Category: Books and Literature

The following reviews and comments about a number of books and publications may be of interest to some of my readers.  The following publications are included in this particular contribution, which will be our final one for 2025

• Quarterly Essay 99: ‘Woodside vs the Planet’ by Marian Wilkinson [pub. 2025];
• Australian Foreign Affairs Issue 25:  The Bomb: Will Asia go Nuclear? [by various authors];
• Ghost Empire’ by Richard Fidler [pub 2016];
• Elianne by Judy Nunn [pub 2013];
• The Secret Year of Zara Holt’ by Kimberley Freeman [pub 2025];
• The Secret of Secrets by Dan Brown [pub 2025];
• The Courageous Life of Weary Dunlop: Surgeon, Prisoner-of-War, Life-saving Leader and Legend of the Thai-Burma Railway by Peter Fitzsimons [pub 2025];
• A Woman’s Eye: Her Art: Reframing the Narrative Through Art and Life’ by Drusilla Modjeska[pub. 2025].

October, 2025

In the Quarterly Essay No. 99, titled ‘Woodside vs The Planet: How a Company Captured a Country’ by Marian Wilkinson  [ and published by Black Inc], I felt we had a very powerful exposure of the way in which these huge and powerful gas and oil companies, etc, can and do dominate and influence government, public and private opinion, over the ‘little people’ of our nation who have little means or power themselves to defend that arrogance and domination.  Apart from ‘both Indigenous and non-Indigenous’ farming communities, it seems that the most  affected groups here are our more remote and regional area Indigenous populations – the way in which much of their culture and historical archaeological sites are [despite all the contrary rhetoric] basically ignored in preference to the ‘greater good’ of the nation [or should that read ‘the greater good of the companies in question’?]. Many of the already destroyed and/or threatened such sites have been described as ancient ‘works of creative human genius’ A substantial section of the Essay is devoted to the damage caused and/or threatened to these works.

Now, I can’t claim enough technical or scientific knowledge about the whole question of the effects of various coal, gas, etc industries  on the climate and the future of our weather patterns,  but it does seem that power and wealth will continue into the near future to ride roughshod over community needs and expectations, government policy making [disguised as climate action while favouring the all-powerful] and so much scientific evidence  – evidence which, while my lack of knowledge means  I’m personally unable to argue for or against –  does seem indisputable amongst the long-standing  research that has and is being  carried out.

In any case, I feel Wilkinson has pulled no punches in pushing against for eg Woodside’s argument that gas is a necessary transition fuel, as the world decarbonises.

On page 81 of her Essay, she writes “In the past decade, Australian governments have supported Woodside and other big LNG exporters pushing new gas developments with the argument that we need more gas so the world can cut emissions from coal. While this might have been the case in the past, today this claim can no longer stand without being tested. Is there evidence new LNG exports will significantly lower global emissions, or are the gas companies vastly exaggerating?  Yes, some gas will be needed to back up renewables, but how much, and for how long? “

Woodside, for eg, in wanting to extend their North West Shelf and other developments are claiming their gas exports will be required until 2070 and beyond. Wilkinson argues this is a gross exaggeration. She also notes that ‘China was the world’s biggest LNG importer and Australia’s second-biggest LNG customer in 2023. But China’s prospects as a long-term lucrative coal-to-gas switching customer are in doubt. Instead, its massive investment in renewable energy is disrupting fossil-fuel markets around the world…………..While Trump has abandoned a leadership role in the energy transition, China Xi Jinping has embraced it”.  Will Woodside’s gas be still needed by China, and other developing nations by 2070 is her concern?

My comments  can’t do the Essay proper justice here – the following introduces it to potential readers –

“The world may have committed at Paris to hold back dangerous climate change, but Australia’s fossil-fuel giant Woodside is doubling down: it has bold new plans to keep producing gas out to 2070. Support from the major parties is locked in, so something has to give.

This is a story of power and influence, pollution and protest. How does one company capture a country? How convincing is Woodside’s argument that gas is a necessary transition fuel, as the world decarbonises? And what is the new “energy realism” narrative being pushed by Trump’s White House?

In this engrossing essay, Marian Wilkinson reveals the ways of corporate power and investigates the new face of resistance and disruption. The stakes could not be higher.

“The gas companies and the Labor governments in WA and Canberra had refined their defence: the gas industry was helping the world decarbonise, curbing its emissions and providing energy security. It sounded like the planet could hardly have a better friend than Australia’s LNG industry and companies like Woodside.” —Marian Wilkinson, Woodside vs the Planet”

Marian Wilkinson is a multi-award-winning investigative journalist and former reporter at ABC TV’s ‘Four Corners’, and an executive producer of that program.  She has been a foreign correspondent and deputy editor for the Sydney Morning Herald. Her books include The Fixer, Dark Victory [with David Marr], and The Carbon Club.

A number of responses to this Essay ‘Woodside vs The Planet’ would appear in the most recent Quarterly Essay [No.100] and these generally supported Wilkinson, with Greg Bourne for eg, noting that ‘The IEA quite rightly points out the myriad of decarbonisation opportunities in multiple sectors  of the economy using numerous technologies. What is missing is the will”.  Or, ‘Australian LNG companies, Woodside in particular, want their ‘customers’ to remain hooked. Successive Australian governments are complicit in the trade…”

Or from Peter Garrett: “Woodside vs The Planet confirms that the fossil-fuel industry is a tax-avoiding, ecocidal con job, whose activities impose great harm, a fact they have been fully aware of for decades…”

On the other hand, Glen Gill writes: “My position is that this essay is a polemic, and its publication…is based on Wilkinson’s past reputation and not its content. First, I find the title…ridiculous: the author is simply playing to the emotions of the uninformed Masses, particularly the activists…………Activists don’t debate or make written arguments, they simply protest and broadcast a narrative of fear, ignorance and hatred…”

In response to such criticism, Wilkinson notes Garrett’s channelling of the frustration and anger of many climate veterans and of many ordinary voters who are alarmed by the Albanese government’s continues support for large coal and gas export projects despite the urgent warnings of climate scientists.

1 November, 2025

In Issue 25 of the ‘Australian Foreign Affairs’ publication [AFA}, the topic is titled ‘The Bomb: Will Asia go Nuclear? – some rather disturbing essays here, certainly from the viewpoint of looking ahead to the lives of my children and their children’s future generations. For eg, Gareth Evans in his essay ‘The Challenge’ writes “The Australia-initiated Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons in its 1996 report, stated the case for outright abolition with admirable succinctness. ‘So long as any state retains nuclear weapons, others will want them. So long as any nuclear weapons remain anywhere, they are bound one day to be used – if not by design, then by human error, system error, miscalculation or misjudgement. And any such use will be catastrophic for life on this planet as we know it’”.

From other essays, we learn that in this part of the world, with China and India for eg [and the rogue North Korea] building on their nuclear capabilities, friends and allies such as Japan, South Korea, Indonesia and others may in the future consider the protective need of their own weapon structure, which could see Asia emerging as the new epicentre of nuclear risk. A scary scenario for all of us.

Jonathon Pearlman, the Editor of AFA sums of the topic of the edition with:

‘Today, Australia needs to prepare not only for an increasingly insecure Asia but also for the risk that this insecurity could cause nuclear weapons to spread across the region. Australia must consider how to respond to near-allies such as Japan going nuclear, whether China’s nuclear outlook is changing as its ambitions grow, and how it might renew its diplomatic push for arms control in an age of proliferation and as memories of the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki fade.  Australia may also find itself pondering, for the first time in more than 50 years, whether otherwise unthinkable options should be part of its own plan B.’

Other essays in Issue 25 are: 

• “Boiling point: Preparing for the new nuclear age”, by Brendan Taylor
• “Beyond AUKUS: Could Australia get the bomb”, by Stephan Frühling & Andrew O’Neil
• “Red sunrise: China’s rapid nuclear expansion”, by Rajeswari Pillai Rajagopalan

Gareth Evans expands on those three essays, and he includes the following scenarios.

The nine nuclear-­armed states possess between them over 12,200 nuclear warheads, with a combined destructive capacity of more than 145,000 Hiroshima bombs. Some 9000 of these are militarily active
or deployed. Alarmingly, some 2000 US and Russian weapons remain on high alert, ready to be launched within a decision window for each president of four to eight minutes. The US and Russia, holding between
them 90 per cent of the global stockpile, dramatically downsized their inventories after the end of the Cold War, but that momentum has completely stalled. Every nuclear-­armed state is now modernising or increasing its arsenal, especially China, whose inventory has doubled in a few short years to nearly 600 weapons, with new land-­ and seaborne delivery systems.

