Author: jkirkby8712

Quarterly Essay No. 96 titled ‘Minority Report: The New Shape of Australian Politics’ by George Megalogenis.

In general summary, this essay, published late in 2024, asks the question –   What does the new political landscape look like in Australia?

As the publisher tells us, Australian politics is shifting. The two-party system was broken at the last federal election, and a minority government is a real possibility in the future. Politics-as-usual is not enough for many Australians.  In this richly insightful essay, George Megalogenis traces the how and why of a political re-alignment. He sheds new light on the topics of housing, the changing suburbs, the fate of the Voice to Parliament, and trust in politicians. This is an essay about the Greens, the teals and the Coalition. In a contest between new and old, progressive and conservative, which vision of Australia will win out? But it’s also about Labor in power – is careful centrism the right strategy for the times, or is something more required?
In Minority Report, Megalogenis explores the strategies and secret understandings of a political culture under pressure.   He writes  “The sword of minority government hangs over the major parties. Neither side commands an electoral base broad enough in the twenty-first century to guarantee that power, once secured, can be sustained for more than a single three-year term. Now the question turns to whether a return to minority government will further damage our democracy, or, perhaps, revitalise it.” [George Megalogenis, Minority Report].    

A worthwhile review of the Essay appeared on the   website ‘Cannonball Read’ which I’ve taken the liberty of copying in full.

 “In this Quarterly Essay, journalist Megalogenis unpacks the world of Australian politics as we plunge forward to our next federal election in 2025. It’s clear, as one looks at elections around the world, that the rules of the past in elections are gone. Polls no longer reliably predict winners. Incumbents no longer reliably get second terms. People don’t vote in blocks like they used to, and single-issue parties and politics are taking hold. It’s a fascinating (if terrifying) time to be alive.  Megalogenis tries to unpack this trend. To explain how and why the political world has changed. The premise is largely that there is a desperate need for the electorate to get comfortable with the concept of minority government. For those who don’t have a Westminster system like Australia, a minority government is what is formed when no single party wins a clear majority. Instead, a minority government forms: a tenuous arrangement between the majority and minor parties/independents – enough to get the numbers to hack together a majority. It’s relies on personality politics and messy deals, and invariably leads to slow government progress.  But it also forces the major parties to engage with the electorate in a way they usually are not forced to, which is not always a bad thing.

Though there are many factors unpicked in this essay to explain how things got here, the most glaring seems to be data on immigration. Australia is an extremely multicultural nation, but you wouldn’t know that when you look at our male, pale, and stale elected officials. Parties are failing to win majorities, or retain governments, because they are failing to inspire and win over immigrant voters. Compulsory voting exists in Australia after all – literally everyone gets a say (whether you like it or not). There’s no electoral college. It makes for a difficult task, which the major parties so far have failed navigate with skill.

Though the essay focusses on Australian politics, I’d say this topic has broader application. I’d recommend it to anyone who is struggling to understand how politics has changed, and will continue to change, over the next decade”. 

This essay also contained correspondence relating to Quarterly Essay 95, High Noon [written by Don Watson] from Thomas Keneally, Emma Shortis, David Smith, Bruce Wolpe, Paul Kane, and, in response,  Don Watson.  At the time of reading that essay, I noted that it was  ‘Certainly  a wide-ranging piece of writing, and for a while I wondered when Watson was going to get to the point of the Essay, which did provide an interesting historical perspective leading up to both candidates, Trump and Harris  [and written in advance of the actual 2024 US election].  Certainly, the subsequent correspondence seemed to be in general agreement with the main thrust of Watson’s essay, with the most perceptions of it coming from author Thomas Keneally.

In his own inevitable style, Keneally began his critique with the paragraph “What I like about Watson’s mind is his capacity to connect the mytho-poetic to the political, and he can do it without hearing from him, generally, any grunt of effort.  The Trump he gives us, essentially, is a special kind of Ogre, and is a fascinating figure in that the more politically literate people insult him with words like autocratic, authoritarian, demagogue, misogynist, the bigger he grows. Elegant abuse is his meat, his drink. This is why one can call Watson’s essay charming, even if it is about the end of America and all of our traditional ties to America. And then, just as the poor old king doses off in the midst of discussing the Ogre with the Townspeople, two apparently ordinary folk wander in, Harris and Walz, who somehow, by nit having a lifetime of experience in politics, can find the words to diminish the Ogre. They were ordinary words, but they bring a previously unseen pallor to the Ogre’s cheeks. ‘Weird’ was one of those words. The people watched in wonder and hoped the code words would keep their power to make the Ogre smaller”.  As we have seen subsequently, that did not occur. 

In late 1878, Horatio Gates Stafford [1828-1888], an American lawyer and Presbyterian Church elder,  farewelled his wife, Anna, and four young daughters, Annie, Maggie, Bessie and Janetta, as they prepared to sale from the USA to Europe to attend an evangelical convention in Europe and enjoy a family vacation in England – the family  went ahead of Horatio who remained behind to complete some business, planning to join his family in Europe.  Spafford had earlier invested in real estate north of Chicago in the spring of 1871. However, in October 1871, the Great Fire of Chicago reduced the city to ashes, destroying most of Spafford’s investment.

On the 22^nd November, 1878, the family’s ship – the S.S. Ville De Havre – sunk, after a collision at sea with an iron merchant sailing ship, with the loss of 226 passengers and crew.  Stafford would later receive a telegram from his wife, having arrived in Wales after rescue in the Atlantic Ocean, which simply stated  –  “Saved, alone…”   Those lost, included their four daughters.

While all four of Horatio Spafford’s daughters perished, remarkably Anna Spafford survived the tragedy. Those rescued, including Anna, who was found unconscious, floating on a plank of wood, subsequently arrived in Cardiff, South Wales. Upon arrival there, Anna immediately sent a telegram to her husband, which included the words “Saved alone….”

Shortly afterwards, as Spafford travelled to meet his grieving wife, and at one point during his voyage, the captain of the ship, aware of the tragedy that had struck the Spafford family, summoned Horatio to tell him that they were now passing over the spot where the shipwreck had occurred. At that point, Horatio was inspired to write what became a Hymn, with the words “It is Well With My Soul” as his ship passed near where his daughters had died.

Horatio’s faith in God never faltered. He later wrote to Anna’s half-sister, “On Thursday last, we passed over the spot where she went down, in mid-ocean, the waters three miles deep. But I do not think of our dear ones there. They are safe….. dear lambs”.  After Anna was rescued, Pastor Nathaniel Weiss, one of the ministers travelling with the surviving group, remembered hearing Anna say, “God gave me four daughters. Now they have been taken from me. Someday I will understand why.”

Horatio and Anne would have three more children after that tragedy, of which the eldest, a son, died of scarlet fever, aged 4 years [with I believe another son having died at the same age previously in the States].

The tune of the hymn was written by Philip Bliss, and was named after the ship on which Spafford’s daughters died, Ville du Havre, and included five verses and a Refrain.  Apparently, the original manuscriptonly had four verses, but one of Spafford’s subsequent daughters, Bertha Spafford Vester (author of Our Jerusalem: An American Family in the Holy City 1881-1949), said a verse was later added and the last line of the original song was modified.

[the reference to Jerusalem arises from the fact that in August 1881, the Spaffords settled in Jerusalem as part of a group of 13 adults and three children, establishing the ‘American Colony’ whose membership would include Swedish Christians, engaged in philanthropic work among the people of Jerusalem regardless of religious affiliation, gaining the trust of the local Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities. What a pity that modern history doesn’t see that kind of trust amongst those religions. Sadly, not all aspects of that colony were quite what most of us today would be favour of – according to a Wikipedia report, membership in the colony required both single and married adherents to declare celibacy, and children were separated from their parents, while child labour was used in various business endeavours while in Jerusalem. Despite that, at the Eastern Front  during and after World War I,  and during the Armenian and Assyrian  genocides, the American Colony supported the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian communities of Jerusalem by hosting soup kitchens , hospitals, and orphanages].  

Irrespective of those later developments, I was inspired by that heartrending story of the shipping disaster, and the subsequent words Horatio Stafford composed on that tragic journey to rejoin his wife. I’m unsure as to which Christian denominations might have taken up with the Hymn, as part of their worship repertoire,  certainly, the composer, Bliss,  wrote a number of other hymns which are included in the current hymnbook of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, so I imagine Ville du Havre is also included. The Tabernacle Choir and Orchestra at Temple Square performed a Mack Wilberg arrangement on one occasion.

The full hymn appears below

Ville du Havre

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say,
It is well, it is well with my soul.

(Refrain:) It is well (it is well),
with my soul (with my soul),
It is well, it is well with my soul.

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ hath regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.
(Refrain)

My sin, oh the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to His cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!
(Refrain)

For me, be it Christ, be it Christ hence to live:
If Jordan above me shall roll,
No pain shall be mine, for in death as in life
Thou wilt whisper Thy peace to my soul.
(Refrain)

And Lord haste the day, when the faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.
(Refrain)

The following was taken from a Blog which was published by the State Library of Victoria on the 11^th October 2024, and I include it in this Column and as a matter of Australian literary historical interest. The writer was Walter Strove, and the article dated 2 February, 2023].

The love story that started in the Library

It’s February 1909 at the Library. On one side of a room is a young woman with avant garde literary magazines strewn across her desk. On the other, a young man building up the courage to speak to her.

For more than half a century, writers Vance and Nettie Palmer stood as beacons in the Australian literary landscape, eventually having the annual Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards established in their honour.
But before all the acclaim and renown, the two first met as young 20-somethings in the Library

For more than half a century, and particularly in the years between the two world wars, Vance and Nettie Palmer stood as beacons in the Australian literary landscape. They were writers who nourished and encouraged others at a time when ‘the atmosphere was more likely to thwart and misdirect talent than nourish and encourage it.’ ¹

‘It was needed we should get a man like Palmer’, the author and poet Leonard Mann stated in a biographical note on Vance. Mann, ‘a born humanist’, as Nettie described him, had written a much praised First World War novel, Flesh in Armour, which, he recalled, ‘was a very lonely venture and one financed by myself.’ ²

It was a time when key Australian writers such as Henry Handel Richardson — the pen name of Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson (1870-1946) — were virtually unknown, and a time when the Palmers did their best to help. ‘I need hardly say how pleased I am or how grateful to you and VP for your efforts on my behalf’, Richardson wrote to Nettie in 1945. ³

Nettie’s biography of Richardson — ‘the first full length study of the novelist’⁴ — appeared five years later.⁵

To the historian Brian Fitzpatrick, and many others, ⁶ the Palmers were a marvel: ‘they permeate articulate Australia’, Fitzpatrick wrote in 1959. ⁷

Both were born in August 1885: Nettie in Bendigo, Victoria and Vance in Bundaberg, Queensland. Of particular interest to us at the State Library is that it was here, in the Public Library of Victoria (as it then was), that Nettie and Vance met.

It occurred in February 1909. Nettie was sitting at a desk within the library, with ‘copies of avant garde literary magazines’ strewn across it, when Vance, who was visiting from Brisbane, ‘took the risk to speak… to the young woman who was regularly studying near him.’ ⁸

Melbourne, at the time, was temporary capital of the newly established Commonwealth of Australia and seat of federal parliament (until it transferred to Canberra in 1927).⁹ The Public Library of Victoria therefore became a de facto national library, a role that its visionary Trustees had prepared it for: ‘The Trustees regarded the Institution’, they wrote in 1880, ‘as a Public Library of reference, consultation, and research, which ought to be characterised by a comprehensiveness which would stamp it not merely as national, but universal.’ ¹⁰

It was here, then, that the partnership described by Vance’s biographer, Harry Heseltine, as ‘the most famous partnership in Australian literary history’, ¹¹ was born.

Nettie and Vance married five years later, in London. ‘It was in 1914’, Nettie recalled, ‘that Vance Palmer and I, who had been living so long on letters alone, decided that we could be married and cease to live at opposite ends of the world — he in London and I in Melbourne.’ ¹²

They became a team, ‘not only of writers’, publisher Walter Stone wrote, ‘but of unselfish and practical idealists, conscious not only of the value of the author in the community but also of the dignity of the profession.’ ¹³ Yet they ‘were really very private persons’, the historian Marjorie Tipping, who had known the Palmers since 1929, wrote in 1985: ‘completely self-sufficient, physically and emotionally very much alive and in love.’ ¹⁴

Vance was known for his novels, short stories, poetry, plays, literary criticism, biographies, histories, as well as well-informed reviews. ‘There is no critic today’, literary scholar Ivor Indyk wrote of the reviews Vance prepared for ABC radio, ‘with anything like Palmer’s range, or the equanimity that allows him to treat a historical romance of the nineteenth century, a French detective novel and the philosophy of Alfred Adler all in one sweep.’ ¹⁵

It had all started years earlier, Vance recalled, when he was ‘working in a Brisbane office and beginning, in leisure hours, the long task of learning to write.’ ¹⁶ The path he followed saw him travel the world and, through his achievements, become recognised as Australia’s ‘foremost man of letters of his day’, ¹⁷ a figure of respect, but also a target for attack.

