford-I-Don't-9781761069666/">I Don’t: The Case Against Marriage</a> and <a href="https://www.quarto.com/books/9780711267114/wedded-wife">Wedded Wife: A Feminist History of Marriage</a>, are accessibly written and pitched at a broad audience. Each turn to history, explore popular culture and litter their investigation with personal stories, including their own. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562046/original/file-20231128-27-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562046/original/file-20231128-27-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562046/original/file-20231128-27-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562046/original/file-20231128-27-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562046/original/file-20231128-27-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562046/original/file-20231128-27-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562046/original/file-20231128-27-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562046/original/file-20231128-27-eamw43.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=602&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Clementine Ford insists she is ‘hopelessly romantic’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Nix Cartel/Allen & Unwin</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Lennon and her wife “made the decision to marry alongside the choice to become married”. Her wife wanted recognition as a parent of their children “without jumping through legal hoops and navigating additional paperwork”. Lennon, even (or perhaps especially) after having been a bridesmaid six times, knew she “wanted a public celebration”. </p>
<p>Inevitably, with two women getting married, there were “moments of misunderstanding in florists, venues and dress shops”. Together, writes Lennon, they “shook off some of the patriarchal expectations of marriage – though we still felt them”.</p>
<p>Ford, meanwhile, has never been married, though she’s had long-term relationships, including with the father of her son. As a young adult, she worked in a pub that regularly hosted identikit weddings, or “carbon copy festivals of heterosexuality”, seeding a grim view. </p>
<p>In researching her book, however, Ford is shocked when an ex-boyfriend reminds her she once told him if they ever got married, she’d take his surname. As she was in her early twenties at the time, Ford concedes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It did sound like the kind of bullocks I might have said when I was a newly gestating human and enjoying the feeling of watching myself be in love. I’m sure I would have framed it as progressive at the time, probably preparing to brag about it the same way people do about their alternative weddings.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These days, she rarely goes to weddings as a guest: like her, most of her friends are unmarried.</p>
<h2>From obedience to intimacy</h2>
<p>Lennon and Ford each reference the key text on the topic, historian Stephanie Coontz’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/marriage-a-history-9780143036678">Marriage: A History, From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage</a> (2005). The notion marriage should be based on mutual love and desire, and freely chosen by both parties, is a relatively recent and by no means universal idea – as captured by Coontz’s subtitle.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562048/original/file-20231128-29-2yzmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562048/original/file-20231128-29-2yzmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562048/original/file-20231128-29-2yzmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562048/original/file-20231128-29-2yzmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562048/original/file-20231128-29-2yzmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=752&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562048/original/file-20231128-29-2yzmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562048/original/file-20231128-29-2yzmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562048/original/file-20231128-29-2yzmes.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=945&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rachael L. Lennon.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“Around 200 years ago, most societies around the world saw marriage as simply too important to leave up to the choice of two people”, writes Lennon, drawing on Coontz. These days, Ford writes, “cultures in which marriages are arranged are sneered at, while the women who still come with a price on their head are pitied. We would never diminish love that way, or women!”</p>
<p>It’s a promising line of argument, but only fleetingly developed because Ford, unlike Lennon, resists cross-cultural analysis or examples, including within Australia. Nor does Ford consider how the mainstream success of the Netflix series <a href="https://www.netflix.com/au/title/80244565">Indian Matchmaking</a> has opened up a wider international conversation about arranged marriages.</p>
<p>Lennon identifies a cultural shift from the late 18th century, evident in the life and work of <a href="https://theconversation.com/jane-austen-is-facing-death-by-popularity-and-men-37908">Jane Austen</a>, as she tracks the rise of the notion marriage should ultimately be about love. Austen’s celebrated novels “set a romantic bar in popular culture”, writes Lennon, “but the social and economic pressures on middle-class women to marry are always present”. </p>
<p>On “a cold evening in 1802”, Austen herself, aged 26 and dependent on the relatively modest income of her father, <a href="https://digitalausten.org/node/26">accepted a proposal</a> from family friend Harris Bigg-Wither, only to change her mind the next morning.</p>
<p>By the middle of the 20th century, Lennon continues, “most young people in Britain would not only aspire to be in love with a fiancé but expect to be”. But, as Lennon foregrounds, the history of marriage – particularly as decreed by religion and the law – is also one of exclusions on the basis of class, gender, sexuality, religion, race or disability. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/aZS2KbLAy5Y?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Ford doesn’t consider how the success of Indian Matchmaking has opened a wider international conversation about arranged marriages.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As the idea of marriage for love became more entrenched in the West, so too did the gender binary, the separation of the spheres, colour bars and anti-miscegenation laws. At the same time, European colonial expansion “restricted and homogenised marriage definitions around huge swathes of the world”. </p>
<p>In 1918, the Australian government, building on existing Protection Acts in all states, passed the <a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-53997665/view?partId=nla.obj-53998321#page/n0/mode/1up">Aboriginals Ordinance</a>, restricting marriage between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people under their jurisdiction.</p>
<p>Ford mostly leaves such histories untouched, making the argument that “as a white woman living in Australia, I couldn’t possibly speak for cultures outside of my own or assert expertise that I don’t have”. </p>
<p>Instead, she purposefully focuses on the “experiences of white, middle-class women” because they “have been instrumental in establishing the idea of success in marriage as a sign of economic status and moral value, which in turn upholds hierarchical power within the patriarchal system”. </p>
<p>Possibly aware she may be negatively targeting her core constituency, Ford makes sure at numerous points to emphasise it is “systemic oppression” she wants to combat and criticise, not “personal actions”. “Contrary to what some may think,” insists Ford, “I am quite hopelessly romantic!” (On this note, in her last book <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Clementine-Ford-How-We-Love-9781760877187/">How We Love: Notes on a Life</a>, published in 2021, Ford compellingly argued for an expansive and capacious definition and experience of love.)</p>
<p>The plot and path of marriage gives each author a structure to roughly follow, from proposal to wedding to what happens or could happen next, including divorce. Both point out the “traditional wedding” or “marriage” as we understand it is a recent invention. </p>
<p>Lennon wryly notes history “is not full of men, century after century, popping the question down on one knee in a carefully choreographed performance”. The proposal is a 20th-century invention. For Ford, the most odious forms are the big, flashy public ones. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561756/original/file-20231127-15-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561756/original/file-20231127-15-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561756/original/file-20231127-15-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561756/original/file-20231127-15-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561756/original/file-20231127-15-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561756/original/file-20231127-15-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561756/original/file-20231127-15-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561756/original/file-20231127-15-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The proposal is a 20th-century invention.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jesus Arias/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ford cites the example of her friend Bridget, whose ex-boyfriend proposed while they were a plane crossing the Atlantic: at “their heart, proposals are an act of entrapment, and there’s nothing quite so inescapable as a tin tube 30,000 feet above the ocean”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/hidden-women-of-history-kudnarto-the-kaurna-woman-who-made-south-australian-legal-history-185390">Hidden women of history: Kudnarto, the Kaurna woman who made South Australian legal history</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The first celebrity wedding</h2>
<p>Queen Victoria is described by Ford as one of history’s most successful wedding “influencers”. Fittingly, she features in both books. When she married Prince Albert in a white gown in 1840, she launched a “tradition” of brides wearing white. She also inaugurated the big, expensive and elaborate wedding as the default standard for the aspiring middle classes – and, adds Ford, <a href="https://museumcrush.org/the-art-of-devon-lace-and-how-queen-victoria-revived-a-cottage-industry/">revitalised Britain’s lace industry</a>. </p>
<p>Lennon aptly describes the wedding of Victoria to Albert as “Britain’s first celebrity wedding”. Widely publicised around the world, its influence – via colonialism and the modern press – extended far beyond England itself. </p>
<p>And while Lennon laments the enduring hold that “Queen Victoria’s tiny waist and sexual purity” maintains on the bridal industry in the UK and globally, she also stresses the merging of local traditions and western influences in Vietnam and Japan. In China, India and much of Asia, she points out, “red is the bridal colour of choice”.</p>
<p>The burden of wedding planning, Lennon and Ford agree, continues to fall largely on women – or at least, is expected to. In the run-up to opposite-sex weddings, writes Lennon, “gender looms large, with parties of segregated people coming together to celebrate and prepare”. </p>
<p>Hen nights and stag dos, only a regular feature since the 1960s, have transitioned from “moments of quiet celebration to whole weekends”, perpetuated by a “massive industry telling us to make the most of these moments and opportunities”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561759/original/file-20231127-27-8c0id2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561759/original/file-20231127-27-8c0id2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561759/original/file-20231127-27-8c0id2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561759/original/file-20231127-27-8c0id2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561759/original/file-20231127-27-8c0id2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561759/original/file-20231127-27-8c0id2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561759/original/file-20231127-27-8c0id2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561759/original/file-20231127-27-8c0id2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Hen nights and stag dos have transitioned from ‘moments of quiet celebration to whole weekends’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jonathan Borba/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ford is especially scornful of what she labels the “wedding industrial complex”. Its history includes the highly successful mid-20th-century campaign in the US to revitalise the exploitative diamond industry by <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/02/how-an-ad-campaign-invented-the-diamond-engagement-ring/385376/">rebranding expensive engagement rings</a> as an essential wedding-related expense.</p>
<p>Attentive to how marriage has oppressed women, neither Lennon nor Ford shy away from its worst manifestations and most enduringly sexist features. On this front, Lennon casts a wider net, which takes in child brides and bride kidnapping, to cite just two examples that still occur. </p>
<p>Until not that long ago, a woman lost her entire legal identity when she became a wife. (This is a strong theme for both writers.) The law of <a href="https://www.womenshistory.org/articles/coverture-word-you-probably-dont-know-should">coverture</a> was defined by British judge and Tory politician Sir William Blackstone in the 1760s: “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband”. </p>
<p>With British colonialism, their model of marriage became a major global export, writes Lennon. Ford points out this legacy can be seen everywhere, from “mechanics or tradespeople” who ask to speak to the “man of the house”, through to men who kill their wives and “believe in their hearts that these women belong to them”. </p>
<p>Both draw their reader’s attention to how long it took to get rape in marriage recognised by the law – in Australia’s case, into the 1990s. <a href="https://www.auswhn.org.au/blog/marital-rape/">Criminalisation of rape in marriage here</a> started in South Australia (which partially criminalised it) in 1976, with New South Wales the first state or territory to fully criminalise it, and the Northern Territory the last, in 1994.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561757/original/file-20231127-23-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561757/original/file-20231127-23-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561757/original/file-20231127-23-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561757/original/file-20231127-23-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561757/original/file-20231127-23-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561757/original/file-20231127-23-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561757/original/file-20231127-23-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561757/original/file-20231127-23-hfexsr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ford is especially scornful of the ‘wedding industrial complex’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dimitriy Frantsev/Unsplash</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As feminists writing avowedly feminist books about marriage, Lennon and Ford each pay some attention to feminists who came before them. They include <a href="https://theconversation.com/mary-wollstonecraft-an-introduction-to-the-mother-of-first-wave-feminism-201046">Mary Wollstonecraft</a>, who is widely though not uniformly recognised as the first modern feminist. </p>
<p>She was also no fan of marriage, at least as it stood in 1792 when she published <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman-9780141441252">A Vindication on the Rights of Woman</a>, an instant bestseller in England. “If marriage be the cement of society”, wrote Wollstonecraft, “mankind should all be educated after the same model, or the intercourse of the sexes will never deserve the name of fellowship.”</p>
<p>Wollstonecraft subsequently married writer and political theorist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Godwin">William Godwin</a> – who, as a foundational anarchist, lambasted marriage as a “system of fraud” and the “worst of all laws” – after she became pregnant in 1797. This is interpreted by Lennon as evidence even the strongest and most vocal critics were not immune to “the social pressures and punishments set up to induce marriage”. </p>
<p>Ford celebrates Wollstonecraft’s “wild life”, including “multiple lovers out of marriage”, having a child with one of them and marrying “a fellow radical” who “inadvertently destroyed her reputation by publishing a posthumous tribute that described in detail what a cool bitch she was”. </p>
<p>That Wollstonecraft died giving birth to her second daughter (Mary Shelley, author of <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/frankenstein-9780241321645">Frankenstein</a>) is for Ford a “terrible irony”, given her resistance to “the entrapment of marriage and all the risks it posed to women”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-how-women-writers-helped-me-find-my-voice-after-divorce-207424">Friday essay: how women writers helped me find my voice after divorce</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Strikingly different</h2>
<p>Despite their shared features, however, Wedded Wife and I Don’t are strikingly different projects. Lennon, a “bisexual, feminist woman from a working-class background in the UK”, was inspired by her own marriage to her now-wife to ponder the institution’s “problematic inheritance”. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561760/original/file-20231127-19-i5tlpv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561760/original/file-20231127-19-i5tlpv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561760/original/file-20231127-19-i5tlpv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561760/original/file-20231127-19-i5tlpv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561760/original/file-20231127-19-i5tlpv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561760/original/file-20231127-19-i5tlpv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1180&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561760/original/file-20231127-19-i5tlpv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1180&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561760/original/file-20231127-19-i5tlpv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1180&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
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</figure>
<p>A social historian and curator, Lennon deftly blends an “intimate history” centred “on the stories of women and those who challenged gender norms” with a “whistle stop tour of 500 years of modern marriage, within the United Kingdom and beyond”. </p>
<p>At the vanguard of the same-sex marriage revolution, Lennon finds plenty of evidence to support her case that “nothing about marriage is inevitable, natural or fated” – and that it’s perpetually open to adaptation. </p>
<p>While hardly a groundbreaking revelation or conclusion, Lennon impressively backs it up in her jaunty and thoughtful survey of marriage practices across time and place, with special attention to its queer history, legal and otherwise. </p>
<p>And if on occasion, she slips ever-so-slightly into what Helen Fielding’s <a href="https://panmacmillan.com.au/9781743034873/">Bridget Jones</a> (in “singleton” mode) called “smug married”, who can blame her? Lennon’s marriage sounds happy and harmonious, and she mostly resists evangelising for the cause.</p>
<p>Ford, meanwhile, as her title “I Don’t” makes obvious, is having none of it. Marriage is the paradigmatic patriarchal institution and cannot be queered or saved. </p>
<p>“Marriage,” she argues, “entrenches gender inequality between men and women while advertising heteronormative goals to queer people”. She is a “marriage abolitionist” who “cannot in good conscience support an institution that has enslaved women sexually, reproductively, financially and domestically”. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561761/original/file-20231127-19-iidrot.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561761/original/file-20231127-19-iidrot.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561761/original/file-20231127-19-iidrot.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561761/original/file-20231127-19-iidrot.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561761/original/file-20231127-19-iidrot.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561761/original/file-20231127-19-iidrot.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561761/original/file-20231127-19-iidrot.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561761/original/file-20231127-19-iidrot.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
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<p>There is no doubting Ford’s ambition. While aware “you can’t summarise six thousand years of patriarchy in ninety thousand words”, she has a go anyway. The obligatory targets and greatest hits are all there – the Ancients, Christianity, the witch-hunts, the Western legal tradition, Piers Morgan. </p>
<p>So are contemporary examples of dud husbands and fear-mongering misogynist podcasters collapsed into the composite figure of “Kermit McDermit”, as are retro comedians (with “a name like Rocket Dickfingers”) who continue to peddle tired “take my wife” jokes to their receptive audiences. Ford’s contempt for such men is occasionally amusing, but more often tedious. </p>
<p>When dealing with the most challenging material – like accounts of coercive sex and rape in marriage that have been shared with her – Ford is sensitive and suitably outraged. But she stops short of providing the proper treatment such disturbing, yet commonplace phenomena demand. Instead, I Don’t is padded with unnecessary detours and digressions, including a lazy primer on what feminism has been blamed for throughout its history.</p>
<p>I Don’t is an unapologetic polemic, which begs the question of who Ford is trying to persuade. The author of three previous books, including <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Clementine-Ford-Fight-Like-A-Girl-9781760633400/">Fight Like a Girl</a> (2016) and <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Clementine-Ford-Boys-Will-Be-Boys-9781760878627/">Boys Will Be Boys</a> (2018), as well as a podcaster with a strong social media presence, Ford has established a dedicated readership. </p>
<p>Presumably, some of these readers are like me – self-identified feminists who are, at best, indifferent about marriage. Or if they are married, or plan to marry, or want to be married, such a reader is probably already quite aware marriage has historically been a somewhat oppressive and sexist institution – and often still is. </p>
<p>That they want to get married anyway invites more reflection on its appeal beyond blaming popular culture, society and the patriarchy. Maybe Ford and the publishers anticipate some new readers who are curious about “marriage abolition”. It’s hard to tell. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-marriage-modern-anna-kate-blairs-novel-poses-the-question-but-doesnt-answer-it-212346">Is marriage modern? Anna Kate Blair's novel poses the question, but doesn't answer it</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>I Don’t ‘fails to persuade’</h2>
<p>In any case, “marriage abolition”, as advanced by Ford, is a far sketchier proposition than other recent and ongoing feminist mobilisations focused on the abolition of some of society’s most entrenched institutions and structures. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561816/original/file-20231127-21-6k6t4e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561816/original/file-20231127-21-6k6t4e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561816/original/file-20231127-21-6k6t4e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561816/original/file-20231127-21-6k6t4e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561816/original/file-20231127-21-6k6t4e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561816/original/file-20231127-21-6k6t4e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561816/original/file-20231127-21-6k6t4e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/561816/original/file-20231127-21-6k6t4e.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
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<p>For example, feminism aimed at dismantling the carceral system is a growing international movement that includes Australia’s <a href="https://sistersinside.com.au/">Sisters Inside Inc.</a> and is showcased in the bestselling manifesto <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/abolition-feminism-now-9780241543757">Abolition.Feminism.Now</a>. </p>
<p>Books like <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/711-full-surrogacy-now">Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against the Family</a> (2019) and <a href="https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2890-abolish-the-family">Abolish the Family: A Manifesto </a> (2022), both by British scholar, writer and activist Sophie Lewis, invite readers to imagine what a world without the family (as it is currently constituted) would look like. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-equality-compatible-with-the-nuclear-family-alva-gotby-proposes-a-radical-politics-of-friendship-199420">Is equality compatible with the nuclear family? Alva Gotby proposes a radical politics of friendship</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>The best polemics and manifestos dare readers to imagine alternative and better worlds: alas, I Don’t is not one of them.</p>
<p>One major reason I Don’t fails to persuade is that there is a tension between Ford declaring her book the “start of a much bigger conversation” about marriage on the one hand, and as a “profoundly hopeful love letter to women” on the other. </p>
<p>Conversations about marriage are happening all the time – for instance, about <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-ethical-slut-has-been-called-the-bible-of-non-monogamy-but-its-sexual-utopia-is-oversimplified-207425">ethical non-monogamy</a>, living-apart-together, blended families and friendly divorces. But surprisingly few of them appear in Ford’s book. And while plenty of queer theorists share her view that marriage remains fundamentally heteronormative no matter who enters it, she names none of them. </p>
<p>As a genre, polemics defiantly resist the obligations of “balance”. But without the voices of women who, like Lennon and her wife, have reclaimed and reinvented marriage to suit themselves, in I Don’t, Ford runs perilously close to accusing women who decide to get married for whatever reason of false consciousness.</p>
<p>As polemic, the success of I Don’t largely rests on accepting Ford’s two related claims. Firstly, that the “modern woman is told that she needs marriage” and this pressure remains overwhelming. Next, that the stigma of not getting married – of becoming the modern version of a “spinster”, the “Cat Lady” – continues to loom large. </p>
<p>As a “spinster” myself (without any cats), I am part of an ever-increasing cohort of women who will never marry, have never really had any desire to, and have somehow remained largely immune from social pressures – including from the enduring stereotype of the “Cat Lady”. </p>
<p>I embarked on I Don’t sharing most of Ford’s criticisms of marriage. And while I still share them, I also found reading it such an alienating experience that by the end, I was tempted to get married just to prove her wrong.</p>
<p>As an alternative, I would recommend Lennon’s nuanced history, or even better, historian Alecia Simmonds’s recently published <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/courting#:%7E:text=Courting%3A%20An%20Intimate%20History%20of%20Love%20and%20the%20Law&text=In%20packed%20courtrooms%20and%20breathless,of%20love%20and%20the%20law.">Courting: an intimate history of law and the law</a>. In her captivating history of people – most of them women, but not all – who sued their prospective marriage partners for breach of promise, Simmonds audaciously suggests there might be merit in reviving and updating breach of promise in the civil law as a way to advance an ethics of intimacy. </p>
<p>It’s the sort of cleverly developed argument you don’t have to necessarily agree with to be excited by. I just wish there had been more of those arguments in I Don’t.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213887/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Zora Simic does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Zora Simic has never been married, nor wanted to. She assesses two new books about feminism and marriage – Clementine Ford’s polemic against it and Rachael Lennon’s history of its reformation.
Zora Simic, Senior Lecturer, School of Humanities, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/216619
2023-11-23T19:02:22Z
2023-11-23T19:02:22Z
Friday essay: ‘when the facts conflict with the legend’ – how does a biographer balance storytelling with the truth?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/561178/original/file-20231122-26-fufacy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C6720%2C4466&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Ron Lach/Pexels</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In October 1975, at a talk in Wollongong, Frank Moorhouse discussed the first project for which he deliberately undertook archival and historical research – a feature film called <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C532391">Between Wars</a>. This process would become integral to Frank’s work.</p>
<p>It would culminate in his celebrated “Edith trilogy”, which followed the League of Nations (a forerunner of the United Nations) from the 1920s through the 1940s, then the establishment of Canberra as our nation’s “Capitol” in the 1950s, through the fictional Edith Campbell Berry.</p>
<p>In Wollongong, Frank discussed balancing what he called “the historical element” with the “the narrative element”. In his notes for that talk, he wrote: “When the facts conflict with the legend print the legend.”</p>
<p>Since 2015, I have been working on a two-volume <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/frank-moorhouse-strange-paths-9780143786122">biography of Frank Moorhouse</a>. This has involved its own process of archival and historical research. </p>
<p>But biography is a sub-field of history. For a biographer, when the legend conflicts with the facts – print the facts. The problem is that establishing the facts, and disentangling fact from legend, is not as straightforward as one would hope – especially when the subject is a protean figure like Frank Moorhouse. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556508/original/file-20231030-23-11of4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556508/original/file-20231030-23-11of4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556508/original/file-20231030-23-11of4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556508/original/file-20231030-23-11of4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556508/original/file-20231030-23-11of4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556508/original/file-20231030-23-11of4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556508/original/file-20231030-23-11of4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556508/original/file-20231030-23-11of4i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Frank Moorhouse at his Ewenton Street studio, circa 1970s.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When initially considering this project, I realised although I had read many literary biographies, I had never really considered how biographies are written. I took for granted certain aspects of the process, which involve complicated, time-consuming reconstructions. </p>
<p>Take, for example, establishing a seemingly simple timeline. I first pulled together a basic chronology of Frank’s life from various public sources. I found nearly 2,000 articles referencing Frank, which included public statements by and about Frank. There were interviews, reviews and news reports on various activities he was involved in. </p>
<p>Frank gave me a 30-page curriculum vitae. He had also written various pieces of memoir over the years. This allowed me to define the scope of the project. </p>
<p>I also started working through Frank’s archives. The initial plan was to integrate the general outline I had pulled together with the more detailed contents of the archive – to use the outline as a method to organise the archival material, a form of call and response. </p>
<p>This proved to be wrongheaded and embarrassingly naïve. </p>
<p>Increasingly, the archive contradicted both my outline and the public sources. Additional research was required to establish otherwise simple facts and sequences of events. There were two seemingly trivial moments, in particular, that forced me to reconsider nearly everything. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/bringing-edith-home-frank-moorhouses-cold-light-7270">Bringing Edith home: Frank Moorhouse's Cold Light</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘I speak for Whitlam at the Opera House’</h2>
<p>In 1980, Frank edited <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/days-of-wine-and-rage-9781742746562">Days of Wine and Rage</a>, an idiosyncratic anthology of the 1970s. One section opens with a reference to <a href="https://theconversation.com/australian-politics-explainer-gough-whitlams-dismissal-as-prime-minister-74148">Gough Whitlam’s dismissal</a> on November 11, 1975. The second piece is an excerpt from <a href="https://theconversation.com/donald-hornes-lucky-country-and-the-decline-of-the-public-intellectual-80743">Donald Horne</a>’s <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/709947">Death of the Lucky Country</a> (1976), a book about the dismissal and the subsequent federal election on December 13, 1975. </p>
<p>The first piece, however, is by Frank, titled: “I speak for Whitlam at the Opera House”. Frank writes about a lunchtime rally that took place at the Sydney Opera House, with 3,000 people inside and 8,000 people outside. After, at the Journalists’ Club, Frank immediately fell asleep – from “the suppressed tension of it all”.</p>
<p>I wanted to include this anecdote in my biography because of something it illustrated about Frank’s character. He was a very shy person, riddled with anxiety and what he referred to as “verbal impotence”, particularly when speaking to an audience. What is interesting about Frank is that in spite of this, he forced himself to engage publicly, at cost to himself.</p>
<p>The problem? The only corroborating evidence for this incident was a letter Frank wrote to his ex-wife in June 1974 – 18 months before Whitlam’s dismissal. There was no rally at the Opera House following the dismissal, though there was a campaign launch there before the December 1975 election – which Labor lost. </p>
<p>And <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/there-s-a-surefire-way-for-labor-to-lose-the-next-election-20191027-p534km.html">there was such a rally</a> in May 1974, the week of the 1974 federal election – which Labor won; one month before Frank wrote about the event to his ex-wife. The anecdote holds, but the context, and more importantly, the date of the anecdote – and where it fits in the sequence of Frank’s life – is very different. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/jenny-hocking-why-my-battle-for-access-to-the-palace-letters-should-matter-to-all-australians-139738">Jenny Hocking: why my battle for access to the 'Palace letters' should matter to all Australians</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Nude sunbathing and copyright</h2>
<p>This made me reconsider a second trivial anecdote, regarding a landmark copyright case Frank was involved in. In September 1973, a story from one of Frank’s books was photocopied without his permission in the library at the University of New South Wales. </p>
<p>In October 1973, Frank first met with David Catterns and Peter Banki, from the Copyright Council. They had engineered this violation in order to bring a test case before the courts, arguing that copyright holders should be paid for their work being copied and used. </p>
<p>The court case took place between April and May 1974. <em>Moorhouse and Angus & Robertson (Publishers) Pty. Ltd. v. University of New South Wales</em> was part of a larger strategy that eventually led to the establishment of the Copyright Agency Ltd, a not-for-profit that, <a href="https://www.copyright.com.au/about-us/what-we-do/">among other things</a>, collects licensing fees for reusing copyright materials, which it then distributes to copyright holders. </p>
<p>But copyright law is dry and the only sources were court documents and transcripts. I needed something to inject some of Frank’s own personality into the proceedings. </p>
<p>In the 1990s, Frank gave various talks about the case. One anecdote Frank told was about how one day he was reading a book about copyright, while sunbathing naked with a woman friend in the backyard at his Ewenton Street studio, when suddenly his heart started pounding: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I said to My Friend, there in the garden – “my god, intellectual property is about the very nature of existence. Intellectual property is the key to all understanding”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He then explains three approaches to intellectual property – in terms of collective rights, moral rights, and economic rights. </p>
<p>One could be forgiven for placing this anecdote in late 1973 or early 1974. Frank explicitly places it as occurring “one day around the time of Moorhouse v University of NSW”. </p>
<p>But the problem is, in another version of the anecdote, Frank names the book he was reading that day: <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/496385">Copyright in International Relations</a> by M.M. Boguslavsky. This book was published in Australia by the Copyright Council, edited by David Catterns, in 1979 – six years after the start of the copyright case, four years after the High Court’s final judgement in August 1975. </p>
<p>Maybe Frank got the book wrong? Perhaps. But this forced a closer look at 1979. I found a reference in October to a woman friend sunbathing nude at Ewenton Street. The following month Frank attended a symposium, hosted by the Copyright Council, on the question of moral rights. The speakers were Peter Banki and David Catterns. Frank was given a copy of their talks beforehand – with, or without, the Boguslavsky book. </p>
<p>Frank’s reference to moral rights and the expansive claim that “Intellectual property is the key to all understanding” is more consistent with that 1979 event than with the copyright case from years earlier. That case was deliberately narrowed down to the single legal question of “authorisation”.</p>
<p>And so, on balance, that anecdote does not hold, at least not as a point of entry into the 1973–74 copyright case. I omitted it from the biography, on the grounds that when the legend conflicts with the facts – print the facts, even when they are dry.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/books-3-has-revealed-thousands-of-pirated-australian-books-in-the-age-of-ai-is-copyright-law-still-fit-for-purpose-214637">Books 3 has revealed thousands of pirated Australian books. In the age of AI, is copyright law still fit for purpose?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘I find it impossible to remember’</h2>
<p>We are all unreliable narrators of our own lives. Faulty memory and self-deception inflict us all when reflecting on our past. Frank is no exception; statements about his own life should not be taken at face value. This unreliability should be taken into account when weighing such statements. </p>
<p>Perhaps this is enough to account for the errors regarding these two stated moments? Frank himself suggests an additional explanation. </p>
<p>Writers of literary fiction often draw on actual experiences as a starting point for their work, which becomes – filtered through imagination, literary convention and narrative necessity – something very different from that initial experience. Frank had been writing since he was 12 years old, but as he got older he became aware of a peculiar psychological effect: the act of writing fiction distorted his memory in a particular way. </p>
<p>“By incorporating one incident and processing it into fiction I find it impossible to remember how that incident occurred in reality,” he wrote to a friend in 1967. “I have difficulty in remembering now what incidents occurred in my life and what occurred in stories.” </p>
<p>Two years later, aged only 30, he told an adult education class that one of the “losses” a writer “suffers” is the actual “incidents” of one’s own life: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>he loses the accurate memory of how it actually happened once he uses, however loosely, a mood or an incident or a character – the created incident, mood or character is not simply confused by the fiction it is in fact replaced by the fiction.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Could this process also have occurred in balancing “the historical element” of his own life with the “the narrative element” in recounting that life? There are many examples which suggest so. Moreover, as with this distortion of memory when writing fiction, Frank is aware of this process occurring when telling his own life story.</p>
<p>During an address in 1997 – where he first relates the anecdote about nude sunbaking and copyright – Frank opens by outlining his first meeting with David Catterns and Peter Banki. “I see it occurring in the famous Marble Bar where Henry Lawson once drank,” he said. But did it occur in the Marble Bar? </p>
<p>In 1989, Frank gave an earlier talk about the Copyright Agency Ltd, titled: “How CAL got started in the Marble Bar”. There are two versions in the archives. </p>
<p>In the first version, where Catterns and Banki are referred to by their initials, Frank writes: “My first serious meeting with DC and PB was one day back in 1974 in the famous Marble Bar where <a href="https://theconversation.com/henry-lawson-and-judith-wright-were-deaf-but-theyre-rarely-acknowledged-as-disabled-writers-why-does-that-matter-208365">Henry Lawson</a> once drank.” In the second draft Frank keeps this sentence, putting their names in full, but adding in parenthesis: “I say Marble Bar because meetings did occur there, but it is a metaphorical site to dramatise the compression of many conversations over many months in many places.” </p>
<p>Frank admits he does not remember where that first meeting took place, and so he creates a legend which, after being repeated enough times becomes considered as fact.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560643/original/file-20231121-27-7kth9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560643/original/file-20231121-27-7kth9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560643/original/file-20231121-27-7kth9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560643/original/file-20231121-27-7kth9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560643/original/file-20231121-27-7kth9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560643/original/file-20231121-27-7kth9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560643/original/file-20231121-27-7kth9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560643/original/file-20231121-27-7kth9r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Frank Moorhouse once wrote that the Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) started in the Marble Bar, where Henry Lawson once drank – but did it?</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/evarinaldiphotography/">Eva Rinaldi/Flickr</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Likewise, the legend of the 1975 Opera House rally was consecrated in 2005 in a book published by Melbourne University Press, titled: <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/the-dismissal-paperback-softback">The Dismissal: Where were you on November 11, 1975?</a>. Frank wrote one of the pieces, relating how that day he was at lunch with Donald Horne in the staff club at the University of New South Wales when news came in over the radio. </p>
<p>Frank segues into the legend of the rally: “In the following weeks, although I supported no political party, I was invited to speak at a great rally of support for Whitlam at the Sydney Opera House…” He repeats the story from Days of Wine and Rage, including falling asleep at the Journalists’ Club after. </p>
<p>But even here, Frank seems to be aware of the vagaries of memory and narrative, even as he applies this selectively. In a footnote to this 2005 piece, Frank adds a proviso: “Donald and I have different recollections of who was at this lunch. Never trust oral history.” </p>
<p>And never trust the legend.</p>
<h2>Jaded with journalism</h2>
<p>There is a further biographical thread that complicates this matter: a question of intellectual honesty and Frank’s relationship with the media. After graduating from high school, Frank started working as a copy boy, quickly becoming a cadet, then a journalist. </p>
<p>Before he was 21, he was editing a newspaper in Lockhart, New South Wales. He worked off and on as a journalist: for the ABC in the 1960s, The Bulletin in the 1970s, freelance reporting since the 1980s. He maintained his membership of the Australian Journalists Association for decades – hence his falling asleep at the Journalists’ Club in 1974. But he was never entirely comfortable being a journalist. This was a day job, so he could pursue his own writing. </p>
<p>He became jaded with journalism very early on. As a cadet he argued with more seasoned journalists over their use of hyperbole in writing stories, or with their poor treatment of citizens on the court beat. Frank exercised an intellectual honesty that put him at odds with his professional cohort. As an editor in Lockhart, it also put him at odds with the rest of the township. </p>
<p>This was fuelled by Frank’s reading in the history, sociology and psychology of media communications, advertising and publishing industries. In the 1960s, at the Workers Educational Association, Frank developed several courses on these topics, while also writing various longform pieces for the Current Affairs Bulletin (for example, “Now Here is the News…”, 1969). </p>
<p>They were all critical of methods and practices of journalism, obfuscated by what he called “journalistic mystique”. Behind the claims of independence, objectivity and just-the-facts rhetoric were economic and ideological dependencies, partiality, subjective decision-making and simplistic narrative forms that forced the “facts” to fit some pre-determined morality tale. </p>
<p>These functioned in our culture, Frank argued in one course, the same way as <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-why-grown-ups-still-need-fairy-tales-87078">fairy tales</a> and folk stories. </p>
<p>But from 1969 on, following the publication of his first book, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/futility-and-other-animals-9781740511384">Futility and Other Animals</a>, Frank’s relationship to the media shifted, from being a consumer, producer and critic of the news, to being a subject of the news. This only reinforced his previous criticisms. </p>
<p>The first thing that happened was the undermining of his literary fiction’s autonomy. The process of writing stories, where the facts of his experience were replaced by the fiction of his imagination, was collapsed by reviewers and journalists, with the resulting fiction being reported as autobiographical or documentary “fact”. Additional associations were then overlaid. </p>
<p>Perhaps the earliest was Frank’s association with the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Push">Sydney Push</a> – that bohemian subculture that emerged out of the University of Sydney in the 1950s. The influence of the Push became overdetermined and was rarely questioned (consider the hastily written obituaries when Frank died in June 2022). </p>
<p>But many of the intellectual positions Frank held that were shared with the Push – advocating for freedom of expression, for sexual freedom, against censorship – were fully formed in him (and articulated) before he became involved with them. </p>
<p>Many of the short stories he wrote during the 1960s drew on experiences he had in the late 1950s, before he entered this circle. And on the rare occasion he did write about the Push (without naming it as such) – for example, “The American Poet’s Visit” (Southerly, 1968) – it is as satire. In 1963, he wrote a paper criticising this cohort as being “reactionary” and “conservative”.</p>
<p>This should not be overcorrected. The Push was part of the facts of Frank’s life, but only a peripheral part. He spent more time, for example, during the same period, at the <a href="https://ala.asn.au/celebrating-a-century-of-workers-education/">Workers Educational Association</a>, a role he found more intellectually fulfilling and politically relevant – but that was not reported on by the media. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/susan-vargas-hard-joy-explores-the-possibilities-and-limits-of-memoir-182852">Susan Varga's Hard Joy explores the possibilities and limits of memoir</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘Ironic involvement’</h2>
<p>Frank’s association with the Push is best described by his own notion of “ironic involvement”, which he defined in the late 1960s as being “where the person participates in human endeavour but as both an observer and game player”. He explains:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Ironic involvement is a description of a relationship to activity. It may in fact, queerly enough, have some of the outward manifestations or appearances of commitment but the relationship beneath the behaviour is radically and fundamentally different. Contained in the ironic attitude is an almost constant awareness of the briefness and insignificance of life, the absence of sacredness, the futility of effort, the paradoxical, the hypercritical, the betrayals, the pretensions, the deceit, the self-deceit, the mutual exploitation and the cruel and bewildering nature of the human condition.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This also describes Frank’s engagement with the media. He became a media game-player, the public persona, “Frank Moorhouse, writer”. This revealed itself in interviews and in news reports on various activities he was involved in. </p>
<p>There is an important caveat to Frank’s “ironic involvement” with the media, however: his intellectual honesty meant he tried to be as accurate as possible when it came to speaking about broader issues and events, and other people. </p>
<p>It was only when talking about himself, his private life and his past that he was a media game-player: sometimes truthful, sometimes not, sometimes telling an anecdote while suggesting it may not be necessarily so. </p>
<p>Frank used hyperbole and distraction in his personal public statements – the cumulative effect of which is the outline of his public legend – in part to protect himself, to cover his trauma and anxiety. And in part he did it to compartmentalise his life, to negotiate the relationship with his family and distinct groups of friends, lovers and acquaintances. To hide from the public, while in public. This was particularly the case regarding his sexuality and gender identity, and the personal difficulties relating to each. </p>
<p>There is a chronological aspect to this: something he would keep to himself at one stage of his life would be slowly revealed over time, in various guises or to various degrees of disclosure. At each moment, Frank would use his understanding of the media to position himself within its coverage in a way that meant he could advocate for ideas he was interested in, while at the same time controlling how those ideas could be applied to himself. </p>
<h2>The personal and political</h2>
<p>In 1971, for example, Frank wrote an essay responding to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Koedt">Anne Koedt</a>’s 1970 pamphlet, “Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm”. There are three versions of the essay. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560680/original/file-20231121-23-81w5vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560680/original/file-20231121-23-81w5vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560680/original/file-20231121-23-81w5vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560680/original/file-20231121-23-81w5vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560680/original/file-20231121-23-81w5vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=776&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560680/original/file-20231121-23-81w5vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=975&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560680/original/file-20231121-23-81w5vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=975&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560680/original/file-20231121-23-81w5vu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=975&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Moorhouse published three distinct versions of his essay responding to Anne Koedt’s The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The shortest version, containing the core of his argument, was published in The Bulletin. This had a large mainstream audience – and, importantly, it was read by Frank’s family. This version reveals nothing of a personal nature, but still argues for a renegotiation between the sexes, and for a social openness in talking about sexual pleasure and anxieties. </p>
<p>A longer version was published in Thor, an underground student newspaper, circulating among Sydney bohemia. Here Frank admitted – for the first time in a public forum – that he had homosexual relations. But Thor had a smaller, less mainstream, more sympathetic audience. Frank could risk revealing part of himself. </p>
<p>There is a final version, however, that touches more on the confusions of Frank’s gender identity – and this remained unpublished. This was something Frank was not yet ready to disclose socially, even within his own subculture. </p>
<p>In Days of Wine and Rage, Frank reprinted the Thor version, including his personal admissions. But by the mid-1980s he downplayed even this, telling interviewers he had “homosexual streams” in his life, but in the past – when, in reality, it was ever present. Around the same time, in an unpublished interview with a university student, Frank first disclosed his transvestism. </p>
<p>This chronological aspect is also where biography intersects with social history. These prevarications and feints are part of Frank’s negotiation of shifting social conventions and historical moments, from a period when homosexuality was legally prosecuted and socially persecuted, through to a period when homosexuality was decriminalised. </p>
<p>This began federally in 1973, and continued state by state, <a href="https://www.moadoph.gov.au/explore/stories/history/40th-anniversary-of-decriminalisation-of-homosexuality">from South Australia becoming the first state to decriminalise homosexuality</a> in 1975 until <a href="https://www.utas.edu.au/library/companion_to_tasmanian_history/G/Gay%20Law%20Reform.htm">Tasmania became the last in 1997</a>. The social opprobrium slowly shifted, but never entirely lifted. This becomes an active ground on which Frank’s biography unfolds. </p>
<p>In the late 1950s, for example, Frank was a court reporter in Sydney, during a period when the number of arrests and prosecutions in New South Wales was on the rise. His comments on his sexuality in the 1980s were made against the background of a developing HIV/AIDS crisis. In between, in 1964 – seven years before his first public admission regarding homosexuality – a 24-year-old Frank said in a lecture: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There seems to be a large minority engaged in the exploration of sexual relationships outside of the conventions. But the interesting point is that this exploration and its results are being concealed by many of these people. Where this concealment occurs among people who are concerned with freedom of action, freedom of information, and the creation of an open society, then they can be criticised. But I want to be gentle in my criticism because I realise that there are immense personal problems in becoming a sexual radical. The obvious case of extreme difficulty is the homosexual. If he behaves openly he will be persecuted and gaoled.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Decades later, Frank gave his younger self greater sexual awareness, self-confidence, and agency. In his 2005 memoir, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/martini-9781740513616">Martini</a>, Frank recalls how, around the time of his 18th birthday, he began a sexual relationship with an older man. “I had seduced him,” Frank wrote of their first encounter. </p>
<p>It was a point he kept repeating to me, in conversation and correspondence, whenever we discussed this situation: Frank seduced him. But the contemporaneous evidence suggests otherwise, and records Frank’s initial response as being freighted with guilt, disgust and repulsion; his internalising of what in the years to come he would refer to as “a sexually sick society”, one that imposed a narrow conventional morality over its citizens. </p>
<p>Accepting the legend would mean omitting the arduous process by which Frank dealt with his own “immense personal problems in becoming a sexual radical”. The personal denial, confusion and acceptance, and the public denials, obfuscations and tolerance, are necessary parts of the facts of his life. </p>
<p>As much as literary biography intersects with social history, it also intersects with political history. In the introduction to The Dismissal, for example, Jenny Hocking, Whitlam’s biographer, points out that the 1974 federal election has been “ignored and invisible in contemporary reference”, distorting our collective political memory. </p>
<p>She cites Whitlam referring to his second-term win as “the election that never was”. Frank’s misremembering of the Opera House rally that accompanied that election reinforces that broader political amnesia and misunderstanding. </p>
<p>Such seemingly trivial moments – when a particular political rally occurred, or where a meeting took place, or an incident occurred – can have broader ramifications. A biography is constituted by numerous moments such as these, intersecting various larger histories - and that is where its responsibilities lie. </p>
<h2>Putting the legend in its place</h2>
<p>The line from Frank’s 1975 Wollongong talk is a variation of a line from the 1962 Western film, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (directed by John Ford). The James Stewart character had built a political career on the legend that he shot the outlaw Liberty Valance (played by Lee Marvin), even though Valance was actually shot by the John Wayne character. When James Stewart comes clean to a newspaper editor about the story, it is the editor who finally burns the confession, stating: “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/363ZAmQEA84?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, 1962, “When the legend becomes fact…”</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We cannot infer from Frank’s notes what interpretation he gave the line that day in 1975: whether he approved of it, disapproved of it, or whether he used it ironically. But this John Ford film is a dramatic example of what Frank had spent more than 15 years at that point arguing against in public culture. </p>
<p>When I first reconsidered these two moments – the legends of the Opera House rally, and the backyard copyright revelation – I realised I had fallen into the trap at the heart of Frank’s media and cultural criticism. </p>
<p>With my initial outline, pieced together from public sources, I was doing what Frank himself objected to in the methods and procedures of a journalist in making those public sources. I was making the “facts” fit some pre-determined narrative, papering over anything that would contradict the legend. Perhaps, too, I was leaning too heavily on my personal relationship with Frank – but knowing him as a friend is not the same as understanding him as a biographical subject. </p>
<p>These moments forced me to start the project over. I abandoned my initial outline and chapter breakdown, expanding the scope of the project and obliterating my initial writing schedule – with frequent apologies to my publisher. </p>
<p>I put public sources and statements by Frank himself at a critical remove, and went back to the archive, not as a retrospective response to various calls my preconceptions were asking of it, but to provide the set of questions I needed to slowly, gradually find provisional answers for, through a steady, chronological building up of material. </p>
<p>This time the project opened up in far broader and more interesting ways than I had previously considered. It led to the discovery of material previously missed or otherwise unavailable to either the archive or the public record. But this new method also meant making certain omissions, killing other darlings, putting the legend in its place. It required weighing the material according to the vagaries of fact and fiction, memory and deception (including self-deception), intentional or otherwise. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560682/original/file-20231121-4426-5ortev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560682/original/file-20231121-4426-5ortev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/560682/original/file-20231121-4426-5ortev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560682/original/file-20231121-4426-5ortev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560682/original/file-20231121-4426-5ortev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560682/original/file-20231121-4426-5ortev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560682/original/file-20231121-4426-5ortev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/560682/original/file-20231121-4426-5ortev.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
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<p>Biography is about making an argument for a particular account of a person’s life and times, while acknowledging the limitations of doing so, and the doubts inherent in the attempt. </p>
<p>In the conflict between the facts and the legend, the question became not only how to establish the facts, or disentangling fact from legend, but a more interesting and important question: how did the legend of “Frank Moorhouse” develop? And how to incorporate this development into the facts of his life – particularly those facts the legend kept hidden? </p>
<p>Wrestling with this question, I would argue, brings us closer to understanding Frank than if I had focused on just the facts, or just the legend. It also brings us closer to understanding ourselves, and a culture Frank Moorhouse himself felt the need to alternately challenge and hide from, all while producing an extraordinary body of work. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>Matthew Lamb’s biography, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/frank-moorhouse-strange-paths-9780143786122">Frank Moorhouse: Strange Paths</a> (Knopf Australia) will be published on November 28 2023.</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/216619/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Lamb does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Establishing the facts – and disentangling fact from legend – is not always straightforward when it comes to biography. Frank Moorhouse’s biographer unpacks his process.