More troubling still, the longstanding taboo against the use of nuclear weapons seems to be weakening, with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in particular talking up this prospect in the Ukraine war in language not heard since the height of the Cold War. A number of states are considering using nuclear weapons – especially so-­called “tactical” weapons – not just for deterrence but for warfighting.

The big arms control agreements of the past, which – at least between the US and Russia – banned certain systems outright, set constraints on deployments and built confidence through transparency, are now either dead (the Anti-­Ballistic Missile, Intermediate-­range Nuclear Forces and Open Skies treaties) or dying (the 2010 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty [New START]). If, as seems likely, the latter expires in February 2026, Russia and the US will be without any limits on their nuclear forces for the first time in over fifty years.

Many might regard all this as scare-mongering, however, as I intimated at the beginning, as a senior Australian, I am looking ahead to the later generations of my children and grandchildren and the kind of world scenario they may be faced with under the kind of conditions described by Evans and others!

11^th November 2025

I’ve been reading ‘Ghost Empire’ by Richard Fidler, published in 2016, and of 492 pages. This is the 4th of Fidler’s histories I have read over recent years, and I found it quite fascinating -the 1000-year history of the eastern Roman province of Constantinople before it was conquered and taken over by the Muslims in 1453 and became known as Istanbul in the modern nation of Turkey. Fidler adds in his familiar way, a personal touch to the story, by relating the history while travelling through Istanbul with his teenage son in 2014, and visiting many of the ancient sites [or what remained of them]

As Professor Karalis of the University of Sydney wrote: “This is an invaluable addition to the growing literature on Byzantium. It doesn’t simply offer a gripping and fascinating story of crucial events in its one-thousand-year existence [though are there in their full gory] but adds the personal touch, the unearthing of its emotional significance through his visit to present-day Istanbul with his son”

Fidler and his son Joe’s journey to Istanbul was fired by Richard’s passion for the rich history of the dazzling Byzantine Empire – centred around the legendary Constantinople – he takes the reader into some of the most extraordinary tales in history.

I’ve previously read three of Fidler’s books – all published after Ghost Empire – Saga Land, the story of Iceland [pub 2017], The Golden Maze, Biography of Prague [2020], and The Book of Roads and Kingdoms, the story of medieval wanderers and the city of Baghdad [2022].

I think I have found Ghost Empire the most interesting of all four – although, as with the Baghdad story in particular, the depictions of the brutal treatment of man’s fellow beings through assassinations, butchery, extermination, fratricide, and so on, I continue to find disturbing [though one has to wonder how much the world has changed, as illustrated for eg currently in Palestine, Ukraine, some African countries and so on]. Despite that, if readers interested in history have the time, this is a story worth tracking down – the clash of civilisations and religions, the fall of empires, the rise of Christianity and Islam amongst other sects, including references to and the involvement of the Crusades in this story.

19 November 2025

I have read a number of Judy Nunn’s novels –  but this one had been sitting on my shelves since 2018 – Elianne by Judy Nunn, published in 2013, my edition of 472 pages. Another of my favourite genres – an Australian based historical novel.  Mostly set in the 20^th century from just prior to WW1, and extending to beyond the Vietnam War, a fictional approach to many of the true events of that period, in all, a very enjoyable, and to some degree a topical read reflecting the periods of my life, though basically set within the cane field areas of Queensland, and occasionally ‘floating’ between there and Sydney. As described on the cover – “Judy Nunn’s latest novel is a story of honour, family honour among hard men in a hard environment of Queensland’s sugar mills. But when honour is lost so too is love and without love, what becomes of a family? 

A point by point summary of the story, as presented by Booktopia.

A sweeping story of wealth, power, privilege and betrayal, set on a grand sugar cane plantation in Queensland.

• LEGACY IN THE CANE FIELDS………………………………………………………………………
  In 1881 ‘Big Jim’ Durham ruthlessly creates for Elianne Desmarais, his young French wife, the finest of the great sugar mills of the Southern Queensland cane fields, and names it in her honour.
• SUGAR AND SECRETS…………………………………………………………………………………
  The massive estate becomes a self-sufficient fortress and home to hundreds of workers, but ‘Elianne’ and the Durham Family, have dark and distant secrets; secrets that surface in the wildest of times, the 1960s.
• AN ERA OF CHANGE
  For Kate Durham and her brothers Neil and Alan, freedom is the catchword of the decade. Rock ‘n’ roll, the Pill, the Vietnam War, the rise of Feminism, Asian immigration and the Freedom Ride join forces to rattle the chains of traditional values.
• The workers leave the great sugar estates as mechanisation lessens the need for labour – and the Durham family, its secrets exposed, begins its fall from grace…
• In the tough world of Queensland sugar mills, it’s not only cane that is crushed …

If that scenario appeals to readers, have a look for the book.

24 November 2025

Now, Kimberley Freeman is an Australian author of historical fiction about and for women, having published over thirty novels.  So why was I reading ‘The Secret Year of Zara Holt’ by Kimberley Freeman, published in 2025, of 452 pages?  A book about women’s fashions, clothing and so on! 

But so much more with an interesting ‘imagined’ scenario depicted over the 12 months following the disappearance of Zara’s husband, PM Harold Holt in the waters off Portsea, Victoria.  I found this book of special interest because of the depictions of political and world events and other aspects of life during most of my own lifetime, as with the previous book, Elianne. 

Described as a richly imagined novel of love, fashion, scandal and one captivating woman’s passionate life.

Portsea, 1967. When Australian Prime Minister Harold Holt disappears while swimming, his wife Zara loses herself in the memories of their volatile relationship. She always believed Harry when he said no matter what happened, he’d never leave. Their bond has stretched to London, Europe, India, America. It has survived anger, loss and heartbreak, media scrutiny, secrets and lies. But now all Zara wants is for Harry to come home. With that in mind, and hinted at through the book title, the next 12 months after Holt’s disappearance represents Zara and Harry’s ‘continued existence’ within the overall story.

One interesting point that arises from this story – the wives and partners of politicians [certainly up until the time of Zara as the PM’s wife] found their lives were dominated by the political demands of their male spouse, they were really only there as a decoration, the necessary companion at official dinners, overseas trips, etc. Zara Holt attempted to rebel against this albeit generally unsuccessfully.

Anyway, again, anyone interested, even as a partially fictional depiction of the life of Zara Holt, and the politics of the time, well worth a read. Described in some circles as a fierce story of love, scandal, betrayal and one captivating woman’s passionate life.

[And I wonder if people of my age, especially here in Australia, how many of them can recall what they were doing on the afternoon that Harold Holt disappeared, presumed drowned – or ‘his presumed death’ as Wikipedia describes it?   I recall precisely – I was at Melbourne’s Myer Music Bowl, at a concert by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, on a hot Sunday afternoon, December 17^th, 1967. I came away from that venue with severe sunburn, so severe that I would spend the next two days in bed in our then ‘batchelor flat in Chrystobel Crescent, Hawthorn, feeling very sorry for myself with severe sunstroke, and getting no sympathy from my two house-mates!!].

27^th November, 2025

After reading ‘The Secret of Secrets’ by Dan Brown, published in 2025, of 676 pages  –  wow, what an enthralling story, the first of Brown’s novels I have read since 2017 [and I just noticed from the cover that this was his first novel for 8 years which probably explains my reading time lapse] and the 6^th overall [and all 676 pages covered over 2 days of reading, though admittedly at the sacrifice of other tasks!!]

Yes, a story that one didn’t want to stop reading, even if some of the many ‘scientific’ and/or fantasy laden scenarios I found hard to understand [or even believe], yet that didn’t stop the enjoyment of the storyline.  My only ‘grumble’ [if you could call it that] was the manner in which Brown continually switched from one ‘scene’ to another within a few pages – a touch annoying when one was waiting to see how a particular situation was going to proceed, but would be forced to wait a few pages until the author came back to it, while he diverged into another aspect of the storyline!!  Nevertheless, a great read.

