Non Fiction

The history of the Pilbara is distinctive, but its contours are those of Australian history in miniature. Successive resource booms have saddled that part of Western Australia with the weight of immense national expectation. The rise and fall of trade unionism was compressed into a few short decades in the Pilbara’s iron ore mines, where compulsory unionism once made workers immensely powerful, and where the decline in union membership now leaves them highly exposed to managerial agendas.

On the evening of Boxing Day 1900, a spectacular pantomime premiered at Her Majesty’s Theatre in Sydney in honour of the imminent federation of the Australian colonies. A theatrical ‘extravaganza’, Australis presented an image of the fledging nation one hundred years hence. In the pantomime’s vision, Australia in the year 2000 is ruled by a former trade unionist, ‘the Boss’, who leads an expedition to annex Antarctica, forming a ‘Great Empire of the South’. One advantage of this move, notes the Boss, is that the capital of the Australian empire can be located on the geographic south pole, thus resolving the dispute between Sydney and Melbourne. Clearly, the pantomime’s librettists (who included theatrical entrepreneur J.C. Williamson) were not above political satire. What Australis also suggests is that there existed genuine popular enthusiasm for an Australian Antarctic empire.

A few years ago, I spent a week in the village of Salamaua on the Huon Gulf coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG). I delighted in swimming in the warm tropical waters that lap the village. After a dip or two, I wondered if there might be crocodiles about. My hosts told me that there was a resident crocodile; sometimes it came through the village at night, but I need not worry. In generations past, Salamauans and crocodiles had come to an agreement not to hurt each other, and since then the people of the village and their guests had been perfectly safe. I kept swimming.

Was Katharine Susannah Prichard one of those present at the first meetings of the Communist Party of Australia (CPA), or not? Did she or didn’t she later pass intelligence to the Soviets, as charged by historians of ASIO Desmond Ball and David Horner? What difference would it have made to have had Lesbia Harford’s full queer oeuvre before the Australian public when it was written? Why didn’t Dymphna Cusack join the CPA if, as this book asserts, her politics were just as far left as Frank Hardy’s? How aware was Eleanor Dark of First Nations activism when writing The Timeless Land (1941)? Politics sit at the heart of Australian literary history, but a raft of questions remain for contemporary readers.

What is the twentieth-century novel? asks Edwin Frank in Stranger than Fiction. What it is not, he begins, is the nineteenth-century kind. This doesn’t mean he argues from a merely negative premise; rather, he’s attempting to wrest the discussion from certain warping assumptions. The very notion of periodisation by centuries – a ‘convenient, newly minted unit’, writes Frank, ‘larger than a lifetime, conformable to the memory of the nuclear family and designed to connect past to future in the developing narrative of human history’ – is itself a product of the nineteenth century.

When teaching the history of medieval Europe it is hard to resist regaling students with lurid accounts of some of the extreme devotional practices performed by medieval women mystics. Saint Catherine of Siena, so it was claimed, drank the vomit of lepers to abase herself before God. Marie of Oignies, apparently, refused to eat anything but the consecrated host and died of starvation. Julian of Norwich lived in seclusion, inside a cell attached to a church, having renounced all things of the world including the opportunity to go outside. These women’s lives, in the retelling, can offer a visceral sense of the strangeness of medieval religious culture, and can also provide a sense of the particularity of gendered celebrity in pre-modernity. As a teacher, however, I am loathe to lean too heavily into the ostensible spiritual otherness of the Middle Ages. I worry that presenting these women as freaks risks alienating students from the historical work I am training them to do; to make sense of historical difference on its own terms.

To begin, a reviewer’s disclosure: I have known Lucy Sussex since we worked together in the mid-1990s on a research project about nineteenth-century Australian women’s writing. Lucy had already been following the various trails and clues left by crime writer Mary Fortune (1832–1911) along the winding, dimly lit corridors of pre-digital cultural history, as she reports at the end of this book: ‘In 1987 I moved from librarianship to working as a researcher for Professor Stephen Knight … I got the delightful job of largely reading old and vintage crime texts and reporting back … Stephen asked me to look into “Mrs Fortune” [and later] told me that Mary Fortune was no longer his research project, but mine. “You have that gleam in your eye!” he said.’

The inaugural addresses of presidents of the United States have inspired and comforted, set new national directions, and defined not only presidents but entire eras of American history. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s assurance ‘that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself’ gave hope to an America suffering through the Great Depression and signalled the beginning of the modern American welfare state. John F. Kennedy embodied a youthful American idealism and challenged a new generation of Americans during the Cold War: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ Ronald Reagan set a different ideological course for the nation with his diagnosis that ‘government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem’.

The new edition of Searching for Charmian, Suzanne Chick’s autobiographical account of discovering her birth mother’s identity, is published at a moment when the reputations of two of the book’s subjects are in their ascendency.