Vance’s role on the advisory board to the Commonwealth Literary Fund (he was a member from April 1942 until April 1953, and chair from March 1947) left him open to attack for being a communist sympathiser. ‘We seem always to be at the mercy of clowns on horseback’, Vance wrote to the journalist Allan Ashbolt in 1951. ¹⁸

The following year, after concerted attacks in Parliament, it was no less a figure than the prime minister, Robert Menzies, who rose to Vance’s defence. ‘I regard Mr Palmer as a distinguished writer’, Menzies stated, ‘and for sheer honest, disinterested and continuous work on the board, he will take a lot of beating.’ ¹⁹

That same year Menzies arranged for Vance to receive an OBE. Vance, however, quietly refused the offer, ‘since he would be perceived as denying or selling out those radical and republican principles which he had consistently championed since his early writing days.’ ²⁰

Vance and Nettie both cared deeply. When, in the early 1940s, Australia was threatened with invasion, Vance calmly wrote of ‘an Australia of the spirit, submerged and not very articulate, that is quite different from these bubbles of old-world imperialism.’ His earnestness, however, was evident in the opening sentence: ‘The next few months may decide not only whether we are to survive as a nation, but whether we deserve to survive.’ ²¹ Two years later, with war in its fifth year, Nettie wrote of a ‘time for stock-taking, as never before.’ ²²

These two articles, one by Vance and one by Nettie, encapsulate their passions in stark, brilliant depth. It is important to know, as the historian Humphrey McQueen reported, that ‘Australia’s finest reviewer in the 1920s was Nettie Palmer’,²³ and that her life, as the writer Flora Eldershaw observed, was ‘in effect dedicated to the service of Australian literature.’ ²⁴

In 1961, when Nettie wrote of 1914 — the year of her marriage and the year when the First World War erupted — Vance was no longer alive.  A gentle tribute to him permeates the article.  Nettie mentions the profound shock she and Vance felt on hearing that the French socialist leader Jean Jaurès had been assassinated on 31 July 1914, quoting the writer Anatole France, who had lamented: ‘Never to see him again, he who was the greatest of hearts, the most far-reaching of geniuses and the most noble of characters.’ ²⁵

In 1985 the Victorian government marked ‘the centenary of the births of Vance and Nettie Palmer’ by establishing the annual Premier’s Literary Awards. ²⁶ At the State Library the centenary was marked with a Palmer exhibition that went on to tour Queensland in the following year. ²⁷

For us in the twenty-first century, it seems appropriate to recall that this ‘most famous partnership in Australian literary history’ began here, at the State Library. As well, we might care to note a prediction writer Frank Dalby Davison made in 1955, on the occasion of Vance’s seventieth birthday.  ‘If anyone, in a couple of hundred years, wants to share vicariously in Australian life as lived in the first half of this century’, Davison wrote, they ‘will find Palmer’s writings a lot of help.’ And, in these writings, he added, they will experience ‘the bloom on Palmer’s prose.’ ²⁸

References [as numbered above]

1. Smith, V, 1975, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Twayne, Boston, p [x]
2. Mann, L, 1947, ‘Vance Palmer’, Australasian Book News and Literary Journal, vol 2, no 6, p 292; Palmer, N, 1947, ‘Leonard Mann — humanist’, Australasian Book News and Library Journal, vol 1, no 10, p 434; Mann, L, 1969, ‘A double life’, Southerly, vol 29, no 3, p 167
3. Henry Handel Richardson to Nettie Palmer, October 1945, in Probyn, C, Steele, B & Solomon, R (eds), 2000, The Letters,  vol 3, 1934-1946, Miegunyah Press, Carlton South, p 701
4. Jordan, D, 1985, ‘Nettie Palmer and Henry Handel Richardson: The power of feeling’, Flinders Journal of History and Politics, vol 11, p 67
5. Palmer, N, 1950, Henry Handel Richardson: A Study, Angus and Robertson, Sydney
6. See, for example, the imposing list of contributors to the ‘Vance and Nettie Palmer Tribute Fund’, 1959, in Meanjin, vol 18, no 2, pp 272-3
7. Fitzpatrick, B, 1959, ‘The Palmer pre-eminence’, Meanjin, vol 18, no 2, p 211
8. Jordan, D (ed), 2018, Loving Words: Love Letters between Nettie and Vance Palmer, 1909-1914, Brandl & Schlesinger, Blackheath, p 23
9. See, for example, Smart, J, 2015, ‘A divided national capital: Melbourne in the Great War’, La Trobe Journal, no 96, p 28
10. Catalogue of the Public Library of Victoria, 1880, p xxx
11. Heseltine, H, 1970, Vance Palmer, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, p 13
12. Palmer, N, 1961, ‘Remembrance of things past: 1914’, Meanjin, vol 20, no 3, p 297
13. Stone, W, 1978, ‘The national heritage: Letters of Vance and Nettie Palmer’, Quadrant, vol 22, no 4, p 85
14. Tipping, M, 1985, ‘Remembrance of Palmers past’, Overland, no 100, p 10
15. Indyk, I, 1990, ‘The ABC and Australian Literature, 1939-1945’, Meanjin, vol 49, no 3, p 580
16. Palmer, V, 1959, ‘Writers I remember: Steele Rudd’, Overland, no 15, p 21
17. Smith, V, 2002, ‘Vance Palmer (28 August 1885 – 15 July 1959)’, Australian Writers, 1915-1950, Gale, Detroit, p 263
18. Quoted in Ashbolt, A, 1984, ‘The great literary witch-hunt of 1952’, Australia’s First Cold War: 1945-1953, vol 1, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, p 164
19. Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates: House of Representatives, 28 August 1952, p 722
20. Ashbolt, A, 1984, ‘The great literary witch-hunt of 1952’, Australia’s First Cold War: 1945-1953, vol 1, Sydney, Allen and Unwin, p 166
21. Palmer, V, 1942, ‘Battle’, Meanjin, vol 1, no 8, p 5
22. Palmer, N, 1944, ‘Australia, an international unit’, Meanjin, vol 3, no 1, p 6
23. McQueen, H, 1979, The Black Swan of Trespass: The Emergence of Modernist Painting in Australia to 1944, Alternative Publishing Cooperative, Sydney, p 15
24. Eldershaw, F, 1955, ‘Nettie and Vance Palmer: 70th birthday tributes’, Overland, no 5, p 6
25. Palmer, N, 1961, ‘Remembrance of things past: 1914’, Meanjin, vol 20, no 3, p 300
26. See, for example, The Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, 2004: Report, p 2
27. Vance and Nettie Palmer: an Exhibition to celebrate the centenary of their birth, in the Queen’s Hall, State Library of Victoria, 20th August — 30th September, 1985 (curators: Richard Overall and Mandy Bede), 1986, Library Council of Victoria, Melbourne
28. Davison, F D, 1955, ‘Nettie and Vance Palmer: 70th birthday tributes’, Overland, no 5, p 6

•  

These days, I feel most users of Face Book [where I originally posted the following] can only cope with, or are interested in, contributions of a sentence or two and/or lots of photos. On that basis I don’t expect many [if any] to read the following. Fair enough!!  Nevertheless, if anyone does reach the end of this, admittedly lengthy piece, I’d be happy to receive your feedback or comments, adverse or otherwise.  This is another article from the ‘Coachbuilder’s Column’.

“People said of Israel. “They are coming.”  They would shake their heads and say no more. They offered no evidence other than that Israel had come before. Israel would come again to strike the blow it had not struck 14 years earlier. It was another old instinct come back to life; with half of Beirut gone, Israel must be about to come again. Hamra had survived the port blast only to expect the next disaster’ [page 272 from ‘Lebanon Days’ by Theodore Ell, published in 2024].

I was drawn to this book, firstly by the current conflicts in the Middle East which has now dragged Lebanon front and centre, and also by the description that ‘this is the story of a nation largely ignored by the rest of the world, a complex country driven over the edge but still seeking faith in itself, seen through the eyes of an outsider drawn into it’s intimate struggle’.

When Australian writer and researcher, Theodore Ell, joined his diplomatic wife, Caitlin, on her posting to Lebanon between 2018 and 2021, he found himself a witness to a country on the brink of collapse, and to a disaster which almost cost them their lives in August 2020.   In this book, Ell writes about that period and of his perceptions and experiences in a fascinating piece of ongoing reporting, and a piece of writing that did little to encourage this reader to ever want to visit the place!

As the book promo describes it – ‘In 2019, facing economic meltdown, the people of Lebanon rose up, united in a revolution of hope [in a country of mixed people and races who were in the main, far from united]. With the country on the precipice of war, Covid-19 swept in and the eerie quiet of lockdowns descended – a silence tragically shattered in August 2020, when Ell narrowly survived the largest ever non-nuclear explosion, which destroyed half of Beirut…………………..  Everywhere from calm cedar forests to crowded Beirut bars, Ell listened to stories of the Lebanese people and tried to make sense of the maze of ideas, desires and illusions that creates the Lebanon of their imagination, a place in sharp contrast to reality’.

A country on the sea border, surrounded on most sides by enemies and hate – a nation with a vast mix of races, religions, refugees, all of whom treat the other with a combination of suspicion, wariness and historically inbred hatreds, with many of the refugees who have fled to Lebanon, themselves fleeing from the neighbouring hostile countries. But also it seems, with an element of nonchalance.

Not long before he left Lebanon at the end of his wife’s posting, Ell noted the comments of a Lebanese man he met in the street  –   ‘If you’re Lebanese, it’s what you know. You just know it has to go that way. Everybody is living for themselves, in their bit of town, in their street, and fighting everybody else for every lira, every piece of bread, and they don’t know that every little bit of money they take from somebody is bringing Israel nearer. Because only Hizballah will have money and, you know, Israel doesn’t want them to use it…….We let Palestine come in. They stayed even though Israel tried to chase them out. Syria came in and replaced Israel. When Syria got out, Israel came back. The world made Israel go out, but now we blow ourselves up and Israel will come again. Syria can’t do anything. That’s the only good news. Hizballah, still here. Palestine, still here. The refugees, still here.  The situation, Lebanon is what happens when everybody else is done’ [page 276].

Meanwhile, while the world’s media reported on the 2020 warehouse blast that destroyed half the city and killed hundreds, many never to be found or identified [vaporised in the initial instant of the explosion], or people not even known when alive [undocumented vagrants, refugees, etc sheltering in the port area], Theodore Ell provides a personal terrifying on the spot description of the moments immediately after the blast, which had left he and Caitlin cut and bleeding in the ruination of their destroyed apartment.

From page 208, he writes:  

“My hearing was dampened. Almost every sound was muffled dead. Yet although Caitlin and I could hardly understand what we said to each other, we could hear the blast charging on through the city, a single wave, which even then we recognised as the result of a gigantic explosion that had followed the first, ambiguous noise. Sounds from the wake of the blast forced themselves into the apartment and onto us, sounds that could only have been whole buildings coming down nearby; avalanches of stone walls, of steel stanchions and concrete cladding coming loose and shearing to the ground, the shocks of each impact shaking up into our floor, as street after street was overrun by a wave of force that could be sensed receding into distances I had never imagined hearing and that I would never hear again, even as the roar was trapped, storming, in my ears’.

At the end of the book, the author provides an historical timeline of the history of Lebanon, through the 1860’s to 2017, and that alone as it illustrates the way the country and it’s disparate communities were shaped, makes for chilling reading.

At this stage I have inserted some selected quotations from the latter part of the book.

From page 282: “Murmurs about Israel kept on. History and political news always on my mind, I still could not credit them. Neither Israel’s government, obsessed as Benjamin Netanyahu was with finding a distraction from corruption charges, nor its notional opponents in the borderlands, Hizballah, could seriously want a war that neither side would win. But then my reasoning always seemed to be limited and I ended up outflanked. It was history that people invoked to show that what Israel had done once it was in its nature to do again.”

From page 285: [a Lebanese taxi driver noting] “You know, I don’t feel……I don’t feel nothing. Anything. About Israel. There’s no reason. Because…..it’s like there is Lebanon and there is the government.  There is Israel and there is the government. The government is not the same as the country. You know, there are people in Israel and Palestine who just want to work. You see…I know you see…how the Lebanese just want to work. We have nothing to argue about”.