I’ll leave it there for now – except to say the story is mainly set in Prague [an old and dangerous city, steeped in folklore and mystery, where for over two thousand years, the tides of history have washed back and forth over it, leaving behind echoes of everything that has gone before]. As noted at the book’s beginning, all organisations, buildings etc referred to in the book exist [almost a travel book in many parts], and apparently, all artwork, artifacts, symbols, and documents mentioned are real, while all experiments, technologies and scientific results are true to life, despite some sceptic notions I might have felt during my read! 

From part of a review appearing in the DailyGrail website, we read  –   ‘Fast forward to 2025, and Dan Brown has just released his latest thriller based in the world of symbologist Robert Langdon, The Secret of Secrets. It very much sticks to the formula of his previous novels: Robert Langdon wakes up in a European city (this time around, Prague) and over the course of around 24 hours goes on a wild adventure in which he explores the esoteric landmarks of the city in question, solving puzzles in order to eventually solve the core mystery at the heart of the story, all while evading a monster-like killer………………… the plot of the novel revolves around scientific research into altered states of consciousness, psychically retrieved information and ‘afterlife’ states, so everything from psychedelics to near-death experiences are discussed. This topic comes via the research of major character Katherine Solomon, who returns from her original appearance in The Lost Symbol some 16 years ago, now as Langdon’s partner, romantically as well as joining him over the course of this adventure in Prague’.

Described as Brown’s most stunning novel yet—a propulsive, twisty, thought-provoking masterpiece featuring a thrilling plot that intertwines themes of consciousness, mythology, and a race against time. Have a look at it!

14^th December, 2025

‘The Courageous Life of Weary Dunlop: Surgeon, Prisoner-of-War, Life-saving Leader and Legend of the Thai-Burma Railway’, by Peter Fitzsimons,  published in 2025, of 540 pages – this was Fitzsimons’ annual contribution in 2025, another powerful book by Australia’s best selling non-fiction writer. Not everyone likes his style of story-telling, whose passion is the telling of Australian stories of great men, women and stirring events in our history, but presented in a form of novel rather than a straight-out text book historical depiction.

 The story of the notorious Thai-Burma railway, and the Japanese treatment of their prisoners-of-war has been related by many writers and commentators in past years, and I have reviewed some of those writings in this Column over time. This book pulls no punches, and does not hold back or try to sensitise the events of that dark period in our nation’s history, and of the world in general during the 1939/45 World War.

In summary form as described in various sources:

In September 1939, young Australian surgeon Edward ‘Weary’ Dunlop was working in London when the dogs of war were unleashed. Signing up, he was commissioned a captain in the Australian Army Medical Corps (AAMC) and sent to the Middle East, serving in Palestine, Greece, Crete, Egypt and Tobruk.

As the European war dragged on, an emboldened Japanese force captured Singapore and marched closer to Australian shores. Weary and over 3000 others sailed back to Java to fight this new enemy. At the No. 1 Allied General Hospital in Bandoeng, the Japanese were ready to murder the bedridden when Weary put his body in front of the bayonets. From that moment his leadership, ingenuity and selflessness became legend as Allied prisoners-of-war were sent to Singapore, Thailand and finally faced the hell of working as slave labour on the infamous Thai-Burma Railway. In the POW camps, tropical diseases, malnutrition, and the brutal work regime imposed by their Japanese captors meant the death toll was horrific. And yet, with little to no medical supplies, under extreme physical pressure, Weary Dunlop took risks and beatings to defy the Japanese and keep his men alive in circumstances that tested the limits of human endurance.

The following are four brief quotations from the book, followed by a more-lengthy extract, which perhaps give a minute idea of the conditions faced by POWS at that time, though even then, these are relatively mild descriptions compared with much of the content.  These selections only go a very small way and reflect on just a few minor situations in covering the contents of the book, which should be read in full by those interested in re-examining the detailed history and stories of that period.  However, a warning:  if readers don’t wish to be reminded of what happened in those years, then simply don’t read this book, because put plainly, much of the contents make for very unpleasant reading.

• page 364: “On this particular day, Major Corlette is sitting in a leaking tent as the monsoonal rain pours down, holding the hand of a young Australian man, just 19 years old, as he dies from a cruel combination of severe dysentery and a haemorrhage. What most aggrieves Corlette is that he knows he could save him if the Japanese had given him even the most basic of medicines, but no, they have denied him, and with one last death rattle, the lad dies.  ‘My heart was filled with hatred and I was cursing our captors…those little yellow bastards who by starvation, brutality and neglect  had murdered this boy and many others of his companions”.
• page 366:  “ When a handful of the desperate POWs decide to make a break for it, and try to get through Burma to India, they are caught and shot. All this, and of course cholera has hit them, too. And yet, without someone like Weary laying down the law on how to proceed, and working tirelessly to keep men alive, all descends into a miasma of misery and mass death”.
• page 370: “Yes, just over there, a man simply crashes down, taking half a bunk with him. Now, it is a question of luck. Had he already drawn his breakfast [rice] before his collapse? If not, he might still be able to get up and get it.  If so, he can lie in the mud, trying to scratch together what he can and get it into him, before facing a day that will now weaken him so much further……Grasping their dixie and hats grimly, late arrivals stumble into place just in time to call their own numbers , trying not to collapse themselves, and just have time to wolf down the three-spoonfuls of rice that breakfast consists of, before sorting themselves to get another three-spoonful allocation for lunch”.  
• page 391: The completion of the railway is not something any of the Australians can celebrate, beyond their own survival to this point – for they, more than anyone, are aware of the cost in lives to get it done. Courtesy of the slave labour that has been used – their own – a project that had been estimated by civil engineers to take five years has been bashed and thrashed through by the military engineers in just 16 months. It has cost the lives of about 100,000 men, together with many women and children among the Asian forced labourers, particularly the Tamils. Of the dead men, some 3000 are Australians – around one life for every sleeper laid along the overall 400 kilometres of track. [Though workers on the Thai-Burma Railway were just four percent of all Australians who saw service in the Second World War, they tallied just under a third of all deaths”.

An extended quotation from pages 374-375

“Everybody must be counted. The Romans were very strict on this idea back when the Dead Sea was only sick, but they have nothing on the Japanese. Roll call is for all, no exception, no excuses. And this afternoon, Blue, says the guard, ‘You one short’.

Yes, but there is no need to worry about an escapee, unless you count the afterlife as a hideout for fugitives. The fellow missing is Dusty, he’s busy dying, back over yonder. ‘I don’t think he’ll last an hour,’ Sys Blue.

Well, that is fascinating Blue, and if roll call were an honour system it might be good enough, but as long as Dusty’s body is breathing it’s a soldier, and all Australian soldiers are to be present for roll call. Blue would ask if the officer is joking, but he is familiar with the Japanese sense of humour, or lack thereof, and knows that he is deadly serious.

Ah, well. Such is death. No, stuff it, let’s try reason even if it is never in season with this mob.  ‘Look, he’ll be dead in an hour. Why do we want to bring him over? Leave hm in peace there. He’s on his own. There’s not even anybody with him. Yiu can’t get him’.

No, they can’t. Blue must. So he goes back, with four men, to find a bamboo stretcher, and they make their way back alng the muddy road to find Dusty. Now there is muddy, and there is waiste-deep muddy, and you and Sod’s law can guess which one is today.  Oh, did we mention we are all barefoot?  Well. They are. But they find Dusty, he is…just…rasping. Fuck. The men talk amongst themselves. Is it worth carrying him? Is it decent?

‘Well, he’ll be dead within half an hour.’

Alright, stuff this. Blue walks back to tell the guard, now backed up by witnesses.

‘WHERE?’ yells the guard as the Dusty-free Blue is spotted. ‘WHY didn’t you bring him?’

‘He’s only got half an hour to live’, says Blue.

Really? Swell Blue won’t even have that if he doesn’t get the bloody man here soon. The guard is ranting, he is raving, his fists are flying closer and closer and Blue doesn’t care.  So what if he gets hit?

‘Physical pain is very easy to take Physical pain won’t break you. It’s mental pain that beats you’.

But mental pain it is, for he is ordered back. Blue goes again, to find Dusty lying and dying and still breathing. Silently they hoist him onto the bamboo stretcher – which squeaks in protest as soon as he is lifted, as light as he is – determined to bring some dignity  to this bloody thing, but failing as they slip and fall in the mud, and Dusty must be gathered and regathered, his bearers slogging through the mud as the bamboo chafes each skeletal shoulder.  They get him there, and when they lower the stretcher, Dusty…is dead.

