Inside Story

“The heat,” says the sweaty Border Force official in Darwin, as if it explains all his problems. He’s on the government payroll in this tropical garrison town instead of comfortably cool down south in Melbourne where he belongs, where hail is predicted for the big horse race running this week. “Out of all the places you could go, why did you choose East Timor?” he asks, scanning our passports and our eyeballs, keeping Australia safe.

“Tourism,” replies Claire. It’s the only answer.

“It’s close,” I add. The flight to Dili is fifty minutes. Why does he need to know?

The plane is near empty, ferrying workers, students and a few functionaries back across the Timor Sea. Immigration at the Timor-Leste end is little more than a stall on the tarmac and a form to be completed in triplicate. The top copy dropped in a tray and we’re through. The guide we’ve been texting greets us in the arrivals hall with the news that he’s leaving in the morning for Honolulu on a tourism training program sponsored by the UN but has found us a replacement, Basilio, who leads us away to the carpark. Basilio is a young man with a family; the Suzuki Swift is the family car.

Into town the road follows the strip of land between coast and mountains, taking us past the new Tibar Bay container port, built by a French company with Chinese contractors, and the site of a luxury resort under construction with Singaporean money. In the distance the rugged skyline notches down in the profile of the mythic crocodile that protects this island and its people.

We stop at a shopping mall downtown for local sim cards, waiting in line with our US dollars, the currency here. There’s more paperwork than at the airport. Then Basilio drops us at the hotel. Fans chug overhead in the cavernous lobby. It’s like a Portuguese pousada, with teak beams and a wide staircase to the upper floors. A trio of Peranakan Chinese women sitting in low armchairs tinkle their gold bangles as they negotiate with a pair of nervously grinning male officials.

It’s getting late. We’ll head out in the morning.

Our visit from Darwin has been set up by translator Lurdes Pires, who was a producer on Timor-Leste’s first feature film, Beatriz’s War, in 2013. Dramatising the experience of women during the long years of Indonesian occupation, it averts its gaze neither from the sexual violence nor from the anguish of accommodation and survival afterwards. The mostly non-professional performers re-enact what happened in the locations where it happened, speaking and singing in their own language, Tetun. It’s a cathartic story of haunted return.

Pires’s most recent film is a documentary called Circle of Silence (2023) about Shirley Shackleton, widow of Greg Shackleton, one of the five television journalists from Australia murdered by the Indonesian military in the lead-up to the invasion. The film shows Shirley Shackleton’s lifelong quest not only to find out how and why those young men died at Balibo in 1975 and what happened to their remains, but also to expose Australia’s complicity in the Indonesian annexation of the former Portuguese colony.

In 1975 Lurdes, aged fifteen, was evacuated to Darwin with her family. In Circle of Silence she appears on camera interviewing her former classmates, including a woman who had married a former Indonesian soldier. Half a century later, as a retired general, the same man helped run Prabowo Subianto’s recent presidential campaign. Son-in-law of Suharto, Prabowo was a high-ranking officer in Indonesia’s special forces, Kopassus, during the occupation of East Timor. Since sanctioned for human rights abuses, he is now president elect.

Balibo memorial: the Australian journalists’ flag, hand-painted in 1975. Claire Roberts

In an extraordinary scene in Circle of Silence, Lurdes is filmed in a Jakarta hotel meeting with her former classmate while separate audio of their conversation, a phone recording, plays over. In 1975 the East Timorese woman’s Indonesian husband, Yunus Yosfiah, had opened fire on the five journalists from Australia as they were attempting to surrender.

“The wet” says Lurdes, meaning this can be a bad time of year to travel. The roads are terrible; the weather is hot and humid; it rains every day. But the country is also at its most beautiful, lush and green, with flowers blooming and trees fruiting. People are happy, returning to their villages for the holidays when festivals and ceremonies happen.

Tourism in post-conflict Timor-Leste is bound up with past conflict in ways that Basilio is trying to understand. First stop on the road to Balibo is the site along the coast where Pope John Paul II celebrated mass on his visit to the island in 1989: a site previously used for political executions. The Pope’s visit to this small Catholic land held risks both for him and for Indonesia in that world-shaking year. Suharto had come to Dili the previous year to affirm East Timor’s future as part of Indonesia, bringing with him a replica of Rio de Janeiro’s Cristo Rey statue to be built on the headland to the city’s east. From the experience with Solidarity in his own country, the Polish pontiff had a different understanding of the church’s role in supporting the oppressed. In East Timor, the church embraced young people with its own version of liberation theology fused with indigenous animism.

Two years later, in 1991, Indonesian troops fired directly into the crowd when young pro-independence East Timorese gathered in Dili’s Santa Cruz cemetery to mourn their slain comrades. British journalist Max Stahl captured the massacre on film and smuggled it out of the country, forcing the international community to confront the atrocities being perpetrated in a part of the world otherwise off the map.

An endgame that proved no less violent and duplicitous had begun. The hastily managed referendum in 1999 showed overwhelming support for independence. Revenge killings followed and Dili was left a scorched ruin as Indonesia withdrew. A belated Australian-led UN intervention brought some order to the transition and is judged to have been a success. Thus was Timor-Leste born in 2002. Max Stahl, whose courage as a journalist played a key role, died in 2021, just short of the new nation’s twentieth anniversary.

Our road passes muddy mangrove swamps where salt is still extracted the ancient way, by boiling down brine until crystals form. A fire in a hut is fed for hours with palm fronds, a pan is skimmed of scum and white salt appears. It is sold in one kilo plastic bags that look like small pillows, pegged up at wayside stalls across the country: the salt of life, for fifty cents a bag.

Further along are paddy rice, corn and vegetable patches and an array of domestic animals — dogs, chickens, ducks, pigs, goats and an occasional pet monkey — straggling on to the unfenced road. We stop to eat rice balls steamed in banana leaves with sweetcorn, strong local coffee and ginger candy. An old Dutch fort is selling handicrafts made from woven palm leaves; its stone walls shaded by mighty camphor trees, it is a disused enclave within erstwhile Portuguese territory on the frontline of maritime defence. Soon we reach the Indonesian border. West Timor is on the other side, Koepang as it was, part of the Dutch East Indies until 1949.

Today’s border crossing has modern grills, barriers and boom gates watched by concrete guard-boxes. It’s sleepy and slow in the afternoon sun, and friendly. Basilio knows the men on duty. He can speak their language. His wife’s family lives on the West Timor side. Their two kids were stuck there with their grandparents during Covid, speaking Bahasa. Basilio — like us if we want — can cross and come back on the same day. There are things that are cheaper to buy on the Indonesian side.

Sleepy, slow and friendly: the border with West Timor. Claire Roberts

After all the death and damage, relations between tiny, Catholic, newly independent Timor-Leste and its populous, sprawling, Muslim-majority, democratising, archipelagic neighbour are closer than with anyone else. Boa viagem / Farewell says the gate at the crossing. We wave goodbye and take the winding road up to Balibo.

For Australians Balibo is a code word that inscribes the death of five young white men into the martyrology of the Fretilin resistance and the sacrifice and deprivation of hundreds and thousands of East Timorese. It is the site of an old Portuguese fort high in the mountains overlooking the coast and the hinterland.

The journalists rushed there to cover the Indonesian military’s border incursions late in 1975, during the prelude to full-scale invasion. They were warned to get out, as if somehow Australian authorities had been tipped off. They were killed to prevent them from reporting and as a warning to others. Today, Balibo House is their memorial, serving as museum, community learning centre and healthcare clinic, funded by charitable donations. Still on its wall is the Australian flag daubed by the journalists in the hope it might protect them.

Balibo is a tourist destination. Across the way is a crumbling store where the bodies of the five men may have been burnt. There’s an old monument to Pancasila, Indonesia’s five principles of reformasi, and a new shop selling Chinese household goods. The shop is run by a young woman from Fujian who is married to a local man and part of a growing Chinese trading network. Everyone needs what they sell. Another stall parades champion roosters and provides palm wine for cockfights. The ground is strewn with discarded playing cards and empty cigarette packets that carry health warnings. Impotencia!

Up the hill is the church and the cemetery where we join the All Souls procession. On this day for remembering the dead, people of all ages are dressed in their best. Girls in frilly blouses and woven tais come forward with baskets of petals — bougainvillea, frangipani, cassia — and carry candles to place at the graves. Boys on motorbikes sport deadly t-shirts, rev their engines and hang back. Wax melts from the burning candles, smoke rises, the flower petals turn to ash.

On his cell phone Basilio shows us the same ceremony happening in his home village. He waves to his wife and kids. The sounds from there and here merge in the music of this holy day. Later, after nightfall, bonfires blaze on the terrace of the Balibo Fort Hotel, keeping the mosquitoes away. The lights attract swarms of flying ants — edible, meaty. The resident tabby cat with no tail leaps to catch them.

Remembering the dead: the cemetary near Balibo. Claire Roberts

In the morning we drive up the track to a farm where a family tends its own graves according to animist custom. The fifteen-year-old daughter is learning English and speaks for the group. Most days she walks into Balibo to school, where she’s good with computer skills. She’ll get a job in town when she graduates. The family shares a hand of the bananas they grow. Toddlers clamber onto our knees and a newborn is passed around. The grandmother smiles at her family, her home, her earth, as my partner Claire, the photographer, documents the moment with the camera on her phone. Then the old woman wanders away.

What makes all these phones work? Nickel, manganese, cobalt, lithium. Where are those minerals? In this earth and in the sea, like the oil and gas long in dispute between Australia and Timor-Leste, settled belatedly in 2019 in a treaty that established the maritime boundaries in the Timor Sea.

Extraction has been this island’s fate, and its attraction, for centuries. In 1436 the Chinese traveller Fei Xin reported a flourishing trade in sandalwood. A century later the Portuguese arrived. Sandalwood, revered by Hindus and Buddhists alike for the spiritual powers of its fragrance, was traded widely through the markets of Malacca. The scent stays in sandalwood for years, making it one of the world’s most valuable timbers.

Native stocks in Timor were so relentlessly logged that by the early twentieth century they became barely sustainable. As journalist Bikash K. Bhattacharya explains, exploitation ramped up further during the Indonesian occupation, funding pro-Indonesian militias through Chinese middlemen. He quotes from a 2001 research paper: “The unremitting plunder of mature stocks has reached a point where the very viability of the species on the island is threatened.”

It’s hard to see a sandalwood tree in Timor-Leste today. When Basilio finds one in somebody’s yard it’s a small, spindly, nondescript specimen. Reafforestation efforts are underway but so far there’s not much to show. The policies put in place don’t always suit small farmers.

What happens to a tree can happen to a people. The incense burns. The smell is divine. The smoke gets in your eyes.

Basilio was born in 1987. His father, codename Felix the Cat, was a guerrilla fighter. His mother conceived a child each year when her husband returned briefly to the village from his mountain hideout; when she died in 2005, aged forty-seven, she had given birth to ten children. Basilio was somewhere in the middle.

The worst year, 1997, was during Indonesia’s last-ditch effort to eliminate the resistance. Felix the Cat was captured and tortured for information. Somehow his comrades smuggled him back to the mountains barely alive while his family staged a mock funeral in the village to convince the Indonesians he was dead. Otherwise they would have kept after him and he might have ended up in the interrogation centre in Dili, a one-way journey. It was a terrible time for ten-year-old Basilio. The teachers at his school, who had been transmigrated from Indonesia, saw such a child as the enemy. The education he got was grudging and deficient.

Later Basilio enrolled in a petrochemical engineering course, hoping for a career in that promising sector. But it didn’t work out. You needed connections. He is still looking for the best way to realise his dream of building a new house in town for himself, his wife and their two growing children. Tourism might be an option, a favoured alternative if Timor-Leste is to move on from dependency on fossil fuels. Meanwhile his father, sixty now, has retreated to a traditional house of wood and thatch in the hills above their village near Aileu, where the spirits visit.

The road south takes us past the monument to the Manufahi war, an anti-colonial uprising in 1910–12 led by a local headman. The Portuguese brought in troops from their colonies in Goa, Mozambique and Macao to suppress it. Now the event is folded into a longer history of Timor-Leste’s resistance to colonisation and eventual independence.

Up the hill at Same are the remains of a Portuguese posto or administrative station — a dormitory that became an Indonesian prison, black with mould; an abandoned colonial-era swimming pool; and a carved memorial to Indonesian troops who were ambushed and killed nearby. The solemn words in Bahasa are weathering slowly. A winged lizard lands atop the stone and Basilio laughs. He tells the story of how Falintil guerrillas disguised themselves as pro-Indonesian militia, deceiving them with smart city clothes and flash haircuts. In the distance Mount Kablake, the freedom fighters’ impenetrable redoubt, disappears into cloud.

All over Timor-Leste, Portuguese and Indonesian structures are layered over, leaving their traces in a halting present. Statues, slogans, even ways of doing things are repurposed but somehow carried forward for a new future that must both honour and transform the last century’s tragic narrative. There are new Chinese buildings wrapped around old Chinese buildings. There are Japanese and Korean aid projects. There’s the localised play of American pop culture everywhere. Half the population of the country is under twenty, born since independence.

The living and the dead: a mural at Arte Moris in Dili. Claire Roberts

In 2003 an Indonesian museum near Dili was turned into a youth arts centre where new kinds of socially engaged art and performance were encouraged. Now, twenty years later, Arte Moris (“living art”) has been evicted from the site as the current Timor-Leste government makes it over into a club for veterans like Basilio’s father when they come in from the countryside.

Those fighters must be honoured, but murals have been destroyed, artworks tipped into temporary storage and a vibrant but fragile cultural ecosystem devalued. The move has drawn the ire of the most senior veterans of all, Xanana Gusmão and José Ramos-Horta, in office again as prime minister and president respectively, after a lifetime of heroic commitment to their people’s freedom. As generations and priorities collide, no solution has yet been found for Arte Moris. Meanwhile Timor-Leste is stepping out on the international art stage with a pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the independence referendum, presenting the work of artist Maria Madeira, whose installation celebrates the resilience of East Timorese women, using traditional materials for contemporary cultural activism.

The reliance on extraction that drove a bloody history continues to drive today’s uneasy politics.

Oil exploration around the Timor Sea dates back more than a century. In the build-up to the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere in the 1930s, Japan drew up plans to access petroleum from the Indonesian archipelago in the event of war. By October 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, “longstanding moves to close off Japanese access to petroleum resources in Portuguese Timor reached fruition with a secret accord between the Australian and UK governments,” as Bernard Collaery writes in his book Oil Under Troubled Water (2020).

After the war Australian companies began exploring offshore in earnest, with seabed boundary negotiations between Australia and Indonesia underway by 1970. A “Timor Gap” — a moveable seabed feast of uncertain jurisdiction — was left between Australia and East Timor. When Indonesia invaded Portugal’s colony in 1975, Australia accepted the annexation, preferring the boundary and resource-sharing agreements with Indonesia to stand. US president Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, had visited Suharto in Jakarta on 6 December 1975 to greenlight the military action (which would use US weaponry) and were back home when it began two days later. Indonesia was regarded as an ally and a bulwark against communism.

Fast forward through five decades of disputation as oil and gas deals are thrashed out against changing geopolitics and a changing environmental consciousness. As part of the Islamic world, Indonesia found itself on the wrong side of the war on terror after the 9/11 attacks. Australia bugged the Timor-Leste government’s Dili offices in 2004 during bilateral negotiations on maritime boundaries and undersea resource–sharing, as was later revealed by one of the technicians involved.

Known only as “Witness K,” the technician and his lawyer, Bernard Collaery, were charged under Australia’s National Security Information Act in 2018. After pleading guilty in a closed court, Witness K got a suspended sentence. Collaery’s prosecution was dropped following a change of government in Canberra. But not all the information concerning the matter has been released. Suspicions of skulduggery abound, some of which I conjure in my recent novel, The Idealist.

The tussle continued over Greater Sunrise, the major gas and condensate fields located roughly 450 kilometres northwest of Darwin and 150 kilometres south of Timor-Leste, now stalled by the question of where the gas should be processed. Woodside Energy, the Australian resource giant in the development partnership, has argued that the project is only economically viable if the refinery is in Darwin. Timor-Leste wants it onshore on the country’s south coast. Not only is the revenue important, with existing oil and gas income streams reaching the end of their life, so too is the location: it is a matter of sovereignty, a legacy project for the same leaders who delivered the country’s independence.

Despite fossil fuels being on the way out, fledgling Timor-Leste could benefit during the transition to green energy, including from skills transfer and infrastructure development — even if a new gas processing plant might be a white elephant in the end, and even if it means bringing China in to help with Belt and Road financing.

“For Timor-Leste, there are no allies or enemies; everyone will be only and only friends,” Gusmão said recently. China and Timor-Leste have outlined a “comprehensive strategic partnership.” Why not? China has been in the neighbourhood a long time.

A decision on Greater Sunrise is imminent. According to the partners, the aim is to identify the option that “provides the most meaningful benefit for the people of Timor-Leste.” There’s been a change of language. It sounds like a win for the old men.

And who knows what else is under the sea? Helium may be present in Greater Sunrise in large quantities, increasingly valuable for treatment of nuclear waste, medical procedures such as MRIs and defence industry needs. This and other inert gases should be included in the calculations of what Timor-Leste is owed in restitution for dodgy past deals, argues Collaery, roughly an estimated additional $5–10 billion. High-income countries with the technology to extract cobalt, nickel, manganese and the rare earths needed for EV batteries and other “clean” innovations are already racing to the Pacific’s sea floor. Deep sea mining has begun off Papua New Guinea.

Timor-Leste is an observer member of the Pacific Islands Forum that works, through its Deep Sea Minerals Project, with the International Seabed Authority to monitor and manage a rapidly evolving extractive situation. The young nation has revived a customary consensual approach to resource management called tara bandu (literally: hanging prohibition), an ecological and spiritual practice designed to enhance sustainability and community benefit in the future blue economy of this island nation.

Between the sea wall and the busy Avenue of Human Rights on Dili’s waterfront shines the refurbished Lecidere football field, the first with artificial turf in the country and a gift from China to Timor-Leste’s youth. You can’t miss its bright green under the lights. Across the bay Ataúro Island glimmers faintly in the lilac dusk. Once a prison island for troublemakers, today it’s a top diving destination.

I think of the great East Timorese writer Luis Cardoso, whose father was jailed there. Cardoso writes about his childhood on Ataúro in The Crossing, a novel translated from Portuguese by Margaret Jull Costa and published in English in 2003. A fine introduction is contributed by Jill Jolliffe, the Australian journalist who kept the faith with the East Timorese people from the time she witnessed the invasion in 1975 until the end of her life in 2022.

Cardoso has a magnificent synoptic paragraph about the history of his country and the exultation of extraction at its core. Writers extract too — stories, images, analysis. In tribute to Cardoso’s work, I offer the paragraph in full:

When the Japanese entered Timor, [my father] was already supplying arms to the Australian commandos, who were engaged in an intense, uneven battle with the Japanese. The war left him with scars which he wore like medals and which, with a certain modesty, he kept covered up; he also had many stories to relate, as well as the names of the Australian soldiers he helped, names which, before his death, he bequeathed to me, urging me to claim some form of recompense. He religiously kept empty cartridge cases as trophies of war and would hang them from the ceiling of my apartment to ward off the evil eye, demons and burglars. Then, when he heard my mother humming the melancholy, monotonous songs she had learned from the soldiers of the Empire of the Rising Sun when she was held hostage by the Japanese in the village of Ulfu, he would start singing songs in English, and then it was as if the war continued in my own house, as if, in their minds, it had never really ended. All in all, more than 50,000 Timorese died, guaranteeing Portugal the continuance of its tragic colonial adventure, and guaranteeing the Australians the present sovereignty of Her Majesty the Queen. In exchange, we were left with the wreckage of a few planes on land and about the same number of rusting, battered hulks which are still rotting in the Timorese seas, giving Timor’s inhabitants something to rest their weary eyes on while they wait for help. Meanwhile, in the skies, the vultures drank toasts in champagne to the treaty that gave them the right to suck up from the high seas the mina-rai, the fat of the land: oil.

Arcing over half a century of depredation, its marks all around, Cardoso comes to rest on that key word. His concluding sentence is an ellipsis. Writing in 1997 he did not have a figure for the estimated 200,000 East Timorese who died in the resistance struggle from 1975.

Dangling his legs beside us on the sea wall as we talk, Basilio is bemused by our old person’s interest in the past. He’s full of vigour and his day is already crowded. His wife is working late, so after he has finished with us he will shop for food, go home and do the cooking, and then help the two kids with their homework. But first he wants to run up the 570 steps to the Cristo Rey statue on the headland and check out the Jesus Backside Beach below. The water is pristine. It’s a top place for snorkelling.

“Cool bananas,” says Basilio. For him it’s all future. •

History casts a shadow over the Middle East at the best of times, and none more so than now.

Take the phrase “two-state solution,” which has become the political currency of the moment. Few, if any, longer historical shadows have fallen across the Middle East than this reference to an ideal of two countries, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, living side by side in relative harmony.

In the absence of a realistic pathway towards resolving the longest-running conflict in modern history, this hollowed-out phrase serves an obvious political purpose.

I use the word “pathway” deliberately. This was the terminology chosen by foreign minister Penny Wong last week when she outlined Labor’s approach to resolving the Israel–Palestine conflict. “We need to build a pathway to a peace that is enduring and just,” she told the ANU’s National Security College in a landmark speech. “Because the simple truth is that a secure and prosperous future for both Israelis and Palestinians will only come with a two-state solution.”

Wong went on to canvass the possibility that Australia might accord recognition to a Palestinian state as a “pathway” towards a revitalised peace process. Controversially, recognition would take place ahead of final-status negotiations on all the vexed issues that have stymied a peace process over many years.

Leaving aside the wisdom of this approach, her remarks were aligned with views expressed by the leaders of several of Australia’s close allies, including, principally, Britain. Conservative foreign secretary David Cameron had suggested a similar step a few weeks earlier, on the basis that whatever had been tried before was not working.

Wong’s alignment with Cameron produced a reaction in Australian domestic politics that was as discordant as it was ill-judged. Opposition leader Peter Dutton indulged in the sort of hyperbole that defines his leadership, declaring it “the most reckless act of a foreign minister I have seen in my twenty-two years in the parliament.”

His remarks were echoed by conservative media, which has adopted an Israel-right-or-wrong culture-wars approach to the Israel–Palestine issue. So invested have sections of the media become in this point of view that headlines appear regularly in which Wong is “lashed” by spokespersons for an assortment of Jewish organisations — including the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, the Zionist Federation of Australia and the Australia Israel Jewish Affairs Council — all espousing very similar viewpoints.

I’ll leave it to the reader to judge whether the views of particular lobby groups who are in the habit of “lashing Wong” are given more credence than is justified.

Wong’s act of “recklessness” was, of course, not reckless at all. It may have been naive, given an unpromising situation on the ground; it may have been contrived, given the complexities of the issue; it may have aimed to ease political pressures in Labor’s heartland seats. But reckless? Hardly.

For argument’s sake, and without much hope of genuine progress towards illusion becoming reality, let us consider prospects for a “two-state solution” in light of the terrible conflict in Gaza.

First, it might be useful to trace the evolution of the concept from the 1917 declaration by British prime minister Arthur Balfour, in which he pledged support for a national home for Jewish people in Palestine, up to the present. Like rusting tanks left in the desert after one of the Middle East’s innumerable wars, the signposts have found themselves submerged in shifting sands of subterfuge, mendacity and ill will.

From Balfour to the 1937 Peel Commission, which first proposed separate Jewish and Arab states; to the United Nations “partition plan” of the 1947; to the wars of 1967 and 1973 that redrew the maps of Israel and Palestine; to the Camp David Accords of 1978 that ushered in a cold peace between Israel and Egypt; to the still-born Oslo peace process of 1993; to subsequent attempts to achieve an historic compromise — all have added layers of complexity.

This was certainly the case at Camp David in 1999 and at Taba in 2000, when a last-minute effort by US president Bill Clinton’s administration to bring Israelis and Palestinians together foundered in a sea of mistrust, with much of the blame for this failure accruing to the Palestinians. Desultory attempts were made during George W. Bush’s administration, and a more purposeful effort was launched by Barack Obama to bring the parties together, but such efforts trickled into the sand.

Donald Trump advanced his own solution by proclaiming that he was intent on bringing off what he called the “deal of the century.” As far as the Palestinians were concerned this was no deal at all, rather than an attempt to expunge their legitimate rights to a sovereign state undiluted by increasing numbers of Jewish settlers. In truth, Trump’s deal was a confidence trick detrimental to Palestinian interests, as if anyone should have been surprised.

Along the way, and apart from the Oslo process and the Clinton initiative, other significant two-state proposals have included the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, also known as the Saudi Initiative, which laid down terms for a resolution of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Broadly, it called for Israel’s withdrawal from territories occupied in the 1967 war and the creation of a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital.

The chances of Israel agreeing to this formulation are, to say the least, remote. But the formula, agreed at an Arab League summit in Beirut and reaffirmed in 2007, remains the cornerstone of Arab demands.

Since no resolution of the Palestine issue remains remotely possible without a regional consensus, the Saudi initiative can’t be disregarded, however far-fetched its demands may seem in light of current circumstances. Separate from efforts to embed a two-state solution into Middle East peacemaking, a binational state in which Jews and Arabs co-exist has its advocates. However, the likelihood of such a “one-state solution” gaining traction is negligible given that Jewish people would risk ceasing to be a majority in a combined state.

History hangs heavy on the Middle East and nowhere more so than in a conflict whose contours are now further complicated by threats of a regional war between Israel and Iran. Israel’s colonisation of swathes of the West Bank, and the subjugation of a resident population to stifling military rule, remains the greatest single impediment to a settlement of the Israel–Palestine conflict based on a two-state solution. Put simply: how do you unscramble the egg?

Again, history is important.

The phrase “two-state solution” didn’t gain traction in peace-making efforts until Jordan’s King Hussein relinquished his claim to represent the Palestinians of the West Bank and East Jerusalem in 1985. The role had been assumed by the Hashemite monarchy in 1950, not long after Israel’s 1947–48 war of independence, when Jordan annexed the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

The king’s reluctant acceptance of reality enabled an animated discussion about two states, one that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was able to exploit. This important historical moment is dealt with in my book Arafat: The Biography.

By 1985, the Palestine Liberation Organisation under Arafat had long abandoned the illusion of armed victory over Israel. After King Hussein’s intervention that year the PLO moved hesitantly towards endorsing Israel’s right to exist under a two-state formula. At a press conference on the sidelines of the 1988 UN General Assembly, Arafat reluctantly accepted Israel’s right to exist, de facto and de jure, by endorsing UN Security Resolution 242, which implicitly recognised Israel. He also renounced terrorism as a means for the PLO to achieve its objectives.

This was the PLO’s down payment on a “two-state solution,” and one that embedded the phrase in Middle East peace-making.

That was thirty-six years ago. Apart from an all-too brief moment between 1993–95, following the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, and the Clinton initiative of 1999–2000, a two-state solution has remained elusive, and never more so than now.

The current conflict will not retire the phrase, of course, since politicians need to be seen to be making constructive suggestions, even if they have no intention of doing anything about them.

Foreign minister Wong should not be censured unduly for this: at least she was suggesting an alternative “pathway” in an effort break the mould of a tired debate in which “final status” discussions have served as a barrier to progress. Her critics offered not much beyond restatements of an allegiance to Israel under an extremist nationalist leadership whose impulses are to crush Palestinian aspirations.

Benjamin Netanyahu’s response to those who have sought to create “pathways” to peace has been to pursue an aggressive annexationist policy in the Occupied Territories built on ever-expanding settlements.

In all of this it is hard to disagree with Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia University. In an essay for the Guardian last week, “A New Abyss: Gaza and the Hundred Years War on Palestine,” he derides the lip service paid to a two-state solution by the Biden administration.

“There was no sign,” he writes, “that the US would demand implementation of the essential prerequisites for such a solution: a rapid and complete end to Israel’s nearly fifty-seven-year military occupation and to its usurpation and colonisation of Palestinian land, which has planted nearly 750,000 illegal settlers in 60 per cent of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.”

With no indication these measures would be firmly enforced, says Khalidi, “a call for a ‘two-state solution’ has always been meaningless, a cruel Orwellian hoax.” •

One-term federal governments in Australia are rare. The most recent — led by Labor’s James Scullin in 1931 — was one of the many victims (political and otherwise) of the Great Depression. That’s the good news for Anthony Albanese. Closer to the present day, though, Labor was forced into minority status after the Rudd–Gillard–Rudd government’s first term in 2010. The prime minister, a key player in that era, would be keen to avoid that fate too.

Unfortunately for Albanese, every first-term government since the second world war has suffered an adverse two-party-preferred swing. Those swings have varied from substantial to meagre, with John Howard being the best example of the former, suffering a 4.6 percentage point swing against his government in 1998. Indeed, Howard only managed to secure 49 per cent of the two-party vote, but his support held where it mattered and he was returned with a comfortable majority. At the other end of the scale, Robert Menzies lost just under half a percentage point in the 1951 election. Coincidentally, he and Howard went on to become Australia’s longest-serving prime ministers.

Peter Dutton offers Albanese a more reassuring electoral precedent. Since 1914, not a single first-up opposition leader after a loss of government has gone on to be prime minister (and that one — Andrew Fisher — had already been PM twice). Since 1972, those losers have been Bill Snedden, Gough Whitlam (attempting an unlikely comeback), Andrew Peacock, Kim Beazley, Brendan Nelson (who failed to survive long enough to contest an election as leader) and Bill Shorten. Still, Dutton may take some encouragement from the demolition of another long-term hoodoo (albeit at his party’s expense) — Labor’s success in winning a seat from the opposition in a by-election, namely in Aston last year.

No first-term prime minister in the modern era has sought re-election with as narrow a majority as Albanese’s. In May 2022 he secured seventy-seven seats in a House of 151 members — a floor majority of two that subsequently rose to four after the Aston win. Redistribution will reduce House numbers from 151 to 150, so seventy-six will remain the magic number for an absolute majority. On the new boundaries, New South Wales and Victoria will each lose a seat and Western Australia gains one, adding an extra dimension of uncertainty to a very finely balanced set of numbers.

Predictions of hung parliaments may be the last refuge of psephological cowards, and it’s hazardous to bet against a first-term government being returned, but in the present context minority government will inevitably be seen as a possible outcome. Partly because of the teal incursion, the Coalition holds just fifty-seven seats and would need to win an additional nineteen in order to govern with a bare majority. (I am treating the two seats where sitting Coalition members turned independent as effectively held by the party that won those seats in 2022.) We may live in electorally volatile times, but by any measure that kind of gain is the proverbial “big ask.”

State breakdowns of federal voting-intention polls are of variable accuracy (individual seat polls even more so) and only guarded observations can usefully be offered about ultimate voting patterns. Moreover, the imminent redistributions in New South Wales and Victoria render speculation more difficult, given not only that each state will lose a seat and boundaries will be adjusted, but also that existing seat margins will change. Western Australia, meanwhile, gains a seat in its redistribution: more boundary changes, more impact on existing margins.

In Victoria, Labor–Coalition contests might well attract less interest than the several seats where the Greens fancy their chances against sitting Labor members. The divided Victorian Liberal Party still seems as incapable of contributing to federal Coalition success as it is to offering voters a credible alternative state government. New South Wales is home to three Labor seats (on current boundaries) held by less than three percentage points.

In Queensland, Labor holds a paltry five of the state’s thirty seats, their most vulnerable (Blair) on a margin of 5.2 points. Surely, they couldn’t lose any more? In South Australia, a recent Labor state by-election victory over the Liberal opposition suggests that the party “brand” there is still in reasonable shape, which is encouraging for Labor’s most-marginal SA seat-holder, in Boothby, on 3.3 points. Tasmania provides a couple of the closest seats in the nation: Lyons (Labor) on 0.9 points and Bass (Liberal) on 1.4. Expect a few VIP flights over Bass Strait between now and the election.

In the twenty-three elections from 1949 onwards, federal Labor has only secured a two-party preferred majority in Western Australia on five occasions, three of which owed much to Bob Hawke’s standing as local boy made good. It isn’t the worst state for federal Labor: Queensland has only delivered the goods on three occasions. It may surprise many readers (as it did this writer) to learn that Labor’s two-party-preferred vote in Western Australia in 2022 (55.0 per cent) exceeded that secured by Labor in reliable left-leaning Victoria (54.8 per cent).

Minus the Bob Hawke phenomenon, though, it might be too much to expect Labor to repeat that 55 per cent share. But until the redistribution is finalised, speculation on specific seats would be premature.

And the territories? The Northern Territory is undergoing a redistribution of its two seats made more interesting by the very narrow margin by which Labor holds Lingiari (0.9 percentage points). And the three ACT seats remain solidly Labor.

A little recognised feature of Australian electoral history is that most first-term governments have “gone early,” failing to see out their full three years. Menzies (1951) and Whitlam (1974) were responding to Senate hostility and managed to secure double dissolutions. Fraser’s election (1977) was clearly opportunistic while Hawke’s (1984) contained opportunism with elements of constitutional necessity. Howard’s (1998) was ostensibly called to seek a mandate for the proposed goods and services tax.

An unusual feature of the election of 2010 and the double dissolution election of 2016 was the identity of the prime ministers defending their first-term governments. In neither case was it the leader who had won government: Julia Gillard had deposed Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull had done the same to Tony Abbott. Gillard had taken the government virtually full term while Turnbull’s double dissolution election was (by definition) “early.” If Albanese goes full term, he will be in a distinct minority among first-term prime ministers.

A net loss of three seats (on current boundaries) would see Labor lose its majority, but there is fair gap between that and a Coalition majority. And the impact of redistributions on the government’s effective majority remains an important variable in the lead-up to the election. It is not unusual after a redistribution for marginal seats to change status from one side to “notionally” the other when the votes from the previous election are reallocated. In theory, a majority government could become a “notional” minority one, needing a positive swing to retain government.