From page 293: [as a storm approached from out to sea] – “I thought for a moment of the black tower of smoke that had been rising out of Warehouse Twelve in the hour before it exploded, and how it was hidden from me behind another tower-block as I worked, unawares, the whole time.  And I remembered the red cloud that came after it, swelling and boiling, sucking air and debris up around it, so high it made me cower. As the waterspouts gently receded and I stepped away from the windows, I realised I had been holding my breath and there was a vein of terror in my awe”.

From page 294 [with the coming of Christmas, the atmosphere of hostility and suspicion amongst the people of Lebanon, dissipates, and changes] – “As we had seen the previous year, that different world, people laughing at a long table in a room that later would be obliterated, the voices of people in all neighbourhoods, Christian, Muslem, Druze, softened as Christmas came.  For once, their instincts and the rhythms of their lives would correspond. The old men outside the Bliss Street bakery were quieter as the day drew nearer and yielded me unsmiling but accepting nods. I looked like a Christian to them. The evening before Christmas, voices raised in welcome or in lively talk drifted into the streets. As the daylight ebbed at four, the long reach of the north coast and the lower mountain slopes began to glitter with new lights, from rooms reopened for visiting kin”.

From page 297: [but then, in the early hours of Christmas morning, the neighbourhoods of central Beirut are awakened by the overpowering noise of fighter planes overhead] – “Israel had come. Those fighter planes, I reasoned, had flown low over Beirut on their way to Syria, and the sound [later] from beyond the mountains could only have come from their bombing raid over Damascus. …..But why, I demanded of the [following] silence, my breath ragged as I suppressed rage, why had they flown low over Beirut like that?  What purpose could that serve, to fly warplanes, afterburners blazing, within skyscraper height, skimming the windows of homes on Christmas Eve?  They had chosen the one night in Lebanon’s most terrible year in which most of its communities shared the rare common purpose of commemorating the same event. They had chosen the night, and the very moment in that night, when for once the people of Lebanon might take comfort together. And they had chosen the part of the city they had [previously] taken, held, ravaged and lost. To frighten Hamra, to harass it, to narrow the abstract world of airspace and vapour trails down to the breaths we caught as we recoiled from the oncoming, invisible force of extermination, was Israe’s revenge. The past was all that mattered. No business must be left unfinished”.

In the September edition of the Australian Book Review, Richard Freadman, in reviewing ‘Lebanon Days’ notes that “The word ‘nothing’ comes up repeatedly, but in unhelpfully shifting ways….Its range of meanings includes a thing or project without value; an absent cause; a crusade that comes to nothing, sometimes for discernible reasons; the vanity of human wishes; and people’s inability to learn from the past. In one of many moments…..he thinks of Beaufort Castle in Southern Lebanon, near the border with Israel” ‘the only spot in all those ranges commanding views in every direction, retreated from as many times as it was captured, a flagstaff on top of a pile of rubble. It stood for nothing..’

It could be suggested that following his time in living amongst the people in Lebanon, Ell became more sympathetic to the lives of the Lebanese people, and the constant fear they faced from the threat of ‘Israel coming again’ and I gained the impression from Freadman’s review that he was ‘hinting’ at that.

And perhaps that view came from paragraphs such as the following, which was written in response to the warplanes flyover of Christmas Eve.

On page 298, Ell writes  –  “I knew then why people took up weapons and hid in ravines and underground, to fire rockets into lands to the east and south. I knew what it was to yearn to purge the shrieking  that the past had planted in the mind, to turn chaos  into a blowtorch of will. To wipe out the agents of the past, to empty the fields of them.  It was in the moment of  these desires…..that I knew I was a changed man. I had accommodated evil”.

And finally, from a couple of reflections, which illustrate, there were quieter moments for Theodore Ell’s time in Lebanon.

From page 302: [as they had done on the few occasions when time and the circumstances of Lebanon permitted] – “Even so, this allowed us one last chance to walk among the cedars.  These were young trees, taller and slimmer than the 3000-year-olds we had seen higher up in these same mountains, or those in the solitary grove above the Qadisha in the north. These cedars still reached upwards and stretched their branches wide. They were only just beginning to spread their foliage  out to form the tiers and plates of their mature years, when the higher branches

would start to fall away and the trees would settle down into the knots and whorls and pyramid canopies of old   age.  These trees were perhaps a few centuries old. Not yet thinned down to a handful of living monuments, they covered the slopes densely, as a true forest”.

During one of the couples’ touring ventures through the mountains and farmland areas to the north and east of Beirut, they were befriended by a small stray cat, which they would take into their care and home. When the warehouse explosion occurred,  they thought they had lost ‘Jazzy’ [as they named her], but a couple of days later, while Ell was attempting to salvage items from their destroyed apartment, Jazzy was found, hiding under some rubble in a corner of the apartment from which the cat had not moved for the two days since the explosion.

As Ell and Caitlin prepared to leave Beirut, at the end of the latter’s diplomatic posting, the author wrote:  “New families had come to replace the embassy staff who, one by one, had been going home. The newcomers were younger than us. Some had children. We left Jazzy to them, with money for her upkeep, her veterinary records and paperwork for the many transfers and periods in boarding and quarantine that awaited her once her vaccination rounds begun with us, were complete.  They looked after Jazzy for half a year until she began a long journey of her own, to come to us again”. [page 304].

Theodore Ell was born in Sydney in 1984. He studied literature and modern languages at the University of Sydney, and spent periods of further research and study, and later gained a PhD. He was working in the public service in Canberra, prior to joining his wife in Lebanon.  His essay ‘Facades of Lebanon’, about the Lebanese revolution   and the Beirut port explosion, won the 2021 Calibre Essay Prize.

Following his three years in Lebanon, Theodore Ell, as noted in the ABR review referenced above, was ‘tormented by involuntary memories. When he returns to Australia, he receives treatment for what is presumably PTSD’.

Note: in this article, I have used the spelling of Hizballah as used throughout the book by Ell. Generally, through the media, etc, we will see that name spelt as Hezbollah [wjk]

Following are some broad comments on two books read recently, as listed:

• Line in the Sand by Dean Yates [2023] [on the question of PTSD]; and,
• Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra, by Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood [2024];

17^th May           

 ‘Line in the Sand’ by Dean Yates [published in 2023, 335 pages].  The powerful and personal story of the war time journalist, Dean Yates and the way in which he descended into the world of PTSD, arising out of various conflicts and natural disasters he reported on, and essentially brought to the surface by the incident of July, 2007, when two of his Reuter’s staff members [and other bystanders] were brutally gunned down by an American helicopter in Iraq. Yates’ memoirs are based on his extensive personal journals, together with emails and other documents. All brought to a head by the revelations of that 2007 incident that has seen Julian Assange incarcerated for more than a decade when he shared the findings of Chelsea Manning and released the video ‘Collateral Murder’ in April 2010. For years, Yates’ PTSD was accentuated by his feeling of moral failure in that he had not done enough to prevent the deaths of his un-armed colleagues and the other innocent bystanders, nor to press hard enough as a journalist, for the truth to come out.

A difficult book to read at times, from both the deeply personal depiction of PTSD, and the ways in which modern warfare is so often conducted.  One quotation from near the end of Yates memoirs.

‘Can the same be said for Collateral Murder? Absolutely. Americans had a right to know how their government was conducting war in Iraq. How their taxpayer money was being spent.  The cost being imposed on Iraqis.  So did the people of Australia, whose conservative government had eagerly followed Bush into Iraq. It was in the global public interest because up to that moment, so much of the war in Iraq was hidden from view.  ‘Collateral Murder’ runs a mere 38 minutes. But from the pilot chatter and the casual way permission was given to open fire, we can reasonably assume this was the everyday in Iraq and Afghanistan. The attack on the van was not out of the ordinary’ [page 293].

As described in various sources
Dean Yates was the ideal warzone correspondent: courageous, compassionate, dedicated. After years of facing the worst, though, including the Bali bombings and the Boxing Day tsunami, one final incident undid him. In July 2007, two of his staff members were brutally gunned down by an American helicopter in Iraq.
What followed was an unravelling of everything Dean thought he knew of himself. His PTSD was compounded by his moral wound – the devastation of what he thought he knew of the world and his own character and beliefs. After years of treatment, including several stints inside a psychiatric facility, Dean has reshaped his view of the true meaning of life. Here, in all its guts and glory, is that journey to a better way of being. Dean has been to the blackest heart of humanity and come out with strength and hope.
Line in the Sand is a memoir that is going to resonate for generations to come. It tackles the most important topic of our age in an unforgettable way.

About the author

Dean Yates is a workplace mental health expert, public speaker, podcast host, and journalist. He is an outspoken advocate on mental health, press freedom and government accountability.
Dean worked for 26 years at Reuters, the international news agency. He was bureau chief in Iraq, responsible for 100 people, and later head of mental health strategy from 2017-2020.
Dean lives in Evandale in Tasmania with his life partner Mary Binks and their three adult children Patrick, Belle and Harry.

From QBD Books  – a selection from the book, produced for QBD blog readers, and shared for my readers on here:

I was a successful foreign correspondent brought to the brink of suicide by workplace trauma, who recovered because of my obsession to get better and the human connection of my family and a mental health system that worked (yes, you read that right).
A combination of factors tipped me into turmoil after my PTSD diagnosis in early 2016: emotional denial about my condition; a psychiatrist in Hobart who didn’t get me; social isolation; and indifferent bosses. Then I was a risk to myself.

One night in late July 2016 I told my wife Mary that I was “toxic” to my family, I just wanted to find peace. I had a plan. Mary was loving but firm: “You need to be hospitalised in a psych ward, and soon.”
Two weeks later I was in the Ward 17 psych unit run by Austin Health in Melbourne, a specialist PTSD unit that treats veterans and first responders.

Establishing safety began the moment I entered. Sure, my anxiety was sky-high, but the intake interviews eased me into accepting I needed hospitalisation. There was no stigma about the word suicide. The building itself was peaceful. I had a private room. Within 24 hours I was sitting across from Dr Maryam, my new psychiatrist, a woman born in Iran who was curious about me. My mind and body felt safe. My treating team could begin to try to stabilise the symptoms I’d accrued from covering the Bali bombings, the Boxing Day tsunami, the Iraq War, from losing two staff to a US gunship attack in Baghdad on July 12, 2007.

Human connections underpinned the treatment I got during three admissions to Ward 17. Dr Maryam, spiritual care worker Cath and social worker Christina helped change the

course of my life. They opened their hearts and took the journey with me. Psychologists Dee and Wendy did it back home in Tasmania. Mary has always been there, ready to talk, listen and to also challenge me if she thought I wasn’t travelling well. It was Mary who said I needed to return to Ward 17 in 2017, and then again the following year. She shared her observations with my treating team. There were no secrets.
I suspect some practitioners prefer to stay behind walls they call boundaries. It’s safer there. Mary was a journalist for 20 years, took 13 years off to raise our three kids then re-trained as a counsellor. She came across this great quote when counselling refugees from war-torn parts of the world: ‘I’d rather a therapist with a warm heart and no boundaries than a therapist with a cold heart and firm boundaries.’ Of course, no one should take the ‘no boundaries’ thing literally. But I’ve seen 25 doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists about my mental state. I know when someone sees me. I feel connection. I can sense a cold heart from a warm one. I know waitlists are horrendous, but if your gut tells you that your therapist doesn’t want to take the journey with you, find one who will.
I’ve concluded from the seven years I spent writing my book that the most critical factor in trauma recovery is the quality of someone’s support network: family, friends, GP, counsellor, psychologist/psychiatrist, employer, workmates, access to hospital services, housing, the justice system. Yes, a support network extends beyond family and friends. It’s the breadth and depth of those networks and how they function together – not the original trauma – that largely determines recovery outcomes. In other words, whether a trauma survivor can find safety. Process their trauma, rebuild relationships, find purpose in life, and live with dignity.
Human connection is the foundation to this.

Writing in the Australian Book Review [July, 2023], from where I gained the impetus to purchase this book, Kevin Foster begins the article as follows:

We’ve all seen the video. The black and white images are washed out, almost solarised, by the heat and glare of a Baghdad morning in 2007. As the men walk and mingle on the street, we can make out the length of their hair, pick out the skinny from the stocky, and identify what they are wearing, loose trousers, casual shirts – one with distinctive broad stripes. Mercifully, we cannot discern their individual features. All the while, the Apache helicopter hovers, unseen and unheard, its cameras trained on the men below. The crew exchange terse messages with US troops in the area and their commanders back at the flight line. Having identified weapons that the men carry and confirmed that they are not coalition forces, the crew request and receive permission to engage, manoeuvring the gunship to get a clearer shot.