Matthew Lamb, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, The University of Queensland., The University of Queensland
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/217670
2023-11-16T19:03:43Z
2023-11-16T19:03:43Z
Friday essay: Rai Gaita and the moral power of conversation
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559244/original/file-20231114-26-7uv53k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=14%2C10%2C974%2C648&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: Mark Baker/MUP</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Ever since the University of Melbourne took from us Rai Gaita’s <a href="https://alumni.online.unimelb.edu.au/s/1182/match/wide.aspx?sid=1182&gid=1&pgid=6278&content_id=4306">public lecture series</a> we have been going to Rai’s house in St Kilda to talk. Not regularly, life is too much for that, whenever we can though.</p>
<p>Few people in this world believe more in face-to-face conversations – in speaking with others not when you’ve done your thinking, but in order to think – than Rai. This is how The Wednesday Lectures, first at Australian Catholic University and then at Melbourne University, where we teach in criminology and creative writing respectively, came to be. This belief is a guiding presence in Rai Gaita’s latest book, a collection of his works, <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/justice-and-hope-hardback">Justice and Hope</a>.</p>
<h2>i</h2>
<p><strong>Juliet</strong>: What I would call “the St Kilda conversations” between Maria, Rai and me weren’t trite. We started with some idea of documenting the thoughts or perhaps even methodology of Rai Gaita. We would take a few moments to adjust to arriving and to decide on tea or coffee but before these important decisions had been made the conversation had begun, about war, about justice, about pain, about grief – and one of us would reach for the phone and press record. No such thing as small talk. Everything and everyone is important.</p>
<p>Rai’s idea of the preciousness of every person appears in all his thinking, and in ours almost from the moment we arrive. Why talk of war at all if there is not something inherently wrong, morally if not legally, in the loss of the uniqueness of a person in war, even if that loss is of something in them when they kill?</p>
<p>Rai’s thinking in these conversations moves from Hannah Arendt to Simone Weil to Albert Camus and back to the ideas in the room. He is promiscuous like this. He values the preciousness of their arguments as he does ours. But there is no place for lazy thought. Having slid into some abstraction, I’d be pulled up – but what do you mean by that, he’d say? It was a painful relief. And sometimes I had no answer and I was grateful even to know that.</p>
<p><strong>Maria</strong>: One day last November, nine months into Russia’s war against Ukraine, I came to Rai’s house wanting to talk about shame and denial. How is it families in Russia were telling relatives in Ukraine: we are not bombing you! you’ve been brainwashed! These photos? Staged. These ruins, air-raid alerts? They’re – if they’re real – your Ukro-Nazi forces bombing their own people, congratulations!</p>
<p>I had never known denial in the face of incontrovertible evidence to be so phantasmagorically total. <em>Mothers to their daughters!</em> I no longer understood how to think alone about this war.</p>
<p>Round that time I’d been delivering a final-week lecture in a capstone subject I coordinate, left my notes in the office, had to go off the cuff. “I’ve come to think of my mission as a teacher as helping students develop a capacity to bear shame” – these words fell out of me. </p>
<p>Could people be so afraid of bearing shame they’d do almost anything not to feel it? So we speak about shame. Rai says, “Shame is not just an emotion or an affect, it can be a form of understanding the moral reality you are caught up in.” We talk about how different forms of reality avoidance – insisting on absolutes (moral, political, historical) is one example – become forces in the lives of individuals, families, communities, nations.</p>
<p>Rai’s tough-minded conception of conversations sidesteps chat and debate alike. You speak not to say something and to hear something back, not to dazzle, be right or stake a claim, but to be held accountable to each other. A conversation is a pact. You are accountable not only for what you say but for the way what you say, and how you live your life, does or doesn’t square up. A conversation is also a precious opening. The light of another person’s presence turned towards you will almost always illuminate something you couldn’t see or find thinkable before.</p>
<h2>ii</h2>
<p><strong>Juliet</strong>: When I first met Rai I was sitting on the top floor at Melbourne Law School feeling the approach of a ferocious exhaustion, having flown from Connecticut, arriving that morning, late, delayed, rerouted, refuelled (barely) to deliver a paper at the Passions of International Law colloquium hosted by Gerry Simpson, Rai’s close friend. I can hardly read the words in front of me, I am trying to convey my feelings about months of watching hours of Holocaust testimony videos. My relationship – a feeling of confusion and a kind of irritation – to one testimonial in particular. I explain it psychoanalytically, trying not to fill the room with jargon, trying to remember that I felt something about this testimony, that I cared deeply about this woman’s experience … before the room starts spinning.</p>
<p>I look up as I read, and though everything’s a bit blurry there is the warmest gaze upon me. It’s Rai, sort of smiling, part care for me, part care for this woman I am using to explain my theories of trauma and imagination.</p>
<p>I think I’ve made a mess of it but all I care about is getting to bed. And then as I’m grasping in the break for the comfort of a piece of watermelon he approaches me and expresses his appreciation. He has heard what I said, how I both cared for this woman and felt unnerved by her melodramatic phrasing, and my own irritation. I say “yes of course, it’s hard not to care” but he doesn’t give me a way out. Nor does he pin me to my own rationales. He is curious. It is an academic manner, of sorts – I recognise it from a time before we thought we knew everything or felt we had to prove it to an audience. I’m fond of saying “I’m an academic, I know stuff about stuff”, Rai is fond of saying “let’s talk”.</p>
<p><strong>Maria</strong>: In 2005 my then publisher asked Rai to launch <a href="https://www.mariatumarkin.com/traumascapes">Traumascapes</a>. My first book, first launch – I bought my nine-year-old a matching green vest and skirt, a friend played a real-life harp. Rai didn’t know me or my work. I never thought I could be a writer once my family left Ukraine in 1989 so this whole “debut author” period felt, still feels, unreal.</p>
<p>Rai came in. Holding my book. To have a thinker of this calibre take your work seriously is destabilising. Rai had a bunch of my lines underlined and some crossed out – he really read me. Also, he was using an actual pen in a book, wow, bad Rai.</p>
<p>The launch was my first encounter with Rai’s moral seriousness, which animates his idea of a conversation. It is like a lamp you expect to be shined in your face but instead it lights up the room and everyone in it. Illuminates you, the shaky little thing in the room’s centre.</p>
<h2>iii</h2>
<p><strong>Maria</strong>: Rai Gaita has been seeking to create conditions in the public domain for people from different, sometimes antagonistic ecosystems of thought and belief to get into each other’s heads. Or – if the head image feels too ickily invasive (it’s mine, not Rai’s) – to pull their thoughts out like sock drawers (mine again) and look at what’s there and what’s stuffed at the very back.</p>
<p>Twice Rai invited me to give The Wednesday Lecture – on the royal commission into the institutionalised abuse of children, then some years later on feminism, and both nights I bitterly regretted saying yes and was finishing writing my talk with minutes (ten, five) to go. I never felt ready even though I had months to prepare. I felt rushed, pushed, whacked and then – adrenaline and self-loathing having peaked – I felt grateful. I was pinned down, called into accountability, made to face the world and myself. At the end, it was a relief.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1019&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1280&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1280&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559467/original/file-20231114-17-gkmrnk.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1280&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
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<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Goodreads</span></span>
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<p>Often these public conversations don’t work (sometimes they are disasters) and people walk away saying what the hell. But the goal of disarming each other through conversation strikes Juliet and me as necessary as water. That this was something our university pulled the plug on felt to us indecent. Decency is a Rai word. In Justice and Hope (2005), the title essay of the new collection, he writes about his father Romulus and Romulus’s friend Hora, the two most important influences on his life: “For them nothing mattered more than to live decently – and when I say nothing, I really mean nothing.” If you have read <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/romulus-my-father">Romulus, My Father</a> and <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/after-romulus">After Romulus</a> you feel this “I really mean nothing” go through your heart and into the shoulder blades. Perhaps you feel it anyway. “Decent” drops its dull, egalitarian overcoat and becomes all silk with sun and wind breathing through it.</p>
<p><strong>Juliet</strong>: The lecture series was an event, historic – the world of academia does not always allow for such conversations, conversations without outcomes or grant pathways and where difficult ideas and sometimes difficult people are able to speak. Rai offered and held this hospitality, and to do so, occasionally had to be a difficult person. Hospitality on Indigenous land is a problematic premise to start with and then it’s hard to know what conversations bear airing.</p>
<p>Rai encouraged presentations and conversations on international law, feminism, colonialism, racism. Hard topics. He never shied. Perhaps the most difficult and controversial was his last series, in 2019, “Sleepwalking Through Privilege and Oppression”. Starting with his own commentary on this, he then asked <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/another-day-in-the-colony">Professor Chelsea Watego</a>, a Munanjahli and South Sea Islander woman, to speak to the theme, and she spoke powerfully and essentially on the importance of black nihilism, to counter his commentary.</p>
<p>When he responded, some in the audience called for him as a white man to leave the speaking to Professor Watego. An important call, a necessary call on Indigenous land when white people have what we can now describe as too much voice. But hospitality is everything to Rai and he remained at the podium, not to reassert his position but to hold the conversation with the audience. It is what I describe as standing accused: the most crucial task of white people on this land. And to walk away would have been disingenuous as the host of a series.</p>
<h2>iv</h2>
<p>We’ve been disagreeing – tangled in a conversation about Palestine and Israel; well to say disagreeing suggests it wasn’t a conversation, but it was, with differences, we shared our thoughts, listened, asked, and still disagreed. This is no skill we were born with. It comes from a belief that neither of us knew best or knew it all. It comes from time listening to and reading Rai.</p>
<p><strong>Maria</strong>: Open letters have been flying like Shahed drones, detonating on impact. Shahed drones, manufactured in Iran and sold to Russia to pummel Ukrainian civilians and civilian infrastructure, are called flying mopeds because of <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLVK-QqEguw">the sound they make</a>. In Ukraine these drones invoke a particular fear. They travel slowly enough to be seen (one was allegedly taken out by a pickled tomatoes jar) and can hit only static not moving targets, such as people, with any precision. This imprecision (“moped” is also evocative of the Shahed’s lowly standing in weaponworld), their visibility, and their use in swarm attacks – multiple drones against a single target – have put nails under the skin of nervous systems across Ukraine. Because they’re cheap, these drones don’t run out. You see where I’m going here, words are cheap.</p>
<p>I know the sickening sound of drones is what Palestinians are hearing in Gaza when they don’t hear explosions.</p>
<p>Open letters are often, if not invariably, single-use, self-detonating pieces of public discourse. I’m not too cool for them and some are astounding documents of collective labour and thought. But I haven’t signed any. It’s not the denotations (I’ve argued repeatedly that for Ukraine being anti-war equals being pro-genocide) but broken glass and craters everywhere make public spaces incapable of not causing injuries and won’t make a toenail of difference to people whose lives can still be saved. I’ve seen so many open letters that don’t mention the October 7th dead, don’t mention Hamas’s hostages. I don’t want to sign up for enshrining the choice between dehumanising the other (which starts with not seeing their dead) and betraying who and what you stand for. Even at the worst of times and our times might be the worst yet, this choice is not a thing until we make it so.</p>
<p>In his 2017 essay <a href="https://meanjin.com.au/essays/the-intelligentsia-in-the-age-of-trump/">The Intelligentsia in the Age of Trump</a>, Rai Gaita writes Trump has destroyed the “space in which Americans can seriously disagree” not merely by arsoning the idea of the political office and public institutions and letting loose demons of predominantly racialised bigotry and hatred but also he “eroded the conditions under which people can call their fellow citizens to seriousness: Come now! How can you say that?”</p>
<p>Juliet, I look around and oh shit. Saying <em>come on! how can you talk about Israel without mention of Iran (and – just slightly off camera – Russia, China, Qatar)? how can you use settler colonialism as your only frame to speak about the Middle East? how can you righteously retweet genocide apologists from other contexts (Syria, Ukraine)</em> will be pounced on as morally bankrupt bothsideism of the worst kind.</p>
<p>To speak of them alongside each other, the anguish experienced by people in Gaza and in Israel, and by Palestinian and Jewish diasporas, has become in the part of Australia that considers itself progressive an abject objectionable act, like “sending thoughts & prayers”, worse, like genocide apologism lite. To me, to speak of each without collapsing them both into a sentimental ahistorical mush, letting them be in a howling tension, letting them be in a shared space of thought and sight, is the only way we (settlers in Australia) can speak of this moment at all.</p>
<p>If shared public places – where a disinclination to dehumanise is not seen as cowardice or respectability politics, and where harm minimisation is a guiding principle – feel impossible right now, the question is what would it take for them not to be? If that feels unanswerable it still needs to be asked.</p>
<p>When the dead or captured on any side get in the way of the argument, the problem is with the argument. I am not talking about “condemning” this or that atrocity, that word’s gone for me, I am referring to an ethical compulsion not to erase.</p>
<p>Dead civilians killed by IDF and by Hamas are the mountains in front of us – can’t walk around them, can’t jump over them. To be clear: I don’t for a minute believe this injunction applies to people in Gaza or the West Bank and to Palestinian families across the world. It doesn’t apply to the Israelis and nationals of other countries whose lives Hamas has destroyed. Climbing those mountains (sliding down their sides) is the job for the rest.</p>
<p>Most Australians do not have families in Gaza, Israel or neighbouring countries of the Middle East. Whatever pain and despair many are feeling (it’s about impossible not to) the responsibility bestowed by Australia’s safety and distance is to keep holding spaces in which non-catastrophic futures are imaginable. This means practising bothness that is not bothsideism and alongsideness that is not equivocation. This means protecting the idea that public spaces should be free of hate. This means not leaving speaking about the co-existence of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism to our politicians and vice-chancellors with their “In Australia there is no place for …” In Australia, we’re seeing, there’s plenty of place for all of it and more. We can’t let the speaking be done in calcified idioms and grubby grabs – “anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism”, “Israel has the right to defend itself”.</p>
<p>I’m Jewish, first gen, from the former USSR. My history encompasses not only the Holocaust and the iron-clad denial well into the 1980s that it ever happened but also the Pale of Settlement, pogroms, gulags and Stalin’s own version of the Final Solution in which Jewish doctors were to be accused of a fabricated plot to poison government members on instructions from “Western imperialists and Zionists” (who else) as a prelude to mass deportations. When Stalin’s death in 1953 pulled the rug out from what many historians believe was a three-stage genocide plan, my mum and dad were 11 and 12. Jewish people in Australia speaking about their history right now are said to be weaponising (the weaponisation of weaponising makes my teeth hurt but OK) their trauma. But speaking about my history is the only way I can be properly – which is to say, to the ends of the earth – accountable for my words and their relationship to my life. To the dead of Gaza and Israel I have to add my family’s dead.</p>
<p>Where my family comes from, the word Zionism was only used with utmost cynicism. Soviet cartoons I grew up with depicted Jews as dogs, deadly snakes, as “Zionist cobweb spiders”; swastikas got fused with Stars of David. There is a pretty straight line from that cynicism to a recent Putin psy-ops in Dagestan where <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/29/mob-storms-dagestan-airport-in-search-of-jewish-passengers-from-israel">crowds tried to storm a plane arriving from Tel-Aviv</a>. It works like this: first, let people know anti-Semitism is very much on the table then crack down on it while blaming Ukraine and the West for stoking “flames of ethnic divisions”, send a message to Moscow and St Petersburg elites to sit tight and count their blessings, arrest and send (as cannon fodder) to the frontlines of the war in Ukraine some of the Dagestanis caught in “disturbances”, and, in the meantime, invite a Hamas delegation to Moscow, speak rousingly of the need for Middle East peace, breathe as one with Iran.</p>
<p>It should matter that the same term with the same inflection is used by the mass murderer Bashar al-Assad, the mass murderer Ali Khamenei, the mass murderer Hassan Nasrallah, the mass murderer Vladimir Putin, the Hamas leadership as they promise a repeat of October 7th in perpetuity to refer to all Jews everywhere who get in their way. For me there is not enough soap in the world.</p>
<p>Thirty-plus years in Australia as a migrant-settler have taught me that the question <em>where I am from</em> must be bound with the question <em>where I am now, on whose lands</em>, if it is to keep its integrity. And since the answer is I’m on stolen, unceded lands, righteousness of any kind is inappropriate for me and it’s not my place to speak to the powerful ties between Palestinian and First Nation peoples in this country – a relationship with a long history of deeply held solidarity. I will register my pain at the way Jewish people in Australia, with the exception of a handful of vetted allies, or “good Jews”, have been shoved into the role of double colonisers, the worst people of all, and so Juliet I address myself to me and you and to other settlers like us.</p>
<p><strong>Juliet:</strong> I have signed so many of those open letters you speak of. I cannot sit still with my hands on a keyboard writing words that help me think, and feel and wonder, but rarely help me be of use to others. I am no activist because I can rarely come to a decision, not a clean one, with edges that allow me to move … somewhere. I never say “moving forward” as we now say in the corporate academy, as if there is always a next step and that step means progress. As I’ve seen it, that progress usually means stepping on someone as you step away from responsibility for the past. But these thoughts keep me quiet. I cannot not sign letters which transport sentiments, ideas and demands I believe in when someone else finds it possible to write, to act. </p>
<p>I believe in them, these words. Cheap. Small. And occasionally violent as they are. I believe in letters that push a university and a government to act on one of the violences of this time. One of the most horrifying violences of this time. Not the only one. But it is one they will not act on. The Australian government did not sign the United Nations resolution that called for a truce, that called for a ceasefire, that called for the slaughter of Palestinians at this time to stop. Yes, the genocide. The Australian government did not sign but it did offer support to the Israeli government and support and care for the victims of Hamas. I do not need to write a letter asking the government to back the Israeli government and assist with trying to save the hostages. It does that of its own volition.</p>
<p>You will notice I say Australian government, not Australia and not Australians, as I do not say Israel or Israelis. That is the true anti-Semitism, the conflation of all-as-one. We are not. They are not. You are not. Just as I shy from the “innocent victims” narrative I do not say there are even combatants in this war, as distinct from children. I have watched reels of ten-year-olds speaking with rage. At what point does innocence begin and end? Is the child who sees their family killed an innocent? Is innocence shed when they join the military a few years later? I would put this question to Israelis and to Palestinians, and to myself. What work does innocence do in this violent conflict? It is the cheapest of words. And yes, I would extend this to settler Australians. It is not the same. Nothing is the same. Analogies do not help us in a war of justifications.</p>
<p>What I know is inter-generational trauma can produce innocence and culpability alike. I know something of why the Israeli government is fuelled by fear, vengeance and aggression. I know some of the stories that mean the violence towards Palestinian people in Gaza and beyond is more of a plea saying “how can you do this to us after what we’ve been through?”</p>
<p>I imagine it is fuelled by generations who watched those before them stare out the window with clouded eyes and memories that can never be spoken. I know when I sat for six months watching Holocaust testimonies I was irrevocably changed in my understanding of the significance of Israel. After hours of stories of lost families, pain, humiliation, systematic destruction of whole communities, and tortured children, the need to claim a space that was their own sounded like commonsense.</p>
<p>I understood something of Zionism. And so I say now, with the small understandings I have, that this did not begin with October 7th and did not even begin with 1948 but perhaps with Kristallnacht or perhaps with the arrogance of the Allies who thought they could declare a nation-state over the top of another. That violence is one we know well in this land and on these nations.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559498/original/file-20231115-27-u4wxne.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Jewish shop damaged during Kristallnacht.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht#/media/File:Bundesarchiv_Bild_146-1970-083-42,_Magdeburg,_zerst%C3%B6rtes_j%C3%BCdisches_Gesch%C3%A4ft.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>To speak of Israel is not the same as speaking of the nation-state of Israel and this too is why I sign those letters that insist we need to be able to criticise law and policy and state practices that deny, that crush and now attempt to decimate peoples. I can understand some of the histories that have taken people there. I can explain but I cannot not fight against these practices with my small, cheap, literary pickle jars. Explanation is not justification. You cannot stretch a name across the lives of others and call it justice. That is colonialism. That is Australia. Explanation has no place on a land where others live. “Oh sorry did I step on your home, your life, the graves of your family, your future?” – this is colonialism and there is no explanation that justifies it. </p>
<p>If we’re to take moral seriousness seriously, in Rai Gaita’s terms, then I can only say that genocide is wrong. And that is what it is.</p>
<p>To say it is genocide diminishes nothing of the Holocaust. It is to use a name to make the world hear the extent of the violence, the devastation and the trans-generational impact: grief and trauma for generations. It is to demand action. Does the Israeli government <em>intend</em> to destroy a people? Well, there have been a lot of words to that effect, but I do not hold all people, or even all of the Israeli government, to the violence of some. There is resistance in all camps. </p>
<p>But if the question is about whether the name fits the act then I think that is a legal question and I am speaking of an experience more than a legal intent. Would it be better if the protests or the many open letters said “alleged genocide”, like we must say “alleged rape” when a woman is asking for her experience to be heard? The urgency is too great for such debates and abstractions. Or perhaps I would ask the Israeli government to stop the bombing while we have a such a legal debate, and allow time for food, water and medicine to be delivered.</p>
<p>I think some of the open letters try to open a dialogue where structures and law and policy are holding us back. These letters and the protests do not mention October 7th, which is to not mention the many dates. This was one. One horrible day that has extended into the lives of both communities. The hostages must be allowed to be free. But I use the word hostage advisedly, not legally, and not in the way the posters use it. I have learned through some of my own experiences with law and police that there are many forms of prison. </p>
<p>I wish October 7th could be mentioned and all those lives could be grieved without that grief taking the air from the history. It cannot. I think of Holocaust testimonies and the repetition and repetition of names. So important. Names going into the world as a pact so that the speaker and listener may share that reality. But we do not own names, we borrow them from history. And genocide is the worst of names, and the worst of worlds. This is my reason for signing letters, trying to make a space to breathe, a space for imagining the non-catastrophic futures you speak of, Maria.</p>
<p>Isn’t this what Rai means by justice – the opening of a space to think, to converse, to breathe? He quotes Camus:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We gasp for air among people who believe they are absolutely right, whether it be in their machines or their ideas. And for all who cannot live without dialogue and the friendship of other human beings, this silence is the end of the world.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The cover of Justice and Hope" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=900&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/559491/original/file-20231115-21-9kr4la.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1131&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/justice-and-hope-hardback">MUP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>You speak of the breaking of silence with the robotic buzz of drones and I find myself wishing for silence. Open letters add to the cacophony, it’s true. But they are also a wish to drown out the drones, bombs, screaming. I have little faith in a competition for sound but I have faith in that pickle jar you speak of.</p>
<p>I do not know if white people in this country should take these positions. But I am doing what I always believe is the thing to do. Stand accused. I learned it from Rai. And have watched him take positions I don’t always agree with, as he has commented of mine. White fragility has never been his weakness. He stands and keeps standing. And I know, when I saw you speak at his series once, that he held that stage for you, so you could speak, and I was grateful for it. As I am always grateful for your conversation and for Rai’s demand: let’s talk.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/217670/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Both Juliet and Maria have an ongoing connection to Rai via their literary and academic lives.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Juliet Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Bit by bit, the philosopher Rai Gaita showed Maria Tumarkin and Juliet Rogers the morally serious worth of face-to-face conversation.
Maria Tumarkin, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, The University of Melbourne
Juliet Rogers, Associate Professor Criminology, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/213890
2023-11-09T19:10:42Z
2023-11-09T19:10:42Z
Friday essay: if the world’s systems are ‘already cracking’ due to climate change, is there a post-doom silver lining?
<blockquote>
<p>Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good … so far so good … so far so good …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>― <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKwcXt3JIaU">La Haine</a>, 1995</p>
<p>If it felt to you like things started going off the rails around the year 2016, you’re not alone. Symbolically, the double blow of Britain voting for Brexit, <em>then</em> the United States voting for Donald Trump, seemed like the “end” of something. (The <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/gold-plated-populism-trump-and-end-of-liberal-order/">postwar liberal consensus</a>? The <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/29/magazine/the-end-of-the-anglo-american-order.html">Anglo-American order</a>?) </p>
<p>For some – myself included – it also felt like the stirrings of a more explicitly dystopian moment. If you count yourself in this category, buckle up: Jem Bendell, former professor in sustainability leadership at the UK’s University of Cumbria, and his research team are here with more bad news. </p>
<p>According to Bendell’s new book <a href="https://schumacherinstitute.org.uk/product/jem-bendell-book/">Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse</a>, “the quality of life in most countries and regions of the world […] peaked around 2016 and [then] began to slowly decline”. There is no sound reason to expect a halt to this deterioration, Bendell argues. </p>
<p>Rather, declining <a href="https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/09/1126121">Human Development Index</a> statistics are one of many signals societal collapse due to climate change is not only possible, or even imminent – but already happening, right now. </p>
<p>But what if collapse is an ongoing and slow(ish) process, rather than a one-off mega-disaster? And what if the cracks appearing in the “cultural cement” of modern society represent not only a crisis, but also an opportunity to radically rethink how humans interact – with each other, and with the natural world?</p>
<p>Breaking Together encourages us to think about collapse in ways that are profound, possibility-expanding and startlingly original. Bendell’s “post-doom” perspective has the potential to change individual lives, upend organisational strategies and give birth to whole new social movements.</p>
<p>Bendell advocates for an ideal of “<a href="https://braveneweurope.com/jem-bendell-what-is-ecolibertarianism-its-the-freedom-loving-environmentalism-we-need">ecofreedom</a>”. This moves beyond obvious ideas, such as reconnecting with nature, to encompass supporting youth climate activism and decolonial, resource-preserving movements in the Global South. </p>
<p>The post-doom approach also calls for embracing a “positive disintegration” of self and values, to refocus one’s mind, and entire existence, on things that really matter.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/we-live-in-a-time-of-late-capitalism-but-what-does-that-mean-and-whats-so-late-about-it-191422">We live in a time of 'late capitalism'. But what does that mean? And what's so late about it?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Deep adaptation</h2>
<p>Bendell is best known for his 2018 paper <a href="https://insight.cumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/4166/">Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy</a>. He submitted it to the <a href="https://www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/journal/sampj">Sustainability Accounting, Management and Policy Journal</a> for peer review; the reviewers requested major changes. </p>
<p>Instead, Bendell published the paper himself, via the University of Cumbria’s <a href="https://www.cumbria.ac.uk/research/centres/iflas/">Initiative for Leadership and Sustainability</a>. Deep Adaptation is a brick hurled through the window of “corporate sustainability”, questioning its very viability as a field of scholarship. The first sentence of the abstract reads: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of an inevitable near-term social collapse due to climate change.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Needless to say, this got people’s attention. The breaking-the-frame gesture of a supposedly sober academic paper containing bold, sometimes alarming claims resonated widely. Particularly this one:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>when I say starvation, destruction, migration, disease and war, I mean in your own life. With the power down, soon you wouldn’t have water coming out of your tap. You will depend on your neighbours for food and some warmth. You will become malnourished. You won’t know whether to stay or go. You will fear being violently killed before starving to death.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Deep Adaptation went viral. By 2019, it had been downloaded <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/8xwygg/the-collapse-of-civilization-may-have-already-begun">more than 600,000 times</a>. The argument’s appeal is based, first, on Bendell’s courage to draw meaningful, personally relevant conclusions from all the terrifying climate and ecological data that has been floating around unsynthesised for years. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557984/original/file-20231107-17-suwinh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557984/original/file-20231107-17-suwinh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557984/original/file-20231107-17-suwinh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557984/original/file-20231107-17-suwinh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557984/original/file-20231107-17-suwinh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557984/original/file-20231107-17-suwinh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557984/original/file-20231107-17-suwinh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557984/original/file-20231107-17-suwinh.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is combined with a sense one might have stumbled upon “<a href="https://jembendell.com/2018/07/26/the-study-on-collapse-they-thought-you-should-not-read-yet/">the paper</a> they don’t want you to read”. A whiff of contraband, the tang of illicit knowledge – which has, of course, become ever more appealing in these heady, post-truth days.</p>
<p>Bendell’s “Deep Adaptation” argument influenced the founding members of <a href="https://rebellion.global/">Extinction Rebellion</a>, who sought to develop an environmental activism commensurate with the scale of threat humans face. </p>
<p>It also led to the formation of an international online <a href="https://www.deepadaptation.info/">Deep Adaptation Forum</a>, which has allowed tens of thousands of people to begin processing their fear and grief about future societal and ecological breakdown. </p>
<p>Bendell’s work has also sparked fierce criticism: that he has <a href="https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/faulty-science-doomism-and-flawed-conclusions-deep-adaptation/">got the science wrong</a>. Or that, even if the science is okay, the implications of Deep Adaptation are counter to a politics of <a href="https://theecologist.org/2022/feb/01/deep-adaptation-or-climate-justice">climate justice</a>. </p>
<p>(It’s also worth noting that some critics of Deep Adaptation commit the classic fallacy of “<a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2019-19962-004">shooting the messenger</a>”, blaming Bendell for systemic problems and/or <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-51857722">emotional responses</a> that are not of his making.)</p>
<h2>‘It’s already far worse’</h2>
<p>Now, five years after the birth of the Deep Adaptation movement, Bendell is back with another nasty surprise:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>as the research [for Breaking Together] progressed, I discovered the data was indicating things were far worse than I had previously assessed. Indeed, they were already far worse in the years before 2018 than I had known. I had been wrong to conclude that societal collapse is inevitable, because it had already begun when I was reaching that conclusion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Chapter by chapter, the first half of the 500-page book presents an interdisciplinary laundry list of ruin: imminent or ongoing economic collapse, monetary collapse, energy collapse, biosphere collapse, climate collapse, food collapse, societal collapse. </p>
<p>Depending on your background, some of this material might be (depressingly) familiar reading. For example, anyone who’s across the Stockholm Resilience Centre’s analysis that humanity has already <a href="https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/research-news/2023-09-13-all-planetary-boundaries-mapped-out-for-the-first-time-six-of-nine-crossed.html">breached six out of nine of the earth’s “planetary boundaries”</a>, or who has read Elizabeth Kolbert’s <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250062185/thesixthextinction">The Sixth Extinction</a> (2014), won’t need convincing that ecological collapse is well underway.</p>
<h2>Hedge-fund gossip</h2>
<p>On the other hand, for readers who are unfamiliar with the finer points of economics or finance – such as myself – there are some huge claims it’s hard to know what to do with. Apparently, the world’s current monetary systems “are not only hastening the collapse of both natural and human systems, but are known to be on the verge of collapse by some senior officials”.</p>
<p>His proof? “Many private bankers I have spoken to believe that the current monetary systems will not last,” while “none of them […] considered the system to be ethically legitimate or sustainable”. This leads to an eye-popping suggestion:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the monetary system would not likely collapse in a random fashion but [would] be triggered when a coalition of corporate and banking interests, both public and private, determine that they are ready to profit from that transformation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’m willing to be convinced on this point – I have very little faith in the motives of investment bankers or bond traders – but I need more than the cocktail-party gossip of “for the last 15 years, in social occasions, I have occasionally chatted with people who work in hedge funds and asked about their views on their work and the future of the financial system”. A lot more.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/fallen-crypto-king-sam-bankman-fried-was-perfectly-positioned-to-make-a-religion-of-himself-213893">Fallen crypto king Sam Bankman-Fried was 'perfectly positioned to make a religion of himself'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Systems under stress</h2>
<p>But even while Bendell and co. can get a bit carried away with their sub-arguments in Breaking Together, its overall thrust is clear and compelling. Many of the world’s natural and human-made systems, which combine to make up “industrial consumer society”, are under severe stress, or are already cracking. </p>
<p>These systems are interdependent, complex, precarious and nonlinear – which means change can occur not just gradually and predictably, but also abruptly, drastically. A sudden breakdown in one part of the overarching structure of global capitalism can – and does – trigger disruptions in other areas.</p>
<p>For example, if <a href="https://theconversation.com/extreme-weather-is-landing-more-australians-in-hospital-and-heat-is-the-biggest-culprit-216440">extreme weather</a> led to widespread crop failures across multiple wheat-growing regions – a possibility known as “a multi-breadbasket failure” – this would also trigger economic and political chaos. This, in turn, would make it much more difficult for the entire world to immediately transition away from fossil fuels and towards <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-original-and-still-the-best-why-its-time-to-renew-australias-renewable-energy-policy-213879">renewable energy</a>, to avoid calamitous climate change. </p>
<p>And that’s without getting into the question of whether we have enough <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/a3mavb/we-dont-mine-enough-rare-earth-metals-to-replace-fossil-fuels-with-renewable-energy">rare earth metals</a> to make such a miraculous transition. (See Chapter 3, “Energy Collapse” for the short answer – we don’t.)</p>
<p>Meanwhile, in recent years we’ve already seen how Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has increased Europe’s <a href="https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/impact-war-ukraine-energy-prices-consequences-firms-financial-performance">energy prices</a>, as well as putting stress on the world’s <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/17/russia-ukraine-grain-deal-what-does-it-mean-for-global-food-prices.html">grain supplies</a>, which forces food prices up – which, when framed as a “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2023/apr/04/theres-nothing-natural-about-australias-cost-of-living-crisis-its-time-we-had-systemic-change">cost of living crisis”</a>, can justify regressive political responses. </p>
<p>It all points towards an understanding of our current situation as one in which widespread collapse is not a spectre looming on the horizon, but occurring all around us, in the present tense – if only we had eyes to see it.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/doomsday-bunkers-mars-and-the-mindset-the-tech-bros-trying-to-outsmart-the-end-of-the-world-188661">Doomsday bunkers, Mars and 'The Mindset': the tech bros trying to outsmart the end of the world</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Boiling frog, creeping collapse</h2>
<p>What would it have felt like to live through the final years of the collapsing Roman Empire? Or the <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-conflict-collapse-how-drought-destabilised-the-last-major-precolonial-mayan-city-187165">last decades of the Mayan civilisation</a>? Would it have felt like collapse to a child – or to an old person? Would what we now understand as history have been legible at the time to an individual, any individual, struggling through their busy unique, vanishingly short lives?</p>
<p>Probably not, I’d suggest. And the experts agree. Jared Diamond, in his magisterial <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/collapse-9780241958681">Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive</a> (2005), mentions the concept of “creeping normalcy”, which refers to:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>slow trends concealed within noisy fluctuations. If the economy, schools, traffic congestion, or anything else is deteriorating only slowly, it’s difficult to recognize that each successive year is on average slightly worse than the year before, so one’s baseline standard for what constitutes “normalcy” shifts gradually and imperceptibly.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This also gets called “<a href="https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/fee.1794">shifting baseline syndrome</a>”, or the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2006/09/the-boiled-frog-myth-stop-the-lying-now/7446/">frog-in-a-pot</a> dilemma (which isn’t actually a scientific thing, but nonetheless remains an instructive parable). </p>
<p>Our individual ability to perceive medium-term change is further hindered by the dramatic changes that occur all the time in our personal lives. If you lose your job, or get a better-paying job in a new city, or are involved in a serious accident and become disabled, or find God, or stop drinking, or become a parent, or lose a parent, these events all function as “noisy fluctuations”. </p>
<p>Changes in your personal circumstances overshadow your understanding of the outside world, with its subtle, slow-moving phenomena (migratory bird populations, sea-level rise). The most obvious example of this is how every single one of us gets old, becomes frail and sometimes enfeebled, and finally dies. </p>
<p>This “personal collapse” occurs over a matter of decades. As it does, old age has “a strong negative effect on <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/s0022381607080127">information processing</a>”. In short: humans aren’t well placed to understand societal change occurring on decades-long timescales.</p>
<p>With this in mind, and borrowing from Diamond, Bendell uses the phrase “creeping collapse” to describe what is arguably happening right now. Bendell clarifies “the study of both ancient and recent history suggests that the collapse of a society is typically <em>a process</em>, not <em>an event</em>” (italics mine). </p>
<p>This is the first big head-shift for us all to make: when societal collapse happens, it won’t be quick and dramatic and simple like an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMWkuGTz_TQ">apocalyptic disaster movie</a> (although spectacular one-off disasters and wars will continue to occur). Instead, Bendell cites sustainability scholars Cathy Rubiños and John M Anderies’ 2020 <a href="https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ab7b9c">definition of collapse</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>such a process is worthy of that term if “key actors, system components and interactions” disappear in “less than one generation”, where there are “substantial losses of social-ecological” assets that sustained the system, with consequences “persisting longer than a single generation”.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/zBruOCKIVMc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Societal collapse won’t be quick and dramatic like an apocalyptic disaster movie.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Bendell contends “most existing trends will more-or-less continue without stopping until the method of human organising no longer resembles what we now call industrial consumer societies”, and that “the current creeping collapse of modern societies will be completed within a generation” – by around 2045 or 2050.</p>
<p>Is he right? Only time will tell. Breaking Together is “unfalsifiable” in that sense: we’ll have to wait for 20 or 30 years to know for sure. Meanwhile, even if contemporary society is still somehow staggering along pretty much unchanged a decade from now, a true believer in Bendell’s society’s-already-collapsing thesis could simply say, “That’s because the breakdown only <em>properly</em> began a couple of years ago; just wait another 20 years, you’ll see.” </p>
<p>In the intervening years and decades, we might all adjust surprisingly quickly to a series of “creeping normals” – just as we’ve become acclimatised to the ubiquity of the World Wide Web, the proliferation of smartphones, the rise of AI, and the increasingly common occurrence of droughts, floods, heatwaves and deadly forest fires.</p>
<h2>A radical rethink of ‘the entire Western project’</h2>
<p>If you haven’t already spent much time pondering how bad things might get, Breaking Together will probably be a brutal read. But for readers familiar with Diamond’s Collapse, or with other books from the new field dubbed “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/11/humans-werent-always-here-we-could-disappear-meet-the-collapsologists">collapsology</a>”, this isn’t the most original, or interesting, part of Bendell’s new book. (I particularly recommend Pablo Servigne and Raphaël Stevens’ excellent 2020 book <a href="https://www.wiley.com/en-au/How+Everything+Can+Collapse%3A+A+Manual+for+our+Times-p-9781509541393">How Everything Can Collapse: A Manual for our Times</a>.) </p>
<p>The second half of Breaking Together tackles the question of what to do with the difficult knowledge of “collapse awareness”. Bendell originally trained as a sociologist, so it makes sense that his insights here are particularly thought-provoking. </p>
<p>Bendell identifies a disturbing trend of “panic-driven authoritarian” in contemporary politics, with governments and elites forcing the public to change their behaviour for their own good. He rejects this vision of top-down change as symptomatic of deeper problems within modernity. </p>
<p>In fact, he suggests:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>public, private and civic institutions of incumbent power, and their officers and apologists, are already making matters worse in the early phases of unfolding societal collapse.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I would agree with this general point, even if the example Bendell chooses – government responses to COVID-19, such as lockdowns and vaccine mandates – isn’t convincing.</p>
<p>Bendell advocates instead for an ideal of “ecofreedom”, defined as “that individual and collective state of being free and enabled to care for each other and the environment, rather than coerced or manipulated towards behaviours that damage it”. </p>
<p>In the mode of philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who believed in the essential <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr_vl62JblQ">innocence</a> and goodness of humans before they’re corrupted by society, Bendell argues “human nature” isn’t to blame for the climate crisis. Instead, the problem is capitalism, as well as deeper hierarchical tendencies within societies that use forms of money – which Bendell describes, unnecessarily, as “the money-power”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-philosophy-of-jean-jacques-rousseau-is-profoundly-contemporary-201179">Explainer: the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is profoundly contemporary</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>This informs his vision of “ecolibertarianism” – which is not to be confused with far-right libertarianism. (Bendell is really talking about something akin to <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-anarchism-all-about-50373">anarchism</a> or eco-socialism, but avoids both terms because of the stigma attached to them.) </p>
<p>Ecolibertarians believe “modern societies are destroying their own foundations because we have been manipulated to experience life as unsafe and competitive[,] and behave accordingly”. Unlike <a href="https://theconversation.com/grandiose-visions-and-arrested-development-a-new-biography-considers-the-contradictory-life-of-elon-musk-214268">Silicon Valley-style libertarians</a>, ecolibertarians see “the influence and intrusion of corporations [… and] capitalism more generally” as one of the factors responsible for the destruction of our ecosystem.</p>
<p>Breaking Together is not a big book of “solutions”, let alone “policy solutions”, to our predicament. It is both vaguer and more radical than that. Bendell is basically calling for us to rethink the entire Western project of modernity and <a href="https://theconversation.com/criticism-of-western-civilisation-isnt-new-it-was-part-of-the-enlightenment-104567">the Enlightenment</a>, beginning with a spiritual “rebooting”. </p>
<p>In this context, he sees little value in “asking for a specific fix for a specific difficulty that is neither solvable nor happening in isolation from other difficulties”. Such thinking amounts to tinkering with a fundamentally broken machine. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557983/original/file-20231107-29-20s4nu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557983/original/file-20231107-29-20s4nu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/557983/original/file-20231107-29-20s4nu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=715&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557983/original/file-20231107-29-20s4nu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=715&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557983/original/file-20231107-29-20s4nu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=715&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557983/original/file-20231107-29-20s4nu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557983/original/file-20231107-29-20s4nu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/557983/original/file-20231107-29-20s4nu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=898&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>He doesn’t discuss large-scale infrastructure projects such as <a href="https://theconversation.com/we-can-rewild-swathes-of-australia-by-focusing-on-what-makes-it-unique-111749">rewilding</a> cities (for a whimsical take on that, see Steve Mushin’s recent illustrated book <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Steve-Mushin-Ultrawild-9781760292812/">Ultrawild</a>). Some readers might find this frustrating, but I think it’s inspiring – it signals the ambition of Bendell’s vision, his attempt to look beyond quick fixes and <a href="https://theconversation.com/greenwashing-can-you-trust-that-label-2116">greenwashing</a>, to discover something genuinely novel.</p>
<p>Bendell believes Western activists should “shift [their] focus to efforts at regenerating nature, an <a href="https://www.soilassociation.org/causes-campaigns/a-ten-year-transition-to-agroecology/what-is-agroecology/#:%7E:text=Agroecology%20is%20sustainable%20farming%20that,concepts%20and%20principals%20in%20farming.">agroecological</a> revolution in farming, shortening supply chains, major economic redistribution and monetary reform”. </p>
<p>He expresses admiration for community-based micro-finance schemes and small-scale farming projects. He has himself moved from the UK to Bali, to establish a “<a href="https://jembendell.com/2023/08/11/regenerative-farming-its-time/">collapse-ready</a>” organic farm north of Ubud. He is also starting to think about decolonial approaches to the climate crisis. </p>
<p>In this context, Bendell suggests Western activists need to support poor people in <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-global-south-is-on-the-rise-but-what-exactly-is-the-global-south-207959">the Global South</a> to make their own choices – including radical ones – about what they want their futures to look like. </p>
<p>This might include “a rebirth of anti-imperialism and protectionism across the Majority World, leading to curbs on [resource] exports to those ‘richer’ regions”. Bendell is more clear-eyed than most about the fact that even if middle-class Western climate activists might be willing <em>in principle</em> to sacrifice their own privileged way of life for the greater good of the planet, in practice this hasn’t happened in the past 50 years. Real change, if it’s going to come, will come from elsewhere.</p>
<p>The final piece of the puzzle is inner transformation. In Breaking Together, Bendell offers some brief suggestions of spiritual and wellness practices that have been useful for him: meditation; mindfulness; “deep relating” (or, focused conversations); “hikes in nature […] fasting […] ecstatic dance”. Learning a musical instrument, getting into improvisational theatre. </p>
<p>This is all well and good. More generally, it is refreshing to see self-help discourses appear side-by-side with serious discussions of monetary policy and climate tipping points. But the self-actualisation aspect is also a bit … basic. The key point, really, is we all have to work this stuff out for ourselves. Elsewhere in the book, Bendell suggests:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Personally, I find natural scientists much less interesting and wise on metaphysical matters than the teachers of the great wisdom traditions. Perhaps I just prefer my spirituality from people with less of an interest in statistics.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I agree. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-in-an-age-of-catastrophe-is-there-still-a-place-for-utopian-dreams-or-might-our-shared-vulnerability-be-the-key-199890">Friday essay: in an age of catastrophe is there still a place for utopian dreams? Or might our shared vulnerability be the key?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Paradigm-scuttling</h2>
<p>Breaking Together: A Freedom-Loving Response to Collapse is an important, uneven, paradigm-scuttling book. It deserves a wide readership, though I fear it might be too endnote-heavy for a general audience. </p>
<p>This book is worth reading even – especially? – if you don’t believe climate change will lead to a widespread breakdown of social structures. I would also suggest the book is worth persevering with even if you’re not convinced by every link in its chains of logic. </p>
<p>As Jonah E. Bromwich wrote for the New York Times in 2020, “even if the [Deep Adaptation] math doesn’t add up, does that make the dark conclusion <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/26/style/climate-change-deep-adaptation.html">any less meaningful</a>?” Or, put slightly more constructively: if there’s a non-zero probability of societal collapse, isn’t that something for us all to take very, very seriously? Isn’t that prospect worth devoting a significant amount of time and mental energy to? </p>
<p>Obviously, it’s worth doing everything in our power to prevent or slow aspects of this collapse. But it’s just as important to face up to the possibility the green energy transition <a href="https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-11-22/the-renewable-energy-transition-is-failing/">might fail</a>. That politicians around the world might not get their collective shit together in time. And that Earth’s climate will continue to spiral out of control, bringing ever-new <a href="https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/5137/">record-breaking temperatures</a>, wave after wave of <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/magazine/natural-disaster-rebuild.html">“unprecedented” disasters</a> and worse. </p>
<p>In such a world – which is, I repeat, <em>the world we already live in</em> – Bendell’s writing on “the Doomster way” is only going to become important. Breaking Together encourages people to take stock of their lives and actively make the most of what good time we have left. </p>
<p>To “dig garden beds, not bunkers”. And to, as Bendell quotes the words of the yogi Ram Dass, “<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym4Rpd72tq8">keep our hearts open in hell</a>” – even as things deteriorate around us.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213890/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tom volunteered for Extinction Rebellion Aotearoa in 2021.</span></em></p>
Jem Bendell encourages us to think about societal collapse in ways that are ‘profound and startlingly original’, with the potential to birth whole new social movements, says Tom Doig.
Tom Doig, Lecturer in Creative Writing, The University of Queensland
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/214840
2023-11-02T19:12:31Z
2023-11-02T19:12:31Z
Friday essay: jilted lovers could once sue for breach of promise – did we lose something in abolishing this law?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556790/original/file-20231031-25-kfakh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=35%2C7%2C4702%2C3137&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/bridal-bouquet-on-cobblestone-street-585841202">Leah Joy Kelton/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>Just a few lines to my ever dear Beattie.<br>
My dear love. I am nearly mad. <br>
Dear love, I love the ground you walk upon. <br>
My dear love. I pity you from the bottom of my heart. <br>
You are my love for life.<br>
I think it is a yarn about my wife being alive … I think it is spite …<br>
Dear, I would like to see you …<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>On a squally autumn day in Sydney in March 1914, Beatrice Storey, a barmaid, sued Frederick Chapman, a farmer, for abandoning her on the day of their wedding. To be precise, she claimed £1,000 damages in the New South Wales Supreme Court for breach of promise of marriage, a suit that could be used to claim compensation for injuries arising from a broken engagement.</p>
<p>Beatrice had first glimpsed Frederick a year earlier, from behind the bar at the Captain Cook Hotel. Cavalier, stocky and a “spinner of yarns”, he breezed into the pub “<a href="https://www.amazon.com.au/Paul-Keating-David-Day/dp/0732284252">smelling of horses and flashing his winnings</a>”. He told her he had been at the Moore Park races down the road. He also said he was 40, wealthy and a widower. After a month of giddy infatuation, he presented her with a wedding ring and vowed he would marry her.</p>
<p>Almost none of what he told her was true.</p>
<p>Beatrice explained from the witness box to the judge and a jury of four that she was 30 years old when she quit her employment, on Frederick’s insistence, and moved back home with her mother a few doors down on Flinders Street. Yes, she and Frederick had made wedding arrangements at St Barnabas’ church on George Street: 40 invitations were sent out; the wedding cake and carriage were ordered. </p>
<p>She had selected furniture for their new home in Kensington, and he had promised to settle the property upon her as well as gifting her £2,000 to furnish the house. “He said he had plenty of money,” she informed the court; “in fact, ‘money to burn’.” The day before the wedding, Frederick kissed Beatrice goodbye on the porch of her brother’s house and told her not to be late for church.</p>
<p>Frederick never showed up for his wedding. He phoned Beatrice and apologised, asking her to cancel the ceremony as he had just received news his wife was alive. The marriage would make him a bigamist. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-3-ways-philosophy-can-help-us-understand-love-155374">Friday essay: 3 ways philosophy can help us understand love</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Beatrice was livid. Frederick rushed to her house and tried to console her, begging her to take the wedding ring, fumbling his way into an embrace, chaotically trying to kiss her. She pushed him away. In the following weeks Frederick turned to ink and paper, bewailing the maddening effects of passion, confessing that the reports of his wife were “a yarn” and exhorting that it was his “greatest wish to marry”. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556796/original/file-20231031-21-fey6h3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A newspaper clipping reporting on the case." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556796/original/file-20231031-21-fey6h3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556796/original/file-20231031-21-fey6h3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556796/original/file-20231031-21-fey6h3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556796/original/file-20231031-21-fey6h3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=940&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556796/original/file-20231031-21-fey6h3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556796/original/file-20231031-21-fey6h3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556796/original/file-20231031-21-fey6h3.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1181&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A report of the case.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">National Library of Australia/Trove.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Beatrice converted Frederick’s love letters into legal evidence and his passion into proof, in one of the most lucrative breach of promise actions of her decade: £350 compensation for her “lacerated feelings”.</p>
<p>The next time Beatrice and Frederick appear on the historical record is on January 23 1915, at St Martin’s Anglican Church in Kensington. This time, Frederick showed up for his wedding.</p>
<p>A little under 60 years later, in the early 1970s, a grandson of Beatrice and Frederick was also sued for breach of promise of marriage, just before <a href="https://parlinfo.aph.gov.au/parlInfo/search/display/display.w3p;query=Id%3A%22legislation%2Fbillshistorical%2FHBILL1976V400018%22;src1=sm1">the action was abolished</a>. No newspaper bothered to report it, and we only know of the action because in 1986 a Liberal politician, Wilson Tuckey, raised it in federal parliament. </p>
<p>“Paul had a girl called Christine,” he hissed, directing his comments at a Labor MP named Paul, also implying (incorrectly) that an illegitimate child had been born. </p>
<p>“Madame Speaker,” the Labor MP interjected. He demanded Tuckey be censured. He railed against him, calling him a criminal. Later that day, the Labor MP held a press conference outside Parliament House to address the remarks and asked that they be erased from the Hansard minutes. This Labor MP, the grandson of Beatrice and Frederick, was <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Senate/Powers_practice_n_procedures/pops/pop34/c14">the future prime minister Paul Keating</a>. </p>
<h2>Servants, seamstresses, nurses</h2>
<p>Why would Keating care so much about a past breach of promise suit – an action that by the 1970s was seen as a quirky relic from the Victorian era? Why should we care about his breach of promise suit, or any action over a thwarted romance in the past? What can the minor tragedies we see in breach of promise cases tell us about the history of love in Australia over the course of two centuries? And what might they suggest about how humans have sought to govern love – the most ungovernable of emotions, across time? </p>
<p>I have spent the past ten years looking for love in the canons of law; digging up around 1,000 breach of promise cases in search of answers to these questions. In the process, I have encountered a different kind of protagonist to those I have been accustomed to meeting in histories of romantic love. Here there are no lofty philosophers, sensitive poets or delicate letter-writers penning epistles in the hush of a lady’s drawing room. </p>
<p>The feckless Lotharios are shearers, train drivers, bankrupt shopkeepers, farmers and commercial travellers. Their scorned brides are people like Beatrice Storey: barmaids, domestic servants, seamstresses, nurses, piano teachers and, later in the century, chorus girls and migrants. They are mostly ordinary people of the lower-middle orders who could not afford the luxury of privacy, nor the indulgence of marrying for love alone.</p>
<p>Some went to court seeking compensation for lost wages or diminished social and economic status, others for wounded affections or missed romantic opportunities, and many more, like Beatrice, were using the action to pressure their partner to marry them. </p>
<p>Women who had been “seduced” litigated to defend their sexual reputations. Most plaintiffs were refreshingly oblivious or indifferent to the social scorn that the legal action cast upon them: the indignity of having your most private feelings filleted before a public audience; the perceived vulgarity of seeking financial recompense for the unquantifiable pain of a broken heart.</p>
<h2>Contemporary fantasies of romantic plenitude</h2>
<p>If Beatrice Storey had been left at the altar today, Frederick Chapman would not have been forced by the state to compensate her for her hurt feelings, nor for any financial losses she incurred. The fact Fred was an intimate partner, rather than a commercial one, would likely have denied her a legal remedy. </p>
<p>The law tends to assume that intimates don’t intend to create legal relations. Women are not economically and socially dependent on marriage as they once were, and a failed relationship does not relegate women to the status of damaged goods. Courtship is now defined by love, choice, physical desire and mutual negotiation, rather than by contractual legal obligation.</p>
<p>Fuelled by dating apps that promise a new partner by simply swiping right on your phone, fantasies of romantic plenitude have replaced legal regimes of punishment.</p>
<p>Yet people continue to experience injury, be it financial, emotional or bodily, when intimate promises are broken, and the discovery of deceit in relationships can be life-altering. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/3-in-4-people-experience-abuse-on-dating-apps-how-do-we-balance-prevention-with-policing-198587">3 in 4 people experience abuse on dating apps. How do we balance prevention with policing?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Rather than seeing the unmooring of love from law as a tale of liberation, by which love was set free from the paternalistic bonds of the state, I question what we have lost in this process, and how we might imagine, legally and socially, an ethics of intimacy.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556793/original/file-20231031-23-3dz8ta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A woman at a window crying." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556793/original/file-20231031-23-3dz8ta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556793/original/file-20231031-23-3dz8ta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556793/original/file-20231031-23-3dz8ta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556793/original/file-20231031-23-3dz8ta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556793/original/file-20231031-23-3dz8ta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556793/original/file-20231031-23-3dz8ta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556793/original/file-20231031-23-3dz8ta.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">People continue to experience injury, be it financial, emotional or bodily, when intimate promises are broken.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/light-fashion-love-people-6670149/">Pexels: Rdne stock project</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Instead of turning to law, the Beatrice Storey of today would likely try to overcome her pain by reading self-help books or talking to friends, family and experts, all educated to varying degrees in psychology. The advice she would receive would no doubt revolve around the virtues of resilience, the balm of commodity culture (go out and buy yourself a new dress!), and interrogation of her own psyche (why had she been attracted to such a duplicitous cad in the first place?). </p>
<p>Where law would have ascribed fault and demanded a tallying-up of emotional, bodily and financial harm that could be compensated (however awkwardly) by money, therapeutic discourse is uninterested in material loss or ethical responsibility. </p>
<p>What was once a public debate about the rules of romance, including its gendered financial costs and the seriousness of its injuries, is now sequestered in the therapist’s clinic. </p>
<p>Like scholars before me, I argue that the “<a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/144078338702300304">coming of the counsellors</a>” by the mid-20th century was not a victory but a loss, particularly for women. Responsibility for romantic injury has been individualised and feminised, and its pain trivialised, drained of economic meaning.</p>
<h2>High stakes</h2>
<p>There is something fundamentally human about falling in love that allows us to feel the amorous tremors of love poetry such as Sappho or Byron although centuries may yawn between us and the poet. But love is also not just love. When we see doctors giving testimony about the medical effects of heartbreak, or read of Beatrice Storey turning around after her court case and marrying Frederick Chapman, or applaud women at the start of the 20th century for claiming damages for the dinners they had cooked their lovers, we know we are dealing with an emotion that is profoundly shaped by culture. Love is a creature of its time. And it is in the space between strangeness and familiarity that the history of love can be found.</p>
<p>When I tell my students they could once have sued a lover for breaking an engagement, they are always astonished and a bit indignant; romance is not a fit subject for law, they say. Their response exposes a cultural assumption that love and law are opposites, conceptual antipodes, each untranslatable and hostile to the other. We think of romance as frolicsome, rebellious, impetuous and wilful, impervious to the monolithic sobriety of law. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556792/original/file-20231031-21-w7qbls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="The cover for the book Courting." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556792/original/file-20231031-21-w7qbls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556792/original/file-20231031-21-w7qbls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556792/original/file-20231031-21-w7qbls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556792/original/file-20231031-21-w7qbls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556792/original/file-20231031-21-w7qbls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556792/original/file-20231031-21-w7qbls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556792/original/file-20231031-21-w7qbls.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Black Inc.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>From the ancients to the romantic poets, love has been a breaker of rules, which is why social contract theorists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau viewed it with suspicion. “Lovers never see anyone but themselves, they incessantly attend only to themselves and the only thing they are able to do is love each other,” he complained. </p>
<p>While law is rational and generalisable, love is a divine delirium that makes little sense to anyone but the couple afflicted. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-the-philosophy-of-jean-jacques-rousseau-is-profoundly-contemporary-201179">Explainer: the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau is profoundly contemporary</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Ethical or not, today’s courting couples can “ghost” away without consequence; they can break promises or refrain from making them at all. Being true to your own feelings and following your own desires now trumps any notion of duty or honour. Ineffable, exquisitely personal, secretive and mysterious, romantic love, as we imagine it, has nothing to do with the coercive, transparent machinations of our public legal system.</p>
<p>But if we think more deeply, this easy dichotomy between love and law begins to break down. Love has its own laws and exercises its own jurisdiction; like law, it demands, either pleasurably or punitively, that we relinquish our will to a higher order. Love may elevate us – magically transfiguring the world into something as beautiful as our imagined love object – but like law it can also deprive us of autonomy, bestow obligations, punish transgressions and issue commands. </p>
<p>And because the stakes in love and law are high, as both change lives, they have a similar interest in evidence: “How do I know you are who you say you are?” and “can I place trust in your words?” are questions asked as anxiously in court as in courtship. </p>
<p>Love and law propel us on a quest for proof: we hunt for clues in small gestures, we read signs into bodily disturbances, we discern meaning in happenstance and we detect broad patterns of significance in the minutiae of everyday life.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/what-is-love-in-pop-culture-love-is-often-depicted-as-a-willingness-to-sacrifice-but-ancient-philosophers-took-a-different-view-187159">What is love? In pop culture, love is often depicted as a willingness to sacrifice, but ancient philosophers took a different view</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>An ethics of love?</h2>
<p>Over the course of two centuries, romantic love and law become separated. Each declares incompetency in the realm of the other, and I wonder whether this is something we should celebrate. </p>
<p>Is there such a thing as an ethics of love? What did we lose in the shift from the legal condemnation of deceit in relationships to psychological exhortations to resilience? Should we take romantic injuries more seriously? How should we economically value intimate labour? </p>
<p>History is not simply about avoiding the mistakes of the past – for we never do this anyway. It is at best an exercise in humility: learning that humans are malleable creatures and that the various incarnations of humanity we meet when we travel back in time may sometimes be wiser creatures than ourselves. </p>
<p>For Australians, a history of love told from the papery relics of one of our most treasured national icons – the working-class battler – is a corrective to traditional histories of love that tend to favour the bourgeoisie, and an antidote to our anaemic national mythologising of stoic, independent blokes and robust women.</p>
<p>Frederick Chapman may have been a stockman, larrikin and “spinner of yarns”, but he was also nervous, sentimental and smitten by Beatrice Storey. And far from being a long-suffering heroine of Australian legend, Beatrice took her squandered affections to court and won. </p>
<p>Writing a history of courtship from the archival remains of broken hearts allows us to tell national and transnational stories of vulnerability and resistance, of fierce and fragile inner worlds.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This is an edited extract from <a href="https://www.blackincbooks.com.au/books/courting">Courting: an intimate history of love and the law</a> by Alecia Simmonds (Black Inc).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/214840/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alecia Simmonds received funding from The State Library of New South Wales where she was a Merewether Fellow. </span></em></p>
Australians could once claim compensation for injuries arising from a broken engagement. Today, the responsibility for romantic injury has been individualised and feminised, its pain trivialised.