There is one area where history is becoming a less useful guide. Prior to the emergence of substantial crossbench numbers in the House of Representatives (sixteen of them elected in 2022), the side (Labor or the Coalition) with the greater two-party-preferred vote was overwhelmingly likely to secure majority government. This can no longer be taken for granted, especially if, as some expect, crossbench numbers are more likely to grow than shrink at the next election.

Those with memories of the indecisive 2010 election will hope that any minority government negotiations are conducted with greater despatch than was the case on that occasion. A keen observer will be the new governor-general, Sam Mostyn, mindful that she is entitled to an assurance that any proposed arrangements are workable (although they are ultimately tested on the floor of the House). I suspect that governors-general prefer decent majorities. •

Just a few days before Christmas 2023 the federal government announced a tough new vehicle efficiency standard for motor vehicles. The standard — which would belatedly have brought Australia into line with most other advanced economies — encountered predictable opposition from Peter Dutton and his Coalition colleagues and from affected lobby groups, most of it focused on the costs for the car industry and purchasers of new vehicles.

Although the climate impact of motor vehicles did figure in the debate, the direct health benefits of the government’s initial plan were almost entirely absent. Yet an accompanying statement from the government’s Office of Impact Analysis put it, vehicle emissions make a major contribution to the air pollution that can cause “reduced lung function, ischemic heart disease, stroke, respiratory illness and cancer.” Australia’s current regulations, it added, allow “a higher level of noxious and carbon emissions” than in comparable countries.

Lacking strong support for change, the government scaled back and delayed the new standard. But its near-silence on the health impacts and healthcare costs of air pollution raise an important question: was this dimension of the policy fully explored during its development?

More than a quarter of the 2700 submissions received during consultations on the standard came from health, environment and social groups. The potential health benefits of the proposal were virtually ignored in the consultation report, though, beyond a statement that the government’s preferred option would deliver $5.52 billion in health savings over the period 2025–50.

When ministers Chris Bowen and Catherine King announced the watered-down standards late last month, not a health expert was to be seen. Fronting the media were representatives of automobile manufacturers and vehicle traders, one of whom, Tesla’s Sam McLean, welcomed the government’s backdown as a “compromise between all the folks you see up here on stage.”

The health effects of traffic pollution have been recognised for decades. But recent evidence shows them to be far more serious than previously known, causing premature deaths, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, childhood asthma, adverse birth outcomes, diabetes and even dementia.

Yet there’s a shocking dearth of Australian-specific research on these effects. I was able to find only a handful of studies, the results of which vary widely because they use different mechanisms of analysis. The absence of robust data makes it much harder for governments to resist heavy lobbying by industry groups and businesses. Nevertheless, the studies that do exist highlight the imperative for action.

A 2005 study from the Bureau of Transport and Regional Economics found that motor vehicle-related air pollution accounted for between 900 and 2000 early deaths in 2000. The economic costs were assessed as between $0.4 billion and $1.2 billion for morbidity and between $1.1 billion and $2.6 billion for mortality, with most of the burden born by the elderly and the very young living in capital cities.

In 2018 the Australian Burden of Disease Study found that 3236 deaths were attributable to air pollution from particulate matter. Most of these deaths were from cardiovascular disease, stroke, respiratory diseases, lung cancer and type-2 diabetes.

A recent paper from Centre for Safe Air conservatively estimated the annual deaths from air pollution to exceed 3200, with a cost greater than $6.2 billion from years of life lost and an acknowledgement of other, more extensive, health and social impacts.

A paper published in January 2024 using data from 2018 indicated that transport emissions caused between 1000 and 2550 premature deaths and roughly 26,700 cardiovascular hospitalisations, asthma attacks and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease episodes in that year, at a total cost of $910 million.

But arguably the most up-to-date and definitive analysis is an expert position statement on the health impact of traffic emissions from the University of Melbourne, endorsed by the Australian Chronic Disease Prevention Alliance. It finds an annual toll of 11,105 premature deaths, 12,210 hospitalisations for cardiovascular disease, 6840 hospitalisations for respiratory disease, and 66,000 cases of asthma in children aged up to eighteen.

Much of the sizeable variation in these studies reflects the fact that they are measuring contributors to air pollution differently — in some cases by including more than just traffic pollution, in other cases by factoring in different-sized particulate matter (it’s usually PM2.5, the smallest, or PM10) or by including or excluding the effects of nitrogen oxide compounds.

The University of Melbourne paper cites a New Zealand study that took in both PM2.5 and nitrogen dioxide. It found that in 2016 some 3300 premature deaths could be traced to air pollution, with more than two-thirds of them attributable to motor vehicles. Air pollution contributed to more than 13,100 hospital admissions for respiratory and cardiac illnesses, including 845 asthma hospitalisations for children and approximately 1.745 million days on which people were prevented from doing the things they might have done if air pollution had not been present. The cost to the New Zealand economy in that year was estimated at NZ$15.5 billion. (The population of New Zealand in 2016 was 4.7 million.)

In Australia, as elsewhere, the burden of motor vehicle emissions falls disproportionately on people who live in urban areas or belong to certain population groups. Unborn and young children, the elderly, ethnic minorities, and those with underlying chronic disease conditions are most vulnerable.

And — as is so often the case — the greatest impact is on those who are most disadvantaged, who are more likely to live in air pollution hotspots and who are already dealing with inequalities in health and access to healthcare. Data from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare shows that the total disease burden attributable to air pollution is 2.2 times greater in the most disadvantaged socioeconomic group than among the most advantaged.

Recent findings highlight one further reason why air pollution should be treated as an urgent public health issue. Researchers have identified it as one of the three main modifiable risk factors — along with alcohol and diabetes — for Alzheimer’s Disease. People with higher exposure to traffic-related air pollution have been found to be more likely to have the elevated amyloid plaques in their brains associated with Alzheimer’s.

The fine particulate matter, PM2.5, in air pollution is hypothesised to cause inflammation and oxidative stress in the brain, contributing to pathology changes. A University of Michigan study that examined the links between different types of PM2.5 air pollution and dementia found that higher exposure to PM2.5 particles from agriculture, road traffic, coal burning, industry and wildfires was linked to an increased risk of dementia.

These studies are observational in nature, but given that fewer than 1 per cent of Alzheimer’s cases are inherited, environment and lifestyle are likely to play a key role in the development of the disease. Moreover, the adverse health effects of air pollution from road traffic should be seen in conjunction with the impact of bushfire smoke, which is an increasingly common threat in Australia.

One more finding should serve to keep the focus on policy rather than politics: there is growing evidence that pollution makes it easier for Covid-19 to spread through the air. An international study has reported that long-term exposure to nitrogen oxide compounds and particulates could have contributed to up to 15 per cent of Covid-related deaths internationally, and up to 3 per cent of deaths in Australia.

In other words, the federal government’s decision to pull back on the new standard was clearly not based on all the available evidence. The loudest voices got the most attention. For whatever reason, Labor also appears to have been influenced by the Biden administration’s concurrent decision to ignore health impacts and cave in to business objections to new air pollution standards developed by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Even though he is keen to reverse Donald Trump’s rollback of regulations, Biden is obviously looking to ensure he doesn’t face headwinds from powerful business sectors, transport unions and the governors of Republican states in a tough election year. And — importantly — the revised standards he announced this week still place the United States well ahead of Australia.

In polling last month by Resolve Political Monitor, only 22 per cent of respondents supported the vehicle emissions plan in its original form and a whopping 78 per cent either opposed the plan or were unsure. That’s not surprising, especially given that only 38 per cent of voters were aware of the plan. But it also shows that the government didn’t communicate the full benefits of a tougher standard.

Support for new policies — even those that increase fuel efficiency, make electric vehicles more affordable, and improve public health — won’t come if voters don’t know how they will benefit. And when a government fails to communicate effectively it’s no surprise if everything voters know about a proposal comes from the interest groups that oppose it. •

If he wasn’t already a hard man when he was jailed, Yahya Sinwar was a very hard man by the time he walked out of an Israeli prison in 2011. A beneficiary of a prisoner–hostage swap, he had closely observed his Israeli guards during his twenty years of imprisonment and had become fluent in Hebrew. This knowledge of his enemy underpinned his planning of 7 October’s shocking break-out from Gaza.

First came a period of strategic deception, during which his Hamas movement appeared to moderate its armed confrontation with Israel, notably by cutting rocket attacks, in return for large-scale economic aid from Qatar. That aid deal was tacitly approved by Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who saw it as a way of helping tame Hamas while deepening the split in the Palestinian leadership between the Islamists of Hamas and the secular Fatah elements running the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

Then came the attack, delivered so surprisingly and with such indiscriminate violence that a harsh military response was inevitable. Sinwar then withdrew his surviving fighters, accompanied by as many Israeli hostages as they could capture. Having himself been part of a swap of 1000 Palestinian prisoners for just one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, he knew their value as bargaining chips.

Stinging at the deception, Netanyahu marshalled 50,000 soldiers and launched an air, land and sea campaign into Gaza with the aim of eliminating Hamas for good and freeing the hostages. So far, some eighty-five of the original 230 hostages have been released in a swap for Palestinian detainees. About one hundred are thought to remain alive, captive to Hamas or other militant groups.

After six months of military operations, the Israel Defence Force says it has killed about 13,000 of the estimated 30,000 fighters in Hamas’s military arm, including several senior unit commanders, for 260 soldiers of its own killed in Gaza operations. But Sinwar and other top leaders remain hidden and active.

For their part, Hamas health officials say 33,000 (among them 9000 women and 12,300 children) have died from Israeli attacks, with about 75,000 wounded and a further 7000 missing, believed buried in rubble. The figures, which seem widely accepted by international agencies and observers, don’t distinguish between militants and civilians.

The Israeli onslaught is the response Hamas expected. “We know very well the consequences of our operation on October 7,” said Khaled Mashal, a Qatar-based Hamas political leader, soon after the attack. “No nation is liberated without sacrifices.”

If any Gazan citizens don’t agree with being put up as sacrifices like this, we don’t hear from them. In the daily stream of smartphone videos of bereaved survivors pulling their dead children from the rubble we haven’t seen Hamas being blamed for the bloodshed. And perhaps Gazan journalists working for Reuters, Associated Press, Al Jazeera and other media would hesitate to ask.

It took Israeli authorities some time realise that the death tallies and horrific video images made up the narrative mostly being seen by the outside world. Israel’s own media, with a few exceptions like the liberal newspaper Haaretz, concentrated on the violence against Israelis in the October attack, showing little of the carnage inside Gaza. After some weeks, Israeli embassies and lobby groups abroad began showing video and other evidence, emphasising child murder and sexual assault, to counter sympathy for the Gazans.

The high death toll and the destruction of more than two-thirds of dwellings in Gaza was meanwhile achieving the objectives stated explicitly by Mashal and other Hamas figures. They had seen the Palestinian cause slipping away, the West Bank being steadily annexed by Jewish settlements with little effective protest by Western powers pledged since 1993 to a two-state solution.

Under Donald Trump, the US embassy had been moved from Tel Aviv to contested Jerusalem: he was not holding out for a two-state settlement. Trump had also brokered the Abraham accords, which brought Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states closer to Israel: support for Palestinians seemed to be weakening among these Sunni powers.

Hamas set out to shatter this trend. “We knew there was going to be a violent reaction… But we didn’t choose this road while having other options,” said one Hamas official, Basem Naim. “We have no options.” It was necessary to “change the entire equation and not just have a clash,” Khalil al-Hayya, a member of Hamas’s top leadership body, told the New York Times in Qatar. “We succeeded in putting the Palestinian issue back on the table, and now no one in the region is experiencing calm.”

Without going into the “context” sometimes used to explain or even excuse the 7 October attack, it’s useful to consider what Israel could have done instead of its all-out military response. What alternatives does it have now to pursuing it?

Cautioning voices in the early weeks made comparisons with America’s “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks. Could a more measured response, holding back the military while carefully assembling police evidence of the atrocious crimes committed by Hamas and other attackers on 7 October, have turned the moral tables? Bodies were quickly buried, and other forensic evidence lost, in the wave of anger and grief that swept Israelis.

And even then, what to do? Military experts say there is no way to eliminate an enemy hiding in cellars and tunnels in a dense urban setting without many civilian casualties. The battle of Fallujah, in 2004 during the Iraq war, and the Mosul siege against Islamic State in 2017 are comparable, except that in both cases most of the civilian population was able to flee beforehand. Even so, the Americans and Iraqis killed many of the remaining civilians and lost many soldiers, while the insurgents were not decisively eliminated.

Given the narrowness of Gaza and Egypt’s refusal to accept refugees (assuming Palestinians agreed to leave, knowing they might end up permanently expelled), the strip has hardly any space for safe refuge, and Hamas fighters would in any case move with civilians. Further slaughter of civilians would be unavoidable.

Netanyahu says Israel’s military is regrouping to push into Rafah in the south of the strip, against the Egyptian border, where 1.2 million displaced Gazans are camped and where the Israeli Defense Force claims the bulk of surviving Hamas fighters are hiding. Israeli spokesmen have suggested the IDF’s first move will be to seal the border and offer Hamas militants safe passage out to exile. If few accept, which seems likely, what then?

The operations in the north and centre of the Gaza strip have not been a clean sweep. Hamas elements remain, causing Israeli casualties, and a recent return to the large al-Shifa Hospital to ferret out hidden insurgents has resulted in more Gazan casualties. A Rafah attack and even more civilian deaths and injuries will only add weight to Sinwar’s grim calculus.

Israel’s main Western allies, meanwhile, are declaring it is time to stop — calls that intensified after a drone attack killed seven aid workers including Zomi Frankcom, an Australian. They are also preparing to deliver humanitarian aid themselves: the United States is building a new jetty and Britain will send a Royal Navy ship to land supplies.

Netanyahu is also facing mounting pressure inside Israel: for not giving priority to freeing the hostages; for failing to take responsibility, by resigning, for the security lapses that allowed the 7 October attack to happen; and for his earlier attempts to undermine judicial independence and wriggle out of corruption charges.

“If we enter into Rafah it will be a human disaster,” Ami Ayalon, former head of Israel’s Shin Bet security agency, told London’s New Statesman last week. “I don’t know how many Palestinians will die. I know that many Israelis [soldiers] will die. We have to assume rationally that Egypt will have to react. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will climb on the [border] fences.” Egypt, Jordan and other regional states will reassess relations with Israel.

Pressure of a different kind comes from within the Israeli cabinet, where extreme Zionists like national security minister Itamar Ben-Gvir say they will topple Netanyahu if he baulks at attacking Rafah. Politically, he has every motive to keep up the military offensive.

At whatever point the Israeli government declares “mission accomplished” it will be left in control of 2.2 million destitute people and a Gaza in ruins, among them many Hamas sympathisers and a new generation seething for vengeance. Like the insurgent leaders in Fallujah, Sinwar might well have slipped away.

But at that point, too, Netanyahu knows that his days in power could end. The war has protected him against calls for elections or a reshuffle in the Knesset. But if it is over, and hasn’t been extended to new fronts — against Iran, against Hezbollah in Lebanon, or by settler attacks in the West Bank — Israel could then have a new leadership, probably still right-wing but perhaps less invested in Netanyahu’s policies.

That would bring an opening for Arab powers, the West, and the United Nations to assume responsibility for rebuilding and securing Gaza.

The US secretary of state Anthony Blinken has been working on a plan that would see a Gaza truce extended into a creation of a Palestinian state. The Washington Post reported in February that the ideas under discussion include the withdrawal of many, if not all, settler communities on the West Bank; a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem; the reconstruction of Gaza; and security and governance arrangements for a combined West Bank and Gaza. Israel would be offered specific security guarantees and normalised relations with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states. Britain and the European Union are said to be supportive.

And Australia? Speaking at ANU this week, foreign minister Penny Wong indicated that Canberra was party to this thinking. Instead of putting Palestinian statehood at the end of negotiations, she said, “the international community is now considering the question of Palestinian statehood as a way of building momentum towards a two-state solution.” Echoing ex–Shin Bet chief Ayalom, she argued that statehood would undermine Hamas, Iran and other extremists.

A reformed Palestinian Authority would be needed to run the state, with no role for Hamas. “Hamas is a terrorist organisation which has the explicit intent of the destruction of the state of Israel and the Jewish people,” Wong said.

(In a revised charter in 2017, Hamas said it would accept a Palestinian state within the territories occupied by Israel since the 1967 war only as a step towards complete settlement of the original pre-Israel territory. It was not opposed to Jews, it said, just Zionists. Netanyahu publicly ripped up a print-out of this less-than-reassuring charter.)

In Australia, the Coalition has quickly characterised Wong’s proposals as “rewarding terrorism,” as have various Israel-aligned lobby groups. Indeed, it will be hard to avoid Hamas getting credit. Among Palestinians, including those in the West Bank, opinion polls have shown support for Hamas and its attack has risen to 80 per cent.

In a plan circulated at the end of February, Netanyahu declared that Israel must maintain security control, including a 300-metre no-go zone at the Gaza borders and a wide corridor across the middle of the strip, and by tightly controlling the Egyptian border. He wants the UN refugee agency, UNRWA, kicked out. He proposes replacing the Hamas administration with local representatives “who are not affiliated with terrorist countries or groups and are not financially supported by them.” He continues to ridicule the idea of Palestinian statehood and says a date has been set for invading Rafah.

In other words, a Palestinian state would probably emerge only over Netanyahu’s political corpse. With the US presidential election getting nearer, Blinken’s time may also be running out.

Many Palestinians would also have to be convinced that the United States and other Western powers are sincere and determined. More than thirty years have passed since the Camp David accords set two states as the goal. Tareq Baconi, president of the board of al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, is one who argues that the moment for a two-state solution has long passed, and that the idea of partition, which ignores the 1947 expulsion of Arabs from what became Israel, is inherently unjust and impracticable. Israeli journalist Dimi Reider has long urged that creative thinking be used to turn Israel’s “apartheid” system into a single entity that gives equal rights and security to Israelis and Palestinians.

Rebuilding Gaza will take decades and tens of billions of dollars, says senior UN economist Rami Alazzeh. Not only have many homes been destroyed, but water, sewerage, electricity, schools, administrative records and financial systems have also been devastated. The population is suffering dire physical and psychological distress.

Just possibly, though, the vista for a longer-term building of peace could be opening. Whether it’s a two-state solution, a single state or one that leads to the other is a field of literature in itself. Either requires a vast effort of trust and reconciliation in the embittered Holy Land. •

Should residents of the most populous Australian city of the late-Victorian age, a status it would reclaim only in the far distant 2020s, take a bow — or should they blush?

In early 1888, James Malley, formerly of Kansas and points further east, was in a proper fix. Acquitted years before of murder, outed as an insurance fraudster and holed up in a San Francisco hotel, this son of an Irish immigrant saw opportunity beckon in the guise of two alluring words: Melbourne Exhibition.

Retailers from all over the globe were gathering to parade their wares in one red-hot marketplace: the perfect place to mix in.

Our hero (loose usage indeed for this unscrupulous self-promoter who, after donning and shedding at least ten aliases, had settled on the grandiose moniker of King) had the ideal product to palm off on an unwary public — himself.

For thirty whole years he had been a chameleon and chancer. For the next sixty-five, from the Melbourne Exhibition onwards, he would riff on the same theme, epitomising what Orwell said of political language by giving “an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

Actually, he went one better, whistling up a few solid achievements out of hot air.

Father of the Commonwealth Bank, as he is widely credited? Historians dispute whether O’Malley was entitled to that appellation. But it is undeniable that the Fisher Labor government, which established the “people’s bank,” had no more persistent and vociferous proponent in its ranks.

And it is a fact set in stone that of the only two members of Australia’s first national parliament who lived into the second half of the twentieth century — both incredibly colourful men, the other being Billy Hughes — O’Malley claims the mantle of longest-surviving.

When he died in Christmas week 1953, O’Malley was either ninety-five, ninety-six or ninety-nine, depending which account you believe. Even now, his origin story remains elusive (is that a ghostly laugh I hear?)

According to the Australian Dictionary of Biography O’Malley, “by his own account,” was born on 4 July 1858 at Stanford Farm (which may never have existed) in Quebec. Wikipedia says he was born two days before that, in Kansas.

In How James Became King his latest biographer, Brian O’Malley, maintains he was born almost a year earlier, on 19 August 1857, in Connecticut; and this seems most likely, though it’s difficult to be sure (the Irishism is apt here) when the man himself supplied thirteen different birth years over a lifetime.

“King” O’Malley — born, whenever, as James Malley — was a kind of reverse “birther.” Rather than do an Obama and produce a birth certificate to prove he’d been eligible to stand for president, this American born a century earlier offered a far less conclusive document: a letter claiming he’d been born in the British dominion of Canada and so was entitled to stand for parliament in the imperial colony of South Australia and, later, in its new federal counterpart.

As observed during last decade’s furore over foreign-born MPs’ eligibility to sit in federal parliament, neither our first Labor prime minister, Chilean-born Chris Watson, nor O’Malley was probably qualified to be in parliament. Questions were raised at the time but our man brazened them out.

Brian O’Malley is a Canberra-based genealogist whose inspiration for delving into the life of his famous namesake sprang from curiosity as to whether they were members of the same clan of that ilk (in the literal Scottish sense). Baffled in that endeavour, he concludes that it is possible he and “King” are related as both had relatives who’d emigrated from County Mayo and ended up in Pittston, Pennsylvania.

If thousands of hours’ research couldn’t enable Brian O’M to join the family dots together — and he trawled through the 11,000 materials in the O’Malley archive at the National Library of Australia, a most impressive feat — it was optimistic to expect him to dismantle brick by brick an edifice of subterfuge and “stage smoke” crafted over a lifetime that embedded his myth in Australian political folklore. Don’t we all still believe that an apple dropped on Newton’s scone?

As an exotic creature in Australia’s political zoo, KOM was relentlessly good entertainment. Contemporaries were not in the business his posthumous biographer is all about — holding him to account.

So what has he discovered? BOM’s research justifies his claim — made in an email to this reviewer — to have uncovered more of the critical pieces in the jigsaw of his subject’s life story than were ever unearthed before. Specifically, “these particularly placed KOM in the same location as James Malley on numerous occasions.”

That James Malley was wrongly acquitted of murdering a young Connecticut woman in 1881 is strongly indicated by the evidence presented here. And, even this late in the day, this matters. It’s a shocking thought that a craven murderer in one country can reinvent himself as a statesman in another.

But BOM’s claim that he has “uncovered the truth that had been hidden for a century about who KOM was” is over-egging it. He can’t prove him a murderer after 140 years. He does demonstrate that, as a Sydney Sun columnist put it in 1915, his protagonist was “a vaudevillian and a fraud,” but that is not a complete revelation.

The famously shameless O’Malley still dances us a merry jig even as the lid is lifted on his American prehistory. As well as the multiple aliases and colourful monikers, his personas include those of huckster, holy roller, insurance salesman and temperance advocate.

When the steamer Mariposa docked in Sydney, BOM writes, KOM had fled from “a country which did not have an extradition treaty with Australia.” An editor would have supplied an excellent reason for not having one: no Australian nation would exist for another thirteen years.

Unfortunately for the reader, this is simultaneously a spectacular life story and an irritatingly flawed account of it, containing defects of spelling, syntax, grammar and occasionally fact that an editor would be expected to have removed before it saw the light of day.

Salt Lake City, the capital of Utah, is translated to Nevada; the famous late-Victorian actress Ellen Terry is persistently misspelt Terri. Halfway through, there’s an implication KOM had been involved in lynching at some time — never referenced elsewhere. At another point, we have KOM traversing the Californian and Victorian gold rushes, “episodes he directly experienced.” Well, this 1850s baby was born too late for the rush of the ’49ers and migrated decades too late for the Victorian one.

If any manuscript gets this far and retains such faults, the publisher rightly shares the blame for not employing an editor rigorous enough to notice and amend them but diplomatic enough not to ruffle the writer’s feathers too much in the process. On this occasion, it transpires, Australian Scholarly Publishing did have an editor but the author — advisedly or not — decided on a wholesale rewriting of the manuscript. Obviously a reviewer has no way of telling if the original version was properly edited; all that can be said, with sincere regret, is that this one was not.

Fortunately, the treasure trove of anecdotal riches, and O’Malley’s eccentricities, will prevent most readers from turning away altogether. But a fraction of the materials the author assiduously lays out would have sufficed to convince most readers that his central thesis — that O’Malley was a charlatan and a fraud — is sound. The overall effect is spoilt by repetitious overkill combined with surmises where the evidence supplied is merely circumstantial.

Mythologies may not be impervious to facts but they are highly resistant. Then as now, those who talk the talk capture our attention. In a prominent interview around the time of Federation, “King” said that in 1887 a doctor diagnosed a lung complaint aggravated by the US climate, and noted narcissistically: “Realising that I had no further show of becoming President of the States, my next idea was to be Prime Minister of Australia, and that I [not] only hope but believe I will be in the next few years.”

Well, he wasn’t, but he wasn’t far off either. Fast forward to 1912 and an event to mark the founding of Canberra. In black-and-white footage of the event held by the National Film and Sound Archive we see rangy O’Malley prominently identified as the Minister for Home Affairs.

Let’s close with a fresh metaphor.

James (O’)Malley was a consummate practitioner of the art of biographical evasion. From these pages he emerges as a Houdini forever extricating himself from the bonds of historical truth (although, of course, unlike the famous escapologist, he did live to a grand old age).

So it should come as no great surprise if a century later, despite the close attentions of his eponymous pursuer, the “wild Irishman” has eluded us again. •

How James Became King: The True Story of James “King” O’Malley
By Brian O’Malley | Australian Scholarly Publishing | $49.95 | 358 pages

In its third year, the Ukraine war has changed much, even as it keeps changing. It proclaims that the old international order is broken. How it unfolds and how it ends will say much about what new order, or disorder, is emerging.

Important history keeps arriving: Russia’s initial arrogance and military blunder in thinking it could invade and occupy in weeks; Ukraine’s extraordinary resistance as a nation found its steel and its soul; the world confronted by threats of nuclear war for the first time in decades; the strategic fanaticism of Vladimir Putin; the galvanised response of Europe and the United States, now overtaken by questions about Washington’s will to support Ukraine.

Such international drama is the stuff of “instant” history. And an exemplary example is War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World, published just last week by Johns Hopkins University Press and available as a free download here.

This is big history with a big canvas:

The war in Ukraine has altered the course of global history. When Vladimir Putin’s forces sought to conquer Ukraine in February 2022, they did more than threaten the survival of a vulnerable democracy. The invasion unleashed a crisis that has changed the course of world affairs. This conflict has reshaped alliances, deepened global cleavages, and caused economic disruptions that continue to reverberate around the globe. It has initiated the first great-power nuclear crisis in decades and raised fundamental questions about the sources of national power and military might in the modern age. The outcome of the conflict will profoundly influence the international balance of power, the relationship between democracies and autocracies, and the rules that govern global affairs.

Edited by Hal Brands, the history offers seventeen chapters by different authors, grouped in three sections: Origins and Overview; The Conflict; Global Dimensions and Implications. The aim is to map causes and essential elements and “explain how this war is reshaping the world.”

Brands, professor of global affairs at Johns Hopkins, says the volume “is an effort to write history in real time.” The quality of the writing and the sharpness of the analysis mean the book does a fine job of hitting many moving targets.

Brands argues the war is part of a broad historical pattern which means that Ukraine, sitting at the hinge of Eurasia, has been at the centre of every major global clash, hot or cold, of the modern era. “Any European empire seeking glory to the east must go through Ukraine,” he writes. “Any Eurasian power expanding into Europe must do the same. So the fate of Ukraine was a vital issue in every great Eurasian struggle of the twentieth century: World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. It is no less central to the clash between Russia and the West today.”

He offers six preliminary understandings on the meaning of the war, linked to looming questions about:

The norms and conventions of the international order: Russia’s attempt at conquest could “usher in an era in which neo-imperial powers engage in the most naked forms of predation.” Will the post 1945 norm against territorial conquest be strengthened or shattered?

A double failure, years in the making: “Putin’s failure to ensure a weak, pliant Ukraine by means short of all-out conflict, and the West’s failure to deter just such an all-out attack.”

The uncertainty of war: The invasion’s outcome was highly contingent and the opening phase was full of surprises. “When the invasion began, most observers expected Ukraine to be defeated in short order. The Ukrainian military was outnumbered and overmatched; foreign governments were urging President Volodymyr Zelensky to flee. The collapse of Ukraine’s government and the success of Putin’s war plan were entirely possible.”

A fractured world: The war deepened and accelerated global division, pitting “two coalescing, rival coalitions more sharply against one another, even as other countries resisted this polarisation of world politics — or profited from playing both sides.” Will advanced democracies that have supported Ukraine, or the Eurasian autocracies that have been complicit in its suffering, have the strength and persistence needed to thrive in this age of global competition? Will the conflict fortify or fragment international order?

The return of great-power nuclear crises: “Before 2022, it had been decades since two great powers squared off in a crisis in the shadow of nuclear escalation. That changed when this war began. From the outset, Putin and his minions made threats, veiled and not-so-veiled, that Russia might use nuclear weapons if the West directly intervened in the conflict.” Will nuclear blackmail be seen to bring strategic benefits or self-imposed costs?

The war’s global legacy is yet to be fully written: “For if this conflict illustrates the contingency of major war, it also illustrates the contingency of global order.”

Looking at military operations and battlefield dynamics, contributor Michael Kofman tells a tale of two wars — the initial period versus the long war. The first period decided whether Ukraine would retain its sovereign status and identity as an independent nation, writes this Russia specialist at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, while the long war is a traditional conflict to determine Ukraine’s geographic boundaries and its economic viability:

After the first month of intense combat, the course of the war began to align with historic patterns of large-scale conventional wars, featuring prolonged periods of positional fighting, offensives and counteroffensives, sieges in urban terrain, phases dominated by high levels of attrition, and operations to break through a prepared defence.

As the war becomes more a marathon and less a race, says Kofman, the factors of “manpower, materiel, money, and mobilisation capacity cast a long shadow over the arc of a conflict.” And now, in 2024, Russia has “a growing advantage in manpower, equipment, and ammunition.”

Russia’s military resilience and adaption is described by Dara Massicot from the Russia and Eurasia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Despite severe casualties, poor field conditions, and commanders of varying quality,” she writes, “Russian soldiers mostly continue to endure their circumstances inside occupied Ukraine.”

During the disastrous opening months of the war in 2022, Massicot notes, some units abandoned equipment and positions while on the offensive, yet these units were later reconstituted and redeployed to the front. “Desertions as of early 2024 have been growing, but they still constitute only a small percentage of overall combat strength inside Ukraine,” she writes. “There have been no mass refusals of orders or cascading refusals along the front lines, even during the collapse of the Kharkiv front in 2022.”

On the whole, Massicot finds, Russian positions have “not capsized due to poor morale or lack of resilience, even as units are likely underperforming as a result of prolonged exposure and stress and lack of rotations.” She suggests that Russia may conclude that it has the resilience to outlast Ukraine and the West:

A strategy for Ukraine centred on attrition or punishment has thus far proved insufficient against an adversary willing to absorb upwards of 350,000 casualties of varying severity and losses of 13,000 pieces of equipment over the past two years. Russian leaders remain willing to pay high costs in personnel and equipment for modest gains and do not appear all that concerned about challenges to domestic stability.

The initial Russian invasion failed to deliver a quick, decisive victory, and the 2023 Ukrainian counteroffensive suffered the same fate. The two sides are now in war of attrition.

Describing the changing war strategies, Thomas G. Mahnken and Joshua Baker write that Russia’s transition to a “deep defence” signals Moscow’s preparation for a long war. Mahnken is a professor at the Johns Hopkins and head of Washington’s Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, while Baker is a recent graduate of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

In this long war, they note, “Russia’s frontline troops seem to be well resourced and more willing to defend their positions.” Ukraine and its Western backers face a war that “closely resembles the great wars of the twentieth century,” conflicts rooted in “ideology and fuelled by nationalist desires.” The determinants of success in long wars are different from those in short wars:

Whereas surprise, new ways of war, and operational virtuosity loom large in short conflicts, victory in protracted conflicts often hinges on other factors. Sound strategy and operational art are always at a premium, but success or failure in protracted wars often hinges on one side’s ability to out-produce the other, maintain its societal cohesion while undermining that of its adversary, and gather and nurture a coalition while disrupting that of the enemy.

The ability of the United States to influence the war was vividly shown when Washington denied Moscow any chance at shocking Ukraine into submission. The “unprecedented warning” issued by US intelligence agencies, outlining Russia’s plans and preparation before the invasion, is described by Alexander Bick, who served in the Biden administration as director for strategic planning at the National Security Council and as a member of the policy planning staff at the State Department. Bick argues that timely US intelligence and military support deprived Russia of any element of surprise, and was critical in the defence of Kyiv.

Bick set up a Washington team of government experts, a “tiger team,” in December 2021 to consider the consequences of the threatened Russian invasion and produce a “playbook” of US responses. The starting point was a list of objectives developed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and given to the president in October 2021:

1. Avoid a kinetic conflict between the US military and NATO with Russia
2. Contain the war inside the geographic boundaries of Ukraine
3. Strengthen and maintain NATO unity
4. Empower Ukraine and give it the means to fight

Two weeks before the first Russian tank crossed the Ukraine’s border the tiger team playbook approved by the Biden in the second week of February laid out a “comprehensive picture” of the US response plan and roles. Bick says the experience offers a caution about any ability to predict future events:

In devising our planning scenario, the Tiger team got the scale, geography, and timing of Russia’s military operations almost exactly right. But we were wrong on almost everything else. We overestimated the Russian military, underestimated Ukraine’s capabilities and resolve, and failed to anticipate the extent to which fear and public revulsion would reshape European politics in favour of tougher response options, some of which seemed out of reach only days before.