Suddenly, shockingly, the ground around the men erupts as the Apache deploys its 30mm Cannon Chain Gun. This weapon is not a ‘gun’ like a rifle, shotgun, or other small arm, but ‘a combat-vehicle mounted war cannon engineered to take out enemy vehicles, convoys or troop concentrations’. It fires 300 rounds per minute. You can imagine, but probably shouldn’t, what it does to a human body. Most of the men fall where they are hit, some manage a few paces before they are cut down. Through the cloud of dust and debris that has been thrown up by the hail of fire, those still twitching or crawling are shot again. When a minivan driver taking his two children to school stops to help the wounded, his vehicle is riddled with fire, the driver is killed, and the children injured. Besides the driver of the van, Saleh Matasher Tomal, two more of the victims are civilians, both employees of Reuters, one a twenty-two-year-old photographer, Namir Noor-Eldeen, the other a driver and fixer, Saeed Chmagh, a forty-year-old father of four. The Apache crew had mistakenly identified the telephoto lens on Namir’s camera as an RPG – a rocket propelled grenade launcher.

25^th May

When I read and reviewed Bruce Pascoe’s book ‘Dark Emu’ a few years ago, I admitted to being a little sceptical about some of his claims regarding ancient practices of the Indigenous peoples, while at the same time, recognising that Pascoe was likely to have much more authentic evidence, than the opinions coming from those inflicting  personal attacks after it’s publication,  sprouted by people like Andrew Bolt and the like! Pascoe faced harsh criticism, and vicious innuendos when the book was released, by Bolt in particular, claiming that Pascoe’s claims of Indigenous descent were a pack of lies! And many jumped on that bandwagon. I personally had no reason to disputePascoe’sclaim.
So it was with interest that I have just finished reading ‘Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra’ by Bruce Pascoe [with Lyn Harwood], published in 2024, 290 pages.
This was a fascinating read, and written describing a period of 12 months [and six seasons] with Pascoe, his family, friends, and business and community associates and their daily activities. It was centred around his property at Yumburra [near Mallacoota], where the organisation ‘Black Duck Foods’ was established, as a guideline for developing traditional food growing and land management processes based on old Indigenous practices. As noted in the book blurb, the authors ‘invite us to imagine a different future for Australia, one where we can honour our relationship with nature and improve agriculture and forestry’. I could comment in quite substantial detail about many aspects of this book, but just a few points which stand out from my reading of it.

• The amazing inter-action that Pascoe demonstrates with the native birds and animals that he comes into contact with on a daily, almost hourly basis, over the 12 months of the book’s time line.
• The enormity of the many trips to takes to gives speeches, presentations, attend family get-togethers, and community and regional functions, etc – I could almost feel the exhaustion, and his relief at returning home to Yumburra after those many ventures away;
• Pascoe’s very personal perspectives on the effect on himself and the people of Mallacoota during the 2019/2020 bushfire disaster.
• The extensive glossary of Aboriginal words demonstrated for the many birds, animals and plant life described through the course of the book.
• Pascoe’s frequent references as part of his everyday life, to seemingly minor issues, viz, returning home after a tiring day, and simply didn’t feel; like cooking a meal; regular flashbacks to this sporting achievements [or failures]; the Richmond Football team; and most importantly, the insertion from time to time of the reactions, and the affect on him, of comments and/or criticisms about his Black Emu book, and his almost philosophical attitude to accepting the attacks that arose from that publication.

A few brief quotations to perhaps illustrate this normality so often of much of his life”

• I’m aware that I often complain about tiredness but it is a fact of my life these days’
• Neither am I as tolerant of cold weather. There was a severe frost on the last day of July and it made me ache;
• The lyrebirds had been really loud and active over the last few weeks, as the autumn weather gets hold of the country….Their calls really do take over at this time of year and their increased activity is a delight;
• I wasn’t picked in Mallacoota’s grand final cricket side! What, ..you can’t find a place for a seventy -four-year-old of limited agility whose bowling no longer rotates…..;
• Lyn and I went to a frog identification workshop in the Genoa Community Hall and got very enthused. To celebrate I cooked a roast meal for the family on the BBQ firepit;
• The Murnong [a Yam daisy plant] undergoes a real dieback in late summer but are now shooting again. The lilies never seem to go into recess and we have found that we can get delicious tubers for at least nine months of the year and often twenty to thirty tubers per plant. …I think this will be a staple of Australian Salads in the future. But will Aboriginal people  be allowed in the industry? Or is ir just one more dispossession?
• Wonga pie [from the Wonga Pigeon] is a favourite meal, unsustainable for 26 million people, but very tolerable when the human population  was 1-2 million, and the totemic system ensured no food was over-harvested;
• Their ‘relatively pet’  Ganggang Cockatoo [named Clark] –  A magpie eventually stabbed Clark in the eye and killed him. Just one more reason to hate Collingwood!
• I love the Kings Cross Hotel but, while the view from it is colourful and lively, and I never tire of that vibrance, I do grieve for the struggle of many of those lives. Next morning, I had a sad breakfast in the dirtiest  café I have see in years. Home of the desperate.

And so we could go on!!!   Indeed, as described as part of it’s publicity, this book is –  ‘a deeply personal story about the consequences and responsibility of disrupting Australia’s history’  – [history from the European perspective anyway].

In summary, Bruce Pascoe and Lyn Harwood have invited us onto the Country they call home in Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra, reflecting on life after publishing Dark Emu.  In the aftermath of devastating bushfires in north-eastern Victoria, the couple rebuilt their farm. Here, they run the Aboriginal social enterprise Black Duck Foods, committed to traditional food-growing

I can do a much better job of describing this book through the views of another author – Tony Birch is an Aboriginal Australian author, academic and activist. He regularly appears on ABC local radio and Radio National shows and at writers’ festivals.  Writing for the Sydney Morning Herald on April 4th, 2024,  he described ‘Black Duck’  as ‘At its heart, Bruce Pascoe’s Black Duck is a love story of both people and Country’. I’ve copied his article in full, and it begins with a summary of the outcome of Pascoe’s Dark Emu, and how the success of the book [despite the criticism it received] partially led to the Black Duck project.

Tony Birch writes  – 

‘When Bruce Pascoe published Dark Emu with the Indigenous-owned publishing house Magabala Books, he could not have foreseen the phenomenon that the book would create. Ten years after its release in 2014, Dark Emu has sold close to 400,000 copies. It has had a major impact on our understanding of the relationship between Aboriginal agriculture and Country.

The book has also met with controversy, most of it surfacing when it became obvious that the reception of Dark Emu was also producing energetic dialogues of inclusion and respect between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.

Pascoe’s critics took aim at his argument that Aboriginal people could not be relegated to the status of mere hunter-gatherers. The irony should not be lost that those who suddenly sought to privilege the concept of the hunter-gatherer, were defending a trope that had historically supported the legal sleight of hand, terra nullius, being that Aboriginal peopled wandered on Country and had no productive claim to it.

What Bruce Pascoe highlighted with Dark Emu was a sophisticated interconnection between agriculture, sustainability and Country.

While some argued over the interpretation of archival documents and footnotes, others influenced by the book accepted the generosity offered by Pascoe in subsequent lectures, writers festival conversations and the inevitable Ted-Talk.

Pascoe was able to harness a willingness, or more perhaps an existential desire, among a sector of the non-Aboriginal community to end a narrative of conflict, to reconsider their relationships to Aboriginal people and Country, and to proactively address the ecological damage to land caused by colonial agricultural practices and increasingly, climate change.

Dark Emu was primarily a challenge to existing power structures and the marginalisation of Aboriginal people. Pascoe was able to build strong and sustainable relationships, which were themselves a threat to the inequitable status quo. Aboriginal communities became interested in Pascoe’s work.

It was gratifying for Aboriginal people, particularly in south-eastern Australia, to realise that, finally, their traditional land-management practices were being valued, and that young people in their communities could engage with Country with renewed pride. Non-Aboriginal rural communities and farmers were also influenced by Pascoe’s research. Some have since forged partnerships with him.

Black Duck: A Year at Yumburra is structured as the story of a year’s activities on Yumburra farm, a property on far south-east Gippsland where Bruce Pascoe and his partner, Lyn Harwood, run the enterprise Black Duck Foods. It is a venture they were able to establish due to the commercial success of Dark Emu.

The book visits the six seasons of Indigenous culture on the farm, from “late summer”, through “autumn”, “winter”, “early” and “late spring”, before ending in “early summer” the following year. We are provided with an insight into the commercial operation of the farm, and Pascoe’s poetic eulogising of the bread baked from harvesting indigenous grain. He sure loves his bread.

We also meet the many characters, both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people who have been drawn to Pascoe’s vision. But Black Duck is far more than a log of a farmer’s year on the land, a story of the occasional eccentricities of rural life, or Pascoe’s need to habitually mention the Richmond Football Club. (An annoying, decades-old tic of his.)

This is a deeply philosophical book. It is the story of a man and the woman he loves deeply, their growth as individuals, as a couple, and parents and grandparents, deeply respectful of Country and the need to live humbly with it. At its heart, Black Duck is a story of watching, listening, reflecting and hopefully, growing.

It may seem odd to describe the book as a “comfort read”. The book addresses the difficult issues of frontier violence and massacre, the heartbreak of seeing a loved dog in pain and having to shoot it, and the continuing damage done to Country by the ill-informed and wilfully ignorant. The concept of comfort could also dilute the power of Black Duck, particularly when the political etymology of the work conjures memories of ex-prime minister John Howard’s “relaxed and comfortable” recipe for engaging with the past.

Black Duck reinforces our need to actively care for Country. There are many people across Australia doing so, regardless of the obstacles they face. I take comfort from the fact that having faced damaging bushfires, droughts and the increasing occurrence of un-natural events, people such Pascoe, Harwood and many others reject a sense of helplessness. They are on the front line of ecological activism in the truest sense.

 I take great comfort in my understanding that Aboriginal communities across the continent are the knowledge holders we need to protect Country into the future, and to fully value the non-human animal and plant species that create the balance we require to become genuinely inclusive.’

About the authors

Lyn Harwood has worked as an editor and artist amongst many other things.

Bruce  Pascoe is a Yuin, Bunurong and Tasmanian man and a writer of literary fiction, non-fiction, poetry, essays and children’s literature. He is the enterprise professor in Indigenous Agriculture at the University of Melbourne. He is best known for his work Dark Emu: Aboriginal Australia and the Birth of Agriculture.

This contribution looks at three books read over recent weeks.  I’ve included some parts of professional reviews together with my own brief comments.

• Desert Queen by Janet Wallach;
• The Wartime Book Club by Kate Thompson; and
• Milat by Clive Small & Tom Gilling

21^st April

I recently watched a 2015 movie about this lady, which encouraged a search for a book about her.  Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Advisor to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia, by Janet Wallach, 1^st published in 1996; 419 pages. The book was ordered from England, and arrived some three months later.

As ‘Goodreads’ describes it – ‘What makes this book remarkable is that it teaches both history, WW1 and the Middle East, and is a biographical exposé on a remarkable woman: Gertrude Bell’ . Indeed it does all of that, and so much more.  ‘Turning away from the privileged world of the “eminent Victorians,” Gertrude Bell (1868—1926) explored, mapped, and excavated the world of the Arabs. Recruited by British intelligence during World War I, she played a crucial role in obtaining the loyalty of Arab leaders, and her connections and information provided the brains to match T. E. Lawrence’s brawn. After the war, she played a major role in creating the modern Middle East and was, at the time, considered the most powerful woman in the British Empire.  In this masterful biography, Janet Wallach shows us the woman behind these achievements–a woman whose passion and defiant independence were at odds with the confined and custom-bound England she left behind. Too long eclipsed by Lawrence, Gertrude Bell emerges at last in her own right as a vital player on the stage of modern history, and as a woman whose life was both a heartbreaking story and a grand adventure.

Amazon goes further – ‘Here is the story of Gertrude Bell, who explored, mapped, and excavated the Arab world throughout the early twentieth century. Recruited by British intelligence during World War I, she played a crucial role in obtaining the loyalty of Arab leaders, and her connections and information provided the brains to match T. E. Lawrence’s brawn. After the war, she played a major role in creating the modern Middle East and was, at the time, considered the most powerful woman in the British Empire’. What is not mentioned there is the actual role she played in helping to create the origins of the modern state of Iraq, as part of the pre-WW1 configuration of the broader Middle East, and this I found of particular interest [see quote from pps 214-215 below].