Ichi!  One! He is counted.

‘Everybody is correct’

The guard is happy, the officer is happy, the roll is accurate. Blue and his men pick up Dusty and take him to the cremation pit.

Dusty, present and correct, is left to his own devices, and Blue and the boys stagger back to camp. This war. These people. You would not believe it”. 

Finally, some concluding remarks.:

• After all, as he [Weary] would later note, while the overall percentage of deaths  among those Australians who saw active service in World War II was just 3 per cent, when it came to POWs  under Japanese control, 8000 of 22,000 overall had died, meaning for them the percentage of death was a staggering 36 per cent [page 447];
• ‘Thousands of men, middle-aged now,  in Australia and across the world’, one of them would note, ‘when they read that Weary Dunlop had been made Australian of the Year [in 1976], would have said” Yes, I knew him in Thailand. He’s the Australian of many years. We’d never have got back home if it hadn’t been for [him]’ [page 458];
• ‘In late April [1987], Tom Uren accompanies Weary with a delegation of ex-POWs back to Hellfire Pass. It is a deeply moving affair for both men, as all the memories, the horror, the heat, the humidity, the deaths, disease and disasters come flooding back’ [page 463];
• One of the many extremely cruel guards was a Korean, whom the POWs referred to as The Lizard.  Not long after Tom Uren retired from Parliament. He and weary received an invitation to attend a seminar for survivors of the Thai -Burma railway together with Australian and Japanese historians. Among those attending was Yi Nak-Nae from Korea, the man the Japanese called Kakurai Hiromura – known to the Australians as The Lizard, the very man who almost drove Weary, completely out of character, to murder him because of his viciousness to the Australian POWs, only changing his mind at the last minute because of the fear of Japanese retribution against the POWs. The Korean was only 18 at the time, and wanted to explain that he himself was a slave of the Japanese as were thousands of his countrymen, and had to carry out the orders of their masters under fear of death and torture. He now sought the understanding of Uren and Weary as to why he and his fellow Korean guards had been so brutal. He is absolutely clear on why he came to Australia. He wishes to try to make amends, and even friends, all these years on. Tom Uren as I imagine many of his fellow POWs would have been, was reluctant to shake the Korean’s hand in friendship, but not Weary Dunlop who ‘proffers his hand, and engulfs the hand of Yi Hak-Nae, before shaking it’.  As Fitzsimons writes in an extensive Epilogue section of the book, ‘And yet for his part, Tom Uren does not offer his hand in reply. The former heavyweight boxer is all for forgiving their former enemies as a people.  But he struggles much more when it comes to individuals like Yi Hak-Nae. And he is not alone in his attitude……several of the other POWs will tell Yi that while they were glad he had apologised, and accepted his sincerity, they cannot bring themselves to personally forgive what had been done to their mates all those years ago. The scars from their time on the Thai-Burma Railway still run too deep.  Weary himself is unrepentant for having accepted Yi’s apology – telling his doctor later that the fact Yi had journeyed to Australia, and given such a heart-felt personal apology was proof positive that there is a ‘little bit of God in every man’ [pages 464-467];

On a personal note, a thought that often occurs to me [in relation to Australian forces in particular, although of  course we were not the only nation that came under the cruel and statistic domination of the Japanese military, and their Korean slave labour force]  – I wonder what our  grandparents or even parents of that generation would think or feel today, about the situation where Japan is one of Australia’s major trading partners and an international friend?   My own father was part of the Australian forces who fought the Japanese in that nation’s attempts to reach the Australian mainland in the 1940s. He was a kind, gentle Christian man who demonstrated throughout his post-war life how much he cared for the welfare of other people, but certainly in the years immediately after the war, he would like most of his generation have found it very difficult to extend much in the way of forgiveness or generosity towards the enemy of that time. Sadly, I never ascertained to what degree his feelings might have changed prior to his own untimely death in late 1969, but I honestly believed that due to his persona and his attitude to life and  his fellow human beings at that time, that some considerable moderation in feelings would have developed.  Similarly with the current families of a second cousin, who was one of thousands to die as prisoners of the Japanese – have they ever forgiven the nation responsible for the death of that young man? 

Yes, we can forgive a people for past actions, but we should never forget.

Fitzsimons certainly doesn’t allow us to do that in this book. 

As for Weary Dunlop, another great Australian, Tom Uren, referenced above [a former politician and deputy leader of the Australian Labor Party] and fellow POW noted “Weary’s leadership wasn’t pronounced or boasted about or loudmouthed in any way. He was a very kind, quietly spoken human being. He led by example”.

28^th December, 2025

My final book read for 2025 –  ‘A Woman’s Eye: Her Art: Reframing the Narrative Through Art and Life’ by Drusilla Modjeska, published in 2025 [of 503 pages].

Drusilla Modjeka is one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers. Her books include the award-winning Poppy and the bestselling The Orchard and Stravinsky’s Lunch [the latter which I read at the end of 2012 after purchasing it from a bookshop in Daylesford, Victoria a couple of months previously] which won the New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. Her novel The Mountain was critically acclaimed and shortlisted for a number of awards; and in 2015 she published her memoir, Second Half First, which was also shortlisted for several prizes. She lives in Sydney.

Stravinsky’s Lunch dealt with a number of Australian and European artists around the era of Russian composer and conductor, Igor Stravinsky [1882-1971], and features substantial sections on two wonderful female Australian painters, Stella Bowen [1893-1947] and Grace Cossington Smith [1892-1984].

This new book deals with the early part of the C20th up until shortly after the end of WWII. Some of the early artists mentioned in Stavinsky’s Lunch reappear in this new publication. As Andrea Goldsmith writes for Readings Books – ‘The art of that time was defined in masculine terms and valued through a masculine gaze; indeed, creativity itself was considered to be the domain of men. We all know the names: Picasso, Man Ray, Breton, Rilke, Kandinsky. However, until recently, the women artists in A Woman’s Eye, Her Art, if they were mentioned at all, were as muses/appendages to their famous male partners. There’s Dora Maar (Picasso), Lee Miller (Man Ray), Clara Westhoff (Rilke), Gabriele Münter (Kandinsky), just to name a few of the artists in A Woman’s Eye, Her Art. Modjeska ‘reframe[s] the narrative through [the] art and life’ of these women and, in addition, by drawing on the work of contemporary artists like Julie Rrap and Chantal Joffe reveals their radicalism, significance and their enduring influence [they appear throughout the book as contemporary echoes to the women of the past]..

There’s a novelistic feel to A Woman’s Eye, Her Art, which I found made it easier to read, as Modjeska takes us into the places where the women worked, to erotically charged summer holidays in the south of France, as she portrays the problems of being an artist/mother/wife. We see the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau through the eyes and camera of Lee Miller [some quotations follow in my extended summary], and marvel at the queerness of Claude Cahun. The book was a pleasure to read’. Although admittedly some aspects of the women’s stories I found a little disquieting, and over-emphasised, such as intimate details of their affairs, partner swapping and so on. But then again, so much of what these women artists were ‘forced’ to do were often a means of ‘trying’ to have their specific artistic talents recognised and acknowledged to the same degree that men were recognised.

From page 323: “The question that hovers unanswered is, how was the summer [1937] for the women? How did they deal with the muse-swapping and homage among themselves – though once again we don’t know how much of it actually happened, or how exaggerated it has become”.

Picasso in particular gets much mention in the book – ‘The absence of paintings of Eileen Agar by Picasso suggests not much fascination came her way, and her account of that summer has her wary of Picasso, whom she describes as dominant and competitive, but not flirtatious – that was the province of the other men’.

A couple of definitions of terms used throughout the book: –

A muse is a person who provides creative inspiration to a person of the arts (such as a writer, artist, composer, and so on). In the course of history, these have usually (but not necessarily) been women. The term is derived from the Muses, ancient Greek goddesses of inspiration. Human muses are woven throughout history. In modern times, specific people are called muses; as a rule, these are close friends and sometimes lovers or spouses, who inspire or affect the works of an artist due to their disposition, charisma, wisdom, sophistication, eroticism, intimate friendship, or other traits. Sometimes muses directly provide models for specific paintings and sculptures and for characters in literary works, but sometimes not, rather providing inspiration for the artist’s work as a whole. In this book, a prime example [though not the only one] is the combination of female French photographer and painter Dora Maar [1907-1997] with Spain’s Pablo Picasso [1881-1973]. Interestingly as comes out in the book, while Maar was both a pioneering Surrealist artist and an antifascist activist, and was depicted in a number of Picasso’s paintings, including his ‘Portrait of Dora Maar’ and ‘Dora Maar au Chat’, Maar said of the works: “All his portraits of me are lies. They’re all Picassos. Not one is Dora Maar.”