During the first year of the war in 2022, the Biden administration proclaimed that Russia had suffered a major strategic failure. The optimism declined in 2023 as Russia blunted Ukraine’s offensive.

Discussing US strategy in Ukraine, Kori Schake of the American Enterprise Institute says Biden’s aim was “to provide extensive but limited support to Ukraine for as long as it takes.” US policy had five main elements: disclosing intelligence information, rallying international support, imposing economic sanctions, isolating Russia diplomatically, and providing military assistance to Ukraine. But Biden, she charges, was principally concerned about limiting American risk rather than maximising Ukraine’s power.

Schake was one of 130 former Republican national security officials who signed a 2020 statement endorsing Biden and claiming President Trump was unfit to serve another term. She offers what can be read as a measured Republican critique of Biden’s Ukraine policy. Her sharpest charge is that the US didn’t “adjust its strategy over time to tighten the noose around Russia until Putin lost on the battlefield.” The refusal of Trump-inspired (or fearful) Republicans in Congress to vote for more military aid to Ukraine seems to indicate that Trump’s policy is to loosen the noose completely.

Delay in delivering weapons and ammunition, Schake writes, was “most tragically and visually evident in Russian construction of defences in late 2022 and early 2023.” Biden’s strategy had the enormous benefit of incurring no American casualties while showcasing American leadership in upholding international order, Schake judges:

Unquestionably without the crescendo of effort undertaken by the Biden administration, Ukraine would have lost its war and been extinguished as a nation. Nonetheless, by early 2024 the Biden administration found itself in a similar position strategically to the Bush administration in 2005: having committed enormous resources to a war effort that was not succeeding and probably could not attain success on the current trajectory, the government remained intellectually unwilling to adopt approaches that might produce a better outcome. And as in George W. Bush’s Iraq war, Joe Biden’s presidential administration was now inseparably tied to the war in Ukraine: should the effort fail, it would look of a piece with the disastrous denouement of American involvement in Afghanistan.

The largest conventional armed conflict in Europe since the second world war has changed Russia as much as Ukraine. The mind of Vladimir Putin conjured up the war and his determination drives the conflict. His dream is to reconstruct the Russian empire that dissolved with the ending of the cold war.

Moscow will challenge Europe and US so long as Putin is in power, and most likely well beyond his departure, argues Andrea Kendall-Taylor of the Centre for a New American Security:

Putin is reorienting Russia around the cause of confrontation, first with Ukraine but also with the United States and NATO. He is reshaping society, has put the economy on a wartime footing, and [has] doubled down on partnerships with like-minded partners, especially in China, Iran, and North Korea. These changes will not easily be undone. Confrontation with the West has become the organising principle of Russia’s domestic and foreign policies, and Putin points to Russia’s “existential struggle” with the West as the primary justification for his regime and its actions. Even if the fighting in Ukraine subsides or ends, Putin will require confrontation to keep his regime in power.

Putin’s “strategic fanaticism” is the focus of the chapter by Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College London. He starts with philosopher George Santayana’s famous observation: “Fanaticism consists in redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.”

Strategic fanaticism stems from obsession and a readiness to go to extraordinary lengths to satisfy that obsession, says Freedman. “Since 1991 Russians have been reluctant to accept Ukraine as an independent state. This turned, under Putin, into a conviction that Ukraine could only be allowed sovereignty so long as it was deferential to Russia’s wishes, accepted a degree of economic integration, and stayed clear of Western institutions. When that could not be guaranteed, it should be dismembered and punished.”

Putin has ensured that that Russia will be hated and distrusted by Ukrainians for generations, Freedman judges, and Putin’s aim of a compliant government in Kyiv is now beyond his reach.

Anne Applebaum of the Atlantic magazine attacks the myth that the Ukraine crisis is the West’s fault. She says that Americans, accustomed to seeing themselves at the centre of every story, imagine that Western foreign policy choices and decisions “are central to the centuries-long power struggle between Russia and Ukraine.” Joined to that myth, she argues, too many in the West give tacit assent to the “Russian argument that Ukraine is not a real country and does not have a right to sovereignty.”

Looking instead at what Putin and his cronies proclaim, Applebaum says, reveals “a Russian elite that believes smashing Ukraine and smashing treaties will alter forever a world that they perceive to be dominated by the wealthy democracies, especially the United States. This nihilism is reflected directly in the systematic brutality of Russian troops on the ground.” The Russian occupiers have “repeatedly demonstrated their intention to eliminate not only the Ukrainian state but also Ukrainian identity and culture.”

Any instant history of a war in progress must confront the ultimate question: how will this end? Applebaum’s answer is that only Russian defeat will deliver a decisive conclusion:

A military loss could create a real opening for national self-examination or a major change, as it so often has done in Russia’s past. Only failure can persuade the Russians themselves to question the sense and purpose of a colonial ideology that has repeatedly impoverished and ruined their own economy and society, as well as those of their neighbours, for decades. Yet another frozen conflict, yet another temporary holding pattern, yet another face-saving compromise will not end the pattern of Russian aggression or bring permanent peace.

The war means that the European Union has shifted from a “peace project to a war project,” according to Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Where “most European countries could not imagine a war breaking out between European states,” he writes, the war changed the way that core nations in the EU think about their identity. A “truly geopolitical Europe” is emerging, Leonard argues, that will “fundamentally reshape the European security order and the idea of Europe along with it.” A Europe that sought to escape history must confront bloody history on its doorstep.

Leonard’s prediction is that the European Union will keep expanding to eliminate “the problematic buffer zone between Europe and Russia,” producing a “sharp definition of Europe’s borders.” A bigger, stronger European Union with a geopolitical role shaped by the war would be “a union able to defend itself against military threats, wield its economic power more effectively, renew itself politically while maintaining its legitimacy, and emerge as an equal partner to the United States.”

In Ukraine today, winter has turned to spring and Russia prepares to mount a major offensive, as it did last year. Last month, Moscow finally abandoned the fiction that it is mounting a “special military operation,” instead expressing the truth that it’s at “war.”

The language shift is aimed at Russians as much as the rest of the world. Russia may have the upper hand militarily — it occupies almost a fifth of Ukraine — but Moscow’s nod to reality is about the huge casualties Russia has suffered and an economy forced on to a war footing.

Ukraine has pushed back Russia’s Black Sea fleet and uses drones to hit targets in Russia. But in the ground war, the Economist reports, Russia is firing at least five shells for every Ukrainian one: “There is an alarming possibility that a big new Russian push in the next few months could punch through Ukraine’s defences and deep into the country.”

The blockage of the Biden administration’s US$61 billion military-support package by Trump-leaning Republicans in Congress means Ukraine may not have the weapons to match its will to fight. Even in a war of attrition, something eventually shifts.

The war has been all about the fighting, with no negotiation. The how-this-ends equation means the conflict must reach a moment when the talking starts. The desired end point for Kyiv is a permanent resolution with Russia, based on a recovery of Ukraine’s territory. That vision sees Ukraine turning away from Russia to consolidate its democracy, to join the European Union and eventually NATO, and begin the decades-long work to rebuild a shattered country.

A senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stephen Kotkin, writes that a country can win the war and lose the peace: “Ukraine winning the peace is an armistice and an end to the fighting as soon as possible, an obtainable security guarantee, and European Union accession. In other words, a Ukraine, safe and secure, which has joined the West.”

A less-optimistic (but highly likely) version of what negotiation will deliver is an armistice along a line of control, with much of Ukraine’s land and people in Russian hands. That is the recipe for a semi-stable but uneasy armed stand-off, with Ukraine winning neither the war nor the peace.

Much of history’s reckoning for Russia’s has already arrived, however the war plays out on the battlefield. Putin failed to achieve the objectives he proclaimed in 2022. His nation has paid a huge cost in lives and treasure. The would-be tsar has united Ukraine in its hatred for Russia. And Putin’s lust for empire means Europe won’t trust Russia long after Putin is gone.

The war demonstrates the limits of US support but has energised Europe in ways that seemed impossible before the invasion. A Russian leader who sought to crush Ukraine and frighten off NATO forever has instead given the alliance new life and purpose and brought NATO closer to Russia. Appalled at Putin’s savage ambition, Finland joined NATO in April 2023 and Sweden joined in March 2024. NATO says the next three nations in line to join are Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia and Ukraine.

In setting up this admirable attempt at instant history, editor Hal Brands imagines two possible futures.

One sees a properly supported Ukraine that blunts Russian attacks, retakes the offensive and eventually wins a tolerable peace. In the other, Russia grinds its enemy down, even if it never takes Kyiv or conquers most of Ukraine.

How the war ends, Brands says, “will determine the degree to which Putin’s Russia — already a vengeful, embittered revisionist — emerges from this conflict empowered or enfeebled.”

Some of the history, though, is already in clear view, as Brands concludes: “Nothing that happens next is likely to fundamentally change the global fragmentation the war has caused. But how the conflict is resolved will have vast consequences for Ukraine and the world.” •

War in Ukraine: Conflict, Strategy, and the Return of a Fractured World
Edited by Hal Brands | Johns Hopkins University Press | US$32.95 or free download | 328 page

In April 2019 hopes were running high in US progressive circles, with the left-wing “Squad” making its presence felt within the Democratic congressional majority and Bernie Sanders launching his second presidential campaign. Universal healthcare and tuition-free universities had returned to the realm of political possibilities, joined now by the Green New Deal. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez narrated a mini-mockumentary, “A Message from the Future,” sketching out how these programs would combat climate change while revitalising America’s economy and democracy.

Five years later, the Biden administration has a track-record of domestic half-measures and compromises, has deepened the Sino-American confrontation and has failed to prevent dangerous flare-ups in Ukraine and Gaza. Its deep unpopularity portends a possible second Trump presidency backed by an unprecedentedly reactionary Republican Party. The hopes of 2019–20 seem all but a mirage.

Or perhaps it was precisely the hopefulness that doomed the progressive cause in America. If one follows Slavoj Žižek, the proper “message from the future” should have been this: our own self-destruction has already happened. Only by fully accepting an apocalyptic future can we muster the strength to pull the emergency brake on the train of history that is carrying us there.

Left-wing members of Congress have seemed reluctant to pressure the Democratic Party, even though much of their economic and foreign policy agenda remains broadly popular. In contrast to the right-wing insurgents’ success in the Republican Party, their faith in the long arc of history bending towards justice does seem to have drained them of urgency.

Žižek’s new book Too Late to Awaken, is the latest instalment in the Slovenian philosopher’s regular — typically more than once a year — book-form commentary on the international political and cultural landscape, always infused with a generous dose of a philosophy that combines the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan and a particular interpretation of Friedrich Hegel.

In his characteristic free-associating style, Žižek continues to refuse to either patronise his readers by simplifying high theory or leave them wandering in abstraction. Once again a cache of anecdotes ranges widely across space, time and even languages — from the differentiated forms of “future” in Slovenian and French to disguised obscenities in the Chinese internet lexicon. Sometimes, tenuous analogies can tax on the reader’s patience, and those acquainted with his work will also notice recurring themes and examples. A long-running joke has it that Žižek is always writing the same book, but it also means, for anyone interested in engaging with his thought, his latest is as good an entry point as any.

Too Late to Awaken is, however, unapologetically presentist, anchored by the ongoing Russian invasion of Ukraine. (It was finalised too early to cover the crisis in Gaza following the 7 October attacks.) But Žižek doesn’t confine himself to the stalemate in Ukraine, instead treating it as part of the unfolding global struggle between the right-wing fundamentalist authoritarianism exemplified by Putin’s Russia and the hegemonic liberal capitalism of the European Union and the United States.

For Žižek, this confrontation distracts us from, and indeed compounds, the existential threats posed by ecological destruction and the “digital control of our lives.” To avoid an apocalyptic war we need a revolution that would reset the faultlines of political struggle to a universalist orientation and enable us to grapple with the contradictions inherent in global capitalism and its nationalist variants.

This doesn’t mean abandoning Ukraine in a compromise with Moscow, an attitude Žižek attributes to some of his leftist friends. NATO’s expansion, despite repeated reassurances to Russia, and the neo-Nazi presence in Ukraine should not be enlisted to serve the Putin administration’s efforts to deny Ukrainians legitimate nationhood. Whatever the strength of Russia’s security concerns, he argues, the invasion is a blatant act of colonialist expansionism and the spearhead of Putin’s grand campaign against liberal-democratic Europe. Both intentions are evidenced, Žižek argues, by the pronouncements of the Russian leadership and its propagandists and theoreticians.

The implication is that Europe must not allow Ukraine to be defeated. To achieve this, NATO must be strengthened — a position not usually associated with a self-proclaimed communist — not by submitting further to America’s military-industrial complex but through a more strategically independent European Union. At the same time, any attempt to reduce Ukraine to a new captive market for Western capitalism must also be resolutely resisted.

To effectively deal with today’s global ecological and political crises, Europe must mobilise itself not only militarily but also on other economic and political fronts. Here, Žižek embraces the bombastic term “war communism,” a mobilisation that overrides market imperatives and even, occasionally, democratic principles. Russia’s aggression is, for him, another symptom of the dangerous undercurrents stirring at the “end of history”: as the nation state and its social democratic elements continue to erode under global capitalism, the nation itself, in its older sense, reasserts its authority through violence.

Žižek’s view is somewhat reminiscent of that of David Graeber and David Wengrow in Dawn of Everything, a book that proposes a longer view of the state as an aggregation of coercive, administrative and charismatic modes of power that has only cohered relatively recently in human history and is now coming apart. Where some see possibilities of emancipation, though, Žižek warns about new forms of unfreedom under the emerging anarcho-capitalism.

But the goal should not be merely one of self-preservation. To be truly secure, Europe must reckon with its culpability in global capitalism, and “war communism” must include international coordination as well as local mobilisation. Solidarity with one victim of colonial aggression, Ukraine, requires a universalist solidarity with all victims of historical and neo-colonialism in the Third World.

There is an undeniable element of enlightened self-interest involved, as Žižek reiterates his preference for lifting living standards in poor countries to obviate a key driver of mass migration into Europe. Solidarity must also extend across the frontlines of official hostilities, embracing anti-war protesters in Russia and perhaps even Russian conscripts. True to his reading of Hegel, Žižek declares that “[t]he line between civilisation and barbarism is internal to civilisations, which is why our struggle is universal.”

The forces of “barbarism” already operate across geopolitical boundaries. The rising far-right movements in Western Europe and America share Putin’s reactionary social visions; even Ukraine itself, Žižek points out, is plagued by a neo-Nazi problem; Christian fundamentalists and nationalists are no less hostile to multiculturalism and LGBTI+ rights than are their counterparts among Muslims, both groups railing against supposed liberal decadence. A universalist solidarity is made even more imperative by one of Žižek’s most interesting observations — the “solidarity of those in power.”

He suggests, for example, that the Chinese party-state’s attempt to portray protests movements in Europe and South America as an outcome the West’s sympathy with the rioters in Hong Kong is a play to evoke the common interests of ruling elites across the world. Paralleling this is a shared interest in “de-communisation” in both post-Soviet Eastern European nations and Russia itself — evident not only in the destruction of the remnants of the welfare state but also in attacks on Lenin, whose principled support for Ukrainian national development Putin blames for fostering its distinctive nationalism.

If the state has to play a central part in our response to the apocalyptic future, Žižek is also warning us to avoid the trap of identifying it with the political class, which plays a realist game in which its own survival is paramount.

Having sounded the alarm on global “barbarism,” Žižek once again rejects the obvious battlelines, instead waging a struggle against liberal sensibilities themselves. It is a move that has made him rather infamous in leftist circles in recent years.

“Woke” ideology and “cancel culture” — terms Žižek now uncritically employs — are not inherently progressive despite their proponents’ declared hostility towards patriarchy, nationalism and other conservative values. Liberation of sexual and gender identities, for instance, is the predictable outcome of capitalism’s erosion of the old social strictures (as Marx vividly described) and perfectly befits the individualistic ethos of its political economy. “Wokeness” — which operates under the logic of the Freudian superego, demanding ever-greater degrees of introspective self-criticism — offers a theatre of radical action that avoids the real challenge of improving the material conditions for all.

While conceding that “wokeness” is largely confined to the intelligentsia, Žižek believes that it reflects a fundamental philosophical mistake no less serious than its paralysing political effect. The “woke” approach to gender identity, for instance, displaces the inherent antagonism within such identity (or “pure difference” in Lacanian terms) onto an enemy “other” — those who are seen as clinging onto male-centric heteronormativity. In Žižek’s eyes, the most emancipatory aspect of the LGBTI+ movement is its embodiment of “pure difference,” the impossibility of fully identifying with the archetypal male or female. The patriarchal mentality makes the difference external to the well-defined genders and constructs the binary gender relationship upon this externalised antagonism, subjugating the feminine to the masculine; the true progressive stance would be to embrace it, to accept that we are all divided and contradictory subjects.

This is where Žižek’s quintessential Lacanian–Hegelian philosophy has always pointed, though he seems somehow reluctant to put it in such simple terms. Instead of sorting ourselves into increasingly niche categories of multiplicity and particularity, leaving us with nothing more than mutual tolerance to aspire to, we can instead build universal solidarity based on shared inner contradictions.

Of course, it is not for a philosopher to propose concrete programs or rules. In this book and elsewhere, Žižek readily admits that no easy solutions exist for theory to reveal. But political analysis must eventually make contact with reality, and it is here that Žižek produces some confusing arguments pertaining to the Ukraine–Russia War.

Moscow shows little regard for the Ukrainian state’s legitimacy; it professes hostility to the European Union as a liberal-democratic polity; it has threatened to use nuclear weapons against vaguely defined foreign intervention or in the event of losing the conventional war — for Žižek, all these seem to make Putin’s Russia an existential threat “aiming to rebuild the world in its image.” It follows that any Western attempt to pressure Ukraine into making territorial compromises with Russia would be morally obscene and self-defeating. He makes a fundamentally sound observation that Putin’s “red line” is not some unchanging parameter but can be shaped by Western responses; yet his formula, “not provoking Russia means surrender,” is at best an imprecise rhetorical ploy to challenge the perceived cynicism among those calling for an early negotiation.

Having rejected the “pacifist” stance, Žižek still has to reckon with the risk of a conflagration involving the world’s second-largest nuclear arsenal. Early in the book he proposes that “the only real solution to this debilitating dilemma is to… transform the way we perceive the situation” by adopting a universalist approach. But while the revolutionary masses organise themselves to remake the global political landscape, how does Žižek propose that we deal with Moscow, whose numerical advantage in troops and ammunition makes it increasingly unlikely that Ukraine, already weakened by this attritional warfare, can recover its territory, especially now Russia has escalated its attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure?

Is it in Ukraine’s interest for more of its young people to be killed on the battlefield or flee abroad, for its land to be pummelled and for it to become increasingly dependent on the United States and Europe? Nor, given the severe imbalance of resources and the sophisticated military hardware necessary for offensive operations, is there any reason to believe that the West can tip the scale without a more direct intervention (such as “no-fly zones,” which Žižek casually mentions as a possibility) that would bring their militaries into direct contact with Russia’s.

Or, if we did manage to implement some form of “war communism,” combining heightened military-industrial mobilisation and an avowedly internationalist political agenda to dethrone today’s ruling elites, would it not make the still existing Russian state feel even more threatened?

Moreover, the notion that Putin is bent on risking it all to destroy Western Europe is at best a gross exaggeration, and Žižek implicitly recognises this by conceding that an all-out war should (and thus, by implication, could) be avoided. Nor is it self-evident that Moscow desires to conquer and absorb the entirety of Ukraine — had that been the case, it would have used a much larger invasion force supported by a more intensive air- and missile-bombardment of which, we now know, Russia is capable.

It is all very well to portray oneself as the “principled” leftist defender of freedom and justice; yet, as any good Hegelian would concede, principles are never separable from their attempted enactment; they are inevitably “tainted” by the consequences. This has precisely been Žižek’s critique of communists who, dismissing the failure of the revolutions of the twentieth century, insist that “pure” Marxist theory applied with more conscientiousness could still lead us to socialist paradise.

If, in our whole-hearted support of Ukraine, we end up strengthening the military-industrial complex or setting off a wider, catastrophic war, it would have to be concluded that our supposed solidarity or desire for justice has been contaminated by war lust in the first place. And the near obsession with the Putin regime (which, however odious and brutal, has limited means to undermine Europe) poses the exact danger that Žižek detects in “wokeness” — to disavow internal antagonisms within the West and project it onto an enemy “other.”

All wars involving major powers end in a settlement, even when they involve arch-villains suffering total defeat like Germany and Japan at the end of the second world war. Is a settlement not more desirable sooner than later — before thousands or millions more causalities? Are we going to continue fighting Russia until the last Ukrainian, or roll the dice on nuclear annihilation, just to keep our universalist philosophy above ugly compromises?

As a late-comer to Western cultural history, my first exposure to the slogan “no future!,” to which Žižek refers in the book and indeed uses in its subtitle, is from the German-language Netflix series, Dark. (Partial spoiler ahead.) In an early episode, before the scope and the stake of the story is apparent, a scene depicts the slogan spray-painted at the entrance to a nuclear power plant, a location around which the mystery of the series will revolve. Through the story, various characters travel through time to change the apocalyptic future, their hopes repeatedly dashed by the deterministic nature of their world. Whatever they choose to do, it has already happened and become part of the fabric of time. And yet they cannot stop trying.

Perhaps only with this sense of impending doom, and radical reassertion of freedom while recognising one’s fate, can we reject the future that is already taking shape. Philosophers are, by Hegel’s definition, the exact opposite of futurologists — “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at the coming of dusk.” But by describing the internal logic of our “pre-apocalyptic” times, as Žižek attempts in his political analysis, they can begin discerning its immanent contradictions, the cracks in the unfolding darkness. We are then left with the daunting task of awakening to the night and bringing forth a tomorrow that has never been. •

Too Late to Awaken: What Lies Ahead When There is No Future?
By Slavoj Žižek | Allen Lane | $45 | 192 pages

In my usual manner, I began this book by reading the conclusion. There, Susannah Gibson closes her new book on eighteenth-century intellectual women, Bluestockings, by quoting Virginia Woolf. “It is the masculine values that prevail,” Woolf rued in 1928. “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room.”

But what if the book is about women who lived through one of the most war-filled centuries in British history? What about the proposition that war shaped every aspect of eighteenth-century British life, even if this is little remembered in the popular rush to curate the Georgian period as a time of big hair, dashing cads and masquerade balls?

You can see that I went back to the beginning of Gibson’s book with some scepticism about the distinction. True enough, Gibson does focus far more on “the feelings of women” than on war, but gradually her chapters turned me around to Woolf’s position. What is lost in the lack of detail about “masculine values” is made up for by carefully drawn portraits of ten or so bluestocking women, each struggling, soaring and surviving in a world designed for another gender. Gibson returns a keen sense of complex female humanity to at least one corner of over-storied eighteenth-century Britain.

The book’s two pillars are Elizabeth Montagu, critic and powerful patron of the arts, and Hester Thrale, writer and general literary busybody in late eighteenth-century London. Also included are discussions of the poet Ann Yearsley, the didact Hester Mulso, the moralist Hannah More, the playwright Elizabeth Griffith, the novelist Sarah Scott, the classicist Elizabeth Carter and the historian Catharine Macaulay. (Yes, those descriptors are inadequate — most worked in other genres too — and, yes, everyone should have tried harder to come up with a greater variety of first names and, also yes, most of these women bore multiple surnames as they moved in and out of marriages: by the end of Hester Thrale’s life, for example, she was more accurately Hester Lynch Salusbury Thrale Piozzi.)

Gibson’s initial chapters set up the two main poles for the bluestocking crowd: Montagu’s glittering and rather controlled Mayfair salon and Thrale’s more relaxed but equally exclusive country house at Streatham, south of London. Both places served as a way for women and men to meet, converse, swap literary news and generally engage in that eighteenth-century pursuit, the “refinement of manners.”

Men could also find this opportunity through other means at the time — in clubs, societies and lecture halls. But for women the chances were scarcer. More than these physical establishments, though, Montagu and Thrale — themselves friends though not coordinated patronesses — helped to create connections between like-minded people that could then be maintained through letter-writing and smaller meetings elsewhere.

It was Montagu who coined the term “bluestocking.” She first applied it in 1757 to a man, a botanist friend of hers who was so obsessed with his studies in his garden that on entering the house he forgot to change from his blue worsted stockings into his white silk stockings. The term became a byword for those who privileged intellectual inquiry over fickle fashion, and it initially attached equally to men and women. By the 1780s, though, it was increasingly being applied only to women; and after 1800, with the death of Montagu and most of her acquaintances and the coincidental tightening of Britain’s gender norms, the term took on a pejorative sense.

More than a hundred years later, Woolf was one of the first to try to revive respect for the bluestockings. Into the twentieth century, some — though not all — feminists took a similar interest, choosing to focus on their mere existence in the face of concerted patriarchal forces (and ignoring their well-known elitism and general conservatism). In her twenty-first-century book Gibson aims likewise.

Carving out a collective existence as intellectual women was no mean feat. And the bluestockings did have a lot of feelings about their efforts to do so, as Woolf would say. Those feelings, though, were not what you might expect — confidence, resolution or pluck. Rather, they were mostly doubt, exasperation and fear.

Griffith, for one, always doubted her writing abilities: “I have none of that charming, flattering Enthusiasm about me, that should support one’s Spirits when their Words are sent to the Mercy of the Public.” On the contrary, she insisted, “I shrink into nothing on such occasions.” Similar feelings might be discerned in the decision of many bluestockings to publish anonymously or with a male pseudonym.

Exasperation was a dominant emotion. It was directed at those things thought to stand most starkly between the bluestockings and the time they needed to write: namely, husbands and children. Montagu once baldly confessed that “I weep more at a wedding than a funeral.” Her own marriage turned out to provide untold wealth and connections, but at the price of having to forever placate a man perpetually jealous of her friends.

Elizabeth Carter refused to get married at all, freeing up space for her classical translations that her correspondents could only envy. She didn’t escape drudgery entirely, though: her respectability depended on living with family. She once explained that her slowness in replying to a letter was due to “working my eyes out in making shirts for my brother… ’Tis a most vexatious thing to be perplexed for want of time.”

Thrale took the cake, however, for vexing domesticity. Gibson’s extraordinary chapter on “Motherhood” details with captivating horror Thrale’s seventeen pregnancies in fifteen years, and the burial of no fewer than seven of the children who were born. Although she was a devoted mother, Thrale often felt trapped, especially when her care ended so often with death: “The Thing is,” she once admitted, “I have listened to Babies learning till I am half stupefied — & all my pains have answered so poorly… The instructions I labor’d to give them — what did they end in? The Grave.”

Her husband was also, hands down, the worst of all the men associated with the bluestockings. A poor businessman who needed his wife to rescue his brewery, he cheated on her endlessly, once adding to Hester’s duties an hourly scrub of his balls with a poultice to cure him of venereal disease.

Finally, there was fear — fear of ridicule, fear of scandal, and most of all fear of being ostracised from polite society. Thrale found out all about bluestocking fear when her awful husband finally died in 1781 and she could marry her great love, a lowly, Catholic Italian called Gabriel Piozzi. Her friends were scandalised by the class and religious incompatibilities, as well as by the gross implication that older women felt lust. Montagu dropped her like a stone. Mulso outright declared her insane: “Passions are not natural in a Matron’s bones,” she fumed; “It has given great occasion to the Enemy to blaspheme… the Bas Bleu [bluestocking] Ladies.”

The historian Catharine Macaulay suffered even harsher treatment when she married a younger man. She had been part of the bluestocking crowd for more than a decade, but with her misstep came total disavowal. Hannah More claimed she had always regarded Macaulay as “absurd, vain, and affected.” For Sarah Scott, she was “a dishonour to the sex” who ought to be drowned in the Avon.

Fair play to Woolf, then, that an account of women’s feelings is not without drama or intrigue. But what of the larger world around these particular women? What of their feelings about the constant warfare that raged alongside their lives? What of their views about the revolutions and colonies that were forged by Britain’s wars? What, in other words, of their politics?

Although we know many bluestockings had strong political feelings, these are not tackled in Gibson’s book. The only person to emerge as “political” is Macaulay, the republican historian who apparently believed that her writings should have “a clear ideological slant.” In fact, all the bluestockings wrote ideologically; it’s just that their ideology was chiefly of the status quo — conservative, royalist, classist, xenophobic and anti-reform — and thus appeared invisible.

Gibson misses several opportunities to explore the bluestockings’ politics. Griffith, for instance, once forgave her fiancé for a misdemeanour because of his ideas about John Locke’s political theory. But what are these? Thrale once helped her cad of a husband to stand for a parliamentary seat against a radical, pro-American opponent. Did this mean she also opposed the American rebellion and reform of the franchise? Mulso once wrote that girls should be encouraged to have “an interest in… politics.” Yet how? Why? To which end?

This silence doesn’t detract from Gibson’s achievement. It probably does mean, though, that her book’s subtitle — “the first women’s movement” — strains too hard for credibility. On page 3 she goes further, calling her subjects “the first women’s liberation movement.” From the evidence she gives, the majority of bluestockings were never cohesive enough to form a movement, and certainly never reformist enough to seek the freedom of any women other than themselves — and sometimes, when a bluestocking transgressed, not even all of their number.

Montagu, Thrale and their associates certainly argued for new ways of thinking about women’s intellectual capacity. But without an adequate account of their opinions about what was happening beyond their own spaces it is hard to make a full assessment of their success. Future works on remarkable women might need to include feelings and politics — not only drawing-rooms but also theatres of war. •

Bluestockings: The First Women’s Movement
By Susannah Gibson | John Murray | $55 | 337 pages.

As he describes them in his newly published memoir, Ron Boswell: Not Pretty, But Pretty Effective, Ron Boswell’s early years in Perth were not happy. His mother, “something of a drifter and subject to Bohemian influences,” was ill-matched with his father, “a devout and practising Roman Catholic with a conservative and constrained personality.” His childhood included two parental separations, frequent changes of school, and an abduction (by his mother, accompanied by her lover) to Melbourne.

Money seems to have been no problem, although Boswell and his co-author Joanne Newbery leave its source unclear. Young Ron (briefly) attended one of Perth’s more prestigious Catholic schools, although here the reader encounters one of the book’s lapses. Boswell claims he attended “St Trinity’s College” but no great theological expertise is required to recall that no such saint exists — and in any event, Trinity College (to which Boswell presumably refers) didn’t come into being until long after he left Perth. (He probably went to Christian Brothers College in St George’s Terrace, parts of which were incorporated into Trinity when it came into being in 1962.)

Soon after he retrieved the boy from Melbourne, Boswell’s father was transferred to Brisbane by his employer, an insurance company. The youngster had attended five different schools in six years in Perth, and his educational experience in Brisbane was not much better. It comes as no surprise that he left school at fourteen — to work as office boy in an insurance company.

Boswell doesn’t dwell on the downside of these disruptions, merely reflecting on what a less troubled childhood might have meant for him. Unsurprisingly, he emerged into adulthood believing a stable family life is important for social cohesion.

Aware of his limited education, Boswell believed that success would come “through selling and salesmanship.” This assessment proved astute, and he ultimately made considerable money in the hardware business. Then, in 1974, his wife Leita (they had married in 1965), a long-term Queensland Country Party member, took him to a now-rebadged National Party conference. Boswell, previously a Liberal voter, became involved in election activity and joined the party. Unusually for a future National Party parliamentarian, at least at the time, he did not have a background in primary industry.

At this point, some contextual background might have been useful. Queensland was (and remains) the most decentralised mainland state. For decades, as a result, the major conservative party was the (then) Country Party, whose electoral dominance was enhanced by the 1957 split in the state Labor Party, which left behind a malapportioned electoral system that benefited its rural opponents. The Country Party governed in coalition with the Liberal Party, which regularly polled more votes statewide but reaped fewer seats because of the weaker electoral power of metropolitan voters.

When Boswell arrived on the scene, the Country Party had embarked on an expansion strategy, partly in an effort to exploit the unpopularity of Gough Whitlam’s federal Labor government. The name change presaged a push for electoral success in outer-suburban Brisbane. As a well-connected businessman, Boswell became heavily involved in identifying promising small business candidates for preselection, in which role he inevitably came into regular contact with party president Bob Sparkes and premier Joh Bjelke-Petersen.

The onerous unpaid political workload eventually drove Boswell to consider a move to full-time politics. He secured Senate preselection for the Nationals and was elected in the double dissolution election of 1983, notionally for a six-year term. But the constitutional and associated procedural consequences of an increase in the size of the parliament and a double dissolution meant he faced re-election in 1984 and 1987.

Repeatedly through his book Boswell makes the legitimate (albeit unoriginal) point that too many of today’s MPs (especially in the Liberal and Labor parties) have effectively been in politics all their lives — union jobs or work for MPs or think tanks being common apprenticeships — and lack “real world experience.” His preferred version of real-world experience is of the small business variety rather than that of the wage and salary earner. His idealisation of small businesses is a constant, but he is not the first person to equate the national interest with his own sectional interest.

Boswell’s product differentiation from his Liberal coalition partners is quite explicit: the Liberals believe no government should intervene in any market (“free enterprise”); the Nationals believe in government intervention in imperfect markets to correct an imbalance of power (“private enterprise”). Of course, cynics have long reduced the Nationals’ philosophy to one of socialising losses and capitalising gains.

Boswell describes in considerable detail his involvement in remedying “market imperfections,” state and federal, in primary industries such as wool, fisheries, bananas, pineapples and tobacco, and his role in dissuading Bjelke-Petersen from proceeding with liberalised weekend trading hours. He was also a successful advocate for the Pharmacy Guild in the face of proposed supermarket competition and for massive funding for rural, regional and remote telecommunications infrastructure to allow the sale of Telstra to proceed.