Alecia Simmonds, Lecturer, Faculty of Law, University of Technology Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/212348
2023-10-26T19:03:21Z
2023-10-26T19:03:21Z
Friday essay: the secret lives of Ian Fleming and John Le Carré – the spymasters shaped by a lack of parental love
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555978/original/file-20231026-29-w5gl2q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=8%2C0%2C5982%2C3988&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">John Le Carré in a scene from The Pigeon Tunnel</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Apple TV+</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 2022, writer Suleika Dawson published an intimate, refreshingly candid <a href="https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/the-secret-heart-john-le-carre-an-intimate-memoir-suleika-dawson?variant=39815110131790">first-hand account</a> of her passionate extramarital affair with David Cornwell – who worked as an intelligence agent for MI5 and MI6 in the 1950s and early 1960s, and wrote spy novels using the pseudonym John le Carré.</p>
<p>Dawson and Cornwell first crossed paths in September 1982. Dawson, who had recently graduated with a degree in English Literature and Language from the University of Oxford, had a job abridging novels for an audiobook firm in London. </p>
<p>Cornwell, whom Dawson correctly describes as “the premier fabulist of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/whats-a-cold-war-a-historian-explains-how-rivals-us-and-soviet-union-competed-off-the-battlefield-192238">Cold War</a>”, was booked in at her firm’s recording studio to read the abridged version of his ninth novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/smileys-people-9780241330913">Smiley’s People</a>, published in 1979. (An award-winning <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083480/">television adaptation</a> starring Alec Guinness appeared in 1982.) </p>
<p>Cornwell had been an internationally bestselling author since his third novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold-9780241330920">The Spy Who Came in from the Cold</a>, was published in 1963. He had stopped working as an intelligence officer to become a full-time writer a year later, after his diplomatic cover in West Germany (where he was stationed when the <a href="https://theconversation.com/world-politics-explainer-the-fall-of-the-berlin-wall-100812">Berlin Wall</a> was erected) <a href="https://spyscape.com/article/john-le-carre-thinker-writer-cold-war-spy">was blown</a> by MI6 double agent Kim Philby – or so he always claimed. </p>
<p>A fictional version of Philby would be hunted by George Smiley, Le Carré’s most iconic fictional spy, in his 1974 novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/tinker-tailor-soldier-spy-9780241658987">Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy</a>.</p>
<p>There was, Dawson remembers, “an extraordinary bond between us, which we both felt from that first lunch – which David, whose life had been a constant search for love, perhaps felt even more forcefully than I did”. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555989/original/file-20231026-19-nhyptv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555989/original/file-20231026-19-nhyptv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555989/original/file-20231026-19-nhyptv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555989/original/file-20231026-19-nhyptv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555989/original/file-20231026-19-nhyptv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555989/original/file-20231026-19-nhyptv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555989/original/file-20231026-19-nhyptv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555989/original/file-20231026-19-nhyptv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=425&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Alec Guinness as George Smiley in the 1982 adaptation of Smiley’s People.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC Images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘Messy private life’ off-limits</h2>
<p>Cornwell’s “constant search for love” is highly relevant to Adam Sisman’s <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Adam-Sisman-Secret-Life-of-John-le-Carre-9781800818231">The Secret Life of John le Carré</a> (2023), a biographical addendum of sorts to his 2015 book, <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/217665/john-le-carre-the-biography-by-adam-sisman/9780307361516">John le Carré: The Biography</a>. </p>
<p>Although Cornwell was initially enthusiastic about Sisman’s biography and agreed to work with him on it, he was wary when it came to inquiries about his “own messy private life”. It was – as Sisman soon came to discover – strictly off-limits. </p>
<p>This is something the famed documentarian Errol Morris would come up against in <a href="https://tv.apple.com/au/movie/the-pigeon-tunnel/umc.cmc.633pbtki99m7e8lc9ybbyab3">The Pigeon Tunnel</a> (2023). His recent documentary adaptation of Le Carré’s 2016 memoir, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/294602/the-pigeon-tunnel-by-carre-john-le/9780241396377">The Pigeon Tunnel: Stories From My Life</a>, concentrates on Cornwell’s relationship with his conman father, and on his career in British intelligence and as a novelist, but is notably thin on details when it comes to certain aspects of his private life. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/9gWnuhjwNrw?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Errol Morris’s documentary The Pigeon Tunnel concentrates on Cornwell/Le Carré’s relationship with his conman father and on his career.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At one particularly telling juncture late in the film, Morris asks Cornwell about the theme of “betrayal” that runs through his life and career. Cornwell’s response is worth quoting:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well, I feel you got the last drop out of the sponge on that subject. But I’ll answer any question you wish me to answer as truthfully as I can. […] I’m not going to talk about my sex life - anymore, I trust, than you would. It seems to be an intensely private matter. My love life has been a very difficult passage, as you would imagine, but it has resolved itself wonderfully. And that’s enough on that subject.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It is a fleeting, yet significant moment in the film – reminiscent of the situation in which Sisman found himself while working on his 2015 biography. Relations between biographer and subject became increasingly strained, with Cornwell threatening to scupper the venture altogether.</p>
<p>Sisman turned to Cornwell’s eldest son, Simon, who recommended the biographer should keep a “secret annexe” of material that could be published in some form after David and his wife Jane had passed away.</p>
<p>“Now that [Cornwell] has died,” Sisman writes in his preface to The Secret Life of John Le Carré, “it is important to add this coda to the biography that he encouraged, semi-authorised, and then tried to sabotage.” </p>
<p>He writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is not a substitute for or a condensation of my 2015 biography, but a supplement containing material that I felt obliged to omit then, as well as information that has emerged since.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The new book affords him the opportunity to paint as complete as possible a biographical portrait of Cornwell, who was born in 1931 and died in 2020, while hoping to dispel “some of the myths about David’s past” – certain of which came from Cornwell himself. </p>
<p>Sisman demonstrates, for example, that it is highly unlikely Philby blew Cornwell’s cover when he <a href="https://theconversation.com/back-in-the-ussr-my-life-as-a-spy-in-the-archives-26303">defected to the Soviet Union</a> in 1963.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/john-le-carre-authentic-spy-fiction-that-wrote-the-wrongs-of-post-war-british-intelligence-152055">John Le Carré: authentic spy fiction that wrote the wrongs of post-war British intelligence</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Ian Fleming and his looming family influence</h2>
<p>Nicholas Shakespeare, who writes novels when not penning <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/355675/bruce-chatwin-by-shakespeare-nicholas/9780099289975">celebrated biographies</a>, says something similar in the prologue to <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/ian-fleming-9781787302426">Ian Fleming: The Complete Man</a>, his 800-page account of the author who created the most world’s famous fictional spy, James Bond.</p>
<p>Shakespeare thinks there “ample and legitimate reasons to go right back to the beginning; to turn the soil of [Fleming’s] personal history and revisit his legacy from a contemporary perspective”.</p>
<p>Drawing on published and unpublished materials, Shakespeare aims to correct a few assumptions about Fleming’s life – especially when it comes to his career with the Naval Intelligence Division during the second world war.</p>
<p>A child of extraordinary wealth and privilege, Fleming was born in 1908 and died in 1964. Of Scottish descent, he grew up in England and was educated at Eton - where Cornwell once taught - and Sandhurst Royal Military College.</p>
<p>His merchant banker father, Valentine Fleming, was, in Shakespeare’s account, “a paragon of whom no one spoke ill”.</p>
<p>Ian Fleming barely knew his father, a well-loved war hero who was killed in action during the first world war, and whose obituary was written by none other than Winston Churchill (which Ian framed and kept above his bed as a child).</p>
<p>“Like Churchill’s framed obituary,” Shakespeare contends, “the phantom of his dead father loomed over Ian for the remainder of his life.”</p>
<p>Shakespeare reasons the untimely death of Valentine Fleming played a decisive role in the genesis of James Bond. Specifically, he speculates that one of the reasons why Ian – who never saw front-line combat – created 007 was an unconscious desire to “join his father at the front”.</p>
<p>Ian Fleming’s relationship with his older brother, Peter, is similarly noteworthy. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Fleming_(writer)">Peter Fleming</a> was an adventurer, journalist and author. Shakespeare asserts that Ian spent his whole life trying to keep up with his much-admired brother.</p>
<p>In 1951, Peter published a bestselling spy novel, The Sixth Column, which he dedicated to his brother. It appeared mere months before the first James Bond novel, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3758.Casino_Royale">Casino Royale</a>.</p>
<p>Ian had long harboured literary ambitions. Upon reading The Sixth Column, Shakespeare says, “Ian knew he could do better.”</p>
<p>Shakespeare quotes Ian Fleming’s American editor – Al Hart – in support. Ian, who worked as a stockbroker and a journalist (with Reuters and The Sunday Times) before finding belated fame as a novelist, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>wrote because he got tired of being Peter Fleming’s younger brother. He was determined that Peter Fleming should be known as Ian Fleming’s elder brother. And by God, he is.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>For Shakespeare, where Ian’s relationship with his brother can be characterised as competitive, his relationship with his mother – Eve – should be understood in terms of control and domination. </p>
<p>Eve Sainte Croix Fleming comes in for sustained criticism in the new biography. Shakespeare, who has very little positive to say here, describes her as “imperious, melodramatic, entitled, and a narcissist who dealt acidly with dissent”. </p>
<p>In Shakespeare’s retelling, Eve’s parenting left a lot to be desired, and had a detrimental effect on Ian’s development. </p>
<p>He suggests Fleming’s fraught bond with his mother came to shape the character and problematic behavioural patterns of James Bond – especially in relation to women. (Like 007, Fleming was an incorrigible womaniser.)</p>
<h2>Infidelities ‘a necessary drug’ for Le Carré</h2>
<p>Familial relationships played an equally significant role in Cornwell’s development. He was always upfront about this. </p>
<p>He spoke and wrote extensively about the effect his father Ronnie – a notorious conman and convicted felon – had on his childhood, and how this vexed relationship shaped his behaviour in adult life. </p>
<p>Ronnie’s presence is most clearly felt in Le Carré’s transparently semi-autobiographical 1986 novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-perfect-spy-9780241322482">A Perfect Spy</a>, whose protagonist, a British intelligence officer and double agent, has a charismatic conman father. Philip Roth thought it the “best English novel since the war”.</p>
<p>Cornwell’s relationship with Ronnie is explored at length in The Pigeon Tunnel: both the memoir and Morris’s documentary adaptation.</p>
<p>“People loved Ronnie to the end of his days, even people he robbed,” Cornwell told Morris. “When he was on stage, beguiling people, he absolutely believed in what he was saying. These spasms of immense charm and persuasiveness were his moments of feeling real.”</p>
<p>His father wanted him to have a “posh education” and sent him to schools where he learned “the manners and attitudes of a class to which I did not belong”. (Set in a fictional private school, Le Carré’s 1962 novel, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/180369/a-murder-of-quality-by-carre-john-le/9780241330883">A Murder of Quality</a>, gives us a sense of Cornwell’s feelings about the British ruling class.) This sense of not belonging, of performing a role, also contributed to him being “a little spy” from “a very early age”.</p>
<p>Cornwell’s relationship with his mother, Olive, was just as complex. Unable to cope with Ronnie’s compulsive swindling and dangerous lifestyle, David’s mother walked out on the family when he was five years old. He met her again when he was 21. “She was impenetrable emotionally,” he told Errol Morris. “I never heard her express a serious feeling.”</p>
<p>Sisman mentions Olive at the start of The Secret Life, when discussing Cornwell’s many extramarital affairs:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Why did David pursue these women with such intensity and what does it say about him? When compelled to confront this issue, he told me that the restless, self-destructive search for love was part of his nature. In his mind this went back to his childhood, to his unrequited love for his mother, who abandoned her children at an early age.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the film version of The Pigeon Tunnel, Cornwell reflects on the night his mother disappeared:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Did she come into the room where we slept and take a last look at us? […] I imagine that she did.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sisman sets out to answer his own questions. He maintains that Cornwell’s infidelities are key to a proper – or complete – appreciation of his writing. Not only do they help us understand what Cornwell wrote, but they help to explain, in Sisman’s words, “how, why and when he wrote”. </p>
<p>Sisman quotes from his private correspondence with Cornwell when making this claim: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>My infidelities produced in my life a duality & that became almost a necessary drug for my writing, a dangerous edge of some kind […] They are not therefore a “dark part” of my life, separate from the “high literary calling”, so to speak, but, alas, integral to it, & inseparable.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dawson would agree with this assessment - appreciating as she does “how entirely fractal David’s life was, how each part was a smaller replica of the whole. The perfect multifaceted reflection of the perfect spy.” </p>
<p>“It’s terribly difficult to recruit for the secret service,” says Cornwell in the film, The Pigeon Tunnel. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>You’re looking for somebody who’s a bit bad. But at the same time loyal. There’s a type they were looking for in my day. And I fitted perfectly.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/john-le-carre-mi6-and-the-fact-and-fiction-of-british-secret-intelligence-124522">John le Carré, MI6 and the fact and fiction of British secret intelligence</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The ‘truth’ about Ian Fleming’s war work</h2>
<p>Nicholas Shakespeare touches on the topic of infidelity at various points in his book on Fleming. He also grants that Fleming’s notoriety as “a prickly, self-centred bounder” with a penchant for sexual sadism is well deserved, and tough to shake.</p>
<p>Shakespeare openly acknowledges he had initial reservations about Fleming’s character and his “undeniable shortcomings”. Selfish, cruel, snobbish – these are a few of terms that tend to get thrown around when talking about Fleming. Some of the others, like the four-letter word <a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/lucian-freud-1120">Lucien Freud</a> used to describe Fleming, cannot be printed here.</p>
<p>Despite this, Shakespeare thinks Fleming “an unfailingly intriguing character” who is ripe for reappraisal. Working with unpublished letters and diaries, previously uninterviewed witnesses, and a series of declassified files, Shakespeare sets out to cast “Fleming and his life in a new light that leads to new conclusions about the man”.</p>
<p>Shakespeare comes to new conclusions about Fleming’s conduct during the second world war. Fleming’s war record has long been a bone of contention. In part, this is due to the fact he worked in a department that dealt with confidential matters of national security, counterintelligence and espionage.</p>
<p>Some people, as Shakespeare acknowledges, believe Fleming was nothing more than a glorified office worker, “too wedded to his comforts and smart uniform to risk going into action himself”.</p>
<p>These critics tend to “wonder with something of a sneer whether he could have done anything really useful in the war”. Cornwell, for example, had precious little time for Fleming, whom he considered a self-aggrandising fantasist. </p>
<p>Cornwell was also deeply suspicious of James Bond – <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-bond-idUKTRE67G24U20100817">he considered Fleming’s famous creation</a> “neo-fascistic and totally materialist” and less a spy than “some kind of international gangster with, as it is said, a licence to kill”.</p>
<p>Shakespeare believes otherwise: since Fleming “was never allowed to write the truth about his war work, facts about his life are hard to see clearly through the aura cast by the success of James Bond”. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556000/original/file-20231026-17-6z74r.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556000/original/file-20231026-17-6z74r.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556000/original/file-20231026-17-6z74r.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556000/original/file-20231026-17-6z74r.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556000/original/file-20231026-17-6z74r.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556000/original/file-20231026-17-6z74r.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556000/original/file-20231026-17-6z74r.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556000/original/file-20231026-17-6z74r.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1160&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Accordingly, Shakespeare – who is unwavering in his conviction that “a clear and reliable picture of [Fleming’s] duties and the depth and range of his knowledge and responsibilities does exist” – strives in his biography to set the historical record straight. </p>
<p>Shakespeare finds Fleming “made a noteworthy contribution to the second world war - and not only in organising covert operations in Nazi-occupied North Europe and North Africa that helped to shorten the conflict”. Fleming also worked to bring the United States into the conflict, and worked to set up and coordinate the wartime intelligence organisation that eventually turned into the CIA. </p>
<p>Shakespeare brings his discussion of Fleming’s war record to a close with the assertion: “Ian never lived at such an intense level again. He would spend the rest of his life in peacetime, trying to recapture moments of time like these.” The way he did this was, as Shakespeare puts it, “by writing the books which have become the reason we are still reading about him today”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-wilderness-of-mirrors-70-years-since-the-first-james-bond-book-spy-stories-are-still-blurring-fact-and-fiction-201373">'The wilderness of mirrors': 70 years since the first James Bond book, spy stories are still blurring fact and fiction</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Bond: ‘a post-war British fantasy’</h2>
<p>Contrary to received wisdom, the 12 action-packed spy novels Fleming wrote after the war were, in Shakespeare’s reckoning, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>grounded in reality and a truth that Ian could not reveal but had intensely experienced. He wrote what he knew. By converting his lived experience into fiction, and updating it, he released the burden of that knowledge.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555998/original/file-20231026-23-byxwrv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555998/original/file-20231026-23-byxwrv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555998/original/file-20231026-23-byxwrv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555998/original/file-20231026-23-byxwrv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555998/original/file-20231026-23-byxwrv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=980&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555998/original/file-20231026-23-byxwrv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1231&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555998/original/file-20231026-23-byxwrv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1231&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555998/original/file-20231026-23-byxwrv.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1231&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Bond books also served specific ideological purposes. Historical context is important here. As Shakespeare puts it, Fleming’s fictions were intended “as a post-war British fantasy, as a balm for a demoralised imperial power on its uppers”. </p>
<p>The writer and columnist Ben Macintyre makes a similar point in his <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/for-your-eyes-only-9781408830642/">official history</a> of 007. “To the readers of the 1950s,” Macintyre writes, “Bond was a promise of glamour and plenty amid postwar austerity, the thrill of sexual licence in a buttoned-up society.”</p>
<p>We see evidence of this in <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3758.Casino_Royale">Casino Royale</a> (1953), the first Bond book. Here’s a description of Bond’s breakfast (his favourite meal of the day):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Bond liked to make a good breakfast. After a cold shower, he sat at the writing-table in front of the window. He looked out at the beautiful day and consumed half a pint of iced orange juice, three scrambled eggs and bacon and a double portion of coffee without sugar. He lit his first cigarette, a Balkan and Turkish mixture made for him by Morlands of Grosvenor Street, and watched the small waves lick the long seashore and the fishing fleet from Dieppe string out towards the June heat-haze followed by a paper-chase of herring-gulls.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Fleming’s novels, which tend to be set in suitably sun-drenched locations, are full of descriptions like this. Self-consciously excessive and extravagant (the line about Bond’s custom-made cigarettes is a particularly nice touch here), they gesture in the direction of a lifestyle that would have been out of reach to all bar the extremely wealthy.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/is-james-bond-a-misogynist-he-doesnt-have-to-be-connery-moore-or-even-craigs-vision-forever-169619">Is James Bond a misogynist? He doesn't have to be Connery, Moore or even Craig's vision forever</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Smiley: deliberately ‘breathtakingly ordinary’</h2>
<p>I want now to take that description and contrast it with two passages from Le Carré. The first comes from <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-spy-who-came-in-from-the-cold-9780241330920">The Spy Who Came In From The Cold</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>His flat was small and squalid, done in brown paint with photographs of Clovelly. It looked directly on to the grey backs of three stone warehouses, the windows of which were drawn, for aesthetic reasons, in creosote.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Where Fleming is expansive and sun-dappled, Le Carré is claustrophobic and drab.</p>
<p>The second passage is taken from Le Carré’s first novel, 1961’s <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/182715/call-for-the-dead-by-carre-john-le/9780241639214">Call for the Dead</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Short, fat, and of a quiet disposition, he appeared to spend a lot of money on really bad clothes, which hung about his squat frame like skin on a shrunken toad.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555999/original/file-20231026-32729-if7v76.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555999/original/file-20231026-32729-if7v76.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555999/original/file-20231026-32729-if7v76.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555999/original/file-20231026-32729-if7v76.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555999/original/file-20231026-32729-if7v76.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555999/original/file-20231026-32729-if7v76.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555999/original/file-20231026-32729-if7v76.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555999/original/file-20231026-32729-if7v76.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This is the first physical description of Le Carré’s famous spymaster, the aforementioned George Smiley. The polar opposite of Bond in almost every conceivable way, Smiley is – as Le Carré insists on the very first page of <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/call-for-the-dead-9780241639214">Call for the Dead</a> – “breathtakingly ordinary.” There is certainly nothing glamorous about him - and that is Le Carré’s point.</p>
<p>Similarly, while Bond’s MI6 is constantly saving the world from the outlandish machinations of egotistic supervillains, Smiley’s British intelligence service is vulnerable to leaks – and the threats it battles are deeply embedded in political systems and real-world conflicts. It is also – and this is something Le Carré says time and time again in his <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/series/180842-george-smiley">Smiley novels</a> – an outdated relic of Britain’s imperial era.</p>
<h2>‘Childhood is the credit balance of the writer’</h2>
<p>Shakespeare acknowledges that readers </p>
<blockquote>
<p>tend to think of John Le Carré before George Smiley. With Fleming, it is the reverse, as if Bond’s unstoppable waves of popularity have lapped back over the author, submerging him.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556001/original/file-20231026-23-wzz8c4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556001/original/file-20231026-23-wzz8c4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/556001/original/file-20231026-23-wzz8c4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556001/original/file-20231026-23-wzz8c4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556001/original/file-20231026-23-wzz8c4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=965&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556001/original/file-20231026-23-wzz8c4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1213&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556001/original/file-20231026-23-wzz8c4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1213&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/556001/original/file-20231026-23-wzz8c4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1213&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By examining the lives of Fleming and Cornwell, and touching on some of the stark differences between their iconic literary creations, Shakespeare and Sisman provide us with a compelling framework to reevaluate the profound impact of these two authors – on the realm of spy fiction, literary history and their enduring influence on Western popular culture. </p>
<p>As we have seen, both works also speak to the role childhood experience and trauma can have on the development of character.</p>
<p>Talking to Errol Morris, Cornwell quotes <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graham_Greene">Graham Greene</a>: “Childhood is the credit balance of the writer.” He says, “It’s not a lament, it’s just a self-examination.” Later, he describes his writing process as a journey of self-discovery, “every time”. He reflects:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have never submitted to analysis. I feel if I knew any secrets about myself I’d deprive myself of writing.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Reading these excellent new biographies, it strikes me that Cornwell’s personal and professional secrets are safe with Sisman, as are Fleming’s with Shakespeare.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212348/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alexander Howard does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
John le Carré and Ian Fleming, the world’s most famous spy novelists, share experience in UK intelligence and difficult childhoods. But their heroes, George Smiley and James Bond, are very different.
Alexander Howard, Senior Lecturer, Discipline of English, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/207424
2023-10-19T19:03:10Z
2023-10-19T19:03:10Z
Friday essay: how women writers helped me find my voice after divorce
<p>When my 25-year marriage broke down in 2017, I did what I always do in my life, especially in times of crisis. I turned to books. Specifically, to books by women. </p>
<p>Many, but not all of them, were in middle age, writing about their lives post-husbands – often post-intensive mothering too. They’d arrived at an unmarked place. There were no literary or narrative models to follow, in their lives or in their art. So they were making them up as they went.</p>
<p>My hunger for women’s voices was amplified by having spent a decade reading and listening almost exclusively to men, for the <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Jane-Gleeson-White-Double-Entry-9781743311554">books</a> I <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Jane-Gleeson-White-Six-Capitals-Updated-Edition-9781760876784/">wrote</a> on accounting.</p>
<p>I had no plan; it was an impulsive, almost life-saving need. The first book I picked up was an old favourite, Jane Austen’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/persuasion-9780141439686">Persuasion</a>. In the slow unfolding of her final novel, Austen subjects her readers to the exquisite agony of watching its heroine Anne Elliott suffer a great and apparently hopeless love for her former suitor. Anne is gentle, reserved and bookish. But when moved, she’s passionate – outspoken about the force of women’s emotions, and inequality of opportunity:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Yes, yes, if you please, no reference to examples in books. Men have had every advantage of us in telling their own story. Education has been theirs in so much higher a degree; the pen has been in their hands.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Persuasion acted like a tuning fork, returning me to my bookish self. The self who’d made a blog called bookishgirl in 2010, before we’d both – blog and girl – become mired in stories written by men: economics and accounting, both <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/aug/01/what-really-counts-how-the-patriarchy-of-economics-finally-tore-me-apart">blind to the value of nature and women</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554176/original/file-20231017-27-gzvb0u.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554176/original/file-20231017-27-gzvb0u.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554176/original/file-20231017-27-gzvb0u.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554176/original/file-20231017-27-gzvb0u.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554176/original/file-20231017-27-gzvb0u.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554176/original/file-20231017-27-gzvb0u.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554176/original/file-20231017-27-gzvb0u.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554176/original/file-20231017-27-gzvb0u.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=478&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">After Jane Gleeson-White’s marriage broke down, she did what she always does in times of crisis and turned to books.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo by Pauline Futeran</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/exes-alcohol-and-loose-historical-licence-why-netflixs-persuasion-is-jane-austen-via-fleabag-185383">Exes, alcohol and loose historical licence: why Netflix's Persuasion is Jane Austen via Fleabag</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Literary motherline</h2>
<p>Claiming her literary motherline is one of the impulses behind British writer Joanna Biggs’s new memoir <a href="https://www.hachette.com.au/joanna-biggs/a-life-of-ones-own-nine-women-writers-begin-again">A Life of One’s Own: Nine Women Writers Begin Again</a>. Much as I did, Biggs turned to women writers to answer the many questions thrown up by her divorce – and her book is the result of this reading. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Tbyhlq8DUs">an interview with Lizzie Simon</a>, Biggs says many people have asked about her decision to write in this hybrid form: part memoir, part biographical essays and part literary criticism. </p>
<p>But Biggs didn’t decide it. The form grew organically from a particular moment in her life, when she was <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/joanna-biggs">writing for the London Review of Books</a> and experimenting with adding more memoir to her reviews, inspired by the autofiction of writers like <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-dying-earth-and-a-lament-for-lost-fathers-sheila-heti-strips-back-the-novel-and-makes-it-new-181938">Sheila Heti</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-execrable-to-memorable-ben-lerners-essay-on-the-hatred-of-poetry-63413">Ben Lerner</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553929/original/file-20231016-24-dgd1s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553929/original/file-20231016-24-dgd1s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553929/original/file-20231016-24-dgd1s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553929/original/file-20231016-24-dgd1s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553929/original/file-20231016-24-dgd1s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553929/original/file-20231016-24-dgd1s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553929/original/file-20231016-24-dgd1s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553929/original/file-20231016-24-dgd1s0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
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<p>Biggs looks backwards, partly prompted by books her mother has given her and partly returning to writers she’s loved – Mary Wollstonecraft, <a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-george-eliot-200-years-on-a-scandalous-life-a-brilliant-mind-and-a-huge-literary-legacy-127438">George Eliot</a>, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Simone de Beauvoir – and reads <a href="https://www.zoranealehurston.com/">Zora Neale Hurston</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-most-influential-american-author-of-her-generation-toni-morrisons-writing-was-radically-ambiguous-121557">Toni Morrison</a> for the first time. </p>
<p>In her last chapter, she turns to the present, reading <a href="https://theconversation.com/true-writing-is-a-convulsive-act-inside-the-mind-of-elena-ferrante-180311">Elena Ferrante</a> as her novels storm the world – then rereading the Neapolitan quartet with friends.</p>
<p>Each chapter is devoted to an author, but their lives spill over into each other’s, creating themes that resonate with Biggs’s own experiences:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I watched them try to answer some of the questions I had. This book bears the traces of their struggles as well as my own – and some of the things we all found that help.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Biggs turns to these women not just to find new ways to live, but also to learn new modes of writing and reading. Having studied English and French literature at Oxford University, she’s trained herself out of reading with her emotions and into the “objective” reading of scholarship. Now she’s undoing that by allowing herself to read with her whole self fully engaged – the same way she’s learning to live.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-fictional-character-ill-never-forget-these-half-wild-too-much-heroines-philip-pullmans-lyra-and-elena-ferrantes-lila-186196">My favourite fictional character: I'll never forget these half-wild, 'too much' heroines – Philip Pullman's Lyra and Elena Ferrante's Lila</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Women writers in flux</h2>
<p>After reading Persuasion, I realised I wasn’t interested in the past. I wanted to know how and what women were writing now, especially about themselves in flux – at a time when marriage and all the inherited structures of our lives seem as stricken and prone to collapse as the world around us.</p>
<p>I quickly discovered I couldn’t have had a more readily satisfied desire. In terms of my reading life, I was in the best of all possible worlds. I read everything I could find by <a href="https://theconversation.com/my-favourite-fictional-character-ill-never-forget-these-half-wild-too-much-heroines-philip-pullmans-lyra-and-elena-ferrantes-lila-186196">Elena Ferrante</a>, Maggie Nelson, <a href="https://theconversation.com/a-dying-earth-and-a-lament-for-lost-fathers-sheila-heti-strips-back-the-novel-and-makes-it-new-181938">Sheila Heti</a> and Anne Carson. I read lots of Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and Olivia Laing, among so many others.</p>
<p>Unlike Biggs, who in 2020 decided to read a book a week to combat her depression and created what she endearingly calls an “embarrassing spreadsheet” to keep track of it, there was no structure to my reading. But I seemed to be guided to books that spoke to my many challenges as I moved beyond my marriage. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=360&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554103/original/file-20231016-27-my1l6s.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=453&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘I read lots of Rachel Cusk, Deborah Levy and Olivia Laing.’ Pictured: Rachel Cusk.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Siemon Scamell Katz</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 2017, soon after my husband moved out and I was ostensibly free, I wrote on a psychologist’s form: <em>I can’t find my voice. I cannot speak.</em> </p>
<p>What is your problem? it asked. <em>I cannot say I</em>, I replied. </p>
<p>Given I was an experienced writer in midlife, it felt bewildering and shameful to have to confess this. The person I’d been had written in a cool, objective voice, which was regularly remarked upon by male correspondents:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I have by chance come across your book and have to write to say what a marvel it is […] It is totally objective (typically, now, books often seem to remind the reader who the author is, and what he/she is experiencing – as if we care!).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>But suddenly what the author was experiencing was all I cared about. </p>
<p>In <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/things-i-dont-want-to-know-9780241983089">Things I Don’t Want to Know</a>, Deborah Levy spoke straight to my turmoil. It takes repeated acts of will, as a woman, to learn to say I, she writes.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s exhausting to learn how to become a subject; it’s hard enough learning how to become a writer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Things I Don’t Want to Know is the first iteration of Levy’s “living autobiography”, a form she invented for writing her life while still living it, catching it on the wing as she travelled through her days after ending her own long marriage. </p>
<p>Reading Levy, I began to understand that for a woman, saying “I” was not a given. It was a learned skill. I had to practise it, to will it repeatedly. Levy was not the only author who shed light on my confounding experience.</p>
<p>Anne Carson is illuminating on the leaden weight of history stacked against the female voice. In her essay <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/46037885">The Gender of Sound</a>, she writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Madness and witchery as well as bestiality are conditions commonly associated with the use of the female voice in public, in ancient as well as modern contexts. The high pitched and horrendous voices of the ancient female furies are compared by Aeschylus to howling dogs.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s as if the entire female gender “were a kind of collective bad memory of unspeakable things”, which the patriarchal order feels obliged to channel into politically correct containers. Freud believed “a thinking man” is his own legislator and obtains his own absolution. But a woman does not have </p>
<blockquote>
<p>the measure of ethics in herself. She can only act if she keeps within the limits of morality, following what society has established as fitting.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>So in ways that became very real for me, I learnt that to speak as a woman is to transgress.</p>
<h2>Transgression and transition</h2>
<p>Transgression is key to Maggie Nelson’s creative practice. In <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-argonauts">The Argonauts</a>, her breakthrough work of creative nonfiction, she borrows poet Eileen Myles’s idea of a poem as a party to make a literary form mutable enough to convey transfiguration. </p>
<p>Notably, her own transition from pregnancy to new motherhood; and her partner Harry Dodge’s transition through injecting testosterone as he prepares for, undergoes and recovers from top surgery.</p>
<p>At her party on the page, Nelson gathers people who’d never be seen together in real life and sits them beside each other, so they must converse. You feel its electrifying force from the opening page, where she juxtaposes a tryst with her new lover, Dodge, with <a href="https://theconversation.com/wittgenstein-tried-to-solve-all-the-problems-of-philosophy-in-his-tractatus-logico-philosophicus-but-he-didnt-quite-succeed-181719">philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>You had Molloy by your bedside and a stack of cocks in a shadowy unused shower stall. Does it get any better? What’s your pleasure? you asked, then stuck around for an answer.</p>
<p>Before we met, I had spent a lifetime devoted to Wittgenstein’s idea that the inexpressible is contained – inexpressibly! – in the expressed. This idea gets less air time than his more reverential Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent, but it is, I think, the deeper idea. Its paradox is, quite literally, why I write, or how I feel able to keep writing.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553947/original/file-20231016-19-pmm9h6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553947/original/file-20231016-19-pmm9h6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553947/original/file-20231016-19-pmm9h6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553947/original/file-20231016-19-pmm9h6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553947/original/file-20231016-19-pmm9h6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553947/original/file-20231016-19-pmm9h6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553947/original/file-20231016-19-pmm9h6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553947/original/file-20231016-19-pmm9h6.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Maggie Nelson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.macfound.org/fellows/class-of-2016/maggie-nelson#searchresults">John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Olivia Laing does something similar in her memoir-in-essays, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Olivia-Laing-Lonely-City-9781782111252/">The Lonely City</a>, in which she charts her own season of liminality after a breakup, via conversations with the art and lives of others. </p>
<p>Suddenly alone in New York City after the man she’s moved there for changes his mind, she makes loneliness her subject. In the absence of love, she finds solace and communion in the city itself, and in the work and lives of artists. It’s here, in visual art and its associated materials (letters, manuscripts, archives) that she begins to find company in her chronic isolation.</p>
<p>I came to The Lonely City at a particularly lonely moment in my own life: April 2020, when all the casual dates, spontaneous beers, snap decisions to eat at my corner bar vanished, all suddenly forbidden by Sydney’s lockdown laws. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553948/original/file-20231016-25-pj8ow4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553948/original/file-20231016-25-pj8ow4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553948/original/file-20231016-25-pj8ow4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553948/original/file-20231016-25-pj8ow4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553948/original/file-20231016-25-pj8ow4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553948/original/file-20231016-25-pj8ow4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553948/original/file-20231016-25-pj8ow4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553948/original/file-20231016-25-pj8ow4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Laing’s opening pages, where she introduces her subject and her own uncomfortable immersion in it, reverberate with such raw pain and fathomless need, I found them almost too distressing to read. </p>
<p>But Laing’s prose flows seamlessly as she crawls through the endless days, her mind wandering, alighting on a new theme, a new artist. And each artist brings with them a community of friends, collaborators, lovers and/or kindred spirits, and characters recur – so it weaves together like an all night party on the Lower East Side, paradoxically becoming immensely companionable.</p>
<h2>‘Searching for a missing female character’</h2>
<p>It seems important to speak of new forms now, especially for women, in life as well as art, because these conversations are everywhere. I’ve talked to an army of women in similar situations since my marriage broke down. They speak of their broken hearts, ruined futures, crushing loneliness, rage. Some are looking for work, housing, sex or love; others for reinvention, adventure, freedom, meaning. Or all of the above.</p>
<p>Most of us are working out how or who we might be beyond our relationships with others, mostly men. And some of us are wondering how to write our newly visible protean selves, entangled in a world that feels distressed in every realm.</p>
<p>Like Levy, it seems we’re all “still searching for a missing female character”. As she asks in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/real-estate-9780241993866">Real Estate</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Who is she? That is the question I was starting to ask in all my books. Not who am I, though that comes into it. How does she get along in the world that voided her?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite six years of living, reading and writing since my divorce, my subject – or perhaps my subjectivity – is still not quite clear to me. In ways I can’t gloss over, my life and my writing remain uncertain. Messy.</p>
<p>In the early hours, this unknowing can still feel perilous, shameful, especially given I’m a grown woman with two adult children. Soon after I began writing this essay, I woke from a nightmare at 5am with these words in my head, spoken from the future:</p>
<p><em>What did you do as the world burned and we ran out of diesel and food?</em></p>
<p>The question was asked by my conscience, or perhaps by my children. By all the children.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A naked woman sitting on a chair" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553967/original/file-20231016-29-3amfaw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘I painted myself naked. I was birthing myself.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://garystockbridge617.getarchive.net/media/emil-von-gerliczy-akt-31a7cc">Emil Von Gerliczy/Public Domain Media</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>My reply came: I painted myself naked. I was birthing myself, re-birthing myself, through my own self-regard. As hundreds of women have done before me.</p>
<p>This need to remake myself was precipitated by my mother’s death in 2015 and the end of my marriage two years later. With shocking speed, these two events radically shifted my focus in life and writing from the outside world to my inner being, which lay parched and untended, overgrown with voices that were not my own.</p>
<p>As my married life of caring for and writing about others collapsed, the work that became urgent was a grindingly slow and painful process of self-examination and reinvention. On most days, this felt (and still feels) self-indulgent, in both life and writing. Even verging on heretical – an act against the received orthodoxies of care, of motherhood, of womanhood itself? – despite the bigger questions it’s led me to. And despite its absolute necessity.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/554175/original/file-20231017-15-gziu36.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘This need to remake myself was precipitated by my mother’s death in 2015 and the end of my marriage two years later.’ Jane Gleeson-White is pictured with her mother in 2005.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘This sort of life can have beauty in it’</h2>
<p>Biggs asks herself a similar question at the outset of A Life of One’s Own. In the wake of her mother’s diagnosis with <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-what-is-alzheimers-disease-24662">Alzheimer’s</a> and the end of her marriage, Biggs is filled with questions: about love and feminism, what’s worth living for, and how you might write about this. And, importantly, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>How would this not be seen as a problem of privilege, a childish demand for definition, narcissistic self-involvement when the world was burning? Wouldn’t I be better off giving away all I have and putting down my books, my movies, my headphones and my pen?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A large part of me still answers yes to her questions, on my own behalf. And yet the need remains. Every time I’ve fallen, however inadvertently, into the familiar grooves of my old life – from fiery affairs with distant men, to writing about the missing value of care work and the natural world in economic measures – something breaks down: me, the relationship, the man. Sometimes all three. I’m reminded again and again of this simple truth: change happens, things break down.</p>
<p>Biggs’s book is her answer to whether this need to reinvent ourselves is an indulgence. No. It’s vital work.</p>
<p>The questions felt urgent as well as overwhelming. At times I couldn’t face the page – printed or blank – at all. I needed to remind myself that starting out on my own again halfway through life is possible, has been possible for others – and that this sort of life can have beauty in it.</p>
<p>Her mother’s Alzheimer’s shakes Biggs’s world. She begins to question the life she’s made and how it fits with her becoming as a writer. In her early 30s, she’s married to a man she met at 19 who wants children as she does not, yet (or ever?). Despite how settled her life feels, she knows she must upend it. Discussions with her husband and experiments with open marriage only convince her of this. He moves out – and she removes her wedding ring and claims her freedom. All this happens by the end of the second page. </p>
<p>Questions about her marriage, lovers, and possible future partners and children are scattered through the subsequent pages; one of Biggs’s driving questions is: what sort of marriage, if any, is possible between a woman who writes and a man? </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=820&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553962/original/file-20231016-21-6dqez8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1030&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Virginia Woolf was obsessed by her mother until she was 44.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">George Charles Beresford</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But as its title from Virginia Woolf suggests, A Life of One’s Own is primarily about women, their lives, writing and relationships with each other. Its emotional force lies in Biggs’s portrayal of her tender and loving relationship with her mother – and in her relationships with women friends, and the authors and books she reads.</p>
<p>The threads of Biggs’s exploration – memoir, biography and literary critique – fuse with particular grace in her chapter on Woolf, which is concerned with the emotionally charged, intractable subject of mothers. Woolf wrote that she was obsessed by her mother until she was 44, when <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/to-the-lighthouse-vintage-classics-woolf-series-9781784870836">To the Lighthouse</a> offered her an outlet:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wrote the book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed by my mother. I no longer hear her voice; I do not see her.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Biggs seamlessly combines Woolf’s work and milieu with her own experience of her mother’s deteriorating mind and the dreaded day when she no longer recognises her own daughter. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>And I remind myself still, with Woolf, that a mother is always a mystery; she has lived so much of her life before you were even born.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>And in turn, witnessing her mother’s fading mind opens her to new understandings of Woolf’s literary experiments. She now sees their aim as conveying “the workings of disordered and vulnerable minds”, or the way centuries of oppression “act on a woman when she sits down to write something”.</p>
<h2>Mothers loom large</h2>
<p>When I was 18, inspired by the tempestuous novels of <a href="https://theconversation.com/locked-down-with-d-h-lawrence-yeah-nah-196935">D.H. Lawrence</a>, I began turning my own passionate love affairs into fiction. But every attempt was derailed by the unwelcome arrival of a mother figure. This astonished my teenage self. Only after her death and the end of my marriage did I begin to accept that the hidden life of my mother was partly, mostly, my subject.</p>
<p>Mothers loom large in the books by women I read. I’m not sure why I initially found it so surprising that other women should be as preoccupied with mothers and motherhood as I am. Is it because, despite all the rhetoric, frank public discussion of mothers is taboo?</p>
<p>In ways I find almost terrifying in their candour and dispassion, Rachel Cusk’s portraits of motherhood and maternal ambivalence are among my favourite. <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Rachel-Cusk-Coventry-9780571350445">She writes</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>My mother and I don’t speak to each other any more. […] The loss of a parent-child relationship is a fact. It is also a failure.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Discussing Aeschylus’s <a href="https://www.greekmythology.com/Plays/Aeschylus/Oresteia/oresteia.html">Oresteia</a> – in which Orestes, encouraged by his sister Electra, murders their mother Clytemnestra – with a male theatre director, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Rachel-Cusk-Coventry-9780571350445">Cusk summarises</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They hate their mother for the fact that she has disposed of their father. They have come to resent maternal power so much that they destroy it. Instead they reverence the paternal, which is all image – their father, Agamemnon, was away fighting gloriously in Troy for most of their lives – where their actual mother is all actuality. They crush and disdain that actual parent in pursuit of the imagistic father whose value is recognised out in the world. Sound familiar? I ask.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=921&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553968/original/file-20231016-17-2p3mz9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1157&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Cusk finds this attitude echoed in the conversations between her teenage daughter and her friends, who spend a surprising amount of time talking about adults they know. They contemptuously dismiss their mothers – an amorphous “she” whose status “was somewhere between a servant and family pet” – while they revere “Dad” for his worldly importance: “unlike ‘she’, their fathers are hard-working, clever, successful, cool”.</p>
<p>Women writers attempting such worldly significance seek it at their peril, especially if they’re embroiled with male lovers, even more so if they become mothers.</p>
<h2>Erasing women</h2>
<p>In a letter to a male admirer, Mary Wollstonecraft described her approach to <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-vindication-of-the-rights-of-woman-9780099595823">A Vindication of the Rights of Women</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>A book I am now writing, in which I myself, for I cannot yet attain to Homer’s dignity, shall certainly appear, head and heart.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ah, Homer’s dignity. I’m fond of tracing the causes of my afflictions and the ones I see around me to hypothetical origins. I now fix these on the erasure of the Sumerian priestess <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/Enheduanna/">Enheduanna</a>, who narrated in the first-person singular – “I” – the earliest known authored text, the <a href="https://etcsl.orinst.ox.ac.uk/section4/tr4072.htm">Exhalation of Inanna</a>. Enheduanna lived in the 23rd century BCE. She is the first known named author in the world.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=573&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553963/original/file-20231016-15-22ul5k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=720&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sumerian priestess Enheduanna was the first named author in the world, in the 23rd century BC. Disk of Enheduanna.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Disk_of_Enheduanna_(2).jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This casts new light on Homer’s dignity. <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-iliad-9780140444445">The Iliad</a> and the <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/odyssey-9781556437281">Odyssey</a> were composed around the 8th century BCE. The historical fact of the putative “Homer” – their author or authors – is still debated by scholars. </p>
<p>What difference would it make if we learnt at school that the first named author was a woman, writing in the first person singular some 2,200 years before Homer?</p>
<p>Instead, we have Rachel Cusk in 2009 CE, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/dec/12/rachel-cusk-women-writing-review">writing of woman</a> as “occluded, scattered, disguised”, gone underground. “Were a woman writer to address her sex, she would not know who or what she was addressing.”</p>
<p>Or, as Sheila Heti writes at the outset of her novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/how-should-a-person-be-9780099583561">How Should a Person Be?</a>,</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One good thing about being a woman is we haven’t too many examples yet of what a genius looks like. It could be me. There is no ideal model for how my mind should be. For the men, it’s pretty clear. That’s the reason we see them trying to talk themselves up all the time.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/553969/original/file-20231016-29-fv4f27.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
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</figure>
<p>Questions of authority and form challenge each of these writers, some to breaking point. Depression and suicide recur. Biggs touches on her own depression, so deep she required medication. I’ve certainly experienced my own. Wollstonecraft attempted suicide twice. We know how the vibrant lives of Woolf and Sylvia Plath ended.</p>
<p>My favourite chapter in Biggs’s memoir is on <a href="https://theconversation.com/true-writing-is-a-convulsive-act-inside-the-mind-of-elena-ferrante-180311">Elena Ferrante</a>, whose Neapolitan quartet makes the erasure of women its subject, while centring two bookish women who’ve been friends and rivals since childhood. It’s about the self-erasure of one, Lila, and her reclamation in writing by the other, Lenu. As Biggs puts it, quoting Ferrante, it</p>
<blockquote>
<p>is Lenu’s attempt, over months of writing, to give Lila “a form whose boundaries won’t dissolve, and defeat her, and calm her, and so in turn calm myself”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite our many differences, it’s uncanny how similar Biggs’ and my trajectories have been, from the formative role of our mothers in our reading and divorces, to the central role of books and friendships with women in our unfolding lives. </p>
<p>Most strikingly, we’re both experimenting with new ways of writing our selves. In <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Rachel-Cusk-Aftermath-9780571351640/">her own memoir on marriage and separation</a>, Cusk suggests this urge is not a pathology, but a definition of a feminist:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>And perhaps a feminist is someone who possesses this personalising trait to a larger degree: she is an autobiographer, an artist of the self.</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207424/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jane Gleeson-White does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
When Jane Gleeson-White’s marriage ended two years after her mother died, she lost her voice. Books by women writers like Rachel Cusk, Olivia Laing and Maggie Nelson helped her find it again.