From page 327: “From the perspective of Roland Penrose’s generation, to say that ‘they were our muses’ was not a disparagement, more a statement of how it was, how it was thought to be.”, and,

From page 328: “The Surrealist muses. Whichever way you write it, the women are defined: Surrealist, and muse. And by one – but only one – reckoning that’s what they were”.

The art form of Surrealism is referenced throughout the book – Surrealism is an art and cultural movement that developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War I in which artists aimed to allow the unconscious mind to express itself, often resulting in the depiction of illogical or dreamlike scenes and ideas. It produced works of painting, writing, photography, theatre, filmmaking, music, comedy and other media as well. Many of the so-called women ‘muses’ in this story were involved with or experimented with surrealism in their respective art genres.

A Woman’s Eye, Her Art tells how six extraordinary women artists of the twentieth century – including Paula Modersohn-Becker, Clara Westhoff, Claude Cahun and her step-sister lover, Lee Miller and Dora Maar – reframed the narrative through their art and lives. It looks back to the lives and art of these European modernist women who recast the ways in which women’s bodies could be seen – from the self-portraits of Paula Modersohn-Becker, to the Surrealist Claude Cahun who exposed the masquerades of femininity, to the radical nudes of photo-artists Lee Miller and Dora Maar. Alongside them in Paris during the first decades of the twentieth century were many artist-women, their friends and colleagues, including Clara Westhoff-Rilke and Gabriele Münter, Leonora Carrington and Meret Oppenheim. In this book, Drusilla Modjeska examines why these women still matter and, and as she did in her seminal and bestselling work Stravinsky’s Lunch, connects their past to our present.

This is a beautiful book, richly illustrated and elegantly written about the spirit it took for these artist-women to step out on that path, and the courage it took to stay there. It is the story of what they saw, and how they were seen as they crashed against the hypocrisies that are embedded deep in the structures of society, certainly in that era. And it is about hard-fought freedoms as in their different ways they changed the landscape of the art world and reframed the narrative.

For a more detailed description of this book, we can turn to ‘Biographers in Conversation’ by Gabriella Kelly-Davis [Dec 4, 2025]

In A Woman’s Eye, Her Art, Drusilla Modjeska illuminates the radical vision of women artists from early in the twentieth century who challenged and recast how women’s bodies and lives could be seen and represented. From self-portraits to Surrealist art and radical nudes of photo-artists, these European Modernists reframed the narrative through their art and lives.

Beginning with Paula Modersohn-Becker’s groundbreaking 1906 nude self-portrait, in which she painted herself seemingly pregnant when she was not, Modjeska traces a lineage of creative courage that extends from the dawn of the twentieth century through two world wars and into our contemporary moment.

At the heart of Modjeska’s narrative lies what she refers to as ‘the grammars of gender’ – the deeply embedded social expectations that shape how women are perceived and permitted to exist. Without the language provided by later feminist thinkers such as Simone de Beauvoir and Virginia Woolf, artists like Modersohn-Becker struggled to articulate their predicament, describing their artistic compulsion as ‘fate’, or viewing themselves as ‘a puzzle’. Yet through their art, these women found a visual language to paint themselves as they were, rather than as they were seen through the male gaze.

Modjeska’s choice to write a collective biography rather than focus on a single artist reflects her conviction that context and community matter profoundly. The friendships, rivalries and support networks among these artists—Paula Modersohn-Becker, Clara Westhoff, Claude Cahun and her step-sister lover, Lee Miller and Dora Maar—enabled their work in ways that an individual life story can obscure.

This approach also allows Modjeska to explore how the camera revolutionised artistic practice in the 1920s and 1930s, offering female photographers like Lee Miller opportunities to earn a living through fashion and advertising while pursuing their own radical photo art in their studios.

Perhaps most compelling is how Modjeska connects the past to present through what she calls ‘contemporary echoes’—living artists whose work continues these earlier conversations. British painter Chantal Joffe encountered Modersohn-Becker’s pregnant self-portrait around 2000 while grappling with the same question: can a woman be both artist and mother? A century later, this question remains urgent. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Julie Rrap, whose artworks focus on representations of the body, knew the male Surrealists but not Claude Cahun or Lee Miller, their female contemporaries, as their archives had been boxed up in attics after World War II and only rediscovered decades later.

The disappearance of so many artist-women after the war haunts Modjeska’s narrative. This was a generation that had pushed back against those deep grammars of gender, and then, with the outbreak of war had to find new forms for their art, new forms of courage. Claude Cahun’s resistance work landed her in a Nazi jail. Lee Miller, who became a war correspondent for Vogue, travelled with the Allied forces, photographing, among much else, the horrors of Buchenwald and Dachau, though many of her most important photographs from the concentration camps were considered as too confronting for a world eager to celebrate peace.

In the decades following the war, these women who had risked everything, their safety, their sanity and their artistic vision, were erased from view, their contributions forgotten until feminist art historians began recovering them.

A Woman’s Eye, Her Art stands as a powerful testament to the creative courage of extraordinary women artists. Modjeska brings these women into focus as visionaries in their own right, reframing how women’s art is seen and valued. By illuminating their once-overlooked contributions, she highlights the spirit it took for these women to create against the odds and claim their place in art history.

Not everyone’s ‘cup of tea’ but if the history of art from different eras is of interest, it’s a great read!  

To conclude. here are a few selected extracts from the book, in particular relating to Lee Miller’s experiences as a photo-journalist war correspondent for Vogue magazine [London], near and around the front-lines towards the closing months of WWII. Admittedly, most of these extracts come from the final chapter of Modjeska’s book [titled ‘Believe it’ Lee Miller, War Correspondent], and the emphasise is concentrated on the results of her photography and reporting undertakings, usually, living and working in the ‘field’. The principal theme of the book is covered through chapters 1-8, referred to above previously. While an American herself. Lee is of not-so-distant German ancestry.

Many of her reports back to Vogue in London, were highlighted by the words ‘I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE’.