Emblematic of the level of corruption in Queensland during that era is Boswell’s tale of an invitation to Bjelke-Petersen to open the sailing season at the Royal Yacht Club, where the opportunity was taken to seek the premier’s “help to reclaim some freehold land.” What many would view as corrupt, Boswell appeared to treat as business as usual. Sadly, that attitude was widespread in Queensland at the time.

Boswell boasted a close relationship, political and personal, with Bjelke-Petersen, a notoriously corrupt politician who probably only avoided a jail sentence for perjury and corruption because a verdict was blocked by a jury foreman who failed to disclose his National Party membership. (Because of the ex-premier’s age, a retrial was not ordered.)

Boswell covers a succession of elections, the emergence of the premier’s wife Flo as a senator, the Joh for Canberra fiasco and (selectively) Bjelke-Petersen’s fall from power, but he glosses over corruption in the state — indeed, he uses those events as a launching pad to fulminate against the very concept of integrity commissions and the damage they inflict on “innocent” victims.

On Boswell’s apparent aversion to combatting corruption and his support for improved superannuation arrangements for MPs (to attract the “successful” who would lose income otherwise — another hobbyhorse flogged in the book), it might be observed that his views would probably fail the “pub test,” even in a sympathetic Queensland bush watering hole. Some in the pub may even be able to apprise him of the modest record of successful business people making the switch to the very different world of democratic politics.

As Nationals Senate leader between 1990 and 2007, Boswell fitted smoothly into his party’s tradition of “persuading” the Liberal prime minister of the day to accede to pretty much whatever the junior coalition partner was demanding. A couple of floor-crossing Nationals senators could sink legislation in a chamber whose numbers were invariably tighter than in the lower house. “Give Boz what he wants” seems to have been John Howard’s customary response during his years as Liberal leader.

On the positive side, Boswell provides an extensive account of his ongoing campaign against extremism on his side of politics, taking on the League of Rights, the Citizens Electoral Council and Pauline Hanson (and her One Nation Party). A cynic might see this as a “turf protection” operation, but there is no evidence that his views are other than genuine and hence they deserve to be taken at face value.

On competition policy, Boswell claims a key role (with Labor senator Chris Schacht) in amending the Trade Practices Act to prevent mergers that would result in reduced competition in a substantial market. He notes that this offended some Liberal free-market ideologues, which worried him not. It is probably the case that good public policy was the winner.

A final example of poor editing concerns Boswell’s assertion that he claimed, at one of his last joint party meetings before he departed the Senate in 2014, to be “the only one in this party room who doesn’t have a degree” and the only one “who has ever run a business.” He might well have made these claims at the time but they are demonstrably inaccurate. His sneering reference to degrees is consistent with a barely disguised inverted snobbery that recurs in the book.

Throughout the book, serious political material is interspersed with the staple stereotypes of Queensland politics: barely credible yarns, trips in small aircraft of dubious airworthiness, overindulgence in alcohol, and the consumption of prawns to “seal the deal.” Several chapters are consequently barely a page or two in length.

Predictably, the book lacks an index, frustrating enough for the ordinary reader but just plain annoying for any reviewer. But the book’s subtitle can’t be faulted for its accuracy. As an insight into the deal-making, no-holds-barred nature of the author’s politics, it could just as aptly have been subtitled “No Place for Idealism.” •

Ron Boswell: Not Pretty, But Pretty Effective
By Ron Boswell, with Joanne Newbery | Connor Court | $39.95 | 320 pages

Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo examines four works of postwar musical commemoration created respectively by a German, an Austrian Jew in exile, an Englishman and a Russian: Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen (1945), Arnold Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw (1947), Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem (1962) and Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No 13 (1962). Although the book is subtitled “The Second World War, the Holocaust and the Music of Remembrance,” only two of these works deal explicitly with the Holocaust and only one explicitly with the war. The third deals with neither. And the fourth? Well, it’s hard to say exactly what is being commemorated. In a way, it is such ambiguity that is the book’s real subject.

Perhaps the least ambiguous of the works discussed is A Survivor from Warsaw; it is also the least like a memorial, being powerfully dramatic and barely eight minutes long. The Austrian-born Schoenberg had seen Hitler for what he was as early as 1924, and left Europe for the United States in the year Hitler came to power. By 1947 he was a long-time resident of Los Angeles, and his terse, twelve-tone cantata is a vivid retelling of an incident remembered from a concentration camp by a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto. The text (by the composer himself) is spoken in English and in the first person, except for the commands of a sergeant, which are shouted in German. At the work’s climax, a men’s chorus defiantly sings a unison setting of the “Shema Yisrael.” (Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God! The Lord is One!)

From the beginning, the work was controversial. The dramatic immediacy of Schoenberg’s music and text was so confronting that some early performances were cancelled and the work bowdlerised. In the first German performance, for instance, mention of a “gas chamber” was deleted.

Shostakovich’s symphony, the first movement of which sets to music Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poem “Babi Yar,” ran into similar difficulties with Soviet authorities. The ravine at Babyn Yar — to give it its Ukrainian name — was the scene of the massacre of more than 33,000 of Kyiv’s Jews in just two days in September 1941. Later massacres there included not only Jews but also Romani, Soviet prisoners of war and communists. Efforts to conceal the atrocities began before the war ended, as the ravine was gradually filled in and levelled. Now it has gone. After the war, the Soviet authorities were keen that the site be remembered for Nazi atrocities but discouraged specific mention of Jews, so Yevtushenko’s poem, which began “Over Babi Yar there are no memorials,” proved contentious.

The poet was not himself Jewish, but in his poem he identified with the victims of anti-Semitism and anti-Semitic genocide, naming Alfred Dreyfus and Anne Frank and stating, “Today I am as old as the Jewish race.” Most radical, as Eichler points out, was the poem’s criticism of Soviet anti-Semitism. Even during the Khrushchev thaw, this was brave of Yevtushenko, and it was braver still of Shostakovich to put it to music. Conductors found they were too busy to take on the premiere and the bass soloist was suddenly indisposed on the day (something that had been foreseen, so a substitute was standing by). It wasn’t long before Yevtushenko was prevailed upon to water down his poem, but when Shostakovich refused to change the words in his symphony the piece was banned.

Eichler quotes the critic Lionel Trilling, who remarked that “if we ever want to remind ourselves of the nature and power of art, we have only to think of how accurate reactionary governments are in their awareness of that nature and that power.”

The most famous musical war memorial is probably Britten’s War Requiem, commissioned for the inauguration in 1962 of new Coventry Cathedral, its medieval predecessor having been destroyed in the bombing raid on that city in November 1940. And yet Britten’s piece makes no mention of the Holocaust, and neither does it refer, directly, to the second world war. The poems Britten put to music, alongside the Latin words of the Requiem Mass, were by first world war poet Wilfred Owen. Perhaps it was this distancing from his subject — the universalising of his theme to be “war and the pity of war,” as Owen put it — that allowed Britten’s piece to gain immediate international acceptance.

Of the four works discussed by Eichler, only Strauss’s Metamorphosen for twenty-three solo strings has no words. The piece began to germinate before the war ended, when the elderly Strauss learnt of the razing in bombing raids of the opera houses in Munich, Berlin, Dresden and Vienna. He had conducted in these houses, some of which had staged premieres of his operas, and felt their destruction keenly. But Strauss was not only in mourning for his own past; the opera houses were emblematic of German culture, and that had been endangered by more than Allied bombing.

Strauss had been nearly seventy when Hitler came to power. His librettist, Stefan Zweig, was a Jew and so was Strauss’s daughter-in-law, and therefore his grandchildren. But Strauss himself was Germany’s most famous living composer, so his instinct was to keep his head down, accept honours that came his way and ingratiate himself with the Third Reich. It couldn’t last. When his opera with Zweig, Die schweigsame Frau, was premiered in 1935 and Strauss saw that the Jewish librettist’s name was left off the poster, he objected. Performances were cancelled and Strauss, now persona non grata, took himself off to Garmisch in the Alps.

Strauss’s Metamorphosen is evidently music of deep regret, but what was the composer regretting? His own behaviour? His naivety? At the end of the score, Strauss wrote, “IN MEMORIAM.” But to whose memory is the music dedicated? To that of his Jewish neighbours in Garmisch who disappeared and never returned? To German culture? If it’s the latter, then there is a semblance of hope in the form of a quotation, just before the end of the piece, from the funeral march of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony. It’s as though Strauss is saying: at least Beethoven survived.

I wrote above that, unlike the other composers, Strauss set no words in his Metamorphosen but, as Eichler reminds us, to begin with there were words. The piece for twenty-three solo strings grew out of the composer’s attempt to put to music a short poem by Goethe, “Niemand wird sich selber kennen” (No One Will Ever Know Himself). This is the complete text:

No one will ever know himself,
Separate himself from his inner being.
But still he senses every day
What at last becomes outwardly clear:
What he is and what he was,
What he can do and what he may.

So, a poem about the struggle for self-knowledge. Is that what memorials are for?

In the prelude to Time’s Echo, Eichler writes of two non-musical memorials. One is a small sculpture made from “Goethe’s oak,” a tree in the forest of the Ettersberg that became associated with the great German poet in the nineteenth century. A little over a hundred years after his death, the forest was cleared by prisoners to make way for their own concentration camp: Buchenwald. The oak was preserved, but during the war it died and, when the camp was bombed, the trunk was charred. The camp guards had it chopped down, though the stump still survives. In an act of bravery, a lump of the wood was saved by a prisoner, Bruno Apitz, and turned into a bas-relief death mask, which he called “The Last Face.”

The other memorial, which is nowhere to be seen, is to the Jews of Saarbrücken. In front of the municipal building that once housed the Gestapo headquarters is a cobblestoned square. One night in 1991 the artist Jochen Gerz led a group of students into the square to dig up some of the cobblestones and replace them with temporary stones. The originals were then inscribed with the names of more than two thousand Jewish cemeteries destroyed by the Reich. Again under cover of darkness, the stones were replaced, but with the names face down.

Word spread in Saarbrücken about the removal and replacement of the cobblestones. But when the locals arrived to see what had happened, they saw nothing. Only each other.

Jeremy Eichler’s Time’s Echo is a towering achievement. Do read it. And listen to the music. •

Andrew Ford talks to Jeremy Eichler about Time’s Echo on The Music Show.

Israel’s bloody attempts to eliminate Hamas in Gaza have already pushed a volatile Middle East to the brink of a wider conflagration. This week’s Israeli airstrike on the Iranian consulate in Damascus adds to the risk. Assassinated by US-supplied F-35 aircraft were brigadier-general Mohammad Reza Zahedi, a senior officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, and several of his associates.

The raid took place at a critical moment in the Gaza war. The Biden administration has been seeking to dissuade Israel from launching a full-scale military assault on Rafah in the southern Gaza Strip, where a million or more displaced Palestinians are huddled.

Under international law, diplomatic missions like Iran’s Syrian consulate are regarded as sovereign territory. Leaving aside the seniority of the commanders killed in Damascus, the missile strike thus represents a direct assault on Iran’s interest in the region. Iran has vowed retaliation, but its leaders have not indicated what form this will take or given any indication of the extent to which they are prepared to risk a wider conflict.

In its responses so far to American and Israeli strikes — including the US assassination of Qasem Soleimani, another senior Revolutionary Guard leader, in January 2020 — Iran has been restrained. Leaders in Tehran clearly want to avoid a direct confrontation with the United States and Israel that would quickly become a regional conflict with devastating consequences — including for Iran itself, whose oil-dependent economy is brittle.

So, the question becomes twofold. How is Iran likely to assuage Zahedi’s slaying? And what are the risks of a further deterioration in regional security?

It is important to bear in mind that Zahedi, like Soleimani, was a commander of the Revolutionary Guard’s Quds force, which is deeply engaged in supporting Hezbollah, Iran’s Lebanese proxy. Indeed, the Quds commander is credited with overall responsibility for overseeing Hezbollah’s build-up of a missile capability aimed at targets in Israel.

For that reason alone, his death during an Israeli airstrike is not coincidental. Nor are the casualties of a number of other such Israeli strikes conducted over recent months against Iranian commanders in the region.

Late last year, for instance, Israeli forces killed Iranian general Sayyed Reza Mousavi in an airstrike in Damascus. Mousavi had been directly responsible for procuring missiles, rockets and drones for Hezbollah and Iranian militias in Syria and Iraq. Strikes like these highlight the fact that Iran prefers to use its proxies to conduct operations against the US and its interests in the region. The Houthi attacks on shipping in the Red Sea, for example, would not be possible without supplies of Iranian-manufactured drones and missiles. It has seriously disrupted container traffic in a waterway that previously carried around 30 per cent of global container trade.

But that disruption is happening at some distance from Gaza. What will be more concerning for Israel and the United States is the prospect of an escalation across the Israel–Lebanon frontier.

Until now, Hezbollah’s cross-border rocket and drone strikes have been sporadic, but the risks of an escalation are ever-present. A full-scale war would have destructive consequences for both countries, and for the region more generally. It would recall the devastating impact on Lebanon of the war it waged with Israel in 2006. Destruction of infrastructure was widespread, further setting back Lebanon’s fragile economic recovery after years of civil war.

The risks of such a conflict are real. With Iran’s assistance, Hezbollah has stockpiled thousands of missiles capable of striking targets deep inside Israel. Given such a threat to Israel’s security, any US administration would find it hard to remain indifferent.

President Joe Biden’s relocation of two aircraft battle groups into the eastern Mediterranean early in the Gaza war was aimed at forestalling a wider regional conflagration of this kind. But what has been noticeable in recent weeks has been an uptick across the Middle East of the proxy war between United States and Israel, on the one hand, and Iran and its allies — from Yemen itself to Iraq and Syria — on the other.

Early this year, for example, Israel killed Hamas’s deputy political head, Saleh al-Arouri, in a drone strike in the heart of Hezbollah’s seat of power in west Beirut. Al-Arouri was the Hamas leader regarded as closest to Iran. His assassination was designed to remind Hamas leaders across the region that they are not immune to Israel’s ability to exact revenge.

Israel has clearly decided that its security would be best served by region-wide pre-emptive actions. It is testing Iran’s tolerance for provocative strikes against its frontline military commanders and allied proxies while reminding Iran and other regional powers that its military reach is long and lethal.

At this stage, Iran seems unlikely to want a wider regional conflict, though the risks of such an outcome can’t be discounted. But Israel’s actions at this intensely dangerous moment, whether or not they are coordinated with Washington, are pushing Iran towards decisions that could spark a wider regional conflict. •

For Rupert, it almost certainly wasn’t love at first sight. When Donald Trump became an acquaintance, probably in New York and probably in the early 1980s, the shameless, publicity-hungry property developer was keen, like his fellow wannabe celebrities, to be covered in Murdoch’s New York Post.

Trump’s business reputation was already far from pristine. He and his businesses would eventually be party to a total of more than 4000 legal actions, exceeding all other leading property developers combined. He would file for bankruptcy — for himself or various of his entities — no fewer than six times. When he was divorcing his first wife Ivana, he planted news stories designed to humiliate her, some of which made the front page of the New York Post and estranged him for a time from his three eldest children.

Over the decades after their first meeting both Murdoch and Trump became better known and more influential. Murdoch’s founding of Fox News in 1996 gave him a much higher national profile; its chief executive for the first twenty years, Roger Ailes, a man who combined heavy involvement in Republican politics with a strong background in television, quickly built the network into a force on the national political scene. On NBC, meanwhile, Trump had huge success with his fifteen-season reality TV series The Apprentice, which launched in 2004.

Once Barack Obama became president, Trump was given a Monday morning call-in slot on Fox News’s Fox and Friends: “Bold, brash and never bashful,” the promo proclaimed, “the Donald now makes his voice loud and clear every Monday on Fox.” It was in that slot that he baselessly propagated the “birther” claim that Obama wasn’t American-born and was therefore ineligible to be president. In just two months during 2011, Fox devoted fifty-two segments to Obama’s “foreign birth”; and in forty-four of these the claim went completely unchallenged.

At some point Rupert and his third wife Wendi became friendly with Trump’s daughter, Ivanka, and her husband Jared Kushner, whom Murdoch helped mentor. In 2015, though, when Ivanka told Murdoch that her father was truly going to run for president, Murdoch “dismissed the possibility out of hand,” journalist Michael Wolff writes in his 2023 book, The Fall: The End of the Murdoch Empire.

Nor in the early days of Trump’s candidacy did the relationship run smoothly, at least in Trump’s eyes. At the first debate among Republican contenders in August 2015, hosted by Fox, one of the network’s most prominent anchors Megyn Kelly asked Trump about his misogyny: “You’ve called women you don’t like ‘fat pigs,’ ‘dogs,’ slobs and disgusting animals.” When Trump responded after the program with a similarly nasty and misogynist attack, Ailes stayed silent and his deputy Bill Shine directed other anchors not to speak up for Kelly. Fox News PR eventually issued a single statement in her defence.

Rupert was more forthcoming. Trump was getting “even more thin-skinned,” he tweeted, adding that “friend Donald has to learn that this is public life.” A few months later, in February 2016, Trump accused Fox of not wanting him to win and Murdoch of rigging a survey of voters. “Time to calm down,” tweeted Murdoch, adding that if he was running an anti-Trump conspiracy then he was doing a lousy job.

Despite his complaints, Trump was receiving much more coverage than the other Republican candidates on Fox News. He and Ailes were in close touch throughout the primaries, and the network fell loyally in behind Trump’s candidacy once it was clear he was going to be the Republican nominee.

Even up to the election, according to Wolff and other observers, the relationship was unequal. At his post-victory party Trump “was on tenterhooks waiting for Murdoch,” writes Wolff. “‘He’s one of the greats,’ he told his guests… ‘the last of the greats. You have to stay to see him.’” Murdoch seemed to be in shock when he eventually arrived, “struggling to adjust his view of a man who, for more than a generation, had been at best a clown prince among the rich and famous.”

Ailes, who had seen the relationship up close, told Wolff that Trump “would jump through hoops for Rupert. Like for Putin. Sucks up and shits down. I just worry about who’s jerking whose chain.” Later, Ailes said that he and Trump “were really quite good friends for more than twenty-five years, but he would have preferred to be friends with Murdoch, who thought he was a moron — at least until he became president.”

Although he was more favourably disposed towards Trump than many others, Ailes had few illusions about his capacities: “Donald? He’s Richie Rich. He’s richer than you but he’s not smarter than you — in fact, he’s clearly a dumb motherfucker, I say with all due respect. He is so dumb. But smart is what people hate.” Two weeks before his death, Ailes observed that Trump “won’t have any idea how to run the government, nor care, but he knows how to pull every fucking string in television.”

Trump’s elevation to the presidency created a unique relationship with Fox News. In Wolff’s words, “The Trump White House was a Fox White House.” Researching his book Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth, journalist Brian Stelter identified twenty people who moved from Fox News to the White House between 2017 and 2020.

Initially the Fox–White House relationship was one of mutual convenience, possibly containing some degree of personal admiration. Murdoch and Trump, who were in frequent phone contact, each put their own gloss on it. “Murdoch, who had never called me, not once, was now calling all the time,” said Trump, while Murdoch complained that he “couldn’t get Trump off the phone.”

Many at Fox News had direct personal relations with many at the White House. Perhaps the most interesting was between Trump and Sean Hannity, a Fox News anchor who had long been Trump’s “go-to guy at Fox.” They were on the phone almost every day — so much so that Wolff describes Hannity as “Trump’s closest confidant, his chief adviser.” Trump lavished public praise on Hannity, one night even claiming on air that he had postponed a call to Chinese president Xi Jinping in order to talk to him.

Trump’s relationship with Fox News was unique in another way, too. He spent more hours each day watching the network than any previous president spent looking at TV, and seemed to rely on it for information more than on his officials’ briefings. One night in February 2017, Trump made a seemingly bizarre comment about Sweden that flummoxed Swedish officials. It turned out that Tucker Carlson’s Fox News program had featured an obscure conservative filmmaker pushing the idea that a Swedish crime wave was being fuelled by lax immigration policies. It was a self-affirming feedback loop of misinformation.

Trump “grew more and more intolerant of any accurate reporting on Fox and raged against the reporters,” writes Stelter. “For Trump it was never enough. Rupert recalled that Trump once told him, of Fox, ‘You’re 90 per cent good. That’s not enough. I need you 100 per cent.’ Rupert claimed that he replied, ‘Well, you can’t have it.’”

In 2020, with Murdoch now living in semi-isolation in England to minimise his risk of catching Covid-19, the telephone relationship all but ceased. When Trump played down the risks of the pandemic, Stelter writes, Murdoch warned him to take it seriously: “You better be careful, it’s a big deal.” Well, Trump responded, “some people say that.”

Fox supported Trump strongly in the 2020 election, but the relationship was on a downward trajectory. A bizarre moment in the developing conflict came on the night of the 2020 election when Fox News’s “decision desk” was the first to say that Joe Biden had won Arizona. The call provoked an enormous and puzzling controversy. Before the election, Fox News had joined with Associated Press in developing what they thought were better ways of projecting outcomes. According to the journalists directly involved, this was what allowed them to be first on the night. But their call provoked extreme anger in the White House, which urged Fox to reverse it, and also among many Fox viewers, who saw it as a betrayal.

The fact that the call proved to be accurate was no defence. What should have been a triumph for Fox was seen even by their own management as an embarrassment. Two months later, the two journalists most directly involved no longer had jobs at Fox.

In The Fall Wolff says that Trump saw the Arizona call as “the tipping point in his relationship with Fox. Murdoch, he understood, not without justification, was out to hurt him.” This is a nonsensical proposition at several levels. Most basically, Murdoch was not involved in the call and only learnt of it after it had gone to air. The ongoing disputes overlook the fact that the call had no substantive impact: voting had finished, so no votes were affected and nor was the counting of votes.

Wolff makes Murdoch’s disillusion with Trump abundantly clear. At various times, he called Trump an “asshole,” an “idiot,” a “fool,” “plainly nuts,” and someone “who couldn’t give a shit,” “had no plan,” “just wants the money,” is “crazy, crazy, crazy” and “a loser.” “Of all Trump’s implacable enemies,” writes Wolff, “Murdoch had become a frothing at the mouth one.”

Rather than give reasons for Murdoch’s views, Wolff seems sometimes to regard them as symptoms of senility. “A close Murdoch confidante…,” he writes in The Fall, “described Murdoch’s loop of Trump obsession as possibly ‘early dementia-like.’ Murdoch could not get off the subject.”

The reasons for Murdoch’s disenchantment were substantial. He was appalled at Trump’s incompetent and irresponsible response to the Covid-19 pandemic. He didn’t believe Trump’s claims about a rigged election. (As early as 8 November, an editorial in his New York Post urged Trump to stop the stolen election rhetoric.) And, like many others, he was outraged by the attack on the Capitol on 6 January 2021 and by Trump’s encouragement of violence. Soon after the attack, Stelter reports, Murdoch told Fox Corp board member Paul Ryan that he wanted to make Trump a non-person on Fox.

But Murdoch found that divorcing Trump was much more difficult for Fox News than his own divorce from Jerry Hall. Trump’s continuing court cases and his pre-eminence in Republican politics made it impossible for Fox to treat him as a non-person. Moreover, Murdoch encountered considerable internal resistance. Hannity, one of the network’s biggest stars, exclaimed, “Fucking no Trump… You want to tell me what Fox is without Trump?,” and, on another occasion: “There’s only one reason I’m here now and that’s to protect Donald Trump.”

Murdoch’s stated wish also ran directly against his top management’s concerns that ratings would plummet if they did not fall in behind Trump. This obsession with ratings meant that short-term considerations were always paramount. The cynicism and evasions of Fox News’s senior managers was eventually exposed by Dominion Voting Systems’s legal suit against the network.

As the primaries for the 2024 election loomed, Murdoch’s early embrace of Ron DeSantis turned into a disaster. The Florida governor’s credentials as a culture wars protagonist were strong, and some saw him as Trump without the baggage, but he instead proved to be Trump without the charisma, or the populist touch, or the support.

Trump, now near-unchallenged within the Republican Party, was not inclined to kiss and make up. He boycotted Fox’s staging of debates and mounted a stream of invective against them. Privately he was scathing of Murdoch, who at ninety-two had just announced his fifth marriage. “Only one reason why: prove you can still fucking do it even though everyone knows you can’t,” he claimed. “It’s a fake news marriage.”

I should conclude with a confession. After Trump’s victory in 2016, I wrote an article for Inside Story, most of which covered Fox’s performance and problems in the lead-up to the presidential campaign. I finished by suggesting that Trump’s election could be a pyrrhic victory for Fox. I noted how the network’s ratings declined during George W. Bush’s presidency, especially in its final year, and suggested that if and when Trump’s political fortunes fell, Fox News would also be in trouble.

I was wrong. I was still focused on the old mainstream media and the old politics. I severely underestimated how successfully Trump could shift the blame for his multiple failures, at least to the satisfaction of his core supporters. Nor did I fully grasp just how niche-driven Fox’s programming strategy had become. Its ratings were not sensitive to shifts in mainstream opinion; rather they relied on keeping faith with Trump’s core.

How will the Murdoch media approach the 2024 election, and what role will its ninety-three-year-old “semi-retired” “chairman emeritus” play? Trump’s dominance of the Republican Party means that many of its candidates and apparatchiks have to face a loyalty test by embracing the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. With one party strongly committed to a baseless fiction, the election presents unique challenges for all the news media, but especially for a network whose ratings are tied to whether it satisfies Trump’s constituency.

No doubt Rupert was and is keen to divorce Donald, but Trump looks likely to get custody not only of the Republican Party but of Fox News as well. •

“History has a way of roaring back into our lives,” warns Brian Knappenberger, whose latest documentary, Turning Point: the Bomb and the Cold War, is screening on Netflix. Tracking through ninety years of geopolitical upheaval from the rise of Stalin and Hitler to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the nine episodes give us history as a swirl rather than an arc. We are turning back into another phase of the cold war, it shows us, with equally massive and urgent risks.

An opening montage blends images of an atomic fireball, tanks in the streets, burning villages, crowds tearing down statues and leaders being saluted by military parades. Historian Timothy Naftali speaks through it all: at its peak, he says, the cold war touched every continent, shaping the decolonisation of empires and transforming domestic politics in the great cities of Europe, North America and Asia.

As Knappenberger acknowledges, the series is “insanely audacious.” It features original footage of critical moments, interviews with people who lived through worst of them, and commentary from around a hundred historians and political insiders, many of whom were directly involved in the crises. Lessons have been learned from documentary-maker Ken Burns, with talking heads presented as dramatis personae. It’s all about managing tone and pacing so that reflections from the present create depths of field for visually evoked scenes from the past.

Knappenberger achieves something of the Burns effect in bringing out an at-times unbearable sense of how these events were experienced by those caught up in them. Rapid montages conveying the scale and density of the upheavals are counterposed with sustained evocations of the experiences of those caught up in them.

Hiroshima, considered a purely military target by the US government, had a civilian population of 350,000. Prewar photographs show carts and bicycles in narrow streets spanned by arching lamps, a place of small traders and modest resources. People who were living in the city as small children deliver their testimonies steadily, quietly — though, as one of them says, visibly working to sustain his composure, “I hate to remember those days.”

Howard Kakita, aged seven, was on his way to school with his five-year-old brother when the warnings started. The explosion came as they returned to their grandparents’ house, which was obliterated. They dug themselves out of the rubble and fled the city through the ruins and carnage. Keiko Ogura’s brother told her he had seen something drop from one of the planes flying over, a tiny thing, which did not fall directly, but was caught for a while in the slipstream of the aircraft before arching down. Then came the flash, the loss of consciousness and the awakening to a world in which “everything was broken.”

The effect of the blast on human bodies creates scars in the memory. Corpses turned to ash on contact. The river was full of them. It’s hard to watch, and to listen to these accounts, as it should be. They are a necessary corrective to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, with its brief, stylised evocation of the horrors, firmly subordinated to the main story of an American hero and his tribulations.

Is it even possible to see such a disastrous train of events from “both sides?” That, surely, is the question we were left with by the cold war that followed. For the first time in history, two global superpowers were frozen in a deadlock of mutually assured destruction. The rush to catastrophe was paralysed by symmetry.

That, at least, was one version of the narrative. But mutually assured paranoia, the more complex and confusing side of things, was anything but paralysing. The belief in an enemy working in secret on unimaginably evil weaponry provokes an overriding conviction that your own side must secretly work on something equivalent or preferably more lethal. This is the “hot” equation behind the cold war.

With technological escalation seemingly taking on a life of its own, no one could comprehend the scale of what was being created. The American government’s messaging was all about survivability — backyard fallout shelters, “duck and dive” drill for schoolchildren — as if a small wooden desk might be an effective shield.

The language used at the time betrays a pitiful divorce from reality. A military officer flippantly describes a planned thermonuclear test as something that will make Hiroshima and Nagasaki look like firecrackers. The monstrous Bikini Atoll explosion, with 7,000 times the power of the Hiroshima blast, give its name to a new provocative style of swimwear.

“Institutional Insanity” is the title of the episode that deals with all this. It is as if the human brain simply isn’t coping with the consequences of its own activities. No one really knew what they were doing, comments nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, and testing became a kind of game for hyperactive experimentalists.

In interviews recorded before his death last year, Daniel Ellsberg recalls joining “the smartest group of people I ever did associate with” at Rand Corporation, men seen in contemporary photographs relaxing with their feet up on their desks, sleeves rolled up, smoking. But it is Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, grimacing in close-up as he advises on enemy psychology, who gets the last word in this particular sequence. “That was a documentary,” says Ellsberg.

Following Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev took a leaf out of the Strangelove manual. With an arsenal that couldn’t catch up with massive overreach of his opponents, he sought to weaponise American fears by making exaggerated claims, mounting the covert Active Measures program, which spread misinformation through news media and other forms of public communication.

Against this backdrop, the achievement of Khrushchev’s ultimate successor, Mikhail Gorbachev, in defusing the collective psychosis was extraordinary, whatever his political failings from the Russian perspective. Polarised views of Gorbachev’s legacy remain one of the deepest challenges to the West’s comprehension of post-Soviet Russia. Putin’s pronouncement that the break-up of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical disaster of the modern era has driven the new wave of military aggression that now confronts us.

One of Turning Point’s great strengths is its engagement with the complexities of moral arbitration, which are explored in the extensive commentary offered those in a position to offer genuine insights. Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter, Nina Khrushcheva, now a professor of international affairs in New York, gives an account of the secret speech of 1956, in which Khrushchev made public the scale of the purges of the Stalin era and condemned the cult of personality that had poisoned Soviet politics.

Stephen Kinzer, author of Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq and other books on American cold war policy, delivers an excoriating analysis of the thinking behind interventions in Guatemala, Chile and Iran. Covert operations like these were one of the defining elements of the cold war; we get insider views of the activities of the CIA and its Soviet counterpart from dissidents now free to tell the tale and bring into focus some of the minor players who shaped events.

The cult of personality accounts for much of the evil in the modern political world, but an excessive focus on these figures is a problem in itself, as we are learning with the media response to Trump in America now. A personality-driven view of history glosses over the influence of those in the supporting cast — the secret service directors, spies, foreign policy advisers, diplomats, propagandists, journalists — and, it must be stressed, the voting public, who allow themselves to be swayed by flagrant manipulation.

Are we returning to the cold war? That question runs through Turning Point, culminating in the final episode on Ukraine. “History is not history,” says journalist Lesley Blume, “but we are in an ongoing tide.” •

The politicians and soldiers do the work but the thinkers give the world the language and concepts to understand power: Machiavelli wrestles Marx while Clausewitz argues theory with Sun Tzu and Thucydides. In this small group, Jesus matters but so does Caesar.

A modern addition to the pantheon is a university professor and writer who also worked in America’s National Intelligence Council, State Department and Defense Department.

Step forward Joseph Nye, the man who invented the concepts of “soft power” and “smart power” and set them beside “hard power.” Described by one of his Washington contemporaries as “the Grandmaster of the study of power,” Nye coined soft power to describe the ability to attract and co-opt rather than coerce. The United States could use culture and communications to influence the decisions and behaviour of others in ways that military force could not reach. Nye stands with Talleyrand, who advised Napoleon: “You can do anything you like with bayonets, except sit on them.”

Military power can bully, economic power can buy, but soft power is blarney magic.

Ideas set international standards in the same way that American software set the standards for the world’s computers. Thus, the lifestyle promoted by American media and the promise of plenty of American supermarkets helped undermine the Soviet Union, backed by the hard power of military forces and nuclear weapons. Mickey Mouse stood with the Marines.

Hard power rests on command, coercion or cash — “the ability to change what others do.” Soft co-optive power, Nye wrote in his 1990 book on the changing nature of American power, is “the ability to shape what others want” through attraction.

Millions of Google citations show the reach of soft power, Nye writes, but “the most surprising was in 2007 when the president of China declared soft power to be their national objective.” For Nye, the result was “countless requests for interviews, including a private dinner in Beijing when the foreign minister asked me how China could increase its soft power. A concept I outlined while working at my kitchen table in 1989 was now a significant part of the great power competition and discourse.”

Nye has seen his idea become an instrument with practical effects: soft power shifts the way leaders talk and generals act. Attending a state dinner at the White House in 2015 (“the hall was filled with cherry blossom and a Marine band in scarlet jackets was playing”), Nye shakes hands with president Barack Obama to be told “everybody knows about Nye’s soft power.”

Nye’s recently published memoir muses about his “life in the American century,” the title taken from a famous 1941 editorial by Henry Luce, creator of Time and Life magazines. Nye, born in 1937, dates the American century from the moment the United States entered the second world war: “Some have referred to an American empire, but our power always had limits. It is more accurate to think of the American century as the period since World War II during which time, for better or worse, America has been the pre-eminent power in global affairs.”