Jane Gleeson-White, Adjunct Lecturer, English and Creative Writing, UNSW Canberra, UNSW Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211669
2023-10-12T19:03:09Z
2023-10-12T19:03:09Z
Friday essay: a poet, a disciplinarian, an illiterate grandfather – writers reflect on the teachers who shaped them
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551636/original/file-20231003-29-zqq5eo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=27%2C0%2C4214%2C2835&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">We see the teacher lay out the tightrope ... as the young writer clenches their toes and steps out above the air.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Danilo Batista/unsplash</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>What does a writer’s education look like? Is it access to books, regular letter-writing, difficulty in childhood (war, illness, a brutal boarding school)? What talent or disposition primes the young writer for their training? In the push and pull of nature versus nurture, a key element is the right teacher, at the right time: the encouraging, goading or resistant pressure that nudges along the curious mind.</p>
<p>The essays in a new book edited by Dale Salwak, <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/au/writers-and-their-teachers-9781350272262/">Writers and their Teachers</a>, lead you to reflect on your own teachers, but one of the themes is that the writing teacher, in retrospect, takes many forms. </p>
<p>I recall Mrs Wagstaff, a dinner lady at my English primary school with dyed red curls and long fingernails, who occasionally read us stories on rainy lunchtimes. “See it in your mind’s eye,” she said to us, as we sat cross-legged on the carpet, 40-odd years ago. I did see it in my mind’s eye, and still do.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=923&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1159&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1159&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551657/original/file-20231003-19-odr3p8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1159&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption"></span>
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<p>We all pick over stories of personal transformation in adulthood, the scenes and <em>dramatis personae</em> vivid across the years. Who was it who made the difference, and how? Writers and their Teachers reads as a collective <em>bildungsroman</em>, in which we come to understand the forces that shaped the adult writer. In this genre, the teacher or mentor is central, guiding the apprentice towards mastery.</p>
<p>Such transformations call for belief on the part of the teacher, and a spark of interest in the student. Salwak, in his introduction, quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The whole secret of the teacher’s force lies in the conviction that men [and women] are convertible, and they are.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here we witness 20 such conversions, from a young person with a desire, or perhaps only its flicker, to a life ablaze with language, ideas, images and story.</p>
<h2>Unlikely teachers</h2>
<p>Kenyan literary giant Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o names his illiterate maternal grandfather as his first writing teacher. </p>
<p>Ngũgĩ became his child scribe, reading aloud his grandfather’s letters until they represented perfectly what he wanted to say. This process not only taught him “the value of the written word and the revision necessary to make it read smoothly”, but crucially “the beauty of written Gĩkũyũ”, his mother tongue. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551629/original/file-20231003-25-nzpkdv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/2136347/ngugi-wa-thiongo/#:~:text=Ngugi%20wa%20Thiong%27o%20%7C%20Penguin%20Random%20House">© Daniel Anderson/Penguin Random House</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Ngũgĩ thrived at school, speaking, reading and writing in his first language, but in 1952, the colonial government banned African-run schools, and use of local languages became dangerous.</p>
<p>Ngũgĩ’s first books, including his classic of the Mau Mau rebellion, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/a-grain-of-wheat-9780141186993">A Grain of Wheat</a>, were written in English, the language of the coloniser. In 1977, Ngũgĩ helped to write and stage a politically outspoken play with Gĩkũyũ speakers. </p>
<p>Imprisoned for over a year as a result, and surrounded by Gĩkũyũ “teachers” in the form of his guards, he wrote his first novel <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/314614/devil-on-the-cross-by-ngugi-wa-thiongo-introduction-by-namwali-serpell/">Devil on the Cross</a> (on toilet paper) in his first language. Ngũgĩ writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>So, it was a maximum security prison in Kenya which made me return to my roots, under the literary tutelage of my grandfather, Ngũgĩ wa Gĩkonyo, to whom I am eternally grateful. He was indeed my first literary teacher.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Few lessons in these essays are learned at such great personal risk, but many of the writers also credit unlikely teachers. The British detective novelist Catherine Aird moved as a child to a village in which she knew no one, and was struck down by that not unusual formative event in the biographies of writers, a long childhood illness. She worked her way through the contents of the village library, plunging into the Golden Age of detective fiction. Her family was also training her to appreciate a puzzle: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I lived in a household daily engaged in solving crosswords and with a keen (and wily) bridge player for a mother and a medical father who likened diagnosis to simple detection.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Aird paints a cosily macabre picture of the breakfast table, with her doctor father sharing his enthusiasm for forensics, recounting a gruesome local murder-suicide case in which he was advising the coroner. She even played assistant to his detective work, on one occasion sent upstairs in a house in which a man was </p>
<blockquote>
<p>found unconscious at the foot of his stairs to feel whether the bed was still warm and thus help establish when he had fallen. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Sometimes what the young writer needs to learn is how to navigate the wider world glimpsed through reading and writing. Michael Scammell, biographer of Solzhenitsyn and Koestler, spent two years as a copy boy at the Southern Daily Echo in Southampton, the first in his family to be educated to 16.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=868&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551335/original/file-20231002-15-jtqvk8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1091&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/438990.Solzhenitsyn?from_search=true&from_srp=true&qid=jOp7YlRQXq&rank=3">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/education-34538222">grammar school</a> boy in the English selective system, he had left his own world behind without a guide for the journey. The older journalist Anthony Brode, “giant of the newsroom”, a bohemian francophone, relaxed, cultured, product of a privileged education “taught me how to write – and live – in an unfamiliar environment”. </p>
<p>A book about education (particularly when the writer is British) is also a picture of class and a navigation of its boundaries. Tony’s home was a revelation: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Unlike my family’s small living room, where four of us huddled over a coal fire on wintry nights with the radio blasting, making it hard to read, Tony and Sylvia’s comfortable lounge was spacious and warm, and I had free run of their bookcases (there was no television, of course).</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In these shelves, Scammell discovered the fiction of Orwell, Wodehouse, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Books, of course, are our other teachers. Later, Tony provided the connection via his publisher for Scammell to begin publishing translations, and he was on his way. </p>
<p>The friendships that emerge from such unequal beginnings are often long and distinguished by the generosity of the mentor. A gentle awe infuses several of the essays, that so much can be given with nothing asked for in return. As poet-critic William Logan writes on his unconventional professor David Milch (creator of NYPD Blue and Deadwood):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>there are debts that cannot be repaid because you do not possess the currency in which they were tendered.</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Sir Vidia’s gifts</h2>
<p>The gift bestowed by V.S. Naipaul, Nobel laureate, on the younger writer Paul Theroux, was great, but ambiguous. Theroux writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>More than fifty years of writing about Naipaul and reflecting on his influence! Yet it is only in the last few years, the dust having settled, that I have re-examined our relationship and seen how complex it was, how important – how crucial – it was to my becoming a writer.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This is the final essay of the collection. Arranged as the pieces are in a journey through “School”, “College” and “Graduate School and after”, a growing sense becomes evident, as the writers recall themselves as adult mentees rather than as children, of their teachers as flawed human beings. This is perhaps difficult to avoid in Naipaul’s case, but for Theroux, Naipaul’s snobberies and imperiousness – and a 15-year break in their friendship – do nothing to undermine his significance. </p>
<p>When Theroux met Naipaul in Kampala in 1966, he knew no novelists and sought guidance. As Naipaul’s driver, escort and interpreter, he was able to observe at close quarters his utter seriousness about writing, and to receive its lessons in a terror-induced atmosphere of total concentration. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mine was an animal alertness: no creature is more wired than an animal in unfamiliar surroundings – every faculty is twitchingly alight, every synapse engaged. I was fully awake in his presence and fearful of making a blunder.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=882&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551649/original/file-20231003-19-dx0b7m.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1108&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2972706-sir-vidia-s-shadow">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When this 30-year apprenticeship ended in rejection born of one of Vidia’s “foul moods”, Theroux saw it as liberation: “promotion to a higher rank”. He was now free to write his controversial memoir of their friendship, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1998/10/04/pen-pals-no-more/8abc5dd8-cb46-4b0a-bf7d-f97ca7277a6b/">Sir Vidia’s Shadow</a>. In the end, Theroux has no regrets. What “every aspiring person” needs, he tells us, is encouragement and belief.
“Naipaul did that for me: he alone told me what I was capable of doing.”</p>
<h2>House calls</h2>
<p>The form the mentor most usually takes in these pages is the school or university teacher, and it is often in the glimpse of them as something more than a teacher that they take shape. </p>
<p>J.M. Coetzee recalls Gerrit Gouws, a cane-bearing disciplinarian who taught the final stage of Worcester Boys’ Primary. One day Mr Gouws broke role to invite the young John to tea, who was amazed to learn that his teacher lived on the same housing estate as he did.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>As far as I was concerned, outside the classroom [teachers] might as well have had no lives. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Here and in other essays a teacher opens up the mysteries and possibilities of other people by revealing an existence beyond the borders of school. Historian and biographer Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina writes of her kind and imaginative teacher Mabel Morrill: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>we had no notion that she could even have a personal life that would interest us.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=706&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551652/original/file-20231003-29-586dxa.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=888&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://gretchengerzina.com/about-gretchen-gerzina.html">Photo by Michael Benabib Slideshow</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Like Coetzee’s Mr Gouws, Mrs Morrill stepped out of the classroom and into her pupil’s life, calling at her house. She had noticed that Gretchen made her own clothes (the teacher taking the trouble to notice is a potent force in this book), and asked to be measured up for a dress, setting off a chain of connections which brought Mrs Morrill vividly into three dimensions. </p>
<p>When the young Coetzee visited his teacher for tea, he made his own discoveries, most improbably, that Mr Gouws had, “of all things,” a wife. What could all this be about? he wondered at the time, but sees now what such a moment always tends to mean: that the teacher views the pupil as an individual, worthy of interest, deserving of encouragement.</p>
<p>The memory also allows Coetzee to access, 70 years on, the significance of his being taught in English, and paid a small extra attention, by an Afrikaner. This teacher, across a social and cultural divide, taught students with more natural facility than himself “the ability to take sentences of the English language to pieces and put the pieces together again”.</p>
<p>Mr Gouws would have operated according to the teacherly hope that some of the children you meet in your years in the classroom will make the fullest use of what is offered. How well this gamble paid off in the case of the future Nobel prize winner who came to tea.</p>
<h2>Learning to read</h2>
<p>The exhilaration offered up by paying meticulously close attention to language is one of the gifts enumerated in Writers and their Teachers. Former British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion learned close reading from his poet-teacher Mr Way, who had been immersed in New Criticism at Oxford. This mainstay of mid-century literary studies, as Motion writes:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>concentrated rigorously on the text and paid little or no attention to biographical facts or historical context.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Motion grew in time to appreciate the connections between the poem and its world, but like many other writers who passed through an education system in thrall to this rigorous separation, the experience of encountering poetry in a “pure form” remained a foundational lesson.</p>
<p>Mr Way and his methods arrived in Motion’s life as balm after the brutalities of an English prep school. The pupil learned in his classes that the distilled nature of poetic language demands a focus approaching that which produced the work. </p>
<p>This discovery was joined by another: that language relies for meaning on sound as well as sense. Poetry became </p>
<blockquote>
<p>a forest of cadences and associations in which no interpretation can be “wrong” […] provided I’m able to explain and justify it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The drama of education is that its transformations occur amid the difficulties of childhood and young adulthood. In this context, knowledge can feel like rescue.</p>
<h2>Words that change everything</h2>
<p>Biographer Carl Rollyson structures his essay around the life-changing comments his teachers made. Like others here, he suffered great difficulty in his young life, in this instance the loss of his father to cancer. </p>
<p>His chapter begins with the words of his English teacher James Allen Jones: “You read beautifully,” after he had recited a speech by Cassius in Julius Caesar. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He put his hand on my arm when he said the words, and it was as if I had been reborn. Some teachers have that power: to move you with a voice that liberates you to be yourself. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>This liberating power is the true subject of this book. Again and again, we see the teacher lay out the tightrope and hold it taut, as the young writer clenches their toes and steps out above the air.</p>
<p>I paused reading to write to an old school friend about our English teachers at secondary school. When we were 16, our beloved English teacher Miss Quinn, wearer of bright silk suits tailored on her annual trips to Thailand, was replaced by a new teacher who was more austere, less of a friend to us. She had been a missionary, and seemed otherworldly, but it was she who wrote on a piece I wrote about early childhood, “You are a <em>real</em> writer.” </p>
<p>What do you do with that? Remember it in moments of uncertainty, and try to honour it.</p>
<h2>Full circle</h2>
<p>Students who liked learning often become teachers themselves. Novelist and poet Jay Parini recalls his college advisor Ed Brown, how impressed he was by him, how he came to imitate his clothes and manner. Even now, when he walks into a classroom, he thinks: “I’m Ed Brown today, reborn.” </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551631/original/file-20231003-15-n2lo07.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Margaret Drabble.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/60750.Margaret_Drabble">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The novelist Margaret Drabble, a graduate of Newnham College at Cambridge, found herself teaching in a very different institution, Morley College in Lambeth, established for the purposes of educating the working classes in a slum area. By 1969, when Drabble arrived, her classes were filled with young mothers, taking advantage of the creche facility and flexibility of curriculum:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>the majority of the group were young women like me, and together we explored the world of literature, making up our own syllabus and our own lives as we went along. I was my own student. We taught ourselves.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These women of the 1970s were living out change, and Drabble was learning and teaching at the same time, as is the way of things. At the end of her essay, Drabble states simply: “We learn much from those we teach.” </p>
<p>The step into teaching is an important developmental stage in many writers’ journeys, as well, perhaps, as a partial repayment of one’s debt. </p>
<p>How in the end are writers made? The answers in this book are – to a degree – specific to certain contexts. For example, only four of the writers are women. As well, contributors tend to be of a certain age. If younger writers were asked about their education, perhaps we would see some essays on the teaching and mentorship taking place in writing centres and community organisations, that can lead to the airing of new voices.</p>
<p>Still, the deep experience of the contributors offers a long view, and makes for rich storytelling, textured by living histories of education, class and literature. What we learn is that it is a dual gift their guides bestow: demonstrating what is possible, offering the courage to reach for it. </p>
<h2>Work to do, but worth doing</h2>
<p>I recognise some of the paths these writers have walked, and yet there is no map to the writing life. Who were my teachers? At first, before school, someone taught me to read. Was it my parents? My recollection is that I taught myself, but no doubt there was more to it. </p>
<p>At school I was allowed to read ahead, wandering through the corridors in the quiet of lesson time – free and trusted – to access shelves outside the other classrooms.</p>
<p>In third year, lovely Mrs Rudra, who allowed the girls to wear her saris as a treat (how cool the silk felt on my skin), organised for me to exchange letters with a children’s author, Rosemary Manning. I had a terrifying teacher in fifth year but she had no problem with my nerdy habit of putting on plays for the other children. </p>
<p>My grandmother, throughout my childhood, insisted I was going to be a writer. This was my education. Strong nudges, provision of resources, a long leash. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551646/original/file-20231003-25-xdrm8k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Lovely Mrs Rudra, who allowed the girls to wear her saris as a treat, organised for me to exchange letters with a children’s author.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/search/a-sari?page=3">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At the end of secondary school I encountered close reading in the form of the Practical Criticism exam (here is a poem: knowing nothing of its contexts, analyse it), but also in the forensic discussion of a single, two-word line – “Kill Claudio” – from Much Ado About Nothing. Our English group of five, plus Miss Yates, planting careful provocations, spent a whole class arguing delightedly about it. </p>
<p>Later, at Nottingham University, I stood marvelling with my friends outside the military-looking huts of the American Studies department, having spent an hour picking through William Stafford’s poem <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42775/traveling-through-the-dark">Traveling through the Dark</a> with our lecturer, the gentle, patient, unpretentious Dave Murray, feeling the same exhilaration as after the Kill Claudio class. So few words, so much meaning, if someone showed you how to pay a special kind of attention. </p>
<p>I spent a summer on exchange in the States. At American universities, unlike in England, you could take creative writing classes. My teacher was the poet Susan Firer, who modelled the life of a person who lived in writing. </p>
<p>She told us about waking early to write and walk, about going to see other writers read when she was young. She was serious and kind, and left “nice"s dotted through my journal: small, sweet gifts. The desire to write was latent before this, a flicker; explicit from then on.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=689&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551648/original/file-20231003-15-rh8wt4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=866&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Gail Jones.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/121139.Gail_Jones">Goodreads</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Much later, I studied for a creative doctorate in Sydney, writing a novel, <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/the-archeology-of-memory-hannah-and-emil/">a fictionalised account of the lives of my grandparents</a>, for my thesis. I submitted a section for workshopping. "Your grandmother is important to you,” the workshop leader said, “but why is she interesting to us?” </p>
<p>A fair question, which I found devastating, until I had tea with my supervisor, the novelist Gail Jones, to discuss the work in question. She paid this far from finished work a patient, brilliantly focused attention that was instantly cheering. “There is work to do,” I felt her saying to me, “but it is worth doing, and you are the person to do it.” </p>
<p>I teach writing now at university. You see a glint in students, as they transform uncertainly into whoever it is they are becoming. Some way into semester, one of them will peel off from the crowd to ask you about a future in writing. You have to tell them there is no money. You have to say there is no path.</p>
<p>You hope what you are also saying, in this moment, and when you stand in front of the class, week after week, talking about their writing and other people’s, is that it is worth it. If you love what words can do, why wouldn’t you want to live a life shaped by their potential?</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211669/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Belinda Castles does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
What makes a great writer? A key element is the right teacher. Belinda Castles reflects on her own guides, as do authors such as Margaret Drabble, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and Paul Theroux in a new book.
Belinda Castles, Lecturer in Creative Writing, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/213888
2023-10-05T19:02:36Z
2023-10-05T19:02:36Z
Friday essay: Lessons in Chemistry – the real Prince Charming in this ‘bad romance’ is a good dog
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552010/original/file-20231004-15-dqil99.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C3994%2C1994&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Main image: Brie Larson in Lessons in Chemistry. Dog at centre (Sharon Snider/Pexels).</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Apple TV+</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you were charmed by the Apple TV+ <a href="https://tv.apple.com/au/show/lessons-in-chemistry/">adaptation</a> of Bonnie Garmus’s debut novel <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/lessons-in-chemistry-9781804990926">Lessons In Chemistry</a> and want learn more about the book, the first thing you’ll discover is that it was a New York Times bestseller (for <a href="https://slate.com/culture/2023/06/lessons-in-chemistry-book-bonnie-garmus-brie-larson.html">more than 58 weeks</a>) and international hit, with a <a href="https://www.tiktok.com/discover/Lessons-in-Chemistry">#BookTok following</a> and rights sold to 40 countries. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551996/original/file-20231004-26-mezc3m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551996/original/file-20231004-26-mezc3m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/551996/original/file-20231004-26-mezc3m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551996/original/file-20231004-26-mezc3m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551996/original/file-20231004-26-mezc3m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=892&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551996/original/file-20231004-26-mezc3m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551996/original/file-20231004-26-mezc3m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/551996/original/file-20231004-26-mezc3m.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1121&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">US cover.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The second is that some American readers were angry about the cover because the pink jacket with the sexy illustrated book face – all flippy hair, pouty lips and cat-eye glasses – implies a sassy romance the story does not deliver. Garmus even received hate mail. “They were like, ‘You’re the worst romance novelist ever’,” <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/16/books/bonnie-garmus-lessons-chemistry-book.html">she told</a> the New York Times. </p>
<p>That North American publishers know a cover with a sexy, flippy-haired cartoon gal is more likely to sell a book than, say, one with a photograph of a serious-looking woman working in a laboratory, aligns ironically with the social truths Garmus investigates. </p>
<p>What kinds of stories, Garmus asks in her novel, do we pay attention to? And whose interests will our attention serve? Given the cover controversy, these questions can be extended to genre, too. What do our expectations around genre do to our reading? What is the difference, for instance, in reading a novel as a romance, popular fiction or feminist allegory? </p>
<h2>Subverting romance fiction</h2>
<p>In part, this is a commercial question. Genre provides a taxonomy for comparing texts, as well as strategies to sell them. Romance, of course, is a billion-dollar industry. </p>
<p>In 2021, the genre accounted for 18% of fiction sales in the US, according to <a href="https://wordsrated.com/romance-novel-sales-statistics/">one source</a>. And its popularity is on the rise while overall book sales decline: in the past year (in the US), romance book sales have <a href="https://wordsrated.com/romance-novel-sales-statistics/">grown by 52%</a>.</p>
<p>Readers of romance expect narratives featuring smart, pretty female protagonists who live, laugh, love without too much rumination on structural oppression. Romance is a feel-good, aspirational genre – which is not to say innovation isn’t valued. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552030/original/file-20231004-31-zyog1m.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552030/original/file-20231004-31-zyog1m.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552030/original/file-20231004-31-zyog1m.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552030/original/file-20231004-31-zyog1m.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552030/original/file-20231004-31-zyog1m.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552030/original/file-20231004-31-zyog1m.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552030/original/file-20231004-31-zyog1m.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552030/original/file-20231004-31-zyog1m.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Recently, Curtis Sittenfield’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/romantic-comedy-9780857527509">Romantic Comedy</a>, which questions why it’s socially acceptable for ordinary-looking men to date goddesses, but not the other way round, performed and critiqued the genre, while looking at how gender biases dominate our real lives and the ways we represent them. In <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Akwaeke-Emezi-You-Made-a-Fool-of-Death-With-Your-Beauty-9780571372683/">You Have Made a Fool of Death With Your Beauty</a>, Akwaeke Emezi imagines the possibilities of a second-chance romance that refuses to overwrite the complexities of past trauma and grief. But both of these writers stay true to the first command of romance: the lovers live happily ever after.</p>
<p>Against the opinion of irate North American readers, I contend it’s possible to read Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons In Chemistry as a subversive romance novel. </p>
<p>Protagonist Elizabeth Zott is pretty and smart. She falls in love. She struggles toward a hopeful conclusion. But if Garmus rocks the love boat, it’s in her refusal to let romantic love conquer all. Particularly when “all” is entrenched capitalist patriarchy. </p>
<p>Further, she refuses to romanticise the experience of being a woman, even a woman in love. Fairy tales are left in the library. Garmus’s protagonist clings to a very basic desire: to live a self-determined life in contexts that insist women shouldn’t determine anything for themselves, least of all their lives. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552012/original/file-20231004-23-ihiaec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552012/original/file-20231004-23-ihiaec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552012/original/file-20231004-23-ihiaec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552012/original/file-20231004-23-ihiaec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552012/original/file-20231004-23-ihiaec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552012/original/file-20231004-23-ihiaec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552012/original/file-20231004-23-ihiaec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552012/original/file-20231004-23-ihiaec.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">If Garmus rocks the love boat, it’s in her refusal to let romantic love conquer all.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Apple TV+</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-romance-fiction-rewrites-the-rulebook-183136">Friday essay: romance fiction rewrites the rulebook</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Lessons in Chemistry</h2>
<p>Lessons in Chemistry opens in 1961. Elizabeth Zott is a 31-year-old single mother, certain her life is over. The particulars of that life are revealed gradually. </p>
<p>Zott grew up with pseudo-religion. Her father, a charlatan preacher, introduced her to chemistry by using pistachio nuts to “conjure a spontaneous combustion whenever he needed a convenient sign from God”. Zott and her brother found sanctuary from the “sanctuary business” in the rational church of the library. They sheltered from a social milieu that would not accept them for who they were: he a homosexual, and she a scientist. </p>
<p>Garmus’s positioning of “scientist” as an intrinsic identity – as maligned in a woman as homosexuality – draws reader attention to the work several generations of women did in the workplace, and in areas of knowledge production that excluded their perspectives. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/NzS2eSvpWLs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Lessons in Chemistry reveals the particulars of its heroine’s life gradually.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/lessons-in-chemistry-author-bonnie-garmus/">interviews</a>, Garmus has attributed the novel’s genesis to the experience of a male colleague blatantly taking credit for her ideas at work. She has the adult Zott set up a freelance business, doing her former male colleagues’ work without any credit for it. And she dedicates the book to her grandmother. The world may have changed, the novel suggests, but there are aspects of the fight that remain the same. </p>
<p>When Zott fights patriarchy, the cultural monolith conveniently takes the form of a singular enemy – a lecherous colleague, a rapist, a power hungry middle manager – which Garmus’s clever writing allows her protagonist to meet head-on with violence. Not sexy, sassy violence either. That pencil tucked provocatively into her chignon on the US cover: it’s sharp, a weapon both figuratively and literally. Zott writes up research findings and fights off rapists with it. The catharsis of such pointed retaliation is undeniable. </p>
<p>Lessons in Chemistry relieves readers of the complexities of post-#MeToo discourse and evokes something akin to feminist nostalgia for clear and obvious enemies. Race, though, is not explicitly addressed in the novel, an oversight the TV adaptation will attempt to address. </p>
<p>When Zott gets a dubious break as a TV anchor on a cooking show, she subverts the format, calling common ingredients by their chemical names and embedding feminist messages in the cooking instructions. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552015/original/file-20231004-17-oxtz0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552015/original/file-20231004-17-oxtz0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552015/original/file-20231004-17-oxtz0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552015/original/file-20231004-17-oxtz0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552015/original/file-20231004-17-oxtz0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552015/original/file-20231004-17-oxtz0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552015/original/file-20231004-17-oxtz0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552015/original/file-20231004-17-oxtz0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Race is not explicitly addressed in the novel, an oversight the TV adaptation will attempt to address.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Apple TV+</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>She’s deemed unmarketable, despite her rising popularity with female viewers. A cover article in Life magazine runs with the headline, “Why We’ll Eat Whatever She Dishes Out”, and opens with a quote about Zott being “the most intelligent person on television today, except the editor had swapped out ‘intelligent’ and replaced it with ‘attractive’”. When the reporter later tries to make amends by penning an article on gender bias in science, he is rejected by ten scientific magazines. </p>
<p>“Women in science isn’t something people have any interest in,” Zott tells her neighbour – without flicking her hair, chewing on her pencil, or pushing her glasses down to stare dreamily at a man she might love. </p>
<h2>Women of science</h2>
<p>Zott’s love story contains more than one scene where the female protagonist needs to patiently explain sexism to her male beloved – a trope of real-life heteronormative romance, as many heroines can attest. When Zott’s beloved, a revered male scientist named Calvin, claims sex discrimination in the sciences isn’t real, Zott asks, patiently, if he can name any woman scientists. </p>
<p>“Do not say <a href="https://theconversation.com/radioactive-new-marie-curie-biopic-inspires-but-resonates-uneasily-for-women-in-science-148986">Marie Curie</a>,” she adds. </p>
<p>It’s an example of Garmus’s playful prompts for readers to consider the stories we do not know. Not just the fun alternative histories, but the real ones, too. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552032/original/file-20231004-17-15zw0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552032/original/file-20231004-17-15zw0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552032/original/file-20231004-17-15zw0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552032/original/file-20231004-17-15zw0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552032/original/file-20231004-17-15zw0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552032/original/file-20231004-17-15zw0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552032/original/file-20231004-17-15zw0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552032/original/file-20231004-17-15zw0y.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The term ‘scientist’ was coined in 1834, in an article on Mary Somerville (pictured).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After all, the term “scientist” was coined in 1834 in an article on <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Mary-Somerville">Mary Somerville</a>, a Scottish polymath whose published books <a href="https://www.beacon.org/Maria-Mitchell-and-the-Sexing-of-Science-P1418.aspx">covered her primary field</a> of mathematics, as well as astronomy, geology, chemistry and physics “so clearly that the texts became the backbone of Cambridge University’s first science curriculum”. The term “scientist” was necessary both to encompass Somerville’s interdisciplinary work, and because “man of science” did not apply. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552037/original/file-20231004-29-73liu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552037/original/file-20231004-29-73liu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552037/original/file-20231004-29-73liu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552037/original/file-20231004-29-73liu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552037/original/file-20231004-29-73liu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=862&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552037/original/file-20231004-29-73liu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552037/original/file-20231004-29-73liu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552037/original/file-20231004-29-73liu8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1083&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ada Lovelace.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Somerville tutored Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer, and was but one of a truncated lineage of female scientists, including <a href="https://www.newscientist.com/people/lise-meitner/">Lise Meitner</a>, who co-discovered nuclear fission in 1938, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rosalind-Franklin">Rosalind Franklin</a>, whose 1950s research identified key properties in DNA and facilitated the correct description of the double helix, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jocelyn-Bell-Burnell">Jocelyn Bell Burnell</a>, who discovered radio pulsars in 1967, and <a href="https://www.astronomy.com/science/how-vera-rubin-confirmed-dark-matter/">Vera Rubin</a>, whose research in the 1970s confirmed the existence of dark matter. </p>
<p>Reading about each of these women’s careers, one encounters enough repeated plot points to constitute a genre. Each woman was excluded from research teams, expelled from prestigious colleges due to disagreements with male colleagues, and/or overlooked by Nobel Prize committees. </p>
<p>An alternative cover for Lessons in Chemistry might represent the determined face of Elizabeth Zott, composed of tiny images of her equally determined and frustrated historical peers. Of course, few of us would recognise them.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/ada-lovelace-blazed-a-trail-in-science-we-need-more-women-to-follow-in-her-footsteps-66661">Ada Lovelace blazed a trail in science – we need more women to follow in her footsteps</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A good dog: ‘the real Prince Charming’</h2>
<p>It’s lucky then, that I never paid any attention to the cover of Lessons in Chemistry. I’m a “pragmatist” and a “scholar”: that is, I like to pretend I do not enjoy romance novels. I do not generally admit to enjoying any books with flippy-haired women on the cover. </p>
<p>I am a “serious” reader. Self-styled above the middlebrow, refusing any gender-tag. As such, I picked up Lessons in Chemistry for one reason only: I heard there was a very good dog in it. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552018/original/file-20231004-19-wpub03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552018/original/file-20231004-19-wpub03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=273&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552018/original/file-20231004-19-wpub03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=273&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552018/original/file-20231004-19-wpub03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=273&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552018/original/file-20231004-19-wpub03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=342&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552018/original/file-20231004-19-wpub03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=342&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552018/original/file-20231004-19-wpub03.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=342&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘I picked up Lessons in Chemistry for one reason only: I heard there was a very good dog in it,’ says Briohny Doyle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Apple TV+</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Very good dogs transcend literary genre. Karenin from Milan Kundera’s <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Milan-Kundera,-translated-by-Michael-Henry-Heim-Unbearable-Lightness-of-Being-9780571135394/">The Unbearable Lightness of Being</a> is as important to literature as Jack London’s <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-call-of-the-wild-and-white-fang-9780804168854">White Fang</a>, Eileen Myles’ dearly departed Rosie, and Laura-Jean McKay’s dingo, Sue, in <a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/the-animals-in-that-country-9781925849530">The Animals in That Country</a>. </p>
<p>In novels, dogs demonstrate humane behaviour. Literary dogs are keenly attuned to the absurd, and to suffering. If, <a href="https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2022/03/18/bentham-on-animals/">as Jeremy Bentham wrote</a>, the proof of animal sentience is a capacity to suffer, in literature, the very good dog suffers with, for, and because of its human counterparts. </p>
<p>Elizabeth Zott finds her good dog, Six-Thirty – who narrates sections of the novel – at 6:30pm in an alleyway at the back of a local deli. The mangy animal lay hopeless and on his last legs until she appeared, at which point he “took one look at her, pulled himself up, and followed”. </p>
<p>He is ready to live, learn and suffer with her. In fact, if we are to read the novel as subversive romance, this dog might be the real Prince Charming. Theirs is a clear case of respect at first sight. Dog and scientist recognise something ineffable in each other, are bound, will never part. </p>
<p>Six-Thirty supports Zott through grief, labour and child-raising. He’s keenly attuned to their co-dependency. The emotional commitment of each keeps the other alive, he observes ruefully, exhausted by the “mess” that is “devotion”. </p>
<p>Zott, whose continually unmet demand for recognition gives her pause to recognise others, sees Six-Thirty for the perspicacious mongrel he is. She reads aloud to him, choosing stories she thinks he’ll enjoy. Like <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/moby--dick-9780451532282">Moby-Dick</a>: “a story about how humans continually underestimate other life-forms. At their peril.”</p>
<p>What Zott doesn’t know is that Six-Thirty is as acculturated an animal as she is. Trained as a bomb-sniffing dog, his descent into the vulnerable position of “stray” is a direct result of a fatal flaw: Six-thirty is gun shy. That is, just like Elizabeth, his intellect is more nuanced than his training allows. </p>
<p>The very good dog and woman scientist are not just emotionally bonded, but a chemically coefficient combination for a multi-species feminist romance.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552019/original/file-20231004-23-44j6v7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552019/original/file-20231004-23-44j6v7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552019/original/file-20231004-23-44j6v7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=842&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552019/original/file-20231004-23-44j6v7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=842&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552019/original/file-20231004-23-44j6v7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=842&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552019/original/file-20231004-23-44j6v7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1059&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552019/original/file-20231004-23-44j6v7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1059&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552019/original/file-20231004-23-44j6v7.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1059&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bonnie Garmus with her dog, 99.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Agregory/Wikipedia</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the novel, Six-Thirty is as smart as he is ugly. He’s tall, grey, thin and covered in “barbed-wire-like-fur that made him look as if he’d barely survived electrocution”. In the Apple TV adaptation, he appears to be a caramel-coloured labradoodle. So it goes. No one is safe from the glamour-washing of commercial media. </p>
<p>Novels – like Moby-Dick – that include significant animal characters also explore the ways power determines who speaks and who is silent. An animal narrator can be a foil to human behaviour, denaturalising the ideological underpinning of the story world. An animal familiar can also demonstrate true humanity. </p>
<p>Although novels with animal characters seldom circumvent the problem of anthropomorphism, they highlight the limitations of our systems of representation. Non-human animals point out the nonsense in the human animals’ sense of the world. </p>
<p>Six-Thirty smells the onset of Zott’s impending labour, her death wish as she grieves, and communicates with her foetus in utero. But he still grapples with the idea he’s a “smart dog”. “The word seemed to have as many definitions as there were species, and yet humans […] seemed only to recognise ‘smart’ if and when it played by their own rules,” he observes. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552038/original/file-20231004-21-zgrrk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552038/original/file-20231004-21-zgrrk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/552038/original/file-20231004-21-zgrrk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552038/original/file-20231004-21-zgrrk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552038/original/file-20231004-21-zgrrk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=903&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552038/original/file-20231004-21-zgrrk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552038/original/file-20231004-21-zgrrk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/552038/original/file-20231004-21-zgrrk4.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1135&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Eileen Myles imagines in <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Eileen-Myles-Afterglow-9781611855098/">Afterglow: a Dog Memoir</a>, that every dog needs to find a writer to tell their story. If that’s true, in Bonnie Garmus’s novel, Six-Thirty might need a scientist to record the truth: we are all capable of surprising each other. </p>
<p>We can never know each other’s capacities, particularly through the prism of our preconceptions. To understand anything and anyone, you have to pay attention – while also holding your assumptions up to critical scrutiny. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/if-animals-could-speak-would-we-understand-them-178883">If animals could speak, would we understand them?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Bad romance</h2>
<p>In Garmus’s bad romance, the clichés of love are rebutted. No emotional state will appear on the horizon and save your life. If there are fireworks, it might be a chemical reaction caused by pistachio nuts. And if there’s conquering to do, you’d better roll up your sleeves and get to work. </p>
<p>Instead of a happy bride at an altar, Garmus gives the reader the image of a grieving, pregnant, unemployed woman doggedly fighting an invisible tide on a home-made rowing machine.</p>
<p>There are, as promised, lessons in Garmus’s novel, though they belong more in sociology than chemistry. Community, integrity and determination pull Zott through tragedy toward a hopeful ending. Love is primarily about co-responsibility. If you can’t have a family of origin, or a Prince Charming, you can have a chosen family. </p>
<p>Romance fiction is defined primarily by two key features – a central love story, and a hopeful ending – though scholars of the genre identify hope, rather than love, as the dominant thematic concern. </p>
<p>As a serious reader, and a woman who has loved and lost, I flip my hair and raise my brows over my glasses at the false hope of happily-ever-after. Elizabeth Zott, and her creator, Bonnie Garmus would feel the same. </p>
<p>Of course love can change the world for the better. It also tears us apart. Happy endings are cheap, and seldom conclusive. Meanwhile, on the pragmatic side of romance, a woman scientist – having thought her own life over – picks up her pencil and returns, with renewed commitment, to her research questions about the wider world. </p>
<p><em><a href="https://tv.apple.com/au/show/lessons-in-chemistry/umc.cmc.40yycssgxelw4zur8m2ilmvyx?ctx_brand=tvs.sbd.4000">Lessons in Chemistry</a> airs on Apple TV+ from October 13.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/213888/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Briohny Doyle does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Briohny Doyle picked up Lessons in Chemistry not for its sassy-romance cover – which this subversive international bestseller does not deliver – but because she heard it featured a ‘good dog’.
Briohny Doyle, Lecturer, Creative Writing, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/212775
2023-09-28T19:59:36Z
2023-09-28T19:59:36Z
Friday essay: ‘I hope eventually to become a woman’ – trans life in Australia from the 1940s to 1970s
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547985/original/file-20230913-29-fzq1ow.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=5%2C11%2C3982%2C1976&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Trove</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Readers are advised that this essay contains historical terms which are now generally considered outdated and offensive.</em></p>
<p>In December 1952, former American GI Christine Jorgensen made global news after undergoing gender affirmation surgery in Copenhagen. Australian newspapers showed great interest, with headlines like “Man Converted to Woman by Danish Doctors”, “Man Becomes Woman and ‘She Is Glad’”, and “‘Converted’ Girl Hopes to Marry”. </p>
<p>Jorgensen’s story even had an Australian angle: she intended to tour the country in late 1954 and appear in a series of fashion parades featuring Australian swimsuits, summer frocks and gowns. She also planned a cabaret-like performance at Sydney’s Palladium Theatre and in Melbourne. </p>
<p>Local models protested, with one modelling agent saying, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>A fashion parade featuring Miss Jorgensen would reek of the sort of sensationalism that’s popular in America, but isn’t suitable in Australia. For local girls to parade with him – I mean her – would lower our professional dignity. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547971/original/file-20230913-29-1hkx7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547971/original/file-20230913-29-1hkx7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547971/original/file-20230913-29-1hkx7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547971/original/file-20230913-29-1hkx7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547971/original/file-20230913-29-1hkx7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=757&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547971/original/file-20230913-29-1hkx7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547971/original/file-20230913-29-1hkx7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547971/original/file-20230913-29-1hkx7e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=952&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Christine Jorgensen in 1954.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Jorgensen">Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The manager of the Palladium cancelled Jorgensen’s show and she called off her tour – though she did eventually visit Australia in 1961.</p>
<p>The media presented Jorgensen’s gender affirmation as a marvel of modern medicine and the embodiment of white, middle-class femininity. Jorgensen put a face and a name to emerging medical discourse about “transsexualism”, which American endocrinologist and sexologist Dr Harry Benjamin <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9780203955055-6/transsexualism-transvestism-psycho-somatic-somato-psychic-syndromes-harry-benjamin?context=ubx&refId=c366fede-0331-41f2-951b-a4669a4b8676">distinguished from “transvestism” in 1954</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It [transsexualism] denotes the intense and often obsessive desire to change the entire sexual status including the anatomical structure. While the male transvestite, enacts the role of a woman, the transsexualist wants to be one and function as one, wishing to assume as many of her characteristics as possible, physical, mental and sexual.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Jorgensen’s gender affirmation also presented Australians who were questioning their gender with new possibilities. Her endocrinologist received letters from 465 people around the world inquiring about the possibility of a “change of sex”. Thirteen such letters came from Australia: nine from assigned male at birth (AMAB) people and four from assigned female at birth (AFAB) people (there were also eight letters from Aotearoa New Zealand). </p>
<p>The changing language and possibilities as embodied in Christine Jorgensen are but one example of evolving understandings and lived experiences of trans people in the postwar period. </p>
<p>The rise of medical discourse about “transsexualism” and surgical options in Melbourne and Sydney offered new explanations and opportunities, particularly for those trans people who adhered to stereotypical ideas of white, middle-class respectability. The postwar era also saw the consolidation of camp cultures in the capital cities, bringing together a variety of sexually diverse and gender-diverse people. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/witch-hunts-and-surveillance-the-hidden-lives-of-queer-people-in-the-military-76156">Witch-hunts and surveillance: the hidden lives of queer people in the military</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>World War II and its aftermath</h2>
<p>Within World War II armed forces, there were surprising gender-crossing opportunities and trans possibilities. Drag performances were common as a form of entertainment, and were socially acceptable contexts in which AMAB people – be they gay or trans – could <a href="https://acuresearchbank.acu.edu.au/download/20b2aea6d26d10b7d444d74269e4cbeea499a2759b9646674a4f10de5ae154ac/27611576/Riseman_2018_Serving_in_silence_Australian_LGBTI_military.pdf">experiment with gender expression</a>. There is also more concrete evidence of trans service members in accounts published after the war. </p>
<p>The Chameleon Society of Western Australia published a newsletter that told the tale of a member who served in the Australian Army and was seconded to a British regiment on the Rhine:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well one day during a routine inspection, the RSM [regimental sergeant major] was going through the members kits and came across a whole heap of ladies apparel. The RSM grunted and said “You are Australian aren’t you?”, “Yes Sir” said our member. The RSM grunted and moved on leaving our member wondering what in the hell was going to happen. Well what did happen was rather remarkable. A few days later the RSM came across our member and pressed a card into his hand and said “I can recommend this club.” On it was a[n] address of a cross-dressing club in Hamburg.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>During and after the war, a few new patterns emerged in media reports that shed light on trends around trans people. Coverage still primarily focused on cases with a salacious element, but one change was that more stories presented perspectives from the dressers themselves. </p>
<p>One such example was Patrick John Cowther, arrested in Melbourne in 1944 dressed in women’s clothes, a pearl necklace and a gold bangle and wearing lipstick, rouge, powder and eyeliner. Cowther admitted to wearing a pink nightdress to bed and, when their family was not around, dressing as a woman at home. They reportedly said to the police: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>You gentlemen wouldn’t understand. It’s quite normal. Something inside me makes me want to do it. I’ve done it all my life. There are hundreds in England like me.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The tabloid Truth included more detailed coverage of this case, even publishing an image of Cowther dressed in women’s clothes. Their lawyer argued that there was nothing offensive about how Cowther dressed, and that Cowther dressed in women’s clothing as “an emotional relief … and to me it is perfectly natural”. </p>
<p>The magistrate disagreed: Cowther was convicted and fined £2.10. It is interesting that their solicitor was making arguments that aligned with contemporaneous understandings of “transvestism” yet did not use the word. The way Cowther expressed themself and invoked the existence of others was a sign of growing awareness about others “like them”.</p>
<p>As time went on, medical discourse gradually crept into press reports about dressing – particularly after the publicity surrounding Christine Jorgensen. For instance, police in Adelaide arrested John Martin Vernon Rounsevell while Rounsevell was dressed in women’s clothing, a wig and high heels and carrying a handbag. </p>
<p>Rounsevell admitted to dressing frequently as a woman and took police to a garage containing several boxes and a wardrobe full of women’s clothing. They said to police, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I cannot help myself. I am not telling lies. I have been to doctors and hope eventually to become a woman. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>A psychiatrist testified that Rounsevell had been experiencing “transvestism” for at least 12 years and this compelled them to dress in women’s clothing. The judge accepted that Rounsevell suffered from a neurosis and released them on a £100 bond with the understanding that they would seek medical treatment.</p>
<p>Examples of AMAB defendants invoking medical defences, and magistrates accepting them, became more common in the 1960s. Coverage of AFAB people caught living as men tended to follow the prewar patterns of assuming it was for economic benefits, to seek adventure or to escape from an unhappy marriage. Yet there was the occasional AFAB person who invoked a desire to transition to being a man. </p>
<p>In October 1950 Truth reported about Bill Armitt, a 22-year-old AFAB person who said that over his lifetime he had gradually developed masculine characteristics. </p>
<p>Armitt had been wearing men’s clothes and had short hair since age 14; in 1949 he had changed his name and lived as a man with his father, working as a bushman. Armitt booked an appointment with a doctor to investigate if he were “one of those rare cases of a woman who is really a man” – the article implying that the specialist was referring to intersex variations. </p>
<p>A few weeks later, Truth reported that Armitt had undergone a gynaecological exam and the specialist had conclusively determined that he was a woman. Armitt did not accept this, remarking, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I don’t care what the doctors say. I know in my heart that I am a man and that I will always be a man. I don’t know what to do now. What can I do? […] If I can’t live as a man, I don’t want to live at all. </p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547995/original/file-20230913-29-j0pj21.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547995/original/file-20230913-29-j0pj21.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547995/original/file-20230913-29-j0pj21.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547995/original/file-20230913-29-j0pj21.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547995/original/file-20230913-29-j0pj21.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=405&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547995/original/file-20230913-29-j0pj21.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547995/original/file-20230913-29-j0pj21.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547995/original/file-20230913-29-j0pj21.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=509&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1947 Truth article about Bill Armitt.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Trove/NLA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Armitt was referred to a psychologist but declined the consultation. He returned to Goulburn and his fate is not known.</p>
<p>The other emerging trend during this period was linking gender-crossing cases with the female impersonator scene. Theatre had always been a socially acceptable site for men to dress as women. By World War II, female impersonation represented an extension of this practice, combining dress, acting and singing and with impersonators appealing to audiences because of how convincing they were as women. </p>
<p>In the early 1940s <a href="https://dictionaryofsydney.org/person/oreilly_benjamin">Lea Sonia</a> was perhaps Australia’s most famous female impersonator, described in one Truth article as “pos[ing] so convincingly as a woman fan dancer as to leave most of the audience still doubtful when the wig is removed at the end of the performances”. </p>
<p>Sonia died during a brownout in 1941 when she was hit by a tram while running for a taxi.</p>
<p>One person who cited the spectre of female impersonation was Neville McQuade, alias Colin Carson. McQuade appeared in the press on several occasions in the 1940s when arrested for vagrancy or offensive behaviour. In an interview with Truth, they expressed a desire to be famous like Lea Sonia, and regaled readers with descriptions of outfits and hair and desires to be a famous stage performer. McQuade was arrested a second time in 1943 for behaving in an offensive manner, being dressed as a woman and dancing with men. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547988/original/file-20230913-19-9uynd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547988/original/file-20230913-19-9uynd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/547988/original/file-20230913-19-9uynd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547988/original/file-20230913-19-9uynd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547988/original/file-20230913-19-9uynd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=603&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547988/original/file-20230913-19-9uynd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547988/original/file-20230913-19-9uynd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/547988/original/file-20230913-19-9uynd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=758&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Truth report on Neville McQuade.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Trove/NLA</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Their third arrest was just after midnight on New Year’s Day 1944, for being dressed as a woman and dancing with a man on the streets of Newtown. On that occasion Dr Norman Haire testified for the defence and said McQuade was a “transvestist type” under his care. The magistrate fined McQuade £3 and released them on a 12-month good behaviour bond.</p>
<p>McQuade made one more appearance in the Australian media: in 1949 police arrested them, then living as Colin Carson, for having insufficient lawful means of support. Police also accused them of performing sex work with men, but McQuade vehemently denied this. They were quite open about continuing to dress in women’s attire and spoke about various social parties and balls that “were mostly frequented by perverts and their associates”.</p>
<p>McQuade’s appearances in the media across the 1940s collectively highlight the continuity and change when it came to gender crossing. Police were still arresting AMAB people dressed as women and laying charges such as offensive behaviour. There were also two emerging patterns that summarised the dominant trans subcultures and discourses until the 1980s: medicalisation and the camp scene. There was overlap between these two sites of trans visibility, but broadly speaking what separated them were the politics of respectability.</p>
<h2>Medicalising transgender</h2>
<p>In 1951, psychiatrist Dr Herbert Bower saw a patient at Melbourne’s Royal Park Mental Hospital who was AMAB but identified as a woman. Bower initially thought the patient was psychotic, but as he came to know them he realised the individual was <a href="https://auspath.org.au/2022/05/26/australian-trans-health-history-report/">well adjusted except for the gender identification</a>. He had no clear diagnosis or treatment for them and subsequently continued to see patients with a different gender identity from their sex assigned at birth.</p>
<p>Bower’s early encounters with these individuals were around the same time that international medical discourse was concretising a pathology and language that built on the prewar sexology and new developments in surgery. </p>
<p>In 1949 Dr David Caldwell used the word “transsexual” to describe a person whose gender identification was different from their sex assigned at birth. </p>
<p>Dr Harry Benjamin’s aforementioned 1954 article Transsexualism and Transvestism as Psycho-Somatic and Somato-Psychic Syndromes explicitly distinguished “transvestism” from “transsexualism”. In 1966 Benjamin published The Transsexual Phenomenon, which became a global textbook for the <a href="https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2164-0947.1967.tb02273.x">medical treatment of “transvestites” and “transsexuals”</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549235/original/file-20230920-21-dn8dih.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549235/original/file-20230920-21-dn8dih.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549235/original/file-20230920-21-dn8dih.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1013&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549235/original/file-20230920-21-dn8dih.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1013&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549235/original/file-20230920-21-dn8dih.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1013&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549235/original/file-20230920-21-dn8dih.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1274&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549235/original/file-20230920-21-dn8dih.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1274&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549235/original/file-20230920-21-dn8dih.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1274&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Australians were conscious of these overseas developments because of the worldwide press they generated. Still, it was only Bower and a small number of psychiatrists who would treat local trans patients. Much of their work in the 1960s–70s centred on searching for a cause for people’s transness, as well as distinguishing between “transvestites”, “transsexuals” and effeminate homosexuals. </p>
<p>Richard Ball was one such psychiatrist associated with what are believed to be Melbourne’s first gender affirmation surgeries. The Victorian Health Department ran a Transsexualism Consultative Clinic from 1969. When Ball diagnosed people as “transsexuals”, he referred them to a surgeon who operated at Royal Melbourne Hospital, usually early on Saturday or Sunday mornings to keep away from conservative “prying eyes” in the general hospital system.</p>
<p>In 1975 Ball was appointed as professor of psychiatry at St Vincent’s Hospital, though the Transsexualism Consultative Clinic continued to run until 1987. Over its 18 years, according to later media reports, the clinic saw approximately 700 people and referred about 100 of them for gender affirmation surgery. </p>
<p>All cases had to go through a review panel before being accepted as a surgical candidate. The clinic’s approach represented an early example of a pattern that would echo across the country, as around the world. </p>
<p>First, psychiatrists made a distinction between “transvestites” and “true transsexuals”. To fit the criteria of a “true transsexual”, a person had to present as seeing themselves as the opposite gender trapped in the wrong body (this is known as “wrong body discourse”). What constituted the opposite gender reflected dominant social constructs framed around white, middle-class respectability. </p>
<p>The big distinction between “transvestites” and “transsexuals” was that the latter had to desire gender affirmation surgery and then to live indistinguishably, quietly, in their affirmed gender. Those individuals who did not meet the criteria would be denied treatment.</p>
<p>Sydney’s history of trans health care in the 1960s–70s has points of commonality with Melbourne’s, particularly around the role of psychiatrists and the need for a panel of specialists to approve surgery. Unverified newspaper reports and an oral history interview suggest Sydney was the site of Australia’s first gender affirmation surgery, in 1968. There were actually two gender clinics running in Sydney by the early 1970s, both directed by psychiatrists. One was at the Prince Alfred Hospital, but it closed in 1975 when the director accepted a position in Newcastle.</p>
<p>The most prominent personality behind trans psychiatry in 1970s Sydney was Neil McConaghy. McConaghy is a controversial figure in Australia’s history of sexuality and medicine because he was a practitioner of gay aversion therapy. When it came to trans people, though, he did not practise aversion therapy; indeed, his research and consultations at the Prince Henry Hospital were more in line with contemporaneous international ideas around “transvestism” and “transsexualism”. </p>
<p>McConaghy and psychiatrist Ron Barr also regularly deployed a “penile volume response test” – a mechanism that measured erectile responses to imagery – as part of their assessment process. They believed that “true transsexuals” were only attracted to men, which of course was a false supposition because sexuality is not the same as gender identity. </p>
<p>Justifying this belief, Barr <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01541372">wrote in 1976</a>: “Patients who show a heterosexual pattern of response may live to regret the loss of the penis following surgery.” </p>
<p>Former patients do not speak fondly of the penile volume response test, which they found not only degrading but also absurd. “Sascha” (a pseudonym) recalls:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>They would take us and they would connect our bits to a machine and then you’d be watching a film that would be flitting through the zoo and a baboon’s arse would flash up, and then you’d go a little bit further and there’d be this large, languid sort of Spanish-looking woman with huge, hairy tits, then she would be sort of lying there going like this and then you’d be flitting through the zoo again and there’d be a man’s penis and it was supposedly designed to measure your sexual responses when you came to any of these diversions.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Carlotta similarly <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1017655">writes in her autobiography</a>: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>they wired my penis and brain up and showed me photos of people in Kama Sutra positions, vaginas, penises and animals fucking, to see what my reactions would be. I was so angry and offended that I ripped off all the wires and stormed out.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Although Barr’s specific test did not continue after the 1970s, physical examinations including measuring of genitals certainly did – and this was not unique to Sydney.</p>
<p>When Sydney specialists approved trans people for surgery, the operations were performed at Prince of Wales Hospital. Those surgeries stopped in 1978. When questioned in a 1981 interview why, Barr gave the following explanation:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Well, several of us felt that, and the surgeon felt, he wasn’t entirely convinced it was helping […] I think being a transsexual is primarily an identity problem, not a sexual problem, because transsexuals are willing to take large doses of Oestrogens which greatly reduce/knock out sex drive and anybody who is primarily interested in sex would not take anything to know [sic] out their sex drive, they are more concerned with identity.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/thanking-carlotta-a-pioneer-for-sex-and-gender-diversity-28191">Thanking Carlotta – a pioneer for sex and gender diversity</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Transgender people have a different recollection about surgeries and why they ceased. Trans people sometimes spoke about surgeons who botched the procedures, with dire consequences. In an article in Cleo magazine sometime in the mid-1970s, performer <a href="https://www.gayinthe80s.com/2013/10/1987-transgenders-hit-australian-day-time-television/">Trixie Laumonte</a> stated:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I wouldn’t have the operation in Sydney. I’ve seen too many botched up jobs here and it is a real tragedy […] Lots of surgeons are in sex change work for the money and I’ve seen some disgusting jobs. They can make a real mess of you and that’s when you get someone who is unhappy afterwards.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A few years earlier, the press reported about a stripper, Tiffany Jones, who died following complications from breast augmentation surgery in a private hospital.</p>
<p>“Sascha” very bluntly said in her oral history interview: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>They [surgeons] mutilated so many people, and so many people just died from stuff that they did. They didn’t know what they were doing and it was awful, horrible. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>She believes the Sydney surgeons were not properly trained to perform gender affirmation surgeries and that the trans women they operated on were like guinea pigs. She recollects one friend whom she describes as having been “butchered” by the surgeons. Eventually, that person died by suicide, which Sascha attributes in part to the surgery complications. Sascha believes the many complications from surgeries led Sydney surgeons to cease operating. </p>
<p>Although there are conflicting accounts as to why gender affirmation surgeries terminated in Sydney in 1978, by then viable alternatives had emerged in Melbourne and Adelaide. </p>
<h2>Trans people navigating health care</h2>
<p>Before the 1970s there were no trans organisations, no publicly advertised gender clinics and no internet to find doctors with knowledge or referral pathways. Some trans people desperately wrote to the media seeking advice. A letter to a Truth advice column published in 1966 read:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I am a male, and I want very badly to become a female. But I understand this operation is against the law in Australia. I have become very feminine in outlook and even my handwriting has changed. When I walk I roll my hips like a woman. I try not to walk like this, but I can’t help it. Can you help me get female hormones? – A.G. (South Australia)</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The response was that the person might have a glandular problem and should seek referral to an endocrinologist.</p>
<p>Those trans people who approached psychiatrists had mixed results depending on the psychiatrist’s specialist knowledge and the resources available where the person lived. </p>
<p>The protocols that psychiatrists developed from the 1960s and 1970s were very rigid: they would assess if a person were a “true transsexual” and judge whether the person could, if given hormone treatment and gender affirmation surgery, blend indistinguishably with cis women. This was of course quite subjective, but it meant psychiatrists wielded significant power over trans people’s bodies and health care.</p>
<p>The psychiatrists expected trans women to wear dresses and apply stereotypical standards of white femininity (during this era it was almost always trans women, but in later periods psychiatrists would similarly expect trans men to dress and present like stereotypical men).</p>
<p>Psychiatrists by their own admission would deny treatment to those whom they considered not feminine enough or those who did not live sufficiently respectable lives, such as strippers and sex workers. </p>
<p>Those whom psychiatrists diagnosed as “true transsexuals” would be prescribed hormones by an endocrinologist and must live full time as women for two years – the “real-life test”, as it was called – before the psychiatrists would approve them for gender affirmation surgery. Trans people had to navigate these rigid boundaries and over time came to refer to psychiatrists as gatekeepers.</p>
<p>Trans people who did not meet psychiatrists’ approval were, to an extent, able to exercise agency and find other ways to secure hormones. One interview participant, Jazmin Theodora, remembers that as far back as the 1960s, “Someone started taking the hormones to get breasts, and then we all started taking them.” </p>
<p>She recalls a Dr Roger Gray who prescribed them without questions – exercising what is now known as <a href="https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.5694/j.1326-5377.1976.tb130424.x">the informed consent model</a>. In Melbourne, Dr Harry Imber joined a St Kilda GP clinic in 1972 and by the late 1970s was known in trans circles for his willingness to prescribe hormones with informed consent – he even wrote about it in the Medical Journal of Australia in 1976. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549232/original/file-20230920-21-vrsi49.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549232/original/file-20230920-21-vrsi49.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/549232/original/file-20230920-21-vrsi49.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549232/original/file-20230920-21-vrsi49.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549232/original/file-20230920-21-vrsi49.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549232/original/file-20230920-21-vrsi49.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549232/original/file-20230920-21-vrsi49.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/549232/original/file-20230920-21-vrsi49.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1167&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Other trans people sourced hormones through the black market. In some instances this meant trans women who had legitimate prescriptions shared hormones with their friends.</p>
<p>In other circumstances it meant finding a chemist who was willing to sell them off-book, though always for higher than the normal retail price. When it came to gender affirmation surgeries, trans people had fewer options. Surgeries were limited to a small number of specialists in Melbourne and Sydney – not to mention the rigid gatekeeping expectations just to be eligible. </p>
<p>In extreme examples of desperation, people tried to perform gender affirmation surgery on themselves. A case from 1968 made the cover of Truth; the person had been taking feminising hormones and said they just could not live as a man. They were rushed to hospital, where they were reported as saying, “I did it myself with razor blades in the kitchen while my wife was in bed asleep.” </p>
<p>Trans people with some means could travel overseas for gender affirmation surgery. From the 1960s–70s the most common destinations were London (where those with British citizenship could have it done through the public system at Charing Cross Hospital), Hong Kong, Morocco and Egypt. </p>
<p>In 1962, PIX magazine ran a three-part firsthand account by a trans woman. In part one she described her lifetime struggle with gender. Part two detailed her numerous psychiatric assessments and meetings with surgeons in Melbourne who ultimately declined to perform the operation. </p>
<p>She managed to source feminising hormones from a chemist and tried other doctors in Sydney who also declined to refer her for surgery. Eventually, doctors in London approved her for gender affirmation surgery and even waived the costs. </p>
<p>The author explained that she was narrating her transition journey because:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>It is the fervent hope that I will instil courage into those who, like me, have been condemned to twilight existence as neuters. Every scorn, every hostility that is heaped upon these poor people is an unnecessary scar. And I would beg of you who have cast the first stone in this direction to stay your hands.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p><em>This is an edited extract from <a href="https://www.mup.com.au/books/transgender-australia-paperback-softback">Transgender Australia: A History Since 1910</a> by Noah Riseman (MUP).</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212775/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Noah Riseman receives funding from the Australian Research Council, project DP180100322. </span></em></p>
Before the 1970s, there were no trans organisations or publicly advertised gender clinics. But camp cultures brought together a variety of sexually- and gender-diverse people.