• Page 391:  “Written in 1996, there’s a note of bemusement – and little sign of the recognition  which had already begun, that the observing eye of women journalists from that war – and the next generation reporting  from the war in Vietnam – had ‘changed the optics’  with their focus less on the smoke  and bombs and marching troops than on the terrible reality for those who were left to live amid the devastation : the women, the children, the orphans, the wounded, the refugees, the homeless and displaced.”
• Page 394-395:  “From the point of view of art in Paris, Lee Miller writes, the most valuable contribution has been the fact that Picasso stayed here under the occupation as an inspiration to others. He was celebrated with a large exhibition of his wartime work…though praise was matched by ridicule – and worse – by those objecting to any return of the modern. More spats, more arguments, even rioters attacking the paintings on the wall.”
• Page 396-396:   “ At the Hotel Scribe, news was shared among the press, all that they’d seen and heard, all that they knew – [Lee Miller] was among the journalists taken to the city’s Gestapo prisons. It took four days to see them all, there were so many – and after that they were taken to the fortress at Romanville ‘equipped with large metal-lined ovens where prisoners could be prepared for interrogation  by a process of slow, excruciating toasting’. And if there was any doubting it…had interviewed survivors, with swathes of their skin like raw beef.”
• Page 398: “This was the Paris Lee Miller was to report from – and on – not in a diary, not in a memoir written a decade later, but then, immediately, for Vogue. How to give words to the joys, the hatreds, the betrayals, the shames, the deaths? As a correspondent for Vogue, her tomorrow was assigned: to report on how the women of Paris had survived, how they had dressed for war, as well as to profile celebrities [including Colette, Marlene Dietrich and Maurice Chevalier] to help get the  to help get the Frogue office working again – and prepare for the opening of the designer collections in October.”
• Page 400-401: “Once they were over [the collections] she was briefly in Luxembourg, witness to its liberation as the Allies pushed through to the border with Germany. In a service message to London, she defends herself for not being ‘joyful’. She couldn’t commit herself – or Vogue – ‘to being rosy-minded’. Liberation was not a ‘happy-ever-after-event’. As she knew from Paris, after the ‘orgy of kisses’ and ‘fiesta of goodwill’, there is hangover and shortage, retribution and anger.  ‘In the reckoning that comes with survival, nervous mistrust can seep like little drops of poison. Back in Paris, nothing was easy. It wasn’t for Lee Miller, and it wasn’t for her friends who’d suffered through the occupation, with its compromises, its poisons and betrayals.”
• Page 404:  “In towns along the border, civilians didn’t know who was friend, who foe. Strasbourg had been raised by the Allies, and as Lee Miller looked at the ruins of their city and met the bombed-out citizens, it was with unexpected shame Had it been necessary to destroy so much so close to the end of the war? At least in England, when the bombers appeared, everyone knew it was the enemy and to run for shelter. But when the townspeople of Strasbourg had watched allied bombers fly over them to strike the enemy who had invaded them, they had rejoiced – until that is, the bombs fell on their upturned faces. The ruins, Lee Miller writes, were ‘appalling’ even to someone who’d ‘seen nothing but ruins for weeks.”
• Page 406: “She was in Cologne when the Gestapo jail was opened…..This was a jail in the heart of a city, in the heart of Germany. And there too, the women with their bouquets [of welcome to the liberators] claimed to know nothing of any of it as they asked for lifts in the jeeps. ‘How dare they!’ Didn’t they know what the men around them in uniform were doing?  While in Aachen the first city to fall. Lee Miller describes the inhabitants as ‘scared and sullen’, not yet believing the war was lost. But as the press moved on to other cities, she describes women running through the ruins towards them – arrogant and spoiled in their silk stockings waving and cheering, offering blossoms, as if they were liberated, not conquered. When she spoke to them, not one woman knew anything about anything that had been going on around them, not the deportation of the Jews, not the slave labourers, nor the concentration camps. Not one of them was a Nazi. Victims, all of them, duped by propaganda, kept ignorant by their press, and now suffering the bombs. Lee Miller’s fury becomes palpable in every word she writes.”
• Page 410-411: “She came in close on the piles of dead bodies, the bones of starvation, which even when seen were hard to believe. She photographed the ovens that the crematorium that had run out of fuel, rows of them with their doors open………She photographed the lines of Weimar civilians walking past the whipping stalls……Had they not seen the smoke billowing from the chimneys of the crematorium?”
• Page 412-413:  Lee Miller photographed two ‘beaten-up’ former torturers, who’d shown no mercy, kneeling in a cell begging for mercy every-time the door opens. In one of the most disturbing images of that day she comes in close on the bloodied face of a guard as the shock and terror of his eyes look into the camera…..He may have deserved that broken nose a hundred times over, but there is a glimpse also of a human man, and the question hovers: what turns a man so cruel?  Does it take a broken nose for him to understand that he too is a man who bleeds.”
• Page 413-414: In the year following the war’s end, Primo Levi [Jewish Italian chemist, partisan, Holocaust survivor, and writer]  in his publication ‘If This Is A Man’ which became the most disturbing and immediate account of Auschwitz,  wrote as witness to the demolition of humanity in that place to “the small actions that could move the dial even there, small moments that gave a man the strength to hold ‘somehow; to something of himself and resist that demolition – he also looks to the Germans and their henchmen, an asks: ‘were these not also men?’ As for the guards with their whips, they were not men, but beasts; guards, who when the Russians arrived ‘raged with the fury of the secure man who wakes up from a long dream of domination and sees his own ruin and is unable to understand it”.
• Page 420; Lee Miller did not vomit that day [as many of the liberating soldiers had done entering Dachau]  but the trauma cut deep as she walked through the camp with its SS training barracks, its blocks where medical experiments were carried out – men held in freezing water to see how long they could survive, others injected with poisons – and the gas chamber that had been set up with the sign ‘shower-bath’ above its door. ………..It was not the worst of the camps, but it was the first, a place of vengeance against those who dared to oppose the will of the Fuhrer – and a model for the demolition of those who were considered lesser, barely human at all. And lowest of all , blamed for all the ills of Europe, were those who were Jewish.”   
• Page 415:  In April, 1945, as the press went into the German camps, the enormity was raw, immediate and hard to comprehend. Although the correspondents [including Lee Mller] knew their task was to report on what they saw and have it believed, they faced the question that Primo Levi was yet to give words to.  If this was the work of men, how was it to be understood? The scale of it, the deliberate cruelty, the piles of corpses? The absence of remorse in the guards? Sand the knowing, unknowing civilians who lived within sight and sound of the camps.  The beautiful beechwoods, the cities of Goethe and Beethoven. A dissonance that had hate and adrenalin swirling in Lee Miller’s blood. For her there was thre complicating factor that her father’s family had originated in Hesse, the named Muller changing to Miller over several generations….She wrote of the Germans as ‘Krauts’, a distancing word, consigning them to a category that did not include her. ………[yet] Cold she avoid the question that was every-where around her?  Lee Mller was too good a photographer, too attuned to the human element, to let hate be all thar spoke”.

These two following contributions are taken from an online weekly paper titled ‘The Conversation: Books & Ideas’ – written about two very different personalities – a former Bosnian Serb political leader, as noted below, the first female high-ranked politician to be prosecuted for mass atrocities; and popular Australian author, Jane Harper. I copy them to this blog in the wish to share the subject matter for the interest of readers,

[1 From ‘The Conversation’ , 14th November 2025: Friday essay: my time with ‘Madam War Criminal’, unrepentant at 95.   Published: November 14, 2025 6.07am AEDT.   Written by Olivera Simic  Professor in Law, Griffith University

How could a university professor and internationally established scientist become a war criminal? This question prompted me to spend hundreds of hours interviewing Biljana Plavšić, now 95, at her home in Belgrade, the Serbian capital.

Plavšić, a former biologist, senior Bosnian Serb political leader and president of the Bosnian Serb Republic, is the only woman of 161 people to have been indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY). She is the first female high-ranked politician to be prosecuted for mass atrocities.

More than 100,000 people died in the Bosnian war from 1992–95. At least 8,000 Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) men and boys were killed by the Bosnian Serb Army in the genocide in Srebrenica in July 1995.

During the war, Plavšić defended the purge of Bosnian non-Serbs (chiefly Croats and Bosniaks) as “a natural phenomenon”, justifying her policies of ethnic cleansing, mostly carried out by Serb paramilitaries, with theories of ethnic and racial superiority.

Described by Western media as the “Serbian Iron Lady” and by Serb soldiers as a “Serb Empress”, Plavšić pleaded guilty in 2002 to a crime against humanity, persecuting non-Serbs for religious, political and racial motives. In exchange, the court dropped further charges of murder and genocide.

After serving six years of an 11-year sentence, she was released in October 2009, returning to Belgrade in a fur coat to meet her supporters.

At the time of her conviction, Plavšić had expressed remorse. This, and her acknowledgement of guilt, were celebrated as milestones for both the tribunal and the Balkans, and hailed as a step towards reconciliation.

However, two years into her prison sentence, Plavšić told a Swedish magazine she had “done nothing wrong”. In our conversations, she told me she had pleaded guilty to avoid other charges and a long trial:

I sacrificed myself. I have done nothing wrong. I pleaded guilty to crimes against humanity so they would drop the other charges. If I hadn’t, the trial would have lasted three, three and-a-half years. Considering my age, that wasn’t an option.

Plavšić, regarded as a hero by many Serbs (she receives regular fan letters), seems unconcerned about her role in the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. “They [the tribunal] think that it is something terrible,” she told me. “I can freely say I did not pay attention to that at all. Simply, I did not care much about it […]”

Given her subsequent lack of remorse, Plavšić’s plea bargain risks making a mockery of justice. Under such a bargain, the defendant can avoid trial and bypass the rigorous examination of evidence and witness testimony. In this way, victims are denied the opportunity for their voices to be heard and acknowledged.

First meeting

I was born in the former Yugoslavia and grew up in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where I remained until mid-1992. I watched my close, non-Serb friends leave our hometown, Banjaluka, from April 1992 due to persecution by Bosnian Serbs. My friends left some of their belongings with me, thinking, as I did, they would return in three months or so.