The United States could still be the strongest power in 2045, he thinks; in which case the American century would, indeed, mark a hundred years. The caveats on that prediction are that “we should not expect the future to resemble the past, and my optimism has been tempered by the recent polarisation of our society and politics.”

This leading member of the American foreign policy establishment offers his biography as illumination for fellow foreign policy wonks and tragics. Most memoirs look inward; the chapter headings of Nye’s book are organised around the administrations of US presidents and America’s international role.

Nye and his friend Robert Keohane are identified as cofounders of the school of analysis of international affairs known as “neoliberalism.” While not disavowing that role, Nye writes that he and Keohane regard neoliberalism as an “over-simplified label.”

Whether in government or university, Nye’s life is one of constant travel, constant conferences and constant writing. In the Defense Department in 1995, “alliance maintenance” sent him to fifty-three countries. The military parades became a blur but the banquets were the real ordeal: sent abroad to eat for his country, Nye jested he would go out “in a blaze of calories.”

Emerging from an “unofficial meeting” with Taiwan’s defence minister, Nye is told that his father has died: “On Friday, November 4, 1994, I had the odd experience of picking up the New York Times and finding myself quoted in a front-page story on Saudi Arabia, while my father’s obituary appeared on page thirty-three. I wept.”

The motto of the public intellectual is “I think, ergo I write” (my words, not his). Nye exemplifies the dictum. He is the author of thirty books and contributor to or editor of another forty-five; his textbook ran to ten editions and sold 100,000 copes. (Here’s the Inside Story review of his book on the foreign policy morality of US presidents from FDR to Trump.) He writes a column for Project Syndicate; topics so far this year: “Is Nuclear Proliferation Back?,” “American Greatness and Decline” and “What Killed US-China Engagement?”

Graduating from Princeton at the end of the Eisenhower years, Nye planned to become a Marine officer. (“All able-bodied young men faced the draft in those days, and I was a healthy specimen and looking forward to the challenge.”) Instead, one of his professors pushed him to apply for a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford and he won:

One result was that, instead of joining the Marines after graduation and winding up as an officer in Vietnam, it took me thirty-five years before I saw service in the Department of Defense, and when I first went to Vietnam it was as dean of the Kennedy School to visit an educational program we had there. Any time I am tempted by hubris, I remember that much of where the roulette ball lands in the wheel of life is outside our hands.

Nye worked for two Democrat presidents. For Jimmy Carter, he was in charge of policy designed to slow the proliferation of nuclear weapons. Under Bill Clinton, he chaired the National Intelligence Council and then went to Defense to run the “Pentagon’s little State Department” as assistant secretary for international security affairs.

Professors who go to work in Washington can offer an anthropologist’s view of the tribes that serve the president and congress. Kissinger is good on this, but the best rules for working the swamp were penned by John Kenneth Galbraith: have the president behind you (or give that impression); adopt a modest aspect of menace — arrogance backed by substance can work; never threaten to resign because that tells your allies you might leave; but be ready to lose and leave town. Nye gets much outsider understanding into a paragraph:

In Washington, there was no shortage of bureaucrats and rival political appointees eager to take my job — or leave me with the title but empty it of substance. I had been issued a hunting licence, but there was no guarantee I would bag my game. My first instinct as an academic was to try to do things myself, but that was impossible… I realised I was drowning. I discovered that unlike academia, politics and bureaucracy comprise a team sport. The secret to success was to attract others to want to do the work for me. In that sense, I learned soft power the hard way.

Nye records two of the “major regrets” Bill Clinton offered about his presidency: “having an inexperienced White House staff and underestimating the bitterness of Washington politics.”

Because of his diaries, Nye’s memoir offers tone and temperature on how different the world felt as the cold war ended. Washington was optimistic about Russia and fearful of Japan: “economic friction was high, and many in both Tokyo and Washington regarded the military alliance as a historical relic now that the cold war was over.”

Japan debated the idea of relying on the United Nations rather than the United States for security. Nye argued against both the economic hawks in Washington and the security doves in Tokyo, pointing to the rise of China and problem of North Korea. “The logic was simple,” he writes. “In a three-country balance of power, it is better to be part of the two than the isolated one.”

During defence negotiations in Tokyo, Japanese officials took him out for evening drinks and cut to the fundamentals: “How much could they trust us? As the Chinese market grew larger, wouldn’t we abandon Japan for China? I answered no, because Japan was a democracy and was not a threat. It seemed to work.”

In 1995, with “moderates still in control in Moscow, there was a sense of optimism about the future of US–Russia relations.” That mood helped drive the expansion of NATO. At talks in Geneva, Russian foreign minister Andrei Kozyrev discussed the idea of a “new NATO” with a “collective security pact” and “partial membership in NATO” for Russia. Nye wrote in his diary that Russia would accept a bigger NATO “if it is done right — and if Russia doesn’t change.”

By 1999, the optimism was gone. The US now believed that “Russia would not collapse but would develop a form of corrupt state capitalism.” Talking to former colleagues in Washington, Nye is “struck that nobody seemed to know much about Putin or to have realised how important he would become.”

As the US century enters this century, China takes centre stage as the peer competitor. Asked by Xinhua News Agency whether he’s a China hawk or dove, Nye replies that he is an owl. At a dinner in Beijing in 2012 a member of the Communist Party central committee tells Nye: “We are Confucians in Marxist clothing.”

The following year, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi invites Nye to a private meal “to quiz me about how China could increase its soft power.” Nye replies that raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and celebrating a gorgeous traditional culture are “important sources of attraction for China. At the same time, as long as it had territorial disputes with its neighbours, and as long as its insistence on tight party control over civil society and human rights continued, China would face serious limits on its soft power in Asia and in the West.”

The US power equation has shifted significantly in two decades. In the early years of this century, as the United States invaded Iraq, Nye’s concern was about “unipolar hubris.” Today, he frets about a polarized America turning inward. He thinks the greatest danger the United States faces “is not that China will surpass us, but that the diffusion of power will produce entropy, or the inability to get anything done.”

In the final pages of his memoir, Nye assesses the balance of power between China and the US, and says America has five long-term advantages:

• Geography: the United States is surrounded by two oceans and two friendly neighbours, while China “shares a border with fourteen other countries and is engaged in territorial disputes with several.”

• Energy: China depends on energy imports far more than the United States.

• Finance: the United States gets power from the international role of the dollar and its large financial institutions. “A credible reserve currency depends on it being freely convertible, as well as on deep capital markets and the rule of law, which China lacks.”

• Demography: the United States is the only major developed country projected to hold its place (third) in the global population ranking. “The US workforce is expected to increase, while China’s peaked in 2014.”

• Technology: America is “at the forefront in key technologies (bio, nano, and information). China, of course, is investing heavily in research and development and scores well in the number of patents, but by its own measures its research universities still rank behind American ones.”

Nye’s fear is that domestic change within the United States could endanger the American century. Even if its external power remains dominant, he writes, a country can lose its internal virtue:

All told, the US holds a strong hand in the great power competition, but if we succumb to hysteria about China’s rise or complacency about its “peak,” we could play our cards poorly. Discarding high-value cards — including strong alliances and influence in international institutions — would be a serious mistake. China is not an existential threat to the US unless we make it one by blundering into a major war. The historical analogy that worries me is 1914, not 1941.

Nye ends his memoir with the humility that befits an old man: “I cannot be fully sure how much of my optimism rests on my analysis or my genes.” In his final paragraph, he ruefully notes that “the more I learn, the less I know… Though I have spent a lifetime following my curiosity and trying to understand us, I do not leave many answers for my grandchildren. The best I can do is leave them my love and a faint ray of guarded optimism.” •

A Life in the American Century
By Joseph S. Nye | Polity Press | 254 pages | $51.95

The publication of Anna Funder’s Wifedom late last year has drawn attention to the role of wives in the creation of their husband’s art, not only in providing domestic support but by contributing ideas and editorial advice. Funder argued for the importance of George Orwell’s wife Eileen O’Shaughnessy, often overlooked by his biographers, in the creation of his best novels.

Offering another perspective, Ann-Marie Priest’s recent biography of Gwen Harwood presented the case of a woman writer fighting to be published and recognised despite her husband’s obstruction and the daily grind of domestic life. Charmian Clift is a third example of wifedom: a writer married to a writer who was acclaimed for a novel, My Brother Jack, that he admitted could not have been written without her help.

The lives of Clift and George Johnston retain a certain glamour because they were spent partly on the Greek island of Hydra, mixing with Leonard Cohen, Sidney Nolan and other artists, during the 1950s. Interest has been renewed in recent years with the release of Paul Genoni and Tanya Dalziell’s study of their role in the Hydra artistic community, Half the Perfect World (2018), Sue Smith’s play Hydra (produced in Brisbane and Adelaide in 2019) and a documentary film, Charmian Clift: Life Burns High, will screen soon on Foxtel. Nadia Wheatley, who has long been the leading expert on Clift, published an excellent biography, The Life and Myth of Charmian Clift, in 2001 and edited a selection of her essays published in a new edition as Sneaky Little Revolutions in 2022.

Now comes The End of the Morning, the first section of an autobiographical novel Clift never completed but Wheatley believes can be read independently as a novella. Readers of Wheatley’s biography will recognise it as a significant source for her account of Clift’s childhood and adolescence in the quarry community near Bombo Beach, north of the NSW coastal town of Kiama.

The novella presents a vivid and charming picture of a childhood spent amid the freedom of the beach and bushland, Clift’s parents managing their poverty with creative resourcefulness and a commitment to literature as a reliable means of access to a wider imaginative world. Some recognisable tropes of autobiographical fiction appear — the rebellious tomboy narrator in rivalry with a more conventionally feminine sister for her parents’ attention; the narrator’s delight in learning — but this is not the conventional story of workers beaten down by the Depression. The father has chosen to live beyond the grind of English city life, among workers in Australia, so that he can enjoy a life with plenty of fishing.

Wheatley explains Clift’s struggle to meet the deadlines of the Commonwealth Literary Fund grant she’d been given for the novel, and gently outlines the anxieties that led to her suicide (which she refers to indirectly as “a cry for help that went unheard”). She speculates about the direction the novel might have taken without suggesting that Clift would have dealt with the sexual experiences that worried her so much at the time of her death.

Many readers will know that as a teenager Clift had a child who was adopted at birth. (She could not know that the child would become the artist and writer Suzanne Chick, herself the mother of Gina Chick who has gained fame in the reality television series, Alone.) But Clift’s concern at the time of her death was the imminent publication of George Johnston’s novel Clean Straw For Nothing, which depicted some of their sexual liaisons on Hydra.

As a kind of scaffolding for the unfinished novel, the rest of The End of the Morning is made up of a selection of thirty essays from the 225 columns that Clift wrote for the Sydney Morning Herald between 1964 and her death in 1969, chosen for their references to family life and childhood. Where the unfinished novel may frustrate the reader looking for a completed story, these short essays show Clift in total command of her form.

These 1000- to 1500-word pieces are full of thoughtful observations about her life and the social world around her. Sometimes she mentions the artistic community on Hydra, sometimes aspects of Sydney life, including renovations to her home in Mosman and the building of the Opera House. Often, she makes literary allusions to John Donne or Laurence Sterne or the most popular Romantic poets, but she never puts on airs — she has met many contemporary English poets and was struck by “over-reverence” before realising “that poets can be just as vain ordinary, peevish, arrogant, timid or plain dull as other people.” The essays assume that her readers also admit literature into their lives.

In his selection Clift makes no mention of her husband’s debilitating illness or the difficulties of her private life. The closest she comes to a political statement is when she contrasts the goals of younger and older women — helping women return to work in one case, engaging them in handicrafts and theatre parties in the other — at the inaugural meeting of a new women’s organisation. There is a lightness of touch and a clear sense of an audience that is made up, by implication, of other intelligent suburban women.

The same close observation enlivens the essays and the novel. Clift delivers wonderful lists of things: “On a Cluttered Mantelpiece” is made up mainly of descriptions of various objects found on her mantelpieces and their histories. “An Old Address Book” does a similar thing with places and people. Here are the county English:

men wearing either tweeds and caps and driving farm utilities or dinner jackets and driving Bentleys, mucking in with the pigs or serving champagne by candlelight and ladies who alternated between maintaining an Amazonian posture on perfectly frightening horses (and that horn so plangent over the Cotswold hills) and rising with that twitch of the trailing skirt that summoned all females at the table to retire and leave the gentlemen to their port.

Reading this you feel there is a novel waiting to happen.

Clift’s writing conveys a nostalgia for a lost Australia, not only for present-day readers but within the essays themselves, as she often remembers Sydney’s past and her own youth on the south coast. The End of the Morning also looks back fondly at the lost world of childhood, giving some clue to Clift’s role in the success of My Brother Jack. The novel is alive with a sense of what it was like to live in suburban Melbourne in the 1930s that Johnston couldn’t match in the Hydra of Clean Straw for Nothing or the Sydney of A Cartload of Clay. Clearly this detailed observation was Clift’s particular talent, just as her adaptation of My Brother Jack (1967) for television showed her gift for dramatic concision.

Clift’s newspaper columns remind me of Helen Garner’s articles for the Age, collected in True Stories and later books, and her comment that feature writing saved her from the loneliness of fiction and the need to “make things up.” Clift also admits to being gregarious, and it may be that she too found personal journalism suited her personality. But the literary world always rates the novel more highly than this kind of ephemeral writing and she struggled to finish her most ambitious work.

As well as her fears about the revelations in her husband’s next novel, perhaps the attitudes of the 1960s made it impossible for her to write about her teenage pregnancy, let alone sex outside marriage. We can speculate and regret the loss of what might have been an important addition to Australian fiction. At least we have these entertaining essays to enjoy. •

The End of the Morning
By Charmian Clift | Edited by Nadia Wheatley | NewSouth | $34.99 | 240 pages

For a long time there was a mystery about John Glover. Whatever prompted an established artist in England, aged sixty-three, to pack up and remove himself to a remote corner of Van Diemen’s Land — when, apart from anything else, it took six months to get there? Gradually, for those of us with only a general knowledge, it emerged that he had a son already established in Tasmania. We now learn from Ron Radford’s excellent book, John Glover: Patterdale Farm and the Australian Landscape, that he had three. Moreover, it was known — no doubt they tipped him off — that free land grants were about to end. It was a case of now or never. And so, in 1830, Glover made the move to a distant colony.

In England, although he had been exhibited at the Royal Academy, it had again rejected his application for membership. His English and European landscapes, they seem to have felt, were not distinctive enough: his watercolours — and he was active in marketing the genre generally — were seen as potboilers. Glover hoped for some sort of rejuvenation. “The expectation of finding a new Beautiful World,” he wrote to a patron, “new landscapes new trees new flowers new Animals Birds &c &c is delightful to me.”

“I mean to take possession of 2,000 Acres,” Glover continued, and “to have a vineyard &c &c upon it.” Born the son of a tenant farmer, a gentleman-proprietor is what he wanted to be, and became. A responsible but strict father, he ran a tight ship: one (unmarried) son functioned as his personal assistant. Altogether, with the sons and their families, free labourers and convict servants, Glover was patriarch to some thirty or forty people. (We tend to forget that big colonial properties were in effect small villages.) Eventually he ran some 3000 sheep on the property, named Patterdale after a favourite spot in the Lake District. And there he died.

Ron Radford’s book, building on the scholarship of Ian McPhee, David Hansen and others, is particularly focused — as the subtitle indicates — on Glover’s Tasmanian period. But due attention is given to the English and Continental paintings, since Glover kept producing them even at Patterdale. The thing was, they sold — in England. In Tasmania, inferior paintings by English artists were preferred by homesick settlers. And they had no interest in local scenes. Apart from a few commissions, it was only at the end of his life that Glover sold one or two major Tasmanian paintings locally. He was, as Radford puts it, “the key, though isolated, figure in what can be called Tasmania’s ‘golden age’ of colonial prosperity, culture and art.”

Radford, as a sometime gallery director, is fully aware of the importance of the market, together with patronage and questions of framing. This practicality carries across to the placement of the sumptuous illustrations: they are always adjacent to the discussion of the paintings, even repeated if necessary.

Glover was a practical, prudent man — except when it came to his house. Perhaps in his enthusiasm he was led to over-estimate his own abilities, for Patterdale was built hurriedly and mistakenly on damp clay, near a soak, and of rubble sandstone. Floors and walls were inadequately joined: the façade fell away in the 1940s, to be replaced by one in concrete and weatherboard. Later there was risk of further collapse. An interesting chapter relates the post-Glover history of the house, culminating in its purchase, rebuilding and elegant restoration by Rodney and Carol Westmore.

Glover had already turned to oils in England, but at Patterdale he painted in them almost exclusively, responding to the new environment with his greatest burst of creativity. The result, writes Radford, is a succession of “realistic and light-filled celebrations of his recently adopted country.” He explains that Glover adapted a technique from his watercolouring, using a white ground which would glow through translucent glazes, helping to capture the intensity of Australian light. Indeed, the painter rose immediately to the challenge of a new country: in an early painting of a gully on Mt Wellington there is no idealisation, but characteristically Australian forest regrowth after fire, and dead stumps.

Even so, while alive to the “thrilling and graceful play in the landscape,” Glover found it more difficult to render than European ones. “There is a remarkable peculiarity in the trees,” he noted, “however numerous, they rarely prevent your tracing, through them, the whole distant Country.”

As was customary at the time, Glover did not perceive such vistas as the direct result of Aboriginal land management — burning the undergrowth to create pastures for kangaroos and wallabies, thereby making hunting easier. The assumption of white settlers was that all this was a God-given natural pasture, just waiting for the sheep and cattle to arrive. (A rare romantic strategy by Glover was to supplant sheep in his paintings with cattle, more picturesque.)

Radford is at pains to show that Glover was keenly sympathetic to the Palawa (Tasmanian Aborigines). The last tribals were being rounded up by George Augustus Robinson when Glover arrived in the colony. Robinson turned up at Patterdale with a small group of them, was well-received, and was shown massacre sites. Tellingly, Glover’s very first — and possibly last — paintings there would be of moonlight corroborees. At every opportunity he inserted the departed Aborigines into his landscapes. For Robinson he produced a painting of Aborigines Dancing at Brighton, Tasmania, explaining that “the figures are too small to give much likeness — my object was to give an idea of the gay happy life the Natives had before the White people came,” and also, he added, “an idea of the Scenery of the Country.” Interestingly, there are almost no whites and no cultivation in his landscapes. They are Edenic, essentially a record of what they were like before the invasion.

At one level Glover was, as the historian W.K. Hancock put it, “shedding an economical tear” about the displacement. For it was so recent, and in stark contrast to Glover’s sense of his own achievement on the same land, caught forever in the famous paintings of his house and garden and in the “My” of My Harvest Home. A contradiction: you might say that — surrealistically — his characteristic spaghetti gum trees had buckled under the strain. For there are few like that around Patterdale, yet Glover fixated on them; they became a trope. Significantly, Radford points to a yearning for synthesis: late works include an ambiguous Ben Lomond (Scotland — or Tasmania?) and the fanciful A Dream At 82.

Glover is still underestimated. Working in Tasmania alone and now perceived as a white man, he was described only a few weeks ago in the press as the “so-called father of Australian landscapes.” Yet, as Ron Radford tells us, he is still the Australian artist most widely represented in galleries abroad — extending to a good half dozen American ones, and the Louvre. Equally tellingly, Tom Roberts — having married into a northern Tasmanian family — painted the landscape Glover’s Country in homage around 1929. When he died a couple of years later, Roberts chose not to be buried where he lived, at Kallista in Victoria, but in a Tasmanian churchyard within view of Glover’s Ben Lomond. And twenty years ago, the locals of Evandale instituted the annual Glover Prize for Tasmanian landscapes, a prestigious and generous award.

In all, it is an impressive node of continuing influence, buttressed by the preservation order recently placed on the Patterdale landscape and the scrupulous restoration of the house. Ron Radford’s book will go a long way to making Glover even better known. •

John Glover: Patterdale Farm and the Australian Landscape
By Ron Radford | Ovata Press | $49.95 | 216 pages

Shakespeare famously concluded that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. But what about fictional characters? Would Arthur Conan Doyle’s Baker Street detective have won as many fans if Conan Doyle had trusted his main character’s original name, Sherrinford Hope? Would the world-in-the-balance quest that underpins The Lord of the Rings have been taken as seriously had J.R.R. Tolkien stuck with Bingo Bolger-Baggins? Would the wild fantasy of a secret agent with a licence to kill have been as captivating if Ian Fleming had kept the name in the first draft of Casino Royale, James Secretan?

In the latter case, probably not. Yet it is in so many ways both the most intriguing first choice — who, after all, would expect the creator of James Bond to allude to the nineteenth-century Swiss philosopher Charles Secretan? — and the most portentous revision. The decision to eschew the clumsy homage and instead appropriate the dull name of an American ornithologist underscores Fleming’s ruthless pruning of anything that might unnecessarily adorn the instrument he created in 1952.

That creation, and the long story of its making, is at the heart of Ian Fleming: The Complete Man, an immense biography by Nicholas Shakespeare. Building on earlier efforts by John Pearson (1966) and Andrew Lycett (1995), the book was prompted by the Fleming estate’s willingness to give Shakespeare access to unreleased archival material that illuminates the real-life source material embedded in the Bond novels. That openness may also have been the estate attempt to adjust the dominant view of Fleming as a man who, where he is not defined by Bond, is derided as a misogynistic, alcoholic wastrel with a penchant for whipping who showboated during the second world war and spent postwar summers in Jamaica fantasising about British grit, foreign villains and sexual conquest in exotic locales.

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man has plenty of whipping and wantonness, but it adds nuance to a life whose early years seem to have been spent in guileless and unknowing preparation for important wartime work — work for which he turns out to have been unusually gifted. In fact, it is the observation of one journalist — that Fleming, in this moment, with all his gifts and talents finally in use, was a “complete man” — that gave Shakespeare his title.

But what freight it brings to the book: an intimation of comprehensiveness underscored by its bulk and the vivid cultural history woven through it; an implied claim to being definitive bedevilled by the persistent haze of uncertainty around Fleming’s war record. Then there is the dramatic portent — that Fleming, even as he created the character that secured his fame, was somehow lesser or incomplete in those postwar years.

But perhaps that was merely a reversion to form. Fleming’s early life was monied but grim. His miserly Scottish grandfather was a banker who had survived considerable bereavement (three siblings had been buried before he was born, and three more, plus his mother, would follow by the time he turned fifteen) to become one of the wealthiest men in Europe. Robert Fleming’s greatest stroke of luck, however, was to be a constituent of a young Winston Churchill, who called on him for donations and provided in his friendship a glow of respectability for Robert’s sons, Val and Philip, whom Churchill nicknamed the “Fleming-oes.”

Val, elected a Conservative MP in 1910, fathered four sons — Peter (1907), Ian (1908), Richard (1911) and Michael (1913) — with socialite Evelyn Sainte Croix Rose, whom he had married in 1906. But his influence as a father was defined by his absence. After war broke out, he joined Churchill’s regiment, trained alongside the future prime minister, and was killed while serving on the Somme in 1917.

Robert Fleming is said to have bellowed in grief at the news, Evelyn painted every room in the house black, and Churchill wrote an obituary for the Times, a copy of which, framed and hung above Ian’s bed, gave the eight-year-old a nightly reminder of the greatness that he could never hope to match.

Val’s estate, meanwhile, gave Evelyn enormous wealth, but in terms that invited her to endure a lifetime of dutiful widowhood: should she ever remarry, the money would be immediately transferred to her children. She responded by elevating her dead husband “from an absent, pipe-smoking, deer-stalker to an iconic figure in the clouds with whom she alone enjoyed privileged communication,” writes Shakespeare, in one of many deft summations.

Controlling, insecure and extravagant, she played her boys off against one another, guilt-tripping them and blackmailing them with threats of disinheritance, pulling out all the stops to ensure they might never suffer the consequences of taking responsibility for their actions.

For Ian, this manifested most acutely in endless reprieves from failure and ignominy, and repeated diversions from paths that might well have led him away from Evelyn. He was pulled out of Eton ahead of trouble over a relationship with a girl and sent to Sandhurst with hopes of joining the Black Watch infantry battalion. Out less than a year later after contracting gonorrhoea in a London brothel, he was dispatched to the Tennerhof, a private school in the Austrian town of Kitzbühel, with freshly adjusted plans that he would pursue a diplomatic career.

Distance from Evelyn allowed promise to flower: linguistic versatility, some artistic ambitions, an engagement to a Swiss woman. But on his return his mother stomped on all these green shoots. After his failure to find a position in the Foreign Office she intervened to get him a job at Reuters, where he made a decent fist of covering a famous Soviet show trial of six engineers employed by a British machinery manufacturer. Then he was off again, moving at Evelyn’s insistence to join a firm of merchant bankers in the City.

Fleming had little to no interest in commerce and even less in maths: “I could never work out what a sixty-fourth of a point was,” he wrote. Yet he flourished to the point of becoming a partner at another firm only eighteen months later. The succession of environments into which he had been dropped had given him a charming veneer that allowed him to adapt and conform while keeping people at a safe distance. Even the jaded journalists he tried to scoop in Moscow had been disarmed to the point that they were willing to help him with his boss: one vouched that Fleming was “a pukha chap.”

The elite education and time spent among the privileged had also knitted Fleming into every club and network that was worth knowing about, giving him vast contacts and points of reference that he wielded readily. The “stockbroker” Fleming would talk to clients about investment strategy, wine and dine them at an appropriate club or hotel, and then turn them over to the pointy heads and bean counters in the office who could make the money flow. On the surface (and, to some, that was all there was), all this made Fleming a Wodehouse character: paid too much to do too little, all charm and glamour and self-obsession.

And yet, Shakespeare suggests, Fleming had by this time planted “miscellaneous seeds.” He could speak several languages, had solid journalistic experience, and was friendly with several notably crotchety press barons. He had contacts and networks across the financial, commercial and intelligence worlds. He even had literary credentials, via the reflected glow of elder brother Peter, who had become a successful travel writer, and his own efforts as a collector of first editions of books that had “signalised a right-angle in the thought on that particular subject.”

The book collecting might not have seemed helpful when war broke out in 1939, but the miscellaneous seeds sprouted once Fleming was recruited to the Department of Naval Intelligence as a personal assistant to its director, rear-admiral John Godfrey. His ability to deal with the press and with people — not least his irascible boss — made him indispensable. His myriad contacts became invaluable. His knowledge of distant worlds and their connections made him insightful. But perhaps most surprising of all was his creativity.

In this vein he was much like Churchill, whom Fleming grew to resemble with his polka-dot bowties and “daily prayer” memos (“Pray, could you find out…”). Under Godfrey, Fleming brainstormed all sorts of schemes, many impractical and far-fetched, to gain an advantage over the enemy. For every hare-brained idea — to have a fake U-boat captain send messages in glass bottles railing against the Third Reich, to create a fake treasure ship packed with crack commandoes (which sounds suspiciously like the Trojan horse) — there was something promising. Perhaps most notable was what Fleming took from a little-known novel, The Milliner Hat Mystery: the germ of what became Operation Mincemeat, a successful tactical deception of the Axis powers.

Placed at the near-centre of British intelligence efforts, Fleming had a wide ambit of activity that Shakespeare believes to have extended to a role in the creation of America’s foreign intelligence service. He was hardly the “chocolate sailor” some contemporaries called him. Godfrey certainly thought highly of his assistant. He called Fleming a war “winner” who was owed a debt that could never be repaid, and Shakespeare adds to this the findings of other historians: “It has taken time to realise how central Ian Fleming is,” says one. “What he was doing touched on so much of the war,” says another.

But ascertaining exactly what Fleming touched, and how lightly or heavily, is difficult. Even the claim to Operation Mincemeat is made via inference, analysis of stylistic tics and coincident timetabling. Secrecy is the issue. With friends and colleagues, Fleming was generally reticent about his wartime service; bar the blurred fantasies of the Bond books, he left few hints of his activities. Shakespeare adds to this the need for confidentiality during the war and, later, during the cold war, when archives were both weeded and closed to access. Then there is the material simply lost to time — damaged, forgotten, burned — and the records that are exaggerated or simply mistaken.

None of this is unusual, yet at other times Shakespeare strains to explain Fleming’s absences from records, or even to gainsay what exists and inveigle Fleming’s way in. “Simply because Ian is not listed in the minutes of a high-level meeting,” he writes at one point, “does not mean he was not there in the room.”

Enough well-documented rooms exist to make arguments like this unnecessary. The array of material Shakespeare proffers is enough to convince this reader, at any rate, that Fleming was an active, engaged, important and unconventional wartime player. While Shakespeare labours the point, it also serves to establish a key fact about Fleming’s literary efforts: while James Bond was depicted in a cold war world, with its dubious moralities and shifting principles, he was fundamentally a creature of the second world war and its starker divides between allies and enemies, good and bad.

The oft-made comparison with John le Carré has never been to Fleming’s advantage, but Shakespeare draws out so many connections, echoes and resemblances between Bond and the second world war that any comparison between Bond and George Smiley or between Fleming and le Carré seems like a category error. In fact, given Shakespeare’s attention to literary antecedents, the better comparison is between Bond and characters such as Hugh “Bulldog” Drummond, Richard Hannay and perhaps even Sherlock Holmes — Britons who, with vigour, smarts and a willingness to do violence, save the world.

Shakespeare is a restless writer. As though to jolt the reader awake, lengthy passages of third-person past-tense narration suddenly crystallise into the first-person present as he tracks down a long-lost colleague of Fleming’s or a vague acquaintance or — in more self-indulgent moments — the descendent of some vague acquaintance. These moments fold into the story of Fleming’s life the story of the stories — of the Pearson and Lycett biographies of Fleming, and of Shakespeare’s biography.

Shakespeare quotes people crowing about their efforts to mislead his predecessors or their determination to shut up shop: “Poor Pearson,” Godfrey writes, of Fleming’s first biographer, “is like a famished man gazing, his mouth watering, into the butcher’s and confectionary shop windows and having to be content with a stale turnip (or swede) from the greengrocer.”

Shakespeare doesn’t conceal his similarities with Pearson, noting his own eager anticipation of new discoveries. But he adds in the dynamics of his interviews, poignant notes about the contingency of historical research, and observations about the dark material at the heart of the Bond novels.

In one scene he arrives in the rain outside a bungalow at Milton Keynes to interview the last surviving member of 30AU, a wartime intelligence gathering unit set up under Fleming’s influence and operating, effectively, under his command. Bill Marshall is ninety-four years old and feels a decade older. He tells Shakespeare he is a week early but beckons him inside anyway. “Later, I am glad I got the date wrong,” Shakespeare adds. “Bill Marshall will be hospitalised five days after our conversation. Had I come at the right time, I would never have heard what he tells me.”

Inside, Shakespeare listens as Marshall — who only days before has received the Légion d’Honneur and a letter from Emanual Macron praising him as a hero — confesses to murder:

On 26 June, Bill watched as German snipers fired through the windows of a hotel, killing one medical orderly and shooting another through the knee as they attended wounded American soldiers in the street. It was raining when the German riflemen surrendered. Another witness told Nicholas Rankin how not long afterwards he had seen their blood flowing in the rainwater.

Bill grows quiet, withdrawn. “I shot four Germans in cold blood.”

“What did you feel?’

“Nothing. How do you feel seeing two men trying to attend being shot?”

What happened next, whether he was reprimanded or Returned to Unit, he does not say. He has said enough. I think of another character who inherited Bill’s licence to kill. This was the compost out of which James Bond emerged.

Much as he had come into his own, Fleming was in an invidious position by the end of the war. Bound by secrecy, he could not dispel or rebut jibes about him being the “Sailor of the Strand.” He was carrying considerable emotional turmoil: his brother Michael had died in 1940 as a prisoner of the Germans; a serious romantic relationship with Muriel Wright, begun in 1935 in Austria, had come to an end with her death in a German bombing raid in 1944. He could too easily see a future in which the skills and talents he had wielded so well went to waste. He was hardly alone in this plight: in the United States, Allen Dulles described his return to the legal profession as an “appalling thing” after heading a spy network. “Most of my time,” he wrote, “is spent reliving those exciting days.”

Where Dulles went to the CIA, Fleming returned to journalism. In 1945, he took a position in the Kemsley newspaper group, handling a network of foreign correspondents. A journalist Shakespeare interviews recounts how Fleming sat in front of a canary yellow map of the world equipped with tiny flashing light bulbs — one for each man.

Shakespeare cautiously ventures that this might have been cover for continuing intelligence work, but the whole portrait has the tragic comedy of a Graham Greene novel: Fleming’s use of naval intelligence lingo with his journalists, his retention of a code and cipher book in his office, the derisive whispers of younger colleagues that his vaunted contacts were nothing but old duffers. Then, of course, there are the corporate machinations: Fleming took the position with Kemsley, which also owned the Sunday Times, on the intimation that he might become the paper’s editor and the hope that he might even get a seat on the company’s board. He also fantasised that the foreign news service he was managing might one day become a rival to Reuters — at which point Fleming would be a press proprietor in his own right.

If true, it was only ever to be a sideline, for alongside a salary of £225,000 in today’s pounds Fleming negotiated an iron-clad policy of two months of paid holiday each year. He would spend those months in Jamaica, at the rather uncomfortable bungalow he had built and initially named “Shamelady Hall” before choosing a name that harked back to a wartime operation — Goldeneye. Here, in daily bursts of 2000 words, he wrote Bond.

In Shakespeare’s telling, the novels came shortly after a burst of disappointments and disillusionments. Fleming’s hopes of advancement at Kemsley had vanished; his long-term paramour, Anne Charteris, had been divorced from her husband and fallen pregnant (again) to Fleming, necessitating a hasty marriage that neither of them much wanted. With fatherhood imminent, wedlock complete, he was looking back to a life he once had and could still have had — in intelligence, on one hand, but also in literature.