Noah Riseman, Professor in History, Australian Catholic University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/207428
2023-09-21T20:06:51Z
2023-09-21T20:06:51Z
Friday essay: my father was always told his mother was dead, but a birthday card revealed she was living in a mental institution
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548947/original/file-20230919-15-7z704n.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C5%2C3976%2C1988&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ada, the author's grandmother, is pictured at right.</span> </figcaption></figure><p>As a child, I found a small, brown suitcase in my wardrobe. It had two silver latches and a squeaky wooden handle. I didn’t recognise the name inscribed on the bottom in pencil: <em>Ada</em>. </p>
<p>I asked my mother, “Whose suitcase is this?” Mum replied, “Your grandmother’s.” </p>
<p>I was confused about who my grandmother was. Born in the early sixties, I grew up with my parents and two older brothers in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. Dad had grown up without his mother and was cared for by his paternal grandmother. </p>
<p>It was around the time of my birth when Dad accidentally discovered the secret of his mother’s whereabouts. Ada was living in a mental institution. </p>
<p>As a young child, I remember waiting with my family for Ada in the foyer of a boarding house in Melbourne. This memory is like a single snapshot of a dimly lit, wood-panelled foyer, marked by the tension of my two brothers being scolded for their noisy behaviour as we waited for Ada to join us for a family outing. </p>
<p>Another time, I recall Ada sitting in the lounge room of our family home, smoking cigarettes. I tried to engage her, but she would not smile, and her face and eyes lacked expression. I knew there had been something wrong with Ada. I am uncertain when I learned she had been removed from her children and locked away. </p>
<p>As my father grew to know her more, stories of her absence from his childhood emerged. It was impossible for me as a child to understand Dad was getting to know his mother for the first time as an adult: a parent with his own children. </p>
<p>For a long time, I had the sense Ada had problems related to her menstrual cycle and that once a month, her periods threw her off balance, and she was placed in the sick ward of the mental hospital for one week out of every month.</p>
<p>The notion that being female caused her sickness gave me some foreboding as a young girl. But of course, that wasn’t true: it was just one example of the lies we were told about what had happened to her.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548952/original/file-20230919-19-z1l47p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548952/original/file-20230919-19-z1l47p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548952/original/file-20230919-19-z1l47p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548952/original/file-20230919-19-z1l47p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548952/original/file-20230919-19-z1l47p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548952/original/file-20230919-19-z1l47p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548952/original/file-20230919-19-z1l47p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548952/original/file-20230919-19-z1l47p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ada (far right) with her daughter-in-law and two grandsons, after being reconnected with family.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A hidden mother, revealed</h2>
<p>Dad had been raised from a baby by his paternal grandmother (a widow), who he knew as Gran. His older sister, Hannah, was placed, aged four, into a Melbourne boarding school for girls, Lowther Hall in Essendon. Dad’s father, who lived elsewhere in the same town, visited the children on Sundays at Gran’s.</p>
<p>The children were reunited when Hannah returned to Gran’s care, aged eight, when Lowther Hall was requisitioned for American military requirements in 1942. Dad grew up assuming his mother was no longer alive.</p>
<p>Dad married my mother in his early twenties. Together, they lived with Dad’s father, who I called Pop. Soon after, Dad and Mum built a new home in the outer suburbs of Melbourne and notified the local post office about their change of address. Dad received a birthday card redirected from his former address. It was signed <em>Mother</em>. </p>
<p>He thought it must have been a mistake. Dad drove to his father’s house, determined to get to the bottom of the situation. He waited a few hours, his mind swirling, before Pop returned home. Finally, he questioned Pop about the card. </p>
<p>Pop admitted it was a genuine birthday card from Dad’s mother: Ada had been living in a mental institution all this time. Pop then produced a bundle of letters and cards Ada had written to her children over more than 20 years. Pop was instrumental in keeping Ada a secret from her children. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548967/original/file-20230919-23-ikags5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548967/original/file-20230919-23-ikags5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548967/original/file-20230919-23-ikags5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548967/original/file-20230919-23-ikags5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548967/original/file-20230919-23-ikags5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548967/original/file-20230919-23-ikags5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548967/original/file-20230919-23-ikags5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548967/original/file-20230919-23-ikags5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ada had written to her children for over 20 years, with her letters kept a secret from them.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.pexels.com/photo/pile-of-letters-in-envelopes-1768060/">Suzy Hazelwood/Pexels</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Now, the secret was out: Ada was alive and living in a Melbourne mental hospital. It is difficult to understand why Pop had kept Ada’s letters all this time without saying anything. One can only guess he had intercepted and confiscated Ada’s letters to her children to protect them from the shame and stigma of mental illness. </p>
<p>It seems likely Pop intended to continue Ada’s long estrangement, had that birthday card not slipped into Dad’s hands that day. </p>
<p>Over 20 years of letters and cards, and not one reply. Ada never forgot her children. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-lament-for-the-lost-art-of-letter-writing-a-radical-art-form-reflecting-the-full-catastrophe-of-life-197420">Friday essay: a lament for the lost art of letter-writing – a radical art form reflecting 'the full catastrophe of life'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The first of many visits</h2>
<p>Soon after finding that fateful card, Dad contacted the mental hospital – and met his mother for the first time he could remember. He recalled his first meeting with Ada in the early 1960s at <a href="https://www.findingrecords.dhhs.vic.gov.au/CollectionResultsPage/Mont-Park-Hospital-Macleod">Mont Park mental hospital</a> in Bundoora, Melbourne. He waited to meet Ada in a small walled garden and was told she would not be much longer. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I was nervous and unsure of what she would look like and what to say to her. I waited for 20 long minutes, and my anxiety increased. When she opened the door, there she was. But six people followed her to take a look at her son. I didn’t know whether to give her a kiss or give her a hug. The first thing she said to me was: “You look just like your father.” They were the last words I wanted to hear at that moment.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As Pop had hidden his mother from him, Ada’s comment had a painful sting. This was the first of many visits together. Dad recalled taking us to collect Ada from Carmel House, where I remembered waiting in the foyer for her. We took her on outings and occasional weekends to our family home. He recalled:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When we went to pick her up from Carmel House, she was always late and I remember waiting in that timber-panelled foyer, looking searchingly at the stairs, until she made her entrance. When I was working in the city, Mum used to go and get her hair done on her days off, and we would meet afterwards at the Town Hall corner, and go off to Coles Cafeteria, her favourite eating place. But then she would go into the toilets and wash her hair out, so sometimes when I met her, she looked a bit wild and woolly, like she had been diving in the Yarra River. She certainly had her eccentricities.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>As Dad and Ada got to know each other and tentatively forged their new relationship, it was still unclear why Ada was committed to a mental institution in the first place. </p>
<p>Dad and his older sister Hannah had little contact or knowledge of Ada’s family of origin. They were surrounded by the silence of his mother’s whereabouts throughout their upbringing, until Ada’s card arrived for him in his twenties. </p>
<h2>‘I felt closer to Ada’</h2>
<p>Dad and I wanted to understand the events that precipitated her committal. We found we could access Ada’s mental-patient files by applying for a Freedom of Information request. We discussed it together, and Dad agreed as Ada’s next-of-kin. I purchased Ada’s birth and wedding certificates, to make sure I requested the correct person’s files. </p>
<p>I found out Ada was the younger sister of five brothers. She married in 1934 at 21 years old, and her occupation was stated on her marriage certificate as a “comptometer operator”. A <a href="https://www.pcmag.com/encyclopedia/term/comptometer">comptometer</a> is a key-driven mechanical calculator, which was operated predominantly by women, and her occupation suggests Ada had completed a specialised business course. Advances in office technology in the early 1930s gave many young and unmarried women like Ada new opportunities for employment in clerical positions. </p>
<p>However, most industries excluded married women, and it’s likely Ada left her job when she married my grandfather in 1934, and moved to the country.</p>
<p>Three months after making the request, we received Ada’s mental-patient files, which ranged from her original committal in 1936 to her death in 1972. Ada’s records include the committal certificates, diagnoses, notes on trial leave, experimental treatments, and her final years as an outpatient at Carmel House. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548954/original/file-20230919-27-ww4vm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548954/original/file-20230919-27-ww4vm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548954/original/file-20230919-27-ww4vm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=684&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548954/original/file-20230919-27-ww4vm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=684&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548954/original/file-20230919-27-ww4vm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=684&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548954/original/file-20230919-27-ww4vm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548954/original/file-20230919-27-ww4vm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548954/original/file-20230919-27-ww4vm9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ada’s photo from her medical files.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As I opened the files for the first time, Ada’s headshot appeared on the first page of her first admission certificate in 1936. Her shoulders are angled and her gaze is focused to the right of the camera’s lens.</p>
<p>At age 24, Ada is youthful and smiling. She wears a dress with a large, white collar, possibly the same clothes she wore when she left home. I was shocked to see our similar physical appearance. I could see my face in hers: the same high forehead, small eyes, fair skin and wavy hair. I felt closer to Ada. </p>
<p>Ada’s patient files show her mental health began to deteriorate following the birth of her second child. She experienced auditory hallucinations when committed to the Royal Park Receiving House in Melbourne in 1936, two weeks after giving birth. The doctor described her as lucid, with “nervous symptoms that alternate between depression and exaltation along with auditory hallucinations”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/girl-interrupted-interrogates-how-women-are-mad-when-they-refuse-to-conform-30-years-on-this-memoir-is-still-important-199211">Girl, Interrupted interrogates how women are 'mad' when they refuse to conform – 30 years on, this memoir is still important</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘Puerperal insanity’ – associated with giving birth</h2>
<p>The cause of her attack is noted as “<a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8953002/pdf/atlantajrecmed141958-0005.pdf">puerperal insanity</a>”, which psychiatrists associated with Ada giving birth two weeks before. </p>
<p>Hilary Marland, in her book <a href="https://link.springer.com/book/10.1057/9780230511866">Dangerous Motherhood</a>, argues puerperal insanity is a 19th-century diagnosis that links insanity to recent childbirth – and links lactation, pregnancy and miscarriage to mental illness. Marland found that in the 19th century, puerperal insanity accounted for approximately 10% of admissions in English asylums. </p>
<p>I found a similar rate of birth-related committals had occurred in Victoria in the early 20th century, in my PhD thesis <a href="https://researchportal.scu.edu.au/esploro/outputs/doctoral/Maternal-insanity-in-Victoria-Australia/991012821132602368">Maternal Insanity in Victoria, Australia 1920-1973</a>. </p>
<p>Alexander Wallis’ article <a href="https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/n7444/pdf/08_wallis.pdf">Unnatural Womanhood</a> suggests puerperal insanity, in today’s terms, is understood as <a href="https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/healthyliving/postnatal-depression-pnd">postnatal depression</a>.</p>
<p>Four days following Ada’s first admission, her doctor recorded his observations:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The patient is cheerful and talkative. She says that lately, she has had numerous auditory and visual hallucinations. She is quite disorientated as regards time and place. Her answers to questions are quite irrelevant and she smiles and talks cheerfully most of the time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I researched the history of “puerperal insanity” and its association with dangerous mothers and infanticide. A dark and taboo subject, it conjures the “madwoman” trope in our cultural imagination and is rooted in popular discourses of the murderous mother, the crazy wife in the attic, or the suicidal mother. </p>
<p>The horror of maternal insanity plays on our worst fears: as vulnerable young babies, we depend on our mothers to care for us.</p>
<p>It’s upsetting that an outdated 19th-century diagnosis was still being used to commit mothers like Ada in 1936. In the 100 years that had passed since “puerperal insanity” was coined, psychiatry had still not developed a better understanding of motherhood, or mental illness.</p>
<p>Within the first two months of her committal, the doctor described Ada as “restless, apathetic, and erratic in behaviour”. The timing of giving birth and the changes in Ada’s behaviour led to the diagnosis of “puerperal insanity” and her committal in 1936.</p>
<p>Yet her files lack information on the length of her labour, delivery method and the health of the mother or the newborn child. Unfortunately, Ada had given birth at a time in Victoria when mothers faced severe health risks during childbirth, due to <a href="https://obgyn.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/ajo.13317">poor standards in obstetrics</a>.</p>
<p>A difficult or protracted delivery may have contributed to Ada’s deteriorating mental health, but the details of birth events are rarely included in a mother’s mental files. Despite the lack of information on Ada’s birth experience, her psychiatrists continued to tie childbirth with maternal insanity, as they had in the past.</p>
<p>Nine months after her original committal, Ada went home on trial leave. By March 1938, she was fully discharged as recovered. Ada spent the next two years at home with her family. Then, she became pregnant with her third child. </p>
<p>Unfortunately, Ada’s behaviour became erratic during pregnancy. With consent from her husband, she underwent a “therapeutic abortion” and sterilisation. </p>
<p>I found these procedures a disturbing part of Ada’s files. Her history of puerperal insanity likely provided the psychiatric grounds to proceed, but it did not bring her peace of mind. </p>
<p>In May 1940, soon after the therapeutic abortion and sterilisation, Ada was re-committed back into a mental institution, this time to Mont Park Hospital for the Insane in Melbourne – where she was when Dad found her in the early 1960s.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548956/original/file-20230919-21-v4agzu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548956/original/file-20230919-21-v4agzu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548956/original/file-20230919-21-v4agzu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548956/original/file-20230919-21-v4agzu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548956/original/file-20230919-21-v4agzu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548956/original/file-20230919-21-v4agzu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548956/original/file-20230919-21-v4agzu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548956/original/file-20230919-21-v4agzu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=572&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mont Park Hospital (circa 1920), where Ada was when her son found her in the early 1960s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">State Library Victoria</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘A world divorced from reality’</h2>
<p>Ada underwent a series of <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/insulin-shock-therapy">insulin-coma treatments</a> (ICT) for the next three months. ICT involves giving patients daily injections of insulin to induce hypoglycemia and coma. <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Manfred-J-Sakel">Manfred Sakel</a> developed ICT in Europe and at Mont Park the therapy was implemented by Dr Farran-Ridge and Dr Reynolds. </p>
<p>Under the supervision of Dr Reynolds, Ada showed “marked improvement” following ICT every morning for three months:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Mentally much improved – states she is no longer hallucinatory although remembers that she was so and seemed to have gained full insight into her condition. A satisfactory remission.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>ICT appeared to aid Ada’s recovery by ending her auditory hallucinations for the first time, but these effects did not last. It proved a dangerous and experimental treatment when <a href="https://www.webmd.com/schizophrenia/features/insulin-coma-therapy">some patients died</a> due to complications. Ada experienced a short-lived remission and again returned home for six months of trial leave. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548959/original/file-20230919-17-13lt4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548959/original/file-20230919-17-13lt4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548959/original/file-20230919-17-13lt4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548959/original/file-20230919-17-13lt4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548959/original/file-20230919-17-13lt4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548959/original/file-20230919-17-13lt4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548959/original/file-20230919-17-13lt4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548959/original/file-20230919-17-13lt4k.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ada was treated with insulin coma therapy. ICT treatments are pictured being performed in Stockholm in the 1930s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_shock_therapy">Wikipedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Upon her return to the institution, Ada suffered grandiose delusions. It is hard not to believe going home on trial leave, considered helpful in some instances, contributed to Ada’s worsening mental health. Her doctor described her delusions of grandeur in January 1942:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She claims she arranged the introductions between Duke & Duchess of Kent. She is willing to oblige for a fee of 1000 pounds to do same for the royal personages. She stated this country is now known as L’Aurolia Republic – it was Australia prior to the revolution in 1900. She says she is a member of Russian Royal family and her real name is Lily Vertel Rose Alvaradora Icebel and says herself “Alvara Russia”.<br></p>
<p>She has numerous other fantastic and bizarre delusions. Naturally she is somewhat exalted. She admits hearing voices talking about British Secret Service work so cannot divulge subjects discussed. She is cheerful and cooperative, her mood is cheerful, but she is living in a world divorced from reality.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dad and I marvelled at Ada’s audacity, intellect, and creativity in her grandiose delusions as a Russian princess and British spy. We wondered if our royal status had gone awry. </p>
<p>Further examples of her grandiose delusions are evident in two letters Ada wrote and held within her files. The first letter is Ada’s application to join the <a href="https://www.awm.gov.au/learn/understanding-military-structure/ran/wrans">Women’s Royal Australian Naval Services</a> in 1943. It is her response to a recruitment drive that sought women to help with increased naval demands. She offered her medical services as a trained doctor and surgeon, fabricated her educational credentials and persisted in her claim of royal birth. </p>
<p>The hospital surveilled all patient letters and prevented Ada’s application from being sent. The address she provided for correspondence was the Female Ward, Mont Park Mental Hospital, which indicates Ada had some grasp on her present reality. </p>
<p>Like the other thousand women who enlisted with the Women’s Royal Australian Naval Services by the end of 1942, Ada wanted to help in war service and gain employment.</p>
<p>The second letter in her files, written in 1943, is addressed to her husband. It reads in part:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>One of the patients here has been friendly and helps to pass the time. With your consent, we are planning to go to England together as I must see to my English affairs, being of Russian titled birth. I inherited from my father about twenty-six years ago, various properties in England, America and Australia, also Europe, these properties, and affairs await my attention in London. Also my Army Commission, with the British Secret Service, which commission continues from my last visit to London.<br></p>
<p>And lastly, my enormous will, I must change it to include yourself, my husband, and only two children, and those several titles to descend upon both, also a ducal title upon yourself from marriage (to me), now Alva.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ada certainly did not see herself as any ordinary mental patient. Instead, her grandiose delusions illustrate her desire for social mobility and increased status – by casting herself as a wealthy Russian royal working as a British spy. Such grand ideas likely provided Ada with a sense of purpose, power and optimism. </p>
<p>In Victoria Shepherd’s book, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/A-History-of-Delusions/Victoria-Shepherd/9780861545308">A History of Delusions: The Glass King, a Substitute Husband, and a Walking Corpse</a>, the author argues delusions are a far preferable alternative to the dramatic loss of status that occurs when a life goes catastrophically wrong. Delusions serve to reconcile a fallen and lowly existence. </p>
<p>We can see this in Ada’s grand delusions: acting as royalty and a highly educated spy gave her ambitions direction and a sense of purpose, as a patriotic Australian and loyal subject to the British Crown and the Commonwealth during wartime. The Women’s Royal Australian Naval Services application attests to this. Shepherd also reminds us that by listening very closely, we can gain a deeper understanding of people experiencing delusions. </p>
<p>I hear Ada’s demand for dignity and respect as her response to the injustice she suffered – and to the loss of her autonomy, power, freedom and the ability to mother her two children. Unfortunately for Ada, displaying her grand delusions meant no further trial leave, following her return to Mont Park in 1943. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-black-bile-malaria-therapy-and-insulin-comas-a-brief-history-of-mental-illness-206580">Friday essay: 'black bile', malaria therapy and insulin comas – a brief history of mental illness</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A schizophrenia diagnosis</h2>
<p>Ada spent the next 20 years in several mental institutions in Victoria without trial leave, which was often a pathway to discharge for patients with supportive families. Her files are brief throughout the rest of the 1940s and mid-1950s, following Ada’s grandiose delusion letters. </p>
<p>In 1948, her doctor noted Ada was “considerably improved, is much quieter, works in the wards and is no trouble in any way”. A further entry states she is a “delusional schizophrenic whose moods are variable”. </p>
<p>This is the first time “schizophrenic” has been used in Ada’s files. By 1954, Ada is transferred from B ward to A ward. She: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>works daily in B ward, which she calls going to the office. Some delusions. Wishes to go home and finish her studies at the university. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The mention of her ward work as “going to the office” shows her sense of humour and is a reminder of the days she worked in an office, as a comptometer operator, before her marriage. </p>
<p>And her desire to complete university points to her desire for social mobility through educational aspirations.</p>
<h2>Domestic service</h2>
<p>In the 1950s, Ada worked as a domestic servant for Dr Donnan and his family, when he was a medical officer at Mont Park mental hospital. After one year, Dr. Donnan was promoted to Chief Superintendent Psychiatrist at Beechworth Mental Hospital in regional Victoria, and the family took Ada with them. </p>
<p>Sally, Dr. Donnan’s youngest daughter, recalls travelling with her family and Ada from Melbourne to Beechworth for her father’s new position:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>There were five of us, including my elder sister, driving up to Beechworth in Dad’s Alvis vintage car with lots of luggage. It got dark and none of us were that comfortable being in the middle of the bush at night. The car conked out at a river crossing, water was running over the road, in the dark. Ada was sitting between us two kids in the back, gripping our hands. Anyway we got going again, though I don’t remember the rest of the trip.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ada lived in the Donnan’s family home located within the grounds of the mental hospital and continued to work as their domestic servant. The Beechworth Mental Asylum was built in 1867, and by the 1970s it was renamed <a href="https://tour.maydayhills.org.au">Mayday Hills Psychiatric Hospital</a>. It still stands today. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548742/original/file-20230918-15-yknd4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548742/original/file-20230918-15-yknd4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548742/original/file-20230918-15-yknd4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548742/original/file-20230918-15-yknd4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548742/original/file-20230918-15-yknd4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=362&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548742/original/file-20230918-15-yknd4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548742/original/file-20230918-15-yknd4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548742/original/file-20230918-15-yknd4u.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=455&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Asylum, Beechworth, circa 1920s.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Courtesy of the Bourke Museum, Beechworth Victoria</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sally recalls Ada and her mother working together in their home:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Everything was on time, the routine, brushing hair, cleaning shoes, preparing school uniforms and meals. I seem to remember Ada being dressed very neatly every day, usually in a black skirt and white shirt. She wore her hair in a well-cut bob. I always remember her wearing thick beige stockings and stout black shoes. Pink complexion, blue eyes. She never wore makeup.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>By 1963, Dr. Donnan transferred to Brierly Mental Hospital in Warrnambool, Victoria, but this time the Donnan family could not take Ada with them. </p>
<p>Ada transferred back to Mont Park in Melbourne, and in the doctor’s transfer request, he wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She spent all her time working for Dr Donnan. She worked quite satisfactorily and seemed very happy with Dr Donnan and his family. After Dr Donnan left the hospital she is missing the family very much and would like to return to Mont Park.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548958/original/file-20230919-25-itb0rx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548958/original/file-20230919-25-itb0rx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/548958/original/file-20230919-25-itb0rx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548958/original/file-20230919-25-itb0rx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548958/original/file-20230919-25-itb0rx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548958/original/file-20230919-25-itb0rx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548958/original/file-20230919-25-itb0rx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/548958/original/file-20230919-25-itb0rx.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Donnan residence, where Ada lived and worked as a domestic servant at the Beechworth Mental Asylum.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Late days</h2>
<p>It was around this time Dad first met Ada, anxiously waiting for her in that walled garden at Mont Park. In 1964, a year and a half later, Ada moved to Carmel House, a residential boarding house for female patients in Preston, Melbourne. From there, she continued to work as a domestic servant and regularly met my father for lunch at Coles cafeteria in the city. </p>
<p>By this time Ada’s condition was described as a “chronic schizophrenic, with auditory hallucinations, and has delusions that she is related to royalty”.</p>
<p>The antipsychotic drugs <a href="https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-6572/stelazine-oral/details">Stelazine</a> and <a href="https://www.webmd.com/drugs/2/drug-6901/mellaril-oral/details">Mellaril</a> were prescribed for the first time. Ada’s grandiose beliefs persisted well into the 1960s, as my father recalls:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The first time Mum stayed at our place for the weekend, she turned to me and
said “Tell me, do you still use your title?” “Er, what title’s that, Mum?” I asked, surprised. “Lord …” she replied, as if everyone knew. “No Mum. People don’t use their titles much these days.” “What a pity,” she said and dropped the matter.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Ada lived at Carmel House until she died in 1972, aged 60. When I was 11, I accompanied my father there, shortly after Ada’s death. It seemed forever that I waited for him in the car, the sun burning through the glass. </p>
<p>Dad returned and placed that small, brown suitcase, which would later make its way into my childhood bedroom, on the back seat. It was the total of his mother’s personal effects. “Not much for a life,” he said.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/207428/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alison Watts does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Alison Watt’s grandmother was diagnosed with ‘puerperal insanity’ and institutionalised not long after giving birth to her father. He didn’t meet her – or know she was alive – until his early 20s.
Alison Watts, Adjunct Lecturer, Faculty of Health, Southern Cross University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/202754
2023-09-14T20:05:15Z
2023-09-14T20:05:15Z
Friday essay: homesick for ourselves – the hidden grief of ageing
<p>Anyone parenting young children will be familiar with the phrase “there’ll be tears before bedtime”. But in a quieter, more private way, the expression seems perfectly pitched to describe the largely hidden grief of ageing. </p>
<p>Not the sharp grief that follows a bereavement (though bereavements do accumulate with the years), but a more elusive emotion. One that is, perhaps, closest to the bone-gnawing sorrow of homesickness.</p>
<p>Sarah Manguso <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781509883295/">evokes</a> this sense of having travelled further from our younger selves than we could ever have imagined:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Sometimes I feel a twinge, a memory of youthful promise, and wonder how I got here, of all the places I could have got to.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Historically, the phenomenon of homesickness was identified in 1688 by the Swiss medical student <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/when-nostalgia-was-a-disease/278648/">Johannes Hofer</a>, who named it nostalgia from the Greek <em>nostos</em>, meaning homecoming, and <em>algos</em>, meaning an ache, pain, grief and distress. </p>
<p>It was the disease of soldiers, sailors, convicts and slaves. And it was particularly associated with soldiers of the Swiss army, who served as mercenaries and among whom it was said that a well-known milking song could bring on a fatal longing. (So singing or playing that song was made punishable by death.) Bagpipes stirred the same debilitating nostalgia in Scottish soldiers. </p>
<p>Deaths from homesickness were recorded, but the only effective treatment was to send the afflicted person back to wherever they belonged.</p>
<p>The nostalgia associated with old age, if it occurs, appears incurable, since there can be no possibility of a return to an irrecoverable youth. But as with homesickness, how badly those afflicted suffer seems to depend on how they manage their relationship with the past.</p>
<h2>The phantom was me</h2>
<p>American writer Cheryl Strayed <a href="https://cherylstrayed.substack.com/p/what-you-know-changes">describes</a> deciding to transcribe her old journals. On reading one of them from cover to cover, she is left feeling </p>
<blockquote>
<p>kind of sick for the rest of the day, as if I’d been visited by a phantom who both buoyed and scared the bejesus out of me. And the weirdest of all is that phantom was me! Did I even know her anymore? Where did the woman who’d written those words go? How did she become me?</p>
</blockquote>
<p>I’ve experienced a similar rush of bafflement and grief upon opening a letter I’d written some time before I turned 50. My mother had saved it and returned it to me 20 years later. Within its pages I found a younger, more energetic and vibrant self. The realisation this woman who inhabited the letter so vividly was no longer available to me came with a jolt of emotion that felt like a bereavement.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-a-lament-for-the-lost-art-of-letter-writing-a-radical-art-form-reflecting-the-full-catastrophe-of-life-197420">Friday essay: a lament for the lost art of letter-writing – a radical art form reflecting 'the full catastrophe of life'</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>I was so knocked off-kilter by this ghost-like encounter that the letter (along with others I had been planning to transcribe) had to be set aside for a day when I might be able to muster the necessary courage and detachment. Whether that day ever comes will depend, I suppose, on how I navigate my own relationship with time, and on reaching a calm acceptance of the distance travelled.</p>
<p>Disbelief at the distance between the young self and the old self is one of the factors in this late-life grieving. At its root, perhaps, is an internalised ageism: innate, or else massaged into us by the culture we spring from. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543975/original/file-20230822-29-4ikzip.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Carol Lefevre found a ‘younger, more energetic and vibrant self’ in old letters.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Suzy Hazelwood/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In a series of recent conversations with people over 70, I encouraged them to tell their stories and to reflect on the effects of time on their lives. Childhood sometimes emerged as a place they were pleased to have left behind – and occasionally, as a place to be held close.</p>
<p>Trevor emigrated alone to Australia when he was just 18. I asked him how often now, at 75, he thinks about his childhood. “Do you have a sense of who you were back then, and is that person still part of who you are?”</p>
<p>“I think about my childhood quite a lot, especially putting some distance between where I was then and where I am now,” he told me. “I didn’t have a really happy upbringing, and coming to Australia was a way of getting away from home and experiencing a new culture.”</p>
<p>In response to the same question, Jo, at 84, led me to a framed photograph, enlarged to poster-size, which has hung on the wall of both his homes. It shows him aged three, in a garden – a radiant child wearing a plain white shirt and dark shorts, arms out-flung as if to embrace the natural world. He bursts with exuberance, curiosity, and joy.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I relate to that as an idea, as a concept of my life. I want to maintain that freshness, that child-like freshness. You’ve got no responsibilities; every day is a new day. You’re looking at things in a different light, you’re aware of everything around you. That’s what I wanted to maintain, that feeling through my life – I’m talking age-wise. My concept of my ageing is there in that photograph.“</p>
</blockquote>
<p>While older voices are often absent in the media, and in fiction they are too often presented as stereotypes, in conversation what arises can both surprise and inspire.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543941/original/file-20230822-25-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jo (not pictured) wants to maintain ‘that child-like freshness’ in age.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Andrea Piacquadio/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘How can I be old?’</h2>
<p>As I approached my own 70th birthday, I realised I was about to cross a border. Once I was on the other side, I would be old – no question. Yet the word "old”, especially when coupled with the word “woman”, is carefully avoided in our culture. Old is a country no one wants to visit.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/metamorphosis-9780241514771">Penelope Lively’s</a> novella-length story Metamorphosis, or the Elephant’s Foot, written when Lively was in her mid-eighties, explores this evolution from youth to old age through the character of Harriet Mayfield. As a nine-year-old, Harriet is reprimanded by her mother for not behaving well on a visit to her great-grandmother. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“She’s old,” says Harriet. “I don’t like old.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When her mother points out that one day Harriet, too, will be old, like her great-grandmother, Harriet laughs.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“No, I won’t. You’re just being silly,” says Harriet “how can I be old? I’m me.” </p>
</blockquote>
<p>Towards the end of the story, Harriet is 82 and must somehow accept that she is “in the departure lounge. Check-in was a very long time ago.” With her equally elderly husband, Charles, Harriet ponders what they can do with the time remaining. Charles decides “it’s a question of resources. What do we have that could be used – exploited?” Harriet replies, “Experience. That’s it. A whole bank of experience.”</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“And experience is versatile stuff. Comes in all shapes and sizes. Personal. Collective. Well, then?”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>If distance travelled is a factor in late-life grief, so too is a sense of paths not taken: of a younger self, or selves, that never found expression. </p>
<p>In Jessica Au’s recent, much-awarded novella <a href="https://giramondopublishing.com/books/jessica-au-cold-enough-for-snow/">Cold Enough For Snow</a>, there is a scene where the narrator explains to her mother the existence, in some old paintings, of a <a href="https://www.britannica.com/art/pentimento-oil-painting">pentimento</a> – an earlier image of something the artist had decided to paint over. “Sometimes, these were as small as an object, or a colour that had been changed, but other times, they could be as significant as a whole figure.”</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1165&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1465&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1465&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543943/original/file-20230822-19-qdhp6r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1465&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Madame Pierre Gautreau John Singer Sargent.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Art historians, using X-rays and infrared reflectography, have identified pentimenti in many famous paintings, from the adjusted placement of a controversial off-the-shoulder strap in <a href="https://www.virtualartacademy.com/madame-x/">John Singer Sargent</a>’s Portrait of Madam X, to the painted-over figure of a woman nursing a child in Picasso’s <a href="https://www.pablopicasso.org/old-guitarist.jsp">The Old Guitarist</a>, and a man with a bow-tie concealed beneath the brushwork of his work <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blue_Room_(Picasso)">The Blue Room</a>. </p>
<p>Singer Seargent’s adjustment was his response to an outcry at the perceived indecency of Madame X’s lowered shoulder strap, which both the public and art critics of the time declared to be indecent. By contrast, the model’s icy pallor caused only a ripple of interest. </p>
<p>Picasso’s hidden figures <a href="https://www.singulart.com/en/blog/2019/10/29/pablo-picassos-blue-period-and-the-old-guitarist/">are assumed</a> to be the outcome of a shortage of canvas during his <a href="https://www.pablopicasso.org/blue-period.jsp">Blue Period</a>, but shortages aside, the word pentimento, which derives from the Italian verb <em>pentirsi</em>, meaning “to repent”, brings to these lost figures a sense of regret that resonates with the feeling in old age of having lost the younger self, or of carrying traces, deeply buried, of other lives one might have lived. </p>
<p>In Cold Enough for Snow, Au’s narrator remarks of her mother that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Perhaps, over time, she found the past harder and harder to evoke, especially with no-one to remember it with. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>The mother’s situation references another source of grief: that of the person who becomes the last of their friends and family still standing. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=815&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543944/original/file-20230822-19-rtve38.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Carol’s interviewees in their 70s all feel the presence of a ‘younger self’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Alina Kurson/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In childhood games of this nature there would be a prize for the survivor. But for those who reach an extreme old age, having lost parents, siblings and contemporaries who knew them when they were young, even the presence of children and grandchildren may not entirely erase this “last man standing” loneliness. There is, too, the darkness of a projected future where there is no one still living who remembers us.</p>
<p>In Jessica Au’s book the narrator occasionally speaks of the past as “a time that didn’t really exist at all”. And yet in my recent conversations with people in their seventies and above, every one of them admits to feeling a vivid sense of the past, and of the continuing presence of a younger self. As one of them wistfully remarked: “Sometimes she even seeps through.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-responsibilities-of-being-jessica-aus-precise-poetic-meditation-on-mothers-and-daughters-175632">The responsibilities of being: Jessica Au's precise, poetic meditation on mothers and daughters</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Memory and detail</h2>
<p>Perhaps part of the problem is the mass of ordinary detail that disappears from memory on any given day. Life is made up of so many small moments that it’s impossible to hold onto them all – and if we did it might even be damaging. </p>
<p>Imagine someone casually asking how your day had been, and responding with the tsunami of detail those hours actually contained. </p>
<p>After opening your eyes at first light, you’d describe your shower, your breakfast, and how you slipped your keys into your handbag as you left the house; in the street you’d passed two women with a pram, a child with a small white dog on a lead, and an elderly man with a walking stick. And so on. </p>
<p>If our minds swarmed with the trivia of daily life, more important events might be forgotten, and possibly the neural overload would even make us ill. Yet with the realisation of the loss of these minutes and hours arises the anxiety that in time, the things we do want to remember will slither away from us into the dark. </p>
<p>I imagine this fear is what compels people to fill social media with photographs of their breakfasts, and of their relentless selfie-taking. It is surely the impulse behind keeping a journal.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543945/original/file-20230822-21-tzqdpw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The fear of losing time must be what compels things like ‘relentless selfie-taking’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">RDNE Stock Project/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The anxiety of losing even the passing moments in a day afflicts the author of <a href="https://www.panmacmillan.com.au/9781509883295/">Ongoingness: The End of a Diary</a>. In it, the American writer Sara Manguso describes her compulsive need to document and hold onto her life. “I didn’t want to lose anything. That was my main problem.” </p>
<p>After 25 years of paying attention to the smallest moments, Manguso’s diary is 800,000 words long. “The diary was my defense against waking up at the end of my life and realizing I’d missed it.” But despite her continuous effort, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I knew I couldn’t replicate my whole life in language. I knew that most of it would follow my body into oblivion.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Is it possible that women experience grief around ageing earlier, and more emphatically than men? After all, by the age of 50, the bodies of even those women who remain fit send the implacable signal that things have changed. </p>
<p>In Alice Munro’s story Bardon Bus, from her collection <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-moons-of-jupiter-9780099458364">The Moons of Jupiter</a>, the female narrator endures dinner in the company of a rather malicious man, Dennis, who explains that women are</p>
<blockquote>
<p>forced to live in the world of loss and death! Oh, I know, there’s face-lifting, but how does that really help? The uterus dries up. The vagina dries up.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Dennis compares the opportunities open to men as opposed to those available to women. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Specifically, with ageing. Look at you. Think of the way your life would be, if you were a man. The choices you would have. I mean sexual choices. You could start all over. Men do.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>When the narrator responds cheerfully that she might resist starting over, even if it were possible, Dennis is quick to retort: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>That’s it, that’s just it, though, you don’t get the opportunity! You’re a woman and life only goes in one direction for a woman.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In another story in the same collection, Labor Day Dinner, Roberta is in the bedroom dressing for an evening out when her lover George comes in and cruelly remarks: “Your armpits are flabby.” Roberta says she will wear something with sleeves, but in her head she hears the </p>
<blockquote>
<p>harsh satisfaction in his voice. The satisfaction of airing disgust. He is disgusted by her aging body. That could have been foreseen.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Roberta thinks bitterly that she has always sought to remedy the least sign of deterioration. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Flabby armpits – how can you exercise the armpits? What is to be done? Now the payment is due, and what for? For vanity. Hardly even for that. Just for having those pleasing surfaces once, and letting them speak for you; just for allowing an arrangement of hair and shoulders and breasts to have its effect. You don’t stop in time, don’t know what to do instead; you lay yourself open to humiliation. So thinks Roberta, with self-pity […] She must get away, live alone, wear sleeves.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-love-in-the-time-of-incontinence-why-young-people-dont-have-the-monopoly-on-love-or-even-sex-198416">Friday essay: love in the time of incontinence – why young people don't have the monopoly on love, or even sex</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>As with most emotions that arise around our ageing, it can usually be traced back to a fraught relationship with time. French philosopher and Nobel Prize winner <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bergson/">Henri Bergson</a> <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/56852/56852-h/56852-h.htm">says</a>: “Sorrow begins by being nothing more than a facing towards the past.” </p>
<p>For Roberta, as for many of us, it was a past in which we relied on those “pleasing surfaces”, perhaps even took them for granted, until they no longer produced the desired effect. </p>
<p>But the truth is that our bodies are capable of more severe betrayals than mere flabby armpits. In time they may cause us to be exposed in skimpy, front-opening or back-opening hospital gowns under the all-seeing eye of the CT scanner; they may deliver us into the skilled, ruthless hands of a surgeon. Our very blood may speak of things we will not wish to hear.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543950/original/file-20230822-1274-mhycyp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Our bodies are capable of severe betrayals.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Muskan Anand/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Glimpsing our mortality in middle age</h2>
<p>Middle age is sometimes referred to as The Age of Grief. It’s when we first glimpse our own mortality; we feel youth slipping away into the past, and the young people in our lives begin to assert their independence. </p>
<p>We have our mid-life crises then. We join gyms, and take up running; we speak for the first time of “bucket lists” – the term itself an attempt to diminish the sting of time’s depredations. None of this will save us from the real Age of Grief, which comes later and hits harder because it is largely hidden. And we’ll be expected to endure it in silence.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543952/original/file-20230822-21-iakn79.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Mid-life crises cause us to take up running and develop ‘bucket lists’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Barbara Olsen/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In my conversations with people aged 70 and older, grief has surfaced from causes other than what might be called “cosmetic” changes. Following a severe stroke, 80-year-old Philippa describes the pain of having had to make the decision to relinquish her home and move into residential care. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>It’s when you lose your garden, which you’ve loved, and you’ve got to walk away from that. I’ve got photos of the house, and I look at them and think, oh, I just love the way I did that room, decorated it, things like that. But change happens.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>“Somehow change always comes with loss, as well as bringing something new,” I said.
“Yes,” she replied, “I just had to say to myself: you can’t worry about it, and you can’t change it. That sounds hard, but it’s my way of dealing with it.”</p>
<p>Tucked away in residential care homes, largely invisible to those of us lucky enough to still inhabit the outside world, elderly people like Philippa are quietly raising resilience to the level of an art form. </p>
<p>In her poem, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47536/one-art">One Art</a>, the Canadian poet Elizabeth Bishop advises losing something every day. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>Accept the fluster<br>
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.<br>
Lose something every day.<br>
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>Bishop goes on to list other lost items – her mother’s watch, the next-to-last of three loved houses, lovely cities, two rivers, even a continent. While the losses elderly people commonly accumulate are less grand, they are no less devastating. </p>
<p>One by one, they will relinquish driver’s licenses. For many there will be the loss of the family home and their belongings, save for whatever will fit into a care home’s single room. Perhaps they have already given up the freedom of walking without the aid of a stick, or walker. There may be the dietary restrictions imposed by conditions such as diabetes, and the invisible disabilities of diminished hearing and eyesight. </p>
<p>A failing memory, one would think, must be the final straw. And yet, what seems to be the actual final straw is the situation, reported time and again, where an old person feels “unseen”, or “looked through”, and for indefensible reasons finds themself being “missed” in favour of someone younger. It might, for example, be a moment when they are ignored as they patiently wait their turn at a shop counter. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543972/original/file-20230822-25-59b80x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The final straw, for most older people, is when they feel ‘unseen’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Daniel van den Berg/Unsplash</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In my conversation with Philippa, she remarked that old people are often looked through when they are part of a group, or when they are waiting to be served. “I have seen it happen to other older people, as if they don’t exist. I have called out assistants who have done that to other people.”</p>
<p>Surely the least we can do, as fortunate beings of fewer years, is to acknowledge the old people among us. To make them feel seen, and of equal value.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-grey-haired-and-radiant-reimagining-ageing-for-women-182336">Friday essay: grey-haired and radiant – reimagining ageing for women</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘Age pride’ and destigmatising ‘old’</h2>
<p><a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7246680/">Ageism, Healthy Life Expectancy and Population Ageing: How Are They Related</a> is a recent survey conducted with more than 83,000 participants from 57 countries. It found that ageism negatively impacts the health of older adults. In the United States, people with a negative attitude towards ageing live 7.5 fewer years than their more positive counterparts. </p>
<p>In Australia, the National Ageing Research Institute has developed an <a href="https://www.nari.net.au/age-positive-language-guide">Age-Positive Language Guide</a> as part of its strategy to combat ageism. </p>
<p>Examples of poor descriptive language include terms such as “old person”, “the elderly”, and even “seniors”. That last term appears on a card Australians receive shortly after turning 60, which enables them to receive various discounts and concessions. Instead, we are encouraged to use “older person”, or “older people”. But this is just another form of age-masking that fools no one. </p>
<p>It would be better to throw the institute’s energy into destigmatising the word “old”. What, after all, is wrong with being old, and saying so? </p>
<p>To begin the process of reclaiming this word from the pejorative territory it currently occupies, old people need to start claiming their years with pride. If other marginalised social groups can do it, why can’t old people? Some activists working against ageism are beginning to mention <a href="https://www.nextavenue.org/how-to-swap-ageism-for-age-pride/">“age pride”</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543973/original/file-20230822-29-s1816g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Old people need to start claiming their years with pride.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tristan Le/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>If we become homesick for who we once were as we age, we might remind ourselves of the meaning of <em>nostos</em> and consider old age as a kind of homecoming. </p>
<h2>Narrative identity</h2>
<p>The body we travel in is a vehicle for all the iterations of the self, and the position we currently inhabit is part of an ongoing creative process: the evolving story of the self. From the 1980s, psychologists, philosophers and social theorists have been calling it <a href="https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2011-21882-005">narrative identity</a>. </p>
<p>The process of piecing together a narrative identity begins in late adolescence and evolves across our entire lives. Like opening a Russian doll, from whose hollow shell other dolls emerge, at our centre is a solid core composed of traits and values. It’s also composed of the narrative identity we have put together from all our days – including those we cannot now remember – and from all the selves we have ever been. Perhaps even from the selves we might have been, but chose instead to paint over. </p>
<p>In Metamorphosis, or the Elephant’s Foot, Harriet Mayfield tells her husband, “At this point in life. We are who we are – the outcome of various other incarnations.”</p>
<p>We know our lives, and the lives of others, through fragments. Fragments are all we have. They’re all we’ll ever have. We live in moments, not always in chronological order. But narrative identity helps us make meaning of life. And the vantage point of old age offers the longest view. </p>
<p>The story of the self carries us from the deep past to the present moment. And old age sets us the great life challenge of maintaining balance in the present, while managing the remembered past – with all its joys and griefs – and the joys and griefs of the imagined future.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/202754/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Carol Lefevre does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
As we age, it can be hard to fathom the gap between our younger selves and the bodies we inhabit. Carol Lefevre explores this strange form of homesickness.