Writing for Publishers Weekly [www.publishersweekly.com]

‘To Sir Mark Sykes, the pre-WWI British Foreign Office Arabist, “”that damned fool,”” Miss Bell, created an “”uproar”” wherever she went in the Middle East and was “”the terror of the desert.”” Three social seasons were all a young lady of good family was allotted to snare a husband. Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) had thrice failed and received the consolation prize, a trip to Teheran to visit her uncle, the British envoy there. After that, she could not be kept close to the dank family manse in Northumbria but was drawn to the sun-drenched Middle East. Dominated even there by her Victorian father, head of a family-owned ironworks, she was denied permission to marry a moneyless diplomat. She refused–to her later regret–a married lover in the military and assuaged her disappointment by pressing British interests in Arab lands east of Suez, becoming in effect the maker of postwar Iraq. The first woman to earn a first-class degree in modern history at Oxford, she wrote seven influential books on the Middle East and, following WWI, was named oriental secretary to the British High Commission in Iraq. Not just another book about an eccentric lady traveller, this colourful, romantic biography tells of a woman with an inexhaustible passion for place that did not always substitute successfully for continuing heartbreak. Despite some maudlin passages, Wallach, coauthor with her husband, John Wallach, of Arafat, vividly evokes a memorable personality’.

In order to illustrate just a few brief aspects of Gertrude Bell’s life and work, I’ve selected various quotations from throughout the book, and while these snippets from the earlier sections of the book don’t do justice to her life in total, they provide some indication of how she was perceived by those she worked for over a number of decades in the Middle East.

• Jerusalem. To Christians it was the way to God, the site of Christ’s crucifixion and Ascension, the scene of the Last Supper, the Via Dolorosa and the Stations of the Cross, close to Bethlehem, where Christ was born. To Muslims it was the opening to Allah, the third holiest city in Islam, the place where Muhammad was carried from Mecca on his legendary steed and where he rose mystically to heaven. To Jews it was the symbol of their homeland, the capital of ancient Israel, created by King David when he united the Hebrew tribes,  and the resting place of the Ark of the Law, their covenant with God. To some people, such as sixteenth-century German mapmakers, it was the center of the world. To the Ottoman Empire, which ruled it now, it was a prized possession [page 44];
• Re. mountain climbing exploits:  “’Had she not been full of courage and determination, we must have perished. Of all the amateur climbers he had known, he added – men and women – no one had equaled her ‘in coolness, bravery and judgement;” [page 65];
• She adored breaking new ground, being the center of attention, with everyone’s eyes and ears on her. But no less fascinated by those whom she deemed of particular interest, she focused her own attention on the way they thought and behaved. At home however, life had curdled from ennui. The English were too predictable; she could tell in advance what a politician might do or what her dinner partner might say. The one group she had met that was different was the Arabs; they excited her.   They stimulated her imagination; they were romantic, exotic, mysterious, unplumbed. [page 68].
• She wanted to inform the English of the ways of the East. She would tell them about the Arab world and it’s culture; it’s people, Bedouin tribesmen and educated townsmen; it’s language, flowery and circuitous; it’s manners, both primitive and polished; its delicate art; it’s intricate architecture; it’s history of holy wars and conquests; it’s literature filled with symbolism and poetry;  it’s politics thraught with international rivalries and tribal revenge; it’s religion of Islam; it’s wailing music; it’s food stapes of flat bread and yogurt; it’s commerce of bazaar merchants and international traders; it’s agriculture of wheat farming and camel grazing; it’s fertile soil; it’s oil-rich sand; it’s terrain of palm trees, incidental water and endless desert. [page 70];
• The Oriental’s action is guided by traditions of conduct and morality that go back to the beginnings of civilisation, traditions unmodified as yet by any important change in the manner of life to which they apply and out of which they arose. [page 72];
• Gertrude saw herself as the equal of any man, but most women, she was firmly convinced, were not. [page 83];
• When the British troops marched into the Baghdad of 1917, a thousand years of splendour and almost a million people, history had swept most of that away. The tyrannical force the Mongiols, the feudal rule of the Persians, the corrupt occupations  of the Turks, and the plagues and floods of the nineteenth century had wiped out most of the city –  the British found only 200,000 people, mostly Sunni Muslims and Jews living in shabby buildings inside the crumbling city walls. [page 194].
• Regarding Gertrude’s influence on the Arabs:  Upon receiving her eloquent plea, the Arab chief said, he summoned his men from the desert and read the letter aloud. ‘My brothers, you have heard what the woman has to say to us. She is only a woman, but she is a mighty and valiant one. Now we all know that Allah has made all women inferior to men. But if the women of the Anglez are like her, the men must be like lions in strength and valour. We had better make peace with them’. [page 197];
• Regarding the Balfour Declaration of 1917 [basically Palestine for the Jews] – Gertude wrote ‘I hate Mr Balfour’s Zionist pronouncement. It’s my belief that it can’t be carried out, the country is wholly unsuited to the ends the Jews have in view; it is a poor land, incapable of great development and with a solid two-thirds of it’s population Mohammedan Arabs who look on Jews with contempt. To my mind it’s a wholly artificial scheme divorced from all relation to facts and I wish it the ill success it deserves, and will get’. Part of her prediction came true, with the trouble between the Arabs and the Jews lasting to this day. But the wholly artificial scheme of a Jewish national homeland, became a reality [though at great cost to others !!]. [page 202-203];
• Exhilarated as she was over defining the borders, she was even more excited about constructing a brand new state. There had never being an independent Iraq, no political entity, no administrative unit had ever existed.  No borders like these had been drawn since ancient times; no western banner had ever flown over it. Now she was not only deciding a country; she was devising its shape and determining its composition; who would lead it, how it would be governed, who would be included in its citizenry, what would be its laws and institutions. Imperialist and Orientalist both, she was creating an asset for England, constructing an entity for the Arabs. [pages 214-215];
• Gertrude wrote: Muslim women who never go out of the house and see no one are absolutely helpless in the face of their menfolk and there’s such a feeling  against interfering in a man’s domestic affairs that no one does anything to help. [page 329];
• Upon her death in 1926, King George, writing to her parents: ‘The Queen and I are grieved to hear of the death of your distinguished and gifted daughter whom we held in high regard. The nation will wish us mourn the loss of one who by her intellectual powers, force of character and personal courage rendered important and what I trust will prove lasting benefit to the country and those regions where she worked with such devotion and self-sacrifice..’

As noted by a number of reviewers and publishers –  ‘Too long eclipsed by Lawrence, Gertrude Bell emerges at last in her own right as a vital player on the stage of modern history, and as a woman whose life was both a heartbreaking story and a grand adventure’. This was a real personal exercise in learning so much about the make-up of the Middle East prior to World War I, and un the immediate decades following that world conflict. In many ways, also an interesting follow up from two recent books read [and reviewed previously in this Column] in relation to the Australian Light Horse  and their exploits in Egypt and the Middle East and ‘historical’ Biblical areas of that part of the world. I’d not realised just how mch influence and control, Turkey had in that part of the world prior to WWI

26^th April

‘The Wartime Book Club by Kate Thompson, published in 2024, 430 pages, [plus 72 pages of reflections, appendices and historical notes and photos].  A wonderful historical book, written as a novel, but based on true events – the story of the Nazi occupation of Jersey  in the Channel Islands during 1943 and the surrounding years.  I’d never given much thought to this aspect of World War II and had a limited knowledge of the events in the Channel Islands.

On this occasion, Kate Thompson brings to reality, the severity of the hardships, the brutality, faced by an ordinary peaceful community as their cobbled streets become dominated by the presence of German soldiers during most of the war period, and their lives and daily activities are completely by the occupation forces.

We read of Jerdsey’s only librarian, and her reaction  to the  Nazi orders to destroy certain books,  where instead she hides many such books away in secrecy, and also, in an attempt to raise the morale of the local community, forms a wartime book club, which achieves its aims, bringing into the hearts and souls of much of the population, a need for books and reading which for many had never existed before  –   until eventually, it was  shut down by the Germans.

The other interesting storyline, involved the post office and the workers who attempted, often unsuccessfully, to either stop letters or delay their receipt to the Germans, written by local residents ‘dobbing in’ neighbours for hiding escapees, or breaking some other rule or law imposed by the occupiers.

I found an especially intriguing aspect of the book was that at the beginning of most chapters, some of those banned books are listed and described, some perhaps surprising examples, such as:

• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck;
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickins [because it featured Jewish characters];
• The books of Sigmund Freud [he died in exile in Britain from cancer, while four of his sisters died in concentration camps];
• All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque [depictions of German failures in WWI];
• Ernest Hemingway’s writings [corrupting influence];
• The Call of the Wild by Jack London;
• Bambi, a Life in the Woods by Felix Salten, banned because of it’s darker origins about persecution and anti-Semitism in 1920s Austria;
• The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, with many of these stories banned, while later, the Allies banned the tales in Germany after the fall of the Nazis, who glorified Little Red Riding Hood into a symbol of the German people saved from the Jewish wolf…………………………..and so on, including a number of German writers who views did not paint the picture desired by the Nazis.

From  Goodreads and other publishers –  ‘From enchanting cliff tops and white sandy bays to the pretty cobbled streets of St Helier, Jersey is known as the land of milk and honey. But for best friends Bea Rose, the local postwoman, and Grace Le Motte, who works in the island’s only library, it becomes the frontline to everyday resistance when their beloved island is occupied by German forces in 1940.  Inspired by astonishing true events, THE WARTIME BOOK CLUB is an unforgettable story of everyday bravery and resistance, full of romance, drama, and camaraderie and a tribute to the joy of reading and the power of books in our darkest hour’.

Or as succinctly described by Booktopia this book ‘Based on astonishing real events, The Wartime Book Club is a ‘love letter’ to the power of books in the darkest of times – as well as a moving page-turner that brings to life the remarkable, untold story of an island at war.’  Well worth a read!!

2^nd May

If the foregoing suggested reading is not grim enough, let me point you to a 2014 publication  ‘Milat: Inside Australia’s Biggest Manhunt: A Detective’s Story’ by Clive Small and Tom Gilling [328 pages]. A detailed former detective’s chilling and forensic description of what was described as the biggest and most complex manhunt in Australian history. The story of Ivan Milat, the serial killer who preyed on young hitchhikers and back-packers who were the innocent victims of a brutal murderer. Belanglo – a place that became synonymous with pure evil.  A very  powerful read,   and quite obviously written from the mind and analytical writing of a former detective, who in fact worked on the case.

Behind the many false leads and dead ends, precious clues emerged that pointed to one man.

The book concludes with very detailed descriptions in a series of appendices of the circumstances [and often minute details] implicating Ivan Milat in the seven backpacker murders and the attempted abduction of an 8^th person, together with detailed technical descriptions of the weapons, etc, used in those crimes.

In summary terms, this is the story of how Ivan Milst was caught. The author, Clive Small, detective in the case, takes the reader inside the operation as he led his team, and how they painstakingly pieced together the evidence that would put Milat behind bars. But as the publicity for the book notes, questions remained, basically unanswered such as did he act alone, were there other victims, and how much did his large family really know?

The book, in its concluding chapters, also examines various other initially unsolved murders, and refers to more than a hundred still not solved at the time of the book publication.

As for the author, Clive Small is a former detective and Assistant Commissioner of the NSW Police. His investigations included the murder of anti-drugs campaigner Donald Mackay, the Nugan Hand bank, the shooting of police officer Michael Drury, the murder of Cabramatta MP John Newman and this book about  the backpacker murders.

As indicated, the book goes into extremely  detailed analysis of all evidence found during the course of the examination, and if you prefer your reading not to be dominated on ongoing minute details, perhaps you might like to seek our a less investigative descriptions of the crimes and the man involved. But in writing in this fashion, we get an excellent description of the type of detail and evidence that needs to be examined so thoroughly and in many cases repeatedly to achieve a correct outcome.,

This contribution looks at a broad selection of books or publications read over the first three months  of 2024, and is provided for the general interest of readers of this Column.

A range of decades, and subject matters, are represented covering the years of publication from 1949 through to 2024.

• Mr Einstein’s Secretary by Matthew Reilly;
• Australian Foreign Affairs’ Issue 20 –  ‘Dead in the Water: The AUKUS delusion;
• ‘The Last Charge of the Australian Light Horses’ by Peter Fitzsimons;
• ‘One Wet Season’ by Ion L. Idriess [published in 1949, including the author’s biography];
• ‘Call Of The Raven’  by Wilbur Smith [with Corban Addison];
• ‘Kidnapped’ by Mark Tedeschi QC [the true story of the kidnapping of 10 year old Graeme Thorne];
• Australia’s Light Horse: The Campaign in the Middle East, 1916-1918, by Phillip Bradley;
• National Geographic special edition – ‘The Story of Jesus’; and,
• Quarterly Essay 93: Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics by Lech Blaine.