Signs of Fleming’s desire for this life recur in the book, especially during Fleming’s time attending the Tennerhof. There, according to Shakespeare, the youthful Fleming was steeped in European history and literature and imbued with ambitions to write a serious novel in the vein of James Joyce or Thomas Mann. He made attempts to act on those ambitions, planning but then aborting a co-authored translation of Paracelsus and, in 1928, self-publishing a volume of poetry titled The Black Daffodil only to become deeply embarrassed by it. “He took every copy that had been printed and consigned the whole edition pitilessly to the flames,” wrote one of Fleming’s friends.

A factor in Fleming’s constant withdrawals, Shakespeare argues, was his elder brother’s success at writing. “Of course, my brother Peter’s rather brilliant as a writer,” Fleming would say, “but I wouldn’t know how you set about writing a book myself.” In the postwar years, however, his attitude changed. One prompt was his belief that he could better his brother’s effort at an adventure novel; another was his sense that he would not be trespassing on his brother’s turf if he did so. Then there was a sense of resentment, aggravated by his failed hopes at Kemsley, as friends, acquaintances and other writers churned out thrillers and spy novels that, in many cases, claimed experiences and actions Fleming saw as his own to write about — the gag of secrecy notwithstanding.

Perhaps too there was a sense of how he might slip that gag: Shakespeare posits that Graham Greene’s difficulties with the intelligence services — it was felt he drew too closely on his first-hand knowledge — may have influenced Fleming to increase the fantastical elements of the Bond stories even as he drew on the real-life material of his wartime experiences and insights. “I think he wrote the books primarily because he had a great deal of knowledge of things like this within him, and he had to get it out,” says one acquaintance.

It is a conflux of influences that Shakespeare presents with considerable verve. He plays with the book’s internal clock, changes style and tone, moves into scenes and back out of them, and in doing so creates vivid juxtapositions and drama. The chapter on Bond’s first appearance on the page follows immediately on Fleming’s decision to marry to create the convincing argument that Bond was an escape for Fleming as much as for an exhausted postwar Britain:

Suddenly, as he floated over the reef [at Goldeneye], above barracuda he had named after battleships, Ian saw an exhilarating path back to bachelorhood — by creating a contemporary naval hero in the tradition of Drake, Morgan and Nelson, loyal to the Crown, who would reaffirm England as a world power, wipe out the shame of the Burgess–Maclean defection, and re-establish SIS as “the most dangerous” Secret Service in Russian eyes. And he would be a bachelor. “If he were to marry and settle down he would be of little value to the Secret Service.”

A chapter later, Shakespeare is looking ahead again, foreshadowing how Bond would consume Fleming. It was not only that Bond’s fame quickly came to define his author’s public persona; it was also that Fleming became reliant on Bond. Advised that it was no good to write just one book, that he had to “hit the nail again and again with the same hammer until it’s driven into the head of your potential public,” Fleming became a factory working on a one-year schedule, the brunt of the work to be done during a spell at Goldeneye.

Fleming went into this routine clear-eyed, seeing it as wholly compatible with his working life as well as a path out of financial difficulties caused by a spendthrift Anne. As he wrote to his publisher Jonathan Cape during negotiations over Casino Royale, “I am only actuated by the motives of a) making as much money for myself and my publishers as possible out of the book, and b) getting as much fun as I personally can out of the project.”

But the fun, in Shakespeare’s telling, dwindled as the money poured in. Lawsuits over film and television rights, accusations of plagiarism, negative reviews and laughter from friends all corroded this late-life literary success. Then there was Fleming’s knowledge that, at some point, he would run out of material. Philip Larkin famously detected in the posthumously published Octopussy (1966) an allegory for how Fleming had used his war experiences as treasure off which to secure his heart’s desires — Bentleys, caviar, Henry Cotton golf clubs. It was acute insight that Shakespeare agrees with. “This was the draining exchange,” he writes. “Once Ian gave birth to Bond, he relied heavily on the hard-earned secret capital of the war. Each book was a different slice of stolen gold until the material ran out.”

The poor quality of Octopussy and The Man with the Golden Gun (1965), also published after Fleming’s death, suggests Shakespeare’s assessment is right. But at play in the preceding Bond books too is a sense of Fleming butting up against the limits imposed on a writer tilling in a single genre. For Your Eyes Only (1960) abandons the novel form in favour of the short story, one of which — the horribly titled “Quantum of Solace” — eschews gunfights and villains in favour of a parable about marital compassion delivered after a disappointing dinner party in a manner reminiscent of Somerset Maugham. The response to this deviation was lukewarm at best.

The Spy Who Loved Me (1962), meanwhile, is unique among the Bond novels for being framed by a meta-fictive introduction from Fleming, for adopting the first-person perspective of a woman, and for its brutally sleazy and violent story. The book contains the most rounded and complex of Fleming’s female characters, but its reception was so virulently hostile that Fleming, taken aback, suppressed a paperback edition, refused to allow anything but the title to be used in the film adaptations, and went back to his safe patch with the Bond that followed, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963).

One might wonder whether Fleming still yearned to write something that his younger, more highbrow self would have been proud of, and whether he had come to believe that, thanks to Bond, he could not. If so, it is all the more tragic for being a knowing compromise signalled by the early change he had made to the draft of Casino Royale.

A homage to a nineteenth-century philosopher was never going to fit into that work, into that world, and Fleming saw it quickly. He slashed a blue line through Secretan and above it wrote a new name. His protagonist would introduce himself bluntly, almost monosyllabically: “Bond. James Bond.” •

Ian Fleming: The Complete Man
By Nicholas Shakespeare | Harvill Secker | $42.99 | 830 pages

The historian Manning Clark believed that Australian political leaders fell into one of two groups; they were either “straighteners” and prohibitors or they were enlargers of life. So too ways of thinking about schools; my new book, Unbeaching the Whale, is an argument for an enlarging spirit in schooling and against the demand for compliance before all else.

That is not what I had in mind; the initial idea was to pull together some threads of thinking developed over a decade or so. Certainly I began with a set against what governments of all persuasions had been saying and doing about schools since the Howard years, an approach driven with utter conviction by the Rudd/Gillard governments in their “education revolution” (with the sole but compelling exception of Gonski). But as I dug out and for the first time really focused on a mass of evidence about how things had been going, I got more than I’d bargained for.

I was not shocked, exactly, but taken aback by the consistency of the picture over a wide field and across many years: Australian schooling has been on the slide for two decades, is still on the slide and is showing no signs of turning around.

That conclusion was reinforced and expanded in scope late in the piece when I realised at last that much-publicised difficulties of a behavioural and emotional kind (“classroom disruption,” “school refusal,” early leaving, bullying, lack of “engagement,” problems of “wellbeing”) are even more marked, fundamental and significant than the cognitive shortcomings on which much of the evidence dwells. They suggest that schooling isn’t working, and that it isn’t working because what children and young people experience there is badly out of kilter with what they experience elsewhere.

There was more to come as I turned to the obvious question: why? Why didn’t an agenda prosecuted with exceptional vigour by exceptionally capable political leaders deliver what it promised, let alone do what really needed doing? There is nothing inherently wrong in the big arguments used to make schools sit up straight and do as they were told — choice, equality, “effective” teaching, and the duty owed by publicly funded schools to the wider society, including its economy. All can be constructive, inspiring even. But not the versions that came to dominate official minds.

Then came the third and final occasion for a sinking feeling: how and by whom could the slide be arrested and reversed? As the straightening agenda expanded and grew in confidence, the system of governance — already limited to doing what could be done in bits and pieces within three-year election cycles — became more complex and less capable. When the Productivity Commission looked at the problem it found that key elements of the national reform agenda had been “stalled” for thirteen years, and that the things talked about at national HQ could seem “remote” from the “lived experience” of teachers and school leaders. There is now no entity, national or other, no government, state/territory or federal, and no stakeholder or combination of stakeholders with a span of responsibility and authority and a relationship between brain and body close enough to conceive and drive change of the kind and scale required.

There is another side to this ledger, however. I was not the only or first to be dismayed at how things were playing out. Prominent veterans Brian Caldwell and Alan Reid (both former deans of education) conclude that “Australian schools have hit the wall” (Caldwell) and need “a major overhaul” (Reid). A former NSW education minister, Verity Firth, argues that the time has come for structural reform rather than more of the same. Her Western Australian counterpart (and former premier and Gonski panel member) Carmen Lawrence rages against the long tail, rising segregation, pathetically narrow performance measures, the failure of new school planning, “deeply disturbing” inequities, and “huge” differences in resourcing and opportunity. Barry McGaw, former chief executive of ACER, the Australian Council for Educational Research, and former head of education at the OECD, famously careful in his pronouncements, says bluntly that quality is declining, inequity is high, and the system is “resistant to reform”; his successor at the ACER, Geoff Masters, says “deep reforms” are “urgently required.”

All this comes amid a flurry of books about the “tyranny of merit” or “threats to egalitarian schooling,” books assaulting policy “that is taking us backwards” or calling for “reimagining” or “revolution” or “transformation” or a “ground-up rethink” of what “learning systems” are needed to equip students for “societal challenges we can’t yet imagine.”

And it’s not just policy wonks and the kinds of people who write books. Others trying to find a way through the maze include some actually giving life to the idea often given lip service by the powers-that-be: that all young people will become “confident and creative individuals, successful lifelong learners and active and informed members of community.” Now, for the first time, breakthroughs in the rigorous assessment of learning and growth are making it possible for schools to keep doing some of the important things they have long done and to do important new things as well, and, what’s more, to do it for everyone: to provide twelve safe, happy and worthwhile years across the board.

So the nub of the answer to the question posed in the book’s subtitle — can schooling be reformed? — is yes, but it’s a very big ask, and schools can’t do it by themselves. It requires a reorganisation or “restructuring” of the system of governance; of the sector system, government, independent and Catholic; and above all of the daily work of students and teachers.

That in turn requires a very different way of thinking about schools and reform: more incremental reform, yes, but within a big, long-term strategy for structural change; equality in schooling rather than through it; more fraternity as well as more equality and liberty; more choice, but made more equally available; sectors, yes, but not organised so that two feed off the third; realising that schools, like students and teachers, need space and support to find their own way within a negotiated framework; accepting that schools can contribute to prosperity, but not by aiming at it; and the really big one, focusing not on teaching, effective or otherwise, but on the organisation of the production of learning and growth by its core workforce, the students.

Thinking needs to be more politically capable and inspiring as well as enlarging in spirit, able to stimulate and guide the kind of top-down-bottom-up popular movement briefly seen in the “I Give a Gonski” campaign (and on a very much larger scale in the distant but formative tumults of the 1960s and early 1970s).

The case for such a big and risky rests on necessity (current and piecemeal reforms can’t do what needs to be done) and the fact that it really matters, not in a life-and-death way but in a hard-to-pin-down, universal, lasting way. •

Unbeaching the Whale is published by Inside Story in association with the Centre for Strategic Education and the Melbourne Graduate School of Education.

“I, Hannah Arendt, was born on 14 October 1906 in Hannover,” begins the CV written by a not-yet-famous German-Jewish refugee in May 1941, just a few days after a ship chartered by the Jewish Joint Distribution Committee took her from Lisbon to the United States. With the benefit of hindsight, we know it marked a half-way point, demarcating Arendt’s European from her American life. She died on 4 December 1975 in New York, her home for thirty-four years. That much is certain.

During the American half of her life, Arendt worked variously as an editor, a journalist, a writer and a university teacher. She became known as one of the most formidable intellectuals of the twentieth century. Her books — The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) foremost among them — became hugely influential and have aged well. Her essays and published correspondence with key individuals in her life — including her lover Martin Heidegger, her mentor and friend Karl Jaspers, her first husband Günther Anders and her second husband Heinrich Blücher — provide yet more fascinating insights into a brilliant mind.

But it has never been easy to categorise Arendt. A famous interview she gave on West German television in 1964 began with a disagreement. “I think you are a philosopher,” the interviewer Günter Gaus said to her. “Well, I can’t do anything about that,” Arendt interrupted, “but I’m of the view that I’m not a philosopher. I think I’ve finally said farewell to philosophy. I studied philosophy, as you know, but that’s not to say that I stuck with it.”

The biographer is expected to fill in blanks, eliminate uncertainties, fit episodes into a cohesive story, and provide historical context. An intellectual biography should also relate a writer’s life to the texts she left behind and construct a narrative that makes sense of the trajectory of her thinking.

Thomas Meyer’s Hannah Arendt: Die Biografie, published last year in Germany to much acclaim and forthcoming in an English translation in October, does all that. He claims his is the first book about Arendt based on archival research, but even if it weren’t he has obviously done more than others to track down written sources. For many years, he has served as editor of Arendt’s collected writings in German. His understanding of her ideas and his extensive sleuthing has produced a comprehensive picture.

May 1941 also marked Arendt’s entry into an English-language universe. Until that point she had written in German, though she was also at home in French — from 1933 until 1941 she lived in exile in France — and read classical Greek and Latin as fluently as her mother tongue. English hadn’t been part of her world until she began lessons in 1940, but it didn’t take her long to write and publish in that language. She immersed herself in an Anglophone world in the second half of her life, though she never abandoned German; in the 1964 interview she told Gaus she knew a lot of German poetry by heart and the lines kept circling at the back of her mind.

Much to his credit, Meyer is interested in Arendt’s entire oeuvre. She wrote almost all her books twice, usually first in English and then in German (sometimes based on a text prepared by a translator). These aren’t German and English versions of the same text. It’s easier to express philosophical ideas in German than in English, Arendt once remarked, while the English language is better suited to thinking politically. When she imagined her German reader, she assumed some philosophical concepts needed little explanation; her American audience was better versed in a tradition of political thought.

Meyer is a diligent chronicler who avoids anachronisms. He discusses Arendt’s life and intellectual journey against the backdrop of the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, rarely filtering it through the lens of his own times. Only when he writes about the men in Arendt’s life does he become judgemental. He disapproves of her relationship with Heidegger (as do many Arendt admirers), is critical of Jaspers, and seems to consider Blücher, the love of her life and her husband for more than half of it, a philanderer who couldn’t hold a candle to her intellectually.

Meyer is thorough. It’s only after a twenty-two-page family history that readers learn Hannah Arendt was born at 9:15 pm, weighing 3.695 kilograms. I can empathise with him: of course he wants to share all the detail he has been able to unearth. And since Arendt’s life was complex and complicated, why not document all its twists and turns?

It’s time to come clean: I found Meyer’s book unwieldy and unnecessarily slow and his curiosity somewhat antiquarian. But I am being unfair, and I know why: I began reading Meyer’s book at the same time as I started on Lyndsey Stonebridge’s biography of Hannah Arendt, We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love & Disobedience. The plan was to consider these books in tandem, life chapter by life chapter. I soon abandoned that idea. Not because Meyer’s book is boring, but because Stonebridge’s is riveting. I was able to return to Meyer’s text sooner than expected simply because I couldn’t put down Stonebridge’s fast-paced narrative.

Her approach is as anti-antiquarian as could be. She is interested in Hannah Arendt as a companion in today’s dark times. And thus her narrative has two protagonists: the biographer and her subject. “I’ve tried to think my own thoughts in the place of Hannah Arendt,” Stonebridge writes, before conceding that “there may be moments [when she] also thinks her thoughts in my place.”

The two seem to have much in common: both come across as passionate, generous and at times opinionated. They complement each other: Stonebridge is not only Arendt’s interpreter but also the one who knows about the world almost half a century after Arendt’s death. It’s different from the one Arendt inhabited, but no less out of joint. Stonebridge convinces her readers that Arendt would have much to say about a world that “seems to be in the grip of a relentlessly awful plot.”

Stonebridge’s frequent references to her own times help the reader to understand why Hannah Arendt and her writings still resonate. The fact that she is read perhaps at least as much now as in the year she died may seem surprising. After all, Arendt hadn’t gathered followers around her who would take responsibility for her posthumous reputation. Her intellectual taste might be considered old-fashioned: with a few notable exceptions, she was not much interested in contemporary political theorists and philosophers, but instead engaged with Plato and Kant. She was one of the very few women in her line of work, but did not consider herself a feminist. Her writing doesn’t support the kind of identity politics that are so fashionable these days. She could come across as arrogant, if only because she often deemed it unnecessary to translate quotes from other languages.

Besides, Hannah Arendt didn’t leave a grand theory behind. It’s not possible to draw on an overarching “Arendtian” framework in the way some people purport to explain things from a Marxian or Freudian perspective. She is not somebody on whose writings we could comfortably lean. But we can take courage from her highly original attempts to understand the world. “What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing,” she wrote in the prologue to The Human Condition. Is there anything less simple than that? Thinking, though, was something Hannah Arendt was particularly good at.

“She wanted to think exactly like Rahel Varnhagen, to shadow her thought and experience as closely as she could so that she might better understand her own emotional, intellectual and at the time often perplexing life,” Stonebridge says about Arendt’s relationship with the German-Jewish writer and salonnière whose biography Arendt finished writing in Paris. Arendt once called Varnhagen her closest friend, although by then that friend had been dead for about a hundred years. Walter Benjamin and Franz Kafka occupied similar roles in Arendt’s life.

Stonebridge’s relationship with Arendt is evidently also close, which makes hers a particularly personal book. Shadowing her biographical subject’s thought and experience, she followed literally in Arendt’s footsteps. Visiting Montauban in the southwest of France, the town where Arendt stayed in the summer of 1940 after her escape from the Gurs internment camp, Stonebridge “carefully counted the sixty steps across the square that it would have taken Arendt to get from her stuffy room to the cool companionship of the library.”

“Perplexing” is an attribute that appears more than once in Stonebridge’s book. For good reason: it characterises the twists and turns not only of Arendt’s life but also in her way of thinking. Stonebridge quotes Arendt quoting Plato’s rendering of a Socratic dialogue: “It isn’t that, knowing the answers myself I perplex other people,” Socrates reportedly said to Meno. “The truth is rather that I infect them also with the perplexity I feel myself.” Whereupon Arendt adds: “Which, of course, sums up neatly the only way thinking can be taught.”

Of course? Arendt was an accomplished teacher who often performed her thinking in front of an audience — in fact the text Stonebridge uses here was labelled “a lecture” when first published in 1971 — but having been a teacher I know that many students resent being infected with perplexity. It requires skill not to lose them.

Skill is also on display when Stonebridge confronts her reader with the perplexities of Arendt’s ideas and life without trying to dissolve them. Arendt would have appreciated that. “I am often captured by the sense that there exists something she will not give up; something precious, mysterious even to herself, but very strongly present,” Stonebridge writes.

But isn’t that just the point of all of this? she might say now, chin resting in her smoking hand from her place in the bar in the underworld where the lost angels of the last century gather at dusk. That we are unknowable even to ourselves, maybe especially to ourselves, and yet capable of collective miracles? Isn’t that what you must fight for again now?

The subtitle of Stonebridge’s biography promises lessons. Arendt may have much to teach us: about indifference, about plurality and about racism, to name but three of the topics she wrote about. Stonebridge avoids turning Arendt into a Vordenker, somebody who does the thinking on others’ behalf. Arendt did not see herself in such a role either. She was principally interested in Nach-denken, in the exercise of chasing and thinking through issues that she found difficult. Such Nach-denken required close attention, patience, imagination and the willingness to leave well-trodden paths.

Without compromising her intellectual independence, Arendt relied on at least one Vordenker herself. Immanuel Kant taught her that our ability to think makes freedom possible and that how we think has moral consequences. From him she learned much else, including the idea that to think politically and critically required an “erweiterte Denkungsart,” which Arendt translated as “enlarged mentality.”

For Arendt, Kant was a familiar figure, and not just because she had read his Critique of Pure Reason when she was sixteen. Arendt grew up in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad), where Kant had spent almost his entire life. After having lived for more than twenty years in New York she admitted to a German journalist: “In the way I think and form judgements, I’m still from Königsberg.”

Perhaps the most important lesson provided by Arendt via Stonebridge is a challenge: Think! How not to think is also a key lesson of We Are Free to Change the World, and here the focus is on Arendt’s essay about Elizabeth Eckford and the other children known as the Little Rock Nine, who in 1957 dared to attend a racially segregated high school in Arkansas’s capital city. “As for the children, forced integration means a very serious conflict between home and school, between their private and and their social life, and… children cannot be expected to handle them and therefore should not be exposed to them,” Arendt wrote.

Here she was not mindful of the need for an “enlarged mentality.” She didn’t travel to Little Rock, she didn’t talk to Eckford and, most importantly, she didn’t take seriously the girl’s experience. Arendt didn’t to think empathetically about Eckford’s situation because she considered empathy an apolitical and therefore inadequate response. But she also failed to think critically about it. It says much about Arendt, however, that after her essay “Reflections of Little Rock” had been published she realised that she had been wrong and admitted as much in writing.

Although Arendt was a public intellectual par excellence in the second half of her life (and one who expertly used the media), she didn’t think it was her role to shape public opinion. Do you want to make an impact with your work, Gaus asked her in 1964. “To be honest with you, I have to tell you: when I’m working, I’m not interested in impact,” she replied. “And when the work has been completed?” he persisted. “Well, then I’ve finished it.” She explained that her main aim was to understand, and that writing helped her to do that. And anyway, asking her about her impact was something only a man would do: “Men are always so concerned about making an impression.”

I loved reading Stonebridge’s book because I felt that in at least four key respects she does justice to Arendt. For one, her biography is exceptionally well written. That matters because Arendt herself wrote well (in German more so than in English) and because she valued good writing. She frequently quoted poetry in her writings — and poets also appreciated reading her. The final passages of The Origins of Totalitarianism, the poet Randall Jarrell told her in 1950, “seem a sort of crushing unbearable poem, quite homogeneous, something the reader feels and understands at the same time… I feel as if I’d seen the other side of the moon.” She is well-served by a biographer whose prose is sharp, elegant and captivating.

Gaus was incredulous when Arendt insisted that she was not a philosopher. Stonebridge understands why she said “goodbye to philosophy for good.” Arendt might not have endorsed Marx’s dictum — “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways, the point, however, is to change it” — but she distinguished between philosophising, on the one hand, and thinking politically and critically, on the other.

Arendt was prompted to think not because of an abstract conundrum but because the world was out of joint. Her thinking was informed by her experience as a refugee and as a Jewish woman who had been lucky to escape the fate of the millions of other Jews murdered in the Shoah. All this provides her thinking and writing with a sense of urgency.

Stonebridge shares that sense of urgency. “Hers was not a call for a return to political reason (such as you often hear today),” Stonebridge writes, “but for a kind of emergency thinking that may, she said, in the end, be all we have.” Our world is in much need of the kind of emergency thinking that Arendt practised and Stonebridge advocates.

Yet even while thinking and writing about a world out of joint, Arendt was committed to living well. Friendship and love were important to her, a fact that we might easily lose sight of when reading Eichmann in Jerusalem or The Origins of Totalitarianism. Stonebridge’s biography keeps the loving and much-loved author of these books in focus. It ends with a call to her readers, which would, I am sure, have met with Arendt’s wholehearted approval: “Now pay attention and get on with the work of resisting the sorry reality that you find yourselves in. And for goodness’ sake — a puff of smoke, raising a glass of Campari — have some fun!” •

Hannah Arendt: Die Biografie
By Thomas Meyer │ Piper │ €28.00 │ 521 pages

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love & Disobedience
By Lyndsey Stonebridge │ Jonathan Cape │£22.00 │290 pages

It was hard not to be charmed by the race between a lettuce and Liz Truss’s prime ministership. It was gallows humour sharply poised between self-deprecation and outright deprecation, somehow typical of British humour. The whimsy worked as a coping measure, but was it also an agent of change?

On balance, British journalist David Stubbs thinks not. His new book, Different Times: A History of British Comedy, opens with a bravura critique of the weakness in the British character that forgave Boris Johnson almost everything because he’s fond of a joke, often apparently at his own expense: “Humour, our craven inability to resist humour, is what created Boris Johnson.” This is a salutary reminder that laughter matters, but it can anaesthetise as well as enlighten. As Peter Cook said about the satirists of the Weimar Republic: “those wonderful Berlin cabarets which did so much to stop the rise of Hitler and prevent the outbreak of the second world war.”

Comedy may seldom transform the world but it provides a revealing window on continuity and change in a society. Different Times traces British laughter during the United Kingdom’s decades-long retreat from imperial primacy, and perhaps it is no coincidence that America is getting funnier as it becomes more intractable while China is one of the most dangerous places on earth to crack a joke.

Stubbs has watched a lot of TV and been to a lot of gigs. If you enjoy anything British, funny and filmed, from Chaplin and Stan Laurel to The Office, chances are they’ll be here. It’s a compendious survey that moves decade by decade from the 1920s to the noughties, with a sketchy coda towards the present. Comedy and satire emerge as lagging indicators of cultural change.

As an Australian with an Anglophile education I kept flashing in and out of recognition. A lot of it I know, because a lot of it we see. The British roots of Australian humour remain strong and possibly predominant against the onslaught of American stuff that comes down the wires and through the ether. The bits I didn’t know are well described, but I’m seldom persuaded I was missing much. English comedy, in particular, can appear rather insular at a distance.

So some of the jokes seem inbred, overwritten by class obsessions. But I do sometimes wish our own writers had the time and the patience to write so well. The sophistication of script and characterisation, the attention to human quirkiness — nobody does it better.

The good news for readers is that Stubbs writes as a proper fan but not uncritically. This is a mostly good-natured, sometimes school-masterish book, its critical arc summed up early: “With magnificent but too few exceptions, British comedy in the twentieth century was not so much about the human condition as about the white, male condition.”

So if you are after a “war on woke” lamentation that no one can take a joke anymore, go to another shop. Things are getting better: “Political correctness liberated comedy,” says Stubbs, “forced it to resort to its creative imagination, helped create a new self-consciousness about what it meant to create comedy, to be more inclusive and open to new forms, new avenues of social exploration, rather than falling back on lazy, reactionary stereotypes and tropes.”

What’s important about this is the demand that comedy must do without the lazy and the reactionary, not that it try to do without tropes and stereotypes entirely. Stereotype is a particularly dirty word these days, and the reflex for a lot of people is to assume it is always a terrible thing. But comedy uses various forms of shorthand and thus always trades in tropes, stereotypes and metaphors. The real debates need to be about who the jokes are targeting and whether they conform to the poetic justice of comedy. That’s what makes the lettuce such a perfect joke. It didn’t implicate anything extraneous like Truss’s class or gender — it focused purely and searingly on the public matter of her government’s doomed program.

We can and should move from a narrow set of stereotypes towards a wider and more representative set. This would be progress, yes, but not a revolution. Comedy can’t do entirely without caricature, stereotype, ridicule. If the world doesn’t see another mother-in-law joke, if an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman never walk into a bar again, it will be no loss. But other tropes and stereotypes are filling the vacuum.

The better angels of our nature would prefer to believe that we mostly laugh with rather than at, but that isn’t true. The same overworked angels then try to insist that only punching up can be funny, and that works a little better. Most people I know think it’s fine to laugh at a president or prime minister and not okay to laugh at someone for being gay. But still people laugh at babies suffering mishaps on YouTube — maybe we shouldn’t, but often enough we do. It seems unlikely that many of the babies really deserve it.

Another good thing about this book is that Stubbs tries hard to see things in social and historical context. He doesn’t judge, as people sometimes do, from the perfect moral clarity of the present. The Carry On movies are a necessary and popular part of his story; Dad’s Army is lovingly analysed as 1970s nostalgia for a plucky, unified and rather ridiculous wartime Britain. The radical satire boom of the Thatcher years is lauded, even while we are reminded that it was mostly posh boys who did the shouting in The Young Ones and elsewhere. Working-class comedians from the Northern club circuit get respectful attention despite their reactionary jokes and views.

Or, rather, Stubbs doesn’t judge prematurely. Monty Python’s creators get lavish admiration but lose a few marks on women and race for being the postwar Oxbridge boys they were. In the end, he lets “progressive” and “morally palatable” merge a bit. Occasionally Different Times drifts into marking the exams of comedians of the past by standards they were unaware of.

Here, Stubbs is in good company. The slippage between what is and what should be funny is near universal in humour studies. Laughter feels good, so we want to feel good about why and when we laugh. Often we are kidding ourselves.

Stubbs tries hard to hold a catholic view of British comedy as a sort of fun-park mirror held up to the decline of national significance. Nevertheless, the most abiding impression I got from this book is how pervasive the hegemony of Oxbridge has been and remains. Stubbs admits he arrived at Oxford two years ahead of BoJo and they both expect to be attended to, as of right. Did the British tolerate BoJo’s lying simply because he made them laugh? No, there is also the fact that he came from the class that was born to rule.

We Australians fool ourselves that we don’t have class distinctions. Lined up beside the British, though, we at least don’t have as concentrated a stream of cultural privilege as Oxbridge. With all the self-congratulation, there is still something in the idea of a larrikin sense of humour, a persistent disrespect for authority in a tie. It used to belong entirely to white blokes like me, and we are still wildly over-represented, but more voices are claiming the right to call bullshit than used to be the case. We don’t defer as much as the British to the bright, loud boys who went to Sydney or Melbourne universities. Things could be worse.

But Stubbs’s BoJo thread shines a light on something less pleasing. What a humourless bunch we tend to elect in Australia! Keating had a killer vein in invective that sometimes looked like satire, but only Whitlam and Menzies were genuinely funny, and that mostly counted against them with the general public as aloofness. People say George Reid could be funny on the hustings, but that’s going back a long way. We obviously expect earnestness in our leaders, certainly in the half dozen since Howard set the pattern. Our public figures should be able to bear a joke, but heaven preserve any politician who gives the impression they are laughing at us, for Newspoll certainly won’t.

Are we really much good at laughing at ourselves, I wonder? Some future historian of Australian comedy may have a tale to tell. •

Different Times: A History of British Comedy
By David Stubbs | Faber | $39.99 | 416 pages

In so many ways over the past few years we have been made aware of the apparent fragility of American democracy — most grievously by the Capitol riots on 6 January 2021; most worryingly by the failure of Congress to enact legislation even when it’s needed to keep government functioning; most frustratingly by the partisan divisions that seem to infect every aspect of American life.

Many Americans, and many of those watching around the world, see American democracy cracking, freedoms being eroded and the political system breaking. Much of the blame is sheeted home to Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again followers, and the case against them can clearly and forcibly be made.

But the United States has faced such crises before: in the 1790s, with the intense standoff between Federalists and Republicans; before, during and after the Civil War; in the Jim Crow period of the 1890s, which also saw five consecutive presidents elected with a minority of the popular vote; and after the Watergate revelations. The problems inherent in the American political system are thus compounded by problems and leaders unique to each era.

Trump’s presidency clearly damaged American democracy. Just how damaged and how long-lasting the effect is up for debate (a detailed 2023 report from Brookings discusses the issues well). During his term the United States was labelled a “backsliding democracy” by International IDEA, a European democracy think tank, and for some years the Economist’s Democracy Index has ranked the United States among “flawed democracies” including Greece, Poland and Brazil.

In a recent interview for the Democracy Project at Johns Hopkins University, political scientist Robert Lieberman stressed that democracy exists on a continuum. The United States started out as a constrained democracy, with citizenship limited to white men and only property-owners entitled to vote. For Lieberman, the key question is not “whether we are a democracy, but in which direction are we headed. Are we moving forward or are we moving backward?”

The current situation is arguably more serious than previous democratic crises because there are so many concomitant threats. There’s the pervasive partisan divide; conflicts over racism, immigration and nativism; growing socio-economic inequalities; the erosion of voting rights, particularly those of minorities; lawmakers’ attempts to undermine reproductive health, the rights of LGBTQI+ people, school curricula and library books; and the endless promulgation of lies and distortions that quickly come to be treated as facts.

Some of these threats have been decades in the making. Americans have long been sceptical of the power of the federal government: trust in Washington, which began to decline during the Vietnam war and continued to decline amid the Watergate scandal in the early 1970s, is at an historic low. Fewer than one-in-five Americans said they trusted the federal government to do what is right “just about always” (1 per cent) or “most of the time” (15 per cent) in 2023 Pew Research Center polls.

Individual institutions have suffered as well. The US Supreme Court’s reputation has been damaged by recent rulings contrary to popular opinion, and trust in federal agencies like the Justice Department, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the Federal Reserve has eroded. It’s shocking to also see declining trust in the military, police and the medical system.

These troubles pile on top of problems intrinsic to American democracy: the unusual mechanism, an electoral college, for electing the president; equal representation for the states in the Senate regardless of vastly different populations; lifetime appointments for US Supreme Court justices; and the lack of a national system for overseeing elections.

Because of their distrust of the popular vote, the Founding Fathers created the electoral college and other structural protections against what they saw as the uninformed masses. Patently, this system no longer works. Twice this century the person elected president by the electoral college had lost the popular vote (George W. Bush in 2000 and Trump in 2016), and it could happen again in 2024.

Because small, less-populous and mostly White states like Wyoming, Montana and North and South Dakota have the same number of senators as populous and diverse states like Texas, New York and California, Republican majorities in the Senate this century have never represented a majority of the population. The impact on confirmations of judicial nominees and senior executive branch appointees has been profound.

Finally, there is the deepening polarisation of the American political system. This began post-Watergate, was boosted by Newt Gingrich and the Tea Party, and is today exemplified by the House Freedom Caucus, the MAGA movement and the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This deepening polarisation has been marked by an intensifying shift rightwards among each new cohort of Republican legislators, echoing the widening differences between red and blue states and the growing urban–rural political divide.