Carol Lefevre, Visiting Research Fellow, Department of English and Creative Writing, University of Adelaide
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/211239
2023-09-07T20:01:32Z
2023-09-07T20:01:32Z
Friday essay: homosexuality was still illegal when Frank Moorhouse started writing – but it was there from his earliest fiction
<p>Frank Moorhouse had been having sex with men since the age of 17 but did not openly identify as gay or bisexual.</p>
<p>David Marr, who edited Moorhouse’s work at The National Times in the early 1980s, told me in an interview about Moorhouse: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>He was seen as a straight writer, no doubt about that […] it was really only with the publication of <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-everlasting-secret-family-9781742746586">The Everlasting Secret Family</a> [in 1980] that I began to think, ‘Oh maybe Frank’s a poof, maybe he’s bi, whatever.’ </p>
</blockquote>
<p>According to Marr, there was often a lag between what men who had sex with men did in private and what they wrote about, prior to the era when “coming out” was acceptable.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In Patrick White’s words, the lag is disgraceful, and Patrick, of course, tended to make homosexuals figures of ridicule in his works for a very long time. I said to him once: “Why didn’t you write [positively about homosexuality or being homosexual] earlier?” […] He said: ‘It’s been impossible, my publishers told me it would be completely impossible.’</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-literary-life-of-frank-moorhouse-a-giant-of-australian-letters-185862">The literary life of Frank Moorhouse, a giant of Australian letters</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Queer literature in Australia</h2>
<p>The history of gay and what is now known as queer literature in Australia has been fraught with debates over how homosexual characters and their desires are represented. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546319/original/file-20230905-15-5c4cul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546319/original/file-20230905-15-5c4cul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546319/original/file-20230905-15-5c4cul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546319/original/file-20230905-15-5c4cul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546319/original/file-20230905-15-5c4cul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=855&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546319/original/file-20230905-15-5c4cul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546319/original/file-20230905-15-5c4cul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546319/original/file-20230905-15-5c4cul.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>When Moorhouse was writing his first collection of short stories, <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/futility-and-other-animals-9781740511384">Futility and Other Animals</a>, in the late 1960s, he was deeply immersed in his first serious homosexual relationship – and it was a time when homosexual acts were illegal and outing himself as bisexual would have put him at risk of becoming a social pariah.</p>
<p>In the 1970s, the nascent gay liberation movement largely focused on changing laws that criminalised homosexual acts between men, and on “normalising” the notion of gay and lesbian relationships. The notion of “<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-gay-nazis-to-were-here-were-queer-a-century-of-arguing-about-gay-pride-78888">gay pride</a>” came later; the positive use of the term “queer”, let alone “queer fiction”, was not in existence.</p>
<p>A number of scholarly literary critics writing in the 1980s took issue with the way Moorhouse represented homosexual characters and acts in his early work. </p>
<p>Chelva Kanaganayakam writes, for instance, that the narrative voice in Moorhouse’s work is “instrumental in transforming a celebration of homosexuality into a castigation of it”. Stephen Kirby <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C413555">argues</a> that “the question of self-censorship within apparently ‘liberated’ texts has considerable application to Frank Moorhouse’s work”.</p>
<p>With his characteristic clarity, Dennis Altman <a href="https://www.austlit.edu.au/austlit/page/C252074">refutes</a> this kind of hunting down of an “appropriate” representation of homosexual desire and makes the following point about Moorhouse’s portrayal of homosexuality: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>To speak of “lesbian/gay” writing is to raise problems of boundaries and definition: the boundaries of politics are not those of literature, which tends to be more concerned with the ambivalences and ambiguities of individual lives than with the sociological construction of individual identities.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Altman is alluding to the way that the shifts in political and social frameworks for understanding and advocating on behalf of LGBTQI identities are historically nuanced. </p>
<p>Essentially he is arguing that it is a misreading to project contemporary
notions of queer identities back onto earlier literary texts. He also opens up the question of whether it is ever appropriate to critique a work of literature on the basis that it somehow fails an ideological test.</p>
<p>Gay liberation was a movement of personal as well as political interest to Moorhouse. For all their espousal of unfettered sexual relationships, the men of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_Push">the Push</a>, a loose collection of libertarian thinkers who gathered to drink, eat and talk about politics in the 50s, 60s and early 70s in Sydney, had little interest in opposing the oppression of homosexuals. </p>
<p>The only openly gay man in the Push for many years was a man known as Della. Anne Coombs <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3202961-sex-and-anarchy">writes</a> in her history of the Push that: “The men of the Push delighted in his stories. He sometimes fucked straight Push men when they were drunk.” Sandra Grimes hung out with a group of younger gay men from Sydney’s Northern Beaches; Coombs reports that they found the Push too straight for them.</p>
<p>Moorhouse said he never talked about homosexuality with the Push men. But he was writing about it in his earliest fiction and had been having sexual and romantic relationships with men since he arrived in Sydney in the late 1950s. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-hidden-in-plain-sight-australian-queer-men-and-women-before-gay-liberation-155964">Friday essay: hidden in plain sight — Australian queer men and women before gay liberation</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘The police persecuted gays’</h2>
<p>I have chosen not to name any of the men with whom Moorhouse had multiple casual and long-term sexual relationships throughout his life, although the chronology and character of some of these relationships can be pieced together from letters in his archive. And I have steered away from using that material, because to do so would be to “out” a number of men who have lived outwardly heterosexual lives. </p>
<p>More importantly, the quotidian details of Moorhouse’s sex life are beside the point here. The interesting thing is how he grappled with his own anxieties about his sexuality in print – an act of astonishing commitment to self-interrogation and
to writing.</p>
<p>Moorhouse recalled that he seduced an older man, a work colleague, when he first arrived in Sydney, and that their sexual as well as personal relationship continued for many decades, crisscrossing the relationships he had with other women and men.</p>
<p>For Moorhouse, the relationship was a hinge in his sexual life. His parallel homosexual life, which continued after he married, was something that he “compartmentalised”. But in relation to his early writing, he reflected: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The word “gay” came a lot later. When I was writing about – drawing on – my own homosexual experiences there was no support system, and it was illegal and it was persecuted. I mean, the police persecuted gays. So it was a very different milieu to the world of the gay movement, and so it was much more furtive and dangerous, and dangerous in terms of one’s occupation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Moorhouse drew on his homosexual experiences in his work nonetheless, observing: “I think when I was writing fiction, I had numbed myself to the risks I was taking.”</p>
<p>In his <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Graham-Willett-Living-out-Loud-9781864489491">history of gay and lesbian activism in Australia</a>, Graham Willett writes that the gay community in this era </p>
<blockquote>
<p>differed most strongly from the later gay community in its nocturnal nature. It was a scene of the night and was very largely invisible to the rest of society. It was also, and most obviously, a radically apolitical scene. Its members hoped for nothing more than to be left alone.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In an Australia where same-sex marriage is legal, as it is in most Western democracies, it is difficult to imagine the violent institutionalised prejudice that gay men and lesbians faced so recently. There was scant history of organised gay politics in Australia until the <a href="https://www.pridehistory.org.au/camp-ink">Campaign Against Moral Persecution</a> (CAMP) was established in 1970 by John Ware and Christabel Poll. </p>
<p>Robert Reynolds <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/318853">writes</a> about the shifts that were occurring in gay identity and politics at the time:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>From 1970 to 1973, the first generation of CAMP activists participated in a remaking of Australian homosexuality. More specifically, it is possible to mark off these three years as a crucial phase in the creation of a homosexual who was, in CAMP’s own words, “open” and “proud”.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Prior to this era, homosexual life was lived clandestinely and was, for some men and women, a source of shame and conflict. In a short story published in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-americans-baby-9781740511377">The Americans, Baby</a>, Moorhouse writes about a series of sexual encounters between the narrator, Carl, and an American journalist named Paul. After they first have sex, Carl leaves the American’s flat abruptly in disgust. But he agrees to drink with him again and returns to the same apartment.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>This time they went to Paul’s bed. Afterwards, he lay there bewildered, wanting to run from the flat. The distance between himself in the bed and the clothes crumpled on the floor beside the bed, was too great. He could not make the move.<br>
‘Christ,’ he said bitterly, ‘you said we wouldn’t.’<br>
‘We’re too attracted,’ said Paul hopelessly.<br>
‘I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to do it. I’m not like this.’<br>
‘I’m not homosexual either,’ said Paul defensively, ‘we have affinity – it happens to people sometimes.’<br></p>
</blockquote>
<h2>Experimental times</h2>
<p>Moorhouse grew up in a world where “passing” as straight was a basic necessity if you wanted to keep the love and approval of your family and the ability to earn a living and basic social acceptance. </p>
<p>The fact that he openly wrote homosexual characters into his first book of short stories is a mark of his commitment to his life as a writer, in the face of the undeniable pull his middle-class and conformist upbringing exercised on him. </p>
<p>In one story in <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/futility-and-other-animals-9781740511384">Futility and Other Animals</a> he writes about a young man who develops a sexual crush on a visiting American: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>There in the alcove of the pub our hands gripped. Mine partly the grip of a mate and partly the grip of a lover. Mark’s? How did Mark’s hands grip? And then a blush. And then a laugh.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Despite the growing visibility of the gay liberation movement in the Balmain milieu, straight men, even self-professed radicals, were not always comfortable with homosexuality, according to Moorhouse. He once told me that “there’s a difference between politics and what men in an intensely homosocial society
were prepared to acknowledge”. </p>
<p>Michael Wilding remarks on Moorhouse’s homosexuality in his memoir, <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/91335622-growing-wild">Growing Wild</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Frank’s homosexuality was something it took me a while to realise […] Gillian and his other ex-girlfriends joked about our friendship, but I thought that was merely a joke and didn’t detect the dark undercurrents. His proud announcement that he had opened the dancing at the Purple Onion [a gay club] meant nothing to me, night clubs were never part of my world. As far as I knew his late-night runs in Rushcutters Bay park were just part of his exercise routine.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>After this slightly anxious reflection on Moorhouse’s homosexual side, Wilding recounts that, “drunk or stoned after the pub or a party”, he once gave into the “experimental times” and decided to “experiment” with his friend.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>I climbed into his bed. He lay there inert. I reached out in the direction of his genitals but encountered nothing. Significant absence, as the literary theorists put it. Then one of us fell out of the bed. It was a narrow one. I don’t know whether it was then that peering over the side to see where he had fallen, or lying on the floor looking under the bed, I saw the rifle.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>It’s an interesting segue from the penis to the gun, and one guaranteed to waken the Freudian in Moorhouse. Wilding goes on to say that seeing the rifle caused him to harbour oddly unspecified “grim suspicions”. </p>
<p>Moorhouse was open about keeping a gun at the time of this incident. Indeed, as he recounts in the documentary A Writer’s Camp, made by director Judy Rymer in 1987, he bought a Winchester rifle with his first publisher’s advance, “to satisfy a boyish dream”. </p>
<p>In the film, which details the 19 years he spent at Ewenton Street in Balmain, where he had his writer’s studio, Moorhouse is interviewed by his desk and goes to the corner of his office to take the rifle out of its carrying case. He used the rifle for hunting with his friend and patron Murray Sime. </p>
<p>Moorhouse goes on to say that it played a number of parts in his life: “If it was under the bed, it scared away the phantoms of anxiety” and that “in very low periods it’s been the rifle I’ve considered using to end it all”.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546295/original/file-20230905-25-gn4q7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546295/original/file-20230905-25-gn4q7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/546295/original/file-20230905-25-gn4q7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546295/original/file-20230905-25-gn4q7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546295/original/file-20230905-25-gn4q7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=920&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546295/original/file-20230905-25-gn4q7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546295/original/file-20230905-25-gn4q7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/546295/original/file-20230905-25-gn4q7l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1156&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
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</figure>
<p>It seems unlikely that Wilding, who was a close friend of Moorhouse’s at the time, would have been unaware that his fellow author owned at least one gun. Wilding’s anecdote about the fumbled sexual encounter and the gun under the bed is, however, illuminating on another count. </p>
<p>Moorhouse always juggled an apparent but central contradiction in his personality and his interests. On one hand, he was a man with a strong sense of his feminine side. Moorhouse had a lifelong interest in cross-dressing in private, and he talked openly in interviews about it. On the other, he always enjoyed traditionally masculine pursuits such as going bush and hunting. </p>
<p>This apparent contradiction in his own personality and persona is connected to his lifelong fascination with crossing borders – including the borders of gender and sexuality. </p>
<hr>
<p><em>This is an edited extract from <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Catharine-Lumby-Frank-Moorhouse-9781742372242/">Frank Moorhouse: A Life</a> by Catharine Lumby (Allen & Unwin).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/211239/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catharine Lumby does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Frank Moorhouse had a lifelong fascination with crossing borders – including the borders of gender and sexuality. It was reflected in both his life and his writing.
Catharine Lumby, Professor of Media, Department of Media, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/210467
2023-08-31T20:00:16Z
2023-08-31T20:00:16Z
Friday essay: traps, rites and kurrajong twine – the incredible ingenuity of Indigenous fishing knowledge
<p>Standing on a ferry chugging across Sydney Harbour, it’s still possible to imagine the city as it was in 1788 – before the span of the bridge, before the marinas and yachts, before buildings were planted onto that sloping, rocky landscape. Pockets of bush still reach down towards the water, where gums and angophoras curl around sandstone coves carved out by the sea water.</p>
<p>Ferries stop at Mosman, Manly and Milsons Point, where fishers share the wharf with boats and commuters. They perch on folding chairs next to white buckets of bait, or they plonk down on the wooden beams, rod in hand, their legs dangling over the edge as they sit.</p>
<p>Yet these places were also occupied, named and fished, long before “Sydney” appeared on any charts. And it’s at one of these harbour places, at Kay-ye-my, or perhaps Goram Bullagong (present-day Manly Cove and Mosman Bay), that our first story of Indigenous fishing is set. (After all, Kiarabilli or Kiarabily – the site of present-day Milsons Point and Kirribilli – is believed to translate into English as “good fishing spot”.)</p>
<p><em>Malgun</em> – the amputation of the joint of a young girl’s left little finger – is one of many Aboriginal fishing rites that took place and was practised along much of the east coast of what’s now known as Australia. Across the continent, diverse and adaptable fishing practices, recipes and rituals were a cornerstone of Indigenous life at the time of first contact – and many remain so to this day.</p>
<p>Like <em>keeparra</em> (the knocking out of teeth) and scarification, <em><a href="https://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/daringa">malgun</a></em> is a custom rich with significance, an offering to the spirits. In this case, the little girl would be forever linked with the fish she had literally fed. And as these girls grew into women, that connection to the underwater world was thought to offer good fortune and prowess with a fishing line. </p>
<p>It’s thought that <em>malgun</em> was also about the practicalities of fishing, since a shorter left pinky could apparently wind a hand line in more nimbly. The practice was observed among Aboriginal communities along the eastern seaboard of Australia (and featured around the country in various forms). But its meaning was frequently misunderstood in early colonial encounters and is still open for speculation.</p>
<p>To make the line, or <em>currejun/garradjun</em>, Gadigal fisherwomen used the bark or the tender fibres of young kurrajong trees, which they soaked and pounded or sometimes chewed, scraping off the outer layers with a shell. The pliable strands were then worked into <a href="https://aiatsis.gov.au/publication/35662">fine strong thread</a>. The women cast out their handlines and quickly drew them back in on the strike, hand over hand, before the fish could shake off the hook.</p>
<p>I like to picture the women sitting on a beach or around a fire as they made their string, humming, singing and chatting. They rolled the fibres along their thighs methodically, slowly turning them into lengths of delicate but durable fishing twine. Even the name of this beautiful and distinctive tree provides a valuable historical link to a time when fishing dominated the physical, social and cultural life of coastal Aboriginal peoples. What they sang and nattered about, while swatting mosquitoes and shooing away curious children, we can only guess.</p>
<p>At the end of these lines, elegant fishhooks, or <em>burra</em>, made from carved abalone or turban shells were dropped over the side of their canoes, or nowies. In other parts of Australia, hooks made from a piece of tapered hardwood, bird talon or
bone have also been found. These “nowies were nothing more than a large piece of bark tied up at both ends with vines”, described the British officer Watkin Tench in his <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3534/3534-h/3534-h.htm">account of early Sydney</a>.</p>
<p>Despite the nowies’ apparent flimsiness, the fisherwomen were master skippers. They paddled across the bays and out through the Heads, waves slapping at the sides of their precarious little vessels. That mobility was essential for Aboriginal communities around the harbour – such as the Gadigal, Gayamaygal, Wangal, and Darramurragal – who needed to chase shoals and find new grounds if the fishing was quiet at particular times of the year. Small fires were lit in the nowie on a platform of clay and weed before the craft was launched into the water from a snug harbour cove. </p>
<p>Then the fisherwoman perched inside and paddled to a favourite spot or two, often with a baby cradled in her lap and an infant on her shoulders or crouched beside her. Out on the water, she chewed crustaceans and shellfish, spitting some out into the water before jigging her pearlescent hook up and down like a lure. </p>
<p>This sort of berleying was practised all around Australia in the hope of generating a bit more action – thousands of years before punctured tins of cheap cat food dropped off the back of a tinnie to attract fish became the norm. When the fisherwoman threw the line overboard, she waited for that strike and tug from a whiting, dory or snapper, which would be quickly hauled aboard and charred on the waiting fire. And she sang as she fished, as <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Grace-Karskens-Colony-9781742373645">Grace Karskens</a> describes in her wonderful book on colonial Sydney, her voice carrying across the bays and inlets and down through the water to the fish below. </p>
<p>Those fishing songs also captured the attention of colonists, such as the colonial judge advocate <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/12565/12565-h/12565-h.htm">David Collins</a>, who described seeing Carangarang and Kurúbarabúla (the sister and wife of Bennelong, respectively) return from a canoe trip “to procure fish” and they “were keeping time with their paddles, responsive to the words of a song, in which they joined with much good humour and harmony”.</p>
<p>Some, like the French explorer Louis de Freycinet, were so transfixed by the songs they overheard bouncing over the water they attempted to write them down in <a href="https://www.sydney.edu.au/paradisec/australharmony/checklist-indigenous-music-1.php#005-2">musical notation</a>.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-on-listening-to-new-national-storytellers-61291">Friday essay: on listening to new national storytellers</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Fishing archives</h2>
<p>While women were the anointed shellfish gatherers in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, as well as line fishers in the areas where that was practised, spearfishing was largely the preserve of men – and this continues to be the case today. Hunters stalked the water’s edge or stood in a canoe, looking for the telltale shadow of a dusky flathead or the flash of silver from a darting bream.</p>
<p>When the water was calm and clear enough, Aboriginal men around Warrane-Sydney Harbour and Kamay-Botany Bay were frequently seen lying across their nowies, faces fully submerged, peering through the cool blue with a spear at the ready. “This they do with such certainty, as rarely to miss their aim,” wrote the painter and engraver John Heaviside Clark in 1813. </p>
<p>At night, Aboriginal fishermen took the canoes out onto the water with their flaming hand torches held aloft. The <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/114667">light lured the fish to the boat’s side</a>, where they were speared by a barbed prong whittled out of bone, shell or hardwood. In the muddy mangroves of northern Australia, fires were sometimes lit on creek banks to attract barramundi, which swam towards the light and suffered the same fate. </p>
<p>Beautiful images from the early days of the colony demonstrate the country we can still see traces of today: folds in the landscape as it stretches out across the horizon, the bush reaching right down to the water’s edge, protected sandy coves perfect for camping and fishing. They also show us the centrality of fishing to
First Nations communities. These sources depict how Aboriginal people fished and what they caught, like a juicy snapper flailing on the end of a spear, or a fisherwoman managing both an infant and a fishing line in her nowie. The skill of these fishers and the abundance of fish are lasting impressions from these visual records.</p>
<p>While early colonial sketches and paintings give wonderful snapshots of Aboriginal fishers, they do so from a European perspective. Written accounts are similarly revealing, and we can be grateful for the faithful record of fishing practices and
winning catches they’ve produced. But we can’t forget that these people viewed First Nations societies through a distinctly colonial lens.</p>
<p>The early colonial view of Australia was mostly curious and enlightened, and colonists were often captivated by the extraordinary skills of Aboriginal fishers, as well as their depth of knowledge about their Country. Yet they were also
people of their time, who saw the British expansion in Australia as inevitable, and viewed Country as a resource awaiting exploitation.</p>
<p>Sometimes, vital Indigenous perspectives creep in. Scars on the mighty trunks of river red gums, or canoe trees, along the banks and flood plains of the Murray River reveal an Aboriginal presence long before any European record. Enormous
engravings of whales, fish and sharks etched into sandstone platforms around Sydney and into the rugged iron ore of Murujuga-Burrup Peninsula in Western Australia have a provenance thousands of years older than any colonial etching or
journal entry. Elaborate fish traps across the continent and the Torres Strait demonstrate intricate knowledge of seasonal and tidal fish aggregations.</p>
<p>Paintings in smoke-stained caves across northern Australia show equally distinctive Aboriginal readings of fishy feats and feasts. And the remnants of literally millions of seafood meals can be seen in middens around the continent
that cascade through dirt, sand and mud at the water’s edge. </p>
<p>These Indigenous archives give us a glimpse into fishing before European colonisation. They also reveal the ingenuity of pre-industrial First Nations communities, long before fish finders, weather apps and soft plastics.</p>
<p>Remnants of vast, curving fish traps, or Ngunnhu, made from river stones still lie near Brewarrina in central New South Wales. (There were even more Ngunnhu once, until they were pushed aside to make way for paddle-steamers taking the wool clip down to Adelaide in the late 19th century.)</p>
<p>In the early spring or during a large flow of fresh water after heavy rains, enormous numbers of fish would travel upriver, swelling the eddies and currents with a mass of writhing tails and fins. Aboriginal fishers – men and women from the Ngemba, Wonkamurra, Wailwan and Gomeroi nations – kept watch from grassy embankments above the river and, as soon as enough fish had entered the labyrinth of traps, they rolled large rocks across the openings, ensnaring them for a <a href="https://nla.gov.au/nla.obj-756525252/view?partId=nla.obj-756525911#page/n0/mode/1up">seasonal fish feast</a>. </p>
<p>These traps and weirs were also an early form of fisheries management – well before government regulations and research organisations – and remnants can be seen right across central and western New South Wales. Juvenile fish were carried in curved wooden coolamons and released behind the barriers on the smaller tributaries as a way of boosting stocks and ensuring fish for seasons to come.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.budjbim.com.au/">Budj Bim</a> eel traps at Lake Condah in southwest
Victoria were designed, built and maintained by the Gunditjmara people, who operated the series of channels, locks and weirs. Built at least 6,600 years ago, the traps have been redeveloped several times over several centuries, and they
demonstrate an ecologically sustainable management of this freshwater eel fishery that was adapted and lasted for thousands of years. What’s more, they can still be seen today.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-detective-work-behind-the-budj-bim-eel-traps-world-heritage-bid-71800">The detective work behind the Budj Bim eel traps World Heritage bid</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Other traps were less permanent, but just as effective. When particular waterholes were low in the Baaka-Barwon–Darling river system in New South Wales, Barkindji people living along the river used wooden stakes, logs and sometimes stones to build shallow pens that trapped fish, yabbies and eels for easy pickings.</p>
<p>The ill-fated explorer William John Wills described a similar “arrangement for catching fish” somewhere north of Birdsville around the Georgina River, where he camped with Robert O’Hara Burke and the rest of their party in January 1861. The
trap consisted of “a small oval mud paddock about 12 feet by 8 feet, the sides of which were about nine inches above the bottom of the hole,” he wrote. The “top of the fence” was “covered with long grass, so arranged that the ends of the blades overhung scantily by several inches the sides of the hole.”</p>
<p>Periods of drought and seasonal dry weather could change rivers from torrential, turgid flows to the most meagre trickle – a chain of muddy holes through the landscape. Across northern Australia, seasons of wet and dry charged the landscape with weather cycles that pushed water across the floodplains of the northern savanna in great sheets, and then inevitably dried them out again.</p>
<p>But even low water could mean good fishing, since the fish would be forced to aggregate in particular waterholes, where they could be readily trapped and caught. While the grass might be parched and brittle up on the banks, the water
below was teeming with life; that was the time when Aboriginal people walked along the creek bottom, muddying the water and forcing the fish to rise and take in air where they were easily speared, clubbed or netted. </p>
<p>In the <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Gunanurang.html?id=I2CaNAAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Kimberley</a>, when the dry season came and the floodwaters finally receded, rolls of spinifex were used to entangle fish that had been trapped in the
remaining waterholes. </p>
<h2>Fishing objects and artefacts</h2>
<p>Artefacts such as spears, hooks and nets also help reconstruct some of the changing ways and means of Indigenous fishing that predate European colonisation and continue to be used and modified long after it. These relics are as beautiful
as they were effective. </p>
<p>Kangaroo tail tendon was used to bind fishhooks in northern Australia. The prongs of spears (fish gigs or fizgigs) were hardened and polished and then attached to the long shaft using pieces of thread daubed with resin.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, nets made from lengths of finely twisted twine were so carefully knotted together that when <a href="https://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks/e00101.html">Governor Phillip</a> showed them to the white women in the colony, the elegant loops reminded them of English lace. Those nets came in all shapes and sizes and were highly prized possessions. To strengthen the nets’ fishing powers, Aboriginal people sang to them: their music and words, literally singing in the fish, were like charms for the Dreaming that cascaded through the weave. </p>
<p>In the area of what’s now known as Sydney, coastal tribes used small hoop nets to pick up lobsters, which hid in underwater crevasses on the edge of the harbour and along the beachside cliffs. Catch-and-cast nets trapped small numbers of fish in creeks and waterholes near the coast and could also be used to carry a feed of fish as families walked back to their camps along the well-worn walking tracks.</p>
<p>Further inland, Aboriginal people made large woven river nets, which could be held by hand or propped up along the bank. Once fixed in place, groups of people waded through the murky water, loudly beating the surface and driving the startled
fish into the mesh. </p>
<p>The nets were usually about four metres long and one metre deep – sizeable enough, considering every strand was gathered, spun and woven by hand. But one extraordinary account from the explorer Charles Sturt described how his exploration party on the Wambuul-Macquarie River in western New South Wales discovered a fishing net some 90 metres long in a Wiradjuri village they came across.</p>
<p>Other fishing methods have been recorded and described in oral histories, or they’ve been passed down and are practised still. These practices are a form of embodied or “living archives”, which is how we know about them today. Stories
of women diving deep underwater for shellfish, walking out across the rocks at low tide pulling off abalone, or wading through billabongs to pick up turtles, are common in accounts from the time and these practices are still maintained by many
Indigenous communities around Australia and the Torres Strait Islands. </p>
<p>Given such longstanding fishing connections, “sea rights” have been increasingly recognised by governments in legislating fisheries management. Back on the beach or riverbank, a fire is inevitably on the go in anticipation of a <a href="https://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/resources/cultureheritage/20120945CoastalHistory.pdf">fresh catch</a>. The fish is usually chucked on whole and eaten.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-moon-plays-an-important-role-in-indigenous-culture-and-helped-win-a-battle-over-sea-rights-119081">The Moon plays an important role in Indigenous culture and helped win a battle over sea rights</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Some of the environmental knowledge used by Traditional Owners seems astonishing in today’s context of mass-produced fishing lures and frozen bait from the local servo. <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/114667">One account from northern Australia</a> described a particularly large Golden Orb spider carefully killed to preserve its abdomen, which was then gently squeezed to milk its adhesive goo. Small fish, attracted to the carcass, would then get stuck to the dead spider before being delicately lifted ashore by nimble
hands. </p>
<p>Fish poisoning, using various berries, roots, leaves and stems, was also common throughout Australia. In the Kimberley around the Goonoonoorrang-Ord River in
Western Australia, Traditional Owners such as the Miriuwung, Kuluwaring, Gajerrabeng used crushed leaves from the freshwater mangrove (malawarn) to poison their prey, sweeping branches through the water until stunned fish started floating belly up. </p>
<p>Along the east coast it was wattle leaves that did the damage. The sunny, fragrant puffballs of two common acacias (<em>Acacia implexa</em> and <em>Acacia longifolia</em>) belie their potency as a fish poison. Once absorbed through the gills, antigens from the bruised leaves were quickly catastrophic for fish in little waterholes and
billabongs. <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books?id=QvwrAAAAYAAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">There are even accounts</a> of eels gliding out of the water and into the bush along the Clarence River in northern New South Wales (known as Boorimbah to the Bundjalung and Ngunitiji to the Yaygir) in an attempt to escape poisoning from Aboriginal fishers. </p>
<p>Although these poisoning methods apparently had no effect on the edibility of the fish, the trick was to carefully manage the immersion of these toxic branches in the water – giving just enough poison to stun the fish , but not enough to knock out the whole waterhole. </p>
<p>That intimate knowledge and understanding of Country and its seasons wasn’t readily apparent to the early colonists. Watkin Tench was so perplexed by the unpredictability of fishing in Australia that he complained about spending all night out on Sydney Harbour for little result. The “universal voice of all professed fishermen”, he lamented in the 1790s in A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port Jackson, was that they had “never fished in a country where success was so precarious and uncertain”.</p>
<p>It was knowledge that came slowly to the colonists, over several generations. William Scott, the New South Wales colonial astronomer from 1856 to 1862, observed how the Worimi people were able to anticipate fishing seasons around Port Stephens on the New South Wales Mid North Coast. “By some unerring instinct the blacks knew within a day when the first of the great shoals [of sea mullet] would appear through the heads,” he explained.</p>
<p>For the Yolŋu in Arnhem Land, flowering of stringybark trees coincides with the shrinking of waterholes, where fish can be more readily netted and speared, or poisoned. And when the <a href="https://aiatsis.library.link/portal/Dharawal--seasons-and-climatic-cycles-compiled/8ypS2t3XXEc/">Dharawal people</a> of the Kamay and Shoalhaven region in New South Wales see the golden wattle flowers of the <em>Kai’arrewan (Acacia binervia)</em>, they know that the fish will be running in the rivers and prawns will be schooling in estuarine shallows. </p>
<p>In Queensland the movement and population of particular fish species have their own corresponding sign on land. The extent of the annual sea-mullet run in the cool winter months can be predicted by the numbers of rainbow lorikeets in late
autumn; if magpies are scarce in winter, numbers of luderick will also be low; and when the bush is ablaze with the fragrant sunny blooms of coastal wattle in early spring, surging schools of tailor can be expected just offshore. Although climate
change may shift these fishing markers in the natural world.</p>
<p>This knowledge was acquired by Australia’s Indigenous peoples through generations of observation and practice. What’s more, that deep understanding was as much about the spirit world as the natural. Neither can be properly comprehended
without reference to the other – although our own contemporary insights are often sketchy, since the sporadic observations of colonists are frequently the only available historical sources we have of Indigenous fishing practices, which had been developed over millennia.</p>
<p>Practical understanding was intimately entwined with spiritual readings of the land. First Nations Dreamings are systems of cultural values and observations: they created the world and are reflected in day-to-day observations of that life. These “<a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233438480_Saltwater_People_spiritscapes_maritime_rituals_and_the_archaeology_of_Australian_indigenous_seascapes">spiritscapes</a>”, as the archaeologist Ian McNiven has called them, infused Country with cosmology. The natural and spirit worlds were one and the same. Country wasn’t inanimate – it
could feel and do. And for many Aboriginal people to this day, that knowledge remains a shaping, dynamic belief system.</p>
<p>There are accounts on the South Australian coastline of Aboriginal people ritually singing in dolphins or sharks to herd fish into man-made or natural enclosures on the Eyre and Yorke Peninsulas. In <a href="https://catalogue.nla.gov.au/catalog/1756993">Twofold Bay</a>, on Yuin Country in southern New South Wales, dolphins were similarly used to herd fish, and a totemic bond between killer whales and Aboriginal people was also observed and documented. </p>
<p>Why did Aboriginal communities around Sydney avoid eating sharks and stingrays? The water was full of them, but they were only ever eaten during times of food scarcity. William Bradley, a first lieutenant on the First Fleet, observed Aboriginal people catching “jew fish, snapper, mullet, mackerel, whiting, dory, rock cod and leatherjacket” throughout the summer, but they didn’t keep the sharks or rays. “There are great numbers of the sting ray and shark, both of which I have seen the natives throw away when given to them and often refuse them when offered”, he noted.</p>
<p>In Lutruwita-Tasmania, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/24046726">archaeological excavations of middens</a> suggest Palawa people mysteriously avoided eating finfish altogether for the 3000 years prior to colonisation, hunting mammals and scavenging shellfish instead. Was it spiritual? A response to some sort of poisoning event? Or an economic decision to harvest easier resources (such as seals and abalone)? Did the community lose their knowledge of fishing, as some have argued? Or did they perhaps dispose of the bones somewhere else? No one really knows. </p>
<p>Some forms of Indigenous fishing inevitably became lost as Traditional Owners were dispossessed and disenfranchised of their lands and fisheries following the expansion of the colonial frontier post-1788. Many Indigenous practices were eventually superseded by new technologies. Other Indigenous fishers became active in the establishment of the commercial fishing industry in Australia, maintaining strong links to traditional knowledges, as well as adapting to modern fishing approaches and technologies.</p>
<p>Indigenous peoples have played and continue to play a prominent role in the history of Australian fishing. </p>
<p>Despite the ruptures of colonisation, the cultural and social cleavages wrought by disease, as well as frontier violence and dispossession, they remain a visible and vital part of Australian fishing culture as commercial and recreational fishers, industry partners and Traditional Owners of the vast natural resource that is Australia’s fisheries.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This is an edited extract from <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/the-catch-9781761342202">The Catch: Australia’s Love Affair with Fishing</a> by Anna Clark (Penguin).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210467/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Anna Clark has received funding from the Australian Research Council and is a member of the Recreational Fishing NSW Advisory Council. </span></em></p>
Across the continent, diverse, adaptable fishing practices, recipes and rituals were a cornerstone of Indigenous life at the time of first contact – and many remain so to this day.
Anna Clark, Professor in Public History, University of Technology Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/206580
2023-08-24T20:20:46Z
2023-08-24T20:20:46Z
Friday essay: ‘black bile’, malaria therapy and insulin comas – a brief history of mental illness
<p>Possibly the earliest account of a disturbed mind is recorded in a 3,500-year-old <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vedas">Hindu text</a> that describes a man who is “gluttonous, filthy, walks naked, has lost his memory and moves about in an uneasy manner”.</p>
<p>In the Bible’s Old Testament, in the first <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Books-of-Samuel">Book of Samuel</a>, we read that King David simulated madness to gain safety: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>And he changed his behaviour … and feigned himself mad in their hands, and scrabbled on the doors of the gate, and let his spittle fall down upon his beard.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>In the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Book-of-Daniel-Old-Testament">Book of Daniel</a>, we find a vivid description of King Nebuchadnezzar’s mental state: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>And he was driven from men, and did eat grass as oxen, and his body was wet with the dew of heaven, till his hairs were grown like eagles’ feathers, and his nails like birds’ claws.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The ancient Greeks made early attempts to explain madness. In the 5th century BC, <a href="https://fherehab.com/learning/humors-ancient-mental-health">Hippocrates</a> viewed it as seated in the brain and influenced by four bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. </p>
<p>The Greek physician Galen, who practised in Rome 600 years later, argued that depression was caused by an excess of black bile (hence the term “melancholia”, from <em>melan</em>, black, and <em>khole</em>, bile). </p>
<p>His contemporary, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aretaeus-of-Cappadocia">Aretaeus of Cappadocia</a>, colourfully described how, if black bile moves upwards in the body, “it forms melancholy; for it produces flatulence and eructations [or, belches] of a fetid and fishy nature, and it sends rumbling wind downwards, and disturbs the understanding”. </p>
<h2>A troubled mind, possessed</h2>
<p>During the Middle Ages, monasteries preserved the view of madness as an illness, and of those afflicted as sick rather than sinful. At the same time, the more sinister belief that the <a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25208453/">principal cause</a> of the troubled mind was possession by spirits or the devil prevailed.</p>
<p>Sufferers were taken to sanctioned healers for <a href="https://theconversation.com/exorcisms-have-been-part-of-christianity-for-centuries-107932">exorcisms</a>, a practice still carried out today in some cultures. People who failed to respond to such treatment might then seek out a celebrated expert. </p>
<p>Consider Hwaetred, a young man living in what is now England in the 7th century, who became tormented by an “evil spirit”. So terrible was his madness that he attacked others with his teeth and killed three men with an axe when they tried to restrain him. Taken to several sacred shrines, he obtained no relief. His despairing parents then heard of Guthlac, a monk who lived a hermit life north of Cambridge. After three days of prayer and fasting, Hwaetred was purportedly cured.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543694/original/file-20230821-29-c0gqfs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543694/original/file-20230821-29-c0gqfs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543694/original/file-20230821-29-c0gqfs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543694/original/file-20230821-29-c0gqfs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543694/original/file-20230821-29-c0gqfs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=439&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543694/original/file-20230821-29-c0gqfs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543694/original/file-20230821-29-c0gqfs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543694/original/file-20230821-29-c0gqfs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=552&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">St Francis Borgia Helping a Dying Impenitent – Goya (1788)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Over time, the role of religious authorities in mental illness dwindled, and the medical profession claimed the exclusive practice of the healing arts. Insanity once more came to be seen more as a physical malady than a spiritual taint. Even so, life for the mentally ill could be appalling. </p>
<p>During the 17th century, religiously inspired persecution of the mentally ill was justified by the clerical hierarchy, and treatment was often some combination of neglect and bestial restraint. </p>
<p>Psychiatrists Martin Roth and Jerome Kroll <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/The_Reality_of_Mental_Illness.html?id=pCQ4AAAAIAAJ&redir_esc=y">describe</a> the insane in this period as “miserable individuals, wandering around in village and in forest, taken from shrine to shrine, sometimes tied up when they became too violent”.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-invention-of-satanic-witchcraft-by-medieval-authorities-was-initially-met-with-skepticism-140809">The invention of satanic witchcraft by medieval authorities was initially met with skepticism</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A watershed: asylums</h2>
<p>The late 18th century was a watershed in the history of psychiatry. The insanity of England’s <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-22122407">King George III</a> revealed society’s ambivalence to the mentally ill (vividly captured in the 1994 film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110428/">The Madness of King George</a>). </p>
<p>In France, <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Philippe-Pinel">Philippe Pinel</a> released the chains that had fettered the “lunatic” for centuries, ushering in an unprecedented phase of benevolent institutional care. </p>
<p><a href="https://dictionary.apa.org/moral-therapy">Moral therapy</a>, a form of individualised care in small hospital settings, was promoted by English Quakers at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Retreat">York Retreat</a> and gradually supplanted inhumane physical treatments such as purging, bleeding and dunking in cold water.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BHNSAK8d3qc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">English society’s ambivalence to the mentally ill in the 18th century is depicted in the 1994 film, The Madness of King George.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As populations grew and urbanised, the sheer numbers of mentally ill people in burgeoning city slums demanded action. An institutional solution emerged. </p>
<p>Asylums (from the Greek word meaning “refuge”) were built in rural settings with the best of intentions, planned to be havens in which patients would receive humane care. In the serenity of the countryside, and through carrying out undemanding tasks, they could be distracted from their internal torment and find dignity far from the bustling crowd. </p>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Daniel-Defoe">Daniel Defoe</a>, the English writer, remained unconvinced: “This is the height of barbarity and injustice in a Christian country; it is a clandestine Inquisition, nay worse.”</p>
<p>Although conceived in a spirit of optimism, asylums tended to deteriorate into centres of hopelessness and demoralisation. They soon became overcrowded dumps. Institutions built for a few hundred people were soon holding thousands. Very few residents were discharged; many stayed for decades. Brutal oppression replaced anything that might have resembled treatment; malnutrition and infectious disease became rife.</p>
<p>In the grim environment, people were shut away and forgotten. With them out of sight and out of mind, a loss of public interest and political neglect became the norm.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543690/original/file-20230821-15-v420lw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543690/original/file-20230821-15-v420lw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543690/original/file-20230821-15-v420lw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543690/original/file-20230821-15-v420lw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543690/original/file-20230821-15-v420lw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543690/original/file-20230821-15-v420lw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543690/original/file-20230821-15-v420lw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543690/original/file-20230821-15-v420lw.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=607&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Asylums were conceived optimistically, but more often housed oppression than treatment. Picture: The Hospital of Bethlehem.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wellcome Collection</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The brooding building on the hill came to symbolise the stigma and fear attached to mental illness. By the mid-19th century, critics were voicing concerns that asylums had become human warehouses that entrenched mental illness rather than curing it. </p>
<p>The combination of powerless patients, hospitals run more for the convenience of staff than for the benefit of the sick, inadequate inspection by state bodies, and lack of resources led at times to quite disgraceful conditions. Unwittingly, the spread of asylums also triggered the movement of psychiatry away from the mainstream of medicine.</p>
<p>The conditions of the asylums are evocatively described in Henry Handel Richardson’s Australian novel <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/the-fortunes-of-richard-mahony">The Fortunes of Richard Mahony</a>. We read of Richard’s decline, probably from syphilis affecting the brain, which at that time afflicted a large proportion of mental patients.</p>
<p>Towards the end of the novel, his wife comes to visit him in the asylum:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>She hung her head … while the warder told the tale of Richard’s misdeeds. 97B was, he declared, not only disobedient and disorderly, he was extremely abusive, dirty in his habits … he refused to wash himself, or to eat his food … she had to keep a grip on her mind to hinder it from following the picture up: Richard, forced by this burly brute to grope on the floor for his spilt food, to scrape it together, and either eat it or have it thrust down his throat … There was not only feeding by force, the straitjacket, the padded cell. There were drugs and injections, given to keep a patient quiet and ensure his warders their freedom.</p>
</blockquote>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-case-for-the-fortunes-of-richard-mahony-by-henry-handel-richardson-24474">The case for The Fortunes of Richard Mahony by Henry Handel Richardson</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Great and desperate cures</h2>
<p>In the asylum, psychiatry turned into a modern medical discipline. The
accumulation of thousands of patients provided the first opportunity
to study mental illness systematically and to develop theories about its
causes. </p>
<p>The idea that these conditions were due to brain alterations, and especially degenerative processes, became dominant, encouraged by the discovery of the cerebral pathology associated with <a href="https://www.healthline.com/health/neurosyphilis">neurosyphilis</a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/what-causes-alzheimers-disease-what-we-know-dont-know-and-suspect-75847">Alzheimer’s disease</a>. A similar degenerative process was proposed by the great German psychiatrist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emil-Kraepelin">Emil Kraepelin</a> to cause <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/dementia-praecox">dementia praecox</a> – later renamed “schizophrenia” – leading to pessimism about the possibility of recovery.</p>
<p>But the priority for asylums was to relieve the suffering of overwhelming numbers of disturbed patients. Psychiatrists grasped for “great and desperate cures”. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_R._Rollin">Henry Rollin</a>, an English psychiatrist and medical historian, captures the intense zeal:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The physical treatment of the frankly psychotic during these centuries makes spine-chilling reading. Evacuation by vomiting, purgatives, sweating, blisters, and bleeding were considered essential […] There was indeed no insult to the human body, no trauma, no indignity which was not at one time or other piously prescribed for the unfortunate victim.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Treatments were sometimes based on rational grounds. Malaria therapy, for instance, was launched as a treatment for neurosyphilis by the Viennese psychiatrist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julius-Wagner-Jauregg">Julius Wagner-Jauregg</a> in 1917, earning him a Nobel Prize ten years later. </p>
<p>The high fever caused by the malarial parasite disabled the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/spirochete">spirochete</a> that caused neurosyphilis, but the hope that it would be equally effective for other forms of psychosis was soon dashed. The wished-for panacea was not to be.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543703/original/file-20230821-10846-x44evz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543703/original/file-20230821-10846-x44evz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543703/original/file-20230821-10846-x44evz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543703/original/file-20230821-10846-x44evz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543703/original/file-20230821-10846-x44evz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543703/original/file-20230821-10846-x44evz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543703/original/file-20230821-10846-x44evz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543703/original/file-20230821-10846-x44evz.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Malaria therapy, a treatment for neurosyphilis, earned its inventor a Nobel Prize.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jimmy Chan/Pexels</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/insulin-shock-therapy">Insulin-coma therapy</a> was introduced by Manfred Sakel in the 1930s in Vienna and was soon being used in many countries to treat schizophrenia. An insulin injection was administered six days a week for several weeks, producing a state of light coma lasting about an hour, because of reduced glucose reaching the brain. </p>
<p>Many years later, an investigation carried out in the Institute of Psychiatry in London, a leading research centre at the time, showed conclusively that the coma itself was of no therapeutic value. Any positive change was probably due to the staff’s painstaking care.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/girl-interrupted-interrogates-how-women-are-mad-when-they-refuse-to-conform-30-years-on-this-memoir-is-still-important-199211">Girl, Interrupted interrogates how women are 'mad' when they refuse to conform – 30 years on, this memoir is still important</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>ECT and lithium</h2>
<p>The first widely available and effective biological treatments for mental illness were developed in the asylum. The discovery in 1938 of <a href="https://theconversation.com/electroconvulsive-therapy-a-history-of-controversy-but-also-of-help-70938">electroconvulsive therapy</a> (ECT) by <a href="https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/ugo-cerletti">Ugo Cerletti</a> and Lucio Bini, two Italian psychiatrists, led to a dramatically effective treatment for people with severe depression. </p>
<p>ECT was eagerly adopted in practice, but its history illustrates a typical pattern of treatment in psychiatry: unbridled early enthusiasm is later tempered by a protracted process of scientific evaluation. </p>
<p>The same can be said of the use of brain surgery to modify psychiatric symptoms. This was pioneered in 1936 by Portuguese neurologist <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Antonio-Egas-Moniz">António Egas Moniz</a> (another Nobel Prize winner in the field of psychiatry) and surgeon Almeida Lima, and remains controversial in psychiatry to this day.</p>
<p>A momentous breakthrough was the discovery in 1949 by <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-02480-0">John Cade</a>, an Australian psychiatrist, of lithium as a treatment for manic excitement. The lithium story reveals how the incorporation of a new medication into psychiatric practice is not always smooth. </p>
<p>Several US and Danish psychiatrists had experimented with lithium in the 1870s and 1890s, only to have their work ignored until Cade’s rediscovery. It was another 18 years before lithium was shown to prevent the recurrence of severe changes of mood, its primary clinical use now.</p>
<p>Major tranquillisers were added to the growing range of psychiatric medications after being discovered fortuitously in 1953. An antihistamine used to calm patients undergoing surgery was shown to reduce the torment of psychotic patients, but without making them sleepy. </p>
<p>Shortly after this, the US psychiatrist <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1983/02/14/obituaries/nathan-kline-developer-of-antidepressants-dies.html">Nathan Kline</a> discovered that a drug being tested for its effect in patients with tuberculosis had antidepressant properties — the forerunner of medications for depression. All these drugs radically transformed the practice of psychiatry. </p>
<h2>Freud, ‘talking cures’ and shell shock</h2>
<p>A very different aspect of mental health care arose in the 1890s, outside
the asylum. Concerned with neurotic conditions, the new treatment grew chiefly out of neurology but was also influenced by a scientific interest in hypnosis and the unconscious. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543695/original/file-20230821-25-qtirft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543695/original/file-20230821-25-qtirft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/543695/original/file-20230821-25-qtirft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543695/original/file-20230821-25-qtirft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543695/original/file-20230821-25-qtirft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=816&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543695/original/file-20230821-25-qtirft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543695/original/file-20230821-25-qtirft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/543695/original/file-20230821-25-qtirft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1025&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sigmund Freud.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Max Halberstadt/Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sigmund Freud conceived a dynamic model of the mind in which, through the mechanism of repression, painful or threatening emotions, memories and impulses are prevented from escaping into conscious awareness. </p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/a-dangerous-method-in-defence-of-freuds-psychoanalysis-5989">Psychoanalysis</a> grew to become an integrated set of concepts about normal and abnormal mental functioning and personality development, and spawned a new method of psychologically based treatment. Psychoanalysis emerged as a major theoretical underpinning of contemporary “talking cures” (psychotherapies), and its influence spread far beyond treating mental ill-health.</p>
<p>Both world wars profoundly influenced the field. The high incidence of “<a href="https://theconversation.com/shell-shock-treatments-reveal-the-conflict-in-psychiatrys-heart-29822">shell shock</a>” in World War I drove home the lesson that mental illness could affect not only those genetically predisposed, but even the supposedly robust. It soon emerged that anyone exposed to traumatic experiences was vulnerable. </p>
<p>A positive outcome from World War II was the development of techniques for screening large numbers of recruits, which revealed the substantial prevalence of emotional problems among young adults. </p>
<p>The need to treat numerous psychiatric casualties led to the development of group therapies. These paved the way for the so-called <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapeutic_community">therapeutic community</a>, based on the idea that an entire ward of patients could be an integral part of treatment.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/ehPcYibzUKc?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Group therapy, as depicted in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The idea of deinstitutionalisation began to gather pace in the 1960s, driven by a burgeoning civil-rights movement. <a href="https://www.penguin.com.au/books/asylums-9780241548004">Asylums</a>, an influential book at the time by sociologist Erving Goffman, containing his minute observations of the sense of oppression experienced by patients in these “total institutions”, was one catalyst for their closure. </p>
<p>Hundreds of thousands of long-stay patients began to be transferred to alternative accommodation and specialist care in the community, a process that is still in progress.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-body-keeps-the-score-how-a-bestselling-book-helps-us-understand-trauma-but-inflates-the-definition-of-it-184735">The Body Keeps the Score: how a bestselling book helps us understand trauma – but inflates the definition of it</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>What is mental illness?</h2>
<p>It is challenging to define what makes a pattern of behaviour and experience a mental disorder. Generally, such a pattern – or “syndrome” – is considered to be a disorder if it is associated with psychological distress, such as intense and prolonged anxiety or sadness, or significant dysfunction, such as a serious impairment in functioning in one or more key areas of daily life. </p>
<p>If the pattern is short-lived, relatively mild, or entirely understandable in light of the trials and tribulations of the person’s life, it should be seen as a problem in living rather than a mental disorder. Such problems may still benefit from consultation with a mental health professional despite not being diagnosable disorders.</p>
<p>This definition of what counts as a mental disorder also clarifies what is not a mental disorder. Merely being unusual or violating social norms does not mean a person has a disorder. </p>
<p>It is difficult sometimes to decide whether a new kind of behaviour is a mental disorder. For instance, should <a href="https://theconversation.com/no-youre-probably-not-addicted-to-your-smartphone-but-you-might-use-it-too-much-89853">excessive smartphone use</a> or <a href="https://theconversation.com/gambling-on-pokies-is-like-tobacco-no-amount-of-it-is-safe-51037">compulsive gambling</a> be counted as diagnosable addictions?</p>
<h2>Troubling cases</h2>
<p>These decisions about what to include under the umbrella of mental illness are fraught, and there have been some troubling historical cases when disturbing decisions were made or proposed. </p>
<p>In the 1850s, for example, Samuel Cartwright, a physician from Alabama, proposed a new diagnosis called “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/15/arts/bigotry-as-mental-illness-or-just-another-norm.html">drapetomania</a>” to explain why African-American slaves would wish to escape their servitude. </p>
<p>He recommended slaves should be treated kindly and humanely to prevent the disorder, but whipped if this treatment failed. A more patent abuse of the concept of mental illness would be hard to imagine, and it should be noted that other physicians ridiculed Cartwright’s proposal at the time.</p>
<p>Two other controversial cases date to the last century. In the early 1970s, one of us (Sidney) stumbled across disturbing media reports that many political and religious dissenters and human-rights activists in the Soviet Union were being labelled as mentally ill and detained in mental hospitals indefinitely or until they renounced their “disturbed ideas”. </p>
<p>For instance, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petro_Grigorenko">General Pyotr Grigorenko</a> criticised the privileges of the Soviet elite and publicly espoused the rights of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_Tatars">Crimean Tatar</a> ethnic minority group. He was diagnosed with paranoid tendencies, one symptom being his “reformist ideas”, and forcibly committed to a psychiatric facility. </p>
<p>In effect, Soviet psychiatry’s definition of mental illness, and psychosis in particular, was so broad that political beliefs about the desirability of social change were recast as delusions.</p>
<p>The second case comes from the US. <a href="https://daily.jstor.org/how-lgbtq-activists-got-homosexuality-out-of-the-dsm/">Until 1973</a>, homosexuality was defined as a sexual deviation and included in the set of recognised mental disorders. Under pressure from civil, women’s and gay rights activists, it was removed from the diagnostic manual.</p>
<p>Noting such cases, whenever the boundary of a mental illness is expanded to include new diagnoses or loosen old ones, some critics will worry we are treating normal behaviour as a pathology and that we will harm people by labelling them. And whenever the boundary contracts, others will worry that people with psychological troubles are being excluded from clinical care. </p>
<p>Deciding what is and isn’t a mental illness is difficult, but has marked consequences.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This is an edited extract from <a href="https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/troubled-mindSees-9781922585875">Troubled Minds: Understanding and treating mental illness</a> by Sidney Bloch and Nick Haslam (Scribe Publications), published 29 August 2023.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206580/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nick Haslam receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sidney Bloch does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Humans have attempted to understand and treat mental illness for centuries – from ancient Greek medicine, Middle Ages exorcisms and the rise of asylums, to modern medical breakthroughs.