20^th January

 ‘Mr Einstein’s Secretary’ by Matthew Reilly, published in 2023, 450 pages. This is the first book I have read by that author, generally a writer of crime and thriller fiction which I usually don’t bother with these days.  The title attracted me when I was the QBD bookshelf last Friday when I was in Melton recently..  Described as about ‘A secretary like no other in a Epic spanning 40 years’  – leading up to the 2^nd World War, during the war and beyond, mainly set in either Nazi Germany or the USA throughout that period. A form of historical novel of the kind I usually enjoy – as described by the author himself  –  “This a work of fiction.  Hanna Fischer [the Secretary] is fictitious. But many of the events depicted in this novel really happened and many of the characters in it actually existed.”  He then goes on to describe the real fates of those ‘real’ characters, or events,  such as the Nazis, Bormann or Hitler;  the Ku Klux Klan march of 1925; the Manhattan nuclear project; the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games; the Muhlviertal ‘Hare’ Hunt; and so on.

The book tells  the story of Hanna Fischer, a young woman who aspired to study physics under Albert Einstein. However, her life takes a dramatic turn when she becomes a student, a secretary, a sister, and a spy. The novel takes the reader on a thrilling journey through some of history’s most dangerous times, from racist gangs in Berlin to gangsters in New York City, Nazis in the 1930s, and Hitler’s inner circle during World War II.

As Goodreads describes the novel ……………………

“All Hanna Fischer ever wanted to do was to study physics under the great Albert Einstein. But when, as a teenager in 1919, her life is suddenly turned upside-down, she is catapulted into a new and extraordinary life – as a student, a secretary, a sister and a spy.  From racist gangs in Berlin to gangsters in New York City, Nazis in the 1930s and Hitler’s inner circle during the Second World War, Hanna will encounter some of history’s greatest minds and most terrible moments, all while desperately trying to stay alive.   She is a most unique secretary and she will work for many bosses – from shrewd businessmen to vile Nazis, to the greatest boss of them all, Mr Albert Einstein…  Spanning forty years, this is the thrilling tale of a young woman propelled through history’s most dangerous times. But read it carefully, because all may not be as it seems”.

The book is certainly written in an interesting style  –  in an interview with the author about the book which is a novel about a secretary navigating her way through a world of gangsters, the 1929 stock market crash, Nazi Germany and World War II, with flashbacks and flash-forwards, multiple points of view and characters including Albert Einstein, Albert Speer, Werner Heisenberg, and several geniuses of the atomic age, well does a novel like this even come about?

Reilly:  “I think it’s safe to say….it’s unlike any of my other novels….. In short, I wanted Mr Eistein’s Secretary to be an epic. To be a story that spanned decades. In doing that, I wanted time and place to be characters in the story. Structurally, the story is built on Hanna remembering her life, either during her fake funeral or through the three interrogations she endured [and everything that went in-between].  So if she is recalling been in a particular place or situation, that triggers other memories of being in that place at another time.

Most of the book is written in the first person, from Hanna’s viewpoint and memories, but on occasions, it is her dangerous twin sister [Ooma] relating the memories!!

In writing about the sister, Reilly explains that “I wrote Ooma as a selfish, petty yet brilliant person who has what’s known today as ‘borderline personality disorder’. This story is about Hanna’s remarkable journey – and remarkable growth – through her life. I wanted Ooma to be a wildcard in that life, a constant danger lurking at the edges of Hanna’s world. The way she can change emotions in a heartbeat makes her unpredictable and very dangerous”

I don’t know if I’ll read anymore of Reilly’s books –  as indicated earlier the ‘inclusion of historical reality in the fictionized story’ is what attracted this reader on this occasion………………..

11^th February 2024

Finished reading ‘Australian Foreign Affairs’ Issue 20 –  ‘Dead in the Water: The AUKUS delusion.

The latest issue of Australian Foreign Affairs examines Australia’s momentous decision to form a security pact with the United States and the United Kingdom that includes an ambitious, expensive and risky plan to acquire nuclear-power submarines – a move that will have far-reaching military and strategic consequences.

Dead in the water looks at whether the AUKUS deal will enhance or undermine Australia’s security as tensions between China and the US rise, at the impact on Australia’s ties with its regional neighbours, and at whether the submarines plan is likely to ever be achieved.

Essays by four writers cover the question of whether the deal is a futuristic delusion.

Hugh White examines whether Australia needs nuclear-powered submarines and whether the AUKUS plan will deliver them.

Susannah Patton looks at the lessons for Australia from the region’s responses to AUKUS.

Elizabeth Buchanan explores how Australia could use its valuable geography to enhance ties with AUKUS allies and other partners.

Andrew Davies weighs the benefits of nuclear-powered submarines against the costs of acquiring and maintaining them.

Other writers, such as Hervé Lemahieu propose that Australia pursue a common travel area and an integrated digital market with the Pacific, while Jack Corbett considers Solomon Islands’ economic options in an era of great power rivalry

Meanwhile, from the introductory comment by Jonathan Peasrlman, editor of the Quarterly Essay –

Australia is embarking on the most expensive – and arguably the most ambitious – defence acquisition in its history. Yet the decision to buy nuclear-powered submarines has been subject to little scrutiny, partly because Labor – given hours to consider the AUKUS deal by the Morrison government – duly fell in behind it.  Serious questions are now emerging about the plan’s risks and costs. As Hugh White concludes in a scathing assessment: “Coalition and Labor governments have committed Australia to acquire nuclear-powered submarines that we do not need, via a plan which will almost certainly fail”. And time is pressing: if AUKUS is destined to fail, it needs to be abandoned quickly – to lower the wasted costs and to ensure that Australia is not left defenceless.

So in summary,  Hugh White [an Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre of the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, long-time defence and intelligence analyst, and author who has published works on military strategy and international relations] in particular, argues in much detail, while considering the pros and cons, that AUKUS is ‘a grave mistake’ He concludes his essay with the statement that ‘our political leaders have given us the charade of AUKUS, which will stand as a fitting symbol of our failure, as a country, to respond effectively to the biggest shift in our strategic circumstances since 1788. If we are to recover from this blunder, and do better, we must start by understanding and accepting how much our region, and the world beyond it, is changing’.

The other writers in the issue explore the prospects of AUKUS succeeding, the logistical challenges [i.e., the enormous costs and challenges in terms of ongoing support and maintenance requirements needed should the scheme ever eventuate], the regional responses, and alternative options.

If the subject and its broader implications are of interest, you may consider it worthwhile purchasing a copy, usually available at most good bookstores, or through Schwartz Books, or www.australianforeignaffairs.com

13^th February 2024

 ‘The Last Charge of the Australian Light Horse’ by Peter Fitzsimons, published in 2023, 497 pages

A great read, as always from this author, and another brilliant depiction of an event and circumstances leading up to it from the early ‘European’ history of Australian.

The book description, as provided by Amazon and various other suppliers reads that  –

On 31st October 1917, as the day’s light faded, the Australian Light Horse charged against their enemy. Eight hundred men and horses galloped four miles across open country, towards the artillery, rifles and machine guns of the Turks occupying the seemingly unassailable town of Beersheba. What happened in the next hour changed the course of history.

This brave battle and the extraordinary adventures that led to it are brought vividly to life by Australia’s greatest storyteller, Peter FitzSimons. It is an epic tale of farm boys, drovers, bank clerks, dentists, poets and scoundrels transported to fight a war half a world away, and is full of incredible characters: from Major Banjo Paterson to Lawrence of Arabia; the brilliant writer Trooper Ion Idriess and the humble General Harry Chauvel; the tearaway Test fast bowler ‘Tibby’ Cotter and the infamous warhorse, Bill the Bastard. All have their part to play in the enthralling, sprawling drama of the Australian Light Horse.

Theirs was a war fought in an ancient land with modern weapons; where the men of the Light Horse were trained in sight of the pyramids, drank in the brothels of Cairo and fought through lands known to them only as names from the Bible.

[That fact alone provided a very poignant aspect to the story –  read, and basically written at the same time as the  modern day tragedies of death and displacement take place in areas of the Middle East which feature so prominently in the book such as Gaza].

The Last Charge of the Australian Light Horse traces the hard path of the Light Horse from the bleakest of starts – being deprived of their horses and fighting at Gallipoli in the tragic Battle of the Nek – to triumph and glory in the desert. Revealing the feats of the Australians who built the legend, it is a brilliantly told tale of courage, resilience and derring-do from Australia’s favourite storyteller.

The text included a couple of quotes from Verner Knuckey [my Mother’s father]. One of those –

“Lone comrades are found too, including the discovery of one Australian trooper of the 8th Light Horse who, Trooper Verner Knuckey will recount, ‘had been shot in both legs and lay out for three days and nights..  When the Turks had found him, they had, ‘made him as comfortable as possible and left a bottle of water beside him. That water saved his life.  Any dirty action done can I think be traced to the German and Austrian officers in charge of these Turks”

[from ‘The Last Charge of the Australian Light Horse’ by Peter Fitzsimons, pub. 2023, page 121]

21^st February

Today [or tonight] I finished reading ‘One Wet Season’ by Ion L. Idriess, published in 1949 [272 pages].This book was a Christmas gift by my Mother to my Father in 1949, one of a number of books written by Idriess that were in my father’s possession and passed down to myself.  I’d read a couple of them previously – my attention was drawn back to him after reading Peter Fitzsimons’ latest book about the charge of the Light Horse [previous review], where a number of quotations throughout the book were attributed to the writings of Idriess who also served with the Light Horse in WWI

‘One Wet Season’  is a book about life in the Kimberley region of Western Australia[1] during the wet season of 1934. The book records true stories of the lives of the pioneers and Aboriginals of the Kimberley, centring predominantly on those living in the King Leopold Ranges and spending the wet season in the town of Derby, Western Australia.

Ion Idriess, who has spent many a long ‘Wet’ in the West Kimberley, puts into print a thrilling account of this aspect of Australian life.  Perhaps I mightn’t use the term ‘thrilling’ in describing the book, but certainly enlightening and of historical interest in depicting not just the life of that time & part of Australia, but the attitudes and perspectives from the point of view of those living there and/or passing through. I was especially interested in the attitude to the Aboriginal population by the whites in the area and the many descriptions of interaction between the two races. While far from perfect, in this area of WA in particular, those interactions seemed to come over as less violent in nature, as compared for eg, with the latter part of the C19th century in Queensland.

Times have changed [to some degree] and much of the language used in describing the Aboriginal peoples is no longer acceptable, and rightly so,  would simply not be tolerated in today’s society. But in the 1940s and in writing about our native Australians, Idriess was speaking to the culture of the time. Take the following brief selection of quotations from my copy [originally published by Angus and Robertson].

• “Poor old Venus, [from page 250] I believe she really was the ugliest lubra in the Kimberleys, but that dog loved her.  ‘Google-eyed Maggie on Napier Downs is about the ugliest gin I ever met’, said an old-timer quietly, ‘but I’m not holding that against her. Many a gin in this country has done a white man a good turn’. The boys puffed silently at their pipes a moment; the old-timer had spoken truly. ‘Ever you noticed,’ remarked Jack Knopp, ‘how the abo when he’s been working for a few years with the whites, but particularly the statin bred abo, turns around on his brother’….”
• Yarning the time away [page 260] – “’There’s still a few more or less wild munjons over the Range,’ mused a stockman, ‘but I suppose they’ll all be broken in time, ‘ he added regretfully. ‘They’re all tame along the Fitzroy now,’ yawned a teamster from Go-Go Station, ‘fat as prime beef. And plenty of piccaninnies amongst them’”
• And speaking of a chase by white authorities [page 263] tracking a group of  ‘bush niggers’ who has been spearing the settler’s cattle , but who made their escape despite all precautions by the trackers, one of those chasers noted that  – “And yet those low-browed sons of apes knew exactly  when we were coming, just strolled out of the trap at their leisure”.

Finally, the following description provides an interesting portrayal of the  station Aborigines, certainly on those properties where they were better treated and/or regarded by those they worked for.

From pages 260-261

“The big stations along the Fitzroy, and further east to the Territory border treated their aboriginal stockmen and families well. Food, clothes, quarters, medicines, all that they needed. And all are free to come and go as they wish. The stations were very desirous of holding their aborigines, to keep them contented and healthy, and to encourage families.  The result was that most of the river aborigines clung to the local stations, quite contented, until annual walkabout – the walkabout that every aboriginal must have,  when he and she must return to the Wilds, right back to the primitive for a time. Every wet sees the exodus. Loaded up like camels under food and blankets and billy-cans and all the little treasures accumulated throughout the Dry, the mob stream out  from the station, men, women, children, and digs, the river waterholes ringing with  their farewell calls and promises of speedy return. Soon they will be right out in the bush. And there with cries of relief they throw off the last vestige of clothing in hilarious corroboree, anoint their bodies with bungarra [goanna] fat and worse,  paint themselves with the ochred bars of warriorhood, seize their weapons and stamp and chant and set straight out on the hunt. Once again, they feel they real men and women. And hungry for bush food from Mother Earth.