They never returned. At that time, I did not know what I was witnessing was, in fact, the ethnic cleansing of my city. I didn’t have the language then to describe it in those terms.

I was aware of Plavšić. She was constantly in the media calling on Serbs to join the army and fight. I would find out many years later that my late aunt and uncle had befriended her after she fled Sarajevo, her hometown, and came to Banjaluka with her elderly mother in 1994. (My uncle, a doctor, had treated Plavšić’s mother.) They remained close to Plavšić for the rest of their lives.

I would much prefer the Bosnian war had not happened, that I had met Plavšić merely as an iron-willed, single-minded person, perhaps ruminating on the margins at a family meal. However, her views became central to the shaping of appalling historical events. Hence it is our responsibility to try and understand how these views developed, and how they fell on so many receptive ears.

The first time I went to see Plavšić was particularly stressful. I was apprehensive and felt totally unprepared. After ten hours of speaking with her over the phone from Australia, there I was standing in front of her door in Belgrade, which had a fake surname on the buzzer.

My anxiety built until I felt it could burst out through the ceiling above me. I took a few deep breaths and knocked. As the door opened wide, I was bracing myself, my heart thumping, my palms sweating. Plavšić stood tall before me. Our eyes met. She was clearly pleased to see me.

Feeling overwhelmed, I stared at her and apprehensively muttered, “Dobro jutro (Good morning)”.

She stretched open her arms as if we had known each other for a long time, took a step back and studied me from top to bottom. A light, blue cardigan hung loosely from her shoulders. She was beaming.

We went inside. I found myself sitting, almost in a state of shock, talking to someone who was convicted for masterminding so much of the Bosnian war.

I ultimately spent hundreds of hours, across eight years, talking to Plavšić, both face-to-face and on the phone. I had to separate this process, as a legal academic, from her friendship with my late aunt and uncle.

I also gained access to Plavšić’s massive private archive, which contained hundreds of letters, newspaper clippings, original wartime documents and even a handwritten set of three notebooks – diaries she wrote in prison. I had to persuade her to speak with me, and gradually build trust. She would not share anything unless she felt her words were being treated with respect.

Biljana Plavšić with a UN guard at the start of her sentencing hearings at the international war crimes tribunal in the Hague, December 2002. Fred Ernst/AFP via Getty images

A Fulbright scholar

Plavšić, who is divorced and has no children, comes from a well-educated, urban and affluent family; her father Svetislav was a prominent biologist, a director of the natural science department at the Sarajevo Museum and custodian of its botanic collection. Her mother was a housewife.

As a child living in Yugoslavia, Plavšić was only 11 when the Nazis invaded in 1941. Her teenage years were marked by harrowing events such as her relatives being killed or deported to concentration camps by Ustaša (a Croatian fascist movement) or expelled to neighbouring Serbia.

This marked her identity and, as she would tell me many times, she entered politics to prevent the “extinction of Serb people”. Serbs were killed en masse in the World War II concentration camps together with Jews, Romany people and others. She feared, she says, this would happen again to Serbs when the Bosnian war started in the 1990s.

Before the war, she was a dean of the University of Sarajevo’s science faculty, a Fulbright Scholar who spent two years in New York conducting botany research, and an author of more than 100 scientific papers.

She entered politics in 1990, as a member of the Serb Democratic Party. When Bosnia declared independence from Yugoslavia in April 1992 – a move opposed by the party – Plavšić joined other party members in proclaiming the Serbian Republic of Bosnia. During the Bosnian war, she served as vice president under president and leader Radovan Karadzić (a convicted war criminal now serving a life sentence for crimes including genocide). From 1996 to 1998, she was president of the Bosnian Serb Republic (Republika Srpska).

Over many hours of conversation, she told me her version of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina: what led her to take part in it, why some events happened, according to her, and how.

I was hoping she would express some regret and remorse. But there was none. Indeed, Plavšić told me she had not wanted to sit through a trial to “listen to all fake witnesses and their lies”.

She has never changed her convictions.

It is human nature to want to see war criminals as “monsters”, different to us. But Plavšić is not a pathological individual. Rather, she is a highly educated and clinical ultra-nationalist who believes in the supremacy of Serbs over non-Serbs.

Ultra-nationalist Serbs consider Bosnian Muslims ethnic Serbs who converted to the Islam faith as a means of survival during the Ottoman Empire’s rule. Such claims that Muslims are not a genuine nationality are deeply offensive to Bosnian Muslims who have practised Islam for centuries.

Plavšić rejects, as do many other nationalist Serbs, the legal term genocide in relation to Srebrenica massacre. She described the killings to me as a “crime” but “not genocide”.

At times when I confronted her with some legal facts and evidence, she would snap into a scolding-professor mode, frowning at me. One time, without skipping a beat, she snapped, “I’ve already told you what I think of it”. I quickly realised that no matter what I said, she will never change her convictions, and that my job was not necessarily to try to do so.

I found it hard to stomach much of what she ardently still believed, but I buried my emotions so I could wind my way through it all. It was hard to strike the balance and know how far I could go interrogating Plavšić. I regret not questioning her more, but I was nervous she would have stopped talking if I probed and poked too much.

Plavšić not only feels no guilt about her actions, but remains utterly convinced of their righteousness. “No, there is nothing to regret,” she told me in one of our last in-person meetings. “I had to protect my people.”

Her lack of remorse makes Plavšić’s early release from prison all the more painful for the families of her victims. “They [the tribunal] don’t think about the blood of so many of our children, whom we are still digging Interviewing Plavšić and writing a book about her was the hardest project I have done in my career. I am glad it is over but the politics of extreme nationalism in the region are not. Today, there is a revisionism of history and the government and political elites in the Republic of Srpska hold dearly Plavšić’s views.

Plavšić’s case may serve as a warning to both our present and future. She is a highly intelligent and articulate woman. She was not someone who merely followed orders, but rather someone who gave them: a high-ranking perpetrator who preached extremist views.

This makes her story especially pertinent, as we are witnessing a rise in female participation in extremist ideologies around the world, most of which reinforce and perpetuate patriarchal systems. A female populist such as Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime minister and leader of the far-right Brothers of Italy party, speaks out against “global elites”, evokes fascist rhetoric, and clings to Mussolini-era slogans such as “God, homeland, family”.

It is important to understand Plavšić’s motivations also because today in the Balkans, war criminals such as General Ratko Mladic, the Bosnian Serb military leader serving a life sentence for his role in the Srebrenica massacre, are treated as heroes.

Serbian political elites do not recognise the legitimacy of the ICTY and believe, as Plavšić does, that the court was set up “just to prosecute Serbs”. Many high-ranked war criminals returned to Serbia and were welcomed as heroes, as Plavšić was.

Towards the end of our project, Plavšić became increasingly eager to know when the book I was writing would be published and why it had taken me so long. She was disappointed and worried she would die before she could see it. “You could have written an encyclopedia by now!” she scolded me in one of our last conversations.

Madam War Criminal: Biljana Plavšić, Serbia’s Iron Lady by Olivera Simić is published by Hurst.

out of mass graves,” said Kada Hotić, a mother who spent two decades searching for a son who went missing in the 1995 Srebrenica genocide. Hotić lost her son, husband and two brothers in the genocide.

A warning

Plavšić’s historical revisionism and staged remorse in the face of established facts is of course deeply offensive to her victims. Some may find it wrong even to give her space to express her views. Still, Plavšić’s “storytelling” provides an insight into why leaders choose to commit war crimes and invite armed conflict rather than peaceful negotiation.

Over all these years of writing a book about Plavšić, based on our interviews, I have come to accept that, no matter how I wrote it, I would always be at risk of being accused of sympathising with her. There seems to be one common experience among researchers studying perpetrators: they find themselves endlessly defending their work. In some circles, including academic ones, there remains a stubborn lack of understanding as to why researchers talk to and listen to perpetrators.

Put simply, we do it to comprehend the motivations of war criminals so we can prevent mass atrocities in the future. There is no doubt genocide and crimes against humanity are morally repugnant. However, when we approach the study of those who commit such acts primarily through moral condemnation rather than analytical enquiry, we risk hindering our understanding of perpetrators and their motivations.

Perhaps Plavšić’s scholarly profession is what makes many academics both uncomfortable and fascinated with her. Plavšić is a reminder that higher education does not necessarily mean one is immune to committing crimes.