Sidney Bloch, Emeritus Professor in Psychiatry, The University of Melbourne
Nick Haslam, Professor of Psychology, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/209864
2023-08-17T20:10:17Z
2023-08-17T20:10:17Z
Friday essay: what do publishers’ revisions and content warnings say about the moral purpose of literature?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542938/original/file-20230816-21-f4anvz.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C11%2C4000%2C2982&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway and Agatha Christie.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>This year, there has been some controversy about the rewriting of passages from authors such as <a href="https://time.com/6256980/roald-dahl-censorship-debate/">Roald Dahl</a>, <a href="https://www.9news.com.au/national/enid-blyton-famous-five-rewritten-sensitivity-edit/b8c5073a-6ea4-4df8-9143-5089e9bbe1a3">Enid Blyton</a>, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/feb/27/james-bond-novels-to-be-reissued-with-racial-references-removed">Ian Fleming</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/mar/26/agatha-christie-novels-reworked-to-remove-potentially-offensive-language">Agatha Christie</a> with the aim of removing potentially offensive material. Some publishers have also adopted the precautionary measure of adding content warnings and disclaimers to books by <a href="https://amp.theage.com.au/world/north-america/ernest-hemingway-masterpiece-given-trigger-warning-by-publisher-20230625-p5dj8h.html">Ernest Hemingway</a>, <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/01/virginia-woolf-to-the-lighthouse-trigger-warning-vintage/">Virginia Woolf</a>, <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/07/29/raymond-chandler-philip-marlowe-trigger-warning-vintage/">Raymond Chandler</a> and <a href="https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/jeeves-wooster-trigger-warning-edited-publisher-unacceptable-prose-pg-wodehouse/">P.G. Wodehouse</a>. </p>
<p>Critics of these bowdlerisations and disclaimers have come from across the political spectrum and seem to vastly outnumber those defending the practice. It is some time since I have noticed a literary topic come up as frequently as this one in conversation with those outside the literary culture. And while, as an academic, it is heartening to see people worked up about books and their value, it is disheartening to see books recruited as culture-war fodder. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542940/original/file-20230816-25-evtmsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542940/original/file-20230816-25-evtmsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542940/original/file-20230816-25-evtmsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=880&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542940/original/file-20230816-25-evtmsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=880&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542940/original/file-20230816-25-evtmsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=880&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542940/original/file-20230816-25-evtmsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1106&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542940/original/file-20230816-25-evtmsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1106&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542940/original/file-20230816-25-evtmsp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1106&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Conservative publications have tended to frame these developments as evidence of “wokeness” (a word, in this context, vacant of meaning). Others have offered more nuanced, less loaded critiques, arguing that such measures fail to account for our obligation to attend to and preserve history, rather than ignore or erase it. In the case of children’s books, the argument has been made for the role of adults as responsible literary guides.</p>
<p>Much has been said on the issue of rewriting writers that I don’t want to relitigate, but it is worth examining the nature of the debate itself and the fact of its prominence. In an era when literature sits on the cultural margins, why does a story like this break through to the mainstream? What are the stakes that have conjured so much talk? </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/roald-dahl-rewrites-rather-than-bowdlerising-books-on-moral-grounds-we-should-help-children-to-navigate-history-200254">Roald Dahl rewrites: rather than bowdlerising books on moral grounds we should help children to navigate history</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Moral questions</h2>
<p>A literary story is taken up by the media most enthusiastically, it seems, when it can be connected to moral concerns. Those who would clean up the classics, and their conservative opponents, are entangled in a moral battle which encourages the application of the same ethical criteria to books that might be apply to elected officials or ministers of religion. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538900/original/file-20230724-19-gxzebd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538900/original/file-20230724-19-gxzebd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538900/original/file-20230724-19-gxzebd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=872&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538900/original/file-20230724-19-gxzebd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=872&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538900/original/file-20230724-19-gxzebd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=872&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538900/original/file-20230724-19-gxzebd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1096&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538900/original/file-20230724-19-gxzebd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1096&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538900/original/file-20230724-19-gxzebd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1096&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Skimming any contemporary writers’ festival program will demonstrate that we struggle to talk about books on any other terms. Yet if book-talk most easily rises to the level of public discussion when it involves a simple moral controversy, then we are inexorably incorporating literature into the sepia mass of monetised cultural gruel of which our society appears increasingly to comprise. </p>
<p>Two questions motivate this latest argument. The first entails uncertainty about what constitutes literary censorship. Is rewriting a sentence to expurgate an offensive term a form of vandalism, or is it no different from (or at least comparable to), say, translation? </p>
<p>The second is a much debated and oft-reformulated inquiry, familiar within and without literary studies: is there a necessary connection between a work’s literary value and its moral quality? When we read a book do we expect a degree of moral instruction, as to how we should or should not live? </p>
<p>These are worthwhile questions, but they are not the only ones. Literature is extraordinary, in part, because it cannot be reduced to such questions. </p>
<p>Moral debates arise easily because they tend to encourage definitive judgements, which are both gratifying and compatible with an increasingly commodified world. In particular, a moral judgement has the power to bestow a final endorsement or condemnation, meaning one can avoid what <a href="https://theconversation.com/john-keats-concept-of-negative-capability-or-sitting-in-uncertainty-is-needed-now-more-than-ever-153617">Keats described as negative capability</a>: “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”.</p>
<p>A capacity to cope with the unpleasantness of irresolution could be taken as a mark of maturity. The desire for certainty, for a world of unambiguously demarcated ethical boundaries of the kind found in much young adult fiction, could be described as a reassuring childish fantasy.</p>
<p>There might be good reasons for removing offensive language from a text, but we should be suspicious of the impulse to polish literature for modern sensibilities, to make writing newly palatable and inoffensive. To treat books as objects that can be modified to suit the mood of the times is to risk ushering them into the category of pure commodity, optimised according to market desires.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542933/original/file-20230816-19-eks3cu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542933/original/file-20230816-19-eks3cu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542933/original/file-20230816-19-eks3cu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542933/original/file-20230816-19-eks3cu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542933/original/file-20230816-19-eks3cu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542933/original/file-20230816-19-eks3cu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542933/original/file-20230816-19-eks3cu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542933/original/file-20230816-19-eks3cu.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ernest and Pauline Hemingway in Paris, 1927.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The urge to keep Dahl agreeable, for example, is a consequence of a corporation desiring to profit from Roald Dahl the brand. Children’s author Philip Pullman suggested that, rather than revising Dahl, it would be preferable to let him go out of print. This is inconceivable. Dahl’s estate is simply worth too much. </p>
<p>It is in the interest of the Roald Dahl Story Company, purchased by Netflix in 2021, to make Dahl as widely acceptable as possible. Thus the effort to sand off his edges. Brands must be slick, inoffensive, inhuman. </p>
<p>No sensible person would defend Dahl’s character. He was a professed <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2023/jul/19/roald-dahl-museum-acknowledges-authors-antisemitism">antisemite</a>. In the 1970s, he was forced by the advocacy of the civil rights organisation NAACP to change Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Oompa Loompas, who were originally depicted as pygmies brought from Africa to work in the chocolate factory unpaid. </p>
<p>These facts may repulse you to such an extent you can never read Dahl again – or perhaps you might prefer to evaluate his books on their own terms, detaching them from the author’s beliefs. Either response is possible and understandable. But the texts cannot be entirely revalued or made morally sound by meddling with a few sentences or replacing them with clunky alternatives. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538173/original/file-20230719-17-h41mg3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538173/original/file-20230719-17-h41mg3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/538173/original/file-20230719-17-h41mg3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538173/original/file-20230719-17-h41mg3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538173/original/file-20230719-17-h41mg3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538173/original/file-20230719-17-h41mg3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538173/original/file-20230719-17-h41mg3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/538173/original/file-20230719-17-h41mg3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1006&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Roald Dahl in 1982.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Hans van Dijk/Wikimedia Commons</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Literature has always been influenced by the marketplace. Historically, it has evolved through systems of patronage and copyright, gatekeeping publishers and nepotistic periodicals. But to reduce an author to a brand is to obliterate what makes literature a meaningful category. Art distinguishes itself from commerce by pushing back against these capitalist formations and, consequently, being incompatible with reductive moralism. </p>
<p>This is obvious when we consider how we treat books differently to other purchasable items. If you buy a vacuum cleaner that fails to suck dust from your carpet, you should be able to return it. This is because vacuum cleaners are meant to perform a clearly identifiable, unambiguous function. </p>
<p>If you purchase a book that does not work as expected, it would be perverse to attempt to return it to the bookshop and say: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I found the prose too dense; the characters were meaner than I wanted them to be; I thought I was reading a detective story, but halfway through it became a revenge tragedy.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>The nourishment offered by reading depends, in fact, on our not knowing how the experience of a book will unfold until we are reading it. The value is revealed in the act of reading. Even when rereading, we find pleasure in noticing patterns or aspects of a work that did not come into view during the previous encounter. We never quite know what we are in for.</p>
<p>The best literature can be spiky, ambiguous, difficult, cruel, strange, unpredictable, hectoring and unpleasant. It is not the job of a book to ease the life of its reader. Reading a good book might mean having a terrible day, a day in which you are scared, sad, distressed. </p>
<p>It is rare (if not unheard of) that we pay to undergo unpleasant experiences that teach us nothing. But literature does not have an obligation to be useful; we do not have to learn anything from it. It need not produce anything except a readerly response. The alternative is that we are paying to be numbed.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/proceed-with-caution-the-trouble-with-trigger-warnings-192598">Proceed with caution: the trouble with trigger warnings</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>A reasonable reaction?</h2>
<p>What, then, is a reasonable reaction to a book that offends? And by what mechanisms are thresholds of offence and moral transgression established? </p>
<p>There are social norms arrived at more or less by consensus which few would dispute. There are certainly examples of books that necessitate judicious editing if they are to continue being published. To return to the original title of Agatha Christie’s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None">And Then There Were None</a>, for example, would make the book unsellable. (Conversely, it could be argued that concealing the author’s choice so as to prolong a book’s life unfairly deceives readers.)</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542939/original/file-20230816-22-b5topg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542939/original/file-20230816-22-b5topg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/542939/original/file-20230816-22-b5topg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542939/original/file-20230816-22-b5topg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542939/original/file-20230816-22-b5topg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=922&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542939/original/file-20230816-22-b5topg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542939/original/file-20230816-22-b5topg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/542939/original/file-20230816-22-b5topg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1158&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In most circumstances, there is nothing wrong with trying to avoid offence. When teaching a text that students may find difficult, I am happy to provide a content warning. It is not obvious to me that forcing a student to encounter shocking material, perhaps material they find personally painful, is necessarily edifying or educational. </p>
<p>In fact, any social interaction requires us to calculate what it is permissible to say, and there are many remarks we refrain from making for fear they might hurt. In the case of this current controversy, however, attention must be paid to how and why the decisions about what constitutes unacceptable material are being made.</p>
<p>In an ordinary setting, a reader who finds a book disagreeable can put that book down, or not pick it up in the first place. An author might also consider such consequences when writing a book. </p>
<p>But if the moral authority to make these decisions on behalf of an audience is sourced from the imperative to keep a property such as James Bond or Willy Wonka marketable, the literature is degraded. While it may be in the interest of art to leave its audience in distress, it will never be in the interest of capital to upset a potential consumer. </p>
<p>To defend literature entirely on moral grounds is to cede important territory. Of course, literature can make you a better person; it can also make you a worse one. It is most likely to do neither. Of course, a reader can find a book morally offensive or morally instructive, but that might be only one thread in a complex array of responses. </p>
<p>Any argument that treats literature as fundamentally therapeutic, self-improving or society-improving, risks reducing literature to self-help – a genre that promises to improve its reader’s character. To approach literature as a machine for self-improvement is to share ground with the bad-faith arguments of those who justify their bigoted moralising by referring to the cultural achievements of Western civilisation. </p>
<p>The shared perspective is that the value of books depends on the readers they produce. To read broadly and deeply is a marvellous thing that can make us alert to the wide-ranging varieties of being. But no book will condemn or redeem us. This is because books do not exist without readers, and each reader is an unpredictable variable. While it is appealing to believe that a person’s aesthetic judgement is a reliable indication of their moral character, these traits are only tenuously connected.</p>
<p>So, if not on moral terms, how might we defend literature? We can liken it to conversation. A conversation can be morally nourishing or deadening. It is neither good nor bad. Conversations are surely responsible for some of history’s worst atrocities, along with its most wondrous achievements. And clearly we cannot stop having conversations, whether we wish to or not. </p>
<p>In this and other ways, reading resembles conversation. It is an ongoing exchange between reader and writer, one that will continue to change with the times, enlivening us for its own sake.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/209864/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dan Dixon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
To read broadly and deeply is a marvellous thing that can make us alert to the wide-ranging varieties of being. But no book will condemn or redeem us.
Dan Dixon, Adjunct Lecturer, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/210801
2023-08-10T19:59:54Z
2023-08-10T19:59:54Z
Friday essay: 60 years old, the Yirrkala Bark Petitions are one of our founding documents – so why don’t we know more about them?
<p><em>Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander readers are advised this article contains names of deceased people.</em></p>
<hr>
<blockquote>
<p>It would be interesting to learn who thought up this gimmick.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>On August 16 1963, Cecil Lambert, the Secretary of the Commonwealth Department of Territories, scribbled these words next to a news clipping of a day-old article in the Canberra Times. “Aboriginal Petition on Bark” read the headline. “Novel Plea by Tribal Group”. </p>
<p>The article was accompanied by a black and white photograph of the then Labor Member for the Northern Territory, Jock Nelson, pointing at a white piece of paper framed by a painting representing Aboriginal motifs.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541657/original/file-20230808-26-9qgvng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541657/original/file-20230808-26-9qgvng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541657/original/file-20230808-26-9qgvng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541657/original/file-20230808-26-9qgvng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541657/original/file-20230808-26-9qgvng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=909&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541657/original/file-20230808-26-9qgvng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1143&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541657/original/file-20230808-26-9qgvng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1143&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541657/original/file-20230808-26-9qgvng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1143&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Canberra Times article.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Author provided.</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This petition, from the Yolŋu people of Yirrkala in North East Arnhem Land, sought consultation with traditional owners prior to the government granting mining leases in the region. It was presented by Nelson to the federal House of Representatives on August 14 1963 – 60 years ago this week.</p>
<p>Far from an eye-catching publicity stunt – an exotic sight bite – the representations of the various clans of North East Arnhem Land have gone on to produce an extraordinary legacy. </p>
<p>The Yirrkala Bark Petitions, as we now know these objects, have been called many things by many people over the past 60 years.</p>
<p>“The most famous petition ever put to an Australian parliament,” declared The Vancouver Sun on May 14 1971.</p>
<p>“Australia’s first native title deed,” stated political scientist Peter Botsman, simply enough.</p>
<p>The petitions were “rightly counted as among the founding documents of our nation”, vouchsafed then Prime Minister Julia Gillard in 2013, on their 50th anniversary. </p>
<p>Dr Yunupingu, who passed away earlier this year, was 15 in 1963. A student at the Yirrkala Methodist Mission school, he watched his father, Mungurruwuy, senior leader of the Gumatj people, orchestrate the unification of the 13 Yolngu estate groups of the Miwatj region (Gove Peninsula) to protest against the federal government’s excision of a portion of the Arnhem Land Reserve to pave the way for bauxite mining. </p>
<p>The Yolŋu people had not been informed of, negotiated with or compensated for the colonisation of lands they considered subject to their laws and sovereignty. </p>
<p>Yunupingu has been more circumspect than the politicians and pundits in his appraisal of the Bark Petitions’ democratic footprint. He called them: “a proud but sad symbol of my people’s fight for their land”. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/yunupinu-was-a-great-clan-leader-a-great-family-man-and-very-much-loved-i-wish-australian-political-leaders-could-have-learned-more-from-him-203160">Yunupiŋu was a great clan leader, a great family man and very much loved. I wish Australian political leaders could have learned more from him</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>How many were there?</h2>
<p>The two Bark Petitions that lie prostrate under glass in Parliament House were a grassroots community response to the clash of legal and land tenure systems on the 20th-century Australian frontier. </p>
<p>They consist of paper petitions, typed in both English and Yolŋu Matha and signed by nine Yolŋu men and three Yolŋu women, pasted in the centre of a bark frame. </p>
<p>This frame is painted with sacred clan symbols (land and sea creatures, plants, patterns and ancestral beings) that read together represent a claim to land ownership from time immemorial. Together, the painted designs represented a simplified version of Yolŋu title deeds, a window into the borders and boundaries of the Yolŋu national estate.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541651/original/file-20230808-17-1obzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541651/original/file-20230808-17-1obzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541651/original/file-20230808-17-1obzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541651/original/file-20230808-17-1obzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541651/original/file-20230808-17-1obzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541651/original/file-20230808-17-1obzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541651/original/file-20230808-17-1obzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541651/original/file-20230808-17-1obzzr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Bark Petitions under glass in Parliament House.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Clare Wight</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>What the government did not see at this time – because it could not read the land and did not ask anyone for an interpretation – was that the Yolŋu had their own systems of governance, mapping, foreign diplomacy, border security, trade, negotiation and agreement-making, practised for centuries with other “outsiders”, particularly Macassan trepang fishermen from Suluwesi. </p>
<p>With this excision of land, Yolŋu law had been broken. The Bark Petitions were an attempt to respectfully communicate this breach in a language the Australian parliament could understand.</p>
<p>After Nelson presented the first petition, the Minister for Territories, Paul Hasluck, rejected it. He said the petition, having been signed by young people, including three women, couldn’t possibly signify the feelings of Yirrkala’s leaders, people of “status and standing”. </p>
<p>Furious that their views had been dismissed, 33 men and women of just such superior standing duly sent three pieces of paper to Canberra, signed with their inked thumbprints and witnessed by both senior Yolŋu and a missionary Doug Tuffin.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541649/original/file-20230808-17-8eqql7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541649/original/file-20230808-17-8eqql7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541649/original/file-20230808-17-8eqql7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541649/original/file-20230808-17-8eqql7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541649/original/file-20230808-17-8eqql7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541649/original/file-20230808-17-8eqql7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541649/original/file-20230808-17-8eqql7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541649/original/file-20230808-17-8eqql7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The thumbprint signatures.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Clare Wright</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On August 28, the then Opposition Leader Arthur Calwell presented a second of the original Bark Petitions along with this thumb-printed imprimatur. A motion to implement one of the petition’s chief requests was successfully passed: to “appoint a Committee, accompanied by competent interpreters, to hear the views of the people of Yirrkala before permitting the excision of this land”. </p>
<p>The first formal petitions presented to parliament in an Australian language, they were the first to lead directly to a parliamentary enquiry. This bipartisan select committee took evidence from Yolŋu and European witnesses. It found in the Yirrkala people’s favour, recommending a standing committee be appointed to oversee development in the area over the next decade, with consultation – and compensation. </p>
<p>But this did not happen. So when the mining project began, complete with plans for a new mining town, the Yolŋu mounted the first land rights court case in Australian history: Milirrpum vs Nabalco. </p>
<p>Although the case failed – Justice Blackburn ruled in 1971 that British law had extinguished any native title rights – the action led to the Woodward Royal Commission, which paved the way for Gough Whitlam’s 1976 Aboriginal Land Rights Act NT. </p>
<p>So here we have a catalyst for Australia’s Indigenous civil rights movement, an avowedly significant turning point in race relations (created in the same year Martin Luther King gave his “I have a dream” speech). But what do we really know of the Bark Petitions’ creation? And their creators? We’re celebratory, but not conversant. We’re not even quite sure what to call them: are they artworks? Documents? Deeds? </p>
<p>Nor have we even been certain how many the Bark Petitions numbered. There were four, my research has confirmed. </p>
<p>I <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-11-24/bark-petition-artefact-truth-telling-returned-to-yolngu-people/101678052">tracked down the fourth</a> – “our lost treasure” as Yananymul Mununggurr, daughter of Dhunggala, the sole surviving signatory to the petitions calls it – to Derby, Western Australia, and facilitated a moving handback ceremony in November between the “missing” petition’s owner and a group of Yolŋu descendants of the original signatories and artists. </p>
<p>It is now being conserved in Adelaide and will soon be repatriated to Yirrkala. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541897/original/file-20230809-22-911kcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541897/original/file-20230809-22-911kcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541897/original/file-20230809-22-911kcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541897/original/file-20230809-22-911kcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541897/original/file-20230809-22-911kcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541897/original/file-20230809-22-911kcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541897/original/file-20230809-22-911kcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541897/original/file-20230809-22-911kcs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=577&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The ceremony where Joan McKie returned the fourth Bark Petition to Yolŋu descendents in November 2022.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Clare Wright</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A missing history</h2>
<p>There are a lot of half-truths and a few out and out falsehoods lurking online. But there is no accurate, authoritative account of the events leading up to, culminating in, and flowing directly from the making of these hallowed objects, two of which lie – either mute or pulsating, depending on your ability to read them – in their current glass “shed” in Parliament House. A third is in storage at the National Museum of Australia.</p>
<p>What does a forensic scouring of the documentary archive – combined with direct consultation with eyewitnesses and descendants – have to tell us about the exact nature of the conflict that sparked these petitions? </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541674/original/file-20230808-29-1g5opa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541674/original/file-20230808-29-1g5opa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541674/original/file-20230808-29-1g5opa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541674/original/file-20230808-29-1g5opa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541674/original/file-20230808-29-1g5opa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541674/original/file-20230808-29-1g5opa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541674/original/file-20230808-29-1g5opa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541674/original/file-20230808-29-1g5opa.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The third Bark Petition in storage at the National Museum of Australia.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Clare Wright</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As author Alexis Wright encourages us to ask of all stories: “What are the border lines? Where are the transgression points precisely?” In other words, what is the history of the petitions, a history that can and should be told – to use historian Henry Reynolds’ groundbreaking construction – from both sides of the frontier?</p>
<p>Given the acknowledged significance of the petitions as key documents in Australia’s past, it is remarkable no such history exists. This absence is even more astounding given that North East Arnhem Land has, since at least the 1930s and especially since the 1960s, been the fertile research playground of anthropologists, linguists, musicologists, educationalists, art critics, curators, activists, filmmakers and legal scholars. Historians have been in short supply.</p>
<p>The Bark Petitions are routinely wheeled out as a crucial, if hazy, reference point for the cascade of civil and land rights-related events that followed: Wave Hill and the Gurindji, the 1967 Constitutional Referendum, the Gove Land Rights Case, the Tent Embassy, the Northern Territory Land Rights Act, then a hop, skip and a high degree of difficulty jump to Mabo, where the weight of scholarship lands.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-the-untold-story-behind-the-1966-wave-hill-walk-off-62890">Friday essay: the untold story behind the 1966 Wave Hill Walk-Off</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>But despite this legacy, anecdotal evidence I’ve gleaned over a ten-year research journey suggests the vast majority of Australians have never heard of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, let alone understand any of the finer points of their political significance. Those who have viewed them in Parliament House often remember them in ethnographic terms: striking traditional artworks rather than innovative, discursive records of legal intent and political will.</p>
<p>And not even that aesthetically arresting to some, perhaps. In 2015, the then treasurer Joe Hockey, while attending the Istanbul Biennale, asked Australia’s Ambassador to Turkey, James Larson, what the object behind glass in a display case was. Larson apprised him that it was one of the original Yirrkala Bark Petitions, brought to Turkey along with a few other items of Yolŋu/settler significance by Biennale Director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. Although Hockey had presumably walked past this petition hundreds of times in Parliament House, he claimed to have <a href="https://www.artlink.com.au/articles/4466/a-short-history-of-yolngu-activist-art/">never heard of them</a> and “express(ed) surprise that he had to come to Turkey to learn about it”.</p>
<p>This ignorance says much about our national pastime of historical amnesia, our wilful forgetfulness of any event that falls outside the canon of military achievement – or failure. </p>
<p>It is precisely why the Uluru Statement from the Heart includes a truth-telling component in its invitation to all Australians to engage in a process of constitutional recognition and historical reckoning. Our unfamiliarity with the Bark Petitions also reflects poorly on Australian civics education. (Hands up who has heard of the US Declaration of Independence.) Ultimately, the gaps in our collective colonial knowledge point to a lazy relationship with our own democracy.</p>
<p>This absence sells us short as a nation, for the Bark Petitions represent more than simply a pivotal step on the path towards the legal recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander land and sea rights.</p>
<p>My research into how the petitions came into being, and what they meant to the community that crafted them, makes a larger claim for the significance of both the artefacts and the processes that led to their creation. </p>
<p>The petitions constitute nothing less than the third pillar of a trinity of material objects that, read together along a historical, political and cultural continuum, comprise our founding documents: the material heritage of Australian democracy.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541681/original/file-20230808-21-rwvjmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541681/original/file-20230808-21-rwvjmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541681/original/file-20230808-21-rwvjmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541681/original/file-20230808-21-rwvjmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541681/original/file-20230808-21-rwvjmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=600&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541681/original/file-20230808-21-rwvjmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541681/original/file-20230808-21-rwvjmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541681/original/file-20230808-21-rwvjmc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=754&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The author with Dhunggala Mununggurr, sole surviving signatory of the Bark Petitions, Garrthalala, 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Clare Wright</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Flag. Banner. Bark.</h2>
<p>As the US has its Constitution, Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence, so Australia has a triad of nation-defining archival “documents”. Ours are arguably more inclusive, not being written on paper by a literate elite, but rather handmade by “the people” for the purpose of proclaiming their right to be counted.</p>
<p>Exhibit A: The Eureka Flag. Symbol of the struggle for rights and liberties by a disenfranchised cohort of newcomers to gold rush Victoria, men and women who fought to have the voices of unpropertied people heard in making the laws that governed their lives, including the right to representation for their taxation. In 1854, they sewed a flag that represented the collective identity and aspirations of the polyglot miners and merchants who rallied beneath it. </p>
<p>Exhibit B: The Women’s Suffrage Banner, painted by Dora Meeson Coates. With the passage of the Franchise Act in 1902, Australian women became the most fully enfranchised in the world. They heralded their peerless political equality on the world stage with a magnificent banner. “Trust the women, Mother, as I have done,” the precocious daughter Australia goads Mother England in bright red lettering atop the banner, which was paraded before hundreds of thousands of people in London’s mass Suffragette street rallies of 1908 and 1911. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541898/original/file-20230809-27-34mk1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541898/original/file-20230809-27-34mk1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541898/original/file-20230809-27-34mk1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541898/original/file-20230809-27-34mk1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541898/original/file-20230809-27-34mk1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541898/original/file-20230809-27-34mk1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541898/original/file-20230809-27-34mk1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541898/original/file-20230809-27-34mk1v.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A poster depicting the women’s suffrage banner.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Collection of the National Museum of Australia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>White women, that is. For the Franchise Act of 1902 threw all Aboriginal Australians under the bus – preventing them from voting in federal elections. The Immigration Restriction Act passed by that inaugural post-federation parliament similarly ensured that the latest immigrant was only the youngest Australian if he or she was European and white.</p>
<p>It would take another 60 years for the Yolŋu people to throw the bus out with the democratic bathwater, not only a display of remarkable colonial literacy but also a feat of diplomatic ingenuity.</p>
<p>Flag. Banner. Bark.</p>
<p>All three, conceived and crafted not by the minds and hands of statesman, lawyers or archetypal founding fathers, but by men and women on the ground, embedded in the struggle, fighting for rights and recognition, dignity and decency, demanding their voices be heard and their sovereign bodies be counted, holding lawmakers accountable to the notion that government by the people and for the people should mean all of the people.</p>
<p>Flag. Banner. Bark.</p>
<p>Each of these declamatory objects speaks back to power, a creative act of resistance to a perceived political injustice. Like the stories of the creation, presentation and reception of the Eureka Flag and the women’s suffrage petition, the story of the Bark Petitions takes us to a time when democratic inclusion, when basic entitlements of citizenship, could not be taken for granted by certain sections of the body politic.</p>
<p>While the Bark Petitions were sent to, and continue to reside in, an institution devoted to democratic governance, their story of their creation also contributes towards what academic and writer Marcia Langton has called “the story of the Aboriginal part in Australia’s economic history”.</p>
<p>Proposing in her 2012 Boyer Lectures that the mining boom then gripping the nation was affording economic opportunities for Aboriginal entrepreneurs and workers, Langton argued that “we need to understand the forces at work, historical and economic, that have produced the present situation”. Whereas in the 1960s, northern Australia was the new frontier of such opportunism – or exploitation – by the first decades of the 21st century, Langton proposed such remote regions as “the geographical heart of this activity”. </p>
<p>The story of the Bark Petitions also shifts historical timelines, pointing us to a version of Australian Indigenous democracy whose political and philosophical traditions go back much (much) further than John Stuart Mill or the French Revolution or even Ancient Greece. </p>
<p>Might the deep time heritage of Yolŋu laws of governance not only challenge the contours of the standard nationalist narrative of progress, but set fire to the map altogether? Were Australia’s First Nations people also the nation’s first democrats?</p>
<h2>Negotiation</h2>
<blockquote>
<p>We must always begin with negotiation. It’s the start of the journey. It’s the dot where you start and you need to join the dots …</p>
</blockquote>
<p>These are the words of the Gay'wu Group of Women, a collective of Yolŋu sisters and Ngapaki (white) researchers from Macquarie University. This collaboration of traditional knowledge-keeping and on-country learning produced the extraordinary book, <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Gay%27wu-Group-of-Women-Songspirals-9781760633219">Songspirals</a>, which won a 2020 Prime Minister’s Literary Award.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In life and death, we always negotiate through bala ga’ lili, through give and take … give and take sustains all existence, the existence of the clans, of lands, of knowledge and of relationships with others, including ŋäpaki.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is always a process, a way of going through the right process of negotiation. This is negotiating and renegotiating relationships between clans and their responsibilities.</p>
<p>The Yirrkala Bark Petitions were a manifestation of these governance principles. Elders and clan leaders, who could not write, selected young, literate members of the community to represent the estate groups’ collective interests. This selection process upheld principles of Yolŋu rom (law).</p>
<p>Their “petition” was not so much an entreaty as a form of treaty between two sovereign nations: the Commonwealth of Australia, which had only enfranchised its First Nations people a year earlier, in 1962, and the united clan estates of the Miwatj region of North East Arnhem Land, people who had been negotiating agreements and conducting international diplomatic relations with other seafaring groups for centuries.</p>
<p>In sending the Bark Petitions to Canberra, the Yolŋu people offered the gift of their own knowledge and representation of land boundaries and ownership principles. They combined this law and cosmology (the bark painting) with the form of representation required of the Australian Parliament (written words set out in the format required of Westminster humility – “your petitioners humbly pray”).</p>
<h2>Cross-cultural activism</h2>
<p>The Bark Petitions constitute a genuine exercise in shoulder-to-shoulder, crosscultural political activism and dissent. The idea for them was, in fact, conceived by Labor MP <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Beazley_Sr.">Kim Beazley Snr</a>, while standing in front of the recently installed bark art panels in the church of the Methodist Overseas Mission, established in Yirrkala in 1935.</p>
<p>The panels were commissioned by the Mission’s new Superintendent, Reverend Edgar Wells, in an act of remarkable religious syncretism. (Will Stubbs, convenor of the Buku Larnngay Arts Centre in Yirrkala, where the Church Panels are now displayed in a purpose-built, cyclone-proof chamber, has called the artworks the Yolŋu world’s Sistine Chapel.) </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541656/original/file-20230808-17-fgrl9a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541656/original/file-20230808-17-fgrl9a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541656/original/file-20230808-17-fgrl9a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541656/original/file-20230808-17-fgrl9a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541656/original/file-20230808-17-fgrl9a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=420&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541656/original/file-20230808-17-fgrl9a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541656/original/file-20230808-17-fgrl9a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541656/original/file-20230808-17-fgrl9a.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=528&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The panels in the church of the Methodist Overseas Mission.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: courtesy Ron Croxford Collection</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The petitions were first drafted in English (likely with significant input from Wells), incorporating the requisite parliamentary language provided by Beazley, and translated into Yolŋu Matha by Djapu ngalapal (leader) and teaching assistant Daymbalipu Mununggurr and Margaret Croxford, the school principal’s wife. Twelve copies of the petition, in both languages, were typed up by Ann Wells, the Superintendent’s wife. </p>
<p>The paper copies were then signed by 12 community members representing six clan estates. The signatories were carefully selected by elders from the clans. Four bark frames were painted in a frantic overnight session by four selected artists, as a form of “mapping” of the clans’ collective land holdings. (The remaining paper copies were sent to other federal and Northern Territory MPs. Several of them are held in the Parliament House archives, and I found one of them tucked away in Robert Menzies’ papers at the National Archives, in a file unopened since 1963.)</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541654/original/file-20230808-29-365ft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541654/original/file-20230808-29-365ft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541654/original/file-20230808-29-365ft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541654/original/file-20230808-29-365ft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541654/original/file-20230808-29-365ft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541654/original/file-20230808-29-365ft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541654/original/file-20230808-29-365ft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541654/original/file-20230808-29-365ft.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rev Edgar and Ann Wells.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: courtesy Wells Collection</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>They were then parcelled up by Ann Wells and sent on the mail plane to four politicians: Prime Minister Menzies, Calwell, Beazley, and Labor MP Gordon Bryant, President of the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement. (It was Menzies’ petition that Nelson presented on August 14.) A truly disruptive act of political syncretism. </p>
<p>As Edgar Wells noted, “the Aboriginal people had established a direct line of communication with the Australian Parliament”. </p>
<p>Though the Aboriginal people of the Northern Territory were legally classified as “wards” at the time (and officially referred to as “natives”) they acted like citizens, “by-passing”, as Wells argued, “all previous lines of authority”. </p>
<p>Explaining his intervention on the Yolŋu’s behalf to Beazley, Wells said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>my simple reason for all this is that the aboriginal is a person – not a number, and the first time he has used the very instrument we encouraged him to cultivate, namely political awareness, the Government cannot stand it.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541861/original/file-20230809-17-hpgo51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541861/original/file-20230809-17-hpgo51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/541861/original/file-20230809-17-hpgo51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541861/original/file-20230809-17-hpgo51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541861/original/file-20230809-17-hpgo51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541861/original/file-20230809-17-hpgo51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541861/original/file-20230809-17-hpgo51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/541861/original/file-20230809-17-hpgo51.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=566&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ann Wells typed up 12 copies of the petition.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo: courtesy Wells Collection</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>‘The tongue of the land’</h2>
<p>Djambawa Marawili AM is an award-winning artist and senior leader of the Madarrpa clan of North East Arnhem Land. Djambawa played an instrumental role in mobilising the Sea Rights claim that resulted in the 2008 High Court decision granting traditional owners exclusive native title rights to the land between the high and low water mark of the Blue Mud Bay region. </p>
<p>He was ten when his family members helped create the Bark Petitions and decades later, spoke at that Istanbul Biennale. Djambawa explains the indivisibility of art and identity, land and law, politics and personhood, culture and cosmology like this:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The land has everything it needs.<br>
But it couldn’t speak. It couldn’t express itself. Tell its identity. And so it grew a tongue.<br>
That is the Yolngu. That is me. We are the tongue of the land.<br>
Grown by the land so it can sing who it is.<br>
We exist so we can paint the land.<br></p>
</blockquote>
<p>There is a new document that flickers from the incendiary embers of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions: the Uluru Statement from the Heart. This document is not a petition so much as an invitation. (Though the Bark Petitions were enticements to healing and mutual understanding too – not a gimmick but a gift to the Australian nation — as all lasting acts of cultural and political diplomacy must be.) </p>
<p>Like the petitions, which set out the contours of Yolŋu land ownership, so the the Uluru Statement provides a map too: Voice, Treaty, Truth. Signposts to a new dawn for an old country, an awakening based on consultation, recognition and restorative justice. </p>
<p>The Uluru Statement calls for the Australian Constitution to grow a tongue. It is time for us to listen.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>This essay is edited and adapted from the author’s forthcoming book on the history of the Yirrkala Bark Petitions, the third instalment of her Democracy Trilogy, to be published in 2024 by Text.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210801/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clare Wright has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council. She is an adopted member of the Datiwuy clan of the Yolngu nation.</span></em></p>
Clare Wright has spent ten years researching the history of these groundbreaking petitions. Though few Australians have heard of them, she writes, we can learn much from the story of their creation.