Well-conditioned now, after nine month’s station feeding. But, after the Wet they will come streaming back to the stations hollow-gutted, ribbed like a stock-horse in drought-time, voracious for plover [flour], tea and tchugar [sugar], and that heavenly luxury, tobacco.

They will gorge like famished wolves until they begin to build up again. For often, during their walkabout, they have gone hungry, cold and wet. Although there is native food in the bush, the hunter must employ constant effort and unremitting bushcraft to secure it. And the station black loses his keen edge of bushcraft, loses his kinship with the Wild, is a child divorced from his Mother Earth.

Yes, most of the ‘tame’ blacks are glad to come back whooping back to the station after a three months’ walkabout. But if tea, sugar, flour, and the precious tobacco grew ready-made in the bush, they would not come back at all”.

About the Author [compliment of a summary from a Wikipedia article].

Ion Llewellyn Idriess  OBE (20 September 1889 – 6 June 1979) was a prolific and influential Australian author.  He wrote more than 50 books over 43 years between 1927 and 1969 – an average of one book every 10 months, and twice published three books in one year (1932 and 1940). His first book was Madman’s Island, published in 1927 at the age of 38, and his last was written at the age of 79. Called Challenge of the North, it told of Idriess’s ideas for developing the north of Australia.  Two of his works, The Cattle King (1936) and Flynn of the Inland (1932) had more than forty reprintings.

Idriess was born in Waverley, a suburb of Sydney, to Juliette Windeyer (who had been born as Juliette Edmunds in 1865 at Binalong) and Walter Owen Idriess (a sheriff’s officer born in 1862, who had emigrated from Dolgellau, in Wales). At birth Ion Idriess’s name was registered as “Ion Windeyer”, although he never seems to have used this name.

From his late teens, he worked in rural New South Wales, particularly in the Narrabri and Moree districts. He travelled extensively around the state, working in a variety of itinerant jobs including employment as a rabbit poisoner, boundary rider, drover, prospecting for gold as well as harvesting sandalwood. He also worked as a shearer and dingo shooter. While working as an opal miner at Lightning Ridge in about 1910, he wrote short pieces for The Bulletin about life on the opal fields. He later headed north, working in several tin mines around Cairns and Cooktown including his own claim. In 1913 he moved to Cape York Peninsula, where he lived with an Aboriginal clan, learning their customs and lifestyle.

With the outbreak of war, in 1914 he returned to Townsville and enlisted in the 5th Light Horse Regiment, AIF, as a trooper.  He saw action in Palestine, Sinai and Turkey, being wounded at Beersheba and Gallipoli – where he acted as spotter for noted sniper Billy Sing.  

After returning to Australia and recuperating from his wounds, he travelled to remote Cape York, and worked with pearlers and missionaries in the Torres Strait islands and Papua New Guinea where he worked as a gold miner. Other ventures included buffalo shooting in the Northern Territory, and journeys to Central and Western Australia.

In 1928 Idriess settled in Sydney where he wrote as a freelance writer. His writing style drew on his experiences as a soldier, prospector, and bushman. He wrote on a multitude of topics, including travel, recollection, biography, history, anthropology and his own ideas on possible future events. His books were generally non-fiction, but written in a narrative, story style. Most of his books were published by Angus & Robertson. Idriess wrote from real life experiences using knowledge he had personally gained by travelling extensively and working at a variety of occupations. “Idriess was no stylist, but his writing was immediate, colourful, well paced and, despite the speed at which it was written, always well structured.”

Although he generally wrote under his name, some early articles for The Bulletin were written under the pseudonym of “Gouger”. When travelling, Idriess was known as “Jack”.

In 1968 he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire for his services to literature.

Idriess died at a nursing home in Mona Vale in Sydney on 6 June 1979, at the age of 89.[8]

His work slipped from favour after his death, but has experienced a renewal of interest. In 2017, Nicolas Rothwell said: “As so often in Australian letters, an initial fall into obscurity and the harsh judgments of the literary establishment serve as good indicators of a writer’s pre-eminence”. His work was never adapted for the screen although several books were optioned by producers.

8^th March 2024

Read  ‘Call Of The Raven’  by Wilbur Smith [with Corban Addison], published in 2020, 410 pages.

Getting into the final few books by Smith –   I don’t whether this is a sign of my age, but   Smith’s novels have always had a strong element of violence in them, but the last couple I have read, and especially this one, the extremity and prevalence of violence, I found much more noticeable, and at times almost disturbing.

Nevertheless, despite that factor, this novel was another great read by this author whose novels I have been reading since  January 1973 [The Lion Feeds was his first novel].

The action-packed and gripping new adventure by number one bestselling author, Wilbur Smith, about one man’s quest for revenge, and the brutality of slavery in America, and the imbalance between humans that can drive, or defeat us. –  THE DESIRE FOR REVENGE CAN BURN THE HEART OUT OF A MAN.
The son of a wealthy plantation owner and a doting mother, Mungo St John is accustomed to wealth and luxury – until he returns from university to discover his family ruined, his inheritance stolen and his childhood sweetheart, Camilla, taken by the conniving Chester Marion. Mungo swears vengeance and devotes his life to saving Camilla-and destroying Chester.  Camilla, trapped in New Orleans, powerless as a kept slave and subject to Chester’s brutish behaviour, must do whatever it takes to survive.  As Mungo battles his own fate and misfortune, he must question what it takes for a man to regain his power in the world when he has nothing, and what he is willing to do to exact revenge

14^th March 2024

This next book was Kidnapped by Mark Tedeschi QC, published in 2015, 317 pages.   It is the  true story of Australia’s only known kidnapping of a child for ransom, from Barrister and Crown Prosecutor Mark Tedeschi. An easily read but fascinating detailed insight into the crime and the investigations that followed, perhaps at a level not seen previously.

 It was 64 years ago, when eight-year-old Graeme Thorne was kidnapped on his way to school in July 1960, Australia was gripped with fear and loathing. What monster would dare take financial advantage of the most treasured bond of love – between parent and child? Just weeks earlier, Graeme’s parents had won a fortune in the Opera House Lottery, and this had attracted the attention of the perpetrator, Stephen Bradley.
Bradley was a most unlikely kidnapper, however his greed for the Thorne’s windfall saw him cast aside any sympathy for his victim or his victim’s family, and drove him to take brazen risks with the life of his young captive.
Kidnapped tells the astounding true story of how this crime was planned and committed, and describes the extraordinary police investigation that was launched to track the criminal down. Mark Tedeschi explores the mind of the intriguing and seriously flawed Stephen Bradley, and also the points of view of the victim, his family – and the police, whose work pioneered the use of many techniques that are now considered commonplace, marking the beginning of modern-day forensic science in Australia.
Using his powerful research and storytelling skills, Mark Tedeschi reveals one of Australia’s greatest true crime dramas, and what can only be described as the trial of the 20th century.

Mark Tedeschi KC has worked as a Barrister and Crown Prosecutor for more than forty years, working on some of Australia’s most significant criminal cases. He was the Senior Crown Prosecutor in New South Wales for twenty years, during which he also served as President of the Australian Association of Crown Prosecutors. Mark has published many articles on the law, history, genealogy and photography, and is the author of critically acclaimed non-fiction titles Eugenia, Kidnapped, Murder at Myall Creek and Missing, Presumed Dead.

Better Reading provided the following Synopsis of the book

Kidnapped is about Stephen Bradley, who perpetrated the 1960 kidnapping for ransom and murder of eight-year-old Sydney schoolboy, Graeme Thorne. This was not only a vivid example of murder for greed, but also marked the beginning in Australia of modern forensic science as a tool in the investigation of serious crime. Many of the techniques of scientific detection used to implicate Bradley had never before been used in a police investigation, but have since become commonplace. Certainly, there had never before been a case in which so many methods of forensic investigation had been used in combination to detect and implicate the perpetrator of this terrible crime. This case therefore marks a watershed in the annals of modern criminal investigation. Mark Tedeschi has prosecuted many people who were prepared to kill to acquire the object of their desires. As such he is uniquely placed to present an insight into the mind of Stephen Bradley. A man so motivated by greed and self-entitlement that when he read about the winner of the Opera House Lottery, his first thought was how much more he deserved the money. From there he located the Thorne family in Sydney’s Eastern suburbs and proceeded to plan the kidnap and ransom of their young son, Graeme. The taking of Graeme off a Sydney street in daylight hours caused shock and horror across the nation and when his body was found the police used all means available, both old and new, to track down Stephen Bradley and convict him.. Mark’s new book is a gripping account of a terrible crime that many people today still remember.

17^th March 2024

‘The Australian Light Horse: The Campaign in the Middle East, 1914-1918’ by Phillip Bradley, published in 2016, 196 pages.  Again, an interesting [and disturbing in view of the enormous casualties faced on all sides] generally overlooked in comparison with the fighting on Gallipoli and the Western Front  during WW 1.

Again, Grandfather Verner Knuckey is quoted on a number of occasions, in the early part of the campaign, as he did not remain with the Light Horse much beyond the end of 1916.

It was interesting comparing this ‘history’ with the book summarised earlier on the Light Horse by Peter Fitzsimons. In this case Bradley provides a much broader and extended history of the Australian Light Horse during WW I, in comparison with Fitzsimons specific concentration on the events leading up to the Charge of the Light Brigade and that event itself. That ‘historical’ battle is treated no differently to many other battles and campaigns b the Light horse in terms of he space in the book devoted to it.

As with the following review [re. National Geographic] I found it of particular interest to read of the geographical locations of so much of the travails of the Light Horse, especially in view of the current events in the Middle East.

From the Australian War Memorial site. We read that:

“The story of the famous Australian Light Horse in the desert campaigns of World War 1. Throughout history, mounted troops have been known as elite men of arms and the Australian Light Horse is a part of that legendary tradition.

Part cavalry and part infantry and often recognised by the emu feathers in their slouch hats, the light  horsemen, were described by the official historian, H.S. Gullett, as ‘in body and spirit the true product of the Australian countryside’. They remain, today, the embodiment of the digger ethos..

After the Gallipoli campaign most of the Australian Light Horse, commanded by Major General Harry Chauvel, remained in Egypt to defend the Suez Canal. After thwarting the Turkish advance at Romani in August 1916 the Light Horse led the advance into Palestine with sparkling victories at Magdhaba and Rafa.

Twice checked at Gaza despite their bold courage, the light horsemen then broke that stalemate following the legendary charge at Beersheba on 31 October 1917. The fall of Jerusalem, the perilous raids on Amman, the trials of the Jordan Valley and the final breakthrough to Damascus followed before Turkey surrendered on 30 October 1918…In Australian Light Horse their story is brought to vivid life through the diaries, letters and photographs of the light horsemen who took part in the bloody battles of the desert campaigns o f the Sinai and Palestine from April 1916 to October 1918”…

On a personal note, my grandfather is referred to a number of occasions early in the book, though he did not remain long enough with the Light Horse, to participate in the more active campaigns described in this book. For the record, his diaries [which are now held in the Australian War Museum] are referenced on page 8, and on various occasions through pages 36-39.

One of those reads as follows:

“The 8th Light Horse was soon in contact and the firing was pretty brisk. Verner Knuckey was behind the top of a sandhill but was being fired on from the flank. The first thing he knew there was a vicious zip and sand rose about two feet to his right. When the second shot hit the same distance to his left, Knuckey knew it was time to move and sure enough the third bullet hit the ground where he had been lying. His squadron retired soon thereafter, the light horsemen suffering terribly in the heat. The only shade was what the horse threw, Knuckey wrote. In the middle of the day, each man would try to sleep under their horse, which would not move an inch..” …The next four hours was agony for us, wrote Verner Knuckey. Five Echuca boys copped it and only two survived to be invalided home. Knuckey’s tent mate and great friend, Dick Chambers, was one of those killed, along with twelve horses. Poor brutes, Knuckey wrote, there are no half measures about shrapnel pellets…..………“The heat was merciless, the temperature 44 degrees Celsius in the shade, which does not exist. If ever the sun burnt it did that day, Knuckey wrote. The hot sun scorched our skin. Wounded men would crawl off for help. In several cases I saw them crawling on one hand and the other arm practically blown off, blood was everywhere and at last we knew what war was………….[from ‘Australian Light Horse’ by Phillip Bradley, published in 2016, pages 36-39]

The Light Horseman quoted above and in various parts of the two publications was Corporal Verner Knuckey.  From the Writer Biographies [quoted on page  179]:

“Corporal Verner Knuckey served with the 8^th Light Horse Regiment in the Sinai Campaign before transferring to the Australian Flying Corps as a mechanic in January 1917. Before the war, Knuckey was a clerk at the Commonwealth Treasury from East Malvern in Melbourne, Victoria. He enlisted in July 1915 and returned to Australia in September 1919”.