[2] From ‘From The Conversation, 14th November 2025:  Why Jane Harper’s ‘outback noir’ novels make for comfortable – and uncomfortable – reading:  Published: November 13, 2025 11.53am AEDT by Jessica Gildersleeve, Professor of English Literature, University of Southern Queensland, and Tara East, Associate Lecturer, Creative Writing and Editing and Publishing, University of Southern Queensland

Jane Harper’s novels do not include any significant First Nations characters or perspectives. Nor do they acknowledge the deeper meaning and consequence of their Gothic conventions.

Jane Harper sits in a rare category of contemporary Australian writers whose novels have achieved phenomenal international success. She has sold 1.5 million books in Australia and 3.5 million overseas.

While all popular fiction adheres to certain formulas – that is, after all, why we read these books – Harper has skilfully combined a set of conventional tropes to develop her own narrative brand. Her crime novels build on a familiar ideas about the Australian landscape we have been taught how to interpret and accept – images that have become a type of shorthand.

Harper’s version of what has come to be called “outback noir” invariably features a small-town setting where the natural world is perceived as threatening, and an outsider or outcast who must solve a crime with a link to the past.

Importantly, her depictions of the Australian landscape also draw on the traditions of the Australian Gothic.

When early settlers encountered Australia’s unfamiliar landscapes, they found the place strange and unsettling. Swans were black, not white; the seasons were reversed. As novelist Marcus Clarke famously observed, the trees shed their bark, not their leaves.

Australia’s earliest writers, including Henry Lawson and Barbara Baynton, used the strange animals and plants, the harsh weather and the seemingly endless deserts as ominous backdrops for their fictional works.

As one character in Harper’s first novel The Dry (2017) reflects on the emptiness that surrounds the fictional town of Kiewarra: “This place is like a nightmare.”

Despite their rural settings, however, Harper’s novels have not to date included any significant First Nations characters or perspectives. Nor do they appear to acknowledge the deeper meaning and consequence of their Gothic conventions.

Harper’s landscapes

A Gothic sensibility is evident in all of Harper’s novels. It is there in the outback settings of The Dry, The Lost Man (2019), and her newest novel, Last One Out (2025). It is there in the forest hinterland of Force of Nature (2018), the rocky coastline of The Survivors (2021), and the rural farmlands of Exiles (2023).

Each novel is set in a new location, but in all cases the central crime takes place in a small town, playing into the Gothic’s concern with isolation. Characters’ limited access to resources, their strained relationships with others, and their remoteness combine to render them vulnerable and create a sense of claustrophobia.

In The Dry, the residents of Kiewarra are suffering from an extended drought. The paddocks of local farms have dried up; so has the town’s river. In Force of Nature, the constant rain and unfamiliar tracks in a mountain forest cause a group of city folk on a corporate “retreat” to get lost during a hike.

The depictions of Tasmania in The Survivors and Australia’s wine regions in Exiles are less extreme. In these works, the natural world is not described with the same eerie, threatening tone of Harper’s earlier novels. But the most violent and climactic events take place not within homes, city streets, or even each town’s single pub. They occur in the dangerously liminal spaces of an isolated cliff and a coastal cave.

The reader is led to understand that these locations are significant in their uncertainty, which creates a sense of unease, a quiet foreboding. Although the natural sites themselves do not harm the characters, they are used for malevolent purposes by criminals, marking them out as haunting and haunted spaces.

In The Dry, the residents of Kiewarra are suffering from an extended drought. The paddocks of local farms have dried up; so has the town’s river. In Force of Nature, the constant rain and unfamiliar tracks in a mountain forest cause a group of city folk on a corporate “retreat” to get lost during a hike.

The depictions of Tasmania in The Survivors and Australia’s wine regions in Exiles are less extreme. In these works, the natural world is not described with the same eerie, threatening tone of Harper’s earlier novels. But the most violent and climactic events take place not within homes, city streets, or even each town’s single pub. They occur in the dangerously liminal spaces of an isolated cliff and a coastal cave.

The reader is led to understand that these locations are significant in their uncertainty, which creates a sense of unease, a quiet foreboding. Although the natural sites themselves do not harm the characters, they are used for malevolent purposes by criminals, marking them out as haunting and haunted spaces.

Harper’s detectives

Crime fiction is the world’s most popular literary genre. It speaks to our desire for justice and resolution.

Its origins can be traced to the 19th century, but it was during and after the first world war that crime or detective fiction was most in demand. This period – dominated by the work of Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh and Dorothy L. Sayers – has become known as the “golden age of detective fiction”.

Precisely because of the horrors of wartime, and the shock of the terrible injuries and deaths experienced there, crime fiction of this period was decidedly “unbloody”. As literary scholar Alison Light observed, “fleshiness, either figuratively or literally, was […] in gross bad taste after the butchery many had witnessed”.

In these early iterations, the crime genre was conservative. The crime has disrupted the social order in some way; the resolution of the story depends on the straightforward discovery of the criminal, with the implication that justice will be served.

In contemporary detective fiction, both the crimes and the detectives have become more complicated, more morally corrupt, less transparent in their view of justice.

This is the genre known as “noir”. Even in the recent BBC adaptations of Agatha Christie’s work by Sarah Phelps, the relatively simple character of the famous detective Hercule Poirot has been made more complex and his responses to crimes more nuanced, through the addition of a traumatic backstory.

Noir detectives are marked by their personal struggles: addiction, traumatic pasts, and – often as a result of the two former traits – difficulty in forming relationships, whether platonic or romantic. These traits compound the detective’s isolation and “otherness”.

This is also true of Harper’s recurring detective, Aaron Falk, who was forced out of Kiewarra as a teenager under suspicion of harming a local girl.

These experiences have caused him to become guarded and emotionally closed off to others, especially his romantic partners. In The Dry, we witness the disintegration of his formerly close relations, and the gradual and careful ways in which he slowly builds a fragile new friendship.

It is critical that Harper’s detectives are outsiders to the communities in which they work, albeit as non-professional detectives. In this way, they stand in for the reader, who is also – Harper’s urban and international readership suggests – an outsider, largely unfamiliar with such places and communities. This too increases the sense of mystery and threat.

A legacy version of Australia

Harper’s adherence to these generic conventions is doubtless one reason for her popularity. But her novels are not simply crime fiction.

Outback noir transfers the gritty urban settings of traditional noir to small regional towns, where the claustrophobia and secrets of a small community, as well as the threat of an encroaching natural environment, add tension and stakes to the crime at the centre of the narrative. This is where outback noir overlaps with the Gothic – specifically, Gothic narratives that take place in extreme environments, such as the Southern Gothic of the United States, and of course Australian Gothic.

This use of landscape is a common strategy in noir set in specific locales, such as Nordic noir or tropical noir. But there are negative consequences to this construction of the detective as outsider when the outback setting is presented as something unfamiliar, something to be feared. These arise from the origins of Australian Gothic, which scholars have long recognised as an expression of settler-colonial anxiety about the violent dispossession of the country’s Indigenous people.

Noir is not the only popular fiction genre that makes use of rural settings. Rural romance (or “ru-ro”) also has a wide readership and, like outback noir, uses small-town settings and the natural environment to add stakes to the plot. The small town offers a host of quirky but lovable characters, while the harsh landscape allows for displays of physical prowess and the romance of being saved from physical threat.

Both outback noir and ru-ro present a landscape that is recognisably, and cinematically, Australian. They draw upon longstanding ideas and images of our landscapes and lifestyle: a scalding sun, empty rain tanks, wide and dry plains, and a small town with a single pub where a drunken brawl is not uncommon.

This clichéd understanding of Australia has been presented and reinforced through media and marketing, often aimed at audiences beyond our shores – in Paul Hogan’s Crocodile Dundee films, for example, or in Ted Kotcheff’s film adaptation of Kenneth Cook’s novel Wake in Fright (1961).

Harper’s contribution to contemporary Australian literature hearkens back to the “golden age” of detective fiction. She uses a formula that embeds familiar features of the crime genre in an alternative setting. And just as the novels of detective fiction’s golden age erased the mutilated bodies of the war dead, her novels gloss over the difficult, traumatic and violent elements of Australia’s past and present.

They are engaging with a legacy version of Australia that is more literary than realistic. In their reinforcement of settler-colonialist depictions of Australia, they are both comfortable and uncomfortable reading.