Clare Wright, Professor of History, La Trobe University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/205937
2023-07-20T20:04:59Z
2023-07-20T20:04:59Z
Friday essay: Australia may ban WeChat – but for many Chinese Australians, it’s their ‘lifeline’
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537707/original/file-20230717-219717-61j6oo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C8%2C6000%2C3970&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Gigi/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>One morning in February 2021, I was woken by a WeChat call from my brother in China. Mum had died the previous night, he told me. I wasn’t shocked to hear about Mum’s death – she had been very ill for a couple of years. </p>
<p>In fact, for months before she died, our weekly WeChat exchanges mostly took the form of my simply looking at her on the screen, noticing subtle signs of deterioration each time. In a way, these online occasions were more for my benefit than hers. She was progressively unable to recognise or communicate with me.</p>
<p>In the days after her death, my brother and his wife did their best to make me feel included. They persuaded the local crematorium to let them stream the funeral event live via WeChat, so I could “be there”. </p>
<p>In my inner-west home in Sydney, I saw Mum’s body in the coffin. Two days later, my brother hooked me up on WeChat again so I could witness the burial of my mum’s ashes in the cemetery. Half an hour after I ended this call, I had to join a work-related Zoom meeting. Thanks to the wonders of technology, my private grief had to be sidelined.</p>
<p>My dad was then in his mid-eighties, but very healthy for his age. He understood I couldn’t be there, knowing what I’d have to go through to actually visit him. </p>
<p>Two weeks of quarantine in a hotel in the international city where I would land (Shanghai), then one more week in a hotel in my home city in a nearby province, plus one week of home isolation. I kept assuring him as soon as the travel ban was lifted, I’d go to see him.</p>
<p>But he died a few months after Mum: suddenly, most likely due to a heart attack. So, we went through the same ritual on WeChat a few days later – in the crematorium and in the cemetery. This time, I knew what to expect.</p>
<p>I still have my dad’s voice messages on my WeChat. But I still can’t bring myself to play them and hear his voice. Even now, two years after his death, it is still too raw. </p>
<p>I am reminded of a remark from a WeChat researcher in Hong Kong: “<a href="https://www.wechat.com/">WeChat</a> is being used as an archive of emotions.”</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537705/original/file-20230717-232909-ymm8xc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537705/original/file-20230717-232909-ymm8xc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537705/original/file-20230717-232909-ymm8xc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537705/original/file-20230717-232909-ymm8xc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537705/original/file-20230717-232909-ymm8xc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537705/original/file-20230717-232909-ymm8xc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537705/original/file-20230717-232909-ymm8xc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537705/original/file-20230717-232909-ymm8xc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=461&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">WeChat is being used as ‘an archive for emotions’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">STRMX/AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Around the same time, I noticed my experience was quite common among people in the Chinese diaspora. In the last two years, I have come across many Chinese-language blogs that narrate their experience of having to farewell their parents on WeChat because of the quarantine. They’re written by people like me: members of the Chinese diaspora now scattered in different countries – the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and elsewhere.</p>
<p>I wanted to write something, too, but I couldn’t bring myself to open the emotional floodgates. There was work to do and academic papers to write. My emotions had to be regulated so they wouldn’t get out of control. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537954/original/file-20230718-25-qf2dvy.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537954/original/file-20230718-25-qf2dvy.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537954/original/file-20230718-25-qf2dvy.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=859&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537954/original/file-20230718-25-qf2dvy.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=859&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537954/original/file-20230718-25-qf2dvy.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=859&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537954/original/file-20230718-25-qf2dvy.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1079&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537954/original/file-20230718-25-qf2dvy.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1079&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537954/original/file-20230718-25-qf2dvy.PNG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1079&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Qiao Ba’s WeChat screen. (Used with permission.)</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But each of the many blogs I read, which circulated widely in WeChat postings, provided me with an occasion to revisit my grief. I found reading them strangely therapeutic. </p>
<p>Qiao Ba (his online persona) is one of these bloggers. He told me he had last seen his father in a coffin, on WeChat. Prior to his father’s death, they had talked with each other on WeChat, with his dad lying in a hospital bed. His siblings used WeChat to update him on his father’s health and Qiao Ba was even in regular touch with his father’s doctors on WeChat. After his father died, in a blog post titled “The deepest pain of first-generation migrants”, he wrote:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Because the Pause button had been hit on international travel, many people’s last, hurried visits home were effectively their final farewells to their loved ones.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Covid-19 has given rise to a new genre of diasporic Chinese writing, expressing a cocktail of feelings. These include grief, sadness, guilt – and, importantly, gratitude to our families in China, who did all the heavy lifting in caring for aged or dying parents. </p>
<p>This is a genre unique to first-generation migrants. And the emergence of its “connection-in-separation” trope would not have been possible without WeChat.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/friday-essay-what-the-migrant-workers-who-made-my-iphone-taught-me-about-love-201563">Friday essay: what the migrant workers who made my iPhone taught me about love</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>The ‘Swiss army knife’ of social media</h2>
<p>And yet, <a href="https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/banning-wechat-would-damage-democracy-experts-say-20230504-p5d5mb">an Australian Senate inquiry</a> is considering submissions that propose banning WeChat in Australia. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Foreign_Interference_Social_Media">Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through Social Media</a> is investigating the risk posed to Australia’s democracy by foreign interference through social media. A key area of its inquiry is whether to ban WeChat. </p>
<p>I’ve <a href="https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/banning-wechat-would-damage-democracy-experts-say-20230504-p5d5mb">made a submission</a> to the inquiry, with RMIT’s Professor Haiqing Yu, my WeChat co-researcher. We argue the ban would do more harm than good. </p>
<p>Many WeChat-using Chinese-Australians have not even heard about the proposal to ban it – but those of us who have are watching this space with mounting anxiety. </p>
<p>Many Australians have never used WeChat, which is owned by Chinese tech giant <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-tencent-became-the-worlds-most-valuable-social-network-firm-with-barely-any-advertising-90334">Tencent</a>, and was launched – as Weixin – in 2011. The international version, WeChat, was launched the following year. </p>
<p>Soon, people found it nearly impossible to get by without it. In addition to being a communication and messaging platform, WeChat has dedicated functions that allow users to pay bills, book hotels and taxis, shop online and buy groceries. </p>
<p>WeChat is not merely an instant messaging tool, but a <a href="https://www.emerald.com/insight/publication/doi/10.1108/9781787430914">“super sticky” app</a>. It has been <a href="https://www.socialmediatoday.com/marketing/wechat-chinas-social-media-swiss-army-knife-could-take-over-world">dubbed</a> the “Swiss army knife” of social media. <a href="https://theconversation.com/facebook-became-meta-and-the-companys-dangerous-behavior-came-into-sharp-focus-in-2021-4-essential-reads-173417">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/whatsapp-a-great-idea-for-mates-but-a-terrible-one-for-ministers-66991">WhatsApp</a> and other Western social media are not allowed in China. This meant the uptake of WeChat soon reached near-saturation point. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537703/original/file-20230717-224435-7f5pi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537703/original/file-20230717-224435-7f5pi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537703/original/file-20230717-224435-7f5pi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537703/original/file-20230717-224435-7f5pi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537703/original/file-20230717-224435-7f5pi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537703/original/file-20230717-224435-7f5pi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537703/original/file-20230717-224435-7f5pi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537703/original/file-20230717-224435-7f5pi4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">WeChat is a ‘super sticky app’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jerry Wang/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>As my research with Haiqing Yu indicates, WeChat is extremely agile, versatile and resourceful. It comes with many features that resonate with traditional Chinese practices, such as sending monetary gifts (<em>hong bao</em> – “red envelopes”) to friends electronically.</p>
<p>Users have four ways of communicating on WeChat: Group Chat (in groups of up to 500 people), WeChat Moments, which allows users to post updates and share content with their circles of friends, WeChat Subscription Accounts, which allows users to publish a certain number of articles each day, and personal messaging. There’s also the recently launched WeChat Channels, which are public feeds of video and visual material, searchable through keywords and hashtags.</p>
<p>Spaces on WeChat are semi-private. WeChat allows users to decide who they want to be friends with in both private and group chats – and which friends they want to block from viewing their Moments. It also allows a user to find and follow any official account or channel, without any request or approval from the account holder (though you cannot unilaterally “follow” another user). And you have the option of “un-friending” anyone you have previously connected with.</p>
<p>To first-generation Chinese migrants in many countries, WeChat was a godsend, enabling them to stay connected with each other free of charge. Currently, there are as many as 1.3 billion users in 200 countries and regions, operating in 17 languages. </p>
<h2>Expert witness against Trump’s proposed US ban</h2>
<p>In August 2020, then US president Donald Trump signed executive orders prohibiting the use of <a href="https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-addressing-threat-posed-tiktok/">Tik-Tok</a> and <a href="https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-addressing-threat-posed-wechat/">WeChat</a> in America. I was asked to <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-trumps-wechat-ban-does-not-make-sense-and-could-actually-cost-him-chinese-votes-144207">write something</a> in response to the news. </p>
<p>A few days later, I received an email from <a href="https://rbgg.com/wp-content/uploads/RBGG-CLAY-Award-DJ-3-20-212-TOP-CLAY-Bien.pdf">Clay Zhu</a>, a San Francisco lawyer. He invited me to give expert testimony in a forthcoming legal challenge to Trump’s ban, which <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/20/wechat-ban-blocked-trump">argued</a> it would harm their First Amendment rights, especially freedom of speech. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537758/original/file-20230717-210840-7qwdng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537758/original/file-20230717-210840-7qwdng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537758/original/file-20230717-210840-7qwdng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537758/original/file-20230717-210840-7qwdng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537758/original/file-20230717-210840-7qwdng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537758/original/file-20230717-210840-7qwdng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537758/original/file-20230717-210840-7qwdng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537758/original/file-20230717-210840-7qwdng.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">I was an expert witness in a legal challenge to Donald Trump’s 2020 attempt to ban WeChat in the US.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dennis Van Tine/AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In my testimony in the US legal case, I explained that WeChat is a lifeline for members of the Chinese diasporas, especially from the People’s Republic of China. It enables them to stay in touch with family members in China. It helps them conduct business and trade. And it helps them find and maintain social networks in their new environment.</p>
<p>My research on WeChat started in 2018, when Haiqing Yu and I embarked on our five-year research project. We aimed to explore Chinese-language digital and social media in Australia. </p>
<p>We spent a lot of time interacting with people in 45 Australia-based WeChat groups over four years, from 2018-2022. We also conducted in-depth, one-on-one interviews with a dozen WeChat users, and two large <a href="https://theconversation.com/who-do-chinese-australian-voters-trust-for-their-political-news-on-wechat-113927">surveys</a> of first-generation migrants from the People’s Republic of China, to get a sense of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/new-research-shows-chinese-migrants-dont-always-side-with-china-and-are-happy-to-promote-australia-126677">media landscape</a> they inhabited.</p>
<p>In 2018, we had no inkling of the tumults and shocks that awaited Australia, China and the rest of the world. Nor did we anticipate the myriad new ways WeChat would be put to use as these events unfolded. </p>
<p>Our study constantly had to take into account whatever reality threw at us. While we tried to stay the course, we also needed to significantly extend our research – in several new directions.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537761/original/file-20230717-222245-8l70pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537761/original/file-20230717-222245-8l70pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537761/original/file-20230717-222245-8l70pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537761/original/file-20230717-222245-8l70pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537761/original/file-20230717-222245-8l70pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537761/original/file-20230717-222245-8l70pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537761/original/file-20230717-222245-8l70pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537761/original/file-20230717-222245-8l70pi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">When we started our WeChat study, we had no idea of the shocks awaiting the world – or the new ways WeChat would be put to use.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Owen Winkel/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>WeChat and the 2019 election</h2>
<p>A few months before Australia’s <a href="https://theconversation.com/compare-the-pair-key-policy-offerings-from-labor-and-the-coalition-in-the-2019-federal-election-116898">2019 federal election</a>, we noticed the election had become a hot topic on WeChat. We realised WeChat was not just being used as a communication tool: it was educating new citizens about the electoral process. </p>
<p><a href="https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2056305120903441">Our study</a> of the election found WeChat was being used to help people become more engaged in Australian politics. (A subsequent <a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/wechat-s-role-australian-democracy-grassroots-view">study</a> of a state election also found this.) WeChat was teaching these new citizens about Australia’s political system, democratic values and electoral processes, and helping them become better-informed about their voting options.</p>
<p>This citizen education was made possible largely by the emergence of self-appointed opinion leaders on WeChat. These individuals seemed to be playing a crucial role in educating fellow voters and promoting informed political engagement. </p>
<p>There was <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/national/labor-asks-questions-of-wechat-over-doctored-accounts-fake-news-20190506-p51kkj.html">widespread reporting</a> of election-related <a href="https://melbourneasiareview.edu.au/the-2019-australian-federal-election-on-wechat-official-accounts-right-wing-dominance-and-disinformation/">disinformation</a> being spread on WeChat during the campaign. But our observations also suggested these opinion leaders played a key role in debunking such misinformation and disinformation.</p>
<p>Sydney-based “XY” was one of eight opinion leaders we featured in <a href="https://brill.com/display/title/63429">our book</a>, which emerged from our study. He was educated in a prestigious university in China, then went on to work in the public service. XY came to Australia in the late 1990s. </p>
<p>An Australian citizen since 2006, this former Chinese public servant now runs a small business in Sydney. Then in his 40s (2019), XY actively participated in a dozen politics-themed groups. Eight were Australia-based and four were US-based. (He also participated in other groups.)</p>
<p>XY spends a lot of time browsing Australian and international English media, such as the Australian, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Washington Post and the New York Times. While Twitter is his preferred social media platform, he uses WeChat to repost news and information from elsewhere to his chat group members.</p>
<p>XY became a de facto leader in many of his groups, given his grasp of mainstream news and current affairs. He was strategic about how to exert influence during the election campaign. When he was trying to shape people’s voting preferences, he did so by quoting traceable sources (like mainstream media publications) and authorities (mainstream public figures), using their words to make his own point.</p>
<p>For example, in March 2019, he made three posts in his WeChat groups in quick succession. The first, in Chinese, said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Sydney Morning Herald reported eight years ago on then Prime Minister and Liberal leader Scott Morrison’s proposal to use anti-Muslim sentiment to win votes – a claim that Morrison did not deny at the time.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>His second post was a link to news.com.au journalist Malcolm Farr’s <a href="https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/pm-accuses-waleed-aly-of-appalling-lie-over-muslim-comments/news-story/8b09f1f6d4c75c2440877bc5e71a30a1">then-recent story</a> about Morrison accusing TV presenter Waleed Aly of lying over this issue. The third post quoted a few key paragraphs from Farr’s story. </p>
<p>XY clearly favoured Labor over the Coalition. Farr’s piece painted an unfavourable picture of Morrison, implying he was at best inconsistent, at worst a liar. Yet, XY refrained from making judgemental statements about Morrison and the Liberals. He preferred to let Farr’s story speak for itself. Many people responded to his posts with praise or a “thumbs-up” emoji.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-australias-mandarin-speakers-get-their-news-106917">How Australia’s Mandarin speakers get their news</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>WeChat during the Black Summer bushfires</h2>
<p>Soon after the federal election in 2019, many parts of Australia were choking with the smoke of <a href="https://theconversation.com/making-sense-of-australias-bushfire-crisis-means-asking-hard-questions-and-listening-to-the-answers-129302">bushfires</a> that spread and burned for weeks. They claimed many lives, destroyed thousands of houses, and devastated millions of hectares of land and the animals on it. Many Australian individuals and community organisations donated generously to the victims and firefighters. </p>
<p>Chinese Australians were no exception. Many WeChat postings encouraged, organised and coordinated donations, disaster relief and recovery appeals. From this, we saw the great potential of WeChat as a platform to involve people in altruistic community initiatives.</p>
<p>It was in this context that the <a href="https://www.sydneytoday.com/content-101947573880036">story</a> of Ethan Wang caught our attention. Ethan was a primary-school boy living in Canberra. One day in November 2019, over breakfast, he heard his parents talking about what was on the news – 350 koalas had died in the bushfires in the Australian Capital Territory and New South Wales. With his Canberra home shrouded in smoke, Ethan decided to act. He quickly made a hand-drawn fundraising poster, found a spot in the Gungahlin Shopping Centre and started playing his violin. His poster urged passers-by to donate money to save the koalas.</p>
<p>Ethan was not disappointed. Shoppers lined up to make donations. Ethan’s proud parents posted pictures on WeChat of their son busking to raise money. Much to their surprise, they received enthusiastic responses and further donations from families, friends and acquaintances in China – as well as Australia. </p>
<p>News of Ethan’s initiative spread on WeChat, and a few days later, having finished school for the day, Ethan found a group of Canberra-based Chinese-Australian parents waiting for him at the school gate – they wanted to hand over the money they had raised in his name.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/making-sense-of-australias-bushfire-crisis-means-asking-hard-questions-and-listening-to-the-answers-129302">Making sense of Australia's bushfire crisis means asking hard questions – and listening to the answers</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>WeChat during Covid-19</h2>
<p>The raging bushfires had just recently been brought under control when Australia was plunged into the initial phase of the Covid-19 pandemic. In December 2019, Wuhan in China <a href="https://theconversation.com/kafkaesque-true-stories-of-ordinary-people-inside-the-first-days-of-covid-19-in-wuhan-china-180039">went into lockdown</a>. </p>
<p>Not long after that, many Chinese Australians returned to Australia, especially after the Chinese New Year (which was 25 January). Many who arrived before mandatory self-isolation guidelines came into effect (on 1 February 2020) decided to self-isolate on their arrival – despite being healthy and virus-free. They were acutely aware of community anxiety about the virus and wanted to do their bit to minimise the risk.</p>
<p>But self-isolation meant the supplies they needed for everyday living had to be delivered to them. In response to this challenge, a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-6b2mzbuyA">network of 300</a> Chinese-Australian volunteers in major Australian cities sprang into action. </p>
<p>They helped 600 households – and the initiative was coordinated through WeChat. Orders for groceries such as food, toilet paper and milk were taken via the app. The volunteers bought the items and delivered them to front doors or front gardens, and the householders transferred payments via WeChat. Through the entire process, there was no face-to-face interaction with those who were inside the isolated homes.</p>
<p>We learned from this grassroots response that WeChat could be an effective tool to mobilise and organise civic action.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/fang-fangs-wuhan-diaries-are-a-personal-account-of-shared-memory-138007">Fang Fang's Wuhan diaries are a personal account of shared memory</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>WeChat and the Black Lives Matter movement</h2>
<p>Across the Pacific, a nationwide political storm was brewing in the US, which was still in the grip of the pandemic. <a href="https://theconversation.com/george-floyd-deserved-a-better-life-a-new-book-charts-his-trajectory-from-poverty-to-the-us-prison-industrial-complex-and-the-impact-of-his-death-182947">George Floyd</a>, a Black American man, was beaten to death by police, precipitating the large-scale <a href="https://theconversation.com/black-lives-matter-protests-are-shaping-how-people-understand-racial-inequality-178254">Black Lives Matter movement</a>. </p>
<p>Before then, WeChat had mainly been associated in the US with <a href="https://www.cjr.org/tow_center/wechat-misinformation-china.php">misinformation</a> by Trump supporters on the right. But 20-year-old <a href="https://www.scmp.com/video/world/3089830/anti-blackness-something-deeply-rooted-my-community-says-student-eileen-huang">Eileen Huang</a>, a student of English at Yale University, changed that. </p>
<p>In June 2020, Huang published an open letter on WeChat addressing Chinese Americans of her parents’ generation. Huang observed that many Chinese Americans have long-held, deep-seated prejudices against Black people – and she called on the Chinese-American community to speak up against racism targeting Black Americans. She called for cross-racial solidarity.</p>
<p>Huang’s letter quickly drew widespread but polarised responses. An open letter countering Huang was soon posted on WeChat. <a href="https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/rU3px2WD5elJ3H1lBUC98A">Lin Fei</a>, a male respondent from Huang’s parents’ generation, adopted a paternalistic tone in the letter, addressing Huang as a “child” who had been “brainwashed by lefties”. </p>
<p>The two letters were shared widely on WeChat, forcing an inter-generational debate across the political divide into the open. The resulting furore – and the intensity of the debate – led one <a href="https://cn.nytimes.com/opinion/20200618/chinese-black-racism-us/">commentator</a> to say Huang’s open letter had ignited “a rare large-scale, open and direct ideological confrontation in the history of Chinese Americans”.</p>
<p>Back in Australia, sensing it might have profound resonances here, I followed this debate with great interest. Meanwhile, amid the global pandemic and the popular groundswell of support for George Floyd, many Australians in major cities across the nation <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-black-lives-matter-movement-has-provoked-a-cultural-reckoning-about-how-black-stories-are-told-149544">took to the streets</a> to voice their support for the Black Lives Matter movement. </p>
<p>When advised by public health authorities not to protest in public places, due to <a href="https://theconversation.com/can-you-socially-distance-at-a-black-lives-matter-rally-in-australia-and-new-zealand-how-to-protest-in-a-coronavirus-pandemic-139875">concerns</a> about the risk of spreading COVID-19, protesters in Perth nevertheless decided to go ahead with their planned rallies. But they did not have enough masks for protesters. </p>
<p>When a <a href="https://thewest.com.au/news/coronavirus/chinese-community-donate-11000-face-masks-to-perths-black-lives-matter-protest-in-show-of-support-ng-b881575795z">Perth-based Chinese community</a> heard of their problem, they took to WeChat and successfully organised the donation of 11,000 masks overnight, which they had delivered to the protesters.</p>
<p>WeChat is <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/01419870.2018.1560110">known</a> to have spread racial prejudices. But its uses during Black Lives Matter and the pandemic show it can also be a powerful platform for civic engagement – and for mobilising positive and effective social movements.</p>
<p>Since our book was published, I have learned of <a href="https://www.crikey.com.au/2023/05/17/wechat-ban-chinese-australian-communities-senate-committee/">other ways</a> WeChat can be put to productive and creative use in Australia. </p>
<p>I’ve had conversations about the platform with social policy researchers in the aged care and health care sectors, as well as with individuals in business and trade. They have convinced me WeChat offers enormous potential to Australia’s social cohesion – just waiting to be tapped.</p>
<h2>Concerns about WeChat</h2>
<p>Despite these new insights, we are not blind to the risks and issues commonly associated with WeChat. These concerns need to be addressed seriously, and with evidence-based research.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/worse-than-tiktok-calls-for-wechat-to-be-banned-despite-huge-cost-20230420-p5d200.html">first major concern</a> is WeChat’s potential threat to national security. Indeed, President Trump’s ban was based precisely on this fear. </p>
<p>But the US court that overturned the ban established that this fear was ungrounded: despite the numerous claims put forward by the President’s legal team, the court found there was “scant” <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/20/trump-administrations-wechat-ban-is-blocked-by-u-s-district-court/">evidence</a> of its threat. The court promptly stayed the nationwide ban and by the middle of 2021, the newly-elected President Biden had officially withdrawn Trump’s executive orders.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/wechat-surveillance-explained/">second concern</a> is censorship and surveillance on WeChat. This is valid. Unknown to many people, WeChat, and its Chinese version, Weixin, are “two systems” that operate on “one app”. </p>
<p>Users who register with a Chinese mobile phone use Weixin, which is run by its Shenzhen-based parent company, Tencent. Weixin is <a href="https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2023/05/30/banning-wechat-bad-may-harm-australias-democracy/">governed by Chinese law</a>. Users outside mainland China, who register with a non-Chinese mobile phone, use WeChat – which is operated by a Singapore-based company, WeChat International. WeChat is governed by the relevant local laws of each user’s country of residence.</p>
<p>WeChat and Weixin work together as a multi-functional messaging and social media app. In some spaces on the app, such as chat groups and Moments, Tencent surveils all WeChat and Weixin messages. But <a href="https://citizenlab.ca/2020/05/wechat-surveillance-explained/">censorship</a> of politically sensitive keywords and images is server-based. This only affects messages to or from Weixin users. </p>
<p>So, there is surveillance of WeChat messages – supposedly for the purpose of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/05/07/wechat-users-outside-china-face-surveillance-while-training-censorship-algorithms/">training the Weixin censorship algorithms</a>. But there is no censorship of messages sent from one Australia-based WeChat account to another, as they don’t pass through a China-based server. </p>
<p>However, messages sent between an Australia-based WeChat account and a China-based Weixin account <em>do</em> pass through Tencent’s servers in Shenzhen. So, they are subject to surveillance and censorship.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537765/original/file-20230717-243941-g5wkwe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537765/original/file-20230717-243941-g5wkwe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537765/original/file-20230717-243941-g5wkwe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537765/original/file-20230717-243941-g5wkwe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537765/original/file-20230717-243941-g5wkwe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=419&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537765/original/file-20230717-243941-g5wkwe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537765/original/file-20230717-243941-g5wkwe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537765/original/file-20230717-243941-g5wkwe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=527&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Messages sent between an Australia-based WeChat account and a China-based Weixin account pass through Tencent’s servers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Liang Xiashun/AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Our study recognises Tencent’s complex surveillance and censorship regime. But it suggests political communication, or criticism of the Chinese government or the Communist Party of China, is not the main reason people in diaspora use WeChat. </p>
<p>Most Chinese-Australian media entrepreneurs who operate on the platform have engaged in myriad ways of resisting, evading, bypassing and criticising surveillance, censorship and other forms of political oppression. So, despite clear concerns about these matters, we have identified many creative ways Australian users engage in entrepreneurial activities and cultural self-expression on WeChat.</p>
<p>A <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/04/technology/wechat-china-united-states.html">third concern</a> is that WeChat functions primarily as an instrument of the Chinese government. Our research indicates that the content of state Chinese media does occasionally get posted on WeChat. And Chinese-language media outlets in Australia that use WeChat to push their content <a href="https://www.eastasiaforum.org/2023/07/08/reading-into-wechats-australian-opinion-leaders-and-brokers/">sometimes self-censor</a> to ensure circulation of their content (by withholding content critical of the Chinese government.) </p>
<p>But producers and editors at these media outlets have told us it doesn’t make business sense for them to function as mouthpieces of the Chinese government, nor to help the Chinese government push its agenda. The claim that WeChat is a “<a href="https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/worse-than-tiktok-calls-for-wechat-to-be-banned-despite-huge-cost-20230420-p5d200.html">narrative machine</a>” for the Chinese Communist Party is ill-informed, alarmist and misleading. </p>
<p>WeChat users in Australia are not a homogenous group. And most people are by no means easy prey for WeChat propaganda. In fact, our research has produced ample evidence suggesting most Chinese Australians are motivated by pragmatic and business decisions to use WeChat: for content production, circulation and communication. </p>
<p>In other words, there is a crucial distinction between WeChat being subject to Chinese authorities’ surveillance and censorship, and WeChat being an instrument of Communist Party of China propaganda.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537763/original/file-20230717-184356-wo8n77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537763/original/file-20230717-184356-wo8n77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537763/original/file-20230717-184356-wo8n77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537763/original/file-20230717-184356-wo8n77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537763/original/file-20230717-184356-wo8n77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537763/original/file-20230717-184356-wo8n77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537763/original/file-20230717-184356-wo8n77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537763/original/file-20230717-184356-wo8n77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">WeChat users in Australia are not a homogenous group.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Jorick Jing/Unsplash</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A <a href="https://qz.com/1742568/is-chinas-messaging-app-wechat-a-problem-for-democracies">fourth concern</a> is that WeChat could only be bad for democracy, due to censorship and the Chinese government’s desire to push propaganda content on the platform. </p>
<p>Our research suggests such a view overestimates the power of the Chinese propaganda to use a single platform to influence and control its hugely diversified diasporas – of over 50 million people. </p>
<p>It also underestimates the agency of members of the Chinese diaspora in harnessing a social media platform and using it for a wide range of purposes that far exceed its intended range of functions. Our research has shown that, like all other media platforms, Chinese-language digital and social media are used for both democratising and anti-democratising purposes.</p>
<p>All these concerns warrant serious consideration. But evidence-based research is vital in investigating and assessing both the risks and the benefits of WeChat.</p>
<h2>Recommendations</h2>
<p>We offer two major recommendations for Australia’s policy makers.</p>
<p>Firstly, we believe the Australian government and regulators should recognise and acknowledge that, for the Chinese diaspora, WeChat is a necessity – not a choice. The government should actively explore the development of social media platforms that can function as viable alternatives to WeChat and can adequately address the needs of WeChat users in Australia in the long run. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537972/original/file-20230718-29-1u0mwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537972/original/file-20230718-29-1u0mwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/537972/original/file-20230718-29-1u0mwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537972/original/file-20230718-29-1u0mwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537972/original/file-20230718-29-1u0mwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=916&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537972/original/file-20230718-29-1u0mwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537972/original/file-20230718-29-1u0mwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/537972/original/file-20230718-29-1u0mwr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1151&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Such a solution would need to accommodate the wealth of functions WeChat offers – bearing in mind that most users want to remain closely connected with family and friends in China, where the major Western social media platforms are currently not permitted.</p>
<p>Secondly, we think the Australian government should try to persuade Tencent to allow its international users to freely register WeChat subscription accounts, and to ensure such accounts are not subject to Chinese censorship. Then any individual or organisation in Australia would be able to use the platform on an even playing field with Weixin-registered users, in terms of content/news production and circulation.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/09/20/wechat-ban-blocked-trump/">Michael Bien</a>, the leading lawyer for the plaintiffs in the legal challenge against Trump’s ban, made a crucial point when he said the proposed ban </p>
<blockquote>
<p>targets the Chinese American community and trampled on their First Amendment guaranteed freedoms to speak, to worship, to read and react to the press, and to organize and associate for numerous purposes.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Most users of Western social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, find ways to navigate around various content restrictions and advertising. While most of us manage to avoid being drawn in by scammers, many are not immune from the commercial and political influences that are part and parcel of using these platforms.</p>
<p>The fundamental difference is that these social media platforms are owned by tech giants in the free world, while WeChat is not. But citizens’ rights to freedom of expression and the exchange of information should be paramount – and need to be guaranteed.</p>
<hr>
<p><em><a href="https://brill.com/display/title/63429">Digital Transnationalism: Chinese-Language Media in Australia</a> is published by Wanning Sun and Haiqing Yu (Brill).</em></p>
<hr><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/205937/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>This book project was funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Grant, “Chinese-language Digital/Social Media in Australia: Rethinking Soft Power” (DP180100663). </span></em></p>
Chinese Australians use WeChat for everything from paying bills and attending funerals, to helping community members in need. Banning the ‘super sticky’ app would do more harm than good.
Wanning Sun, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Technology Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/206592
2023-07-13T20:05:28Z
2023-07-13T20:05:28Z
Friday essay: from angry gods and fertile myths to battleships and new technologies – how the wind shapes our world
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536487/original/file-20230710-23-rh65ob.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C68%2C3503%2C2264&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Shutterstock</span> </figcaption></figure><p>When it comes to the natural elements, wind’s role in shaping our world can be overlooked. <a href="https://www.livescience.com/ancient-egyptian-pharaoh-sphinx-statues-unearthed-at-sun-temple">The worship of the sun</a> in ancient cultures such as Egypt is common knowledge, and ancient gods such as the <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/Vulcan/">Roman Vulcan</a> deify volcanoes and fire. </p>
<p>But the work of wind – invisible to the naked eye – often goes unnoticed. Yet, for millennia, this unseen force has critically shaped aspects of life as varied as religion, trade, warfare, culture, science and more.</p>
<p>Mysterious and magical, wind has been worshipped, decided the outcome of innumerable military battles and powered the processes of <a href="https://cosmosmagazine.com/space/exploration/nasa-parker-probe-solar-wind/">scientific exploration</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536443/original/file-20230710-19-3a8gm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536443/original/file-20230710-19-3a8gm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536443/original/file-20230710-19-3a8gm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536443/original/file-20230710-19-3a8gm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536443/original/file-20230710-19-3a8gm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=406&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536443/original/file-20230710-19-3a8gm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536443/original/file-20230710-19-3a8gm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536443/original/file-20230710-19-3a8gm0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=510&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Winslow Homer, The West Wind (1891).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Wind and the natural world</h2>
<p>Wind can be described simply as the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/science/wind">movement of air from areas of high to low pressure</a>. By definition, wind maintains a perpetual motion. Wind is a critical element for the maintenance of life on Earth – while the sun provides the planet with warmth, <a href="https://www.billnye.com/the-science-guy/wind">wind disperses this solar energy</a>, allowing for a habitable biosphere.</p>
<p>As well as shaping the course of human history, wind has shaped the Earth and its contents. A <a href="https://phys.org/news/2020-11-powerful-sculpting-argentina-landscape.html">powerful terraforming force</a>, it is as influential as glaciers and rivers in moulding landmasses and creating mountains. Far from earth, winds blowing through the cosmos are thought to <a href="https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-science/how-galactic-winds-affect-evolution-of-galaxies/">seed the formation of galaxies</a>, while in the Southern Ocean, westerly winds feed the movement of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-the-antarctic-circumpolar-current-helps-keep-antarctica-frozen-106164">world’s strongest ocean current</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536460/original/file-20230710-29-tb1mqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536460/original/file-20230710-29-tb1mqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536460/original/file-20230710-29-tb1mqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536460/original/file-20230710-29-tb1mqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536460/original/file-20230710-29-tb1mqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=387&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536460/original/file-20230710-29-tb1mqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536460/original/file-20230710-29-tb1mqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536460/original/file-20230710-29-tb1mqb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The largest ocean current on Earth, the Antarctic circumpolar current.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">British Antarctic Survey/AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wind has influenced the growth of plants and the <a href="https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2017317118">evolution of their physical forms</a>, and has at times wielded an unseen evolutionary force over animals. </p>
<p><a href="https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32341144/">A recent study of neotropic lizards</a> (tree-dwelling reptiles) found lizards with bigger toepads were more common in areas that <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/hurricanes-make-lizards-evolve-bigger-toe-pads-180974772/">experience frequent hurricane activity</a>. Larger feet appeared better able to cling to points of security during powerful winds. Similarly, hurricane activity is thought to be shaping the evolution of some species of spiders, <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/08/21/spiders-becoming-more-aggressive-survive-after-hurricanes/2054316001/">making them more aggressive</a>.</p>
<p>Wind <a href="https://phys.org/news/2018-12-biologists-mechanism-transition-insect-pollination.html">spreads the seeds, spores and pollens</a> necessary for fertilising the planet. It also carries life-giving rains, at times through aerial pathways known as “<a href="https://www.theamazonwewant.org/flying-rivers/">flying rivers</a>”. </p>
<p>Yet, the damaging potential of wind is as costly as it is unpredictable. In 2022, the Atlantic storm known as Hurricane Ian took 161 lives and caused <a href="https://wusfnews.wusf.usf.edu/weather/2023-01-11/new-report-ian-third-costliest-hurricane-on-record">over US$100 billion dollars in damage</a>. <a href="https://www.history.com/news/hurricane-katrina-facts-legacy">Hurricane Katrina</a>, in 2005, caused catastrophic flooding, widespread damage and the loss of over 1,800 lives. The financial cost of Katrina has been estimated at over US$125 billion. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/how-the-costs-of-disasters-like-hurricane-ian-are-calculated-and-why-it-takes-so-long-to-add-them-up-191736">How the costs of disasters like Hurricane Ian are calculated – and why it takes so long to add them up</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Wind and religion</h2>
<p>Wind’s unseen force has been recognised since the times of our earliest written records. In literature from ancient Mesopotamia (an area roughly synonymous with modern-day Iraq), a theme appears that continues throughout much later literature — the fusion of wind and religion in human thought.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536439/original/file-20230710-29-2fw8io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536439/original/file-20230710-29-2fw8io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536439/original/file-20230710-29-2fw8io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=970&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536439/original/file-20230710-29-2fw8io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=970&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536439/original/file-20230710-29-2fw8io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=970&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536439/original/file-20230710-29-2fw8io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1218&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536439/original/file-20230710-29-2fw8io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1218&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536439/original/file-20230710-29-2fw8io.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1218&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Baked clay statue of the Mesopotamian god Enlil, from Nippur, Iraq, 1800-1600 BCE.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">World History Encylopedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Enlil is a primary deity in the Mesopotamian pantheon, situated at the top of the divine hierarchy from the earliest times. <a href="https://www.history.com/news/hurricane-katrina-facts-legacy">Described as “king” or “supreme lord”</a>, his name can be translated as “Lord Wind”. Enlil’s wife is named Ninlil, meaning “Lady Wind”. </p>
<p>Enlil at times wields wind as a weapon. In the <a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-epic-of-gilgamesh-73444">Epic of Gilgamesh</a>, he sends a great storm to destroy most of humanity. Wind is also weaponised in the Babylonian Creation myth, <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/article/225/enuma-elish---the-babylonian-epic-of-creation---fu/">Enuma Elish</a>, which dates to around 1200 BCE. In this myth, a cosmic battle involves an array of savage winds, alongside the divine creation of the cardinal winds, North, South, East and West.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/guide-to-the-classics-the-epic-of-gilgamesh-73444">Guide to the classics: the Epic of Gilgamesh</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>In the Bible, the cardinal winds are frequently connected to apocalyptic settings. The four winds are involved in mediating the power of life and death in the Books of <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=job+1&version=NRSVUE">Job</a>, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mathew+24&version=NRSVUE">Matthew</a>, <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=mark+13&version=NRSVUE">Mark</a>, and <a href="https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%2037&version=NRSVUE">Ezekiel</a>, while under the power of God or angels (or both). </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534480/original/file-20230628-29-6ms1i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534480/original/file-20230628-29-6ms1i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/534480/original/file-20230628-29-6ms1i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534480/original/file-20230628-29-6ms1i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534480/original/file-20230628-29-6ms1i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=849&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534480/original/file-20230628-29-6ms1i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534480/original/file-20230628-29-6ms1i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/534480/original/file-20230628-29-6ms1i0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1067&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Durer: Four angels holding back the winds, and the marking of the elect.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The connection between the cardinal winds and apocalypse is reflected in art. The German Renaissance artist, <a href="https://news.artnet.com/art-world/albrecht-durer-3-things-to-know-1970024">Albrecht Dürer</a>, depicts angels holding the four winds in his work The Apocalypse with Pictures (1498). It represents a passage from the <a href="https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-history-archaeology/book-revelation-curses-0017927">Book of Revelation</a>, where angels are described “holding back” the four winds, thus representing the staying of divine judgement prior to further cataclysmic events.</p>
<p>In Egyptian religion, the four cardinal winds are found in the <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/article/148/the-pyramid-texts-guide-to-the-afterlife/">Pyramid texts</a> – sacred texts carved on the walls of the pyramids of Egyptian rulers during the Old Kingdom period. </p>
<p>In these texts, the four winds were viewed as servants of the <a href="https://www.livescience.com/ancient-egyptian-sun-temple-discovered">Egyptian god of creation and the sun, Ra</a>. The four winds were thought to stand behind him. Their power of “looking with two faces” meant their gaze could either be protective or harmful. </p>
<p>In the Egyptian <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1021/the-coffin-texts/">Coffin Texts</a>, the cardinal winds were connected to the afterlife. They also played a complex role in <a href="https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1019/magic-in-ancient-egypt/">ancient Egyptian magic</a>. Wind and magic have long been fused in religious thought. In many ancient cultures, religious practitioners were believed capable of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempestarii">magically summoning the wind</a> and manipulating its power. </p>
<h2>Fertile breezes</h2>
<p>As well as recognising the wind’s dangerous and destructive potential, ancient cultures revered its creative capacity. In Greek myth, <a href="https://www.theoi.com/Nymphe/NympheKhloris.html">unions between wind and plant deities</a>, such as Chloris the flower goddess and Zephyrus, the West-Wind, mirrored the role of the wind in spreading seeds and pollinating plants. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536447/original/file-20230710-27-6ofe7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536447/original/file-20230710-27-6ofe7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536447/original/file-20230710-27-6ofe7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536447/original/file-20230710-27-6ofe7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536447/original/file-20230710-27-6ofe7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=797&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536447/original/file-20230710-27-6ofe7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536447/original/file-20230710-27-6ofe7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536447/original/file-20230710-27-6ofe7i.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1001&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Attic vase thought to depict Zephyrus (on left) and Hyacinthus, from Tarquinia, c. 480 BCE.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">World History Encyclopedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>It was thought at this time that wind’s fertilising role worked on animals, too. Several early works in the genre of natural history, such as Pliny the Elder’s The Natural History (c. 1st century CE), describe divine, animate winds <a href="http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D8%3Achapter%3D67">impregnating mares</a>. The Roman poet <a href="https://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/VirgilGeorgicsIII.php">Virgil</a> described this behaviour as inspired by the <a href="https://www.getty.edu/art/exhibitions/aphrodite/venus.html">Roman love goddess, Venus</a>.</p>
<p>In myths from West Africa and South America, wind shows a religious association with <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-77481-3_48">breath, as well as living and ancestral spirits</a>. </p>
<p>The wind deity <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/1465923?casa_token=MDVNYTM4o3kAAAAA%3A_N7PN_qaEaE6hB5CRvGp7D0LSXaSgtLrF1KQKm66blwSA482i8Qm1ETaL1LcXev6eC_PXSG-FnbLTh7wmixRWvChuptDFX9f7zQ4bZMbAgytCHVqqQ">Oya</a> is connected to tornadoes, change and rebirth. These connections symbolically represent the role of wind in bringing rains and assisting in the production of new life. </p>
<h2>Winds of war</h2>
<p>The invisible force of wind has helped shape the course of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/nov/16/how-wind-direction-changed-the-course-of-english-history-in-1688">innumerable human battles</a>. An ancient example of the use of wind in warfare comes from the <a href="https://www.history.com/news/ancient-romes-darkest-day-the-battle-of-cannae">Battle of Cannae</a>. In 216 BCE, <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/hannibal">Hannibal</a>, the famous Carthaginian general, led his troops to victory over the larger Roman army in a bloody battle that took place in south-eastern Italy. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536444/original/file-20230710-19-w7ak16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536444/original/file-20230710-19-w7ak16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536444/original/file-20230710-19-w7ak16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536444/original/file-20230710-19-w7ak16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536444/original/file-20230710-19-w7ak16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=601&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536444/original/file-20230710-19-w7ak16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536444/original/file-20230710-19-w7ak16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536444/original/file-20230710-19-w7ak16.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=756&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Livy, Histoire romaine: The battle of Cannae.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Hannibal understood the direction of a scorching local wind, known as the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libeccio">libeccio</a>, could prove a decisive element in the battle. </p>
<p>Knowing the wind would intensify in the heat of the afternoon, Hannibal positioned his troops so it would blow against their backs – and into the faces of his enemies. Hannibal’s success was recorded by the <a href="https://www.livius.org/articles/person/livy/">Roman historian, Livy</a>. The hot wind blew dust and grit into the eyes of the Romans, obstructing their vision. </p>
<p>During the English <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/european-history/wars-of-the-roses">War of the Roses </a>(1455-1487), the wind helped the Yorkists defeat the Lancastrians in the <a href="https://www.historic-uk.com/HistoryMagazine/DestinationsUK/The-Battle-of-Towton/">Battle of Towton</a>. While the Lancastrians had claimed the higher ground on the battlefield, the Yorkists had the wind at their backs. This powerful headwind sent their arrows deep into the bodies of the Lancastrians, while limiting the range of their opponents’ arrows.</p>
<p>Sudden changes in the wind were decisive during several points of the 16th century <a href="https://www.tudorsociety.com/30-july-1588-wind-scatters-armada/">battles of the Spanish Armada</a>. Fortuitous winds also played a key role <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/03/20/weird-weather-saved-america-three-times/">helping George Washington</a> escape a British siege in the <a href="https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/battle-of-long-island/">Battle of Long Island</a> during the <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/american-revolution-history">American Revolutionary War</a> (1775-83). </p>
<p>Washington’s retreat was assisted by the arrival of a fog and a wind shift that filled the sails of his company’s ships. In a later battle, <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-tornado-that-saved-washington-33901211/">a tornado </a> pressed the British troops into retreat.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536445/original/file-20230710-19-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536445/original/file-20230710-19-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536445/original/file-20230710-19-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536445/original/file-20230710-19-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536445/original/file-20230710-19-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=426&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536445/original/file-20230710-19-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536445/original/file-20230710-19-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536445/original/file-20230710-19-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=535&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">An 1889 painting of the American retreat from Long Island after the battle of Brooklyn.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>More contemporary examples show how wind can be a fickle friend on the battlefield. During the first world war, the use of <a href="https://sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/a-brief-history-of-chemical-war/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw7uSkBhDGARIsAMCZNJueAShis_-YcLIAM6SNw4iQo99qIU76ucuLzyYE7psNZYfiKI3CqFwaAnjPEALw_wcB">chlorine, mustard and other gases</a> led to both psychological horror and devastating death and injuries. </p>
<p>Wind speeds and direction were carefully measured by military meteorologists, who advised on the optimal time to release gas to cause the greatest damage to the opposing side. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535459/original/file-20230704-22-3ledi8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535459/original/file-20230704-22-3ledi8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535459/original/file-20230704-22-3ledi8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=225&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535459/original/file-20230704-22-3ledi8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=225&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535459/original/file-20230704-22-3ledi8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=225&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535459/original/file-20230704-22-3ledi8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=282&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535459/original/file-20230704-22-3ledi8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=282&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535459/original/file-20230704-22-3ledi8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=282&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Singer Sargent, Gassed (1919).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But a change in the wind’s direction, or a shift in its intensity, could result in unintended consequences – and potentially, blowback. The nebulous quality of gas borne on wind meant the poisons could not be restricted to the battlefield, easily carrying to villages near the battlefront. This caused civilian deaths, too.</p>
<h2>Nuclear fallout</h2>
<p>In modern times, the unpredictability of wind has influenced the testing and use of nuclear weapons. On August 6, 1945, crosswinds meant the nuclear bomb dropped over <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/18/story-of-cities-hiroshima-japan-nuclear-destruction">Hiroshima</a> was carried a short distance from its aiming point – the Aioi Bridge – to the Shima Hospital, which was instantly destroyed.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535460/original/file-20230704-27-8jovfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535460/original/file-20230704-27-8jovfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535460/original/file-20230704-27-8jovfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535460/original/file-20230704-27-8jovfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535460/original/file-20230704-27-8jovfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=356&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535460/original/file-20230704-27-8jovfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535460/original/file-20230704-27-8jovfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535460/original/file-20230704-27-8jovfh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=447&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Atomic clouds over Hiroshima, left, and Nagasaki.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1954, the <a href="https://www.history.com/news/nuclear-bomb-tests-bikini-atoll-facts">testing of nuclear fusion bombs on the Bikini Atoll</a> by the US military was <a href="https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/location/marshall-islands/">adversely affected</a> by an unexpected weather event. The wind on the first of March in Bikini did not follow the predicted patterns of the meteorologists. Strong westerly winds carried fallout contamination across the population of the Marshall Islands, and beyond.</p>
<p>More than 70 years later, Bikini Islanders continue to <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/us-nuclear-testings-devastating-legacy-lingers-30-years-later?loggedin=true&rnd=1687827127877">face the consequences of the spread of radiation from the nuclear tests</a>. <a href="http://www.bom.gov.au/aviation/data/education/wind-shear.pdf">Wind shear</a> and ocean currents carried the fallout from the tests as far as Europe, Australia and India.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536446/original/file-20230710-28-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536446/original/file-20230710-28-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536446/original/file-20230710-28-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536446/original/file-20230710-28-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536446/original/file-20230710-28-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536446/original/file-20230710-28-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536446/original/file-20230710-28-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536446/original/file-20230710-28-ruryie.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The second atom bomb test at Bikini Atoll explodes underwater on July 25, 1946.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Shaping technology</h2>
<p>The invisible potency of wind has also powerfully shaped the development of technology. Since the Upper Palaeolithic times, wind-born aerofoils have been used for many purposes including hunting. The first known <a href="https://www.nma.gov.au/defining-moments/resources/earliest-evidence-of-the-boomerang-in-australia#:%7E:text=Boomerangs%20and%20throwing%20sticks&text=A%2023%2C000%2Dyear%2Dold%20mammoth,to%20about%2010%2C000%20years%20ago.">boomerang</a> dates to around <a href="https://apnews.com/article/5386e4fc34507bfe5a66dcb9f2753d80">23,000 years ago</a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/5-indigenous-engineering-feats-you-should-know-about-198987">5 Indigenous engineering feats you should know about</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Wind filled the <a href="https://www.thoughtco.com/mesopotamian-reed-boats-171674">sails of early boats</a> in Mesopotamia over 6,000 years ago, allowing for longer sea voyages, trade and cultural exchanges. </p>
<p>And in China, as well as parts of the Middle East, the invention of <a href="http://www.historyofwindmills.com/">windmills</a> allowed communities to pump water, grind grain and irrigate crops hundreds of years before the industrial revolution. </p>
<p>In modern times, wind-powered kites featured in many early weather experiments. Wind was critical to the discovery and development of electrical power — perhaps <a href="https://www.fi.edu/en/benjamin-franklin/kite-key-experiment">most famously in the experiments</a> of the American polymath, <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/american-revolution/benjamin-franklin">Benjamin Franklin</a>, who flew a kite fastened to a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leyden_jar">Leyden jar</a> into a thunderstorm to research the connection of lightning to electricity (please don’t try this at home).</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535462/original/file-20230704-19-1xh7f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535462/original/file-20230704-19-1xh7f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535462/original/file-20230704-19-1xh7f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535462/original/file-20230704-19-1xh7f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535462/original/file-20230704-19-1xh7f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535462/original/file-20230704-19-1xh7f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535462/original/file-20230704-19-1xh7f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535462/original/file-20230704-19-1xh7f8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Benjamin West, circa 1816, Benjamin Franklin Drawing Electricity from the Sky.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Wind power generated <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2023/04/12/wind-and-solar-generated-a-record-amount-of-global-power-in-2022.html#:%7E:text=Sustainable%20Future-,'Entering%20the%20clean%20power%20era'%3A%20Wind%20and%20solar%20generated,of%20global%20power%20in%202022&text=An%20analysis%20published%20Wednesday%20by,global%20electricity%20generation%20in%202021.">a record amount of electricity in 2022</a>, becoming the top energy producer in the UK. Further from home, the use of wind turbines <a href="https://www.popsci.com/technology/mars-wind-power-turbines-nasa-study/">on the volcanic highlands and crater rims of Mars</a> has been posited as potentially powering future human bases on the red planet.</p>
<p>Last year, <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-04363-9">wind dispersal</a> was explored as a means for carrying battery-free, wireless-sensing devices (sometimes called “<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2018/09/16/smart-dust-is-coming-are-you-ready/?sh=70e756785e41">smart dust</a>”) in a study published in Nature. </p>
<p>The authors were inspired by <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/dandelion-seed-flight/">dandelion seeds</a>, which carry adaptions to make them easier to carry on the breeze. Battery-free wireless sensory devices are a relatively new field of research with many potential applications — including the areas of medicine, agriculture and military science.</p>
<p>In the 21st century, the need to understand and appreciate the natural world has become increasingly clear. Wind by its very nature is always shifting, and in recent years, <a href="https://e360.yale.edu/features/global-stilling-is-climate-change-slowing-the-worlds-wind">changes to global wind patterns have occurred due to climate change </a>. </p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/cyclone-ilsa-just-broke-an-australian-wind-speed-record-an-expert-explains-why-the-science-behind-this-is-so-complex-203835">Cyclone Ilsa just broke an Australian wind speed record. An expert explains why the science behind this is so complex</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536959/original/file-20230712-24-bdstyv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536959/original/file-20230712-24-bdstyv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/536959/original/file-20230712-24-bdstyv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536959/original/file-20230712-24-bdstyv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536959/original/file-20230712-24-bdstyv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=840&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536959/original/file-20230712-24-bdstyv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536959/original/file-20230712-24-bdstyv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/536959/original/file-20230712-24-bdstyv.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1056&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Indeed, climate change has been linked to an increase in <a href="https://theconversation.com/climate-change-isnt-just-making-cyclones-worse-its-making-the-floods-they-cause-worse-too-new-research-182789?gclid=CjwKCAjw44mlBhAQEiwAqP3eVqPwZCGYkGkY9LuAltqIolEqxP7h1AKSYYc1k3IOjUv6AuP2-_ywlRoCX7kQAvD_BwE">catastrophic wind-related weather events</a>, an <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-65844901">increase in clear air turbulence</a> (also known as “in-flight bumpiness”) and a <a href="https://www.ft.com/video/94669d40-8d30-4e95-8865-a4d034176c59">global reduction in wind speeds</a> known as “The Stilling.” </p>
<p>The impact of climate change on wind is a developing area of study, with the long-term impacts difficult to predict. Delving into the intangible and <a href="https://theconversation.com/cyclone-ilsa-just-broke-an-australian-wind-speed-record-an-expert-explains-why-the-science-behind-this-is-so-complex-203835">unpredictable</a> world of the wind is an encounter with nature’s ephemeral complexity.</p>
<hr>
<p><em>Louise M. Pryke is the author of <a href="https://reaktionbooks.co.uk/work/wind">Wind, the latest volume in Reaktion’s Earth Series</a>. Wind explores the element’s natural history as well as its cultural life in myth, science, religion, art, music and literature.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>_Correction: in the original version of the article, The Book of Revelation was incorrectly listed as the Book of Revelations. _</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/206592/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Louise Pryke does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Invisible to the naked eye, the work of the wind often goes unnoticed. Yet, for millennia, this unseen force has shaped religion, trade, warfare, culture, science and more.
Louise Pryke, Honorary Research Associate, University of Sydney
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/208596
2023-07-06T20:21:23Z
2023-07-06T20:21:23Z
Friday essay: we knew we were Bundjalung – but I was shocked to discover a pardoned convict slave trader among my ancestors
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535722/original/file-20230705-23-3ss8n5.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C0%2C4000%2C2000&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption"></span> <span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>We’re a superstitious mob, but I don’t think it’s an exclusively Aboriginal reaction to instantly think <em>Who’s died?</em> when the phone unexpectedly rings late at night. </p>
<p>That night in 2008, my trepidation rose quickly when I heard it was my Uncle Gerry from Sydney who was on the line. But instead of sounding mournful, he sounded strangely … incredulous. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>I’ve just been on the phone with a Bostock woman, a “white” Bostock woman from A.J.’s side of the family. You won’t believe what she told me about the white side of the family!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Immediately I knew he was referring to Augustus John Bostock, my non-Indigenous great-great-grandfather, whom Uncle Gerry had long ago nicknamed “AJ”. Uncle Gerry explained the elderly caller’s name was Thelma Birrell, but her family name, like ours, was Bostock. </p>
<p>He told me Thelma was an avid genealogist who had been researching the Bostock family tree for over 30 years. She told him she knew of her family’s rumour that her great-grandfather’s cousin, Augustus John Bostock, had taken up with an Aboriginal woman in the 1800s, but she didn’t know if there were any descendants from that union.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/he-was-horrific-nearly-two-thirds-of-family-historians-are-distressed-by-what-they-find-should-dna-kits-come-with-warnings-207430">'He was horrific!': Nearly two thirds of family historians are distressed by what they find – should DNA kits come with warnings?</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘They were slave traders!’</h2>
<p>Incredibly, after seeing <a href="https://www.fnawn.com.au/members/gerry-bostock-1942-2014/">Uncle Gerry</a>’s photograph online, an obviously Aboriginal man with the Bostock family name, she somehow tracked him down. Uncle Gerry was a writer and film producer who participated in the political struggle surrounding the Aboriginal Embassy in Canberra and helped establish the Black Theatre in Sydney. In their long conversation, Thelma told him she had traced the Bostock family line back to the 1600s in England.</p>
<p>“Guess who our white ancestors were?” Chuckling to himself, Uncle deliberately paused for dramatic effect before he blurted out: “They were slave traders! A couple of generations of slave traders! Can you believe it? Imagine that!” </p>
<p>A deep, loud belly laugh erupted down the line, and he snorted as he added, “Those white ancestors of ours must be rolling in their graves knowing we turned out to be a mob of blackfellas!”</p>
<p>Up until that time, Augustus John Bostock was known to us only as “the whitefella who gave us our family name”, but on hearing this new information about his family history, a burning desire to find out more was suddenly ignited in me. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535298/original/file-20230703-257464-edbjvx.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A late night phone call sparked Shauna Bostock’s desire to learn more about her family history.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Thelma had given Uncle Gerry her phone number, and I was surprised to find she lived only a little over an hour’s drive away from me on the Sunshine Coast. When I rang Thelma we chatted easily on the phone. And by the end of the call, she kindly invited me to come and visit her next time I was up that way.</p>
<p>Thelma was a lovely elderly lady who, years earlier with her husband Matthew, had travelled to England and to Australia’s southern states many times to collect her treasure trove of historical, archival and church records. </p>
<p>We spoke on the phone many times, and I enjoyed my face-to-face meetings with her over several cups of tea and delicious sweet treats. She was thrilled that I was interested in her work, and so proud to gift me a copy of her self-published book <a href="https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Mariners_Merchants_Then_Pioneers.html?id=SdIOtwAACAAJ&redir_esc=y">Merchants, Mariners … then Pioneers</a>.</p>
<p>Thelma thoroughly enjoyed telling me all about the history of the non-Indigenous Bostock family prior to Augustus John’s birth. </p>
<p>She had been able to trace the Bostocks back to an ironmonger called Jonathan Bostock who lived in Chester in late 17th-century England. Jonathan Bostock was the father of Peter, Peter was the father of Robert, and Robert Snr was the father of Robert Jnr. The two “Roberts” were the slave traders.</p>
<p>Thelma explained that after slave trading was abolished, the British government arrested Robert Bostock Jnr and his business partner John McQueen, and sentenced them to “transportation” to the colony for 14 years. </p>
<p>She was quick to tell me that not long after they arrived here, “Governor Lachlan Macquarie pardoned them”. I had never heard of “pardons from the Governor” in Australian history, until Thelma showed me her transcription of the colonial secretary’s documents, in which the last sentence of the pardon declared:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>By virtue of the power and authority Given and Granted unto me the Governor in Chief of the said Territory of New South Wales under such Warrant and conformally to the tenor thereof I do hereby order and direct that Robert Bostock therein named be forthwith discharged out of custody accordingly and he is hereby […] restored to all rights and privileges of a free subject. Signed, L. Macquarie, 1st January 1816.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Confused by the pardon, I remember asking Thelma for confirmation. “But Robert Bostock really was a slave trader, right?” She patted my hand and answered in a hushed voice, “Ooh yes, he was a very naughty boy.” </p>
<p>Silently, Thelma handed me the pretty floral matching teacup and saucer and busied herself pouring us more tea. Then once seated, she enthusiastically told me tales of Robert Bostock’s exploits after he arrived in Australia – about how he became an excellent merchant in Sydney, married a beautiful maiden, then moved to Van Diemen’s Land and expanded his business interests in Hobart, became a very wealthy landowner and lived in a grand mansion.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=373&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535300/original/file-20230703-274753-azdorj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=468&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Pardoned slave trader Robert Bostock became a wealthy landowner in Hobart.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Most precious to Thelma were the stories about his children, who left Van Diemen’s Land and settled in southern Victoria. She was so proud of the white Bostocks’ narrative of dashing pioneers and nation-building settlers – but I wanted to pause the story and go back to understand more about the two “Roberts” who were slave traders. </p>
<p>I had so many questions, but her reluctance to discuss them was palpable. </p>
<p>In her book, she explained that even though Robert Snr had a number of ships and was successful to some degree, he was regarded as a small operator. Thelma wrote that “he exhorted his captains to treat the slaves well at all times” and she pointed out that “Robert [Snr] died 20 years before slave trading was actually abolished”, and that “trading in slaves continued up to the 1860s in different parts of the world”.</p>
<h2>Befriending a slave-trade historian</h2>
<p>Thelma’s writing moved on to present her outstanding genealogical research, and her proud narrative of the pioneering lives of the non-Indigenous Bostocks. </p>
<p>After the initial excitement of finding Uncle Gerry and connecting with me over cups of tea, Thelma and I continued to chat on the phone every now and then, but unfortunately a year or so later contact between us gradually faded away. </p>
<p>But before we lost touch, she introduced me to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-the-caribbean-to-queensland-re-examining-australias-blackbirding-past-and-its-roots-in-the-global-slave-trade-158530">slave-trade historian Emma Christopher</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=904&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535455/original/file-20230704-27-eqh5ac.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1136&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Emma Christopher's book includes the story of the Bostock slave traders</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Emma’s field of expertise is the <a href="https://theconversation.com/african-leaders-in-sierra-leone-played-a-key-role-in-ending-the-transatlantic-slave-trade-207382">transatlantic slave trade</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/from-the-caribbean-to-queensland-re-examining-australias-blackbirding-past-and-its-roots-in-the-global-slave-trade-158530">Pacific Islander labour</a>, West African and historical slavery, and <a href="https://theconversation.com/behind-the-boko-haram-headlines-slavery-in-africa-is-the-real-crisis-26379">modern slavery</a>. When a fellow historian told her that a mansion built by a convict transported for slave trading still existed in Tasmania, Emma was astonished. After years of extensive research, she had never heard of any slave traders in Australia.</p>
<p>Her response was like mine: she was gripped by the need to know more about the two Roberts. As the Australian expert on Bostock genealogies, Thelma was a major contributor to a website for Bostock descendants all over the world, and that is how Emma found her.</p>
<p>Being a spiritual person, I paid close attention to the intriguing way we all connected with each other. Seemingly out of the blue, Thelma found Uncle Gerry on the internet, then Uncle Gerry contacted me, and this led to my contact with Thelma. Emma was told about Robert Bostock, then found Thelma on the internet, and this led to her contact with me. My intuition was telling me this synchronicity was somehow orchestrated, that it was all part of God’s plan that I met Thelma and Emma.</p>
<p>Back then, I was focused on filling in the gaps in my family tree chart and finding out how Robert was related to my great-great-grandfather, <a href="https://oa.anu.edu.au/obituary/bostock-john-augustus-135">Augustus John Bostock</a>, whereas Emma, an established PhD historian and a published author, wanted to know all about the global legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. </p>
<p>Despite our contrasting levels of academic knowledge at that time, our common interest in the history of the Bostocks quickly led to us becoming good friends. She helped me to see how interesting history can be when you push through the surface level and delve more deeply.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/from-the-caribbean-to-queensland-re-examining-australias-blackbirding-past-and-its-roots-in-the-global-slave-trade-158530">From the Caribbean to Queensland: re-examining Australia's 'blackbirding' past and its roots in the global slave trade</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>‘I feel numb about it’</h2>
<p>When Emma and I met, she was compiling research for a book about Robert Bostock Jnr and his business partner John McQueen, who were the only two convicted slave traders to have ever been transported to Australia. Emma was surprised when Thelma told her about the Aboriginal branches of the Bostock family. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=771&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535449/original/file-20230704-17-gd7xns.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=969&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Uncle Gerry (left) with George Bostock, 1961.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>I say the plural “branches” because George Bostock, the cousin of my great-great-grandfather Augustus John Bostock, lived in the Northern Territory of Australia and had children with a Jingili woman, who, in the historical record, was only recorded as “unknown F/B” (“F/B” meaning “full-blood”; a child with traditional Aboriginal parents). So, it turned out that my family are not the only Indigenous descendants of Robert Bostock.</p>
<p>In 2018, Emma’s book <a href="https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/125/1/204/5721711?redirectedFrom=fulltext">Freedom in Black and White: A lost story of the illegal slave trade and its global legacy</a> was published. It is a meticulous examination of the lives of the two Roberts, their tragic human merchandise and their captive African workers. As with Thelma’s book, I devoured every word. </p>
<p>The fates of the African captives who worked for Robert Bostock Jnr, and his Aboriginal descendants, are essential to Emma’s final discussion on the global legacy of the transatlantic slave trade.</p>
<p>Out of the blue, Emma said, “It must be a shock to be an Aboriginal Australian, a woman of colour, and find out that your ancestors were slave traders.” After what seemed like an excruciatingly long time, I realised I simply did not have the words to describe how I felt. Frowning, I lamely said, “I don’t know what to say … I feel numb about it – I just wish I had better words to say.”</p>
<p>That was over 12 years ago. After advancing my education, and undertaking intense study and archival research, it is only now that I am in the position to be able to present my research and provide answers to complex questions such as the one Emma posed.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/535301/original/file-20230703-187037-sofqxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=592&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">This group photograph (circa 1920) of the people who lived at Box Ridge Aborigines Reserve includes the author’s great-grandmother Mabel Yuke, and other extended family.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At the beginning of my research journey, I imagined my future book would be exclusively limited to my Aboriginal family history and would not include any of the non-Indigenous side of the family. </p>
<p>It was only when I was completing my PhD, and had read Emma’s extraordinary book, that I realised how integral my slave-trading ancestors are to the conclusion of this history of my multi-generational Aboriginal family.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-didnt-we-know-is-no-excuse-non-indigenous-australians-must-listen-to-the-difficult-historical-truths-told-by-first-nations-people-208780">'Why didn't we know?' is no excuse. Non-Indigenous Australians must listen to the difficult historical truths told by First Nations people</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>Our ‘mob of blackfellas’</h2>
<p>It is not known when Augustus John Bostock travelled north to Bundjalung Country, but at around 27 years of age he married my great-great-grandmother, an Aboriginal woman called One My. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
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<p>I know this because on his death certificate, in the section marked “Marriages: Where, at what age and to whom deceased was married”, the corresponding details recorded were “Tweed River … about 27, One My otherwise Clara Wolumbin”. Her name, this record and other archival documents (which name her), as well as confirmation from Bundjalung Elders, indicate that she was a traditional Aboriginal woman from the Wollumbin/Mount Warning people. </p>
<p>Finding One My was incredibly exciting for me, because I actually had the name of one of the traditional Aboriginal ancestors from whom our “mob of blackfellas” is descended.</p>
<p>We always knew we were Bundjalung, and my father had frequently told us, “Our mob are from the Tweed”, but he didn’t know much else. Now I had a starting point.</p>
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<p><em>This is an edited extract from <a href="https://www.allenandunwin.com/browse/book/Shauna-Bostock-Reaching-Through-Time-9781761067983/">Reaching Through Time</a> by Shauna Bostock (Allen & Unwin, $34.99).</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/208596/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shauna Bostock-Smith does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
When Shauna Bostock began researching a book on her family, she thought it would be limited to her Aboriginal ancestry. But then a late-night phone call led her down a surprising path.
Shauna Bostock-Smith, ANU PhD, Australian National University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.