Bring an ambitious, narcissistic, embittered and malevolent Trump back into this setting and the weaknesses of both the political system and the guard rails of democracy will become very apparent. Trump has schemed to overturn legitimate election results (and is likely to do so again), encouraged violence and discrimination, attacked the media and government institutions, undermined the staff and bureaucrats who worked for him, courted dictators and appeared beholden to foreign interests, lied and denied, and profited from his public office. Most egregiously, he encouraged the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Three years on, amazingly, a majority of Republicans believe Biden was not legitimately elected. Despite Trump’s multiple indictments and legal jeopardy, they are willing to vote for him yet again. Republicans in the Congress increasingly follow his wishes on key pieces of legislation, and even those lawmakers he has belittled and besmirched end up endorsing him.

If Trump is re-elected he will be much less constrained and much more able to get his way than in his previous term. His rhetoric on the 2024 campaign trail — dark, violent, authoritarian and vengeful — has generated alarm. We have been warned about a Trump kleptocracy.

Some observers think the worst cannot and will not happen (see, for example, this article by Elaine Karmack). But a Brookings Institution report, Understanding Democratic Decline in the United States, warns that “the electoral road to breakdown is dangerously deceptive”:

People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are “legal,” in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts.

The most obvious preventive measure lies at the ballot box — though that can only get rid of Trump, not Trumpism. And American voters themselves display some worrying tendencies. The Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution found that 75 per cent of Americans believe that “the future of American democracy is at risk in the 2024 presidential election” and the Democracy Fund found that more than 80 per cent of Americans see democracy as a “fairly good” or “very good” political system; but the latter study highlighted that only about 27 per cent of Americans consistently and uniformly support democratic norms across multiple survey waves. Perhaps not surprisingly, this response differs by political allegiance: 45 per cent of Democrats consistently support democratic norms but only 18 per cent of Independents and 13 per cent of Republicans.

Many voters acknowledge Trump’s true character but rationalise their actions as support for conservative judges, anti-abortion legislation, overturning unfair trade agreements, retaining tax benefits or protecting the Second Amendment. Yes, there are Republicans who consider Trump a “grotesque threat to democracy” and won’t vote for him again, but there are also former Obama voters who see Trump as “our last shot at restoring America.”

Even with Trump gone from the political stage (and that endpoint may result in further efforts to upset democratic processes), considerable effort will be required to restore individual rights and freedoms and deliver the blessings of democracy to all Americans. Ending Trumpism will require a massive effort by the Republican Party to reconfigure its base and operations and find leaders who will promote a different kind of conservatism. For their part, Biden and the Democrats must work to understand the anger and despair that has driven Trump’s MAGA supporters to adopt his bleak and autocratic views. •

What Australians witnessed this week in the encounter between foreign ministers Wong and Wang was a combination of Peking Opera, Kabuki theatre and that great Australian theatrical device, the shirtfront.

Penny Wong is well-suited for all these roles, alternating between the higher-intensity Peking opera, the low-intensity Kabuki form, and the diplomatic shirtfront. Thus, she said she was disturbed by China’s confronting behaviour in the South China Sea, concerned about China’s human rights abuses and “shocked” by the suspended death sentence meted out to Australian citizen Yang Hengjun for allegedly spying.

Having got that off her chest, she was also pleased that relations between Australia and China had “stabilised” under the Albanese government, enabling the resumption of what diplomats call a high-level foreign and strategic dialogue. That process had fallen into disuse under the more combative and, as it turned out, less constructive approach taken by the previous Australian government.

As for Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister provided a relatively enigmatic foil in his public encounters with Australian leaders, including Wong and prime minister Anthony Albanese. In private, he will no doubt have given as good as he got: as a long-serving foreign minister he is no stranger to difficult encounters triggered by China’s assertiveness.

Wong and Wang won’t have neglected the implications of an extremely unstable global security environment for regional peace and stability. While they may not have dealt directly with a possible return of Donald Trump to the White House, it will have been part of their calculations about what lies ahead.

Offstage we had a staple of Peking opera, with a villain in the shape of Paul Keating, whose meeting with the Chinese foreign minister was portrayed in some excitable media quarters as treason. In a world of high-stakes diplomacy in which one of Beijing’s stocks-in-trade is divide and prevail, the meeting with a former prime minister who is a critic of Australia’s China policy will have served a symbolic purpose.

What was achieved by all this activity?

The answer is straightforward. The Wong–Wang meeting served both countries’ interests. For Australia, it demonstrated that relations with its cornerstone trading partner are in mutually beneficial shape. For China, it suggested Canberra had not moved irredeemably into Washington’s orbit.

The encounter was realpolitik writ large in preparation for a visit to Canberra later this year of Chinese premier Li Qiang. To use a phrase borrowed from Chinese leader Xi Jinping, it had a win–win outcome for the two countries, though not for Australia’s China hawks.

Much of this movement, including an easing of restrictions on Australian exports to China, would have been off limits under Scott Morrison’s government — a time when Australia’s trade minister could not get his counterpart on the telephone.

In the eighteen months since Labor took office, bilateral encounters have occurred monthly at least, and with increasing frequency more recently. Contrast this with the paucity of meetings, invariably restricted to encounters on the sidelines of international gatherings, under Morrison.

Absent from Wong’s remarks about the relationship on this occasion was the bromide that Australia would disagree with China where it must, and agree where it can, or words to that effect. Increasingly, we now have Wong saying that Australian wants a “stable and constructive” relationship with China “in the interests of both countries.”

This might be bad news for those critics of China who have put us on a “red alert,” as a febrile newspaper series in Age and the Sydney Morning Herald described it last year. A “constructive” relationship would seem to be in Australia’s own interests, though it shouldn’t be at the expense of Australia’s treaty arrangements, its national interest or its values — a fact that shouldn’t need to be repeated ad nauseum.

In their quite lengthy talks Wong and Wang will have dwelled no doubt on a trading and people-to-people relationship that has rebounded since the Covid crisis subsided. Goods and services exports to China gained 13 per cent to A$203.5 billion in the 2022–23 financial year, with China accounting for a shade over a quarter of total exports. Service exports to China were up 27 per cent as a result of the return of students and tourists. The country is far and away Australia’s biggest export market.

If there is an impediment from China’s point of view, it is the obstacles facing Chinese enterprises attempting to gain a foothold in Australia’s investment market by the Foreign Investment Review Board. China’s investment stock in Australia stands at just A$44 billion, or 4 per cent of total foreign direct investment. It ranks sixth among foreign investors, far behind the United States, the European Union and Britain.

Among jarring aspects of Wang Yi’s visit, and one that raised questions about China’s willingness to engage more broadly, was the foreign minister’s unwillingness to avail himself of the opportunity to answer questions from the Australian media. Wang and his advisers won’t have overlooked the hostile tenor of some of the reporting ahead of his visit, and the near certainty that this hostility would have permeated an encounter with an Australian media loaded for game.

In all of this, participants in the diplomatic jousting will continue to play their roles for both a domestic and a wider audience. Senator Wong is proving quite good at it. The question, as always, is how much substance is there behind the shadow play. •

For decades the outside world tried to understand Soeharto, the little-known Indonesian army general who emerged from Jakarta’s shadowy putsch attempt of 30 September 1965, seized power from the ailing independence leader Sukarno and obliterated the army’s communist opponents by orchestrating mass slaughter.

It took a while for diplomats to realise they had a window into the mind of this reticent figure courtesy of a Westerner — an Australian, in fact —who had become part of Soeharto’s household a decade before these events and was to remain a key intermediary between the general and the West until Soeharto stepped down in 1998. In the words of an American diplomat in Jakarta at that time, Clive Williams was Soeharto’s “Australian whisperer.”

But as former Australian diplomat Shannon Smith writes in his intriguing biography, Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher, Williams’s role was kept largely secret from the public for more than fifty years. “Those who knew him in an official capacity are confined to several dozen international diplomats, journalists and politicians, and they had national interest, and sometimes self-interest, in keeping his name, his position and his role out of the public spotlight,” says Smith. The man himself would divulge only that he came from Geelong. “Beyond that, to every single person who ever came across Clive Williams, he was a puzzle, a riddle, a mystery, an enigma.”

So who was Clive Williams? How did this cashiered Jehovah’s Witness missionary and self-trained chiropodist become attached to Soeharto? How important was he in the power transition and Soeharto’s long presidency? And what did he know about the manoeuvrings around the night of 30 September 1965? Thanks to exhaustive research, Smith has answers to the first three of these questions, but only a hint about the fourth.

Williams was born in Geelong in 1921 to a family on the edge of survival, his father shattered by two years as a German prisoner of war. His mother died when he was sixteen, robbing him of close emotional support just as he was coming to the realisation that he was homosexual.

Feeling “hunted” in Geelong, Smith conjectures, Williams needed somewhere to “hide in plain sight.” He found it as a Jehovah’s Witness. Though the sect had only about 2000 followers in Australia, it was well known thanks to its early adoption of new technologies. Sound vans cruising the streets, radio broadcasts, pamphlets and foot-in-the-door house calls — all these were used pushed its millenarian belief that Christ would soon return to Earth and replace all worldly governments with a paradise populated only by Witnesses.

The group was unpopular, of course, and as Australia entered the second world war it was also suspect for its pacifism. Its eventual banning in 1941 added to the attraction for Williams. “An ardent, proselytising Jehovah’s Witness must have felt a real adrenalin rush pitting themself against community standards, breaking laws, and actively seeking pushback or confrontation,” Smith thinks. “Living in a society where one felt pressure for being ‘other’ or ‘less,’ such as a homosexual, it would have been an ideal outlet for barely twenty-year-old Williams to fight back, especially where the attention was on one’s religious beliefs not sexuality.”

Having started out as a self-supporting “pioneer” roaming the towns in a sound-van, Williams graduated to a central role in the Jehovah’s Witnesses headquarters in Sydney, got exempted from call-up as a religious minister even as the sect continued to operate semi-underground, and then, in 1950, gaining induction into the sect’s global training centre, Gilead, in upstate New York. The following year, when his class was dispatched as missionaries, he landed in Manado, the province in the north of Indonesia’s Sulawesi island.

Williams lasted not quite three years in that role. Smith found a cryptic reference in the sect’s records for 1954 — “During the course of the year it became necessary to disfellowship a person from the congregation for unchristian conduct” — but Williams was otherwise expunged from the sect’s history books. He might have been expelled for attending more to charity than conversions, Smith generously observes, but his sexuality seems a more likely cause.

Aged thirty-six, Williams then moved to Semarang in Central Java, taking with him a younger Manadonese man. “It was also a good place to lose oneself or, indeed, hide from view. A place to shake off a religion and find some spirituality, to conceal sexuality, and to reset,” Smith writes. “Over the next few years, Williams delved into Javanese culture, became fluent in the local languages and established a series of lifelong friendships. Like many who enter witness protection, he emerged with a new identity.”

Despite his humble schooling, Williams had always been well spoken, had become a confident speaker from years as a missionary, and no longer had a mission to convert the local Muslims. He quickly tapped into the immense demand for English-language tuition in the new nation, particularly among upper-echelon Indonesians who could pay for classes and textbooks.

Word of Williams’s activities reached Tien Soeharto, wife of the rising army officer. The two struck up a rapport: “he delighted her with his demonstrations of Western etiquette and customs, he became the couples’ English tutor, and like most Australians, he was practical and handy at fixing things (including cutting her in-grown toenails).” Clive also followed international affairs: “he had travelled to London and New York! And his knowledge about the human condition, gained from travelling around the cities and isolated communities of Australia and his missionary work, was extremely broad. To the inward-looking Javanese couple, Williams was a revelation.”

It was during these years, the 1950s, that Soeharto rose to command the army’s crucial Central Java region, building a patronage style of leadership bolstered by commodity smuggling, protection rackets and other business activity. In the process he attracted life-long loyalty from army colleagues like Sudjono Humardhani, Ali Murtopo and Yoga Sugama and among Chinese-Indonesian compradore businessmen like The Kian Seng (known as Mohammed “Bob” Hassan) and Liem Sioe Liong (Sudono Salim).

Eventually the business deals got too much for the puritanical army head, Abdul Haris Nasution, who transferred Soeharto to the new staff college in Bandung in 1959. But that didn’t stop Soeharto’s rise. He took command of a new Jakarta-based ready-reaction force called Kostrad that also had the job of regaining Western New Guinea from the Dutch. Tien stayed in Semarang through this period, with Williams becoming a trusted male presence while frequently flying to Jakarta to see Soeharto.

Smith takes us through much of the still-emerging history and analysis of the events of 1965, though he misses some parts of the story, notably the role of the double agent Sjam Kamaruzaman, an army intelligence asset inside a “special bureau” attached to the top leadership of the PKI, the Indonesian Communist Party.

What Smith’s research reinforces, though, is that neither the CIA nor other foreign intelligence agencies were masterminding events. Although Western powers quickly piled in with propaganda blaming the killing of six army generals on the PKI, they were taken completely by surprise by the nature of the military putsch and knew virtually nothing about Soeharto. A provincial figure, he had not been among the more cosmopolitan Indonesian officers given US army training.

As Soeharto moved to undercut Sukarno, first by facing down his attempt to appoint someone else army commander, then by forcing the handover of executive powers in the famous 11 March 1966 letter Sukarno was intimidated into signing, then by becoming acting president in 1967, foreign embassies were baffled by the opaque responses they were getting from the emerging leader. When he said “yes” it could mean yes, or maybe, or just “I have heard you,” or even a no.

Then, in mid 1966, Williams was discovered by American ambassador Marshall Green and soon became an indispensable intermediary for the embassy, and vice-versa. He would often turn up on the doorstep of an American diplomat’s house at the behest of the acting president, and the embassy also chose Williams for reciprocal approaches.

Williams was very different from other potential intermediaries including members of the ring of ex-Semarang army officers serving as “special advisors” to Soeharto, or foreign minister Adam Malik and other civilian politicians who sometimes had different political agendas. He was non-political, incorruptible and simply not interested in money. He understood “Soeharto’s nuances and communication style; he could read Soeharto’s mood and could tell whether he was angry or prevaricating or anxious, and he could anticipate Soeharto’s thinking and reaction to an issue.” He also spoke both English and Indonesian fluently, “ensuring there were no linguistic or cultural misunderstandings.”

By 1967, Soeharto was ensconced in the large house at Jalan Cendana in Menteng, the old inner suburb of Dutch officialdom. Williams took a small house, connected by gate, at the back. He would come in for meals, take Soeharto through what the foreign media were saying, coach the six children in English, and guide Tien through the Australian Women’s Weekly.

The Australian embassy was two years behind Marshall Green in discovering Williams as the best conduit to Soeharto. Or at least its mainstream diplomatic staff were. An army attaché, Colonel Robert Hughes, met Williams in Central Java in 1966 and got a meeting with Soeharto, with Williams interpreting. Murray Clapham, a suave young officer of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, became friendly with Williams, as did his chief of station Kenneth Wells.

The ABC’s correspondent, Tim Bowden, also discovered Williams and persuaded him to give a radio interview in October 1966. While current politics were barred, the hour-long encounter went deeply into the kind of divination that Soeharto — like many Javanese — practised as they reached major decisions.

But these insights were disregarded by Australia’s ambassador from 1966 to 1969, Max Loveday, a rigid and self-important character who insisted on using conventional channels, notably the Indonesian foreign ministry and Malik, its minister, whom Soeharto distrusted. The Australian government consequently made a number of diplomat blunders by pushing proposals that Williams would have advised were bound to be refused. A visit by prime minister John Gorton in 1968 to cement reopened political contact was a near failure, redeemed mostly by the Indonesian-language fluency of Gorton’s wife Bettina.

It was not until Gordon Jockel — who knew about Williams from a memorandum the exasperated Ken Wells circulated in Canberra behind Loveday’s back — became ambassador in March 1969 that the embassy tapped into the Whisperer.

Smith’s biography ends about there, with the relationship from 1969 to Williams’s death in 2001 to be covered in a second volume. Those who met Williams over these decades know he remained fervently loyal, especially to Tien Soeharto (and her memory after she died in 1996). During the tension over East Timor he remained a vital channel for Canberra.

His house in Menteng remained a modest one, as did the former home and hobby farm of Soeharto himself by the standards of Marcos, Mobutu or Putin (or even Sydney’s harbourside mansions these days). Whether he exercised any restraint over Soeharto’s children in their business dealings would be interesting to discover. From the available evidence it would seem not. Any role he took in the nuptials of Soeharto’s daughter Titiek to the dashing special forces officer Prabowo Subianto would be of added interest now that Prabowo is president-elect.

On the last question — what did Williams know about 1965–66? — Smith has found only tantalising clues. When a German-born Jesuit, Franz Magnis-Suseno, met him just prior to the 30 September coup, he was surprised by Williams’s conviction that Soeharto was ready to act against the communists. “What was clear from Magnis-Suseno’s account of his conversation with Williams — and it wasn’t a [later] recollection, he recorded it in his diary — was that Soeharto was either planning his own initiative or preparing to respond to another scheme,” Smith writes.

But then Smith backs away. “The 30 September Movement seems to have been no more than an old-fashioned army putsch by disgruntled middle-level officers using whatever support they could get,” he writes. “But it was a clumsy, poorly planned operation and probably didn’t expect Soeharto’s quick counter-reaction. It might also have been subverted by Soeharto; he certainly didn’t orchestrate the movement but it is very reasonable to assume he knew the plans in advance, and that he both infiltrated the putsch and then took action against it.”

So Smith, despite have read and cited much of the still-expanding literature about 1965, hangs back from the logical leap that other scholars are making, and that the Jesuit’s diary points towards. This is that Soeharto’s own spooks fired up impressionable middle-ranking officers to mount the 30 September putsch against pro-American generals allegedly about to overthrow Sukarno, in the hope of drawing the PKI into a power grab, thereby justifying an army counter-coup.

We live in hope that the second and third volumes of David Jenkins’s account of Soeharto’s rise to power will clarify further, and that Williams grew less discreet in his later years. So far, though, Soeharto’s Australian whisperer remains largely enigmatic. •

Occidental Preacher, Accidental Teacher: The Enigmatic Clive Williams, Volume 1, 1921–1968
By Shannon Smith | Big Hill Publishing | 254 pages | $34.99

Given Peter Dutton’s own admissions, it is no surprise that writer Lech Blaine sees the Liberal leader’s experiences in the police force as having encouraged a narrow, black-and-white view of the world. In his insightful new Quarterly Essay, Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics, Blaine also notes that Dutton plays up his nine-year career as a cop to appeal to everyday suburban Australians while downplaying the three decades he has spent as a very financially successful property developer.

While he acknowledges the influence of Queensland’s bipartisan history of populist leaders, the best-known of whom was Joh Bjelke-Petersen, Blaine also suggests that John Howard has particularly influenced Dutton’s socially conservative culture-war focus on issues such as race and immigration. But while Howard used a dog whistle, he writes, Dutton uses a foghorn.

Blaine highlights the most contentious statements that Dutton has made about race and ethnicity, from his claims about African gangs terrorising Melbourne’s would-be diners to his criticism of Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser for letting in too many Lebanese. He also analyses Dutton’s most contentious ministerial actions in portfolios ranging from workplace participation and immigration to home affairs. Victims of Dutton’s “bad cop” toughness range from the unemployed and single mothers, who suffered from his demonisation of welfare recipients, to deportees, particularly Māori and Pacific Island New Zealanders, who encountered the sharp end of Dutton’s law and order push.

As a minister Dutton may have been an authoritarian populist, but Blaine reminds us that while he was home affairs minister his department awarded highly questionable and very expensive contracts to the companies chosen to manage offshore detention. Visa abuses involving those who came to Australia by plane — ranging from the exploitation of “modern-day indentured labourers” and “sex slaves” to the entry of “Albanian gangsters” — meanwhile went unheeded.

Dutton’s selective toughness has a clear strategic rationale. On numerous occasions he has set out his plan to win government especially by using culture war tactics to attract working-class voters in outer-suburban seats traditionally held by Labor. He claims that cost-of-living pressures and other challenges faced by workers have been neglected by a Labor government preoccupied with woke “frolics” on issues such as the Voice. He argues that crime (often associated by Dutton with racial or ethnic groups) is out of control, and often a particular threat to women. It is a strategy that draws on John Howard, Tony Abbott and Donald Trump.

Nonetheless, both Liberal and Labor critics believe that Dutton’s strategy is flawed for modern-day Australia. It might be suited to his own seat of Dickson, writes Blaine, where the vast majority of residents are Australian born, “but he has little experience speaking to electorates in Sydney and Melbourne with significant Asian and Middle Eastern diasporas.” Here, Dutton’s bad cop routine can come unstuck, as when his strongman rhetoric on national security issues alienated Chinese-Australian voters.

Nor, Blaine points out, does Australia have the equivalent of Trump’s “heartland states filled with rust belts, nor the political system that makes them disproportionately powerful.” Yet winning back affluent teal seats, whose voters are alienated by Dutton’s rhetoric, may still prove crucial if the Liberals are to win government in their own right.

Blaine is at his best analysing such issues. Nonetheless, some of his insights — particularly regarding Dutton’s strongman persona — could be developed further or in a different direction. He argues that Dutton’s “raison d’être” is to “Make Australia Afraid Again. Then he will offer himself as the lesser of two evils. A serious strongman for the age of anxiety.” Recent events — fears evoked by the Voice referendum, for example, and crime in Alice Springs, and offences committed by immigration detainees released by a High Court decision — have fed into that strategy.

Blaine argues that Dutton is attuned to key voters’ “deepest fears” not because he is “a genius or a psychic, but because he was also afraid of change.” Possibly “because he would have felt emasculated by the truth,” Dutton has never fully explained why he left the police force. Consequently he is “always displaying simplicity and strength. Because he feels so complicated and weak.” Indeed, Blaine depicts Dutton as an inherently fragile human being: “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.”

Blaine’s psychological assessment of Dutton is intriguing and possibly insightful. But additional or alternative interpretations would have been worth exploring in more depth. After all, as Blaine himself acknowledges, conservatives’ mobilisation of fear against Labor governments is far from new. Conservative ideology is inherently wary of change, so this doesn’t necessarily reflect Dutton’s own vulnerabilities.

Similarly, the Liberals have a long history of using strongman politics to try to emasculate their Labor opponents, so Dutton’s appearance of strength may not be concealing deeper insecurities about his own masculinity. As Blaine himself notes, Dutton’s comment that Albanese is “a weak and woke prime minister” evokes Howard’s description of Kim Beazley as lacking “ticker.”

The point about strongman politics is precisely that it is a performance of masculinity, and of protective masculinity in particular. Dutton is arguably not so much offering to be the “bad cop” who is the “lesser of two evils,” to use Blaine’s words, as offering to be a strong “good cop” who defends those he perceives as upstanding citizens from the dangers he argues weak Labor politicians are exposing them to. He is offering to be a traditional masculine protector who will keep his favoured voters safe from “woke” identity politics, from the elites, from criminals, from China, from reduced living standards and even from the undermining of gender binaries. He’ll only be the “bad cop” to those his would-be supporters resent and fear.

Dutton’s potential appeal is therefore also broader than Bad Cop credits. Blaine writes, for example, that Dutton is a “practitioner of right-wing identity politics” who highlights difference and has spent his career “persuading Australians to prioritise cultural belonging above egalitarianism.” Dutton does indeed have a narrow view of Australian cultural identity that marginalises some Australians and privileges others. Despite attempts to construct him as a “big gentle giant” who genuinely cares about people, his expressions of empathy are highly selective. Nonetheless, it is a bit more complicated than Blaine suggests.

For example, Dutton’s arguments against the Voice actually constructed him as a champion of egalitarianism, but one who argued that equality means treating all Australians the same regardless of their needs or circumstances. It is a longstanding argument by social conservatives. Dutton highlights difference when it serves his purpose but also denies its salience, arguing that he is defending the vast bulk of Australians from the “divisive” identity politics of the elites. Indeed, this argument lies at the heart of his populism. Dutton’s close association with Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, meanwhile, a National Party senator with a similar conception of equality, helps to defuse accusations of racial bias.

Dutton’s styling of himself as a strong male economic provider who will protect voters from rising living costs is a common political strategy that draws on the traditional role of the male head of household as protector and provider. It too channels Howard, Abbott and Trump. Trump’s campaign in particular has long targeted working-class males.

This is a gender politics that Labor needs to take seriously. Labor won office partly on the argument that the Liberals had a woman problem, as indeed they do. But Dutton wants Labor to have a men problem.

Albanese needs to tread cautiously. His emphasising of the fact that Dutton’s team “is dominated by blokes” and “they keep having preselections and putting up more blokes” will play well with many female voters and socially progressive men. But it could be phrased more strategically. Albanese needs to be careful that he isn’t depicted as being “anti-bloke” as well as woke, especially with the Coalition mobilising old climate wars rhetoric to suggest that real men don’t drive electric vehicles but do embrace nuclear power.

Despite Dutton’s claims, the Labor government has been making serious efforts to tackle wage stagnation, precarious employment and other working-class issues, often encountering business and Liberal opposition in the process. Many of the social equity reforms the government has pursued, including improving the pay of under-valued female-dominated jobs and lowering childcare expenses, have also had benefits for workers and have reduced living costs. Nonetheless, the government is vulnerable to Dutton’s charges of working-class neglect given that inflation and high interest rates continue to undermine many of its best efforts.

As well as successfully tackling living costs, Albanese will need to win the argument that his form of caring, socially inclusive masculine leadership is not a sign of weakness but is better for Australians in general than Peter Dutton’s alternative. After all, gender politics isn’t an aside in Dutton’s politics, it is central. Democrats successfully targeted Trump’s masculinity during the 2020 presidential election campaign by arguing for the benefits of a different kind of protective male leadership — although their task was made easier then by the politics of the pandemic and is made harder now by Biden’s frailty.

We wait to see how successful Labor will be in countering Dutton’s strongman politics, as well as his attempts to encroach on Labor’s heartland. •

Bad Cop: Peter Dutton’s Strongman Politics
By Lech Blaine | Quarterly Essay | $27.99 | 172 pages

Brisbane’s deputy lord mayor was at the Commonwealth Games in Christchurch in January 1974, lobbying for the Queensland capital to host the 1982 Games, when the Brisbane River broke its banks.

On the night of the opening ceremony, 24 January, Cyclone Wanda crossed the coast at Double Island Point north of Noosa. It didn’t have the devastating winds of cyclones like Ada and Althea that smashed the Whitsundays in 1970 and Townsville in 1971, and it weakened rapidly, but the monsoonal trough it forced south to Brisbane stayed there for days. Small oscillations in its movement and intensity generated many stretches of drenching rain.

Across Brisbane, 600 millimetres fell on the first three days of competition in Christchurch — twenty-four inches, or two feet, in the language of the time. This was three times the city’s average rainfall for January, its wettest month. On 28 January the trough weakened and retreated north. A drier, cooler air mass from the south finally brought some blue sky to the capital of the Sunshine State.

The river peaked in the early hours of 29 January at a height not seen since 1893. Residents woke to find about 13,000 buildings damaged. Children due back at school that morning got an extra week added to their Christmas holidays.

Across the Tasman in Christchurch, Australia had won a bag of gold medals while the river rose. Raelene Boyle retained the 100 metres sprint title she won in Edinburgh, fourteen-year-old Newcastle schoolgirl Sonya Gray won the women’s 100 metres freestyle and Mexico Olympic champion Mike Wenden the men’s. As the waters receded, Boyle and Gray added the 200 metres to their 100-metre golds and Don Wagstaff completed a double in the diving pool.

The deputy lord mayor reported Brisbane’s promotional T-shirts “were without doubt the most sought-after item at the Games.” Its souvenir match boxes and coasters “were widely distributed and caused much interest.” Sandwiched amid coverage of the floods, the full-page advertisement for Brisbane’s bid in the Christchurch’s main paper, the Press, caused “some concern,” but it was not fatal because “most people realised that occurrences such as these were not the normal thing.”

Whether or not the 1974 flood was abnormal depended on the time scale. The “River City” had not seen a flood as high in the twentieth century. During the nineteenth century it had seen four as high, including three much higher, and a total of eight floods classed as “major” according to the Bureau of Meteorology’s current classification system (3.5 metres at the City Gauge). Only two other “major” floods occurred in the twentieth century, the last in February 1931. This century is different again. The February 2022 flood was Brisbane’s second major flood after the even higher one in January 2011, and a further “minor” one occurred in January 2013.

The inaugural meeting of Brisbane’s Commonwealth Games Committee was held two months before the Christchurch Games. Chaired by lord mayor and sports fan Clem Jones, the meeting was told an application had already been lodged for Brisbane to host the 1982 Games. Business representatives thought the city council’s report on possible venues was technically excellent but lacked ambition. By 1982, they thought, the city “would deserve a sporting complex of world-wide standard.”

Council representatives baulked at the zeal. They “could not commit the City to structures which could become ‘white elephants,’ or to a financial burden which it might be virtually impossible to meet.” After the floods, the committee’s next meeting was deferred, but not for long. Lord Mayor Jones and his deputy flew over the city in the 4KQ helicopter and were “amazed at the number of places which could be regarded as possible sites for the Games.” A sites sub-committee was whisked around nine possible venues in a council bus just three months after the flood’s peak.

The choice narrowed to the Northside versus the Southside. Deputy Mayor Walsh, representing the Chermside ward on the Northside, wanted Marchant Park redeveloped. Mayor Jones, representing the Southside’s Camp Hill ward, liked a site in the new suburb of Nathan, adjacent to the Mt Gravatt Cemetery and Griffith University, which would accept its first students the following year.

In late July, six months after the flood, a decision was reached: the Southside. It would be closer for visitors staying at the Gold Coast and more convenient for residents of the rapidly expanding southern suburbs.

The campaign for Brisbane to host the 1982 Games succeeded, although the likely “phenomenal” cost was much criticised. At the Montreal Olympics in 1976, where the Commonwealth Games Federation met to decide the venue for the ’82 Games, Brisbane found itself the only bidder. Montreal’s diabolical financial outcome scared others away.

New lord mayor Frank Sleeman assured Brisbane ratepayers they would pay only for the “bare essentials.” A new stadium would be built in the new suburb, but it would have a permanent grandstand seating just 10,000. “Temporary” seating would accommodate another 48,000. Work began immediately and the venue was first used in late 1975. Two years later, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, it was named the “Queen Elizabeth II Jubilee Sports Centre,” or “QEII.”

There was one big problem with siting the main stadium on the top of a hill. One of the signature events at major games, the marathon, traditionally starts and finishes in the stadium. After the local distance-running community rejected a plan for the runners to complete three laps along the nearby South East Freeway, ending with a sharp climb back up to the stadium, organisers agreed to start and finish the race away from the stadium. (It was men’s only; the first women’s marathon was run at the 1986 Games in Edinburgh.)

A flatter, “city” course was mapped, like those becoming popular in places like New York, Chicago and London. For Brisbane, this meant using the river. The new route started and finished on the south bank, opposite the CBD. It headed out through the city and “The Valley,” across Breakfast Creek to the river at Kingsford Smith Drive, then doubled back to the river bank around the University of Queensland. TV cameras would capture the city at its most picturesque, spectators would get accessible viewing spots, runners would appreciate the cool breeze and flat ground in a city that doesn’t have much of it.

Held the day before the closing ceremony, the marathon did not disappoint. Big crowds lined the route. Australian favourite Robert De Castella found himself well behind two Tanzanians who were close to world record pace at the halfway mark. He set off to chase alone, catching Gidamis Shahanga just before they passed a heaving Regatta Hotel, then ran side-by-side with Juma Ikaanga for a kilometre along Coronation Drive (named in 1937 when George VI was crowned). Morning peak hour traffic on the Sydney Harbour Bridge slowed as commuters tuned car radios to the struggle. Finally, “Deek” made a decisive break and won by twelve seconds.

Building the main stadium for the Commonwealth Games on a hill in the southern suburbs had helped, paradoxically, and indirectly, to re-energise an old conceit. Decades earlier, tourism promotions dubbed Brisbane the “River City.” Soon, the first of several major arts and cultural organisations began setting up on the South Bank. Expo 88 would draw millions of people from the suburbs, the state, the nation and the world to the banks of the big river.

Despite the best intentions, QEII struggled to avoid the fate those Brisbane City Councillors feared: becoming a white elephant. Track and field events take centre stage in Olympic and Commonwealth Games but local athletics events, even the biggest interschool carnivals, attract much smaller crowds at other times.

For a while, in the 1990s and early 2000s, QEII was back in business. On joining the national rugby league competition in the late 1980s, the Brisbane Broncos played at the sport’s traditional home in the city, Lang Park. A few years later, after the temporary seating at QEII was made a little more permanent, they moved there and started drawing Commonwealth Games–like crowds to the renamed “ANZ Stadium.”

Annual State of Origin matches against New South Wales, though, stayed at Lang Park. The regular monster crowds at ANZ declined. Eventually the state government and others decided to revive the old cauldron. The two “Origin” matches played at ANZ in 2001 and 2002 while Lang Park was rebuilt were the last.

In 2003, the Maroons and Broncos returned to the new “Suncorp Stadium.” They have been there ever since, sharing the venue with the Queensland Reds (rugby union) and Brisbane Roar (soccer). Last year, it was at Suncorp that the Matildas played their World Cup quarter-final against France, which ended in that epic, victorious penalty shoot-out.

QEII went back to being a track and field venue, the Queensland Sports and Athletics Centre, “QSAC.” It was used as an evacuation centre during the 2011 floods. After Brisbane won the right to hold the 2032 Olympics, there was a chance it might be revived again as a temporary venue for cricket and AFL while the traditional home of those sports in Queensland, the Gabba, was being remade as the main Olympic stadium at a cost of $2.7 billion.

That was until Monday, when QSAC got an even bigger future. Queensland’s government considered the recommendations of a committee set up to propose further options after the earlier rejection of the Gabba rebuild. The committee recommended that a wholly new stadium be built at Victoria Park, at a cost of over $3 billion, and eventually replace the Gabba as the home of cricket and AFL in Brisbane. Both recommendations were rejected. (Victoria Park was one of the sites rejected by Clem Jones’s 1974 committee.)