He later married an English girl from Newcastle, UK, whom he met through family friends while on leave in England during WWI.

Verner Knuckey, and that English lass were my Grandparents, and the parents of my mother, Betty Knuckey. His War Diaries from which the foregoing quotes were taken, are in the possession of the National War Museum in Canberra – eight pocket sized booklets, which my wife initially photocopied in their entirety during the 1970’s while she worked for the Army Department. Later, while the diaries were still in  her possession, my Mother painstakingly typed them in full on an ancient typewriter in the late 1970s, while in recent years, those foolscap sized pages were used by my brother, to have the diaries retyped and printed into a modern bound A4 size booklet.

26^th March 2024

I’ve just read a National Geographic special edition – ‘The Story of Jesus’, a publication from around December, 2021. While I have not subscribed to National Geographic for some decades, I was a little surprised to find this subject matter in the magazine, suggesting that National Geographic had substantially broadened the scope of the articles they publish. However, on reflection, I should not have been surprised, as the following second paragraph below,  clearly indicates the relationship of geography as such to the topic in question, as I recall now, have many articles in past years.

Before Jesus became one of the most famous figures in the world, he was a shepherd and teacher in Galilee living an unremarkable life. In this lavishly illustrated portrait of the life of a prophet, scholars unveil what is known and speculated about Jesus’s youth, life, work, plus the larger events that combined to shape the world in which he lived.

Following in Jesus’s footsteps from Bethlehem to Nazareth, some highlights include: Maps of Jesus’ path across the Holy Land, forensic reconstruction of key biblical sites, and insights into Jesus’ childhood and young adulthood. this writer – with most of the story taking place in the Middle East, and having just read two books about the Australian Light Horse serving in that part of the world  – this publication included a number of very detailed maps related to the life of Jesus, and one couldn’t help but take note of the names of towns, rivers. Lakes, etc, all of which had historical Biblical connotations’ –  brought to real life today in view of the current war and conflict involving Israel and Palestine and other sites in the wider Middle East  environment.

30th March 2024

The Quarterly Essay, No: 93, released in March, 2024  is titled ‘Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics’, and authored by Lech Blaine, whose writings have appeared in publication such as the Good Weekend, Griffith Review, The Guardian, and the Monthly, and who is currently the 2023 Charles Perkins Centre writer in residence. Covering some 119 pages,

Blaine traces the making of a hardman, from Queensland detective to leader of the current Federal [Liberal] Opposition in Australia, from property investor to minister for Home Affairs. The essay is described as the story of ambition, race and power, and a politician with a plan – to reach the top!

An interesting Essay, which covers Dutton’s family ancestral background, and Dutton’s early career in the police force in Queensland, which would mould many of his attitudes and policies in his political career, especially in respect to security, crime and the risks of immigration and refugees  – perhaps always looking for and anticipating the worst in people and organisations.

In a selected extract from the Essay, we read:

“Peter Dutton eats bleeding-heart lefties for breakfast. He is tall and bald, with a resting death stare. His eyes – two brown beads – see evil so that the weak can be blind. His lips are allergic to political correctness. Peter preaches the gospel of John Howard with the fanaticism of Paul Keating. He wants to do the Labor Party slowly, slowly, slowly, and defeat the woe-is-me heroism of identity politics.

“It’s a movement that seeks to define and divide us by class, sex, race, religion and more besides,” said Dutton in 2023. “Worse, such movements seek to undermine traditional values of ambition, gratitude and forgiveness and replace them with resentment, envy and anger.”

Once upon a time, the federal Opposition leader was a cop in clammy Queensland. He was a listener, a lurker, a watcher; not a storyteller, nor a performer. He set traps for suspects and waited for them to make a mistake. For poker-faced Dutton, leadership isn’t about kissing the cheeks of babies, or the arses of journalists. It is about bleeding for your beliefs and denying the griefs of your enemies. White lies are often the cost of beating the bad guys. “In a different age, we’d be clashing swords,” Dutton told journalist Madonna King in 2014. “I see myself as a contestant in that battle.”

In May 2022, Australia just so happened to elect a good cop as prime minister. Anthony Albanese promised a cuddlier, less bloodthirsty form of leadership. “Safe change,” with a patient embrace of democratic rituals………… Dutton isn’t so happy-go-lucky. He views the world with the pessimism of a Russian novelist. The son of a Brisbane bricklayer, he bombed out of university to become a copper. His earnest conservatism comes from the gut instincts of a suburban upbringing and the racial tensions of being a police officer in Queensland; not from the anti-abortion bootcamps of Bob Santamaria, nor the sermons of Brian Houston.

“I am not the evangelical here, not out and proud on abortion,” Dutton told Niki Savva for her book Plots and Prayers. “I voted for gay marriage.”

Dutton hasn’t fabricated an identity based on feedback from focus groups. “ScoMo” spoke like a NIDA student’s idea of a Queenslander. “Dutts,” as mates call him, doesn’t strain for an ocker accent or drape himself in sporting paraphernalia. His persona? A sombre straightshooter. One tough hombre. The bad cop.”

Worth a read to get a clearer version of the man –  not sure how biased the author is, but Dutton is not generally presented as someone you would especially like, but maybe that’s not a handicap to future aspirations?

Blaine ends the essay with “Dutton wants a country where people don’t worry about the powerful and feel threatened by the defenceless…..This is Peter Dutton. Tall and strong at first glance. But when you watch him for a long time, you can see that the man is small and scared”.

Over the years, I’ve shared articles about Jelena Dokic, and have reviewed her first book ‘Unbreakable’, and generally had much respect for the way she has survived through so much personal and professional adversity. The following article I’ve copied for my Column as a further illustration, of why I’ve maintained that respect. Jelena, who is a former champion tennis player, was one of the principal commentators for the just completed Australian Open, a role she has performed admirably for a number of years now, both here and overseas.

The Age newspaper recently published an interview with Jelena by Australian renowned author, Peter Fitzsimons, and I’ve copied that interview to the Coachbuilder’s Column for the interest of readers.

Why I and so many others needed to apologise to Jelena Dokic –  a Story by Peter Fitzsimons  [as appeared in the Age newspaper, late January 2024]

Fitz: Jelena, congratulations on your successful transition from champion tennis player to the tennis media. Is there a particular commentator you like to emulate?

JD: Yes – Todd Woodbridge and Jim Courier. Todd, particularly, has been a massive influence on me, my friend for 15 years and a great mentor, and I certainly wouldn’t be here in a lot of areas post-tennis if it wasn’t for him, but especially in the commentary box and TV world.

Fitz: And did John McEnroe give you any advice?

JD: No! But I learnt from him. He’s very different. He’s obviously fun and likes to joke around and I actually like the way that he’s quiet, kind of easy going, and he just kind of goes with the flow as well. Everyone’s different: Jim, Todd, and John. But I’ve been able to learn from all of them and I still get very nervous, particularly when I am with John. I just have so much respect for him, and he is my idol of idols when it comes to reinventing yourself after being a tennis player.

Fitz: Most sports people who become commentators and stay around the game can’t help but compare the current crop with their own generation and wonder how they’d go against them. Do you look at the women’s game right now and then think, “I could clean them up”, or do you look at their generation and think, “They have taken the game to a level we weren’t even close to”?

JD: No, I don’t like to compare generations. I don’t think it’s fair. You know, I tried playing with a wooden racket and couldn’t get the ball over the net. It’s just a whole different ballgame and something that you can’t compare. And I think there’s amazing and wonderful players in all generations. I’m lucky that I played in the era of Steffi Graf, Monica Seles, Jennifer Capriati, Lindsay Davenport and Kim Clijsters – and they’re all amazing champions.

Fitz: Did you form friendships with those players?

JD: Yes, and even though we don’t live in the same place, we stay in touch. And when I see them, it’s actually really nice now because there is no pressure and we have the best conversations ever.

Fitz: All of those players you mention won many grand slam events. In the 1999 Wimbledon championships you burst on the scene, beating world No.1, Martina Hingis 6-2, 6-0 as a 16-year-old qualifier – perhaps the biggest upset Wimbledon ever saw. Your glorious future was obvious. Do you have any regrets that one way or another, you didn’t end up winning Wimbledon or other majors?

JD: No. I think if you take into account my whole life experience both on and off the court and everything that I went through, to be honest, to have gotten as far as I did is quite an achievement. And I think when I look back, I am very, very lucky to have even survived and to be here today. After what I went through, I’ll take a grand slam semi-final in singles, a final in doubles, and No.4 in the world any day, because at one stage there was a real chance that I was not going to ever be able to live a normal life or even be here, so … no regrets. And especially because a lot of the things that did happen were out of my control. I was a child as well. I’m very proud of where I am today and how far I’ve come.

Fitz: On that subject, you’ve been extraordinarily open about the “mental, emotional and physical abuse” you received from your infamous father, Damir, from the age of six. His explosiveness was no secret. Did the tennis world do enough to protect you, to at least reach out and say, “Hey, Jelena, are you OK?”

JD: Look, I think that’s probably a question for others. Do I know people that definitely knew of things that were going on? Absolutely. Is it a very different world to what it is today, in terms of how we look at general child abuse and domestic violence? Absolutely. But look, that was the whole point of me writing my books and being open about it, to help someone else and to see what changes we can make. I never told my story to blame anyone. We didn’t have enough measures in place to protect kids like me. But we do now.

Fitz: But what of us in the media? I remember having many goes at Damir Dokic, and making merry at his expense, but not doing what we should have done, which was inquiring after your welfare.

JD: I do talk a little bit about the media because I just felt, at the time, they all did interviews with my father who was obviously very aggressive and drunk nine out of 10 times when he was doing interviews. And I just wish someone would have said, “Look, there are two underage kids going home with this person, and that’s not OK,” because my brother was eight years younger than me. And I wish maybe that there was a little bit more concern instead of making him a joke and a punch line. When my book, Unbreakable, came out, I can’t tell you how many journalists came to me personally and apologised, and I really appreciate that.

Fitz: Well, you have my apologies, too. If this is too painful, please ignore and we’ll move on, but when was the last contact you had with your father? And were you able to say, “What you did to me was totally unacceptable”?

JD: [Softly.] I last had contact about 10 years ago. And yeah, I even tried to reconcile with him once or twice … I think no matter what happens, you kind of hope that maybe you can kind of salvage a relationship when it comes to family. Those dynamics are always very difficult. But it’s very hard, when someone doesn’t have any remorse or can’t say sorry. In fact, what he says is that he would do it all again. So, for me, that is very, very hard. I had to make a cut and go, “I don’t need a toxic person or a toxic relationship in my life.”

Fitz: What about your mother and brother? Are you in contact with them?

JD: Yeah, I have a great relationship with my brother, which I’m really glad about because my father used my brother and weaponised our relationship – not allowing me to talk with him for about seven years, because he was so much younger than me. But yeah, today we have a wonderful relationship. We pretty much talk every day, and with my Mum as well. I’ve had some tough conversations with her because she was on my father’s side – but we’re in a good place today.

Fitz: Your mental strength is inspirational, and I also admire very much the way you stand up to trolls on social media. I was shocked, however, by the piece you wrote in the Herald last year, on how vicious those trolls are on body-shaming and so forth. Despite your mental strength, is it not wise for you just to stay away from social media and not read that toxic sludge?

JD: I could take that road. Absolutely. But I don’t want to. I want to be very open and honest. And I want to fight for things that are important – whether it’s domestic violence, child abuse, mental health, or trolling. The easiest thing would be to block the trolls, but why should I? I’m not hurting anyone. I’m not doing anything wrong. In fact, I try and use my platform for something good. So I wanted to take that toxicity on. I want to send the right message out there that we shouldn’t hide behind it every time we stay silent with abuse. It’s kind of like we were allowing it to happen. Silence is the worst thing that we can do when it comes to abuse.

Fitz: When you’re playing, your ambition was to win Wimbledon. What is your ambition now?

JD: Look, I am very content with where I am in my life and professionally. I just want to continue doing what I’m doing. I want to fight for the right things and really important issues in society. I want to be the best commentator I can possibly be, as well as doing a lot of public speaking. I want to continue that and continue spreading that message and continue trying to make a difference.

Fitz: I know I speak on behalf of everybody, Jelena, when I say that although life has dealt you a very strange deck of cards, you’re playing them wonderfully well. Good luck.

JD: Thank you so much.

@Peter_Fitz

[Age Editor’s note: this is an edited transcript of the conversation’.