The Gabba is going to stay the Gabba, with a modest upgrade. Victoria Park is going to stay Victoria Park.

The winner is… QSAC! The stadium on the hill will rise again to host the track and field events at an Olympic Games fifty years after it staged them for the Commonwealth Games. At a cost of $1.6 billion, permanent seating will be increased to 14,000, and total capacity will touch 40,000 for the period of the Olympics, some way below the 1982 full houses.

The other winner is Suncorp Stadium, with its larger capacity of more than 50,000, which will get the opening and closing ceremonies.

The marathoners? They will surely follow the river again, winding out, back, out and back, sticking to the old, deceptively gentle watercourse that has always drawn people to this place. •

Information about Commonwealth Games planning is taken from Brisbane City Council committee minutes and files, and about the 1974 floods from the Department of Science/Bureau of Meteorology’s “Brisbane Floods January 1974” (AGPS, 1974). Other information drawn from Melissa Lucashenko’s Edenglassie (2023), Margaret Cook’s A River with a City Problem (2019) and Jackie Ryan’s We’ll Show the World: Expo 88 (2018), all published by UQP.

The debate about AUKUS — the military technology-sharing agreement best known for its promise to supply eight nuclear-powered submarines for Australia’s navy, announced in September 2021 by prime minister Scott Morrison — was initially conducted mostly among defence boffins. But in March 2023 Morrison’s successor, Anthony Albanese, went to San Diego to announce the “optimal pathway” for the deal.

Labor had long endorsed AUKUS, but now a Labor PM was standing beside US president Joe Biden and British prime minister Rishi Sunak to announce how it would be implemented. The political symbolism was sharp; what had previously been endorsed by Labor was now being wholeheartedly embraced.

Soon after, former prime minister Paul Keating appeared at the National Press Club to drop a rhetorical depth charge. He called the Albanese government’s embrace of AUKUS Labor’s “worst international decision” since Billy Hughes tried to introduce conscription. Suddenly the debate opened up, and since then doubts and criticisms of AUKUS — among them my book The Echidna Strategy — have barely let up. As former Foreign Affairs and Trade secretary Peter Varghese put it during Adelaide Writer’s Week in February, the anti-AUKUS argument is now reasonably complex and sophisticated while the pro-AUKUS position rarely rises above platitudes.

In the two-and-a-half years since the deal was announced, we have not once heard — either from the Morrison government or its successor — what the order for eight nuclear-powered submarines is actually designed to achieve. With neither a prime minister nor a senior minister providing any kind of strategic rationale for the deal, the case for AUKUS has not advanced beyond clichés and truisms about “deterrence.” Apart from pacifists, everyone is in favour of deterrence; the debate is solely about how we deter, and on this point the pro-AUKUS side has barely engaged.

Still, for all the strength of AUKUS scepticism, it seems unlikely to have any perceptible impact on government policy. Foremost among the reasons is the fact that major-party support for AUKUS remains steadfast: neither Labor nor the Coalition is likely to move away from AUKUS because they have nothing to gain by doing so.

AUKUS was conceived by a Liberal-led government, and the Liberal Party typically feels that national security is its electoral strong suit. So, barring a major reversal in the practical implementation of AUKUS (more on that in a moment), it is difficult to see what they could gain by revising what they regard as a signature policy initiative. Former prime minister Scott Morrison recently said that history would record AUKUS as the best decision his government made.

Of course, it’s not unprecedented for subsequent leaders to walk away from policy stances championed by their predecessor. But Peter Dutton was defence minister when AUKUS was conceived so he is closely associated with the policy and will stand by it.

Is Labor support for AUKUS more fragile? A heated debate took place at the party’s national conference in September last year, but ultimately a resolution backing the initiative passed with a comfortable majority. Former Labor leader Kim Beazley was moved to describe AUKUS as a “core Labor value,” evoking a sense of grassroots support and deep historical resonance. Beazley called the conference vote “the most significant move in the party since the 1963 Labor Federal Conference,” which dealt with the establishment of the North West Cape naval communications station.

But there is reason to doubt the sincerity of Labor’s conversion. Before AUKUS, no senior Labor figure had ever campaigned for nuclear-powered submarines. Indeed, support for such subs was a fringe position even in the Australian strategic debate. Then, in September 2021, the Morrison government gave the Labor opposition less than a day’s notice before announcing AUKUS. Labor, fearing a khaki election, instantly threw its support behind the initiative.

By any measure, it was a lightning-fast conversion on a huge policy question. And it seemed to be based largely on political calculation rather than deep principle or historical affiliation. Beazley’s “core Labor value” declaration looked like an attempt at what American political strategists call “astroturfing” — political elites creating an artificial semblance of grassroot activity.

But even assuming support for AUKUS inside the Labor caucus is a mile wide and an inch deep, does that matter for the future of the project? Perhaps less than we might think. Major political questions are never decided purely on principle or on the careful weighing of policy alternatives divorced from party-political considerations. Politicians can change their minds, but they change them faster if arguments align with incentives. At present, that’s simply not the case.

Prime Minister Albanese has spoken openly about his plans to entrench Labor in office for several terms to guarantee its reforms can’t be undone (as was the carbon price) by the Liberals. To win successive elections, he and his senior ministers appear to believe that Labor should never give Australian voters reason to doubt its national security credentials. And the cost of providing that reassurance is, for the moment, manageable.

AUKUS spending is not expected to peak for some years. Of a total project cost of between A$268 billion and A$368 billion, the government expects to spend A$58 billion over the next decade, but with less than a quarter of that sum due in the first five years. In budgetary terms, therefore, the decision is easy. Why offer the opposition a stick with which to beat the government at the next election when avoiding that fate costs the government so little?

Labor doesn’t even have an incentive to encourage debate about the deal by having the prime minister or defence minister give a major address. Policy wonks want such a debate, but who gains? What powerful political force would be quieted by a prime ministerial statement? Critics of AUKUS are unlikely to be satisfied; supporters just want to see the project go ahead.

This reflects two things about the structure of Australian politics: first, the number of people who care about defence policy is tiny, and so government doesn’t feel an urgent need to be accountable; second, the number of key decision-makers in defence and foreign policy can be counted on one hand. Unlike in the United States, no alternative base of power exists in the legislature to encourage accountability.

But political incentives change, and this project will rise or fall on its practicalities. Once a steady drip of news reports about cost overruns and program delays begins, internal critics will emerge. (The latest worry concerns the capacity of US shipyards to fill Australia’s order while keeping the US navy itself supplied with new subs.) There are AUKUS sceptics in the parliamentary Labor Party, but scepticism will need to turn to disaffection and resentment. When ministers and parliamentary secretaries see their budgets sliced while AUKUS is fed, internal grumbling may begin.

What else could crack Labor’s AUKUS consensus? The most immediate threat, if he takes office next year, will be Donald Trump. It’s unlikely Trump even knows what AUKUS is right now, but if he’s confronted with its existence he may reel. Australians remember his blistering response when prime minister Malcolm Turnbull described to him a refugee resettlement agreement that his administration had inherited from Barack Obama. It was a testament to Turnbull’s deft handling of the call that the president didn’t renege on what he described as “the worst deal ever.” Goodness knows what he will make of an agreement that makes the US navy smaller so a foreign navy can grow larger.

Presently, Australia is responding to the prospect of a second Trump term in much the same way as America’s other allies — lots of fretting and crossed fingers but precious little policy change. The assumption appears to be that if Trump wins, allies are in for another rough four years before the situation returns to “normal,” much as it did when Biden replaced Trump.

That interpretation requires a good deal of optimism and a peculiar reading of recent history, yet it remains the prevailing view. It is remarkable to recall that Australia proposed AUKUS to the Biden administration just a few months after the 6 January assault on the US Capitol. Our government was evidently so convinced that this outrage, and the president who had provoked it, were aberrant rather than an expression of enduring change that they almost immediately proposed to his successor the most dramatic upgrade to the ANZUS alliance since it was signed in 1951.

While media and political attention is focused on whether AUKUS can be delivered, in the background lurks a strategic question: even if we can get AUKUS done, is it even a good idea? That’s the issue The Echidna Strategy focused on. Australia’s biggest strategic asset is distance — Beijing is closer to Berlin than it is to Sydney — yet the AUKUS submarine project is effectively an attempt to compress that distance when we should be exploiting it. If China ever wants to project military force against Australia, let it traverse the vast oceans that separate us. There is no pressing reason for Australia to project military power to China’s near seas and onto its landmass.

Such arguments have no purchase on either major party right now, but the real job of books like mine is to open the “Overton window” — to make the unthinkable thinkable. When AUKUS begins to sink under the weight of its misdirected ambition, political leaders will look for new ideas. An alternative defence strategy exists that is prudent and affordable, not weighted with ideological baggage from either extreme, and based on realistic assumptions about the future of Chinese and American power in our region. •

It’s now common knowledge that we are in the grip of a mental health crisis. Stories about rising rates of diagnosis, surging demand for treatment and straining clinical services abound. It is hard to avoid feeling that the psychological state of the nation is grim and getting grimmer.

The truth of the matter is more nuanced. The National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, carried out between 2020 and 2022 by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, tells us that 22 per cent of Australians had a mental disorder in the previous twelve months and 43 per cent within their lifetime. Large numbers, no doubt, but no larger than the 20 per cent and 45 per cent figures obtained when the study was conducted in 2007.

But hidden in these aggregated figures is a worrying trend. Among young people aged sixteen to twenty-four, the twelve-month prevalence of mental disorder rose from 26 per cent to 39 per cent, and that increase was especially steep for young women, up from 30 per cent to 46 per cent. When half of this group has a diagnosable mental illness — an underestimate, because the study only counts a subset of the most prevalent conditions — something is clearly very wrong.

A similar story of age- and gender-biased deterioration is told by the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia survey. When an index of mental health is tracked across iterations of the survey from 2001 to 2021, older and middle-aged adults hold relatively steady but people aged fifteen to thirty-four, and especially young women, show a relentless decline beginning around 2014. The pandemic, the usual all-purpose explanation for recent social trends, can’t be held responsible for a rise in psychiatric misery that preceded it by several years, so what can?

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation offers a provocative but compelling answer to this question. Haidt, an American social psychologist known for influential books on well-being (The Happiness Hypothesis), moral psychology and political polarisation (The Righteous Mind) and upheavals on US college campuses (The Coddling of the American Mind, written with Greg Lukianoff), argues that some of the usual explanatory suspects are innocent. They don’t account for why declining mental health disproportionately affects young women, why it is occurring now or why the trendline started to dive in the early 2010s after a period of stability.

The prospect of ecological catastrophe, for example, weighs most heavily on younger people but every generation has experienced existential threats. Wars, natural disasters, and economic crises are conspicuous reasons for distress and despair, but world events have always been terrible. It is not obvious why they should disproportionately make young women anxious and depressed while leaving older and maler people unaffected. The stigma of mental illness may have declined so that people have become more willing to acknowledge it, but increases in the prevalence of mental ill-health among young people are not confined to subjective reports but also found in rates of hospitalisation and suicide.

The chief culprit, Haidt proposes, is technological. Smartphones and social media have rewired young minds to an unprecedented degree, replacing “play-based childhood” with “phone-based childhood.” Portable devices with addictive apps and algorithms engineered to harvest attention and expose children to damaging content have wrought havoc on young people’s mental health. They have done so in ways that are gendered and most severely affect generation Z. Born after 1995, these young people are the first to have gone through puberty in the virtual world.

Haidt marshals high-quality evidence for the decline in young people’s wellbeing over the past decade. Graph upon graph show inflection points in the early 2010s when mental health and related phenomena such as feelings of social connection or meaning in life start to trend downward. These trends are not limited to the United States but occur more or less in lockstep around the Western world. Their timing indicates that it is not the internet or social networking sites themselves that are damaging, but the transformation that resulted from the advent of smartphones, increased interactivity, image posting, likes chasing, algorithmic feeds, front-facing cameras and the proliferation of apps engaged in a race to the bottom to ensnare new users.

Haidt argues that the near-universal use of smartphones in children and especially pre-teens is driving the increase in mental health problems among young people. Coupled with over-protective parenting around physical risks in the real world has been an under-protection around virtual risks that leaves children with near-unfettered access to age-inappropriate sites. Like Big Tobacco, the developers of social media platforms have designed them to be maximally addictive, have known about the harms likely to result, have made bad faith denials of that knowledge, and have dragged their heels when it comes to mitigating known risks that would have commercial consequences.

There are many reasons why phone-based childhood has damaging effects. It facilitates social comparisons around appearance and popularity, enables bullying and exclusion, exposes young children to adult-focused material, and serves individualized content that exploits their vulnerabilities. It fragments attention and disrupts sleep, with implications for schooling as much as for mental health. Smartphones also function as “experience blockers,” reducing unstructured time with friends and the opportunities for developing skills in synchronous social interaction, conflict resolution and everyday independence.

Haidt is emphatic that the problem of phone-based childhood is not just the direct harms it brings but also the opportunity costs: the time not spent acquiring real-world capabilities and connections. Added to a prevailing culture of safetyism that attempts to eradicate risk and prescribes structured activity at the expense of free play and exploration, the outcome is a generation increasingly on the back foot, worried about what could go wrong and feeling ill-equipped to deal with it. Well-documented developmental delays in a range of independent and risky behaviours are one consequence, and the rise of anxiety is another.

When many children and adolescents report that they are almost constantly on their phones we should therefore not be surprised that they feel disconnected, lonely, exhausted, inattentive and overwhelmed. Haidt argues that many of these emotional and social effects are common to young people as a group, but some are gendered. Girls are more likely to be entrapped by image-focused networking sites that promote perfectionist norms, decrease their satisfaction with their bodies, and expose them to bullying, trolling and unwanted attention from older men. Boys are more often drawn into videogames and pornography, which foster social detachment, pessimism and a sense of meaninglessness, sometimes combined with bitter misogyny.

Haidt reminds us not to think of children as miniature adults, but as works in progress whose brains are malleable and developmentally primed for cultural learning. “Rewiring” may be an overstatement — brains never set like plaster and cultural learning continues through life — but the preteen years are a sensitive period for figuring out who and what to look up to, a bias easily hijacked by influencers and algorithm-driven video feeds. Older adults can be moralistic about adolescents who won’t disengage from their phones, but when those phones are where life happens, and when the brain’s executive functions are only half-formed, we should understand why shiny rectangles of metal and glass become prosthetic.

What to do? Haidt has a range of prescriptions for parents, schools, tech firms and governments. Parents should band together to encourage free play, promote real-world and nature-based activities that build a sense of competence and community, limit screen time for younger children, use parental controls, and delay the opening of social media accounts until age sixteen. Schools should ban phones for the entirety of the school day, lengthen recess, encourage unstructured play, renormalise childhood independence and push back against helicopter parenting. There is a social justice imperative here, Haidt observes, as smartphone use seems to disproportionately affect the academic performance of low-income students.

Responsibility for intervening can’t be left to individuals and local institutions alone. Governments and tech firms must recognise their duty of care and come to see the current state of affairs as a public health issue, much like tobacco, seat belts, sun exposure or leaded petrol. Tech firms must get serious about age verification and increasing the age of “internet adulthood” at which young people can make contracts with corporations hell-bent on extracting their time and attention. Governments can legislate these requirements, design more child-friendly public spaces, and remove penalties for healthy forms of child autonomy such as going to a playground without a parent, currently criminalised in the United States as “neglect.”

The Anxious Generation is a passionate book, coming from a place of deep concern, but most of it is written with the cool intonation of social science. The work is accessible and clearly intended for a wide readership, each chapter ending with a bulleted summary of key points. There is a refreshing humility about the empirical claims, which Haidt accepts can be challenged and may sometimes turn out to be wrong, referring the reader on to a website where updates on the state of the evidence will appear.

The part social media plays in mental ill-health is in dispute, for example, although the evidence of a correlation with heavy use is not. Haidt offers up studies supporting the causal interpretation but acknowledges that nothing is straightforward where human behaviour is concerned. Nevertheless, he is justified is arguing that his “Great Rewiring” hypothesis is now the leading account of the origins of the youth mental health crisis. No other contender appears capable of explaining why things seemed to start going wrong around the globe somewhere between 2010 and 2015.

Critics of The Anxious Generation are likely to argue that Haidt’s hypothesis is simplistic or that it amounts to a moral panic. Both charges would be unfair. A single explanatory factor rarely accounts for something as complex as a major social trend, of course, but identifying a dominant cause has the pragmatic benefit of prioritising interventions. If phone-based childhood is the problem then we have a clear target for possible solutions.

As explanations go, Haidt’s isn’t quite as simple as it might seem in any case. The advent of smartphones and all-consuming social media may take centre stage, but earlier cultural shifts that amplified the sense of risk and promote over-protection set the scene and compounded young people’s vulnerability. Haidt’s account of the elements of smartphone use that are most damaging is also highly specified rather than a wholesale rejection of the virtual world.

The mental health field often extols the complexity of its subject matter, which sits at the jumbled intersection of mind, brain and culture, but that recognition can hamper the search for agreed interventions. The usual calls to boost clinical services are understandable, but solutions that address individual distress in the present fail to tackle the collective, institutional and developmental sources of the problem.

Some proposed solutions, such as efforts to build online social connections, may be ineffective because they fail to foster the embodied, real-world connections that matter. Other supposedly compassionate responses, such as accommodating student anxiety with diluted academic requirements and on-demand extensions, may make anxiety worse by enabling and rewarding avoidance. Haidt arguably overlooks how much mental ill-health among young people is being inadvertently made worse by well-meaning attempts to accommodate it and by backfiring efforts to boost awareness and illness-based identities.

The charge of moral panic is equally problematic and doesn’t stick for three reasons. First, evidence for the harmful consequences of phone-based childhood is now documented in a way that past worries about new technologies were not. Second, Haidt’s proposal focuses on the welfare of young people rather than social decay. Although he argues that phone-based life can cause a form of spiritual degradation, his critique is primarily expressed in the register of health rather than morality. Third, although Haidt articulates a significant threat, with the partial exception of social media companies he is not in the business of lashing villains so much as promoting positive, collective responses and a sense of urgency.

The youth mental health crisis is real, and it shows no signs of abating. The human cost is enormous. If rates of mental illness among Australians aged sixteen to twenty-four had remained steady since 2007, around 350,000 fewer young Australians would be experiencing one this year. The Anxious Generation is vital reading for anyone who wants a sense of the scale of the problem and a clear-eyed vision of what it will take to tackle it. •

The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness
By Jonathan Haidt | Penguin | $36.99| 400 pages

Months ahead of the parties’ national conventions, the US presidential campaign is already in full swing. Joe Biden and Donald Trump have each secured enough delegates to be sure of their party’s nomination. Trump has been in full campaign mode for months, largely as an offset to his legal woes; Biden’s State of the Union oration was essentially his first 2024 campaign speech.

But behind the hyperbolic headlines — “Trump Racks Up Massive Wins in Super Tuesday GOP Races,” “How Trump Steamrolled His Way to the GOP Nomination” or “How a Fighting Biden Took on the State of the Union” — are the many twists and turns that will determine the campaign’s eight-month trajectory and its outcome in November.

The only thing the two putative candidates agree on is the significance and consequences of this year’s vote. Trump says, rightly for once, that the 2024 election will be the “single most important day in the history of our country.” Biden says the election is “all about whether America’s democracy will survive.”

In the days since Biden’s State of the Union speech, duelling campaigns in Georgia and other swing states have offered glimpses of the two candidates’ strategies for courting an electorate less than enthused by another Biden–Trump showdown. It’s clear that this re-run of the 2020 faceoff will test the limits of campaign financing and political decorum.

The endgame is the pattern of voting in the general election — and, more particularly, in the swing states like Georgia, Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Using polling to make forecasts is complicated by the fact that the winner is the candidate who racks up the most electoral college votes, not the most votes.

Polls offer little in the way of accurate insight at this point in the election cycle. But as their current base of support stands, neither Trump nor Biden can win. The polling averages from FiveThirtyEight and 270toWin have them neck and neck, with their favourability ratings languishing in the mid-fifties.

The votes that will make the difference must be won from independent voters and those party voters who are not strongly committed to either Trump or Biden. Here, despite his age and the general lack of enthusiasm for a second term, Biden seems to have the edge. But he faces problems with some segments of the population: the Democrats’ longstanding advantage with Black, Latino and Asian American voters has shrunk to its lowest point in more than sixty years; his administration’s failure to end the Israel–Gaza conflict has upset young voters and especially Arab Americans and Muslims; and many young people are simply lukewarm about Biden. Nevertheless, the president has consistently gained more than 90 per cent of the Democratic vote in the primaries to date, and even in Michigan, where Gaza war sentiment led many to vote “uncommitted,” he scored more than 80 per cent.

Trump’s base is more galvanised, more rusted on, and smaller. His party’s “Never Trump” contingent remains strong, as seen by the support Haley attracted. On Super Tuesday she received more than two million votes across fifteen states. She pulled 37 per cent of the Republican vote in Massachusetts, 33 per cent in Colorado, 29 per cent in Minnesota, and a surprise victory in Vermont. A week later, after she suspended her campaign, she drew more than 77,000 votes in Georgia (a state Trump lost to Biden in 2020 by fewer than 12,000 votes).

What is rarely pointed out is that Republican state primaries are increasingly a winner-take-all proposition for the convention delegates (a situation cleverly engineered by Trump campaign staff). On Super Tuesday Trump reaped 93 per cent of Republican delegates while winning only around 70 per cent of the vote.

Haley’s continuing support shows that Trump hasn’t been able to defuse his long-term problems with suburban voters (especially women), moderates and independents. These are the voters who cost him a second term in 2020 and could potentially cost him again in 2024.

A key issue for the Trump campaign is where the Republicans who voted for Haley will go in November. Quinnipiac University polling found that 37 per cent of Haley voters would vote for Biden and 12 per cent would stay home. Emerson College polling found 63 per cent of Haley primary voters would vote for Biden in the general election with 10 per cent undecided. Some exit polls have delivered even higher numbers of voters reluctant to commit to Trump.

Trump, who has derided Haley using sexist and racist language, has shown little interest in reaching out to her voters. In January he seemed to reject them outright, declaring that anyone who made a donation to Haley “will be permanently barred from the MAGA camp. We don’t want them and will not accept them.” No surprise then that many of her supporters wonder whether they still have a place in the Republican Party, a perception that will only deepen as Trump, his campaign and his family take control of the Republican National Committee.

Trump’s efforts to appeal to independents have been desultory at best; he seems incapable of moving beyond the rhetoric of stolen elections, woke liberals, the deep state, threats from illegal immigrants and asylum seekers, and his own perceived victimisation. His speeches offer little more than a dark vision for his second term. His embrace of Russian president Vladimir Putin, Hungarian president Viktor Orbán and other authoritarians, his suggestion that he was open to making cuts to Social Security and Medicare, and the persistent efforts of conservative Republicans to undermine women’s reproductive rights won’t win over these independents.

This inability to broaden his support is the biggest threat to Trump’s efforts to reclaim the presidency. But that doesn’t necessarily mean Biden will have an easier time sweeping up the independents and undecideds. Will those concerned about the Israel–Gaza crisis who opted for “uncommitted” in the primaries vote for Biden in the general election, or will they simply stay home? (Given Trump’s vilification of Muslims they are unlikely to vote for him.) That will largely depend on what happens in Gaza between now and November. And can Biden and the Democrats reverse their declining support among minority groups and young voters?

The changing demographics of the United States has seen a decline in the White, non-college educated voters who have been the mainstay of the Trump Republican Party, an increase in politically active young voters, many of whom don’t see either party as dealing with the issues that matter to them, and an increase in racial and ethnic diversity at a time when race is a central political issue.

The Pew Research Center has reported that Biden received more 90 per cent of the Black vote in 2020 while Trump received just 8 per cent. But this year these voters are frustrated with Biden over a range of issues, including the lack of progress on racial justice and the economic impact of soaring inflation.

Latino voters, who make up some 15 per cent of the electorate, are a heterogeneous group politically, with divergent opinions on issues like immigration. A recent poll from the New York Times and Siena College shows 46 per cent of Latino voters supporting Trump and 40 per cent supporting Biden (albeit with a large margin of error).

Recently Trump has touted his support among the Black community, though not always in flattering terms. He does have a growing contingent of Black hip-hop artists among his vocal supporters and most recently resorted to using AI-generated pictures to build his credentials with the African-American community. But there’s little evidence of a major shift in support; a December poll showed only 25 per cent of Black adults had a favourable view of Trump.

Jaime Harrison, the African American chair of the Democratic National Committee, has accused Republicans of promoting “fairy tales about their plan to win over Black voters.” He made particular note of the fact that Trump “pals around with white supremacists.” Just days after the Trump campaign began its overhaul of the Republican National Committee came the announcement that the party is closing all of the community centres it established for minority outreach in California, New York, North Carolina and Texas.

Ideology aside, the issues that will drive voters to the polling booths in November are common to all Americans: the economy and its impact on family budgets, healthcare costs, immigration, gun control and abortion. America’s role in supporting Ukraine and as a potential peacemaker in Gaza will also be important. These issues often play out very differently for Democrats and Trump Republicans: abortion and reproductive rights, immigration policies and gun control are classic examples. Perceptions of other issues, including the economy, interest rates and the outcomes of Biden’s national security and foreign policy efforts, will change — perhaps dramatically — between now and voting day.

For many Trump supporters, policies (or lack thereof) are of little consequence; like Trump, they are not interested in a united country or a bipartisan approach to legislation. They share Trump’s story, described by Biden in his State of the Union speech as one of resentment, revenge and retribution, and, shockingly, many of them embrace his authoritarianism. As one supporter posted on social media, “I’m not voting Republican, I’m voting Trump.”

For Democrats, kitchen table issues also include the erosion of freedoms and the future of democracy in the United States. Historian and presidential biographer Jon Meacham makes this stark statement about America today: “Historically speaking, the forces now in control of the Republican Party represent the most significant threat to basic constitutionalism we’ve experienced since the Civil war. That’s not a partisan point; it’s just the fact of the matter. And I’m not talking about particular policies, about which we can and should disagree. I’m talking about the self-evident willingness of a once-noble party to embrace lies and the will to power over essential democratic norms.”

The months ahead will be some of the most consequential in the nation’s history, with no guarantee this tense situation be overturned or resolved by the vote in November. •

India’s eighteenth general elections are only weeks away, a thumping victory for Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party is predicted, and I’m watching Bollywood movies from 1977 to remind myself of how much the country’s mood has changed.

That was the year when Indira Gandhi ended her seventeen months of authoritarian rule (“the Emergency”) and called elections she expected to win. It was a make-or-break decision: if she prevailed, her opponents feared she would cement the authoritarianism of the Emergency.

Critics have described the spirit of prime minister Modi’s government during the past few years as “the Emergency you have when you’re not having an Emergency.” Techniques to harass your foes, pioneered by Mrs Gandhi and her cronies, have been deployed by the BJP with the efficiency of modern management and the relentlessness of digital technology.

In the elections of 1977, Indira Gandhi and her Congress party lost decisively to a hastily formed alliance of old politicians, some of whom had been jailed during the Emergency. A varied crew, they included fist-shaking socialists, heavyweight dropouts from Congress and future BJP prime minister Atul Bihari Vajpayee. They formed a government committed to undoing the excesses of the Emergency. India, they promised, would get a new start. Voters seemed to share their hope.

The top box-office film that year, Amar, Akbar, Anthony, had everything a Hindi film of its time needed: big stars, including the young Amitabh Bachchan, music, dancing, car chases, crime, murder, slapstick comedy and a happy ending. It was also cheap: filmed in a month entirely in Mumbai.

The plot carried a message. Three small boys are abandoned and separated. Amar is found and raised by an upright Hindu policeman, Akbar by a kindly Muslim tailor and Anthony (Bachchan) by a Catholic priest. Three filmic hours later, the brothers discover each other and together vanquish the criminals who have caused their distress; the family is reunited; the blind mother has her sight restored; the ne’er-do-well father repents, rejoices at the unity of the family — and is packed off to jail.

You don’t have to be into semiotics to get the message about national unity and “out of many, one.” Amar, Akbar, Anthony was so popular it got remade in three south Indian languages, each with a locally appropriate name change (including John, Jaffer, Janardhanan in Malayalam, the language of Kerala).

Today, a number of recent films and those announced for 2024 pack a different punch. They focus on international enemies working to destroy India. Pathaan, the box office favourite of 2023, is about international terrorists, viruses and cloak-and-dagger struggles between Indian secret agents and evil-doers in the employ of shadowy figures in Pakistan. It has earned hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.

This year’s previewed films don’t pussyfoot around when it comes to messaging. The new releases include Bastar, focused on the Naxalites, murderous would-be revolutionaries in a rugged district in central India who killed more than seventy paramilitary police in 2010. “Urban Naxalite” is a common term of abuse for human rights activists and critics of the BJP government. In the film’s trailer, a police officer says that those “supporting” Naxalites “are pseudo-intellectuals, Left liberals” and promises to gather them in the street “and shoot them in public view.”

Pro-government? On the contrary, says the producer, it’s “pro-India”: “Our film talks about what is good for India. Now, if the BJP speaks similarly, it is their political stand.”

Another example with a political kick: Swantantrya Veer Savarkar (“freedom warrior Savarkar”). A prolific real-life writer and translator, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1883–1966) was imprisoned for years on the Andaman Islands for complicity in plots to murder British officials. He later became a leader of the Hindu Mahasabha and a favourite ideologue of the BJP. Savarkar was never incriminated in the murder of Mahatma Gandhi, but he didn’t much like Gandhi either. Savarkar “does not hate Gandhi but hates non-violence,” says film’s director.

Kunal Purohit, author of H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindu Pop Stars, an impressive new book on Hindu-supremacism in popular music and publishing, estimates that ten of the films due for pre-election release demonise Muslims and opponents of Hindu ascendancy.

Films like these highlight the political contest going on in Indian popular culture via the country’s digitisation and its almost 900 million broadband subscribers. The BJP and its many subsidiaries are drowning out other voices.

The film business offers another significant angle on electoral politics. The films mentioned above, all in Hindi, come out of Mumbai (Bollywood). But the south Indian film industry, based in Hyderabad and Chennai, has “taken over the commercial and critical reins,” according to one of India’s most experienced film critics. The south, on this view, is where the most original and successful films are being generated.

The south Indian film that made movie people around the world pay attention, and crowds flock to the theatres, is the Telugu-language RRR, set in colonial times. The British and a Muslim prince provide the main villains. It is an expensive production with spectacular fight scenes and box office collections estimated at A$230 million internationally. (“A Netflix top 10 hit in 62 countries,” according to the streaming service, which screens a Hindi version).

South India will be a key focus in the coming elections. Just as its films are enjoying wide success, the region is registering India’s most impressive economic activity and social statistics. The telling number is estimated GDP per person, which is more than four times greater for the southern states than for India’s two most populous states, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in the Hindi-speaking north. Together, UP and Bihar are home to about 25 per cent of India’s 1.4 billion people; the five southern states have 20 per cent. Female literacy, infant mortality and life-expectancy data are all better in the south.

Mr Modi and the BJP have had notable success in only one of the five southern states, Karnataka (capital, Bengaluru), where they won twenty-five (out of twenty-nine) parliamentary seats in 2019. But the BJP lost state elections to the Congress last year and didn’t hold a single parliamentary seat from Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu or Kerala in the 2019 parliament.

On the surface, this inability to win in the south doesn’t matter. The BJP doesn’t need the south to win national elections, and that advantage will grow if a redistribution of seats, which hasn’t happened for fifty years, is carried out next year. The number of seats will be increased and reapportioned on the basis of population. On those calculations, the five southern states together will elect only about fifteen more members than Uttar Pradesh alone.

To people in the south, this looks like power being embedded in regions with poor records in health, education and economic growth. The feckless will be rewarded at the expense of the virtuous. That impression doesn’t fit well with Mr Modi’s frequent proclaiming that his main mission is economic development and material prosperity.

With victories seemingly assured in much of the Hindi-speaking north, the BJP is throwing talent and money at the southern states and at West Bengal. All these states have their own languages written in distinctive scripts, and they don’t regard the BJP’s pressure to use Hindi as the national language of Bharat (the BJP’s preferred name for India) with great enthusiasm.

Opposition leaders around India have as much reason today as in 1977 to be apprehensive about their futures in the event of a thundering victory for the government. Nevertheless, an attempt last year to coordinate opposition election campaigning has fallen apart even before the election dates were announced. Key political leaders in West Bengal, Bihar and Odisha have either aligned with the BJP or, in West Bengal, decided to fight on their own. Elsewhere, the BJP picks off potential adversaries with offers they can’t refuse.

Congress, the only opposition party with national recognition, is frail and easy to deride. Rahul Gandhi, its fifty-three-year-old leader, has few qualifications other than being the descendant of three prime ministers, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. His elderly Italian-born mother, Sonia, is still part of decision-making.

A big BJP victory will assure the party of fifteen years of power from 2014 to 2029. It will embolden the party to incorporate in the constitution provisions advocated before independence by the ideologues of Hindu supremacy. One of those goals was a centralised government in which the states would be simply implementers of the national program. Changing from a parliamentary to a presidential system has also been discussed in the past.

The long-term project of the BJP and the Hindu-supremacist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh movement, of which Mr Modi was a member from adolescence, is an India in which all citizens subscribe to a common version of what it is to be a Hindu. Non-Hindus may continue to live in India but they must be prepared to be at the back of every queue and expect no favours from the state. In this way, Bharat will reclaim its pre-Muslim, pre-British glory.

Today, someone making an updated version of Amar, Akbar, Anthony might feel the need to recognise how the spirit of the times has changed. The film would tell how a brave Hindu boy saved his two hapless brothers, his blind mother and his country from powerful internal and external enemies. It might also be a good idea to call the film Modi! Modi! Modi! •